Random

Last weekend I participated in Startup Weekend Utrecht. At almost 100 attendees, we’ve got the 8th floor of the Nijenoord building pretty stocked. As I predicted, I got an idea during the pitching process. Luckily I was able to pitch it anyhow and after the voting procedure the announcement was made that I made it to the top 13 viable ideas. So now I had to go and create a team!

The Quantified Self is all about getting data about ourselves. We distill information and use that to our knowledge to improve our lives and that of others. Self-knowledge trough numbers. As we use algorithms in our lives we don’t think that often about how they see us, but this is exactly what the New Aesthetic is about. And here’s the cross-over between the New Aesthetic and QS. Machines and algorithms run our lives, and how they look at the world causes us to act.

At the third Quantified Self Conference in Stanford last week I gave a talk about Plugin Heuristcs, a term that describes something I’ve come across during my years of self-tracking experiments. Here are the slides:

Plugin Heuristics confines an architecture that I propose for self-tracking things with a side-effect. For example when tracking my food intake for at least a month, it changed the way my brain remembers all the things I’ve eaten.

So much projects, so little time… But hey, let’s just use some of my spare time for keeping you guys updated on the stuff I do. I’ve been doing several things, but the most interesting right now is a new iPhone app concept that we’ve been developing since last month. Together with Nils Waanders and Willemijn Edens we are creating an app which helps people save water while showering. It’s called Showertrack.

The way we are building Showertrack is an excellent example on how to create something in a more freeform way, or lean if you want to call it that way. We don’t seem to have office hours or office space. We are however supported by people like Arjan Haring and Matt Wallaert. Utrecht Inc. also lends us space for creative processes.

The concept is coming along nicely, we’re done with our first wireframes, have a look below:

I like Storify, a service that lets you curate your own story based from sources like Twitter, Facebook or other social networks. And sometimes I wonder what would happen if you let people curate it live on a beamer during festivals or want to use it for public talks… Then the website isn’t that handy or slide-enabled. But it shouldn’t be that hard to extract all data from Storify and glue everything together into a slide-ready format right?

Together with my brother I run a little experiment called Hoofdbeelden. It’s a exploration for both of us as an artist and how we can use data generated by me as a person can be used for audio/visual performances. We’ve had a few gigs so far, but our last at Fiber Festival certainly made sure for the both of us that this is something we want to do.

In short Hoofdbeelden is a system which allows us tap into devices hooked onto my body for real-time information. I wrote a little piece of software which reads all different kinds of devices and outputs OSC (Open Sound Control) messages so my brother can use those for visuals.