African Robots is a project by South African artist and researcher Ralph Borland to create interactive electronic street art. ‘Street art’ in this instance means art sold by people on the street, in South Africa and Zimbabwe – usually forms of handicraft using inexpensive materials like fencing and electrical wire, beads and waste wood, plastic and metal. Continue reading

Turbulence.org Commission: Killbox by Joseph DeLappe (US) and Malath Abbas, Tom deMajo and Albert Elwin (UK) [To “play” the game download the application to your desktop, and make sure your speakers are on.]

Killbox is an online interactive game that critically explores the nature of drone (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV) warfare, its complexities and consequences. It is an experience that explores the use of technology to transform and extend political and military power, and the abstraction of killing through virtualization.

Modern warfare technology disguises the lethal nature of weapons as they become surgical precision instruments producing ‘clean’ destruction within acceptable limits of “collateral damage.” – Jill Berke* Continue reading

Turbulence.org Commission: text_ocean by Zannah Marsh [Optimized for Google Chrome]:

text_ocean is an experiment in random access reading and text visualization, using Herman Melville’s notoriously impenetrable whalefishery epic Moby Dick as source material. Selections of the text are blown apart and become a dynamic sea of words, animated according to grammatical function. The user “reads” the text by ‘hooking’ and releasing words and, in the process, disconnects them from their original lines. Thus Moby Dick is slowly, randomly rewritten by the user, word by word, as she reads.

text_ocean is a 2015 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence.org website. It was made possible with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Continue reading

Turbulence.org Commission: “besides,” 3 networked performances by Annie Abrahams and Martina Ruhsam:

June 11, 12, & 13 online http://bram.org/besides at 19:00 (CET), 1:00 pm (EDT) (find your local time) Streaming by Ivan Chabanaud/mosaika.tv.

Annie and Martina will investigate the performative potential of real time computer-mediated communication. By listening to each other’s gestures (in a visual and acoustic sense) they will choreograph each other’s actions, despite Annie being in Montpellier, France and Martina in Berlin, Germany. Will they be able to create an intimate space within two webcam windows framed side-by-side on their screens? What will emerge when two vulnerable bodies, their silences, fragmented communication, a few mundane objects, and a lot of uncertainty collide? Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Condition:Used by Anna Pinkas:

Condition:Used gathers bits and pieces of intimate spaces found online to create domestic scenes made out of paper. The pieces of furniture comprising these uncanny miniatures are replicas of items for sale on eBay: The listings’ images were transformed into printable/foldable paper templates, assembled to form intricate scenes, photographed, and displayed on the Condition:Used website. The visitors can click on each element in the dioramas to get a detailed view and a screenshot of its original eBay page. They are also invited to download and print any of the templates to create their own “paper doll house.” Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Empire State by Steve Klise [To observe, visit after sunset EST. To create, visit anytime]

Empire State transmits camera flashes from the Empire State Building’s observation deck in New York City to the virtual observation deck of your computer screen. It also provides step-by-step instructions on how to create a LEGO replica of the iconic building, which lights up every time a visitor takes a photograph of Manhattan at night. Empire State is a continuous feedback loop of physical and virtual architectures (building/model/code) and of the perceptions of sightseers both on-site and on-line. The actual is recorded, translated, transmitted, and received. The observers are the observed. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Psychographics: Consumer Survey by Dane Watkins: Corporations use state of the art technology to examine every aspect of your lifestyle and generate a unique psychological and demographic consumer profile. There are three archetypes of consumerism: “Basic Consumer — Merchandiser”; “Average Consumer — Passive Spectator”; and “Advanced Consumer — Networker”. “Psychographics” is an online survey that helps you to evaluate your consumer status. Take the survey and discover your archetype!

Psychographics: Consumer Survey is a 2014 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Continue reading

Read | Write In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art) by Nathaniel Stern — in Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art):

“In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art) is a free, digital companion chapter to Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (2013, an Arts Future Book with Gylphi Press).

“In the book, I argue that interactive art suspends and amplifies the ways in which we experience embodiment as per-formed, relational, and emergent. I provide many in-depth case studies of contemporary artworks that develop a practice of embodied philosophy, setting a stage to explore how we inter-act and relate with the world. I offer a critical framework for analyzing interactive artworks and what’s at stake in our encounters with them, which can be applied to a wide range of complex and emerging art forms. Continue reading

Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance by Nathaniel Stern, Arts Future Book, Gylphi Limited, 2013:

What is interactive art? Is this a genre? A medium? An art movement? Must a work be physically active to be classified as such, or do we interact when we sense and make sense? Is a switch-throw or link-click enough — I do this, and that happens — or must subjects and objects be confused over time? Is interaction multiple in its engagements (relational), or a one-to-one reaction (programmed)? Are interactive designs somehow more democratic and individualized than others, or is that merely a commercial strategy to sell products and ideas?

This book argues that interactive art frames moving-thinking-feeling as embodiment; the body is addressed as it is formed, and in relation. Continue reading

TEMP Art Space is pleased to announce Everything is TEMP, an exhibition curated by Alex Ahn and Ari Lipkis featuring work by nine emerging artists who explore the fleeting nature of digital art. The idea ultimately reflects the inherent ephemerality of technology and life. Artists include Yonatan Ben-Simhon, Tyler Healy, Jack Kalish, Rune Madsen, Marisa Prefer, Byron Peters, Matthew Ostrowski, Ryan Raffa, and Timo Toots.

In the novel Nineteen Eight-Four, George Orwell created a fictional language “Newspeak,” intended to be used by the dystopian rulers of his world to limit and control free thought. Orwell masterfully demonstrated that the development of language could either hold back mankind’s advancement or pull it forward. Arduino, C, C++, CSS, HTML, Java, Javascript, PHP, Processing, Python, UNIX, XML, etc. – these are the new languages of today used to program the technologies that now run our lives, these are the advancement of language. Continue reading