Pete Chapman – rgbFilter

Only Kinect

December 19, 2011January 23, 2012 Pete Chapman alley posts, Jame George, Kinect, Kinect hacks5 Comments

Media artist James George calls it “an old tourist movie from the future”. A walk down the summer streets of Barcelona recorded through a handheld 3D scanner. He was quite properly trying to avoid using a genericised trademark (like saying Xerox when you mean photocopy): he shot it using the output of a Kinect. Put to music by Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto the images become recognisable as much through their movement as their form. The two and a half minute piece “alley posts” has been posted on Vimeo. George’s…

Arts Featured

Putting It Together: Modelling Modern Memes

August 26, 2011August 29, 2011 Pete Chapman Apollo moon landing, conspiracies, hoaxes, JFK, Marylin Monroe, Roswell, Tamiya3 Comments

Words fail me. Yes, it’s that good. Brought to you by Tamiya: The “Put It Together” famous conspiracies model series: the Roswell Saucer Crash, the JFK assassination with lone gunman on grassy knoll, Marilyn Monroe’s “suicide”, Elvis’ faked death and the studio-filmed Apollo “moon landing”. Apparently these models don’t exist but then where did the pictures come from? Check out the full set at GeekoSystem.

Arts Featured Film

Attack the Block: The Street Finds Its Own…

August 17, 2011August 19, 2011 Pete Chapman Attack the Block, London Riots, The street finds its own uses for things, William Gibson1 Comment

William Gibson said that when he reads a science fiction story by Alfred Bester he doesn’t get any ideas about the future but he does get a feeling for what it was like to be an adult living in New York in the Fifties. Science fiction stories are always set in the present. Science fiction movies are lucky if they even come close to the present. By the time a movie gets made it’s often referring to something that’s had it’s day. Film is at best a souvenir. Viewing Attack…

Arts Computing Featured Film

Docs and Taxes

July 29, 2011August 17, 2011 Pete Chapman business, Law, Tax0 comment

To the filmmakers in our readership- this might be of some interest to you come next year at “income tax time”. Yes, it is from an American perspective but a) some of our readers are U.S. citizens and b) Canadians shouldn’t feel too smug: our current government is unlikely to go after large corporations and it is very ambivalent about the arts and non-mainstream journalism. If Revenue Canada is trying to make itself look busy they might just decide to try some of the tactics that the IRS is presently…

Computing Featured Internet

Collusion: Do you know where you are?

July 16, 2011 Pete Chapman Collusion, Firefox, Trackers, Tracking, Web Traffic11 Comments

The image and text above tells you just about everything you need to know. It’s from the Collusion project at http://collusion.toolness.org/ . It’s a Mozilla Firefox plug-in that allows you to visualise, either on the site or in a separate tab, a history of your web surfing for that session with lines showing which websites are sharing information about your movements with other websites ( the grey dots) or with dedicated trackers (the red dots). When you first visit the site it will demonstrate this using a pre-set series of…

Featured Science

Saturday Morning Science 15

June 18, 2011June 29, 2011 Pete Chapman Life, Saturday Morning Science, Science0 comment

Arsenic and Old Life– I grew up reading science fiction and was introduced at a young age to the idea that life might have a different chemical basis than the standard arrangement based on carbon. Silicon based life was already a cliché long before I saw the old classic Star Trek episode The Devil in the Dark wherein a Federation mining colony is terrorised by a life-form that could ingest rock and move through solid matter as if it were swimming in water. I remember asking my father, a chemical…

Computing Featured Gaming Science

Saturday Morning Science 014

June 4, 2011June 6, 2011 Pete Chapman DNA, Mass Effect, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, Saturday Morning Science0 comment

The deep nature of life as we know it just got weirder. One of my favourite books on biology is Jacques Monod’s magisterial Chance and Necessity. It is a step by step description of how life evolves at the microbiological level without any predefined plan, purely as a by-product of random forces.

Computing Featured Science

Saturday Morning Science 013

May 28, 2011May 30, 2011 Pete Chapman exoplanets, quantum computing, robots, rogue planets, Saturday Morning Science4 Comments

The world’s first commercial quantum computer meets its “early adopter”…What was imagined as rare and unique now looks to be numerous and common and enough with the killer drones: what about a robot for the best in us? Schrodinger’s Catbox Arrives!!! It’s powered by a 128 cubit processor, it has a 100 square footprint, it looks like the monolith from 2001: a Space Odyssey trying out for the role of of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull and it’s yours for 10 million dollars. Originally this space would have held…

Featured Science Zombies

Saturday Morning Science 012

May 21, 2011May 24, 2011 Pete Chapman Apocalypse, Outer Limits, Roswell, Saturday Morning Science, Science, Stalin, Zombies1 Comment

The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. Roadhouse Blues- The Doors The silly season is well under way. Today the world is going to end. Joe Stalin engineered the Roswell saucer crash. The Centre for Disease Control went viral with a zombie attack piece. And don’t get me started about Lars Von Trier, his silly “worlds in collision” movie or his public airing of his private Fuhrerbunker. I’m glad this is a science column. I could just walk away and say none of this is on my beat….

Featured Science

Saturday Morning Science 011

May 14, 2011May 15, 2011 Pete Chapman Neanderthals, Radiolab, Saturday Morning Science, Science0 comment

Caveman Blues -I’ve been working up a piece about Neanderthals, collecting links on current research and rereading older theories about our enigmatic, long lost relatives. The problem is; we just keep finding stuff and it keeps getting written up as somehow conclusive or definitive when it’s really just cumulative. Take for example two findings from this week, I’ll cite the Science Digest articles, not because the folks at that site are doing anything wrong (in fact they are getting tighter on their writing and presentation) but because even the good…

Science

Saturday Morning Science 010

May 7, 2011May 15, 2011 Pete Chapman relativity, Saturday Morning Science, Science, space1 Comment

Saturday Morning Science is back!!! I wish I could say that something ground breaking, phase changing or paradigm shifting had happened since the last instalment. Something that had eluded detection by the entire world and could just now be revealed to rgbFilter readers as an exclusive article. But no, science doesn’t work that way and beware of anyone that claims it does. The biggest story this week involves an experiment that took a year to run, decades to implement and proved a theory that is nearing its centenary. Gravity Probe…

It Gets Thinner: The PaperPhone

May 4, 2011May 15, 2011 Pete Chapman flexible display, Human Media Lab, Mobile, PaperPhone0 comment

It’s called the PaperPhone and its creator Roel Vertegaal, the director of Queen’s University Human Media Lab, says, “This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.” Dr. Vertegaal will present his “paper” computer on May 10 at 2 pm at the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI 2011 (Computer Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver. Here are two videos from an article at…