Digital Futures of Dance presents massMobile App: Responsive Smartphone Performance: project by Jonah Bokaer (US) developed in collaboration with the Center for Music Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology; performed and introduced by Adam Weinert:

massMobile is an interactive platform for audience members to participate and influence live performance. Dancer Adam Weinert responds to live data transmitted by the audience through their smart phones and through live relay with the choreographer Jonah Bokaer in the US.

The massMobile system was developed during Jonah Bokaer’s inaugural ARTech Residency at Georgia Institute of Technology. In collaboration with Bokaer’s 2011 production FILTER, the project was led by the Center for Music Technology’s Assistant Professor Jason Freeman, Human Computer Interaction Master’s student Stephen Garrett, and Music Technology master’s students Anosh Daruwalla and Nathan Weitzner.

With his team at SENSEable City Lab, MIT’s Carlo Ratti makes cool things by sensing the data we create. He pulls from passive data sets — like the calls we make, the garbage we throw away — to create surprising visualizations of city life. And he and his team create dazzling interactive environments from moving water and flying light, powered by simple gestures caught through sensors.

stylus was created in response to the Pulitzer building, which was designed by architect Tadao Ando. As a visual artist whose contributions to contemporary art span three decades, Ann Hamilton’s installations are notable in part for their capacity to weave a broad palette of media into engaging sensory environments. Conceived in response to the Pulitzer’s mission to be both sanctuary and laboratory, stylus is structured around live acoustic elements. The sound design was developed in collaboration with composer and sound designer Shahrokh Yadegari.

Accompanying the project is a similarly experiential multimedia online catalogue. Visitors can explore Ann Hamilton’s work and immerse themselves in the images, video, and audio that fill the installation.

stylus engages the building in a multitude of ways, transforming the space into a unique audio and visual environment. Sound is a constant responsive presence. This begins at the front desk, where visitors “sign-in” and the piece calls back. Two turntables are situated in the Entrance Gallery, along with a shelf of records, inviting visitors to select a record to play with the gallery attendant. A steel table in the Main Gallery is equipped with rolling balls and a microphone. Visitor interaction with these elements will feed into the audio system, including two player pianos in the Cube and Lower Galleries. Visitors are also encouraged to communicate with stylus by calling (314) 884-1553 to read a story or a poem, share a vocal call from a cultural tradition, sing a lullaby, or serenade the night. This message may be projected during the installation from the five exterior speakers mounted to the Pulitzer roof. A rotating selection of books from the St. Louis Public Library are available in the Entrance Gallery for visitors to read within the exhibition and concordance texts are created weekly from international newspapers and are available for purchase. The texts intersect along key words, re-ordering the information to create new meaning from these outside sources. In a similar fashion, visitors to the installation bring their background and individual perspectives to the viewing experience, informing their interpretation of the work. These interactions are further animated by prerecorded sound, which continuously moves throughout the galleries. In addition, the Mezzanine is installed with jumping beans, whose sound is amplified. The beans move in response to the intensity and presence of exterior light and warmth, in the same way that natural light animates the interior volumes of the Pulitzer building.

Visual elements include a large video of clapping hands, which uses the main column as an axis point as it greets, motions to, or threatens visitors as they move into the Entrance Gallery. Five rolling platform ladders situated throughout the Main Gallery serve as a base for rotating projectors that cast videos across the surrounding space. A wall of cast-paper hands, installed in shelves that extend across the Watercourt windows, are puppet-like forms that suggest both disused shells and props for collective gatherings.

Duality is an important element in this installation and can be seen throughout the piece. Above and below, right to left, light to darkness, silent to speech, even Ando’s architecture and Ellsworth Kelly’s permanent sculpture Blue Black, poetically reference primary, dualistic relationships. The materials that make up stylus engage a relationship between the individual and the group, a single voice and a chorus, a silent book and a spoken reading, and finally, between a solitary listening and a collective hearing.

Through art exhibitions, programs, collaborations, and exchanges with other institutions, the Pulitzer aims to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of art and architecture and is a resource for artists, architects, scholars, students and the general public.

The Pulitzer is open and free to the public Wednesdays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. In addition, the Pulitzer will be open every Thursday evening from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. for programming and to give visitors the opportunity to experience the work at night. For more information about the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts visit www.pulitzerarts.org or call 314-754-1850.

ArtTrail, an annual festival of contemporary artistic practice, facilitates and supports site-specific and site-responsive projects in the Cork City area. It offers the context and support for artists of all disciplines to develop and present work outside their normal studio practice; and brings the audience into direct contact with the work, the artists and the making process. The festival aims to be aware of and responsive to its location, without being solely defined by it.

Following from 2009’s theme of “Rediscovering Locality”, in 2010 ArtTrail is working with a theme of “Multiple Endings”. ArtTrail invites proposals for projects relating to this theme in these or other ways:

- the non-linear development of human society and culture
- the infinite variables affecting each individual’s life.
- Individual evolution, and the effect of context on development (the ‘Nature v. Nurture’ argument)
- Urban planning - balance between overt control and devolution of choice/responsibility to inhabitants (overt control implies a fear or expectation of chaos?)
- Artistic processes and the relationship between means, methods, and desired learning outcomes
- Development of society, how this is influenced/controlled by individuals and groups
- Abdicating from or grasping personal and collective responsibility for the direction and content of society.
- Evolution, e.g. of species, climates, humans, habitats.
- Peer pressure and effects on choice
- Random actions, games, chance
- Reliance on ‘order’ and fear of ‘chaos’
- Implication of the negative aspects of chaos, the ‘un-planned’
- Anarchy
- the ability to assess potential outcomes and choose which one/s to aim for
- responsibility for and awareness of choices
- Fiction and real life
- The mathematics of chance, permutations and combinations
- Statistics and interpretation of data
- Lucid dreaming
- Parallel universes, time warps, time travel, Terminator
- Computer games and interactive technology, and their effects on an expectation of a fixed outcome.
- Sport as an exploration of potential outcomes
- Role of the arts in exploring and expressing this/these themes

Projects can take the form of but are not limited to:

• Exhibitions
• Installations
• Performances
• Interventions
• Curatorial projects
• Talks
• Presentations (of work, research, theses, papers, etc)
• Workshops
• Events
• Articles, texts for publication
• Publications
• Psychogeographic walks
• Tours

We are particularly interested in projects that would be developed both before and during the festival.
Projects will be hosted in a number of City centre locations, indoor and outdoor, depending on the requirements of the selected projects and the suitability and availability of locations.

As one approaches AANN in an exhibition space, one is confronted with an intricate frame-like network electronics, about the size of a medium sized dog, suspended at about shoulder height. The front portion of the sculpture is a dome-like structure with yellow discs (photo sensors) evenly distributed along its framework. The body of the sculpture is a radially symmetrical mass of tiny electronic components held together by bare wire, with yellow, orange, and red insulated wire connecting various parts within. The sculpture will periodically emit quick chirps or tone bursts descending in pitch, and small red lights distributed throughout the sculpture light up with each outburst. The cause is not immediately known to the viewer, but the invitation for interaction is irresistible. Waving and clapping hands, even shouting, makes the sculpture blink, twitter and chirp more vigorously, and occasionally the fragile mass of electronics chatters on its own for a few moments before settling back down. Eventually the temptation is for the viewer to adopt the sculpture’s language and to “speak” to it by chirping and whistling in turn.

AANN occupies the space between varying disciplines of art (music, sound art, media art and interactive installation, and sculpture) while simultaneously drawing heavily upon the sciences (neurobiology, cognitive science, network science, and electronics). The project follows a tradition within music of exploring generative systems — i.e. works by David Tudor, Felix Hess, League of Automatic Composers, George Lewis, and David Rosenboom amongst others — and was inspired by James Tenney’s work on harmonic lattices (pitch spaces)and by Douglas Repetto’s “Crash and Bloom”, an electronic sculpture made up of networked units that “exhibits emergent behavior similar to the ‘crash and bloom’ cycles experienced by many biological systems.”

Phillip Stearns (AKA Pixel Form) is a practitioner of sonic and visual arts; music composer and performer; electronics sculptor and installation artist. He views technology as a site for exploring the global society-environment system and how changes in the relationship between society and environment manifest in our technology. Through the medium of networked systems, his work explores the horizons of information, politics, noise, control, proximity, subversion, corruption, interconnectedness and interrelatedness. Central to his practice as a visual artist and a performer are the use of custom electronics, hand-craft, hardware hacking, media technologies, and iterative processes marked by a judicial use of materials, restraint, simplicity, a careful balance between conceptual depth and playfulness. He has presented, performed, lectured, exhibited, led workshops, and screened works at various festivals, conferences, residencies, museums and institutions around the US, Latin America and Northern Europe including FILE (2009), NIME (2009), FONLAD(2009), Transitio(2009), Torrance Art Museum (2008), Optica(2008), Filmer La Musique (2008), Spark(2008), Soundwalk (2006,2007,2008), GLAMFA, Machine Project, STEIM, Experimental Television Center, Solar1, Chaos Communications Camp (2007), and Darmstadt (2006).

Divination2.0 by Emily Schleiner :: April 23, 2010; 8:00 pm :: Media Labs, 58 North 6th, Brooklyn.

The project has been an exercise in bringing the emergent experience of our social/computerized self to a precise space, creating an architectural feeling with video and sound using visuals of items like screws, wires, and other small parts.

Upon entering Divination2.0, one sees a glowing round mandala that makes visible and frames commonplace words associated with computers. At the touch of movement in the Mandala, people are invited in to meditate in stillness. After calmness is sensed by the computer, people can then enter an on-the-spot-created password to find out what Divination2.0 will respond with. This program utilizes a Google-generated image response as well as recent sociology research on the changing relationship between technology users and culture to treat each participant to his or her unique reading.

The gallery@calit2 goes green this spring with an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Sabrina Raaf, whose custom-built robotic sculptures and site specific installations include a series of experiments that address issues of sustainable practice, the construction of social spaces, and prototyping for modular green architecture.

Dietz has selected five of Raaf’s electronic and responsive artworks to be included in this exhibition: Translator II: Grower, Icelandic Rift, Light Green Light, (n)Fold, and Meandering River.

Translator II Grower, a robotic sculpture, measures carbon dioxide levels inside the gallery as they are generated by visitors, and actively draws the measurements in green ink as a field of grass on the gallery walls. Examples of these ink drawings will be on display on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. The Icelandic Rift sculptures are electronically-powered works that include mechanical systems, representing far-future visions of agricultural production and mineral mining in zero-g environments. Prototypes and concept animations for Light Green Light, a lamp that unfolds into a netted tent for sleeping, and (n)Fold, a flat-fold design for dew harvesting and passive solar cooking, are also on view in the gallery. Meandering River is a sculptural installation made up of thermal screen material that has had its surface milled robotically with meandering river designs. Its installation form is derived from self-organizing and meandering river mathematics. This thermal screen installation is also designed to cascade vertically in order to create a climbing surface for vines and thus support the growth of a vertical garden. A cascading instance of the Meandering River sculpture is hung in the six-story window of the Atkinson Hall stairwell, and a second, river-type instance will be viewed in the hall area on the first floor.

Sabrina Raaf works in experimental sculptural media and designs responsive environments and social spaces. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Brandts Art Center (Denmark), Transitio_MX (Mexico City), Sala Parpallo (Spain), MejanLabs (Stockholm), Lawimore Projects (Seattle), the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art (Germany), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), Ars Electronica (Linz), Museum Tinguely (Basel), Espace Landowski (Paris), Artbots 2005 (Dublin), Kunsthaus Graz (Austria), ISEA (Helsinki), the San Jose Museum of Art, and Klein Art Works (Chicago). The artist is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 &2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Leonardo, Washington Post, and New Art Examiner. She received an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Steve Dietz is Founder, President, and Artistic Director of Northern Lights.mn. He was the Founding Director of the 01SJ Biennial in 2006 and is currently Artistic Director of its producing organization, ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996.

Chapter I - The Discovery invites us to to discover an unidentified artificial entity emitting a code of light and sound. Its shape is a pure platonic solid, a dodecahedron, a geometry often associated with philosophical theories, esoterism and sci-fi culture. After visioning a series of videos staging the discovery of this alien object in several places, we end up in an encounter with a physical interactive object which co-opts information flows, sound and light transmission. The dodecahedron seems to respond to our presence. Is this artificial entity trying to initiate a dialog with us? What does mean the code of light and sound it generates? Is it the discourse of some intelligence coming from elsewhere? How autonomous is it? Is it alive? Does it exist?

The behaviour of this strange object seems to be produced by some kind of artificial intelligence. With the videos series previously viewed, it questions the viewer’s perception about the truthfulness of the representation. The work also addresses feelings like the irrational fear of ‘the other’, of the foreigner or the barbarian, themes that are often relevant in sci-fi literature and cinema.

In Chapter 1 - The discovery, Félix Luque plays with a variety of formal expressive modes, from audiovisual, sculptural, informational to narrative ones. Rather than answering essential philosophical questions - such as, How can technological advances be controlled? On what ethical bases can its purposes be chosen? Who is entitled to decide on the ultimate mission of machines? Can machines destroy us? - the installation, on the contrary, is about reformulating those modern philosophical questions through the use of images associated with the popular culture of science fiction and the techno-utopias and myths around artificial intelligence.

Chapter I: The Discovery has been previously shown at LABoral (Gijon, Spain) and is nominated for the Transmediale 2010 (Berlin).

Félix Luque Sánchez (Oviedo 1976) is a digital artist. His works and installations have been presented at various contemporary art institutions in Spain, including Mercat de les Flors, Metrònom, CCCB and MACBA. Félix has received a number of scholarships, including a Phonos grant for audiovisual and musical production for young artists (2002-2004), and the Digital Art scholarship of the Belgian Ministry for Culture for the Francophone community (2008). He has also been nominated at the Transmediale 2010 for his project Chapter I: The Discovery.

Credits
Concept, Software and hardware development: Félix Luque Sánchez
Design of dodecahedron: Damien Gernay
3D videos: Iñigo Bilbao
Video camera: Nicolás Torres

Chapter 1 received a production grant from the French Speaking Community of Belgium (digital art commission) and was produced with support from LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial and through an artist residency at iMAL.

You are invited to see the work in progress of 14 participants who are working together over 5 days to develop a piece of responsive and adaptive software for artists. The participants are: Jacqui Banks, Fab The Detonators (Tiago Gambogi), Jeannie Driver, Simone Gumtau, Alain Renaud, Olu Taiwo, Jo Tyler, Adam Vanner, Wanda Zyborska with facilitation, participation and documentation from Tessa Eliott and Jonathan Jones Morris (SurgeryDar), Helen Sloan (SCAN) and Steve Lewis (OrangeAlert).

Drawing on the metaphors of artificial life, in computer science, literature and the arts, the title DataGolem compounds Data - “the qualities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by computers” with Golem - “a shapeless mass, a human figure of clay supernaturally brought to life, an automaton, a robot” to suggest a radical, generative live art performance system.

Many of the current digital interfaces for the performative arts follow the surface conventions of flow charts and circuit diagrams and show little relationship to individual creative practice. Artists, therefore, are required to fit their work into the constraints and conventions of others. Examples include:

DataGolem aims to break the mould of conventional digital interfaces by constructing computer code in an ‘open source’ fashion through a series of LAB sessions, in which people from different specialisms in the arts and technology contribute to structured improvisations with their ideas, desires and expertise. DataGolem is intended to contribute not only to digital artistic practice and performance but to touch on the practice and theory of the human computer interface, with implications for design and software development.

The first DataGolem LAB is a unique opportunity for the participants to be instrumental in design and construction of computer software which is intrinsically reflective of your own practice. The LABs are set up as creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams (drawn from performers, dancers, filmmakers, sonic artists, visual artists, computer scientists, social scientists, set designers….) and aim to harness a multiplicity of approaches to produce a prototype for a radical ‘open’ interface, combining discrete forms of representation.

Each LAB intends to synthesise the individual aspects of art and participation; agile software development and interactivity; digital technology and performance; to harness a multiplicity of approaches in the design, production and realisation of software.

The DataGolem LABs will utise an agile development methodology, employing adaptive as opposed to predictive methods in software and interface design and development. See their wiki.

The project is produced and developed by SCAN with financial and resources support from the University of Portsmouth.

We look forward to seeing some of you on Thursday evening. Please do contact me if you would like any more details. Please also forward this to anyone who may be interested.