Lo and Behold

I'd been waiting for Werner Herzog's new documentary about cyberspace, & I finally caught it on the last day it was playing at a neighborhood theater. Lo and Behold was originally conceived as a series of promotional videos for the network management company NetScout, but in Herzog's hands it turned into a feature-length documentary. The film is in 10 pithy chapters, on topics ranging from the creation of the Internet, to colonizing Mars, to reading the brain's thoughts directly. Herzog interviews engineers, scientists, businessmen & hackers, as well as people who have in some way been victims of technology.

In the opening segment, Leonard Kleinrock, a chipper UCLA professor, enthusiastically shows off the 1st computer on the Internet, as the overture to Das Rheingold plays on the soundtrack, & the rest of the movie is similarly layered with ideas. I was delighted to see an interview with Ted Nelson, computer visionary & weirdo who invented an alternative version of hypertext decades before the World Wide Web. He is Herzog's kind of guy.

I had no idea that fabled hacker Kevin Mitnick would be so cheerful & such a terrific story teller. His talent for social engineering might be more dangerous than his computer skills. I felt I needed to learn more about the story of cybersleuth Shawn Carpenter, who is far too casual describing how to get spyware onto someone's computer.

There are plenty of odd moments. I could not help staring at the pile of pastries in front of the pained Catsouras family, who describe the trauma caused by photos leaked onto the Internet. The sight of orange-robed monks checking their cellphones on the Chicago lakefront prompts Herzog to wonder, "Have the monks stopped meditating?" Elon Musk looks preoccupied & worried, even before Herzog volunteers to go to Mars in one of his spaceships.

Some of the ideas presented are highly speculative, but I love that Herzog gets provocative answers when he ask experts if the Internet dreams of itself. I am skeptical of the brain scientists' frightening claims to be able to read thoughts, but it seems quite valid for physicist Lawrence Krauss to ask, "Will our children's children's children need the companionship of humans, or will they have evolved in a world where that's not important?" It all adds up to a feeling that we are at a turning point in human consciousness.

§ Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016)
A film by Werner Herzog 
98 min., USA

SF Opera iCalendar Fix

The calendar page on the San Francisco Opera website has an iCalendar link which I thought would be handy for importing their performance calendar into my Google Calendar. However, when I tried it, Google Calendar only created one event. There's a slight problem with the file, but after a bit of hacking, I came up with a fixed version. If anyone would like to give it a try, I've uploaded it here. For the tech-savvy, I've also made it available on github.

Maker Faire Bay Area 2015

Last weekend I was in San Mateo for the Bay Area Maker Faire, an exhibition emphasizing the intersection of art, play & technology.

I was there helping out Chris Jefferies, who is a friend & an advanced hobbyist. At his booth he demonstrated how to build sensor networks suitable for home automation.

The faire has also become a fashion-forward consumer trade show, with lots of small vendors & startups offering productized versions of many of the technologies on display.

The fairgrounds were packed both days, & the lines were so long at the food stalls that we gave up trying to buy lunch during the midday hours.

The event attracts affluent families, & there are lots of activities for kids.

I was enamored with the Steampunk village, set up like a gypsy camp in a corner of the fairgrounds.

I always enjoy the fanciful Burning Man vehicles. They seem to belong to another world.

My favorite object at the faire was this magnificent orrery, showing the planets revolving around a sun spouting real flames.

When I arrived on Saturday morning, not all the planets were rotating correctly, so Neo had to climb a ladder & give them a push to get them going.

I've been at Mr. Jefferies's booth for most of the years he's been exhibiting, & I've clearly backed the right horse, because on Sunday he was awarded an Editor's Choice ribbon. His ability to explain technical concepts to attendees was cited particularly.

§ Maker Faire Bay Area 2015
Saturday May 16th   10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, May 17th   10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
San Mateo County Event Center

Bay Area Maker Faire

Thursday afternoon I was at the San Mateo County Event Center with a friend who is exhibiting at Maker Faire over the weekend. This year the faire opens a day early, with an "Industry Day" preview on Friday afternoon.

It was nice to walk around & see some of the exhibits going up.

The faire breathes a free-wheeling, anarchic atmosphere which is naturally appealing to kids.

It attracts a lot of affluent families, & exhibitors are increasingly vendors & major corporations.

My friend attends as a hobbyist, demonstrating how to build networks of sensors that could be used for home automation. But very often people come up to this booth and just ask what he's selling. It makes me wonder if people have a hard time interacting with things that they can't buy.

§ Maker Faire Bay Area
Friday May 15, 2015   1p - 5p (Preview Day)
Saturday May 16, 2015   10a - 8p
Sunday May 17, 2015   10a - 6p
San Mateo Event Center

SFIFF58: Deep Web

Last Monday night I attended the San Francisco International Film Festival screening of Deep Web, Alex Winter's up-to-the minute documentary about Silk Road, the online black market, & Robert Ulbricht, the man recently convicted of being its founder & owner. Mr. Winter uses the story of Silk Road to raise issues of anonymity, privacy, freedom from government coercion & the war on drugs. Interview subjects include journalists, cryptography experts, lawyers, law enforcement, anarchist hackers & former Silk Road administrators. It's hard to miss the poster of Ed Snowden in the office of WIRED journalist Andy Greenberg or to disagree when EFF lawyer Cindy Cohn asserts that "An observed life is not a free life."

Deep Web is also a work of advocacy. It portrays Mr. Ulbricht as a benign & idealistic young man who wants to make the world a better place. Though he is not interviewed for the film, we get to know him through family photos, personal videos & testimonials from his family, friends & colleagues. The movie strongly hints that the government violated Mr. Ulbricht's 4th Amendment rights. The festival audience laughed when security expert Nicholas Weaver characterized the government's account of how it found the Silk Road servers as "vaguely connected to the truth."

Following the screening, journalist Susie Cagle showed slides of her illustrated coverage of Ulbricht's trial, which she described as "absurd theater." Her account suggests that the judge's ignorance of technical issues played to the advantage of the prosecution. Festival programmer Sean Uyehara then led a discussion with director Mr. Winter, EFF lawyer Ms. Cohn & Ms. Cagle. We learned that Mr. Winter destroyed all his source material as soon as the film was finished, so that there could be nothing to subpoena. The quotable Ms. Cohn asserted that this is a golden age for government surveillance & that it is hard to get a fair trial when the government won't give away how it finds out things.

The screening was full, & I sat in the balcony of the Kabuki Cinema, where a lot of people were eating. Keanu Reeves was in attendance, though I did not spot him. He narrates the film, which includes a bit of computer animation recalling The Matrix. He was also reported to be at Dosa across the street afterward.

§ Deep Web
Director: Alex Winter
2015, USA, 91 mins.

§ 58th San Francisco International Film Festival
May 4, 2015   9:00 p.m.   Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
May 6, 2015   2:00 p.m.   Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

Trevor Paglen at Altman Siegel

This week I checked out the handful of works by conceptual artist Trevor Paglen at the Altman Seigel gallery at 49 Geary. Mr. Paglen investigates secrecy, communications technology & government surveillance, & though his art is part documentary, it is not self-explanatory. Code Names of the Surveillance State is a video scroll of the nerdy, boastful & funny names of NSA spying programs. Large photographs of people at the beach are paired with annotated maps revealing that these are also landing sites & choke points for the undersea cables carrying the world's Internet traffic.

Inside a curtained room, a projected video gives us a long, continuous shot of the GCHQ's UFO-like headquarters, filmed from an aerial camera that circles the building & occasional zooms in on cars & employees.

This sculpture of computer parts sealed in a plexiglass container looks like a skinned Power Mac G4 Cube, but it's a functioning wi-fi hotspot which communicates with Websites through the Tor network, a protocol designed to disguise a Web user's location. It is difficult to give concrete, visual form to subjects that are by nature hidden & recondite, but I found the exhibit a bit spooky nonetheless.

§ Trevor Paglen
March 5 – May 2, 2015
Altman Siegel
49 Geary Street, San Francisco

SFIFF58 Opening Press Conference

Yesterday morning the San Francisco Film Society held the opening press conference for the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, which runs April 23 to May 7. Executive Director Noah Cowan gave us an overview of this year's films & events, along with programmers Rachel Rosen, Rod Armstrong, Sean Uyehara & Audrey Chang.

The printed program groups over 180 films under blurry categories like "Masters," "Global Visions" & "Vanguard" but is difficult to navigate. There is definitely a strand about technology, starting with opening night film Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, a new documentary by Alex Gibney. Mr. Gibney will also be interviewed onstage in a separate Cinema Visionaries event. Alex Winter's documentary Deep Web explores the trial of Silk Road owner Ross Ulbricht. Special effects master Douglas Trumbull will discuss new immersive cinema experiences in a State of Cinema talk, & Nonny de la Peña will talk about using technology to create immersive journalism.

Guillermo del Toro & Richard Gere are among the special guests receiving awards. Performance artist Miranda July will do a live event involving audience participation. The Kronos Quartet will accompany a film constructed from World War I footage. Films about music include a Brian Wilson biopic & documentaries about Nina Simone & The Residents. The documentaries City of Gold, about food critic Jonathan Gold, & Very Semi-Serious, a look at The New Yorker's cartoonists, should be entertaining. Monte-Cristo, a 3-and-a-half-hour French silent film from 1929, will be presented with a recorded soundtrack as part of an afternoon with subtitler Lenny Borger.

Ms. Rosen announced 3 films not in printed program: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Overnight & Ride, with Helen Hunt acting, directing & writing. Mr. Cowan tried to end the event without a Q&A, but a few media representatives piped up with questions anyway. I felt sorry for the publicity staff, who had to check in attendees using a multi-page list that did not have our names in alphabetical order.

§ Festival Website | Film Finder | Calendar | Program Guide PDF | Tickets

§ Opening Press Conference
March 31, 2015
The Crown Room of the Fairmont San Francisco

§ 58th San Francisco International Film Festival
April 23 - May 7, 2015

Maker Faire Bay Area Town Hall Meeting

Tuesday evening I was at the Maker Faire Town Hall Meeting, a general meeting & mixer for exhibitors at the up-coming Maker Faire, taking place May 16th & 17th in San Mateo. This is the fair's 10th year, & Maker Media has done a tremendous job of building an affluent, family audience, which in turn is attracting major corporations. This year there will be a soft opening on Friday afternoon, which raises the bar for exhibitors who want to participate fully.

Dale Doughtery, the fair's exuberant founder, addressed the gathering & pointed out that most everyone present was white. The Bay Area version of the Maker Fair is less diverse than New York's, & he wants to change this.

The event took place in a workshop space in The Palace of Fine Arts Exhibition Hall, which Maker Media is rebranding as the Innovation Hangar.

§ Maker Faire Bay Area Town Hall Meeting
February 24th, 2015, 7p
Maker Media Lab
The Palace of Fine Arts Exhibition Hall

§ Maker Faire Bay Area
May 16 & 17, 2015
San Mateo Event Center

The Interval

While at Fort Mason today I discovered that the Long Now Foundation has remade its vague storefront space into a fancy bar called The Interval. The Long Now was founded by people who did well in the 1st tech boom & is a think tank for ideas about planning & sustainability over very long time periods. Their flagship project is the 10,000 Year Clock, a huge timepiece built inside a mountain & designed to last for 10 millennia.

Bar decor includes an orrery, silhouette portraits of board members, & books neatly arranged on unreachable shelves.

There was a gathering of international students when I popped in to take a look. I was mistaken for one of their event speakers while I was perusing the drinks menu.

There's a nice nook with a bridge view in the back.

The place probably works better as party space than a bar or cafe, but someone with a laptop & cellphone managed to turn one of the few tables into an office.

Generous donors to the foundation may be allotted a personal flask of high quality gin, which hangs in a numbered space in the ceiling, awaiting their next visit.

SF DocFest: Ivory Tower

Monday night at SF DocFest I saw Andrew Rossi's Ivory Tower, a wide-ranging critique of higher education in the US. It's a sound bite documentary, containing snippets of inteviews with academics, students, parents, administrators & politicians. The film covers a lot of of stories, including the history of public education, the rise in tuition & student debt, the shift of education from a public good to a consumer good & the emergence of online courses, to name just a few. It adds up to a compendium of urgent issues rather than a specific argument.

Footage of students in luxury accommodations & at notorious party schools makes going to university look like a holiday cruise, while the study hall for Harvard's freshman computer science class looks like a sinister hive mind. The film's most dramatic storyline tracks students at Cooper Union who take over the president's office to protest the end of the school's tuition-free policy. I liked seeing alternatives to the 4-year university, such as Deep Springs College, whose curriculum is split between student-directed academics & manual farm labor. The uncollege movement refashions school as a tech startup.

One angry audience member could not refrain from uttering his opinions aloud & had to be sushed early on. The film may have left the DocFest audience depressed, since its ending was met with dead silence. Festival founder Jeff Ross & David Sapp of the ACLU led a discussion about some the film's issues afterward. Ivory Tower plays again at the Oakland School for the Arts on Sunday, June 15th at 5p. It also opens theatrically in the Bay Area starting June 20th.

§ Ivory Tower
dir: Andrew Rossi, 2014, USA, 97 mins.

SF DocFest 2014
Roxie Theatre, June 9, 9:15p
OSA, June 15, 5p

Bay Area Maker Faire 2014

I spent the weekend as a booth babe at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, assisting Chris Jefferies, who was exhibiting a wireless sensor network he built from open source hardware & software. In addition to a diverse range of sophisticated hobbyists like Mr. Jefferies, ...

... the fair hosts affinity groups ...

... & artists utilizing technology in novel ways.

There was discussion among the makers about how commercial the fair has become, & in fact most of the exhibits are products.

Big corporations have taken note of the huge audience & duly set up camp.

I didn't come close to getting around to everything, but I did see a lot of custom fabrication & 3D printers.

In the Dark Room, I caught feeding time at this jellyfish aquarium.

The fair has exhibits with flame throwers, but I had to sign a safety waiver just to stand next to some beehives.

This transparent beehive totally made me want to learn beekeeping.

The fair does a terrific job of being family-friendly, & I saw lots of kids.

Every little girl wore an outfit that was coordinated in some way, & even the boys dressed better than me on a good day.

§ Bay Area Maker Faire 2014
May 17 & 18
Sat. 10 AM - 8 PM | Sun. 10 AM - 6 PM
San Mateo Event Center

Setup Day at Maker Faire

This weekend I'll be at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, helping out at the table of my friend Chris Jefferies, who is demoing how to create a home wireless sensor network from open source hardware & software. If you ever wondered how to make XBee, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, Python, Node-RED & Graphite work together, check him out.

Friday was a setup day, & I got a chance to peek at some of the exhibits, such as this ethereal, illuminated forest.

I'm always awed by the huge mobile sculptures. This is as close to Burning Man as I'll ever come.

On closer inspection, this dragon turns out to be made of hardware more commonly used in kitchens.

This whimsical submarine looks convincing both inside & out.

An aisle over from where we were setting up, several people were busy putting finishing touches on this detailed landscape, ...

... composed  of intricate objects made entirely from masking tape.

At the end of the afternoon, massive mounds of paella were served to the makers, courtesy of Gerard's Paella. Mr. Jefferies & I dallied too long during setup, though, & were disappointed to discover that the beer ran out before we got there.

§ Bay Area Maker Faire 2014
May 17 + 80, 2014
San Mateo Event Center