June 26, 2007

Ars Virtua Presents: We are the Strange

Ars Virtua is proud to present the Second Life premier of We are the Strange :: June 29 at 6:00 pm SLT [SLURL].

M dot Strange takes us into the new realm of video game structured and inspired storytelling with his character's harrowing quest for ice cream. The variety of animation styles, game and cultural references and distopian beauty of this work make it important to modern filmmaking. Add to this that m dot strange created this virtually single handedly and had it selected for Sundance based on his YouTube audience and you end up with a very powerful piece of contemporary media.

We are the Strange is an animated feature film in which two diametrically opposed outcasts fight for survival in a sinister fantasy world. After meeting in the somber Forest of Still Life, an abused young woman (Blue) reluctantly follows a care free dollboy (Emmm) to Stopmo City on his unreasonable quest for ice cream. They're lives are constantly in jeopardy after they're caught in the middle of a deadly battle between bizarre monsters on their way to the ice cream shop. A flamboyant ultraviolent hero(Rain) appears and effortlessly dispatches all the horrible monsters in his path. Blue meets Rain before he partakes in an impossible battle against the source of all that is evil in Stopmo City. When it seems as if darkness will have the last laugh a gleaming fist made of aluminum foil bursts through the ground thus starting the final showdown
between mega_good and hyper_evil.

We Are the Strange is its own imaginative and immersive universe. M dot Strange spent three years painstakingly creating this film, using a range of animation techniques: traditional, stop-motion, computer, and his own unique blend of 8-bit graphics and anime, dubbed "Str8nime." The stunning visuals are complemented by a soundtrack that is both beautiful and harrowing. The end result is a freaky technocarnival ride that climaxes with a momentous battle between innocence and darkness.

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June 18, 2007

Turbulence Artists' Studios

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Boulevard by Peter Horvath

Turbulence Artists' Studios: Boulevard by Peter Horvath :: DSL / Cable access, Internet Explorer 5.0+ or Safari and the Flash 9 plugin are required for viewing.

In "Boulevard" we follow a striking woman, the passenger of a convertible car, driven by an unidentified driver through the city, passing its generic streets, billboards and motels, with an unknown destination.

"Horvath's videos have a sense of grand drama; frenetic, contemporary anxiety; and an interest in the collision of the beautiful with the grave. This drama of sexual angst has shades of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and the edge-of-the-earth angst of contemporary California Gothics such as Magnolia and Crash. The central figure is a by-turns haughty and vulnerable beauty, one of Horvath's reoccurring angst-laden women passing through the glamorous and tawdry landscape of Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon." - Felicia Feaster

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Peter Horvath works in video, sound, photo and new media. Camera in hand since age 6, he inhaled darkroom fumes until his late 20's, then began exploring time based art processes. He immersed himself in digital technologies at the birth of the Web, co-founded 6168.org, a site for net art, and adopted techniques of photomontage which he uses in his net and print based works. Exhibitions include the Whitney Museum Of American Art' s Artport, the 18th Stuttgarter Filmwinter (Stuttgart, Germany), FILE Electronic Language International Festival (Sâo Paulo, Brazil), Video Zone International Video Art Biennial (Tel Aviv, Israel), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec City, Canada), as well as venues in New York, Tokyo, London, and numerous net.art showings. He is the recipient of commissions from Rhizome.org at The New Museum, NYC (2005) and Turbulence.org/New Radio and Performing Arts, New York (2004). A founding member of the net.art collective Hell.com, he likes to consider a future when high bandwidth will be free.

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June 08, 2007

Four Eyed Monsters - Entire 71 minute Film - (1 week only)

YouTube Hosts First Feature Length Film by Adario Strange, Wired, June 08, 2007 - "YouTube has allowed the independent directing team of Arin Crumley and Susan Buice to be the first ever to post an entire feature length film on the site. The 70-minute film, “Four Eyed Monsters,” premiered at the indie film fest Slam Dance a couple of years ago. While reviews of the film have generally been mixed, the one sure thing about this online event is that it will make Hollywood sit up and take notice..." [Related posts on networked_performance 1, 2]

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April 30, 2007

Gebhard Sengmueller: SLIDE MOVIE - DIAFILMPROJEKTOR

SLIDE MOVIE - DIAFILMPROJEKTOR, a new installation by Gebhard Sengmueller, will be presented at the European Media Art Festival Osnabrueck :: April 25 - May 20, 2007.

Black cube installation: A film sequence (35mm motion picture, 24 frames/sec.) is cut up and the individual frames are mounted as slides. They're then distributed among 24 slide projectors that are all focused on the same screen (the exact same point). Via electronic control of the projectors, these individual images are then reassembled-in an extremely cumbersome way-into a chronological sequence. The formula - one projector per frame - thus gives rise to something that at least rudimentarily (and inevitably very inaccurately, due to the lack of precision of the mechanical devices) suggests a motion picture. The film soundtrack emerges as a byproduct - the mechanical clattering of the projectors changing slides.

[...] Slide Movie, the most recent of Sengmueller's apparatuses, is located not only in the field of media archeology, though, but also in the field of media theory. With the infernal noise produced by twenty-four slide projectors changing pictures, the "film projector" is liberated from the sound-proof projection room and opened up. With the inside out, we find ourselves no longer in the audience space, but in the middle of the projector. The film, whose content is conventionally the focal point, moves into the background. What becomes visible, as though under a magnifying glass, is the medium, the illusion, the way still images are turned into moving pictures. In the terms of cognitive psychology, from which Heideggerian phenomenology also draws, this can be understood as a displacement of "figure" and "ground". The figure is that, to which attention is directed; the ground is everything that first makes the figure possible, but which is omitted by perception, so that we can concentrate on the figure. The ground of the figure "film" is the cinema, the box office cashier selling tickets, the darkened projection room, the muted projector, the electrical currents that provide the projector with energy, and so forth. All of this must be present, in order for us to see the film. At the same time, however, we must also fade it out, so that we can concentrate on the content of the film, the "figure". Although - or perhaps specifically because - they are faded out, all these things have a much more lasting influence on our culture than any single film, which often disappears again after a few weeks, only to be replaced by the next film. [...] (Felix Stalder)

Gebhard Sengmueller is an artist working in the field of media technology, currently based in Vienna, Austria. Since 1992, he has been developing projects and installations focussing on the history of electronic media, creating alternative ordering systems for media content and constructing autogenerative networks. His work has been shown extensively in Europe and the US, among others at Ars Electronica Linz, the Venice Biennale, ICA London, Postmasters Gallery NYC. His main project for the last few years has been VinylVideo, a fake piece of media archeology.

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January 31, 2007

Hazardous:

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Second Front watches "Strange Culture"

This week we were invited to attend the premiere of "Strange Culture", an independent film by Lynn Hershman which discusses the infamous case of the arrest and pending trial of Steve Kurtz from the Critical Art Ensemble. The film will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival this week and has the distinction of being the first-ever feature film shown in Second Life.

It seemed altogether appropriate to have the first-ever performance art group in Second Life present at opening night (afternoon). We decided to don hazmat suits and gas masks to show our support for the defense in the ongoing Kurtz case. Second Front was unusually subdued in its urge to create a large-scale performance. We sat quietly and watched the film. The only sound besides the movie soundtrack was the constant clicking of the Second Life cameras as we documented this historic event.

Watching a movie in Second Life was totally weird. When you get to the movie theater, you hit the play movie control on your SL window. We're all watching the same film, but a different times! That seems like the most significant difference from a traditional cinema. Continue reading Hazardous: Second Front watches "Strange Culture" by Great Escape, Second Front.

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January 10, 2007

James Cameron’s Virtual World Film Greenlit

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Avatar

Filmmaker James Cameron of Titanic fame (and, probably more importantly to readers of this blog, The Terminator), has just gotten the go-ahead on his next film. What interests 3pointD about this is the fact that it will be filmed in a moviemaking version of a virtual world, and new details of the process have emerged in a story in today’s New York Times [Computers Join Actors in Hybrids On Screen]. Cameron is using the latest “performance-capture” technology to record the movements of actors’ bodies, as well as their facial expressions. But such recordings are usually made against a blank background that’s later filled with a digitally produced environment. In the case of Avatar, Cameron’s next film, “The most important innovation thus far has been a camera, designed by Mr. Cameron and his computer experts, that allows the director to observe the performances of the actors-as-aliens, in the film’s virtual environment, as it happens,” the Times writes.

The key phrase here is “as it happens.” Cameron and his team have essentially created a virtual world that they view live as the performances are recorded. What they see on their screen is the motion-capture already composited into the digital environment, rather than having to wait until later to see the combination of the two streams of content. In addition, Cameron can pan and zoom around on the fly: “If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale. It’s pretty exciting,” he says. That’s exciting technology indeed. Though it bears little direct impact on current multiuser virtual worlds, it’s the kind of technology that will gradually filter down to broader levels, and the kind of filmmaking that could help promote Internet-based 3D spaces. Will the movie be any good? Who knows. The filmmaking techniques, however (which almost resemble the ultimate in machinima), are fascinating. And don’t forget that Cameron sits on the Multiverse advisory board. [blogged by mark wallace on 3pointD.com]

Posted by jo at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2006

A Swarm of Angels

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Remix Cinema

Want to Remix Cinema? You can help invent the future of film by joining the Swarm in creating a £1 million pound film and giving it away to over one million people in one year. By using the Internet as a medium to fund, help make and distribute this film A Swarm of Angels wants to remix cinema.

A Swarm of Angels is a new way to create cult film. The project is a giant new media experiment to gather 50,000 people paying £25 each to create a new type of movie. This feature film and associated original media embraces the flexible digital-age copyright of Creative Commons, because we want people to freely download, share, and remix the original media made for this project. You can remix and use the film for any non-commercial purposes. You can also use parts of it for your own commercial work, under our additional Sampling Plus clause.

"A Swarm of Angels is an attempt to bridge the top down auteur-driven world of cinema with the bottom-up networked world of open source and the Internet, creating a fully financed feature film to be released under a Creative Commons non-commercial license. But if the finished film can be distributed freely upon release - why will anyone bother paying to see the end result? Well instead, people pay to be part of the process of creation. £25 gets you membership of the Swarm, and you can start voting on scripts, posters and production, while discussing decisions and direction directly with Matt himself. It's no small task, and Hanson seeks 50,000 angels / £1m to make the project, which he will write and direct, a reality, with just under 1000 signed up to date. That said, given the high production values shooters can produce on no budget when working together, open source stylee, one cam imagine something substantial being created with a tenth that many people." From "MATT HANSON: From onedotzero to Open Source filmmaking in A Swarm of Angels" by Nicol Wistreich, Netribution.

Posted by jo at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2006

Interactive Digital Cinema Workshop

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Call for Participation

Call for Participation :: Interactive Digital Cinema Workshop :: ZKM, Karlsruhe :: October 19 ­ October 25 2006.

Besides effecting production, distribution and projection technologies and procedures the rollout of digital cinema will enable interactive experiences in cinemas even without further major financial investments.

During this intense 5 day-workshop participants will explore the potential for new interactive film theatre experiences starting with a look back at early interactive cinema projects and building on advances in interactive technologies and media usage. (keywords: multi-user <­> single location/several networked locations, live-gaming, VJing, machinima, group-interaction, live cinema, databased narratives, ad-hoc customization of content, live audience participation, expanded cinema, d-cinema-alternate content...)

Sagasnet workshops are aiming in the first place at professionals (developers, writers, producers, designers, programmers, artists, researchers...) coming from MEDIA member countries. Applicants coming from other countries please contact the sagasnet office for details.

Application forms: www.sagas.de
There is a limited budget for scholarships available.

Interactive Digital Cinema Workshop
Preliminary Timetable

Thursday, October 19 2006
Arrival
7.00 p.m. Meet & Greet

Friday, October 20 2006
9.15 a.m. Brunhild Bushoff (sagasnet)
Opening Speech

9.30 a.m. Greg Roach :: Introductionary Session Part 1: Identifying the opportunity.

How digital projection, next generation platforms and the growing pervasiveness of interactivity are combining to create a unique, new opportunity for filmmakers. What separates digital interactive cinema from games, interactive narrative or other forms of new media. The overview will then be followed by a detailed examination of Sony's failed InterFilm project. We'll also look at a brief overview of interactive cinema in general and examine the range of expectations audiences are likely to bring to the genre.

11.00 a.m. Chris Hales :: Kinoautomat Rediscovered

This presentation will explain and contextualise the world's first interactive film system, Kinoautomat, which ran for several hundred performances at the Expo'67 in Montreal. Created in Czechoslovakia as the brainchild of Raduz Cincera, the film¹s seminal interaction and narrative scheme has been much discussed in the academic literature - despite the fact that it had never been publicly performed since 1974. Interactive cinema was most certainly kick-started by the Kinoautomat, even though it predated the use of digital technology (it was shot on film and shown using synchronised projectors). Although Mr Cincera himself died a few years ago, I have conducted research in Prague in collaboration with his eldest daughter to author an interactive DVD using the original material of the film (which was actually entitled "A Man and his House") and have edited a book of 120 pages around the subject of Kinoautomat. Additionally, in February 2006 a Œlive¹ screening was produced at the National Film Theatre in London. The presentation will include a run-through of the DVD. www.kinoautomat.org

12.30 a.m. LUNCH

2.00 p.m. Greg Roach: Introductionary Session Part 2: Possible Modes of Interaction

How might the audience effect and alter the experience? Narrative forms, aesthetic variance and different ways to compute the results of audience choice. Media forms in interactive cinema: film, video and real-time 3D. The implications of media choices on both emotion and interaction. A detailed look at Volumetric Cinematography and it's implications for interactive cinema. Playback engines: from high-end PCs to XBox, xServe, HD DVD, Blu-Ray and PS3 - the choice of platform is more powerful and robust then ever before. How do you know which to choose? The problems of group interaction: input forms (gesture, sounds, buttons, etc), interface constraints, user feedback techniques, signal-to-noise. The tyranny of the majority. Basic production overview: how do you go about combining film making and computer software design?

4.00 p.m. Greg Roach: First Brainstorming Session with assignment for exercise

Saturday, October 21 2006

9.30 a.m. Greg Roach: Presentation and discussion of exercise results

11.00 a.m. Chris Hales

Interactive Film Performance, based on the experience of "Cause and Effect". Since 2002 I have been creating interactive movies specifically for "live" performance to large groups, and have taught numerous workshops from which additional films have been created. This hour-long show will present a variety of these films, each of which can be affected by the audience in a different way, for example audio frequency detection or the video-tracking of a bright light. Most of the films fit into the existing repertoire of "Cause and Effect", a collaboration between myself and Teijo Pellinen, which has performed almost thirty live shows at various venues and events in Europe and North America and from which important experience has been gained. www.causeandeffect.tk

12.30 a.m. LUNCH

2.00 p.m. . Friedrich Kirschner

Using Realtime Engines and Machinima for Audience Participation The Session will introduce the machinima approach of creating live performances with audience interaction - using game engines to produce realtime content that can react to audience participation in a wide variety of ways. Examples and demonstrations will illustrate basic approaches to use this new way of animated filmmaking in a performative context.

4.00 p.m. Greg Roach/ Tom Klinkowstein: Second Brainstorming Session followed by group work sessions

Sunday, October 22 2006

Horizon Projects Workshop

Horizon Projects are proposals for the future created to gain fresh perspective on current creative undertakings. This workshop employs the Horizon Projects premise as a tool to imagine new forms, locations and themes for the interactive cinema concepts already created to that point in the larger workshop.

9.15 a.m. Tom Klinkowstein: Introduction, teams formed, teams work ...

12:00 a.m. Tom Klinkowstein

Proposal presentations by teams from the perspective of the Future Frame of Reference, followed by discussion/ feedback from the other members of the workshop.

1:15 p.m. Lunch

2:15 p.m. Tom Klinkowstein: Proposal presentations continued ...

3.15 p.m. Tom Klinkowstein: Team work sessions

5.00 p.m. Tom Klinkowstein

Presentations with iterated proposals based on morning feedback and suggestions on how what is being proposed for the future might be adapted to current conditions. Wrap-up discussion.

Monday, October 23 2006

9.15 a.m. Greg Roach

Final team formation and reconsidering concepts on the basis of brainstorming and Horizon workshop results, Assignment for building a (paper) prototype Mentored group work session.

12.30 a.m. LUNCH

1.30 p.m. Greg Roach: Mentored group work session

3.00 p.m. Greg Roach: Testing and feed-back

Tuesday, October 24 2006

9.15 a.m. Greg Roach: Mentored group work session; Preparing for final concept presentation.

12.30 a.m. LUNCH

2.00 p.m. Greg Roach: Final concept presentation, discussion and overall evaluation

Wednesday, October 25 2006

Departure

BIOS

Christopher Hales: Artist and researcher specialising in interactive film and video, based in the Smartlab’ research centre of the University of East London. Taught many years in art/design with computers, and studied MA Interactive Multimedia at the Royal College of Art, London. His PhD "Rethinking the Interactive Movie" is due for completion in October 2006. His cdroms were selected at numerous film/multimedia festivals, and his touch-screen installation (showing a dozen or more films) was presented in Seoul, Helsinki, Warsaw, Nagoya, San Francisco and Sydney (amongst other places) and was included in the 2003 "Future Cinema" exhibition curated by the ZKM. He writes frequently about "interactive moving image", has taught over 80 short workshop courses on this subject in numerous institutions in Europe, and is a regular speaker at international events. Recent projects include "Cause and Effect", an experimental interactive cinema performance staged with Finnish colleagues, and a research project in Prague to rediscover the "Kinoautomat" from 1967 - the world's first interactive movie. www.kinoautomat.org www.causeandeffect.tk www.smartlab.uk.com

Friedrich Kirschner is a filmmaker, visual artist and board member of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences. He recently worked as a senior researcher at the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz. He re-purposes computer games to create animated narratives and interactive performances. His award-winning work has been shown at various international animation festivals and exhibitions, including the ZKM Karlsruhe, the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Ottawa international Animation festival and the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. He also publishes machinimag, an online magazine focussing on the development of the emerging art form of machinima moviemaking. www.zeitbrand.net friedrich.kirschner[at]zeitbrand.net

Tom Klinkowstein is President and Creative Director of Media A, LLC, an internationally recognized design and consulting group with clients such as NASA, Reuters, the Ford Foundation, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Nissan and Japan Airlines. He has spoken to over 100 art, design, business, political and academic groups, including the United Nations Conference on the Information Society, the Smithsonian Institute's Cooper Hewett Museum of Art and Design, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, the Industrial Design Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai and the Dutch Design Institute¹s, Doors of Perception conference. Klinkowstein previously was a professor at the West Brabant Art and Design College in the Netherlands and since 2000, an Associate Professor of New Media at Hofstra University on Long Island. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute of Art and Design in New York City. His work has been shown in art centers, museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy. Mr. Klinkowstein¹s work also can be found in the archive of the Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art in The Netherlands.

Greg Roach, M.F.A., is the CEO and Artistic Director of HyperBole Studios, which he founded in 1990. For nearly fifteen years Roach has been recognized as a worldwide leader in the field of interactive film, video and storytelling. His company, HyperBole Studios, explores interactive multimedia as a new artistic and cinematic form. In 1990, Roach´s first effort was the creation of an online, interactive digizine - years ahead of the internet explosion. During the two years he published HyperBole magazine, he designed, wrote and produced the world's first interactive, multimedia novel. The Madness of Roland, one of the first non-reference CD-ROM's, which was published to great acclaim. While finishing work on Roland, Greg also wrote, produced and directed a short interactive film called The Wrong Side of Town, a work that the American Film Institute considers to be the "first interactive narrative film." With these two milestones under his belt, Greg began work on Quantum Gate, the industry's first full-length interactive movie, and the first product to use his newly conceived VirtualCinema technology. His first six years in business culminated when Fox approached him and asked him to helm the much sought after X-Files game. Upon its release The X-Files Game exceeded all expectations, premiering at number one in nearly every territory where it was released, and going on to sell over a million copies worldwide. Currently he is primarily focused on the DVD and wireless platforms. The ROM applications which he designed for "The Terminator 2: Extreme" DVD won an IRMA award for best DVD ROM. He is currently working on several DVD and wireless projects for major publishers. Recently, he presented a paper entitled "Imagine Places: Distributed Telepresence Installations for Creating Immersive Historical Reconstructions" at the UNESCO "World Heritage in the Digital Age" conference held in Alexandria, Egypt.

sagasnet
Bavariafilmplatz 7
D-82031 Muenchen-Gruenwald
tel: + 49 89 64 98 11 29 /30
fax: + 49 89 64 98 13 29/30
mobile: + 49 (0) 171 45 28 0 52
URL: http://www.sagasnet.de :: http://www.sagas.de
e-mail sagasnet[at]sagasnet.de :: sagas[at]sagas.de
Skype: brunhildbushoff

sagasnet is a non profit initiative to further interactive content creation in the frame of the MEDIA Programme TRAINING .

Posted by jo at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2006

Mark Wallace

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LonelyGeeks, LifeLogs and Four Eyed Monsters

A few of us from the Brooklyn metaverse crowd went to see Four-Eyed Monsters last night, a very interesting feature film about a young New York couple who end up documenting their every move via videotape and handwritten notes, only because they’ve decided not to actually speak to each other. While the film is not a documentary, it was made by the couple who it’s about, and their real lives and dramatized lives do begin to converge toward the end of the film. While it’s a movie about relationships (you know, the kind where two people “slowly start to meld into one beast that has 2 mouths, 4 eyes and 8 limbs and takes up 2 seats on the subway!!!”), it’s in greater measure a movie about the act of recording itself, and what it means at a moment in history when you can store, play back and share as much of your life as you like, with as many people as are willing to pay attention. In this case, Susan and Arin have created a virtual version of their real life together, and it’s interesting to ask what the differences between the two may be, if any — especially in light of similar trends in things like lifelogging, and in the fictionalization of a life like lonelygirl15’s. And if you stay with this long-winded post all the way to the end, you get to think about how this kind of logging of our lives might help enhance them in some future 3pointD world.

“How long can their relationship survive as an art project???” asks the Four Eyed Monsters Web site. But that doesn’t describe everything that’s going on here. There’s an art project unfolding, but there’s a relationship too. Are they the same thing? Does the art project follow the course of the relationship, or is the relationship subservient to the art project? The truth is probably somewhere in between: you can’t separate the relationship from the art project; at some level, the relationship is the act of documenting itself. A more interesting question might be, “How long could their relationship survive if it stopped being an art project?”

The documented life got some attention recently with the stellar rise of lonelygirl15, who appeared to be recording her days via a video diary on YouTube. Except that lonelygirl15, who’d garnered millions of fans in the four months she’d been videoblogging herself, turns out to be the construct of a couple of young California filmmakers. “Bree” was a totally fictional character, but it’s interesting to ask how the fictional Bree differs from the fictionalized Susan and Arin. Four Eyed Monsters is composed for the most part not of documentary footage but of re-enactments. (And in any case, what does it mean to re-enact what was in part acted out in the first place?) Are the characters of “Susan” and “Arin” that appear on the screen somehow qualitatively different from the character of “Bree” that appears in the YouTube videos? Are they all virtual people, or do Susan and Arin have some deeper gravitas for being based on their actual counterparts? And isn’t Bree, the lonely teenager, based on an actual archetype? Does that make her any “more fictional” than the characters in the film? Or is that like being “more pregnant”?

One of my favorite ideas is the impossibility of autobiography: you can’t ever really give an accurate account of yourself and your history; there are just too many intangibles of memory, bias and emotion that get in the way. Four Eyed Monsters is only one version of the lives of Arin and Susan. Cut together differently, the film could have given a very different impression, or examined some other aspect of what it’s like to come together in the way they have. You can’t present all views at once, and any one view leaves out some amount of information. (There’s a 3pointD uncertainty principle here that I’ll post about at some point in the future.)

Lately, though, some people have been looking for ways to capture their lives in as much detail as possible, using the tools of the information age. While the Internet and digital media make recording the scenes of one’s days far easier than it has been before, they also make possible, at least in theory, a detailed quantification of one’s life that could potentially be very useful in a future metaversal age.

One failed version of this is the now-discontinued LifeLog program of the Department of Defense. “The LifeLog capability would provide an electronic diary to help the individual more accurately recall and use his or her past experiences to be more effective in current or future tasks,” according to DARPA’s description. “The goal of the LifeLog is to turn the notebook computers or personal digital assistants used today into much more powerful tools for the warfighter.”

That program is no more, but into the breach has stepped ur-blogger Justin Hall, who’s been looking at “Passively Multiplayer Online Games” in recent months. (We first blogged about this back in June.) Basically, a PMOG, in Justin’s early conception, logs all your Internet activity and assigns scores based on various factors such as which and what kind of sites you visit, for how long, and what you do there, etc. It’s not very far advanced beyond an idea, but a kind of proof-of-concept version of Justin’s game is online, where you can see how surfing various sites might raise or lower various attributes that are used to describe your avatar in the game.

It’s interesting to contemplate what it might be like to compare the fictionalized self created by such a game to the real person who plays it. But this kind of lifelogging can be taken a giant step further and allowed to bleed out into the real world, where it could become really useful (or really scary, depending on who’s doing the logging).

It already happens on the Web all the time: the recommendations you get from Amazon or NetFlix and the targeted ads in your Gmail sidebar all work off subsets of the lifelogging idea. Amazon, NetFlix and Google log your activity on their sites, and use that information to point you toward things that are in line with the preferences you’ve shown in the past.

Now extend that idea to all areas of your life. Imagine if, after you’d used FreshDirect for a while, it started automatically ordering and delivering your food for you, based on the orders you’d placed in the past. Now knock down the walls between FreshDirect’s information and the information gathered by NetFlix, and it might even tweak your delivery based on what kind of movies you’d ordered that week. (Popcorn and chocolate for the chick flicks, Red Bull for the slasher movies?) Now imagine you’re sharing all this information — travel itineraries, iTunes playlists, anything else you care to name — with a whole bunch of other people, much as Susan and Arin shared the moments of their lives.

I’ll let Jerry contemplate the ramifications of videologging (no “b” here) one’s life for all to see. Logging the data of your every move, though, could get interesting. Vernor Vinge mentioned the potential opportunities that are opened by this in his keynote speech at the end of the recent Austin Game Conference. Vinge envisioned “lifestyle cults” that gather and share their information in order to garner favorable terms in whatever context. If 1,600 other people in your neighborhood all order Red Bull on the weekends, for instance, you ought to be able to leverage that into a discount. Things like that seem to be the gist of Vinge’s thinking here.

If it sounds outlandish to be sharing so much information with so many other people, consider the fact that Web 2.0 has pushed us much further in that direction than almost anyone thought we would head. On Flickr, YouTube, Blogger and so many other sites, we offer up personal information about our habits, thoughts, purchases and selves every day — many times a day, in fact. One of the ideas behind lifelogging is simply that you as an individual would be able to aggregate all that information in a single place. Without revealing anything more than you’re already putting out there, you’d immediately have a powerful resource for doing things like making decisions, making friends, making new discoveries, you name it.

Me, I’ve shared enough in this post already. (1,400 words!) See you — or some version of you, at least — at the movies. [blogged by Mark Wallace on 3pointD]

Posted by jo at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2006

A Certain Brazilianness

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Maurits Script

Maurits Script, the third part of her ongoing project A Certain Brazilianness by Wendelien van Oldenborgh :: 23 September – 29 October 2006 at Casco.

In the attempt to find an alternative mode of production, ‘A Certain Brazilianness’ became the title of a multidisciplinary process, based on relations and resonances. From a heterogeneous Brazilian culture a number of significant strategies, partly stemming from the social sphere, have led to impressive moments of cultural production. As a way of working, A C_B__ transfers these possibilities into the production of film, drawing on the basic language and roles in a film production to set up situations that lead to new relations. Two performative stages have taken place so far. In these active encounters the participants were performers as well as viewers and listeners, creating the script and cinematic material during the event.

The third part will be based on a script compiled of excerpts from different sources relating to Johan Maurits van Nassau’s period as governor of the North East of Brazil (1637 - 1644), for which he has often been credited as being an early modernist ruler. Maurits Script focuses on the paradoxes and inner conflicts produced within the art of governing, the institutions of the period, and personal relations at a moment when many different groups found themselves living together with clashing interests. It will be staged and filmed at a live event in the Golden Room of the Mauritshuis, den Haag (built by Maurits during his period of government in Brazil), where a group of participants, each of whom have differing relations to the contents of the script, will perform it and discusses its contents in relation to the present day.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh is based in Rotterdam. Recent projects include "A C_B__ Sound Track Stage" for “Cut For Purpose”, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam 2006, ”The Basis For A Song” for “Be What You Want But Stay Where You Are” (by Ruth Noack and Roger M. Buergel), Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2005.

14 September : Public film shoot: Mauritshuis, den Haag, 1-4pm
Korte Vijverberg 8, NL 2513 AB Den Haag
The film shoot is open to the public, but the Mauritshuis' standard entrance fee applies to all visitors.

Friday 22 September: Opening of exhibition at Casco, 6-9pm
Sunday 22 October: Discussion and screening of final edit of the film, 5-8pm

Maurits Script is supported by Fonds BKVB, Amsterdam, Gemeente Utrecht and the Mondriaan Stichting.

Casco
Office for Art, Design and Theory
Oudegracht 366
Utrecht 3511PP
T/F: +31 (0)30 231 9995
info[at]cascoprojects.org

Posted by jo at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)

August 21, 2006

DemoKino

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Virtual Biopolitical Agora

DemoKino: Virtual Biopolitical Agora by Davide Grassi :: An Anti-entertainment interactive movie, that develops according to your vote! :: DemoKino is a virtual parliament that through topical film parables provides the voters (participants) with the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of modern politics: the questions of life. The project questions not only the utopia of contemporary virtual forum that is supposed to open ways for a more direct and influential participation but also points out a much deeper problem of modern democracy (virtual as well). With its reduced narrativeness - the story is built on the "pro and contra" inner dialogues of the protagonist who is led around his home in a parliamentary kind of way by the "voters", based on their decisions - Demokino shows how these ethical dilemmas of modern life suddenly become the core of our political participation.

When the issue of life enters the political arena and modern politics becomes biopolitics the democratic decision reaches an impasse: in the political arena laws are being debated on issues that can actually tolerate no decisions and any kind of majority rule is problematic in itself, any political regulation a publicly legitimated act of violence. Demokino is a virtual parliament that clearly displays how politics comes before law. Law is just a utopic and redundant technical procedure to cover the political essence. [via]

Posted by jo at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)

August 11, 2006

Who's Rosa von Braun?

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SUFFERROSA

Sufferosa (neo-noir) interactive narrative space, by Dawid Marcinkowski, is an interactive, narrative project combining photography, film, music and web. It is a multidimensional, audiovisual collage referring to Jean Luc Godard's 'Alphaville' (1965). Sufferosa derives from the American film noir, silent cinema and the aesthetics of music videos. Surrealistic, full of cliche, it is a reflection on the cult of beauty and fear of death in our present-day world; a world that is getting dramatically older (by the year 2025, one in four people in developed countries will be over the age of 60).

Posted by jo at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2006

The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success

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Art as Disease

Random and Artificial are proud to present The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success by Carlo Zanni, a two minute movie transformed by an Internet data flux and re-edited server-side when web statistics (Google Analytics) are available: the public can watch a new movie every day. Opening: August 3rd 2006 at La Rada Centro Per l’Arte, Locarno as part of WIRELESS a show in partnership with 59° LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.

The core idea of the work is the relationship between manic-depressive illness forms and success at large, a theme it symbolically tracks through the filming of a ill man lying in a bed and the presence of his partner (actress Stefania Orsola Garello). The man’s body (actor Ignazio Oliva) progressively fills with stains: quantity and position depend on the number of users (and country of origin) visiting the website. The more users, the more stains, thus causing the "illness" to spread all over the body. The public grants success while appropriating the body of the artist.

The title of this work has been derived from a review of a book called Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison. This is basically a work dedicated to all those people living beside someone suffering or experiencing bipolar disorders.

Music for the film is by acclaimed composer Gabriel Yared (The English Patient, Cold Mountain); words of the voice playing over the film are taken from the last page of American Purgatorio, a novel by Brooklyn based American writer John Haskell, who also plays the text in the English version.

"Art as disease. And success as a contagious and self-destructing process. In a challenging mix between cinema and live Internet data. The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success is a visual statement about the ancient theme of malaise as a typical artistic condition, built with tools and metaphors of our technological era." (Valentina Tanni)

Posted by jo at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success

tieszanni.gif

Art as Disease

Random and Artificial are proud to present The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success by Carlo Zanni, a two minute movie transformed by an Internet data flux and re-edited server-side when web statistics (Google Analytics) are available: the public can watch a new movie every day. Opening: August 3rd 2006 at La Rada Centro Per l’Arte, Locarno as part of WIRELESS a show in partnership with 59° LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.

The core idea of the work is the relationship between manic-depressive illness forms and success at large, a theme it symbolically tracks through the filming of a ill man lying in a bed and the presence of his partner (actress Stefania Orsola Garello). The man’s body (actor Ignazio Oliva) progressively fills with stains: quantity and position depend on the number of users (and country of origin) visiting the website. The more users, the more stains, thus causing the "illness" to spread all over the body. The public grants success while appropriating the body of the artist.

The title of this work has been derived from a review of a book called Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison. This is basically a work dedicated to all those people living beside someone suffering or experiencing bipolar disorders.

Music for the film is by acclaimed composer Gabriel Yared (The English Patient, Cold Mountain); words of the voice playing over the film are taken from the last page of American Purgatorio, a novel by Brooklyn based American writer John Haskell, who also plays the text in the English version.

"Art as disease. And success as a contagious and self-destructing process. In a challenging mix between cinema and live Internet data. The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success is a visual statement about the ancient theme of malaise as a typical artistic condition, built with tools and metaphors of our technological era." (Valentina Tanni)

Posted by jo at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2006

Meanwhile

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Interactive Online Film

"Godard once said that a film must have a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in this order. This is the source of inspiration of Meanwhile, by David Clark, Jeff Howard, Chris Mendis and Shelley Simmons, an online film that even if it has been made with all the standard movie rules, appropriate the peculiarities of the net (and of the videogame paradigm also). Actually it gives up straightforwardness and embraces a selective enjoyment that allows the user to make a free plot composition, using the nine clips the movie is divided in.

The project is not claiming any originality: amongst the predecessor there are 'Sanctuary', perhaps the first interactive film in history that allowed not only to modify the plot but also to make sort of remixes, and an Italian project funded by the tv on demand 'E' developed by Ebismeda, a film whose plot can be disassembled and re-assembled through the remote control.

But 'Meanwhile' has some food for thought on the evolution of the filmic text. As a matter of fact the scene fragmentation and interchangeability seem to invalidate the intrinsic nature of the movie language causing a significant overlap in the videogame territories. In other words the film becomes a trait d'union between the narration linearity and the text produced in fieri, or between the affective adhesion of the spectator and the claim of an almost absolute player's desire to be the centre of attention. Therefore, if on one hand the new media action and interaction possibilities allow the user to pretend to be an author (here we deal with the net, but the dvd possibilities must not be left out), on the other hand they risk to cause an intellectual levelling off, exchanging an interpretative effort with an exclusive self-referentiality." -- Francesca Tomassini, NEURAL.

Posted by jo at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2006

international remix

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KinoTek

San Francisco International Film Festival's new program Spotlight: KinoTek, International Remix "reinvigorates essential ideas about modern media production and use through the lens of technology. The program allows Festival Web site visitors to reedit, repurpose, remix and mash up an array of clips from selected Festival films. Remixes are then posted back to the site for others to view and enjoy." This remix practice is also known as "media mashups", "social media" or "user-generated content".

This program was developed in collaboration with Yahoo! Research Berkeley and the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University and MOD Films . Besides the online gallery, a selection of the best remixes will screen at the festival.

The remix project follows historical antecedents, paying "homage to a lineage of cut-and-paste sensibilities that pervade modern media aesthetics, echoing many experiments in cut-up artistic practice such as Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov's film tests and Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray's Dadaist use of ready-mades and absurd juxtapositions. These early experiments (and others like them) helped pave the way for the powerful artistic concept known as montage, which itself has been repurposed and remixed over the years through contemporary practices such as pastiche aesthetics, collage and mashups, which, in turn, owe a huge debt to the breakout of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1970s."

Posted by michelle at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2006

DemoKino

demokino.jpg

virtual biopolitical agora

DemoKino is an anti-entertainment interactive movie that develops according to your vote; a virtual parliament that through topical film parables provides the voters (participants) with the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of modern politics: the questions of life.

The project questions not only the utopia of contemporary virtual forum that is supposed to open ways for a more direct and influential participation but also points out a much deeper problem of modern democracy (virtual as well).

With its reduced narrativeness - the story is built on the "pro and contra" inner dialogues of the protagonist who is led around his home in a parliamentary kind of way by the "voters", based on their decisions - Demokino shows how these ethical dilemmas of modern life suddenly become the core of our political participation.

Developed by Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Arts, a cultural instiution exploring social, political, aesthetic and ethical concerns through artistic production using new technologies.

Posted by michelle at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2006

Shadow Bag

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Symbiotic Systems

Normally there's an individual perception of our own shadow? What's the relationship between the body and its projection in space? This is the area of interest Shadow Bag deals with. It's an installation, by Scott Snibbe, that through a complex system of video projections involves the body of the spectator with a reactive attitude. Everytime a visitor walks in the area illuminated by the projector, his shadow is captured and re-projected on a screen, triggering an unpredictable series of interactions and behaviors. Sometimes there's no feedback, sometimes the shadows are wandering from side to side, sometimes they behave like mirrors. When the spectator's movements cross one of the projections, it suddenly collapses or simply dissolves.

The work's title is inspired by the Junghian theory of the body's shadow: it is compared to a bag that contains all the human animal instincts and goes further wondering about the social fallout of this hypothesis. Through the project's interactive principle, Snibbe digs up the complexity of the individual behaviors in front of our own (or another) projected alter-ego. But he also promotes the interdependence feeling and the friendly interaction amongst foreigners, improving also the visitors' focus on the self. The sense of the work is constructed by the participants through a body awareness process and all its expressions. Quoting the words of the philosopher Merleau Ponty, the body is the privileged access to the world: "The body in the world has a similar role of the heart in the organism: it continuously keeps the visible spectacle alive, it animates it and it feeds it from within, establishing a symbiotic system with it." by Francesca Tomassini, NEURAL. Another work by Scott Snibbe...

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Via Computing for Emergent Architecture: You Are Here 2004 (led by Eric Siegel) is an interesting application that tracks and displays the paths of visitors traveling through a large public space.

The system displays the aggregate paths of the last two hundred visitors along with blobs representing the people currently being tracked. When viewers approach the work, they can display the live video image with the paths of currently tracked visitors superimposed.

(…)

The technology of this system is rooted in surveillance systems that are rapidly being put into place in all of our public spaces: airports, shopping malls, grocery stores and our streets and parks. The motivation for such public systems ranges from security and law enforcement to marketing and advertising. The system of this artwork is wholly anonymous – no data is collected and the only use of the information is by the museum visitors to track themselves and their friends. However, in many real-world applications of such technology, the identities of those being tracked are also registered. You Are Here provides a visceral understanding of surveillance systems’ capabilities and a sensual, visual representation of information that is normally only accessible as dry statistics.

This benevolent application of tracking is also meant to show the interconnectedness of viewers’ with other visitors to the space by give them a sense of the aggregate presence of people over time. [blogged by nicolas on pasta and vinegar]

Posted by jo at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2006

Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin's

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The Battle of Algiers

The Battle of Algiers by Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin launched March 1, 06 artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet art.

This work recomposes scenes from the 1965 film "The Battle of Algiers" by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. The original film is a reenactment of the Algerian nationalist struggle leading to independence from France in 1962. The success of the actual battle for independence has been attributed to the nationalists organization: a pyramidal structure of self-organized cells. For their project, Lafia and Lin recomposed the film along a cell-based structure, in which French Authority and the Algerian Nationalist cells are represented by stills from the film and move according to different rulesets. When cells of different camps intersect, they trigger video cells displaying each side's tactics (as depicted in the film) according to the rules of the system.

Accompanied by an essay by Daniel Coffeen: Film, Play, Power and the Computational, or Byting Celluloid: On Marc Lafia's and Fang-Yu Lin's 'The Battle of Algiers'.

"The Battle of Algiers" is the second in a series of three works co-commissioned in collaboration with Tate Online. See http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/new_commissions.shtml

Critical texts and video interviews with the artists will accompany the wor=
ks at http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/

Posted by jo at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2006

New Gothic + Rattus Norvegicus

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Magical Lock-down Dark Pegasus

Martin Sexton presents New Gothic which combines music and performance and features Truth Machine's 'Heraldic Unicorn Lion Grace System', described variously as 'the high-concept band to end all high-concept bands' and as a cult religious group by others. The varying members of this arts collective reportedly all work to a set of instructions cut from the text of books that vary from hermetic works, theological mediations to pulp fiction, erotica and maps. Steve Severin conducts and provides the sonic soundscape.

Ride up with the Magical Lock-down Dark Pegasus: a Harley-Davidson XL53 custom motorcycle resplendent with blue-black Scottish crow wings and 'pimped' with a DVD monitor as tail-plate, that echoes TE Lawrence's quote that ‘A motorcycle with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocations, to excess’.

Meanwhile, HMC create new visual experiences, as they unleash chthonic forces with their technological multimedia film noir Rattus Norvegicus as part of New Gothic at Tate Britain.

This fantastic, free, HMC MediaLab event will be: Friday, March 3, 2006 at 18.00 - 22.00pm; Tate Britain, Millbank, London, England SW1P 4RG.

Rattus Norvegicus is a dark digital artwork shown for the first time at "Late at Tate Britain" as part of the "Gothic Nightmares" exhibition.

HMC MediaLab is a cutting edge play-group for digital-art professionals.

HMC MediaLab exists to build a functional culture of innovation.

The HMC MediaLab encourages experimentation between the arts, science and technology disciplines. HMC MediaLab believes that interesting people do interesting things. The HMC MediaLab was formed in 2005 as a creative outlet for digital arts professionals. If you are a digital artist, or if you do something "interesting" and would like to get involved, please contact us at mail@hmcmedialab.org . We showcase, develop and build cutting edge projects that blur the lines between art and science.

To find out more about some of our projects click here.

If you are developing digital art, we want to know about it. Please get in touch with us.

To be invited to future events, simply sign up for our free e-mail newsletter here.

Posted by jo at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2006

Deptford.TV

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Annotate the Regeneration Processes in Deptford

During March, Deptford.TV will host 3 two-day long hands on database filmmaking workshops, in which we will establishe a public database of documentary film and video to help annotate the regeneration processes in Deptford and across SE London. Join us to remix Deptford comment and contention in a series of public screenings and talks at Deckspace, Goldsmiths and across boundless.coop network.

Review of material already in hand and the newly accumulated documentary evidence, interviews and accounts of experience. We invite you to take part in the three workshop weekends plus the walk and conference taking place at dek.spc.org, The Albany and Goldsmiths.

The workshops are free buth places are limited, to book, please send an email to info[at]deptford.tv and state workshop and/or event you want to attend.

Programme March 2006:

Workshop #1: TV hacking
at http://dek.spc.org, Borough Hall
Friday 3rd March, 11AM - 5PM
Saturday 4th March, 11AM - 5PM

Workshop #2: regeneration doc
at http://dek.spc.org, Borough Hall
Friday 10th March, 11AM - 5PM
Saturday 11th March, 11AM - 5PM

Workshop #3: database doc
at http://dek.spc.org, Borough Hall
Friday 17th March, 11AM - 5PM
Saturday 18th March, 11AM - 5PM

Deptford Walk
starting at the Albany Cafe
Friday 24th March, 11.30AM

Remix Conference
at Goldsmiths College, New Cross, small hall
Saturday 25th March, 10AM - 5PM

The events are free, but places are limited. to book please email info[at]deptford.tv

Further info: http://deptford.tv

Contact details:

adnan hadzi
phd media & communications

dept media and communications
goldsmiths college
university of london
new cross
london, se14 6nw
united kingdom
tel. +44 20 8816 8166
fax +44 20 7943 2772
(account# 7041207864438)

www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/departments/media-communications
www.filmcode.org
www.deptford.tv
www.liquidculture.cc
www.copyleft.org.uk

Posted by jo at 07:55 AM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2006

HOSTS

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An Interactive Cinema work for Bath Abbey

Supported by Bath Film Festival 2005--Bath Abbey Church, 9th-27th February 2006, Monday-Saturday 10am-6.00pm.

HOSTS is an ambitious project inspired by the motif of Jacob's Ladder on the West front of Bath Abbey. Bristol-based media artist Martin Rieser will hang five giant screens at strategic points of the Abbey space. Wearing a special ultra-sound badge and wireless earphones, the participant in HOSTS triggers the presence of a variety of evanescent projected video characters. As the participant approaches a screen, these individual characters or messengers appear to move forwards from a deep space and come into focus. If the participant then moves on, the characters too pass onwards from screen to screen, keeping pace with them. In this way, once a participant has entered the installation they become part of the story space. By standing in front of a screen they will eventually be paired with and addressed directly through a series of aphorisms by their individual messenger.

HOSTS combines poetry performance, animation and cinema in a unique blend. The words of the spoken and animated aphorisms are apparently those of humans, fraught with ambiguity and misunderstanding. Perverse and fragile, the aphorisms hover between the portentous and the mundane, inflected over and over into different meanings by the messengers. We are captured by the messengers and hurled into their drama in the same way that an unwilling passenger in a train can be given someone's life story. This is not always a comfortable experience. HOSTS is intended as a spiritually enhancing experience for a broad audience, not usually drawn to a media art gallery.

HOSTS is a major multidisciplinary exercise involving film-makers, animators, programmers, electronic engineers, lighting /cameramen, professional actors, and social scientists. The sensor developments have already been made in partnership with Bath University's Wearables Group. Support has been given to the project by Bath Spa University under their research enhancement funding, since this project lines up with the work of the CTOL research group (Critical Topologies of Landscape) and with an AHRB Study award. Bath Abbey and The Bath Film Festival are also supporting the Project.

HOSTS represents a step-change in the way cinema can be made interactive for a mobile audience. It combines the latest technology with innovative creative ideas.

A disk of supporting visual material (Jpegs and QuickTime) is available on CD by request.

Contact Details: Martin Rieser

Tel: 0117 9731041 Mob: 09766766429
e-mail: martin.rieser[at]gmail.com

Posted by jo at 09:00 AM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2005

MobLab

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Origami Bus Pattern

For the MobLab [Related] bus adventure (a bus-gallery with on board artists-Mobnauts who challenge conceptions of public space), Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa from exonemo are filming sceneries from the window of the traveling bus. The Road Movie is made available for visitors to download from the internet.

Downloaded frames from the Web cam, which change every three to five minutes on the Web site, are complete with dotted lines for cutting and folding, and can be printed out and transformed into a paper sculpture of the Moblab bus with windows showing the captured images.

It's a way of bringing public space into private homes and computer cubicles, says Sembo. "We think using paper craft in this way is a sign of other space invading your own space."

Part of the MobLab project, touring Japan, Tuesday 18 October - Sunday 6 November. There's a report on what's going on at MobLab in Asahi and on the MobLab blog. Image. Also by exonemo: Shikakunomukou. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

Posted by jo at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

SPECFLIC 1.0

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Sousveillance Grid + Community Built Display

The Community Built Display enables a group of people with wireless laptops to create a modular, flat-panel, dynamically reconfigurable large-format display. For SPECFLIC, The Outsider Jeremiad will serve as a ringleader of a group of audience members who want to send high-impact visual messages to those on the Inside. Developer: Robert Twomey, UCSD MFA Candidate, Visual Arts; Advisor: Natalie Jeremijenko, Visual Arts Dept., Xdesign Studio.

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The Sousveillance Grid is a net-based interactive display which processes user-submitted camera phone images and displays them in a grid in a random fashion. Projected to the public SPECFLIC audience, it encourages bystanders to assist in documenting their surroundings with the efficiency and depth that only a populace armed with many, many cameraphones can provide. The display was created with PHP and JavaScript and can be viewed on any web browser. A proliferation of digital recording devices are leading us to a place where privacy will evaporate without any parallel efforts from the State — a community armed with compact, wirelessly-connected recording devices will record and police itself far better than any government could have hoped to. Developer: Andrew Collins, UCSD alum, ICAM’05, Calit2 Undergrad Fellow; Advisor: Adriene Jenik [Related 1, 2]

Posted by jo at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

SPECFLIC 1.0

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dress for 2030

Public Launch October 28th, 2005; Pre-show 8pm, main event 9pm-midnight; Calit2 Courtyard, UCSD Campus.

Set in 2030, SPECFLIC's story is not just told, but experienced. Based on cutting edge science and engineering research, SPECFLIC 1.0 performs the social costs and benefits of accelerated progress. What type of future do you envision? Come be part of the public launch of this ongoing performative media project!
Bring wireless devices (laptops & cell phones). In honor of Halloween, dress for 2030.

Directed by Adriene Jenik; Additional text by author Kim Stanley Robinson. Featuring performances by Allison Janney, Ricardo Dominguez, Richard Jenik, Lisa Brenneis and Nao Bustamante. Innovative public interaction modules by Neil McCurdy, Andrew Collins, Robert Twomey, DoEat and Radioactive Radio. [Related post]

Posted by jo at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2005

OneWordMovie

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Collective Unconscious

Beat Brogle and Philippe Zimmerman's One Word Movie is an online platform which organizes, based on user-supplied terms, the flood of images on the internet into an animated film. A word turns into images, images turn into a movie. This project plays with the tension between online and cinematic approaches to images. What images are associated with what words? One Word Movie reveals a glimpse into the collective psychology of online cultures by showing patterns of word image associations, as created by millions of people around the world.

Using a specially programmed search engine, users can call up images from the Internet which match their search term. The project's search engine is built on top of the most popular image search facilities available on the Internet (e.g. Google). Supplied with a search term, the engine produces first a «hit list». This list can be several thousand images long, depending on the term. The images on this «hit list» provide the «raw material» for the movie . Following the ranking on the «hit list», the images are animated into a film in real-time, following a fixed and predetermined score, which consists of a series of interwoven loops. Each film has an individual trailer, displaying the search term as the title and each film lasts until the «raw material» is used up.

Posted by michelle at 04:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 06, 2005

Tangible Viewpoints

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Graspable Surrogates in Multiple Point-of-View Interactive Narratives

Today's story creators have the opportunity to bring digital stories back into our physical environment. Using wireless and tag-sensing technologies, interactive narratives can make use of rich, haptic interactions with physical objects, combining them with the flexibility of digital multimedia content processing and delivery.

The Tangible Viewpoints project explores how physical objects and augmented surfaces can be used as tangible embodiments of different character perspectives in a multiple point-of-view interactive narrative. These graspable surrogates provide a direct mode of navigation to the story world, helping to bridge the gap between the realms of bits and atoms within the field of multimedia storytelling.

Using a system for interacting with a character driven-narrative, the different segments of a multiple point-of-view story are organized according to the character viewpoint they represent, as well as their place in the overall narrative. These segments can consist of various types of media (video, audio, images, and text), and can present character development, action, and location with as much complexity as any scene of a film or chapter of a book.

Posted by jo at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2005

Unusual Encounters

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Chance Encounters

Unusual Encounters is a three-part, web-based art project in which Jean Paul Gaultier has had the pleasure of participating and which is a mixture of creative sophistication and the latest technology, unique in the world, viewable at this address. Designed by the film director David Mileikowsky, under the artistic direction of Jean Paul Gaultier, the Unusual Encounters site proposes 3 original modules, offering 3 unique meeting experiences:

On September 9th, an on-line artistic improvisation will be organised for 500 trendsetters around the world and we have the pleasure of inviting you to take part in this exclusive venue. On that day, "Zhang will meet Veng" and for the first time ever, the unusual encounter between two unrivalled virtuosos, Maxim Vengerov and Zhan Yimou, the Russian and the Chinese, the violinist and the film director: two meteors of the Modern Arts will be brought together online in a live artistic performance, somewhere between China and Germany. Some 9000 km apart, the amazing duo will perform on-line, in unison. The first showing is scheduled for September 9th, at 12:00 exactly (Paris time).

You might also like to try Tango Painting, available as of today! For the first time ever, this multi-user graphic application allows user pairs to simultaneously draw up, from a distance and in an entertaining way, multimedia forms, regardless of their skill level. Their work can then be complemented by creations from artists such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Jean-Baptise Mondino, then shared with others on the web.

Finally, on September 10th, The Perfume Alchemist will be presented in an on-line world premiere. This visionary manga by Alain Escalle (director) tells a story of a child, a little prince of the streets, in a high-rise megalopolis, who decides to create the perfume of his dreams. Thanks to "Manga Maker", an on-line video editing platform, every user can participate in the adaptation of the course of the story and then pass the modified story on to his/her soul mate. An extract of this manga is available here.

Posted by jo at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2005

Mediamatic Interactive Film Lab @ Budapest

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6-day Workshop

The Intermedia Institute of the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts is going to host a Mediamatic Interactive Film Lab. Intermedia has promoted the contacts of art and technology in the past years, building up an extensive network in Hungary and Europe. As part of its diverse interest in non-linear modes of narration, the Intermedia Institute invites participants to share experiences and create prototypes for online interactive film projects.

The workshop is designed for up to 16 film-, tv-. radio-, or new media makers from all over Europe. You can use your own footage (up to 40 min) to make an interactive film and publish it on- or offline. The approach is interdisciplinary and introduces new media and cross media content production to people with a background in filmmaking.

The workshop focuses on the cinematic aspects of online interactive film and on issues of combining narratives with interactive possibilities. Participants use the ever-evolving Korsakow software to build their new media projects. Developed by the UdK Berlin and Mediamatic, Korsakow is a powerful, elegant, and easy to learn editing tool.

This 6-day workshop takes place from October 3 - 8. It starts with a symposium and ends with a public presentation of workshop projects.

The price of the workshop is 200 EUR for EU citizens of the new memberstates, and 300 EUR for EU citizens of older member states. Mediamatic provides fully equipped Apple Computers for this workshop.

For more information go to www.korsakow.org or call Klaas Kuitenbrouwer: +31 20 6389901.

You can register online.

To prepare for the workshop we provide an online reader with related articles on interactivity and narration.

Posted by jo at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2005

Obsession

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Manuscape: An Instrument for Non-Linear Storytelling

"I have just got back from Helsinki where I saw Pia Tikka's interactive film Obsession at Kiasma Art Museum. This is a four screen work of immense complexity, working with an automated rules-based system of clip selection, influenced by an audience's physiological reactions to what is seen on screen. Swivelling chairs allow the programme to compile data on viewers's gaze direction, while an interactive handprint on the chair arm picks up subtle alterations in skin conductivity and pulse rate and augments the presentation of image according to arousal states. The subject of the film is sexual obsession and attitudes to rape-conflating female desires and fantasies with a semi-documentary narrative. This is an innovative work, using aspects of audience mobility and biology to alter content." [blogged by Martin Rieser on Mobile Audience]

m-cult.org Project Profile:

Obsession (2003-), Finland
Project URL: http://crucible.uiah.fi/crunet.nsf/etofilmpages/obsessio
Actor: Media Lab / University of Art and Design
People: Pia Tikka, Rasmus Vuori
Genre: interactive film/ installation and research project

Obsession is an interactive film/ installation and research project by film director Pia Tikka which uses motion sensors, cinematic metadata and generative algorithms. The participant has control over the drama flow in a manner that respects the affective nature of the cinematic media, where the participant may even lose conscious control over the flow of the events. Both conscious actions and unconscious sensorimotor reactions of the participant‘s mind/body can have effect on the narrative. Analyzed images are assigned a position in the narrative story-world map, i.e. the manuscape. The manuscape works as an instrument for non-linear storytelling and allows development of a range of interactive multimedia applications. Interaction and software design by Rasmus Vuori.

From the project web site:

Obsession is an attempt to describe, how the traumatic acts of violence not only affect the individual, but how his or her family and the life-environment are also violated. The narrative level of Obsession, in regard to its subject matter of "sex and violence" in our representational culture, brings this important subject matter to the focus of discussion. Inside the four walls of a self-service launderette, young Emmi and an entrant stranger, Henrik, measure embodied distance. From their interaction, a loaded emotional situation emerges, framed by a trauma that Emmi and Emmi’s mother Jatta share. The distorted mind of Emmi creates an endlessly wandering path of narrative potentialities and interpretations.

The computational core of Obsession is a narrative engine, based on content metadata. Inspired by the Russian film theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), the”montage-machine” of Obsession maps spectators’ psycho-physiological states to cinematic elements. Obsession is a kind of enactive cinema: How the narrative unfolds, and how rhythm and soundscape are formed, depend on how the spectator lives by the emotional dynamics between the characters.

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

Parasite + Parallel Worlds

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Mobile Movies

Parasite--by Frédéric Eyl, Gunnar Green and Richard The--is part of the Moving Canvas series; it investigates the visual and symbolical importance of trains in an urban context and the possibility of exploiting them as brief communicative moments.

Affordable mobile video-projections could be used to re-conquer public space often only reduced to graffiti and streetart. The tunnels of a subway-system bear something mystic—most people usually have never made a step inside any of those tunnels. Parasite is a projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains. Using the speed of the vehicle as parameter for the projected content, the projection starts with the train moving inside a tunnel.

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All along their journey, travellers see images mysteriously appearing through the train windows: words, aquatic animals, etc. Confusing the routine of your train-travelling-journey, your habits and perception Parallel Worlds allows you a glimpse into a different world full of surrealist imagery.

Don't miss the video. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

Posted by jo at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

wave_scan

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Allegorical Mapping of the Liminal

wave_scan, by Brad Todd, is composed of an ELF (extremely low frequency) sensor, an antenna and a projection of a video database of water filmed over the past 15 years in different countries.

The system is centred around the ELF sensor. In paranormal research these electric and magnetic fields are also monitored by people searching for ghosts and other inexplicable phenomena: "cold spots" and other signs of paranormal activity reported by persons who think they are seeing phantoms are in fact closely tied to these EMF fields.

The ELF sensor is attached to an old TV antenna and is transmitting to a computer. Any detection of weak fluctuations of frequencies near the antenna results in the direct manipulation of a soundscape which is generated using a sine wave and white noise to create synthetic oceanic sounds. Any readings are also translated as clicks and pops, thereby creating a minimialist audio environment which gives audible evidence of a "presence" in the space.

Besides, the image slowly works itself from full chroma to blank, depending on the number of "hits" in the space. This sense of effacing the work and rendering the image into a ghostly and finally invisible screen closes a circuit or cycle of the works "life", in an allegorical mapping of our anxiety concerning the unseen or liminal... [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

Posted by jo at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2005

KORSAKOW-SYSTEM

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Films with a Twist

The Korsakow-System is an easy-to-use computer program for the creation of interactive films, or better: interactive database narratives. Korsakow-projects are films with a twist. They are interactive - the viewer has influence on the film. They are rule-based - the author desides on the rules scenes relate to each other, he does not create a fixed order. They are generative - the order of the scenes is calculated while the viewer looks at a Korsakow-project. Korsakow-projects can only be viewed on a computer. They can delivered via internet-streaming, DVD-Rom or CD-Rom.

The Korsakow-System was invented by Florian Thalhofer in 2000 for the making of the nonlinear documentary the [korsakow syndrom], his final piece at the University of the Arts, Berlin. It is being improved an developed by him and Prof. Willem Velthoven.

In March 2003 the Korsakow-Foundation was founded in Amsterdam. The Korsakow-Foundation organizes workshops and takes care about the further development of the Korsakow-System.

TEACHING & WORKSHOPS

Mediamatic, Amsterdam organizes Korsakow-workshops at Film- and Media-art-festivals and at Filmschools in Europe. More than 15 one-week-workshops have taken place in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, USA, Finland, Estonia and Portugal. Find out more about Korsakow-workshops at korsakow.org

From 2001 - 2004 the Korskow-System was the students' main working tool in the class "Interactive Narration", led by Prof. Willem Velthoven and Florian Thalhofer at the University of the Arts, Berlin.

From autumn 2005 on, the Korskow-System will be used at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig in a class led by Guest-Prof. Florian Thalhofer.

The Korsakow-System is also used at a number of Film- and Media-Art-Schools all around the world.

We know of approximately 250 projects that have been made with the Korsakow-System so far. Projects done with Korsakow were shown at Galleries and Festivals worldwide.

Posted by jo at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2005

HINGES ON

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Adaptation, Access, Regulation, Open Source

HINGES ON is an interactive film installation on the informal and formal economies of India's "ICT capital", Bangalore. Visitors enter through a sparsly lit sound tunnel, where they are exposed to an audio experience of failed efforts to retrieve information. (The sound works can be downloaded from the site.) Finally, one is released into the room hosting the video installation. Multiple door-shaped screens in the centre of the space serve as projection surfaces for the four simultanous projections. The screens are on hinges and invite the visitors to turn them into the angel required to catch the projection they wish to watch. (You can find information on the themes and issues in the backdrop section). A switch board provides the interface to the speakers featured on video. (In depth documentation of the process including a list of interviewees and the 'making of switch board, doors and software patches is accessible here!'

HINGES ON at Ars Electronica, opening September 1, 2005, 15:30, Campus / Kunstuniversität Linz. The work was realized by ambientTV.NET during the Tactical Media Lab at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India; with Thomas Abraham, Salam Hidish Singh, Ishan Ghosh, Nishita Kavadia, Siddharth Muthyala, K.T.Thomas, Pratima Kalmadi, Divya Viswanathan, Umang Razdan Bhattacharrya, Ramyah Gowrishankar, and Priyanka Dilip. Lab led by Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel.

Posted by jo at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2005

LIVE FROM PARADISE

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Three Venues, Four Performances

Nine people in three different cities perform together in one single production. An empty shop in Birmingham, a disused church in Colchester, a former courtroom in London merge to become a fourth imaginary space. Three audiences, one in each city, witness the performance simultaneously.

Live from Paradise is a global internet project that breaks new ground in live performance. The show takes place in three different locations which are linked by video streaming to create a simultaneous combined performance, telling a story that uses cinematic language to create a fourth imaginary space. In each place the audience witnesses a live performance and a large-screen video projections from the other two venues. The resulting single narrative is like a report transmitted from somewhere metaphysical – live from paradise. SATURDAY 21 MAY to SATURDAY 4 JUNE [no performance on 23 May] at 7:30pm

Station House Opera’s Live from Paradise is a co-production with De Daders, Amsterdam and premiered in October 2004 performed simultaneously in three apartments across the city. In 2006, Live from Paradise will be presented in three cities in Europe and finally at three locations on three different continents.

LONDON
The Courtroom
Toynbee Studios
28, Commercial Street
London E1 6AB
Box Office: 07952 769633
http://www.stationhouseopera.com

COLCHESTER
Presented by Colchester Arts Centre
ST. Martins Church
West Stockwell
Colchester CO1
Box Office: 01206500900
http://www.colchesterartscentre.com

BIRMINGHAM
Presented by Fierce
Level 3
The Mailbox, Wharf Side
Birmingham B1 1 XL
Box Office: 08707301234
http://www.fierce.info

Live from Paradise is produced by artsadmin Funded by Arts Council of England
Contact Judith Knight email: judith[at]artsdmin.co.uk
tel: +44 (0) 20 7247 5102 fax: +44 (0) 20 7247 5103
Artsadmin, Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk
http://www.stationhouseopera.com

Posted by jo at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2005

Passion Film: The Message

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How Your Creativity Sells Airline Tickets

"SN Brussels Airlines has launched a viral campaign that effectively combines movie, web and interaction. The campaign, which is called Passion Film, allows you to integrate your own personal text message into a movie ad and thus, to twist its plot.

In the ad, you see SN airline service personnel receive an important phone call from one of its passengers (the call is from the you). Unfortunately, the passenger has already boarded and the plane is on the runway about to take off. However, with a bit of imagination and bird-like group organization, the friendly personnel manages to get your message through to crew and passengers." [blogged on Guerilla-Innovation]

Posted by jo at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2005

Cyburbia Productions

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Live Movies

Cyburbia Productions, a multimedia performance studio, focuses on the collaborative creation of "live movies," syntheses of cinema, theater and music. The company’s work employs digital projection and sound technologies, and filmic narrative techniques, to construct moving stage pictures and sonic theater, in which live actors interact with animated performers, and emerge from or vanish into projected environments, settings and dreamscapes.

Projects include: SILENCE & DARKNESS is a live movie for the cell phone age by Kirby Malone, and passages from Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Heiner Müller. See list of productions here.

Posted by jo at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2005

artificial changelings

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Sphere of Influence

In Toni Dove's Artificial Changelings there is the possibility of moving back and forth between two centuries as if they were parallel realities suspended in a universe where time has no linear direction. The viewer does not change the narrative events, but develops a more immersive relationship with the characters and environment based on physical behavior. Different viewer responses will produce different aspects of content, emotional tone and information.

Posted by michelle at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2005

Interactive Panoramic Cinema

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Embodied Spectatorship

Paper abstract: For most of the past 100 years, cinema has been the premier medium for defining and expressing relations to the visible world. However, cinematic spectacles delivered in darkened theaters are predicated on a denial of both the body and the physical surroundings of the spectators who are watching it. To overcome these deficiencies, filmmakers have historically turned to narrative, seducing audiences with compelling stories and providing realistic characters with whom to identify. This paper describes several research projects in interactive panoramic cinema that attempt to sidestep the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema and instead are based on notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship rather than just storytelling. Example projects include interactive works developed with the use of a unique 360 degree camera and editing system, and also development of panoramic imagery for a large projection environment with 14 screens on 3 adjacent walls in a 5-4-5 configuration with observations and findings from an experiment projecting panoramic video on 12 of the 14, in a 4-4-4 270 degree configuration. [via USC Interactive Media Division]

Title: "Experiments in Interactive Panoramic Cinema"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 1/19/2005

Steve Anderson, Susana Ruiz, and Scott Fisher will give a summary of the work done over the past year with Sony's Fourth View panoramic video camera system. This will be a runthrough of a paper to be given by Steve tomorrow in the annual SPIE conference in San Jose on "The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2005" chaired by Mark Bolas.

Posted by jo at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2005

OptionalTime/Public Expanse

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Between Reality and Fiction; Before Meets After

OPTIONALTIME/Public Expanse, by Joes Koppers and Susann Lekås, uses new new media to make a non-linear experience tangible in public space...It appears as a big mirror that in fact is an interactive movie...OPTIONALTIME/Public Expanse is a layered projection visually blended into one 'real' image. One layer is pure fiction and has been filmed by the artists, forming their most direct (personal) contribution...(It) uses cameras with full transparency; what is recorded is shown and nothing is archived. All images are processed in real-time by a computer, resulting in playback that sometimes is 'live' (a normal mirror image), sometimes buffered (delayed or accelerated image) and sometimes spatially manipulated. The playback 'mode' of the projection is directly controlled by the actions of the public.

Posted by jo at 08:24 AM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2005

HopStory

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Interactive, Location-based Narrative Distributed in Space and Time

"As computing and communications technologies evolve, there is the potential for new forms of digitally orchestrated interactive narratives to emerge. In this process, balanced attention has to be paid to audience experience, creative constraints, and presence and role of the enabling technology. This paper describes the implementation of HopStory, an interactive, location-based narrative distributed in space and time, which was designed with this balance in mind. In HopStory, cinematic media is housed within wireless sculptures distributed throughout a building. The audience, through physical contact with a sculpture, collects scenes for later viewing. Inspired by the history of the installation space the narrative relates a day in the life of four characters. By binding the story to local time and space and inviting the audience to wander, we amplify the meaning and impact of the HopStory content and introduce an innovative approach to a day-in-the-life story structure." Abstract for Hopstory: an Interactive, Location-based Narrative Distributed in Space and Time by Valentina Nisi, Alison Wood, Glorianna Davenport and Ian Oakley [PDF]

Posted by jo at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2005

LifeLine

""...Traditionally, the performing arts is comprised of three components - the performer, the audience, the stage. The performer engages the attention of the audience; the audience observes and responds to the gesture and prose articulated by the performer; the stage provides a formal structure within which the relationship between performer and audience is cultivated and sustained. Separation from the creative process is perpetuated whilst the stage imposes its own criteria upon it." 1.

The hierarchical performance space described above is posited on notions of authorship, in the modern history of cinema and theatre first the writer, then the text and finally the context have all laid claim the authority of meaning. New forms of performance especially interactive forms rely on a more democratic distribution of authorship that occurs when the performance space no longer relies on the separation of author and audience but engenders an integrated space, a space shared by both the performer and the audience that disperses authority." from The Extended Logic of the Interactive Performance Space by Gregor White.


Posted by jo at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

December 31, 2004

MISSION TO EARTH

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Soft Cinema

MISSION TO EARTH (Soft Cinema Edition), A Media Installation by Lev Manovich: What kind of cinema is appropriate for the age of Palm Pilot and Google? Automatic surveillance and self-guided missiles? Consumer profiling and CNN? To investigate answers to this question, Lev Manovich - one of today’s most influential thinkers in the fields of media arts and digital culture – has paired with award-winning new media artist and designer Andreas Kratky to create the Soft Cinema project. They have also invited contributions from such other leading cultural figures as DJ Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis and Jóhann Jóhannsson (music), servo (architecture), Schoenerwissen/ Office for Computational Design (data visualization), and Ross Cooper Studios (media design).

Lev Manovich will present Mission to Earth in The Project Room @ Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY – from January 8 through January 26. The exhibition includes a public reception, the release presentation of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database DVD, and a panel all taking place on Saturday, January 8, 2.00 – 4.30pm, 2004.

MISSION TO EARTH (Soft Cinema edition) is a science fiction allegory of the immigrant experience that adopts the variable choices and multi-frame layout of the Soft Cinema system to represent ‘variable identity’. In this gallery installation the film is being assembled in real-time by the Soft Cinema software from a large database of media elements. While the narrative stays the same and repeats every 23 minutes, all other elements can potentially change. As a result, there is no single ‘unique’ version of the film – every run produces a new
version.

SOFT CINEMA: Navigating the Database is the Soft Cinema project’s first DVD publication published and distributed by The MIT Press (2005). It presents three ‘films’, including Mission to Earth, that were created within the framework of the project. Although the ‘films’ on the DVD reference the familiar genres of cinema, the process by which they were created and the resulting aesthetics fully belong to the software age. They demonstrate the possibilities of software) cinema - a 'cinema' in which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives.

Lev Manovich, the leader of the Soft Cinema project and the videographer, editor, and author of Mission to Earth, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of new media culture. He is the author of The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) and Little Movies (1994), the first film project created specifically for the World Wide Web. His computer-driven installations and films have been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries, media and film festivals in the US, Europe and Asia, including ZKM, Karlsruhe; the ICA, London; SENEF, Seoul; and the ICC, Tokyo. In addition, Soft Cinema received an honorary mention at Transmediale 2003 festival, Berlin and is the subject of a short documentary by ARTE-TV.

Andreas Kratky, the author of the Soft Cinema software, has been responsible for media design and co-direction of a number of groundbreaking new media projects, including the award-winning DVDs That’s Kyogen and Bleeding Through – Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 (both published by ZKM).

FURTHER INFORMATION
Soft Cinema Project
Complete text used in Mission to Earth

OPENING AND PANEL DISCUSSION at Chelsea Art Museum SATURDAY January 8, 2:00 - 4:30 PM with:

Lev Manovich, associate professor of new media, University of California, San Diego
Christiane Paul, adjunct new media curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
Barbara London, curator, video and digital media, Museum of Modern Art
Sue Hubbard, art critic, Independent Newspaper, London
Ken Feinstein, artist/professor of experimental video

WHERE: Chelsea Art Museum is at 556 West 22nd Street, at the corner of 11th Avenue. Take the E or 1, 9 to 23rd Street.

HOURS: Chelsea Art Museum is open Tuesday - Saturday, Noon – 6 PM; Thursday to 8.

TICKETS: Events are FREE with museum admission: $6 for adults, $3 for students and seniors. Thursdays $3 for everyone. Free admission for members and visitors 18 and under.

Posted by jo at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2004

netzwissenschaft

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Emerging Infrastructures of All (Inter)net Research

Dr. Reinhold Grether's network research | netzwissenschaft site maps the "emerging infrastructures of all (inter)net research endeavours. net.science as an anthropology of connectivity is trying to overcome the constraints of specialist method transfers on net matters. the protuberance of technical networks necessitates a professionalization of human net knowledge. neither the isolation of concepts as in basic research nor the encapsulation of processes as in applied sciences will ever be able to adequately describe the complex autopoiesis of networks. net.science is undoubtedly developing into a scienza nuova of its own right."

Check out his Mobile Art and Virtual Performance research areas.

Posted by jo at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2004

Station House Opera project

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A Global Event of a Different Order

DOMESTIC SPACE needed for use as development and performance location for STATION HOUSE OPERA. New project LIVE FROM PARADISE is a global internet project that breaks new ground in live performance. Three events around the world, each with its own local audience, are linked by video streaming to create a combined performance that is presented at each location as a live movie projected on two screens, edited together in real time.

Each location is unique and has a single camera, which can move from the performance space itself to other places in the building or the surrounding streets. Close-ups, views from windows, street scenes, views of hidden rooms, all from different places, are linked to form a single narrative.

The house/flat/space will be needed for a year from April 2005, as the piece will be tailor-made and rewritten to fit the specific location, whilst the other two performances travel from Brazil to Berlin, Japan to Amsterdam. If you know of a possible location or want more information about the project, please contact Alex Hyde, alex @ artsadmin.co.uk

Live from Paradise is an event which aims to make the ordinary, physical existence of distant performers close, immediate, unpredictable and alive. By joining the physically present performers with performers in remote locations, via the visual language of a narrative film, shot and edited in real time, the audience is confronted with a global event of a different order - one which makes a performance while questioning their own understanding of film, video and live broadcasting.

Live from Paradise will be performed in three apartments simultaneously. In each of the three places the audiences will see the live performance along with video streamed from the other two locations, projected on two screens placed side by side.

Posted by jo at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2004

Mulholland Drive

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cinema sans image

In Mulholland Drive by D. Scott Hessels, three artists drove Los Angeles' famous Mulholland Drive with five types of sensors—measuring tilt, altitude, direction, speed, and engine sound. The captured data was used computationally to control two robotic lights in a dark room filled with fog. Two beams of light and the processed sound of the engine recreated the topology of the road as a new form of visual experience and sculpture—cinema without image.

Mulholland Drive is a light installation that translates the movement across a topology as two beams of light. Instead of direct human interaction, the work takes the sensed data (tilt, sound, and GPS) of traversing an environment and recreates the drive through angles, light, and sound. A passive interactive experience, the artwork emphasizes the spatial quality of light—it is cinema without image. Like cinema, direct data is captured, then edited, and shaped. However, here the environment directly defines the experience, using the geography computationally. In a sense, “Mulholland Drive” is a new media Earthwork and demonstrates how suddenly the rhythms, patterns, and random chance of the environment can be sensed through new media technologies and used to create new forms of visual experience.

Producing under the name Damaged Californians, Scott Hessels has released experimental art and commercial projects in several different media including film, video, web, music, broadcast, print, and performance for the last decade. His work has shown in international film and new media festivals, on television, and in contemporary art galleries. He recently completed a commission of three interactive films and six online movies for Australia and was honored with a career retrospective at the Melbourne International Film Festival. As a media artist, his installations have shown at CiberArt in Bilbao, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Professionally, as Director of Information Technology for Fox Television, he was responsible for the systems, software, communications, and security for two television stations and two cable networks…a career he followed for 25 years. He currently teaches digital video at UCLA in the Design | Media Arts Department and is studying for his graduate degree in that field.

Posted by jo at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2004

Time [Re]Sequenced

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user dependent cinema

PLACE--a year long series of exhibitions that explore the role of networked technologies in transcultural experience, organized by MediaNoche-- presents the first exhibition in the series. Time [Re]Sequenced (Networked Cinema) is a project by Cyril Tsiboulski which explores the ways traditional cinematic structure can be affected by new media.

Time [Re]Sequenced is a screen based interactive project in which a four minute scene from Solaris (1972), a Russian film directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, is broken into individual frames by the users accessing the project site. The sequence is then reconstructed and played back using shots initiated by the users. Time [Re]Sequenced depends on and responds to the virtual participation of the audience. A unique network driven algorithm creates a new space and a new language of cinema. Edited in real time, the film sequence can only be reconstructed as a result of audience participation. It depends on the network traffic volume thus creating potentially endless variations. As a contributor to the cinematic structure, but a passive viewer of the result, an audience member is challenged to re-think the role digital technology plays in how we experience our culture.

November 5th - 24th, 2004; Opening reception: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5th from 6 - 8p.m.; MediaNoche is located at 161 East 106th Street, New York City.

DIRECTIONS: Take the 6 subway to 103rd Street and walk north along Lexington Avenue to 106th Street. Turn right on 106th Street. MediaNoche is on the north side of the street in the middle of the block.

HOURS: The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 3PM to 7PM. Appointments can be made by calling 212 828 0401.

http://www.networkedcinema.org

Posted by jo at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2004

iCinema

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Immersive and Interactive Narrative

The iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, established in 2001, is a joint venture of the College of Fine Arts and the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. It brings together researchers and postgraduate students in new media, digital cinema, digital aesthetics, film theory, multimedia design, computer science, artificial intelligence and software/hardware engineering.

The iCinema research program focuses on the research and development of a digitally expanded cinema. This includes all forms of the moving image, made visible on any type of screen or in any sort of immersive environment, whose structure is constituted by various methods of narrative coherence. The project is directed by Jeffrey Shaw and Dennis Del Favero.

The Centre has four principal research domains:

Immersive Visualization Systems: The exploration of immersive environments which provide for the collection, integration and display of visual, audio and kinesthetic data.

Distributed Interface Systems: The integration of interface systems with the experience of distributed spatial visualization environments.

Interactive Narrative Systems: The exploration of interactive narrative systems which provide the viewer with the ability to select and edit interaction with a set of visual narrative streams.

Theories of Interactive Digital Narrative Systems: The inquiry into theories of narrative and the organization of units of meaning and experience within the digital domain.

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

October 13, 2004

Cinéma

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Shuttled Between Worlds

Cinéma is a multi-artist, cross-disciplinary performance presented in a storefront, converted into a theatre which looks out onto an urban streetscape. The audience inside this theatre watches and listens to video and sound elements while live performance takes place on the street outside. Narrative elements in Cinéma are in both French and English. Cinéma opens with texts which deal with the nature of the first word, the dominance of the ‘cinematic eye’ in our experience of the world, and the fragility of the human body. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with its shuttle across the transitional space between the worlds of the living and the dead, is used as a structuring device for the piece.

Cinéma will be presented at SAT (Society for Art and Technology/La Societé des arts technologiques), 1195 rue Saint-laurent, Montréal [between René-Levesque et Sainte-Catherine - métro: Saint-Laurent]; October 12-15, 2004 at 8pm. During the day visitors can sit in the theatre observing the street while listening to an audio piece in which fragments of the performance soundtrack are adapted as an installation.

Thematically, the use of the myth is of interest in examining the very contemporary problem of the ability of art to influence the unfolding of events. What is the use of art in the face of political and social conditions which appear to be beyond our control? Can art create a window onto invisible forces which seem to control our lives? Can it open a process which allows us to approach spiritual and existential questions without falling into romantic clichés? In short, what is the potential relevance of art beyond its contemporary relegation to the role of diversion and entertainment?

Music: Rainer Wiens
Texts: Shauna Beharry, Andrew Forster
with: Monique Romeiko, Robert Schweitzer, Solomón Díaz, Michael Fernandes, Nathalie Claude

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

September 22, 2004

Geo-Cinema

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Embedding GPS in Moving Images

"If we can send a picture of a place, why wouldn’t we want someone else to find exactly the same spot? The same angle? The same longitude and latitude? The same Place." Being On Location: The beginnings of a Geo-Cinema & Location-aware video recording. See also: Get Carter 1971 Location List & Days in the Country & Photo recognition software gives location & RAW What happened in that minute before you took a picture? (=place) & this MDVR from March Networks & Data and Narrative: Location Aware Fiction.

originally posted by thomas, 04.11.04 on angermann2.

Posted by jo at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2004

Elastic Test

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eliminate undesirable foreigners

Immigration authorities around the world need our help!! Use this website to contribute your ideas or proposals for an elastic test that can be devised to eliminate undesirable foreigners.

Immigration Statutes around the world are generally written using vague or abstract notions such as good moral character. It is the messy job of the courts to make such abstractions concrete, to objectively test and measure the moral character of a foreigner, and to eliminate arbitrary or contingent factors from the immigrations process. Join us in doing our part. We will invent, develop and implement numerous elastic tests, which can help the authorities contain and eliminate undesirable foreign bodies. Some of these tests will then be executed on our foreign test subject in a series of live and webcast performances.

Robert Lawrence (UNIMAS, Sarawak, Malaysia and USF, Tampa, Florida) wrote to us about this project on July 22, 2004. He said:

This project from the beginning has had an open door for participation through the web, but currently we are looking for ways to decentralize the project in more significant ways. Some issues related to this on which we are cogitating:

1. Given that our interventions require location-specific collaborations, how can the role of trans-local media, networks or distribution channels be re-imagined?

2. How can the project become less centralized? What are some models of de-centered cooperation we can try to implement – what is the advantage of a distributed network of creators in this case?

3. How might considerations of distribution and re-usability expand the current scope of the work?

4. One of the important aspects of the work is initiating and facilitating new relationships between local communities and structures – is this sustainable?

As we continue to evolve this project and develop ways to ‘turn it loose’ we are very interested in engaging in dialogue, theoretical and practical collaborations, and discovering and developing new models for distance collaboration.

Another of Lawrence's projects Un Message, Evidemment was blogged here.

Lawrence had this to say about it:

"The ‘story’ will be told entirely in the recorded messages that the foreground characters are listening to on their cell phones. These stories will be selected, synthesized and/or adapted from the contributions at this website and other venues. These stories will be gathered in several ways. Whenever the film in progress is shown at festivals, workshops or any other venue people will be asked to contribute storys by phone, sms, email. Participants will be encouraged to engage the performance on any number of levels.

We are also seeking opportunities to workshop the film doing shooting or writing. The “completed” film provides another dimension of the viewer/performer dynamic. At every stage of production, post-production, and presentation the ‘final form’ of the film will be negotiable. It will be shown in a user interactive form on the web, and in ‘concrete,’ though varying, versions in festivals and the usual film art venues – It may not ever appear in the same form twice."

Posted by jo at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2004

Textual @traction

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Audience gets the message

In the new movie about text messaging--Textual @traction--audiences "will be able to see the messages exchanged between leading characters-on their own mobiles...The film centres on a young man who finds a lost mobile phone and starts replying to text messages from a mystery stranger...What makes the film unique is that the audience does not actually get to see the messages on screen...Instead, by pre-registering, they receive the texts to their own phones at the same time as the characters on screen." Karen Price, The Western Mail, Sep 9 2004. Textual @traction has been selected to compete for Best Short Film, Best Foreign Film and Best Drama, at this year's Los Angeles International Short Film Festival. Posted by emily 09.09.04 | 05:54 PM on textually.org

Posted by jo at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2004

Un Message, Evidemment...

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Cell phone portraits

Un Message... is an ongoing film and performance. The performance actions are built around the activity of making an interactive collaborative film. The film is a story about communication. The performance is a communication about story.

The film is already shot. The film has not been written. The film will be written through mobile phone lines, voice messages, sms’s, email, conversations, random overheard snatches of dialogue and any other sounds produced by the participants of various festivals, seminars, workshops and by visitors to this web site.

Posted by jo at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

help me make it through the night

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Acting Out

help me make it through the night, brought to you by the Gob Squad...

"In the blue, dead hours of night, four people return to their hotel rooms. None of them can sleep, instead they kill time in cold baths or by finding comfort in the solace of the hotel mini bar. Each is being watched by a surveillance camera, sharing their moments of fear and boredom as they sit out a long and sleepless night. In the conference room of the hotel the audience watches the four performers on a fourway split screen projection. In the anonymity and discretion of the hotel environment the performers will enact forbidden games and unlived desires at the request of the audience."

Posted by jo at 02:00 AM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2004

More Distributed Cinema

Lev Manovich's Soft Cinema

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Soft(ware) Cinema is a dynamic computer-driven media installation. The viewers are presented with an infinite series of narrative films constructed on the fly by the custom software. Using the systems of rules defined by the author, the software decides what appears on the screen, where, and in which sequence; it also chooses music tracks. The elements are chosen from a media database which at present contains 4 hours of video and animation, 3 hours of voice over narration, and 5 hours of music.

Affective
Cinema

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Affective Cinema is an interactive video installation. The order and parameters of image and sound shown on the video are influenced according to the visitor’s measured emotional response to displayed video clips. Players see more important video scenes; the stronger they react, the more they understand of a secret system, where abstract characters and objects tell a situation of social dependencies and connections. There is an abstract spatial situation: only elements like windows, doors, cars, etc. are placed in a wide unlimited white space – no walls or environmental elements. The sound has the important function to create that space in the human mind and to cause additional emotional reactions.


Posted by michelle at 07:16 PM

July 30, 2004

Distributed Cinema

SPEC-FLIC

Described by Adriene Jenick as a "Speculative Distributed Cinema Project....a series of fictional events performed as distributed cinema. SPEC-FLIC is a platform for speculation, creative experimentation and imagination among UCSD students, faculty, staff and the larger public. SPEC-FLIC's title refers to speculative fiction (an area of science fiction that is focused less on new science/tech and more on societal impacts) as well as to the size (a "speck") of the PDA-based video frame that serves as the conduit for this durational collective performance. Originally described as a distributed science fiction soap opera in three phases."

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Adriene, tell us about this image.
What is the technology and experience behind this work?
Would you speak about the progression of your work from Paper Tiger television to Desktop Theatre on the internet to Active Campus and Spec Flic on the wireless network?

In your initial post you note these ongoing issues. Can you discuss them by way of examples from your work?

- timing/pacing/duration
this can be thought of from the perspective of participants or from "viewers" - in my experience the "lags" and glitches are all absorbable within the context of a live event. The archiving of this work does not allow for its tension to exist

- relationship of writing to performing, or textuality and orality
this is hugely fascinating to me especially considering the constant evolution of written and spoken language

- use of agitprop to catalyze unexpected engagements
all of my work is engaged within the larger "publc sphere" and cedes a large amount of control to the folks who are engaging with it.

Regarding SPEC-FLIC, your blog shows you in the midst of testing equipment. What are you testing? What is your creative process for working with technology and networks?


Posted by michelle at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)