Army Goes Ghost

What the U.S. Army has to do with Sarah Palin, the Terminator and Men in Black.

Holograms may be the stuff of CNN laughability these days, but it turns out the U.S. Army is working hard on the real stuff. According to Dr. John Parmentola, Director of Research and Laboratory Management with the Army’s science and technology office, they are “making science fiction into reality” using quantum computing.

Here’s the gist: There’s a special kind of photons that don’t bounce off of objects but off of other photons, which have bounced off of objects themselves. This causes the object to be reflected in the second set of photons, creating a “ghost” image. Hence, the technique name: “Quantum Ghost Imaging.”

The Army hopes to use it in confusing the enemy with objects rendered through smoke and clouds. And we thought ghost soldiers were the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.

The interesting part is that the military has been dabbling in quantum mechanics, neuroscience and robotics a lot lately, making nice with scientists and major research universities so they can grab revolutionary technologies before the general public.

Remember the Boston Dynamics Big Dog that shot straight to the YouTube top a few months ago? The technology was actually developed years ago and its possible military applications were first discussed by roboticist Rodney Brooks in his TED talk back in 2003. They’ve also dabbled in stem cell research for “growing back” body parts, turned to neuroscience for memory-erasing amnesia beams, and looked into controlling robots with nothing but thought.

Creeped out yet? You should be — it’s scary, Big-Brother-meets-Terminator stuff. But it’s also exciting to observe the mind-blowing scientific and technological progress of our day. That, and we loved the amnesia beam in Men In Black.

via Fast Company

Geek Mondays: Dating Data Art

Why 1.7 million people yearn to have their balloons popped every day and what the MoMA has to do with matchmaking.

Jonathan Harris, of We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt fame, is one of our all-time favorite data artists working in what we like to call “information aesthetics.” His ability to take pure information and transform it into pure visual magic is the epitome of modern concept art. And his last project is nothing short of that.

I Want You To Want Me explores our quest for love in the now mainstream world of online dating, which draws over 1.7 million web romantics every day. The project, commissioned by the MoMA, dissects the personal dating profiles, which themselves are meticulously curated presentations of how we’d like the world to see us and what we’re looking to find in it.

The interactive installation is displayed on a 56″ high-resolution touch screen hung vertically on the wall of a dark room. Visitors can control the weather on a digital sky, where hundreds of balloons float. Each represents a single dating profile and is coded for gender and age by color (blue=male, pink=female) and brightness (bright=younger, dark=older). Inside each balloon is one of 500 video silhouettes, showing a solitary person engaged in a particular activity listed in their dating profile — yoga, air guitar, jumping jacks, you name it. Viewers can move the balloons inside the sky at different speeds, activate thought bubbles for the people trapped inside them, and even pop them.

The installation pulls data every few hours from dating profiles all over the world. Each movement highlights a different facet of online dating: Who I Am explores the revelation of the self, Taglines takes the taglines of people’s profiles and puts them in a DNA-like helix symbolic of human identity, Matchmaker offers a “resolution” of sorts by algorithmically matching people based on data from their online profiles, and Breakdowns offers insight into larger population trends from the world of online dating.

The project aims to offer us a glimplse of ourselves as we peep into the lives of others — a quest for self in the quest for love. It was installed at the MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

It is part of the brilliant, brilliant Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition curated by the ever-amazing Paola Antonelli.

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Chris Jordan’s Photographic Visualizations of Excess

What Van Gogh has to do with Big Tobacco and how piles of folded laundry put the prison system in perspective.

The best of art is about something bigger than aestheticism, something that reflects on culture and makes a social statement that moves people. The work of artist Chris Jordan does just that. It grabs culture by its most unsettling truths, then displays them in gripping visuals that are part data, part philosophy, part brilliant photographic art.

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, Jordan’s latest project, exposes those hidden layers of consumerism, the big truths we give little thought to, by putting the devastating scale of our cultural excess into perspective. A visualization of statistical data, the project attempts to bring a human perspective to the alienating world of numbers.

Each statistically accurate image is a collage of miniature photographs portraying a specific excess:  The 15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes, the 106,000 aluminum cans we chug every 30 seconds, the 3.6 million SUV’s we buy every year, the 2.3 million Americans in prison, and so forth.

Plastic Cups depicts the one million plastic cups U.S. airlines use every 6 hours. Looking at the image from far away, it resembles a neo-industrial landscape where factories are spewing filth into the sky. Closer up, it transforms into a series of interwoven pipes. And really close up, you realize these are all stacks of actual plastic cups.

Barbie Dolls exposes the 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries performed in the U.S. in 2006 through an equal number of Barbie dolls. The soft natural curves of a woman’s body seen in the full-scale image stand in stark contrast to the plasticky unrealness of the dolls in the close-up.

Denali Denial paints a portrait of the parts of nature we’re losing thanks to our reckless unsustainable habits. The image is composed of 24,000 logos from the GMC Yukon Denali, equal to six weeks of sales of that model SUV in 2004.

Watch Chris Jordan’s eye-opening TED talk where he talks about his art, probes uncomfortable truths, and compares public reaction to the 3,000 deaths in 9/11 with the lack thereof to the 11,000 deaths from smoking that day and every other day.

What we admire most is that his art doesn’t aim to point the finger but, rather, to put our individual role as change agents into perspective.

In a world where large numbers have become practically meaningless, it’s easy to glide over the piles of zeroes, but it gets a little harder when we’re looking straight at the building blocks of our apocalypse.

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The Mother of All Music Visualization

What global warming has to do with the formative role of music in 20th-century culture.

Two of our most popular recent stories, the fan-made Goldfrapp music video and the brilliant new album by David Byrne and Brian Eno, meet today in the mother of all music visualization.

After observing how reactive traditional music videos are, with their meticulous film direction, legendary motion graphics designer and ex-DJ Jakob Tröllback began an experimental animation project. He took David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 25-year-old track Moonlight in Glory and completely removed the human producer/director element, letting the music itself be the voice that the animation follows.

The result is a stunning visualization that makes the music, as well as its message, all the more impactful — and we’re particularly mesmerized by it because it tackles the rather timely, pressing issue of environmental apocalypse.

Watch Jacob Tröllback’s full (and by full we mean 4-minute) TED talk about it.

Meanwhile, enrich yourself with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ freshly released book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.

If there ever was a grand revelation of music’s formative role in social psychology and cultural anthropology, that would be the one.

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