The Commute Project, is a body of work in progress that looks at the micro decisions made during commutes in LA every day. It is currently investigating and attempting to show how all the decisions, physical interactions, and sheer duration of commutes translate into a range of mental states that include aggravation, fatigue, and relaxation. The project is currently broken into three components, 3D stereoscopic live action, 3D sculptures created with GPS data, and visualizations of driver input, e.g. gear shifts, and environmental factors, e.g. cabin temperature.

3D-Stereoscopic Live Action & Surround Sound
Each commute is documented with a stereoscopic camera rig and recorded in 5.1 surround sound, in an attempt to capture the drivers experience behind the wheel. The videos contain no cuts and capture the full durations of the commutes. Currently three commutes have been shot and are in the process of being graded. Below is a short 3D stereoscopic test that takes place on Los Angeles’ “Dead Man’s Curve” on Sunset Blvd.

Documentation of Vehicle Rigged with 3D Stereoscopic Camera and 5.1 Surround Recording Setup

GPS Sculptures
The commutes have their GPS data tracked and processed with an application written in Processing that parses the logged GPX data and maps the various data points into a 3D mesh. The latitude and longitude values are mapped to the x and y-axis and elevation is mapped to the z. These values form the main central contour of the mesh with speed being mapped as a secondary set of points that create the bottom edges of the peaks. The DXF file created from the processing application is then cleaned up in Autodesk’s Maya and scaled in Netfabb before being printed as a 3D model. Below is an example of one of the commutes GPX data converted into a 3D mesh.

The 3D prints will then have points backlit with LEDs or projection that correspond to points of interest that will be combined with audio narration of the route.

 
Driver Input and Environment Tracking
The driver of a vehicle makes countless decisions during every commute that contribute to the mental state of the driver. This can include things such as usage of the pedals, gear shifts, and turn signals. In addition cabin environment and road conditions also contribute to the driver’s state. Currently a set of low-cost sensors are being tested to record this data. The final data set will likely include gear shifts, pedal usage, pedal pressure, turn signals, cabin temperature, lateral acceleration, shock, and impact forces.

Below is an early example of tracking gear shifts with a color tracking application written in Processing. The application uses pre-recorded video footage that color tracked to determine what gear the shifter is in.

EULA for a _____, creates end-user license agreements (EULA) for everyday objects and services to illustrate the encroachment of legal agreements into every aspect of our existence and comment on social practices.

In 2010, I was invited to stage the project for the Electrofringe, new media festival, in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. A number of EULAs were created for Newcastle including EULAs for automated teller machines, staircases, along with some site specific EULAs recalling the contentious history of Newcastle’s obelisk and one for the festival itself.

Select Documentation of EULA for a _____ in Newcastle

Map of Newcastle EULAs

View EULA For A _____ (Newcastle, AUS) in a larger map

EULA For A _____ Artist Talk @ Electrofringe 2010

The EULA for a _____, project has continued with a recent venture across the mid-west and a foray into physical chain letters.

Additional documentation can be found at http://eula-for-a-blank.tumblr.com/

The Neighborhood Network Watch (NNW) is a simulation of a possible next step for network-based government eavesdropping operations through a community volunteer group that monitored the network traffic of public and private WiFi access points for terrorist activity. This simulation acts as vehicle to localize and engage the public into critical discussion about some often distant and or overlooked issues that affect their everyday lives. These include the embedded politics and power within everyday technology and networks, the ways in which entities that own, control, access, and exert power over networks use the data that we transfer everyday over them, and hierarchical power at large.

The group is modeled after the neighborhood watch programs, which enlists citizens to look out for the community, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) goal to “safeguard” our nation by any means necessary, legal or extralegal. The group’s history is intertwined heavily with the DHS’ own history as well as current events. They see themselves as a progressive government affiliated group that has the flexibility to adopt new emerging technologies, such as Web 2.0 for strategic purposes. Their methods and tactics are rooted in guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency warfare, substituting arms for off the shelf electronics to carry out network eavesdropping to identify networks that maybe being used by terrorists. There primary targets are publicly accessible and publicly used wireless networks and encouraging the community to monitor their own home networks.

The Five Components of the NNW:
-Collection
-Analysis
-Web Presence
-Public Service Announcement (PSA) Series
-Performances

In addition some of the byproducts of the five components are manifested as printed materials or objects.

Collection
The collection portion of the NNW covers the methods and tactics that could and can be used to collect actual data being transferred and received across networks with everyday electronics. Many of the tactics come from Mao Tse-Tung’s, USMC Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith’s analysis of guerrilla tactics and counterinsurgency warfare, as well as current day tactics being employed by terrorist and insurgent groups. The technology side is comprised of everyday WiFi enabled devices, primarily laptops loaded with open source packet sniffing software like TCPDUMP. In addition TCPDUMP has also been tested and run off mobile platforms such as iOS mobile devices.

Analysis
The Neighborhood Network Watch Keyword Analysis Application v3.6 (NNWKAA) is a multithreaded Java/Processing text analysis application that looks for words associated with terrorism or national security threats, within raw network dumps and assigns a rating. The NNWKAA first breaks down the raw network dumps by stripping out extraneous information, e.g. HTML and CSS tags. Next the NNWKAA looks at each word within the network dump and checks to see if it is on a list of flagged words that are known to be associated with terrorism or national security threats. This list is known as the Neighborhood Network Watch Keyword List (NNWKL). This list is based on the cold war era ECHELON word list that has been supplemented with data that has been scraped from the FBI and INTERPOL websites. If a word is flagged the application pulls the word preceding and following the flagged word. These words become contextual words that maybe eventually added into a separate word list, which acts as a supplement to the NNWKL, to allow the applications word lists to learn over time and automatically expand or initiate mission creep. If a word is not flagged it is cross referenced with the WordNet Lexical database to ensure the word is a word. From here the application then calculates the “Terror Percentage” which is the amount of words flagged to the total number of words found. Also, outputted are the counts for both flagged words and the total number of words. Based off of this percentage the application also generates a rating for the network traffic using a rating system that is similar to that of the Department of Homeland Security, both in verbiage as well as in description. Along with this rating a listing of the top 20 flagged words, also known as the hit parade, is then generated and displayed. At this point the contextual words that were found around the flagged words have probabilities calculated for them to see if they meet the minimum requirement to be added to the supplementary word list. In addition there is a minimum occurrence threshold as well. These words are then added to the supplementary word list and the statistical results and the hit parade are outputted to text files. A flow diagram of the NNWKAA can be viewed here.

The NNWKAA is not meant to be an accurate tool for finding terrorist, rather it is designed to inflate the amount of perceived terror that is found in the network traffic dumps. This amplification of terror acts as both the fuel and pretense for the ideology that governs the NNW. It also is able to demonstrate that software, systems, and apparatuses are not necessarily objective entities that are infallible. Rather they are subjective and are governed by the entities that designed them and in turn often reproduce the ideologies of those creating any given application. The NNWKAA also critiques and foregrounds the usage of opaque systems such as the DHS’ five-tier color coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Web Presence
The NNW’s web presence contains its history, its fictitious results, news on the group’s activities, upcoming events, policy and future plans, all of which operate as subtle propaganda. The site is a sprawling 120+ page site modeled after the DHS’ own site. In addition there is NNW Web 2.0 and social networking presence on sites such as Facebook and MySpace that serve as a means for communication and coordination, as well as YouTube and Google Video for their PSA series. You can still visit the original NNW website at www.dhsnnw.org.

Public Service Announcements
The NNW’s public service announcement series operates as video based propaganda and documentation for the fictitious group. The public service announcements are typically short videos ranging from two to six minutes in length that discuss a number of topics. Some aim to present the fictitious history and findings of the group while others offer documentation of events attended by the NNW, known as “special presentations.” They are narrated by myself and often incorporate me as a high-ranking official for the NNW. The tone of the PSA’s are typically benign and friendly despite some of the outlandish claims and statements made during them. They have been primarily viewed within web contexts, those being the NNW official website, YouTube and Google Video. They are also sometimes seen alongside the performances and operate like props. In total there are currently seven released public service announcements.

The Neighborhood Network Watch: Introduction (PSA #1)

The Neighborhood Network Watch: ITP Winter Show 07′ (PSA #2)

Performances
The NNW public presentations/performances bring together all the varying components of the project and are presented in two different formats. The two presentation formats are PowerPoint podium style presentations and trade show recruitment style booth setups. With these presentations I make usage of many of the other components that comprise the group as props and artifacts. Throughout this process individuals who interact with me and or the project will often begin to raise questions, start a dialogue and deconstruct the simulation. During the ensuing dialogue we can discuss how these issues have a direct relationship to them while also raising awareness of current events, past historical context, and a deeper understanding of networks and technologies utilized in their everyday lives.

Exhibitions, Performances, & Talks

NNWKAA: Making Terrorism Out Of Your Emails, 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, CA
Have You Seen My Privacy, 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, CA
Collective Show LA, 995 N. Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA
Electrofringe:  2010, Project Space, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
A Day in LA: Washington Blvd Art Concert, Whittier, CA
OURS Democracy in the Age of Branding, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center / Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY
ITP Spring Show 2008, New York University, New York, NY
Sousveillance Culture Conference, The Change You Want To See Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
ITP Winter Show 2007, New York University, New York, NY
Electronic Social Club, Hunter College, New York, NY

During the project the website has had over 50,000 viewers with over 500 referring sites, most of which are blogs with their own interpretations and takes on the project. The public performances have been great successes with people taking the time to talk and discuss at length about the various issues raised by The Neighborhood Network Watch.

Selected Press
The Register: “Unmasking the Neighborhood Network Watch”

Black & Green (2006) is a video loop/software piece that memorializes those who have died from improvised explosive devices (IED) during the current Iraq War. The loop is primarily comprised of text that includes each name, rank, military branch, division/battalion/company, place of death, hometown, home state, and the cause of death that never changes. The loop begins with the earliest death by an IED leading to the most current. With the change of each name there is an audible explosion that accompanies it.

Black & Green was created by parsing data from the iCasualties.org database. This data was then assembled by an application that I wrote to generate the visuals that comprise Black & Green. You may view the piece in its application form here (requires java). This current version reflects all available data as of November 2006.

On March 17th, 2007, I participated in an anti-war protest in Los Angeles with a group of friends and students from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and the University of California Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) and artists based in Los Angeles. A sub-group of ten of us wore black hoods, created by Audrey Chan that were reminiscent of those used on detainees in Iraq and suspected terrorists. We wore these hoods during the course of the march and protest remaining silent throughout.

Los Angeles Times staff writer Charles Proctor, approached me for an interview at the onset of the march. Proctor was drawn to the hoods we were wearing. The interview began with why I was/we were wearing hoods along with my age and if I was a student. Upon hearing that I was a student from New York University, he asked why I was currently in Los Angeles. Eventually he asked why I was out protesting and what effect can protest have. I responded with mention of my own moral objections to the war, the influence of both friends and family serving in the war, as well as my family’s relation to military duty. This last aspect very much interested him and I explained a short excerpt of my family’s military history and involvement in the current conflicts of the past two decades.

Later that day, the Los Angeles Times, ran article on their website about the protest which included parts from my interview. In general the article was a positive one in relation to the protest. A few hours later, the article was revised and most of the original content was removed and the protest was marginalized to an assembly of freaks. It also omitted all and any mention of myself or the group I was with.

I began to think about why was the media drawn to our group? After the heavy revision of the Los Angeles Times article I also began to think more about the malleability of information on the web and how it can be quickly altered to manufacture reality. This became a subject of a paper that I presented at a conference on tactical media, as part of a panel speaking on “Fear, Spectacle, and the Media.”

You can download PDFs of the March 17th and March 18th versions of the Los Angeles Times articles.

Select Documentation of the Protest

Death, Destruction & The Weather Coming Up Next, is a set of public interventions and an animated short that takes a look at the structure of the mass media’s coverage of war and death and recontextualizes it within American suburban landscapes. The short is comprised of live action found news footage that has been edited and then placed into sequential posters that are hung in suburban landscapes. These posters are then photographed and the edited once again to bridge the various spaces and reintroduce the movement from the original news footage; conjoined with audio from the vantage of the camera moving through the space, the space itself, the posters, and sound bytes from the found footage. This creates a hyperreality that places the news physically, in this case war, in our own familiar suburban landscape in order to break down the disconnects that exist between the everyday and world events that effect people.

Awards
34th Student Academy Awards National Finalist – Experimental
2nd Place at the 4th Annual Careless Drive-In Film and Video Festival

Screenings
2009 – Le Cinématographe Nantes, “Juste à côté de L.A. : CalArts Video, 2005-2007,” Nantes, France
2008 – Anthology Film Archive, New York, NY
2007 – Chinese Taipei Film Archive, Taichung City, Taiwan
2007 – Taiwanese International Animation Festival, Taipei, Taiwan
2007 – Milano Film Festival, “Different American Films,” Milan, Italy
2007 – 4th Annual Careless Drive-In Film and Video Festival, 2nd place, Sylmar, CA
2007 – 34th Student Academy Award Western Regional, Portland, OR
2007 – Philadelphia Film Festival, “Visions of Persistence,” Philadelphia, PA
2006 – CalArts Experimental Animation Showcase, Hollywood, CA

Documentation of Death, Destruction & The Weather Coming Up Next

*nix Genealogy, is a performance by a Dell Mini 9 “hackintosh” laptop computer, that recites the genealogy of the operating system it is currently running, using language typical of Old Testament Biblical genealogies. It starts in 1969, with UNICS, from AT&T Bell Labs, and traces it all the way to Mac OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard, which the machine is running. The script is written and fed into a program written in Processing that is then translated into speech using the RiTA text to speech library, Java TTS, and Mac TTS. This is the first iteration of the project.

*nix Genealogy, was created for the “1969″ show curated by Vincent Ramos, on December 5, 2009, at Dan Graham. “’1969′ is a show of performance-based works that respond to the key events of 1969 and/or uses them as a catalyst for commenting on our current state of affairs in this country and abroad.”

In the popular game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas there is a gun shop chain named Ammunation.  Within the game there are various radio commercials for the Ammunation store that are simultaneously humorous, ridiculous, scary, yet not removed enough from reality.  The Ammunation store and its customers are a composite of right wing NRA who believe the Second Amendment should allow the sale of any type of weapon and explosive to combat the Communist threat of a previous decade, liberalism, and of course to defend yourself and your home.

De-contextualizing these commercials from the game space and re-contextualizing them within the context of the 2008 presidential election aims to enable these satirical commercials to be more potent.  Due to the fact that they are no longer confined within the game space that is typically associated with the imaginary.  Rather it is addressing the world directly with its critique and is no longer hampered by the constraints and stereotypes of the game space.  These commercials can now directly address issues regarding gun control, the military industrial complex, and the outmoded tactics currently being used in the war on terrorism.  In turn the performance can be used to undermine the positions of the extreme right elements of the Republican Party by agreeing with them to the point of excess and thus showing the flawed logic and insanity that are embedded within their various positions.  You can download a copy of Ammunation Script here.

On November 4th, 2008, Jason Kunke performed my script entitled Ammunation Script, as part of the Exchange Rate: 2008 performance exchange.  This coincided with the 2008 U.S. presidential election as well as the massive surge in firearm sales that resulted primarily due to the potential of a democrat as president.

Select documentation of Jason Kunke performing Ammunation Script at the Exchange Rate: 2008 Election Night Event, Los Angeles, CA., 11/04/08

On November 4th, I performed Jason Kunke’s performance script, Political Speech for a Hydra, as part of the Exchange Rate: 2008 performance exchange. The script is essentially a political speech that was primarily comprised of the voices of people who were present during assassinations or attempted assassinations of U.S. Presidents. This included the following: James G. Blaine, Floyd Boring, Jim Brady, Anton Cermak, John Connally, George B. Cortelyou, David Crockett, Albert H. Martin, Henry Rathbone, Mikheil Saakashvili, Oliver Sipple, as well as a description of a college football game between Auburn and Arkansas from October 29, 1994.

These were the instructions for performing the script:

“It must be delivered publicly, by a single orator, and must not be edited. It should be delivered in a manner consistent with political speeches, with gravity and purpose. The orator must attempt to deliver the speech as smoothly and seamlessly as possible, in one voice, though the speech’s content is derived from multiple voices. The orator is allowed to dress themselves and the performance environment in anyway they see fit, using any accoutrements, costumes, effects, or props that they desire, or none at all, so long as the flow of the speech is not hindered, or the content obscured. The orator may use a printed copy of the speech. All errors are quoted verbatim and should be considered [sic]. Some simple stage directions are scattered throughout, denoted by brackets. I apologize for its length; a quick delivery should take between roughly 12-15 minutes, though there is no time limit or minimum.”

The script is available here in pdf format.

Documentation of Performance of Political Speech for a Hydra at the Exchange Rate: 2008 Los Angeles Event – 11/04/08

This is not about random(), is a new and very small text piece done in processing for the Rhizome/OpenProcessing 200 Character Tiny Sketch challenge. Having seen too many works made in Processing that have relied on random functions for no other reason than, “it makes things look pretty,” I decided I would not use/make anything like this. I also wanted to try and do work outside of the normal stage environment. So, I opted for doing an animated text loop down in the browser’s status bar about the over usage of random. You can experience the sketch at OpenProcessing.