Soft Cinema

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

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

The final edit of a dance film is only one ending in a range of infinite possibilities. The sequence of the material is essentially down to artistic decisions made at a particular point of time in the edit, usually by the editor and director of the work. Hyperchoreography offers an alternative approach. Using digital hypermedia, Hyperchoreography is a non-linear dance performance ‘space’, existing in an interactive, networked medium. The elements are put in place by the creators, but the shape of the work is decided by the user at the moment of interaction.

Big represents one particular train of thought within the greater concept of Hyperchoreography. It offers the chance to explore a body of edited material whilst creating a multi-screen video-dance work.

Inferencing Techniques for Navigation of Terrains

Defining the nature of resemblance between things that are otherwise unlike is the focus of The Analogous Landscape project. In the tradition of monumental works by environmental artists Robert Smithson, James Terrill, Christo, Richard Long and the Harrison’s, C5 intends to produce a large scale conceptual and performance artwork. The Analogous Landscape: Rim of Fire project integrates a sophisticated research agenda within the context of adventure sports, corporate culture and art. Beginning with the successful expeditions in 2003 to ascend Mt. Shasta and Mt. Whitney in California (the highest peak in the continental United States) C5 is planning research expeditions with the intent of climbing 20 volcanic mountains along the Pacific Rim of Fire. The environmental space of the Pacific Rim is a complex dynamic shaped by a context of economic globalization and post-modernization.
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Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure, by Brian Holmes, Springerin.

Great social movements leave the content of their critical politics behind, in the forms of a new dominion. This was the destiny of the revolt against bureaucratic rationalism in the sixties. The Situationists, with the practice of the d?rive and the program of unitary urbanism, aimed to subvert the functionalist grids of modernist city planning. They tried to lose themselves in the urban labyrinth, while calling for the total fusion of artistic and scientific resources in ?complete decors? ??another city for another life?, as the radical architect Constant proclaimed. With the worldwide implementation of a digital media architecture ? and the early signs of a move toward cinematic buildings ? we are now seeing the transformation of the urban framework into total decor (Lev Manovich: ?In the longer term every object may become a screen connected to the Net, with the whole of built space becoming a set of display surfaces?. What kind of life can be lived in the media architecture? And how to explain the continuing prestige of Situationist aesthetics, in a period which has changed so dramatically since the early 1960s? Continue reading >>

Experimental Performance Device

Vidget 3.5 is an experimental interactive audiovisual performance device which allows the user to manipulate video in real time online. As well as mixing a number of video clips together, the user may search for still images from the Flickr photo sharing site and mix them together. [via unmediated]

“…this version (Vidget 3.5) follows on from previous versions: Vidget 1; Flickr Image Viewer (Vidget 2); and Vidget 3…For instructions on Vidget 3.5 usage, see previous versions above.
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Chat or Go Hungry

Communication Grill Chang-tei (CGC) by Japanese artists Kou Sueda and Kouji Ishii, is an electric cooker controlled by a chat software for making Yakiniku (Japanese-style barbecue). The conversation exchanged on a network powers the electric heater. In order to roast meat, you have to continue carrying out a chat with the person that shares your table. Once you stop chatting, the fire of the electric heater goes out. But beware, if the conversation gets too lively, the meat could burn. View movies [via unmediated].

The Future of Digital Democracy

Wireless Politics May Determine Future of Digital Democracy, Part One of a Two-Part Series by Michelle Chen, The NewStandard, December 29, 2004.

“A teenage public housing resident searches the web for scholarship opportunities while her mother looks up tips on starting a small business. A public art space lets visitors download a multimedia exhibition onto their laptops, which are simultaneously linked to a dozen other galleries around the city. A local Independent Media Center breaks news before the major network affiliates by sending a report instantly to thousands of home computers sharing a wireless network.

You may not be able to see into the future of digital democracy, but you may already be breathing it; the new frontier, say activists and technophiles, is on the air. Broadband access and its wireless digital “ether” are giving rise to a new technological geography that defies spatial boundaries and historical precedent.” Continue reading >> [via]

Thoughts about maps and spatial logic

“…Terms such as “mapping,” “borders,” “hacking,” “trans-nationalism,” “identity as spatial,” and so on have been popularized in recent years by new media theories? celebration of “the networks”?a catch-all phrase for the modes of communication and exchange facilitated by the Internet.

We should proceed with caution in using this terminology because it accords strategic primacy to space and simultaneously downplays time?i.e., history. It also evades categories of embodied difference such as race, gender and class, and in doing so prevents us from understanding how the historical development of those differences has shaped our contemporary worldview.

…” Read full article Questioning the Frame: Thoughts about maps and spatial logic in the global present by Coco Fusco, In These Times, December 16, 2004. Responses to the article culled from Locative and nettime:
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Control, Misuse, and Subversion

“…The rapid convergence of mobile communications, automated positioning technologies, and geographic information systems (GIS) into “locative media” is raising the possibility of a dramatic transformation of the way we perceive and move about the urban environment, and how we interact with each other in urban spaces. Endless possibilities for locative media are being proposed that promise increased convenience, awareness, transparency, and access to information and social opportunities that break traditional power structures.

Simultaneously, at this moment of realization of the potential of locative media, there is an emerging sense of helplessness at the potential for control, misuse, and subversion of these technologies. Whether by states or anti-state organizations like al Qaeda, locative media extend the ability of the powerful and mobile over the weak and immobile. Cross-referenced information through geographic tagging adds many more dimensions to the problems already raised by unchecked, widespread linking of relational databases in industry and government…” Read entire post by Anthony Townsend [and The Auto and The Mobile by Howard Rheingold].

Also, see Townsend blogs Wireless Public Space and Telecommunications: New Media and Cities.

Watching Information Flow

Spanish researchers Clara Boj and Diego D?az are working on the Free Network Visible Network, an augmented reality project which aims to make visible the exchanged information between computers of a wireless network. First, marks in the facades of the buildings will indicate the presence of a node, thus the possibility of connecting to the net, and at the same time to see the 3D representation of the information that we are interchanging with this node in real time.

Free game tools will then be developed that use the location of the players in the physical space as main element of the action development. For example, players would be able to modify the information (message, images or videos) on the marks placed in the physical space and record messages for other users / players. Or they would be able to change the publicity images or the urban signals by using small marks and creating game strategies. Besides, the players will know in real time the position of other players if they are looking to a mark. On the basis of these simple applications, users will be able to develop their own games.

Via Aminima, reblogged by Regine at near near future. See also Visualizing Social Networks by Linton C. Freeman [PDF].