I made a website for Matt at www.sebastianinlandharbor.com

With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour

By RANDY KENNEDY (NYT) 1542 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 5

But the other day, a college student, Malena Negrao, stood in front of Pollock's "Echo Number 25," and her audio guide featured something a little more lively. "Now, let's talk about this painting sexually," a man's deep voice said. "What do you see in this painting?"

A woman, giggling, responded on the audio track: "Oh my God! You're such a pervert. I can't even say what that--am I allowed to say what that looks like?"

The exchange sounded a lot more like MTV than Modern Art 101, but for Ms. Negrao, it had a few things to recommend it. It was free. It didn't involve the museum's audio device, which resembles a cell phone crossed with a nightstick. And best of all, it was slightly subversive: an unofficial, homemade and thoroughly irreverent audio guide to MoMA, downloaded onto her own iPod.

The creators of this guide, David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan College, and a group of his students, describe it on their Web site as a way to "hack the gallery experience" or "remix MoMa," which they do with a distinctly collegiate blend of irony, pop music and heavy breathing. It is one of the newest adaptations in the world of podcasting--downloading radio shows, music and kitchen-sink audio to an MP3 player.

Specifically, these museum guides are an outgrowth of a recent podcasting trend called "sound seeing," in which people record narrations of their travels--walking on the beach, wandering through the French Quarter--and upload them onto the Internet for others to enjoy. In that spirit, the creators of the unauthorized guides to the Modern have also invited anyone interested to submit his or her own tour for inclusion on the project's Web site, mod.blogs.com/art_mobs. (Instructions are on the Web site.)

In the museum world, where the popularity of audio tours has grown tremendously over the last decade, the use of commercial MP3 players seems to be catching on. Officials at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis have discussed putting their new audio guide material on the Web for downloading to portable players. Last year, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo lent viewers iPods to use as audio guides for one exhibition, and Apple Computer has helped the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley of France do the same thing, using the sonorous voice of the actor Michael Lonsdale.

But the rise of podcasting is now enabling museumgoers not simply to enjoy audio guides on a sleeker-looking device but also to concoct their own guides and tours. A New York art Web site, woostercollective.com, recently made a sound-seeing tour of the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, which the Web site's creators made in hushed tones while wandering through the show, sometimes quoting from the museum's official audio guide, which they listened to as they chatted.

At Marymount, on the Upper East Side, Dr. Gilbert said he was partly inspired to create the unofficial guides after listening to the museum's audio tours for children, which he found much more entertaining and engaging than the new ones recently introduced for grown-ups.

But Dr. Gilbert said his larger point was to try to teach his students to stop being passive information consumers--whether through television, radio or an official audio guide--and to take more control, using as his model the guru of so-called remix culture, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School.

"It's not incumbent on us to, you know, praise the art necessarily," Dr. Gilbert said recently at the museum, wearing neon-green sunglasses and leading a group of students through the underground tour. "That's part of the playfulness and fun of this project. If we want to say something irreverent or something scathing about the art, that can come out." (In the name of politeness, the project's Web site does tip its hat to the Modern: "Apologia: We love MoMA. Hackers hack a platform out of respect for it.")

Informed about the project last week, museum officials declined to reciprocate with their opinions, but also made no comments about instituting an iPod ban.

So far, the unofficial guides cover only a few of the museum's works--by artists like Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon, Picasso, Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall, whose well-known "I and the Village" comes in for a critical pummeling by Jason Rosenfeld, a Marymount professor of art history, who calls it "the worst, most reductive kind of art" and blames Chagall for all the "ugly menorahs" and tacky stained-glass windows in modern synagogues.

"It's the worst style that ever developed in the history of art," he declares.

A visceral Bacon painting called "Painting" (1946) gets an all-music treatment that sometimes sounds like Metallica. Beckmann receives a dark hip-hop soundtrack. ("If anybody cares/ I'll be in the basement slitting my throat/ Happy New Year.") And the Pollock guide, while mostly sex-obsessed, does include the owner of the deep voice, John Benton, another Marymount communication professor, talking about Pollock's calligraphic technique and his references to Roman art.

But lest any of this become boring, the discussion is also sprinkled with driving guitar riffs from the 1970's song "Peaches," by the Stranglers, along with echo effects and the sound of a woman moaning in pleasure.

"That's not me doing that," stressed Ms. Negrao, a Marymount junior who is one of the women's voices on the Pollock guide. "That's a sound effect."

Last week, as she and her fellow students Liza Pastore, Cheryl Stoever and Aubrey Strickland gathered in a semicircle in front of the Pollock, other museumgoers crowding by would slow down and stare, wondering why the women were laughing and what they were hearing through those familiar white iPod earphones.

Later, in front of Ms. Sherman's "Untitled No. 92," the group roped in a stranger, Ashkan Sahihi, and persuaded him to listen along on one of their iPods to a funny and sometimes silly recorded exchange between students and professors about the photograph, with the soundtrack from the movie "Kill Bill" blasting in the background. Mr. Sahihi smiled and bobbed his head to the beat and later pronounced the student production much better than the last audio guide he'd heard (and that was an official one narrated by David Bowie).

"Anybody who listens to those guides that you really get in museums," he said, "you get pretty tired because usually it's a very drawn-out explanation of why the museum was willing to pay so much money for a picture."

"This is not just some expensive name telling me about expensive art," he added. "Plus, it's funny."

According to a report by Cahners In-Stat Group, the competition has forced severe price cuts already and will continue to do so throughout 2001. But the report predicts end-use revenue growth by early 2002 as 5-GHz technologies are deployed. The report also predicts that wireless LAN (WLAN) technology will be immune to the current economic conditions and will increase its total enterprise WLAN end-use revenues to almost $4.6 billion by 2005.

All this is good news for Intersil, which has spent the past year developing its direct-conversion Prism 3 chip set to cement its standing as a leading provider of WLAN chip sets, a position it shares with Agere. While Agere develops its own baseband and media-access controller and relies on Philips for the RF front end, Intersil, on the other hand, has been doing both. That is what separates the two companies and gives Intersil the edge in direct conversion for 802.11b radios, said Larry Ciaccia, marketing manager at Intersil.

"We took a system-level approach that tightly couples the baseband to the RF front end," said Ciaccia. "This is essential if a fully optimized zero-IF (ZIF) radio is to be achieved." The tight coupling allows Intersil to apply complex, nonlinear signal acquisition algorithms to control the automatic gain control (AGC) and dc-offset loop closures, which is a particularly difficult task in a WLAN environment.

"Because of the short packet preamble you only have about 10 microseconds to close," said Doug Schultz, a designer on the Prism 3 team. "Otherwise, you don't get the data." While targeting the short-preamble IEEE specification is aggressive, it allows the radio to achieve maximum throughput of 11 Mbits/s.

Cellular applications have been inundated lately with direct-conversion solutions from the likes of Analog Devices, Conexant, Parkervision and Texas Instruments. "While it's been done before, it's not been done for this application," said Schultz. "Cellular applications are full duplex and don't face the same time limitations when it comes to converging."

Schultz said that while Philips has already released a direct-conversion radio for .11b, it suffers from the fact that the AGC and dc-offset loops are completely self-contained. "You can't fully optimize for cost and performance with that type of design," he said.

Much of the cost reduction in direct-conversion radios comes from the elimination of the intermediate-frequency stage between the RF front end and the baseband. That eliminates many components, most notably the expensive SAW filter. Along with lowering cost and saving space, the smaller component count also reduces inventory requirements, saves on assembly and test costs and improves overall reliability.

In Prism 3, the approach has allowed the complete radio to be reduced to four main components — the ISL3871 baseband processor and media-access controller (BBP/MAC), the ISL3684 RF front end, the ISL3984 power amplifier and the ISL3084 5-GHz voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO).

"Keeping these stages separate allowed us to use the best technology and process for each," said Ciaccia. The BBP/MAC is done in a 0.25-micron TSMC CMOS process, while the RF stage and VCO are in Intersil's own UHF-2 BiCMOS process and the power amp uses IBM's silicon-germanium process.

Due to the 15 patents pending for the Prism 3 design, implementation details are sketchy, limited to "proprietary algorithms" for the acquisition processing and "proprietary layout techniques" to minimize local-oscillator coupling (to reduce the dc offset). "We also minimize coupling through the use of the UHF-2 process, which features extra layers for junction isolation," said Ciaccia. "And the inputs are fully differential." For the transmit side, the design uses "highly linear circuit design" with patented techniques to maintain phase and amplitude balance and control of dc offset.

However, performance details at the receiver include adjacent-channel rejection of about 40 decibels (the IEEE spec is 35 dB) and an input IP2 range of between 14 dBm and 51 dBm, depending on the front-end gain state. The spectral regrowth on the transmit side is greater than 40 dB down at the first side lobe, at 30 dBc.

The device operates from 3.3 V and consumes 0.9 W in receive mode or 1 W in transmit. Standby consumption is 0.01 W.

Amazon's A9

a9.com (yellow pages section)

Let your fingers do the walking? That's just sooooo 2004.... Amazon subsidiary A9 this morning rolled out a new Yellow Pages service that allows users to view pictures of the storefronts and locations of businesses in 10 cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle and cities in the San Francisco Bay area. "We allow people from their computer to look at the street, to walk to the left, to walk to the right, to see the neighborhood, to see parking — it's virtually like you're there," A9 President Udi Manber told Search Engine Watch. "Pictures get you information faster than any other way. Very often you remember a place but not its name. This is a very easy way to find it." Indeed, search on "Biz Markie alarm clock," for instance, and the site returns a list of stores in your ZIP Code, a map showing where they are, and a photo panorama of the city block in which each of those businesses is located (pedestrians and all). Click on the photo and you can virtually stroll down that block, getting a feel for the neighborhood while thanking fate that you weren't one of those poor camera-equipped interns sent out to document the urban landscape. (Of course, if you're a user of France Telecom's Pages Jaunes, this is old hat.) So what's in this for Amazon? Right now, not much more than the satisfaction of stealing a march on Google, which owns its own digital mapping company, Keyhole, and is no doubt cooking up something that involves search, maps, pictures and ads. But one day, I imagine, it may take commission fees for referrals to bricks-and-mortar stores. Or it will begin charging for "Click to Call" -- a feature that lets customers phone a business at the click of a mouse, for free. Says John Battelle, who runs the widely read Searchblog: "This is one small step away from a pay-per-call model, which is one of the most sought-after features from businesses." Others see an untapped market for a mobile version. "This service should be formatted so that cell phones can access the service, not just computers, because the chance of using this on a cell phone will be much higher," Mark Anderson, the publisher of the tech newsletter Strategic News Service, told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. "I think we need the info, but I am not sure that it has been offered in a way that has been useful, such as in the right devices. I think these things are kind of spontaneous, because I am more likely to be in the streets when I want to know where the nearest Italian restaurant is."