Artist/roboticist teaching neural-net bots to love and dance to punk music - Boing Boing

Artist Fiddian Warman built some robots controlled by a neural network. neural networks can learn, so he’s been playing them classic punk records in an attempt to turn them into robotic versions of his younger self. the robots are 2 metres tall and have the ability to pogo. It all culminates in a gig at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London 3-5 July 2008: bring your friends

This should be good.

(Disclosure: I was at the Centre For Electronic Arts with Fiddian, I was also briefly in SoDA with him, and he’s great.)

Old Time Out article on the Strange Attractions shop

Strange Attractions is a freaky new “sort of front-line cultural science centre cum fractal_art/boutique” in Kensington Park Road, Portobello

Or was in 1991. I used to make my way there to get fractal stuff in the early 1990s. Well, it was generally 2 or 3 dimensional, but it had images of fractals on it. I never got any of the music. I must try to find some.

I’ve a soft spot for fractals. I’ll write about why another time.

As well as destroying proprietary implementations, VRML 2 has resisted full implementation by Free Software projects for over a decade. That’s no mean feat.

There are no VRML plugins in Ubuntu (my current distro) at present. So I downloaded a copy of FreeWrl and installed that. After working out how to actually get Firefox to take notice of it I found that the plugin’s menus draw behind its drawing area and (Update: This was a problem with the window compositor, not FreeWrl. Uninstalling Compiz fixed this. that those worlds I could get it to draw it didn’t seem to place the camera in properly.

I then downloaded the source for OpenVrml. After several hours of building and the same plugin installation dance as FreeWrl I found that it just jammed on the worlds I looked at.

I wish both projects well, and I’m sure they work well with the worlds they are designed to render, but they are a dead loss for just getting on with browsing web 3D. I’ll see if I can dig out some of my old worlds to try them on.

Crosbie (in the comments) recommends OpenCroquet, which I am downloading. And I am installing the Microsoft anti-Free Software timebomb that is Mono in order to run OpenSim and try Free Software Second Life networking.

But I still just want a VRML browser plugin that just works.

In the mid-1990s there were four problems with internet-based Virtual Reality (VR).

1. The plug-ins were all for Windows, not Mac. Ignoring early adopters and designers is a bad idea when launching a new visual medium.

2. People’s PCs had anaemic graphics cards and processors. Skilful design could offset this, though.

3. People were on 24-56k dial-up modems for the most part. Again, skilful design could offset this but it did set a limit.

4. VRML 2 was an unimplementable turd of a standard. It destroyed any company that tried to implement it.

I think people underestimate the Mac angle. Apple had a miniscule market share but Macs were disproportionately represented on the Internet and within that there were a disproportionate number of the kinds of people you need making and consuming your new medium if you want it to succeed. But I digress.

Reading the VRML 2 standard when it first came out I was struck by its complexity and by the naivete of some of the implementation notes. I couldn’t see how to implement it without much more work than the notes seemed to suggest was needed.

Events showed my concerns to be well founded. Cosmo, SGI’s VR outfit, was spun off and failed before they managed to finish implementing VRML 2. Intervista also failed to implement it and got bought out. A trend was emerging. Try to implement VRML 2, fail, lose your company.

VRML 1 had been OK. Black Sun had based a multi-user VR system on it. It would have been better for VRML 2 not to have been specified and for VRML 1 to remain the standard with external animation added by the likes of Black Sun than for VRML 2 to destroy the industry.

A couple of years ago the corpse of VRML 2 was exhumed and wrapped in XML to produce X3D. The problem with VRML 2 was not that it wasn’t verbose enough, and wrapping it in an extra layer of verbosity in the form of XML tackled the wrong problem. As a comparison, SVG is basically PDF in XML but it is easier to parse than PDF and better suited to inline web graphics because of the choices that were made when considering which bits of PDF should be included or left out.

VRML 2 played a unique part in the failure of the first wave of Internet virtual reality. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that a second wave arrived with less powerful scene description than VRML 1 and a walled-garden, service-based approach that is at odds with the freedom of the hypertext internet that VRML sought to extend.

I long for the return of internet virtual reality based on open standards, distributed client-server systems, and text-file-hackability. With meshes.

A debate about net art at Rhizome.org has some of the younger hipsters of the New York internet art scene circling the wagons. I’m not sure what around.

There’s not being careful what you wish for and then there’s not being touched by your own irony. Surf Clubs remind me of the night club events I’ve been to that have been organized by cultural studies lecturers. Empty dancefloors with a few scattered would-be observers around the edges.

Turning the dross of popular media into fine art has a long pedigree, one that I am invested and implicated in. Art may be the superstructure of kitsch. Animated gifs and lolcats are not immune from this, in fact they are a logical progression. Internet time is measured in months, and to ironically act out a group blog a la 2001 in 2006 is no worse temporally speaking than screen-printing Marilyn Monroe in 1962. Or 1984.

But to act out acting out, that is to make a performance of a culture that is already more performative than the artist’s performance, and to regard oneself as terribly clever for doing so misses a layer of irony. Several layers of irony. And to be terribly offended by people mistaking what you are doing for what you are doing shows that you should retain a lawyer before rubbing any lamps.

Yes, I am curmudgeonly about the current state of the internet. But the Jemima Puddleduck economics and reified, servicized social relations of Web 2.0 isn’t a case of be careful what you wish for, it’s a case of don’t pawn the family silver. And even within inauthenticity there can be refinement. Hipsterism is an ethic of consumption masquerading as an aesthetic of flaneurie. Compared to that, the technohippies of the early 1990s were gods.