rose marshack : whyamistillawake.com

I’m compressing “Faith Healer” from Big Dipper’s Boo-Boo album. They are reuniting and playing some shows in April, and releasing an album in March. Oh, maybe you’re not supposed to know that. Anyway Rick and I do work for Merge and Touch + Go Records and sometimes ThrillJockey; we compress and write the Enhanced-CD software. Leftover knowledge from our free non-working days.

What does Big Dipper mean to me? If they are not playing in the midwest, I will fly out to see them play on the East Coast, and we all know how much I love the East Coast. YUCK. I’m not exactly sure why I’m so excited to see them. I guess they’ve just been gone for so long. And Bill has such a beautiful voice. I was tempted to try to see if we could open for them, but fuck it. I’d rather just enjoy them.

Rick, Gram, Jim, and I are going to see RiotFest 2007 - Naked Raygun and Stiff Little Fingers - this Saturday. Gram, who is 4 years old now, has special noise-canceling children’s headphones made by RJ Reynolds to protect his hearing (and ostensibly, give him his first whiff of second-hand smoke; at a concert).

I had another one of my epiphanies last night; the kind where I am at least a year late to jump on some kind of bandwagon. I decided that it would be prudent to

“Employ artistic uses for augmented reality platforms to explore ideas of sustainability.”

Things like RFID tags, GPS, etc. Cool idea, huh? Why not google Spatial Practitioners and see if anyone has been doing this for the past 5 years. Duh. And on top of it, they are doing it at UIUC, where I have somewhat just banished myself from. Maybe I did come up with something new though, and forgot about it and assimilated my interests into what my colleagues are doing here in Champaign. For example, I think that MUSIC fits in there somewhere, along with SOUND. And I don’t see much of it, that “M” word in what already has happened. How can we fit that in, and also get a more authentic version of the P word (Performance)? Maybe there is still some work left to be done.

Here’s a good crapshoot: I’m trying for the Reality Jam theme of ISEA2008 with Rick’s and my Eggpass project (phase II). They say they want augmented reality and religion. I can provide that thanks to my 3 days with His Holiness.

We are currently designing an augmented reality project that which employs a social network trace to help envision the doctrine of Pratitya-samutpada; the Buddhist principles of interconnectedness.

This paper describes data collected from phase 1, an augmented reality social network trace begun in 2004 (http://www.eggpass.org) along with the design process and initial results of this next phase.

On December 8, 2004, in a classroom on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a dozen sculpted eggs bearing the URL “eggpass.org” were handed out with three simple rules:

1. Pass the egg to someone with whom you are on a first-name basis.
2. Please explain these rules to them.
3. Please visit eggpass.org and answer a few questions.

Stanley Milgram’s work on the Small World Problem was an obvious precursor; however while Milgram’s studies involved sending a package to a specific recipient through personal connections in order to determine the links between two strangers, Eggpass was meant to be open-ended, it was our hope that the eggs would continue to be passed from friend to friend for an extended period of time, building up a complex web of relationships and tracing them via the world wide web.

Almost three years have passed since this project’s inception, and with our data (collected via php and mySQL) we now design Phase II, the ultimate goal is to explore the possibilities of using an augmented reality social network trace to visualize (“prove”) the doctrine of Pratitya-samutpada; interconnectedness.

Buddhism posits an interconnected and interdependent reality where all phenomena (actions, conditions, results) are fundamentally connected in some way. All human action affects perceived reality. All actions are social actions. It is our hypothesis that using the tools of augmented reality (GPS, RFID, SMS, and the internet), we can illustrate these principles.

Total crapshoot. Why do I know ISEA is a great conference to go to? Because Kevin Hamilton went there, and anywhere Kevin Hamilton goes is probably awesome. More deity worship.

But get this. There has to be a way to display proof of the doctrine of interconnectedness with all these new technologies. Buddhist thought especially lends itself so easily to be visualized with scientific instruments. All the Prayer-Wheel-in-a-Hard-Disks, all the 3D CG mandalas. The next step is proving that butterfly wing effect.

I know just the men and women who could help me with this. If I could get a team together of my favorite brilliant authors and scientists, I could have a really nice party with chocolate cake and then someone could figure out a really neato experiment to do and I could program it. But it’s not the 1990s anymore and they’re all spread out over … uh… Illinois and Indiana. And I’m spread out all over a gradebook.

One of my best students brought in the new Oliver Sacks book. A tip of an iceberg. A tree of knowledge. My mind turned into a vein of amazon.com for 30 seconds: which should I tell him about: temporal lobe epilepsy? Nuns? (The book Lying Awake?) Other Oliver Sacks books? He hadn’t heard of them. That movie with Robin Williams? Richard Powers? (His newest book has an Oliver Sacks character in it). Other Rick Powers books about music? DNA? Happiness? Where do you start?

I have only ever wanted to wake people up. But now I have a bunch of students in front of me and their eyes are wide open! Now that they’re awake, what do I tell them?