May 29, 2007

LightHive

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Renders Transparent What Was Once Concealed

LightHive, an installation by artist/architect Alex Haw :: Architectural Association :: until Saturday June 2, 2007.

LightHive occupies the entire main block - 5 addresses, 5 storeys and 160 rooms - of the institution's home in Bedford Square. A vast distributed network composed of various types of camera, infrared and wireless sensors relay back to a central exhibition space, where the communal activity of the school illuminates a scale model of its own light sources. Each light source is custom scripted and generated from the spatial and luminous parameters of its original source, and activated in real time by occupancy, contributing to an immersive form of spatial, 3-D surveillance. The installation renders transparent what was once concealed, compensating for the optical restrictions of the very object of the school's study: architecture.

Appearing as a spatial extension of the existing Front Members' Room's magnificent listed chandelier, its greater aim is as a self-documenting, self-recording architecture that is animated by people, resulting in a form of spatial video. It has several operational modes: predominantly realtime (which obediently varies between dynamic liveliness and patient placidity, with only intermittent signs of life), it is punctuated every half an hour by timelapse playback from its sensor database, followed by a series of fictional playbacks.

http://www.artshub.co.uk/view/ahrd.asp?Id=158989&ref=admin
http://www.kultureflash.net/current/#event4500

Posted by jo at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2007

404 FESTIVAL - ON TOUR / EUROPE 2007

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Einstein's Brain Project

[left: Alan Dunning, Paul Woodrow, The Einstein's Brain Project: The Errant Eye, 1997-2001. Virtual reality installation. The participant navigates around a recognizable visual environment, a forest whose outline faded into an abstract visual universe reflecting the variations in biological signals processed in real time by a computer module.]

Astas Romas & 404 Festival decided to launch a European Tour that begins on May 31, 2007. Directors and team of the "404 Festival" will be visiting cultural centers, public and alternative places performing live concerts, projections and conferences, also presenting "404 selected" artworks from international authors. Artists from different countries will join this tour, such as SadMb (Japan), Synchdub (Belgium), Sample Mousse (Finland), Guillermo Giampietro & Lara Baracetti (Italy), Einstein's Brain Project (Canada), Vladimir Manovski and Aleksandar Secerov (Serbia), Miha Ciglar (Slovenia), among others.

"...The cycle of installations in The Einstein's Brain Project (1995-2001) is a major technological detour for Dunning that, nonetheless, re-examines his past conceptual concerns. In this long-term project begun in 1995 with Paul Woodrow and a team of scientists from different fields, Dunning probes the new epistemological models that have developed thanks to technological advances in virtual reality.

The artificial worlds summoned up by the immersive universes often rekindle the presuppositions of a naturalistic project whose aim is to simulate familiar experiences. The interfaces created by Dunning and Woodrow propose a critical counterbalance to the withdrawal to the Cartesian universe. In the wake of recent research in cognitive science, the two men are interested in how biological and brain processes shape our perception of the world.

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[Left: Diagram showing the way biological data gathered in real time on the participant's body is altering the display parameters of a three-dimensional virtual universe.] An initial series of installations completed between 1997 and 2001 explored popular culture's fascination with the human brain. Evidence of this fascination is found in Roland Barthes's essay on the fetishism of Einstein's brain, a reflection that serves as a critical point of reference for the installations in this body of work. By reactivating obsolete systems of representation (phrenology, eugenics, etc.), this series also underlines the impact of pseudo-scientific projections on our knowledge of the body and psyche.

In The Fall, The Furnace, The Flesh (1997), (7) participants underwent a sort of ritual as they crossed through a curtain made up of thin vinyl strips. These strips served as a screen for projecting an image of a blazing fire. Participants found themselves in a cubic space defined by four screens. In the middle of the space was an anatomically correct model of the human head covered with touch-sensitive pads (audio-digital). The location of the 55 pads replicated the brain map developed by the phrenologists Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim. In the Victorian age, studying the skull's contours over these zones supposedly revealed a person's character traits and psychological predispositions. Dunning recycled the paradigm of phrenology as a means of accessing the installation's touch-sensitive interface. As participants pressed the pads, a series of video segments were projected on the wall. These segments, which came from various sources, showed irreconcilable objects and events that evoked the series of random associations produced by the brain as it assembles fragments of stored memory. Here, the unconscious content could not easily be distinguished from fragments of images from the media sphere. Images appeared erratically: a lunar eclipse, close-ups of the body, a political demonstration, a hall in a museum, a text flashing at a dizzying speed, barely perceptible abstract images. With the combination of images almost infinite, the screen constantly offered new sequences of juxtaposed images.

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[Left: Alan Dunning, Paul Woodrow, The Einstein's Brain Project: The Furnace, 1997-1999. Video and sound installation with interactive components. Segments, from various sources, showing irreconcilable objects and events evoking the series of random associations produced by the brain as it assembles fragments of stored memory. Excerpt of the video documentary The Einstein's Brain Project, The Errant Eye, The Furnace, 1998-1999. Go here and click on the first segment under "Multimedia."]

The virtual environment installations The Errant Eye (1997-2001) and The Madhouse (2001) delved into Dunning and Woodrow's premise that the image captured on the retina doesn't always converge with brain activity. In The Errant Eye, the biological data gathered in real time on the participant's body altered the display parameters of a three-dimensional virtual universe. The participant donned a head-mounted display equipped with encephalogram electrodes that recorded the changing amplitude of brainwaves from the brain's right and left sides. The participant then navigated around a recognizable visual environment, a forest whose outline faded into an abstract visual universe reflecting the variations in biological signals processed in real time by a computer module. Once the feedback process reached the balance sought, the participant could recognize recurring motifs that corresponded to certain types of reactions and perceptions.

The Madhouse (2001), which was presented at the gallery Oboro (Montreal, Canada) in 2001, allowed participants to pool their individual perceptions as they experimented simultaneously with feedback. A luminous life-size cast of the human body lay in the centre of a room and was surrounded by participants in an immersive state. The participants touched the surface of the body, which stored and displayed their handprints and fingerprints as if which stored and displayed their handprints and fingerprints as if the body's material presence were providing them with a kind of anchorage in the physical world. Behind their displays, the participants were catapulted into a virtual world, while viewers on the periphery could observe their erratic gestures, which resembled the spasms of mental patients (hence the work's title). Through this sharing of the immersive experience, which is often deemed autarchic, Dunning and Woodrow's project created a more complex model of a virtual community that didn't exclude the body of the participants.

A series of installations in development will further explore technological and conceptual aspects begun within The Einstein's Brain Project. Under the working title (WIW), Worlds in Worlds, Dunning plans to put together an immersive environment whose boundaries will be defined by the real dimensions of the room the participant is in. Dunning is also interested in the Anatomically Lifelike Biological Interface, which operates via a model reproducing certain bio-anatomical functions. In this vein, he is pursing research on the properties of ferrofluids, liquid matter that can be altered by an electromagnetic field and modified by biological signals from the human body.

V.B. © 2002 Fondation Daniel Langlois

Posted by jo at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2007

Opensource: {Videodance} Symposium

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Call for Proposals

The second international Opensource: {Videodance} Symposium :: Universal Hall Arts Centre, Findhorn Foundation Community, Morayshire, Scotland :: 21st - 25th November 2007.

Screen dance is a rapidly expanding area of artistic, academic and curatorial activity worldwide. Inherent in screen dance practice is the interface and collaboration between dance artists and media arts practitioners. Opensource: {Videodance} 2007 is an open symposium for video dance-makers and dance artists, academics, curators and producers coming together, to share ideas and work, network and debate, and provide a valuable platform for current issues in the area of screen dance practice to come to the surface.

Building on the strengths of the 2006 event, this symposium expressly aims to place current screen dance practice in a wider theoretical and critical context and to bring people from the collaborating disciplines together in a way that rarely happens, in order to impact significantly and positively on the lives and work of the participating individuals. The vision is to create an exciting and supportive place for people to engage, talk, hang out, relax, think, and listen, and to enable the spontaneous and dynamic unfolding of events. The programme for the four days will be a mixture of pre-arranged presentations and open forums initiated by the participants.

Whilst the greater part of the timetable will be dedicated to allowing the participants to initiate and following though discussion, we will again approach a select few artists/academics to give special presentations/lectures designed to inspire and provoke thought beyond the direct concerns of the participants. In addition, this year we are inviting proposals for limited number of presentations.

Call for proposals:

Seminar and Paper proposals are invited for presentation from authors (Academics and practitioners) of investigations into the interfaces of screen dance to one of the following formats: Academic research paper, Reports on practice-based work, Essay, Curated screening of work.

We encourage contributions that are related to all aspects of screen dance practice including interdisciplinary approaches in performance,

architecture, music, literature, visual arts, and new media but particular preference will be given to those exploring the outcomes of the first Opensource {Videodance} symposium in 2006, notably the "draft (hu)manifesto" available to read here.

All proposals will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their quality, originality, and potential for further discourse and appropriateness for the symposium. Paper Proposals/Abstracts should be submitted no later than June 30, 2007. Notification of acceptance will be sent by July 30, 2007. Those selected will be invited to submit their presentation for publication in the first issue of The Screendance Journal. email: abstracts[at]screendance.org

Due to the open nature of this symposium presentation slots are limited therefore we are interested in inviting speakers who will be able to engage fully with the wider aims of the event.

Produced by Bodysurf Scotland and Videodance.org.uk . Funded and supported by Scottish Arts Council and The School of Media Arts and Imaging, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK

Contact bodysurf[at]findhorn.com for booking details and to register interest and keep checking http://videodance.blogspot.com for bulletins.

Posted by jo at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2007

Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments

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aka Project CONE

Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments :: PI: Dezhen Song (Texas A&M University) CO-PI: Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley).

This project is a collaborative effort by computer scientists and engineers from Texas A&M and UC Berkeley consulting with natural scientists and documentary filmmakers. The goal is to advance the fundamental understanding of automated and collaborative systems that combine sensors, actuators, and human input to observe and record detailed natural behavior in remote settings.

Currently, scientific study of animals in situ requires vigilant observation of detailed animal behavior over weeks or months. When animals live in remote and/or inhospitable locations, observation can be an arduous, expensive, dangerous, and lonely experience for scientists. The project proposes a new class of hybrid teleoperated/autonomous robotic "observatories" that allow groups of scientists, via the internet, to remotely observe, record, and index detailed animal activity. Such observatories are made possible by emerging advances in robotic cameras, long-range wireless networking, and distributed sensors.

This project will investigate the algorithmic foundations for such observatories: new metrics, models, data structures, and algorithms, that will comprise a robust, mathematical framework for collaborative observation. The project will build on past work to extend and formally characterize hybrid models of collaborative and automated observation that draw on computational geometry, stochastic modeling and optimization. The project will advance fundamental understanding of networked robotics and develop efficient algorithms for collaborative observation that combines human and sensor input. This effort is intended to benefit biological scientists and facilitate collaboration among researchers. It will produce working prototypes that will be accessible via the internet to scientists, students, and the public worldwide.

Updates, hardware designs, CAD models, schematics, source code, experimental data, and documentation will be posted on this website as they emerge.

CONE Sutro Forest: Collaborative observatory to identify birds in sutro forest, California, Spring 2007
ACONE 1.0: Automated Observatory to assist in the search for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Arkansas, Fall 2006
CONE 1.0: Collaborative Observatory for Natural Environments, Audobon Nature Preserve, Mill Valley, CA, Fall 2005

Posted by jo at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2007

The Reception

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Performance + Discussion

A tele-immersive cross-disciplinary performance piece called The Reception will be presented April 20, 21, 27, 28 at 8pm and April 22, 29 at 2pm as a part of the Berkeley Dance Project 2007. The piece was created by the co-directors of SmithWymore Disappearing Acts, Lisa Wymore and Sheldon B. Smith in collaboration with Ruzena Bajcsy of CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society). Live performance and streamed realtime 3d tele-immersive technology are used to poetically examine the subject of presence. BDP is an annual collection of danceworks presented by UCBerkeley's Department of Theater Dance and Performance Studies. Performances will take place at UCB's Zellerbach Playhouse theater.

The April 22 performance will be followed by a post-performance discussion: Being Here: Presence/Remote Presence within Live and Media Based Performance by N. Katherine Hayles. The discussion will feature a demonstration of a live bi-located dance utilizing the tele-immersion labs at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, the Towsend Center Dance Studies Working Group, and the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College. The discussion is free and open to the public.

Posted by jo at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2007

Mladen Bizumic: How If – A Translation in III Acts

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A 'Spatial Opera'

Mladen Bizumic: How If – A Translation in III Acts :: 29 March – 28 April 2007 :: Finissage April 27, 19.00 :: PROGRAM: initiative for art + architectural collaborations, Invalidenstrasse 115, D-10115 Berlin :: t: +49 (0)30 39509318 :: in collaboration with Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

PROGRAM – initiative for art + architectural collaborations presents ACT III of the exhibition How If – A Translation in III Acts by New Zealand artist Mladen Bizumic. Bizumic's first solo exhibition in Germany is structured as a ‘spatial opera’ in which he explores the facets of contemporary geopolitics in relation to representations of architecture. In each of the piece’s three acts, we find the contribution of other artists, musicians, theorists and in one instance, his mother. Act III is presented at PROGRAM, while ACT I & II form the installation at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

Bizumic’s work is often based on the architecture, urban context and history of the space in which he is living. How If - A Translation in III Acts activates Berlin, his current abode, as the urban fabric comprising the space between Künstlerhaus Bethanien and PROGRAM.

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ACT III (at PROGRAM)

Since 2004 Bizumic has been working on a multi-channel video project called event.horizon.black.hole. An angled wall in the gallery acts as a screen for a pair of mirrored video projections. A video of the crumbling architecture of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris is projected back-to-back with images of an avalanche on Mt. Cook, itself a UNESCO world heritage site in New Zealand. Mirrored along the bend in the wall, each pair of projections resembles an enormous, constantly morphing Rorschach blot. On this occasion, a multi-channel soundtrack has been added, bringing together ambient sounds taken from the Berlin Museum Island (also a world heritage site), with the flapping noises of flags outside the UN Headquarters in New York. The projections dematerialize the wall while the soundtrack organizes notions of nationality, geography, and the concept of a world heritage.

ACT I (at Künstlerhaus Bethanien)

Freud Museum (for her) 2006-2007 is a vitrine of fragments from buildings in Vienna. Two commissioned works accompany this: a piano piece composed by his Viennese girlfriend (a musician), and a ‘psychoanalytic poem’ written by his mother (a psychologist) which both articulate the personal dimensions embedded in the work. The material index of Vienna’s built environment becomes a self-consciously museological display – it’s materiality abstracted and questioned in turn by the music and poetry.

ACT II (at Künstlerhaus Bethanien)

Sister Cities of Berlin (Paris) 2007 is a video installation depicting streetlights seen through the glazed door of a building near the National Highway 7 in Paris. The distorted image through the glass is contextualized as a voice-over begins to tell a story of the Parisian suburb Le Kremlin-Bicetre, loosely based on an interview conducted by Bizumic with French artists Saadane Afif and Valerie Chartrain – themselves residents of the aforementioned building. The characters in the narrative are reduced in their description, but a counter point of complexity is provided by the collision of images, poetic verses and ambient sounds composed by MINIT.

Mladen Bizumic (born 1976, lives and works in Berlin) will present his work in the New Zealand Book at the Venice Biennale (2007). Notable exhibitions in the past include: Through the Picture at the 2nd Moscow Biennale (2007), Busan Biennale (2006), Hide-Tide, CAC, Vilnius and Zacheta National Art Museum, Warsaw (2006), Re: Modern, Künstlerhaus Vienna (2005), Fiji Biennale Pavilions, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2003), Mladen Bizumic, ARTSPACE, Auckland (2002).

PROGRAM is a nonprofit project aimed at testing the disciplinary boundaries of architecture through collaborations with other fields. Initiated in 2006 by Carson Chan and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, PROGRAM provides a discursive platform for artists, architects, critics and curators to explore ideas through exhibitions, performances, workshops, lectures, and residencies. PROGRAM intends to diversify the ways we understand and make architecture by engaging the discourse with emerging creative processes that activate the space between pure theoretical research, professional praxis and architecture's social role.

The exhibition is generously supported by Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Embassy in Berlin.

opening hours:
Tuesday–Friday 14.00–19.00 hrs
Saturday 11.00–19:00 hrs

For further information please email info@programonline.de, or visit http://www.programonline.de

Posted by jo at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2007

Groundbreaking:

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Extreme Landscapes in Grains and Pixels

This paper reflects on Groundbreaking: Extreme Landscapes in Grains and Pixels, a real-time generative installation commissioned from the authors by the UK Research Councils. The work interrogates visual and sonic representations of soil studies to reveal interaction and tension between extreme environments and cultural experience, between scientific understanding and contemporary soundart practice. The work offers a critique of scientific hierarchies; its assertions, assumptions and attendant aphorisms. Challenges to established hierarchies are embedded in science's history - Francis Bacon's Novum Organum still questions today's domains - and continue to resonate within debates about risk in science's future directions. Such a resonance is re-evaluated in processes of deduction, to link scientific assertion with societal comment, and abstraction, to link scientific modes of representation with artistic values of communication, visualisation and sonification .

People who live in geographically and socially marginalised areas, vulnerable to climate change, provide compelling impetus for this investigation. The Sahel is one such area, contrasting the desertified extremes of the Sahara with the needs of nomadic pastoralists and of settled agrarian peoples.

There are established deductive understandings of interaction between the environment and society at a regional- and local-scale; how people use (and used) the landscape to support their daily lives, how landscapes are managed to achieve this and influence the development of society. Repeated snapshots of the Sahel region offer one understanding, at least within subject domains entrained in sequences of similar studies: they suggest how adaptive strategies can be developed for the future of this region. Instead, we can break out of this entrenchment, investigate new forms of dialogue that examine atypical physical scales of human-landscape interaction. Evidence of human activity may be preserved in the sediment of an extreme landscape, and by examining these we gain an understanding of the nature and intensity of past human-landscape interactions in an extreme context, and a trajectory for the future.

This paper aims to further the comprehension of such interactions, reaching across barriers presented by different temporal and spatial scales: between landscape and the production of artefacts, between the scientific analysis of artefacts and their manufacture, between the perception of visual and sonified representations, and between micro-scale information and macro-scale evidence of extreme climatic change. In doing so, and with reference to the authors' installation work, novel understandings are elicited regarding the nature, scale and quality of the interfaces present.

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh 2007. Supported by Research Councils UK, NSW2007 Award.

Blackwell, T. and Young, M. (2004) Self-Organised Music. Organised Sound 9:2, 123-36

Adderley, W.P., et al (2004) Enhancing ethno-pedology: integrated approaches to Kanuri and Shuwa Arab definitions in the Kala-Balge region. Catena 58, 41-64.

Adderley, W.P., Simpson, I.A. and Davidson, D.A. (2006) Historic landscape management: a validation of quantitative soil thin section analyses. Journal of Archaeological Science 33, 320-334.

Paul Adderley is a soil scientist with interests in geoarchaeology and environmental history. An RCUK Academic Fellow at the University of Stirling, Scotland, he specialises in the sustainability of societies in extreme environments such as Greenland and the African Sahel; he lectures on topics surrounding environmental risk. Recent studies have centred on understandings of long-term societal-climatic interactions.

Michael Young is a composer with interests in computer music and interactive media. He lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London and cofounded the Live Algorithms for Music network www.livealgorithms.org. Recent compositions include Aur(or)a, a generative system for solo instrument and computer (2006) and Argrophylax (2005) for oboe and electronics.

Paul Adderley and Michael Young will speak a the MUTAMORPHOSIS conference, Nov 7-10 2007.


Posted by jo at 07:33 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2007

Lev Manovich

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Deep Remixability

"During the heyday of debates on post-modern, at least one critic in America noticed the connection between post-modern pastiche and computerization. In his book After the Great Divide (1986), Andreas Huyssen writes: "All modern and avantgardist techniques, forms and images are now stored for instant recall in the computerized memory banks of our culture. But the same memory also stores all of pre-modernist art as well as the genres, codes, and image worlds of popular cultures and modern mass culture." [1] His analysis is accurate - except that these "computerized memory banks" did not really became commonplace for another fifteen years. Only when the Web absorbed enough of the media archives it became this universal cultural memory bank accessible to all cultural producers. But even for the professionals, the ability to easily integrate multiple media sources within the same project - multiple layers of video, scanned still images, animation, graphics, and typography - only came towards the end of the 1990s..." From Deep Remixability by Lev Manovich, Piet Swart Institute, 2005/06.

Posted by jo at 03:44 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2007

Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation

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INTERNATIONAL POLAR YEAR

I-TASC FOR THE INTERNATIONAL POLAR YEAR :: Friday March 30, 2007 : I-TASC settles for two years at Espace :: Mendes-France, Poitiers, France :: Free entrance.

I-TASC (Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation) is an official project of the International Polar Year 2007-2008. I-TASC is a decentralized network of individuals and organisations working collaboratively in the fields of art, engineering, science and technology on interdisciplinary development and tactical deployment of renewable energy, waste recycling systems, sustainable architecture and open-format, open-source media. I-TASC is a lichen-like structure sharing and integrating local knowledge, resources and skills across six continents in order to symbiotically engage with common issues concerning the air, ocean, earth and space.

The science centre Espace Mendes-France and Ellipse join the I-TASC project to organize a series of events during the 2007-2008 International Polar Year. An I-TASC terminal will be installed in the Espace Mendes-France for the duration of IPY. It will provide information in real time on the activities of the I-TASC project and display environmental data collected by the Automatic Weather station deployed, by I-TASC since winter 2007, near the South-African base of SANAE in the Dronning Maud Land region of the Antarctic.

FRIDAY MARCH 30, 2007 : OPENING DAY

17h: presentation of the I-TASC initiative
Marko Peljhan (Slovenia), artist and initiator of the project
Stephen Kovats Canada), associate member and artistic director of Berlin Transmediale Festival
Ewen Chardronnet (France), associate and member of Ellipse

18h30: inauguration of terminal I-TASC
drinks and buffet

21h: Signal Territory performance by Mx&Nullo (rx:tx, Slovenia) In the Planetarium of the EMF http://www.rx-tx.org

Free entrance.

Access: Espace Mendes-France, 1 Place de la Cathidrale, 86000 Poitiers,
France; Contact: ewen[at]e-ngo.org

I-TASC in the Espace Mendhs-France of Poitiers is a co-production of Ellipse (Tours, Fr), Projekt Atol (Slovenia) and the EMF of Poitiers, France. The project is supported by EU Culture 2000 program.

http://www.i-tasc.org
http://www.ipy.org
http://e-ngo.org
http://www.maison-des-sciences.org

What is I-TASC's first project?

Acknowledging that Antarctica and the Arctic are critical departure points in developing a complex understanding of common ground, I-TASC has proposed to establish in the Arctic and Antarctica the framework conditions for collaborative projects between artists, scientists, tactical media workers and engineers within three broad topical fields: migration, weather and communications. This is envisaged through the installation and maintenance of two mobile research stations in the Arctic and Antarctica between 2007-2009 and the construction and launching of a nano-satellite in a high sun-synchronous elliptical polar orbit to enable research and contact between the two stations and the sharing of sensor data with other IPY projects. The I-TASC stations in the Arctic and Antarctica will be solar/wind powered, zero-environmental impact communications, research and living units capable of sustaining up to 8 crew members for long periods of work in isolation / insulation conditions (60-180 days). Onboard renewable-energy systems, bioreactor / biological sewage processing, water recycling systems, satellite and HF communication systems and radar infrastructure will provide I-TASC crews with the tools/resources needed to conduct joint or independent work in remote polar field-research environments. The I-TASC base station for Antarctica has been given the name LADOMIR. It is named for the utopian poem of the same name written in 1920 by the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, which describes the universal landscape of the future through the destruction of the old world and its synthesis in the new. The word is a combination of LAD, meaning both harmony and living creature, and MIR, both peace and world, universe. Adopting the related constructivist notion of FAKTURA, which can be understood as the conferring of tactile and sensorial qualities onto abstract elements, LADOMIR will be dedicated to producing readable / tangible surfaces which the public will be able to use to reflect on vague or otherwise invisible systems and environmental data from Antarctica and the Arctic. Communication, weather and migration are seen as three multiple-dynamic global energy systems which can be explored to understand how our planet functions on natural, social and technological levels, and the knowledge inherent in each can in turn be applied as primary sources for new cognitive and evolutionary strategies, with implications for global ecology and future human exploration of space.

The first I-TASC Reconnaissance and Communication Expedition (RECE) to Antarctica from Dec 2006-Feb 2007 was codenamed: GROUNDHOG. The objective of GROUNDHOG (translated from the Norwegian word Grunehogna) was to construct and deploy our first Automatic Weather Station, Remote Sensor and Packet Radio Unit in support of I-TASCs future operations in Antarctica from 2007 onwards. The expedition crew installed the solar and wind powered unit at 710 40.433' S 020 48.700' W in order to autonomously transmit daily environmental data via HF packet radio to SANAE IV base and from there to the I-TASC partner websites and IPY public via the internet. The site has been identified as the location for the installation and testing of the prototype I-TASC LICHEN mobile base station module in the 2007/2008 Antarctic summer season. The LICHEN module will test systems and train crew ahead of the installation of the I-TASC LADOMIR mobile base station at Grunehogna between Dec 2008 - March 2009 which will host artists, scientists and engineers conducting research and collaborative work in the Dronning Maud Land sector of Antarctica during the International Polar Year.

The first I-TASC expedition crew to Antarctica consisted of Amanda Rodrigues Alves (Brazil); Adam Hyde (New Zealand); Thomas Mulcaire (South Africa  expedition leader); Ntsikelelo Ntshingila (South Africa/Swaziland). The crew departed Cape Town harbour for Antarctica on 7 December on board the South African National Antarctic Program supply ship SA Agulhas and spent 42 days at SANAE base and on field reconnaissance expeditions in Dronnig Maud Land.

Posted by jo at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2007

‘If the route’: The Great Learning of London

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[A Taxi Opera]

‘If the route’: The Great Learning of London [A Taxi Opera] :: PerformanceStudio Voltaire :: Friday 9th March at 7.30pm :: The radio works: 104.4 Resonance Fm, Wednesdays 9pm 14th of March - 25th April 2007. More times below.

A collaboration between artist Beatrice Gibson and musician Jamie McCarthy, ‘If the Route:’ The Great Learning of London is a live performance and radio work in seven parts based on The Knowledge (the infamous London cabbie navigation system and mnemonic device students must master in order to become licensed cabbies). The Performance: The live performance of the 'if the route' has been developed collaboratively with 10 students from Knowledge Point and four improvising string players. A complex and fascinating mathematics of the everyday, The Knowledge involves learning 320 routes or runs mapped within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. Traveling approximately 26,000 miles across the city on Honda C90's, knowledge students memorize a total of 30,000 streets. ‘Calling over’ entails that after the completion of the days run[s], students must call them out, reciting them out loud. Partners form to call over runs to one another, using recital and repetition as a means to remember the city.

Knowledge Point on Caledonian road, one of several taxi universities students may attend and whose curriculum includes a series of mnemonic devices to aid in their endeavor, is filled with pairs of men and increasingly the odd woman aurally reciting sets of directions to one another. Entering it is to be surrounded by the city fragmented and auralized into sets of sentences and street names, a veritable symphony performing the city as text .

Using the technique of calling over as its principle sound source, the performance of ‘if the route’ celebrates and elaborates this formidable system and poetic by re-contextualizing it within in the space of the gallery. Modeled on paragraph seven of Cardew's original score, Gibson and McCarthy's compositional structure emphasizes the practice of calling over as an ongoing process of repetition, memorization, rehearsal and navigation, articulated in a networked and non heirarchical manner.

The Score

‘If the Route’ takes it title from The Great Learning, the well known score by the radical and experimental 60’s composer and musician Cornelius Cardew. Informed by similar developments and ideals in the Fluxus movement and realized around the same period, Cardew’s work was rooted in belief of the democratic potential of music as a social platform, his score’s often intended for implementation by untrained musician-performers. Cardew’s version of the Great Learning was a score in seven paragraphs, rooted in and acoustically generated by the Confucian text of the same name. Playing on the title of ‘the great learning’ as it relates to The Knowledge and its own system of learning, and borrowing from the methodology, structure and political intent of Cardew’s score, Gibson and McCarthy have used both aural and non aural research into the knowledge as the generative principle behind composition. The score for 'if the route' provides the basis for both realization of live perfo rmance and the radio works.

The Radio Works

Mirroring the seven paragraphs of Cardew’s score, the radio piece comprises seven parts and takes place over seven weeks. In keeping with the spirit of Cardew and the political gesture of experimental composition in general, seven practitioners from varying fields and disciplines have been commissioned by Gibson and McCarthy to use and translate the score for radio according to their own personal and varying interpretations.

Participants include; artist and architect Celine Condorelli, artist Beatrice Gibson, musician and composer Kaffe Matthews, musician Jamie McCarthy, artist and writer, Tom McCarthy, poet and cabbie, Simon Phillips, and architect and theorist, Eyal Weizman in collaboration with Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer (Networked Cultures)

Wednesday 14th March 9pm Beatrice Gibson and Jamie McCarthy
Wednesday 21st March 9pm Celine Condorelli
Wednesday 28th March 9pm Simon Phillips
Wednesday 04th April 9pm Eyal Weizman in collaboration with Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer (Networked Cultures)
Wednesday 11th April 9pm Tom McCarthy (International Necronautical Society)
Wednesday 18th April 9pm Kaffe Matthews
Wednesday 25th April 9pm Beatrice Gibson and Jamie McCarthy

'If the Route:' The Great Learning of London is generously supported by Arts Council England. Partnered by Studio Voltaire and Resonance FM.

With special thanks to London Contemporary Dance School at The Place.

Posted by jo at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2007

Experimental Gameplay: Toward a Massively Popular Scientific Practice

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Massively multi-citizen science is almost here

Can a game developer be nominated for a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences by the year 2032? That's my plan, which I presented this past weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You can download the slides from my talk, or read the related research paper (hot off the press!), or peruse some related links, on my AAAS webpage here. (Or see what Newsday took away from it here.)

My goal over the next decade is to support the development of a massively multi-citizen science through massively collaborative games (think: alternate reality games with real-world data embedded inside.) So in the near future, when the most creative, collective-intelligence gamers are grinding away 10, 20, 30, or more hours a week, they're grinding on real scientific research problems wrapped inside a yummy fictive or fantasy shell.

Yes, I am calling for a truly popular scientific research practice that engages the global public in hands-on, brains-on collaboration, via sites Citizen Science and Amazon's Mechanical Turk and through immersive, story-driven play. Amateur participation + a creative commons for science literature + the stickiness of a well-designed game and well-told story = radically interdisciplinary mash-ups accessible to lay people and productive of real scientific insight.

Sound crazy? No way. This is seriously possible, and plausible. Here's three reasons why:

1) Science practice itself is increasingly leaning toward a kind of collective intelligence, amateur participation. You can read about it in the incredible Institute for the Future report: Delta Scan: The Future of Science and Technology, 2005-2055.

2) Meanwhile, there is no doubt -- as I argue in my new 50-page case study for the MacArthur foundation -- that alternate reality gamers are doing real CI investigations that would fully prepare them for real-world collaborative research. Their gameplay is already fundamentally a CI scientific effort to undertand fake (fictive) data. I'm just proposing that we shove some real scientific data in there, while they're at it.

3) And perhaps most importantly, as Sean Stewart - the original and most esteemed alternate reality storyteller around - has famously said: "I do NOT assert that [alternate reality gaming] is the first, or greatest, example of massively multi-player collaborative investigation and problem solving. Science, as a social activity promoted by the Royal Society of Newton's day and persisting to this moment, has a long head start and a damn fine track record.... We just accidentally re-invented Science as pop culture entertainment."

So, yes, If this sounds interesting, get the slides. And here are a couple of other sites to get you thinking: "Fostering Scientific Habits of Mind in the Context of Online Play" and MacArthur Spotlight on Digital Media & Learning.

If you want to propose a data set, scientific problem, or research focus for a massively multi-citizen science game, or if you want to be notified when there's such a game to be played, email me at jane @ thenameofthisblog dot com. [bblogged by Jane on Avant Game]

Posted by jo at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2007

RPM's Remixed

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A Virtual Space "Sings"

RPM's Remixed is a telematic, transdisciplinary performance based on remixing Alvin Lucier's RPM's score – integrating dance, video and sound improvisation between artists in New York, Tampa, and San Jose.

Alvin Lucier, a well-known composer of music and sound installations that explore natural phenomena and resonance, is renowned for making spaces "sing." This piece explores the possibilities of using one of his scores to make a virtual space "sing" by using improvisational techniques as well as the natural feedback and delay created by streaming.

Themes exploring isolation, intersection, and madness reverberate through images, body and sound. Dancers and sound artists in San Jose, Tampa, and New York collaborate while realtime processing of the video images is driven partially by the performers’ movements. Motion analysis is sent over the network to trigger aspects of video manipulation, further blurring the lines of authorship and contributing to the impromptu chemistry.

Lucier’s original “RPM’s” score was a tongue-in-cheek take on creating sound based on depressing and releasing the accelerator of an Aston Martin engine. The score itself is a series of nonsensical curvatures and dashes – nonsensical, that is, until a personal interpretation of each written gesture is applied.

Taking this a step further, the cast of RPM’s Remixed deconstructs the score, into dance gestures, violin strokes, guitar riffs, and sound and video mashing. The challenge is not only to collaborate within one’s own medium but to improvise successfully between mediums and within a virtual space. Can the magic of improvisation reach across the ether? [via Rhizome]

Posted by jo at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2007

V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media

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Camera Lucida: Sonochemical Observatory

V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media presents Camera Lucida: Sonochemical Observatory by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand :: Thursday 25 January until Saturday 3 February, 2007.

Camera Lucida is an immersive spatial art work creating a fleeting ephemeral materiality by intersecting ultrasound with hyperlight - in essence creating an unstable sonic aurora. Developed in collaboration with numerous physics research labs the 'observatory', a transparent gas-filled chamber, converts sound waves into visible light by employing a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. Here, gaseous micro-bubbles injected within a fluid medium are blasted with ultrasound causing them to implode, at which point they become as hot as the sun and release light energy in the form of sound waves. By modulating, or 'playing' the ultrasonic transducers attached to the glass chamber an ever-changing sonochemical environment, visible only within a sheath of extreme darkness, emerges.

Belarussian/American artist duo Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand's practice creates cross-disciplinary art works that integrates physics, chemistry and computer science with philosophical practice. With the /Camera Lucida/ they work to harness wave phenomena, both as sound and light in order to examine intrinsic questions of spatial perception and perpetuality. Having dismissed all forms of fixative and recording media, Domnitch and Gelfand's installations exist as unstable, ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. http://www.portablepalace.com

Daily: 11:00 hrs - 18.00 hrs :: Admission: free :: V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media. Eendrachtstraat 10 3012 XL, Rotterdam :: Phone: +31 (10) 206 72 72

/Camera Lucida: Sonochemical Observatory/ will continue from 7 February until 3 March. Opening hours: Wednesday - Friday: 11:00 hrs - 17:00 hrs :: Extra opening Museumnacht, 3 March 2007 : 20:00 hrs - 02:00 hrs

Posted by jo at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2006

Daan Roosegaarde talks about Dune 4.0

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"Alice in Technoland"

Dune 4.0, developed by Daan Roosegaarde, is an interactive landscape which physically changes its appearance in accordance to human presence.

Placed in the main corridor of Montevideo (Amsterdam, NL), Dune 4.0 is composed of hundreds of fibers which react to the movements and sounds made by the visitors. This hybrid of nature and technology functions as a platform on which the relationship between visitor and the existing architecture is enhanced. By means of looking, walking and interacting, visitor and space merge into one coherent environment which could be best interpreted as a kind of "Alice in Technoland".

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Dune 4.0 is currently further developed for a public site besides the river Maas in Rotterdam.

It's not the first time i mention Roosegaarde's projects. He has previously designed, among other projects, 4d pixel, a smart surface which physically reacts to your voice, music and can write relievo letters and Liquid 2.0, a living cocoon which physically reacts to your motion and sounds. This time i decided to ask him a few questions about his latest piece. More >> [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]

Posted by jo at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2006

Environmental Awareness through Eco-visualization

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Combining Art and Technology to Promote Sustainability

Abstract: Eco-visualization technology made by media artists offers a new way to dynamically visualize invisible environmental data. Eco-visualization can take many forms. My own practice of eco-visualization involves animating information typically concealed in building monitoring systems, such as kilowatts or gallons of water used. A public display with real time visual feedback promotes awareness of resource consumption and offers a practical alternative to remote meters concealed in utility closets. The long-term goal of most eco-visualization practitioners is to encourage good environmental stewardship using hybrid practices of art and design. This essay contextualizes the emerging field of eco-visualization and its interdisciplinary trajectories. Environmental Awareness through Eco-visualization: Combining Art and Technology to Promote Sustainability by Tiffany Holmes, Neme.org.

Posted by jo at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2006

Climate Commons:

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A Networked Conversation About Climate Change, Sustainability, and the Arctic

Climate Commons: a networked conversation about climate change, sustainability, and the Arctic :: Developed by Jane D. Marsching with Matthew Shanley :: November 27 2006 - February 28, 2007. Please join the conversation by reading the posts and comments and then logging in to respond with your own comments.

Climate Commons is a conversation between thirteen people who focus on climate change, sustainability, and the Arctic in a wide range of disciplines including a glaciologist, an architect, a journalist, and a comedian. Each author contributes weekly posts about their work, inspirations, discoveries, or questions. Readers can join the conversation by clicking on the comments hex icon and choosing a hex cell to respond to any particular post. As an interdisciplinary collaborative hybrid art/research project, Climate Commons seeks to point to the multiplicity of voices behind the complex environmental concerns and to create connections/analogies/discussion across disciplines, economies, and ideologies.

Core participants:

Sally Bingham, Episcopal Priest
Jock Gill, Carbon Neutral by 2020
Mitchell Joachim, Architect
Jane D. Marsching, Artist
Larry Merculieff, Alaska Native Science Commission
Robert Newman, Comedian
Matt Nolan, Glaciologist
James Overland, Climatologist
Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
Russell Potter, Historian
Andrew Revkin, Environmental Journalist, New York Times
Matthew Shanley, Artist/Programmer
Juanita Urban-Rich, Windows Around the World

Climate Commons is part of a larger project, Arctic LIstening Post, a series of interdisciplinary, collaborative hybrid art research works in digital technologies by Jane D. Marsching. On exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 12/10/06-3/11/07.

A project of Creative Capital with the generous support of the LEF Foundation Contemporary Work Fund.

Posted by jo at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2006

Saskia Sassen

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Essay and Lecture

Open 11 :: Hybrid Space: The influence of digital technologies on the use of the public domain :: Thanks to new wireless technologies (WIFI, GPS, RFID) and mobile media, public space is subject to drastic changes. It is being traversed by electronic infrastructures and networks, and alternative cultural and social domains are evolving, though often invisible from a conventional viewpoint. The traditional physical and social conditions of the public domain are being supplanted by zones, places and subcultures that transcend the local and interlink with translocal and global processes. The question is whether there are also new opportunities for the individual and for groups to act, participate and intervene publicly in this hybrid, seemingly flexible space. How do people appropriate the new public spaces? Where does the 'public' take place in this day and age? Who shapes and moulds it by devising spatial, cultural and political strategies?

With contributions by Drew Hemment, Howard Rheingold, Saskia Sassen, Frans Vogelaar/Elizabeth Sikiardi, Noortje Marres, Koen Brams/Dirk Pultau, Marion Hamm, Kristina Andersen, Ari Altena, Daniel van der Velden, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Esther Polak, De Geuzen and Max Bruinsma. Guest editor: Eric Kluitenberg, Jorinde Seijdel and Liesbeth Melis (eds.)

Public Interventions: The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition by Saskia Sassen :: De Balie, Amsterdam :: Saturday, November 18, 2006 :: Start: 20.30 hrs (CET) :: Live-stream webcast.

This year’s SKOR lecture (Fourndation for Art and Public Space) is delivered by Saskia Sassen, who will talk about the ‘making’ of public space by means of architectural and artistic interventions. The evening includes the presentation of Open 11, which takes hybrid space as its theme and includes an essay contributed by Sassen.

Human experience is threatened by the massive architecture of world cities and the density of infrastructures – digital and otherwise – that exist to serve international capital and the global economy. Sassen argues that there is a need for the production of subversive narratives as a counterbalance to this, to make the local and what has been silenced manifest and to generate new forms of ‘modest public spaces’.

Saskia Sassen is Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Professor at the London School of Economics. She has gained worldwide acclaim for studies such as The Global City and Cities in a World Economy. Her most recent publication is Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006).

Panelists: Arnold Reijndorp, urban sociologist; Willem van Weelden, artist and theorist; Moderator: Bahram Sadeghi

Language: English

Organised by: SKOR / Open / De Balie

SKOR is the Netherlands Foundation for Art and Public Space.

Open, a cahier about art and the public domain, is published twice a year by NAi Publishers in association with skor.

ADDRESS: De Balie, Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10, Amsterdam.

RESERVATIONS: De Balie t 020-5535100, or via >>

Admission: 12,50 (students: 7,50)

Posted by jo at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)

October 05, 2006

it was a PICNIC '06

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PICNIC '06 cross media week was last week, september 27-29, in Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam. It showcased gaming and music content delivered via TV, Internet, mobile phones, virtual reality. Conference sessions explored online and mobile games, interactive TV show formats, multi-format brands, and consumer-generated content. See video stream.

Posted by michelle at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)