Scape the Hood

Just wanted to let everyone know about the 8th annual Digital Storytelling Festival in San Francisco Oct 7-10 hosted by KQED, public broadcasting. There will be a large locative media presence. The opening night party is the launch of the ‘Scape the Hood mediascape, Using GPS-enabled HP iPAQs and software developed by HP Labs, participants will walk the streets and listen to the neighborhood stories, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells from both the physical and virtual worlds.

Peel back the layers of the neighborhood and explore narrative archeology with us. Hear the stories of Project Artaud, once the American Can Company, now transformed into a dynamic live/work space for artists. Experience the Mission Village Market, a bustling flea market on Saturday, but just a ghost of itself on Sunday. Transport to the environs long since erased by the overlay of the city. Continue reading

E:vent Collaborative Residency

NODE.London [Networked, Open, Distributed Events. London] is a season committed to building infrastructure and raising visibility of media arts practice in London. Working on an open, collaborative basis, NODE.London will culminate in a month long season of media arts projects across London in March 2006.

As part of the season, E:vent will host a month long collaborative residency for London-based electronic musicians, media artists and architects. Threshold will set a conceptual thread around ideas of threshold, topology, landscape and borders, with the objective of transforming E:vent’s lower warehouse space into a dynamic and interactive environment.

To apply or for further information, please send statement of artistic practice, CV and URLs for existing & past projects and additional supporting information to residency[at]eventnetwork.org.uk. Closing Date for applications: 1st December 2005. Continue reading

Standard Vocabulary, Generic Models >> Toolkit

Architecture of Interaction [AoI] is a project initiated by a group of artists and theorists who are collectively aiming to create a toolkit which can be used to describe the processes and effects of interactive work. This toolkit will consist of a standard vocabulary which can be used by individuals from different artistic backgrounds, as well as a set of generic models that describe six different critical dimensions of interactive working methods. The editors of this site want to connect vocabularies and ideas about art and interaction from various disciplines, namely theatre, visual arts, performance and new media.

Why?: The initiators–Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Yvonne Dröge-Wendel, Lino Hellings, Anna Best, Mina Kaylan, Nikolaus Gansterer–have several reasons to do this. The interest in interactive artistic work methods continues to grow among makers, curators and commissioners. Yet, each discipline (and often each individual artist) has an independent language for describing interactive works. These languages don’t mingle well at all. There is therefore currently too little scope for communication between artists from different disciplines. This often means that the nuanced and vital elements of interactive art works are overlooked. Continue reading

Inciting Responses to Transmutations

Victoria Vesna’s interactive installation, Mood Swings, creates states of emotion and perception by translating the viewer’s body into a swarm of moving particles that change “moods” from one extreme to another. As the visitor’s image is captured on a live video camera, radical shifts in color and sounds occur in the projection while particles and poetic texts emerge and dissolve in response to the viewer’s movement. The seven colors change with audio shifts, moving from irritating and disturbing to peaceful and calming. The use of new technologies in Mood Swings creates an interface between virtual and real worlds and engages the viewer by inciting responses to the audio and visual transmutations.

Media and Medicine for Communities partner Victoria Vesna developed the interactive exhibition “Mood Swings” for the Inside Out Loud exhibit, the first significant survey of contemporary American art to explore critical issues related to women’s health. Continue reading

Let 1,000 Machines Bloom

Mobicasting. Let 1,000 Machines Bloom by Stevphen Shukaitis, Sophea Lerner, and Adam Hyde

Let us suppose that life is a dance, a chaotic unfolding of bodies in motion, repeating but utterly unique gestures tracing lines of flight over the unfolding of the new earth these steps create: the resistance of fleshy bodies and their collisions embodying the limitless nature of human experience, from the antagonism of the unexpected blow to the warmth of the gentle caress. Each interaction always exceeding our capacity to enunciate its experience but paradoxically embodying the very basis from which we come to communicate, to relate, to describe in common.

Stepping back from the metaphor consider: is the art of political communication all so different from this? Moments of creation, resistance, and expression–from the collaboration of gardeners growing a patch of vegetables in a community garden to mass actions in the streets–are constituent elements in an on-going process of creating new forms of sociality and community, new forms of life. But in the same way the experience of motion always exceeds our ability to express them, forms of political communication stumble on the gap between an ever present sensation of movement and our attempts to describe it. The intricate weaves of affective bonds, experiences, and memory tatter and fray from their immediacy in the shaping of representation. And all too often attempts to describe become methods of capture, transforming vibrancy into pallid reflection. Continue reading

Learning from Archaeology

“Abstract: Pervasive computing and locative media are emerging as technologies and processes that promise to reconfigure our understandings and experiences of space and culture. With the critical hand of material and cultural studies, we start to shape questions about locative media representations of urban mobilities, and begin to unearth some of the struggles and tensions that exist within these fields of operation. By looking at archaeologyÂ’s constitutive processes of collection, ordering and display we highlight some of the problems found in mapping people and objects in space and time, and ask what kinds of social/spatial relations are made possible in particular locative media projects. Ultimately, we take archaeologyÂ’s critical focus on authorship and ownership, explain its relevance to locative media, and suggest questions to consider in the future research and design of locative media.” From Locative Media as Socialising and Spatialising Practices: Learning from Archaeology (draft) (PDF), by Anne Galloway and Matt Ward. Continue reading

Web 2.0 Arrives

“Some technological revolutions arrive as revelation…Other revolutions creep up with more subtlety, built of tweaks and minor advances, not radical breakthroughs. E-mail took decades to gestate, but now many of us canÂ’t imagine life without it. ThereÂ’s a comparable quiet revolution under way right now, one that is likely to fundamentally transform the way we use the Web in the coming years. The changes are technical and involve thousands of individual programmers, dozens of start-ups, and a few of the largest software companies in the world. The result is the equivalent of a massive software upgrade for the entire Web, what some commentators have taken to calling Web 2.0. Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest…” From Emerging Technology: Web 2.0 Arrives by Steven Johnson, Discover, Vol. 26 No. 10. [Related] Continue reading

Fortress Urbanism

And so now New York City may attempt to install the total cinematic dream that has consumed London’s private security firms for the past three decades, lost as they are in the Warholian ecstasy of filming every last centimeter of urban space, week after month after year, in what is surely the largest outright expenditure of cinematic ambition since… perhaps since film began. That dream is known as the ‘ring of steel’ – part of what I call ‘military urbanism,’ and what is referred to by Eric Lupton, in The New York Times, as ‘fortress urbanism.’

‘For more than a century now,’ we read, ‘winged dragons flanking a shield have guarded each entrance to the City of London. In recent decades, this coat of arms has been reinforced with an elaborate anti-terrorism apparatus known as the “ring of steel,” consisting of concrete barriers, checkpoints and thousands of video cameras. City planners call the system, set up to defend against bombings by the Irish Republican Army, “fortress urbanism.”‘ Continue reading

Sousveillance Grid + Community Built Display

The Community Built Display enables a group of people with wireless laptops to create a modular, flat-panel, dynamically reconfigurable large-format display. For SPECFLIC, The Outsider Jeremiad will serve as a ringleader of a group of audience members who want to send high-impact visual messages to those on the Inside. Developer: Robert Twomey, UCSD MFA Candidate, Visual Arts; Advisor: Natalie Jeremijenko, Visual Arts Dept., Xdesign Studio.

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Locative Animals

Mikel Maron’s presentation of his contribution for the Open Plan workshop is very insightful and original. I like his ‘locative animal‘ concept very much:

“My [Mikel Maron] angle in my application to the Workshop was Locative Animals. Nothing much happened on this, but I did get to meet a researcher with similar interests, Shaun Lawson. HereÂ’s the blurb I submitted on Locative Animals.

My interest in Locative Arts has been somewhat on the fringes of the predominantly urban, socially focused arts projects. The natural world is under ever greater stresses, and these technologies, usually employed to buffer nature, can and have been effectively used to raise awareness of the non-human world and give it a voice. The idea of over saturation of technology has been parodied by projects like “Augmented Animals,” though in reality new communication modes are being employed by wildlife researchers to track elephants and reindeer by SMS and GPS. IÂ’ve been gathering various resources on spatial technology and spatial understanding in animals under the moniker Locative Animals. Continue reading