Sunday, June 14, 2009

Analog TV Termination Results

From the event at Machine Project, first a mechanical television that uses a Nipkow Disk:

Mechanical Television @ Machine Project

So there was a stack of analog TVs:
Analog Termination event @ Machine Project

And just before midnight, they turned off the lights:
Before the analog termination

Then as the minutes ticked away, the analog signals winked out, until finally at midnight:
After the ananlog termination

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Analog TV Termination Party in LA - Friday, June 12

Friday June 12th at 10pm - a talk by Jason Torchinsky about mechanical televisions, to be followed by a midnight countdown to the demise of analog TV. Sometime Friday night (depending on the station) all the old analog television broadcasts will stop, to be replaced by digital signals. That means old TVs without converter boxes won’t work anymore. In memoriam of the TVs we all have known and loved/hated, we’ll be gathering a pyramid of old TVs together for a countdown as they go to static. Please join us, and if you promise to bring it home with you afterwards, bring a TV for the pyramid.

Machine Project 
1200 D North Alvarado 
Los Angeles, CA 90026 

Gel Electrophoresis Artwork

Here is a neat web page about using restriction digestion of DNA samples to make artwork using gel electrophoresis:

Latent Figure Protocol

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Dorkbot SoCal 36

Dorkbot SoCal 36

***** Saturday, June 20, 2009
***** 1:00pm
***** Machine Project
***** 1200 D North Alvarado Street
***** Los Angeles, CA 90026
***** 
Google map of Machine Project

Design Algorithms: Skeuomorphs, Spandrels & Palimpsests 
This event will explore how cultural objects shift over time, with each presenter exploring a single term related to patterns of cultural change. 

Skeuomorphs - Garnet Hertz - UC Irvine
"An ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques" 

Garnet Hertz is an interdisciplinary artist, Fulbright Scholar and doctoral candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He also holds an MFA from the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI, has completed UCI's Critical Theory Emphasis and is currently an affiliate of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction in the Department of Informatics. His dissertation research explores the creative, historical and cultural advantages of reusing obsolete information technologies in the media arts, and uses these examples to construct a critical theory of a cluster of related activities: circuit bending, D.I.Y., critical design and media archaeology. He has shown his work at several notable international venues in eleven countries including Ars Electronica, DEAF and SIGGRAPH and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotics. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based DIY lecture and workshop series on electronic art and design. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News. 

Spandrels - Tim Durfee - Art Center 
"The roughly triangular space between the left or right exterior curve of an arch and the rectangular framework surrounding it" 

Tim Durfee is an architect based in Los Angeles. His independent and collaborative work has produced buildings, exhibitions, temporary installations, furniture, urban sign systems, interfaces, videos, and maps. 

He is a partner of the Los Angeles office Durfee | Regn and teaches at Art Center College of Design in the Graduate Media Design Program. He was director of the Visual Studies Program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), and recently completed a Visiting Professorship at Woodbury University. 

Current projects include several houses, a penthouse loft and rooftop in downtown LA, signs for the Gallery Row district in Los Angeles, and a museum on the history of transportation in Los Angeles near the Port of Los Angeles. With Durfee Regn Sandhaus (DRS), Tim Durfee has also created award-winning exhibitions for museums across the country. 

Palimpsests - Norman Klein - CalArts / Art Center
"A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible."

Norman Klein is a cultural critic, and both an urban and media historian, as well as a novelist. His books include "The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory," "Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon," and the data/cinematic novel, "Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86" (DVD-ROM with book). His next book will be "The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects." (Fall, 2003). His essays appear in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers, scholarly journals, on the web -- symptoms of a polymath's career, from European cultural history to animation and architectural studies, to LA studies, to fiction, media design and documentary film. His work (including museum shows) centers on the relationship between collective memory and power, from special effects to cinema to digital theory, usually set in urban spaces; and often on the thin line between fact and fiction; about erasure, forgetting, scripted spaces, the social imaginary.