BLOG.MICHAELGAIO » trends

The Internet of Living Things

Michael Gaio — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 03:33:14 +0000

As an active participant in the Information / Communications Technology domain (ICT), this is perhaps one of the most influential videos I have seen in the last several years. We are now, again (as with the emergence of the Internet), on the verge of a new great frontier in human ingenuity.

I’ve been tracking the progression of advents in bio-synthetic technology for a while now. Aside from this recent breakthrough in producing a bio-synthetic cell, there are also some significant developments happening in the overall scope of collective access and participation to the knowledge, technologies, and applications involved in this budding frontier. Essentially, the bio-tech and neuro-tech domains are beginning to go open-source and non-centralized by a trend very similar to the way the software and internet industry has in the last 10 – 15 years. The means of bio-engineering are now reaching a level of accessibility and automation that will allow for research, innovation, and applications to go well beyond the traditional scientific and corporate institutions–and into private laboratories, and even into the kitchens of people’s homes.

Can you imagine the potentials of 100,000s of independent, networked, and open-source scientists and technologists focusing on issues such as Cancer and HIV in their own homes in the same way that, say, Linux, Wikipedia, and FireFox have been developed? This same kind of collective intelligence can also go towards innovations in bio-fuels and other green technologies. And that’s just the very tip of the synthetic iceberg …

The implications are profound and staggering!

“Andrew Hessel reasons that Synthetic Biology will be the next big IT industry. In his remarkable talk Andrew talks about the parallels between IT and biology.”

video link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S23owdOuLjc

blog page link: http://blog.michaelgaio.com/2010/06/18/the-internet-of-living-things/

Program or Be Programmed

Michael Gaio — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 06:43:46 +0000

Douglas Rushkoff drops the word at SXSW conference on programming reality:

“We are attempting to operate our society on obsolete code. … Legacy sytems to legacies we don’t even remember.

…

How much of this is the bias of the medium, and how much is it the biases of the people who program our technology for us? And how do we know which is which? How can we even tell them apart? What I believe is that we won’t know until we understand how our technolgies work, and how our technolgies work on us. I do believe that if you are not programmer, you are one of the programmed. It’s that simple.”

“We get text. … Instead of getting priests to read everything to us … we make our own words. We get the printing press. Instead of depending on a few scribes, now anyone can write. Now we get the computer, now anyone can program reality. Now that’s not what actually happened though.

…

We get the computer. Do we get a nation of programmers? No, we get a nation of bloggers. Now we have the great ability to write, but we don’t know how to program. We write in the box that Google gives us.

My issue is that at each stage, when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one stage behind, one generation, one iteration behind the medium they are using. And an elite, maybe a new elite, learns to actually use the thing. … Programming is even bigger than the printing press. It’s as big as text. Text gave us Judaism. The printing press gave us Protestantism. What does this one give us?”

video link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV3pPIUy1k

blog page link: http://blog.michaelgaio.com/2010/04/07/program-or-be-programmed/

New City : the Future of On-Line Social Networking

Michael Gaio — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:41:53 +0000

Greg Lynn explains the concept behind New City, a new virtual world. The architectural topology of such a world “map” is based on transmorphic manifolds, and context relative perceptive “lenses”:

Human-Computer Interface Revolution

Michael Gaio — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:17:59 +0000

I’ve been doing some deeper research into Tangible User Interfaces (TUI), and specifically–multitouch screen technologies. As a Flash developer, I’ve been waiting for the day to put my interactive art onto a touch-screen surface. I’m amazed to discover just how far things have come, and especially in the blooming creative community developing around open-source and easy to use components. People are making their own mini-multitouch screen hardware devices (for $5 – $50), sharing loads of code across cross-platform, artistically supportive open source frameworks, and co-creating some incredible applications.

We are on the verge of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) revolution … based on audio, visual, physical and kinesthetic sensations.

Here are a few videos that represent some of the aspects of interface extention:

MultiTouch Screen Physics beauty:

Tangible User Interface Objects (TUIO) and gestures:

Muilti-User Music Creation:

User 3D head tracking and gaze interaction:

Sudden motion kinesthetic sensing and reaction:

Various Projects in Audio / Visual Social Augmentation:

Some links:

CMS Trends

Michael Gaio — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:59:52 +0000

Everyone and their grandmother’s dog needs a website with good design presentation, key functionalities, and the ability to manage the content themselves or as an organizational team. This later aspect is referred to as a Content Management System (CMS). Years ago, it was typical to the internet industry to contract a “Web Master” to manage on-going site administration and make even minor content edits and updates. While a Web Master’s skills continue to be critically useful in many cases, the authority to manage content and do at least basic site administration is being passed onto the site owners through easy-to-use CMSs.

There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of CMSs available out there. Some of the more popular CMSs over the last several years have been: Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, and WordPress. Ruby on Rails has also been gaining popularity with web developers, and though it has CMS capabilities, it is really gaining attention for other good reasons, such as it’s exquisite ease of use to programming developers. Django is also a newly emerging web framework that includes CMS built with Perl (a more advanced programming language). All of these above mentioned frameworks are open source and free. Then there are also proprietary CMS frameworks available, such as Water and Contribute.

As a web enthusiast, I’ve been conducting on-going research in CMS options for a few years now. I’ve tried Drupal, and found that it was very difficult to integrate good design into. I’m using WordPress for a few different blogs (such as this blog), and it is a really good CMS for blogging, and I can see how it can even be extended as a framework for more general web site publication. I’ve also successfully used Water for a few client projects because of it’s rapid development, and ease of use for the client. Joomla is an off-shoot from Mambo (there was some contention with the founders of the Mambo open source project), and so Joomla is considered better than Mambo all around. Yet I had not really considered Joomla too much until now.

I recently came across an article that represented the popularity of a few of these CMSs using Google Trends, and so I decided to do my own trends research:

It’s apparent how Mambo dropped off after Joomla emerged from Mambo. WordPress has had a steady climb being used widely in the blogging community. Perhaps Joomla has surpassed WordPress simply because Joomla is a more encompassing framework for websites in general (where WordPress is specialized for blogs). In any case, both WordPress and Joomla are great open-source frameworks with huge communities behind them, providing a wide range of plug-ins, components, template themes, and other options for custom development and support.

Which to choose: WordPress or Joomla? After discussing it a bit further with a developer friend, I’ve decided It really depends on what you want to accomplish. Joomla is a bit grander in scope, includes community building components (for a community or social website), and may end up having more options as far as overall component-enabled functionality. WordPress is geared mainly for blogs, and so is more streamlined and perhaps simpler to use, has loads of functional plug-ins, and yet can also be re-geared to represent a something beyond a blog, more like a typical website.

Meta-Language Technique : OSC

Michael Gaio — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:03:57 +0000

With new technology comes new possibilities to execute technique. If we look to the trend of advents in internet protocols, we see how particular innovations in the information technology domain resulted in tremendous transformative effects in social, economic, and political arenas. The TCP/IP protocol allowed for the identification of independent computers, and for the transfer of information between computers in the nodal network of the non-centralized global communications system (the internet we know today). HTTP brought us the hyperlink. SMTP brought us email. DNS ushered in the “World Wide Web”, allowing every website to have a unique name (URL). There are many other protocols worth mentioning (such as XDI). Like the technical protocols that have come before, OpenSound Control (OSC) may lay the foundation for a new level of collective interaction in the realm of art, music, and multimedia.

OpenSoundControl (OSC) is a protocol for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices that are optimized for modern networking technology. Bringing the benefits of modern networking technology to the world of electronic musical instruments, OSC’s advantages include interoperability, accuracy, flexibility, and enhanced organization and documentation.

OSC integrates within the set of other standard internet protocols.

Internet Protocol Mandala

It appears that OSC is intended to supersede MIDI in multiple aspects. For one, OSC uses standard ethernet cable to transfer more information, with more flexibility and control of the types of information, with much less latency (operating at broadband speeds). Since it uses TCP/IP Ethernet, various types of data can be transfered and synchronized between an assortment of devices and applications, and more—such transfers can happen over any network, local or non-local—including the internet. This could make for some very interesting and novel capabilities in group multimedia collaboration, and in multimedia interaction with internet data and APIs (such as real-time multimedia data interpretations of collective processes).

OSC is implemented with a wide arrangement of audio and multimedia creation software (such as CSound, Max/MSP, Quartz Composer, and Pure Data). There are also some interesting devices emerging that use the OSC protocol—such as the incredible multi-touch screen control interface, the Lemur, and an iPhone application.

The Lemur multi-touch screen control interface.

What is the extent of possibilities with this new technical protocol? Pierre Levy, in his principle work, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, speaks of the necessity of some type of new collective language:

We are thus in the situation of a species whose members … have not yet achieved the state of collective intelligence of the culture for lack of an articulated language. How do you invent a language that no one has spoken, for which there are no records, no examples, and when we lack even an idea of what such a language might be?

My sense is that OSC is yet another key technical advent in the gradual crossing of the threshold into the realization of such a language, the awakening of collective consciousness, and the first coherent articulations of collective intelligence.

Now we may begin to collectively utter the early instances of an “over-language“. Such a language will not be on the same level as English, Chinese, or French. This meta-language, as a universal language of consilience, will transcend and include all preceding cultural contexts, and synthesize the diversity of our human strands. It will extend from our established media and data bases, yet somehow also surpass rational associations to the semiotic. It will engage us directly with an authentic immediacy and novelty that mimics the impulse of evolution itself. It will orient us, reflect our comprehension of ourselves, our reality, and our purpose in a type of synaesthesic hyper-poetry that continuously describes the nexus where each individual traverses the multitudinous terrain of collective being. It will arch like a rainbow across the noosphere, sprouting spontaneously upon the fresh and tender tongue of the collective psyche in astonishing response to sensing ourselves as a symphonic orchestration in participation with cosmic evolution.

Global IP feedback visualization.

[ Originally published here: http://spacecollective.org/MichaelGaio/4263/MetaLanguage-Technique-OSC ]