networked_performance

July 10, 2007

[1001] 1001 nights cast news

Have your Say, Workshop and more

1001 NIGHTS CAST News: THE THREE-QUARTER MARK; YOUR SAY; MOVING TIMEZONES; LONDON WORKSHOP.

THE THREE-QUARTER MARK: Sometime between tonight's performance (#750) and tomorrow's I will pass the three-quarter mark of the project. Since the two-third mark back in April, I'm very honoured to have performed stories by these new contributors to the project: Jordan Peimer (LA), Peter S. Petralia (London), Catherine Lord (LA), Adrian Heathfield (London), Sara Jane Bailes (Bristol), Karen Christopher (Chicago), Rinne Groff (NYC), Rebecca Schneider (NYC), Tony White (London), Geoffrey Batchen (NYC), Trevor Smith (NYC), Kate McIntosh (Brussels), Michael Grosberg (NYC), Hannah Chiswell (UK), Angela Piccini (Bristol), Lina Saneh (Beirut), Thalia Field (Paris), Alisa Lebow (London), Jane Gleeson-White (Sydney), Robin Bale (London), Branislava Kuburovic (Prague), Lara Pawson (London), Matias Viegener (LA), Kathryn Ryan (Sydney), James Tierney (Portland), Linda Dement (Sydney), Agnes Kocsis (London) and Nicholas Royle (London).

YOUR SAY: There is a new feedback section on the site. It's called Your Say. If you want to make a comment about a story, a performance or the project in general, please Have Your Say. You can choose to have it published on the site or to keep it private. If you want to see the published comments, hit the What You Said button.

MOVING TIMEZONES: The project moves to London on Tuesday July 17. That night, performance # 757 will be webcast at 9.10pm. That is: 10.10pm in Paris, Madrid and Prague 11.10pm in Jerusalem, Beirut and Istanbul 4.10am, July 18 in Perth, Hong Kong and Manila 6.10am, July 18 in Sydney 7.10am, July 18 in Auckland 4.10pm in New York, Toronto and Bogota 1.10pm in Los Angeles

LONDON WORKSHOP: Ten writers from the UK will join Barbara Campbell in London on July 20, 21 and 22 to write a three part story for the project. The writing workshop is part of DIY 4. DIY 4 is a collaboration between the Live Art Development Agency, Artsadmin, and New Work Network, and is being developed with Nuffield Theatre/LANWest, New Work Yorkshire, Fierce Festival, Colchester Arts Centre, The Basement Arts Production South East, and Dance4. DIY 4 is part of Joining the Dots, a Live Art Development Agency initiative supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Posted by jo at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2007

Régine Debatty Interviews

Christine Hill

"[...]Do you perform or role-play with Volksboutique? How do you differentiate one from the other?

It is good that the the word "performative" has entered the general art vocabulary, because it rescues work like mine from being labeled as Performance Art. I am extremely averse to theater, because I don't want to see a simulation of life. I want life. I want things real and in real time. And there is always going to be that unfortunate leap the mind makes when hearing the phrase "performance art" that conjures the stage whisper, or someone setting themself on fire. So I don't consider myself to be performing in the sense that we understand "acting" or staging. But I DO find that the entire thing is about performance, in terms of what in German is the word Leistung. And I do have a certain public persona that is in the work (and probably in my teaching as well). It is a part of my own personality, not something that is assumed, but it is also specific to certain projects that contain an extroverted element. Initially, my labors in the Volksboutique were specifically about pointing directly to the fact that this was an occupation. Something all-consuming, that required a sweat to be broken. And about clarifying that my own person/a was the guide through this set of ideas. This is also a way of addressing accountability and responsibility. Projects of mine require participation of various levels by viewers. How much they can access has in part to do with how they approach me as the representative of any given work. I feel this is a fair exchange, similar to any in a shop transaction..." From Régine Debatty's Interview with Christine Hill, we-make-money-not art.

Posted by jo at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

Nina Czegledy reports on Media Forum 2007

Nudity:_Game Console_

Between June 25-28, Media Forum, Moscow in collaboration with the Moscow International Film Festival, presented Nudity/Game console - a series of events including a Vito Accoinci retrospective, round table discussions and a video art competition. The theme of this year was: Nudity/Game console. The ERA Foundation hosted the Media Forum events in their centrally located, elegantly renovated gallery space.

In this report I would like to focus on the round table discussions - especially as the majority of the presenters happened to be women working with research & practice in digital fields/communities. Instead of lengthy descriptions, links are provided below for further information.

"Cultural cooperation online", the first discussion on June 26th was presented by Angela Plohman, content developer of Labforculture. The organization provides extremely useful tools for those in the arts who wish to collaborate across borders. The constructive, practical value of this information and knowledge platform was very much appreciated by the audience as attested by the numerous questions and comments.

On June 27, Anne Nigten of V2 lectured on "Research and development in the interdisciplinary field from an art perspective" followed by Dmitry Bulatov on "The third modern - denuding the media. The technobiological art work." Last but not least Margarete Jahrman showed us "Pong Dress" and Ludic Society. All of these presentations were very well received with lively Q&A periods.

Next day, June 28, "Super-Embodiment of Woman Artists in Media Arts" was presented by Irina Aristarkhova, Nina Czegledy and Elena Kovylina. Irina noted in her introduction that "Nudity and the Nude - have become key issues in contemporary art, theory and politics. Women artists face what Foucault called 'hysteriarization of female body', while men artists face an issue of 'absent male body' (Kelly Oliver) and respond to it with various strategies. One might argue that both Western and Eastern European women artists have exhibited 'too much body', and to a certain extent find it difficult to leave "body" behind. However, we rarely discuss what impact socialist gender policies and practices have had on this process within aesthetics. If performance art leaves us with legacy of 'too much body' - 'super-embodiment', - one wonders of it morphs into (new) media art as question of 'machine' / 'cyborg' embodiment and its identity."

In the course of our presentations both Irina and myself emphasized that feminism and gender issues can not be separated from the particular history of the region. Lack of clarification of this issue leads to numerous misconceptions and miscommunication. Case histories of media art were presented including "I am a robot" by Boryana Dragoeva Rossa (Bulgaria) and "Reality Resonance" by Erika Katalina Pasztor (Hungary), followed by the outstanding Russian performance artist Elena Kovylina, showing her "Pick a Girl" video performance featured at the Sydney Biennale 2006. The questions and comments at the end of our panel revealed that controversy and strife are still embedded in this discourse.

The schedule left room for us to visit some artists studios, participate in the mega-retrospective by Oleg Kulik and Vinzavod and old factory converted into a mixed use art center and luxury boutiques - where hopefully the Media Art Lab will have its future home. There is so much more including Art4 the private contemporary art museum, Moscow Rolls Royce, the electroboutique, traffic jams, night life etc. etc -worth a visit!

nina [via Spectre]

Posted by jo at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2007

Interferences

Interferences ... is an interactive installation created by Matteo Sisti Sette and Maribel Pozo which consists of a back projection screen showing an artificial life system which is sensitive to electromagnetic waves emitted by users mobile phones.

In its ‘natural’ state, image and sound are in constant evolution, moving and growing as if alive. Their growth and evolution is altered in the presence of electromagnetic waves.

This work tries to draw attention to a phenomenon whose physical and material relevance we tend to ignore. Little is known about the effect these radiations produce on human body. Maybe they are not dangerous. Many elements of our environment are not, yet they concern us because of their aspect or noise or odour. If we couls [sic] see, or hear the amount of energy which is carried by electromagnetic waves and which passes through our body, would we behave the same way as we do?

The installation is created with Pure Data and Processing. [posted by Garrett Lynch on Network Research]

Posted by jo at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2007

Spinal Rhythms:

Autonomous Embodied Evolution of a Biomimetic Robot's Rhythmic Motion Behavior

ABSTRACT: "The robotic art work Spinal Rhythms investigates the qualities and dynamics of physical movement performed by inanimate shapes. To avoid mimesis the robot’s body is a primitive abstraction, a connected system of bare wooden limbs linked by joints. The spotlight lies on the action that brings this inorganic shapes to life - the motion. Actuated by elastic shape memory alloy springs the robot performs slow and noiseless movements that differ from robotics’ typical electrical motor characteristics. The movements are the subject of an embodied evolutionary computation process that controls the robotic performance. By repetitive mutation and evaluation the system evolves the actuation signals for the robotic muscles and makes the robot find temporal solutions for the sensitive dynamics between software, hardware and environment. The fault-prone hardware-body of the robot and changing environmental conditions create an unstable fitness landscape that demands continuous adaptation of the activation patterns. The evaluation process uses image analysis to grade the performance of motion patterns according to a fixed set of fitness functions and attempts to find activation patterns that produce more movement while consuming less energy. Trained in an autonomous loop without human supervision the robot is granted a certain awareness of its own body.

The art work presents a solution on how to bridge the gap between digital and robotic artificial life art. It introduces the shaping power of evolutionary systems – widely employed in digital artificial life – into a real-world setup full of complex dynamics and unpredictable conditions. The crucial differences between digital and analog worlds – constituted in the messiness and unpredictability of real life – are emphasized instead of being inhibited. The exhibition setup which shows one machine intelligence training another machine intelligence serves as an allegory on the future superiority of artificial intelligence that will advance without human help." From Spinal Rhythms: Autonomous Embodied Evolution of a Biomimetic Robot's Rhythmic Motion Behavior by EVA SCHINDLING. [PDF] Project website >>.

Posted by jo at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2007

[iDC] SHOWING

Presentational rather than Representational

In our cultural landscape of blogs, webcams, profiles, live journals, and videosharing sites, the intimate lives of everyday people are on parade for all to see. One could say that a new culture of erotic exposure and display is on the ascendance, fueled by the impulse to reveal the self, and streamlined by DIY media technologies. In many ways this culture would seem to be less a representational than a presentational one, where we are compelled to solicit the attention of others, act for unseen eyes, and develop new forms of connective intensity -- as if this were somehow the very condition of our continued existence, the marker of our worth.

Within this new culture of self-exposure, one could say that the dream of panoptic power has vanished, or reversed course. Does the drive to willingly display the self constitute a surrender to the controlling gaze, or simply a shift in the dynamic of the game? For within these presentational environments, performance and role-playing reign supreme, and new forms of subjectivity and identity emerge.

These new cultures of self-display challenge us to rethink foundational concepts in film and media theory and, consequently, to rethink the very conditions of our approach. For clearly these cultures are not necessarily those of mastery and visual pleasure. They do not resolve easily to questions of perception, power, and language. They are cultures of showing as much as those of watching. Instead of a reliance on questions of spectatorship, representation, and scopic power, we are challenged to foreground issues of performance, affect, and display.

Instead of a privileging of reception, we are challenged to incorporate authorial intent or originary motivation. For these new media phenomena are not only texts to be read: they are solicitations, conductive excitations, embedded within networks of erotic exchange. There are pleasures and affective stimulations that motivate these new acts of connection, sharing, and erotic display, for all players on the circuits of production and reception, including both displayer and watcher. Their texts must not only be decoded but their circuits traversed, in implicated ways that destabilize any one-way analysis and its deflections of libidinous investment.

There is much to be gained in rethinking the dynamic between voyeurism and exhibitionism, compensating for the under-theorization of the latter. In film theory, concepts of "attraction" have provided useful tools in thinking forms of exhibitionistic address that counter the voyeuristic orientation of film analysis. In contrast to the mechanisms of maintaining a coherent narrative world, transporting the viewer into another time and space, attractions are those phenomena that directly solicit the viewer's attention in the here-and-now. They can take the form of narrative asides, spoken in confidence to the viewer outside of the diegetic space; as spectacles for their own sake; or as shots which exist purely to titillate the viewer, having no function in the furthering of the narrative. They prompt modes of apprehension that rely less on discursive flow than on direct transmissions that arouse or tease the viewer, engaging the immediacy of the bodily sensorium. In this way they are similar to the way that affects can counter meanings.

In the case of new media of self-exposure, sharing, and erotic display, one could suggest that the emblematic "pose" functions as such an attractor. The pose is a form of exhibitionistic spectacle -- direct address, performative display, or bodily stimulus -- that stands in contrast to the narrative or conversational flow of a social world, whether real or imaginary. It bypasses demands for narrative coherency and instead conducts transversal operations at the level of both the semiotic and the sensational, the reflective and the transmissive. It solicits attention while at the same time functions as portal or conduit for a reciprocal flow: a conductive excitation geared to develop a degree of connective intensity.

Since the pose feeds on reciprocality, it can prompt the changing of roles and positions. In this way it can be seen as a catalyst for identity-formations. Especially as witnessed in the database-driven format of the online profile within which the pose is often embedded, identity is performed through the adoption of specific codes (whether gender or otherwise). One is called upon to play roles in order to assume symbolic mandates, to the extent that "impersonation" becomes a core act of self-identification. Yet the pose does not only operate extensively but intensively, and such "impersonations" arise equally through the internalized transmission of affects. Emergent forms of identity arise through flows of affective resonance that are themselves a powerful social and subjectifying force.

Such impersonations and internalizations can be understood to be driven by lack or by abundance. As a performative player, we are driven by a primary lack at the core of the psychic apparatus. It compels us to seek fulfillment through the gaze of the other: the elementary fantasmatic scene of being looked at (validated) by an unseen presence. The imagined gaze observing us becomes a kind of ontological guarantee of our being.

It serves to put us in our place -- to subject us. In this way, erotic cultures of exposure and display can be seen as driven by the need to perform for the gaze -- the Big Other, the symbolic order -- and therefore to write themselves into existence. Yet at the same time, these insertions of the self into the symbolic order can be regarded as a way of channeling or dissipating surplus energy. From such a viewpoint, the connective intensities that drive these new forms of self-exposure and display are those of expending excess, and the allure of showing could parallel that of sacrificing. The pose, as event-portal, becomes a double-edged solicitor.

Jordan Crandall

iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity iDC[at]mailman.thing.net http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc

List Archive:
http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/

iDC Photo Stream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/

Posted by jo at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2007

The Present Group presents

Earth-Kiln-Bay-Kiln-Bay

Land Art Performance meets the digital world. Artist’s work presented online for the public to experience: The Present Group, a quarterly art subscription service, unveiled an interactive online version of Earth-Kiln-Bay-Kiln-Bay today. For his piece (the second edition of The Present Group) artist Presley Martin collected weathered bricks from a beach in Berkeley, CA. To insert himself into the process, Martin glazed and fired these cast-offs before returning them to the beach and arranging them in a simple circular form. As the tide rose and fell, the waves of the San Francisco Bay continued to weather and re-distributed the bricks. With the help of The Present Group and the United States Postal System, the bricks continue their journey around the country, each stage collected and re-presented to the homes of TPG subscribers. Emily Kuenstler sums up the work in her statement,

“I find Martin’s work especially relevant to the times in which we now live. While the seriousness of world events and crises require daily reckoning with meaning, reclaimed objects inherently illicit new meanings, recontextualized. Rethinking where we have been as a society—and how we have gotten here—is crucial; doing so in a pure, considered aesthetic gesture is restorative.”

An interactive, digital version of the work, with video documentation of Martin’s performance, is now available for the public online, along with an interview, critique, annotated links to other resources, and a discussion of the work.

A New Way of Supporting Contemporary Art: Subscription Art

The Present Group’s quarterly subscription model is a new approach to funding artists while expanding the base of art lovers and collectors. TPG aims to de-mystify the art world one piece at a time, by interviewing the artist, commissioning critics to help subscribers contextualize the work, and by providing a free online resource and discussion area built around each piece. Subscribers can learn about and absorb each piece at their own pace, in the comfort of their own homes, without the intimidation factor of a gallery or museum. As Oliver Wise, co-founder of The Present Group, points out, “It’s the most current contemporary art class you can take.”

For more information contact: Oliver Wise – oliver[at]thepresentgroup.com

Posted by jo at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)

TAGallery

link.of.thought_ thought.of.link

TAGallery by CONT3XT.NET extends the idea of a tagged exhibition and transfers the main tasks of noncommercial exhibition spaces to the discourse of an electronic data-space. The method of tagging allows the attribution of artworks to different thematic fields. EXHIBITION_003 was tagged / curated by Ursula Endlicher and Ela Kagel, who started the blog Curating NetArt in May 2006 as ongoing conversations about various topics surrounding media arts. Their exhibition link.of.thought_thought.of.link for TAGallery is an extension of this blog in dialogue-form and a meta-curatorial statement of their perspective on the challenges of curating media / net / art.

With projects / works by: UBERMORGEN / Alessandro Ludovico / Paolo Cirio, Jo-Anne Green / Helen Thorington (Turbulence), Aleksandra Domanovic / Oliver Laric / Christoph Priglinger / Georg Schnitzer, Cornelia Sollfrank, Eva Grubinger / Thomas Kaulmann, 0100101110101101 (Eva and Franco Mattes), Ruth Catlow / Marc Garrett (Furtherfield), Graffiti Research Lab, Mushon Zer-Aviv / Dan Phiffer.

Exhibition :: Curator's dialogue :: Curator's bio/CV :: Curator's blog [posted on newmediafix]

Posted by jo at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2007

Metabiosis - Go Forth & *

Call for Participation

Metabiosis - Go Forth & * by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk :: Medialounge, The Media Centre, 7 Northumberland Street, Huddersfield, HD1 1RL :: Opening: 11 July 7 - 9pm :: Exhibition runs from 12 July until 17 August 2007 :: 10am - 5pm, Monday to Friday.

Create your own data-packet to live on a network of computers. Give your packet a personality! Is it shy? Outgoing? Is it afraid to leave its home or is it more of a traveler? Is your packet screaming for attention or is it more of a loner? Answer the questions and set your packet free. Your packet will soon bump into other packets, and start to interact, maybe even to breed, but its limited lifespan means that one day it must face the inevitable ... packet heaven. Follow your packets ups and downs, its travels and its offspring by following its journeys through the three computer based ecosystems in this installation.

Metabiosis — Dependence of one organism on another for the preparation of an environment in which it can live. Metabiosis is a collection of works about digital life and autonomous creation processes. We are developing, writing, sketching, investigating and working on a series of sub projects, with as a final goal a software that combines all our efforts. Because we are working in a modular way, we cannot predict the eventual results, but at the moment we’re working on creating small ecosystems on a network of computers. In these ecosystems you’ll be able to seed little packets of data. The packets are in reality only a set of numbers, but they do have some special features. The packets can jump to other computers with ecosystems, they can reproduce and they can die. This system of networked ecosystems, inhabited by self replicating data packets, is an experiment and a game for those who are curious about the possibility of digital life in the ever growing ecosystem of connected computers.

This website contains articles about different aspects of Metabiosis: the code, texts with thoughts, ideas and research, input that gives us new ideas, and information about events such as exhibitions or performances.

Posted by jo at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2007

The G-7 Stock Puppets

An Internet-driven "Commodities" Trading Environment

The G-7 Stock Puppets are an Internet-driven kinetic installation that tracks the movements of global stock markets with seven larger-than-life marionette puppets. Using a real-time data stream, a network of PC laptops, and a complex electro-mechanical control system, the installation reanimates the abstract machinations of global financial markets as an absurdist carnival puppet show.

Unfortunately, the script for this puppet show remains a bit hazy. One moment, we might find the NASDAQ puppet soaring 20 feet into the air, consumed with the latest IPO elation. The next moment, without apparent reason or warning, the Nikkei puppet might fall to the ground, crumpling into a fetal posture of weakness and desperation. From the opening to the closing bell, the puppets continue to rise and fall in serendipitous synchronicity with the "arbitrary" movements of the G-7 market indices. Clearly, in this puppet show, the markets themselves are the "puppet masters". But we may ask ourselves, "Who are the puppets?"

Physical Particulars: The puppets are made from 8 foot tall fiberglass mannequins, dressed in gray-pinstriped double-breasted suits, accessorized with standard-issue red power ties. Large VGA monitors for heads stream stock ticker symbols and index numbers for the individual markets. Each puppet movement cues a face animation of the appropriate finance minister on the monitor head- the face morphing and contorting in relation to the direction of market movement. The puppets are elevated and articulated by cables extending down from pulleys supported 25' overheard on seven individual puppet towers. Surrounding this mechanized market ballet is an ambient soundscape of shouted buy and sell orders, bells and gavels, racing heartbeats and terrified curses.

Performance: In the middle of the semi-circle arc of puppet towers is a "Blackjack style" trading table, staffed by a tuxedo-clad dealer. The dealer keeps up a steady banter of market analysis, beckoning the brave to come forward and speculate on the index of their choice. Feeling bullish on Germany? Step up and place your "bet" on the Germany circle. No money please, just the random ephemera you happen to have with you- keys to unknown locks, photos of ex-lovers, business cards from clients you'd rather forget, or whatver else you might find in your pockets, purse or backpack. If the corresponding puppet goes up, choose your prize from the pile of profit in the trading pit. If the puppet goes down, you lose your "bet" and build the pile of profit for the next day trader.

Token Theoretical Elaboration: The Puppet installation is a gentle commentary on our society's near pathological infatuation with global stock markets in this era of the "new economy". At the same time, it is also a serious experiment to map the complex information stream of financial data onto dynamic objects in the physical world. Our intention is to re-embody this information ecology in a manner that reveals some of the character and patterning encoded in the fragments of the data stream. And during the process, we hope to also laugh a bit at the arbitrary control this data stream holds over many of our emotional lives and reckonings of self-worth. [Via Pasta and Vinegar]

Posted by jo at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2007

Canal Street Station

Participatory Public Pay Phone Who-Dunnit

31 Down's interactive telephone mystery Canal Street Station runs through October 31, 2007. To play, call this toll-free number from a pay phone inside the station: 1-877-OR-WHAT-31 (1-877-679-4283). Note: This mystery takes place on the N, Q, R, W, 6, and J, M, Z platforms, not the A, C, E, station.

Canal Street Station is a free public media art installation set in the Canal Street Subway Station in New York City. Participants are invited to make a toll-free call from any public payphone in the Canal Street station (inside of the turnstyles). Participants will then be guided on a pay phone mystery. The game takes approximately 45 minutes to complete.

Tajna Tanovic stars in this public pay phone who-dunnit set in the maze of tiles that make up the Canal Street Subway Station. This is an interactive piece that challenges participants to test their skills at listening and following directions. Players are put in the shoes of Mike Sharpie, private investigator, as he searches the depths of Canal Street Station for a young French woman that may have committed a murder, or may be a figment of Mike's wandering imagination.

"Canal Street Station" is co-produced by 31 Down radio theater and free103point9 and presented by free103point9 as part of the transmission arts non-profit's Tenth Anniversary celebration. Created by: Ryan Holsopple, Shannon Sindelar, Mirit Tal, and Tanja Tanovic.

Posted by newradio at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2007

The Art Happens Here: The Full Exhibition Review by Paddy Johnson

@ iCommons iSummit 2007

[...] Individual works are of varied success, largely reflecting the portability of the artist’s practice. In that respect probably the most successful work in the show, came from the New York art collective MTAA whose net art piece On Kawara Update displayed beautifully on an “antique” computer screen dating to (I’m guessing) the early 90’s. Unlike some many art titles that leave viewers befuddled, this work tells you exactly what the piece does. Drawing upon the canonical On Kawara’s “Today Series”, an ongoing project whereby the artist creates Spartan black canvases with only the date, and a separate collection of news clippings from the day, MTAA’s update recreates that same canvas for the web as a splash page displaying only the date which is also a link to a program that pulls news stories from that day with Creative Commons licenses [editors note: apparently most newsfeeds are CC licensed so MTAA decided it wasn’t worth the effort to make a specific filter]. Now, to be honest, I’ve always had problems buying into the original series MTAA draw inspiration from, namely because the artist spent a life time doing the project without apparently getting bored of it. For me, this piece immeasurably improves the latter not only because the filter [if it existed] adds a layer of specificity to the work, but by automating the repetitive aspect of the work, thereby eliminating criticisms lodged against artists who remake the same piece through out their lifetime...." Read the full review at iCommons iSummit 2007.

Posted by jo at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2007

SMS2Wall + Mobile Whispers

Your Prayers Delivered to the Western Wall

SMS2Wall is a result of an effort to enable people all around the world to communicate their intimate messages to the Western Wall, directly from their mobile phones. Whatever the wish, prayer, hope or thought you would like to address to Western Wall, all you have to do is to compose text message (SMS) with the text: WALL (space) your message and send it to 46898. We will print out your message and (without revealing the message or your personal data) place it as a note into the Western Wall in your behalf.

Every week we will publish a video of the notes being placed in the Wall, so you can verify that your message has indeed reached its destination. You are welcome to use this service whenever you feel the need to express your inner self and reach to Western Wall. It is our imperative to treat you and your intimate message in a decent and professional way, emphasizing the attention and respect for privacy and prompt service.

Mobile Whispers is a global platform with the goal of aiding people all over the world in their spiritual and emotional needs, regardless of race, nationality or religion. We utilise the latest (mobile) technology in closing the distances in time and place and enabling communication between people and their intimate destinations, ensuring the highest sense of responsibility and respect to people's privacy and their inner values. Together with our network of worldwide mobile and internet connections combined with our proven technology and operated by experienced and knowledgeable team, we are able to deal with each request promptly and in the highly professional manner. Our vision is to bring closer people and places. We are working intensely to develop new and meaningful services each time.

Posted by jo at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2007

Rosemarie Fiore

Scrambler & Firework Drawings

Rosemarie Fiore utilises common appliances and machinery, including amusement part rides, to facilitate her mark making explorations. The Good-Time Mix Machine: Scrambler Drawings appear as gigantic mandalic spirograph patterns (technically Hypocycloids), incredibly up to 60×60ft in size!

‘I connected a gas generator and air compressor to buckets of paint and secured them into the seats of a Scrambler amusement park ride. Once the ride was in motion, paint sprayed out of the benches onto vinyl tarps placed underneath. The result is a series of enormous hypocycloid designs which recorded the hidden patterns created by the ride as it turned’

Continuing a process based path her firework drawings appear as Rayogrammic chromatography experiments with subtle overlapping colour arrangements. This time she uses the after burn of live fireworks’ exploding to create saturated abstract compositions! Who could resist ‘lit fireworks on paper, collage’ as a media description?

More on the Hypocycloids & other Spirographic drawing machines
More Drawings of Harmonic Motion [blogged on dataisnature]

Posted by jo at 07:29 PM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2007

Torrent Raiders

Aaron Meyers put together a short promo music video-ish thing for Torrent Raiders! Music by Cursor Miner.

Torrent Raiders is a dynamic network visualization realized through the idioms and aesthetics of arcade-style video games. Driven in real-time by the activity of bit torrent swarms, Torrent Raiders takes place on the ad-hoc networks created by bit torrent users. Torrent Raiders playfully addresses issues of domestic surveillance and intellectual property by putting players in the role of a mercenary copyright enforcer, encouraging them to capture evidence against peers on torrents in order to collect bounties. Players assist in the distributed surveillance of these torrent swarms, sending information to a central server where it will be used to drive further visualizations of this information. As a dynamic visualization exploring privacy, piracy and surveillance, Torrent Raiders challenges Internet users, content pirates and government spooks to examine their allegiances and mistrust their computer connections.

Posted by jo at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)

Erkki Huhtamo:

On Art, Interactivity and Tactility

"I have secretly caressed paintings in museums, shaken hands with statues..." This line from asong called "The Tourist" recently caught my attention. Is this an expression of projected affection? The confession of a madman? An account of innocent touristic pranks familiar fromtravel snapshots? Or is it a deliberate subversion of received codes of behavior with - perhaps - ideological implications? As it turns out, the protagonist of "The Tourist" is a loner, "a man lost inhis hometown." Touching paintings and sculptures is a compensation for the lack of a human touch that he has been searching for "in wrong places." Touching the untouchable, crossing theline, avoiding the public eye. Our experiences in public spaces often include the temptation to 'exceed the limits,' at least for a passing moment. Such actions often involve the hand. I have met'normal' people - including artists - who occasionally practice shoplifting. Not for profit or the need for anything - the stolen object is something insignificant, like a piece of gum. For suchpeople the act of shoplifting is more like a sleight-of-hand that challenges the limits of the permissible. It is also a test of one's agility and "guts," bringing to mind the lonely endeavors ofRobert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959). More determined challenges are the "para-legal" arts of street graphics and graffiti that often spring from alienation. They represent the need to "makeone's mark" and to assert one's presence while remaining anonymous, a shadow figure. Posting notes or spraying tags is linked with tearing down, covering, replacing. These acts are part of anunfinished/able urban semioclasm, a palimpsest taking place anywhere where bills are posted and bare walls - potential surfaces to be filled - are available." From On Art, Interactivity and Tactility by Erkki Huhtamo, NeMe.

Posted by jo at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2007

Interview with Susana Mendes Silva

Explorations of 'Constraint'

Interview with Susana Mendes Silva by Miguel Amado; Commissioned by Rhizome.org :: Lisbon-based Susana Mendes Silva is a pioneering artist in the Portuguese new media art scene. Although her practice reaches beyond the conventional genres of this field, her technologically mediated performances, in which she explores the emotional states underlying personal relationships in general and intimacy in particular, granted her a deserved recognition both locally and abroad. She is about to relocate to London, where she will do a studio-based PhD at Goldsmiths College and, recently, she presented the latest installment of her important work ‘art_room’ in the US at Upgrade! International in Oklahoma City. This led Rhizome Curatorial Fellow Miguel Amado to interview her about her practice.

MA: Tell me about your background.

SMS: I have studied Visual Arts in Lisbon’s University and have been showing my work since 1996, being part of what one defines as the generation of Portuguese artists of the mid- to late-1990s.

Recently, I have had a solo show, called ‘Did I hurt you?,’ in the Zoom program (dedicated to cutting edge projects) at Lisbon’s Carlos Carvalho Gallery, and a site-specific installation was commissioned for the group show ‘(Re)Volver’ at Lisbon’s independent space Plataforma Revolver. My practice, however, is not only studio-based, as I participate in several projects that take the form of discussions or talks. For example, I was a participating guest in the ‘Bare Life’ conversation, moderated by Christina McPhee, that took place during July 2006 at Empyre - http://www.subtle.net/empyre - in a collaboration with Documenta 12 Magazine.

MA: What are your interests as an artist?

SMS: My practice addresses the human condition in general and allegorically explores constraint in particular. Constraint can be related to a physical or a psychological condition as well as to an ethical positioning and socio-cultural conditioning. There are also related concepts playing an important role in my work: limit - in its physical and psychological meanings; impossibility - as an imposed boundary (by the self or by others); violence - as a visible or invisible exercise of force; affection - in the sense of a human feeling and of disease, either of the mind or the body; and desire - as a powerful human drive. I am very interested in subverting concepts, rules, and prevailing points of view. I am therefore committed to a critical vision about art and of the world.

MA: You operate in different media, some that one defines as ‘traditional’ (drawing, photography), and other that one calls ‘new’ (video, Internet)...

SMS: I am not very concerned if the media that I employ is seen as old or new, but whether their properties are suitable for my work. I understand media as tool, as something that can be used according to the project that I am developing in a given moment. I use media very freely, and frequently in a grouping manner – for example, in installations and performances. If one considers Lev Manovich’s definitions of cyberculture and new media, some of my works would belong to the first category, some to the second, and others to both.

MA: How do you approach these different media?

SMS: For me, it is fundamental to use media in an experimental way, and to explore specificity, whether site-specificity, media-specificity, or context-specificity. This is a strategy that encompasses and is an attempt to overcome the dichotomy of constraint-freedom that exists in artistic practice. My work is associated with some kind of discovery, mapping, or combinatory method. This is quite present in the way I function and brings together the dimensions of each project.

MA: Can you discuss one of your most well known projects, ‘Artphone’ (2002)?

SMS: In 2002, I applied to be a participating artist of ‘Free Manifesta.’ This was a project by the New York artist Sal Randolph, that was part of Manifesta 4 held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. A place in Manifesta 4 was purchased by Sal, for $15,099, in an ebay auction. Any artist who wished was invited to show their work, and over 225 artists and groups participated in public art projects which took place across the city as well as through the broadcast airwaves, telephone and mail systems, and on the Internet. I did a performance, via mobile phone, called ‘Artphone.’ There was a flyer and an online page with my personal mobile phone number and the sentence: ‘Don’t be afraid to ask everything you always wanted to know about contemporary art.’ I received the calls and established a completely spontaneous and improvised conversation (about a contemporary art issue) either with someone I knew or with someone I had never met before.

MA: This work led to ‘art_room’ (2005), right?

SMS: Yes, as a development of ‘Artphone,’ I created ‘art_room.’ I used a webcam in a webchat site called webcamnow. In this site there was only the possibility to exchange text messages as the software available did not support voice messaging. The performance occurred during a pre-set schedule, during June. When I started the performance, on the first day, I went to Room One to announce what I was doing by simply posting the sentence: ‘Don’t be afraid to ask everything you always wanted to know about contemporary art.’ I moved to a free room (from 30 rooms, only three had people in them), and I began to chat with some of the people. I soon realized that some of the users felt like they ‘own’ the website (no matter what room I moved into), and they began to become very aggressive towards me. If ones looks at the performance’s documentation, one will only see my eyes, as I was hiding behind my laptop, because some of the users kept saying that I was showing off too much (even though I was properly dressed). In order to avoid the disturbance, I ended up ‘veiled’ by my computer.

MA: The interaction with the user, in ‘art_room,’ was different from that of ‘Artphone’?

SMS: This time the result was totally the opposite from what I expected. Even though there were a couple of interesting chats, the experience of a certain degree of intimacy and significant questions was this time replaced by aggressivity and exclusion from most of the usual members. For example, in the second day I was expelled from the ‘family and friends’ area: my camera was shut down, and I was disconnected as a user by the moderator in an arbitrary way.

MA: Nevertheless, there was another installment of ‘Artphone’ later that year.

SMS: During ‘Prog:me’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil I did ‘Artphone’ again yet using Skype this time (still with no image). One of the interesting things was that visitors could talk to me from the exhibition space. This went quite well and it was not very difficult to overcome some shyness or awkwardness. I spoke with people from all ages and from different backgrounds, including some artists and curators. Several visitors saw the show more than once and spoke with me on different occasions. Every time I talked with a person it was a very intimate experience.

Carlos Sansolo (one of the curators of ‘Prog:me’) expressed this ambivalent feeling - of pleasure and fear - very accurately: ‘The Portuguese artist Susana Mendes Silva proposed the ‘Artphone.’ The idea is quite simple: she provides her address so we can talk to her through a microphone and headphones from the computer about contemporary art, using the computer as a telephone. I have talked many times with Susana, never about art, always about technical issues and always presenting one other artist that appeared while talking to her. Actually talking to an unknown person on the phone gives you a certain degree of intimacy that I always felt terrified about. As a matter of fact, I have always felt a certain compulsion to confessing things to this unknown voice. My first thought is always about the history of sexuality of Michel Foucault, about this fear of confessing in intimate moments. She says: ‘Have no fear, ask me what you’ve always wanted to know about contemporary art’ - and all I felt was fear. The simple presence of a voice that talks about contemporary art has the ability to inspire disturbing or great situations for whoever contacts it. One may think it is a reflection on intimacy on the Internet. The work is not only a proposition, but the result of this chat that can never be completely predictable.’

MA: When was the performance done for the last time?

SMS: The last time was at the Upgrade! International in Oklahoma City - as part of the Upgrade! Lisbon’s presentation - and I used Skype with voice and video on both locations. However, a year ago, I tried to do ‘art_room’ in a very different way. I was participating in the exhibition ‘Between word and image,’ at Fundacion Luis Seoane in A Coruna, Spain and, on the opening program, there were some performances. I distributed A4 posters in the museum building announcing that people could meet me in the patio next to the auditorium. I had a table with two chairs (one for me and other for the participant) and I received the visitors that wished to talk with me for two hours. It was very interesting to interact in physical presence, and some of the people started to call it the ‘confessionary’.

MA: Do you plan to reenact this version of the work?

SMS: I always try to do both the ‘Artphone’ and the ‘art_room’ with different components, and this version was an attempt to explore new features for the work, but repeating this performance will depend on the context of its presentation.

MA: What do you think about the passage of the piece from a technologically-mediated context to a face-to-face situation?

SMS: It might sound strange but the situations are not very different. I guess that, on face-to-face, I was a bit nervous because I was not sure if someone would participate. Also, it was more awkward when I was wondering who would be the next person to approach me, perhaps because there was no device separating us.

MA: What are you working on now?

SMS: I am working on my studio and doing research for some projects that will happen later this year. One of them is a group show that will take place within a Lisbon psychiatric hospital, and I am sure that the audience’s reaction will be very different from that of a conventional exhibition space. Next September I will start a studio-based research program at Goldsmiths College in London. I’m very excited with the prospects of this experience, as I will be living and working abroad for the first time and I am sure that this will initiate new directions in my practice.

Posted by jo at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2007

Blogged

the bubble inflated by blog traffic

Is 'blog' the new 'bubble', ready to blow out? According to the metaphor used in Blogged, an interactive installation by Bill Shackelford the answer is: yes. This piece of 'web 2.0 art' consists of red balloon (a bit less than 2 meters large) blown up using traffic generated by linking blogs during a specific day. Like in a flash mob, Shackelford uses the efficiency of communicating information on the net, exploiting online communities to spread the word and so determining the event success.

The installation was opened on Thursday May 31, 2007, live from the Ohio State University Art and Technology show 'Digescape'. During this 24 hours event Shackelford submitted his link for consideration to a number of blogs, hoping that they would have blogged it including a link back to the Blogged home page. Each visit logged in a MYSQL database, counted one second of compressor-generated air inflation into the balloon. Visitors joined and monitored the balloon status through a live video feed. Schakelford explains that he's concerned to understand the way things actually are, to determine what is valid and important: "The questions that I find most interesting deal with our place in the natural world and how it has changed over time with technology, invention and human ingenuity". 'Blogged' shows clearly how quickly artwork spread from blog to blog and, simultaneously, how fast the artwork is forgotten the day after. It's instantaneous joy what the ranking causes. And however blog is where the debate on net art goes on." - Valentina Culatti, Neural.

Posted by jo at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2007

network by mark dixon

http://www.markdixon.me.uk/network.htm

Posted by jo at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2007

UAPD NYC Action: Sign Event

Urban Attractors Private Distractors (UAPD) is a collaborations between Angie Eng, Vietnamese artist, Rich Streitmatter-Tran and a collective of student interns in New York and Ho Chi Minh City. The two groups conduct actions in public centres highlighting private behavior in public space and the invisible boundaries/filters prompted by mobile technologies and urban invasions of one's public space. The next action is 06.09 @ 1pm: 'Street Eat'. All actions meet @ eyebeam.

Posted by jo at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2007

Valerie Bugmann

Secret Under My Skin

Secret Under My Skin, by Valerie Bugmann, is a performance that allows us to reflect on our natural necessity/desire to express our emotions, to share our innermost thoughts and to see them extended in the world.

The performance takes place in the room of secrets where a skin-to-skin communication network* is employed. Here, the performer and the space await the opportunity to become alive through the interaction with the participant who comes to intimately confess/convey a secret by touch. A lighted keyboard floating in the darkness invites the participant to type a secret into its glowing keys. Once typed out, by simply touching the keyboard the secret is reintroduced into the participant’s body in the form of its new physicality – an electric wave. The secret, now flowing from the keyboard into the participant’s body is ready to be further transmitted/confessed to the performer by touch.

Once skin-to-skin contact is established with the performer, the participant will be able to see his/her secret revealed on a wearable display on the performer’s body; the participant is then confronted with a very intimate part of him/herself. Despite the secret being displayed on the performer, it remains unread by anyone expect the participant, or has the performer – this almost inert object of inscription, desire and redemption - actually become aware of the secret through the transmission?

Skin-to-skin communication, as a suitable technology to express intimate thoughts, generates an intense effect as we recognize ourselves as part of the other through touch. Secret under my skin brings together different notions and implications of touch in this confession-like context, exploring new behaviors and novel parameters of social interaction that can develop out of this contact.

*a network in which touch permits the transmission of information from one person to the other using the physical conductive characteristics of the body. More >>. Also see Digital Communication with a Human Touch [In-gesture].

Valerie Bugmann finalized her studies in Art and New Media at the University of Los Andes in Bogota in the year of 2002. From 2002 till 2005 she realized a Master in Art and Technology in Goeteborg, Sweden. Since then she has concentrated in the application and analysis of new technologies of communication in her artwork. She is interested in the impact these have in the way we relate to ourselves and to the world. through performative and interactive art she has invited the spectators and participants to take part in a communication structure in which each person has a decisive role. She is currently doing her doctoral studies for a University of Plymouth PhD at the Planetary Collegium's Z-Node, based in the HGKZ (School of Art and Design in Zurich), Switzerland. Keywords: wearable computing, cognition, theater, interaction design.

Posted by jo at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2007

Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea: LX 2.0 Project

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea launches next Thursday, May 24, LX 2.0 Project's new commission: Manhã dos Mongolóides (Morning of the Mongoloids) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

For LX 2.0, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries created the Portuguese version of Morning of the Mongoloids, the laughable, yet tragic (and extremely ironic) story of a white men that wakes up after a night of “drunken partying” to find himself no longer who he used to be. Without any motive or underlying logic, the man wakes up and gradually realizes he is Korean. He looks Korean, he speaks Korean and he lives in Seoul, when just the night before he was a white man living in a western country. The piece is a delightful insight on the prejudiced views towards Asian cultures and specially, Korean culture. Not only are we faced with the main character’s stereotypes of Asian people, as he gradually comes to terms with the improbable change, we, westerners, are confronted with our own biased views of the rest of the world. It is us, not “china men” who are being ironically portrayed. It is a mirror-like device and it is returning us our own prejudiced image of ourselves.

Posted by jo at 09:28 AM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2007

Synthetic Performances

Second Life Re-enactments

While virtual environments like Second Life offer artists a new platform for the creation of original works, it's always interesting to see the past being reinterpreted. I'm pretty sure it was Marshall McLuhan who said all new media consumes its predecessor's content before settling on a new form, and we have witnessed his observations unfolding with the Radio > Television > YouTube evolution.

Eva and Franco Mattes (of 0100101110101101 fame) have taken this ethos of appropriation to heart in their ongoing Synthetic Performances. Seminal performance works from the 1960’s–80’s have been re-staged in Second Life and exhibited in-world and on their web site. Re-performances to date include Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks, Valie Export's Tapp und Tastkino, Vito Acconci's Seedbed (he was a bad boy) and Chris Burden's Shoot.

More images after the jump, or you can skip right to their site. If you have an SL account, click here to visit the 7000 Oaks performance in Second Life. More images >> [Posted by christo on selectparks]

Posted by jo at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)

Machine Therapy by Kelly Dobson

Human-Machine Resonance

Machine Therapy by Kelly Dobson (2002-present): I began singing with large machines in public spaces, discovering that I could come to be in resonance with the sounds of their motors. The motor sound was experienced then as inseparable from my own voice, as like when singing in resonance with another person. I experienced a connection with these machines as if body extensions. Sometimes I felt that I was controlling the motors of these giagantic machines with my voice; sometimes I felt that they were pulling me along. They brought me through expressions physical and vocal that I would have found no other way. This experimental balancing act and communication with the machines facilitated personal exploration, discovery, and development.

I am working to bring this form of experience directly to other people. I host Machine Therapy sessions with machines I have made or found. Small-size movie (5.4MB QuickTime). Related: Blendie.

Thesis Abstract: In this thesis I describe a new body of work called Machine Therapy, a methodology for revealing the vital relevance of subconscious elements of human-machine interactions that works within art, design, psychodynamics, and engineering. This practice highlights what machines actually do and mean, in contrast to what their designers consciously intended. Machine Therapy is a cyclical process that alternates between discussion of and sessions for empathic relationships with domestic appliances, personal extension and connection via wearable and prosthetic apparatuses, and the design of evocative visceral robots that interact with people's understandings of themselves and each other. Combining research and practice in digital signal processing and machine learning, mechanical engineering, and textile sensor design, I have been able to create new objects and relationships that are unique in some aspects while maintaining quotidian familiarity in other aspects. This is illustrated through the documented construction of several projects including re-appropriated domestic devices, wearable apparatuses, and machines that act in relation with users’ autonomic signals. These Machine Therapy devices are evaluated in studies of participants' interactive engagements with the machines as well as participants' affective responses to the machines. The Machine Therapy projects facilitate unusual explorations of the parapraxis of machine design and use: these usually unconscious elements of our interactions with machines critically affect our sense of self, agency in the social and political world, and shared emotional, cultural, and perceptual development. [via architectradure]

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

May 21, 2007

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at La Biennale di Venezia

Pulse Room

Pulse Room, one hundred incandescent light bulbs controlled by the heartbeat of the public :: Mexican Pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia :: Press Preview: 7-9 June, 10 AM-8 PM :: Receptions: 7, 8 and 9 June, 8-10 PM :: Exhibition: 10 June–21 November, 2007 :: Palazzo Van Axel, beside the Chiesa dei Miracoli, Cannaregio 6099, Venice 30121 Italy :: +39-041-520-4807 .

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer represents Mexico at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia with the exhibition “Some Things Happen More Often Than All of the Time”, curated by Príamo Lozada and Bárbara Perea, a show which will mark Mexico’s first official participation in the Biennale. The exhibition will consist of 6 large-scale installations covering 1,000 square metres of the Palazzo Van Axel, a 15th-century gothic landmark bordering the Chiesa Santa Maria dei Miracoli, in the vicinity of the Rialto bridge.

Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico City, 1967) develops large-scale interactive installations combining the languages of architecture and performance art. His work uses technologies such as robotics, surveillance and telematic networks to create platforms for audience participation, creating "anti-monuments for alien agency". His large-scale light and shadow installations are inspired by animatronics, carnivals and phantasmagoria, situating the spectator as a fundamental component to “complete” the work.

“His work succeeds in giving the unchoreographed the power of a full orchestra..."-- CK Kuebel, NY Arts Magazine

Lozano-Hemmer’s work in kinetic sculpture, installation, video and photography has been shown in over thirty countries, including the Biennials of Sydney (Australia), Shanghai (China), Liverpool (United Kingdom), Istanbul (Turkey) and Havana (Cuba). His work is part of important private and public art collections such as those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, La Colección Jumex in Mexico City, Fundación Cisneros Fontanals in Miami, the Daros Latin America Collection in Zürich and the Tate Collection in London.

The official participation of Mexico in Venice is the result of joint efforts by Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Consejo de Promoción Turística and the generous support of the Fundación/Colección Jumex and the Fundación BBVA Bancomer. The non-profit Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo, which has also contributed funding and resources, is in charge of the administration of the project. The receptions, starring DJ sets by Sonido Changorama, will feature sponsored drinks by Jumex, Tequila Cuervo and Cerveza Sol.

A bilingual catalogue will be published by Turner Libros, featuring essays by Manuel de Landa, José Luis Barrios, Barbara London, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Victor Stoichita and curators Príamo Lozada and Bárbara Perea.

Coinciding with the 52nd Biennale di Venezia, Lozano-Hemmer’s work will also be exhibited at Art Basel Unlimited, at the Luminato Festival in Toronto and in the exhibition “Automatic Update” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Contact information:

Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes:
Plácido Pérez Cué, Director General de Comunicación Social
Tel. +52 555 662 1907
Fax +52 555 662 4314
pperzcue[at]correo.conaculta.gob.mx

Contact for Rafael Lozano-Hemmer:
Natalie Bouchard
Tel +1 514 597 0917
Fax +1 514 597 2092
natalie[at]antimodular.com
http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/

Contact for the curators:
Proyectos Hélix
Príamo Lozada and Bárbara Perea
+ 39 340 755 9584 in Venice
+ 52 555 207 6411 in Mexico
helix.curatorial[at]gmail.com

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is represented by Galería OMR (Mexico City), bitforms gallery (New York) and Galerie Guy Bärtschi (Geneva).

Posted by jo at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)

070707 UpStage Festival

Performances Announced

Shadow puppets, flights of fancy, air guitar and a visit to a London building site will be some of the virtual attractions at 070707 UpStage Festival - a feast of online performances on July 7, 2007 to celebrate the release of UpStage 2.

New Zealand and international artists are creating work specifically for the UpStage environment, which will be performed for an online audiences and simultaneously screened at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington.

UpStage is software that allows audiences from anywhere in the world to participate in live online performances, created in real time by remote players. Audiences need only an internet connection and web browser and can interact through a text chat tool while the players use images to create visual scenes, and operate "avatars" - graphical characters that speak aloud and move.

The diversity of proposals for the festival has impressed the organisers. "It's exciting to see UpStage being used in such a variety of ways," said UpStage project manager Helen Varley Jamieson. "We have all manner of artists - writers, musicians, dancers, performers, videographers, story-tellers - experimenting with how they can use the internet as a creative medium and a site for their work."

The full list of performances and artists is on the UpStage web site. Performance times will be publicised on the UpStage and New Zealand Film Archive web sites soon, and live links to the stages will be accessible from the UpStage web site on July 7; online audiences just need to click!

The performances will be screened live in the the New Zealand Film Archive mediagallery where visitors can buy a coffee, take a seat and watch the performances taking place from remote locations around the world. Exhibitions Manager Mark Williams says "It will be like watching a live movie, as the shows unfold in front our eyes."

UpStage workshop facilitator Vicki Smith has been providing graphic, technical and tutorial support for artists and education groups who are creating performances, and says that the level and range of work being produced promises breathtaking cyberformances (online performances) for audiences to view and take part in.

UpStage 2 is funded by the Community Partnership Fund of the NZ Government's Digital Strategy, with the support of partners CityLink, MediaLab and Auckland University of Technology, and developed by programmer and digital artist Douglas Bagnall.

The launch takes place on 28 June and will be accompanied by an exhibition at the NZ Film Archive from 28 June to 15 July, and the festival on 7 July.

For further information and images, contact:

Helen Varley Jamieson: helen[at]upstage.org.nz
Vicki Smith: vicki[at]upstage.org.nz http://upstage.org.nz/blog/

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

1001 nights cast

# 700 Tonight!

1001 nights cast Performance # 700 will be on May 21 at 9:30pm from Madrid.

That is: 8:30pm in London and Lisbon; 3:30pm in New York, Montreal and Bogota; 12:30pm in Los Angeles; 10:30pm in Beirut, Jerusalem, Istanbul; May 22, 3:30am in Hong Kong and Perth; May 22, 6:30am in Sydney; May 22, 7.30am in Auckland.

Since the 600 milestone in February, these new contributors have joined the team: Sheila Ghelani (London), Derville Quigley (Dublin), Maria Miranda (Sydney), Norie Newmark (Sydney), Ruth Watson (Auckland), Christopher de Bono (New York), Arnold Zable (Melbourne), Jordan Peimer (Los Angeles), Peter S. Petralia (London), Catherine Lord (Los Angeles), Adrian Heathfield (London), Sara Jane Bailes (Bristol), Karen Christopher (Chicago), Rinne Groff (New York) and Rebecca Schneider (New York). Many many thanks to these and all the other contributing writers.

Posted by jo at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

Anne-Sarah Le Meur

# Eureka + Eye-Ocean

Anne-Sarah Le Meur will present at Eureka: The Moment of Invention, a dialogue between art and science, May 31, 2007.

Eye-Ocean--experimental real time 3D--is on line for 5 days. It is a mono-screen version of an immersive and interactive 3D artwork, Into the Hollow of Darkness, based on exploration and contemplation of non realistic light phenomena in computer generated image. The images are abstract but organic, metaphors of a world both cellular and cosmic, very carnal, so minimal that they become archaïc, a sort of pre-semantic vision (before language). Eye-Ocean is part of the Abbaye de Maubuisson at Contemporary art center in Val-d’Oise during Nuit Blanche on the October 6, 2007.

Posted by jo at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2007

Oracle by Justin Bennett

Available for Consultation Now

Oracle: A project by Justin Bennett for the City of Luxembourg: The Oracle, situated in a park on the rue de Trèves, is available for consulation from 28th April until 2nd December, 2007. A park bench by a clump of trees provides the perfect place to rest, to enjoy the view over the city, and to consult the oracle.

The Oracle predicts the future, of course, but it also comes up with wise statements, comments about the visible environment, personal advice, riddles, instructions for performative actions, political observations, and inspiration for all visitors. It attempts to answer all questions, especially those that the visitor didn’t ask. It is truly a 21st century oracle, using state-of-the-art random technology to prepare and share its wisdom.

The oracle speaks the languages Luxembourgish, French and German. For those not willing to make the journey to the city of Luxembourg, or for the linguistically challenged, an online consultation in English is available. However, because of the great distances involved, and the limitations of bandwidth, the oracle cannot guarantee its habitual variety or accuracy.

Oracle responses inspired by, among others: Delphic utterances, I Ching, Nostradamus, Eno/Schmidt’s “Oblique Strategies”, Situationist International, “Kerndenkers” by André Garitte, Jean Luc Godard’s “One plus one”, George Brecht, Confucius.

voices: Sonja Neuman, Christophe Dumont, Stephie Büttrich.
texts: Justin Bennett, Stéphanie Templier, Renate Zentschnig.
curator: Hou Hanru. - Trans(ient) City program.
production: Art Public Contemporain, Paris.

Posted by jo at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2007

Wafaa Bilal: Domestic Tension

Iraqi born artist Wafaa Bilal has become known for provocative interactive video installations. Many of Bilal's projects over the past few years have addressed the dichotomy of the virtual vs. the real.

He attempts to keep in mind the relationship of the viewer to the artwork, with one of his main objectives transforming the normally passive experience of viewing art into an active participation. In Domestic Tension, viewers can log onto the internet to contact, or shoot, Bilal with paintball guns.

Bilal’s objective is to raise awareness of virtual war and privacy, or lack thereof, in the digital age. During the course of the exhibition, Bilal will confine himself to the gallery space. During the installation, people will have 24-hour virtual access to the space via the Internet. They will have the ability to watch Bilal and interact with him through a live web-cam and chat room. Should they choose to do so, viewers will also have the option to shoot Bilal with a paintball gun, transforming the virtual experience into a very physical one.

Bilal’s self imposed confinement is designed to raise awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis. This sensational approach to the war is meant to engage people who may not be willing to engage in political dialogue through conventional means. Domestic Tension will depict the suffering of war not through human displays of dramatic emotion, but through engaging people in the sort of playful interactive-video game with which they are familiar.

For the duration of May, 2007, Iraqi born artist Wafaa Bilal will live in the FlatFile Galleries in Chicago. The public can watch him 24 hours a day over a live webcam; and if they choose, visitors to his website can shoot him with a remote controlled paintball gun.

Bilal’s self imposed confinement is designed to raise awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis.

You can participate - eg shoot at him with a paintball gun - by clicking here.

See this site for some videos and more about the Wafaa's work. [via selectparks]

Posted by jo at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)

Synk

Real-time Processing

Synk is an experimental dance / video / audio piece where video and audio samples and recycles the movements of the dancer on stage, creating rich layers of images and sound. The performance deals with transformation of time ; distortion, displacement, delay, layering and buffering. The idea of Synk is that no prerecorded video or audio will be used, only material sampled during the performance are presented, to investigate live as raw material, and to impose a structure on a live situation to allow unpredictable results within that frame structure. Synk was made in 2002 and performed in a split-evening with the video ensemble 242.Pilots.

On Friday May 4th, (HC Gilje) performed Synk with Kreutzerkompani and Justin Bennett. More images from Synk (click on the small images).

Posted by jo at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)

Sinister

Social Networks Foster Conspiracy

Annina Rüst's Sinister "is a service based on research into software designed to identify and analyse suspicious behaviour through communication patterns rather than the content of conversations (data-surveillance). Visually, Sinister appears as a friendly social networking environment, but it suggests that social networking also fosters conspiracy. Online chat bots and automatised scoundrels (artificially intelligent characters) infiltrate chat networks and discuss seemingly common-place topics such as gardening, but occasionally include criminal harmful comments. You can telephone the bots and insert your own messages into their conversations also, using voice recognition software which looks for con-spirative content. The software then maps and interprets these online conversations, comparing diagrams to a database to determine the possible unfriendly uses people might have for the online social network. In the gallery-based installation, the seats represent the nodes in the social network – by moving the seats around as you join into conversation with your fellow visitors, the computer can then draft and analyse new diagrams based on the connections in the social network you create." Part of MY OWN PRIVATE REALITY: GROWING UP ONLINE IN THE 90S and 00S.

Posted by jo at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)

AUR: a Robotic Desk Lamp

Performs Lives

AUR: a Robotic Desk Lamp is a robotic desk lamp, a collaborative lighting assistant. It serves as a non-anthropomorphic robotic platform as part of Guy Hoffman's Ph.D thesis on human-robot fluency and nonverbal behavior. The lamp's design was conceived around an existing 5-DoF robotic arm, and is aimed to evoke a personal relationship with the human partner without resorting to human-like features. By retaining the lamp's "objectness", I hope to explore the relationship that can be maintained through abstract gestures and nonverbal behavior alone.

The lamp is animated using a custom pipeline enabling the dynamic control of behaviors authored in a 3d animation system. This week, it will take its first stab at performing alongside human actors in MIT Dramashop's Playwrights in Performance. That's right, a robot, on stage, live, with nothing but an emergency button to save it. What: "The Confessor" - a play by Rony Kubat written especially for this human-robot ensemble.

When: May 9, 10, 11 @ 8pm
Where: Kresge Rehearsal Room B (seating *very* limited)
How: As part of MIT Dramashop's "Playwrights in Performance" and in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab

Posted by jo at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2007

liners performance -- May 10, 2007

The "liners" performance by Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson revolves around a simple graphical idea: a line which starts and never ends. The performance mixes different video clips that people have sent them of lines being drawn, along with live content, in order to tell the story of a seamless line which never ends. The two performers use custom software to seemlessly mix together a large series of live and pre-recorded linear expression into a ceaseless, evolving, whimsical landscape, in which one line leads to the next. From a line of simple pixels, to a hand drawn line, to a horizon line, to a line of text, the performance is not at all about getting to a final destination, but completely about the delight of traveling.

They are accepting contributions until noon on May 10th. For information on what kind of material and where and how to send it, click here

Posted by newradio at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)

Art Intercom: An Interview Series with the iCommons Artists in Residence

MTAA

Art Intercom: An Interview Series with the iCommons Artists in Residence. Featuring Art Collective MTAA: MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) is simply described on their website as “a Brooklyn, New York-based conceptual and net art collaboration founded in 1996.” I like them because they give me wine when I visit their studio. I like their work, because it is characterized by economy of expression without being generalized or simplistic. What’s more, they frequently extend this aptitude to create feedback systems that require the same streamlined response from their audience. The result is very clean and eloquent communication mediated by or in the form of websites, installations, sculptures and photographic prints. Creative Commons licensing plays a critical role in their work, because it provides a set of pre-established rules for use of their work so that they don’t have to. In short, it simplifies the conversation, and facilitates the elegance that defines their art.

In the two part interview that follows I discuss specific works and what the collective has planned for the iCommons Summit. Part One; Part Two.

Posted by jo at 09:14 AM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2007

Schwelle

@ Elektra 08

Schwelle II at Elektra 08 / Place des Arts / Cinquieme Salle Series, May 10-12, 2007 :: Schwelle is a three part new media and performance project using cutting edge acoustic and interactive technologies to explore the extreme threshold states of consciousness that constitute human experience. Part II is a live performance in which the audience confronts a lone single performer Michael Schumacher, master improviser and former dancer with William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet, experiencing the traumatic transition period between death and rebirth. Utilizing wireless sensor networks in the room and on the dancer's body, Part II creates a stage environment where light, sound and objects take on their own choreography, performing with Schumacher, breathing, and behaving alongside him. Where does the body end and the room begin? What happens in the threshold where body and room merge, mutually influencing and transforming each other?

Concept/Direction: Chris Salter in collaboration with Michael Schumacher
Performer: Michael Schumacher
Dramaturgy: Heidi Gilpin
Lighting: Leah Xiao
Sound Design/Programming: Marije Baalman, Daniel Grigsby, Chris Salter,
Philip Viel
Interaction Design/Sensing/Programming: Marije Baalman
Production Technical Director: Harry Smoak

Co-Production: Elektra Festival and Place des Arts/Cinquieme Salle with
the support of Tesla Medien Kunst Labor-Berlin, Transmediale, ACREQ, Hexagram, Concordia University, FQRSC

Thursday-Saturday, May 10-12, 2007, 20:00
Place des Arts/Cinquieme Salle
Place des Arts
For tickets please call: 514-842-2112
or http://www.pda.qc.ca

Posted by newradio at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2007

the story of a never ending line

Call for Contributions

Zachary Lieberman is making a performance at the OFFF festival along with his good friend Theo Watson (of L.A.S.E.R TAG fame). The idea of the performance is really quite simple -- the story of a never ending line -- and the performance will be made up of both videos as well as live material, and synthesized graphics.

We are asking you, with your awesome brains and wicked fast design skills, to send us videos in your own style, of a line being drawn from one side of the screen to another. It can be animated, live video, computer generated, or some other way we can't even think of yet.

We would love to get videos from you to use in our performance. The more imaginative the better! All the videos used will be credited at the end of the performance so it will be a great chance to show what you can do with a line and 5 seconds of time. Multiple submissions are encouraged!

Rules:

1: The line should start off screen, enter on one side and leave on
another (doesn't have to be right to left, can be any side to any side, including the same leaving on the same side the line started on).

2: The line should have the effect of being drawn, not moved across the screen. See examples bellow.

Good: http://impssble.com/OFFF/good.mov
Bad: http://impssble.com/OFFF/bad.mov

3: Once a part of a line is drawn it should not move too much, the animation should be the effect of drawing the line (as in the good movie above).

4. The video doesn't necessarily have to be the drawing of a line (although most of what we are working with is), but it can also be something moving along a very clear path. The idea should be about going from point a to point b.

5. Both sound or silent is ok.

6: Videos should be 3 - 8 seconds long, 640 480 quicktime format. (320x240 also ok)

7: Videos should be submitted to zlieb[at]parsons.edu or theo[at]muonics.net (if under 10MB) or posted online for download.

8: We need them by tuesday 8th of May.

We hope you enjoy this challenge, and would like to take part in our project. Thanks and have fun!

zach & theo

Posted by jo at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

Bjørn Magnhildøen

Chyphertext / Noisetext Performance

Bjørn Magnhildøen: Chyphertext / Noisetext Performance :: May 3, 20:00 - 21:30 (central european summertime)* Places: web, mail. Subscribe to the noisetext list to receive performance emails. Thanks to noisetext list admin phaneronoemikon / lanny.

Haphazard description of the performance: a c(h)yp(h)ertext performance betatesting, in a series of protocol performances dealing with networked online events. In addition to a text and code feed, there are images, sounds, a webcam, text interaction, and email.

The images are rather randomly chosen among jpgs less than 750 bytes in size. The sound is realtime generated midi from the textfeed the webcam updates every five sec or so the interaction are textbased, you can input text in the form to the right, longer or shorter one-liners - these inputs goes into the feed and from there into the sound output also. Mails are sent out as part of the event. If the thing hangs, halts or hucks up, try to reload the page or restart the browser. Any report or comment appreciated.

Thanks to Norwegian Cultural Council for funding protocol performance, and Atelier Nord for hosting noemata and the event.

* CEST = central european summer time = UTC/GMT +2 hours.
In other timezones the performance will be:
England: 19:00 - 20:30 (UTC +1)
US Westcoast: 11:00 - 12:30 (UTC -7)
US Eastcoast: 16:00 - 17:30 (UTC -4)
(see eg. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ )

Posted by jo at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)

May 01, 2007

LIVE: (Possession & Poetry Part 2)

Machfield at Tanzquartier Wien

PREMIÈRE: LIVE: (Possession & Poetry Part 2) :: May 10-12, 2007, 7pm :: Length: 3 hours (TQW Foyer and Studios) :: Tanzquartier Wien | Studio.

When someone goes on a journey then they narrate something: for two months, the choreographers Sabina Holzer and the “fictionaut” Jack Hauser went in search of material for their new production, studied Morocco and Spain as well as films, music, texts and dreams. The unforeseeable and the unknown – essential components of every journey – are also the essential parameters of LIVE. On stage with the Machfeld artists’ collective, consisting of Sabine Maier and Michael Mastrototaro as well as the musician Martin Siewert, Holzer and Hauser go into the adventure and the way of work of traveling:

“Some things are prescribed, a lot is prepared”, say the performers. They follow the gestures, sounds, lines and colours which have been appearing carefully. A secret system of phantasms? This and other things the audience is invited to discover with them.

Bon voyage!

Concept, staging: Sabina Holzer, Jack Hauser
Live video, video editing: MACHFELD (aka Sabine Maier & Michael Mastrototaro)
Live soundtrack: Martin Siewert
Realisation, performance: Jack Hauser, Sabina Holzer, Sabine Maier, Michael Mastrototaro, Martin Siewert
Production: Sabina Holzer / Jack Hauser and Tanzquartier Wien.
With the support of the City of Vienna.

MACHFELD, International Arts and Culture Society
A-1020 Vienna, Max Winter-Platz 21/1
Phone: +43(0)650 99 103 04
http://www.machfeld.net
http://www.myspace.com/machfeld

Posted by jo at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

April 30, 2007

It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston

How do you measure fear?

Right now, kanarinka is running the entire evacuation route system in Boston and measuring its distance in breaths. The project is an attempt to measure our post-9/11 collective fear in the individual breaths that it takes to traverse these new geographies of insecurity.

It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston consists of a series of running performances in public space (2007), a web podcast of breaths (2007), and a gallery installation of the archive of breaths (2008).

It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston is presented by iKatun for the 2007 Boston Cyberarts Festival. The project will be on view at the Cyberarts Gala on Fri, May 4, 2007, 6:30pm at the Hotel @ MIT, Cambridge, MA. If you want to attend a running performance, email kanarinka AT ikatun DOT com for upcoming dates & locations or just subscribe to the podcast.

Posted by jo at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

From White Box to Inbox

Jesse Aaron Cohen

On the last Friday of every month, archivist Jesse Aaron Cohen 'opens' a new email exhibition. The shows are delivered to subscribers' inboxes, in the form of thematized collections of digital images. (Below is the root directory for these images.) Cohen is based in New York and many of the shows in his series revolve around immigrants to the city and diaspora Jewish culture. The current one, number 28, is called 'Dr. Z's' and features scans of ads for 'health, beauty, and wellness products and practitioners as they appeared in programs from various Yiddish theaters in New York between 1890 and 1928.' The title is inspired by dermatologist Dr. Zizmor's (Dr. Z's) ubiquitous subway ads, as traced in the supplementary links included in the email. Each of the exhibitions features such extra info and is contextualized by a brief curatorial statement.

Number 21 was simply called 'Myspace,' and the statement read, 'This exhibition features images found on the Myspace pages of US soldiers currently in Iraq. Click on the photo to view the profile.' Together, and without extra editorializing, the images painted a broader picture of the anxieties and banalities, of the soldier's daily life. Exhibition 4 ('Envelope Art') focused on mail, itself, and identified 'four disparate groups in which envelope art has thrived as a creative medium, namely: members of the US Armed Forces, Deadheads, incarcerated Americans, and video game enthusiasts.' Once again piecing together artifacts to make a thoughtful cultural statement, Cohen's musings might also apply to email art: 'If the medium is the message, then the message of envelope art seems to generally involve craft, dedication, boredom, and the desire to communicate personality with the recipient from afar.' - Marisa Olson, Rhizome News. http://brightbrown.fastmail.fm/

Posted by jo at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2007

a show of hands: May 1, 2007

Show of Solidarity

A year ago, the immigration reform movement swept through city centers across the United States in an historic series of marches. Over a million workers and their families took to the streets. This year a second wave of marches has been planned (May Day 2007). Although media outlets frequently focused on Latin American immigrants, the rallies invited all immigrants and their supporters to make their presence known, and many answered the call. After attending that march and being swept in the currents of political change, I began a show of hands.

As a show of hands is still in its early stages, I encourage readers to explore it and to send their feedback. Remember to register for Literatronica (even just as a guest) so the system can best adapt to your reading habits. Literatronica is available to authors who are interested in developing their own literary hypertexts. Readers can see a list of the current selections at the site.

Culminating in the May 1, 2006 marches, a show of hands is an adaptive hypertext written on Literatronica (or Literatronic), a system developed by Colombian doctoral candidate (FSU) Juan B. Gutierrez. Although the piece is in-progress, [Mark Marino] wanted to take this moment to present its early manifestation in commemoration of the marches that inspired it.

The icon of a show of hands is a photomosaic (there are currently two in the piece), featuring images of the hands of the marchers as well as of those of other people I encountered through Los Angeles at the time. The photomosaics also act as navigational maps, leading to the various storyheads in the tale. The reader chooses from the hands.

The hands could not be reduced or flattened to an iconic Brown Power fist. While at the march, I snapped pictures of hands, waving flags, raising banners, cradling cell phones, and aiming cameras. Marches often become a single image in the newspaper, members dissolve into a solitary stream. However, the vision, this showing of hands could not have been predicted, and the hands themselves, in all their activities and difference, good not have been imagined. And this is the age of multiple media as this Flickr set from the Chicago march attests.

The photomosaics bring together these photographs to form the broader image of this moment. Of course, due to the gaps inherent in mosaics, the image requires the viewer to complete it, to integrate the pieces, to recognize the larger pattern in what might be called gestalt. Read more >>

Posted by jo at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

boredomresearch's

the Forest of Imagined Beginnings

boredomresearchs' latest web project is now live! Go to Explore the Forest of Imagined Beginnings & leave your thoughts embedded in the trees.

boredomresearch are interested in creating landscape environments online that develop over time, where users can explore and manipulate these environments, creating an individual experience which is both contemplative and rewarding. In the Forest of Imagined Beginnings there are no clear rules or objectives. It is simply an online landscape that is vulnerable to the whims and wants of the community that adopt this digital terrain as their own.

Forest of Imagined Beginnings will be exhibited at enter_unknown territories, International Festival & Conference for New Technology Art, Cambridge UK (25th-29th April). During this festival boredomresearch will be discussing the development of this work in a public presentation on Saturday 28th April.

This project has been co-commissioned by folly, Lancaster & enter_unknown territories, International Festival & Conference for New Technology Art, Cambridge UK and supported by the National Centre of Computer Animation, Bournemouth University.

Posted by jo at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2007

1001 nights cast

night 667 from LA

This week 1001 nights cast passed the two-thirds milestone with a story by Caroline Lee for night 667. And this Sunday, for the first time, the International Date Line will be crossed. This event gets Barbara Campbell across the Pacific without missing a date on the calendar and she gets a 24 hour holiday as a bonus (largely spent in an economy class seat).

Performance number 671 will be on April 22 at 7.30pm from Los Angeles. That is: 10.30pm in New York, Toronto and Bogota; April 23, 3.30am in London; April 23, 4.30am in Madrid, Paris, Berlin; April 23, 5.30am in Beirut, Jerusalem, Istanbul; April 23, 10.30am in Hong Kong and Perth; April 23, 12.30pm in Sydney.

As you can see, for most places other than North and South America, there will be no performance on the April 22 date. Campbell will do three performances from LA before heading to the east coast of the US. The pop-up news page on the site will give the relevant information about changes to performance times according to where you are. You'll start to see lots of new writers' names, as well as European ones returning.

Posted by jo at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

Turbulence Commission:

Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments

Turbulence Commission: Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments by Carmin Karasic, Rolf van Gelder and Rob Coshow, with special thanks to the HP mscapers team, Brett Stalbaum, and Jo Rhodes :: Part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, pick up a smartphone at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury Street, Boston :: April 21-28, 2007, Tues-Sat 10am-6pm. Gallery talk today: 2:00 pm.

Designed for HP iPAQ 6900 series smartphones, Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments uses GPS and mobile technologies to address historic bias in Boston's public monuments. The artwork gathers non-official stories to socially construct hyper-monuments that exist as digital doubles, augmenting specific historic monuments. For example, imagine you are near the Old South Church in Boston, MA, USA. The smartphone sounds church bells to get your attention. It then displays an easily identifiable image of the Old South Church circa 2007, followed by images of the church that take you back in time. Finally you see the location as it was in its natural, wild state. You can send text, image and audio content to the website from the monument location via any internet enabled device. Or use any internet browser to view and add histories to the hyper-monuments.

HHHM requires HP mediascapes locative media software to create content rich hotspots on GPS aware maps. Once the HHHM mediascape is installed on a handheld device, a GPS fix is required to automatically display the hyper-monument. WiFi internet connectivity is best for viewing and contributing to the hyper-monument via the handheld's browser.

“Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments” is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the LEF Foundation.

BIOGRAPHIES

One November morning in 1994, CARMIN KARASIC was listening to digital artists on NPR when she realized she was a digital artist trapped in a Fidelity Technical Project Manager's body. This simple realization changed her life. A multimedia artist focused on Internet Art, she is also an Assistant Director of Boston Cyberarts, and on the faculty of Lesley University. Her work can be seen online in several e-zines, websites, and galleries, such as CAGE. She has exhibited in the Boston area at the DeCordova Museum, MIT List Center, the Attleboro Museum, Computer Museum, New England School of Art and Design, The Art Institute of Boston, and The Brodigan Gallery; in NY at the Studio Museum, Harlem; Brooks Gallery at Cooper Union, and the New York Hall of Science; and Austria, Canada, Japan, and Germany. Carmin has been awarded a Mudge Fellowship from the Groton School and a duPont Fellowship from the Art Institute of Boston.

ROLF VAN GELDER is an artist and web developer. Self-taught, he has been creating visual art since the early 80s. He has been collaborating with Carmin Karasic since the 1990s. They created "d{s}eduction dialogue" for the 2001 Boston Cyberarts Festival and "Virtual Quilt" (2002) for the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, USA (with Clara Wainwright). In 1995 Rolf founded one of the first on-line art galleries, CAGE - Cyber Art Gallery Eindhoven (http://www.cage.nl). His work has been exhibited in over 50 exhibitions in the U.S.A., Canada, Austria, Portugal, Italy, Sweden, Germany, UK, Spain and the Netherlands.

ROB COSHOW is an artist/photographer who recently graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Art Institute of Boston. Trained in classic wet-lab photography as well as digital and new media, Rob has honed his experimental approach to create works that bridge multiple disciplines. In 2006, he exhibited his “Crab Cake” robots at Axiom Gallery, and collaborated with Jeff Warmouth, Roland Smart and other Boston artists to create “Art Show Down” at Art Interactive. He has received various honors for his photography and illustrious reviews for his new media work.

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

April 20, 2007

N3KROZOFT LTD's Aether 9

Collaborative Video Performance

the N3KROZOFT LTD media group is pleased to announce the world premiere of the collaborative video performance, Aether 9. Linking nine performers in various remote locations around the globe, this performance will occur on May 3, 2007, 21:00 CET, in the framework of Mapping Festival Geneva, in conclusion to a 3-day workshop directed by N3KROZOFT members.

Conditions of participation: [1] Participating in the workshop : If you wish to follow the workshop in Geneva: plase send an email to wrkshp[at]1904.cc describing briefly your experience and motivations (moderate knowledge and experience of video tools + originality of ideas is expected). Workshop dates are: May 1st-3rd, 14:00-18:00. Workshop location: BAC, Geneva (see below).

[2] Participating as a remote performer: Artists wishing to participate in one of the remaining performance slots: please send an email to remote[at]n3krozoft.com. Requirements for remote performers:

- You need to have access to an imaging device (webcam, miniDV camera) and a computer linked to the internet.
- Sufficient knowledge of video tools + performance is expected, to operate for instance a webcam and upload its images to a server. Server access will be provided.
- Knowledge of Max/msp or Pure Data is an advantage, but not a necessity.
- You are required to be available through skype or similar protocols for instructions and synchronisation during the days prior to the performance (1st-3rd May).
- 100% availability during the performance and at least 1 hour prior to performance is crucial.

Questions and Answers

Q - What will this look like?

A - The basic concept: 9 different locations will be linked during a 60 minute performance. The performance will be projected as a 3x3 grid of videoframes.

Q - When and where will the performance take place?

A - The performance will occur on Thursday 3rd May 2007, 21:00 (9 PM) Central European Time. The location is the BAC (Bâtiment d'Art Contemporain), 10 rue des Vieux-Grenadiers / 28, rue des Bains, Geneva, Switzerland.

Q - Is it possible to watch the performance on the internet?

A - The performance will be visible through the internet. Not directly as a video stream, but as a standalone viewer application, which will be available at http://n3krozoft.com/remote. If you are in charge of a public venue, you are welcome to use the standalone viewer to broadcast to performance to an audience. Click here to find your local performance time: http://tinyurl.com/2rjxhb

Q - Will there be any dogma/ritual imposed on the performers?

A - The content of the performance will be dictated by a formal set of rules, which will be established in part during the first 2 days of the workshop. The significance of time and the subjectivity of human experience in a specific
timeframe will be a crucial element of the performance.

Q - What technology will be used for the transmission of images?

A - To insure the possibility for performers in low-tech situations to participate, the system will be designed for robustness rather than for speed. Since streaming video needs a considerable upload rate, the transmission of images will occur rather through image-by-image upload, allowing participants to use slower transmission lines. The target frame refresh rate will be 5 seconds, similar to the transmission rate of the videophone devices in use during the 1990's. At the main performance venue, buffered playback will occur at much faster or slower framerates, depending on the performer's actions.

Posted by jo at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

Brad Kligerman Ars Virtua Artist-in-Residence (AVAIR)

Determining Image-Space

Brad Kligerman Ars Virtua Artist-in-Residence (AVAIR) « Organizing light in the time and space of the projected image » (the determination of an Image-Space) :: Opening TONIGHT April 20 (23:59 SLT) & April 21 (12:00 SLT - noon) :: Go Here >>

Artist and Architect Brad Kligerman has turned the idea of art making upside down or rather inside out in his AVAIR exhibit. Kligerman questions the idea of materiality in the rendered environment and the nature of image. He successfully blends the idea of moving through "space" with the idea of moving through image in his new multi-sim installations.

Over the course of Kligerman's eleven week residency he has collected images from various experiments in SL. These images have been deftly applied to objects which form a path through three "machines." Kliger uses these machines to extract data from SL in order to understand materiality, quote the history of art and painting and contrast with what has become "traditional" Second Life architecture. The end result is a series of places where image and space become one.

"In contrast to projects that view virtual worlds as simply another node in a communication strategy, this project attempts to find another creative and productive scenario by interrogating the physical and material extents of SL."

"This project recognizes synthetic space not for its faculties of communication, but rather for its potential as a representational, sensational medium. "

"Image resonates on its surface, through its envelope and beyond its physical reach, to capture, through the distribution of space, its tangible atmosphere. Avatars merge in image, emerge through the image, we lose ourselves in the image, of art, only to reemerge through it. The colors, lights and forms, the tensions and compressions of the space's force, superpose to project an «Image-Space »."

AVAIR is an extended performance whose purpose is to investigate the nature of art making in the 3D synthetic environment of Second Life. It is an examination of policy and institution, as well as a reflection on place and art. Artists are given a stipend and technical support. They are expected to have an open studio, produce an exhibition, and make a public presentation. Their methodologies are documented here. Orchestrated through the classic structure of the gallery, the performances run at any time of the day or night, and create a platform for exchange between artist and audience.

“AVAIR” is a 2006-2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Ars Virtua is a new media center and gallery located in the synthetic world of Second Life. It is a new type of space that leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation. Ars Virtua is sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

Posted by jo at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army

Circus of (Im)Migration

The Boredom Patrol of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army is a gaggle of clowns who spend their days trying to create a world without borders by clowning fascists. They display their videos online and the lovely Minutemen gladly patricipate in the networked performance by engaging in a debate about immigration with all the other posters. You can see their videos here.

The Boredom Patrol is doing a traveling Circus of (Im)Migration from Portland to Tijuana, all along the west coast of the US and a bit of Mexico. Join us for stories, ridicule of fascism, creative resistance, tearing down walls and building community, including Fantastical feats of Fire, Lion Taming, Tight Rope Walking, Knife Throwing, Burlesque, Punk Rock Opera, Theater, oh yeah and clowns too!

..We are C.I.R.C.A. because we live in the borderlands, always in between, on the edge of the nation state, mischevously ambiguous...You can see our lovely flyer here and our travel schedule here.

Posted by jo at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2007

Emma on Relationships

How to Play

Call (617) 544-3022. You will hear: "Hi this is Emma. Leave a message for me or one of my friends. To leave a message for me, press 1. For Chris, press 2, for Jamie, press 3, for Emma's brother, press 4, for Eugene, press 5, for Sarah press 6, and for Paresh, press 7." Leave a message (up to 15 seconds). You can ask a question like "How do average girls get with hot guys?" or whatever you want. Listen to what other people are saying by choosing one of the cards on the right. Emma will try to respond to your questions and concerns in her next episode. The latest episode is on the topic of "Breasts." Please call. Website.

Posted by jo at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2007

Domenico Quaranta's Interview with

Second Front: A Leap into the Void

At first sight they may appear like a pop hybrid between the X-men and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, reviewed through the exaggerated and postmodern aesthetics of a virtual world such as Second Life. Quite the contrary. They are the first performance art group in Second Life: serious guys, practicing artists, curators and academics in real life, who decided to sound out the performative possibilities offered by a public virtual space that is growing at an impressive rate and being filled up by media agencies, stores, products, brands and inhabitants.

Second Front officially formed on November 23, 2006, gaining new members up right until the last few days. Now they are: Wirxli Flimflam aka Jeremy Owen Turner; Tea Chenille aka Tanya Skuce; Man Michinaga aka Patrick Lichty; Alise Iborg aka Penny Leong Browne; Tran Spire aka Doug Jarvis; Great Escape aka Scott Kildall; Lizsolo Mathilde aka Liz Pickard; Gazira Babeli aka CLASSIFIED.

The attention of “in world” media comes fast, even if Second Front doesn't seem to work much on communication: its very first performances are set up, unannounced, in public spaces, for a little, unconscious audience. Then, almost immediately (January 5, 2007) comes the big intervention scored at Ars Virtua Gallery – the most notable contemporary art gallery in Second Life – for the opening of the visionary installation by the American artist John Craig Freeman (JC Fremont in Second Life). And may other performances...

Saying that Second Front is opening new paths in an unexplored territory is not rhetorical; and the loose, immodest and a little bit punkish way in which they do it is definitely unrhetorical. Their key feature is openness: openness and plurality of visions and perspectives, quite blatant in this interview (where almost each one of them decided to give his/her answer to the same question); they are open about a wide range of interventions, from reenactment to improvisation to code performing; open about different ways of shaping their work for the art audience, from prints to video to live broadcasting. They are growing up before our very eyes. And, rest assured, they hold good things in store.

DOMENICO QUARANTA: What is Second Front?

MAN MICHINAGA: Second Front is an international performance art group whose sole venue is the online world, Second Life. Second Front has members from Vancouver, St. Johns, Chicago, New Orleans, and Milan (to name a few), and works with numerous artists from around the world.

WIRXLI FLIMFLAM: As of January 14th, Second Front received official legitimacy from The Ava-Star tabloid (owned by Die Zeit in Germany) as the “first performance art group in Second Life”. This basically makes us the in-world equivalent of Fluxus – perhaps we could also be nicknamed “SLuxus”. This sudden rush from formation to celebrity has been quite fascinating since Second Front officially formed on November 23, 2006.

As for a more detailed idea of what Second Front is all about, some people in Second Life might confuse us with a “performing arts” group rather than a “performance arts” group. We are not a circus act nor a dance or a theatre troupe although our artistic practice might superficially resemble those other performing acts at times.

TRAN SPIRE: Second Front is a network of performance interested artists exploring new and different environments, specifically the online 3d animated game world of Second Life. The members have come together through a myriad of personal relationships that existed during the early days of the group’s formation. This dynamic has morphed and mutated to include and involve variations on membership based on who is available and what presence can they perform with the others.

DQ: What does it mean, for you, to make performances in Second Life? Do you make rehearsals or do you prefer improvisation? Do you work with code or do you simply make what all other avatars do?

ALISE IBORG: So far we have done both. I think it depends on what kind of performance we wish to make. If it is better improvised we will probably do that. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. With prerecorded performances, we can fine tune and edit out things we don't want the audience to see. But with improvised performances, the work takes on a life of its own fueled by the creative energy of our players which really shows through. Also, many times, it's the surprises and unintended actions that make the work really come alive!

MAN MICHINAGA: Performing in Second Life gives Second Front the opportunity to work at scales they would not normally be able to work in if done in the physical world, and often has the opportunity to play to a wider audience. Our level of preparedness is dependent on the context for the event.

In regards to whether we use code or not, Second Front is using a growing set of code-based interventions in its performances, thanks to our techno-doyen, Mama Gaz Babeli. In regards to our avatars, and props, almost nothing we use is ‘standard’, but some of us retain a few basic props like specific wings, or even old beginner’s props like hair as a sign of their past as newcomers to Second Life.

WIRXLI FLIMFLAM: When we rehearse and plan scripts for major public performance events, we still have to rely on individual improvisation. Nothing is ever entirely scripted so each member can do their “own thing” and have breathing room yet at the same time not be confused as to what they should be doing. We use scripts and rehearsals etc. as a guide to help the performing member to feel secure with the thematic manner with which they wish to improvise. This allows for group cohesion both on an optical and practical level.

GREAT ESCAPE: Second Life offers a unique space for performance. Without the normal constraints of the body ― the usual center of performance - and without a traditional audience, we can try and do things that have been previously thought to be impossible.

TRAN SPIRE: Performing in Second Life introduces variables and situations that complement and push further the understanding and comprehension that the members of the group share as a sense of what is real. By engaging the contrived space of an online gaming environment the challenges to perform are exaggerated by the parameters that persist as the interface with the context, the others members of the group, audiences and the templates of performance as an art medium. All of the tropes of performance are available to the group to use at will, hopefully to ends beyond the surface of what may appear evident around us.

GAZIRA BABELI: The real performance starts with login, the rest is performance record. The avatar just tries to forget being a code.

DQ: Do you prefer, for your performances, a public space or an art venue?

MAN MICHINAGA: Second Front chooses its venues to fit the context of the piece and the performance. In the case of Border Control, it was done at Ars Virtua, therefore the context was that of an art space. For our Breaking News and Abject Apocalypse pieces, these were context specific (the Reuters building and the Star over the Christmas Tree at the US’s NBC Rockefeller Plaza), and were performed in situ, with the product being the documentation.

WIRXLI FLIMLAM: Personally, I prefer a large and well-known public venue that is not usually within the context of high-art. So for example, IBM, Sears, American Apparel, Wired, and Reuters are all great examples of the kind of venues I think are really inspirational for me. Again, this is a personal preference and not necessarily reflective of Second Front as a group.

GREAT ESCAPE: It depends on the nature of the performance. An art venue is interesting because it brings Second Life into the physical space. I think it is ideal to broadcast the performance at an art venue while engaging a specific site in Second Life.

GAZIRA BABELI: In art venues you can be welcomed with cheers, in public spaces with bullets. I prefer the latter, as death doesn’t exist.

DQ: What kind of audience are you looking for? Do you think that a performance in Second Life could be displayed also in the real world?

MAN MICHINAGA: We are interested in reaching out to audiences who are interested in Second Life, and are curious of the possibilities that avatar-based performance art can have. Currently, Second Front is performing in hybrid venues, such as simultaneous events in its home, the BitFactory in Han Loso, and in physical spaces, like Vancouver’s Western Front, and Chicago’s Gallery 416. We do hope that in addition to our performances in Second Life, Second Front can have exhibitions of its performances, imagery, video, and ephemera in the physical as any and all possible media. We do not wish to be limited by media, and also wish to spread our curiosity to the widest possible audience.

GREAT ESCAPE: One thing I think we’re looking to do is to question the underlying assumptions of Second Life and what it means to be a virtual being in that space. A dominant trend in Second Life is to shop, make friends online and participate in a virtual economy. We think this can be a venue for unique artistic expression. In this way, anyone in Second Life is an appropriate audience. The possibilities for the space haven’t been fully explored as of yet and so I think people are much more receptive to performances that they might be in real life. Because it is so new, we can have a huge affect on people’s thinking.

TRAN SPIRE: I like the idea that the notion of an audience is being blurred by my own participation in this group. I am conscious of the fact that during all the stages of our performances from pre-production planning emails to after-party videos, I am both a performer with the group and an audience to the many things taking place. Anything that contributes to challenging this space and dichotomy between creator and audience I think is an interesting thing to pursue.

ALISE IBORG: We are looking for open-minded audiences who are not afraid to be part of the performance. And absolutely, Second Front could be displayed in the real world. The term that I use to describe this intervention into the real world, is 'virtual leakage'.

I define virtual leakage as a two way exchange between the virtual and the real, through which new hybrid meanings can be made. Meaning-making can no longer operate within the hermetic cases of the real vs. virtual, but instead, becomes a back and forth exchange in which ideas migrate by osmosis. While we as Second Life avatars become more real in the virtual world, so too, that we as human inhabitants of the real world become more virtual.

In my opinion, there is an amazing opportunity for Virtual Reality (VR) to stake its own territory but in order for VR to produce meaning that breaks from the real and from past artistic social practices, and to become a medium that produces singular works, the binary of the real vs virtual must be dismantled. Only then, will we be able to look at VR not as a simulation of the real, but as a simulation of itself.

GAZIRA BABELI: I prefer an unaware audience, an audience who does not necessarily have to understand what’s going on. Second Life is a real world.

DQ: Can you tell me something about the performances you had till now? How did your approach changed from the first one?

MAN MICHINAGA: Like any experimental troupe, we are always learning, and this affects our performance process. In addition, for Breaking News, many of us were only recently active, so our first performance was a really interesting experience. In short, Breaking News was an absurdist play on the 18th Century idea of the Town Crier, played out in the latest of 21st Century news facilities. By shouting out non-sequiteur, moment-to-moment headlines, Second Front hoped to perhaps jam the usual flow of information in the Reuters space, and possibly (ridiculously enough) barge into Adam Reuters’ office itself! On the second occasion, we did get an audience, as passers-by stopped and sat to listen to our tabloid headlines. Of course (we assume) they did not take us seriously. For Border Control, we knew we would have an audience, and that we would need to fill a fairly set period of time with detailed orchestration, we experimented at the BitFactory, rehearsing a series of vignettes that fit the context of JC Fremont & Rain Coalcliff’s Mexican Border installation. The first act, “Border Patrol” was a Dada-esque performance of the increasing militarization of the borders throughout North America. Following that, “Red Rover” was a play on the creation of a border in the traditional children’s game, but in our case the border decided to break down the audience instead of the other way around. Lastly, the final act, “Danger Room” was a piece that was intended to inspire a gestalt of danger and chaos in the age of Terror, but unexpectedly, chaos erupted and the sim actually crashed, whether by our actions or a combination of us and the audience isn’t really clear. The approaches for the two pieces are quite different, as one is ad-hoc and the other following a set choreography and set. Are we changing? Of course; it wouldn’t be interesting if we weren’t. We learn new things each performance, and while certain things get easier, we then try to push the envelope harder in other areas.

TRAN SPIRE: I like to think that part of the script of each performance is written in the code of the place or environment in which it is situated. This lets the content be influenced by not only the art or non-art context but also by the different terrains that can exist in the real life as well as Second Life.

DQ: What do you think about art in Second Life? Is performance the only possible way to make art out there?

MAN MICHINAGA: Absolutely not. While Second Life has limitations like any medium, the members of Second Front are excited to see individuals working in many different forms of expression, such as live music, ‘painting’, sculpture, even fireworks and aerial ballet. While Second Life is relatively new, the possibilities for expression in virtual worlds has yet to be fully explored. That’s why Second Front was created!

WIRXLI FLIMFLAM: Context is extremely important here. Part of what makes Second Life itself is the fact that every moment seems like part of a performance. The fact that everything can be customizable in Second Life as well as the fact that just about any object can be wearable enhances my personal impression that performance art is the most “authentic” medium of Second Life in that Greenbergian sense.

GREAT ESCAPE: Right now, the Second Life galleries are mostly replicating paintings and sculpture, enhanced with visual effects in Second Life. These are what you’d expect with the first generation of art-making in any new medium. I think that what we’ve seen so far in Second Life is only a glimpse of what the future holds.

ALISE IBORG: Absolutely not. Second Life has offered the ability for anyone to create in VR which means that there is boundless possibilities for creativity and unprecedented work. In my opinion, VR is in itself a new medium but what is unique about VR is that through its technology, it can create work that can free itself from past art practices, though, there is also amazing avenues of creation by referencing precedent artists and works, For instance, our Last Supper performance appropriates one of the most canonic religious events by producing an event of binging and purging art itself!

GAZIRA BABELI: Second Life is a frame-space which can include all sorts of artistic perversion. I call it performance, anyway. But if you find a better definition, please let me know.

DQ. What is your relationship with your Real Life counterpart?

MAN MICHINAGA: There really is none. Patrick Lichty does not exist. Only I am real, and I control him. On a more serious note, the relationship between Man and Patrick is completely in line with my RL life. I am very sensitive to context, and the way I act in one context may be very different from another. In Second Life I feel that one has to be “Larger than Life”, and that's what Man is – He’s a big dark, figure – part angel, part rock star, part architect, part actor. That is, all the things that Second Life gives the individual more freedom to be if they so desire. I think that most of Second Front do this with great effectiveness and aplomb. My greatest concern is “the risk of the Artist”; that is, the bleed between worlds that I take by making potentially controversial art in Second Life. I think that Second Life is the first place where we can say that sometimes our action online DO matter, and this is very perplexing.

GREAT ESCAPE: I think that the avatar Great Escape occupies a strange nook in my subconscious. In many ways, Second Life operates as a fantastical dream state. We can fly, teleport and pick up houses and cars. My avatar has purple skin and fire out of his hair. When I go to sleep at night, images of the other Second Front members often fill me head. So for me, my avatar is embedded in my psyche, rather than an extension of my self.

WIRXLI FLIMFLAM: In a lot of ways, the relationship between Wirxli and Jeremy is much more closer than one might think from first seeing me. I did intentionally want to make Wirxli more of an alien than human or perhaps as a kind of first-generation “post-human”. I was also reading up about the stereotypical shaman in most cultures who is gender-ambiguous... so in this case, there is a slight departure here from my Real Life self.

TRAN SPIRE: I prefer to triangulate, dimensionally shift my relationship to each of the entities constituting themselves as versions of me. Therefore, I am waiting for the two to have a discussion and then ask me to join in on the conversation. I am interested to hear what they come up with and how they define themselves in regards to existence in a spatio-temporal plane, and whether they recognize each other.

GAZIRA BABELI: My body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs shoes.

LINKS:

Second Front - http://slfront.blogspot.com/
Gazira Babeli - http://gazirababeli.com/
The BitFactory - http://patricklichty.com.thing.net/bitfactory.html
Ars Virtua Gallery - http://arsvirtua.com/
Imaging Place - http://imagingplace.net/

Domenico Quaranta is an Italian art critic and curator focused on New Media Art. He is the author of the book Net Art 1994 – 1998: La vicenda di Äda'web (Milan 2004) and, together with Matteo Bittanti, the editor of GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (Milan 2006, http://www.gamescenes.org/). He curated several exhibitions in Italy, including: GameScenes (Turin 2005), Radical Software (Turin 2006), and Connessioni leggendarie. Net.art 1995 – 2005 (Milan, 2005). He teaches “Net art” at the Accademia di Brera in Milan.

A LEAP INTO THE VOID: INTERVIEW WITH SECOND FRONT by Domenico Quaranta is was commissioned by Rhizome.org.

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

April 15, 2007

Karaoke DeathMatch 100 (AKA KDM100)

New Rounds Daily, April 15 - June 4

Artist collaborative M.River & T.Whid Art Associates face off in the most brutal performance art smack down of the new millennium… Karaoke Deathmatch 100! This alcohol-fueled blood feud features 50 rounds of sing-along fury (taped live over an 8-hour period with hardly any pee breaks). No Carpenters hit too cheesy, no heavy metal lyric too trite for these teleprompter warriors to hurl in a battle to the end. Who will emerge victorious? Only YOU can decide.

MTAA's Karaoke DeathMatch 100 is a video blog performance that takes place over 50 days starting April 15th, 2007 and ending June 4th. Each day, a new round is posted pitting M.River & T.Whid against each other in drunken karaoke competition. Visit the web site daily to view the sets of videos, vote for your favorite and discuss the artists' performances. At the end of the competition, the votes will decide who is the Karaoke DeathMatch 100 Champion.

The web version of KDM100 is an official selection of Visual 07. 7º Festival De Creación Audiovisual Ciudad De Majadahonda. The gallery version of KDM100 premiered at the Leonart '05 art festival in Leonding, Austria.

KDM100 was shot in May 2005 over 8 hours.

credits:

video production:
Bill Hallinan, Andre Sala and George Su

web production:
T.Whid & M.River
Developed using open-source software: Wordpress, X-Poll and embedthevideo.

URLs:
web site: http://www.mteww.com/kdm100/
QuickTime feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kdm100m4v
Windows Media feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kdm100wmv

also available on iTunes...

Posted by jo at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2007

Object of Desire by Yael Kanarek

Three Languages, Four Ports of Entry

World Premiere of Internet art project Object of Desire by Yael Kanarek: Object of Desire is the third chapter in World of Awe, and online travelogue that chronicles a search for lost treasure in a parallel world called Sunset/Sunrise. The project imagines a post-gender and post-national protagonist. Born from an observation that language defines borders and territory on the Internet, Object of Desire examines these borders, as the chapter is written in three languages: English, Arabic and Hebrew. Challenging the notion of fixed territory, thirteen scenes of the online project download from servers in four locations-—in Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Izmir and New York.

Object of Desire has four web addresses by which to enter: New York; Tel Aviv; Ramallah; Izmir.

Object of Desire was awarded a 2005 Renew Media Fellowship (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation)

Friday April 20, 2007, 7:15 PM: Artist's Talk with Yael Kanarek :: 8:00 PM: Panel Discussion: Plausible Maps, Possible Worlds: Memories for a Post-National Future with Galit Eilat (moderator), Livia Alexander, Hakan Topal, and Michael Connor :: Exit Art, 475 Tenth Ave (at 36th street), New York, NY 10018, Tel. (212) 966-7745.

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

April 11, 2007

Last Tag Show Net Performance

Exploring the Facade of Web 2.0

Multiplace 2007 | network culture festival presents Last Tag Show :: On 14th of April watch http://www.lostpostservice.net/lts for a net performance exploring the facade of Web 2.0. Name it social media hack or Web 2.0 circuit bending, but above all the show is going to refer to global performance of users building and enhancing their own web image setting thus a social mask and yielding a performance of it's kind.

Last Tag Show will start at 8am London time, 3am NY time, 9am Prague time, 11am Moscow time and will run for 24 hrs. For time converter tool go to world time server.

Posted by jo at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2007

SKINdoscope

A Game of Alterity and Identity

Participate in Martha Gabriel's SKINdoscope by entering your personal data and your skin color (by clicking the button "add your skin"), and choosing your position in the kaleidoscope. You can also interact with the SKINdoscope by controlling th speed, mirrors, zoom and filters, or by choosing a specific visualization mode (skin, gender, name, age, etc...), therefore changing the visual presentation and effects.

The skin is the largest human body organ, and besides being its protecting layer and a system that regulates the body temperature and receives pain and pleasure stimuli, it also strongly contributes to the individual identification: it is the skin that in the first place separates physically our inside and the outer world – the other.

Among several skin characteristics that distinguishes one person from another, its color is one of the most interesting and maybe the most controversial. The human skin has nuances of colors that form together a true and interesting aquarelle. The skin has been reason for passions and wars in the human history, for it can either unite or separate, either regarding the semblance or the difference. “The difference is simultaneously the base of the social life and permanent source of tension and conflict.” (Gilberto Velho, in “Cidadania e Violência”, 2000).

According to the skin color and some other physiological and characteristics, the present work – SKINdoscope –builds a kaleidoscope on the web, where the poetics and visual result are formed and depend on the relationship between the pieces and the shapes and colors of each one, in a game of alterity and identity.

The SKINdoscope is formed by the pieces that represent people who have interacted with the work – the size of each piece is proportional to the person’s BMI (body mass index), the color of the piece is the person skin color and the shape of the piece is determined according to the person gender. The position each piece occupies in the space of the kaleidoscope is defined by the person herself/himself, and she/he can choose who to stay close or far, or even to overlay.

In this context, the present web-art work intends to lead the participant to reflect about questions related to the poetics of the alterity, the value and importance of the difference, and the way we interact with it when we face it by positioning ourselves among others.

Posted by jo at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)

DEAF: Snack&Surge Brunch: Marked Up City

You Are Not Here.org: Gaza - Tel Aviv

Marked Up City: You Are Not Here.org: Gaza - Tel Aviv :: Hosted and introduced by Nat Muller (NL) :: Saturday 14 April 2007, 11:00 – 13:30 hrs :: Location: V2_Studio :: Entrance: € 7,50 :: LIVE STREAM (REALVIDEO) - 14 april, 11:00-13:30 (Clicking on the above link before the indicated time will result in an error message!) This live stream can be viewed with the free RealPlayer.

Cities are more than their streets and squares, their commerce and inhabitants: they are part and parcel of a whole economy which brands and markets "the urban experience" to us as a commodity. Tourism is of course the latter's most logical instrument: more often than not we are sold a sugar-coated product, which discards the dynamics, frictions and population groups, which make up the city proper. Marked Up City dips into the belly of city branding and urban tourism... with a twist.

You Are Not Here.org (YANH), urban tourism mash-up project by artist Thomas Duc (US), media activist Mushon Zer-Aviv (IL/US), interaction designer Kati London (US) and new media hacker Dan Phiffer (US) :: Laila El-Haddad (PS/US), journalist and writer :: Merijn Oudenampsen (NL), specialises in issues concerning flexibility of labour, precarity, gentrification, and city branding.

The SNACK & SURGE Brunches create a performative and gastronomic theatre of operations addressing political, technological and artistic questions relating to the poetics of power. We invite the DEAF audience to kick off their day pondering the aesthetics, actions and media of resistance and critique. Part hang-out, part culinary experiment, SNACK & SURGE intends to be a caress for the palate, an opener for the mind, and a rebelliously festive wake-up for the mood.

Rise and start your day deliciously: biting at the poetics of power!

Food by: anders eten.com

Posted by jo at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)

Time Based Text

The gesture in computer art

"Thinking about gesture in art, people usually refer to choreography. If the topic is related to IT, instead, usability becomes the issue. But, what about gesture in computer art? Does it mean natural interaction or is it just a matter of performance? Certainly, a gesture is a way for emphasizing communication. Based on this concept, pioneers of net.art (or as we should better say 'net.art is dead') such as Jaromil and Jodi are exploring this area with a project called Time Based Text (TBT). TBT is a free software that records performances of written text and vehicle it as additional information. This is both a command line and console tool that records and playback keyboard strokes with a millisecond precision. As a command line tool it can record from standard input or playback to standard output (from and to a file or pipeline), so it can be interfaced with other software reproducing a sequence of actions.

As a console tool it offers a simple typing interface to record and playback text exactly as it is typed, including all corrections and hesitations. This'd be a unique possibility in electronic poetry, literature, and even daily email. The authors simply describe this process as: saving and reproducing every single action during the composition of a text let us vehicle emphasis in written communication. But, this 'recorded' gesture is then a new time-based medium." Valentina Culatti, Neural.

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

Mladen Bizumic: How If – A Translation in III Acts

A 'Spatial Opera'

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

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

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

ACT III (at PROGRAM)

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

ACT I (at Künstlerhaus Bethanien)

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

ACT II (at Künstlerhaus Bethanien)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turbulence Commission: The Simultaneous Translator

Live Performance on April 15

Turbulence Commission: The Simultaneous Translator by John Roach and Willy Whip [Requires Windows OS] LIVE PERFORMANCE: Sunday April 15; 12:00 PM EST to 3:00 PM EST

The Simultaneous Translator (SimTrans) is a Windows based audio interface that enables anyone to load audio streams and manipulate them in real time on the Internet. SimTrans makes the delays and fluctuations of the Internet visible and audible. The Internet becomes your collaborator as you create your mix, and the instability you usually try to avoid becomes a tool for creation. Distance and delay are manifest within the interface numerically and as a series of sliding heads; there is also a link to Google Earth where you can watch the dynamic flight of data travel between yourself and the audio source.

“SimTrans” is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Murray G. and Beatrice H. Sherman Charitable Trust.

THE PERFORMANCE: The Simultaneous Translator grew out of the artists’ live networked performance project "Simultaneous Translation," in which the delays of the internet are used to dynamically effect the live performances of geographically distant artists.

The performance will take place from 12:00 PM EST to 3:00 PM EST on Sunday April 15. Log on via http://turbulence.org/Works/simtrans.

Participants: Greg Davis (USA), Kenneth Goldsmith (USA), John Hudak (USA), Keyman (France), Lawrence Li (China), Mice69 (France), Miguel Ramos (Spain), Joe Reinsel (USA), John Roach (USA) and Willy Whip (France).

BIOGRAPHIES

JOHN ROACH doesn't consider himself an installation artist, a sound artist, or a sculptor, but prefers to think of himself as a nomad, touching down in whatever place is most hospitable to his ideas. Recent projects have been an installation at the 2B Gallery in Budapest, Hungary; a collaborative performance with objects and video at the Saint Stephen Museum in Szekesfehervar, Hungary; and a web video project called Sweet Music. He continues to work with Willy Whip on their long-standing live networked performance project Simultaneous Translation.

WILLY WHIP is a designer and teacher in hypermedia interactivity. Outside his institutional work he likes to produce mashups that fertilize his own secret garden. This personal research and development leads him on a quest for hybrids: connect this information to that information; grow new contents; release new senses. Recent activity includes projects with the artists Anika Mignotte, Reynald Drouhin, and Du Zhenjun.

Posted by jo at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2007

Urban Interface | Berlin (Olso)

Interspaces of Public/Private Urban Space

Urban Interface Berlin :: A symposium, exhibition and curatorial research project exploring the interspaces between public and private urban space :: April 15 to May 6, 2007 :: Berlin and Oslo :: Some of the works are:

Exposure, by Jussi Ängeslevä (FI) and Richard The (DE), is a spatial art installation combining smart materials, simple sensor electronics and poster design to weave micro narratives for the unsuspecting public as they navigate through the urban landscape. An array of unobtrusive, monochromatic posters is arranged along a segment of a passageway. Adjacent to the individual posters a light gate is watching when a pedestrian passes by the poster. The light gate is connected to a tele-objective camera flash and triggers it, casting the person’s shadow momentarily on the poster. The poster, being covered with fluorescent ink, captures the shadows and retains the glowing silhouette, becoming an integrated element of the poster’s graphics which gradually fade away. The work can be seen as a commentary and counter-reaction to the established disempowerment of the individual. Above and beyond the exhausted Big Brother discourse, Exposure takes a stand also on the new emergent "Participatory Panopticon", or "Little Brother", the ever present prying eye of the neighbours’ ubiquitous camera equipped digital device.

The project series Mitting operates at the interface between the sociologically and culturally different boroughs of Mitte and Wedding. For two days, the area that has been defined for the exhibition acts as a space for actions and as a starting point for mobile and stationary events. Oliver Hangl puts on two “Secret Tours” through public and private spaces that bring the coexistence of these parallel cultures to awareness. The participants, equipped with two-channel wireless headsets that enable them to choose between two alternative streams of information presented by the guides and musical liveacts, will be led through the different areas by two tour guides as well as musicians, actors, artists, DJs and a technical crew. Statements from pedestrians and local residents will flow into the liveact audio streams.

Mitting separates levels of perception while isolating the participants. On the streets, in warehouses, flats, and wherever the groups enter, they appear mute to residents and passers-by. Because of the dialogue that is sent inward through headphones, the action bears a subversive potential. But the participants should also be alert to when reality turns suddenly into fiction.

Oliver Hangl declares spaces, participants and watchers an open field of imagination, an audiovisual energy field that oscillates between performance, demo-protest and communication experiment… „Remember, that it’s all in your head!“ (Gorillaz)

Daniel Jolliffe presents the project Berliner Stimmen in the context of urban interface | berlin. His work is a mixture of mobile sculpture and performance that examines the participatory moment. Visually, Berliner Stimmen is a sculpture mounted behind a bicycle, but its main function is performative. Over a period of three weeks, Jolliffe will cycle through the borough of Mitte, Wedding and Gesundbrunnen three times a week. While he is travelling, the loudspeaker broadcasts previously recorded one-minute calls. It is possible for each caller to have his message broadcast in the public space. The past realisations of the project under the name of One Free Minute in San José and Vancouver have shown that the callers use this public platform for different reasons. The spectrum of the recorded messages includes private statements and stories as well as commercial announcements and political speeches. In times when governments and public agencies are increasingly vigilant of who is saying what and where, citizens and activists can express their opinions in Berliner Stimmen freely and without fear of repression.

Also on exhibit: Laura Beloff's Head; Zone-out of Vision.

ABOUT urban interface | berlin

The project deals with the changing notion of private and public space that occurs due to, particularly, the everyday use of communication technologies. The artworks in the context of urban interface convey the idea of public space as an accessible and contributive sphere and call attention to a more sensitive engagement with the private, physical and digital spheres.

The works are developed for individual spaces by participating artists and if possible realised in cooperation with hosts. Hosts can be private individuals as well as companies, which then communicate the artworks out of their private spaces into the public. Private becomes public, public becomes private. Art space intermixes with urban space.

In responding to selected public and semi-public sites and their inherent qualities, the artworks will become focal points of the shifting conceptions of private and public space. Being often immaterial and digital and located at the difficult-to-define boundaries of private and public space, the artworks challenge all users – perceivers, organisers and the local authorities to formulate and discuss their individual understanding of those spaces. At the same time, the dispersed and temporary nature of the artworks challenges the formula of exhibitions in public space.

This website is conceived as an archive and contributive forum which ideally could serve as a knowledge platform for other art projects dealing with or happening in public space. To that end, relevant processes between the involved parties such as artists, sponsors, organisers and the city administration will be published on this website. Hence this website can be understood as another interface between private and public, theory and practice.

The thematic discourse is extended to presentations and panels accompanying the exhibitions

Posted by jo at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2007

WindMaker

Feel the Breeze

WindMaker is an ambient weather widget that applies the current wind conditions to your Web site. First, it uses a United States ZIP Code to grab local conditions from the Yahoo Weather RSS feed. Second, it parses your Web site into individual pieces such as text blocks and images. Finally, WindMaker sets the pieces in motion according to the strength of the wind.

Add WindMaker to your own Web site in one step. Insert the following JavaScript into your HTML just before your closing BODY tag. WindMaker does the rest. [via]

Posted by jo at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2007

Institute for Infinitely Small Things

Transferring Patriotism

Transferring Patriotism is a new work by the Institute for Infinitely Small Things now on sale at Evolution de l'Art Gallery. The Institute is selling its patriotism to any interested buyers. Once the sale is made, the full transfer of our patriotism to you will occur in the following way:

Two members of the Institute will fly to your country. We will meet you and a witness from your country at the border between your country and the US Embassy or Consulate. We will set up a table with four chairs. We will sit at half of the table on American territory and you will sit at half of the table on your country's territory. We will then proceed to share an American beer. Then we will share a drink from your country. We will repeat those drinks until we are all drunk. At that point, the transfer of patriotism will be complete.

Price: Cost of two plane tickets from Boston, MA, USA, to your country plus additional logistic costs. Sale handled via Evolution de l'Art Gallery.

The gallery Evolution de l’Art arises from a collaboration between SPACE (Juraj Carny, Diana Majdakova and Lydia Pribisova) and Cesare Pietroiusti. Evolution de l’Art is a gallery for contemporary art which only sells artworks that are immaterial, with no physical residue, and it does not release certificates of authenticity, nor statements or receipts. EdlA will represent, on a non-exclusive basis, artists whose artwork is, at least in the case of some specific projects, alien from any physical-material component. Beyond this condition, there will not be any other limitation or requisite for represented artists in terms of medium or technique.

Posted by jo at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2007

An Event for a Conversation

'fancy a skype chat?'

An Event for a Conversation celebrates social networking and is designed to explore the social and technological aspects of communication through experimental events and conceptual research. This experimental and research process will develop towards, and inform the final interactive and relational ‘Event for a Conversation’.

The first event ‘fancy a skype chat?’ took place yesterday (March 25); ‘fancy a skype chat?’ invited people to an online, social event hosted by the artist Rebecca Gamble. Gamble's goal was to re-create the pub-like environment of informal chat around a table over a drink, by inviting people to ‘bring their own’, ‘log on’ and start chatting over Skype. Through this event, the artist hoped to connect people and their different environments through online conversation, in a virtual environment. It was documented through the texts of the ‘Group Chat’ on Skype, from screen grab images of the artists’ desktop at 10-minute intervals, and in other ways the participants added to it. The conversations themselves were not recorded.

Posted by jo at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2007

1001 nights cast

TIME CHANGES

1001 nights cast: Daylight Savings ended in Australia and started in Europe on Sunday March 25. Performance # 644 on March 26 is at 6pm from Sydney, that is: 4pm in Perth, Hong Kong and Tokyo; 9am in London; 10am in Madrid, Paris and Berlin; 11am in Beirut, Jerusalem and Istanbul; 4am in New York, Toronto and Bogota; 1am in Los Angeles. And then will get earlier with each passing day. If in doubt, wait for the "Performance # xxxx begins in XX:xx hrs/mins" countdown clock on the Today Now page.

New writers always invited to contribute. Story submission deadline is always 3 hrs before performance time (sunset).

Posted by jo at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

New Media Art in a Control Society

Transcript from a Performance

Adam Trowbridge: New Media Art in a Control Society :: Transcript from Performance :: The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN, USA
March 22, 2007 :: video stills here

As noted in the transcript, the majority of the statements read were not original and instead shamelessly stolen (edited and unedited) from various sources: theoretical texts, artists' statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. Transcript:

This is...a performance and new media art...or maybe not. [video begins] [text below is read]

- - Gilles Deleuze said "Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control." End quote.

- - The phrase "new media art" is pointless.

- - The selection of medium is not the selection of a wardrobe for an idea. We are well past ideas and communication. Medium should be selected like legal and illicit pharmaceuticals: where do you want to go today?

- - What is a digital painting? Idiotic.

- - Contemporary art is both scattered and networked, always in motion. Medium, if anything, is a measure of speed and distribution. Is the texture of an oil painting that different from that of flypaper? Video is faster and shedding the weight of the poetic yet precious medium of film. Photography is a film still. Internet-based art is faster but still flails, lashed down by too many examples of bad information design masquerading as art.

- - THEY create DELIRIOUS RULES and sell you free access to their BACKSTAGE if you follow these sick rules. YOU KNOW IT.

- - Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome has been falsely represented as a metaphor for a network and for networked art. Deleuze and Guattari did not deal in metaphors.

- - Rhizomatic action is a force relationship in which power is distributed then scattered before it can begin to collect. This is not a metaphorical description but a plan of action.

- - Over 650,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by military intervention in Iraq and we are here to discuss...what?

- - Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before.

- - All hoarding, speculation on art, must cease and be seen for what it is: usury and exploitation.

- - In the beginning, you enjoyed it. You were caught in the middle of the WAR between THEM and THE OTHER SIDE, and you were trying to help THEM win the war.

- - All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

- - Six billion worldwide population, all living, have a Computer God Containment Policy brain bank brain, a real brain in the brain bank cities on the far side of the moon we never see.

- - Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.

- - Human beings are not fully conscious of their real life...usually groping in the dark...at every moment groups and individuals find themselves confronted with results they have not wished.

- - Control is short-term and has rapid rates of turnover, but is also continuous and without limit.

- - New media art involves people who make watering plants more complex than it needs to be by using cell phones that call the Internet when the plants need water.

- - If you can talk about it, why paint it?

- - The Dia: Beacon is a tomb for the last gasp of studio art, let it be a monument and move on.

- - Man and machines can make symbiotic art.

- - Psychogeography: The study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behavior of the individual.

- - Inevitability of gradualness. Usually, in a few years, you are made string bean thin or grotesquely deformed, crippled and ugly, or even made one foot shorter or one foot taller, as the Computer God sees fit.

- - In the future we will have foreign genetic material in us as today we have mechanical and electronic implants. In other words, we will be transgenic. However, there's no excuse but marketing for purchasing a glowing rabbit.

- - Users of the world are presented with fresh, owned content every day. We have the technology, the precedents, and the duty to make new art out of this owned content.

- - A lot of people say that new media is revolutionary. They say the net is subversive. But how subversive can you be in an exclusive club where it costs $1,000 for a computer and $50 a month to connect to the Internet.

- - The main function of Art is to distinguish rich people from poorer people.

- - Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; we re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to us to discover what we're being made to serve, just as our elders discovered, not without difficulty, the ultimate end of the disciplines.

- - Personal expression and human and artist centrality can be abandoned.

- - Complex machines are an emergent life form in the masturbatory fantasies of those siding with control. I distrust transhumanists but I want to be friends with a computer.

- - Any moralistic or spiritual pretension or representation purposes for art must be abandoned.

- - Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV, sight and sound recorded by your brain, your moon brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold brainwash radio lifelong, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual, "Don't worry about it."

- - Professionalism in the arts (and the accompanying stratification of skills) must be abandoned in favor of a progressive (class-less) artistry of both a personal and collective nature.

- - Over the last decades, using positions of power in your STAGE-WORLD reality, THEY introduced their key words and also their sick DREAMWORLD- TO-SELL key ideas in every aspect of culture in the STAGE WORLD society where you live : songs, movies, humor, even propaganda.

- - Derive: An experimental mode of behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique for hastily passing through varied environments.

- - The economic and cultural exploitation of the artist has reached appalling proportions. The individual and/or collective artist, whose work is plagiarized as commercial 'technique', or exported as cultural commodity, has little control over these conditions.

- - Consciousness is not exclusively restricted to the brain. Human bodies have no boundaries.

- - The artist must be concerned with the moral relationship that his/her endeavors have to the institutions within which he/she expresses his/her work.

- - The majority of what I've read has been shamelessly stolen from various sources: theoretical texts, artists' statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. They stand as a collection of connections and disjunctions. I am, we are, a manner of speaking.

- - Art is not knowledge.

- - Art does not communicate.

- - There is nothing here for you.

- - Gilles Deleuze said that new situations could "...at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons".

[via nettime]

Posted by jo at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2007

Interview with Gazira Babeli by Tilman Baumgärtel

My body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs Prada shoes

Tilman Baumgärtel: Is Gazira Babeli your real name? If not, tell us a bit about your existence outside of SL.

Gazira Babeli: Yes, it's my real name in Second Life but most of people call me Gaz'. Outside SL, my existence is not so different from yours... drinking, eating, sleeping, meeting people, looking at a computer monitor and working the least possible.

Tilman Baumgärtel: You mess around with the code in Second Life. Can you give me a non-technical description how you insert your code into the system?

Gazira Babeli: Codes are just instructions, imperative verbs. An example: PUSH-IT-FAR... a box, a Museum, a Church, an avatar-person... or an entire avatar audience. The result could be spectacular and/or create social troubles. I found it easier to call these instructions "performances" or "actions". It makes sense in SL frame-space 'cause the results look more like a sensible real space than a computer output.

Tilman Baumgärtel: Why do it at all? Isn't Second Life fun enough as an imitation of the real?

Gazira Babeli: Yes, imitation is fun, but it's only the "background color" of every possible behavior. I'm exploring that.

Tilman Baumgärtel: Why intervene into Second Life, if there is a whole world out there. What is difference between a performance in SL and in the real world?

Gazira Babeli: I would say that the term "whole world" itself is more or less virtual. There's a whole world of people working in call-centers and one hand-making shoes. There's a whole world considering itself privileged because it can have access to information and spends a great deal of its life idling on Office or on a Web Browser. We keep forgetting that what we call Real Life has been a virtual frame for a long time. Second Life offers the chance to build and deconstruct this space in the form of a theatre performance. What's the difference? I'm trying to find out. For the moment I like to say: my body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs Prada shoes.

Tilman Baumgärtel: Are you familar of the net.art of the 1990s, and is your work influenced by the likes of Jodi et al?

Gazira Babeli: COME.TO.HEAVEN actions are inspired by Ives Klein and JODI. Weird mix, don't ask me why. I also loved Alexei Shulgin 386DX shows and some extremely conceptual stuff by Florian Cramer. RTMark net.prankster projects was really weird. It has been a very meaningful scene. For me net.art is like a wild middle-age of Internet.. Second Life seems to offer a Renaissance Perspective.

Tilman Baumgärtel: Do you create any work outside of SL? Have you shown your work in the real world and if yes how?

Gazira Babeli: This is an interesting problem. First: I cant get out of Second Life because I exist only thanks to Second Life. Two: I saved thousands of high-resolution images and videos that some people, in the physical world that u call RL, are willing to publish. An interesting solution would be the one I experienced with the PEAM festival. I simply offered the curator the digital images and a very detailed license with all the print specifications. At present Im finalizing the shooting of a movie which draws inspiration from "Simon of the Desert" by Bunuel and from the early Buster Keaton. The set is a portable desert, as big as 16 regions, and very likely the title is going to be "Gaz' of the Desert". I hope it will reach somehow physical world, because the only thing I really cant stand in SL is going to the movies. I find it very disturbing for an avatar who is already living in a film-like environment.

Tilman Baumgärtel: Did Linden labs approach you or even try to kick you out due to you actions, especially the "Grey Goo" performance? Or did the builders of the Virtua Art Center come down on you?

Gazira Babeli: During "Second Jesus", one of my first performances, I have been contacted by a Linden. I believe it only wanted to understand if my aim was to offend Christian beliefs; I did not want to offend anyone, of course. "Grey Goo" was a trivial trick, quite amazing but totally harmless. Media probably misunderstood some information, spreading the "grey goo bandits" panic. I do not believe Lindens want to interfere as "virtual cops", they have more substantial problems and aims. I think Lindens would prefer residents to solve their internal troubles instead of filing a "Report Abuse". The Artwork "DONT say" is the result of this consideration: it allows to register those words we consider abusive and when someone pronounces them is seized by a tornado and shaken up until he apologizes. The effect is very cartoon-like.. Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. After "Singing Pizza" (the symbolically abusive installation in Ars Virtua), the director Rubaiyat Shatner wanted to talk to me, he was worried and amused. We became friends though maintaining different views on SL-Art. Most SL residents believe they can build only visible "objects", but the range of behaviours and the margins of freedom are wider than most people think.

Tilman Baumgärtel: Most of your works seem to focus on manipulation of the technology of SL rather than e.g. intervening into the social conventions. Why?

Gazira Babeli: It's strange.. some people asked me the same question reversed. From my point of view, we are talking of two elements which are complementary, not divisible. SL is a complex society and without a univocal final aim. It includes heterogeneous social forms and conventions. The social-symbolic exchange is generally based on a sort of parody of the consumer-oriented western world... in brief, gadgets on which to build up one's identity. This happens in a fairly anarchic and pacific way, thanks to a "dictatorship" of the technologic protocol, strictly defining properties and utilization concessions. Now we consider Google as a friend but even Google is a strange phantom-dictatorship on information. It this good or bad? Try to imagine internet without Google. Now, SL is a smaller environment compared to the Web, but I think it is a step ahead. My art consists in experimenting in an ironic and "pop" way the complementary and often contradictory aspects of a "whole world" which, despite being inhabited by "puppets", it hosts at least a million people. Real people.

Tilman Baumgärtel: A lot of people are put off exactly by the consumerist or capitalist leanings of SL, and - unlike you - not every body sees them as a satire, but rather as a confirmation of the status quo. Can you imagine a more utopian system (without money, without exchange value, without work...), and would you prefer it?

Gazira Babeli: We are mixing up two different issues: anthropological observation and ethical judgement. Of course Id love to login in a space called "First Utopia"! I can even imagine it but only from a technical point of view peer-to-peer protocols taught me a lot. Would I prefer it? I honestly cant answer to this question, first I should live in it a few months. Second Life, on the contrary, is an accomplished fact. If I like SL? I never said that and I dont want to say it. You talk about satire, I repeat parody. The distorted and conscious imitation of a model is something concerning theatre or literature.

If you have grandeur manias you can buy a castle and crown yourself King even if you are connected from a small flat in the suburbs; if you feel antisocial you can become a black box there are the headquarters of the French National Front and of the Anti National Front. The majority of the people I met are aware of this imitation-distortion the parody of what we call real life. ["My body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs Prada shoes" Interview with Gazira Babeli by Tilman Baumgärtel via nettime] Related 1, 2.

Posted by jo at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2007

Eva and Franco Mattes' re-enactment of Joseph Beuys'

7000 Oaks

Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG) are reenacting Joseph Beuys' "7000 Oaks" in Second Life :: Beuys' project began on March 16, 1982, at Documenta 7, in Kassel. His plan called for the planting of seven thousand trees, each paired with a columnar basalt stone. Beuys intended the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change.

The Mattes planted the first virtual tree on March 16th, 2007, exactly 25 years after the original oak was planted. The 7000 basalt stones have been stacked on Mattes' island in Second Life: Cosmos Island. The diminishing pile of virtual stones will indicate the progress of the project, which will go on until all 7000 oaks and stones will be placed. Second Life inhabitants will have the chance to take part to the performance, placing stones and trees in their lands.

This work is part of Eva and Franco Mattes series of "Synthetic Performances": reenactment of historical performances inside synthetic worlds where body, space and time can be completely reinvented. The series started at the beginning of 2007 and will feature works by artists like Vito Acconci and Marina Abramovic.

"Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks" is commissioned by Centro de Arte Juan Ismael, Fuerteventura (Canary Islands, Spain), for the exhibition "Deambulatorios de una jornada, en el principio y el proyecto Tindaya", curated by Nilo Casares.

Posted by jo at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2007

Logo.Hallucination

Pattern Recognition of Hidden Logos

After investigating on 'semantic capitalism' and 'taylorisation of speech' with the project 'Google Adwords', Christophe Bruno reflects on the economic dynamics of collective hallucination. According to the French net artist "The Web, specifically in its version 2.0, is an implementation of control strategies in writing." On the contrary, the image can't be easily interpreted by a machine remaining a hardly accessible territory. Therefore, he created Logo.Hallucination, a software based on neural image recognition that continuously monitors images on the Internet, to track pattern similarities with corporate logos. The idea is to use image recognition technologies to detect subliminal logos or emblems forms, hidden (mostly involuntarily) in the visual environment or whole images on the net. The 'found' images can be accessed through a weblog, with an argued comparison between the original picture and the (supposedly found) original brand logo.

Like Cayce Pollard, protagonist of William Gibson's 'Pattern recognition', Bruno investigates to find brand loyalty secret that would become every marketing research gold mine. Clearly here there's a massive amount of irony. Every time a hallucination is detected, an email is then sent to the image owner - if the owner is known, to inform him that the "automated monitoring spiderbot has detected a potential infringement of Intellectual Property Law." Logo.Hallucination confirms Bruno's theory on the alliance between the society of control and the Web 2.0 spectacle: media corporations cannot measure their messages real effects and hence they need an additional control structure, like Google and the same Web 2.0. The role of this panoptic web part, achievement of the society of control, is to scientifically analyze the message effect and observe its deviations. The resulting outcome will be sold back to media corporations, so to continuously optimize the whole process in loop." -- Valentina Culatti, Neural.

Posted by jo at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2007

Franck Ancel's Triptych

5/5 + 5C + 5G

5/5: In 2004, Franck Ancel completed a triptych on architecture, image and technology by projecting the words "Mobile Wireless Digital" onto the screen of the Montparnasse Tower in Paris. Today, under the title "5/5", he is projecting on the Théâtre de l’Agora à Evry, France his two projects "5C" and "5G", in connection with this line of research.

The trail presented here in the shape of a diptych challenges known and recognized limits, and the outdated boundaries of the past. These documents trace the use of a special form of GPS tracking based on a real experience, that of a separate journey, while also questioning virtuality in the age of world globalisation. Therefore, it is not about abandoning criticism of technological uses to technological uses of criticism. After all, it is through a person's very existence that the temptation to understand the space of his or her time arises, and this forms the focus of this presentation, in which a particular journey becomes an objective creation.

5 Continents (5C): Between 18:00 and 19:04 hours, Paris time, on Saturday 17 December 2005, the first artistic creation from an in-flight passenger plane took place. It was transmitted live over the Internet during a flight from Shanghai to Munich, at an altitude of 30,000 feet and at a speed of over 900 kilometres an hour. This live transmission at "X" moment was the culmination of a series of 5 communications "From Scenography to Planetary Network", for and on 5 Continents.The transmission was posted in real-time on our website, via a wifi satellite link relaying images and sound from the plane. This performance was made possible thanks to Lufthansa's offer to provide FlyNet with Boeing's in-flight online connectivity service, Connexion by Boeing.

This webcast makes a formal nod to the sleeper John Giorno, the poet of "Sleep", a legendary film for the Neo avant-garde art movement made by Andy Warhol in 1963, New York. This time round, a sleeper has left the Asian New York of tomorrow. This world first lasted 64 minutes. In the video recording 64 key words appeared in a combination of 12 interplays on five themes (five continents, colours, senses, elements, years), initiated with an eye to the forthcoming 2010 World Expo in China.

5 Guggenheims (5G): In 2006 we collected data in front of the 5 Guggenheim museums. The traces of this journey echo the possible virtual construction of a space on a planetary scale symbolised by these museums. The shift from a fluid virtual architecture to a constructed reality takes shape in the form of a 3D video animation created by Bryan Bey and a resin model created with 3D prototyping, made in collaboration with the IDO creation company from the elements we had gathered together. 5G is made up of photos and GPSb.

Posted by jo at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2007

from a land down under (myspace)

Being MTAA, Just for one Day...

Once upon a time, I made a site for MTAA on myspace. (Yeah, I know, I know.) Then, a person named “Penny” from Australia asked to be MTAA’s friend. So I, of course, said, “Yes”. Then she asked if I wanted to be part of a chain of email performances. So I, of course, said, “Yes”. (Yeah, I know, I know.) This is where it gets a bit complicated but stay with me. Penney made a list of performers. The person above MTAA name was to send us an artwork and the person below our name was to get an artwork. Now, the person above our name was Emily. Emily emailed that she thought that email was a bit impersonal (or at least I think that was what she thought), She asked if she could mail us some art. So I, of course, said, “Yes”. Today, in the mail, came Emily’s first project.

Wonderful right? If we get another one, I’ll post it on the blog as well.

Now, as for sending an artwork, the person we got was Penny (who, you’ll remember, also started the project.) What did we send her? We sent her a set of instructions for a performance on how to be “MTAA” that, if she completed and documented, would be the artwork. (Yeah, I know. I know.) Anyways, here is what we sent her:

Being MTAA, Just for one Day
To Be Performed by Penny Spankie

Dress in a black t-shirt, blue jeans, black boots, and a black belt. Perform any or all of the following artworks/ actions. Each performance attempted should be documented with 2 photographs or 2 short videos.

1. lying propped up in bed
2. checking your hair in a mirror
3. tossing a paper airplane out of a window
4. pointing at public sculpture
5. jumping over things on the street.
6. holding an open umbrella inside your home.
7. listening to music with headphones on.
8. drinking a beer not in a bar

So, guess what? She wrote back with this documentation of choice #2 (Checking your hair in the mirror)

Reply Video - for MTAA - Email Art - RCW

Reply Video - for MTAA - Email Art - RCW

Perfect.

So, If we get any more email myspace art, you’ll see it here. That’s all for now. Thanks Emily and Penney. [posted by M.River on MTAA-RR]

Posted by jo at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)

An American in Iran: Kristen Alvanson's

ARTISTRY OF NOTIONS AND COSMIC DRAPERY

The interactions of things, the undulation of entities in the space, the art of stitching events together, or in a word, cosmogenesis of all kinds requires abundant sewing work and notions artistry.

American Artist Kristen Alvanson, who relocated to Iran in 2006, has created a new website Artistry of Notions and Cosmic Drapery highlighting her current projects including Middle Eastern focused Maskh Project, Graveyards and Lumpen Orientalism as well as a section on the artist's forthcoming book entitled Lessons in Schizophrenia and her dESIRE Project.

Maskh Project: the connotation of the word maskh in Farsi is more than metamorphosis; it includes experiencing limits of one's identity or existence usually with the assistance of new independent vehicles of material and abstract articulation, as in the case of spirit possession. Maskh project is a visual compendium of drawings diagramming Alvanson's metamorphoses in the Middle East in the form of spells and maps.

Graveyards: project as a psycho-geographic exploration of Middle Eastern graveyards, entombments and post-mortem spaces escapes necromanticism or fascination with ruins by illustrating the cognition and encounters with space and time, and consequently the twofold of dwelling and thinking, in the Middle East.

Lumpen Orientalism: gathers the fragments of a lost civilization, the decaying parts of a once breathing animal. Named after a term suggested by China Miiville, Lumpen Orientalism is a photo-blog engendering an anomalous fascination with the Middle East in a similar way to the mongrel techniques of Gilles Deleuze, H. P. Lovecraft, Gaktan Clirambault and William Beckford for tackling this enigmatic monstrosity, the Middle East.

Lessons in Schizophrenia: is the artist's forthcoming book, based on real events which led her to leave the US for the Middle East in a cataclysmic process. It includes an introduction by the Iranian Philosopher Reza Negarestani entitled Epithemic.

The dESIRE Project: is an ongoing investigation on desire which includes artistic components; it is an attempt to reach concrete but not necessarily corporeal definitions of desire by tapping into its obscure formations. dESIRE Project is intertwined with the mathematics of natural numbers, countability / uncountability, pimp as a nomadic dissipater, stock market, legal contracts, intangibility and expendability of desires. Alvanson's dESIRES, both intangible and their photographic representations, are for sale on the Market section of her website.

Posted by jo at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)

Turbulence Artist’s Studio:

Michael Takeo Magruder

Turbulence Artist’s Studio: Continuum… by Michael Takeo Magruder :: Needs Flash Player 8+ plugin and stereo audio

Continuum… reflects upon the evolution of our collective history through the real-time analysis of global news information networks. As no event transpires in isolation, each moment of our existence is defined by the sum of an infinite number of interconnected occurrences. Given that no individual can absorb and process the totality of this information, how can we obtain an informed notion of the present?

"Continuum…" was commissioned by Oog online, a commentary and opinion platform for the online edition of De Volkskrant a major Dutch daily national newspaper.

Michael Takeo Magruder is an American artist based in the UK deploying New and Technological Media within Contemporary Art contexts. He is a long-standing member of King's Visualization Lab located in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London. His artworks have been showcased in over 150 exhibitions and 30 countries. Artistically, his interests concern the simultaneous utilization and dissection of new technology as a means to explore the formal structures and conceptual paradigms of the digital realm. He seeks to create artworks in which there are no divisions between technologies, aesthetics, and concepts.

Posted by jo at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2007

X-Com: An Auditive Mapping-Project

Soundscapes as Cultural Artifacts

X-Com: An Auditive Mapping-Project by MACHFELD (aka Sabine Maier & Michael Mastrototaro) :: In cooperation with: Cityvarsity and Trinity Session, Johannesburg, South Africa.

In times of global networking MACHFELD (Sabine Maier & Michael Mastrototaro) and the Trinity Session (Marcus Neustetter & Stephen Hobbs) use digital and analog devices to create an auditive communication-soundscape. This soundscape will be transformed to a crosscontinental sub-room in form of an art-radio broadcast. Supported by students of the Cityvarsity we will analyse the phenomen of inter- and transcontinental communication and we will find an answer for the question: How are soundscapes related to cultural facts?

This audio mapping will be the starting point of a Ö1 Kunstradio Broadcast which will air in autumn 2007.

MACHFELD, international Arts and Culture Society, Max Winter - Platz 21/1, A-1020 Vienna.

Posted by jo at 08:19 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2007

Independent Robotic Community

Social Network for Robots and Humans

"In a special edition of El Pais Digital reporting the Arco festival in 2001, the Spanish artist Ricardo Iglesias, one of the net art pioneers in his country, said that nothing or almost nothing ("only cliché") can be said about net art in five or six lines. However he mentioned a series of isolated topics that interconnected, related to each other, that'd really express net art: the network, the global and decentralized communication, interactivity, the virtual spaces, telepresence, the chaos theory, the active and interactive principle, the telematic interfaces, the post-biological culture, the hypertextual perspective, on line-chat, the rhizome image and the state of uncertainty.

His latest artwork, Independent Robotic Community, is a sum of all of the above. Developed with Gerald Kogler the project focuses on new forms of interaction between robots and humans on two levels.The first one features a community of 20 small robots divided in two groups. Each group has a primary level of socialization and a series of sounds conforming with a single vocabulary. Each robot's initial state consists of a very simple movement within a delimitated spatial environment. When it comes across other robots, it swaps data about its state with sounds and increases its degree of socialization and the complexity of its movements. On a second level humans can interact with robots using mobile phones and Internet, communicating with them in real time and further influencing the socialization process within the independent groups. The result is an original visual representation of a social network that includes both the subjective point of view of a spy camera and the graphic display of social statistics. As to confirm that net art is the art of networking." Valentina Culatti, Neural.

Posted by jo at 08:48 AM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2007

‘If the route’: The Great Learning of London

[A Taxi Opera]

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

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

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

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

The Score

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

The Radio Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

NeuroZappingFolks

Santiago Ortiz

LX 2.0: Contemporary Online Experiments: NeuroZappingFolks is a non-linear zapping through the Internet, a path leading to the inside of a web of relations, a web that can be explored from one tag to a site, to another tag, to another site... from word to image to word to image. NeuroZappingFolks is then the simulation of a brain lost in the web (lost between servers, but also lost in Internet's double identity: word and image).

Santiago Ortiz was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1975. Artist, mathematician and a researcher on art, science and representational spaces, he has been exploring the development of shared spaces for different kinds of knowledge. Ortiz has been using communication, creative, and literary techniques, as well as digital space and architecture ones. He works as a teacher, having lectured all over Spain, Portugal and Latin America. He is one of the co-founders of the Blank magazine and of the Bestiario company-collective. He lives in Lisbon and Barcelona.

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

March 06, 2007

REAL Alien Invasion of "Our Minutemen" at a Home Depot

Videos are posted on YouTube and the comment and rating interactions become a network performance. The video itself refers to and calls into question YouTube itself. Thanks to all the Minutemen's anti-clown comments, they made the video one of the most commented on videos on YouTube the day it was posted. More of our videos are in the "related" chunk of the YouTube page and here: http://circasd.org/clown-media.html. Related post >>

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

March 02, 2007

Email Clock

A networked clock that reads email

Like every person who spends most of his day in front of a computer, Tom Igoe is obsessed by his email. Researcher and Teacher at NYU Interactive Teleccommunications Program (ITP), he can't stop checking his inbox constantly. Unfortunately the evolution of the email programs, that alert the users as soon as a message comes in, is Email Clock feeding this obsession. This is why Igoe decided to invent a device that hopefully will allow him to get rid of the anxiety generated by the email flow. It's called Email Clock, it's a work in progress and consists in an analogic clock that reads email. This Newtworked Sculpture, as its author refers to it, would run at a normal pace when there is no email waiting , but every new kilobyte of email would drive it hyperactively forward. A java application living on an application server would check Tom's email accounts, noting when new data arrived. With each new message, the application would send the number of bytes to a microcontroller attached to the internet. The microcontroller would then move the clock. If this device is going to be successful in allevieting anxiety over the inbox is not certain. However it is a good example of what Physical Computing is, that is an approach to learning how humans communicate through computers that starts by considering how humans express themselves physically. Taking the body as a given, physical computing researchers have to learn how a computer converts the changes in energy given off by our bodies, in the form of heat, light, sound, and so forth, into changing electronic signals that it can read interpret. In this case the computer will hopefully absorb the bad vibes produced by anxiety - The irony that hides behind this idea makes the Email Clock a real Smile Machine." Valentina Culatti, Neural

Posted by jo at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2007

Flavonoid

Translating 1st Life into 2nd Life

Speaking about 1st Life and 2nd Life connections, the Flavonoid project by Near-Future Laboratory colleague Julian Bleecker is of great interest. To put it shortly, it’s a mechanism for translating embodied, kinesthetic activity into 2nd Life actions.

A homebrew, Internet-enabled kinesthetic sensor, conceptually similar to a traditional pedometer, is being designed as a networked object that bridges the geophysical worlds (1st Life) and online digitally networked worlds (2nd Life). By providing data feeds about the kinesthetic activities of the person wearing Flavonoid, various embodiments representing that data can be created in 2nd Life, such as the appearance of online avatars, or that avatar’s wealth or capabilities.

So how does it work?

The Flavonoid Kinesthometer, a wearable networkable device, can transfer data as a networked object, providing simple data feeds of one’s movement over long periods of time. This data provides a channel of RSS information used as a baseline of information that can be translated to 2nd Life representations.
(…)
Flavonoid is envisioned as a platform, using standard, open feed technologies, for a variety of embodiments. The initial embodiment being a dynamic site “badge” — a small snippet of HTML that can be embedded on virtually any site, such as one’s blog or social networking home page.

The Flavonoid project proposal gives a more thorough description of what is aimed at here.

Why do I blog this? because this project takes the “Internet of Things” in a more interesting mode that what we’ve seen so far. By creating a framework for linking digital environments and the material world (”the leakage of digital networks into the physical world turns that world into a framework for a hybrid 1st Life/2nd Life”), it redefines the notion of embodiment in both environments.

This is an issue that interest me both to think about the future of ubiquitous applications and also as a user experience researcher. From a psychological point of view, there are intriguing questions to address here; especially regarding the overlap of spatial environments, their perception and how the interaction in each of them have an influence in the others. [blogged by nicolas on pasta and vinegar]

Posted by jo at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2007

Do It With Others (DIWO): E-Mail-Art at NetBehaviour

A Collaborative Exhibition at HTTP Gallery, London

Hi DIWOists,

The Furtherfield crew has been discussing ways to get the most out of the co-curating session on Sunday when we will discuss and experiment with ways of exhibiting the contributions at HTTP gallery (don't forget the opening is next Thursday).

Other known contributors to this process in the gallery on Sunday are Frederik Lesage and james[at]jwm-art.net, others are welcome. Please check back with the list at 1.30 on Sunday for details of thewebcast and public chat room where you can join the discussion online. Until then you can view a gallery floor plan and tech spec here.

So here is a summary of our considerations, proposals and a number controversies for your feedback!

CONSIDERATIONS:

1) How to Survey the Contributed Materials for the Curation Process: There have been over 600 posts to NetBehaviour since the start of this project and we have 2-5pm on Sunday to review and discuss how to present contributions. The main ways that we have for looking at work is:
- through our mailboxes
- through an index of attachments that can be view browser here

Your Suggestions Please: We would like your suggestions for any other (reasonably straight forward) way to order materials for review.

2) Categories - How to Order and Discuss Materials.

It would be useful to have some broad themes or categories to discuss. Here are a couple of possible categories with examples (and these really are just examples) of what we mean.

- Threads - discussions, exchanges, actions and responses eg Sachiko Hayashi's 'The Other Half',
- Collaborations and remixes eg RandomLab's reblogging and remixing, Michael Szpakowski's remix of Thomson and Craighead's 'Additions' image
- Digital becomes Material eg Sim Gishel has sent a 'Will Work For Food' vehicle, brian[at]netartguy's currency could be laser-printed as actual currency, Other works proposed for print, Other works actually sent to HTTP etc
- Proposals/ Instructions- eg Ant Scott's installation proposal, Glorious Ninth's Love Potions
- Generative/machine Art- eg. Sim Gishel's data-mining, ARN's generative pngs
- Stand alone streams - movies, soundfiles and images eg images by Clive McCarthy, lem urtastic - movies by Lizzie Hughes, Alan Sondheim - mp3s by james[at]jwm-art.net
- Texts eg Janedepain's recent 'Poetic Terrorism and Guerrilla Art in the 21st Century' and technical discussions.

PROPOSALS:

1) We propose that the main projection consists of a Mailbox containing a DIWO archive for searching by gallery visitors. This would be organised into themed directories that would coincide with the categories listed above. PLEASE SUGGEST: more or other categories.

2) We propose that we highlight and exhibit some 5-8 works (made by individuals or collaboratively) in the form of objects, printouts, projections and sound. These would be up for discussion and debate from this point - to be decided on Sunday.

CONTROVERSIES:

1) The question of selection - how do we create an exhibition in a physical space that communicates the DIWO spirit?
- how do we highlight a selection of works?
- how do we stay true to the open principle of including all submissions?

2) Contextualisation
- do some works need contextualising in order to be accessible to gallery visitors eg should some works be displayed with titles, artist, date, materials, description of process etc?
- if so how, and who does it?

3) Is everything that has been posted to NetBehaviour since February 1st considered a submission to DIWO?
- including announcements and reblogging?

4) A number of people have proposed works in private emails to Marc or myself- should these be included under the rules of submission?

Whoever wants to contribute to the curation of this show- share your views here on the list or come along on Sunday ttp://www.http.uk.net/DIWOcurating.shtml

Let's DIWO!
: ))
Ruth [via netbehaviour]

Posted by jo at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2007

Turbulence Spotlight

"Zeno Boundary" by Kevin Hamilton

Turbulence Spotlight: Zeno Boundary by Kevin Hamilton :: "Zeno Boundary" collects portraits of places regarded as public, created according to a prescribed photographic system. Images uploaded by contributors are dynamically animated into a looped sequence of pans and zooms through the space. The project originated in Spring 2006 as part of the Mobile Studios project, in cooperation with curators of the 13 Kubikov collective in Bratislava, Slovakia. After touring with Mobile Studios through Eastern Europe, the project continues as part of the 2007 Depauw Biennial Exhibition, in Greencastle, Indiana.

Kevin Hamilton currently teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is appointed to the Painting/Sculpture and New Media programs. Recent work has included co-organization of a symposium series about Walking, and the creation of interactive artworks for gallery and public settings. His scholarship includes research on manifestations of absence in contemporary and historical telecommunication technologies, and development of new methodologies for interdisciplinary collaboration. Kevin has exhibited or lectured at festivals and art institutions in Spain, Holland, Slovakia, Hungary, Canada, and the United States.

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

February 20, 2007

Botanicalls

The Plants Have Your Number

A small group of plants in a building in New York City is quietly exchanging information. Botanicalls--a project of a team of four students at the ITP program at NYU--allows thirsty plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the botanicalls network needs a lot or a little water, it can call a human and ask for exactly what it needs. When humans phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics, including how they like to be watered and cared for. Call 212.202.8348 to hear more about each of the plants.

Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species cohabitation and understanding. How? Plants call people about their needs. People can call the plants to understand them better. The project originally spawned from completely non-technical conversations about indoor container gardening and the air-filtration qualities of common houseplants. Our concern about bringing plants into the ITP community was their chance of survival-- high-paced technologists seldom have time to stop and smell the flowers, let alone water them. 'But, what if,' we wondered, 'the plants could call us and tell us what they needed when they needed it? If they assigned us tasks, would this alters or engages us,' and the project was born.

The Botanicalls project is fundamentally about communication between plants and people. We are empowering both by inventing new avenues of interaction. Plants that might otherwise be neglected are given the ability to call people and request assistance. People who are unsure of their ability to effectively care for growing things are given visual and aural clues.

The goals of this project:

1. Keep the plants alive through an interdependent relationship with co-habiting humans by translating the communication protocols of the plants (leaf habit, color of foliage, droop, etc) to more common human communication protocols (email, voice phone calls, digital visualizations, etc). More than keeping individual plants alive, we want to keep the system and project alive.

2. Make a connection between people and plants. Explore/enhance/create/visualize people's emotional connection to plants, the ways plants help humans, how caring for a shared resource can create sense of community, how natural life is a valuable counterpoint to our technical environment.

3. Gather data, create a complex and dynamic network, documentation for do-it-yourself style propagation of the project, record process. [via]

Posted by jo at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2007

love_potion

DIY installations

love_potion is a distributed artwork that uses borage plants, seeds, scents, magic spells and networked technologies. All of its elements are featured on the glorious ninth website and can be woven together by us or by you, inside a gallery space or as DIY installations in our homes, gardens or public spaces.

You can join our invisible network of tactical gardeners by preparing your own love_potion made from borage, an herb that reputedly drives away sorrow, uplifts the spirits and when shared with others nurtures compassion and peace. Follow the potion recipe, find out how to grow your own borage, download the glorious ninth sound and visuals (or make your own) and put together a love_potion DIY installation.

Posted by jo at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2007

A LEAP INTO THE VOID:

INTERVIEW WITH SECOND FRONT

"A LEAP INTO THE VOID: INTERVIEW WITH SECOND FRONT" by Domenico Quaranta; Commissioned by Rhizome.org.

At first sight they may appear like a pop hybrid between the X-men and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, reviewed through the exaggerated and postmodern aesthetics of a virtual world such as Second Life. Quite the contrary. They are the first performance art group in Second Life: serious guys, practicing artists, curators and academics in real life, who decided to sound out the performative possibilities offered by a public virtual space that is growing at an impressive rate and being filled up by media agencies, stores, products, brands and inhabitants.

Second Front officially formed on November 23, 2006, gaining new members up right until the last few days. Now they are: Wirxli Flimflam aka Jeremy Owen Turner; Tea Chenille aka Tanya Skuce; Man Michinaga aka Patrick Lichty; Alise Iborg aka Penny Leong Browne; Tran Spire aka Doug Jarvis; Great Escape aka Scott Kildall; Lizsolo Mathilde aka Liz Pickard; Gazira Babeli aka CLASSIFIED. The attention of “in world” media comes fast, even if Second Front doesn't seem to work much on communication: its very first performances are set up, unannounced, in public spaces, for a little, unconscious audience. Then, almost immediately (January 5, 2007) comes the big intervention scored at Ars Virtua Gallery – the most notable contemporary art gallery in Second Life – for the opening of the visionary installation by the American artist John Craig Freeman (JC Fremont in Second Life). And may other performances...

Saying that Second Front is opening new paths in an unexplored territory is not rhetorical; and the loose, immodest and a little bit punkish way in which they do it is definitely unrhetorical. Their key feature is openness: openness and plurality of visions and perspectives, quite blatant in this interview (where almost each one of them decided to give his/her answer to the same question); they are open about a wide range of interventions, from reenactment to improvisation to code performing; open about different ways of shaping their work for the art audience, from prints to video to live broadcasting. They are growing up before our very eyes. And, rest assured, they hold good things in store.

DOMENICO QUARANTA: What is Second Front?

MAN MICHINAGA: Second Front is an international performance art group whose sole venue is the online world, Second Life. Second Front has members from Vancouver, St. Johns, Chicago, New Orleans, and Milan (to name a few), and works with numerous artists from around the world.

WIRXLI FLIMFLAM: As of January 14th, Second Front received official legitimacy from The Ava-Star tabloid (owned by Die Zeit in Germany) as the “first performance art group in Second Life”. This basically makes us the in-world equivalent of Fluxus – perhaps we could also be nicknamed “SLuxus”. This sudden rush from formation to celebrity has been quite fascinating since Second Front officially formed on November 23, 2006. As for a more detailed idea of what Second Front is all about, some people in Second Life might confuse us with a “performing arts” group rather than a “performance arts” group. We are not a circus act nor a dance or a theatre troupe although our artistic practice might superficially resemble those other performing acts at times.

TRAN SPIRE: Second Front is a network of performance interested artists exploring new and different environments, specifically the online 3d animated game world of Second Life. The members have come together through a myriad of personal relationships that existed during the early days of the group’s formation. This dynamic has morphed and mutated to include and involve variations on membership based on who is available and what presence can they perform with the others.

DQ: What does it mean, for you, to make performances in Second Life? Do you make rehearsals or do you prefer improvisation? Do you work with code or do you simply make what all other avatars do?

ALISE IBORG: So far we have done both. I think it depends on what kind of performance we wish to make. If it is better improvised we will probably do that. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. With prerecorded performances, we can fine tune and edit out things we don't want the audience to see. But with improvised performances, the work takes on a life of its own fueled by the creative energy of our players which really shows through. Also, many times, it's the surprises and unintended actions that make the work really come alive!

MAN MICHINAGA: Performing in Second Life gives Second Front the opportunity to work at scales they would not normally be able to work in if done in the physical world, and often has the opportunity to play to a wider audience. Our level of preparedness is dependent on the context for the event. In regards to whether we use code or not, Second Front is using a growing set of code-based interventions in its performances, thanks to our techno-doyen, Mama Gaz Babeli. In regards to our avatars, and props, almost nothing we use is ‘standard’, but some of us retain a few basic props like specific wings, or even old beginner’s props like hair as a sign of their past as newcomers to Second Life.

WIRXLI FLIMFLAM: When we rehearse and plan scripts for major public performance events, we still have to rely on individual improvisation. Nothing is ever entirely scripted so each member can do their “own thing” and have breathing room yet at the same time not be confused as to what they should be doing. We use scripts and rehearsals etc. as a guide to help the performing member to feel secure with the thematic manner with which they wish to improvise. This allows for group cohesion both on an optical and practical level.

GREAT ESCAPE: Second Life offers a unique space for performance. Without the normal constraints of the body ― the usual center of performance - and without a traditional audience, we can try and do things that have been previously thought to be impossible.

TRAN SPIRE: Performing in Second Life introduces variables and situations that complement and push further the understanding and comprehension that the members of the group share as a sense of what is real. By engaging the contrived space of an online gaming environment the challenges to perform are exaggerated by the parameters that persist as the interface with the context, the others members of the group, audiences and the templates of performance as an art medium. All of the tropes of performance are available to the group to use at will, hopefully to ends beyond the surface of what may appear evident around us.

GAZIRA BABELI: The real performance starts with login, the rest is performance record. The avatar just tries to forget being a code.

DQ: Do you prefer, for your performances, a public space or an art venue?

MAN MICHINAGA: Second Front chooses its venues to fit the context of the piece and the performance. In the case of Border Control, it was done at Ars Virtua, therefore the context was that of an art space. For our Breaking News and Abject Apocalypse pieces, these were context specific (the Reuters building and the Star over the Christmas Tree at the US’s NBC Rockefeller Plaza), and were performed in situ, with the product being the documentation.

WIRXLI FLIMLAM: Personally, I prefer a large and well-known public venue that is not usually within the context of high-art. So for example, IBM, Sears, American Apparel, Wired, and Reuters are all great examples of the kind of venues I think are really inspirational for me. Again, this is a personal preference and not necessarily reflective of Second Front as a group.

GREAT ESCAPE: It depends on the nature of the performance. An art venue is interesting because it brings Second Life into the physical space. I think it is ideal to broadcast the performance at an art venue while engaging a specific site in Second Life.

GAZIRA BABELI: In art venues you can be welcomed with cheers, in public spaces with bullets. I prefer the latter, as death doesn’t exist.

DQ: What kind of audience are you looking for? Do you think that a performance in Second Life could be displayed also in the real world?

MAN MICHINAGA: We are interested in reaching out to audiences who are interested in Second Life, and are curious of the possibilities that avatar-based performance art can have. Currently, Second Front is performing in hybrid venues, such as simultaneous events in its home, the BitFactory in Han Loso, and in physical spaces, like Vancouver’s Western Front, and Chicago’s Gallery 416. We do hope that in addition to our performances in Second Life, Second Front can have exhibitions of its performances, imagery, video, and ephemera in the physical as any and all possible media. We do not wish to be limited by media, and also wish to spread our curiosity to the widest possible audience.

GREAT ESCAPE: One thing I think we’re looking to do is to question the underlying assumptions of Second Life and what it means to be a virtual being in that space. A dominant trend in Second Life is to shop, make friends online and participate in a virtual economy. We think this can be a venue for unique artistic expression. In this way, anyone in Second Life is an appropriate audience. The possibilities for the space haven’t been fully explored as of yet and so I think people are much more receptive to performances that they might be in real life. Because it is so new, we can have a huge affect on people’s thinking.

TRAN SPIRE: I like the idea that the notion of an audience is being blurred by my own participation in this group. I am conscious of the fact that during all the stages of our performances from pre-production planning emails to after-party videos, I am both a performer with the group and an audience to the many things taking place. Anything that contributes to challenging this space and dichotomy between creator and audience I think is an interesting thing to pursue.

ALISE IBORG: We are looking for open-minded audiences who are not afraid to be part of the performance. And absolutely, Second Front could be displayed in the real world. The term that I use to describe this intervention into the real world, is 'virtual leakage'. I define virtual leakage as a two way exchange between the virtual and the real, through which new hybrid meanings can be made. Meaning-making can no longer operate within the hermetic cases of the real vs. virtual, but instead, becomes a back and forth exchange in which ideas migrate by osmosis. While we as Second Life avatars become more real in the virtual world, so too, that we as human inhabitants of the real world become more virtual. In my opinion, there is an amazing opportunity for Virtual Reality (VR) to stake its own territory but in order for VR to produce meaning that breaks from the real and from past artistic social practices, and to become a medium that produces singular works, the binary of the real vs virtual must be dismantled. Only then, will we be able to look at VR not as a simulation of the real, but as a simulation of itself.

GAZIRA BABELI: I prefer an unaware audience, an audience who does not necessarily have to understand what’s going on. Second Life is a real world.

DQ: Can you tell me something about the performances you had till now? How did your approach changed from the first one?

MAN MICHINAGA: Like any experimental troupe, we are always learning, and this affects our performance process. In addition, for Breaking News, many of us were only recently active, so our first performance was a really interesting experience. In short, Breaking News was an absurdist play on the 18th Century idea of the Town Crier, played out in the latest of 21st Century news facilities. By shouting out non-sequiteur, moment-to-moment headlines, Second Front hoped to perhaps jam the usual flow of information in the Reuters space, and possibly (ridiculously enough) barge into Adam Reuters’ office itself! On the second occasion, we did get an audience, as passers-by stopped and sat to listen to our tabloid headlines. Of course (we assume) they did not take us seriously. For Border Control, we knew we would have an audience, and that we would need to fill a fairly set period of time with detailed orchestration, we experimented at the BitFactory, rehearsing a series of vignettes that fit the context of JC Fremont & Rain Coalcliff’s Mexican Border installation. The first act, “Border Patrol” was a Dada-esque performance of the increasing militarization of the borders throughout North America. Following that, “Red Rover” was a play on the creation of a border in the traditional children’s game, but in our case the border decided to break down the audience instead of the other way around. Lastly, the final act, “Danger Room” was a piece that was intended to inspire a gestalt of danger and chaos in the age of Terror, but unexpectedly, chaos erupted and the sim actually crashed, whether by our actions or a combination of us and the audience isn’t really clear.
The approaches for the two pieces are quite different, as one is ad-hoc and the other following a set choreography and set. Are we changing? Of course; it wouldn’t be interesting if we weren’t. We learn new things each performance, and while certain things get easier, we then try to push the envelope harder in other areas.

TRAN SPIRE: I like to think that part of the script of each performance is written in the code of the place or environment in which it is situated. This lets the content be influenced by not only the art or non-art context but also by the different terrains that can exist in the real life as well as Second Life.

DQ: What do you think about art in Second Life? Is performance the only possible way to make art out there?

MAN MICHINAGA: Absolutely not. While Second Life has limitations like any medium, the members of Second Front are excited to see individuals working in many different forms of expression, such as live music, ‘painting’, sculpture, even fireworks and aerial ballet. While Second Life is relatively new, the possibilities for expression in virtual worlds has yet to be fully explored. That’s why Second Front was created!

WIRXLI FLIMFLAM: Context is extremely important here. Part of what makes Second Life itself is the fact that every moment seems like part of a performance. The fact that everything can be customizable in Second Life as well as the fact that just about any object can be wearable enhances my personal impression that performance art is the most “authentic” medium of Second Life in that Greenbergian sense.

GREAT ESCAPE: Right now, the Second Life galleries are mostly replicating paintings and sculpture, enhanced with visual effects in Second Life. These are what you’d expect with the first generation of art-making in any new medium. I think that what we’ve seen so far in Second Life is only a glimpse of what the future holds.

ALISE IBORG: Absolutely not. Second Life has offered the ability for anyone to create in VR which means that there is boundless possibilities for creativity and unprecedented work. In my opinion, VR is in itself a new medium but what is unique about VR is that through its technology, it can create work that can free itself from past art practices, though, there is also amazing avenues of creation by referencing precedent artists and works, For instance, our Last Supper performance appropriates one of the most canonic religious events by producing an event of binging and purging art itself!

GAZIRA BABELI: Second Life is a frame-space which can include all sorts of artistic perversion. I call it performance, anyway. But if you find a better definition, please let me know.

DQ. What is your relationship with your Real Life counterpart?

MAN MICHINAGA: There really is none. Patrick Lichty does not exist. Only I am real, and I control him. On a more serious note, the relationship between Man and Patrick is completely in line with my RL life. I am very sensitive to context, and the way I act in one context may be very different from another. In Second Life I feel that one has to be “Larger than Life”, and that's what Man is – He’s a big dark, figure – part angel, part rock star, part architect, part actor. That is, all the things that Second Life gives the individual more freedom to be if they so desire. I think that most of Second Front do this with great effectiveness and aplomb. My greatest concern is “the risk of the Artist”; that is, the bleed between worlds that I take by making potentially controversial art in Second Life. I think that Second Life is the first place where we can say that sometimes our action online DO matter, and this is very perplexing.

GREAT ESCAPE: I think that the avatar Great Escape occupies a strange nook in my subconscious. In many ways, Second Life operates as a fantastical dream state. We can fly, teleport and pick up houses and cars. My avatar has purple skin and fire out of his hair. When I go to sleep at night, images of the other Second Front members often fill me head. So for me, my avatar is embedded in my psyche, rather than an extension of my self.

WIRXLI FLIMFLAM: In a lot of ways, the relationship between Wirxli and Jeremy is much more closer than one might think from first seeing me. I did intentionally want to make Wirxli more of an alien than human or perhaps as a kind of first-generation “post-human”. I was also reading up about the stereotypical shaman in most cultures who is gender-ambiguous... so in this case, there is a slight departure here from my Real Life self.

TRAN SPIRE: I prefer to triangulate, dimensionally shift my relationship to each of the entities constituting themselves as versions of me. Therefore, I am waiting for the two to have a discussion and then ask me to join in on the conversation. I am interested to hear what they come up with and how they define themselves in regards to existence in a spatio-temporal plane, and whether they recognize each other.

GAZIRA BABELI: My body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs shoes.

LINKS:

Second Front - http://slfront.blogspot.com/
Gazira Babeli - http://gazirababeli.com/
The BitFactory - http://patricklichty.com.thing.net/bitfactory.html
Ars Virtua Gallery - http://arsvirtua.com/
Imaging Place - http://imagingplace.net/

Domenico Quaranta is an Italian art critic and curator focused on New Media Art. He is the author of the book Net Art 1994 – 1998: La vicenda di Äda'web (Milan 2004) and, together with Matteo Bittanti, the editor of GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (Milan 2006, http://www.gamescenes.org/). He curated several exhibitions in Italy, including: GameScenes (Turin 2005), Radical Software (Turin 2006), and Connessioni leggendarie. Net.art 1995 – 2005 (Milan, 2005). He teaches “Net art” at the Accademia di Brera in Milan.

Posted by jo at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2007

1001 nights cast

February 10: Performance #600

1001 nights cast will reach another milestone this Saturday: Performance #600 from Sydney on 10 February at 7.53pm which is: 5:53pm in Perth :: 8:53am in London :: 9:53am in Madrid, Paris and Berlin :: 11:53pm in Beirut, Jerusalem and Istanbul :: 3:53am in New York, Toronto and Bogota :: 12:53am in Los Angeles.

If you'd like to read any past stories please go to the new FASTER archives pages.

Since the half way mark was passed in early November, these new contributors have written for the project: Kristin Hannaford (Central Qld); Sam Twyford-Moore (Newcastle, NSW); Kate Richards (Sydney); Cecilia Berth (Sydney); Myo Sei Murphy (Sydney); Sam Grunhard (Japan); Folake Shoga (UK); Lesley Stern (San Diego); Adam Possamai (Sydney); Cathy Naden (Vancouver); Eileen Myles (San Diego); Mary Paterson (London); Colin W Gore (Sydney); M John Harrison (London); Beth Jackson (Brisbane); Josephine Starrs (Sydney).

The project will be moving again to the northern hemisphere, departing Sydney and arriving in Los Angeles on night 666 (April 17)! Stay tuned for time change updates.

Posted by jo at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2007

0100101110101101.org's

3 classic performances at Ars Virtua!

Chi5 Shenzhou sent me a TP (TelePort) to Ars Virtua and the audience as well as the critics and artists were already milling about while gathering their energy and nerves waiting for the retro-performance-bonanza to begin...

Hey there performance art fans!

Today was a special day in that the reknowned con-ceptual artists, Franco and Eva Mattes aka. 0100101110101101.org were back at Second Life's Ars Virtua for another arousing round of exhibitions! This time their retro-performance trinity was being broadcast (possibly projected) into a contemporary art museum in Trento (Italy) known as the Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporanea.

For this day (evening in Italian time), Franco and Eva focused on remediating the classics of performance art. If you scroll down the blog a bit, you will realize that they remediated a previous performance remediation by myself and Great Escape... How Postmodern is that! More >> [blogged by Jeremy on Wirxli FlimFlam's Second Life Blog]

Posted by jo at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2007

Hazardous:

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.

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

January 30, 2007

Stay in Place

Telesharing

"Stay in Place reveals the resurgence of small complicities between two friends in a chat session while the screen acts as a mirror of oneself and the other, and makes us reflect about personal relationships in the presence of new technologies." -- Arlan Londoño, curator

STAY IN PLACE is a reflection of connection moment between two friends through a Chat by Internet. In this way, a teleshared space arises among them when both maintain a telematic talk by this channel. This scene is captured by the creator of this video, Sara Malinarich, with the intention to trap this spontaneous action in which both achieve to articulate a narration in the context of an unique and unrepeatable situation.

According to this video, the woman that is in the upper window is Maren Pimstein, who was located in Santiago of Chile at 14:32 hrs. of June 12 of the 2006; the another is Sara Malinarich, was in Cuenca, Spain at 19:32hrs of that same day.

Few years ago, both women were girlfriends on the University of Chile. Normally Maren and Sara used make up every time before going out. The day in which this action occurs, Sara had to leave again. For this reason she took her makeups again and she begins to be makeup herself, using the screen of the computer as a mirror and, as well as, an intangible backup for her friend that, from the another side, feel that this results very similar for her, finally, both knows that this is a renewal among them of their old complicities.

This work speaks us, not only of a concrete theme of human relationships, also of the simultaneous and multicultural settings produced by the connection by webcam across the distance. In the same way, meeting places and people on a digital backup. This technological backup admits new elements of composition, implying new narrative possibilities, but also present us anxieties such as where the action occurs? How many artworks have been produced on a simultaneous way during this action? Why these friends have been themselves motivated by their digital clones?

STAY IN PLACE is a proposal directed to the experimentation into the cyberculture land, oriented to the collaborative creation to distance through Internet. This artwork arises after the development of other projects proposed and directed by the author of this piece, related to the scenic arts and the new technologies, such as, "ORBITA. Festival for the teleshared actions by webcam" (2004-2005) and "INTACT. Interface for the teleshared action" (2005-2006).

The reflections considered in the implementation of ITCT at the service of the scenic arts, are basically the digitalization of the body and the transmission of data in real time, as well as the fusion of the scenes into one space of digital nature. STAY IN PLACE connects elements that are inherent to the action and the new technologies, such as: Light, speed, body, sound, communication, virtuality and digital code, de-materialization and data transformation. [via Rhizome]

Posted by jo at 02:51 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2007

Performing Second Life

Gaza Stripped

These past couple of months has been extremely productive for me... Not only was the performance-art group that I co-founded, Second Front formed within days of me actively creating my avatar (Second Front est. November 23, 2006) – this very same group was able to add Gazira Babeli to our roster almost exactly a month later. For those who do not know Gazira Babeli already, she is probably considered to be the very first dedicated performance artist in Second Life. Little is known about the RL life of Gazira Babeli. This is an avatar who likes to hermetically exist only within the virtual bubble-economy of Linden Labs. All the public knows for sure is that she hails from Milan, Italy and is a “code performer”.

You may have seen her at Ars Virtua slinging endless pans of singing pizzas or possibly had to scrape off the globs of both the nanotech industry’s and Linden Labs’ worst virtual nightmare, “grey goo”. If “Gaz’” (as she is known in SL) took a special liking to you, you may have had the privilege of being barfed on! If you have not already witnessed Babeli’s official performances and artistic interventions yet, you are very likely to be her unwitting “audience” sooner or later. Just make sure you do not offend her with any foul language as she is likely to send an intelligent yet sinister tornado after you in order to make you repent your impolite ways. http://www.gazirababeli.com/DONTsay.html)

I interviewed Babeli about modernist White Cubes, contemporary Pop-(T)art(s), “Fluxus Hut” pizza toppings and the generally non-lucrative enterprise of performance art in Second Life...

Wirxli: The Second Life art-critic, Lythe Witte has written a previous article for SLatenight magazine called “The White Cube of the Virtual Art Space” where she questions whether or not the modernist white cube gallery model is worth reproducing in Second Life.

You might recall from a few days ago that we were all hanging out together feeling depressed and bored about the fact that even Second Life itself felt like one big and boring white cube.

"...My question is, what kind of methodology do you think is needed to make interesting art that can be comprehended within the unique context of Second Life?

Gazira: To realize an “artistic” or “aesthetic” experience, it requires a frame-space that is contemporarily physical and conceptual; it could be a frame, a museum, a computer network, a bedroom... or just a plain box 'dressed' like a RL art-galley. This referential "cube gallery" reminds me of the ironical artwork made by Marcel Duchamp called "Box in a valise" (Boîte-en-valise, 1942)

Although the "box gallery" could be a valid expression, I prefer thinking the whole SL environment as (a kind of) frame-space. It means that scripted and built objects, avatar-people and their behaviors become essentially parts of the artwork...a "world in a valise", in this case. :)

Wirxli: So there are parallels between the Second Life infrastructure as a kind of “artistic” framing device and the statements made by the early RL performance-art group, Fluxus where they blurred the boundaries between “art” and “life”?

Gazira: Sure, and it is very similar with the Linden's statement: "Your World. Your Imagination". We still don’t understand what “life” is and yet, we are talking about a second one. One life at a time, please! Maybe these lives (RL and SL) are not so different: symbolic abstractions and virtuality are common attributes.

Wirxli: Is there a difference in your mind between "performance art" in SL and "performing arts" (theater etc) in SL? Also, everyone in SL seems to be either intentionally or unintentionally an artist of some sort - in what way does a performance art group like Second Front stand out from the regular surreal, yet routine activities of SL residents?

Gazira: Yes, SL looks like a very democratic kind of theatre. Everyone is an actor, director and audience together. But is that so different from what we call RL? I think that "intention" is the keyword. The artistic goal could be primarily some shared aesthetic way of thinking and it also needs a shared kind of intentions, so I enjoy being part of the Second Front crew. I think Second Front is the first example of Second Life as the embodiment of a "native" artistic proposal..."

From Gaza Stripped by Wirxli Flimflam, Slate.

Performance Art for a Virtual World

Aidan: I read on your blog that you're an Alien…
Wirxli Flimflam: Yes I consider myself an alien but at the same time accessible enough to pass for Post-Human ;-)
Aidan: Do people react instinctively to your avatar appearance?
Wirxli Flimflam: Hmmmm..most people are polite, it is always hard to know what people really think. Some have immediate surface reactions though, they can tell right away that I am an artist of some kind, usually.
Aidan: And it's a benefit to Second Front that you all vary in appearance?
Wirxli Flimflam: I have noticed that by instinct, performance artists choose to be Tranny-esque. I like to keep my avatar recognizable. I would like to endorse the meme of brand recognition. Other avatars in the group like to change their appearance, but I am also the PR face of SF so I like to keep things familiar.
Aidan: How did your last performance go at Ars Virtua?
Wirxli Flimflam: No regrets, if that is what you mean, I consider it "early work". We learned a lot from it. Continue reading Performance Art for a Virtual World by Aidan Aquacade, SL Enquirer (scroll down).

Posted by jo at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)

Viroid Flophouse

An Exploration of Playable Art

The Viroid Flophouse was an exploration of playable art in an online gaming environment, which incorporated movement, motion tracking, streaming technologies and telematic performance, within the common theme of "virus."

It was a hybrid game/performance environment created by ADaPT (Association for Dance and Performance Telematics) which includes among others Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona), Nottingham Trent University (Nottingham, UK), Wayne State University (Detroit, Michigan) and Waag Society for Old and New Media (Amsterdam, NL).

The sites functioned as rooms in the "flophouse," in which on-site participants could interact with remote participants.

The ADaPT members involved in this production included a team from Arizona State, spearheaded by John Mitchell, a small team from Waag Society headed by Josephine Dorado, with additional input from Johannes Birringer (Nottingham Trent University).

Previous renditions of the project:

ADaPT had already experimented with one rendition of the project, named the Saira Virous which involved teams from Nottingham Trent University, headed by Johannes Birringer, and Wayne State University, headed by Kelly Gottesman.

Birringer's documentation of the Saira Virous can be viewed at the following urls:

http://art.ntu.ac.uk/performance_research/birringer/lat5.htm
http://art.ntu.ac.uk/performance_research/birringer/lat.htm
http://art.ntu.ac.uk/performance_research/birringer/lat4.htm

That rendition of the project mainly focused on the extension of dance performance telematically within an online gaming infrastructure, via streaming and projected media integrated with live performance.

The introduction of OSC (Open Sound Control protocol) into the gaming structure: In our rendition of the project, the goal was to enhance the interaction by incorporating the sending and receiving of OSC data (Open Sound Control protocol) combined with motion capture, into the scenario.

The incorporation of osc data transmission over a network, in combination with motion capture via softVNS, enabled the sites to communicate the performers’ positions to each other. That data, in turn, could be used to control game events.

The gaming structure: The game structure was developed and was based on the action of the remote and local gamer "sharing" the same space. In other words, the gamer in Arizona and the gamer in Amsterdam had to position themselves in the same virtual gaming space in order to get to the next level. The game was played by Arizona and Amsterdam players in this fashion, with supplementary commentary being streamed in sports commentary style, from Birringer.

More >> [via Rhizome]

Posted by jo at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2007

Dear Internet v1.

Networked Technologies and the Paradoxes of Social Relations

In preparation for an upcoming exhibition at Maryland Art Place (MAP) Dear Internet --a project by Mark Cooley and Edgar Endress--will be accepting letters via Dear Internet. Dear Internet v1. investigates how networked technologies become platforms for the paradoxes of social relations in digital culture. Connection, fear, communication, alienation, interactivity, dislocation, intimacy, disembodiment, are all possible and often simultaneously present in our attempts to interact with others online and off.

The installation: A live screening of Dear Internet develops, with the help of participant input, over the course of the exhibition and serves as a partial expression of networked consciousness. Content for Dear Internet v1. is collected from 2 primary sources:

- A participatory blog that forms a collective memory of "users" experience in networked living. Dear Internet (the blog) is an unmoderated site for the publishing and archiving of letters written by Internet users concerning their relationships with the Internet. Through http://dearinternetuser.blogspot.com, users may address the internet directly and indulge in their deepest thoughts, feelings and fantasies with the abandonment, comfort and protection that only online anonymity can provide. Texts gathered from http://dearinternetuser.blogspot.com are remixed and projected in the gallery while they are read with text to speech software.

- Live IP surveillance cameras are accessed using a variety of well-known advanced google search techniques and projected in the gallery space. While these surveillance cameras are accessible to any internet user, they remain largely unknown to casual internet users. However, the cameras have attained significant attention from hackers, technophiles, security professionals, bored surfers and others. The interest no doubt comes from the common presumption that these surveillance cameras are left unsecure unintentionally by camera owners who have neglected to set-up camera security features. Internet users are often able to access full control of an accessed camera's, zoom, pan, snapshot and other features. Camera controls are removed from the interface for the Dear Internet installation and the cameras are set to refresh every 30 seconds.

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

Robert B. LISEK's

GENGINE

Fundamental Research Lab invites you to the Lecture and the Opening Reception for Robert B. LISEK's GENGINE :: January 25 - February 25, 2007 :: Lecture: Thursday, January 25, 6 pm :: Opening: Thursday, January 25, 6-8 pm :: National Gallery of Art Zacheta, Warsaw.

Gengine, the first part of project SUPRAMIND that aims to build a general-purpose intelligent system based on a visual inference engine which allows us to solve problems by extracting new information from existing. Gengine module use genetic programming as an automated "invention machine". In the Zacheta Gallery presentation the DNA of the members of Fundamental Research Lab has been used. After the translation, the sequences have been treated by various genetic programming techniques. The output sequences have been used to create extraordinary diagrams, objects and instructions on what works to make. Each object alludes to the different conditions that include not only mathematical, but also social and philosophical roots.

The purpose of the whole project Supramind is to create a artificial general intelligence ‘implants’ [SUPRAGII], i. e., programs that can be used to solve problems in many completely different fields.

The next modules of the project SUPRAMIND in preparation:

2. visual inference engine based on dynamic probabilistic logic network (NYU)
3. knowledge representation engine based on hyperposets (ready core >> FLOAT project, LMCC NYC) and optional Suprabot extensions:
4. open source game engine for visualization and sensing (UTD)
5. robotic sensimotor interface (the Hanson Robotics)
6. natural language processing interface (UTD)

The SUPRAMIND is sponsored by the Arts Links, the University of Texas at Dallas, and in cooperation with the Harvestwork Digital Media Arts Center in New York.

Robert B. LISEK is an artist, mathematician and a founder of FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH LAB; he is involved in the number of projects focused on alternative art strategies, hacktivism and artificial intelligence. A pioneer of art based on GAI (general artificial intelligence). His visionary combination of GAI and telerobotics explores the possibility of building distributed, intelligent entities.

Downloadable images:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fundamental_data/

Info and contacts:
http://www.fundamentalresearch.org/
lisek[at]fundamental.art.pl

Posted by jo at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2007

Packet Garden

Landscapes of net behaviour

Packet Garden, developed by Julian Oliver, captures information about how you use the internet and uses it to grow a private world you can later explore.

The (free) software keeps track of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on.

None of this information is made public or shared in any way, it's your own private landscape.

Somewhat related, Visualization of statistics in computergames, by Michael Zoellner and Daniel Kupczyk, tracks and projects the behaviour of German internet users in a 3D world. Topics as different as politics, sex, sports, environment or economy are translated into the appearance, behaviour, and the sounds of an avatar. As the stream of data creates and changes, so does the population of this world, unvealing a mirror image of the net society.

The game consists of three scenarios with different levels of interactivity and abstraction. The first level shows a landscape of islands, each island representing a subject area, coded by colours and textures connected to the topic. the avatars feel attracted by the topic islands to which they belong and stay close to them.

The second level gives the player more possibilities for interaction and to influence what is happening in the game.

The third level represents a realistic environment, a scene in the street with a supermarket, cars and lawns. This representation projects the statistics in a real world. in a later further development the game could be experienced in an augmented reality environment, meaning that the avatar would be projected in a real scenery.

Search words which date back further in the past are represented by ghost-avatars. One can recognize very fast how different weekdays and daytimes influence the search words and hereby the significance of the categories. On a Sunday morning you will find another population as during the nightly hours of a working day.

Via a comment by Bjoern, information aesthetics and selectpark + La petite Claudine. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]

Posted by jo at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2007

Schwelle

@ Tesla/Transmediale 2007

Schwelle is a new media and performance project using cutting edge acoustic and interactive technologies to explore the extreme threshold states of consciousness that constitute human experience. The multi-part project uses High Definition image and multi-channel sound, interactive installation and live performance to create states of consciousness in the spectator akin to the thresholds states that one experiences at the edge of trance, sleep and death. For transmediale '07, Tesla presents parts 1 and 2.

Part 1 is a turbulent exploration told by way of image and sound of the experience undergone at the time of the dissolution of the body and of consciousness. Part 2 is a live performance in which the audience confronts a lone single performer Michael Schumacher, master improviser and long time dancer by William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, experiencing the traumatic transition period between death and rebirth. Utilizing wireless sensor networks in the room and on the dancer’s body, Part 2 creates a stage environment where light, sound and objects take on their own choreography, performing with Schumacher, breathing, and behaving alongside him. Where does the body end and the room begin? What happens in the threshold where body and room merge, mutually influencing and transforming each other?

Schwelle is a co-production between artists and researchers from cultural and scientific institutions in Canada, China, Germany, Holland, China, and the USA. Schwelle, Part 2 was partially developed during a project residency at Tesla in Summer 2006 and will receive its world premiere at "tesla zur transmediale".

Part I
Concept/Direction/HD Video/Sound: Chris Salter
Collaboration Sound: Daniel Moody-Grigsby and Philip Viel

Part II
Premiere: Tesla/Transmediale 2007, Berlin, February 2007
Concept/Direction: Chris Salter, in collaboration with Michael Schumacher
Dramaturgy: Heidi Gilpin
Lighting Design: Lea Xiao
Sound Design and Programming: Marije Baalman, Daniel Moody- Grigsby, Chris
Salter, Philip Viel
Interaction Design/Sensing Systems: Marije Baalman
Objects: Thomas Spier, Flora Luna
Production Stage Manager/Technical Director: Daniel Plewe
Production Assistents: Daniel Wessolek, Alexander Wilson, Brett Bergmann

Tesla: Medien-Kunst-Labor, Klosterstrasse 68, Berlin
Thursday-Saturday, February 1-3, 2007. 20:30
For tickets/more information, please visit http://kasse@tesla-berlin.de

Christopher L. Salter, Ph.D.
Asst. Professor of Computation Arts
Faculty of Fine Arts
Concordia University

Researcher_Interactive Performance and Sound Hexagram

Posted by jo at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2007

Nathaniel Stern

In and Around: the Implicit Body as Performance

"Theorists and producers of the "mixed reality" movement within interactive art argue that inviting action and enactment, rather than producing illusion and simulacrum, creates more immersive spaces. Mark Hansen’s concept of the "body-in-code," for example, reads the sensorimotor body here as an "activity" and a "being-with," where the body is "distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics."

Others, such as Brenda Laurel and Chris Salter, have sought to re-think critical histories of digital practice in order to locate interactive and digital art more precisely in the theatrical or performance realms.

My research contends that in such spaces, it is the body, itself, which is performed. A body in space can "act" as a site of emergence, a boundary project, and an incipience. While Rebecca Schneider’s "explicit body" in feminist performance art performatively unfolds (Latin: explicare) and explicates, the implicit body concordantly enfolds (Latin: implicare) and implies. Inter-action is both constitutive of, and always already involved in, the space of the body as relational. Like an animated moebius strip, the body is: in and around.

This paper attempts to think through digital art as a proscenium for, and framer of, the implicit body. I’m not necessarily interested in work or environments that are more illusory or more immersive, but that, rather, ask us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing the boundaries of performativity and affect. Like space itself, bodiliness is "susceptible to folding, division and reshaping… open to continual negotiation" (K Kirby). By setting the stage, interactive artists-as-directors create productive tensions between the per-formed and the pre-formed, shifting our experiences of "body". At stake, are potential strategies for intervention in our understandings of enfleshment, art that contextualizes embodiment towards specific ends." In and Around: the Implicit Body as Performance by nathaniel stern [blogged by nathaniel on nathaniel & the non-aggressive]

Posted by jo at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)

eRiceCooker

Rice is nice?

eRiceCooker, by Annina Rüst, tracks Internet news about genetically modified rice. Whenever there is a new report about GM rice, a quarter cup of rice is dispensed into the cooker. When there's enough rice for a meal, water is added automatically to the rice and the cooker is switched on. When the rice is ready, an email is sent out to inviting people to eat the rice.

The more news reports appear, the more rice is cooked, the more often invitations are sent out, increasing awareness to issues surrounding genetically modified organisms by producing excessive amounts of cooked rice and attempting to feed people with it.

Check it out at the upcoming Dorkbot Oldenburg, Edith Russ Haus für Medienkunst, January 19, 2007.

Another great rice project: Nigel Helyer's Everything's nice with American rice proposes a radical "green" solution to the so called free-trade agreements which promote the importation of American rice into the Japanese rice economy. Imported rice is converted into "Bio-fuel" that, in turn is used to power local rice cultivating equipment to produce Japanese rice, whilst at the same time reducing the reliance upon imported fuel oil. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]

Posted by jo at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

The Institute of Unnecessary Research

pluckEhisquare_anti

The Institute of Unnecessary Research is a concept by Anna Dumitriu and looks at the relationship of artists to science and research. Anna is listed as Director, other artists a listed as dept heads, mimicking the institutional model. There are depts of Artificial Life, Neurofeedback, cross species communication and so on. The project is both web based and event based via interactive performances.

Artists are innovators, if a new piece of technology or a new medium, becomes available; artists want to try it, to experiment with it, to push the boundaries. Some artists take on the role of a scientist in almost a performative way and some scientists equally take on the role of artist. Attitudes to science, medicine and art have changed over the last five hundred years, in that whilst Science has become more formalized, Art has become increasingly less so. By stepping outside the testable hypothesis artists are free to go off at tangents, to get bogged down in aesthetics and be mavericks. [via Rhizome]

Posted by jo at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2007

WhisperBox

Interactive Sound Installation in Second Life

Second Life, one of the most populated MMORPG, is an important watching point to verify how the borderline between real and virtual tends to become more and more ephemeral. In the last months Second Life has seen many famous names and brands of the real world coming into its virtual spaces. The Reuters news agency has opened a virtual editorial office, IBM decided to test here its v-business (virtual business) idea. Many other events as lectures, talks (Lawrence Lessig), concerts (Suzanne Vega) has packed the SL dwellers agenda. So an interactive audio installation couldn't be missed. A certain Robbie Dingo (this is the name of the homonymous British sound designer avatar) programmed his WhisperBox (a 21st Century Folk Song).

The installation, hosted by the SL Phoenicia Center for Contemporary Art, captures words and pieces of the conversations that happens amongs the avatars inside its space (a circular space marked off by seven speakers) and translate these pieces in sounds. Tones and rhythms are directly influenced by the conversation progress. Furthermore WhisperBox provides also a visualization form of the spoken words, appearing near each avatar in a sort of 3D balloon. The displayed text then is an echo of the previous conversations. Clicking on different avatars with active balloons, their spoken words are played as music, and the previous conversations are immortalized, in a sort of inextricable and synaesthetic loop, made out of real and virtual, present and past, expression and representation." Vito Campanelli, Neural.

Posted by jo at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2007

Turbulence Commission:

"html_butoh" by Ursula Endlicher

Turbulence Commission: html_butoh by Ursula Endlicher :: [Needs Flash Player; high speed Internet connection (DSL/Cable or better); speakers on; Mozilla Firefox 2.0+, Opera 9.10+, Netscape 8.0+, and Safari 2.0+]

"html_butoh" questions the way information is indexed on the Web; it enacts the "Global Top 500" websites and is choreographed by their real-time HTML structure. Small video clips show participants translating the "functionality" of each HTML tag into movement. The URLs, and therefore the "stage," changes every 3:28 minutes, running through 500 websites within a twenty-four hour cycle. "html_butoh" runs on the html-movement-library, an open-for-participation video clip database. In Butoh--a Japanese dance technique--the dancer "becomes" an image through her movements, which parallels to how a web browser scans through HTML and displays its content. By submitting to the html-movement-library every participant instantly becomes part of the "html_butoh" performance.

"html_butoh" is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Ursula Endlicher was born in Vienna, Austria and has lived and worked as a "multiple-media" artist in New York since 1993. Her work resides at the intersection of Internet art, performance and multi-media installation. She focuses, with a critical and yet humorous eye, on the underlying structures of the Web, questioning online identity while often anthropomorphizing and enacting the Web, and bringing the Web into a "physical" realm via alternative human-machine communication interfaces. Endlicher has been shown internationally, including "artport," Whitney Museum, New York and "Illegal Machines" at Art Athena, Greece. Recently she participated in "No body on this line", a research lab at Tanzquartier, Vienna, Austria. Endlicher initiated a discussion and web conference about "Curating net art" with Mobile-Studios.org in 2006. She has lectured about her work in the US and Europe.

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

January 10, 2007

Teleklettergarten

Physical and Programming Commitment

Teleklettergarten -In collaboration with the group FOK, Bitnik reconfigured the facade of the art university in Linz to become the world largest keyboard. The facade was converted into a climing wall with oversized keyboard keys and buttons as a input interface for a computer. The visitors who participated in Teleklettergarten passed through a trainee programm and where trained as software developers. Through physical commitment the climbers and the programmers collaboratively inputed code into an oversized programming environment. In a week-long performance the collaborators programmed codes, scripts and tools and demonstrated various software functions.

Aim of the Teleklettergarten was not only to make programming a physical experience but to also use this public and collaborative programming interface to collectively demonstate against the arbitrary awarding of software patents for core functions which are the basis of day-to-day work with computers. By ensuring that the illegal action (the execution of patented code) is performed by an anonymous collective, no single person can be made responsible whilst being able to publicly demonstrate the restriction these patents mean for programmers and for the whole user community. [via VVork]

Posted by jo at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2007

Flickeur

Stream-of-Consciousness Movie

Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur), by Mario Klingemann, randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings' magnetic memory. The virtual tape will also play and record forward and backward to create another layer of randomness. This principle will create its own sometimes very suggestive or scary story. It might take a few minutes until the tape has accumulated enough material to not show any empty screens anymore.

Flickeur is part of the NET.ART section at Art Tech Media 06 which can be seen in various museums across Spain in 2006.

Posted by jo at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2006

Broken City

Transcoding

Broken City by James Alliban: This piece lies somewhere between generative art, software art, interactive fiction and photomontage. Interacting with it allows the user to paint different combinations of the various elements of a city and its inhabitants, and compose a random soundscape. Mini-narratives are generated from these ever-evolving juxtapositions.

The fragmented aesthetic employed within this hypermediated environment echoes our increasing ability to multi-task due to the computerisation of western society. It is an examination of this quasi-evolutionary development of human culture which Lev Manovich calls transcoding. [via Rhizome]

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

December 19, 2006

Low-fi Guest Selections

Charlie Gere + Cory Arcangel

Touch in art and elsewhere by Charlie Gere :: Recently, for various reasons, I have become interested in the question of touch, in art and elsewhere. We live in a world in which the ways in which we can communicate with each other become more and more immaterial, incorporeal and virtual, particularly through the increased use and greater ubiquity of digital technologies. In this context touch is often occluded and, at the same time, overly fetishised. In the last half century or so, there has been an increasing interest in touch in art, especially in relation to performance and telematic works, that may be a response to the increasing virtualisation of culture, though the question of touch can be traced in far older works, particularly some of those dealing with the life of Christ, which is, whether we are religious or otherwise, the founding myth of Western culture, and which has determined much of our understanding of questions of presence and absence, corporeality and spirituality, and our relation to the senses and thus to touch.

Cory Arcangel's Offline Art Show: Hello, for this project I have been asked to curate a small "online" artshow by low-fi.org.uk. Therefore, for a reason I am unable to explain myself, I have decided to put together this show "offline" aka - with no internet connection. So, since I have no Internet, I can't check my bookmarks to see what I've been interested in lately, and I can't search though my email to help me remember cool stuff I've seen lately, so basically I just have to remember the stuff off the top of my head. More >>

Posted by jo at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

Touching the Invisible

Working with the Invisible Flow of Information

Touching the Invisible characterizes the work performed at the Smart Studio and reflects how we work with the invisible flow of information. As it is channelled and directed into specific lines of investigation, the bits and waves transform through an eclectic mix of ideas into compound forms that become both visible and tangible. Our aim is always to bring the invisible out into the real space we inhabit, to invite the visitor for interaction, and overturn the outcome. The exhibition is built around six individual pieces representing different aspects and interpretations of the theme, that in different ways challenge our preconceived notions on flux and immobility, on thought and matter, on time and space.

The generative processes that lead to the final work can often start from discussions in the group, where we try to find associative paths between individual definitions, for example by delimiting an area of interest with keywords or images that may provoke a multitude of interpretations. The shifts of meaning that occur in the process are used as an asset that can add an unexpected twist to the issues and their realisations.

Brainball is a game, an art object and Smart studio's first completely hybrid research project. The players move a ball on a table by the sole use of their brainwaves. Encouraging competition through relaxation, the game objective is to score a goal on the opponent's side with the least possible action. Brainball is an exciting and social game but also an interesting tool for learning how to control your mental states. It has been exhibited in as widely different contexts as art and design exhibitions and medical fairs, and is seen as one of the studio's most successful hybrid objects.

Brainbar is a mechanical bar that mixes drinks according to the visitor's brainwaves. The bar reads the brain frequencies (EEG or electroencephalogram) in the alpha and beta wavelength. These wavelengths are generally considered to be synonymous with the states of relaxation and activity in the mind. Thus the BrainBar serves the drink most suited for you, at the moment of measurement. BrainBar can be seen as a mediator or manipulator designed to give a party its perfect state of enhanced socialising, carefully adjusting the drinks served so that every guest stays within acceptable parameters for a “good” behaviour or, if the settings allow, a “bad” behaviour. By the use of alcohol and medical herb essences, the bar can emotionally equalize or polarize the group of guests. This can be seen as a sociological experiment exploring how much a person is prepared to submit to external forces and how far the person can allow a machine to intrude on the body.

A paranoid web spider searching for the Devil on the net. By detecting inverted pentagrams in images stored on the Internet, the program determines if the image has evil content and alerts the siteowner. HellHunt is an application based upon the use of so-called vision algorithms, a way of enabling computers to detect and distinguish geometrical configurations inside pictures. The active algorithm in this piece traces down the diabolic symbol of the reversed pentagram on images stored on the Internet. When the program hits an image that corresponds with the algorithm, it draws the lines of the hidden pentagram on it. Furthermore, it saves the address of the page and sends an e-mail to it, kindly demanding the removal of the harmful image.

More >>

Posted by jo at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2006

Interactive Telecommunications Program

Winter Show @ NYU

As promised, I went to the ITP Winter Show opening today @ NYU; had a couple of thoughts about the show. Spoke with Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis and Lesley Flanigan who created the Sonic art weapon: Ravezooka which I mentioned yesterday.
.
Benedetta also has a personal blog hosted at NYU. The Sonic art weapon is programmed in MAXMSP and it seemed to me that this is a good program to learn since it's so visual. LemurPlex, located in Brooklyn, NY, not far from my Studio, appears to be the best place to learn MAXMSP around here, in NYC, - and you can see all the courses you can take at the LemurPlex -

I've passed by LemurPlex several times but never spoken to anyone - and several of the projects in the ITP show had connections with LemurPlex.com. I think I'll look them up and take an intro course to MAX -as I think I can learn from them how to execute some of my ideas for modern art, ideas I don't think I can execute in traditional paint media - these ideas need electronic media.

By the way, the Sonic Art Weapon cost less than 100 dollars to manufacture and has applications in science (Mars Robotic Probes would benefit from the technology used here, for example).

Other exhibits in the ITP show that I liked - LocationAura which similar to We Feel Fine, a subject I have already written about in Webmetricsguru.com; Catherine Colman and Nanna Halinen were not aware of the program (I think they should have been - as LocationAura tries to do, more or less, exactly what We Feel Fine does, much better) - but for a graduate project, LocationAura was pretty good - with a focus on mobile phones that We Feel Fine does not have (but does not need, either).

The Interactive Pond by Diane Chen, Peng Zhao and Hye Ki Min where you can play with a fantastic virtual reality pond and get your hands wet was pretty neat. Whales in the Sewer was pretty funny but I'd feel sorry for any whales that actually got caught in a city sewer. Orb was pretty amazing - I wanted to touch it - but I was told it would hack my hands off if I did; you can see a good picture of the Orb in action here. Future TV is an interesting project - getting information on anything on TV by clicking on that part of the image though it's more of a concept as everything had to be hand programmed - but the idea is great, especially if bots can go out on the web and pull the data in.

And while there is a strong element of telecommunications at the ITN show, there are several students who did not go in that direction; I don't know why they're in the program in the first place.

I think it's important for the ITP program not to lose it's focus - all the projects in this show, in my opinion, should have been about using technology to interact and create communication - but not all were.

Links: ITP Winter Program [blogged by by Marshall Sponder on Smart Mobs]

Posted by jo at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2006

susana mendes silva's

art_room

art_room: Don't be afraid to ask everything you always wanted to know about contemporary art.

My Skype name is susana_mendes_silva, call me.

art_room (#3) :: Saturday December 16, 1:00pm - 3:00pm (CT) | 7:00pm - 9:00am (GMT) :: Untitled [ArtSpace] Upgrade! International: DIY, Oklahoma City.

susana mendes silva :: arslonga[at]netcabo.pt

Posted by jo at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2006

Haiku Trader

Distributed Creativity and MySpace

Haiku Trader is a new media poetry / performance artwork that began in 2005. The art work as such utilises the social network myspace as a virtual collaborative space investigating the theme of distributed creativity and aesthetics. Practically speaking, what this means is that the work is not 'limited' to this profile but must be conceptualised as the network it involves progressively over time. This network can be explored through the virtual traces left as haiku 'comments' throughout the myspace community as well as in the group which this profile acts as 'moderator' for - Desert Islands.

Leon Tan works as a lecturer and psychotherapist at AUT University, and as a consultant for an ICT company Cogitatus Solutions. He is also a doctoral candidate in art history and film tv & media studies at the University of Auckland. He researches interactivity, psychoanalytic social theory, social and cultural software. He is also a new media poet / artist. His current work experiments with distributed authorship in poetry utilising social software platforms. [posted on Rhizome]

Posted by jo at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2006

Second Life

First Annual SL Literary Festival

First Annual SL Literary Festival :: Verum's Place, Yanguella :: December 16, 2006; 2:00 pm SLT :: Contact Carla Herrera, carla[at]contemporaryguide.com for more information.

Schedule of Events (Tentative/subject to change) :: Throughout the day there will be poetry readings, streaming music, discussions, art display, interactive literature projects, classes and workshops.

TBA: Patrick Lichty / Man Michinaga - Discussion: Digital Narrative and Online Spaces.

2:00 Opening ceremony Greetings & guest speaker on front lawn ::
3:00 Schedule of Workshops and Classes begin Signs and teleporters provided :: Workshops and classes run throughout the day and will conclude at 6:30 for fireworks And storytelling :: 4:00 Tours of the Gothsburg castle begin Tours last 30-45 minutes. :: 3:30 Open mic at Verum's place Essays & poetry welcome :: 4:00 Poetry Challenge $L100. to the winner :: 5:00 Tramp's Theatre Troupe Surprise performance :: 6:30 Fireworks By Spider :: 7:00 Storytelling circle on front lawn :: 8:00 Event close/Open chat/discussion.

Posted by jo at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)

[iDC] Introduction and Blinks & Buttons

Networked Photography

I'm Sascha Pohflepp, currently based in Berlin, where I spent the last couple of years at the University of the Arts' (UDK) visual communication department (some of the work from that time can be found at http://www.pohflepp.com). I also frequently contribute to the blog We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com and occasionally work with the Mediamatic foundation in Amsterdam.

My most recent work is a two-fold thesis project, titled "Between Blinks & Buttons". It is a try to look at photography as an increasingly connected process and the implications which arise from that – both for the individual but also for the process of remembering and the camera as an object in itself. Quoting from the introduction:

"Photography has become a networked process. It no longer ends with pasting putting prints into an album. Instead, making them public through services like Flickr is rapidly becoming one of the main ways how we treat our visual memories. The photographic process extends from preserving a moment to an act of telecommunication, with numerous implications on how we perceive reality, how we make our memories and how we create a narrative from it.

The camera itself has become a networked object and through the fusion of the snapshot-camera and the mobile phone, this object will even become more part of our everyday lives. Cameras always have been recorders for their contexts, essentially equipped with a light sensor to capture a visual representation and a pressure sensor for the person who decides which moment will be saved – the button. Furthermore, digital photos come with a great amount of data attached to them as so-called EXIF-tags. These include a multitude of precise information about technical aspects of the shot, the make of the camera, how it was held and when the image was taken.

For almost any given moment since early 2004, it is possible to find a photo on the web which was taken in the exact same second. For every of my photos that I myself have a memory of and an emotional connection to, I can see someone else's moment. I can see what happened in another part of the world while I was doing what I remember when I see it. In that sense, cameras become networked buttons that create a link between two people through the simple fact that they did the same thing simultaneously: press a button. The cameras create a visual trace of it, with time as a reference."

This resulted in two installations – firstly "Blinks", a prism sitting on a kind of light-table that actually refracts the ray of time which metaphorically runs through every photo into all the other moments that had been simultaneously captured in various places all over the world.

Secondly, "Buttons", a camera which intentionally boils down the photographic apparatus to its essential button. Once this button has been pressed, no picture is taken (the person will remember the moment, though), but a networked device inside starts to look for photos from that very same second. It might take some time, but eventually, a photo will show up on the camera's display.

Interestingly, in both pieces, the photos never feel random since the user shares a moment with that other person who took the photo. At a recent presentation, someone called the whole process "momentograph" which I found very fitting and beautiful. Please feel free to let me know what you think of all this, the website mentioned above also has some more information and videos.

iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity:: iDC[at]bbs.thing.net :: http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc

List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/

Posted by jo at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

December 08, 2006

Will Pappenheimer's Public Mood Ring

What is your Relationship to News?

Will Pappenheimer's Public Mood Ring opens at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI, USA :: December 8, 2006 18:00 EST - January 19, 2007.

Public Mood Ring is an installation/internet work inspired by the common wearable “mood ring.” The ring is believed to be capable of translating the bearer’s emotional condition into its changeable color hue. This project attempts to find the color mood of a current public issue represented by instant Internet news text. It does this at the request and questioning of remote viewers logged onto the artwork site and to a computer station within the installation room.

what is your relationship to news? Web participants can see the change and status of the installation space via web camera. The shared experience is both the gift of the remote participant, as well as a gauge or color representation of the current world events. Installation visitors are then immersed in the ambient light.

Posted by jo at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

YOUR TUBE, YOUR IMAGINATION

Dancoyote_antonelli_and_skydancers

Online world as new artist's medium. I haven't had a chance to attend a performance designed by DanCoyote Antonelli, founder of a new school of metaverse-era art theory he calls hyperformalism, but Gary Hazlitt has. Hazlitt shot at a recent showing of Antonelli's ZeroG SkyDancers (evocative, though it's clear you need to attend the show in-person, to get its full power), then read his detailed and thought-provoking write-up of the event and interview with Antonelli here. [blogged by W. James Au on New World Notes]

Hyperformalism is an aesthetic philosphical construct that may be employed by to describe a late 20th century, early 21st century mass art phenomena consisting of scores of personal computer users generating abstract, often spacially unique artworks with software tools.

These spacial realities have no analog in the physical world, and instead of making reference to physical reality, create a unique continuum of reference; a rearrangement of photons to illuminate alternate worlds of form, shape, color and space.

The term Hyperformalism is derived from the combination of the words Hyper and Formalism (as described by WikiPedia) and is being used here to describe aesthetic self expression without anthropomorphic, or representative context. This seperates Hyperformalism from digital collage, aesthetic photo manipulation and other forms.

Hyperformalism is not anthropomorphic or representational. Often times hyperformal art may resemble natural formations or even employ naturalistic algorythms such as the work of Casey Reas which is described on the aforementioned website as "stringently defined yet wonderfully organic".

Other times hyperformal artwork takes a more industrial or unnatural form such as the work of Shirley Shor

Hyperformalism may be flat like Casey Reas or spacial like Shirley Shor but never contains recognizable elements like text, figures, landscapes, objects and concepts relating to humanity.

Hyperformalism, the product of a desktop computer, suffers from stigmatization of its association with computers and has yet to find a neutral delivery platform. This means that vast amounts of work is being created, at the pace of technological change, without the hope of display beyond a desktop computer screen.

Since most of the material viewers are accustomed to encountering on a desktop computer screen is commercial in nature, disposable consumer culture, it is a hard sell to suddenly invoke the weight of culturally important artifact on to such a homely delivery platform.

Guilt by association...

Posted by jo at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2006

OPENSTUDIO

Interview with Amber Frid-Jimenez and Brent Fitzgerald

"While at SIGGRAPH this September, I had the chance to visit MIT Media Lab a couple of times and stick my head into the labs of the different groups. At the time, the people in John Maeda's Physical Language Workshop were developing something exciting about art and commerce called OPENSTUDIO. At the time it was still closed but since it has recently been opened to the public, it is high time to find out more. Two of the group's current researchers who also worked on the system, Amber Frid-Jimenez and Brent Fitzgerald, are happy to explain.

And – if you find this any interesting, you should also check out PLW-graduate Burak Arikan's (whose name will appear a few times more) latest project A Stock Market In Life as well!" More >> [blogged by Sascha on we-make-money-not-art] OPENSTUDIO AND SHIFTSPACE WILL BE PRESENTED AT UPGRADE! BOSTON ON JANUARY 11, 2007.

Posted by jo at 08:35 AM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2006

Garrett Lynch

"Quote me!"

"Quote me!" by Garrett Lynch: (please be patient this may take a few moments to load) :: Every good artist has at least one quote, aphorism or soundbite attributed to them, yet the new media artist barely has time to keep up with the rapid change of technology let alone spend time thinking of witty aphorisms.

"Quote me!" is a work, triggered by users to its web page, that reuses quotes and the date they were expressed from various online sources for the busy new media artist who hasn't time. Quotes are relevant comments to current political and social events, both nationally and internationally, taken from the current headlines of a handful of global newspapers via their respective rss / xml feeds, yet placed without context or explanation.

Information and the database have become the ultimate pervasive commodity. New things are no longer said and done instead they are recombined, recompiled or remixed from the archives we are continuously compiling both as individuals and as a race.

"Quote me!" is in a sense an agent for the artist. Reusing the media's carefully edited information as source for quotes the agent is able to automatically recycle information for the artists use. Allocated parameters it is given free reign to search and retrieve others quotes from the internet, republishing and archiving them on its web page. Quotes are attributed to the artist ensuring that (s)he has a voice in a space where things need to be continually said. The importance or profoundness of what is said becomes unimportant, replaced instead by the regularity and continuous act of saying.

A web 2.0 tool or service as work of art, "Quote me!" both continues themes of net.art (reusing, recycling, transforming) and simultaneously highlights the redundancy of it as a tool when the content is unoriginal and without context. It draws attention to the highly important exploration involved in these types of recombinatory net.art works, not possible outside of the internet, yet questions the same use of techniques employed in their creation for the critical discourse that surrounds them in our collaborative, tagging, reblogging and ever more copied, unoriginal content of web 2.0.

a+
gar

Garrett[at]asquare.org
http://www.asquare.org/

Posted by jo at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2006

Climate Commons:

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

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

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

Core participants:

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

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

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

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

November 27, 2006

Upgrade! International: A Day in the Life

Stock Market

Upgrade! A Day in Life events take place in four cities simultaneously. Urban spaces in Oklahoma City, Boston, Munich, and Istanbul will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the event. For each location, sensors mounted in the entrance register how many people are in the room at any one time and send this information to the Stock Market central server. The number of visitors define the fair value for each place.

The stock market uses this value generated by the immaterial labor of visitors. Each location has 100 shares and the shares gain or lose value depending on the speculations in the market and the number of people in the local rooms. You can contribute to the value either by just visiting the physical locations or by trading in the online stock market. Get your shares now!

The Upgrade! Stock Market is a project by Burak Arikan. Other Upgrade! Boston events >>

Posted by jo at 02:09 PM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2006

Nearness

Information Artefacts

Katharina Birkenbach (aka Ponypink), an Amsterdam- and soon Berlin-based designer, has just launched a pretty fresh social networking website, it's called Nearness. Built on Mediamatic's anyMeta system, it allows you to feed it with various information about events, people, things, etc., all of which are equally treated as artefacts. This allows users to create rich interconnections between the individual entries, creating an ever more complex network of stuff.

I asked Katharina to briefly line out what the idea behind it is: "Nearness is an environment where people can store their information that is surrounding them in their daily life. It is not focused on one kind of media but is open for nearly any kind of information, doesn't matter how big or small, important or unimportant it is. Nearness can become an always present little companion, which is helping you to collect, to not forget, to organise the things you like. But organising not in the sense that you are somehow the administrator of a complex folder system, but by generating context for the data and embedding it in the data network. The context in which, for example, your favourite book is displayed is not only set up by the information you've entered, but all the users of Nearness. In this sense it can develop to some kind of stimulating treasure trove."

Trying to explain the potential of it, she also sent me a scan from her sketchbook which is pictured above, along with its history: a photo from i-D magazine, alluding to The Virgin Suicides. A sticker from Dazed and Confused which itself is a quote from The Who. Ten friends also made collages like this as part of something called Feed Me. So, Nearness in her vision could grow to become a tool for the same process. Something that today many creative people use notebooks for: collecting snippets of culture, ideas – in a way making mental collages but with the power of a networked system. [blogged by Sascha on we-make-money-not-art]

Posted by jo at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2006

Franck Ancel

5G

5G :: While the sixth Guggenheim Museum was under construction in Mexico, in 2006, I captured data on the five existing Guggenheims. The traces of this very real course provide an echo of a possible virtual construction of a museum on a planetary scale, of which the Guggenheims are the symbol. The shift from a fluid architecture of the virtual to a reality of the constructed form takes shape in the final stage of my project in Paris, involving a 3D video animation created by Brian Bey, and a resin model, from 3D prototyping, in collaboration with the IDO company, that is based on the elements I brought together.

This 5G is composed of a photo, in conjunction with GPS coordinates showing the exact position of the images taken in front of the 5 Guggenheims in Berlin in June, Bilbao in July, New York and Las Vegas in August, and Venice in September. 5G thus defines itself as the outline for a performance-installation networking several sites on a global scale. A unique moment that is in symbiosis with the projected entity involving more than a hundred Guggenheims all over the world that is now being studied.

This project has already outlined the infinite scope for feasible artistic achievement in terms of the distribution and exchange of tomorrow's works of art, in the all-digital age. But it is also a tribute to the will of one woman, Peggy Guggenheim, that is directed towards artistic creation -- a woman who was cursed in the 20th century and is more than acknowledged today. For the transmutation of living forms involves an endless movement, and it is only this current epoch of ours that has established the bounds to be crossed.

Born in 1970, France, Franck Ancel lives in Paris. He has been exploring technology for more than fifteen years, tracing the development from the avant-gardes artists of the last century to the recent mutations of creation on a planetary scale. He has also organized and coordinated symposiums, expositions, and performances in cooperation with associations and institutions. The last one was a retrospective on Jacques Polieri, the creator of ”modern scenography,” at the BnF. Since the attacks of 9/11, Franck Ancel has set up an interactive triptych probing “architecture – image – technology” on 20th century heritage sites. In 2002, he put it in the Le Corbusier/Xenakis convent; in 2003 in a classified theater in Catalogne; and in 2004 on the screen of Montparnasse Tower in Paris. Franck Ancel challenges the viewer outside traditional frontiers, by projecting a setting of a network of information on screens. At the same time, he analyzes this technique on a more theoretical level in texts and talk. It encloses thus in 2005 a cycle of five communications for five continents with a world internet premiere from a plane flying from Shanghai to Munich. In 2006, he continues to open to the world with a digital capture in the world’s five Guggenheim museums and launches UFOs on this website remixarts.com

Posted by jo at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2006

Cemetery 2.0

Physical/Virtual Memorial

Cemetery 2.0 is an interesting work wirelessly networking the grave of Hyman Victor (the great-grandfather of the artist) in Chicago with some online information about him and his life, photographs of his life, a copy of his entry into the largest genealogical database in the world, a link to the family tree of the Jewish People etc.

Cemetry 2.0 is very much a personal exploratory work for the artist [Elliott Malkin], getting to know his great-grandfather (and his family history) and it employs technology to that end. It documents his research but also creates a memory which can permeate and persist beyond any physical media (an actual photograph and it’s siting in say a family album), the memory of any single person (relatives), any physical location (the grave itself) and yet ensures that the grave, the physical memorial, is the place and link to the virtual memorial.

The work, while not using RFID technology, is a work of object hyperlinking. It employs radio frequencies and so shares many of the ideals and [dis]utopian visions we are currently seeing written about the coming, Internet of Things, the benefit of things becoming active in networks and the drawbacks of people being always on[line], always possibly to find and surveil. Comparable work to Cemetry 2.0 includes Semapedia, the object hyperlinking project based around wikipedia. However while this is an application of what is hoped will be a practical technology and raises questions (good and bad) depending on what (or who) is tagged and of course who on wikipedia documents it (amidst claims that wikipedia has accuracy issues and is monopolised), Cemetry 2.0 mangaes to sidestep many if not all of these concerns, in what is already a delicate subject, to truly create a sensitive and personalised new media.

Note: This work has very much the feel of Christian Boltanski’s work (interview on youtube - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) in the way it tackles memory and the ‘artifacts’ we associate with remembering.

Work reviewed at We Make Money Not Art. [bogged by Garrett on Networked Research] [Related]

Posted by jo at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2006

Defining Lines:

Breaking Down Borders

[image: National Velvet by David Crawford] Defining Lines: Breaking Down Borders :: This exhibition will attempt to present a comprehensive survey of the work of artists who are breaking down the borders or boundaries that define artistic practise in the 21st century. From the computer DESKTOP, to DOWNLOADABLE COMPUTER VIRUSES, OPEN SOURCE AND CODE CRACKING SOFTWARE, and E-BOOKS, to ALTERNATIVE NETWORK BROWSERS, OPERATING SYSTEMS and SHAREWARE/FREEWARE, DOMAIN NAME SERVERS, to GAMING PATCHES, LISTSERVS, ONLINE THEATER (in the form of activism, or ELECTRONIC PROTEST) -- what constitutes "ART" is being re-defined as EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES and mediums are giving artists the "TOOLS" and a new means of expression. In addition, our notions or definitions of the tangible, physical "BORDER" "TERRITORY" or "OWNERSHIP / PROPERTY" is being transformed in the virtual realm of cyberspace. The idea of territory becomes one of "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY" and "COPYRIGHT / LEFT". Geopolitical, and topographical territories are being replaced with domain of the Corporations and Governmental Agencies (ICANN) who control the "space" of the World Wide Web. Borders existing on the network, tracing the idea of "open" borders vs. "closed" borders, similarly we look at "firewalls", "encryption", "carnivore"; in contrast to "open source", "General Public License" (and therefore the ideas of "authorship") "sharing of files", "data transfer". The "SERVER" or "HARD DRIVE" as the new territory where "HACKING" and "ART" exchange fertile ground in the realm of the digital NETWORK we know as the Internet. Artists and Activists have their say in the wide open territory of the WWW, creating a hybrid art form called "PRACTIVISM" (Paul Garrin). Hackers and Activists merge and become "HACKTIVISTS" (Electronic Disturbance Theater). A new form of electronic theater or digital performance art is developing, that of the Online Protest, or "VIRTUAL SIT-IN".

At the beginning of the 21st century, we see that the words of Joseph Beuys has its corollary in the electronic realm:

"...Social Sculpture--how we mold and shape the world in which we live: SCULPTURE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS; EVERYONE IS AN ARTIST...All around us the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped, or created." -Joseph Beuys

ARTISTS:

0100101110101101.ORG
Mark Amerika
Betty Beaumont
C5 Corp
David Crawford
Douglas Davis
Andy Deck
Electronic Disturbance Theater(EDT)
Epidemic-C / 0100101110101101.ORG
Fakeshop
Peter Fend
Joy Garnett
Paul Garrin
Marina Grzinic & Aina Smid
Wenda Gu
Ingo Gunther
Fran Ilich
I/O/D
Irational.org
Jodi.org
Eduardo Kac
Yael Kanarek
Knowbotic Research
Tina LaPorta
Jenny Marketou
Jennifer + Kevin McCoy
MEZ (aka Mary-Anne Breeze)
Mark Napier
Netochka Nezvanova
Marko Peljhan
RTMark
Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud)
Linus Torvalds + others
Stephen Vitiello
Ade Ward

Posted by jo at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2006

Franck Ancel

Tuut: Utopia of Theater

"Studying the terrain, the litterateurs believe they have established the existence of a major psycho-geographic crossroads — with Ledoux's Rotonde de la Villette at the centre – which can be described as a unity…" - the journal Les Lèvres nues, November 1956, Paris.

Mobile_Wireless_Digitale, for the bicentenary of the death of the utopian architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux in Paris, faced with the extension of the Cité des Sciences et de la Musique. I am no longer drafting a utopian performance which could have involved an immersive projection (cf. estimate drawn up with the UTRAM company) within Ledoux's Rotonde, and have been made possible by means of an inflatable dome (cf. study by another company), as conceived by me since 2001.

In contrast with some of the anticipated utilitarian hijackings aimed at establishing a modicum of social aesthetics on the square that is dedicated to the battle of Stalingrad in Paris, my idea involved a light and sound projection at the entrance to this capital: issues not only of physical fluidity but also fluidity of data. Thus, this space that traces the old boundaries closing in on the city, would be transformed by opening up the city, at a time when a dark globalisation is being prepared for us by some of the uses to which technology is being put.

I therefore propose an open-access 3gp stream broadcast from GPS co-ordinates N 48°53.365' E 002°22.555' to video receivers at this address: rtsp://217.71.210.164/ancel/19 , to other portables and on the Internet, on 19 November 2006 between 19:00 and 20:00 (Paris GMT). The 3D animation of this presentation has been created in association with Bryan Bey. It transfigures my Black Time epoch, for this action is primarily the echo of a manifesto for a Pari(s) lancé dans un lyrisme électronique (‘Paris (bet) cast in an electronic lyricism'), between active memory and the virtual future. - Franck Ancel

Posted by jo at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2006

XpositionREVERSE

A Modern Gesamtkunstwerk

XpositionREVERSE :: Aarhus/Denmark – Gothenburg/Sweden :: Real-time streaming: web :: November 29 -December 2; 8 p.m.

XpositionREVERSE is a live digital chamber performance about position and identity on and with the Internet. Presented simultaneously in Aarhus and Gothenburg, and streamed on the Internet, XpositionREVERSE s a surrealistic and humorous montage of new text, dance, video, electro acoustic music and streamed bits. A modern Gesamtkunstwerk, placing itself somewhere between installation and the intimate chamber play. Inspired by cabaret, sitcoms and cosy evenings in the sofa.

XpositionREVERSE is a complex creation about being outside and excluded contra to be inside and included. About being in the centre of the events contra being in the periphery. The performance is about the modern man’s need to be "on" and wish for "15 minutes of fame". But do we only exist if we are seen, filmed and are placed in the focus point of the media lens? What defines centre and where is it placed? And what will happen, if focus is moved and periphery and centre is swapping place?

To be another place. Another position. Xposition.
To expose oneself. Exposure. Exposition.

PARTICIPANTS IN AARHUS

Staging, choreography and performer: Annika B. Lewis
Dramatist and performer: Gritt Uldall-Jessen
Interactive media and set design: Signe Klejs
Composer and live music: Anders Krøyer
Video technique and live music: Jens Mønsted
Internet architect and streaming: Jonas Smedegaard

For more information about live location in Aarhus and ticket reservations contact EntréScenen: phone: +45 86 190079 (10 – 16)

Produced by Kassandra Production in collaboration with Atalante in Gothenburg and EntréScenen in Aarhus, with others. Subsidized by The Municipality of Aarhus’ Kulturudviklingspulje, Koda, Dansk Skuespillerforbund and Tuborgfondet, with others.

Posted by jo at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2006

NOTHING TO SEE

for the sense of touch

NewYorkRioTokyo e.V. :: NOTHING TO SEE: Piece touchee, No 1: a performance exclusively for the sense of touch. Being the interface: Touch is the most strictly codified sense in our society. This performance is an attempt at designing work to be perceived only through the sense of touch, beyond its usual connotations .

The piece will be performed on your body. (Duration 15 to 20 minutes). You will not be asked to be active. Please make an appointment either by email or by
phone in order to avoid waiting times: 0163-235-1869, piece.touchee[at]web.de

Performances possible every day, from 11.00 to 22.00 from Thursday November 16 to Sunday november 19, 2006.

Concept: Kenji Ouellet
Performance: Katharina Weinhuber, Kenji Ouellet

Kontrapunktus I, II: contrapuntal soundscapes (pieces for headphones)
Composition: Kenji Ouellet

Opening talk/discussion (and drinks) Thursday November 16, 19.00 (but performances possible before the discussion all day thursday).

NewYorkRioTokyo e.V.
Eberswalderstrasse 4, 10437 Berlin
www.nyrt.net

Posted by jo at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2006

Interface and Society

AbA Logic + Superconsumer

AbA Logic by Art by Accident (Kalle Grude, Jan Løchstøer) :: Six Muses of Randomness: Six white mice reside among books on logic subjects inside a laboratory cabinet. What are they doing there? Well, obviously they are nibbling on the books. Apparently they are nesting, as in quiet moments they cuddle up in a ball beneath snippets of logic. As they wander among the books they trigger a databank of words connected to electronic boards. The boards make up two sentences of three words each (so-called AbA-logic statements). Each time a mouse triggers a sensor, a new statement appears. The words (adjectives, adverbs and nouns) are common in logic terminology. The statements that appear are less common. This is why they are of interest to us.

In order to materialize this constant stream of statements, they are printed as they appear. On AbA’s desk piles of sketches and notes from the process accumulates. In addition to participate in a digital process, the mice -through their nibbling- are creating sculptural rephrasing of the books, and produce new combinations of the texts and illustrations from the pages of the books.

Superconsumer by Franz Alken and Karl Rueskaefer :: What happens when a computer programme starts buying and selling stuff on Internet auctions like ebay autonomously? That is the key question of superconsumers. The stuff the Bot has bought is exhibited for a short time. Thus digital values are translated into tangible goods. And vice versa, since the Bot sells them again after a while to buy new ones. In this way, commonplace products are temporarily translated into works of art.

The basic principle of superconsumers, is to make an amount of money available to a software (a so called “bot”). The software uses this money to buy goods autonomously at the online-auction-platform ebay, transfers these goods to an art-space, exhibits them and sells them again via ebay. The exhibition-module consists of a computer-interface displaying the softwares actions at ebay, 7 pedestals that show the current goods and a watchmann who executes the software’s instructions and arranges the goods on the pedestals. There are mainly 4 points that form a fascintation for this project: The relationship between humans and machines - the bot replaces exemplarily the role of humans in the ebay environment.

The ready-made principle: While transferring ordinary objects from the mass-market to an art space, the bot enhances the objects to pieces of art. This enhancement is temporarily, the bot takes away the “art aura” by selling these pieces again via ebay.

The installation gives a constantly updated overview on the mass-market. The programming of the process makes the items the bot will buy unpredictable - a search on the topic “football” can respond items like fan-articles, computer games, books or sportswear. Interaction is an important point on art-projects dealing with the internet. The interaction at superconsumers is quite hidden: Everyone dealing with the bot at ebay is arranging the exhibition without knowing it.

More about Interface and Society [PDF]

Posted by jo at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

November 09, 2006

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

net.art as on-line activism

"Introduction: Over the last ten years, the Internet has embedded itself in the daily lives of a vast number of people. As a new telecommunication technology, it allows the common individual to engage in a cybernetic system that is globally networked. Today, however, a race goes on to establish the social dynamics of the Internet as a public arena. Will cyberspace become a highly monitored and regionalized control space or will the Internet retain its radical potential for independent endeavors and ideological exchange? The political implications of the Internet as a social network present rich issues for creative and critical cultural production.

The nature of the Internet as a network of connected computers to exchange information engenders a sense of liberty and freedom in the individual. Early in its development, mainframe teams established host-to-host protocols such as Telnet and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) that decentralized computer networking between independent users from the main frame.1 As the network grew it evolved into a new, democratic public sphere of communication via a globally expansive routing system and a vast array of on-line applications, amongst them electronic mail, and the world wide web.2 The individual was able to interface with an enlarged public, and a new dialogical space emerged.

Given the numerous forms of exchange possible via the Internet, on-line activity parallels Nancy Faser’s re-articulation of Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere as put forth in his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas presents the public sphere as a bourgeois arena for exchange where citizens may discuss common affairs, a model based in the old town hall. In the essay, “Rethinking the Public Sphere” (1993), Nancy Fraser updates and expands the Habermasian public sphere beyond institutionalized public forums to include the market place and the domestic space (specifically in relation to domestic violence). Whereas, Habermas places market relations and domestic issues within the private sector, Fraser argues that, in doing so, these arenas of human interaction are restricted from “legitimate public contestation.”3 Fraser’s re-articulation expands the public sphere beyond the bourgeois domain to a space that is “open and accessible to all.” As the Internet becomes increasingly commonplace and interweaves itself into general daily life in such forms as list serves, chat rooms, gaming communities, a host of multi-user domains it springs to life a multiplicity of publics by Fraser’s definition.

Each public sphere is part of a civil domain that is governed by a set of laws and policies. Therefore, just as any civil, public space, the Internet must have its own set of policies that mirror those of our physical space. Amongst the on-line policies and regulations currently being established are decisions pertaining to appropriate policing and monitoring of cyber space, and determining the boundaries of privacy in a networked society.

The very nature of the Internet presents a highly efficient means of surveillance, as a networked electronic system that interfaces logical indexing machines, the computer. The ability to digitize nearly all types of records in conjunction with the computer’s indexing and networking efficiency has established the database as the most advanced archival utility.

Use of such emergent technologies has been a long time goal by policing authorities. In the essay “The Body and the Archive,” Allan Sekula traces in detail the use of photography to document, categorize and archive the human body by early criminology. As the body became a subject of the archive through photography, the fundamental problem of volume became apparent: “The early promise of photography had faded in the face of a massive and chaotic archive of images.” The electronic database’s vast storage capabilities solves the problem of volume. Hence, the photograph once used to document the body and help establish identity is replaced by data. And as various types of data such as our home address, our shopping patterns, our level of institutionalized education, our employment and income, for example, are monitored and stored data becomes a basis of identity. The electronic network used to transfer data becomes a tool of investigation due to its potential for surveillance. The questions then arises: how far will police, federal and even corporate monitoring of the electronic sphere extend? How will we ever know its parameters? Is it a matter of trust or open systems or regulatory institutions? Where and how will the lines of personal and civil rights be drawn in a networked society?

The questions surrounding on-line privacy are complex and encompass a wide number of issues such as ownership, which in itself introduces a chain of other questions. It is impossible to present an answer to these involved questions as they will continue to arise. However, I do contend that unless non-governing independent groups protect the Internet as a space for independent production, dissemination and open discourse, the radical potential of the Internet will be consumed, largely through its very nature. Therefore, if there exists today an artist avant-garde, looking to merge art with daily social life, it is the growing number of socially active artist engaged in cyber resistance as a critical practice in which the network and the database represent tools for engagement.

I will present two primary forms of resistance as executed through two artist projects. First, TO INFORM: Brooke Singer exposes her own electronic data to enlighten a general public of one’s freely available data. Second, TO SUBVERT: iSEE, a collaborative project between the Institute for Applied Autonomy and the Surveillance Camera Players makes use of the database structure to subvert the monitoring of the public sphere." Continue reading The Work of Artists in a Databased Society: net.art as on-line activism by Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, NeMe.

Posted by jo at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2006

Carlos Katastrofsky

Two New Works

REMOTE IMPRESSIONIST ART: Remote Impressionist Art consists of a webpage with coloured squares in the center. Like a framed picture these colourfields are intended to transfer one principle of impressionism into the digital age: the emphasis on light in its changing qualities. Connected to different webcams in remote parts of the world the colours of the fields are determined by them. The automatic reload every 10 seconds lets you see always newly generated impressionist artworks. This is another free piece, accessible for everyone connected to the net.

CUMPUTER: Where is the art in the process of generating artificial images? Is it the programming of the algorithm generating the picture? Is it the algorithm "at work"? Or is it the result of this work? Is art in this context defined by the artist's choice for one or more of the results or by the interaction between the artist and the machine? All those conditions are possibilites to define the art in generated pictures. Are they art? [from netbehaviour]

Posted by jo at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2006

Justin Hall's

Passively Multiplayer Online Games

Passively Multiplayer Online Games is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online. Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves. Examples of avatars: virtual pets, animals, virtual humans, virtual fantasy characters, secret agents, athletes, movie stars, famous people, gangsters, soldiers. Documentation (Quicktime). [via]

Posted by jo at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2006

The Trinity Session

UrbaNET – Hillbrow / Dakar / Hillbrow

Inspired by encounters with francophone immigrants in Hillbrow (a neighbourhood of Johannesburg’s inner city, notorious today for its state of urban decay and influx of African immigrants) Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter (for their contribution to the Dak’Art Biennale ‘Off’ Programme) interviewed a group of Senegalese immigrants asking them to draw maps of Dakar, which Hobbs/Neustetter used to navigate the city during their two week residence in May 2006. The culminating exhibition at the Ker Thiossane residency space in Dakar presented a series of wall paintings and stills projections that reflected on the interactions and engagements resulting from navigating Dakar on foot and visiting colleagues and friends of the Senegalese immigrants.

Returning to Johannesburg, the project has been featured at the “Sightings / Site-ings of the African City” conference held at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research in June, and a project page has been commissioned for the September 2006 issue of Art South Africa. The project returned to the Senegalese Immigrants as an audio-visual presentation and action-reflection session (on the comparative findings between Johannesburg and Dakar) held at Chez Ntemba night-club in Hillbrow.

UrbaNET – Hillbrow / Dakar / Hillbrow will find its conclusion in a drawing, photography and video installation in Johannesburg in 2007. Download: project visuals.

Posted by jo at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

Turbulence Commission:

"Cell Tagging" by Brooke A. Knight

Turbulence Commission: Cell Tagging by Brooke A. Knight :: The mobile phone occupies a space that is both connecting and distancing. Seemingly ubiquitous, it has become an increasingly powerful tool, functioning as a phone, PDA, browser, and camera. With "Cell Tagging" it becomes a remote control that allows users to dial, draw, and speak. After dialing the number posted on the website, users are asked to enter a zip/city code that is significant to them. An aerial map of that place loads onto the screen. After choosing a color and brush size from the palette, users can use their cell phone keypads to draw directly onto the map. They are asked to speak into the phone and say why that place and drawing is meaningful to them. Users can save their drawings to the "Cell Tagging" database where others may view them. Cell phone users "graffiti" the sound-space around them, making every place their own. "Cell Tagging" literalizes this act of marking.

"Cell Tagging" is a 2006 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the LEF Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Brooke A. Knight is an artist and educator who has been working with digital media for over a dozen years. He has exhibited in over 40 international and regional venues, including Art Interactive, Photographic Resource Center, Mediaterra 2001, and Experimenta 02. His current areas of interest include webcams, the landscape, and text in all forms. Knight’s writings have been published in Art Journal and Sandbox. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, where he teaches classes in interactive media.

Posted by jo at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2006

1001 nights cast 501st Performance

Call for Stories

1001 nights cast turns 501 this Friday 3 November. This is the half way milestone of the project. To celebrate the event I am calling upon newcomers everywhere to submit a story for that day. I will select the best to perform or I may even do a montage of several stories. So please spread the word to your writer friends.

If you want to tune in on Friday night, the live webcast will be at 7.25pm from Sydney. That is 4.25pm in Perth, Manila, Hong Kong and Singapore; 10:25am in Beirut, Jerusalem and Istanbul; 9:25am in Madrid, Paris and Berlin; 8:25am in London and Portugal; 3:25am in New York, Toronto and Bogota; 12:25am in Los Angeles.

You might like to listen to The Book Show on ABC Radio National on Thursday 2 November at 10am when I perform one of Anne Brennan's stories and she and I talk to one of the producers about the project. There will also be a piece in the arts pages of the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday 3 November (so I'm told).

Meanwhile, here are some statistics about the project to date: 133 writers have contributed since performance #0001 on June 21 2005. Together they have written about 425,000 words. At the average novel length of 80,000 that is more than 5 novels worth, all archived on the site for you to read. To this point, the site has had 23,780 visits. Currently, it is getting an average of 63 visits/day. Stories have been performed from Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne, London, Madrid, Granada and a property outside of Dungog, New South Wales (thanks to a satellite dish).

On the sobering side, I have read reports every day covering contemporary events in the Middle East in order to give writers their writing prompt. To recap on some of the things that have been told to us by journalists working for western media outlets: The coalition forces in Iraq have found no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein is still on trial for genocide. Meanwhile more than 100 Iraqi civilians are killed every day - many more if the report in The Lancet is to be believed (and why should it be discounted - the investigators were shown death certificates after all). There are now wars within wars in Iraq with no clear "strategies" for resolution. Former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafic Hariri, was assassinated, his killers still at large and Syria's involvement pointed to and denied. Hamas won the January elections in Palestine and for their voting sins, the US and Israel continue to enforce an economic blockade. The new Kadima party won the Israeli elections in March without the intellectual presence of its figurehead Ariel Sharon who still lies in a coma. Before this, some of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank were evacuated and bulldozed. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has come to power in Iran and has been denying any sinister nuclear intentions ever since, much to the frustration of Washington who still refuses to have direct talks with Tehran. Condoleeza Rice has been earning lots of frequent flyer points. And freshest in our minds is the five week Israeli/Hezbollah conflict with cluster bombs lying unexploded in the fields of southern Lebanon. In reading through all these reports, I have implemented my own kind of self-censorship. It may give you some comfort to know that I do not draw any writing prompts from straight reportage of beheadings, suicide-bombings or body counts. To quote from story #495, I would feel like a "lammergeyer in Tyre". --Barbara Campbell

Posted by jo at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2006

Synthecology

A Tele-Immersive Collaboration

Synthecology combines the possibilities of tele-immersive collaboration with a new architecture for virtual reality sound immersion to create a environment where musicians from all locations can interactively perform and create sonic environments.

Compose, sculpt, and improvise with other musicians and artists in an ephemeral garden of sonic lifeforms. Synthecology invites visitors in this digitally fertile space to create a musical sculpture of sythesized tones and sound samples provided by web inhabitants. Upon entering the garden, each participant can pluck contributed sounds from the air and plant them, wander the garden playing their own improvisation or collaborate with other participants to create/author a new composition.

As each new 'seed' is planted and grown, sculpted and played, this garden becomes both a musical instrument and a composition to be shared with the rest of the network. Every inhabitant creates, not just as an individual composer shaping their own themes, but as a collaborator in real time who is able to improvise new soundscapes in the garden by cooperating with other avatars from diverse geographical locations.

Virtual participants are fully immersed in the garden landscape through the use of passive stereoscopic technology and spatialized audio to create a networked tele-immersive environment where all inhabitants can collaborate, socialize and play. Guests from across the globe are similarly embodied as avatars through out this environment, each experiencing the audio and visual presence of the others.

Participants from the WWW use a browser interface to contribute sound elements to the garden environment for use as compositional items. All the while, this real-time composition is streamed through web broadcast of the virtual environment to illustrate the audio-visual transformation of the garden. Broadcast throughout the entirety of the festival, Synthecology will celebrate the possibilities of collaboration, improvisation, and distributed authorship that exist on the horizon of an increasingly interconnected world.

As current advances in networking become commonplace, the creation of collaborative environments connecting remote individuals will become less involved. By augmenting the possibilities for users to share sensory presence through tele-immersive interfaces, Applied Interactives intends to combine the possibilities of real-time collaboration and socialization with the dynamics of digital creation and manipulation. Synthecology is a speculative glance at how the technology of today may be utilized to create new autonomous zones for sampling & re-mixing culture.

COLLABORATORS

Synthecology is being created as a collaboration of students and faculty from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago, and art(n) through the Applied Interactives organization.

ABOUT APPLIED INTERACTIVES

The purpose of Applied Interactives, NFP is to educate the art and science community about the medium of Virtual Reality as an interactive, computer-generated, immersive computer graphics environment. Applied Interactives, NFP plans to advance the medium through research and experimentation as well as provide a bridge to bring the technology out of institutional labs and into more publicly accessible arenas. Applied Interactives, NFP intends to propagate the medium by providing support and direct access to the resources necessary for artists and scientists to exhibit and develop works in the medium.

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

Christophe Bruno (2004-2006)

The Web before the Web

The Web before the Web :: Christophe Bruno (2004-2006) :: James Joyce, Jeremy Bentham, Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, Alan Turing, Georges Perec & Marcel Bénabou, Stanley Milgram, Frederick Taylor, The Great Chain of Being, The Web after the Web.

In September 2004 Bruno was a guest-blogger for the French online magazine fluctuat.net. He wrote a series of short posts about what could be called "the precursors of the Web"... or "the Web minus the technology". (the posts in french are here.)

Here is an augmented and updated version in English.

To be published in the magazine for art and new media Aminima N°20.

Posted by jo at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

November

An Online Networked Performance TONIGHT!

November: An online Networked Performance :: Join us as we cast out the stale air of the fading summer and move together into winter. Celebrating Halloween and the changing of the season, we come together online to exchange our collected thoughts across the Internet whilst each eating garlic cloves.

This networked performance by Patrick Simons and Kate Southworth (glorious ninth) in collaboration with Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett (Furtherfield.org) will be launched at: - Time: 9 minutes and 41 seconds before midnight (GMT) :: Date: 31st October 2006 :: Location: http://november.gloriousninth.net

NOVEMBER is a performance that utilises peer-to-peer instant messaging technology, and the participants were able to see and hear each other on their computers throughout. Working with their own pre-chosen texts, each participant alternated between reading aloud and listening, amending and improvising their performances in response to each other. At times a cacophony of competing voices, the performance was a spontaneous and unrehearsed encounter, exposing moments of vulnerability, intimacy, connection and rhythm.

Posted by jo at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2006

net.tv

An Art Browser (browser as art work)

Net.tv, by Garrett Lynch, is a cross between a browser and a streaming media player designed to view the internet as it really is, code or more specifically markup, not a series of web pages designed under a print metaphor. It makes no attempt to interpret the code into an organised layout as do conventional browsers, instead it displays the code as an audio-visual stream of indeterminate length.

Why reduce the internet to an audio-visual stream? Simply to provoke thought around our use and consumption of different media, linear push media such as television and non-linear interactive pull media such as websites, which have been converging for sometime now. Net.tv's purpose is to highlight the way we as users continually construct self made narratives when we use the internet through choices based on an interact / react model. It does this by removing our ability to chose and act on those choices. Users enter a chosen url, click go and from there on the experience of 'surfing' is automated and dictated by a preprogrammed rule:

On start
{
retrieve webpage url entered.
Visualise webpage as an audio-visual stream.
Spider to first webpage url available on current webpage url.
Repeat while new url available.
}

When we use a browser to surf the internet what we view and how we view it is controlled by the browser. It functions as a framing mechanism and for net.art this can be considered a problem or challenge depending on your point of view. The creation of a browser as a work of net.art allows an artist to not alone create an artwork but control how and under what conditions it will be viewed.

"After the first experiments with web sites, the browser rapidly became the unavoidable framework for Net art [sic] in the eyes of the artists. Webstalker, created by the London-based art group I/O/D and introduced in the first part of net.art, was the first 'art browser' to call into question the conventions of representation on the internet on a much more fundamental level than any work on the web was able to. After Webstalker, a whole series of art browsers appeared...they show precisely what 'normaly' browsers try to hide. Instead of Web sites with pretty designs, one sees what lies beneth the surface: the code the pages have been written in and the structure of the Web sites appearing on the screen as complex diagrams which most definitely have their own aesthetic appeal." (Baumgärtel, T. 2001)

By denying the user any possibility of interaction with or control over browsing content when using net.tv, the possibility to surf the internet, the user is in fact denied the status of user and becomes simply a spectator of a broadcast medium much like television. Web pages, net.art works themselves (including the artists own) become input, the equivalent of a signal for the browser, suppling a constant feed of content which controls the browser and the path it takes through the internet. Linking from page to page or site to site is no longer a controlled or chosen decision by the user. Instead the application decides constantly spiraling off onto new pages as soon as it finds a link.

Unlike most browsers which exist and are defined by the content they depict, their message, the internet as viewed / interpreted through net.tv is no longer a source of information. It is a browser which is viewed solely for its aesthetic form, an abstracted composition of sounds and images.

Net.tv is available to download for Mac OSX 10.2+, Mac OS 8/9 and Windows 98 / Millennium Edition / NT 4.0 / 2000, or XP from the artists website.

a+
gar

Garrett[at]asquare.org
http://www.asquare.org/

Posted by jo at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2006

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

e and eyeToy

Noah Wardrip-Fruin's contribution to the Tate’s e and eye project has just gone live: “e and eyeToy.” Where else can you get Myron Krueger, Camille Utterback, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, EyeToy: Play and much more all bundled into one short essay?

"The Tate's "material gestures" hang cuts across time, but I find my mind settles, first, on the moment of abstract expressionism in the U.S. This work brings the artist's gesture into a particular relationship with artworks shown in museums.

This might be contrasted with the nearby moment of the Happening - the attempt to incorporate the live gesture, including the audience gesture, into artwork that was self-consciously unshowable. The blurring of art and everyday life, as a book title of the Happening's most famous proponent would have it later.

Now we enter a moment in which, through interaction, we see the gesture of the audience being incorporated into showable art. This work moves beyond video art, which included the audience as an image of itself. Now the audience, while perhaps also visible as an image within the work, becomes data - one of the fundamental components of digital media. In work such as that selected by Camille Utterback for the "New Materiality" installment of "e and eye" the audience's gesture is seen to drive the work, to fundamentally produce what we see. The audience's gesture can drive the work by providing data because the artist has begun to work with a particular material: digital computation." Continue reading e and eyeToy by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. [via]

Posted by jo at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2006

Turbulence Artist’s Studio:

"Headlines" by Michael Takeo Magruder

Turbulence Artists' Studios: Headlines by Michael Takeo Magruder [Needs Flash Player 7] :: Headlines examines the mediated histories generated by today’s news corporations and reflects upon our collective preoccupation with real-time information generation, distribution and access. Given the developed world’s countless network structures and our current state of data saturation, has news media evolved beyond mere information source and become a new form of cultural stimulant?

Headlines was created for OOG, a commentary and opinion platform for the online edition of De Volkskrant a major Dutch daily national newspaper. "OOG" began in September 2005 as a platform in which every week a different artist working in sound and image is asked to respond to news and current affairs. The selection of artists participating has grown into a varied group of national and international artists working with very different forms of expertise and approaches. In this way, artists are using their skills to become commentators on events in a news environment. After each week, the work is placed in the archive.

The artists participating in "OOG" are a diverse and renowned group of applied and autonomous artists both from inside and outside The Netherlands. "OOG" is one of the most visited pages within the Volkskrant website with weekly visits of 3,000-5,000.

BIOGRAPHY

Michael Takeo Magruder is an American artist based in the UK deploying New and Technological Media within Fine Art contexts. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1996 receiving a BA (Hons) in Biological Science. He is a long-standing member of King's Visualization Lab in the Centre for Computing in Humanities, King's College London. Through this organization he undertakes research, development and implementation of emerging technologies; including motion capture, immersive space and virtual environments, for use in contemporary creative and academic practice.

Takeo’s artworks have been showcased in over 150 exhibitions and 25 countries, including venues such as the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, EAST International 2005, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau. His works are regular inclusions in international New Media festivals, such as Cybersonica, CYNETart, FILE, Filmwinter, SeNef, Siggraph and Split. His artistic practice has been funded directly by Arts Council England, The National Endowment for the Arts, USA and numerous public galleries both within the UK and abroad. He is also recognized for his on-line arts practice and has been commissioned by leading portals for Internet Art such as Turbulence.org and Soundtoys.net. As artist/curator, he has been responsible for the internationally-renowned touring exhibitions, Net:Reality, the Cyber-Kitchen and Spectrum.

Artistically, his current interests concern the simultaneous utilization and dissection of new technology as a means to explore the formal structures and conceptual paradigms of the digital realm. He seeks to create artworks in which there are no divisions between technologies, aesthetics, and concepts.

Posted by jo at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

Katy Shepherd's

Vitreous Humour Project

In this age of "high definition" I have taken a contrary interest in technology's failings, for example the way certain camera film has colour biases, scratches and glitches on the surface / distortions of brightness and contrast / flickering / dropped frames when a computer plays back. Consequently I have developed a fascination in the parallel limitations of an artist as a fallible mortal, in particular the inadequacies of memory and eyesight.

Is it a common held belief that an artist is born with the talent to see the world differently to others? - more vividly perhaps, a heightened experience? - with more insight? - they are more visually aware? - they are gifted? They are able to see beauty and design where others see the everyday? An onerous responsibility I think. What are the public's expectations of an artist?

The Vitreous Humour project will allow people to explore these beliefs (myths?) by enabling them to view their own images through the eyes of an artist - my eyes.

I have particles in my eyes called floaters that move around in the fluid of my eyes - the vitreous humour. They are very common, many people have them but of course each person's are individual to themselves. "Floaters" are the shadows cast on the retina of the microscopic structures in the vitreous humour. Some of these may be due to condensations of vitreous collagen which degenerates with age - creating increasing numbers of floaters. These may look like specks, worms, single or clumped, hair - like, forms. Others may be remnants of debris from the hyaloid artery that nourishes the eye of the foetus but starts to disintegrate by the seventh month of development. It disappears by birth bar a small amount of debris inside the eye.

Floaters are easier to see if you lie on a bed and look at a diffusely illuminated ceiling or a bright sky. However they are constantly falling away from the centre of the eye so can only be seen clearly for a brief moment. If your eyes move more quickly the floaters will flick around your eye, rushing to keep up with the movement but always slightly behind or overshooting it. This flickering movement gave rise to the latin name - muscae volitantes - fluttering flies.

I have attempted to create my own elusive shadows as digital entities. "Vitreous Humour" the film is an animation of my eyes examining , in close up, a family snap of myself as a new born baby (taken 1961). The photo appears as if seen through my eyes. It is a self portrait - of sorts.

Secondly there is a program to download that enables you to view your own images as if through my eyes. It will certainly be a unique vision but whether this will enhance or degrade the image I couldn't say.

Posted by jo at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2006

Ah-ha: Narrative Structures in Reactive and Interactive Video Art

Connecting the Physical and the Digital

[Image left: "Guillotine" by Steve Shoffner) "Performance is so many things: the synchronized sounds of a symphony; actions with words in a play; steps and turns in a dance; words from a pulpit. Performance art, too, is variable, perhaps too multifarious to define, even with semicolons. At traditional performances with traditional support materials, from symphonies with program notes to theatre productions with playbills, performance acts as replay, a repeat of an event, a memorization of a string of notes or a set of lines, a reformulation of a tested formula. Then there are those performances that vary, that respond to the moment, that unfold through the implementation of chance or improvisation or, more and more, digitization. With the insertion of new technologies into performance, the question arises – do actions result from numbers? What indeed is the connection between the physical and the digital? Does the digital component determine the performance, or do actions generate a numeric pattern, which then underlies the piece's structure?

The aesthetic and conceptual import of digital performance pieces is linked to the ordering of a piece's technological components. Random sequencing is one form of structuring immersive environments or data-triggered scenes. Fixed sequencing of scenes, with a predetermined index of performed actions and triggered events, follows a preset score. Alternately, sensory responsive improvisation is flexible and often produces variations in structure. In each case, the piece's content is the result of a digital system: programming or computer responses to external stimuli determine how the performance plays out. Even interactive improvisation, in which a human action triggers a computerized event, is a digital system, albeit one that emphasizes the human element, or input, in that system. The content of an interactive piece is closely related to its structure – the interaction between trigger, whether generated by the viewer or performer, and event. Interesting variations in content emerge when the structure becomes the art.

Below, by electronic interview, four new media artists describe their modes of working with interactive technologies and probe the relationship between order and content in their work. Johannes Birringer makes telematic connections in performance, installation, and video. Mark Coniglio co-directs the interactive dance company, Troika Ranch, with Dawn Stoppiello; he both designed and implements the interactive software, Isadora. Cat Jones' alternate persona catgURL interacts with viewers while performing live on and off the screen. Steve Shoffner instigates interactions with viewers while performing simultaneously on video and within his installations." From Ah-ha: Narrative Structures in Reactive and Interactive Video Art by L. Hermes Griesbach, VJ Theory: ART, 12/10/06.

Posted by jo at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)

Andy Deck

Archived Performance at VisitorsStudio

Every now and then somemof the Furtherfield crew review some of the
archived content on the VisitorsStudio. Some times by projecting it up
on as wall whilst consuming coffee or alcohol in the studio at Furtherfield.

Earlier today we came across an archived performance by Andy Deck in the
VisitorsStudio - and thought, this is pretty decent work.

- Turn the volume up and give it a few seconds to load, and then just
sit back and enjoy... [Marc Garrett]

Posted by jo at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2006

From The Great Beyond

Talking with the Internet

Is the Internet becoming an entity? If the answer is positive, what are the characteristics of this being?, wonders Fang-Yu Lin. Inspired by the Turing Test, he designed From The Great Beyond, a typerwriter that has (seemingly) a life of its own.

By typing on the keyboard of the custom robotic typewriter, you are able to "chat" with the Internet while the background application searches online resources for response. There's not screen, the typewriter automatically prints out the resulting text or ASCII art on a paper roll for you to view or keep. Be it whimsical, intelligent or simply irrelevant, the typed words of the Internet reveal a fragment of truth regarding itself.

The existence of an invisible entity is suggested by the noise of the typing and flowing responses spit out from the typewriter. Video. Via exibart.

More typewriter: TTSM (Typewriter Tracklog Sewing Machine), by Alejandro Duque, uses a GPS device to track and save the data of a journey without destination; 22POP is a typewriter that sends typed letters as emails to your destinary; Life Writer turns the letters typed into artificial life creatures that appear to float on the paper of the machine. Also: The Universal Digest Machine features a web spider that crawls the net, digesting web pages, outputting a brief analysis of their contents and printing it on a receipt. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]

Posted by jo at 08:25 AM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2006

Coke Is It

Suicidal Robot

Coke Is It, by SWAMP, is a robotic performance, a comment on the marketing strategies deployed by companies such as Coca Cola. They infuse our culture with a sense of well being and elevated self worth that contradicts the actual benefits of the consumable product.

C3 is a hex-crawler robot, outfitted with a CMUcam and sensors, enabling it with the ability to search and find puddles of Coca Cola placed on the gallery floor. When C3 finds a puddle of coke, it sucks the beverage up through an electrical pump, and then sprays it across itself. After several feedings, the acidic nature of the coke eventually eats through the robots skin. Eventually this "digestive" process finds its way to the circuitry, causing it to break down.

The performance concludes when the robot is consumed to the point where it has killed itself. Video. Suicide in media art: Kurt Cobain's Suicide letter meets google adsense; Suicide Solution, a DVD documentation collected over a year of committing suicide in over 50 first and third person shooter games; and The Lovers, two networked machines, one infected with a virus, slowly infecting the other through the interface of classic romantic poetry. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]

Posted by jo at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2006

Oppera Internettikka - Protection et Sécurité

FearingS

What is fear? Why should you be afraid? What, who is to fear? Where does your fear come from? Participate in creating a collective voice about "fear". Help reveal its actual tendencies.

FearingS is a part of the project Oppera Internettikka - Protection et Sécurité by Annie Abrahams & Igor Stromajer.

Oppera Internettikka - Protection et Sécurité explores the poetics of a contemporary sound form -- live opera as a sound event for the audience in the form of a live internet audio broadcasting. In that way it combines the notion of the world wide web communication protocols and classical artspace -- an opera house. Opera is a very strictly coded form of art with a lot of passion, and internet is a lonely place of solitude and intimate communication which is becoming more and more fragile, dangerous and suspicious.

The theme of the project is security and protection, which refers both to private and personal safety issues in the present post-WTC world of high and intense but questionable security measures and to the internet as a global and therefore extremely vulnerable and unstable communication tool.

Three artists with specific roles (artist Annie Abrahams as mutter courage, intimate mobile communication artist Igor Stromajer as bigbrother and professional opera singer as French secret service agent) are performing a complex structure combined of sounds, voices, noises, internet audio files and sound-manipulating machines and are using these sounds to perform/sing/reproduce a story for the audience present in the opera house, and for those following the audio part of the project live on the internet worldwide.

The libretto for the opera is composed out of three sources -- mutter courage is using the texts written and proposed in advance by the online visitors, bigbrother's only lyrics comes from a web search engine which he is manipulating in realtime, and the secret service agent is singing the HTML source code (Hypertext Markup Language - the authoring software language used on the internet's world wide web for creating world wide web pages) and Java scripts (JavaScript is a script language - a system of programming codes that can be embedded into the HTML of a web page to add functionality) from specifically selected French secret service web sites, openly available on the internet.

It is a new media project filled with abstract emotions, created in a valuable tradition of Bauhaus musical theater mixed with Dada, sound poetry and contemporary digital means of expression. Therefore the location of L'Opéra National de Montpellier has been selected to emphasize our efforts of introducing new artistic forms and production processes to the audience.

Project supported by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of France, The Municipality of Montpellier, The Council of the Languedoc-Roussillon region and Rhizome.org 2006-2007 Commissions. Co-produced by Intima Virtual Base (Slovenia), Panoplie.org & bram.org (France)

Posted by jo at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2006

Turbulence Commission:

"Nothing Happens - a performance in three acts"

Turbulence Commission: Nothing Happens by Nurit Bar-Shai, Zachary Lieberman and Rich Miller :: Nothing Happens is a networked online performance in which the viewers work together to make a series of objects tip over. The performance consists of three acts, which are centered on staged environments – a high shelf, a cluttered tabletop, and a deserted corner. Each scene contains a central protagonist, respectively: a cardboard box, a clear pint glass full of water, and a wooden chair. In all three acts, web-enabled physical devices controlled by the viewer’s clicks will make these objects tip over.

The three acts will be presented on October 15th, 22nd and 29th at 3rd Ward gallery Brooklyn. Please join the artists for an opening reception Sunday, October 15, 2006 6-8 p.m.

"Nothing Happens" is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from The Greenwall Foundation. Additional support from 3rd Ward Gallery.

BIOGRAPHIES

NURIT BAR-SHAI'S main interest lies in exploring tensions between the mundane and the uncanny in everyday life. Emanating from her creative roots in fine arts, Bar-Shai employs video and new technologies to explore fundamental questions of presentation and representation, to reframe the familiar and turn audiences into foreigners in their own ontological domains.

ZACHARY LIEBERMAN'S work uses technology in a playful and enigmatic way to explore the nature of communication and the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible. He creates performances, installations, and on-line works that investigate gestural input, augmentation of the body, and kinetic response.

RICH MILLER is a sculptor and a recent graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. His creative energies are focused on making electro-mechanical pieces that humor him, as well as designing and fabricating innovative and dynamic children’s museum interactives and furniture. He lives and works in Astoria, NY.

Posted by jo at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2006

Riot Gear for Rollartista

An Action Dedicated to African/Muslim Immigrants

Riot Gear for Rollartista: a blog and mobile gaming performance project by Anne-Marie Schleiner and Talice Lee. This blog is for posting information about a performance action we are doing in Castellon Spain on Saturday October 21, 2006 as part of an exhibition at EACC Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castell from October-January 2007. It will involve three short Machinima (stories told with video game footage) videos that will be beamed from an ultra-light projector stapped to one of our head helmets. (The videos are now linked from the blog to YouTube.) We sampled the two Playstation games Narc and MechWarrior. It sort of evolved into a violent (break) dance musical and each video is dedicated to an African or Muslim immigrant who was seriously abused by police in Spain or France. We, two American women in padded anime/riot gear/something else inspired moda, will be holding Playstation controllers and rollerskating at the same time, (and sometimes dancing), while we coast around projecting onto surfaces of the city.

After the performance/action we will also post documentation videos and photos on the blog.

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

October 09, 2006

Turbulence Commission:

"Self-Portrait" by Ethan Ham

Self-Portrait is a software search for the artist's face among the millions contained in the photos uploaded to www.flickr.com. The project's site displays three photos: 1) an ever-changing photo that depicts what is currently being evaluated by "Self-Portrait's" facial recognition software; 2) the most recent photo that was identified as containing a face. (The software often misses seeing faces and occasionally misidentifies an inanimate object as a face.); and 3) the most recent photo that has a high probability of depicting Ethan Ham (the artist). Clicking on this photo allows viewing earlier photos that were found to contain Ethan.

"Self-Portrait" is a 2006 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Ethan Ham is a kinetic and new media artist who has recently moved to New York from Portland, Oregon. His projects often involve art generated by viewer participation, seemingly random events, and/or automated means. He is Assistant Professor of New Media at City College of New York, CUNY.

Posted by jo at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2006

Kostas Daflos

Bodysmaze/Cibo _05

In Kostas Daflos' last visual art work Bodysmaze/ Cibo _05 which consists a performance machine for the production of virtual spaces, the specific site of the interactive installation reinforces the tangible urban public space. The human action is being captured by a web camera, which activates a programmed robot -unit and produces a thermoelectric, -liquid nebula environment, as an interface, which is the medium for the projection and the intermediary in the communication of our visual experience with the technological platform of the personal computer. In his former visual artworks as in Cipo _03 (and here), and its genuine descendant muscle- skeleton Cipo _04, he focused his research on visual plasticity, video-installations and interactive real environments, co-existing automatic intelligence' robotic objects with human beings and communicating via web cameras . His artworks expand the real space in the World Wide Web.

Kostas Daflos:

Architect - National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A.), School of Architecture, Sculptor -National Athens School of Fine Arts (A.S.F.A). Postgraduate Degree in «Digital Forms of Art», National Athens School of Fine Arts (A.S.F.A.), in collaboration with the Department of Computer & Information Science, Polytechnic School of Patras University.

He is a PHD Candidate at the N.T.U.A., School of Architecture. He focused his research on visual plasticity, video-installations and interactive real environments, where automatic intelligence’ robotic objects co-exist with human beings and communicate via web cameras. His artworks expand the real space in the World Wide Web.

Since 1997 he has participated: in several research programs, in conferences, in national and international architectural competitions with awards, national and international exhibitions. The areas of expertise include human computer interaction, computer mediated environments, new media, and interactive multimedia installations. His interest is to create a new class of “connected objects”. He is an author of a number of essays on contemporary architecture, arts and communications. He curates and participates in web sites with a personal theoretical and visual art work www.transitionalathens.com, www.apothecae.com. He teaches Visual Arts and Digital

Representations at the Polytechnic School of Patras University, Department of Architecture.

Posted by jo at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)

The Copy and Paste Show

A Virtual Gallery in Brooklyn

Projects by Seth Price, Ida Ekblad & Anders Nordby and 808 :: Curated by Hanne Mugaas :: The Copy and Paste Show explores the evolution of copy-and-paste culture, through which the copying of digital material has become a major technique in the construction of online identity and style. As with any visual style, web aesthetics often rely on the appropriation of non-original media. In design, people often copy html codes from other websites in order to sample existing material. In constructing online profiles or personal websites, participants often call upon found images, video or graphics. In this context, software and tools gains importance, as they enable new kinds of sharing and distribution amongst cultural producers, and amateurs become empowered to create and distribute sophisticated and layered work. The artists in The Copy and Paste Show explore how technical and digital tools alter web aesthetics, music production, and online and offline relations through the use of copy and paste techniques.

This show is part of Time Shares, a series of online exhibitions co-presented by Rhizome and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Time Shares was launched in tandem with Rhizome's Tenth Anniversary Festival.

Posted by jo at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2006

New Media Poetics

Poetry Composed, Disseminated, and Read on Computers

New Media Poetics edited by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss :: New media poetry--poetry composed, disseminated, and read on computers--exists in various configurations, from electronic documents that can be navigated and/or rearranged by their "users" to kinetic, visual, and sound materials through online journals and archives like UbuWeb, PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center. Unlike mainstream print poetry, which assumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media poetry assumes a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. The essays and artist statements in this volume explore this synergy's continuities and breaks with past poetic practices and its profound implications for the future.

By adding new media poetry to the study of hypertext narrative, interactive fiction, computer games, and other digital art forms, New Media Poetics extends our understanding of the computer as an expressive medium, showcases works that are visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic, and traces the lineage of new media poetry through print and sound poetics, procedural writing, gestural abstraction and conceptual art, and activist communities formed by emergent poetics.

Contributors:: Giselle Beiguelman, John Cayley, Alan Filreis, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Alan Golding, Kenneth Goldsmith, N. Katherine Hayles, Cynthia Lawson, Jennifer Ley, Talan Memmott, Adalaide Morris, Carrie Noland, Marjorie Perloff, William Poundstone, Martin Spinelli, Stephanie Strickland, Brian Kim Stefans, Barrett Watten, Darren Wershler-Henry

Adalaide Morris is John C. Gerber Professor of English at the University of Iowa, where Thomas Swiss is Professor of English and Rhetoric of Inquiry.

Thomas Swiss is Professor of English and Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa.

June 2006
The MIT Press
A Leonardo Book
ISBN 0-262-13463-2. 416 pp., 92 illus.

Posted by jo at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2006

Marco Villani

This is a net.art operation

Marco Villani's DNA has been analysed by the Forensic Science Laboratory of the University of Genova for identification purposes. Today, Villani will conduct a Net.art operation: he will put the results of his DNA profile online for people to download together with a text. Please e-mail him at info[at]marcovillani.net with your response; use "Dna on the net" in the subject line. Your comments will be posted on the site.

Also on the site is a video about the analysis of Villani's DNA with an interview to Doctor Simonetta Verdiani (on the site will be a little trailer).

This is an investigation into the concept of “Biopolitics” coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is a category which analyses the profound relationships that link the individual to power. This kind of link is based on a system of permanent reading of the subject in which science and technology converge. Every subject is a never-ending source of data which makes up an archive of knowledge through which it is possible to organise social behaviours. The topics range from demographics to psychology, psycho-attitudinal tests and medical tests.

HANGING ON A THREAD OF REALITY

Identity is the essence of a relationship, in which symbolic and biological systems and existential orbits tackling life’s complexities converge. The attractive pole around which these systems rotate is the subject, the termination declined according to the group of social-linguistic practices that form his or her ecological niche and take possession of the inner system. This process of appropriation is the place in which an individual is formed, in keeping with a social image. The desires that pulse in the body and the sadness that flows through it reside in the linguistic flows that are rooted within in his or her experience.

There’s no escape route towards an authenticity which isn’t an expression of the ability to decide, decided within the form of language. Strength works directly at primitive and unconscious level so that man perceives his inner qualities as natural as opposed to derived. But Self is a relationship. And it is from this characteristic that the possibility to communicate and receive communication germinates in bios, along with the possibility to be organised and dominated in keeping with the political ideas that man has expressed in the ages that have succeeded one another on the earth.

Biopolitics is the term used by Michel Foucault to describe this relationship. It indicates the dynamics through which the subject is possessed by the codes he or she has learned in order to observe the silence of things. These codes, added to the technical apparatus with which men surround themselves, are the shape taken on by collective behaviour.

The filing of the body and the analysis of the attitudes imprinted permanently on the individual by science, technique and jurisprudence, make up a technological device which allows the objectification of the subject in a complex combination of information, making social use possible.

This is possible because language acts as a code for the programming of behaviour and perception and its use by the subject as a model of cosmos does not fall within the scope of choice. It precedes choice in the same way that the fact that we are born with a body, two eyes, our own DNA and everything else precede choice. It isn’t possible to make a clear division between the biological level and linguistic level. There are numerous nuances that highlight how the linguistic aspect contains a biological residue and how the biological aspect contains a linguistic form. The Hopi tribes of New Mexico use a single term to describe blue and green together. This implies that their nervous perception identifies a single linguistic phenomenon, while our culture identifies two. In the same way, the Eskimos use twenty different words to say “white”.
Both of these dimensions are certain elements.

So is there a point of escape towards freedom? Towards choice?

This place is still the subject. The dimension of subjection to language and to the body as certain is realised within it, along with the possibility for criticism, which is born of the conjuncture with experience. It is here that language is exposed to the heterogeneous influence. And it is here that particles of entropy and desires collide with it, envelop it and cross it.

The inner dynamics of this process remain bio-linguistic, as there is no linguistic nudity. The reality we take possession of and which takes possession of us is, in any case, the result of a process of mediation implemented by a nervous system, whether it is linguistic, organic or both.

The profound structure that makes this kind of system possible is the fact that all things are part of a relationship. And this is the relationship between the already experienced aspect of language and the live experience of self, the original condition of the individual. A perpetual condition of crossing, of moving beyond, which is simply another way of staying put.

In this being constantly on the edge humanity becomes aware that it doesn’t have to realise any essence or substance or historical destiny. The apparatus that captivate it are always the ideological result of an historical conjuncture that carries individual and collective destinies within.

But destiny, seen from here, is a union of particles and, as such, has a place, a time and a body, which make it constantly up to date compared with all the magnetic flows which exercise their attraction upon it. This being up to date is the gap that blends the possibility of criticism and ethic experience.

Marco Villani, 2006

Posted by jo at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2006

WJ-s

Web Performances in Real Space

WJ-s web performances in real space in Maribor and Ljubljana, Slovenia :: September 26th - 30th 2006.

Satellite Night Fever :: live WJ-s performance by Davide Grassi, Aksioma: Traveling around the world does not start and does not end at home. In between there is a planet which is a window into the world. In 365 megabytes with software around the world.

RoboMarseillaise :: live WJ-s performance by Igor Stromajer, Intima Virtual Base: Historical facts are constructed fiction and fictive construction. History is written by winners, facts are written by artists.

# performances: Maribor: Gallery KiBela, Tuesday September 26th 2006 at 9 PM; Ljubljana: Cyberpipe, Friday, September 29th 2006 at 9 PM Admission free.

# open workshops: Maribor: Gallery KiBela, Wednesday, September 27th 2006 from 11 AM until 2 PM, Ljubljana: Cyberpipe, Saturday, September 30th 2006 from 11 AM until 2 PM, Practical artistic workshop on WJ-s software, lead by Anne Roquigny in collaboration with Stéphane Kyles. Admission free.

Concept: Anne Roquigny, new media curator, France
Programming WJ-s/oftware: Stéphane Kyles, artist / programmer, France Web performers in real space: Davide Grassi (Satellite Night Fever) and Igor Stromajer (RoboMarseillaise), Slovenia

Co-produced by Intima Virtual Base - Institute for Contemporary Arts Multimedia Center KIBLA, MAribor Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ljubljana.

Partner: Multimedia Center Cyberpipe / Kiberpipa, Ljubljana

Co-financed by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana and Institut Français Charles Nodier, Ljubljana.

# information in Slovenian language: http://www.wj-s.org/Maribor-Ljubljana

# information in English and French: http://www.wj-s.org

"WJ-s" is a software and a flexible, high speed connexion public device for web performances which allows actors of the Internet, webjockeys, sound and image artists, netartists, bloggers, graphic designers, flashers, programmers, curators, hacktivists, new media theorists, pioneers and web mutants... to play live with the full scope of contents available in the wideness of the web.

About the authors:

Davide Grassi is a media artist, performer and producer of Italian origins working and living in Ljubljana since 1995. His artistic work has a strong social connotation and is characterized by an inter-media approach. Grassi is the author of numerous videos, performances, installations, documentaries and media projects. Among them I Need Money to Be an Artist, Brainscore (with Darij Kreuh), Problemarket - the Problem Stock Exchange (with Igor Stromajer), machinaZOIS and DemoKino.

Igor Stromajer is an intimate mobile communicator. He researches tactical emotional states and traumatic low-tech strategies. He has shown his work at more than a hundred exhibitions in forty-two countries and received a number of awards. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia; Computerfinearts Gallery, New York and others.

Posted by jo at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)

BLACK TIME is not a BLACK BOX modernising a WHITE CUBE

perfinstallation

Abstract preview: BLACK TIME is not a BLACK BOX modernising a WHITE CUBE :: Following the completion of a cycle of 5 communications for 5 continents at the end of 2005, "from Scenography to Planetary Network", via a wi-fi internet link from an aeroplane in flight between Shanghai and Munich, and on being invited by criticalsecret, we are now proposing a ‘perfinstallation’ during the inauguration of the 2006 Salon de la Revue in Paris. This show's name gives a nod to a contemporary play, but does not permit communication with the other. It simply tries to transform a mobile into a sort of awareness machine with an editorial line that is set where the Dream Machine stops. This show is made up of images gathered from the internet and a sound track, as a first revue for mobiles (as a 3gp file) transmitted only between 21:00 hrs and 22:00 hrs via the number ‘+33677804966’ (via Mms) from my mobile (Nokia 6233).

Thus, this creation-action is actually giving real expression to another ‘sound-image’ which the artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had already thought up in the last century. Nevertheless, from then on, technological performances set up an empty space in a post-mediatic universe that was not emerging but converging, which can still be freed of meaning simply by linking up with our lives, as experienced in plays by Dan Graham X or John Knight "Site displacement" 1969 during the mass media age. As part of setting up the transmission of a "Theater of Utopia" digitised animation, which will take place in honour of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux on the bicentenary of his death, on 19 November, we are going to test it on Friday 13 October, using a wi-fi link for a live streaming, from zero convergence, via the Internet and viewable on Internet-enabled mobiles, at this address rtsp://qts.zonepro.com/ancel/X (on your video player) before announcing the forthcoming "Black Time" in a podcast version for criticast.net. Contact Franck Ancel info[at]franck-ancel.com.

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

September 21, 2006

Google-ad hacks

Kurt Cobain's Suicide Letter vs. Google AdSense

A few years ago, French artist Christophe Bruno created the Google AdWords Happening, in which he utilized the AdWords program to publish abstract poetry instead of ads. Google didn't find the happening appropriate hence, he got banned.

Last year Bruno's happening was followed up by GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself, an artistic click-fraud scheme developed by Hans Bernhard & Alessandro Ludovico. GWEI turned Google's ubiquitous AdSense program against Google itself in order to draw public attention to the fact that Google's immense popularity constitutes a democratic paradox. The operation was quickly discovered and stopped by Google.

Now, US artist Cory Arcangel has added to the list of conceptual Google-ad hacks. Arcangel recently put up a webpage containing the entire text from Kurt Cobain's suicide note and paired it with Google AdSense.

Naturally, the text-ads generated by Cobain's suicide note are totally absurd and so, the site demonstrates just how clueless AdSense is despite Google's claim that 'AdSense can deliver relevant ads because Google understand the meaning of a webpage'. [blogged on Guerrilla Innovation]

Posted by jo at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

[iDC] Some things about things

"Performance" and Situated Technologies.

I thought I might introduce a paradigm, that of "performance", into the discussion of situated technologies. This could provide a way to talk about people and things in networked milieus without fetishizing the object or exceptionalizing the human.

Trebor writes: "Sociality between networked objects and humans is a core question. Who is served by such mythologizing rhetoric with terms like "co-inhabiting"? These, ___ (fill in the blank) are just pieces of metal and silicon... They are around and they make some things easier and they (will) join our conversations by contributing data."

And Anne also points out: "I also wonder about a current fetishising of 'things'. Or how can we 'return to the object' without privileging objectivity? I really disliked the phrase 'the internet of things' when I first heard it, but I've since embraced it as a rather lovely manifestation of a type of contemporary commodity fetishism."

Firstly, as a designer I can't help but like things. Sometimes they are buildings but mostly they are just things. I don't design them in and for themselves but to be used by a variety of actors: people (gender age and race a clear consideration) but also for institutions (and here I use it in Agre's terminology: http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/hci.html) like festivals and cities. Although I agree with Anne's warning of fetishizing, I don't think it will be of the object. Their will be nostalgia for the material object, but it will be difficult in light of networked technologies, virtual/real hybrids to essentialise and fetishize the object in the same way again. What I do think will be become fetishized if it hasn't already is "performance".

Jon McKenzie in his book _Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance_ attempts to formulate a general theory of performance by drawing on three strands of concurrent but fundamentally independent researches: "Performance Studies", "Management Performance" and "Techno-Performance". All three are products of the post-war: Performance Studies taking its germination from theater studies and anthropology, Management Performance developing in opposition to Taylor's Scientific Management and Techno-Performance Research tied to computer science and engineering. What McKenzie tries to do is demonstrate the "normativity" of performance. Performance has become a mode of measuring, evaluating and ultimately reifying forms of knowledge and power. The nature of these measures/values differs from one activity to another and McKenzie distills three to coincide with his three research areas: "efficacy" for cultural performances, "efficiency" for organizational performance and "effectiveness" for technological performance. These valuations are instrumental in maintaining "high standards" (normative) while also issuing a challenge (operational) to all those that wish to participate. It is in the relationship between challenging and performance that McKenzie finds "the power of performance":

"At the crack of millennia, performativity guides innumerable processes ranging from the intricacies of class, race, ethnic, gender, and sexual identification to the large-scale installations of technologies, organizations and cultures. "Perform- or else" is a challenge made in the USA and now restoring itself worldwide through innumerable circuits... Challenging is the fundamental tonality of this transformation without foundation; it is the affective dimension of the performance stratum, the shifting element of its "perform_ or else." Accordingly, the age of global performance is not only populated by high performers, peak performers, star performers, performers who challenge forth themselves and others, but also by the performatively challenged, those who cannot perform up to spec: the mentally challenged, the physically challenged, the economically challenged, the digitally challenged, the stylistically challenged and even the liminally challenged. Perform- or else: there is no performance without challenge, without claims and contestations, demands and accusations, field tests and identity checks, as well as the occasional untimely dare (p.188)"

In light of the performance paradigm Sterling's spimes are interesting. They rise to the challenge of techo-effectiveness as they as incredibly sophisticated compositions of cutting edge technologies: rfid, gps, the internet, CAD, rapid prototyping and recycling. They rise culturally to the environmental challenge because as they transform materially and informationally over their lifetime they develop a history with their environment (people and other things). And when their use is up they forfeit their material existence for the benefit of other spimes and the planet. Organizationally they would be an efficient version of my verizon mobile phone service or my fav software, both organizations of "convenience", quick fixes, and upgrades every n years. Also spimes carry lifetime warranties, which tie me to a contract that probably carries heavy penalties, social and financial, if I want to opt out. The spime program appeals to designers and why shouldn't it? It has great technical challenges tied to social responsibility. This is innovation with conscience. In conflict resolution parlance it is a win-win.

McKenzie again:

"The most striking aspect of performative power is that it actually encourages transformation, innovation, even transgression and perversion. No longer objects of discipline, we now perform, multitask, do our own thing. This last aspect of performance is especially troubling, for it reveals the libidinal infrastructure of contemporary domination. Deleuze, reading Foucault, writes that strata coalesce around relatively rare perfomative statements or "order-words." The order word of the performance stratum? Perform- or else."

This is the paradox of performance, it is "normative" but also "mutational". The disaffection that I sense from Trebor and Anne's posts seem to be directed at performance's normative tendencies: techno-effectiveness with its concerns for "optimizing" and organizational-efficiency with its needs on "streamlining". Perhaps it is easy for us on this list to rally around cultural performances, theater, dance, performance art, aesthetic practices, political demonstrations and "free cooperation", whose aims are social efficacy. But I am suspicious that it won't be so easy to decouple one type of performance from another. As McKenzie also points out "the paradigms are coming into contact more and more, and as their citational networks become hyperlinked, their respective performatives and performances break apart and recombine in a highly charged, highly pressurized milieu."

This brings me to Architecture and Situated Technologies. I think architecture in architecture in particular is a good example of the "perform-or else" challenge. It requires efficient organizational management to handle the considerable capital that it uses, it provides lots of work making it one of the engines of the global economy, its practitioners are concerned with the aesthetic, social and environmental effects of their project (mostly) and technical innovation is a hallmark of its quality. The role of situated technologies in this mix can be twofold. They can contribute to achieving the prime directive ("perform-or else") or they can open the performance of architecture up to unscripted performances which would allow for other socialities: alterity, participation, learning, cooperation. It all depends on "which" situated technologies we are talking about and not "what" situated technology.

In my last post I evoked the specter of Gordon Pask, "mister cybernetics" to suggest some antecedents for this symposium. In addition to his contributions to the subject of cybernetics and human-machine interaction he was a performer and "dramaturg" http://www.pangaro.com/published/Pask-as-Dramaturg.html. In July, 1968 Gregory Bateson organized a conference in Burg Wartenstein, Austria entitled "Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation." Its proceedings were published in the form of a personal account by Mary Catherine Bateson entitled "Our own Metaphor." The conference has extended conversations on cybernetics with the metaphor of the machine being a contentious point. Here is Pask laying out an argument for "things":

"'You have all talked as though there was a fixed heritage of machines that dated from the Industrial Revolution or somewhat earlier,' Gordon said. "It seems to me that the notion of machine that was current in the course of the Industrial Revolution- and which we might have inherited- is a notion, essentially, of a machine without goal, it had no goal "of", it had a goal "for". And this gradually developed into the notion of machines with goals "of", like thermostats, which I might begin to object to because they might compete with me. Now we've got the notion of a machine with an underspecified goal, the system that evolves. This is a new notion, nothing like the notion of machines that was current in the Industrial Revolution, absolutely nothing like it. It is, if you like, a much more biological notion, maybe I'm wrong to call such a thing a machine; I gave that label to it because I like to realize things as artifacts, but you might not call the system a machine, you might call it something else.'"

Pask's "biological" observation is performative not ontological. These "things" will perform biologically, evolutionarily, iteratively. The agency that he gives them should not be confused with the idea of human agency which is tied to intentionality and hence consciousness. I think material things with underspecified goals can have agency in the way Pask describes them, where "intentionality" doesn't exist a priori but is an emergent quality apprehended only recursively.

If we are to understand the "internet of things", "networked things" or "situated technologies" from the position of performance then I think we may be able to interrogate them critically and constructively. We have to be careful of terms like "co-habitation" because to inhabit or dwell may suggest too much human intentionality. "Co-perform" may be better? To do this we would ask which situations? and what technologies? so as not to objectify the "thing' but elaborate on its performativity.

Omar Khan

Below is an excerpt from Pask's The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics, Architectural Design 1969

A simple cybernetic design paradigm
In the context of a reactive and adaptive environment, architectural design takes place in several interdependent stages:
i) Specification of the purpose or goal of the system(with respect to human inhabitants). It should be emphasized that the goal may be and nearly always will be underspecified, ie. The architect will no more know the purpose of the system than he really knows the pupose of a conventional house. His aim is to provide a set of constraints that allow for certain, presumably desirable, modes of evolution.
ii) Choice of the basic environmental materials.
iii) Selection of the invariants which are to be programmed into the system. Partly at this stage and partly at ii above, the architect determines what properties will be relevant in the man environment dialogue.
iv) Specification of what the environment will learn about and how it will adapt
v) Choice of plan for adaptation and development. In case the goal
of the system is underspecified (as in i) the plan will chiefly consist in a number of evolutionary principles.

_________________________________________________________________

Like a sleeping dog whose ears prick up when he hears himself being called, I glimpsed my name in Sergio's post, and, flattered as I am by the mention, just want to nuance what I said about Performance. I was trying to suggest that Performance was both a product of and a resistence to burgeoning digital culture. This is the quote from the book

...whatever their individual content or treatments performance works are united by a shared consideration of context and methods. Central to any performance is the question of the space in which it takes place and the means by which it is articulated, often centred on the artist's body as both location and means. Such work concerns the media, in the sense of that which mediates a communication, and how that mediation affects the message. It is no coincidence that modern Performance Art emerged at a time when electronic media were initiating what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo describes as an 'society of generalized communication'. To some extent Performance can be understood as a pre-emptive defensive reaction, emphasizing the corporeal and embodied as well as the ephemeral and the physically located, as a form of resistance to the immateriality, ubiquity and virtuality of mass media and communications, which had taken over so much of art's role as the provider of aesthetic solace and meaning. But Performance can also be seen as rehearsing many issues that later become relevant to electronic and, in particular, digital media. These included questions of interaction, response, feedback, the relationship between the audience and the performance, the methods for combining different media elements and so on. Much of the visual and interactive grammar of modern electronic media, such as television and digital multimedia of various sorts derives from the work of those involved with performance and other, similar areas. Those working in these areas were among the first to explore the possibilities offered by electronic media, first in video and then in digital technology. Many of those involved in developing Performance as an artistic practice are currently involved in media art practice. But, even before the widespread use of technology these practices offered a framework for thinking about multimedia, interactivity and other issues, as well as offering an artistic and poetic matrix through which to think about their use.

Charlie

Charlie Gere
Reader in New Media Research
Director of Research
Institute for Cultural Research
Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YL UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 594446
E-mail: c.gere[at]lancaster.ac.uk
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cultres/staff/gere.php

iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity:: iDC[at]bbs.thing.net :: http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc

List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/

Posted by jo at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

Blog? Project

Blog as Platform for Creating Art

Blog? - exhibition at no-org.net is launched! :: Participant Artists: Cyrill Duneau, DVBlog, Mez, Eduardo Navas, Coyoteyip, Jhave, Confettis, Gustavo Romano, Bridgegirl.

Blog, one of the most spread forms of expression on the web -varying from personal diaries to community weblogs, professional knowledge exchange resources, political campaigns and more. In their different manifestations, blogs (moblogs, videoblogs, photoblogs, etc.), became a phenomenon influencing in many cases upon social and cultural areas: journalism, politics, alternative knowledge sources, literature, art, etc.

The blogs? project takes blog as art and as a stage for net artworks investigating the language, the aesthetics, the impacts and the practices of blogs, blogging and the blogoesphere. Blog? presents works utilizing the blog platform for creation of artwork. Works that break the conventional purpose of the platform, conveying a message or delivering data, by emphasizing poetical and aesthetic manifestations of blog, and by exposing capabilities of the blog as a platform for creating art. Blog-specific works.

Posted by jo at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2006

Annie Abrahams

Am I an artwork? Performance

Am I an artwork? Yes, no, maybe. Suis-je une oeuvre d'art? Oui, non, peut-être.

Am I an artwork? was commissioned by the FRACLR in 2002. The piece (in perl) collected visitor reactions and traced them by IP to influence the colours of the page layout. This was a way to point to the fact that the visitor wasn't anonymous, something a lot of visitors weren't aware of in 2002. More important, and still actual, the piece permitted to openly ask if a piece of "net art" could be "art" on the site of an official French art institution.

On the 24th of September all the French entries of the piece will be read in public during a performance in the show called "Chauffe Marcel !" organised by the same art institution. Two microphones will be placed about 10 meters one from another. One will be used to amplify the "yes" phrases the other the "no" phrases.

Performance: lecture/combat :: 24 September 2006 11.00h, la Panacée, 14 rue de l'école de pharmacie, Montpellier, France. in the show "Chauffe Marcel ! " subtitle "L'imitation de Marcel Duchamp". Curator : Emmanuel Latreille, director of the FRAC Languedoc Roussillon. The performance will be followed by a special guided visit of the show by Emmanuel Latreille its curator.

Posted by jo at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

FURTHER PROCESSING

Generative Art, Open Systems

FURTHER PROCESSING: Generative Art, Open Systems :: Pablo Miranda Carranza (ES), Fabio Franchino (IT), Ben Fry (USA), Golan Levin (USA), Lia (AT), Mark Napier (USA), C.E.B. Reas (USA), Martin Wattenberg (USA), Marius Watz (NOR)

Opening: Sat 23.09.2006, 1.15 p.m. :: Duration: 23.09.-25.11.2006, Tue-Fri 2-6 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.-6 p.m. :: Venue: Kunstverein Medienturm, Josefigasse 1, A-8020 Graz :: Curators: Sandro Droschl, Marius Watz.

FURTHER PROCESSING uses the Open Source software "Processing" as a departure point to examine current positions in software-based art. Code is becoming an aesthetic material, with software as the new art object. The exhibition can be grouped into two loose positions: Generative Art and Data Art. The former sees the software system itself as an object of investigation, with algorithms and code structures becoming the framework and material for the work itself. The generative works present an aesthetic of complexity, concerned with formal explorations of spatial and temporal parameters. Ranging from the opulent to the minimalist, these pieces comfortably bridge the gap between an electronic image culture and traditions in drawing and painting.

Data Art positions the computer as mediator between humans and the increasingly complex information networks that surround us, using computational processes to make visible structures and patterns that go unseen by our natural senses. Data visualization thus becomes a pure art of the database, a new cultural artefact in a world of information.

Beside works of nine well known international media artists the software "Processing" will also be on display, so that visitors can try the tool and perhaps get a taste of code for themselves. After all, FURTHER PROCESSING is based on a continuous artistic discourse, of which the effects are reflected on an aesthetic, technological and discursive level.

Posted by jo at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2006

The Department of Network Performance

Arts 404.JO

Open Enrollment 9.19.2006 :: The Department of Network Performance :: Network Performance - Arts 404.JO :: Times: Ongoing, Always, 24-7 :: Professor: C. Peppermint, Dept. of Network Performance :: Fall 2006 - current.

Course Outline: This is not MySpace. This is Arts 404.JO, simultaneously a networked course and performance intended to assist students in the conceptualization, development, and implementation of online instances of networked performance-art practices.

PLEASE NOTE: This course is intended as a restless, evolving, active-media template for researching, exhibiting, coding, creating, and building network performances. Arts 404.JO is NOT a vehicle for commercial, corporate, individual, or self-promotion. Arts 404.JO is not a course for simply displaying one's works. This course is a network performance unto itself. Unexpected solutions are encouraged, i.e. works that follow the exercises provided in the syllabus but attempt to push that structure into realms of creative play.

Course Requirements and Objectives: (1) Arts 404.JO is an information-arts course titled "Network Performance Art - Arts 404.JO" Arts 404.JO is intended for: Artists, Hackers, Cultural Purveyors, Imaginative Housewives, Creative Construction Workers, Creative Workers, Creative Chocolatiers, Urban Homesteaders and Back to the Land Types, Special Teachers, Special Education Teachers Who are Fighting Corporate / State Mandates, Cosmopolitan Farmers, Innovative People and Animals, Eco-minded Global Citizens, Cultural Readers, Whole Food Eaters, Savvy Art Critics, Curators, and Art Historians Who Aren't Afraid to Ride In The Back of Pick-up Trucks, Cyborg Mycologists, AIs Masquerading As Musicians, Information DJs, Print-makers, Painters and Ceramicists Who Set Information Free, etc.

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

September 18, 2006

Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca

Transpermia

Performance calendar :: A mechatronic conference presenting the Dedalus project and its micro performances at zero gravity as well as the Transpermia theory.

Using the Space Station as a metaphor, Marcel.lÌ Ant·nez Roca has developed a hybrid show alternating performance, concert and lecture. It is structured in different modules. During the show Ant·nez wears his Dreskeleton (an exoskeletal body interface) and with it he samples, activates and modulates sounds as well as controlling the films projected on two screens. In the first module he presents some of the mechanical aspects characteristic of his work such as the Fleshbots, the Dreskeletons, the Biometries and the Systematurgy. The second module takes us through recurrent images in his work. The third module reveals the end result of the process of preparation for the Dedalus project in Star City in the Russian Federation as well as the micro performances that were carried out during periods of microgravity provided by the parabolas.

In these micro performances we witness the Requiem bodybot experiment and the interaction between the dreskeleton, the softbot and the interactive films. The last module presents the Transpermia theory and at this point the performance becomes more like a conference. Ant·nez proposes a new landscape for a Utopia called Transpermia. He describes some of his prototypes organized in 4 sections:

1 Interface: new devices with which to perceive the world and take part in it
2 Robots: machines as metaphors for life
3 Fleeting Identities: transitory states of personality as a setting for new experiences and knowledge
4 New Creations: models of activity in the Transpermia Utopia.

Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca (Moià, 1959) is well-known in the international art scene for his mechanotronic performances and robotic installations. In the nineties his avantguard mechatronic performances combined such elements as Bodybots (body-controlled robots), Systematugy (interactive narration with computers) and dresskeleton (the exoskeleton body interface). The themes explored in his work include: the use of biological materials in robotics, as in JoAn? l’home de carn (1992); telematic control on the part of a spectator of an alien body in the performance EPIZOO (1994); the expansion of body movements with dresskeletons (exoskeletical interfaces) sed in the performances AFASIA (1998) and POL (2002); involuntary choreography with the bodybot REQUIEM (1999); and microbiological ansformations in the installations RINODIGESTIO (1987) and AGAR (1999). He is currently working on the spatial and utopian artwork TRANSPERMIA.

In the early nineties his performance EPIZOO caused a commotion in the international art scene. For the first time a performer’s body movements could be controlled by the audience. By operating a videogame, a spectator interacts with the bodybot worn by Antúnez, moving his buttocks, pectoral muscles, mouth, nose and ears. This performance stresses the ironical, and even cruel, paradox rising from the coexistence between virtual digital iniquity and the performer’s physical vulnerability.

Since the eighties, Antúnez’s work has been based on a continuous observation of how human desires are expressed and in what specific situations they appear. First in the tribal performances of La Fura del Baus and later, on his own, he expressed this interest by creating complex, in many cases hybrid, systems hard to classify. Antúnez’ works belong to the fields of both visual and scenic arts.

From the early nineties, the incorporation and transgression of scientific and technological elements in Antúnez’ work, and their interpretation by means of unique and specific devises, have produced a new cosmogony - warm, raw and ironic - of traditional themes such as affection, identity, or death. In his works these elements take on an extremely human dimension that causes a spontaneous reaction in the audience. He was also founding member of La Fura dels Baus, he worked in this company as art co-ordinator, musician and performer from 1979 to 1989, and presented the group’s macro-performances ACCIONS (1984), SUZ/O/SUZ (1985) and TIER MON (1988).

Posted by jo at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2006

Mark Wallace

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 14, 2006

Jane McGonigal

Please feed (but don't fetishize) the participation

I'm feeling a bit squeamish about a lot of the lonelygirl discussion going on this week, in the wake of the previously secret puppet masters' curtain call. As someone who designs participatory experiences, often games with a serial narrative component, I think it's really important that we stop and look at the kind of participation and engagement actually engendered by projects that purport to solicit the collaboration of the audience.

In the LA Times, the producers of the You Tube serial drama describe their goals for engaging the audience:

The intent was to allow fan response posted in the comment section of lonelygirl15's YouTube and MySpace pages to determine the direction of each subsequent episode.As an example of the fans' influence over the story line, what the team calls "collaborative storytelling," they pointed to an episode in which Daniel reveals his romantic feelings to Bree. "In the 'Hiking' video," Beckett said, "where Daniel filmed her, there were a ton of comments saying, 'Daniel likes you. It's obvious that the cameraman was completely in love with you.' We saw the comments and said this is the perfect opportunity to address this."

Okay, fair enough. I'm all for collaborative storytelling. But I don't think it's right to accept this account of the kind of participation that happened during the lonelygirl project at face value. Today and yesterday I spent a lot of time reading through pretty much every single comment left on the lonelygirl videos, the space where the audience was purportedly invited to help decide and direct the course of the narrative. I would encourage anyone else interested in the currently much praised and hyped lonelygirl "community" to do the same. A great hub for doing this is