30.8.09
28.8.09
20.2.08
14.2.08
Do You Believe In America Yet?
Thanks Web 2.0. Thanks new millenium. Thanks hyper-conscious superstars. Thanks for the striking contrast between old and new.
(p.s. Can you spot the Canadian?)
12.2.08
You Are (barely) Alive!
The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami certainly has a rainbow coloured imagination, but who knew he had feelings too? The ironic, desperate kind, the frustration-of-being kind. Not to mention the subversion of advertising within the confined framework of a commercial. It is usually that longing is fulfilled within these contexts, that desire can be overcome and its goal reached. Not here. But more importantly, outside of the localized capitalist motif, these commercials give us a unique insight into how an artificial creature, bestowed with the same neuro-curcuitry and consciousness as us, would be stuck living a life of longing and resentment. The brain is only half the battle.
(via Kitsune Noir)
3.2.08
The Reality of the Virtual
Brain-Computer Interface for Second Life
"A research team at the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. An EEG machine reads motor cortex data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move."
(more via Pink Tentacle)
"Virtual Reality is a rather miserable idea. A much more interesting notion is the opposite. Not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual. That is to say reality, real effects produced by something that does not yet fully exist." Slavoj Žižek - The Reality of the Virtual
