Toshio Iwai, a well known media artist and creator of Nintendo DS non-game title Electro Plankton, was in San Francisco a few weeks ago to demo his latest co-creation, the Tenori-On. His presentation not only included a breakdown of the Tenori-On’s development process, but also video from an SNES project that never got released (too ahead of its time?) and his various installation work.

Yuki and I had the chance to talk to him after his presentation, apparently he coded the demo for Electro Plankton himself in C++ because he “had been using it over the years for [his] installation work” and he felt that the concept would be misinterpreted if only presented in a document. Neat! His presentation was totally inspiring, filling me with so many ideas! I only wish that the beautiful magnesium, robot hand polished, 256 LED sporting sequencer was being released for less than $1,200.

I attended the opening of fellow ACiD member Lord Jazz’s exhibit in San Francisco Saturday night. The small venue was absolutely packed. The ANSI is being displayed on light boxes and LCD’s. You can see the process of creating the exhibit material on Lord Jazz’s webpage. The exhibit runs until February 3rd.

I have been keeping my eye on an interesting game engine named Unity. The first Unity users conference, entitled Unite 2007, was held in San Francisco last week; I was asked by Gamasutra to cover the event! This was my first time to officially cover an event and resulted in my first two press credits. It turns out that covering an event is way less stress than running an event and way more stress than simply attending an event. Other than some formatting errors, I think that the following two posts turned out pretty well, thanks to Brandon Boyer for editing and to Brandon Sheffield for supporting my involvement.

Day 1:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15815

Days 2, 3; Event Wrap Up:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15851

Other impressions not conveyed in the two reports above: the Unity user community is super friendly, this was really clear. The founders of Unity Technologies are fashionable and exude a lot of confidence and enthusiasm. What I like about them is that anything is possible; they are not an arbitrarily closed black box, marred by bureaucracy, rather they are open to feedback and are very flexible about policy, preferring to form good relations and do what it takes to get thing done. Another admirable quirk is that they profess to borrowing good ideas when they see them, implementing them in Unity “only better”. They seem to be sticklers for doing things well or not at all. I look forward to future developments in their product; if they can stick to their ideals Unity will continue to grow feature rich without sacrificing usability.

This weekend I had the pleasure… neigh, the privilege of attending the Accelerating Change conference at Stanford University. This is a futurist conference produced by the non-profit organization ISAC – The Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change.

The attendees and speakers represented a wide range of people from many various backgrounds… in summary: interdisciplinary… but futurists one and all.

The highlight of the conference for me was when Doug Engelbart; inventor of the mouse shook hands with Richard Marks; inventor of the Eye-Toy following Richards’s presentation which had followed Mr. Engelbart’s. man…

David Brin was also VERY entertaining.

I was pretty much in amazement the entire weekend… and guess what the overwhelming view of the current political/world situation was by some of the world’s leading pioneers of technology, business, entertainment, and futurism was??? come on… guess! It turns out that intelligent, forward thinking people see the America of today very similarly…

I would like to make a point that Futurists and Integralists are not Democrats, despite that we all voted for John Kerry. Liberalism and Conservativism are really outdated concepts… though very much active today in the majority of the world’s populace.

It is really a question of Progressive vs. Regressive, Pragmatic vs Inane. I have a lot of problems with Liberals, Democrats, and Kerry… but the problems with the Neo-cons and Bush are far greater. I look forward to a day when good ideas can win over more people than outdated ideological/tribal allegiances. A day when someone who is actually qualified for office is able to effectively run for office.

This was an email that I sent to my family after September 11th:

I am far from home, working hard every day on my documentary, having computer problems, and am not doing as much Zen/kung fu training as I'd like to, due to the fact that I'm exhausted. Yuki has said that she's not sure why I'm sending this… I'm not either… guess I just wanted to share some thoughts that I had today with those I love:

Dear family,

I'm sure that in times like these it doesn't take a yoga master to feel the strange energy… or chi in the air. For myself, I have been feeling lots of this strange chi ever since I arrived in Sri Lanka. A friend of ours who is very spiritual says that it is from all of the fighting in the north of Sri Lanka. Actually, I believe her. Negative energy (and positive energy as well) have infinite chain reaction effects. In addition to this, televising negative or angry emotions actually amplifies the effects of this kiai. I have, in truth, been almost unable to eat. I also feel a very hot … or angry chi through my whole body.

As I had mentioned to my father this morning, although this act of violation is media worthy and poignant to the status of the world view of westerners, this tragedy is not as big or any more important than the many sufferings that go un-noticed throughout the world… ethnic cleansing in Africa for instance. Yes, I feel an unbearable compassion for this tragedy… but such an act also serves to bring to my awareness the suffering happening all over the world. Suffering and images we usually try to block from our minds.

Yesterday's events on American soil are not unique. In fact tragedy is as much a part of life as joy. Indeed it can even be stated that tragedy is joy and that joy is tragedy and that these are constructs of our minds… unable to exist without one another. But for us who are unenlightened to this truth (me included) it is clear that our perception of tragedy and joy have noticeable effects on our lives.

Even though thousands of lives have been claimed by this terrorism, how many more lives will be claimed by malnutrition, cancer, aids, and car accidents? Indeed suffering is all-pervasive. But just as there is no end to suffering, there is no end to joy as well.

I would like to end by quoting from the Hagakure (a samurai manual):

It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this.

There is nothing outside the thought of the immediate moment.

A famous Chinese monk is said to have awaken from a dream where he was a butterfly. At that moment he was unable to say whether he was a Butterfly dreaming that he was a Monk, or a Monk who was dreaming that he was a Butterfly.