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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
This past weekend I participated in a New York Society for Acoustic Ecology residency at Free103's Wave Farm in the Catskills. Nine members participated and for three days enjoyed the beautiful 60 acre surroundings, listening to the sounds of creeks and waterfalls near two small lakes on the grounds and the incredibly diverse sounds of wind rustling through the leaves in two forest areas. We also enjoyed snow-capped mountain views and a dense ceiling of stars on a clear Saturday night.
I worked on plotting the GPS coordinates and elevations of the area using a garmin geko 201 and viewed the area on a googlemap that was completely lacking in detail. At best the satellite imagery showed two large lakes miles from the property. There was something sort of comforting being in a place that didn't have detailed satellite imagery online. Kind of a feeling of being 'off the map' (although we hardly were in actuality)
Before our radio broadcast on Saturday night, Tom Roe of Free103point9 gave a workshop on microcasting and webcasting. Here is a summary:
Microcasting is defined as any radio broadcast under 100 watts. In 1978 NPR and independent Christian stations successfully lobbied to prevent new stations over 100 watts.
In the early 90's free, under 100 watt radio stations started popping up all over the country in reaction to the first Gulf war and taking advantage of new cheap transmitter technology. One well known and controversial free radio pirate from that era was Mobana Kantaku who continues to broadcast from a housing project in Springfield IL. Steven Dunnifer of San Francisco started his work at this time too along with Doug Brewer who built and sold transmitters from Tampa, Florida. Free103point9 started in 1994 in Tampa under the name of 87X. In 1997, a number of Tampa free radio operators/pirates were arrested, it was the largest arrest of radio pirates in history.
In 2001, the FCC changed the law allowing low power fm stations and free low power radio is going strong. Some groups have become involved in the lobbying effort. For example, Prometheus, a group in Philadelphia started as 'Radio Mutiny' has now become a lobbying/educational group.
On the Free103point9 web page, http://www.free103point9.org, follow links to radio lab and wave guide that provide information about how to create your own low power station.
To broadcast, you need:
1] A transmitter $200-300 power/audio signal
tuning board to station (dip switches)
order from Broadcast Warehouse or Veronica in UK
or find Ramsey Kits from Hobbytron
2] An antenna $110-120
3] A cable to connect the antenna to the transmitter (Radio shack) $20
For webcasting there are some services that allow you to webcast without having to have a server or broadband connection. Some examples are: Live365, Nicecast, and the Pandora system (Linux Ogg Vorbis)
The 'The Singularity is Near' Kurzweil refers extensively to the work of Hans Moravec, a robotics pioneer and head of the mobile robots lab at Carnegie Mellon. Moravec develops robots that sense their environment in ways similar to the ways humans sense their environment, starting with the eye. He has found that in addition to containing light detectors, the vertebrate retina itself contains edge and motion detectors. He has actually calculated the computer processing power equivalent of the human retina.
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Moravec called 'When will Computer Hardware Match the Human Brain?':
"The retina is a transparent, paper-thin layer of nerve tissue at the back of the eyeball on which the eye's lens projects an image of the world. It is connected by the optic nerve, a million-fiber cable, to regions deep in the brain. It is a part of the brain convenient for study, even in living animals because of its peripheral location and because its function is straightforward compared with the brain's other mysteries. A human retina is less than a centimeter square and a half-millimeter thick. It has about 100 million neurons, of five distinct kinds. Light-sensitive cells feed wide spanning horizontal cells and narrower bipolar cells, which are interconnected by whose outgoing fibers bundle to form the optic nerve. Each of the million ganglion-cell axons carries signals from a amacrine cells, and finally ganglion cells, particular patch of image, indicating light intensity differences over space or time: a million edge and motion detections. Overall, the retina seems to process about ten one-million-point images per second. "
Modeling the design after the human perceptual system, Moravec builds robots with what might be called 'localized intelligence', that is, robots with processors at the source of the input, functioning as the retina does, as a kind of pre-processor of information.
I'm currently reading Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity is Near' and it is filled with information about new research, so expect several posts based on it.
Here is the first: One question that Kurzweil tackles is how the complexity of a human body can be derived from the relative simplicity of DNA. He suggests one answer might be to consider biological design as 'probabilistic fractals;. In other words, in a similar way to the way in which complex designs like mountain ranges and ferns can arise from relatively simple formulae in fractal geometry, complex organic forms can arise from the information in DNA. Genes supply the basic information, but the expression of the gene is much more detailed.
I think we could also use the analogy of the compression algorithm. Particularly effective compression algorithms use fractal geometry to turn a large video file into a much smaller file with very little perceptible loss of information. Human DNA acts like this compressed file, holding only the most essential information that when uncompressed (expressed) becomes the complex human being.
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