A red herring is used in narrative story telling as a diversion from the plot. In this video however, the viewer is not mislead in any way, shape, or form.

This is a "rip-off" from a scene in Lars Van Triers Medea, with an alternate ending. It was an assignment for a video class with Christian Moeller at UCLA in 2006.

A couple struggles to communicate in a convaluted world of words. Starring Carel Struycken and Nancye Ferguson, with editing help from Aaron Ohlmann.

Yawning is one of those archaic functions of the human brain and body that has alluded scientists for ages. I took a fancy to one theory in a publication called Neuroimage that suggested yawning is “part of a more general phenomenon of unconscious signals that serve to synchronize group behavior” which “would be essential for a species survival and works without action understanding, like when a flock of birds rises to the air as soon as the first bird does so” (via worldscience.net)

Needless to say I got super excited when someone on YouTube asked to use this video for their experimental research on the subject. When I inquired as to the nature of the experiment he explained:

We’re still at early stages but we predict that contagious yawning is linked to empathy ie. those who have more ‘theory of mind’ or who have more empathy are more likely to yawn contagiously. We‘re linking this idea to autobiographical memory by suggesting that people who have earlier childhood memories have greater theory of mind and so are more likely to yawn.

In conclusion, this video could very well be the perfect test of your friend, family member, or lover's true empathetic potential. Be sure to let me know of any findings memadaa at gmail.com.

One day I was very sick and completely incapcitated by the virus that had co-opted my cells and basically snatched my body for its own devious purposes. Apparently, people with ebola are a larger percentage foreign invaders than they are themselves...imagine if that virus had a more animated plan for the bodies they invaded. In any case, this is a tribute to the pathogens that live through and between us.

I recently received an great random email from a friendly internet stalker with some more interesting insights in viruses. Reproduced here:

Commenting on another random internetism of yours: Bacteria, beyond being our much-maligned endosymbiotes and ancestors, and all of that -> are able to exchange genes with each other. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer)

For some reason I think this is a metaphor for personality that will explain a lot about people's behavior with information technology. ("will explain" - as in, as we get in deeper with this series of tubes) (as in -> somewhat discrete entities, at least for operational purposes, but able (unable not to?) exchange important/utterly useless pieces of information directly into neighboring lives. (or not neigboring))

one of the most elementary questions in psychology classes investigating the boundaries of the self is the following: if you were asked to drink a cup of your own spit, would you? The answer is most often a unanimous no. I decided to try it out.

The same friendly internet stalker from above also had this to say:

I think we're at pains to define ourselves in basically every possible way, as humans. I think we desperately need to define our bodies by difference and make it absolutely clear that our fingernail clippings, our shit, our spit and our skin-dust are not ourselves. Hence why we throw our spit away, however precious and however potentially and actually bodily intimate we are with it. It's sad, but it probably explains why consumption and physical affection and all those acts whereby we don't cast off but we take up are so .. not sad? Whatever.

On October 29th 2007 myself and a group of fellow UCLA students celebrated the Internet’s birthday. We tied ourselves together into a physical network that grew as we walked around campus and expanded. We snagged people eating their lunch, people going to meet with TAs, and people who spontaneously stuck in our web of yarn the whole day.We also went and visited Leonard Klienrock, the man responsible for getting the first message from UCLA to Stanford through ARPAnet on this day 38 years ago.

By physicalizing the Internet we got to visualize our love for it, which I’ve realized is really important to make clear, considering how much it's shaped our lives. A pretty spot on editorial ran in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago by a student at Yale [ Nicholas Handler ] who deemed the current 20 something generation the ‘post-everything generation.’ He writes

"the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s – it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there."

I was glad to hear someone put that out there, and though i don’t completely relate to everything he writes about, I was somewhat surprised by how much flack he got, both in letters to the NY Times and the blog comment responses. Maybe it’s exaggerated to suggest that a revolution is taking place through online activism, but it seems that we’re a generation caught between hard-liners, be they liberals or conservatives, when in reality, polarities are just not of our time. We’ve been shaped by the Internet, by instant access and freedom to information, to multiple perspectives, to self-directed learning. Somehow, the cliched baby-boomer critique is akin to the ‘this’ll come in handy when you’re older, just you wait and see’ explanation of schooling, when in reality the outside world is ripe with context and it's tradition that keeps us in a classroom absorbing abstractions on a blackboard. Just as we are expected to learn a particular way we are expected to rebel a particular way while the context has completely changed, and just as the sixties generation strove to re-define themselves on their terms, we have to define ourselves on ours. For the time being, though this generation of multiplicities may not have found a unified political cause, the one thing you can be sure we’ll rally around is the Internet.

The End of Money was the last last show at Billy's Coffee Shop / INMO Gallery, which was forced to close because Inmo wasn't all that interested in what the average art dealer might call marketable artworks. We had a week to build up the gallery and essentially create an alternate universe governed by an economic system of our own invention. We conceived of a performance based economy that would essentially re-value social interactions as a form of currency. There was a rotating bartender who assigned people tasks (go find 5 people who are cold and make a human heater, for example). People were encouraged to modify the system as they saw fit and the performance economy thrived until a black market emerged and eventually chaos turned into anarchy after a raptuous drum circle took hold and the bar was raided. Overall, the greatest finding of the experiment was that in our temporary society, alcohol consumption was at an all time low, without being at the expense of fun. Perhaps time should be invested in the development of more dynamic and creative social lubricants.

A typical Saturday night in the company of my machine.

Inspired by, ZOLTAN, among other things.

I made this clock using a stepper motor, and an arduino board in Casey Reas' Programming Media class. Keep an eye out, it may make an appearance on a wall near you.

In space, there really isn't an up and down to the solar system–what we call up could be down and visa versa for all I care. In that case left is right and east is west and upside down is right-side up. We can look at it at an angle too. Then none of our directional conventions make sense.

This simple determination of the direction of all things, by someone(s) at some point has lead to so many complex socio-cultural models which have shaped our perception and minds, and in return, which we apply to almost everything and anything, anywhere.

How would a change in perception evolve in a space colony if these directions are nulled and everything is in constant movement, in all directions? What will that society be like? How will their minds work when they don't have these trite, earthly limitations?

My response:

It's interesting how stuck we get in certain modes of perception - at my scale, I'm convinced that as i sit, just chilling in this chair desk chair I'm not moving very much at all BUT IN FACT I am moving at !!! 1040 miles/hr !!! around the Earth's central axis. On top of that, I'm revolving around the sun at 30 km/sec, and the solar system i inhabit is moving around the galaxy at 250 km/sec. Of course, we can't neglect to consider the rate at which our galaxy is moving in the local group of galaxies, 300 km/sec. AND IF WE CRASH BACK DOWN TO EARTH to notice the atoms and molecules vibrating at top speed just to hold each human body together, my previous notion of stillness is thrown up and my mind marvels at its extrapolated perception, and it's habitual ignorance. We're so convinced that we're contained in these bodies, mostly impenetrable, when in fact we're just a fluid process of matter in constant motion. BUT this is quickly becoming something else. End of transmission.

It's just an ordinary day in downtown LA...UNTIL! a lone creature with unusual social customs decides to make contact. To some it's just a meeting with an odd girl in a red leotard and red face-paint, to others it is an invitation into a fantasy world that only reveals itself in full on video. Painting the Town documents a spontaneous exploration of chroma-key compositing performed on the streets of Downtown Los Angeles.