aesthetic system

Camille Utterback’s interactive installation
Untitled 5 is the fifth interactive installation in the External Measures Series, which Utterback has been developing since 2001. The goal of these works is to create an aesthetic system which responds fluidly and intriguingly to physical movement in the exhibit space. The installations respond to their environment via input from an overhead video camera. Custom video tracking and drawing software outputs a changing wall projection in response to the activities in the space. The existence, positions, and behaviors of various parts of the projected image depend entirely on people’s presence and movement in the exhibit area.
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networked performance

Isabelle Jenniches true looks takes over a store’s webcam system, intended as a marketing ploy for online clients to check out their collection of smart Italian furniture. The artist’s friends and colleagues -dancer, cook, choir member -are sent into the furniture store located in SoHo (NYC) as covert protagonists. Mingling with the clients, shop assistants and teamsters they are instructed to initiate subtle dramatic occurrences amidst the beds and sofas. Everyday patterns of consumer behavior are being poached, subverted into micro-dramatic moments which are followed and captured using the store’s robotic webcam system. A selection of these images distills the routines and surprises of daily life in the shop into a series of episodes -part photo novella, part documentary -with text by theatermaker Richard Foreman.

networked narrative

Andrea Zapp edits Networked Narrative Environments. Via various forms of audio-visual communications, from chat protocols, net and software art to online theatre and immersive telepresence, artists are using a wide range of technologies to explore the digital network as a narrative space. Human presence is increasingly subject to a constant flow of online contributions, material, and data. How does this reposition our collective understanding of the physical and the virtual, the real and the imaginary?

In this context the ‘networked narrative environment’ must be defined as an artistic modus operandi and experiment that reflects medial and social processes. The book documents exemplary and unique research positions within a developing genre. It serves as a resourceful illustration of the cultural debate on narratives, networking, and media art.

Leading international artists, writers, and curators examine specific examples of public installations and dramatic spaces that are linked to the Internet with the aim to integrate the viewer into the artwork. Key artistic projects and initiatives reflect sophisticated and complex new models of audience participation, real-time experience, and production of content:

Sphere of Influence

In Toni Dove’s Artificial Changelings there is the possibility of moving back and forth between two centuries as if they were parallel realities suspended in a universe where time has no linear direction. The viewer does not change the narrative events, but develops a more immersive relationship with the characters and environment based on physical behavior. Different viewer responses will produce different aspects of content, emotional tone and information.

Still Powerful

Fusing art and technology, Char Davies has achieved international recognition for her work in virtual reality. Integrating real-time stereoscopic 3-D computer graphics, 3-D localized sound and user interaction based on breath & balance, the immersive environments Osmose (1995) and Eph?m?re (1998) are world-renowned for their artistic sensibility, technical innovation, and powerful effect on participants.

Scanscapes

A new landscape is emerging in the urban space, a SCANSCAPE that transgresses the boundaries and protocols of public and private space due to the extensive use of surveillance apparatus and telecommunication systems in the urban realm. How can we define these Scanscapes? How can we create Digital Shelters that will protect us, isolate us or allow us to live within these Scanscapes?

Digital Shelters, a PhD project by Pedro Sepulveda, explores how critical responses to the surveillance apparatus and telecommunication systems in the city landscape can inform the development of aesthetic possibilities for electronic spaces.

Silent Virtual Dancer

In Michael Saups Binary Ballistic Ballet participants send audio-signals through a microphone to a computer which transforms them into abstract shapes. A dancer then translates this information displayed on a computer monitor into a dance pattern on the stage.

The interactive choreography system “Binary Ballistic Ballet” was developed for the ballet piece “Eidos Telos” by William Forsythe, which was premiered in January 1995 in Frankfurt. The ensemble had already been experimenting with an alphabetical dance- system which was then transformed into movement in 3dimensional space-time. For this production this alphabet needed to be ported onto a computer platform to make it more fluid.
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Age, Sex and Location

ASV [v.f.] 1.0 was the first version of the “chatroom plays”–by Vincent Makowski/AmsterdamEditions–performed during the Internet Fiesta and the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Net.art exhibition on March 23rd, 2002.

“The chatroom plays just slightly twist the original purpose of chatrooms. With ASV [v.f.] 1.0 (which in English should rather be ASL for Age, Sex and Location, the most basic self definition given by chatters to those they interact with), I intended to use a chatroom as a theater stage and asked professional actors along with some people having no acting experience to play a role we defined together…(N)one of the actors’ cues were pre-written and we had no rehearsal whatsoever. Furthermore, we never met before and (or) during the performance. Our communication only went through e-mails exchanged between the actors and myself.
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Light Lunch with Molly

“Project Molly is a series of roaming interactive webcasts captured live using a wearable wireless audio/video acquisition system by artist Nichola Feldman-Kiss. Please interact with Project Molly live for light lunch and conversation via internet relay chat at the Project Molly interface.”

Project Molly was a performance art/research innovation; it used a Xybernaut wearable computer with a head-mounted audio video acquisition and display system to stream a live video feed to the internet via wireless connection. The prototype real net video performances interactively linked the remote audience with the real time audience/performers via Project Molly?s personal a/v surveillance and chat interaction. Each consecutive interactive webcast incrementally evolved the project molly interface and knowledge database. Ultimately, the interface tracked project molly’s movement through real space and captured streamed video into a data archive that is indexed and searchable by a variety of terms.

Engaged by Others, Remotely

“(Eduardo Kac) first conceived the Telepresence Garment in 1995 to investigate the notion of the mediascape as an expanded cloth; i.e., to consider wireless networking as a new fabric that envelops the body. The Garment, which I finished in 1996, gives continuation to my development of telepresence art. This time, however, instead of a robot hosting a human, we find the roboticized human body itself converted into a host. The Garment was designed as an interactive piece to be worn by any local participant willing to allow his or her body to be engaged by others remotely.” Continue reading >>