Stung Eye

The eye of the bee holder.

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What time is it?

Today's posts to streetart:
the dark
slo-mo
gf doodles
no needles

A Crash Course On Complexity, Emergence and Collective Intelligence

The next four graf shots posted to streetart:
gf viewing freight
Another freight
Little man hidden to the left
Collage
***
A Crash Course On Complexity, Emergence and Collective Intelligence

"Put a hundred army ants on a flat surface and they will walk around in never decreasing circles until they die from exhaustion. Yet a colony of a million army ants becomes a sophisticated super-organism."

An anonymous 17th century poet wrote: "...and the thousands of fishes moved as a huge beast, piercing the water. They appeared united, inexorably bound to a common fate. How comes this unity?"
This is the science of emergence and complexity.
The Article, Emergence as a Construct (dead link) which appeared in Volume 1 of Emergence Magazine provides a detailed, although rather complex look at the subject. Better yet, a web-based project over at MIT allows you to explore emergence via the wonderful world of cellular automaton. (Remember Stephen Wolfram's ode to the cellular automaton, A New Kind of Science?) You can also use this piece of software to create interactive art pieces that use emergence to "provide the opportunity to explore the role of artificial life and human presence in the creation of an art form which includes the interactive experience."
I find that I am drawn to one particular subset of emergence known as Collective Intelligence. The Chef and I have spent many hours discussing this concept. You may have noticed that I've been linking to Wikipedia through-out this post. Wikipedia is great example of Collective Intelligence, it's a free encyclopedia made for and by the collective intelligence of the citizens of the internet.
The following projects are exploring this global net-based intelligence in some interesting and novel ways:

  • Typophile : A Smaller Picture - Harnessing the collective intelligence to democratically draw the english alphabet. Make sure you try viewing the drawing/evolution process as an animation. (The one flaw I see in this project is that the collective intelligence will most likely end up drawing a copy of the font used on the site itself.)
  • The World Map of the Mind - "Visitors to the project are presented with the map so far, a crude bitmap build out of green and blue blocks. Green blocks represent land, blue blocks water. One of the blocks is red. The visitor is then asked whether that block should be land or water." (The project appears to be offline at the moment due to a heavy user load.)
  • Community based news and discussion sites like slashdot and kuro5in use the collective intelligence of their user-base to improve and moderate the quality of information, discussion and debate.
  • The Collective Unconsciousness Project - Explore the connections that exist in the dreams of net users across the globe. Add your own dream experiences to the dreamscape. Navigation is quite dream-like.
  • Site like daypop and blogdex allow us to track meme probagation across the blogsphere.
  • The Open Mind Common Sense Project - "An attempt to make computers smarter by making it easy and fun for people all over the world to work together to give computers the millions of pieces of ordinary knowledge that constitute 'common-sense', all those aspects of the world that we all understand so well we take them for granted."
Further Reading: These are exciting times. We have an opportunity to watch and study the development of an emergent intelligence rooted deep within the interconnections of the net. The interconnections in this case, are not only the physical real-world network connections but also the interconnections within the web itself, the blogshere and the flow of human consciousness that "surfs" across the datascape.

Update: (21/02/06)

Since this post, Folksonomy and tagging have become all the rage. Services like Spurl, del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit (to name just a few) harness online collective intelligence to categorize, and propagate websites. I discussed this last February in the Noosphere Snapshots section of my post on net-based search and discovery.

A few more relevant inks:

Unintentional Intentions

Soupandspoons posted this stencil to streetart the other day. In response I've sorted through my digicam photos of the past year and posted the first four to streetart. (Four more will be posted tomorrow. Four the next. And four more the next.)
The first four:
Create
Effective
Flow
Abstract
I stumbled across these images of pollen a few days back. Long live the microscope.
Speaking of magnification... I figured out how to take macro photos on my digicam while out at the lake last week. Many digital cameras have a special macro mode to allow you to take close up photographs. My camera however, has a minimum focal distance of 30cm (aprox. 12"). Here's the trick that shrank the focal distance to almost 10cm: holding a small magnifying glass in front of the lense! Here are two example photos: Afghan - Fingers
I'm currently sick. At home instead of work. My throat is very sore and my head and body ache. Chefquix's post on Wonder inspired the following:
A sense of wonder.
A distracted mind torn asunder.
Distracted to the point of forlorn blunder.
Why trouble ourselves with the unknown
when we can cover up these questions with a form of wonder cologne?
It provides a simple replacement masking our true intentions
It provides a laziness excuse with dollar-store bought interventions
Sure it would be nice to question and learn each and everyday
but our time is limited (right down to the time allotted for play)
We have so many things to do in this life
this can lead to something known as after-school-strife
you get home from a hard day of school or work
you want to scream. you want to shout
in fact you want to smirk
at the very idea of putting any more time into:
learning
asking questions
and traveling the mind
we are looking for distraction and a way that we can play
without doing anything ourselves at the end of every day
we have found all these ways to cover up our mind
with comfort food ideas that other people have designed
The paper teaches politics
The TV gives us Friends (TM)
Yet it all comes down to one simple fact in the very end:
A sense of wonder would distract us from our distractions.

LONGER IS BETTER

Guest entry by Dj Mose: Just wanted to share a great article I recently read in the Vancouver Sun. The story by Graham Turner was originally printed in The Daily Telegraph in London. The title, The U.S. Empire.
here's a little snippet:
Why is there such a deep distrust between the United States and the rest of the world? To find out, veteran British journalist Graham Turner, a senior feature writer with London's Daily Telegraph, spent five weeks traveling across the U.S., talking to members of the administration, university presidents, military commanders, CEOs of giant corporations and banks - and ordinary citizens. What he came up with is a picture of the world's imperial power - seen through the experienced eyes of an older, faded empire.
I know it's long, but trust me, it's worth it... longer is better...
page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5
page 6

Half Way Through

The eye project. Photos of unstung eyes.
The friendship and art of Vangogh and Gauguin.
5th graders interpret Radiohead's music by drawing what they hear.
Darwinian Poetry. Help poetry evolve.
Napster uses fake graffiti to advertise their re-launch. (lame)
100 years of design.
Peepshow!
Drifter TV.
Information Pollution.

Would somebody think of the animals?

Shouts out to the google surfer who ended up at this site 3 times after searching for the following:
how do you treat a dog that has been stung in the eye
Hope the dog is ok. On a related note we've had one visitor via google searching for: masturbation workshop israel

Non-cellular life created?
Grid Shock - "You go from the box garage in the house to the box car, driving down the street, not touching anything or being part of your environment"
Follow this story. Soak in these images.
Zen and the art of... watching TV?!?

For all you Winnipeg music lovers here's a quick overview of some exciting upcoming shows:
September 25 - Zen Lounge, Winnipeg
Pharcyde with Rahzel and DJ JS1
September 26 - Pyramid
DJ CO-Op and Hunnicut 70's Blast
Right in time for my b-day. Nice one.
October 4 - Pyramid
Panic 2003 Old School
Miss the underground warehouse parties of the early 90s? Check this event.
October 4 - U of M MPR
The Weakerthans
Man. Why does this have to be on the same night as Panic?
October 14 - Pyramid
Kid Koala Presents: Short Attention Span Theater with very special guests:
DJ P-LOVE, DJ JESTER AND LEDERHOSEN LUCIL, Also animated shorts by Monkmus
October 20 - Pyramid
Ninja tunes presents The Art of Listening Tour
DJ Vadim with MC BLURUM13 and DJ FIRST RATE
October 23 - Pyramid
Moses Mayes and Blue Quarter
Talk about a power house of funk!

Scenes from a memory

The song of the week [offline] is Phoebe Snow's rendition of the old Gershwin tune, There's a boat that's leavin' soon for New York.
A new collage of mine has been added to the sticker section of the images page. Lost At Sea.

In A Way

I wrote some rhymes and composed some music. The result is my latest track, In A Way. The lyrics can be found in the words section. As always, feedback is appreciated.
*****
And we woke up early that morning and dragged heavy adult shovels down to the beach and began to dig. We reached water at 5 feet but keep on. The deeper it got, the wider it got; the walls would crumble. Near the end of the day my dad came by to tell us to fill in the hole.
"Someone could be walking their dog tonight in the dark and fall in."
We hadn't yet reached an age where we would understand the consequences of our actions. I'm grown up now and I can only grasp the simple ones.

On a ferry

People sit in rows facing forward and back.
The vessel rocks gently side to side in the sea.
A man with tanned skin makes his hand into a fictional gun and points it to the sky which is hidden by the metal of the boat.
A boy and girl sit very straight, erect, in their seats. His cap is on backwards. His arm rests across the back of the seat beside him, pointing towards her.
A couple in their late 50s cuddle across their armrests. Their bodies mirror each other: fingers interlocked. legs crossed. knees pointing inwards. She tucks her head in towards his neck and closes her eyes. He pulls her close and gently kisses her forehead.

On a ferry.


The moment we are in the exact middle we change
From departing to arriving, we are what is new
Neither here nor there, a short trip between then and now
We all want to be on the other side of the water and to get there without getting wet
The swaying sea makes walking an adventure, drunkenness that makes your thoughts slosh, held in only by the music of your headphones
On deck the two of you can be in the background of tourists' photographs, smiling or frowning a long-lasting message onto kodak paper for strangers
Kissing her is by far the best option for your mouth in this situation.

What happened here?

I guess it's time for some links:

Stealth Disco! (Check out the "best of" clip) via the wonderful link blog @ Coudal Partners.
Jonathan Clark put together a hauntingly gorgeous flash/photo piece on cemeteries. This is a must see. (via things)
An interview with a great author: TMN chats with Douglas Coupland.
Kuro5hin has had some interesting front page articles of late: The Future Of Money. Legal Music Downloads. A Quick Overview Of Buddhism. (On a related note: Are Buddhists Ambitious?)
If you don't have time for all three, just skip through all the talk and read the interview that spawn the future of money discussion. What is money and how well does it work to solve society's ills? The interview features Bernard Lietaer who co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the Euro). Some very interesting and thought provoking ideas here. The main focus is the idea of private non-monetary currency systems that work in conjunction with our existing currencies to promote positive social change.
Culture as anesthetic. Numbed by the world.
The Harper's Index is always fun.
Streetart is a collaborative weblog for photos of DIY posters, guerrilla stickers, home-made stencils, etc.
Opium magazine - Literary humor for the deliriously captivated.
The Philosophy of Time.
What do you get when you mix a doll with an onion?
In music news, The Pixies may be getting back together.

All good things must come to an end

"First things first," he spit out as he barged through the door unannounced.
"Excuse me?” I replied rubbing the sleep that had recently accumulated in the corners of my eyes.
"I'm here to set things straight," he continued unfazed.
“Set what things straight?”
“The corners. The angles. The parts of speech that fall on deaf ears!”
On any other day the sudden arrival of a strange man dressed all in black spouting nonsensical clichés would have sent my mental faculties off to the land of fear and paranoia. This morning however, I felt ready for anything. Although my memories of last night were foggy at best, the drugs must have been of the highest quality.
“Lets start at the beginning!” He exclaimed, so that is where I too will begin.
The beginning…