YOU ARE NOT DEAD: A Guide to Modern Living

(Photos by Gabriel Collins!)

“Your dreams and dangerous notions, our cutting-edge advice”

VANCOUVER, BC: You are invited to view and review Black Pants Productions’ presentation of You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living, the theatrical wellness seminar.

You Are Not Dead is a site-specific, seminar-style performance inspired by civic duty propaganda, self-help manuals and popular theories on life management. Actors Adam Bergquist and Jessica Harvey will lead you through an efficient eleven steps that encourage you to embrace cognitive dissonance and be Not Dead. Topics covered include:

* Breaking the Five-Year Fail
* Assessing Your Mediacation
* Recognizing Your Debit to Society
* Stopping Identity Theft Before You Happen

…and much more.

Based on an e-book of the same name by writer/librarian Meg Holle and musician/hacker Daniel Reetz, the dynamic theatrical adaptation of You Are Not Dead offers incisive and humorous social commentary on pop-psychology and superficial empowerment. Produced and directed by UBC graduate and Yvonne Firkins Award-winner Danielle Marleau (Black Pants). Adapted for theatre by Meg Holle and Danielle Marleau with dramaturgical contributions by Rachel Peake (Solo Collective). Original audio-visual presentation by Daniel Reetz, and PowerPoint AI programming by Brandon Marback.

The show runs May 27 – June 5, 2010. All shows at 7:30 p.m. except May 30 at 2:00 p.m.
Tickets $18/20 in advance at Tickets Tonight or $25 at the door.

www.youarenotdead.ca

I’ve been waiting for the right moment to announce this in a big way — but I’m in the middle of it, and the right moment never seems to come. The time is now — before I’m dead, duplicitous, plane-crashed or burned out.

Krista Eide just wrote a great article about the project. I hope you’ll take a moment to check it out, and possibly donate — we need a bit more cash to realize it in the best possible way.

My job right now is making the images for the play — and I suspect I’m going to be at it for the next month or more. I just can’t tell you how totally awesome this thing is gonna be. You’ll see. Wish us all luck — myself, Danielle Marleau, Meg Holle, and the actors and dramaturgs polishing and preparing this thing for the next stage.

These are the sorts of things that are only justifiable to businessmen — Yes! make a one-of-a-kind undocumented connector, and then charge loads of money for cables and connectors, because we’re the only source! You can almost hear them laughing all the way to the bank extinction.

I recently acquired a Uniden Bearcat BCD396XT, which is a remarkable radio. The most salient feature of this radio is its ability to decode APCO25-standard broadcasts, which now comprise the majority of public service frequencies like police, fire, etc. But this radio goes a step further, allowing connection to a GPS (for “location based scanning”, a funny thing for a radio device, when radio was invented to overcome problems of distance) or to a computer for complete control. Problem is, the connector of interest is wacky.

This connector, though it kinda resembles USB connectors, does not transport a USB signal. It is a plain old serial connection. Why they chose to use this connector is beyond me. However, as a hacker, I want access to those pins. I could just open the radio and solder to the board, but it’s more elegant and flexible to find the connectors themselves. After taking some detailed photographs, and searching around a bit, I was able to find a replacement.

Detailed photographs:

Items on eBay — they can be had for about a dollar each, with shipping – a hell of a lot cheaper than the $20 asking price for the standard serial cable. The magic search words turned out to be “4 pin mini USB cable” (most are 5 pin, these 4 pin models appear on a few odd digital cameras and MP3 players).

Please note, these cables are only good for the connectors on the end. Plugging the radio into a USB port without a proper USB adapter is asking for pain.

Quoting Dr. Slator:

I am pleased to announce the winners of the South Beach
International Animation Festival have finally been announced
and posted online at

http://www.southbeachanimationfest.com/winners2009.htm

where the winner of the ‘Education’ division is
“Through the Virtual Cell” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1370799/)

Brian Slator

w0000000000000000000000000000000t!!!!!!!

I am pleased to announce the release of a major project — complete plans for a high-speed book scanner made from off-the-shelf cameras and salvage. With the help of Aaron Clarke, there is now software to complete the process, too.

The complete plans and software are on Instructables. Please vote for this project!

PageBuilder:

Big thanks to Aaron Clarke, Noah Bicknell, L, and everyone else who contributed. Couldn’t have done it without you.

THROUGH THE VIRTUAL CELL

I recently did some sound design work/scoring for a biology film called “Through the Virtual Cell”. There’s more information on the IMDB title page; I’m not listed because it’s a “title page”, which apparently has some different status than “regular” IMDB pages.

You can see it at the South Beach International Animation Festival in South Beach, Florida.

Special thanks to Brian Slator and Christina Johnson.

A HUGE thank you to Sovereign Sectfor saving my setup with a working power supply. I am grateful and indebted. Also, big thanks to Ree, who is a masterful wizard behind the scenes.

If you want to get in touch with me, the best way is via email. d a n r e e t z @ g m a i l dot com.

The Carnivale, as originally conceived and executed by Mike Dagen and Amber Fletschok, has been a big deal for Fake. Aside from the recent L.I.V.E event at the Plains Art Museum, it is perhaps the only event with the right kind of venue to play (and experience) my kind of work. For that reason, I am dedicating this show to the Abandoned Scout Camp and Casey Borchert/Sursumcorda.

This year, for better or for worse, I will be playing alone. It will be killer.

One of the premises of much ubicomp literature is that the interfaces between and operations of machines will be invisible, and in some sense then, incomprehensible now — taking a form we cannot imagine or manifesting in an extrasensory fashion by virtue of speed (gigahertz), medium(radio), complexity, and so on. What’s great is that like so much previous, we can devise instruments and interfaces to bring it into the realm of the sensory. I have a simple demonstration — you can see fluorescent tubes cycling in the image below. An ordinary camera brought it into the realm of human detection.

Now, I have an inkling that the proper design of ubiquitous systems will include affordances to bring their operations and interactions into the realm of human perception — most crucially in cases involving encounters with novel systems as well as transactions involving critical information. But that is the subject of a future post.