Studio City East

Florida transplant Living in Long Island City, NY. Serious minded absurdist, habitual hobbyist, and all around friendly character.

[studiocityeast]

Summer wrap up from top:

Delicate Steve on a boat

View my hotel room in San Francisco

Japanese Tea Garden - Golden Gate Park

Grilled mackerel, eggplant, scallions, poblano

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From a recent trip to Acadia

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The Air Up There

Drones and the issues that accompany them have been showing up with increasing frequency.  The US Open was delayed because of a drone.  There was the Kentucky man that shot down the drone over his home.  The graffiti drone.  Various weaponized drones.   And of course Amazon's famous announcement of Prime Air, which with the ubiquity of their deliveries paired with drones immediately conjured images of future cities buzzing with low altitude air traffic.  Interestingly, searches around air rights have remained relatively flat in relation to drone searches (I tried a few variations on the search term, but all produced similar results).

With the rise in drone traffic, or more commonly radio controlled aircraft, Federal and state governments are taking measures to place restrictions on this technology.  In an unrelated case, the Supreme Court had previously ruled that property extended to at least 83 feet above the your home, and the FAA has claimed control over the airspace 500 feet above the ground.  As I have argued in the past, I think highly restrictive regulations on new technology are futile and counterproductive.  This is a case where the technology brings tangible benefits (efficient transportation, traffic management, public safety, search and rescue).  Building the necessary infrastructure and architecture to better support these new aircraft will not only reduce the issues caused by the technology, but also facilitate innovation and progress.

Luckily, Google and NASA have partnered with several other companies to develop the Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management.  These organizations see the benefits and economic opportunity.  Encouragingly, the FAA has also published a UAS (unmanned aircraft system) roadmap to "enable UAS integration into the National Airspace System."

There are obvious issues of safety, security, and privacy that absolutely should be addressed through legislation and court rulings, and the logistical concerns over managing these aircraft are totally valid.  However, I'm hopeful that after the first stage of defining the legal boundaries that drones can operate in, the technology can flourish with the right implementation and guidance.

Additional reading: https://www.faa.gov/uas/

Cover image and airspace service provider image source: http://utm.arc.nasa.gov/docs/GoogleUASAirspaceSystemOverview5pager[1].pdf

[studiocityeast]

Hey hey!  It’s been a while.  I seem to have neglected this corner of my activities for a little too long. But I haven’t exactly been idle.  I built a website, took it down, and now I’m in the process of rebuilding it.  I’ll post the link here when I have it running it again.  In order to catch up, I thought I would do a digest of some topics that have been of interest lately.

As counterintuitive as this sounds, the MTA keeps claiming that removing the trash cans from subways is helping to reduce litter in the stations.  If they have the data to support these claims, that’s great, but anecdotally I’ve seen plenty of people toss trash onto the ground with or without trash cans being present.  This could be a plan to cut costs with less than credible data, which I would support if it means the money saved is reinvested in infrastructure improvements.

This article about the thermostat battles received a fair amount of attention, but not a lot of data to support the case. Maybe the attention confirms the bias?

Great information about the maple syrup cartel.

While the idea of launching a Kickstarter campaign without an idea is presented here as a joke, the premise is not unreasonable.  There are methods (keyword traffic, A/B testing for example) that are employed when you aren’t sure what you should be building.  Think of all of the pages that just have an email registration to notify you when whatever they are building is ready.  It’s actually not too far from what Quirky has been doing for the last few years.

While I’m waiting patiently for Bear Simulator, this fire lookout simulator looks intriguing.

Lastly, I bought a Kindle.  I think I’ll still end up reading a fair amount of physical books, but overall I’m a fan.  Amazon has clearly perfected the user experience for the device, but the reading experience is still missing something.  Maybe I’ll adjust.

[studiocityeast]

Art and the Internet and Internet Art

Some of William Faulkner's best work explored the nature of time, and the complicated fluid relationship between the past and present.  He of course famously wrote “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”  The dynamic between the internet and the physical world operates in a similar way, but I am increasingly curious about the distinction between the two.  More specifically, I’ve been preoccupied with the art of the internet, and digital influences on different mediums of art.

For a great overview of the latter, I recommend Every Frame a Painting’s look at the depiction of texting and the internet in film.  It demonstrates how film has successfully adapted to some changes in technology and failed with others.  There are plenty of other examples of digital art using anything from algorithms to MS Paint.  Also, see the case of Emily Howell.

I took a stab at the former and previously wrote some thoughts here, a professional photographer plied his trade on video games (link), and there was a film set entirely within a computer desktop (link).  Obviously, there are the dominant memes and .gifs which could be seen as internet art, but it all feels a bit like using a movie camera to film a stage play when the possibilities offered are so much more.  The digital surface is only part of the internet.

It is possible that these are the nascent stages of a new art form.  Experimenting with old forms before coming into its own.  Maybe it is important to determine the place the internet occupies in the physical world, and if there is a distinction between the internet and other digital technology.  Is it an artificial digital mirror of our reality or is it a separate reality?  Has the internet replaced the past or even perhaps diminished it’s influence?

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Gantry Plaza Park - LIC

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Wave Hill - Bronx, NY

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Lindsay's photos from Lake Sebago in Harriman State Park

Save for both of us discovering a tick on our persons the final evening, it was a wonderful vacation.  Great weather almost everyday, and just the right amount of rustic.  Plenty of trails, lake access, and BBQing.  And a lot of deer just wondering through the campsite.

[studiocityeast]

For less than $100, you can buy a device smaller than a smartphone that plugs into an HDMI port on your television and run the Google Android (4.2.2 on this model) operating system.  I think that's pretty cool.  Not to say the device I ordered, the MK802IV, is flawless.  The pre-loaded Android ROM was buggy, which improved after a firmware upgrade but still did not solve the Netflix issue yet.  That said, the devices (of which Dell is even possibly entering the market soon) offer enormous potential for portable computing and a range of applications at a relatively small cost.  I used this wireless keyboard for basic navigating.

[runoffatthemouth-deactivated201]

If you do not have Instagram, then you have missed out on these highly edited water views from my weekend in Rhode Island. The homes are the backsides of Newport’s summer cottages, which can be viewed from a cliff walk, so I’m tossing them in this water-views set. Contrary to what these photos show, I was not alone during the trip.

[studiocityeast]

This looks fantastic.  I really want to make the trip soon.  Though, it does make me wonder if Newport is doing some amazing marketing, or if everyone I know has the same interests around the same time.  Fast, Cheap & Out of Control also made me want to visit.

[oldflorida]

Sliding gator

Alligator Farm at Sulphur Springs, Tampa

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I do miss Florida sometimes.  The beaches and the weirdness.

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New York Botanical Garden, Bronx

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The photo above is from another blog I was using to explore the idea of screenshots being a form of photography of the internet.  My interest in the project came from walking between two separate exhibitions at the Met.  The first was After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age and the other was William Eggleston: At War with the Obvious.

As the digital space becomes a bigger part of the human experience, can virtual life be captured in an artistic way?  A sepia toned Craigslist ad, a high contrast splash page, or several programs layered in a certain pattern across the screen.  It may seem redundant or self-referential, like an inefficient web crawler or a terrible meme, but I think there is a way to coax something more out of the screenshots.  Out of this confluence of information, images, and sounds, that continues to grow and evolve.

On the other hand, the internet may just be the medium.  Although, some frames around paintings could be considered works of art, and I certainly wouldn't be the first person to acknowledge software as art.  But can coding reach the level of art, or would that be the same as equating the paint on the palette or the unexposed film to art?  This may be too much reductionism.  After all, I am talking about something that is in many ways alive, or at least could be soon.  Which would make screenshots early portraits.

As a side note, the screenshot of a Google image search for potatoes had the most likes and re-blogs of anything I've ever posted on the internet.

[criterioncollection]

“How a major studio allowed such a vehemently odd movie to exist really is a mystery. Its outlandishness isn’t forced; it’s forceful. This is a film that expands a singular style of humor into an entire worldview, a physics as vast as the Force in Star Wars.”

— Sam McPheeters, Repo Man: A Lattice of Coincidence

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You really should watch this movie.

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Aereo should offer to sell viewer information to networks, so that networks can use the information to generate more advertising revenue by recapturing this "hidden" audience.  The streaming broadcast service is taking advantage of the demand from consumers to consume media with the technology that is readily available and convenient to them.  If networks remain obstinate, consumers will continue to abandon them.

Link

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East River carts

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Just got my tickets for Here Lies Love at the Public Theater