Thursday, 24 January 2008
80 Million Tiny Images
Here's a beautiful web project: 80 Million Tiny Images, a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning, by Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman at MIT.
It's not just pretty, either: the project aims to use this massive dataset to train a computer to recognize objects within an image and to understand the scenes depicted in photographs. What's fascinating to me is the way the composite image comes out so familiar - colours of the earth, I suppose. This is despite the fact that each of the tiles in the "poster" represents a composite image of one of the 53,463 nouns (retrieved from WordNet) representing an average of about 140 images (a total of about 7,527,697).
Is it art, is it linguistics, or is it science? The answer of course, in the traditions of the best projects, is all of the above.Labels: digital art, image processing, internet policy, linguistics, web projects
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:04 AM
Thursday, 3 January 2008
Shiftspace commissions
Turbulence has commissioned ShiftSpace and now ShiftSpace is offering artist/software develper commissions.
Ten development grants, of up to $2,000, will be granted to individuals and collectives using ShiftSpace as a platform.
From the ShiftSpace website:
While the Internet's design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web is undergoing a transformation that promises user empowerment—but who controls the terms of this new read/write web? The web has followed the physical movement of the city's social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.By pressing the [Shift]+[Space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions – which we call Shifts. Users can choose between several authoring tools we're working to develop – which we call Spaces. Some are utilitarian (like Notes and Highlights) and some are more experimental/interventionist (like ImageSwap and SourceShift). Users are also invited to map these shifts into Trails which can be used for collaborative research and extended as a platform for a context-based public debate.
ShiftSpace has announced a new commissions program based on a developer API, through which users can create their own spaces. The platform evolves through an Open Source process that seeks to build advanced social software tools, develop workshops and create online public spaces within a distributed network architecture.
What interface would you create on top of any website? What trail would you choose through the meta-web?
Submissions should be either a proposal to develop applications using ShiftSpace OR an already created ShiftSpace trail.
Closing date February 25th, 2008.
Labels: digital art, digital creativity, digital writing, new media writing, shiftspace, turbulence.org
posted by Helen Whitehead 10:40 AM
