The Festival of Ideas starts tomorrow with events at the New Museum, Cooper Union Great Hall, Bowery Poetry Club, and other venues around the city. Here are a few highlights from a rich program of events that address urban development, art, architecture, and technology. Many downtown organizations are working together to imagine the future city:

Thursday, May 5, 7:00pm
The Networked City
Keynote Address: Jaron Lanier
$10. The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 E. 7th St. (between 3rd and 4th Aves.)

Author of the best-selling You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier has long been associated with Virtual Reality research and founded VPL Research, the first company to market VR products. He has served as Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services and as Lead Scientist of the National Tele- immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. He has recently served as Scholar at Large for Microsoft and currently acts as their Partner Architect. Purchase Tickets.

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Excerpt from Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior by Chad Birch on GameInternals:

Each of the ghosts is programmed with an individual “personality”, a different algorithm it uses to determine its method of moving through the maze. Understanding how each ghost behaves is extremely important to be able to effectively avoid them...

The key to understanding ghost behavior is the concept of a target tile. The large majority of the time, each ghost has a specific tile that it is trying to reach, and its behavior revolves around trying to get to that tile from its current one. All of the ghosts use identical methods to travel towards their targets, but the different ghost personalities come about due to the individual way each ghost has of selecting its target tile. Note that there are no restrictions that a target tile must actually be possible to reach, they can (and often are) located on an inaccessible tile, and many of the common ghost behaviors are a direct result of this possibility...

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Video consists of one frame of each of the videos saved by a member of the Archive Team (via Nic Alderton.)

Google Videos content is no longer available for playback. The company has migrated videos to YouTube, after originally announcing on April 15th that users would be responsible for immediate content backup pending deletion. The Archive Team, lead by Jason Scott (textfiles), worked to download as many videos as possible in the meantime. Here's a recent interview with Scott on the CBC radio program Spark.

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2010: The Year We Make Contact isn't quite as memorable as the Stanley Kubrick film that preceded it, still Russell Davies brings to our attention these "banks of beautiful buttons":

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In 1999, British TV series The Dope Show profiled experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute (1906—1983.) Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who has since collaborated with Martin Scorsese on dozens of films) is interviewed. Also look for a young "Ronnie Walken," who appeared in one of her live-action films before changing his name to Christopher.

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Time to get your applications in for Rhizome's 2011 Commissions cycle! Each year, this program supports emerging artists by providing grants for the creation of significant works of new media art. Deadline is Sunday, May 1st. Be sure to read over the eligibility, policy and procedures before you begin the application process.

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