See especially his Wii project on head tracking and the $14 Steadycam. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/academic/

The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information--too often leaving users with "Where am I?" puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time. To do so requires increasing the information resolution of the screen by the hardware (higher resolution screens) and by screen design (eliminating screen-hogging computer administrative debris, and distributing information adjacent in space). This video shows some of the resolution-enhancing methods of the iPhone, along with a few places for improvements in resolution. The video is essential to the essay below. Made in January 2008, using the original iPhone. This video is also available on YouTube and Vimeo In 1994-1995 I designed (while consulting for IBM) screen mock-ups for navigating through the National Gallery via information kiosks. (The National Gallery had the good sense not to adopt the proposal.) For several years these screen designs were handouts in the one-day course in my discussion of interface design, and were then published in my book Visual Explanations (1997). The design ideas here include high-resolution touch-screens; minimizing computer admin debris; spatial distribution of information rather than temporal stacking; complete integration of text, images, and live video; a flat non-hierarchical interface; and replacing spacious icons with tight words. The metaphor for the interface is the information. Thus the iPhone got it mostly right. Here are pages 146-150 from Visual Explanations (1997):

I recently visited the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. This is one of the few museums in the United States devoted to the work of a single artist. Both the artworks and the museum are wonderful. O'Keeffe's catalogue raisonné contains 8 especially intriguing paintings from 1976-1977 that depict a subtle varying gray field (appearing as a rectangle in perspective) against a luscious blue sky background. These paintings reminded me of some photographs of my landscape work Escaping Flatland 1-10 against the sky. Below, photographs by Andrei Severny of my stainless steel artworks, the series Escaping Flatland. Immediately below, color graduations in an O'Keeffe painting, followed by studies of color graduations in photographs of Escaping Flatland:

A useful way to monitor access attempts to your computer is Little Snitch 2. LS2 is described by its developer as follows:

"As soon as you're connected to the Internet, applications can potentially send whatever information they want to wherever they want.

Sometimes they do this for good reason, on your explicit request. But often they don't. Little Snitch allows you to intercept these unwanted connection attempts, and lets you decide how to proceed.

Little Snitch informs you whenever a program attempts to establish an outgoing Internet connection. You can then choose to allow or deny this connection, or define a rule how to handle similar, future connection attempts. This reliably prevents private data from being sent out without your knowledge. Little Snitch runs inconspicuously in the background and it can also detect network related activity of viruses, trojans and other malware."

Here's a recent report that indicates Adobe CS3 InDesign calls home to a web monitoring/marketing agency when the user opens InDesign. The IP number given by Little Snitch, upon an IP search, identified the agency as Omniture. Is Adobe a client of Omniture or Ominture a client of Adobe?

This video is also available on YouTube and Vimeo

Rocket Science, my landscape artwork, was recently installed in rolling meadow surrounded by local, middle, and distant horizons. Rocket Science is ~32 feet (10 meters) high and ~72 feet (22 meters) long, and is constructed from ~48,000 pounds (22,000 kilograms) of rusting scrap steel. The picture above shows, for scaling purposes, the artist (6 feet, 1.8 meters tall) standing inside the spaceship at upper right. Below: Mike Nitowski, the welder from United Concrete who worked on Rocket Science, crawled 72 feet (22 meters) up the hollow tube in the fuselage and spacecraft emerging to see the fine view. The picture resembles a 1930s Soviet workers-paradise poster: Rocket Science casts amazing shadows down on the rolling land, shadows that flow across the land and move up the sloping hillside as the Earth rotates and the sun sets. Here are shadow pictures taken from my spacecraft perch looking down to the ground. Note the distortions in the shadow shapes. In creating the piece, I expected some good shadows to show up, but these exceeded my expectations. The distortion of the human form is an especially happy result. The shadows formed by the 3 legs should be interesting but shadows cast by nearby trees masked the leg shadows during this photo shoot. Eventually we'll make a time-lapse video of one full day of shadow-flows (as Andrei Severny and I did for Larkin's Twig here). Following an afternoon atop Rocket Science, I called for a rescue mission. Conducted by Commander Andy Conklin, the mission arrived smoothly in due course. As seen in the shadows below, Andy climbs aboard the spacecraft from the rescue vehicle: After rescuing the camera guy, Andy conducts our long voyage (32 feet or 10 meters) back to Earth. One reason that outer space activities produce intriguing images (other than their intrinsic content) is the complex and unfamiliar points of view that naturally occur in front of the cameras of astronauts and cosmonauts. Here we see the spacecraft, its shadow, and also the shadow of the rescue platform. This flatland image becomes coherent when we realize that the rescue platform, where the photograph was shot, is in front of the rusting steel spacecraft; thus the camera is looking down into the spacecraft and further down onto the shadowed ground below (with the sun in back of the camera shining onto the artwork). Theory of Rocket Science Rocket Science surprises, generates stories, presents self-contained paradoxes, is self-contrary. On Rocket Science paradoxes and internal contradictions: RS is massive, assertive, made from grossly industrial materials; BUT RS is toylike, funny, surprising, installed at a modest low point in a small valley that makes RS's massive size tiny compared to the surrounding landscape, treescape, viewscape. RS is toylike BUT RS does not appear to be an uncontextual enlargement from a small model, but rather it appears as a piece and place in scale. RS was created at actual size from the scrap metal that went into the piece. Then, again at full scale, RS was revised during construction and installation. A small model was used late in the process to adjust the angles of the legs and to provide a guide for the engineering of assembly and welding. RS has a strong symmetry about the fuselage and spacecraft axis: BUT the RS legs are strongly askew. The RS symmetry about a central axis combined with the crew headquarters in a capsule at the top is likely the best design for space vehicles (Apollo, and the new post-Shuttle generation of space vehicles carrying humans--Constellation, Ares, Orion). Such symmetry is contrary to the design of the current Shuttle (with its pretend airplane) that has contributed to its chronic difficulties. Better also to place the crew at the top end of the rocket, in front of the launch debris-shower in an unromantic capsule (no landings by astronaut commanders) as is the case for Apollo and the forthcoming Orion/Ares. Thus, RS has the symmetric architecture for the vehicles of the future BUT RS is crudely assembled, amateur rocket science. Construction of Rocket Science At United Concrete in Wallingford, Connecticut, a pre-launch high-level engineering meeting of Bruce Woronoff and ET. We used Advanced Design System Methodologies to plan Rocket Science, as can be seen in our working drawings below: Here is the first time Rocket Science got off the ground. At the factory, the fuselage and spacecraft were connected by a temporary tack-weld for the lifting shown at right. I then concluded that the fuselage was stubby and needed to be longer by about the distance between the rear 2 circular plates at the back of the spacecraft (about 10 to 12 feet, 3 to 4 meters). The resulting fuselage seam can be seen on the built piece. Below, our model of Rocket Science. A little cardboard human provides a sense of scale. I looked at many photographs as well as the model itself. Some images are desaturated to calm down the surface texture on the model. Installation of Rocket Science The United Concrete factory-built kit (some assembly required) for Rocket Science consisted of 8 items: fuselage, spacecraft, 3 legs, and 3 concrete mounting pads (each weighing 12,000 pounds or 5,400 kilograms). The installation took all weekend, with work late Saturday night. The main tasks were: (1) attaching the spacecraft to the fuselage, (2) attaching the 3 legs to the fuselage, (3) tying the leg baseplates to the concrete pads and tying the pads together by underground steel, (4) cleaning up the fields under and around Rocket Science. Here is our movie showing the 2-day installation: This video is also available on YouTube and Vimeo Photographs by Andy Conklin, Andrei Severny, Edward Tufte.

Here's the first version of this sculpture, a steel and bronze Buddha, supported by the three cylinders of wisdom (perhaps a reference to the Diamond Sutra scroll books), sitting on a stone. The new version of this artwork is below, deeper into the thread: Buddha also appears in my Beautiful Evidence (at page 87) in the discussion of the Diamond Sutra: Photographs by Andrei Severny.

NPR interview with ET about the exhibit. Amanda Gefter, "ET Escapes from Flatland," New Scientist Benjamin Genocchio, "Science and Art, Melded in Sculpture," The New York Times Diane Dewey, "Aldrich Features Edward Tufte Exhibit," ARTES Patricia Rosoff, "Edward Tufte: Seeing Around," Art New England Marx Dorrity, "Edward Tufte's Rocket Science," Chronogram cover story Patricia Rosoff, "Edward Tufte at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum," Sculpture Lyra Kilston, "ET, Pioneer of Visual Data Analysis, on His First Major Museum Show," Modern Painters Josh Morgan, "Tufte Continues to Dazzle with Larger Than Life Works," Cheshire Herald Jen's Museum Experience, "At the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum" Sheila Carroll "Field Trip for Art," Looking Out from Central Massachusetts Susan Hodara, "A Master of Two Dimensions, Plus One," The New York Times Alan Bisbort, "Seeing Around with Tufte," Waterbury Republican American Over the years, I have had shows at Artists Space in New York and the Architecture+Design Museum in Los Angeles. In both cases, I exhibited about 20 prints and a few sculpture pieces. Now the Aldrich Contemporary Art Musuem has invited me to create a major show for 2009-2010. I will have lots of space, including the museum's 1.5 acre sculpture garden for ten months. I'm delighted for this inspiring opportunity. Here are the dates: Opening reception: Sunday June 21, 2009, 3.00-5.00pm. Exhibits in the galleries and on the Main Street frontage: June 21, 2009 to August 30, 2009. Exhibits in the Aldrich Sculpture Garden: June 21, 2009 to April, 2010. Here's a description of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, from their website: The Aldrich is one of the few non-collecting contemporary art museums in the United States. Founded on Ridgefield's historic Main Street in 1964, the Museum enjoys the curatorial independence of an alternative space while maintaining the registrarial and art-handling standards of a national institution. Exhibitions feature work by emerging and mid-career artists, and education programs help adults and children to connect to today's world through contemporary art. The Museum is located at 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877. For more information call 203.438.4519. The eighteenth-century "Old Hundred" building appealed to Mr. Aldrich because of its high-ceiling rooms and the extensive backyard that would be suitable for the year-round sculpture garden he envisioned. The Larry Aldrich Museum was incorporated as a nonprofit and opened in November 1964 as one of the country's first museums devoted exclusively to the exhibition of contemporary art. In 1967, the Museum was renamed The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, with an original Board of Trustees that included Alfred Barr, Joseph Hirshhorn, Philip Johnson, and Vera List. Foremost in Mr. Aldrich's vision was that the Museum should make contemporary art accessible to a variety of audiences. Over the course of its forty-year history, The Aldrich has become renowned as a national leader for its presentation of outstanding new art, the cultivation of emerging artists, and its innovation in museum education.

Several months ago 32 sheep visited our sculpture field; here is a video showing sheep interaction with many of the pieces. Encouraging visitors to interact with the art--and even to touch the art works--is a current trend in museum installations. The interactions in this case include rubbing up against the artworks and eating the grass around the pieces.

This video is also available on YouTube and Vimeo

This video is also available on YouTube and Vimeo