Clay on the 2008 US Beef Protests in South Korea

Clay on lolcats

Clay on the Gneezy and Rustichini Haifa day care center study

Clay on the Grobanites for Charity

Cognitive Surplus on Amazon

Follow @cshirky on Twitter

My friend and former ITP classmate, Carolina Vallejo’s project, Design for the First World needs help with funding on Kickstarter and with spreading the word around the internets. In Carolina’s own words:

My ITP thesis project Design for the First World, is a competition with a motto: The Rest Saving the West.

I’m proposing to flip the traditional equation of the first world helping the “third” by calling artists, designers and thinkers of developing and emerging economies to propose ideas to solve 4 first world problems: obesity, consumerism, integration of immigration and low birth rate and aging population.

The call is open until July 1st, and there’s a 1000 dollars prize along with a catalog and an exhibit coming in the fall. I’m still looking for great contestants so if you know awesome people from and living in a developing country send them my way!

Also, I’m raising money through Kickstarter and i’m 84% funded (5 days to go!) so please consider donating if you can, tweeting and posting on facebook are also of GREAT help!!

Thanks much!

Carolina

Estrella Intersects The Plane by Matthew Richard

Significant Other by Diego Rioja

The Life Dress by Elizabeth Fuller

ITP Thesis Presentation: SokoSquare from lee-sean on Vimeo.

Download PDF of my SokoSquare thesis paper

And here is the back channel chat log from Chatterous:

maddparker@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:19):
i have a friend who’s nickname is soko
tom.igoe@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:19):
good.
tom.igoe@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:19):
everyone should know about it, Gordie
Gordie posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:20):
Lee-Sean leading the dapper award for the day
ruferto posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:20):
like the white suit
maddparker@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:20):
Pete Leonard!
maddparker@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:20):
I could make so many Vassar CS jokes no one else would get…
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:20):
try us
maddparker@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:21):
nah, maybe offline
clmensch@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:21):
he just did
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:21):
lee-sean.presentation = smooth;
Xiaoyang Feng posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:22):
Juri Imamura: http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/spring2010_archives/Juri%20Imamura_ITP%20Thesis%202010_Large.mp4
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:22):
benjamins
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:22):
lee sean gets street in his presentation
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:22):
how often do you hear that in a master’s thesis presentation?
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:23):
amen
pl posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:24):
slowly backing away.. enjoy presentations, and have fun.
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:24):
“conduit” is the word of the week
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:24):
badgers
tom.igoe@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:25):
I thought the word was “bear”
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:26):
chicken & egg would be a contender
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:26):
2 words tho
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:26):
and a punctuation dealy
jorge posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:26):
ampersand
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:26):
bless you
jorge posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:26):
thanks
andrewstyer@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:26):
the lee-sean camera view (the upper-right thumbnail) is pretty awesome
tom.igoe@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:27):
that’s awesome.
jorge posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:27):
he traded that house for an ipad 3g
tom.igoe@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:28):
I’d give three red paperclips for an apartment in Brooklyn
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:28):
did tom just hate on brooklyn?
tom.igoe@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:28):
no, I live there. I love it there.
Marianne posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:28):
No.
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:29):
www.soko.com is taken
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:29):
my rent in brooklyn is due
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:29):
maybe I can pay with paperclips
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:29):
or maybe leesean can find something for me to barter
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:29):
100,000 paper clips
jorge posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:30):
roy: http://sokosquare.com/
paulparadiso posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:30):
Can you not pay them in dance?
Marianne posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:30):
(Roy – I bet you can barter rustproofing if you want.)
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:31):
paul, I bet you could get me out of at least a month’s rent with your merce cunningham impression
tom.igoe@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:31):
now that’s a specific impression!
paulparadiso posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:31):
deal
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:31):
tom, you should see it
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:32):
maybe paul could do it on the break
tom.igoe@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:32):
I should.
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:32):
rustproofing?
Marianne posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:32):
(did you read the link you sent?)
jorge posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:32):
i do an impression of merce cunningham in the composition and choreography phase. mainly i just roll dice.
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:33):
now i did
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:33):
i prefer engines
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:33):
jorge, win
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:33):
clap, clap, clap
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:34):
stern hiss
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:34):
oohhh, me
jorge posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:35):
http://blog.sokosquare.com/ needs some updatin’
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:35):
will program for food
andrewstyer@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:35):
what can i trade him for his jacket?
Sarah Dahnke posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:35):
if I programmed for food, I’d never eat again
paulparadiso posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:35):
a velcro jacket
mustafa bagdatli posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:35):
your weird thing with velcro
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:35):
if i danced for food, i’d get hit w/tomatoes
tymm posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:36):
i gave up eating a long time ago.
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:36):
tomatoes nom
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:37):
I can decorate Peters house..with beer cans
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:37):
that’s a great idea
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:37):
clpa, clap
tehaynes posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:37):
just have to throw it in there. the bell reminds of spelling bees
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:38):
delay( 120000 );
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:38):
I spelled “cloud” wrong in a spelling bee
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:38):
humiliating
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:39):
I was 14
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:39):
i still can’t spell buroucraecey
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:39):
beurocarcy
ckundo posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:39):
bureaocracy
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:40):
buracracy?
jelanijohn@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:40):
barrackacy
Roy Vanegas posted from the web at (05/05/10 13:41):
that’s it!
jelanijohn@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:42):
ok, 20 mins to get to school before next presenter
jelanijohn@… sent an instant message at (05/05/10 13:42):
gotta pwrwalk
Xiaoyang Feng posted from a guest at (05/05/10 13:55):
Lee-Sean huang: http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/spring2010_archives/Lee-Sean%20Huang_ITP%20Thesis%202010_Large.mp4

Download PDF

A quick update on the status of SokoSquare:  Catherine, Peter, and I went to a “how to pitch” workshop at Stern this Tuesday and got some practice presenting and feedback from other teams.  We have a dress rehearsal of the full pitch next Wednesday.

We will also be participating in an ITP pitch-off this Saturday, for which I prepared this new 1-pager on our project.  In short, we are getting lots of opportunities to practice and refine our presentation for different audiences.

In other news, the Drupal intro session at Purpose I was supposed to attend was canceled, so I’m going to look into other ways to get up to speed on the tech side of building the next SokoSquare prototype.  In the meantime, I will focus on developing the user interactions and the trust mechanisms (I got lots of good feedback from my thesis group on this on Wednesday).

Wednesday: Catherine and I had lunch with a professor/VC who gave us some very good feedback. But also raised some questions about our direction. Need to narrow down and make choices that I hadn’t thought of before. I had thesis class later that day. The best suggestions were to go ahead and start wireframes and mockups. And develop user scenarios. And the best advice of all: divorce the creative process of Soko as my ITP thesis from the “how will you make money” demands of the biz plan competition. The best advice I’ve heard this week.

Thursday: Feedback session on the biz plan draft at Stern. We scored an “excellent” on the exec summary, “good” in the other sections. We need to tweak the financials, but we have a roadmap. Got some excellent advice about using principles of game design to incentive users to participate in SokoSquare and as a way of visualizing and communicating social currency on the site, i.e. how can you trust someone. Lots of crazy ideas in my mind right now. Time to type them up, more soon.

Ok, that was free-form and stream of consciousness, but I’m on a roll. Now back to work…

Above: a light sculpture by Matthew Richard.
Below: Thomas the Barrel by Meredith Hasson.

Below: Life Dress by Elizabeth Fuller. Featured in Gizmodo.

More pics on Flickr.

An eerily impressionistic and grainy photo of my Mumbo Jumbo Maracas performance at ITP NIME 2009 by Derek Chung.

Above: Group photo!  Below: Me and my “nerd prom” date, Catherine.

More photos and video on the official ITP30 documentation site.  And here are the photos that I took on Flickr.

Mumbo Jumbo Maracas vs. T.I.

Mumbo Jumbo Maracas vs. Art Kleiner

Mumbo Jumbo Maracas vs. The Plastic Ono Band

Thanks to Yasser Ansari, Paul Paradiso, and Jorge Just for these brilliant mashups!

Mumbo Jumbo Maracas (excerpt) @ ITP NIME 2009, Southpaw, Brooklyn, NY from lee-sean on Vimeo.

Here is an excerpt of my Mumbo Jumbo Maracas piece for the ITP NIME concert at Southpaw in Brooklyn last night.
Featuring Eric Mika on maracas and Arturo Vidich on keytar
Thanks to Meredith Hasson and Tianwei Liu for the video

More video coming soon. Photos on Flickr.

Ubiqui.tv is a prototype online video travel guide for the Boxee platform.  Ubiqui.tv was created by Joel Leimer, Oskar Von Hauske, Timothy Haynes, and myself as our group project for the ITP class Designing The Future of Television with Richard Ting.

Here is the score for my new musical composition, Mumbo Jumbo Maracas, a trio for Wiimote MIDI controller playing a custom MainStage patch, keytar, and maracas.  I will be playing the Wiimote, with Arturo Vidich on keytar and Eric Mika on maracas.  We will be playing the world premiere of the piece as part of the ITP NIME show on December 15.  Details coming soon!

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.

More info

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?

Description

Copyright, copyleft, copy-what? We will discuss the various copyright/intellectual property issues faced by artists, designers, and other creators of content. Learn how to use Creative Commons and other open licenses to share and protect your work.

Notes

Start with a video: A Shared Culture

What is “intellectual property?”

Is it like real property? Or is it a “mirage”?

Copyright, Patents, and Trademark

What is copyright?

A restriction on free speech?

A temporary monopoly on the use, reproduction, and transmission of a creative work?

Copyright vs. “Right of Authorship?”

The current copyright system is broken

Copyright can be an incentive to creativity, but copyright can also get in the way.

Copies vs. Use

Atoms vs. Bits

Fair use? Free use?

Solutions? Creative Commons is one possibility.

What is CC?

How to use CC licenses

How to license your work

How to find CC-licensed work

What I did last summer – OpenEd

Learn More

Online Resources

Creative Commons – Learn more about Creative Commons the organization, find out how others are using CC licenses, and license your own work

Digital Copyright Slider – tool for determining whether works first published in the US are protected by copyright based on date of first publication

Fair Use Evaluator – online tool to help you better understand how to determine the “fairness” of a use under the US law

Public Domain Sherpa – online “calculator” helps you determine if a given work is in the public domain

Copyright, Commerce, and Culture – NYU course taught by ITP alum and Creative Commons Product Manager Fred Benenson. Lots of links to articles and discussion about copyright.

Video

Good Copy/Bad Copy – Danish documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

RiP: A Remix Manifesto – Canadian documentary film about copyright and remix culture.

Steal This Film – a series of documentaries about the movement against intellectual property

Books (free digital downloads)

CONTENT: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future, Corey Doctorow

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Lawrence Lessig

Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, Lawrence Lessig

Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law? – comic book that explains copyright basics; Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins

Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own – historical overview of the “digital commons” from GNU/Linux to Creative Commons, David Bollier

Glossaries and Terminology

Brown University Copyright Glossary

Cornell Law School US Copyright Law Definitions

US Copyright Office Definitions

Credits

Video: A Shared Culture

I borrowed some slides from Fred Benenson for my presentation

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.