TXTTONE is my final project for Live Web.  It’s a web browser and SMS-based collaborative musical instrument that is meant to be performed in a room full of people with laptops and cellphones.  I wanted to create an interactive and collaborative musical experienced based on the ubiquitous technologies that we normally have with us at all times.  I was also interested in the play between the synchronous and asynchronous and explore the phase effects that result from TXTTONE being played on multiple computers simultaneously.  TXTTONE is programmed in AJAX/PHP, with SMS support by TextMarks.   I did the sound design in Logic Pro; I was going for “wind chimes meets dial tone.”

Check it out here.

Last week in Live Web, we learned about using Shared Objects in Flash and Canvas in JS/HTML. For my homework, I used the ODI and AMO characters I created last year and reimagined in a Shared Object Flash chat. Check it out here. Click on the text field and type new captions for ODI or AMO to say. The Shared Object should sync up with other people viewing the page to reflect the changes.

It kind of works and kind of doesn’t work. Part of it is my buggy code. Part of it is because AMO doesn’t actually have a mouth.

Monkey Think
Monkeys often evokes a strong emotional response among people. Monkeys as symbols are also charged with social and political meaning.  We often anthropomorphize monkeys and project our own human anxieties onto them. Monkeys drive us bananas. They are Curious George one minute and the next minute they are giving you Ebola or AIDS or ripping off your face. Horror lies just under the surface of cute. 

I worked this week with Kristin Loeb on Monkeys Watching Monkeys, a streaming web video installation that deals with the mediated gaze, reflections and narcissism as they relate to how people look at monkeys, and how we think monkeys look at people and how monkeys look at each other.

More monkeys / This is is really disturbing / WHOA!

Monkey Do
We started with the Conference.as code that Shawn gave us in class, but we came across some mysterious problems. For some reason the compiled SWFs only worked part of the time on Kristin’s computer and never actually worked on mine. (Does Snow Leopard hate Monkeys or what?) So we moved on to some off-the-shelf solutions, trying first iChat, then Skype, and finally USTREAM.tv to create a series of simian scenarios. The goal was to position webcams and screens in a way to create an “infinity effect” of primate viewing pleasure.

Documentation outtakes on Flickr

Finally, we created the be beginnings of the Monkey Show, a webpage featuring two USTREAM channels and a Twitter widget that displays the latest tweets with the work “monkey” in them. We hope to trick this page out with more live monkey media in the near future.

Monkey Learn
Bandwidth is an issue
There are mysterious bugs in the system
Even off-the-shelf solutions have their limitations
This installation would probably work better and be more aesthetically pleasing with just cameras and monitors (with the laptops hidden)
The installation would probably have worked better with analog video
Lighting and camera placement are tricky
If only our monkey talent were this well trained:

This week I have continued to develop my idea for my Live Web midterm.  My project is called Monkey Watching Monkey Watching Monkey… It combines live streaming video with elements of Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha and The Infinite Cat Project. I want to play with the idea of the mediated gaze, reflections and narcissism.  I have also been reviewing some of the concepts we dealt with in my Animals and People class last spring.  I’ve previously said that I like looking at animals through webcams and in zoos.  But what do animals see when they look at us?  What do they see when they see themselves reflected in a mirror or on a video screen?  I want to create an infinite loop (or more like spiral) of live internet video of monkeys watching monkeys watching monkeys, ad infinitum.  It would be awesome to try this with real monkeys, but in the meantime, I’ll demonstrate proof of concept with virtual monkeys.  Starting off from the Infinite Cat idea, but with monkeys:

Lemur photo by Sandrine Vuillermoz, published in National Geographic.

Imagine the above scenario with live video, multiple computers, and streaming online.  What if I replaced the lemur photo with the last photo with me in it.  Would that create an infinite loop of monkeys looking at monkeys?

I want to do something involving live streaming video that combines elements of Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha and The Infinite Cat Project.  I want to play with the idea of the mediated gaze, reflections and narcissism.  I also want to work with animals, whether real or fake.  Still trying to flesh out this idea…stay tuned.

But maybe I’m just crabby today. UStream is definitely cool. I’ve seen singer-songwriter Jay Brannan perform a live stream from his living room with hundreds of fans watching and chatting. It’s like giving anybody with a webcam and a connection their very own public access cable channel.

In terms of other content on UStream, things are pretty hit-or-miss, but like YouTube or any other user-generated media site, different strokes for different folks.  The long tail and all that jazz.  One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, or something like that.

I like looking at animals, at the zoo and on video, so I found this live alpaca stream and embedded it below. It’s as easy as embedding a Flickr photo or YouTube video, but it’s live (although no hot alpaca action as of the writing of this post).

Streaming live video by Ustream

For more animal cuteness, check out the San Diego Zoo’s Pandacam. No embed code though

Investigate existing internet radio stations and give an impression on your blog regarding their level of interactivity/audience engagement and so on.

The internet radio station I listen to most is NPR, which offers a combination of live streaming content, streamed content on demand, and downloadable MP3s of select programming. There is an NPR community page which serves up “community curated” content by displaying the most commented stories, most recommended stories, and most viewed stories. Users can give feedback about individual stories by commenting, recommending, and sharing the stories via social media platforms. Too bad there isn’t a kind of live feedback system where internet listeners can interact with shows in progress. I would be interesting to see some experiments where listeners could IM live with show hosts similar to call-in talk shows.

We learned how to set up a streaming server with Nicecast and how to embed streaming audio on a webpage (not currently prodcasting).

Using JavaScript and AJAX (and possibly PHP), create an application which allows you to control and change the content that someone else is viewing on your site. Perhaps something like you directing a slide show or taking them through different web pages.

I wanted to make a live photo slide show chat application that I could use to show my friends my photos while chatting in the same browser window.  I took the AJAX chat demo code from class and added on a JavaScript-based photo slide show.  Check it out here.

Right now, users can control their own slide show viewing experience locally, but I thought it might be cool if I an AJAX puppet master (me) could control the slide show and everybody else would see the same photos I am seeing.  I’m not quite sure how to go about that.  I’m thinking it might require reviewing my PHP and perhaps using a MySQL database rather than storing the photo slide show locally in the file.

I found a chat room with a name that looked innocent enough.  But then I noticed the not-so-innocent screen names of those in the room.

Despite all the people in the chat room.  Not much was going on, so I thought I would just start telling my story and see what would happen.  I am “odietamo”:

I didn’t get a response for 15 minutes, and when I did, it was a one-word racial slur.  I signed off soon after that.  Not the most exciting introduction to the world of IRC.  The chat room name seemed general enough, but I couldn’t really tell what the purpose of it was.  I don’t think my story was particularly suited to the medium.  I did not know anybody in the “audience,” and even in real life, it is the kind of story that I wouldn’t normally tell to strangers without a context.  In real life, I would modify how I told the story (if I were to tell it at all) based on the reactions of the people I was telling it to.  In this case, I got no meaningful feedback, so I was basically just broadcasting into the ether.