Yuri's Night World Party at NASA/Ames Research Center: April 12, 2008, Part 8
http://www.ynba.org/2008/
Written by Dennis Gonzales.
Photography by Jim Taylor, John Schultz, Kyle Cavallaro & Paul Langston.
Interview with S. Pete Worden by Dennis Gonzales.



Art and Science (Continued)

Tim Thompson, software engineer and artist, demonstrated for the first time "Finger Painting with Planets," an interactive installation using FingerWorks iGesture multi-touch pads in a custom-built controller. The installation let people place objects in space; gravitational attraction between the placed objects produced graceful movements that were translated into visuals and sound. Knobs and buttons on the controller were used to adjust parameters. A keyboard was used to select notes for the accompanying music. From MIT Media Lab, Gene Shuman presented ìEpimorphism,î a vibrant high precision simulated video feedback.





Argentinean-born electronic musician, sound and multimedia artist, Luis Maurette, presented "Color Space," an interactive three-projector video installation based on RGB color space theories. Participants walked inside the color space, observing colors as they combined to form new hues and gradients.






NASA Ames's contractor Planners Collaborative set up a trail of beautiful banners on the tarmac. Called "Flight Path," it was a tribute to past aero and space explorers. The company also presented the Y-Prize bus.





Lisa Schile brought her SWARM of rolling robot ORBS that evolved into complex formations of light, pattern, and music in response to the environment. (SWARM is a collaborative project featuring members of the Flaming Lotus Girls, the Sunflower Robots Project, and members of the robotics, kinetic art, and Linux/open source communities.) The ORBS, one of the most unusual autonomous systems on the tarmac, were controlled by a heavy, battery pack-powered, reactive ballast. A drive motor spun the shell against the ballast, causing the orb to roll. A steering motor tilted the ballast, allowing the orb to steer.


To read more about the SWARM at Yuri's night 2008, go to CNET News.


The Long Now Foundation brought the Rosetta Disk, a physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. The Diskís surface, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: "Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,000 human languages assembled in the year 02002 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 15,000 pages of language documentation." The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk. (The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages. Since becoming a National Science Digital Library collection in 2004, the Rosetta Archive has more than doubled its collection size, now serving nearly 100,000 pages of material documenting over 2,500 languages-the largest resource of its kind on the Net.)


Instructables shared their web-based documentation platform from the community on what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others. As their site explains, "the seeds of Instructables germinated at the MIT Media Lab as the future founders of Squid Labs built places to share their projects and help others."


NASA released their World Wind SDK for Java a while back and Peter Kirn, using globeSynth, pulled topographaphical data and satellite imagery of the Earth's surface, and transformed it into real-time 3D visualizations and music.





The solar energy company, PointFocus demonstrated their method for making power through reflective lenses through the use of mirrors and lenses.





Mark McGothigan and his Mad Scientists offered a video presentation, "Cosmonauts Monument," that was a 21st century visual representation of the Cosmonauts Monument in Russia that honors manned space flight. His inspiration for this piece replaced the hard metal of concrete achievements with the illusion of video montage to illustrate how scattered our thought processes have become.


NASA Ames presented "Viewpoints from Hyperspace", "Return to the Moon!" and the lunar lander project "Hover Test Vehicle". They also reprised the Telescope Viewing Area on the tarmac, one of the most popular demos at the previous yearís event.






Brad Bebout, of NASA Ames, returned with his "Microbial Mats" booth, a demonstration of Earth's earliest ecosystems, complicated communities of microorganisms that are relevant to NASA missions, our search for life elsewhere, and the quest for economically-viable biofuels.



Marcus Murbach, of NASA Ames, gave a talk about Sub-Orbital Aerodynamic Re-entry Experiments (SOAREX). SOAREX utilizes sounding rockets to test advanced re-entry probes, including the self-stabilizing Slotted Compression RAMP probe or SCRAMP and the hypersonic waverider lifting body. SOAREX also conducts research into simplified planetary entry, descent and landing technologies; sensor and instrumentation development; hybrid rocket propulsion and novel planetary rover design.


NASA Ames Earth Sciences Division presented the SIERRA UAV for public awareness, an unmanned aircraft that helps firefighters battle forest fires. The plane, an adaptation of the Predator drone used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, can stay airborne for more than twenty hours. It uses an infrared imagery system to identify hot spots and can transmit that information instantly to firefighters across the state. The infrared vision looks through the smoke and creates what's virtually an MRI of the fire and can make tactical decisions almost in real-time.


Daniela Steinsapir utilizes her extensive understanding of multimedia and experimental art as a means of engaging with the relationship between mass production, technology, and the psychological state of society. Inspired by The Tin Man from the wizard of Oz, her Tin Girl was an interactive electromechanical video sculpture created from found (discarded) materials, and capable of sensing humans. When Tin Girl sensed someone, a light turned on and a video was captured and recycled inside the robot's eyes.


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