Deborah Heath, professor of anthropology at Lewis and Clark College,
participated in midwifing cyborg anthropology, attending the Cyborg
Anthropology seminar in Santa Fe, NM that led to the book Cyborgs &
Citadels.
After several years of following the human and nonhuman
alliances involved in genetic knowledge production [cf: Genetic
Nature/Culture, Univ. of California Press], she’s currently captivated
by the techne and technoscience of food and drink, including the
science and rhetoric of the foie gras controversy.
CyborgCamp’s Pre-party will be graciously hosted at Vidoop, our local Portland Open-Id provider!
Come partake in drinks and festivities before the conference in the morning! Special guests Cami Kaos and Mike (Dr. Normal) will be live-broadcasting Strange Love Live.
They do an extremely incredible, awesomesauce, sweetopian podcast live-streaming Portland tech conversational media event every Friday night at 10Pm.
If you’ve never been able to tune in before, you’ll be able to see it LIVE tonight!
There will be great conversations and some seasonal ale donated by Widmer brewery. Plus wine, snacks, and a live DJ to whip up some Cyborgian tunes.
His name is Alain Bloch, and he’s a sweet Rails developer too.
If you haven’t already heard, Lia Hollander @missburrows is going to be giving a presentation on “How Being a Cyborg Keeps Me Alive” from 11:45Am-12:30Pm at CyborgCamp.
She also just made this little promo video for it, which is pretty epic+adorable+cyborgian.
Lia will talk about the electronics that help keep her healthy and alive, the difficult decision to be attached 24/7 to an insulin pump and that “cyborgs” do in fact have sex.
There will be time for Q&A, open discussion on defining the role in medicine and actual insulin pumps and glucose meters for you to play with.
Anywho — it is a speech you will not want to miss.
What does data feel like? What if cables that were formerly solid became liquid, and capable of being modified in a dynamic, liquid state?
This musical instrument evaporates the lines between data and then brings them back together on the surface. This is visual programming — visual synthesizing. Something that we will perhaps have at a CyborgCamp preparty in the future.
“Each block has a different function — like changing a sound wave’s amplitude or acting as a metronome — that is denoted by a unique hieroglyph. Players move, rotate and flip the blocks, run their fingertips over the tabletop’s surface and alter the blocks’ proximity to each other to control the music produced by the machine. Pulsing visuals that light up the tabletop come courtesy of a projector beneath the reacTable’s translucent Perspex surface, making the instrument interesting to the eyes as well as the ears”.
Björk also uses this instrument. And why wouldn’t she? It is one of the most instruments I’ve ever seen.
By the way, we’re going to have a CyborgCamp Pre-party at Vidoop on Friday, December 5th, 2008. Come to the official CyborgCamp pre-party and partake in drinks and festivities before the conference in the morning! Special guests Cami Kaos and Mike (Dr. Normal) will be live-broadcasting Strange Love Live. There will be great conversations and (hopefully) drinks!
Vidoop is located directly above Backspace, which is located at:
117 NW 5th Ave, Suite 210
Portland, Oregon 97209
Our DJ: Alain Bloch. Bring your Cyborg music to him and he’ll play it (or you can send it his way via alainbloch@gmail.com (put CyborgCamp preparty in the subject line).
We’ll have data visualizations, music and merrymaking, but nothing like the reacTable (yet).
Humans and cameras. The ultimate cyborgian relationship.
Machines helping humans to preserve memories. Humans helping choose settings that help a camera best represent reality. Beauty results when humans and machines operate in symbiotic harmony.
With that said, Mark Coleman is one of the most harmonious cyborgs I’ve encountered.
Mark is excited to help capture CyborgCamp on film, so that our memories of it will be highlighted by his own flavor of cyborg history.
If you’re not familiar with Mark yet, he is a professional photographer with over twenty years of experience. He works in numerous major markets including Milan, Italy; Madrid, Spain; San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. Mark’ clients include the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adrian Belew, Jethro Tull, Warner Bros., EMI, Karl Kani Jeans, Zoom, Eyemazing and Face magazines (among others). His fine art work has been exhibited in the LA County Museum of Art’s gallery.
With that said, he’s one of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet — just like the rest of the Portland Tech community. Needless to say, we’re really excited to have him at CyborgCamp, and hope you are too! Thanks Mark!
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You can find Mark Coleman on Twitter @kram, and more of his professional work at MarkColmanPhoto.com.
One of the topics for the unconference part of CyborgCamp is exactaly this. Every year, we’re teased by science and technology magazines, advertisements, and news shows. They tell us that in a few years, we’ll all live forever, or that we’ll all have flying cars. But when has a sceintific or technological prediction actually come true? Where is the future that was promised to us?
M.T. Richardson of Vidoop (where we’ll be having the pre-CyborgCamp party) first suggested this as a topic at the Inverge afterparty. It’s been stuck in my head ever since.
But what about you all? What invention have you been promised that hasn’t panned out? For me, it is definitely awesome computer interfaces. We can’t even touch data today! I suppose we’ll be hearing all about it on Saturday, December 6th.
If you haven’t already, please purchase your ticket for CyborgCamp. This ticket covers food and lets us know you’ll be there.
It’s important that you register as early as possible, the ticket costs $10 person before Wednesday December 3rd, 2008, at Noon. If you register afterwards, the ticket before $20. The form is secure and accepts credit cards.
Important: Ticket deadline is December 3rd at Noon. Afterwards, ticket price is increased to $20/person.
The $10 ticket is for food, and because we want to know how many people to order food for.
Formal conference speakers (BIll Derouchey, Ward Cunningham, Hideshi Hamaguchi, and Lia Hollander) and Sponsors do not have to pay or register, but can if they can if they wish to contribute to the CyborgCamp fund/food items (if you’re a sponsor and have already purchased a ticket, I can refund you if you wish).
All unconference session speakers must pay.
5 student tickets are available. If you’d like one, please contact me (see contact info below).
The reason we’re charging $20 on the 3 days before the vent is simply to get you to register before then. We’d still like people to be able to register — but we want to know how many people are going to come to the event 3 days before we have the event.
If you’re tuning into the live streaming, there is no need to register.
If you’re not registered, you won’t be able to attend the event. Plus, we won’t have a badge for you. This will be sad. Registering on Upcoming is only for approximation purposes and does not count as real registration.
A lot of times we wait around for technology to just “appear” like we see in films. But if we continue to do that, nothing will get built. Thankfully, people are out there filling in the gaps.
Zigelbaum showed me what he was working on during the first night of MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3. When he told me about it, I knew it was the thing I had thought about before when the opportunity to visit MIT had presented itself.
All of this was apparently built off of the original prototype system used in Minority Report. What made me happy was that the UI was exceedingly smooth and enjoyable to use. It was a relief. A complete and total relief.
A tremendous thanks to Jamie for letting me take pictures and showing me the lab. He is a very interesting and awesome person and I highly recommend his existence to you.
These are new gloves (he said that eventually they wanted the gloves to not have to be worn, and for the device itself to be able to recognize gestural movement.
G-stalt – the rules for interacting with the system. A set of a new sign language for controlling movement from a distance. It was great to have these up on the wall when I tried on the gloves to interact with the system. Very intuitive and simple to learn. Especially with the rewards of being able to move things across the room without touching them.
Sensor/Cam: part of the set of twelve needed for the full control of the system. Less can be used, but the resolution of movement suffers with each lost sensor.
Here are Some Moving Pictures For You
And here’s the tiny amount of video footage I was able to get (in chunks, in between furiously deleting old videos from my camera to make room for the new. Hopefully it conveys the excellence of the system).
Zigelbaum also showed me something secret that I can’t say anything about (yet). Let us just say that it was very cool, and that it will be public soon enough.You can read more about Gesture Recognition on Wikipedia if you want. Or you could run into me somewhere and hear a lot of hot air on what I’ve been calling “8 bit haptics”.
Anywho, this stuff rocked. The Media Lab was ultimate. I can’t wait to go back.
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Jamie Zigelbaum is Ph.D. student in the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. His research interests include the social implications of physical interface media, frameworks for next generation interfaces, and tangible interfaces for abstract digital information. He received a B.A. from Tufts university working with Professor Rob Jacob. At Tufts he created a multidisciplinary major in HCI, drawing from neuroscience, psychology, computer science, and human factors engineering.
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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who also posts over at the Makerlab Blog, which is something you might enjoy reading if you enjoyed reading the post above. It’s about more experimental tech and activities related to pushing the limits of art and technology. If not, you can always follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.
What is PowerPoint Karaoke? It is an ironic mutation of Toastmasters, one of the original and most successful ways to have fun while overcoming the fear of public speaking. It basically entails giving a humorous PowerPoint presentation to random slides generated by someone else.
Process
Simply get a small group of people together and have everyone assemble a PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow consisting of 10 slides. Then tie all of the presentation slides together and load them onto a computer attached to a projector.
Then, each person in the group gives a presentation to the slides of another person’s randomly hashed together slideshow without seeing the slides beforehand.
The results? Pure hilarity and enjoyment.
Example Presentation
This is an example PowerPoint Karaoke Presentation. This one does not have text, in order to increase the narrative flexibility of the speaker.
PowerPoint Karaoke way to learn how to give presentations on the fly. It is a fun and enjoyable practice that was first started in 2005 by a group of German artists. Now, the practice and experience of PowerPoint Karaoke is ubiquitous across many geek gatherings, and is increasingly a part of Unconference proceedings such as BarCamp (we’ll feature a session of PowerPoint Karaoke at CyborgCamp).
Tips
PowerPoint Karaoke is often best played with a slightly inebriated group of 6-8 interesting people.
Slideshows with funny pictures that are either completely random or part of a theme are the most amusing.
Slideshow presenters that try to be really serious about completely silly subjects often highly amuse their audiences.
Give your group a very short amount of time or a limitation in order to keep them from fretting about formatting.
Avoid slide transitions, unless you feel they would add ironic enjoyability (and surprise to the one giving your slideshow).
Want to play before CyborgCamp? Simply come to a Portland Makerlab meeting on Sunday or Tuesday, where we’ll be playing with tech, ideas, and projects — as well as having PowerPoint Karaoke breaks. See the MakerLab website for contact information and time, or simply ask @caseorganic on Twitter.
Sometimes graphs are really fun to make. This one was especially fun and easy to make (read how to make your own below). It gives some info on topics that CyborgCamp may touches on.
To make this graph, I simply went to the ‘About Page’ of the CyborgCamp site and selected all of the text. Then I pasted it right into the text box on Wordle.net/create. Wordle is an especially useful tool to use if you want to examine the word volume on your website. Just copy and paste, and Wordle generates a sweet graph.
An unconference about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. We’ll discuss topics such as social media, design, code, inventions, web 2.0, twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.
