igargoyle

Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) this weekend

Here's a brief blast of some of this weekend's LA haps, with details below:

Saturday-
1pm: Dorkbot SoCal @ Machine Project
8pm: The Tissue Culture & Art project (TC&A) talk @ Machine Project
8pm-1am: Censor This Show @ Basswerks [I'm exhibiting a video installation there!]

Sunday-
11am to 5pm - Mini Tissue Engineering workshop and lecture @ Machine Project

From Machine:
"
Dear friends,

We have an ambitious weekend planned. Saturday night at 8pm, tissue culturing pioneers SymbioticA will be on hand to discuss how to grow ears, minature leather jackets, and other fascinating biological experiments. Sunday afternoon they will be leading a workshop in tissue culturing (or meat cloning as we like to call it). Saturday afternoon we are hosting a meeting of Dorkbot, featuring HDR photography, self organizing robots and super efficient vehicles. Details below.

Love,

Machine

-------------------------
Saturday Dec 1st 8pm - Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, SymbioticA, University of Western Australia:
Free

The talk covers the work of The Tissue Culture & Art project (TC&A) that began in 1996 as an R&D project into the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. Some of TC&A’s projects include the Pig Wings, Semi-living Worry Dolls, Disembodied Cuisine (the first time that tissue engineered meat have been grown and eaten), victimless Leather, Extra Ear 1/4 Scale (in collaboration with Stelarc) and NoArk. The talk will also discuss SymbioticA, A unique laboratory dedicated to the research and critic of the life sciences form an artistic perspective, located at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia.

more information > http://machineproject.com/2007/11/25/symbiotica/

———————–
Sunday Dec 2nd 11am to 5pm - Mini Tissue Engineering workshop and lecture
Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, SymbioticA, University of Western Australia:
$55 materials included, space limited. Registration now open

Tissue engineering enables researchers to grow three dimensional living tissues constructs of varying sizes, shapes and tissue types. This half-day hands on intensive workshop will introduce artists and other interested people to basic principals of animal tissue culture and tissue engineering, including its history and the different artistic projects working with TC and TE. The workshop will involve a demonstration for how to extract and cultivate stem cells from bones bought at the butcher. These advanced techniques can be done with homemade equipment and kitchen gear.

registration > http://machineproject.com/2007/11/25/tissue-engineering-workshop-and-lecture/

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Dorkbot SoCal 25 - Bullock (HDR Photography), Hoetzlein (Intelligent Things), Hertz Sr. (Supermileage Vehicles)
Saturday, December 1st 2007, 1pm
Free

Three awesomely diverse and diversly awesome presenters for Dorkbot's triumphant return to Machine Project.

1. Today's digital cameras have a limited dynamic range compared to film. If you shoot a photo of a landscape with a beautiful cloudy sky, your landscape will be properly exposed, but your clouds will be washed out or vice-versa. High-Dynamic Range photography allows you to circumvent your sensor's limitations by taking multiple photos with different exposures and combining them on your computer. All you need is a camera capable of manual exposure settings, a tripod and a computer and you'll be on your way to HDR mastery. Presented by Dave Bullock.

2. Rama Hoetzlein will present a range of projects, including videos of mechnical and robotic sculptures, self-organizing systems and systems for knowledge organization. Themes will include the relationship between physical (embodied) and non-physical (mental) activity, knowledge representation, and systems of belief. The relationship of these projects to the interdisciplinary questions raised by intelligent systems will be introduced with the intention of engaging in an open discussion.

3. Professor Barry Hertz will be presenting on the development of ultra-fuel-efficient vehicles developed from 1980 to 1988 at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. The distinctions held by the U of S engineers include winning every SAE Supermileage event entered during nine successive years, breaking three amateur world records, and shattering the absolute world fuel economy record on May 29, 1986 with a vehicle that got 4,738 miles per US gallon (5691 MPIG, 49.6 mL/100 km).

For more information > http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsocal/

Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado
Los Angeles, CA, 90026
213-483-8761

[via Machine Project Events list]

Censor This Show!
29 artists, 3 bands, a comic, and no cover
Saturday, December 1 8pm-1am
Basswerks Gallery
5411 W. Adams Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90016
http://www.basswerks.net

Anonymous Surfing with TorPark ThumbDrive

For all you cypherpunks out there:

Download TorPark for your language, and put it on a USB Flash keychain. Plug it into any internet terminal whether at home, school, or public. Run Torpark.exe and it will launch a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, giving the appearance of having the Tor exit computer's IP.

[ Link via MAKE blog ]

Democratic Convention Wifi Ban?

No confirmation yet if this is legitimate, but wi-fi networking news says:

This seems like a troublesome idea as it shifts the political reporting balance significantly out of the blogosphere for the democratic national convention. At least it's not a cellphone ban though. The future-saavy blogger Regine from we-make-money-not-art says "Read also 601Am for an insight about the (dis)organization of the event."

[Link via we-make-money-not-art]

ACLU Bust Card for Photographers

Reader Len Norton wrote in with a great tip in response to the uncamera'd post describing a pdf/palmbook similar to the ACLU's Bust Card but released by Attorney Bert P. Krages. The free document is a quick and well written guide for photographers who want to know where and when they legally can snap their photos.

From the front page of their distribution site:

"The right to take photographs is now under assault more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples include photographing industrial plants, bridges, and vessels at sea. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society.

Ironically, unrestricted photography by private citizens has played an integral role in protecting the freedom, security, and well being of all Americans. Photography in the United States has contributed to improvements in civil rights, curbed abusive child labor practices, and provided information important to investigating crimes. These images have not always been pretty and often have offended the sensibilities of governmental and commercial interests who had vested interests in a status quo that was adverse to the majority in our country."

From "The Photographer's Right":

"Who Is Likely to Violate Your Rights

Most confrontations are started by security guards and employees of organizations who fear photography. The most common reason given is security but often such persons have no articulated reason. Security is rarely a legitimate reason for restricting photography. Taking a photograph is not a terrorist act nor can a business legitimately assert that taking a photograph of a subject in public view infringes on its trade secrets. On occasion, law enforcement officers may object to photography but most understand that people have the right to take photographs and do not interfere with photographers. They do have the right to keep you away from areas where you may impede their activities or endanger safety. However, they do not have the legal right to prohibit you from taking photographs from other locations."

...

"Despite misconceptions to the contrary,
the following subjects can almost always be photographed lawfully
from public places:"

• Accident and fire scenes
• Children
• Celebrities
• Bridges and other infrastructure
• Residential and commercial buildings
• Industrial facilities and public utilities
• Transportation facilities (e.g., airports)
• Superfund sites
• Criminal activities
• Law enforcement officers

Other sections include: "They Have Limited Rights to Bother", Question, or Detain You", "They Have No Right to Confiscate Your Film", "Your Legal Remedies If Harassed", and "How to Handle Confrontations". All of which is on one small reference page that you can fold up and put in your wallet.

Makes me want to print up a bunch for my photography and photojournalist friends.

JWZ and the livejournal crowd have this to say on the subject.

Update: "the whole photographic freedom debate just annoys me...it seems so clear to me :-)" [Rich_Gibson]

[Link thanks Len!]

Kim Jong-il and the Cellphone Ban

North Korea's cellphone ban seems to be more complicated than previously stated. While the following quote from Howard Ringhold supports the censorship hypothesis for the reason behind the banning, freenorthkorea reveals that the train bombing was an assassination attempt by "anti-North Korean government forces" on the disliked leader, Kim Jong-il.

"Ohmynews is a website in South Korea that employs 26,000 citizen-reporters. Those citizen-reporters and their readers vote on which articles should appear on the front page. It's wildly popular, particularly among the young cybergeneration. Earlier this year, Ohmynews did something remarkable. The candidate that was favored by many of their readers and reporters was behind in the polls in the days before Korea's Presidential election, and the exit-polls in the early hours showed him losing. A call to action on Ohmynews led to readers sending nearly a million emails to their friends, urging them to get out and vote, along with an uncounted number of text messages to their friends' telephones. That unprecedented online get-out-the-vote effort tipped the election – and the first interview President-elect Roh gave was to Ohmynews."

This indicates that North Korea's neighbor has recently had a change in government directly due to improvements in communication in the form of the internet and cellphones. While censoring the internet is easy, censoring text messages is almost impossible unless you restrict or outlaw cellphones.

In addition, if the the train bombing in Ryongchon on April 22 "had been conspired by anti-North Korean government forces to harm North Korean leader Kim Jong-il" the ban seems justified, at least from the view of the North Korean dictator. For someone so disliked, cellphones seem an obvious target to quell dissent.

"A North Korean official who was recently on his business trip to China said, “The North Korean National Security Agency has investigated the incident since it took place and concluded that rebellious forces had plotted the explosions targeting the exclusive train of Kim Jong-il. The security agency, in particular, gained evidence that cell phones had been used in triggering the explosion and reported to the North Korean leader that the use of cell phones should be banned for the sake of the leader’s safety.

...

A North Korea defector who crossed the border a few days ago said, “It doesn’t seem to be a temporary measure, because even handsets have been conscripted following the cell phone use ban.” “The Postal Service, which manages the cell phone business, has unilaterally conscripted handsets without offering any compensations. It's a typical example of a dictatorial state,” the defector pointed out." [freenorthkorea.net]

In any case, while North Korea's citizens are being held back in the dark ages, their government is still watching.

In related news, Italy takes the opposite approach, and spams it's hipster crowd with pro-voting text messages.

[Link from Howard Rheingold]