live from South Africa

A few weeks ago, I blogged a piece called front, by, among other artists, Ralph Borland - a South African sculptor. Some of his response to me, over email:

in the spirit of blogging, i’ll tell you what i’ve got into lately that relates to front. i picked up a book called “the anatomy of human destructiveness” in a second-hand book store in observatory on the weekend. the photographer pieter hugo was with me and he recommended it as one of the best books he’s read. it was written in the early 70s, and is an investigation by psychologist eric fromm into the question of humanity’s instincts or tendencies: are they towards aggression and violence - is that the underlying cause of war and cruelty?
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dialogue between the street, the web and people’s mobile phones

From “Interactive Street Interface” by Jaap De Jonge: Speakers Corner is a 15 metre long interactive LED text display fixed to the outside of The Media Centre in Huddersfield. Running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Speakers Corner will display a wide range of content, information and news, providing entertainment and services to people using The Media Centre and the local area.

Users can interact with content on the screen in three ways by sending a text message, by using the phone booth outside The Media Centre which converts speech into text, or by adding comments from the web at www.speakerscorner.org.uk. Users’ comments are then archived in the database and sent to the display, building a dialogue between the street, the web and people’s mobile phones.

Read more at Patrick Lichty’s [re]distributions.

The Sensor Shoe

by John Paradiso

Ordinarily dancers dance to music. With the Sensor Shoe the dancer makes the music.

Electronic sensors are built into this ordinary shoe to pick up foot movement and changes in pressure. The short antenna at the back of the shoe transmits data from each sensor to a nearby computer. The computer is programmed with a set of rules that map the data to particular sounds. A digital music synthesizer produces the sounds, which are then heard through speakers.

See NY dancer Mark Haim dance in the sensor shoes (2001)

Seven Mile Boots

Seven Mile Boots,
“…the magical footwear known from folk tales that enables its owner to travel seven miles with one step. With little effort one can cross the countries, to be present wherever it seems suitable and to become a cosmopolitan flaneur with the world as the street.”

The project Seven Mile Boots is a pair of interactive shoes with audio. One can wear the boots, walk around as a flaneur simultaneousy in the physical world and in the literal world of the internet. By walking in the physical world one may suddenly encounter a group of people chatting in real time in the virtual world. The chats are heard as a spoken text coming from the boots. Wherever you are with the boots, the physical and the virtual worlds merge…The site contains a short bibliography on the “fl?neur.”

Presence and Absence

PING, by Kate Armstrong, uses a telephone menu system to distribute active commands to participants who call in using cellular telephones. The choices made by the caller when navigating the telephone system produce directions for physical movement through the city.

PING comes out of psychogeographical inquiry, which focuses on the study of the effects of the environment on the perception, behaviour and mood of individuals. PING is intended to explore the interface between disparate fields such as situationist thought that focuses on subjective mood, generative psychogeography which introduces algorithms as a way to inspire movement through urban space, existentialism, and the interpolation of digital metaphors onto physical, analog space. Read “A Psychogeographical Account of PING and the PsyGeoConflux 2003” by Kate Armstrong.

Teleintervention

Poetrica is an investigation about reading and reception in cybrid and entropy situations. The project involves a series of visual poems conceived by Giselle Beiguelman with non-phonetic fonts (dings and system fonts), a DVD, digital prints, movie trailers and a teleintervention which allowed to anyone compose visual messages and submit them, by the Web or SMS, to three commercial electronic billboards located in downtown S?o Paulo, using the same typographic background she used in her nomadic poems.

IKI-IKI Hoikuen

“IKI-IKI Phone is a multi-user, networked Artificial Life (=Alife) art game for the I-mode mobile phones. In this system, subscribed users can create Artificial Life creatures (=IKI-IKI pets), interact with these pets, feed them, take care of them, and evolve them. Networked users can also share their pets with other mobile phones users, trade them, watch them compete against each other, become friends with each other, create offspring and develop an IKI-IKI pet society. Users can also start communicating with each other through their shared pets.”

A collaboration between Alan Dorin, Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau and the students of the Institute for Advanced Media Art & Sciences (IAMAS), Ogaki, Gifu, Japan. Read “IKI-IKI Phone: a Multi-user Alife Art Game for Mobile Phones.”

From an essay written for Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts by Matt Locke:

[A story about Uncle Roy All Around You by Blast Theory; A story about Surrender Control by Tim Etchells; and A story about Audit by Lucy Kimbell]

“Those stories describe three interactions. Or performances. Or moments in the production, or consumption, of an artwork. Or perhaps they are descriptions of how the production and consumption of an artwork can be reduced to the same act, the same moment. They operate within, to use Nicholas Bourriaud’s term, a ‘relational aesthetic’ - these artworks don’t rely on an encounter with a traditional art object, nor do they substitute that with some transcendent concept of a dematerialised art object. In Bourriaud’s definition, these works exist within “the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”. They are moments to be experienced, not viewed, reaching out and enmeshing themselves in the messy network of conversations and relationships that make up your life.” Continue reading.

Jill of Jill/txt has observed a new kind of narrative emerging from the net, what she calls “distributed narrative” or “viral narrative” or sometimes, “contagious narrative.” It’s narrative that doesn’t try to be a total or complete artwork but sends “fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in.” It’s a “book without end.” She likens it to distributed computing, which spreads processing across many computers, attaining as much or more power than is possible in a single supercomputer.

Jill references Tim Etchell’s (see also Forced Entertainment) work, Surrender Control, where the reader receives SMSs asking her to do things that carry the narrative into her physical world.

So with “viral narrative.” It asks the reader to take it up and pass it on to places it has never been. To become a performer on its behalf.

Jill will be writing more about this viral narrative in the upcoming months.

interludes from the cityscape

A collaboration between the networks and telecommunications research group at Trinity College, and the Media Lab Europe - both based in Dublin - this project uses the city as a place to perform narratives with your mobile phone. Viewers can MMS to upload images from around them into a live database, or, by SMSing keywords, download snaps from the archive at any time. more info

(Posted by Nathaniel Stern)