Public earth and its endangered pieces

Exactly one year after I blogged about our plans for turning our catalog of almost 5,000 pieces  of Venetian of public art into an active preservation program (PreserVenice), with the support of local Venetian groups, out of the blue we heard from Clara Peranetti of the Veneto Region who thinks she can fund our efforts to make the catalog public and to begin the actual restoration process.  Alberto G.  and Andrea M. have a meeting with her on Thursday.

Meanwhile, thanks to one of those synchronistic astral alignments that Santa Fe seems to serendipitously conjure up like magic, the Complex hosted Rethink Public Art with a panel of distinguished public art experts, including Jack Becker, the editor of Public Art Review magazine, who told us about an ongoing project to map all (US for now) public art, called Public Earth.  I gave Mr. Becker my card and immediately signed up for the beta program and informed Kyle Miller of this new development, since he worked on this topic for his junior year project and he will also be in Venice as of June 10, working on this issue among other things...

Let's see what happens Thursday!

Sounda Fe mashup

James Brody, a local Santa Fe musician member of the Complex art group, has downloaded our sounds of Venice, which have been available on the Venice 2.0 anniversary gallery, and created a sonic mashup just for us, while he works on a more elaborate composition that will use our sounds database.  Before him, my friend Marty Quinn had already created musical sonifications based on Venice tide gauge data.  Given that Kyle is also an accomplished musician, and he is going to be in Venice this summer, I am confident that we can get a musical celebration together, by re-engaging with my colleague and friend Fred Bianchi, with whom I had conceived of the Venice Sonification Requiem and Postmodern Postmortem projects.

Passed-over by Google

Despite a valiant effort on the part of the indefatigable Kyle Miller, our bid to get support for our effort on the Emergent Transcriptions Initiative through Google's Summer of Code program was not successful.  Oh well...  We will not be deterred!  

Today, I met the executive director of the Alliance for Information Science and technology Innovation (AISTI), Corinne Lebrun, whose work on Digital Libraries may help us get this project fully funded and off the ground once and for all...  Let's keep our fingers crossed!

After that meeting, I had my first experience with a Passover Seder at the students' apartment here in Santa Fe, courtesy of Sam Drogin and his mom.  

Being passed over is not a bad thing sometimes!

Vending Venice

As if all the other trends were not disturbing enough, news reports have informed us about the latest creative use of Venice's public space, which is something that the Venice Project Center has successfuly pioneered as recently as this fall.
As heard on NPR (among others), the Venice city council voted in favor of allowing the Coca-Cola corporation to install vending machines in many of the campi in the historic city. Perhaps the thinking is that the coked-out tourists would expeditiously move through the city, creating fewer bottlenecks in the narrow calli and ponti. Hmmm... it may be worth a try!

Although the mayor seems to have backtracked on this one, the trend of "vending Venice" seems clear and inevitable, now that all the national government funds are going towards the construction of the MOSE barriers against high tides...
If you want to know more, you may consider going to the public roundtable discussion we will be holding at Williams college a week from tomorrow.

First Friday Fractals

The first friday of every month, the fractal foundation, puts up one of the most entertaining and psychedelic shows I have ever seen.  Simon Mehalek took all six Santa Fe students, plus Nick and his friend Drew, JP Gonzales and me to see first friday fractals at the Albuquerque Museum of Natural History.  Jonathan Wolfe sure can make math fun!  It's the kind of thing that can make a huge difference in a young child's mind (in more ways than one)...  Made me revisit my MIT essays on the fractal dimension of the urban landscape and I already proposed a collaboration with Jonathan and Kim Sorvig on my original dissertation topic on visual preferences in the built environment.

Imagine watching the video below while laying completely reclined in a comfortable chair, staring at a planetarium dome with the fractal movie taking up the entire field of vision!  

Fractastic!

Sandbagging Venice

Our Venice Traffic simulation table is proceeding. Steve and I gave a live demo over skype to Venice City officials to illustrate the interactive capabilities that we are building into the table.
Using a combination of fiducials, markers and laser pointers, we will allow all traffic stakeholders to interact with the model in real time.

Working with Los Alamos, we are developing a Venice GUI Design that will be implemented over the next few weeks.

Jus for fun, we projected  the GUI on the sandtable...  

Click on the image for a video of the interface behavior

(warning: the movie is large and thus slow to stream).

Dome of Doom

Just a quick preview of a graphic that I plan to use at the April 16 panel discussion about "Monuments in Peril:Venice" at The Clark at Williams college in Williamstown, MA.
Kyle Miller prepared this for me and it will be refined to make a major point about the value of the flood gates in Venice.If you can recognize what city is depicted in the picture, you may perhaps guess what is going to be the gist of my argument...

Spring skiing and fiducials

Yes.  As promised, I did go skiing today and it was fabulous!  Even though it's a Saturday, and despite a mandatory stop at 10,000 waves on my way down the mountain, I still managed to get some work done today (including making this blog entry).

Most notable is the progress on the design of the fiducials for the Venice simtable, which our Los Alamos friends are plugging away at.

Next Friday we are broadcasting a live skype demo of our progress on the simtable in direct connection with the Venice mobility office...  Stay tuned!

White googley spring

Today, we woke up to several inches of fluffy new snow here in Santa Fe.

I took the opportunity to go snowshoeing early this morning.  It was heavenly! Upon return, I had a skype conversation with a new contact in Silicon Valley (who shall remain un-identified for now) to pick up the thread about the Venice Mashup camp that we hope Google will sponsor in collaboration with UNESCO. Buzz about this event is already starting to spread...

Tomorrow a bunch of us are going skiing on the fresh powder.

Not bad for a snowy day in late March!

Handling report searches in Dspace

Our project repository is now completely accessible via our Web portal.  All you need to do is type a search string (like the word "art") into the search box (top right) and voilà!  The results are displayed and you can return to the web portal by clicking the title bar.  All of our 20 years of projects are catalogued in  Dspace, an online repository system developed by MIT and HP.  Each entry is handled through a unique URI (Universal Resource Identifier) which is a permalink that uniquely points to the report's bibliographical records.  Every word in the bibliographical record is fully indexed and the search is very fast.  

We're working on including pointers to the report's PDF and on a process to export the report archive to knowledge reef here in Santa Fe.