time is funny

A Website for Synesketch, my new artistic software project for textual emotion recognition & visualization, is finished. There you can find a downloadable code, documentation, gallary, info, new logo design, and a community portal.

Moreover, a post about the Synesketch was published on the Infosthetics blog, a major weblog for data visualization and visual communication!

Thanks to professor Michael Haller and this very generous Austrian scholarship, I’ll be spending one full month, October, in Hagenberg, small place near Linz, playing/working at the Media Interaction Lab, Department of Digital Media, Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. It is a very cool place which glues art, technology, and interaction together, and probably best of that kind in Austria!

Also, the lab is connected with the world-famous Ars Electronica in Linz, a global leading platform for digital arts and media culture. I’ve missed the festival – Prix Ars Electronica, world’s premier cyberarts competition – but I can’t wait to see it’s Museum of the Future!

In a month or so, I’ll tell you my impressions.

“The Two Minutes of Eclipse”, a travel blog by Nenad Morača, Mario Janković-Romano, and me, about a 23 day eclipse chasing trip to Siberian and Mongolian never lands — is finished! All texts (unfortunately, still in Serbian) and 500+ photos, both geotagged on the interactive map, and more — could be found at:

http://sibir.krcadinac.com

So far (during last month and a half), blog had 20.000+ overall visits, or 350+ visits per day! Thank you all for reading!

Did you ever wonder how the emotion hidden in words could be transferred into the one caused by a picture? How do reading impressions look like? Is there a synesthesia-like abstract connection, hidden code, thread or a string, between poetry and painting? If yes, gather around, and let me tell you more about a new project of mine, about Synesketch.

Synesketch (Synesthesia + Sketch) is a bridge between words, images, and code. It is a computer program, free software library, interactive animation, and a creative open project for textual affect sensing and creative visualization of it.

Integrating several rather divers fields – natural language processing, affective computing, algorithmic visual art and design, animation, psychology and color theory – I have constructed a Java-based toy which scans a written conversation in real time (e.g. chat session), analyses emotional manifestations, and visualizes it via interactive algorithmic animated Processing graphics. Emotion types which can be recognized are the basic ones by Ekman: happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust (on the picture you can see representative frames of these types, done by a demo visualization system, from left to right, top to bottom). One of the concrete Synesketch applications is the visual chat: while we talk, colors and shapes are being generated.

Besides being a new media experiment, an “automatic illuminator” with “artificial synesthesia”, Synesketch is also an open source free library, so that other Processing designers and artists can create their own text-based interactive works.

But, this is only a glimpse of the whole project. A lot, lot more on Synesketch later. For now, take a look at my thesis, where all of this is explained in detail:

http://www.krcadinac.com/papers/synesketch_rad.doc (in Serbian)

Da li ste se ikada zapitali kako se emocija skrivena u rečima može pretvoriti u onu izazvanu slikom? Kako doživljaju tokom čitanja zaista izgledaju? Postoji li apstraktna veza nalik na sinesteziju, skriveni kod, između poezije i slikarstva? Ako da, poslušajte nekoliko reči o mom novom projektu, projektu Synesketch.

Synesketch (Synesthesia + Sketch) je most između reči, slike i koda. To je kompjuterski program, softverska biblioteka, interaktivna animacija i kreativni otvoreni projekat za prepoznavanje i vizuelizaciju emotivnog sadržaja teksta.

Integrišući nekoliko solidno udaljenih oblasti – procesiranje prirodnog jezika, afektivno računarstvo, algoritamsku vizuelnu umetnost i dizajn, animaciju, psihologiju i teoriju boja – napravio sam Java igračku koja čita tekstualne razgovore u realnom vremenu (npr. čet sesije), prepoznaje manifestacije emocija i vizuelizuje ih interaktivnom algoritamskom animiranom Processing grafikom. Tipovi emocija koji mogu biti prepoznati su osnovni Ekmanovi: radost, bes, strah, čuđenje, tuga, i gađenje (na slici se vide reprezentativni frejmovi ovih tipova generisani od strane demonstracionog sistema za vizuelizaciju, s leva na desno, od gore ka dole). Jedna od konkretnih Synesketch aplikacija je vizuelni čet: dok mi razgovaramo, boje i oblici se generišu u obližnjem prozoru.

Pored eksperimenta u oblasti novih medija, „automatskog iluminatora” sa „veštačkom sinestezijom”, Synesketch je takođe i open source besplatna biblioteka kojom svaki Processing dizajner i umetnik može praviti svoje interaktivne radove bazirane na tekstu.

No, ovo je samo najava. Mnogo, mnogo više o Synesketchu kasnije. Za sada, možete pogledati rad u kome je ovo opisano u detalje:

http://www.krcadinac.com/papers/synesketch_rad.doc

I was in a bus, sweating, a bit nervous, late for a discussion about the future of Web, about formal semantics, ontologies, and knowledge representation in general (my friends and colleagues from the Good Old AI research group organised it) and not prepared for it at all. The night before, I was reading (again!) a wonderful travelogue from Central Asia and it just didn’t seem important to gather information about microformats and RDFs and Tim Berners-Lee viewpoints…

So, the only thing left for me was to take out a book – Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino – and at least try to enjoy my bus ride. Feeling several different skins touching my skin, I managed to get lost in stories about cities and cities about stories, imaginably told to Kublai Khan by Marco Polo; one of those cities was Zora.

Marco (or Calvino) told Kublai (or me) that „beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city no one, having seen it, can forget. (…) Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower, the melon vendor’s kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the café at the corner, the alley that lead to the harbor. This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary infinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.”

A small eyelid-like pattern of dust on the bus window overlapped the stone eye of Dimitrije Tucović’s statue at the Slavija square, spontaneously forming a meaningful new portrait, and I realized that Zora was nothing but a semantic network, an upper ontology, with rigidly defined structure between concepts – just like an armature or a honeycomb; an objective formal representation of the world which could be processed by a machine (e.g. an intelligent agent on the Semantic Web) and which would make the programme understand the meaning, which would, in a way, make it think. In other words: Zora’s map is a gigantic RDF graph.

The dream held by AI researchers was similar to the one of Zora; by seeing what happened to this town (“Forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.”) one can ponder, as I did: Could it be that Tim Berners-Lee’s dream is just another Kublai Khan’s empire, tempting, yet evasive, ambiguous, impossible to posses, doomed to be forgotten?..

The bus, then, stopped.

After a screening in Moscow, Russia, in official selection of the Golden Knight (Zolotoy Vitiaz) Film Festival, film Self-Portrait will take part in NAFF, Neum Animated Film Festival (July 28 - August 04), Bosnia and Herzegovina, and BUSHO, Budapest Short Film Festival (September 03-07), Hungary.

In the just released Encyclopedia of Information Communication Technology, edited by Antonio Cartelli, you can find an article of Milan and me about software agents, written more then a year ago. (See the list of contributors.)

Self-Portrait entered the Red Stick International Animation Festival in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. Festival stated that they received “entries from 30 countries, and the quality of work was extremely strong”, so only the small number of films were chosen for screening.

“The Red Stick International Animation Festival is an exciting community event that converges the worlds of technology, art, entertainment and exploration. Though artists have always used the tools of their time, at no time since the Renaissance has there been a similar convergence of science and art. Artists draw and paint with computers, and scientists convey their complex theories in color and motion. The 2008 Red Stick International Animation Festival highlights this convergence celebrating art, motion, and exploration in downtown Baton Rouge April 16-19, 2008.”

Also, Self-Portrait will be screened at official selection programmes of Athens Video Art Festival (April 11-13) and Naoussa International Short Film and Video Festival (May 7-11), both in Greece.

(Between us, what is it with me to create things that Greek people like?! This is the 5th Greek festival that accepts one of my films.)

ASCII portrait of my J.

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