Beaming Text and Images in the Air

SK Telecom announced Monday that it would launch an Air Beam service that displays text messages or images in the air. You can spell out messages in the air by waving your handset after downloading relevant program. A total of 16 beamed messages can be stored in the handset and a variety of emoticons are downloadable on Nate, SKT?s portal website. An acceleration sensor is deployed and the messages can be seen up to 20 - 30 meters away. [via Telecoms Korea]
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Interview with Helen Thorington

“They began with the radio, producing over 300 projects in 15 years. Then while it was still the dawn of a new genre, they started with net art. Today, Turbulence.org has around eighty net projects running, many of these making history in net art. With an enthusiasm and energy that’s hard to compare, they continually enrich their collection in which one of the most important and most visited blogs of those dedicated to the relationship between creativity and new technology can be accessed. It doesn’t have a physical space, but it doesn’t need one, considering it can boast to be one of the most interesting places on the web. We asked the artist and co-director of Turbulence.org, HELEN THORINGTON, the project’s backbone right from the start, to tell us the story, enlighten us on the structure and the problems it has had to face and to take a glimpse at what the future has in store.” From Let’s get loud!: Interview with Helen Thorington by Domenico Quaranta, Cluster.

Experiments in Social Networks

“Connectivity Probes is a two year (2003-5) research project comprising a series of objects, installations, and systems that explore the expanding potential of digital tools in communication mediums…The focus of the project is to provide inspirations for new directions in communication systems of the future or s of interaction in shared public space (using wired and wireless networks) and to develop new forms of asynchronous communication spaces.

…We define a “connectivity probe” as a sort of cultural or technology probe that specifically involves connecting two people or locations in an unexpected or provocative way with the hope of revealing unusual behaviors and inspiring feedback that may provide insight into the nature of human communication and serve as a resource for creativity and ideas in the development of new communication technologies. In its purest form, a “connectivity probe” is not a “prototype” that is meant to be formally analyzed and studied from a usability perspective in a process of iterative refinement leading to a product. Connectivity probes, like all probes, exist for the purposes of inspiration and feeding ideas into a design process in which the final products may take forms very different from the original probes that inspired them.”

A Magical Tactical Practical

The Center for Tactical Magic is a San Francisco-based collective operating in the realm of performance (art) and action. Highly trained in the principles of magic, ninja-ism, art, investigation, and critical theory, the Center’s actions represent a novel combination of serious political thought and social gathering. Presenting a model of art-making as collaborative, relational, and political, CTM has pseudo-military cousins in groups like Basekamp (Philadelphia) and Atelier van Lieshout (Rotterdam, The Netherlands).

MAGIC: Like artists, magicians and ninjas synthesize technical ability with tricky showmanship, competition, and illusion. The artist-as-magician illuminates the aspect of art presentation that works on the tiered levels of the public, the curator, and the fellow practitioner. CTM is able to entertain local children while foregrounding political statements and acts, rather than merely clowning. This works on the level of the public- and the artist-viewer, while entertaining and educating both.
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Garden of Sonic Lifeforms

Synthecology, a tele-immersive collaborative project with a new architecture for virtual reality sound immersion to create a garden of sonic experimentation for visitors to explore and cultivate. Synthecology invites visitors to create a musical sculpture of sythesized tones and sound samples provided by web inhabitants. Upon entering the garden, each participant can pluck contributed sounds from the air and plant them, play their own improvisation or collaborate with others to create a new composition.

As each new “seed” is planted, grown, and played, the garden becomes both a musical instrument and a composition to be shared with the rest of the network. Every inhabitant creates, not just as an individual composer shaping their own themes, but as a collaborator in real time who is able to improvise new soundscapes in the garden by cooperating with other avatars from diverse geographical locations. Synthecology will debut at NEXTFEST2005 in Chicago, June 24-26, 2005. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

AttentiveTV

“Gadgets Gone Glamorous! None other than our beloved Karl Lagerfeld himself put his innovative mastermind to work to create this Chanel TV Belt. This gem was almost overlooked during this year?s Chanel Spring/Summer 2005 Runway Presentation, yet it is the item for any socialite this summer. Yeap, Karl is always good for some ridiculous magic out of the blue. And yes, the screens did indeed show Nicole Kidman?s ad while the models ran the catwalk. However, it is questionable that this gadget will ever hit the Chanel stores. A lady at the NYC store apparently mentioned it may stay runway only, but who knows with Chanel.

What more could this world need than more garnered attention and stares at peoples crotches? [blogged by Vlad on The Purse Blog] “…But what I love even more is the prospect of incorporating AttentiveTV (3.4MB .mpg) technology into the new Chanel TV Belt…Would it not be even more cheeky/mod if the Chanel TV Belt had the ability to know when someone was looking at it?…” [blogged by connor on HML]

Collected Memories of a War Refugee

The Story of Boris shows the sessions of a traumatised war refugee with his psychiatrist. Edited sequences of the latest session will be uploaded weekly, along with other files on the history, treatment and life of the patient. This way a dossier is created to reconstruct Boris’s past.

Boris is suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) as a result of the war he fled from. Because of this disorder his story is fragmented. In order to recover, his memories and the reality of war have to be disclosed. What are the events that Boris went through? Which role did he play during the war? The audience is free to investigate Boris’s past and present by browsing the files at this website and take an independent view in search for the truth.

The Ontology and Expressions of Code and Protocols

“…(C)omputers are no longer interesting because they can simulate reality, but because they transform the written word into reality, a reality whose ontology is to be found in and between ‘environment’ and ‘organism,’ and even if the complexity of the network of networks and their data have not yet reached a threshold where the network actually transforms from merely a set of connected nodes to an entity worth describing as a totally new category, form, or dimension, a rich and fascinating set of issues and areas of research open up by claiming and solidifying it by giving it a name. I propose the term ‘Infome’ to denote this all-encompassing network environment/organism that consists of all computers and code. The term is derived from the word ‘information’ and the suffix ‘ome,’ used in biology and genetics to mean the totality of something as in chromosome or genome.

Within the Infome, artist programmers are more land-artists than writers; software are more earthworks than narratives. The “soil” we move, displace and map is not the soil created by geological processes. It is made up of language, communication protocols, and written agreements. The mapping and displacement of this “soil” has the potential of inheriting, revealing, and questioning the political and economical assumptions that went into this construction…” From The Infome: The Ontology and Expressions of Code and Protocols by Lisa Jevbratt, Crash, London 2005.

Exploring Polarities

16 (R)evolutions is a work in progress that can be seen for the first time in the UK at Colchester and in Chelmsford. It combines dance, theatre, and interactively generated video imagery to explore the polarities of being animal and being human; the former being dictated solely by the need to survive and reproduce, the latter being a state of confusion created when these basic instincts are blurred by intellect. Technologically Troika Ranch’s Isadora software is integrated with EyesWeb to allow the dancers to create and manipulate three dimensional imagery as they perform. In the winter of 2005 the English company will be travelling to New York to complete work on 16 (R)evolutions and present the premiere of the completed work in New York City.

Art with a Captial A and Activism

“Abstract: Tactical media are the field being worked by artists adopting a positive attitude towards contemporary digital technology, in a critical, innovative spirit. Media artists reveal a preoccupation with aesthetics as a concept, not with a particular style. This trend is part of the creation of a new language for the communications network era, a user language which is successful as art because it transmits an effective activism. Media activists are a hybrid of artist, scientist, theoretician and political activist that shuns labels and categorizations. Their creations are characterised by integration of user and machine in the work itself, so that interactivity has an important place within it. The concept of tactical media allows Art with a capital and grassroots political activism to be combined and, in this sense, we could include in it the tactical struggle that is part of anti-globalisation movements. Media activists point to the power of tactics as a means of breaking down the barriers between mainstream values and alternative ones, between professionals and amateurs and even between people who are creative and those that are not.” From The GHI of Tactical Media, conversation between David Garc?a, Geert Lovink, Andreas Broeckmann, Artnodes.