A Brief Account of Recent things: Sub-Mullae 2012, The Patriotic Cabby, and the Geology of Singapore

From left to right: Khai, Heewoo, Annabelle, and Mulim

This week is the start of the first phase of a collaboration between me and Korean artist Jeong Heewoo. Heewoo is a meticulous artist who also works with mapping and I'm excited to be showing her around and working with her! We are working from the The Substation Random Room where we have a kind of open studio from around 11 to 6pm each day (when we are in, if we are not in, then it means we are outside seeing things).

The only problem is that my schedule has also suddenly exploded! It has become ridiculously hectic this week, along with my usual overwhelming commercial design work, preparation for talks and abstracts and journals, and on top of that: my Postcode Postcard receiving a lot of good but unexpected attention, including being mentioned in a presentation at the World Cities Summit Expo Forum 2012, and fielding some interviews. Despite the superbusyness, I find that it has been very fruitful to have worked on that project as I have met many amazing people working in data visualisation / data mining / programming as a result of participating in that data hackathon... and I am always keen to meet more people who are interested in this area or actually work in this area.

I have posted some things about the last few days: our trip to the WCS Summit, going to the Marina Bay City Gallery, and going to the URA Resource Centre & City Gallery.

Here are links to our new blog and wiki for the Sub-mullae project:

Blog: http://sub-mullae-2012.blogspot.sg/
Wiki: http://map.wwgou.org

A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF OTHER RECENT THINGS

Patriotic Cabby

THE PATRIOTIC CABBIE

I was taking a Taxi back home one day when I met a cab driver who was fiercely patriotic and he told me of his secret plan to buy 10000 singapore flags and to festoon his entire HDB block with them, overnight, in order to remind Singaporeans that they should love Singapore and not behave ungraciously. "I will hang a Singapore flag from every single ledge! i will plant one flag in their pots of plants! I will put one flag in every single pot of plant that I have! I will also get some bunting and go around the estate with the Singapore flag! When everyone wakes up they will be shocked! But then, I will be quiet and not let anyone know it was me." I hope he gets to do it! He even had a design that he had made by himself - he let me take a picture of this design that he had also pasted on his own taxi. I love the idea and I hope he manages to accomplish it, whereever he might be right now...

THE GEOLOGY OF SINGAPORE

I was reading a book by the Public Works Department about the geology of Singapore and it tabulates all the geological faults in Singapore (no matter how tiny and almost non-existent).

Few faults are actually exposed in Singapore, and the only ones that can be dated are the Murai Fault, Nanyang Fault, and Pasir Laba Faults which are thrust faults with other associated tear faults around them. Basically if Singapore was a big slab of rock, what happened was that there was probably some horizontal stress from the south-west and this mass of material kinda over-rode on top of the usually north-west trending sediments that were from the older Triassic period. A fault means there was either a thrust fault or tear fault where the rock was compressed/pushed together or pulled apart by the plate tectonics. I find this mindboggling since we aren't used to thinking of the very creation of the land of Singapore, tracing it all the way back to a period where dinosaurs might have even existed. To think that Singapore was here all along, this silly little spot of an island in the world!

So basically if we had to make a list of geological faults in singapore, they would be: Murai Fault, Pasir Laba Fault, Nanyang Fault, Henderson Road Fault, Tanjong Lokos Fault, Pepys Road Fault, Nee Soon Fault, Seletar Fault. Did i miss out anything?

LTA ROAD DETAIL GUIDE

I recently found a road detail guide released by the LTA which is like a detailed design guide to everything to do with road construction and road signage. Yes, they have a detailed guide for that.

ESRI and GIS

I read a ESRI magazine which publishes a selection of outstanding GIS projects each month, from . I have been trying to teach myself about GIS and bought a number of books to learn more about how to get started with ArcGIS (in some brief flashes of madness i even think that I might do a surveyor course here, because I enjoy the idea of doing meaningful urban spatial analysis so much. (I often think I am slowly shifting towards wanting to do my Masters in something like Advanced Spatial Analysis as a starting point to a further PhD in this area, so that I can combine my love for data visualization with my interest in urban built environments, architecture, and geography...)

UP Singapore Urban Prototyping Weekend - Postcode Postcard

Over the weekend I was at UP Singapore where there was a great big data hackathon with interesting datasets from places such as Singtel, Taxi, LTA, etc. We met loads of interesting people, learnt lots, had fun experimenting with the data, and at the end of the weekend, Me and Yuta ("Team Jalan Besar") built this:



The idea I had for the Postcode Postcard was to build a simple web app that aims to visualize the local mobile network data and other datasets in Singapore, and to render this into a physical postcard that can be printed on the spot and distributed as a real postcard that can be mailed to a friend who might not have an internet connection.



Many asked me why not just make it a visual on the iphone, but I feel the point of the physical postcard is because the people who need to see "big data" in this format are the ones who won't be online with their smartphones to see it. How can a smart city be smart if not everyone can understand it?





(Our entry won 3rd prize and we got a Playbook!)

Yangtze Scribbler - Spotted on Queen Street

Yangtze Scribbler - SPOTTED AGAIN (June 2012)! Thanks to a tipoff by my friend Yuta (who also lives along Jalan Besar), I had a little walk around Queen Street, around the Bus Terminal and the Indian Church - and I found this on the side wall of the slightly run-down "Cambridge Institute". I can't believe I missed it before as I have many shots of the old market that is now being disassembled across the road from it, and I must have been standing right in front of this spot before but I just hadn't noticed it before! At night, the path along this wall is not very well lighted.

Its proximity to the station suggests a possible connection to.... Malaysia. Either the person commutes to Malaysia via the bus and thus walks past this path frequently - or the person lives in my area (Near Little India/Jalan Besar) and is also walking around like me. What are the chances that I would have ended up moving to the exact area as the mystery writer whose scrawlings I first discovered on a wall in Chinatown some years ago?

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See Also:
Open Urbanism: Looking for the Yangtze Scribbler
Open Urbanism: Yangtze Scribbler on Victoria Lane
Singapore Memory Project Showcase - Tan Pin Pin's short on the Yangtze Scribbler

Retroalimentacion (Facultad del Artes Gallery, UAEM)

Here are some images from our show "Retroalimentacion" at the Facultad del Artes Gallery, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México.



From the Wall Text: "Retroalimentacion is a series of workshops and a sampling of digital art works by artists located in S.E. Asia sponsored by the Facultad de Artes de la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, in Mexico. It is hoped that these events, including workshops conducted in Mexico by four artists/designers located in Southeast Asia, will be the beginning of a cross-cultural dialogue about approaches to the digital medium between Latin America and Southeast Asia. The retro in the title recalls a return to a focus on digital art, a medium of expression that first bloomed at the dawn of the Information Age in the late 1990's. Although not as novel as when wide-spread computer and the Internet usage first sprung up in many parts of the world, the digital medium is being energetically explored by a newer generation of artists geographically located in regions of Southeast Asia such as Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines who approach the medium with fresh insights, as well as by other creators located in the region with longer histories of international practice.

The theme of the workshops and exhibit is loosely related to the theme of feedback, feedback in games, feedback in audio-visual remixing, and in other interactive works such as hacked Kinect games, as well as through mediated social feedback. The alimentation in this event's title also hints of a desire to feed, to consume, an addiction to mediated reflections and immediate responses to actions. We are easily drawn into expecting continuous feedback, whether provided by human agents, such as comments in socially mediated software like Facebook, or taking the form of artificially programmed audio-visual responses. Feedback satisfies our sense that our actions have consequences, and this addiction is being harnessed for developing commercial design products and games.

But feedback can also be distorted creatively into noise. Audio and visual effects ripple out from electronic sources. Players intuitively follow paths through digital artifacts based on negative and positive responses to their actions. Feedback then becomes both a guide and a lure, noise and art effect."

Participating Artists:

Andreas Siagian [lifepatch.org]
Anne-Marie Schleiner [opensorcery.net]
Brian O'Reilly
Debbie Ding [dreamsyntax.org]
Kenneth Feinstein
Luis Hernandez Galvan [ungravity.org]
Tengal Nolasnem
Vladimir Todorovic

Organizer:

Janitzio Alatriste

Opening Speech

The Director gave a short speech to the crowd outside before everyone burst inside. It was a small gallery with many projections and "interaction zones" so as a result the first half hour of the exhibition was quite chaotic and I mostly only have pictures of people's heads, arms and shadows...

Luis Hernandez Galvan

Luis showed a number of works projected on the far end of the wall and on a temporary wall in the centre of the gallery. One of them was an exact model of the HDB flat they had been living in Singapore.

As it was hard to take good photos of projections in the gallery, you should also visit Luis' website at http://ungravity.org/ to see more of his work.

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Anne-Marie showed two games, one more abstract video game involving rearranging cut-up bits of music made in different places, and another game about bees that she had worked on during the workshop with input from students.

As it was hard to take good photos of projections in the gallery so for more, do also take a look at more of Anne-Marie's work at http://www.opensorcery.net/.

Andreas Siagian

Andreas spent days working on building an installation that amplified the sound of water being filtered through a series of boxes with the power of gravity, entirely from local materials found in Toluca. Even the PCBs were printed in Toluca, thanks to Relder's help!

Debbie Ding

Sun Cycle (see also previous post for more information):





The Singapore River as a Psychogeographical Faultline:









I showed two kinect-based works at the gallery. People seemed to enjoy it, especially the seeming "unpredictability" of the Sun Cycle (that eventually reveals itself to be quite simple).

Other Artists

A cluster of iMacs were in the gallery to show the video works from the other artists. This was one of them.

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PS: If anyone else has other photos of the exhibition, please let me know at 04.48am @ gmail and i will add them or link them to this page as well! Thanks!

Getting Started with TUIO, Reactivision, AS3, and PD

Recently, a bunch of us were at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (Facultad del Artes) in Toluca, teaching a workshop and having an expocision there! Luis gave a class on Blender, Anne-marie taught about Gamemaker, Andreas taught about Pure Data, and I attempted to teach about TUIO/Kinect/Reactivision.

I say attempted, because I and Andreas did not speak much spanish (or rather we did not actually speak ANY spanish on arrival), and as I am a particularly longwinded and wordy person (with some incredibly longwinded and complicated ideas to communicate about the purpose and meaning behind interaction or programming), there were many things lost in translation due to the language barrier, despite the very kind attempts by some of the MA students such as Julio and Blanca (who tried to bridge the language and learning gaps for us by teaching the younger students a little bit more about flash and programming before we got there). But I hope everyone there still learnt something from my murmurings about tangible touch (and thanks to Janitzio for having us all there to teach as well!).









Some pictures from the part of the workshop that Andreas and I were teaching

The class was actually very sweet and it was lovely to go there and teach them all for a week, although there were truly some moments of utter exasperation of not being able to communicate an idea better as I simply did not have any common words to do so. In the end I also had to improvise and turn the class into a reactivation focused lesson because there were too few kinect sets in the classroom (I had only brought two from Singapore). I suppose I too have learnt a lot of things from this experience:

1. it is truly very difficult to really teach programming to people who speak a different language to one's own (especially when simple pseudocode examples do not make any sense to them)
2. its easier to teach a short workshop with opensource tools like pure data, rather than a program like flash that requires a licence, or with external hardware like kinect, because one really needs to have a day in advance to do a pre-setup session or installfest. i had not catered for this earlier unfortunately. also, that part about Flash files not being readable by more than the version before it (ie: Flash CS5 files are only editable in CS4 and CS5, but not CS3) really bothers me. (caveat: despite this drawback, i feel Flash is a pretty practical tool with its own commercial uses so i would still recommend learning Flash although its a little more bothersome...)
3. it is very difficult to learn how to make a tangible touch setup AND to write the program if one does not have any basic understanding or grounding in programming. IN FACT LET'S JUST SAY ITS IMPOSSIBLE. this is not going to be the easiest "MY FIRST FLASH APP" to start with. perhaps i could eventually find a way to write a simpler tutorial, but at this point i suppose i don't have enough teaching experience to know how to make it understandable to someone with TOTALLY ZERO programming experience. it would take much longer. but i suppose maybe as i slowly accrue more teaching experience, i might also learn the mystical way of magically teaching anything to people who have zero knowledge of the thing that you are teaching about......

Julio and Blanca in a funny moment. The MA students really helped translate and communicate some of the things I could not say in Spanish to the rest of the class. Thank you so much guys!

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at the workshop i tried to show examples in both as3 and pure data. having played a little bit with max and pd before, it was straightforward for me to figure out how i could start using pd and tuio from the examples provided although this was also my first time really using PD.

I am by no means some sort of ultimate expert on learning about TUIO (as these were things I had slowly figured out by myself on my own from reading on the internet and posting on forums) but I suppose one thing I've appreciated about this in the few years that I have been trying to figure it out is how TUIO is easy and consistent so that when you code up something, say for Flash AS3, you would then have a consistent way to refer to things and a flash app could be built for a touch table OR also used for kinect and it would still work immediately both ways for both setups (assuming you used the term TUIOCursor and TUIOObject consistently)

The difference between TUIOCursor is that a cursor is like a dot on the screen that is tracked and does not have rotational angle. There can be many many Cursors as well, whereas an TUIOObject is something that is already defined an object number and it is an object which has an "Up" or "Down" while on screen and can be rotated around and around. (There is also a TUIOBlob, but suffice to say since its been all pretty homebrew I rarely get around to calibrating my blobs)

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Click here to view the full
TUIO + Kinect/Reactivision + AS3 Workshop Guide
http://dreamsyntax.org/tuioworkshop

- This guide is for Mac Users who use 10.5 and above.
- Windows users can also use the guide but some instructions may differ (such as the way one uses the Terminal/Console)
- Example start file available at http://dreamsyntax.org/tuioworkshop/tuioclientexample.zip
- Solution file available at http://dreamsyntax.org/tuioworkshop/tuioclientexample_solution.zip
- Presentation built with slidedown

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BONUS! - Getting started with TUIO and PD

To get started with TUIO and PD, download PD Extended from the puredata websitew.

Download the TUIO Client Reference Implementations for PD

Download reactivision and print out some fiducial markers to wave at your camera to test it

Open the programs in this order: reactivision > pure data > the tuio pd patch of your choice, and voila it should work out of the box when you wave a symbol at your webcam!

The Sun Cycle (Documentation of New Work)

⚙ / THE SUN CYCLE
By Debbie Ding

In the rear-view mirror appeared Tezcatlipoca, demiurge of the "smoking-mirror." "All those guide books are of no use, "said Tezcatlipoca. "You must travel at random, like the first Mayans; you risk getting lost in the thickets, but that is the only way to make art."
- Robert Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" (1969)

In 1973, the land artist Robert Smithson was in a plane overseeing the site of his new work Amarillo Ramp in Texas when his pilot collided into a mountain, killing them instantly. It was a tragically prophetic death for a man who once said that the physical and the mind are in a "constant collision course". For in the process of making of his work, he had inadvertently ended the physical possibility of himself making the work. And for those of us who are deeply interested in land and spaces, and in places, the physical impossibility of being in more than one place has always been a quandrary.

For me, the most striking realization of traveling from Mexico to Singapore is the physical distance from Singapore. I marvel at being able to sit in a plane that flies across continents and oceans, according to the map on your inflight screen, and finally lands on the opposite side of the globe… And then to pick up and to hold in my hand a seemingly inconsequential rock on the ground in Mexico... These rocks, stones, soil, and dirt have been a silent but constant audience to man’s numerous movements and interventions around the globe.

I saw numerous artefacts at the Museo de Antropología e História de Toluca, at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City, and in a small bookstore here I also saw miniature replicas of some of these ancient sculptures - from the iconic coiled feathered serpent of Quetzalcoatl to the Aztec Sun Stone, which is also frequently simply labelled as "Mayan Calendar" in small shops. As an artefact, the “Mayan Calendar” is visually arresting with its detailed glyphs and symbols. The calendar round itself is made up of 3 interlocking cycles made up of 365 days, 20 names, and 13 numbers, and the names of the dates are designated according to the alignment of the three cycles. 52 years will pass before the three cycles will align in the same way again. The origins of these calculations also came from the way in which the earth aligned with the sun and the other stars and planets. Although we think of time as a fluid abstraction, it is marked by observable changes in the position of physical matter – the very physicality of the land and earth that we are on.

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Automatic translation with Google Translate:

⚙ / EL SOL DE CICLO

Por Debbie Ding

En el espejo retrovisor apareció Tezcatlipoca, demiurgo del "hábito de fumar-espejo". "Todas esas guías no sirven de nada", dijo Tezcatlipoca. "Usted debe viajar al azar, como los primeros mayas, corre el riesgo de perderse en la espesura, pero esa es la única manera de hacer arte."

- Robert Smithson, "los incidentes de espejo de Viajes en la península de Yucatán" (1969)

En 1973, la tierra artista Robert Smithson estaba en un avión que supervisa el sitio de su nuevo trabajo Amarillo Ramp en Texas cuando su piloto chocó contra una montaña, matándolos al instante. Fue una muerte trágicamente profético para un hombre que dijo una vez que el físico y la mente están en un "curso de colisión constante". Porque en el proceso de elaboración de su obra, sin darse cuenta que había terminado la posibilidad física de sí mismo haciendo el trabajo.

Para mí, la realización más notable de viajar desde México a Singapur es la distancia física de Singapur. Me maravillo de poder sentarse en un avión que vuela a través de continentes y océanos, de acuerdo con el mapa en la pantalla durante el vuelo, y finalmente aterriza en el lado opuesto del mundo ... Y luego para recoger y sostener en la mano una apariencia roca intrascendente sobre el terreno en México ... Estas rocas, piedras, tierra y suciedad han sido un público silencioso pero constante de numerosos movimientos del hombre y las intervenciones en todo el mundo.

Vi numerosos artefactos mayas y aztecas en el Museo de Antropología e Historia de Toluca, y en una pequeña librería aquí también vi réplicas en miniatura de algunas de estas esculturas antiguas, desde la serpiente enrollada icónica emplumada de Quetzalcóatl a la Piedra del Sol Azteca, que También es frecuente, simplemente etiquetados como "Calendario Maya" en las tiendas pequeñas. Como un artefacto, el "Calendario Maya" es visualmente con sus glifos y símbolos detallados. La ronda del calendario en sí se compone de 3 ciclos entrelazados compuestos por 365 días, los nombres y los números 20, 13, y los nombres de las fechas se designan de acuerdo a la alineación de los tres ciclos. 52 años pasarán antes de los tres ciclos se alineará de la misma manera otra vez. Los orígenes de estos cálculos también vino de la forma en que la Tierra alineada con el sol y las estrellas y los planetas. A pesar de que pensar en el tiempo como una abstracción de líquidos, que se caracteriza por cambios observables en la posición de la materia física: la corporalidad misma de la tierra y la tierra que nos encontramos.

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The Actual Sun Stone which I went to see at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City...

Don Porfirio - El Senor de la Bestias

On our first day in Toluca, I noticed this face on a wall. And then it just kept reappearing...















We were told that the artist of the faces was a homeless man in Toluca known as the Don Porfirio / Lord of the Beasts (El Senor de la Bestia) and he had been drawing these faces around Toluca along with a rambling political text for some time. He was frequently seen with his many dogs following him, hence the beasts, and I wish I knew how to speak spanish because we eventually met the man himself on the street in front of Los Portales... He asked me where I was from. I said Singapore, but then he asked me to list some other cities and went off on a tangent about the China and eventually Vietnam War. Due to my poor (ie: nonexistent) Spanish I did not know what he was going on about...









To be honest when I was first told that the place where we had been standing at was "Los Portales", I thought of "lost portals" like these were gateways to mysterious places elsewhere. I also wondered why he asked me to name some other random cities near Singapore. Perhaps it was all the same to him, whatever country I might be from did not really matter. Or perhaps it is all the same to him, all the countries have evil people in them that need fighting against, that there will always be stories to be told and drawn in the countries. Or perhaps there is no complex story, this is just the mad ravings of an artistically inclined homeless man in Toluca. Who knows? Its amazing to find his drawings in small corners, on walls, everywhere in Toluca...

Another mystery is the stereotypical asian features of the characters. Although I could not seem to find out from him why they looked asian, and some others told me he was not drawing asians but the stereotypical small mexican person, this one in particular seems to suggest that he is infact consciously drawing a chinese character because he writes "Chinese Monk" on top of this one drawing: