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 Commission: INTERP by Jeff Thompson:

INTERP is a series of digital sculptures generated by blending 100 unrelated photographs, placing them into simulated three-dimensional space, and importing them into photogrammetry software, tricking it into thinking that the photographs were of a single object. Thompson is interested in “useless” and culturally-derived data sets, so rather than use an arbitrary archive of photographs (a Google image search for a particular term, for example), it seemed more natural to use a finite set that he had generated himself (approximately 12,000 images when he began the project in 2012). Every photograph was used. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Panemoticon by Ali Miharbi and John Priestley [Needs Firefox (16 or later recommended), headphones/speakers, mouse/trackpad]:

We know how you feel. Panemoticon observes your behavior, makes a few inferences about your emotional state, and plays music to match your mood. Your mouse/trackpad use says a lot about your energy level, confidence, and perceived control over your environment. Panemoticon tracks and analyzes these data to create an image of your mood, and then generates music, adjusting properties such as tonality (major/minor), harmonic & rhythmic complexity, tempo, timbre, and proximity. Collective mood is calculated for all Panemoticon users on a given site. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: WoodEar by Peter Traub [Needs download, and Speakers/Headphones]:

Bringing the body of the tree to the network is a natural fit — a tree is a network too: roots sensing and absorbing nutrients, leaves sensing and photosynthesizing sunlight, and phloem and xylem running throughout to carry nutrients across the structure. WoodEar attempts to merge the dynamic qualities of this biological network with the digital network. A series of sensors attached to the tree stream data on the state of its environment — light, temperature, air pressure, and wind. This live data is merged with photos and recordings of the tree’s immediate surroundings into a generative application/installation. By downloading and running the application, anyone can access the live environmental experiences of the tree — one that may be very distant from them, but that still shares the same air, sun, earth, and sky. Continue reading

Life in Code and Software: Mediated Life in a Complex Computational Ecology, David M. Berry (ed), Living Books About Life:

The essays in this collection explore the relationship between living, code and software. For Berry, technologies of code and software increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment – indeed, their reach stretches to even quite remote areas of the world. Life in Code and Software introduces and explores the way in which code and software are becoming the conditions of possibility for human living, crucially forming a computational ecology, made up of disparate software ecologies we inhabit. As such we need to take account of this new computational environment, Berry argues, and think about how today we live in a highly mediated, code-based world – a world where computational concepts and ideas are foundational, and within which, code and software become the paradigmatic forms of knowing and doing.

Radius 22: Radio Tune by Public Domain:: April 1, 6, 8, and 13 at 6:00 pm CST.

Public Domain takes after its name sake, the public domain, and views, manipulates, edits, and comments on material found within it. Public Domain uses material from radio, records and the internet. The work often mirrors the collective unconscious through the use of voyeurism and dark humor. The resulting work is a collage of reality, time, and experiences.

Public Domain is Jane Burton and Doris Lake, a duo based in central London, UK. They often listen to the bells of Big Ben. Public Domain uses collage and montage to reflect upon the things they love, and simultaneously place them in ridicule. Continue reading

(Read a review here) Good Listeners is a browser plugin that exposes the secret ways in which our browsing habits are shared with and mined by 3rd party web trackers (like Google Analytics and Facebook “Like”) without our consent or knowledge. Whenever a site exposes the visitor’s data to a third party service a confessional booth window is opened and the priest in the window offers words of invisible wisdom, divine providence and spiritual guidance pertaining to matters of web browsing, social networking, e-commerce and digital identity.

Good Listeners in a critical/ amusing/ awkward visualization and sonification of the vast data dimension passively generated by us and aggressively collected and mined by these mysterious omnipresent all-seeing tracking forces of the web. Continue reading

Hz Call For Articles — Deadline: March 10 :: Please send your submissions to hz-journal [at] telia.com.

Online journal Hz is looking for articles on New Media, Sound Art, Electro-Acoustic Music, Virtual World/ Machinima and Social Media. We accept earlier published and unpublished articles in English.

Hz is published by the non-profit organisation Fylkingen in Stockholm. Established in 1933, Fylkingen has been known for introducing yet-to-be-established art forms throughout its history. Nam June Paik, Stockhausen, Cage, Stelarc, etc. have all been introduced to the Swedish audience through Fylkingen. Its members consist of leading composers, musicians, sound artists, dancers, performance artists and video artists in Sweden.

Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, MIT Press:

New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things – mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict – even embody – a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.

Chun approaches the concept of programmability through the surprising materialization of software as a “thing” in its own right, tracing the hardening of programming into software and of memory into storage. Continue reading

Decode Me by Mushon Zer-Aviv and Guy Saggee (with code by Zohar Arad). Mushon says “It is a code based online campaign for DECODE, an exhibition of code based works. Participants are invited to “decode” their FB profile image into a triangle pixels combination and stamp their share on the timeline. Every day at midnight the participant with the largest share on the timeline (longest time before next decode) gets a free ticket to the show.

The show opened this last Friday and would go on until mid-March, by that time we expect the Decoder of the Day to lead with just a few minutes share…”