PS3 eye microscopy hack – Rawcut_test from dusjagr on Vimeo.

I bought a second hand camera for 15 euro and mounted the lens upside down. Here is an image of the screen of my laptop:

Robot self-portrait #3 (Disneyland)

Robot self-portrait #4 (Disneyland)

Robot self-portrait #5 (Disneyland)

Robot self-portrait #6 (Dublin)

Robot self-portrait #7 (Golden Gate Bridge)

And a newer one: scaleofuniverse.com

* Most of the world’s current satellite imagery is over 5 years old.
* “Satellite” images are often taken with airplanes.
* “In September 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Google Maps quickly updated its satellite imagery of New Orleans to allow users to view the extent of the flooding in various parts of that city. (Oddly, in March 2007, imagery showing hurricane damage was replaced with images from before the storm; this replacement was not made on Google Earth, which still uses post-Katrina imagery).”
* “Google Ditu shows the disputed border areas between China and India as being part of China, while on Google Maps those disputed areas are shown inside dotted lines.”

• CITY SYMPHONIES: “Electric cars are increasingly using synthesised sounds in order to mimic the recognisable noise of the internal combustion engine. I explore an alternative in which the sound that the cars generate changes according to its relationship to other road users and the environment.”
• Sonata for the Unaware, by Alexander Chen, who also did Conductor.
• Ambient Addition by Noah Vawter: “(Download) (6MB QuickTime .mov, 3:15)

  Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone’s sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener’s world. ”

Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Song Lines is an album by Tom Johnson’s Shark that based on the Barcelona subway system. I wonder if the title is related to Bruce Chatwin’s ‘The Songlines’ novel that was recommended to me by Carlos. The book describes how Aboriginal songs functioned as a kind of GPS: they could find their way by singing ancient songs.

Relationship with my project: language is also a kind of map. Language influences how we perceive the world. Just like maps are never a one to one representation of reality, the same goes for language.

Google Maps is quickly becoming our new default map. What does it mean when a company from Silicon Valley is behind our standard representation of place? These kind of theoretical questions are important, but the focus of this project will be the development of alternatives to Google Maps.

The Mercator projection is not the only way to create a map. For example: the equal-area projection faithfully represents the proportions of continents and shows how big Africa actually is. We need similar alternatives to Google Maps; alternatives that will never show us the “real” place, but that will each reveal something special about a place.

These alternatives can take on different forms. Here are two initial explorations I did:

• The ‘35 days in NYC’ project is an experiment in finding more interesting ways to visualize GPS data.
• The Barcelona metro travel time map shows the city from the point of view of a subway station. Distances on the map represent time instead of physical distance, and the standard map is deformed according to travel times.