Mimicking Endurance: Who, Me?

“We shall seal images of ourselves in images of our studio, seemingly in solitary confinement inside seemingly identical images of cell-like rooms measuring 10ft x 10ft x 10ft. We seemingly shall not converse, listen to the radio or watch television, until–after you have viewed them for one year–we unseal our images…

“1 year performance video”, commissioned by Turbulence, continues MTAA’s series of Updates which resound seminal performance art from the 60s and 70s in part by replacing human processes with computer processes. For example, is there meaning in replacing On Kawara’s zen-like devotion to his date paintings with an automated script which functions in a similar way?
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BiReality: Mutually Immersive Mobile Telepresence

BiReality uses a teleoperated robotic surrogate to visit remote locations as a substitute for physical travel. The goal is to create, both for the user and the people at the remote location, the sensory experience relevant for face-to-face interactions. The second-generation system provides a 360-degree surround immersive audio and visual experience for both the user and remote participants, and streams eight high-quality video streams totaling almost 20Mb/s over wireless networking. The system preserves gaze and eye contact, presents local and remote participants to each other at life size, and preserves the head height of the user at the remote location.

A Real-time Editing Engine for an Algorithmic Sitcom

Office Voodoo is an interactive film installation for two people. It tells the story of Frank and Nancy, two bored Irish officemates, condemned to spend their lives in an office. This infinite film is an algorithmic sitcom inspired from Sartre’s play “Huis clos”, crossbred with an office life simulator. Two physical voodoo dolls, that represent the protagonists, can be manipulated in order to change the emotions of the characters in the film. It is a social laboratory where the viewers can experiment on the influence of emotions as initial conditions in any social interaction. As viewers get skilled manipulating the dolls, they can control the emotions of Frank and Nancy, and see what happens when : Frank is cranky and Nancy is hyperactive ? Frank is horny and Nancy is depressed ?

The interactive film is made exclusively of real lens-based footage shot with real actors, but it runs on a real-time editing engine that fluidly assembles the film shot by shot as one watches it, while respecting the conventions of continuity editing. The installation is built as a little immersive wooden house for two people – a cross between a confessional, an arcade game booth and a kinetoscope parlour. Download PDF.

Interface at Critical

Mark Marino (of the Barthian and bachelor bots) sends word of Global Interface, a yearlong, interdisciplinary workshop on cyberculture that is just starting up with a talk from Kate Hayles on Monday, Oct 4. Meatspace meetings will happen monthly at UC Riverside, as is explained in the proposal. The diverse set of participants includes faculty from music, dance, and computer science. ?The interface serves as the nexus between artist, viewer, programmer, technology, and industry,? the blog for the workshop declares. Mark and the other organizers hope that this blog will foster intersections and conversation online, too, and there?s a plan to post extensive notes on all the talks.

posted by nick on grand text auto, 09.29.04

By the Fine Thread of Text Messages

Following The Man of the Crowd is a co-located, 24-hour following piece conducted by Glowlab’s Christina Ray and Lee Walton in conjunction with Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City. It’s a 24-hour walk in which two participants, linked by text messaging, drift separately through the city in an alternating pattern according to the movements of strangers. Based loosely on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” and inspired by Vito Acconci’s 1967 “Following Piece,” Ray and Walton have developed a collaborative performance that involves following strangers over a 24-hour period. Working as a team connected only through text messaging, the two will alternate turns following selected strangers through New York City.

Date: October 2 – 3, 2004; Time: 10am – 10am; Location: starting at Doma Caf?, 17 Perry Street at 7th Avenue; end location unknown. Participate! Sign up at Dodgeball.

Gathering of the Tribes – Sousveillance

Gathering of the Tribes’ call for submissions:

“We seek creative works exploring how individuals and cultures artistically respond to and represent our world under surveillance. New media performance emphasizing the importance of public reflection on ubiquitous surveillance and sousveillence is encouraged, as well as essays, short stories, poetry and visual works that assist in defining the ideals of human centeredness in a mechanical and monitored world.”

Hmm. perhaps I will submit my percolating critique of sousveillance…

anne galloway’s post at purse lips square jaw, 09.29.04

Troubling Utopia

From Edward Picot’s review of AVATARA’s DVD\”Machinima Documentary” by Donato Mancini, Jeremy Turner and Flick Harrison (536 Productions).

Avatara, from a Canadian team called 536, is a documentary about an online community – “a global subculture who spend their lives immersed in an online 3-D voice-chat program”, as the blurb explains. What makes this particular documentary special is that “every second… was recorded in-world (ie. online, within the virtual environment), so we don’t meet the people directly. Instead, their voices speak to us through the puppet-like ‘avatars’: rabbits, pharaos, seahorses, giraffes, the grim reaper, flowers, guitars, trolls (etc) which they’ve chosen to represent themselves in cyberspace.” Because of this immersive approach the documentary is more than just a factual report about these people and their private activities: it gives us a sense of what their world feels like from the inside.

The Invisible Train is a mobile, collaborative multi-user Augmented Reality (AR) game, in which players control virtual trains on a real wooden miniature railroad track. These virtual trains are only visible to players through their PDA’s video see-through display as they don’t exist in the physical world. This type of user interface is commonly called the “magic lens metaphor”.

Players can interact with the game environment by operating track switches and adjusting the speed of their virtual trains. The current state of the game is synchronized between all participants via wireless networking. The common goal of the game is to prevent the virtual trains from colliding. Watch the Quicktime video. Invisible Train will be demonstrated at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2004) in Arlington, VA.

Originally from waxy. Reblogged by tripp USC Interactive Media Division blog, and by emily on near near future.

We are learning to launch our winged words. (New York Times, November 5, 1897)

When Gugliamo Marconi, traveled from England to the U.S. in 1898 to demonstrate that Morse Code signals could be sent through the air without wires, he was officiating at the beginning of what we now take for granted: wireless communication.

The fantastic nature of his invention gripped the journalistic imagination of the time and its beneficial use was forecast in elegant prose not unlike that used to usher in the Internet and wireless in our time.
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More on Sky Ear

Rereading David Pescovitz?s article State of the Artists, where he discusses Sky Ear?a ?surreal electric ?cloud? of mobile phones and helium balloons that connect participants with the electromagnetic ether?,” I am reminded of early radio.

It was Guglielmo Marconi who first exploited Heinrich Herz?s discovery of electromagnetic radiation and demonstrated that radio waves could be used to transmit morse code over hundreds and then thousands of miles. When he first introduced wireless to America, during the popular America Cup races in 1899, the press hailed him as a hero and a wizard. Wireless itself evoked ?psychic metaphors? (see Susan Douglas? great book, Listening In). It was magic; Popular Science Monthly wrote that it was as if ?the nerves of the whole world (were)?being bound together.? And the reputable scientist, Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the leaders of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, suddenly began praising mediums, insisting the dead don?t die and describing contact with the spiritual world. The connection between radio, the ether and spirituality ran strong.
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