My employer, Disney Research, took best of show at Siggraph 2010 emerging technologies. Some of our work has been featured on Wired.com

I was the photographer. Enjoy this brief glimpse into the otherwise-secretive world of corporate R&D. These are old projects, but good ones.

Thanks, Priya, for the great article.

This is a good time for me to say that NOTHING ON THIS SITE (unless otherwise noted) REPRESENTS WORK DONE WITH THE SUPPORT OF DISNEY RESEARCH, THE OPINIONS OF DISNEY or DISNEY RESEARCH, etc. This site and its content are my independent work and has nothing to do with my employer. It is not property of Disney or Disney Research, or endorsed by them, either.

See you in Vancouver on June 5th…

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

THIS week You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living hits the lecture hall stage as a live-action seminar/evil-genius play in Vancouver. The original project—a music, image and text collaboration I did with Meg Holle—was conceived and executed primarily in 2005, but my adventures in Russia put it on hiatus until its online release in 2008. Soon after it caught the attention of Black Pants, a theater company in Vancouver. Not to mention Metafilter, stumbleupon, and lots of other sites.

Over the past several months, we have worked furiously on adapting the project for live performance. The guide—a self-help manual meets social control propaganda—lends itself beautifully to an immersive, seminar-style experience of superficial empowerment and underhanded hilarity. Fakeproject Corporation representatives lead the audience through eleven steps of self assessment, attitude maladjustment, questionable life improvement and cognitive dissonance.

Check out the clickers I lasered for the faux personal response system:

Illusory audience input is “collected” throughout the seminar by the HAL-like character PowerPoint, for which I created dozens of slides. Brandon Marback programmed the artificial intelligence for PowerPoint in Flash. These images and others are also incorporated into a printed version of the guide—fully expanded, deadly sharp and on sale.

(this is PowerPoint)

(this is the book)

I went to Vancouver a couple weeks ago to tighten the screws on the technical bits at a test run of the show. Actors Adam Bergquist and Jessica Harvey are phenomenal. You don’t want to miss this.

The show runs May 27 – June 4. Learn more. Hope to see you there — I’ll be attending June 5th.

Although it may not be immediately obvious, the screen on the top of the scanner, showing pages of scanned books, is a watershed moment for DIY Book Scanners. Though it hasn’t been shared publicly yet, it’s the first instance of a fully integrated scanner using a computer to control the cameras. It’s ten steps in the right direction — one of our technological dreams is to create a Linux LiveCD containing everything you need to scan books from end to end.

However, the scanner is far from the most important thing there. Ben has not only been the main proponent of a 100% Free Software workflow — with extensive documentation — as well as producing some of the most complete and extensive hardware documentation on the forum to date — but he also works on the Durationator, which, in the fullness of time, will allow us all to check the copyright status of a given work. In other words, what Ben is working on not only uses DIY Book Scanner technology, it enables us all to make better use of scanning technology.

If I were anywhere near New Orleans, I would be checking out this meeting if only for the opportunity to meet Ben. Here are the details:

A news article about the event.

Automata Sculpture Show
Clattering Collection of Kinetic Art in the 9th Ward

The Candle Factory,
4537 N. Robertson St. (at Japonica Street),
504.908.4741

As always: the proof is in the pictures. If you attend, please capture more:

Young book scanners at work!

That’s http://youarenotdead.ca/

Big thanks to Matija for such outstanding web-execution.

REETZ-JENSEN ENGINEERING. “BOLT CUTTERS, CABLE CUTTERS, CORNER CUTTERS”.

REETZ-JENSEN ENGINEERING. “WE CAN UNPROVE THIS”.

REETZ-JENSEN ENGINEERING. “TODAY. TOMORROW. TERROR”.