Belgian artist Herman Asselberghs won the Transmediale festival this year with his film 'Proof of Life'
The work 'Proof of Life' by Herman Asselberghs is testament to the power of art to bring its audience into the present. Its layering of meaning and the interplay between different times and spaces, mirrors current multiple realities saturated in images of terror,the viewe) is impotent and in a perpetual state of emergency. 'Proof of Live' is an artwork which first and foremost speaks to a universal and splintered human condition through both the description and metaphor of incarceration. Consistent with a long history of text based interventions, Asselberghs plays with a space denoting an, 'absence of presence and presence of absence' with strong resonances, reminiscent of the film essay by Alain Resnais, 'Night and Fog'. Sitting between audio performance and site specific installation, this work demonstrates the power of the text. Contemporaneous in form and content, referencing and further propagating mediated witness and solace, ‘Proof of Live’ invites us into a space in order to question the degree of our own comfort and the abstraction of the world around us. (transmediale.07 jury statement)
I submited my project Beautiful Mess, but there were 1030 submissions so I won't take it personal they didn't select me :-)
After 10 years it finally happend, I got myself a Mac.
I have always been very happy with my pc and spreaded the message that Mac's were used by girls or the more girlie type kinda guys...
Well now I have one myself. So yeah I am in touch with my feminin side!
I have to say that I enjoy working on this machine more and more. The keyboard lights up in the dark! How funky is that? That is actually the main reason why I got it really.
So one of the first things I had to do was setting up my development environment. That includes playing around with AS3 yeah!
So here's a litle 'howto' on compiling AS3 on the Mac. Flexbuilder is a much more complete solution (codehinting, debugging, ...) but is not free and Flashdevelop which is great does not support Mac.
My good friend Steven passed me through 5 sticks. This means I have to reveal 5 things about myself most people don't know about me.
I know it's been a while since he asked me. Steven my deepest apologies for being so late but here they are.
* From the age of 10 till about 17 I played handball. I played with a club called Ajax in first division (at that time). I even got a national selection when I was 16. It seems they are in big trouble at the moment if you read the news at their website (dutch).
Thanks to self proclaimed flash evangelist Nicolas who pushed me into the flash 3D engines I started playing around with Sandy (see previous post) and Papervision3D.
Papervision is an engine written for AS2 as well as AS3. It is still in private beta but the results are stunning. I have been goofing around with the AS3 engine and it's really performing well.
This demo features around 300 objects on stage with 2 sided bitmap material and a moving camera. I have never seen 3D performing like this in Flash.
Sandy is performing slower and you need the pixlib framework too. I know it is not really fair comparing an AS2 to AS3 application when it comes to performance. But the AS2 version of Papervision seems to be performing better than Sandy as well. Feel free to comment :-)
Sandy however supports much more primitives and methods than Papervision3d. Papervision only has mesh, plane and point while Sandy implements box, hedra, plane, sphere, cylinder, line, etc..
Anyway all the guys and girls (it seems there are too few girls doing stuff like this) who are putting things like this online deserve a big cheerio!
The last couple of months I started noticing a lot of floating islands in webdesign.
You see, I allready told everybody this 4 years ago: "Someday floating islands will be hot!" Some made fun of me, some of my best friends abandoned me, some tried to put me in a mental institution.
Blow into the microphone or speakers and the girl will react on it.
Great video integration and very well done. The 'I am lazy' button is a very cool feature. You don't have to set up your speakers and in return you get a nice preview of what to expect when you do find the time to set up everything.
MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation , MIT, and generous support of the Ab Initio software company. MIT OCW's goals are to: Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware" concept. I am now watching a video about the analysis of Algorithms. The OCW initiative is very interesting for people like me to get an inside look of what those great minds like John Maeda are teaching the lucky ones.
Ok dude grey won't cut it, this website gotta be black. Paint it black. Black is the color of rock, because black is the absence of light.
Besides the fact this site is hilarious, tongue in cheeck it is well build and packed with cool stuff.
One of the best features i have ever seen is the rock the internet feature. An extreme makeover for any site you suggest but in their own unique way. This is very very well done! The best part is you don't have to fill in huge forms, leave your email address etc,... This is how it should be. Be funny and don't try to sell anything.
If you are somewhere around 30 you will remember the times you were waiting 7 minutes to view a 30 second trailer in a format of 160/120 pixels. And at that time it felt like you were the premier witness of something magical.
Now we allmost have it all. Sound, effects, animation,... But still the average medium resolution of a trailer is somewhere between 320/160 and 480/260. This means we've added about 200 pixels in 10 years. Maybe not that much? But then again, it shouldn't really matter.
I was as excited back then, as I am now and will be in the future. It's like with television. Nobody missed it back in the days it didn't exist. 15 years ago we didn't care for broadband technologie or Flash or Ajax, because it was just not there. We'll see what the future brings.
I have made a screen capture of some of my motion tracking tests in Flash 8. I also created a recording function as you can see in the movie below.
The left screen is the captured data, the right screen is the original incoming data. I was using the flashlight on my cell phone as the light source, which was not very reliable. But it's working.
The data is captured at a rate of 1 millisecond at 800/600 resolution. That is not bad, not bad at all.
Me and my buddy Peter, got the standalone flash player 6 working on Linux distr. Fedora Core 5. It didn't work the first time offcourse (it's always like that). Problems with missing libraries and stuff. We had to install some libraries from the Fedora 4 core and suddenly it worked.
We all know the feeling when stuff like this suddenly works. For about 7.3 seconds you really think you are the smartest one on the planet.
It's a pitty that Adobe doesn't support newer standalone versions than version 6.
Muchas gracias to Mr. Peter Galle, for setting up the Linux and walking me through it!
Haaaaa... sweet teenage memories coming back and so are The Lemonheads.
This great band (which is actually Evan Dando) released a new record!
Evan Dando worked together with Bill Stevenson and Karl Alvarez from punkrock pioneers Descendents. You can defenitly recognise my guitar hero J Mascis in some songs. Oh man, I'm so excited! Even Dinosaur Jr. is touring again!! Oh why am I in Europe...
It looks like most of the bands and people I grew up with listening too are getting back together. Come on Bob Mould, let's get Sugar back together will ya!
FACT: I have met Bill Stevenson somewhere in the year 1999 when he was drumming with Bad Religion. I played in a band that was the warming up act for Bad Religion. I only remember thinking:"That guy is a really good drummer". Which he is... Just listen to the DESCENDENTS albums.
A couple of months back, someone asked me why I'm such an extremist. Surely, everything traditional marketing can't be bad. Why not be a big more moderate.
Some interesting thoughts about online marketing... My point is that some of the arguments stated are open for discussion. But as the writer states, she is merely looking at this from an extremist point of view.
Let me refraise again: One of the market industry leaders who are shaping the sites as we like them are putting the source code of one of their newest engines online. We are not talking about some bouncing ball they have developped 2 years ago. This engine is brand new and used in their latest work.
If more agencys use this code and, more important, share their own, the evolution of multimedia websites will be much faster than it is today.
So it's not all about the code itself actually. The initiative is even as much as important. I hear you saying: "Open source is widespread allready and many fine people have put some great code online allready. So why are you so excited?" Well because Big Spaceship is one the few market leaders doing it. Not too many agencys like BS are doing this.
In the end (does it end really?), we will all benefit from this and especially agencys who were there first :-)
Because I was in Crete, I missed the 10 years of Flash party hosted by the belgian MMUG. Looks like everybody had a lot of fun. Everybody was there (hi Peter, Serge, Gert, Christel, Wim, ...)
I will defenitly be there at the 20 year party :-)
After Peter won the election for most influential flash site of the decade in 1998 with his classic NRG , we now have a nomination for group94 for their work on the Carl De Keyzer website in 2004.
I have to read all of this more in detail, but i think it's worth knowing how these statistics are put together. Almost daily I still encounter people who think Flash is the devil itself, complete IT departments banning flash on their employees computers for God knows what reason... Knowing how to argument these statistics can help you getting your flash projects up.
See how rich media websites are developped now a days. The workflow is pretty close to shooting a commercial or multiple scene's for any regular movie.
Creating full blown experiences on the web like this one, http://www.207.peugeot.com/, is more than opening up photoshop and flash. It involves a lot of strategic decisions, (motion) designers, tight planning and budget control, studio's, actors, technicians, coders, copywriters, and so on...
The times that you could create a competitive, compelling consumer website for high-end clients with 2 guys and a flash intro are really behind us now. We are all growing up aren't we :-)
But beware, sites like these must be well tested. It did crash on me. While preloading a new section, the preloader just gave up on me and nothing happend anymore. I waited for more than 15 seconds, but nothing happend. I couldn't click on anything anymore as well. I also noticed 2 translation mistakes in the dutch website. * In the interior section one of the buttons says: "Verken de buitenzijde", which means 'explore the exterior'. * the back button, which is actually also the preloader, still says: "retour acceuil". Which is French and should not appear when you are in the dutch website.
Both of these sites have been around for quite a while but still... I think it's all about guts just putting sites like this online for a very commercial product like a movie. It works...
But hey, don't we all sometimes get some inspiration from Hi-res?
Oh yeah, David Hasselhof is in the list as well. Most people tend to laugh with David's music (and his acting) career. We at SeeingIsBelieving do not participate in such activities. We support David for a 100%. I contacted Quentin Tarantino the other day and asked him if he could pull off a 'John Travolta comeback' for David... He said: "yes".
This week data communications provider Alcatel Bell started a test project about community television.
"Mmm... nothing seriously important" you might say, but it just so happens to be that good ole' Indra (a famous flash developer and long time member of the DHT army) was a part of this fabulous project.
Anyway: This project (Cleverly named: My Own TV) is allowing people from Lommel to create and manage their own digital televisionchannel. These lucky people can zap to their own channel to share family pictures, video's or other personal things. The application can also be used to distribute multi-media-content to a specific target audience.
You can read all about it here. (you will have to understand dutch for this)
pornvalidation_btn.onRelease = function() { indexOfPorn = email.text.indexOf("porn"); lastIndexOfSex = email.text.lastIndexOf("sex"); if (indexOfPorn !=-1 && lastIndexOfSex !=-1){ if (lastIndexOfSex message.text="this email seems to be legit."; }else { message.text="There seems to be somebody entering your email in the porn database"; } } else { message.text="please do not waste time not sending me porn"; } }
Mike Chambers, senior product manager for Adobe/Macromedia gained worldfame with introducing this: import mx.utils.Delegate http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flash/articles/eventproxy.html /* for me that is */ /* notice the picture of Mike looking very smart */
The Flex Ajax bridge (FABridge) is a library of code enable to expose it's scripting to the browser. This enables you to define an interface for Javascript to communicate directly with actionscript.
SeeingIsBelieving will create screenplay, storyboards and flash programming for a game for Studio100's new production Pinokkio.
Studio100 is a major company in Belgium producing tv shows, musicals and merchandise for kids. Every game they release on their website is good for +/- 30.000 unique players.
We had a small discussion that internet is not a pretty straightforward name for what it really is. So Murten came up with a new name for the internet:
'Thing on screen with information" aka "TOSWI" pronounce as toshwi
This saturday the application 'Amigo TV' for Alcatel/Microsoft TV we have build will be featured in 'Savoir Plus Sciences'. A television show on science France2.
Program that dvd recorder yeah! (or your vcr for the non believers ;-)
The Suzuki Wanna Fly game is online! We managed to pull this off (site included) in 2 days! Yes that's right 2 days! It's even a day earlier then expected /*this does happen once in a while :-) */
It's been more than a week since the previous post, but I have a good excuse. I got married last week and I can tell you, it was great. We had a hell of a party here www.thenewpresident.be and we had a great time resting (sleeping :-) here www.ogygia.be.
A new challenge for the team has emerged... We are proud Suzuki is working with us for the creation of a new online game. We are gonna do this in 3 days :-) Deadlines are always sneaking up on you from dark and dirty alleys .
In an article by friend and colleague Steven Verbruggen (see minorissues.be), Steven writes the following:
Ik heb een tijdje geleden een demo gezien van het Microsoft platform (wat dat is hetgeen ze produceren, een product om IPTV te zien) en ik moet zeggen dat het er verdomd goed uit zag. Zeer vlot, zeer mooi vorm gegeven, en zeer geïntegreerd met andere services zoals communicatie, entertainment enzovoort. Frankly, wat ik daar gezien heb stak met kop en schouders uit boven zowel het product van Telenet en Belgacom.
He is saying that a demo he saw for Microsoft's IPTV platform was really good. It happens to be that Indra and myself where members of the team at Alcatel who created this demo. It's nice to see that our work gets appreciated :-)
1. sshhhtt, top secret project... /*the tower of power rules the universe...*/
2. cd-rom for Durabrik (a major contractor firm). Pretty nifty stuff with databases, xml and on and on and on. You know how these things are now a days :-) Indra is working this all out in components, it's gonna be really nice
Finally, we all have our own copy of the sensational Flash8 release!
Look at it shining on my desk... hmmm
Depending on the cheering (jéééé Flash 8 is here) and the dancing that came along with this delivery, I must acknowledge the nerdness level in this office is extremly high!
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