Then when you open a file on the server FireFTP creates a temporary file in temp directory and opens it with TextWrangler. Everytime you save the file FireFTP automatically uploads the file to the server.

To see if you have command line option installed type ‘edit’ in terminal. Do ‘which edit’ in terminal. If the path it returns is different from /usr/local/bin/edit use that in FireFTP.

Another feature of play is the juxtaposition of time and space. The play happens at early nineteenth century and late twentieth century simultaneously at the same time. It also deals with the ways of representing this kind of idealism that first was in medieval literature, and then that description was re-mediated by classical painters such as Poussin himself in paintings. Then later in late 18th century British landscape architects used the painting as a model to design English gardens.

Now the 21th century technological understanding of the world still deals with the same issues and tries to find a shelter for the vulnerabilities of human being using technology to create new ways of representing utopia.

What interests me is the representation of this theme using different media, from literature to architecture, and the juxtaposition of space and time happening in all of them. ‘Arcadia’ itself is the projection of heaven into the concept of garden and vice versa at the same time and it floats back and forth between those two concepts: a space that is constantly flickering.

This is Pousins’ painting ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. The first image is the painting itself and the second one is the same image with the shepherds being removed.

The image will be projected inside a frame (or a monitor is put inside a frame because it has better quality and closer to print image). A box is placed in the middle of the room and a depth camera (like Kinect) overlooking it.

As someone gets close to the box a shadowy image of him appears in the painting.

In the diagram above, ‘A’ sees ‘B’ and ‘C’ in Arcadia.

Without anybody being near the box or looking at the painting, what is represented inside the frame is another space that doesn’t have anything in common with the containing space of the room (or gallery). But at the certain moments, based on the position and interactions of persons in the room, those two space are getting aligned together with the tombstone and the box being the reference point of the alignment.

This momentary alignments also points to the similarity between the shepherds and people in the room (especially if it is a gallery space): wondering around and enjoying their time to conceal what is uncomforting.

Implementation:

Using Kinect to be able to first, separate background, etc. from the image of persons. Also the depth image allows the rendered shadows to be from another direction from where camera is. So it gives ability to do further directional juxtaposition.

Framework: More likely with openframeworks because it is faster and it works more effectively with OpenNI code that are both in c++ but for prototype I may use Processing since development is easier and faster.

wphttp://youtu.be/ON1vvDSQFKg

http://youtu.be/ON1vvDSQFKg (1:45)

http://sepans.com/sp/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/show.jpg

installed ruby1.9.1 : sudo apt-get install ruby1.9 .1
–installed heroku: wget -qO- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install.sh | sh
-heroku login
-heroku keys:add (created keys)
-checked out code: git clone git@heroku.com:APPNAME.git -o production
-installed whole bunch of things from http://blog.moonflare.com/2011/10/25/installing-ruby-1-9-2-and-gems-on-ubuntu-11-10/ :
sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-dev
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev
sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev
sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

(please send me a note @ sepans-at-sepans-.-com if you have comment)

Try Tewxt

Link-free WordPress template (In Progress): The interconnected nature of web and ease of navigation makes our experience of reading and very different from physical media (Books, Urban space etc.). In this project I tried to experiment alternative modes of navigation within a website. I am creating a WordPress template that instead of using links, navigation is possible by solving the puzzles generated from the WP content.

WP template : http://sepans.com/bcwp/

McLuhan Quotation Generator:

http://sepans.com/misc/markov/mcluhan.php

TEWXT creates a hypertext structure from a corpus of text not by using hype-links, but by allowing users to branch-search-read at any point.

In TEWXT users can use any of the search boxes on the screen to search for a word within a corpus of texts, choose one of the results and start reading the text. At any point users can open a new box in any of the adjacent positions, perform another search and follow a new path in reading. Also it is possible to open new boxes for marginal notes.

This structure of text boxes can grow infinitely.

It is possible to record and replay the whole experience of reading (including notes) using TEWXT.

Using each box (or combination of adjacent boxes), users can apply natural language processing algorithms to the content of the boxes and transform and create new text:

• Wikifying: highlighting and linking words within the text to Wikipedia articles by a natural language processing algorithm.
• WIkiTransformation: Transforming text by substituting words within text using Wikipedia and the semantic relevance of the linked articles as thesaurus.
• Markov Text Generation: Generating new text by applying Markov Chain Text Generation Algorithm to text inside a box.
• Cellular Automata Generation: Using adjacent text boxes as cells of a cellular automata to generate new text.

Moreover users are able to combine retrieved text, notes and transformed text to create a new text which implicitly resonances the reading trails being used as a high-tech tool to create something like Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcade’ or just go through ‘The garden of forking paths’

To fight back ELIZA with her own technique, I once tried to talk to ELIZA using sentences from Kittler’s ‘Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter’:

http://sepans.com/gwodot/nothing.htm

Broken images

http://sepans.com/gwodot/imgrotate.htm

Wikistalker text image:

http://sepans.com/sp/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/s.png

http://sepans.com/wikistalker/sandbox/textimage.htm

Brains

3D:

Examples of ‘Softwares that see’:

Observed Spactator

- It deals with the question of detached observation and the line separating object of observation from subject

- PS3 Camera, Processing

- It projects Velasquez’ Las Manias inside a frame as if it is a drawn picture but user eventually realizes that it is the picture of herself looking inside the room in the painting

-It can be improved by adjusting the pose and size of the person to make it more similar to the person in the painting.

Backspace

- It incorporates and realizes something hard to imagine, embodied navigation in cyberspace, using vision.

-processing, kinect, openni, Wikipedia miner

- it projects the links of a wikipedia article in 3D based on the semantic relevance of them and users can navigate in that space by grabbing links.

- Making ‘reading’ an essential part of experience as opposed to experience of playing  with links.

This project is implemented in HTML5 using processingjs and raphaeljs.

Click here to try Wikistalker

Gallery

Click here to try Wikistalker

The initial idea of this project came from the reading of Hubert Dreyfus’s book ‘On the Internet’ and his existential analysis of the Internet based on ideas from Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Foucault.

About user interface:

You can filter links by their relatedness using the bar and sort them alphabetically or by relevance. A short description and an image of article appears in the middle of the page. For the complete article you can click on ‘Article view’ on top.

To navigate you can click on any link that when it is highlighted and either chose ‘Go to entry’ in the middle or ‘close’ to select another link.

Category View (New Feature) shows how how different links are related to the main article by connecting those which are sharing a category.

Circles on the end of the links are for articles that are mutually linked.

Top image is the visualization of Michel Foucault article with the link to ‘Order of the Things’ highlighted.

Embodied navigation, information foraging, spatiality of cyberspace and the hierarchy of knowledge in cyberspace are among the themes studied in this project.

This project is a collaboration with Raschin.

More Description:

Back-space is an interactive installation exploring the spatiality of cyberspace in our wanderings and investigations. It tries to bring to focus our everyday dwelling with huge amount of interconnected information and the way we move in this space by using hyperlinks.

Spatial distance has always been an obstacle to accessibly. Historically technological progress has advanced in the direction of reduction or eliminating distance and erasing the differences between far and near. This compression of space was first become more noticeable with the spread of telegraph and railroads. Now cyberspace delivers the ultimate annihilation of space by making every destination effortlessly accessible and making every point uniformly distance-less.

I believe access, nearness, distance and perspective play crucial roles in our ability to comprehend at both cognitive and aesthetic levels. Distance is a part of the bodily ground for cognition and a primary force behind element of aesthetic understanding of the world. It helps us determine what is reachable and reveals what is worth paying attention to.

Backspace explores how objectifying associations in a representation of knowledge using hyperlinks affects our interaction with this body of knowledge. Participants in Backspace use their bodies to do what seems playful and magical: to navigate Wikipedia by seeking and grabbing hyperlinks surrounding them in different distances.

In back-space participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. Outgoing links from a Wikipedia article are projected for users in 3D and each link is placed in a distance from user according to its semantic relevance to the that article. The more relevant they are, the closer they become to user. Participant’s body is captured using a Kinect camera and they can interact and grab links by using their body to navigate in Wikipedia. The effort needed to reach a link is proportional to the relevance of the link. The content of each article they visit appears beneath the link cloud as a block of text. By navigating inside Backspace a city-like structure emerges from the history of navigation and user can bend to land down and look through the city they’ve just created.

Backspace - Embodied Wikipedia navigation with Kinect

Wikipedia is now more than just an encyclopedia. It is an interconnected representation of knowledge analogues to a limitless library with uncountable aisles of books, described by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story ‘Library of Babel’: “The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.” Similar to the library of Babel, any entry of Wikipedia can be considered as the center of this library, from which, one can wander forever from one article to another. In the ‘Library of Babel’ Borges states that the library is total; containing everything representable in every representational form. The destruction of some volumes of the library cannot possibly damage the aggregate of knowledge, since the lost ones can be recreated from its de facto facsimiles. ‘Absence’ is meaningless in an infinite library.
In a hyperlinked media, being connected is equivalent to being present; only a disconnected entity is inaccessible and therefore absent. In Wikipedia, as in Borges’ library of Babel, absence is unimaginable since all entities are interconnected with every conceivable connection. Even removing all links to an entry won’t disconnect it since it is still connected through search engine indices.