Language, frames, stories

"we actually become the sum of our experiences and the stories we've told about them"

Tim O'Reilly on Ignite, (Nov. 10, 2009) commenting briefly and further elaborating on a quote many of us like so much and have found in so many places: Korzybski's "The map is not the territory". (Gee I went all the way to the Berkeley Library many years ago just to get a copy of it!, which I later donated to the Fundación Inst. Gregory Bateson, where I'm sure Martin, Rosa et al have gleaned and further processed and shared... great historical memes).
YouTube link.

Quote:
"... if you start thinking about how this process of perception works you start to be able to notice when you're out of track. When you're actually stuck in paying attention to the labels as opposed to the underlying reality. And you can take yourself back up in the chain and to the experience and maybe just to tune in."

"... When everybody was convinced that the web was over, the dot.com bust had happened, we were able to go back and say "no, there's something really important and new happening on the web". We called it Web2.0, we told a new story, built a new map of the world, and kicked off something as a result."

Connecting the dots...

The following clip has been distinguished by TED.com , YouTube EDU Channel, (mostly commencement speeches...) it's been retweeted by scholars and Stanford provided the transcript... So let's listen to the amazing stories he shared that day.

Lemonade happening and park

Via Cool Hunting a 2:08 min. clip showing the world's largest lemonade stand, an incredible park built on an elevated railroad track, sharing the story of a traditional workshop based in NYC.

Direct link to the clip on YouTube

Transcript:

"The tank goes on the top of the building and the water is fed down through gravity to provide the people of New York ... to wash and shower with, to fight fires, and tack life and property.

Today we are erecting the world's largest lemonade stand, which will serve for the grand opening of the High Line.

The High Line is the City's newest park, an incredible park built on an elevated railroad track, that had been abandoned for many years and it stretches the west side of Manhattan.

We were opening the High Line just a few weeks ago, and this is sort of the first big public celebration. We have all kinds of stuff in this happening, this is just puppet festival. Behind me you'll see, a construction of what will be the world's largest lemonade stand. A lemonade tank containing 15 hundred gallons of natural lemonade

When we had this idea of a lemonade stand and when we took it a step further and started thinking about the water tanks there was really only one person to call, which is Rosenwach. They are the company, they've been doing this for generations.

We've been in business for over a 100 years ... I'm the fourth generation and my son is the fifth generation, and we started in the late 1890's here. Our buildings are over 20 stories and they really require an artisian well top with scrubby fed down and best we have in wooden tank.

But the tanks that we make on the roof obviously hold water, and the tank here will hold lemonade, and it goes together like a traditional barrel.

The water tank after the walls is an icon of New York, and what better than to provide the lemonade for the grand opening than a traditional New York water tank."

>

Learn more about the High Line Park Project: according to wikipedia this started as a project in 2004 with the New York City committing $ 50MM to establish the proposed park, which was inaugurated and opened to the public in the summer of 2009. (June 8)

Brazilian project

Take a good look and listen... serious business and a beautiful place, fun people and great things to actually "do" in a design mix of settings and buildings, with plenty of water inlets, lots of green and a lake. Main structures seem to be already in place together with the promise of transport integration, which shows quite daunting on the clip. The place is a spectacular combination of sites: clusters of hills, the nearby sea and water spaces, ... the complexity of how to integrate the different nearby scenarios through and around the hills makes it much more challenging and fun.

Unbeatable discourse: the olympics and para-olympics mix, the stadiums, the transport plan, "a place to live your passion" with the Corcovado Christ as an oversight ... "a Brazilian celebration" ... " to inspire a continent"... this was not just about a city.

While the London clip of the previous contest was also tops, we also recognized that the show offered as an advance last year in China, was rather dis-connected to the sophistication of the flowing strings of dancers and athletes selling the promise of a multi-dimensional city in Singapore. The reality check and actual performance of the British in China brought to life a double-decker bus (do they still run?) a gang of average people dancing, a football star and a pop singer. The question now is, what will eventually take place when the curtains are drawn in 2012? We hope they re-connect again with what they'd shown before in order to become a winner.

A lot of what you see on the Brazilian clip is already there and just as beautiful as it shows... the issue might be with the coordination and the overall security, but they've already proved with the Rod Steward and Rolling Stones concerts drawing crowds of circa 3.5m (1994) and 1m (2006) respectively at the Copacabana beach, that they can do this and ... a lot more.

Turning Cars and Computers into Art

Rocketboom interviews Zach Lieberman on his latest projects. (3:57min video)

Transcript:

-I'm here with Zack Lieverman and I don't know exactly what to call you... What would you title yourself as?

-Like nerd, artist, researcher, hacker, yeah... I don't know.

-Renaissance man of technology?

-I guess so maybe.

-So how did you get your start in the field that you're doing right now?

-I discovered this community on-line, especially through Flash, people writing code to animate, and I've always loved animation... And for me it was just really beautiful this idea that you could write some lines of could and you could see something move, and then you could make really elegant types of motion.

One thing that I'm involved with now is an open source project called open frameworks, which is the C++ toolkit so... I said before I'm sort of a nerd artist, I you know, re-write software, we do sort of low level hacking, and this is making a tool for other people to make stuff with.

-For each individual use you're creating a brand new kind of software...

-Yeah, every time we have a new problem, a magician comes and says I want to do augmented reality card trick and then it's like, OK, let's make new software, about, you know, how do we track a playing card... we have a new problem and we come up with software to solve it.

-So I saw a really cool video on ... I think that it uses the open frameworks software with a car...

-Yeah, the project was in Belgium, and it was an advertising company that has the Toyota account and then, once they had the idea of driving and making a type face they contacted me through that... they needed to use software kind of real time software, in order to track the car to get a good sense of what the outcome would be. They did some experiments here, with, kind of , imagining on paper what the movements would be like. The driver would then take those drawings and try to interpret it driving, he would drive slowly at first and then drive faster, cause some of the things are really... involved wipe outs ... I software outputed in image and then the software designers took that image traced it and cleaned it up a bit, and then made the font.

We were making an eye tracker for a disabled graffiti writer, named Tempt, and Tempt has "Lug...ris" disease, and we were making a tool to help him retro feel again with his eye... Ok let's hook this up...

We're actually tracking the pupil, so as the pupil moves around we're following it, so we're like using open frameworks... write some code in order to find it and fitting and ellipse through it. There is data coming from the camera, and then we have some illumination from this infrared LEDs, your eyes are very good input devices, not a very good output device, and when you actually start to hook it up to draw, it's a little bit tricky.

And so we have to do a lot of work to make it easy for ourselves, and also easy for Tempt, it's all Tempt can use to communicate

-I guess this takes a bit of a learning curve ...

-It's a little quirky right now...

-I just closed my eyes that's the weirdest thing...

-So if anyone wants to look into using your software, how do they do that?

-Sure, so they can join the main list, it's at frameworks.cc and then we have workshops and events all the time.

-Somebody could learn from the master..

-No no, we're all learning so that's the exciting...everybody is in it together and learning and growing and evolving together.

-Very cool, thank you very much, that is cool stuff.

Have a look at Funky Forest