Friday, November 02, 2012

Progress: avatar boy with cellphone


Work-in-Progress Report: Screen shot of a 'stand-in' avatar boy with cellphone in taro field on McCarthy Mall of UH Manoa campus. The goal is to include local spoken word artists as avatars in taro field. The visitor touching the avatar hears their poem. The Kamaka 'ukulele provides musical accompaniment.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Progress: sunset sky 'ukulele


Work-in-Progress Report: Screen shot of 'ukulele in the sunset sky over the UH Manoa campus to be used as as an audio trigger component over the AR taro field in previous posting. The musical instrument image is derived from a Kamaka 'ukulele. Audio: stay tuned.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Progress: Student texting in taro field


Work-in-Progress Report: Screen shot of a UH Manoa student texts on cellphone while walking through an augment reality restored taro field in McCarthy Mall. Next steps include a more pleasing integration of taro field. Hear is the base audio track for this view dawn_427a_Kiholo_20121024.mp3.

Sunday, October 07, 2012

VOG imaging of locale: Hawaii Island

HYSPLIT animated GIF.

VOG output from Hawaii Island starting Oct. 4 and ending Oct. 7, 2012. VOG measurement and prediction http://weather.hawaii.edu/vmap/hysplit/ and the directory of recent .gif files used to create the animations on the map are in this folder here http://weather.hawaii.edu/vmap/hysplit/images/bigis/horiz/so2/

Aloha

Monday, October 01, 2012

Taro Field 1000' x 500' x 3'


Preview: This is a 2D export image sketch of a 3D taro field that I am contemplating as element in a Junaio AR art project for my Fall 2012 UH Manoa ART 401 "Advanced Electronic Arts Studio" guided by Peter Chamberlain. Taro was an important sustainable agricultural crop for the Hawaiians in the Manoa Valley before colonial encroachment.

Monday, September 03, 2012

Steve models aloha shirts for Brian

Brian Ward pays the 'ukulele in Hokitika and I wanted him to have one of these aloha shirts that I recently purchased second hand from Goodwill.













Saturday, May 12, 2012

Svoboda Bull Cattle Company

Earlier this year the calves were standing in snow. Here a camera phone on May 10, 2012 records this herd of thirty three grazing on a organic field of oats and peas.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Suffolk Times reports on AR installation

On May 3, 2012 The Suffolk Times published an article written Joyce Beckenstein on the 'inVisible Presence' installation. For the complete article as a .PDF file go to URL http://stevebull.org/PDF/inVisible_Presence_in_Suffolk_Times_20120503.pdf

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Four Busts in Gazebo Location

In this Junaio AR browser photo from the 'inVisible Presence' installation there are four virtual busts next to the close up of a plant from the Gazebo location in the garden of Villa dei Pini. The Bogliasco Fellows from left to right are Flavio Ermini, James Schmidt, Veronica Branca-Masa and Marco Cappelletti. The busts will vary in relative size on every AR viewing.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Benedetto Sicca in Panoramic Aloes


Benedetto Sicca visiting the opening of inVisible Presence finds his bust among the Panoramic Aloes of the gardens of Villa dei Pini. In this photo the bust appears to be a logo on his shirt. Sicca is a playwright, director and actor, and a Bogliasco Fellow in 2011. One of his productions is Principe Jorgos.

Thursday, April 05, 2012

Everyone Invited

The Bogliasco Foundation
is happy to invite you to participate

INVISIBLE PRESENCE
AR INSTALLATION BY STEVE BULL
14 - 15 April 2012

Bogliasco Foundation, Garden of Villa dei Pini, Via Aurelia 2, Bogliasco (GE)


Programmed for the XIV Settimana della Cultura,
by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivitá Culturali
Press release
Map and Summary

Friday, March 30, 2012

AR Installation Explanation by Elena Zanichelli

inVisible Presence, Garden of Villa dei Pini, The Bogliasco Foundation, Via Aurelia 4, Bogliasco, ITALY.

Organized within the Settimana della Cultura program from 14th until 22nd April 2012

Curated by the Ministero per i beni e le Attivitá Culturali.

"Augmented Reality Busts in the garden of Villa dei Pini"

On the occasion of the celebration of the 15th year of activity of the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Bogliasco Foundation will open the Villa dei Pini's eighteenth century garden to the public. Located close to the Via Aurelia, which follows the track of the ancient Roman road to the town of Ventimiglia and France, the Genoese style garden features paths with breathtaking views of the Mediterranean from a cliff which goes down to a steep rocky seaside. Since its inaugural year, the Linguria Study Center's garden has hosted strange and stimulating encounters, being a location for both meditation and creativity.

inVisible Presence - Augmented Reality Busts, the installation by Steve Bull, explores the unusual intersection between sculpture in public places and the most modern digital technologies. It will guide the public down the garden path to stop in search of inVisible Presence. These presences will be seen only on the screens of the visitors' smart phones or iPads, showing the busts of academics, artists, writers, novelists, choreographers and professors, composers and architects from all over the world. These busts will talk to the visitors about their projects at the Study Center. While literally geo-localized, these traces or presences are superimposed on the reality of the garden, memorializing research work or artistic endeavour that occurred at the Villa dei Pini.

The protagonists of this “encounter hunting” are the visitors themselves, who are invited to explore the garden and interact with it.

The technology used in inVisible Presence overturns the celebratory and "irremovable” aspect of the traditional bust, not only by making the traces of the presences fluid, but also by adding new information that should stimulate (im)probable discussions and encounters.

To this extent, Steve Bull participates in the contemporary debate about virtual experiments with augmented reality, a technology which enriches our perceptions by electronically addressing information which is not available otherwise to our five senses. He does this by taking an ancient expression of individuality, the bust, and putting it in a traditional location, a garden. By allowing the busts to talk and to be both visible and invisible, he invites the visitors to consider the social impact of virtual reality and the its creative potentialities, both popular and emotional.

The scope of inVisible Presence is to create a network of conversational interferences which can transmit us beyond our culture, the living and lived, the speaking and spoken. It creates a lively experimental laboratory in a micro-political environment of confrontation, discussion and cultural cooperation.

by Elena Zanichelli
Bogliasco Fellow 2012

Translation IT=>EN: Alessandra Natale and Terese Svoboda
AR browser: Junaio

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Progress in front of Villa dei Pini


Here is a work-in-progress screen grab from my iPad2. First, I acquire latitude and longitude coordinates from Google maps to postion Pasquale Pesce and Marina Harrison in front of the main entrance to the Villa dei Pini. Afterwards I walk around the site viewing the results. In technical rehearsals next week I plan to make corrections to the busts' orientation that will alter the keystone visual effect the next time a visitor views from this postion.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

inVisible Presence



I am installing thirty-eight virtual AR busts in the garden of the Villa dei Pini by a commission celebrating the 15th year of the Bogliasco Foundation. The current fellows that you see as busts in this photo (L to R) are Arni Ingolfsson, Ersi Sotiropoulos and Judith Wechsler. My next several posts are dedicated to my installation process.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Solid Buckyballs in Space



Q: What happens when an interstellar space craft or inner solar system space craft collides with a relatively small solid buckyball cluster?

A: A dent in the hull and minor deflection from course.

"Astronomers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have, for the first time, discovered buckyballs in a solid form in space. Prior to this discovery, the microscopic carbon spheres had been found only in gas form in the cosmos."
- NASA's Spitzer Finds Solid Buckyballs in Space

Friday, February 17, 2012

World Freshwater: Real vs Virtual



The NYTimes article Tracking How the World Guzzles Water
By JOANNA M. FOSTER
interests me because I have two half sections that are dry land farmed near Grant, Nebraska.


View Larger Map

The circles on the map show intense pivot irrigation agricultural practice.


T-L Center Pivot Irrigation System


The sprayers under the pivot boom are positioned above the final crop head height. These sprayers are a recent innovation delivering moisture closer the ground. The pivot irrigation practice in western Nebraska requires significant amounts of water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer that is nominally threatened by the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Canadian teens send Lego man off planet


"Two Canadian teenagers have sent a Lego man into the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere using a home-stitched parachute and equipment found on Craigslist." reported by Shiv Malik, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 January 2012 11.17 EST Full article with video

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Home Companion Reporter - 2012 jan 25



Home Companion Reporter is a telephone service that allows caregivers to reassure family members that their aging parents are receiving quality attention. A quick and easy service, Home Companion Reporter encourages independent living and promotes positive dialogue between caregiver and family members. Messages can be reviewed at the family member's convenience and archived.

Home Companion Reporter is a work in progress and this the current iPhone logo and mission statement.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Algae Culture Techniques


This lecture addresses everything you know about algae but were afraid to ask. Learn about the good the bad and the ugly algae species and find out why this critical base of the marine food chain affects shellfish from birth to death.
Date/Time: Thursday, 1/19/2012 6-8pm, and again Friday, 1/20/2012 2-4pm
Where: Cornell Marine Center, 3690 Cedar Beach Road, Southold NY

I will be there.