JOHNNYJUICE

Looking Into the Past is a Flickr pool that lays two picture of the same location, but from different times, over each other. It’s a fun and creative way to see how scenery has changed over time. You can see how structures have been built, modified and demolished.

Jasonepowel, the group admin, has this note about the group:
This group is for images you make where some part of a modern day scene is overlapped by an old photograph. For example, you hold up an old photo so that you can see its place in the modern context.

Check out the whole Flickr pool here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/lookingintothepast/pool/

Somewhere in the course of my internet travels I wandered across the work of a German artist Simon Schubert. Schubert is a mixed media artist whose paper-fold artwork originally caught my eye but whose work covers a wide range of installations and sculptures. Trying to find more information about him is difficult as his website is, understandably, entirely in German.

Google delivers this confusing translation of his biography:

Simon Schubert decorated rooms of paper, to entire living space from wrapping paper. Simon Schubert decorated rooms of paper, to entire living space from wrapping paper. Complete with a deranged, indicated in his form only a few residents and real light is everything in these rooms made of folded paper jacket on a hanger on the wall, a bed, a picture. Complete with a deranged, indicated in his form only a few residents and real light is everything in these rooms made of folded paper jacket on a hanger on the wall, a bed, a picture.
In a subtle shift in the real Schubert questioned levels of transience, disappearance and vulnerability and translates them into a physically perceivable reality. In a subtle shift in the real Schubert questioned levels of transience, disappearance and vulnerability, and translates them into a physically perceivable reality. Beyond this, he negotiated the idea of a consciousness in the crisis of modernity has become brittle consistency of identity and the world. Beyond this, he negotiated the idea of a consciousness in the crisis of modernity has become brittle consistency of identity and the world.

In almost imperceptible interplay of positive and Negativfaltung created here, depending on the viewing direction, a vivid portrait that the next moment, however, can again become invisible. In almost imperceptible interplay of positive and Negativfaltung created here, depending on the viewing direction, a vivid portrait that the next moment, however, can again become invisible. This portrait, shifting between two-and three-dimensional, drawing and relief, object and image is characterized mainly by the reduction of design elements. Again and again, it seems to tip over into nothing, it shows variable in the change of light or the viewer’s position. This portrait, shifting between two-and three-dimensionality, drawing and relief object and image is characterized mainly by the reduction of design elements. Again and again, it seems to tip over into nothing, it shows variable changes in the light or the viewer’s position.

If you have the time, click around and explore his site and beautiful work: http://www.simonschubert.de/papierarbeiten.html

GML = Graffiti Markup Language from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Awhile back my good friend @kapuaonalani send me a link to Evan Roth’s latest project, Graffiti Analysis.

Graffiti Analysis is an extensive ongoing study into the motion of graffiti. Custom software designed for graffiti writers creates visualizations of the often unseen motion involved in the creation of a tag. Motion data is recorded, analyzed and archived in a free and open database.

That last sentence is really the most interesting. A new format has been created to record and store the motion data. This new format is called Graffiti Markup Language (GML) and has so far been used for some other projects by Roth and his pals over at the Graffiti Research Lab. The largest repository of this data is at http://000000book.com/ (that’s the hex code for “black”book). GML is the results of collaborative efforts between computer hackers and graffiti writers.

Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. The project aims to bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city.

Developers can use GML to prove the visiualization data for their own tools. They can also capture their own data and share it with the rest of the community. So far some really cool applications have been made including EyeWriter, DustTag, L.A.S.E.R. and Graffiti Analysis. Each of the them capturing their movements from a different medium (eyes, finger, laser pointer and a marker, respectively).

Movements captured from my iPhone and uploaded to the Blackbook database.

GML captures x,y and time data and can be drawn using Javascript (HTML 5), Flash, Processing, C++ (OpenFrameworks). For more technical information and the API documentation, you can go here.

Wooster Collective is always a huge source of inspiration for me. While my personal tastes tend to steer away from high concept street art, there are always gems to be found. One such gem is this post about the evolution of graffiti on a wall outside the home of Serge Gainsbourg.

Serge Gainsbourg – animation des graffitis sur 5 ans du mur rue de Verneuil from Arnaud Jourdain on Vimeo.

Using After Effects and Lightwave 3D, animator Arnaud Jourdain composited thousands of photos taken over a 5 year period into a beautiful animation showcasing the evolution of the art on the wall over time.

The moment I saw this piece I was reminded of another similar undertaking, Graffiti Archeology, a project of Cassidy Curtis that also attempts to capture the evolution of graffiti. Curtis describes his project as:

Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990’s to the present.

While both of these projects share a similar concept, they are unique in execution and purpose. Jourdain’s execution is his artistic interpretation of the wall. His camera movements and angles do not showcase each individual art piece in the way that Curtis does. Graffiti Archeology is more of an academic approach to cataloging the art pieces, though his shapes and cropping are very graffiti inspired (especially for the 90s!). I think that using motion, rather than clicking through images creates a more seamless experience of time lapse, but the dramatic camera movements adds personality to the artwork that might not have been there previously.

Both projects are fantastic ideas and are definitely worth checking out.

I was one of the first users signed up for Google Voice. Google voice was generating buzz as the newest player in the very tight telephony market. It can manage multiple phone numbers, multiple voicemails, and offers lots of enhanced features including voicemail transcription, call recording, call screening and free SMS.

Signing up gave me a new phone number. After having the same phone number for over 8 years, switching my number from carrier to carrier as I graduated from college and moved, now Google expected me to give it up and use their randomly generated number. At that point I decided that while interesting, the features of Google Voice just didn’t warrant a phone number switch for me and I abandoned my Google Voice account.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when Google announced that their Voice service will now work with your existing phone number. The functionality is different depending on whether you use your own phone number or theirs. If you use your own the advertised features are:

Google voicemail: voicemail like email
Voicemail transcription: read what your voicemail says
Custom greetings: vary voicemail greetings by caller
International calling: low cost calls to the world
Notifications: read voicemail messages via email or SMS
Share voicemails: forward, embed, or download voicemails

So I registered my 8 year old number and quickly set up the service on my iPhone. I was most excited for the Voicemail transcription and custom greetings. I could greet my coworkers clients with a professional “Sorry I am unavailable to take your call..” and my friends with something more appropriate, and if I missed anyone’s call I would get a text message letting my screen my voicemails.

I have been looking for this type of functionality for some time now and even tried similar services before, with little success. Given Google’s track record I had high hopes. While I am aware that the Google Voice app had been rejected, with over 50% of Smart phone traffic being iPhones, I thought that the experience would have been much better.

In all actuality, I’m not sure if the phone-support is the problem. My Voice account was easily able to import all of my phone contacts, and I receive the SMS transcriptions fine. The problem is that the transcription service is so bad, that it forces me to listen to every voicemail to comprehend what is being communicate.

Random, nonsense transcription of a voicemail I received.

What I liked about the regular iPhone voicemail was that it downloaded the messages and I could listen to them anytime. If I received a voicemail while I was in the gym, I could see the ‘new voicemail’ notification and listen to them from anywhere (like underground in a subway on my way home).

The Google Voice behaves in a similar way. Depending on how you have your preferences setup, a SMS or email transcription will be sent to you whenever someone leaves you a message. The frustrating part is that this transcription is mostly nonsense and does nothing more than serve as a notification that you received a new message. It then has a link that that you may click on to hear the original. The bad part here is that to listen to the message you have to connect, download and then play and audio file from Google’s server. Not the quickest or easiest thing to do on AT&T notoriously spotty 3G network. The first time I tried this, my phone could not even recognize the audio format of the message.

The custom voicemail message works great, and I haven’t really attempted to try any of the other features like international calling. Really, I am using Google Voice to enhance my voicemail experience, and thus far it’s only adding an extra step (or more) before I can listen to my message. I’m aware that voice to text transcription is not an easy thing to do, and I have confidence that Google will eventually get it right.

But, until then, I’m going back to standard iPhone voicemail and clients and drinking buddies alike will both be getting the same away message.

The past month I have been getting a lot of use out of my luggage. In late August I took advantage of a Jet Blue Airways limited time offer, 30 days of unlimited flights to all of their destinations for $599. A fantastic deal of course, but best if you have the luxury of time to exercise its full potential.

Not wanting to pass up such a great deal I set-out to see how much use I could get out of it. The biggest challenge I faced was maximizing the time that I did have. Because of my busy work schedule I was limited to only traveling on weekends, with a hard-fought travel day here and there.

In the past 30 days I have visited 3 countries (including the US), roughly 7 different cities and a whole bunch of friends. During these trips I climbed a mountain, saw one of the 7 wonders of the world, ate lots of fresh seafood, took a surfing lesson, swam in an ocean, a cave, a swimming pool and watched a record holding lumberjack perform his trade. Most importantly though, I got to catch up with many old friends and loved ones.

Jet Blue planes are also my new favorite. While Virgin has the better entertainment package, there is absolutely nothing that beats more legroom for my 6-foot-plus frame. No amount of free snacks or movies (of which Jet Blue also has) will make me more comfortable during a coast to coast flight. I also found out that, in order, my seating preference goes:

1) Window
2) Aisle
3) Center

I also found getting the center seat, on a 6 hour flight late Sunday night from the west to east coast (losing 3 hours in the process) is an experience where words do no justice. Traveling solely on the weekends was not ideal, we all can’t be as fortunate as Dustin Curtis, but having a certain urgency to my trips did create a bit of romantic appeal.

I only packed one small duffle and as the airports started to blend together my nights became more meaningful. If you were in Seattle at midnight, what would you see? If you could have only two meals in Los Angeles, where would you eat? These kinds of questions became adventures and I was eager for each one.

Overall it was a fantastic trip and next time Jet Blue runs a deal like this again, I’m cashing in all of my travel & sick days and calling all of my friends.

I’ve been reading lately about all of the cool inventions coming out of Maker Faire Africa, a celebration of African ingenuity, innovation and invention at the AITI Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT in Ghana’s capital, Accra.

This spin-off of the 2006 California conference is centered around do-it-yourself innovation. What makes this year’s conference so interesting is that it focuses on the indigenous populations of Africa. Instead of the Rube Goldberg-esque mousetrap or the Diet Coke & Mentos Fountain of previous years, this year’s inventions include solar-powered lamps and contraptions to harness wind energy and make use of recycled and discarded materials.

This conference reminds me very much of an exhibit I saw a few years ago at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The exhibit, Design for the other 90% highlights advances in design and technology that help the world’s poor. The exhibit showcases some products and inventions that it proposes are the beginning of a design revolution:

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”

The exhibit is centered around the topics of Health, Shelter, Water, Education, Energy and Transport. Many of the same problems that the participants of Maker Faire Africa has sought out to solve.

Both the exhibit and the conference are introducing new people (like me) to an area of design and technology that is often overlooked. I wonder how many of us designers are actually doing work that is as impactful as this. While we might describe some of our ideas and interfaces as innovative, if we are operating in the same arena as 90% of the world…how innovative is it really?

You can check out the Maker Faire Africa site and get more information here .

I spent the past week relaxing with my family in Edisto Beach, South Carolina. It was really enjoyable and could not have happened at a more appropriate time. I’ve always enjoyed the South Atlantic because of its unique terrain, people and cuisine.

We hung out on the beach & in the surrounding wildlife, ate plenty and did a walking tour of Charleston. Here are a few photos from the trip with more to be added to my Flickr page shortly.

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is pleased to present Born in the Streets—Graffiti, on view from July 7 to November 29, 2009. The exhibition brings to light the extraordinary development of an artistic movement that was born in the streets of New York in the early 1970s to rapidly become a worldwide phenomenon. It provides the public with the opportunity to rediscover an art both ubiquitous and continually evolving, and thus relate to the city in a new way.

As part of the exhibition they have released a book: Born in The Streets, a film: Pixo, and my favorite, an interactive display by Evan Roth: Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris, 2009

Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris, 2009 from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Over 2,400 graffiti tags were photographed from April 24 to April 28, 2009, from each of Paris’s 20 districts. All photographs were archived, tagged and sorted by letter. The ten most commonly used letters by Paris graffiti writers were identified for further study (A,E,I,K,N,O,R,S,T and U). From each letter grouping, eighteen tags were isolated to represent the diversity and range of that specific character.

These sets are not intended to display the “best” graffiti tags in Paris, but rather aim to highlight the diversity of forms ranging from upper case to lowercase, simple to complex and legible to cryptic. You can read about the artist’s here. This amazing interactive piece was developed by Todd Vanderlin.

Photo by Todd Vanderlin

Photo by Todd Vanderlin

Tags are laid out in a grid using small multiples, and arranged by letter. Letters can then be isolated, browsed, and viewed in context (original photographs). I find it fascinating the unique approach each graffiti artist takes to the same letter. Large, small, drippy, illegible, whatever the case – each handstyle gives a glimpse into the persona of the artist.

This interactive piece is a continuation of the artist’s original work, which used tags from NYC

You can check out the online version here http://fondation.cartier.com/

While augmented reality has been around for awhile now, there have not yet been many real world applications of it. We’ve all seen 3D models floating around, video applications, and even some really nice micro-sites interactions. But there have not been very many practical, dollars & cents applications of this technology.

Zugara is attempting to shift this dynamic with an alpha release of their latest app, The Webcam Social Shopper. This application uses augmented reality to allow shoppers to try on virtual clothes, browse through different colors and styles, purchase items and even share their snapshots across social networks.

While this application is still pretty rough around the edges, the concept of “social shopping” is something that is quickly picking up steam. We saw it hinted at in the Project Natal demo and we are starting to see developments of it with this Zugara release. With this app Zugara hopes to bridge online brands with offline shopping habits:

It’s not a secret that friends/family recommendations influence a consumer’s purchase decision and beat any other “consumer touchpoint”. Now, we can help brands empower their consumers to integrate their friends and family into their online shopping process like never before. The thinking is that this application will help bridge the gap between how people like to shop offline and how they are forced to shop online, subsequently providing an enhanced interactive shopping experience for the consumer and increased sales for the brand.

Click here to read the full release