talk

Hear.Feel.Fear: Presentation of work, 17cox gallery in Beverley

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

I will be presenting PC//MM alongside Joey at 17cox on Saturday, December 3rd.  Joey and I have been performing music together for about a year and a half.  Having the context of a presentation will allow us to discuss our influences and our process for composition and performance.

This will include the ideas and inspirations in the evolution of our setup, performance style, and equipment, as well as the development of WHIRL and the intersection of art, music, and community we’ve found in our execution.

So if you’ve seen us perform and wonder who is doing what, or how I’m getting the monomachine to make sounds, or where Joey finds his samples, swing by.

Yup, you guessed it- that's a breadboard synth there. Three oscillators and ring modulation.

The event is produced by 17cox, and is designed to explore collage techniques in the creative process:

In tandem with Continuity, 17 Cox is hosting events engendering collage to all forms of cut and paste media; not just 2D collage, but film, turntables, and other devices/methods that arrange prefabricated media samples like sound bites, film stills, track cuts, et al. into larger compositions.

17cox: 17 Cox Court, Beverly MA 01915, December 3rd, 6pm. 

Posted on November 30th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , , ,

t=0 festival workshop at MIT

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Profile from the T=0 festival lineup

Last Saturday, the 17th, I ran a workshop at the t=0 festival at MIT.  It was a festival over the weekend that brought together hackers, artists, and entrepreneurs.  The workshop I ran was titled ‘Rapid Prototyping, Creativity, and Open Hardware‘.  I put together some material on the opportunities within open hardware in product development (heavily influenced by Eric von Hippel’s work) and a gallery of some cool Arduino projects.   There is still quite a lot to be explored within entrepreneurship and open hardware- and that’s what I wanted people to get inspired to do.  You can see the material here. The idea was to explore the Arduino as a prototyping platform, and while doing so understand the implications of both open hardware, and of rapid prototyping.

Afterwards, we went over a few tutorials on using the Arduino.  This was actually a whole lot of fun.  We had students from the Sloan school, from CSAIL, and from the Media Lab as well.  Most rewarding was seeing quirks of excitement as the projects came to life.  I’ll be compiling a video documenting the workshop, and will post it in the coming week.

T=0 Festival

 

Posted on September 20th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The 2011 International Conference on Complex Systems

Monday, June 27th, 2011

ICCS 2011 kicked off yesterday and will continue until friday this week.  High-profile speakers that I’m pumped to see include Gene Stanley (statistical physics, econophysics), David Gondek (IBM Watson), Alex Pentland (human dynamics, reality mining), Geoffrey West (cities and scaling), Stephen Wolfram (Mathematica, Alpha), and, the one I’m most excited about, Nassim Taleb.  Here is the list of poster presenters and speakers.

I will be presenting a talk today and a poster tomorrow, both on research I have been doing at NECSI.  Here are the abstracts of the talk and poster, respectively.

Quantifying Multi-Scale Structure and Capabilities in Complex Systems

A central challenge in building and managing human organizations is identifying the proper structure to adopt. This problem affects all tasks ranging from those of small teams to global organizations. Today, costly trial and error learning dominates reorganization efforts. Here we characterize the coordination structure of an organization in order to match the structure to a similar characterization of the task to be performed. This characterization involves both the scale of tasks (the number of individuals or other organizational components needed to perform a task) and the variety of tasks that must be performed.

We quantify the scale and variety dependent capability using the complexity profile, and generalize Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety to describe the matching of system organization to task. A successful organization optimizes tradeoffs between variety and scale to match the complexity profile of its tasks.

Here we develop a quantitative method and computational tools to calculate the multi-scale structure of the system and a set of tasks. We demonstrate through exam- ples that organizing a system effectively for a task requires matching both the scale and complexity of the organization to the scale and complexity of the task. These results provide a framework to calculate the organizational structure for successfully performing specific tasks.

Applications of our approach are relevant to a wide range of systems. Challenges in the economic, financial, development, education, and military sectors highlight that many of the most difficult problems stem from inability to meet multi-scale demands. Characterizing the structure of successful solutions given a task can provide direct insight into how to address these problems.

Characterizing Complex Terrains: Mathematical Foundations and Applications

We generalize fractal and affine analysis to describe the multi-scale structure of systems that are not self-similar. The approach is based upon the complexity profile and, unlike multifractal analysis, directly maps the scale dependence of key properties of the structure. This technique is of both fundamental and practical importance in a wide range of real world contexts. We apply this method to construct a natural characterization of scale and complexity of a given geophysical terrain. We develop an approximation that is useful for high resolution elevation data, and calculate the complexity profiles for Afghanistan and Iraq. The analysis provides direct insight into the human social dynamics, including conflict, that occur in these countries.

Posted on June 27th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , , , ,

Talk on Complex Systems and the Maker Community

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

A few weeks ago I presented some work at Mass Art’s Pozen Center. Alongside the artwork, the event hosted a series of speakers who spoke on their work and on developing a stronger art+tech community in Boston. I presented the Complexity and Creativity talk, adding a brief review of recent work by researchers of complex systems (with a focus on complex social systems): A-L Barabasi, S. Pentland, N. Eagle, NECSI, and C. Hidalgo.

I followed up the Complexity and Creativity talk with recent material from the Maker Entrepreneurs talk at Barcamp Boston. With the theme of communities in art and technology- the narrative flowed from academic researchers, to how the ideas could be applied to art pieces (PDX I Love You), to how developing a maker community, and empowering individuals to be entrepreneurs, can lead to stronger and more adaptive organizations that can better meet the most difficult challenges we face today.

Of interest to me in particular was a talk on Collision Collective, a group in the boston area passionate about the intersection between art and technology. One of the recent collaborations of the group has been at the Charles River Museum, which has provided members of the group commisions on steampunk work, and has provided a venue for the group to meet and display work. Such a model is exciting- the collaboration allowed memebrs of the colelctive to pursue their passions, and still be sustainable.

The final speaker was incredible. Joe Davis, a researcher and artist based at MIT, spoke of his many art+science projects. Such a boundary between disciplines does not exist with him. Both sides of the work he does play off each other, his artwork pushes scientific inquiry, and he uses high-tech to construct elaborate art pieces. All the while you try to make sense of the artwork you’re seeing, you also try and make sense of Joe Davis.

One of the stories he shared was of a Harvard physicist who visited Davis’ lab space, and Davis told him of some of the work he was doing. The physicist claimed it impossible, but Davis showed him the work, at which point he was invited to Harvard the following week to speak of his results.

Most of all it was amazing to be in the Mass Art space and exchange thoughts and ideas with the students there. I look forward to the growing collaboration.

Posted on June 14th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , ,

Barcamp Boston 6 talk about Maker Communities

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

I knew I wanted to give a talk about the social context of design at Barcamp Boston 6: there would be tons of people thinking of product development, marketing, start ups, open source tech, and entrepreneurship- why not describe some of the things I learned in design for empowerment and how they could be both profitable and socially conscious?

Adam Hasler (Dorkbot Boston) and Ben Sugar (who also took DFEX) agreed to join in the presentation, and we crafted a talk that would be an overload of ideas meant to inspire a discussion.  We wanted the talk to be interactive, and excited discussion that would trickle out of the room and continue through the rest of the weekend.  We made sure to include audience engagement throughout the talk- through back chatter and quick interactions- and left a good amount of time at the end for others to speak.

Take a look at the slides to get an idea of the talk:

Maker Entrepreneurs
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The discussion was pretty exciting. Some notable comments from the audience were that :

+It can be easy to fall into an us vs them against coporations, but not all corporations are bad- they can be created as platforms to work for you.  Some corporations take principles from healthy communities in their development- Southwest and Virgin were cited- and we can learn a lot from these companies.
+While changing the corporate landscape could be difficult, the interest in widening connections of the maker community is feasible- the qualities of an entrepreneur are invariant over many cultures, and these similarities could help spread the spark.
+One inherent value in makerspaces is their low barrier to entry.
+A potential source of funding for certain projects bourne out of makerspaces could be SBIR programs (small business innovation research)

Posted on April 16th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , , , ,

Complexity and Meaning

Monday, January 17th, 2011

As an artist and designer, I find meaning an essential concept to understand- you must understand the implications of what you make and how they measure up to your actual intentions.

I had the pleasure of giving the Patterns and Meaning lecture at the 2011 NECSI winter school.  It was my favorite lecture when I took the course, so preparing a talk on the subject was an exciting opportunity.  I’ll begin with the contents of the lecture, in particular how they unify many important ideas regarding meaning, and then describe how these ideas can be applied to designing experiences for groups and individuals.  I will follow that with a summary of my own explorations on meaning.  The lecture was originally developed as an exploration of complex systems as applied to art.

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Posted on January 17th, 2011 under Articles, Blog. Tags: , , , , , , ,

Complexity and Creativity

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

A talk I gave at the December 2009 Research Club brunch at Tribute Gallery on applying ideas of complexity to creative projects.  Applications of complex systems ideas in the projects HEXAGON and PDX I Love You are described in the presentation.  The talks were limited to five minutes each, and a transcript is included below.

Brunch #1 / Lecture #3 / Kawandeep Virdee Talks About Complexity from Research Club on Vimeo.

Complexity and Creativity

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Transcript

Posted on March 2nd, 2010 under Articles, Complexity and Creativity. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,