This is very interesting, and great to see an overview of exactly how many different indigenous languages there are in Australia. This indiginous language map was created by David R Horton and can be found over on the abc website. Originally created by AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies)

Found via the twitter feed of dotcommob, a charity helping to introduce technology into remote aboriginal communities.
They also need a graphic designer to help out with a bit of work, so get involved if you are interested.

The Vestri bike system concept designed by Charlwood Design is inspired by the environment of the modern city & uses wind power to sustain itself. Rental stations with vertical wind turbines are installed in the city. The Stations can generate power, lock bikes & transmit to a command centre. Users insert a credit card or a vestri card & borrow the unique bicycle. They can pre-book online, via sms or on the train. They can return it to a rental station with incentives in place such as credit towards a meal or a train ticket home to distribute bikes to high use areas. Since the turbines are not “on the grid” the stations can be relocated based on demand.

This post was submitted by Luca Abate.

Similar to google maps, but instead of using satellite images, Nearmap uses images shot from planes flying at 7000ft. This results in incredibly high resolution images. Cities are also mapped every month, with the ability to view the history of a location over time, by accessing the historical shots.

Harvested deep in the forests of Nicaragua, MR. USB provides the highest grade natural USB storage solutions for modern living. Only the ripest and juiciest USB devices are selected for consumer use.

Available in three delicious personalities, Mr. USB, Mrs. USB and Dr. USB, these nutritious USB morsels will both tantelise the taste buds and please the stomach.

This post was submitted by youhateplanes.

This is interesting: The guys over at the Interaction Consortium have made this visualisation of the use of popular websites in Australia. Via Pierre S.

What have you been up to Lately?
Not much really ;) – I’ve been really busy with my ‘real’ job (I’m a Product Designer for www.pollenizer.com) that doesn’t leave me with much time to walk around and take pictures. However I always manage to find some time once in a while and for example during the Easter week end I went for a little urban exploration to the old tram depot in Glebe – Photos coming soon ;)

How would you describe your work?
Fortunate. I never really plan my shots and just take what’s coming. I think it reflects on my work as my portfolio is a large melting pot of genres. I have a preference for street portraits but always find myself disappointed by my work in this area so rarely end up publishing anything in this domain…

When did you first become interested in photography?
I’ve always been interested in visual arts and when digital photography started to reach acceptable levels of quality at decent prices (that was about 8-9 years ago!) I made the move and bought my first digital camera. Digital photography was very appealing to me as it was taking off the cost of film processing and made learning photography much cheaper :) So I learned the basics with a couple of point and shoots cameras (always from the excellent Canon Digital Ixus range) and bought my first DSLR (Canon 350D) when moving to Australia about 4 years ago. That’s when I started to spend more time at taking and processing my photos.

What was the first photograph that you remember making an impression on you?
I can’t recall a specific example however I can tell you that I’m a big fan of photo-journalism and I always appreciate the lecture of the World Press Photo annual selection. The last photograph that made an impression on me was Brian Skerry’s “First encounter” . This is a brilliant photo and it looked fantastic on the Australian Museum’s wall where I saw it exhibited.

What equipment do you use for your photos? What’s your favourite lens?
A couple of months ago I bought a Canon 40D. I use it most of the time but still use my old Canon 350D as a backup/second body. I also have a couple of film camera, my favorite, and most used, being a Canon Canonet G-III QL17. With my Canon 40D my favorite lens would be my Canon 10-22 USM. It’s an awesome wide angle that opens a lot of creative angles on things :)

Can you tell us a bit about pxcream? What inspired you to create the site?
pxcream is an advanced photoblogging tool for semi pro and pro photographers. In other words this is a place where photographers can upload and showcase their pictures without all the bling bling of services such as Flickr. Flickr is great for photographic related social interaction, but it sucks when it comes to looking at pictures (ever tried browsing Flickr on a 20″+ screen? You’ll find yourself looking at thumbnails of pictures surrounded by tons of mostly un-relevant information ;)). So pxcream was born out of the conclusion that there was a need for a photographic website that would put photos first.

Pxcream was chosen in the Top 100 Web 2.0 Applications in BRW Magazine, how far away are you from releasing pxcream out of private Beta?
So close but so far ;) The technical side of pxcream is already fairly mature. I’ve designed it so that it would be massively scalable (making extensive use of Amazon Web Services). However the product design itself needs (must!) be improved. It is now a couple of years old and could be so much better. I’m just taking the time to actually work on it and iterate the design toward something more usable by everyone.The good news is that I’m now looking at raising some money to give a new kick to the project. Hopefully in the next months I’ll be able to secure a first round of financing that will allow me to spend more time on the beast and get it to the next level. Stay tuned ;)

Any other photography projects on the horizon?
Most definitely ;) My experience with pxcream gives me a solid ground to build upon and I have a couple of ideas in my bag ;) But again it’s a matter of having the time to execute those ideas…

Which photographers have influenced you most?
It’s hard to tell. I really like the work of a painter, Edward Hopper, especially his urban paintings. His paintings have a look and feel that I’d like to reach one day with my photography ;)

Links:
www.mcfull.com
www.pxcream.com
www.thejuicycow.com

After the H.M.S. Bounty 1997

What have you been working on lately?
I am currently working on a project called “eMotion – Mapping Museum Experience,” which will analyse the art museum from a psycho-geographical perspective, encompassing the emotional, cognitive and physical effects upon viewer reception, and how those factors influence the decision-making processes of visitors. It’s a collaboration project between both scientists and artists that will be exhibited in June, 2009 in the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland.
The project is being developed with the Institute for Design & Art Research in Basel, Switzerland. This institute supports projects that push art or design from a research standpoint. This means that the final form of the project does not necessarily need to be art or design but it does need to answer critical art/design questions in the same way as any other discipline.

The challenge for me is to create an installation in an art museum that not only has an artistic dimension but also gathers empirically valid data for the sociologists, psychologists and other science members in the project.

eMotion - Mapping Museum Experience

How did you end up in Berlin, Germany?
After my BA in Fine Arts in COFA, Sydney, I received a DAAD scholarship in 1994 to study at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. This, you could say, opened my eyes to the possibilities of art making in Germany. Since then I have been in Germany with some time spent back and forth in Sydney and London.

I always liked Berlin because it’s a city that feels like anything is possible. Even when I was living back in Sydney I used to dream about living in Berlin. Likewise now I dream a lot about Sydney but mainly about its nature.

Myself, as well as the some 5000 other artists that live and work here, are attracted to the city for its central location in Europe, relatively cheap rent and cost/quality of living. For most artists here to exhibit, say, in London but live and work in Berlin is very manageable.
These are some of the reasons why I choose to live and work here.

How did you find integrating culturally into the German culture, particularly within the art scene?
I think that there is a lot of cultural cross-over between German and Australian culture. The clichés of strict German culture are–particularly in the case of Berlin–simply not valid. Likewise, Australian laid-backness isn’t all that true either, e.g. the ‘Howard’ years. So there are a lot of similarities between both cultures that I personally love and hate.

The concept of cultural integration isn’t something that I can personally relate to. Something like a trans-cultural identity feels more appropriate to me. This no doubt feeds into my art. Fortunately it
hasn’t been too much of a problem getting my work accepted and/or understood here.

Self Perception 2005

Your art installations are quite technologically advanced (motion tracking, sound networks etc). How do you go about constructing these installations?
I generally have a concept-to-realisation approach. My works usually take a long time from conceptualisation to finished work as I generally build them all myself. Many artists outsource the technical side to specialists. This can be a very effective way of working. The drawback is that if you (as the artist) don’t have direct contact with the material you lose out to the possibilities that the technology/medium can offer. Of course that means that you have a steeper learning curve but it pays off in the knowledge that you can re-use in later projects.

Do you have a typical creative process in generating new ideas and work?
I generally start out with an idea or concept and then find ways to realise it. I document all my ideas on paper and just let it sit for a while. Once I finish a project I go back to these sketches and pick out the one I think works best. Then I go about getting all the materials together and try to get it to work. Although I use a lot of technology in my work it isn’t a conscious decision to create art with technology. It simply feels natural to me. Technology and software are, generally speaking, very fluid media like plasticine that I feel very comfortable with. Of course the changing nature of this media can be sometimes very challenging to
exhibit but that’s one of the thrills for me in showing my work.

Pissoir 2000 by Allan Giddy & Steven Greenwood

Do you have a favourite artist, or artists?
I grew up on a diet of conceptual art and so was naturally taken by the eruption of conceptual creativity at the beginning of the 20th century. Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, Michelangelo
Antonioni and Yves Klein are a few of my all-time favourites.

Where do you find inspiration?
Life’s unplanned series of events.

What can we expect to see from you in the future?
My work will continue to concentrate on themes surrounding memory, virtuality and the physical, perception and self perception. Parallel to the Emotion project I am developing a series of net art objects.

Links:
www.telesthetic.org
www.mapping-museum-experience.com

How did the idea for VideoTrace come about?
The technology around the extraction of 3D from image sets (including video) has advanced a lot over the last 10 years, but no one had figured out an accessible way to extract usable 3D geometry. We set out to make 3D modelling from video something that anyone could do.

For something as involved as developing a project like VideoTrace, what does the development process look like and how have the team structures formed?
We’re a very small team, so there’s not a lot of structure necessary really. We’re very flat. I’d love to be able to tell you that we had three teams working around the clock on different continents, but what we really have is a small committed bunch of guys who do it because they’re interested more than anything else.

How was it when the project passed its first big milestone and you knew the technology would work?
That really happened about 12 hours before our first big deadline, and it was a wonderful thing. None of us were really sure we were going to make it, and there wasn’t a lot of sleeping going on. The fact that we were delirious could have been due to either factor.

How has the technology been received so far?
The reception has been amazing. I really didn’t expect it to be so popular. We crashed the web server with the number of hits we were getting, I was mobbed at the talk I gave about it at SIGGRAPH (the biggest computer graphics conference around), and I started getting so many emails I had to put someone in charge of reading them all.

How can the software be used by Artists and 3D game developers?
VideoTrace allows a user to model an object directly from a video. Generating a low polygon count, but very usable model takes only a few minutes and is very easy to do. This means that you can model a lot of geometry very accurately and very quickly. It’s not going to replace a full modelling package, because a lot of what you’re doing in a full modelling package is not really about accurately reproducing existing geometry. It does mean, however, that you can generate a simplified but accurate model of the real geometry in minutes. This makes it very easy to generate scenery for games because you could model the buildings on a street in 10 minutes in order to get depth for compositing for example, or you could spend an hour generating a really high fidelity model for a racing game. The limit of the fidelity and accuracy of the models is really just a question of how much time you want to spend doing it.

For the nerds: What programming languages and hardware systems were used in developing VideoTrace?
The system is written in C++ and QT. We develop on Mac, Windows and Linux, so it’s platform agnostic from the ground up.

How does the technology and talent standards within Australia rate and how would you compare it to what is developing in the rest of the world?
The only real difference is the amount of money being spent. We have really good people here doing great things on the cheap. That is right until they get bought up and moved elsewhere. There’s just not enough business investment in research here I’m afraid.

What have been some of your other career highlights that you are most proud of?
Presenting VideoTrace at SIGGRAPH in front of 4000 people was certainly a big one, and when the whole audience gasped at the same time is something I will certainly remember.

Where do you find inspiration?
I just really like technology I’m afraid.

For the up and coming students: for someone interested in learning and developing these sorts of technologies, what are the skillsets and qualities needed?
A good solid Computer Science degree is the first thing, and good maths the second. Everything else you can learn afterwards, but if you don’t have those it is pretty much impossible to get into this kind of technology. The opportunities in this area at the moment are fantastic, there are a lot of well paid and very interesting jobs out there for Computer Science graduates at the moment

Links:
www.acvt.com.au/research/videotrace/
www.acvt.com.au

VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video—models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video

Amazing.