GENOMICON

I now no longer know how many digital cameras I have.

I think it’s 9: 2 phones, 3 laptops, one aux, DSLR, point-and-click, cheapy-tiny.

I’m thinking about buying one of those sanyo underwater ones, and another EOS 550. I’m making a film about someone making a film. That means you need more than one camera. Simple maths. Simple maths.

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So the war of eyes continues apace. The Love Police guys actually did get arrested (twice) in Canada during the Renta-Police-State that was the G20

The spirit of the age – police telling you that they’re allowed to film things, and you’re not.

So what does the Universal Panopticon need next.

Um…. 360 degree lenses that publish straight to the web?

Cool. Reminds me of The Eye of HAL – though appropriately enough it’s a beautiful blue. And has skiers in it. You can sort out the image in software and make it horizontal.

The quality is a bit el-cheapo because it’s a little hand-held thing… which Sony have called a “Bloggie”…

… which is not what I would have called it. I would have called it a “frabble” or a “strogshite” or a “grimplet” something like that… because every single word has been baggsed by people wanting to make new products… so we’re forced to stagger about the place making ridiculous noises like psychedelic cavemen. I was looking for wireframing apps earlier… “Gliffy”, “Omnigraffle”, “Cacoo”, “Lumzy”. I shit you not. Forget about peak-oil, we’ve hit peak-syllable-combinations. Everyone’s talking shit.

Still – 360 degree lenses… a way to go perhaps. There are various offerings from Olympus etc, and I think I was going on about a home-made variant earlier. Or maybe not. Whatever… maybe these are stuck permanently in novelty land… although, although… the clueless gadget-bot-bloggers do claim that the lens can be used in reverse – and can project onto all the walls and ceiling of a room at once… which would be cool because you could make movie tents – and sit right inside whatever scene you were supposedly looking at… like a womb with violence projected onto the walls.

That’s the world we’re making for ourselves.

Publishing straight to the web… eye-fi cards. and Qik. Easy.

This is how camera lenses are made btw.

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Still, never mind about that – the evil empire needs to have a go as well… article here about a town in Mexico that has set up eye-scanners everywhere – that can retinal scan one person a second without them having to slow down or even know about it.

I don’t get these people – how could you invent something like that and not imagine in your wildest dreams that it wouldn’t be used for something evil? What’s the matter with these fucking people. The guard-economy is a disease.

But never mind about that either

Some mental art… that reminds me a bit of universal panoptica

from Justine Khamara who is from Australia, and who’s name sounds a bit like Camera, so that’s brought us full circle then.

As you were.

Sounds like an older sibling to R2D2, but is in fact this

which is a tiny 3d camera that’s designed to go in a cellphone or whatever – and they’re 720p, which is no mean feat. The future’s so bright, everyone’s going to have to wear shades.

Obviously the first thing you’re going to do is get some of those completely opaque swimming goggles and blu-tak these to the front, with tiny screens inside… so you don’t bang into things etc. Then you’ll be able to do really cool things like erase your friends – or superimpose their heads over the bodies of squirrels etc – which is what I do in my imagination with my friends anyway, which is probably why I don’t have any.

As a soothsayer, I’m kindof conflicted over this one. There are two opposing vectors:

1) Entertainment is becoming more emmersive – it’s an NLP thing; it’s an art thing; it’s a porn thing. The closer an artefact is to reality, the more likely it is to… “catch”… to pluck a string in your heart, or gut, or knob or whatever… but you still need to isolate and amplify those aspects that resonate with the human condition. It’s this interplay between reality and fantasy – you need enough reality to fool your reptile-level nervous system into going along with the fantasy that the borg part of your mind responds to.

2) who could be arsed wearing glasses?

I think I need glasses actually. I can no longer read my medication containers.

Tiny little cameras that fit inside pens and can shoot 1.5 hours of 1,280×960 at 30fps… for $65

!!!

What’s interesting about that, is not the spying part, but the hacking part. It’s that they’re small enough to hack onto flying robots etc – and cheap enough to lose… or use as bifocals.

Can’t find any example videos to see what the quality is like. It’s a nice little unit though.You could use them for rockets or kitty cams etc

Both of which make me feel dizzy and sick. Still… Nick Drake is cool.

This is the most incredible photograph that I’ve seen in my life

It’s a 26 giga-pixel photograph of Dresden, taken over 90 hours by a robot.

Check out the ferris wheel on the far left… then zoom slightly to the left… two people on bikes on a cycle-path next to a river…. then zoom right back to the starting point. In the hotel in the foreground, you can zoom right in to a bloke leaning out the window, waving. It reminds me of Pieter Bruegel for some reason.

Blows my mind. I don’t know what this is a significator of, but I know it’s a significator of something.

Something to do with Immersion. The ability to zoom almost infinitely. Pity it takes so long to shoot – imagine being able to do it in real-time. All I’d need would be the ambient noise over headphones, and a smellovision plugin blowing the moderately polluted Eastern Germanic air…

Ok… I’ve finally cracked – and have gone over to Linux, because Windows is just too slow, and too frustrating… and too fuckin ugly and evil. The new salvo of Windows advertising where they try to get you to host “Windows 7” parties was just too much. I never want to have anything to do with these people ever again. Charlie Brooker summed it up best “it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment which I like to call “shitasmia”. It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It’s the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history”

Away, away…

To Linux/Ubuntu : you can boot into linux from a usb memory stick now. It’s really easy – and a different world. Everything is nice… and free and easy. Everything is there to help you, rather than confining you and containing you with… fine-print and THREATS. I also installed vBulletin recently – a paid package… honestly, it’s was like being a sheep in a cattle-run, being barked at on all sides by mad dogs with mad, frightening faces made of buzzing white-noise of legal-speak.

So anyway, what it has meant is that I have finally gotten round to backing up EVERYTHING. Several decades of photos. All of it, all uploading to the cloud as we speak. It’s going to take days.

And out of this, a couple of things have become apparent.

1) “losing photos” is less of a problem than forgetting you ever had them.

2) most of it’s shit. You wouldn’t think twice if you never saw it again

3) some of it though, takes you back. Some of it is pricelessly valuable… which raises this other Big Problem…

4) The biggest problem. Not of losing photos, not of not being able to find them… or forgetting you had them. The biggest loss is not taking them in the first place.

One of the jobs of the transition generations – the early 21st century isn’t just to create data – to bear witness to their lives, but to digitise that of the 20th… and previous generations. I think last year, there was more photographs uploaded to Flickr than had actually been taken in the entire history of photography previous to this.

This is normal – it’s how it should be. It does my head in how much has been lost. Sometime soon I’m going to try to connect with other people to restore as much of our own digitised lives as possible… but… it’s like finding scraps of photos after a fire.

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ps: That photo is my mate Adi, backstage at The Riverside in Newcastle sometime in the early 90s.

It’s worthy of note because the walls had years and years of graffiti from touring bands – and had become something of a national treasure. Nirvanna had tagged it for example. A lot of people played there.

Anyway, eventually this band called the Teenage Fanclub went all art-rock on it, and instead of adding their graffiti, turned up with paint and rollers and completely redecorated it. All those moments were lost like tears in rain.

from

I’ve gone on about these before.

Even made one myself…

That’s the view out of my hotel window in Marseilles, back when I had a life.

I think this is pretty cool:

It’s a camera… or more accurately, a bunch of synchronised cameras, that someone has put together for around $300… and they take 360 degree photos in 8 second bursts… a bit like google street-view… but you can wear it as a hat!

Although you would look like a bit of a twazzock if you did. Still… I really like the idea of fully immersive video… particularly for tourism… instead of actually going to the National Gallery in London, you hire a robot that you control over the web… and with the right kind of headset, it feels a bit like actually being there.

I keep getting this vision of The Internet… The Universal Mind, having so many cameras and sensors going at once, that they cover the entire world (well, big cities at least) in this kind of lucid soup of perception. There are so many cameras at London railway stations right now that it’s practically already there… but anyway, there’s this soup of perception, that with the right software stitching together all the input from the different cameras, you can move through… and see pretty much whatever you’d see if you were walking (or flying) through the place yourself.

It’s not what you’d immediately envisage, but…

from wired

It’s a little robot that sits there doing it’s facial-recognition thing, combined with it’s rule-off-thirds thing, happily taking photographs of whoever happens to be around.

I think this is a really neat idea – not for parties, but for absorbing local colour – for sitting at an outdoor table in a square on holiday somewhere, and letting the robot unobtrusively take photographs of the most interesting things it can find… which are almost always the people milling about, but pointing and clicking at them is a bit intrusive.

http://tiltshiftmaker.com

That’s pretty cool – you can make your own etc.

I think it’s quite remarkable how quickly this has gone from an Oooh and Aaah wonder on Digg etc, to being something that anyone anywhere can now do without having to know what they’re doing.

Well… you just have to ask Microsoft : There’s more mileage to be gained from flattening an expertise-gradient than there is from being an expert. Every barrier to entry is an opportunity.

Usually I’m not that into proprietary-gadget porn, especially if it costs $9000, but this showreel for a SprintCam v3 is seriously impressive. Mostly 1000 FPS.

Mind you, the slo-mo is kindof a special effect and not much good for anything else – unless you’re doing scientific work with it I suppose. Or porn. Do people like slo-mo porn? I suppose they probably do. People are a bit weird sometimes. Still, not as weird as it would be if you were into it being sped up 1000 times. I mean what are you, a bee?

No. You’re not. You’re a weirdo.