Ok people, you can stop sending me emails about Microsoft Surface. I’ve seen it already. And as I mentioned in this interview and this one the experimentation phase of interactive surfaces is over. Everyone knows that Microsoft is the pretty much the last cog in the technology wheel. When they’ve figured it out, well that means that just about everyone else has already figured it out some time ago.

I love that historical timeline on the surface web page. NO REALLY EVERYONE, LOOK, WE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE THE IPHONE. NO, HEY, WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING? IT’S TRUE! The funny thing about Microsoft is that they are still actually sincere after all these years. They just don’t get the joke. They really do think that they have invented all these technologies, only they just weren’t savvy enough to make people realize it. For example, to them, OS X’s interface is actually a rip-off of ideas they were already working on in Vista and not the other way around. Back in my little bubble world, we digital artists are always suffering from the same illness — it’s in fact our favorite sport (oh, I was doing that years ago) — but it’s even funnier to see one of the richest companies in the world fretting over their public image: gosh, if people only knew!

But kidding aside, this is a really good thing. I said in the above interviews that when Jeff Han’s solution was shown, it was officially over for surface innovation. I called them Hypertables, Hypersurfaces and Object Oriented Objects, MIT people called them Things That Think amongst other terms (and ages before me), and then before all that there was Bill Buxton and Myron Kruger. So none of this is new. But what we needed was a starting block, a sort of ok, fiddling’s over, time to use this stuff. Jeff solved the fundamental visual-gestural language, and all we had to do from there was to start using it.

I also should mention here what got cut out of the Fast Company interview, in response to the question « are hypertables the replacement for the keyboard/mouse combination? » My answer to that was « look at the Wii ». You cannot seperate the iPhone introduction from the introduction of the Wii controller. Both are looking to phsyicalize algorithms, make algorithms maleable physically, and as far as that goes, the field is still wide open. Keyboards and mice are still workable, so they probablly won’t die, no, beacause people will be writing things for a long time to come. Neither the Wii, nor the iPhone, to Surface, will help you write your blog. Maybe your video blog, but not your text blog.

Or maybe a million little things will complement the keyboard and mouse, or maybe just a half-dozen solutions will turn out to be modular enough to solve most of the things we will want to do. Or maybe Cronenberg is right, and it’ll be your body itself. But in my opinion 1) phyiscal objects are good for abstract thinking, and 2) no single object will be fully modular enough for all uses. There will not be one single system, although touch will indeed solve quite a few of the old ones. But whatever the case, the interfacing will require interfacing algorithmically. And when it comes to interacing algorithmically, nothing beats the Rubik’s Cube.

So now are finally seeing real-world hypersurfaces that we can work with. Personally I was expecting Apple to solve the commercialization problem first, and maybe they will. With that $5000+ tag, Surface still feels like vaporware. But I don’t think Microsoft will have any problems shipping at the end of the year as they predict. Trust me, this is very easy technology. For my installation at the Pompidou Center in 2004, for example, I solved my lighting problem with a 5€ bathroom lamp from the BHV down the street. Now, if I can make Hypertables with household appliances, Microsoft can probably commercialize the thing with more professional processes.*

I’m also intrigued that so many people are offering the same solution. That more or less solves the patent problem right there.

Also, Vista is running behind Surface, and while I think Vista is oh-so Mac 10.2 (which is still just a fancy NeXT machine), it’s ultimately great news that there’s a boring old operating system sitting under that coffeetable. Running Processing or Flash or vvvv or whatever on top of it shouldn’t be all that hard.

This is going to sound bad, but personally I’ve got about a five-year start on what works and what doesn’t in these touch-contexts, and plenty of ideas that have just been waiting for the technology to become a reality. But I’m also a little bored with it as well, so we’ll see if I invest a new round in this technology. Our crew has it’s work cut out for it whatever the case: neither Microsoft, nor Apple, nor Perceptive Pixel for that matter, have proposed any tangeable experience with this technology. So far, we’re just talking about « interfaces ». So artists still have a lot to offer in this field.

So thanks Microsoft. I guess I’m trying to say thanks for being so reassuringly tweed coat and making this technology feel like Daddy’s old jalopy…

Karsten Schmidt und Matt Wade von Moving Brands reden über ihre Arbeit mit processing:

As heavy users of Processing, Moving Brands have been asked to contribute material to the “Built with Processing” launch event @ SuperDeluxe, Tokyo. This filmed interview features two of our Design Directors, Matt Wade and Karsten Schmidt, who have proliferated the use of this new tool and design approach for some of our most prestigious branding projects over the past year. Karsten has also actively contributed to the earlier development stages of Processing. Together they will talk you through 3 of these projects and talk about their experiences and the creation process with this tool.

Author: movingbrands

Keywords: processing.org mb.com book interview interaction design portfolio installation kef muon lcf toxi

Added: May 31, 2007

A few people have asked if I’m still using Processing now that I’ve joined Stamen (best known for their Flash work). Whilst it’s true that I’ve been quiet on the Processing front, hard at work learning Actionscript 3 for Flash 9 to enable us to deliver Trulia Hindsight, much of that piece was informed by early sketches I wrote in Processing. (The graphs we made of a day of diggs were also made with Processing.)

Here are four movies we made from Trulia’s data to get across the ideas we wanted to develop into Hindsight. It’s a lucky thing that Flash 9 can shift many more points around the screen than Flash 8, otherwise we’d have been stuck. That said, it’s still way behind Processing with OpenGL for this kind of visualisation, so choose your tools wisely when building a proof-of-concept in a different language to the one your project will be delivered in!

In the first few weeks of working with Trulia, we did some initial work exploring non-geographic views of their data such as tree maps and node graphs and so on. In the end though, the most compelling thing we came up with was to explore the different dimensions of the Trulia database in the form of animated maps.

Here are two movies, the first is San Francisco and the second is San Jose, showing the properties animated along an intuitive axis: the year they were built.

San Francisco by Year (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo

San Jose by Year (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo

And here are two more movies, also made with Processing, that show the properties that were sold in the last 10 years (under $2m), this time animated by sale price:

San Francisco by Price (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo

San Jose by Price (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo

The animations by sale price aren’t available in Trulia Hindsight (yet) but we hope to work more on these less-intuitive dimensions for animation in the future.

No doubt whichever direction we go in next I’ll still reach for Processing to try things out. It’s the tool I find it easiest to think in, and although Flex Builder (based on Eclipse) is a great IDE, I still find myself wanting to bend Actionscript to be more like Processing when it comes to prototyping my ideas - it seems I’m not the only one!

The abstractmachine:synchronizer is the latest of the practical, rapidly developed, small-scale algorithmic tools that I’ve been working on as of late — along the lines of abstractmachine:wrap, abstractmachine:crypt, and abstractmachine:background. Like those programs and protocols, it was designed to be a machine that you could use in some practical capacity, despite its particularities

The idea is very simple: each participant downloads a plug-in for Firefox from the abstractmachine website and installs it into their browser. Once loaded, this system allows for people to navigate their browsers collectively, with each click onto a new page or site carrying the entire synchronized community along for the ride. Collective navigation, synchronized surfing (hey, sounds like an olympic sport), active/passive web flanerie…

From the documentation: The Synchronizer is a system for synchronizing browsers. It allows all of its users to synchronize with each other by literally « getting everyone on the same page ». Pages are called « settings » so as to emphasize the temporary and spatial nature of collective travel. When a user changes a setting by entering a new url, this changes the collective setting for everyone else; i.e. everyone’s browser moves to the new setting.

For more information, and detailed installation/usage instructions: head to http://www.abstractmachine.net/synchronizer, ou aller sur http://www.abstractmachine.net/synchroniseur pour les instructions en français. Also note that while the instructions are only in French and in English, the plug-in itself contains several languages, including Polish(!) and Icelandic(!), and more should be on the way soon. Translation participation is welcome. Contact me for details (it’s only a couple of lines, nothing special).

Please note that this is a public beta, and although we have already tested the system for the past month, we have only done so as a small group and not all that professionally. Don’t be suprised if real-world use with many more synchronizers doesn’t reveal some hidden design flaw. Be sure to post comments here for any suggestions/complaints you might have.

And finally, for those that want to access the backend of this system, for example in order to create some dynamic client in Flash or Processing, there are full instructions on accessing the public API at http://www.abstractmachine.net/synchronizer/backend.php.

I've got my hands on a Nokia N93 and am trying to see what I can do with this beast using Mobile Processing. It's got a nice big screen and supports Java / MIDP 2.0, so there should be some potential, right?

Well, so far I feel like I've been timewarped back to 1995 and old-skool Java 1.0 AWT graphics: No transparency, no floating point math, no 3D. It doesn't help that Mobile Processing only comes with a bare minimum of example code, and that at least some of the contributed libraries are outdated. At this point I wonder if I'd be better off ditching Mobile Processing and using regular Java with Nokia's custom SDKs.

If any readers out there have experience creating eye candy for cell phones, input would be appreciated.

Note to readers. Please observe that I am just about to condemn myself from all future speaking engagements by unabashedly biting the hand that feeds; even worse — coward that I am — from the comfort of my little countryside home, after-the-fact, far from stone’s throw. Whatever. Let the chips fall where they may. Some things just have to be said.

I’ve just gotten back from a very strange festival, of the likes I’ve been avoiding for quite some time: Flash Festival, a very well-produced, well-intentioned festival + prix, but with an absolutely vaccuous artistic core. It suffered from being what in French can be considered the worst of all insults: gentil. I say « gentil » and « vaccuous » not because of the invited artists — I have nothing but esteem for many of the speakers, amongst them Christophe Bruno, Michael Sellam, Jean-Louis Boissier, entre autres. But in reality these artists had very little to do with the themes and orientation of the festival, which for its part seems above all to revolve around that very ambiguous thing: the artistic prix. And when it came to the actual prix itself, and the artistic values it defended, I am here to say here are the nails, and if you don’t have the courage to do it, give me the hammer and I will nail that coffin shut for you.

Oh and, as much as I like anonymes, it’s not « net art », which is normally spelled « net.art » by the way, even if in 2007 most people have more or less dropped the term. Net.art traditionally maintains a critical approach to the web as a medium, or form, not just as a means of distribution. Please, oh pretty please, can we bury the cultural CD-Rom past of France once and for all? Maybe we could call Mexico and see if they have any room left next to the landfill with all the E.T. 2600 cartridges. There is still this echo of desire that the web will become a pure means of transmission of cultural artfacts, i.e. what in France is called édition: books, magazines, comic books, music, cinéma, … Works that can only be approached from the point of view of its « content », and for which the technological underpinnings have become ubiquitous or banal. The current political climate seems to reinforce this view, making it all the more incompatible with the web 2.0 (or call it what you will). The technological field is still shifting and has not yet coalesced into any one format. I have mentioned it before here, and I will mention it here again and again, but the current powers-that-be are trying to form a wall around content-based media precisely because it is terrified of new algorithmic forms of expression.

At one point, someone for whom I have too much respect to name here, got up on stage and commended the festival for being one of the « last few » to defend works of this sort. Perhaps it should, in fact, be the last. While I know it’s sometimes hard to hear, and we would all like to assume some larger conspiracy, the fact of the matter is that it is also just as often the case that artistic institutions die because it was their time to do so, and that there is some public money that is better spent elsewhere. Most of the Flash-inspired festivals have either died, or matured into something far more complex than some Adobe love-fest.

As for some of the comments I made during my talk on the proximity+distance double-step artists need to maintain with industry, a few clarifications are in store. For one, let it be known that I think that Flash is a great animation program, perfect for people wanting to make stuff like this. It’s also great for cool on-line stuff like this. And during the awards there was a very slick site that won the commercial category: crazyhorse. I can without reservation see the use of Flash for all that stuff. But this is not what Flash is being groomed for. It is currently in the middle stages of a full-scale assault as a closed platform for protected content (ignore recent open-source annoucements, c’est du bluff). And as a platform, it not only is wrong-headed, it is out-and-out dangerous. Can someone explain to me why Microsoft/Explorer has nothing but haters for all the damage it did to the web back in the 90’s, whereas Adobe/Macromedia/Flash has nothing but admirers? Flash is not just about animation anymore, it is about the « full experience ». Are graphic designers really that myopic? The commercial strategies of the two platforms (concerning the web at least) are exactly one and the same: dominate the landscape and become the de-facto web standard, only privately owned. A private standard for the public. A strategy based on protocols as the nexus of control. Are we really that politically naïve?

Also, a word of advice on the role of sponsors in artistic institutions. Many people asked me about this after my talk (cf. Etienne’s comment). I’m all for sponsors — who isn’t? — it’s an absolute win-win for everyone. But there are limits on what that sponsorship gets you.

To explain myself, let me tell you a story about a childhood friend of mine: Jonathan. Jonathan just stepped down from over a decade of stewardship of one really kick-ass festival for digital video shorts. Everyone knows this festival. It’s been all over the world. It’s got a magazine. It dominates the landscape in its own way. Now, I know Jonathan very well, I should because the two of us started our own television show when we were just 16 years old. And back then, he already knew exactly how to work with sponsors. When to say yes, when to say no. Back when we were 16 he was convincing music companies to give us exemptions for music video fees, and he was sending back the tapes of the synthpop wannabies the labels were trying to push on us. He’s got guts that guy. So ten years later, it came as no suprise to me to learn that he had quit what was quickly becoming a world-renowned festival, in part because his partner lacked artistic integrity. As just one example, Apple wanted stage-time to present whatever software it was presenting in the 90’s — in return for the large donations it was making to the festival. I give you this, you give me that, right? Wrong. While his partner caved in, Jonathan knew right away that it was poisoned fruit, promptly quit and started his own festival, leaving the previous one in the dust. Lesson? Street cred and artistic integrity goes a lot longer than you might suspect. People can smell a dirty deal, even Apple, who quickly decided to back Jonathan’s new festival.

You would figure that the Centre Pompidou would balk at inviting Adobe on their stage not only once, but twice. I can understand the pairing in other contexts, like Siggraph, or whatever, but not at the Pompidou. This is not a trade-fair, this is an arts center. They don’t need that kind of funding, do they? They already funnel a huge chunk of the public arts budget already, they can’t be that desperate. I might be wrong on this, maybe Kodak or Canon demo their new cameras at the opening of each photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art, or give out free prints to the participating artists (yeah right). Or perhaps we could look at existing hybrids such as the Hugo Boss Prize — but even there I have a hard time imagining models walking around the opening at the Guggenheim with the new underwear collection. Well, now that I think about it, that might be funny. I’ll have to see if Victoria Secret has its own arts competition…

So let that be a reminder that we need to be techno-power conscious just as in previous battles we needed to have a class consciousness. Today, class consciousness has become public final class consciousness (lame coder’s joke), i.e. an understanding of the social role of programming structures and their function in shaping discourse. Within this context, artists are neither neutral, nor necessarily in a position of inferiority. Processing nicely held its own yeasterday, and I thought it looked pretty damn slick next to Adobe’s offerings. Especially the OpenGL stuff, the PDF examples (more Adobe there), and its interfacing with robotics and sensors of all sorts. Sure, Processing’s built on Java, and that wasn’t officially open-sourced until only a few months ago. Maybe Sun is just a lame competitor to Adobe, and open-sourced because they had to. Maybe. But we still need to be very careful in the current political climate, especially here in France. Meanwhile Silicon Valley itself is embracing open-source en masse (and gasp as an economic model!) while most of the big media companies (outside of the big French holdings) are dropping DRM like it was the plague. Allez la France, encore un effort!