Looks like the rumored O’Reilly magazine, Make is finally going to come out. Yay, physical computing projects!
In other news, my bud kaki is over at the Banff New Media Summer Arts Festival for the wearables workshop. Is there a wearables community in SA? I’d be keen to see what they’re up to, and how we could connect with the growing digital arts and digital video (and slowly building p-comp) communities.
–gurgle–
Having trouble sleeping so I thought this’d be a good time to continue on my quest to take back my blog. Below are two links to lists of blogs in and around southern africa I found today, and then the two I found most interesting and quirky (separately, and in that order).
Blogwise: List blogs in South Africa
Blog Africa: BlogAfrica Catalog
AfricaBlog: July 2004 Archives
Is it just me, or, all of a sudden, are a lot of joburg artists starting up blogger accounts? I hope it’s not just me (altho I just moved to WordPress)…. Lemme know if you are in SA and have a blog – I’m all about aggregating those RSSes!
Apologies to everyone who has been trying to surf nathanielstern.com over the last 5 hours – as you can see, there have been a lot of changes around here! Don’t worry: all your old links and permalinks should still work, tho I do recommend updating/changing them when you get a chance. Most exciting new things for me are the searchable blog (thank you wordpress!) the RSS feed off this blog (thanks to the same), and the neat flash movie on my main page.
So, obviously, a lot has happened over the past 6 weeks, between Cuba, the US and Dublin – so much so that I have forgotten all the blog entries I wrote in my head while traveling (bad nathaniel!). My excuse: having a great time, and working on the new design of this site in my spare time! Anyhow, I’ve decided to, rather than play catch up, post all the new things going on, and maybe just mention tidbits from my journey as they come up.
Now you might ask, what’s the “stay over” (beyond the “make over”, per the title of this entry)?
Well, above is a pic of South Africa’s own Daniel Hirschmann, giving a talk @ Wits’ Digital Soiree (yesterday). He was mainly showing us Glowbits, his thesis project from ITP – super cool and fun to play with physical pixels, that change color when you move them in and out on a grid. The neatest part is that they can be networked, and you can draw and send images to your friends’ Glowbit modules (they all have motors built in)!
That’s all for now – I only got back 3 days ago, so I have heaps to do. Perhaps I’ll be seeing some of you at Zingi Mkefa’s birthday shindig at gallery momo tonight?
Boing Boing: Pixelblocks are like a cross between Lego and Lite Brite
Biorhythm 1.0b2 – VersionTracker:: “This Konfabulator widget computes your biorhythm”
iMailist 1.5b – : “iMailist is a software allowing the sending of mails to format HTML to a whole mailing-list from a loaded web page.”
Did I mention that I finally got me an RSS aggregator, and am totally loving it? You bet nathanielstern.com will soon have its own feed. Stay tuned….
Lawrence Lessig takes on Fox – OK, so he blogged this a while ago, but it’s still a must read. Thank goodness for RSS!!!!
I was one of the lucky 5 people who got to test Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s new net.art project, UMBRELLA.net: Exploring ‘Coincidence of Need’ Networks, yesterday afternoon. Jonah is meant to toss me some images of the interface soon, and I’ll post them then. In the meanwhile, you should know that this ad-hoc networking with layers thing is super cool.
I just got word that double standard, one of my pieces from serial faces is now up in the front of the Sasol offices, Johannesburg, after their purchase two weeks ago. How cool is that?
If you haven’t already, tho I’m sure you have, jib jab.
Finally, for obvious reasons of my long trip, I have not been informing much on the Jozi art tip. Be SURE to check out both of Jo Ractliffe’s shows, which, even tho I am not there, I know are stunning. There also seems to be a beautiful group exhibition of paintings at Gallery Momo at present, if you can make it.
Back home in 5 days!