Digital Test Bed

Attended the launch of the BFI’s Digital Test Bed at the NFT this morning — currently Europe’s only test laboratory for digital cinema. They are justifiably proud that they can now play everything from nitrate to pure digital feed (demonstrating the former with a lovely technicolor excerpt from The Harvey Girls (1946), and the latter with a live connection to ‘The Hall of Edoras’ set for The Return of the King in Wellington, New Zealand, with Jim Rygiel, Weta’s digital effects supervisor). I had to leave before the tour, but from their press pack, it looks as if they have …

Murmurs of Earth

Peters argues that SETI was to the 20th century what the spritualist movement was to the 19th, with serious researchers in both fields resolutely pursuing the inner strangeness of their chosen quests, and yet missing the point that all communication is inherently strange: SETI research reminds one of Thoreau’s quip about those who tried to measure the depths of Walden Pond: “They are paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness.” (p. 257) Curiously, he doesn’t directly reference Carl Sagan’s Murmurs of Earth, effectively the ‘sleeve notes’ for the gold-plated records launched …

Dwelling

Watching Hiraki Sawa’s lovely Dwelling of which I only have a QuickTime cutdown (and thanks to EAST 2002 for the cutdown — anyone with the DVD who wants to sell, please let me know — I missed out through indecision). Looking for a new flat. I want one with aeroplanes…

dorkbot

A nice walk through the East End last night to DorkBot London in Limehouse. The highlights: Peter Cusack’s LF magentic audioscapes of Highbury and Islington underground station (south-bound platform, I think), and The Institute of Applied Autonomy‘s fine collection of DARPA website scrapings and repurposing of military technology and aesthetics for urban activism. Crucial performance requirement for their GraffitiWriter robot: it has to move faster than a cop. Very good stuff. Cheap beer, too.

Entrances to Hell

It’s Friday afternoon, with a hangover. Today the best thing on the Internet is The Catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell. Lovely. Oh and it’s raining as well…

Where the Action Is

I’ve been reading Paul Dourish’s Where The Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, a good introduction to issues and perspectives of designing with embodied action in mind, although he doesn’t really get very far with actual guidelines. Favourite quote (which opens the section on ‘Wittgenstein and the Meaning of Language’): Like Elvis Presley, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) had a professional career that fell into two distinct phases. Vegas Wittgenstein? Maybe. Nothing radically new in the book, but a decent overview of the field, with a nicely phenomenological slant (no mention of Bachelard though). For me, the most interesting discussion was …

uniqueliveevents.com

Last night, care of Helen, we blagged our way to a viewing of The Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House, organised as a promotional evening by uniqueliveevents.com, a newish consortium formed by BT Broadcast Services and Shooting Partners. The opera was broadcast live from France, and displayed projected via JVC’s QX1 projector (“the highest quality image currently available in the world using DILA technology”). Where we were seated, there was a lot of fan noise from the projector, but the image and sound quality was very good, and the whole uniqueliveevents.com proposition is an interesting one. Their pitch …