temporal textures

> Now that Fall is coming, starting to fire up the temporal textures discussions, and to plan for milestone events in Fall and Spring. Don't know about Winter... any ideas on what you'd like for midway lilypads?

I hope to map out some workshops to bring some TML folks back to UC Berkeley this coming year. Maybe you'd be interested in the larger May events, ie part of Wymore's Dance Tech symposium, but presenting more provocative work like phenomenology time or presence consciousness cir lighting induced temporal textures, working with dancers. what would you think of linking the October workshop on psychology and architecture with Drs. Helga Wild and Linnaea Tillett with the May events, en route to Einsteins Dreams as a local shaping theme, but open to a cone of possibilities.

"Texture" should remind us that time does not have to be modeled on a unidimensional path, -- though all our software tools for time-based media assume this! it's not at all clear to me where that leads, yet. Any thoughts to start?

Mine are informed by (1) Maturana & Varela appendix to essay 2; (2) notion of spacelike hypersurface in general relativity; (3) harmony and texture in music; (4) the poetic figure of exfoltiation from Christopher Alexander, and Le Pli...and some more stuff. Lefebvre RHythmanalysis which we read in the Alexander & architecture reading group 3 4 years ago, is suggestive but not maybe productive enough? I don't know -- Erik Conrad knew it well. eg. I've been discussing generated time -- with Marek here. His model is a very clever approach to quantizing spacetime, but I am looking for a more textural, measure-theoretic approach that discovers temporal rhythm out of live movement, live processes.
Speaking of live process, please tell me what you think would be useful as guiding questions / themes/ curiosities for initial materials explorations. For my part, I propose to contribute some performance workshop scenarios from Einsteins Dreams. Id like to ask Michael as well as David Morris when we're all back in Montreal, if we might recruit some people to workshop this together with what lighting or activated materials we gather. Not only those people of course, and we can rapidly go through a bunch of other scenarios... to the limits of what can be done of course. What do you think ?

Xin Wei

PS Morgan and Michael are familiar with some of this already.
I'd like to share this with Linnaea and Helga if that's ok, And Navid for sophisticated, richer texturing.

May I suggest a small but important shift in the way of thinking of
imaging on the displays. Instead of referencing the image to coordinates
established from the edges of the screen, think of the edges of the
screens as addressing locations in a larger virtual world.
(i.e. "a temporal texture space")
Use the accelerometer to "move the frame" in the larger space. This is
an oldish idea that I have seen revived several times in the last
decades. (e.g., Jaron Lanier described it to me a few years ago and Sun
research did it in a PDA prototype before that). Now the displays that
are hanging like bats in  a cave can be swung from pendulums or blow
around in a breeze (there are some nice energy effficent
rigs for this with muscle wire). This motion is important for me for
two reasons, it can be used to create experiences like
the shimmer of leaves blowing in the wind where the matt and shiny sides
modulate temporally (also fields of wheat) but also it defeats
a problem I have with screens in theatrical contexts which is most
apparent in the "magic mirror" trope when activity in real space in
front of the screen is transformed and reflected back behind the real 
actors/dancers. The problem is that the screen is anchored 
and the action isn't so when you move your head the screen reveals
itself throughout the image instead of framing the image
thus defeating the necessary suspension of disbelief for cohabitation of
the screen information and the action. This is analogous to the sweet
spot and uniform directivity problems in audio that we have been
tackling.

As for the iPad choice: you might want to wait for the slew of
competitors coming out. HP has one
coming out real soon and a lot of programmers I know prefer other OS
development tools for such things.

Finally, remember if you are willing to live with lower overall lifetime
of the leds (a year or two instead of 4 or 5) you can increase the
backlighting brightness considerably:
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Wi-Fi-Teardown/2183/4#s11207.