Art Scientist Manifesto in Progress

Notes for digital artists presented at the Escondido Art Partnership June 13 2009.  - A set of inquiries about modern science and personal art. The notes are here.

Apple WWDC09 – Become your own carrier

Apple has the hardware, software, content and the user experience to tie it together with an intelligence that no competitor in any one of these industries can synthesize. As the future hurdles on toward smaller, more communicative realtime devices what is Apple missing? Becoming its own carrier.

How often do I buy a product thinking, if only Apple designed it. Because Apple doesn’t just build and box something. They think outside the product about how a person will interact with other things in their life. It is how the new iPhone 3Gs (speedy, beautiful) shows a new 3 MP camera, but the autofocus is augmented by tap to focus software using touch screen. Outside of the product pictures are directly brought in to iPhoto (comes with every Mac) and shared easily on the web. Back to the point.

What is clear at Apple WWDC09 among the 5200 others is how badly their no-show prime carrier is performing. They bring very little to this party. This lack of coordination is why Dell and Micorosoft prefer enmity to building a product superior to Apple. It begs the question. What if Apple were to become its own wireless carrier? Clearly at&t is not keeping up with Apple’s pace of innovation. The operator has inferior stores to buy product. If you have issues with Apple’s Genius bar – don’t even try to buy from an at&t sales person. At my local at&t store they actually told me to take the Apple iPhone outside of their store to open the box!

at&t offers one thing. As a regulated monopoly they convey their precious frequency on which Apple iPhone’s do their 3G traffic. Sprint may be the only carrier with nimbleness to go beyond being a pipe, but they signed with Palm. Verizon, with greater coverage could be even slower in bureacractic support than at&t.  Operator’s do not live in a free market.  They are afraid of the future. Their worst nightmare? To become the ”dumb pipe”.  If they fail to innovate then they will earn both ends. Apple needs a great patner. Operators and handset makers may best simply end up following the piper sprinkling the seeds.

Apple figure’s things out. Putting capital and coercive FCC considerations aside, Apple could become the operator with the best wireless Internet services.

Jeff Jarvis’s basic thought experiment guide “What Would Google Do?”, admits that Apple is the exception to all of his Google rulings. So for the wireless world in which we are entering, where everything communicates and computes in smaller and smaller packages, might Apple add services to its operating plan. What if a carrier were as imaginitive and integrated with customer services and producst as Apple? I find myself full of answers when more and more I ask, “What would Apple do?”

The New Personal Art

raw thoughts unstrung:

Custom tennis shoes. Personal photography – my pictures, Karaoke – my voice. Personal recipes, personal restaurant tip sheets, personal hand marks, group signs, my bookmarks, personal ethics, personal saviors. 

Internet of a hundred thousand pictures a week, a million radio stations streaming, ten million blogs changing weekly, one hundred million daily voices. Layers, transparencies, textures of language, overlays of culture. An event is mediated by ten thousand photographers, a thousand videos, audios, text (blogs) to carry it the rest of the world. Then samples, remixed, mashed up. A band called God has the voices of the Earth all in a line. Aa singer goes from Japanese, gangster English, French, Swedish, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese and back. What do you call that art?

With so much digital media around, is aesthetics all about editing? Cutting, framing, overlaying, seeing transparencies and building fine multiple overtones? Still we have personal choice and your magical editing ritual. What became of making, the pre-analog, and does this not put greater value on the source? Or is it as Buckminster Fuller said – mankind no longer needs to mine the Earth, their is plenty on the surface – only a recycling strategy counts. Not editing but a meltdown to be reborn.

Your autobiography is no different from Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed. No one has had a chance to embellish your moral code, pause on the mythology of your job, trumpet your psychological struggles. Someday everyone will have their own personal church. A grand personal philosophy, an art movement, your Blue period, your Romantic group, your Classical era, your expressive experimentalism, the morph of good luck to a personal religious symbol. It is all there, lived but unwritten, untold. One’s reverence no different than another’d. There are the hearsayers, observers, appreciators, lovers, believers, fans, fanatics?  In the end culture is what we choose to repeat. Although propagation strategies count, the recipe for the repetition of free unexplored life has eluded our many races and religions who sing that they know it all. The value is fundamentally on your person, you as the source. In a word – presence.

What was once His became his then yours then mine. History is his story and mine is the future. Over time we tire of having in our head only the “great song” ethed in by its mega-hearings. Who has their own song inside. That is the new personal art that values the raw unworshipped person. The real person with future potentials.

There are many more Darwinian branches of the culture tree than broadcast media would have us believe. The same told stories of the fathers had nothing to do with their actual lives. Certainly most people have an equally potent set of life forming challenges. The story gets told, converted to metaphor and wisdom only later.

The poetry of our gate, our subtle dance, walking down the sidewalk is ours, savor it because noone will see your  walking. You will see only the music in your lover’s walk and they may see that in us. Individual, very personal, very expressive, very much busy being born preferable to being dying.

Where the new personal art leads is a question.

Should not the traveler also create places for people to travel to?

EPSON 7900 – First Impressions

After years of waiting, I bought my first industrial printer.  From scratch, without much help other than a manual, I found the key challenges are mastering the machine and the network. Revving up the beast and connecting to Macs and PCs takes steps. Small steps. Lots of assumptions are dashed. Assumptions about how it should have worked as opposed to learning why it doesn’t and doing it the machine’s way. 

I started on the Mac which has a 16  bit color workflow down to the printer driver,  but moved to the PC because this was the only update for the FW image. The Mac version from Epson was not ready. The first firmware update ran for 45 minutes when I realized something had crapped out. Poor error detection in the SW. Second time the FW update took in 8 minutes, but only after horrendous network shenanigans to bring the printer online. Clearly my network needed restructuring amid my three wireless  routers.

Long story short. I was able to print some of the time on both roll and sheet, as the printer slows down on big files without any feedback. 

The print path on the 7900 is near vertical with a vacuum pull so gravity rules. For sheet, if you offline it, the paper drops like a rock, nearly crimping a corner – so you must be vigilant. The paper catcher is a torture chamber disguised as a gauze dress. First there is no clear picture to show if you have assembled it right side out. I assembled it two different ways with the plastic runners showing – which I think is right, but with those prints rocketing out, wet emulsion side down, it sends me to the drafting table to figure another solution. 

I can only print some time because the network is flakey. Maybe because the firmware is early? If I were a Mac-only person I could not get it, though I have a PC so I found it.

Although you are supposed to send jobs on either USB or Ethernet, initially I could only get results off the USB. The manual does not say it in the instruction, but if you fiddle with the printer you will find that the network is “Disabled” by default. It seemed not to make a difference because I was talking to it in disabled mode. Ah – what it means is the ability to change the network settings is “disabled”. But to actually get ink on paper, I could only get data from USB. How much storage is on the printer? Nothing in the manual. It would take me another day to rebuild my network to get it all going smoothly. But there are other issues in the meantime.

When you run rolls, the mounting is easy from the front, but you have to mangle and force the paper through the path, completely forcing it out off the printer with 3 feet  to spare. There is no way to do this without cotton gloves. It is too bad they couldn’t write the firmware to open the platten, blast the vacuum and auto feed it through. I hate touching pristine paper.

So I pulled  a first print off USB to compare to my desktop Epson 2400. Same file, same paper -Luster 13×19 sheet, both from the PC.  The appearance is almost identical. The 7900 printed in half the time, but the appearance is almost identical. 7900 imaged darker areas better, but no noticeable enhancement using those orange  and greens  inks.

The bottom line is the Epson 7900 is an industrial “roll printer”. Sheets are possible, but the paper loading is finicky and you have to really watch it as they drop or you will bend corners. Unlike the table top Epsons, you cannot mount a stack of sheets. But this makes big prints from a roll well.

There is another reason this is an industrial printer. Moving it from the palette crate, into your studio, is much a thinking man’s game as a brawny one’s. Even though I asked three buddies over, with a rug over a dolly, I got it most of the way – especially through narrow doors that must be taken off the hinges. Alas the stair steps, took three brawny men. But that’s over now. 

On the second day, I came to my senses and realized it was time to run a Gigabit network, so I simplified the topology of my three chained ancient wireless routers. The studio/home giganet is now one wired Gigabit router coming in to a 16 port switch. Coming from the switch are macs, Dells,  two Apple WiFI Time Capsules for auto backup, and an Apple TV for large viewing.  A few new RJ45 wires with good ends didn’t hurt. I bought the crimper and not one Cat 5 wire made it.

With computers running clean and fast, I want to make sure the printer is a good network citizen. The key is to put every device on DHCP, which is assigned from the router.  I sent a small band print, then 97 MB, then 850 MB with 16 bit color – wow. That last one took an hour on USB, but only 15 minutes on Gigabit Ethernet. 

So now I have tamed the beast, now I am looking at big prints and color is a big problem. Too much color. On to look at paper profiles and work flow. More on that later. 

Tips for the Newcomer

1. Buy an 11 ink kit. Ink comes with the printer, but 60% is used up feeding the ink hoses to the print head. 

2. Visit epson.com/support and upgrade your firmware, driver and anything else you see. This is key to purchasing any new technology, as software often gets “perfected” after hardware.

3. Your first print should be a small horizontal band to make sure you are up and running. Crank up to big sizes later. My biggest to date is 16 bit color, 26 bit data from the Mac 850 MB, 22″w x 33″ 426 pixels/inch. 

4. Slow down and really take your time to read every dialog box, and hidden panel and button in detail. It pains me to say, but the interfaces for key settings are often buried. For example, the default settings are short cuts for the fast print, when you usually want to getting the best quality with a fine print.

5. This is a network printer  that gulps huge files so put away your USB cable and upgrade to a Gigabit Ethernet system. 

Biggest Beeves

1. If you send too big a job, there is no status on the printer data transfer. With no error message you simply wait and guess if the printer gave up the ghost. The light winks when the printer is printing, but the buzz of the print head tells me that. 

2. 11 Inks, 10 hoses. The promise that this Epson would run both Matte and Photo black is only half true. You mount two cartridges, but rather than build a hose for each ink, you have to run a process to evacuate the line and insert the new ink which takes 5 minutes. They actually have a special button on the LCD to change  black ink.  What were they thinking?

3. Paper catch system puts prints at risk.  This is a near vertical print path, so engineer your own catch table.

Postscript: I went back to my dealer and saw last year’s model the 7800. The 7900 is far sturdier and better made. Turning the roll paper cover is solid on the 7900. Taking a peak at the paper catcher assembly – plastic rails should show. 

Final Note: Artist David Em’s experience of the same machine.

The Tube vs the Tube

Media students observe at TVNewser that “msnbc.com generated 1.1 million video streams in the first 24 hours, making the Powell interview which included an endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama, the program’s most-watched individual video stream ever.”

Media questions here for Jeff Jarvis or other media schools.

What is #2, #3 ?

What stream format is working? preroll, post roll, 30 second interstitials after 5 minutes view. How does this compare to  commercial TV – 3 minute ads to 13 minute views. They are both tube media, why is the Internet more rapid? And what of small tube media – faster intervals and short bits still. It is that on the Internet the frequency of publishing and feedback is instantaneous. Longer time cycles are not meaningful to this medium.

Articulation and Artiface

Jeff Jarvis is stimulating a discussion on the new definition for Article on the Internet. Appreciate that the high speed, highly connected, multiple media art form allows for communicators to assemble all manners of link and node. Jeff is pushing this. But articulation is not there yet.  Articulate media takes reflection and composure to turn into a program worth having an audience. The journalistic effort that Dwight MacDonald marveled is learning that “Everything on the same topic should go into the same place.” (Discriminations). In rapid Internet meshes of reportage and observation and opinion, we see elements of a conversation emerge. It is exciting to see this present and future tension – adding to Jeff’s #2 query,  Jan Chipchase who travels the world discovering and reporting the artifaces of the world by blogpicturing for Nokia design.

TED Ideas

Looking for some evening entertainment? On your PC or your AppleTV catch up to TED- (Technology, Entertainment and Design) web videos of the conference held in Monterey California. It costs a fortune to get in, but the meeting is rich.  Podcasts to AppleTV are quite watchable. Many great technologists and thinkers provide personal demonstrations and insights into their latest area of work. A suprise this year is Al Gore’s 2008 presentation, stay for the Q&A. Almost as good as my favorite political blog Mark Brand.

Wildfire World

On Technology and Emergency - October smoke heavy from my house, behind me, I write from a balcony in Capistrano beach, a refugee overlooking the sea. Lucky to have a room with my wife, dog and cat and a few moments to reflect on the Internet and media in emergency. It all began Sunday when my wife warned me of fires she read of on the Internet. Four years ago were the fires in Rancho Bernardo. Can’t happen again.

The Quest for University

I CHOOSE TO LIVE A LIFE OF DESIGN.  My thoughts. That is why I have my iPhone. Especially having enjoyed the silvery MacBook Pro after struggling with an XP for years and imagining the hellishly complex life of Vista to come. Vista, that’s work. There, me and my IT department (all use Macs) fritter away investor resources on the convolutions of Microsoft and Intel OEMs that marginally interact for my benefit.

I choose my home life to be Apple. A life by design. Something I love to touch. Something rich in experience. Apple combines what Microsoft and Dell cannot. Full media, cameras, software smoothly integrated at the highest bar design point. Apple hardware. Mac OS X. People want “the Apple experience”. If I told you I was going to give you the “Microsoft experience” – well that would be rude. The new Apple really began with iPods for iTunes, well studied by media instructor Jeff Jarvis. The core purpose of iPhone and iPods he writes, is about enabling personal conversation. To teach conversation, a necessity for the Web 2.0 era, comes ironically from the ancient curriculum, once necessary for a cultured people – oratory. It has always been about finding your own voice. Invoked today as Rhetoric 2.0, the new universe must  span realtime digital media, the principles of media, interaction sciences, and all the arts. Poetics and poetry again.

Freeing the Wireless Internet Market

Face it. The regulated monopoly for Telecoms has to go. Within 10 years it has to end or the national economy will lose billions of dollars.

Some background. The Federal Communications Commission, created in 1934 – replacing the Federal Radio Commission of 1927,  specified spectrum as each new technical invention came along. This spectrum was for AM radio, that is for FM radio, this is for VHF tv, that is for UHF TV, this is for AMPS cell phones etc. Ever since the 1980’s as mass market digital devices have shown, all media is just wireless bits. Radio=bits, text=bits, tv=bits, voice=bits. Bits=Bits. All media is bits. In the 2000’s it is laughable that spectrum must be regulated and protected as one media function. In Being Digital (1995), Nicolas Negroponte spelled out the ecophysics of bits as the basis for the dawning era of the bitcasters.

Ever since the Times May 2007 article carried the story of Google bidding on FCC Spectrum, the Carriers, notably Verizon have been all up in a huff with sophistic arguments of how Google will stiffle innovation. But guess what folks – the evacuated spectrum at 700 MHZ is all television. So the broadcast folks should be in a huff.  What gives cellular voice companies the right to argue that only they can take broadcast televisions space?  Furthermore innovation is exactly what the carriers have halted, or as they see it – allow to flourish in the degrees of freedom within their walled garden. Ask any software maker who has tried to publish on a carrier deck.

Today in the USA, you can buy any PC, any software, any content and choose freely among competing companies. You cannot do this on telecom. You may like a certain phone, but you had better see if the carrier operates it. This is absurd. There is no competition in the market, the way there is in the PC market which allows the consumer to freely choose between Dell, SONY, Apple, etc. It is as if to watch NBC television you have to buy an NBC TV set. The antics of today’s “telecom business model” is absolutely insane and unfair. It is going to take the FCC and clearly this will lead to the Department of Justice as it did in 1982. The reasons for needed DOJ intervention are numerous. It is now clear that operators will defend their turf all the way to their breakup and the inevitable open platform deregulation to come.

Perhaps the subsidy provided to select phone makers should become a generic rebate for any device that a consumer chooses to operates on the network.