Robin Gareus

Big Screen Plaza, NYC

rgareus — 2012-01-26T20:05:09+00:00

Streaming Museum, an international public art and online museum, will celebrate its fourth anniversary on January 31 with the US premiere of ”Emotion Forecast” and ”Occupy Wall Screens”, real-time artworks by the renowned French artist Maurice Benayoun. The exhibition will be on view for one month at Big Screen Plaza in New York City and through 2012 at StreamingMuseum.org.

“Emotion Forecast” and “Occupy Wall Screens” are part of Maurice Benayoun's ongoing series on the “Mechanics of Emotions” which translate emotions into maps, performances, the Emotion Vending Machine, and sculpture relics of the world.

The artworks have been developed by Robin Gareus, at the CiTu-Paragraphe Lab of the University Paris 8, in the frame of The Art Collider project as a part of the PUF program of the FACE Foundation in collaboration with the SFAI (San Francisco Art Institute).

Streaming Museum is the first global public space and online hybrid museum with collaborating locations and cultural centers on 7 continents. The 30 x 16.5 ft. HD format screen of Big Screen Plaza is located at 29th Street and 6th Avenue, adjacent to the Eventi Hotel.

More information: http://www.streamingmuseum.org/featured/maurice-benayoun/

news, video

Protest SOPA, PIPA et al.

rgareus — 2012-01-20T15:50:56+00:00

As you may have noticed various sites and domains that I manage went black - or rather redirected to http://protestsopa.org/ or to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It probably does not wag the tail of anyone, but I felt that is incumbant upon me to express my support for freedom of speech and that I am prepared to defend it.

SOPA, PIPA - What is that?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968 both are propsed laws in the US of A.

Why is bad?

The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. The intention may be good and justified, but the implementation would be nothing short of legal censorship and discrimination.

It'd grant the executive the power to simply shut down information sources. In fact, if the law passes, it would not even require a court order to ban a service! A simple note would suffices to censor information, unless the provider of the content can prove and assure (monitor) that his/her site does not facilitate the commission of criminal violations.

There are times that everyday reasonable activities can be construed as piracy, but the actual problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.

Since the USA directly or indirectly controls most of the internet's infrastructure, and the proposed legislation has been written in a manner in which they specifically take into account “foreign rogue sites”, the legislation will, should it pass, have an impact upon the world as a whole.

These acts could have a significant impact on the way in which we currently use the internet: Free Speech is only as strong as the weakest link.

What to do about it?

Thanks to many activist sites (see links above and below) this is easy. If you are US resident, complain at your senator(s). If you are elsewhere, there are local efforts: e.g. join contacting the German minister of foreign-affairs who is supporting the law in the US!

Note that, Europe with the upcoming ACTA law is not too far behind. Act now!

References

For more information about SOPA/PIPA, please see:

news

Time Based Text

rgareus — 2012-01-20T03:09:10+00:00

Introduction and Example

A DokuWiki plugin to render time based text on a wiki page.

Restart

Usage Information

The tbt plugin has been released on the DokuWiki website.

download tbt plugin (link to v0.2.2) - install w/ DokuWiki's plugin manager (shift-reload your site to flush cached javascript after the installation).

Playback with DokuWiki

{{tbt>[[100,885],[111,647],[8,598],[8,159],[68,322],[111,279],[107,198],[117,717],[87,251],[105,135],[107,174],[105,206],[32,120],[114,371],[111,121],[99,132],[107,112],[115,555],[46,320],[8,790],[8,198],[8,462],[8,198],[8,390],[101,331],[97,134],[108,200],[108,110],[116,277],[32,344],[8,326],[8,111],[121,100],[32,224],[114,563],[111,152],[99,164],[107,169],[115,220],[33,764],[13,856],[45,940],[45,158],[45,142],[45,150],[45,134],[45,126],[45,372],[45,16],[45,17],[45,16],[45,17],[45,16],[45,17],[45,17],[45,16],[45,146],[45,158],[45,134],[45,142],[45,142],[45,142],[45,134],[13,734]]}}

TBT Format: time-base-text is saved as JSON encoded array of [ ASCII-char, milli-seconds ] array pairs. The DokuWiki plugin responds to

{{tbt> }}

tags.

Recording Text

tbt@dyne and dynebolic includes tools to record, replay and convert time-based-text data files in various programming languages.

Here's some XHTML/Javascript to author time-based-text from a website. You can test and use it at http://robin.linuxaudio.org/tbt-generator3.html

Comments and Notes

There's ongoing discussion to rewrite the javascript - which is currently git.dyne.orgs version; also adding timing (optional speedup and fixed-time regions) and styling (inline color, italic, bold,..) and scrolling features.

DokuWiki tbt-plugin ToDo:

add style.css.
Allow to select
- monospace (demo mode) or
- serif ((story mode) fonts
provide for options
- to hide/display the restart/pause buttons
- caption
- alignment.
- custom speed/time scaling.
improve code to generate unique ID's when using multiple tbt div's.
integrate tbt-generator - similar to mediamanager.

FLOSS, dokuplugin, development

Video synchronization - Screen-shots

rgareus — 2012-01-19T00:48:36+00:00

This is about testing and debugging Video/Screen synchronization.

The problem is simple and common: You play a video file at a given framerate (eg 24 fps, 25fps or 29.97fps) while your Screen is refreshed at a different rate (eg 60Hz, or 75 Hz or 85Hz).

Motivation and Introduction

Test Setup

video files with alternating black and white frames (at different framerates)
cable from VGA (green-luminance) to soundcard (audio-in)
yass (yet another scrolling scope)
different video players (mplayer, xine, xjadeo) in fullscreen mode

For the black video frames the signal will be zero during the whole cycle. For white frames it should be about 1V, with the start and end of each frame marked by a short (~1ms) zero.

This may give you an idea: smoothly playing a 25fps file of alternating black and white frames on a 75Hz screen: 3times black ; 3 times white frame with vertical sync.

The setup was done on one machine with two screens (one for monitoring, and the 2nd screen used as probe displaying the video). Using a single machine allows for software to measure the delay between a requested screen update and resulting signal (after compensating the audio-interface's latency). (Note that not all grafic boards allow DRI sync if two screens are in use)

…

Video, Installation, Development

InOut

rgareus — 2012-01-18T23:04:20+00:00

..work in progress..

Interaction Concept

Flow for InOut Collab.

Create Account (once)
- agree to CC-SA
- choose username & pass; request a secutity token
Choose Interaction Mode (for each session)
- simple - webcam, browser, file-upload
- normal:
  - relay - DSL, low bandwidth, firewalled users
  - p2p - requires IP, direct access to icecast & OSC ports
Connect A/V streams
- create OUT-port (provide hashed security-token and/or register on server)
- announce public OSC commands/modifiers for this OUT port (via XMPP)
- retrieve a list of available OUT-ports (from others), that can be used as IN

Brainstorm

Use XMPP for join/leave the network (alike jabber chat) and feedback (xmpp group chat)
unique ID for all ports.
use OSC for real-time control messages (client specific)
provide a minimal set of OSC for simple mode eg. zoom, seek, effect settings
provide a XHTML <video/> interface to monitor/select active streams
media-browser for available files in the pool
simple-mode:
- server-side A/V creation tools (OSC-in; A/V out)
- server-side filters (OSC controlled)
normal-mode
- provide a icecast server (true p2p, or relay via server)
- use custom pure-data, processing, MAX/MSP

development, installation

FLOSS Lighting

2012-01-18T15:07:38+00:00