A surveillance feedback loop

In Surveilling the surveiller visitors can sit down on a chair facing two small security monitors. The images on the monitors are live as you approach it. But as soon as you sit down the monitors show a previous visitor sitting in the place where you are sitting. Instead of monitoring the place, you monitor the visitor before you, who in turn is monitoring the visitor before him etc.

The three main actors lead the visitors through several screens. Asking the questions, recording the answers and taking their picture to have a photograph with the actors and the visitor printed out at the end.

I wish I had his hair

Facemixer is a fun video-projection for festivals where we take pictures of faces of visitors that get mangled up directly on a large projection with the faces of other visitors.

Send a message of love with a real pigeon

In september of 2009  about 100 pigeons spread messages of love through Amsterdam.

The people of Amsterdam were invited to choose a pigeon and leave a message of love on the IDoveYou.org website. As soon as that pigeon with it's special RFID-ring would arrive at one of the three special pigeon houses (at the Paradiso, Vondelpark and Musemplein) this message would be shown and the sender and receiver would be notified by e-mail.

Images of everyday life that broach wonderful themes

In the large movement everyday life gets subtitled. The audience sits in a small movie theater and see the outside world as if it were a film. Random passersby play the tragic lead role. The world stops and the lonely individuals engage in a jointed choreography.

A theatre-concept by Dries Verhoeven for Theater Festival Boulevard 2006. In 2009 the show was recreated with new software on new locations.

Sylvain created the software which included the simultaneous recording an playback of the outside world and choreographing unknowing passerby by manipulating the live-images from the world outside the theater.

Every city should have it's own pigeon.

For the Stifo@Sandberg workshop Teun Castelein and Sylvain Vriens initiated the Stadsduif.nl project. An inititive to give every city the possibility to design a custom pigeon through a democratic process.

The public may design their own pigeon on the website by changing it's size, form, color, sound etc. They can also post non-visual and audible ideas and wishes. These designs are then taken into a rating process.

From the top-ideas and wishes trends are derived and from these a new pigeon is designed as the 'ideal' pigeon for that city. From there a breeding process is started to create a live pigeon that is as close as possible to the digital one.

The pigeons will be introduced by replacing the old pigeons when they are caught. Most cities capture (and often) kill pigeons on a regular basis. The space that is created by this is normally filled by the remaining pigeons who now have better opportunities produce more offspring, this would be the ideal moment to introduce the new pigeons.

Just saw this old video of mine on youtube again. More than a year ago and still haven't found the time to finish it. But still pretty cool. It is based on the concept of a 'video cube' through which you rotate (with the metal knob i am holding in this case) your viewport. The video is live btw, only the music is added.

Anyone know any good exhibition spaces, once it is finished?

The most recent changes:

The biggest changes in the months prior to release 1.0 are as follows:

• Libraries – All libraries must be placed in a folder named "libraries", inside the sketchbook folder. Do not use the main "libraries" directory in the Processing distribution, as it is reserved for the core libraries, and is not visible on Mac OS X.
• XML – The XML library is now included by default, so you won't find it in the Import Library menu anymore. In addition, the XML library since 0135 has been greatly improved, making it compatible with far more documents.
• Processing.app – The Mac OS X release of Processing is now a single .app file, more befitting an OS X application.
• Processing.exe – The Windows release has a new launcher based on launch4j. Unfortunately, some machines have a problem with the new launcher that we haven't been able to track down. If you have trouble, please help us find the problem. PDE files are also now double-clickable on Windows.
• OpenGL – All OpenGL sketches now use 2x full screen anti-aliasing. This means that these sketches are always smooth, and the smooth() and noSmooth() commands are ignored. To return to the behavior found in the beta releases, see the hint() reference.
• P2D and P3D – The P2D renderer has returned (see the size() reference) and smoothing is now enabled for both P2D and P3D. Smoothing support is unfortunately incomplete, however, and sometimes thin lines can be seen inside shapes. This is a very high priority bug to be fixed in a future release.
• Candy and PShape – The Candy SVG library has been merged into the core, which brings along a new loadShape() command and a new PShape object. The special powers of PShape will be rolled out in future releases. For the time being, loadShape() works best with the default renderer (JAVA2D). Complex shapes will often appear jagged or not at all when rendered with P2D, P3D, and OPENGL. We've also added better support for SVG files created with Inkscape.
• PVector – We've added a new class called PVector, which is a simple three-dimensional vector (also known as point or tuple) class. This is useful for storing point data, or operations on 3D points.
• Tools – A new Tools API has been created for developers who want to contribute code that extends the Processing Development Environment in some fashion. Let your creativity flow with fantastical contributions like "Color Selector 2.0", "ROT13 Code Mangler", and "I Am Rich". Visit the developer page on tools for more information. Similar to libraries, tools are installed in a folder of the same name within your sketchbook folder.
• Asynchronouse Images – Big JPEGs and small pipes? We've added a new requestImage() that loads an image in the background so that your sketch doesn't freeze when loading lots of large images over a slow connection.
• Present – Present mode (full screen) is handled differently. When run inside the PDE, only Mac OS X uses exclusive mode with Present. Windows and Linux just do full screen windows. When run outside the PDE, all three simply create an undecorated window the size of the entire screen, and on the Mac, an option is added to the Info.plist file to hide the dock and menubar (since that cannot be done programatically from Java).
• Compiler – We've removed the old Jikes compiler and are now using another. We've also tried hard to improve the quality of error messages, though some are still real gems that invoke the complaints of mainframe computers in 1970s films.
• Internationalization – For better internationalization support, we've changed to UTF-8 encoding when loading and saving sketches. Sketches that contain non-ASCII characters and were saved with Processing 0140 and earlier may look strange when opened. Garbled text and odd characters may appear where umlauts, cedillas, and Japanese formerly lived. If this happens, use the "Fix Encoding & Reload" option under the Tools menu. This will reload your sketch using the same method as previous versions of Processing, at which point you can re-save it which will write a proper UTF-8 version.

Java – Linux and Windows now inlude Java 6 update 10 with the download. We still don't have support for Java 1.5 syntax yet, but we hope that the performance boosts in Java 6 will help applications run well.

Also the digital tv-channel Nederland-e will broadcast a special about 'Science on Terrorism', including an item and an interview about i am always here. For those without digital television, it will be available on http://www.nederland-e.nl soon. I haven't seen it myself yet, so feel free to laugh.