So I’m back from a wonderful couple of days of hanging out with the Kickstarter team near the beach. I managed to rent a surfboard and catch a couple of waves too. During a margarita-induced what-if-session, someone encouraged me to try and auto-generate some blurbs from the Kickstarter homepage. These are typically 150-200 character descriptions of projects that our community team labors over and refreshes daily.

Since I had worked with Markov Chains for Dan Shiffman’s class “Programming A to Z” at ITP and had done two projects using them: ROBODRUDGE (autogenerated Matt Drudge Headlines) and The Rutabaga (an April Fools Joke that Google was attempting to compete with The Onion by using auto-generated news headlines), they seemed like an obvious place to start. I found Eric Hodel’s Markov Chain ruby code readily usable and went from there.

To give some background to Markov Chains: the basic principle is to use probability to auto-generate new sequences based off old patterns. Sometimes these sequences can be numerical, sometimes they’re musical, and sometimes they’re  characters and words.

An example of exquisite corpse from Wikipedia.

Another way to think of Markov chains is as a computer’s attempt to play Equisite Corpse: it is fed a certain amount of existing information and then it attempts to extrapolate a similar pattern. A classic example is to feed a Markov Chain Engine Shakespeare; not only is it readily available in raw text and in the public domain, but Markov Chain generated Shakespeare looks strikingly similar to the real thing (thanks to Jim’s Random Notes for the work):

If they in thou, thy love, that old,
Thought, that which yet do the heat did excess
My love concord never saw my woeful taste
At ransoms you for that so unprovident:
For thereby beauty show’st I am fled,
Althoughts to the dead, that care
With should thus shall by their fair,
Where too much my jade,
Her loves, my heart.vs.

I pulled down a document with a majority of the text that Kickstarter has used to blurb projects on the homepage. Below is a subset of an almost infinite list of hilarious and sometimes disturbing auto-generated project blurbs:

• It features monstrous puppets, mystic sex rituals, yellowface assassins, wildly stylized violence, and a songwriter who created that all-important childhood fave Schoolhouse Rock.
• To promote NAIN, an all-new miniature setting for his REIGN roleplaying game, Greg Stolze has put together a group of thespians shouting thank you at their laptops to a great $3 price.
• Karl Cronin wants to document and collect relics of the concoctions of Atlanta’s Good Food Truck.
• Emilia Brock types out every word of her adorable and inventive zine, “Muster,” on a manual typewriter, has each copy illustrated by the Simpsons as a mobile CSA.`
• First Law of Mad Science channels cyber-punk and sci-fi to bring a Yakuza noir production to the emerging subculture of asexuality.
• Rewards include CDs mixed by a visit from a song left on your voicemail to a unique fabric whose color + pattern is determined by keywords pulled from Twitter’s database in real time.
• Joe Mangrum has been designing simple-but-compelling computer games based on Eugene O’Neill’s play.
• The project will help them print their fourth issue, and editor Mindy (a drummer herself!) is offering backers personalized designs and original music and prove that the rail system is a five-minute short film about a roach violinist who falls in love with the bravado you’ll find in Memphis Heat, a documentary on the real-life appearance of a giant, hand-crafted, Rube Goldberg contraption.
• After 13+ years of genetic testing and solitary confinement, Oliver’s getting a new horror-adventure comic about the movements of immigrants across vast bodies of water.
• With just a camera in hand and boundless curiosity, Rebekah Potter interviews artists for her series 10min4walls, in which a twenty-something guy returns to Argentina to rekindle past excitement and romance, but instead is confronted with a musical twist, features a one-of-a-kind mood swing.
• Fans have flocked to support him, and it’s not hard to see it for yourself: it’s available only to backers of the fastest competitive lockpickers in the form of a pig’s dissembling and its indie rock soundtrack.
• Director Jonathan Langer will reward backers with the woman whose apartment he inhabits.
• Common Cycle is a feature-length thriller about strained family relationships, small-town antics, and second chances.
• I’m Going Home will be filled with a stowaway lab mouse as his only companion.
• She’ll combine intimate interviews, vérité footage, and animation in a city decimated by the public for performances, gallery space, meetings, bike repairs, relaxing — or pretty much anything.
• This August, thousands of individual leaf, flower, and bird forms from reclaimed wood and connecting them into an animated feature film starring comedic legend Leslie Nielsen.
• Trailer Park: A Mobile Public Park is a witty comedic web series.
• Missed Connections is a film about three friends on a loom into a community biology lab so that no two experiences are alike.
• Check out his video and you can get a sense of humor and would like to be normal, and Nick’s lusting for the Queen of England and wrote a jazz pianist whose work was performed by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and many others; was dead.
• First Law of Mad Science channels cyber-punk and sci-fi to bring you a hand-drawn postcard from the original.
• The video teaser feels wonderfully Tim Burton-esque, and the search for the over 45,000 participants who attend Burning Man every year.
• This latest project will launch Gerlan’s Spring 2011 runway show, and she’s offering backers everything from print copies to mix tapes to personal drum lessons.
• Brooklyn-based independent art collective Ugly Duckling Presse is publishing the first twist ending that we’ve come across in a unique fabric whose color + pattern is determined by keywords pulled from Twitter’s database in real time.
• Check out their touching video and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
• Chicago’s Chinese Fine Arts Society has been making stunning sand paintings in public spaces for years, totally 160 in the journey with awesome drawings.
• Following her lauded Gypsy Killers album, Sanda Weigl has a web series as The Office for actors or Entourage for poor people.
• As the World Cup opens in South Africa, Stan Engelbrecht and Nic Grobler’s project to document the life histories of 200 plants and animals through expressive movement, which he’ll share in this hilarious pitch video for great world beats!
• Fed up with the absurdist aesthetic of Dutch animator Emiel Stevenhagen.
• The result is hypnotizing, and the Land of the Misfit Toys.
• Check out their touching video and creative rewards includes communist-issue Mongolian Bomber Goggles!
• Coyote Pursues is a charming character-driven video game for kids.
• Coyote Pursues is a fan of the remaining villagers.
• After the success of the most disgusting way of making coffee we’ve ever seen, plus fun quotes like Let’s go slightly less on the road, and you can still get the book for just $10, plus artwork, CDs, a photo book honoring space exploration.
• Dario Ciriello’s homegrown publishing outfit is guided by a subway car or Wal-Mart aisle is a massive interactive Burning Man installation comprised of an old Dodge pickup with fresh, seasonal veggies, Truck Farm was born.
• Cobbled together from actual footage and the Outs have recorded a sweet, limited-edition EP on cassette (you heard me right) to help everyone send their phones to space and is going to help everyone send their phones to space and designing an app that will take place in a beautiful color poster, the DVD, and tickets to see any show, or a private event thrown in your town AND cook you dinner- what’s not to love?
• Expect a fabulous soup of literary aficionados chatting intelligently about a roach violinist who falls in love with the bravado you’ll find in Memphis Heat, a documentary on the real-life appearance of a giant, hand-crafted, Rube Goldberg contraption.
• After 13+ years of genetic testing and solitary confinement, Oliver’s getting a new recording in the film’s virtual town.
• With Kickstarter, the beloved web-comic slash zine will be reissued in an American town, Congress, in the last 30 years, the PCR machine has been a fascination and obsession for 400 years, made clear by the economic crisis.
• Help her bring her spring collection to NY’s Fashion Week Green Shows and you might end up pledging $10 to see his son do one of a series of mathematical stories that will open and close by electrical current.
• The goal of CicLAvia is to put all the way through the eyes of the great ’60s cult classics.
• Fart Party is the subject of Angela Kline’s boisterous documentary, A Love Letter to Tom Waits.
• Akimenko Meats is a powerful combination of portraiture, live audio, and writing, creators Kitra and Chris aim to offer an intimate glimpse of a secretive guy in search of his Jens Pulver Kickstarter project, Gregory Bayne has set his sights on his first film, Person of Interest.
• The work is beautifully previewed in a fantastical world where every shared glance across a subway doo-wop group can be a kite-flying extravaganza!
• By showcasing this innovative and highly accessible approach to cinema, filmmaker Benjamin Reece hopes to perform A Chinese Love Story for a new work of comics journalism exposing the human cost of trafficking.
• Pick up a signed copy of the fastest competitive lockpickers in the city!
• Fishtank Performance Studio in Kansas City works hard to see his fantastically illustrated children’s story become a real-life 13 ft. sculpture and installation at the end, the super bouncy balls will all go flying when she throws herself off a roof.
• Operating Theater’s play Transatlantica revolves around a psychoanalyst who encounters a series of bicycle-powered food tours.
• Backers can witness the event in real-time; $20 gets you a package of exotic recipes, hard-to-find ingredients, and info cards on your voicemail to a Brooklyn rooftop.
• It’s an inventive project from SFHny Studio, a group of thespians shouting thank you at their laptops to a unique photo book and traveling gallery show, dubbing the project that’s so infectious.
• Fed up with a variety of sculpted paper viruses.
• Get rewards like an unreleased font and a songwriter who created that all-important childhood fave Schoolhouse Rock.

Most represent composites of parts from two or three different project blurbs, and I’ve also tried to remove the ones that weren’t modified at all (sometimes MCEs just spit out unmodified sentences). I think part of the reason these work so well is because the original blurbs end up conforming to a particular style of quippy, short descriptions structured around rewards and project topics.

Apparently my alma-mater (and current part-time employer) ITP is suggesting current students look at my thesis because of its formatting.

I used LaTeX to format it and used the ACM template here I’m proud to finally post it almost 2 years later. It also means that ITP students don’t have to go through the demented process of trying to recreate / reformat a template.

The significant departures from ACM’s template are the copyright notice and the image inclusions.

Good luck!

Cause Caller Thesis – PDF, 2.5mb, CC BY-SA.
Cause Caller Thesis – LaTeX Source Code, .tex, 74kb

Scribd:

Cause Caller Thesis

Here’s a video of my presentation:

You could say that I’m partial to Lessig‘s maxim that “code is law.”

I also think it goes a long way to explaining some decisions James Cameron made while making Avatar. More specifically, the code and technology responsible for the majority of the movie’s (we can’t very well go on calling them films much longer, can we?) visual experience actively constrained the choices of the production team and thereby the choices of the Avatar characters themselves. Neytiri couldn’t have had voluminous hair even if she wanted to, because James Cameron’s hardware and software wasn’t good enough.

If you haven’t followed computer graphics closely you might not know that certain textures and materials, like hair, are incredibly difficult to get right. Though there has been quite a lot of progress in the realm of still CG, capturing the motion and flow of humanoid hair is still very difficult if not virtually impossible. Cameron’s Avatar didn’t significantly advance the state of the art, but he was able to creatively sidestep the issue by giving his characters thick braids and dreadlocks which he could motion capture.

This alleviated the chore of trying to artificially generate the realistic movement of millions of individual hairs: if all the Na’avi had braids or dreadlocks, then all of that movement could be motion captured by actors in reality.

Much has been made of Cameron’s innovation to accurately develop motion capture for individual facial movements, and it is my strong feeling that the team also took this approach for the hair of their characters. As Wired pointed out in their features on the movie, this is an evolution in the modern director relationship to computer graphics: instead of trying to *simulate* real world phenomena using procedural software, directors opt to direct a close enough analog in the physical world whose motion could be captured at a very high resolution using camera-like devices.

Don’t believe me? Check out these screen grabs from the Avatar making of video floating around:

Look closely at Zoe’s head and it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to believe that her dreadlocks have individual motion capture devices embedded in them. It’s also probably true that motion capture systems of this type can not be scaled small enough for individual hairs. This might change in the future, but for now it is a real technological constraint in the world of Pandora. There are a couple other examples of technology constraining creative choice: why don’t any animals in the Pandora jungle have fur? Might it be because Cameron couldn’t get CG fur to look right?

So Cameron’s technological constraints and innovation drove choices that would have have otherwise been purely creative. Code became law on Pandora. Sometimes the origins of code’s constraints are artificial (such as copyright law) but sometimes they’re just practical constraints like software and CPU horsepower, and I think that’s what happened here.

Let me know if you agree or have any evidence to the contrary.

The New Yorker is holding its annual contest for re-interpretations of the famous Eustace Tilley cover and I thought this would be a good one.

Unfortunately since I live with Thessaly (unfortunate that she works there, not that I live with her ;) I’m most likely disqualified from participating in a Conde Nast competition.

I used Photoshop to batch process the emoji (zip download) so that they have white backgrounds and used Foto-Mosaik-Edda for the mosaic.

Check it out full size here.

I just launched a project on Kickstarter (an awesome NYC based startup that helps people fund their ideas) to translate Moby Dick into Emoji using Amazon Mechanical Turk. I’m calling it Emoji Dick:

This project will fund the production, via crowd sourcing, of a never-before-released translation of Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick in Japanese emoji icons.

Here’s an example of an Emoji sentence from Moby Dick:

Each of Moby Dick’s 6,438 sentences will be translated 3 times by different Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Those results will then be voted on by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence will be selected for inclusion in the book.

I’m trying to reach $3,500, and you can give at the $5, $10, $20, $40, and $200 levels and get different awesome rewards, like their name included in the book, a CC BY-SA licensed PDF, the raw data, and either a softcover black and white copy or a limited edition color version.

If you want to support the project, just visit the page here. Thanks!

Obviously, this is written by someone with a deep understanding of copyright and the Internet: Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the EFF. Congrats Brad, this video beats the rest of them.

Brad explains the video here, but you can also read more about about Downfall remixes here.

Apologies for neglecting this blog for a bit. I’m have got lots of drafts saved so some more posts are on their way.

I wanted to announce that in conjunction with my day-to-day job as Outreach Manager at Creative Commons, I’m now working at Eyebeam (a digital arts space in Chelsea) a day or two a week as a research associate with Michael Mandiberg and Patrick Davison. Michael and Patrick and I are developing a project called “One for the Commons” for Eyebeam’s Open Culture group which will help contemporary and notable (notable as defined by Wikipedia’s hive mind) artists release their work into the commons. We’ve done a lot of work to prepare the project, but there’s still a bit more to do before the site launches; you should see something here about it soon.

I’ve also joined the board of Rhizome, which is an digital art organization at the New Museum. This is a great honor and I’m looking forward to helping them grow. You can help Rhizome now by purchasing space on their $50,000 homepage; an homage to the original Million Dollar Homepage. Also check out my 35 Million Pixel Animated gif from 2006.

Aside from that, I’ve been Creative Commons stuff has taken up most of my other time. It’s been great, we’ve seen a lot of interesting and fantastic things happen in 2009, and there is lots more to do. In case you don’t follow my twitter/facebook feed, I was recently on RTE Radio 1 in Ireland talking with Dave Fanning about the future of the music industry, and today I’ll be on a panel at Cardozo talking about why Network Neutrality is important for Creative Commons.

Also, I posted a trance mix I made in high school and got a funny (positive) reaction on facebook about it. Download DJ_Mecredis_-_Bad_Old_Trance.mp3 or listen here:

I’ve been working as a photographer for MoMA’s PopRally for the last year or so and it has quickly become one of my favorite live events to work for. Last Tuesday was “PopRally: Silent But Deadly“, and the evening’s entertainment would come in form of comedy from and about public domain films. Max Silvestri, a friend and comedian I booked for a Creative Commons Salon was the MC for the night and started off the evening explaining how he was planning on curating MoMA’s Department of Internet Funny Pictures. Above, you can see him highlighting a photo he found on the Internet of a snow penis made in a pickup truck.

What was so special about Tuesday (besides the fact that I took the time to read the instruction manual for my flash prior to showing up) was that MoMA packed the house showing restored mostly-public domain silent films with live improvised piano accompaniment by Ben Model. If you’ve ever watched a silent film, this should surprise you.

On top of that, MoMA featured awesome remixes of those films afterwards. Having taken a couple of film classes and fancying myself a basic appreciation of the history of photography, I know why silent films are historically important but I’ve always had a hard time actually sitting through them. I’ve occasionally downloaded some from the Internet Archive, but never found them particularly engaging or watchable.

But sitting and laughing with the audience at MoMA, I finally understood the appeal of the silent film — it was the presence of an audience affirming and interpreting the screen that allowed me to enjoy it. Since there was no dialog, we, the audience, had to create and share what we thought was happening on screen with our laughter and reactions.

In other words, you’re not supposed to watch silent films by yourself; they require group dynamics to really come alive. This may apply to contemporary film, and may be a reason year after year, Hollywood still breaks box office records despite panicked proclamations that the sky is falling. Theater experiences are highly rivalrous and I think this PopRally really demonstrates why theaters and real live audiences are still very important.

My favorite part of the evening were the remixes that various comedians were commissioned to do. They make less sense without first seeing the original films (none of which seem available online in their entirety), but here’s one that I think definitely works by Joe Mande:

The Knockout: 15 Years Later from Joe Mande on Vimeo.

If you’re not already signed up for PopRally, do not hesitate to join their mailing list, and buy your tickets early because they almost always sell out.

(The ^H’s in the title of this blog post are explained here.)

A story told in three videos:

1. “Original” Soulja Boy Video **

2. Students for Free Culture board member and friend Kevin Driscoll teaching ROLFcon nerds how to do SouljaBoy:

3. Kevin responding to his Soulja Boy takedown notice:

It seems that Kevin’s video has become the victim of YouTube’s auto-takedown robots. Good thing he posted it to Blip.tv as well. More info on the ROFLcon blog.

**Soulja Boy’s YouTube channel doesn’t allow me to embed his video into this blog, and despite my halfhearted attempts at circumventing this “feature” I wasn’t able to post it with the others. I can’t believe I’m arguing for the right to embed a video, or even that it would be possible to deny me the right to do so, but this is what happens when we rely on proprietary video codecs like Flash.

I just wanted to thank everyone I know right now for helping Barack Obama win this presidency. Your effort in this campaign made the difference, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for making change happen this election.

As a way to move on, I’ve created a site with my friend Sorrel, called “Don’t Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out” where we are collecting farewell notes for Bush. Think of it as catharsis politics.

The basic idea is that you e-mail us your images, words, and ideas and we’ll compile them into a book that we’ll try and get into Bush’s hands before Obama is sworn in. All submitted works must be licensed under CC’s Attribution license. We want as much participation in this as possible, so please let everyone you know about this project.