Had a little trouble with the shuttles this morning, which got myself and about 5 other folks this morning a few minutes late this morning. However I did snap a picture of Louis DeMattei, Amy Tan, and a charming lady whose name I missed. (If you can help out leave a comment.)
Here’s Michael introducing the day.
Sunday is now all wrapped up, what a whirlwind first day. Met some great people at dinner. (Saw Jeff Bezos in the crowd and at dinner.) Going to try to rest up so I can do my best to keep up tomorrow.
The Mythbuster guy! He’s doing a Q&A with himself, hopping from chair to chair.
He says he’s been thinking a lot about Open Source, he’s been trying to think of what’s next. He sees an amazing thing happening with Make, Craft, Intsructables, Lifehacker, people are trying not only to parse their world, but take it apart. Someone always takes the hit to buy a brand new part and take it apart to its base parts. He started to look at analogs for that, and he looked at the car. He thinks we’re still in the Model A period of the computer, even though they’re ubiqutous, they’re still a lot of work.
You have post-war America, you have people with some leisure time, rising middle class, so you had these cars that were great but they didn’t work as well. When people started working on their car they started making improvements. Industry started taking these improvements and incorporating them. That’s what happened in the 50s, and that’s what’s happening now. Endless websites devoted to modifying technology to fit your life better.
Because of this massive community that is the web, you can connect from across the world. It’s a trope to say the web is a great community, to me it’s not the source of all knowledge, it’s a repository of discovery. I always knew the web was a great idea, I just hadn’t figured out what that idea was yet. There’s a desire to learn, the web is providing that to a huge capacity.
When I first moved to New York I got addicted to dawn, so I slept like every third day. He stumbled upon Canal street when all these stores were opening, sounds like lots of parts stores. The web is like that on steroids. The show is inspiring a generation of schoolkids. There’s a sense of wonder in what we do, a sense of curiosity. There’s so much great, great stuff that it’s like a… in the 70s everyone started knitting, home crafts, my Dad made glasses from old wine bottles with this kit he bought, we’re having a resurgence of that. We have a hacker culture… hacker comes out of MIT in the 50s, the idea is a do-no-harm exploration of the world. We declared the American frontier completely explored in 1909, there’s a new frontier, like the duct system at your college.
In the last five years, the hackers have met the knitters. They’re generating knitting machines that make Nintendo knits and stuff.
What do you plan to do after Mythbusters?
The idea of Open Source, to call this exchange OS is to do a chicken and egg reversal. Science has always been open source, you do research, you figure something out, and you publish! Hopefully you don’t waste your thesis on something somebody did already in Germany. Open source is that exchange of ideas. When I think about what I’d like to do next, I posit a show that is an interface between TV, the web, to interface between what goes on the show and the audience, to develop really great ideas and build upon them, and those ideas are in the public domain. Whatever we do I’d like it to be an interaction with the audience, I’d like it to be free to the world, and I’d like to be able to improve ideas over time.
My knowledge is for everybody. It’s not like other professions when you ask someone how they did something and they won’t tell you.
Performs 200-300 neurosurgeries a year. He’s a surgeon. He’s dona bout 7,000 operations for brain tumors. He’s also a researcher to try and find better treatments for patients with disorders in the brain. 99% of the procedures that we practice today started in his lifetime. It started with Egyptians, recorded how to relocate a shoulder, figured out that language mapped to the left side of the brain. If you went to a doctor in the 1940s he was more likely to do you harm than good.
When he grew up he was a fan of Star Trek, there was one episode when the Enterprise came back to the 20th century. Showed a clip that shows Bones arguing with a 20th century doctor, calling him a barbarian for wanting to drill a hole in the patients head to find the cause of the pulse slowing.
Most promising development in the past 10 years is stem cells. What isn’t really discussed is the problem of trying to use embryonic stem cells in the treatment of humans. They’re from a person, so they are rejected by the new patient. The other big problem why they won’t be used in the next 5-10 years is that the cells are immortal, meaning they keep dividing and dividing, which is the same characteristics of cancer. They can cause cancer. (I hadn’t heard of this?)
We had an ‘aha’ moment when looking at learning at behaviour in two sets of rats. One set was put in a regular cage, the other rats were put in a cage with mazes and other engaging things. They found the rats in the fancy cage had more neurons and more connections between them. The first thing that changed in the brain was the immune cells in the brain, and it was the immune cells that then called the natural stem cells to the areas of learning and made new neurons. Our immune system is guiding the stem cells. The immune system is directing our ability to learn, and our ability to create new memories. It gives us the ability to use the immune system to direct stem cells in the brain without ever taking them out of the brain.
Patients with immune disorders, like the bubble baby, also had learning disorders. There’s a rat line where they can immunize and reverse Alzheimer’s disease in these rats. If you give Alzheimer rats a vaccine that can activate a particular immune cell in the rain, it can reverse the disease. The same thing could also occur in rats in strokes. Their ability to intervene clinically in a stroke is only good for 3-6 hours after a stroke, if you don’t get there in time, you miss the opportunity for any therapeutic treatment. But using these immune-directed stem cells they can actually regenerate.
They hope to do clinical trials for these brain-based vaccines within the next 18-24 months. (!) In the most aggressive form of brain cancer, they can stimulate the immune system to attack tumors. They increased the two-year survival rate from 8% to 42%.
Architecture fundamentally challenges the assumptions and conventions of space. She’s gathered a sample of work that demonstrates “productive Nihilism.” High defitinion has become the new othedoxy. They created an exhibition space which was a cloud, like fog. Fog pyramids, about 300 feet wide, sits on 4 delicate columns. The system is reading the real weather. All references are erased, nothing but whiteness and white noise. It’s an anti-spectecle.
They have a water bar, where all the waters of the world are served. It was adopted as a national icon that came to represent Swiss Doubt. It was a temporary structure that was eventually destroyed. It’s a memory of an apparition. It lives on as a chocolate bar. In the 80s and 90s they were mostly known by independent work, comissioned work from museums. The work itself resisted the nature of a retrospective. The retrospective is an invention of a museum that’s supposed to represent a complete body of work, but their work resisted that because it doesn’t resolve itself.
They created a robotic drill that went around and drilled the wall, as the wall represented a museum construct. The drill would pick a random point on a wall. Rather than be a backdrop, the wall competed for attention, eventually destroying the acoustic and visual seperation, and removing all the curator’s text.
They’re redoing Tully Hall to remove al the visual distractions. The walls will glow at certain times in the theatre experience.
General manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They have an annual budget of 250-260mm a year. He worked there as an usher when he was young. He has no formal musical training, but he’s now running the world’s biggest opera house. It’s interesting to be juxtapositioned with Liz because she’s transforming Lincoln Center from an architectural perspective, and he’s transforming the Met from an artistic perspective.
He just began his second season as a GM. He was most recently the president of Sony Classical, he was more famous for the crossover hits, like the soundtrack to Titanic — the anti-christ of classical music. The Titanic soundtrack sold 28 million copies, best selling pop album ever. The environment of the Met was at a point where ever since the events of 9/11 its attendence was steeply declining and its audience was aging.
The board declined to tell him just had bad thing were. There was a marketing survey that showed that the average age of the audience was 65 years old, the bad news was that 5 years older it had been 60 years old. The government doesn’t support the arts directly, but through tax breaks for donors to non-profits. The challenge was to come up with a program to convince the audience that gives them hunderds of millions a year would be non-threatening to them but would still appeal to a new audience.
The program was almost like a political platform, with many planks. Where the Met had lost its footing was through its very conservative and cautious approach to the theatrical qualities of opera. Opera is a sublime marriage of music and theatre. Richard Jones said to him, “Oh the Met, I couldn’t possibly work there. That’s where singers stand and sing, or as I like to say, park and bark.” So by increasing the theatrical values of Met by inviting the greatest theatre directors, do 7 or 8 productions instead of 3 or 4, comission new works, to open the Met up. Rehersals for the first time would be open to the general public. The first performance was simulcast into Times Square, with chairs and everything. The announced a family entertainment opera, one in English during the holiday period.
The Met was an isolated artistic island, he wanted to build the bridges back to contemporary art, to bring the Met back somewhere near the mainstream. 24-hour opera radio channel on Sirius, and a bigger connection with movie theatres around the world, like the Times Square simulcast.
Their attendence after six years of decline, is finally going up. They have sold-out houses as the rule, not the exception. Of the first 50 performances, they had 33 sold out. It seats 3,800 people, which is large for opera. The acoustics are all natural, no amplification. The top singers are singeng there than ever before. Trying to demonstrate that opera can be as engaging and exciting as any theatre production. 500 movie theatres in North America, another 100 in Europe, that are hooked up via satillete to show everything live. He’s going to end by showing a trailer for a new HD production they have showing in 3,000-4,000 theatres.
Michael showed a short and incomplete film about Johann Sebastian Bach. He’s currently taking donations to finish the film.
His website is mlfilms.com.
We Feel Fine - scans newly posted blog entries searching for occurances of “I feel” or “I’m feeling” and tries to determine some demographic info about them, like their age, location, what the weather is where they are. About 20,000 sentences a day get put into it.
He has some awesome visualizations for these, one with dots, one with the sentences in order, and this popped up on screen and Jonathan read it:
“I feel like changing to WordPress.”
Cool! 
There’s a version with pictures attached to it, a statistical view that can break it down by weather, gender, gender, .
“I feel like I’m diagonally parked in a parallel universe.”
It collects short stories, sometimes as short as 2-3 words.
New projects, stories from life. The Whale Hunt - he lived in Alaska with some eskimos. The eskimos wait for a whale to pass, and then harpoon it, and then haul it up. He photographed the entire expience, beginning the taxi ride to the 2nd killed whale 7 days later. A camera took a picture every 5 minutes, but he could speed up the pace if something exciting was happening, like a photographic heartbeat.
Bhutan is a country where they focus on Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. He would ask them to rate their happiness between 1-10 and then inflate and give them that number of balloons. Then he asked their wish, and then wrote it on a balloon, took a picture of their hands, a portrait, and then asked them to make a funny face. He’s going through about 10-20 of these mini-stories attached to the pictures, they’re really interesting.
He then took all of the wish balloons, re-inflated all the balloons and put them on a string. They’re still there.
Jonathan is at number27.org.
Experiements at the Intersection of Art, Technology, and Nonverbal Communication.
Golan’s site is Flong.com. (I like that it rhymes.)
“From the perspective of a typical computer, a human is a brain with one finger. - Joy Mountford
So much of the life is conducted through the mouse. The mouse has to be the narrowest straw you try to suck all of human expression through.
The work he does, which manifests itself as art, also is experimentation that he hopes that will be incorporated into the future paradigms of computer.
Dialtones - There was a concert where they registered their mobile phone, and whether they wanted to be soprano, alto, tenor, or bass. They got back a ticket telling them where to sit and got SMSed a ringtone. On stage is people dialing the phones over and over to create a symphony. They would do chords by dialing multipl people at the same time. They’re create melodies that move throuh the crowd. 8,000 phone calls in the 20 minute concert.
Most of his work has to do with gesture and the body. To reflect things back to people so they can learn something about themselves that they didn’t know before. They did an exhibit where singers’ voice and location was an interface into an interactive art project.
He’s doing a live demo of some software called Eyecode that takes a picture of your eyes every time you blink, so the image is wholly constructed by the people who viewed it.
Opto-isolator is a machine which makes eye contact. Right now it looks you in the eye and it blinks when you blink. He wants to do the eye contact like on a train when you look at someone and it looks away, or it looks at the person who is talking.
Another project, called Facecode, when you look at it slices you face into three segments, and then splices it with other people who have also viewed it.
They showed some cartoons from RingTales.com, pretty funny.
Mike does a cartoon called Over the Hedge. It was the first he had seen that had an email address. He sent him an email and said “Can we make a movie?” The movie came out last year from Dreamworks, 10 years later. There must be an easier way to make animations out of cartoons, and bring it to the internet.
Comics have been mass-media for the past 100 years, but where they’re distributed is slowly dying. They want to take this art form to the new medium. They’re not trying to make movies or TV shows, just trying to animate the strip itself, 15-30 seconds. Print cartoons are always a casual part of reading, a “Zen slap in the face” that wakes up the other part of your brain. They want to have these little cartoons everywhere that people are reading things digitally.
They started with the New Yorker archives, they have over 100,000 comics. They have an open editorial session every TUesday, anyone can walk through the door and try to get published. They get 10,000-15,000 a week, and print 20. They try very hard to honor the art of the original cartoonists.
Computers don’t like all the imperfections that cartoonists put into things. They do most of their animation hand-drawn, it’s old-fashioned, but it captures the look and feel of the art. They had a license for the New Yorker stuff, and just finished a deal with United Media to their comics, doing Dilbert. They’re hoping it will become ubiquitous, while you’re reading, you’ll get a little gift of humor.
The site is RingTales.com.
He does snowflake photograph, a camera attached to a microscope. He lives in Southern California, so he has to travel a bit. Northern Ontoria is his favorite. He lets snow fall on the cardboard, then looks for one that looks nice. He then picks it up with it up a paintbrush, and then put it on a microscope slide.
He’s going through pictures of snowflakes, apparently the different shapes all have names. He shines colored lights on them, because they’re clear. He photographed a 10mm snowflake, he thinks it’s the largest photographed.
His website is SnowCrystals.com.
Most museums wouldn’t think of inviting a living calligrapher, they only want the dead ones. He has two more years left on the bible he’s working on. He has spent his whole life doing something that most people don’t think that they want.
But people realyl do, when htey find something that they need to say in a different way. When you make something essentially for yourself, and then you put it out there, and it has an ability to connect in a way that type does not, no matter how bueatiful.
When he was watching the violinists earlier, he wasn’t watching the violins or the bows, he was watching the feet. That’s where the music starts.
Calligraphy can channel energy, it’s polite, it’s wedding invitations. Not many people come across it in your everyday life. Why would you have a wedding invitation written by hand? He said, it’s when you want to show someone you care about them. It’s about expressing a feeling. What does that say about our society that only on the level of wedding invitations that we employ that level.
He fell in love when he was little boy with calligraphy. He fell in love with a bottle of red ink, a pen point, and a pen. His aunt gave it to him in desperation to stop this kid from rampaging around the place. (Why did she think red ink was going to help the situation. ;))
You can have “cute” calligraphy, he draws a very loopy B on the board. It’s great for engraving, but you couldn’t read a bible in that type.
He wants everyone to make a letter in the air. Just like a violin, you can put a motion into a graphic art, and it stays there. Everyone just did the Reinassance A, it’s like typographic yoga.
If he was in the Middle East and was a Torah scribe, everyone would know his job, because he was dealing with the sacred. Same for the Koran. In the West, it’s actually something servants do, lawyer’s clerks do, notaries, except when it comes to cerimonial work. There are more people writing invitations at the White House than at Buckingham Palace… there are none at Buckingham Palace. You’re just happy enough to get the invitation! He’s showing some examples of the things he gets commissioned to do.
While in the Falkland Islands he saw some birds and started wondering why we think things are cute or not. Human children have many features of cuteness.
If you’ve ever had a child, they’re also impossibly annoying. If you didn’t think they were gosh-darned cute, they’d no longer be around. That’s not just true for humans, it’s true for mamels. He’s going through pictures demonstrating some of these characteristics. (I wonder if all these photographs are his? They’re great.)
I missed the name of the bird, but it’s definitely something that isn’t cute:
In short - snake with wings. They may be beautiful, but not cute. Even baby crocodiles aren’t cute, unlike many young in different species. They don’t have distorted features relative to the body, they’re just small versions of adult crocodiles.
It’s likely that we have a common conception of what’s cute because they have a common inheretence, something that was involved in the evolution of species that can’t support themselves when they’re young.
Most people are between 5-6 heads high. Shrek is 4 heads high. 4 heads high isn’t as extreme as a baby, which is 2.5-3 heads high, but Shrek has those proportions because he’s supposted to be lovable. We’re not supposted to love Prince Charming, and he’s 7 heads high. If you look at classic comic books, heroes are 8-9 heads high, they’re pinheads!
He’s showing 4 penguins from a movie. (He’s on the board of Dreamworks.) Knit brows, narrow set eyes - serious penguin. Open brows, wide set eyes, the goof. Even tigher brows, half closed eyes, narrow set, large nose, the boss./skipper. Open bros, very wide-set eyes — the clueless one.
He was on a safari and saw a lioness who had one eye that was enormously enlarged and blue. Most lions are right-handed. If you’re right-handed, you’re more likely to approach from the right side, and you’re more likely to be injured there.
He did a demo wiht modifying Dick Cheney’s face to make it cuter, I got a picture:
“If I can get you to think, even for a second, that Dick Cheney might be a little cuter, it shows how strong those evolutionary biases are.”
We’re hard-wired with hundreds, maybe thousands of these built-in notions. Art and architecture try to figure some of that out, usually it’s more difficult because there’s nothing as obvious to compare to as that baby we saw in the beginning. If you come to EG in twenty years, there’s a real opportunity to learn more about how those things work, and inform the visual arts in a quantative way like we never have before.
Miguel Angel Corzo is giving a background on the music here at the conference. All of the music is from students at his conservatory, the Colburn Institute.
He thought it’d be a good start to talk about one piece, called Gran Tourismo. In his view these conferences really are about a sense of discovery, a sense of looking around, taking a trip, going in different directions. It is tourism. Gran Tourism is the name giving to the cars racing around.
The piece wa by a living composer, a 28-year-old man here at the conference, Andrew Norman. He was inspired by three things: th sense of discovering futuristic art, the sense that there was an incredible opportunity to pick up on an Italian theme combined with a modern approach, and finally his roomate had a game called Gran Tourismo.
It is performed by 8 violinists from the Colburn school. The piece is a race, everyone is trying to beat everyone else. It has a complete sense of perfection in that everybody has to follow everbody else — it is performed without a conductor. Everyone has to be listening to each other. At the very end when you think it’s finished, it picks back up again.
Eduardo Santana on the left is from Guadalajara, he’s a biologist (with a penchant for birds) and he’s currently working on creating a new natural science museum. He’s here to gain perspective to help him shape the museum, which they hope to launch in 2011.
Kevin Kelly is a speaker at EG. He has a incredibly short domain name, kk.org, and here’s his Wikipedia page.
The first session today is going to be called “Different Strokes.” You can of course read the bios of all the presenters, but here are a few links and recent news about each that hopefully give a little more background.
