Artificial Eye fALk

The worst possible scenario for me always was "what if the state has all my biometric data and can do with it whatever it wants". That is about to happen and even more as all german passport starting November 1st 2005 (in less then 4 weeks) will have an RFID chip implanted with all the data concerning your face and very soon - less then six month - it will also have fingerprints as an addition. All that stored on a remotely readable (read by anyone with a capable reader) RFID (remote frequency identification) chip. Now you might think that is not bad in itself as things on borders would speed up - until someone reads out your fingerprint and leaves behind a false trace on his murderous route, or you are protesting against the political system in 5 years time - the examples of missuse are numerous and generally the state shouldn´t know everything about a person - it was a concept called freedom some aeons ago.
Read also the press release from the Chaos Computer Club concerning the problem.

OUR ONLY WAY TO PROTEST IS TO GET A PASSPORT NOW BEFORE ITS TOO LATE - and as a benificial you get an old passport for less then half the price of the new one (around 25 euro compared to around 60 euro).

The loop contains images from my personal old passport happily usable until 2013 - hopefully mankind has awaken then and I will get a passport without all that crap (one can hope). Please redistribute this and spread the message.

Lovely music is from subatomicglue called aeonblue. Enjoy...

Three things grabbed my attention today: 1. The second paragraph of Declaration of Independence includes the lines, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, sic), it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it"2. Some enterprising flash programmers have put up an animation of the location and number of american casualties overlayed onto a map of iraq which is updated daily, and 3. The iraqi resistance has a website with daily updates of their activitiesfALk has also noted on his normal blog that the americans have killed more iraqi's than Saddam... so it just makes me wonder, how long before the american public awakes from its slumber, and brings the troops home from this ill planned, cynical neo-conservative nightmare? This mix is a re:vlog of the above elements, along with musical accompaniement from a US marine hendrixing the Star Spangled Banner from atop one of Saddams Palaces, taken from one of the trailers from "gunner palace."

From wikipedia: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but whose meaning is nonsensical. If you havent noticed, fALk's favorite colour is green, that of this blog and its elements... home of where "Newly formed bland ideas are unexpressible in an infuriating way." And this time without music :)

There's a cultural war going on that IMHO is far more determinative for our future than the superficial one being waged by the christian right against islam - a battle for our ability to communicate with one another creatively and interactively with the products of our shared culture. Todays vlogpost is a remix of the cover image from Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture some creative commons images, and Lost in the plot from The Dears, who took the SXSW festival this year by storm.Lessig talks, in the opening paragraphs of this phenomenal book about "Disney creativity,"--a form of expression and genius that builds upon the culture around us and makes it something different. Disney (or Disney, Inc.) ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture. Rip, mix, and burn. Most of the content from the nineteenth century was free for Disney to use and build upon in 1928. It was free for anyone--whether connected or not, whether rich or not, whether approved or not--to use and build upon, without permission. Yet today, the public domain is presumptive only for content from before the Great Depression. Lessig has been instrumental in the Orphan Works project as well, and is probably the most important contemporary legal activists fighting to maintain a common culture, and therefore our ability to collectively communicate with each other via the powerful tools that have been put on our desktop.As noted by Tom Sherman in 1996, "We are willing participants in the creation of a second nature. While the biological world is collapsing, we are busy constructing an elaborate media environment."Lets hope this environment wont collapse as well.

So the truth has to come out...falk has been so busy NOT posting to the blog that i sort of put an unofficial boycott on myself since my content was filling up the site (and this is supposed to be a group project!)... but since its been soooo long, i figured, well, better get SOMETHING up... so if u could just imagine for a second that i havent been posting to the site because i suffered a Distributed Denial of Service Attack, well, u might understand why we have been so b0rk3d around here this last month. How's that for a good excuse? Music is an unreleased IDM (intelligent dance music) track from a barista named Bayrak who makes my daily fredocino in the gourmet coffeeshop i frequent in istanbul, which now has WIFI. What a great combination.

According to recent studies completed at the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard University "Apparently our hunger for novelty begins with the eye itself, as the retina adapts to seek the unexpected, and ignore the commonplace". Japanese researchers have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced. Pretty soon u just wont know who around you is a cyborg, no matter how artificial your eyes are :) Music to this post is appropriately titled "pull" by soplerfo from The Ep For Dogs