You stroll through a gallery of items donated by people who for one reason or another decided to display their memories of past relationships and the stories that accompany them.  Some stories are just one word – but that can be enough.  With others you read the donators thoughts, and experiences, and while you stroll through their memories, you’re recognizing your own, and also, recognizing a universality.  All of the stories are so different, so unique, but, they’re also all the same.  A long line of poetic tragedy’s of love.  This, maybe, we can all understand. 

The items might come from Zagreb, or Ljubljana, Berlin, New York, Las Angeles, Montreal, London, Belgrade, Tehran, and more.  The people in the museum are from backgrounds as diverse as the exhibit.  But, you all leave with the same thoughtful acknowledgment of what you just saw.  The entertaining ones, the more lighthearted, are there punctuate the others.  But, after reading the story about the olive seeds, you might take a few hours to recalibrate your emotions. 

As the friend I was with said, “I could donate a whole room to this museum.” (I’m not sure we’re all that bad.)  One item is all you need.  These are just a few pictures from the shorter stories(hard to get a good picture of the longer ones).

Classically defined “seabirds” spend the majority of their lives at sea only returning to land to breed. They live longer, breed later and expend more resources nurturing fewer young than other birds. When exposed to even small amounts of oil they lose their buoyancy, their ability to regulate body temperature and often their ability to fly. They are thereby forced to return to shore early in an attempt to survive.

We want people to extrapolate their own conclusions based on the parallel we’re presenting. Our take is that current right-wing policy diminishes women’s freedom to explore, learn, cultivate resources and make choices regarding their role in society, especially regarding their approach and investment in child rearing. Oil spills are representative of the anti-sex education, anti-choice, and anti-birth control stance many right-wing pundits have been aggressively perpetuating in the media. While returning to shore is synonymous with mating and bearing children.

Did I say yes? Because I meant HELL YES. You have until May 6th to see it at Gainsourg. Live without regrets. Go!

This piece is titled “Period”. We traded a vegan cookie for the egg, which came from a duck who was rescued by Tiffany Young, a board member of Northwest Animal Rights Network. Even backyard eggs involve suffering and death but this beautiful creature is not kept for her egg production…in fact, her eggs are usually fed back to her! As they should be.

]]> http://reactionaryabsurdistparty.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/zombie-hotline/ Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:38:53 +0000 Patrick Neill Gundran http://reactionaryabsurdistparty.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/zombie-hotline/ It’s Easter and in honor of our favorite zombie, Jesus H. Christ, here’s some music I recorded awhile back as Almost Certain Death called “Zombie Hotline.” Enjoy the static and remember, aim for the head.

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Last summer, I was drawn to a black spot painted on the side of an old structure at 17th & Yesler in Seattle’s Central District. I took a pic and made it my cellphone wallpaper until I got rid of the thing. The year prior, I did a series entitled “Shadow People” that consisted of single black spots painted on found wooden drawers. Apparently, I identify with lonely black spots. Anyway, when curating Occupy The Walls, I heard about a street artist going by the name of Drinkwater, and one day, I spotted a man carrying a ladder and a bucket of paint away from the corner of 17th & Yesler and I had a feeling it was him. Lo and behold, the black spot had been covered up with a vibrant mural! Drinkwater, for sure. It was like an alchemical process had occurred and I was tied to it. Though my black spot is covered up, it remains underneath…lurking like my black heart.

~ Patrick

~ Patrick

~ Patrick

Tim King of Salem, Oregon~

Tiffany Young of Seattle, WA~

Pete Keller of Seattle, WA~

Hopefully they will inspire more of you to artful action. ~Patrick

Totally fucking rad, right? It gets bigger. The fine folks at Because We Must altered the message to be more inclusive and put it on a fair trade tee shirt. Proceeds from the sales go to SARC, Portland’s nonprofit sexual assault resource center which provides community education, free mental health services, and 24 hour crisis intervention and support. You know you want one.

Do something today to inspire political art.
Send photos to reactionaryabsurdistparty@gmail.com.

We at Reactionary Absurdist Party headquarters would love to see what you are sending back to companies on their dime. Email photographs of your efforts and we just might post them on the blog to inspire others.

~Patrick

~ Patrick

In October 2011, I had a show entitled “Bottled Fears.” There were 13 bottles that I glued onto tiny burnt shelves and mounted along a wall. Inside each bottle was a typewritten fear of mine and water. Twine connected all 13 bottles together along with a large jar entitled “Your Fears”. I asked that visitors write down their fears with paper and pencil and place them inside the jar. I promised to burn them after I took the show down as a way of releasing them. Before I set fire to them, I scanned all the fears and made a slideshow that you can view here.

~ Patrick

Roksana Mical

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Eugenio Recuenco

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Fuco Ueda

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Alastair

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Zdzislaw Belsinski

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Harry Clarke

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Hush

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There have been some posts before about the gene regulatory network engine that is developed at Almende. This post shows one of the results of the integration of this engine with the 3D robot simulator, Symbricator3D, in the FP7 Replicator project.

Each robot runs the same gene regulatory network. The movie shows only the result of the evolutionary process. In the evolutionary process itself groups of robots compete with other groups of robots. The group of robots with the right gene regulatory network does have a fitness advantage compared to the other group. In total 32 groups of robots have been competing to create a so-called glider. A glider is a repeating pattern that can be found in cellular automata. It is a pattern of 5 units. By applying the local neighbour rules of the Game of Life it moves diagonally over the 2D grid. This can be seen in the picture at the left from wikipedia.

Metamorphosis

Although it might seem far fetched on first sight, a glider is a very special type of “organism”. Its “body shape” changes continuously over time. Most of the research with respect to gene regulatory networks is tailored to development. The creation of a static body layout. Or the creation of a locomotion pattern that corresponds to a static body layout. The glider is, however, a dynamic body form. It can be seen as a trivial example of metamorphosis. As everybody knows, the cells in our body are regenerated in, say, every 7 years. We do not have a static set of cells at all. During puberty suddenly a bunch of cells start to undergo transitions again. With wounds we are able to regenerate tissue. Cancer might very well be in certain cases errors in the gene regulatory machinery. Aging is related to the inability to maintain this homeostatic balance with continuously changing subcomponents.

Implementation

This movie shows the result of an evolution process (which will be published in the ANTS 2010 Proceedings later this year) that creates a simplified glider. The robots are not able to dock diagonally, so a Von Neumann neighbourhood is used. The colours indicate the state of the robot module. The state is uniquely defined by a vector of all protein quantities in each module. The gene regulatory network is a matrix that takes this vector as input and produces a new protein quantity vector. When the robot is blue it wants to dock, when it is red it wants to disconnect, when it is purple it wants both. As soon as the robot modules are connected an additional mechanism comes into play. The proteins generated by both gene regulatory networks are now able to flow into the other module. The new state of a modules does not only depend on its previous state (the protein quantity vector) of itself, but also the one of its neighbour. This allows the module to “change mind” as it gets connected to another module, and request a disconnect again.

The simulation does abstract from the process of finding a robot module and docking to it. This has been shown previously in the sensor fusion movies. A combination is needed to completely implement the metamorphosis process on the real robots.

There are many morphing robots around. Okay, perhaps not that many. However, the ones in Replicator (and Symbrion) distinguish themselves from the crowd by the enormous amount of sensors that are on them. That is why sensor fusion is such a very important topic in the first place! A robot of 10 modules, with on each module 4 cameras makes a stunning amount of 40 cameras! That’s why such a developmental engine is being built.

But this post is not about the Replicator software. It is about a soft morphing iRobot. This iRobot has been presented at the IROS 2009 conference. It is a ball with a shell that exists out of compartments. By vacuum some of those compartments expand which makes it possible to create a blob on one side of the ball and starts it rolling.

And, what if they can sense light or warmth! Imagine enormous large morphing balls rolling through the desert getting energy from the sun. Freaky!

The software and movie is created by Anne van Rossum at Almende B.V. in the European FP7 project Replicator. Software is open-source and freely available at https://svn.almende.com/svn/replicator.

The software and movie is created by Anne van Rossum at Almende B.V. in the European FP7 project Replicator. Software is open-source and freely available at https://svn.almende.com/svn/replicator.

Cochleogram representation and acoustic saliency maps in parallel with retinal and visual saliency maps. The acoustic saliency maps are not “easy to read” because frames from left and right sides are shown interleaved. It is just to show that acoustic saliency maps might be considered similar to visual saliency.

The software and movie is created by Ted Schmidt at Almende B.V. in the European FP7 project Replicator. Software is open-source and freely available in the near future…

There is a movie out! It starts with the different dockable robots, continuous with some sensors that will be placed on them and adds with a view of the Hardware-In-the-Loop simulator, where several Cortex microcontrollers attached by serial to the simulator control a robot organism, and finally shows some simulation about the type of caterpillar locomotion we want to achieve in the future (but which is controlled by one global controller by now).

Sorry, I am asked to temporarily remove the movie.

[Submitted by Anne van Rossum]