The poisson alarm clock refers to an abstract mechanism for modeling independent, random events that occur over time according to a poisson distribution. The processing sketch below realizes this abstract mechanism, at least in digital form. The alarm rings in expectation once an hour.
This quick experiment was inspired by reading Jimena Canales’ A Tenth of a Second, according to which our ability to perceive discrete events breaks down right around a tenth of a second. The diagram below is a constructed in the manner of an eye chart, but instead of scale it is speed that varies and we are interested in the recognition of discrete changes rather than distinct forms. Each column represents one second and each row breaks the second into increasingly smaller fractions. Click ‘start’ to initiate this clock of sorts and find out at which row can you no longer distinguish distinct events.
A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice
Screenshots taken from google image searches for the words in ><.
Screenshots taken from google image searches for the words in ><.
I’ve started playing around with google’s ngram dataset. It should have controls, it should be better, but time is scarce at the moment. [click image to open]
From Louisa Dennison's Accidental Monument
From Joana Pimenta's Revere Double Exposure
I’ve been thinking lately about new ways of online media consumption, particularly in an environment where production levels so dramatically outweigh the ability to consume. I cobbled together some code from the Zeega project this afternoon into a very simple dynamic youtube mashup. I’m fairly sure that something like this exists already, but after poking around a bit without luck, I decided to build it myself. Channelsurf is a seamless, never-ending sequence of short clips taken from recently uploaded youtube videos strung together through tag relationships. The tag relationships are strong enough to bring together short vignettes on a single theme while remaining weak enough to send you all over the mediascape of youtube. Prioritizing recency over the popularity of a video pulls in some very obscure material and the clips are short enough that nothing feels particularly punishing. It works best on a reasonably fast internet connection [chrome/safari] and is definitely a bit buggy, but I hope entertaining nonetheless.
I recently read an interesting article in cabinet about the practice of art restoration, or recovering what is lost. The piece was written around trateggio, the practice of in-painting in which strict pointillist rules are observed. Afterwards, I went through the somewhat embarrassing exercise of putting this together.
