So I have now made 3 compilation movies. Each movie is about 90 minutes long and covers six months of my timelapse movies. From Mid 2009 to Jan 2011. To me, they are something like fishbowl or fireplace movies. A texture or pattern of life. Is there a narrative?

And here is timelapse version of the third episode compressed into 3 1/2 minutes.

All the individual movies and the compilation movies are public domain so you are free to reuse as you please.

But maybe you want a copy of the full lengths on DVD? I am happy to put them together for you with some custom art and mail it to you.

What did i take away from all these movies? I think mostly it made me think about plants and slowness. After all this time filming myself I figured it was time to spend some time filming something shared like our food supply so I am working with a couple small Boston area (Concord) farms to create a public domain movie about the 6 month growing season. Roughly late April to late September. $99 and you will get some timelapse movies, some handdrawn art and the bonus of helping fund a public domain movie about food.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1464315496/timelapse-farm-a-source-code-for-food

The documents:

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all of these pieces of media i consume, they all have a story associated. a narrative. they contain information about how a series of events leads to a particular conclusion. depending on what type of stories i consume, then my mind is likely to interpret my own options and choices in the world differently.

for food, i can understand that i am what i eat. imw uti eat. imwutieet. when choosing what food to consume i might be guided by the food pyramid (or 40-30-30, local food, etc). basic carbohydrates at the bottom, fruit and veggies just above, meat and dairy after that and finally fats and oils. if i eat too much of the stuff at the top i will become unbalanced, unstable. a lopsided pyramid.

so what about the media i consume? how would i categorize or break down the different common narratives? what is the carbs? what is protein, fiber, fat? my first guess would be that hero narratives are fatty and i(and the rest of the west) have consumed a few too many of these. what should be the basic narrative, the bottom of the pyramid? something like “hard work pays off” or “clear goals and small steps”? or “just be”?

some of what i eat passes through me. some becomes fuel, some becomes muscle, bone, etc. what do the stories become? and how do i feel about my current diet?

The Future of the Human/Machine Interface
Tuesday, October 19th, 7-9 pm
Hive at 55, 55 Broad Street, 13F, NY NY 10004
Panelists: Irwin Chen, Jill Nussbaum, Dan Paluska, Ian Spalter
Presented by Zeitgeist NYC and Hive at 55, Lower Manhattan’s coworking space.
Suggested donation: a measly $5. Facebook RSVP

I’m taking part in a panel discussion this Tuesday. I will discuss my transition from midwestern youth to robotic creator to street videobooth proprietor and give my take on “the future”.

update:
timelapse from the day, includes layered audio from the event. jump to 1:30:

something like slides:
my youth was lots of building forts in the backyard and playing with legos. then i discovered tv and became fascinated with robots, rock and roll, hero narratives, and all the rest that comes with media saturation.

i went to mit for a long time and learned to build robots. Met a great photographer and got 15 minutes of fame… the picture is great but reality looks like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixmilliondollardan/2436408689/
left mit to pursue art. continued to build some robot stuff including this one with jeff lieberman.

lately been working on some personal tracking stuff like making timelapse movies of my computer screen and timelapse movies of my life. Computer screen: http://plebiandesign.com/blog/?p=552 Life:http://youtube.com/usemoreproduct
and a ten minute excerpt from a movie compilation i made of the first 6 months.

A timelapse memory wall installation for a shared workspace:

Public videobooth work. Brooklyn Mobile is one.
Here’s an intro:

More on Broadcasterproject and brooklyn mobile.

i backdated this post because the publication was a few months ago and i just got around to the post…

rocketboom nyc

new people productions

me

and see these videos and videobooths from a school in germany.

update:
a 14m compilation of Episode 4 of the brooklyners:

http://brooklynmobile.blip.tv has several longer compilations that make it easy to watch a bunch of videos in a row.

Snips (26x)

Layers (26x)

And 3-5 friends hanging out and talking with each other.
Snips (42x)

Layers (42x)

Script files:
Install Sox, FFMPEG, imagemagick.
layer audio script
timelapse audio script
snips and layers video frames
chmod 755 *.sh

Other links to check for more info on scripts and other necessary installs:
http://plainfront.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/experiments-with-timelapse-and-audio/
http://broadcasterproject.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/how-to-layerremix-videos-with-free-command-line-tools/

So now we also keep records through mobile phone transactions, credit cards, twitter, youtube, version control systems, github, server log files, browser histories, and so much more. Are most of our recent records written from private spaces or private devices?

Courtrooms, sports games, on location news, and rock concerts are notable for their group witness to recording. We can trust media more if we have been part of the audience in a similar situation before?
And how about in our day to day lives, do we trust someone from far away with a mobile phone more than someone close without one?
It’s especially interesting in a dense city how many people you walk by each day and don’t talk to. Do you generally need some sort of third party technical reference to trust them? In a village you know (and trust?) your neighbors but in a city, you need a third party institution to regulate trust?

Is there a small service enterprise like a restaurant, barber shop, or bodega, but instead of serving you food or giving you a haircut, it delivers/collects info from you? And this would build trust and collaboration from bottom up as opposed to coming from the top down like current government or corporate trust systems? By putting collected info into the public domain, you are creating a lake instead of a warehouse full of inventory? And this would be a symmetric shared resource, more liquid than exoskeletal?

How would public record keeping change the dynamic between large product driven companies and small service businesses? Could a public history file for a small farm (local food) or a tailor(custom clothes) or any small service professional counteract the advertising dollars (tv, movies, billboards) of large corporate chains with packaged products?

And what do steroids have to do with any of this? What incentives do you create when you start keeping records? If certain transactions are worth big gains (like home runs), then how far will people go to ‘cheat’ the system in order to get that particular spot?
So if you want to avoid steroids and other abuses, what properties do you want your record keeping system to have?

After spending all this time making timelapse movies, I had to make some timelapse audio. I wrote a simple script and here are a few samples of the output:

ELP live at the middle east. 60 minutes compressed to about 1 minutes:

A conversation with Bill and Jamie that went from 40 minutes to about 1.5 min.

A performance of Handel’s Messiah from the Brooklyn Pentacostal church (missing the famous ending). About 70 minutes down to 1.5 min.

How do they make you feel? They correctly convey the feelings of being there but don’t really reveal too many details? I will continue to experiment with versions of this. Play with timings, mixings, etc.

This was a shell script implemented with SoX, a free and open source audio toolkit. Download for free from http://sox.sourceforge.net. It requires a little bit of UNIX/LINUX know-how but is pretty straightforward. Check the attached SoX README file on installing the separate LIBMAD and LAME for dealing with mp3s.

Here is the script:
timelapse_audio.sh

The script calls on another script you can get for free from the SoX page as well:crossfade_cat.sh. edit the $SOX line in this file to point to correct location. varies slightly on mac/linux distros.

Enjoy!

also, superbowl 44 in 2minutes:

imagine you’re in a room with 20 people. maybe it’s your workplace, maybe it’s your church group, maybe it’s a holiday dinner or a classroom.

picture the group of people in your head, do you know how much each person is worth? now imagine everyone pulling out a balance sheet from their bag and putting it on the wall, side by side with all the rest. you and the rest mull around the walls and discuss?
how do you react to finding out that so-and-so is much richer or poorer than you expected? how does money change your opinion of the people you meet, be they new connections or old friends?

do you know groups of people who do something like this? would this increase collaboration? or minimize the rat race? how often do you comb your hair or check your clothes in the mirror?

i’m thinking a lot about my own practices with money and how i present my financial information to myself. i definitely pay my share of late fees, atm withdrawals, data overages, etc because i don’t have a good feedback loop for my own behavior. once a month is too infrequent and i don’t even do that.

i tried a picture for every purchase but it was the wrong type of publishing to actually effect my behavior and too much camera work. so i didn’t make it that far.

lately i’m thinking about some type of fridge door/wall calendar/corkboard exercise to place the info more in my physical and visual space. maybe some sort of timelapse whiteboard of my financial state… more on that to come. low tech, hi visibility, small batch, and reward based are some goals for whatever this turns out to be.

in the meantime, the year end signals to collect financial information and pay your duties to our governing systems. you know what they say when you get to the border, “where are you papers?”

anyways, here’s a look at the current state of things.

i’ll update this post with spreadsheets, etc as i get around to organizing the accounts and tallying. flickr set will contain the sources…