CROWDS / CONVERSATIONS / CONFESSIONS

March 11–June 10–Max Dean and Kristan Horton, Atom Egoyan, Laiwan, George Bures Miller, Don Ritter and David Rosetzky.

Crowds/Conversations/Confessions brings together the work of seven international artists who explore the dynamics of human interaction, articulated by the use of technology. Their works play with modes of interpersonal communication, from the discursive structure of conversations to the one-sided delivery of confessions and public addresses. Each of the works promises a form of engagement, communication and personal contact, but each also suggests that this is a fiction, a promise of technology that can never be fulfilled.

In George Bures MillerÂ’s installation Conversation/Interrogation an office chair faces a suspended television. As a viewer sits in the chair a shot of a man (the artist) appears on the screen and begins a conversation. The viewer quickly realizes that the interviewer is talking to them. The questions asked by the on-screen interviewer shift between the banal and the manipulative, so it is never quite obvious what the intent of the conversation is.
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The Guilt Eye

Human Avatars, a multimedia installation created by Andrea Zapp with the Vini Reilly’s music, plays on two classic levels: the real and the virtual. The visitors have to walk through the installation’s space, discovering a small wood cabin, which they are asked to enter. Once inside, the bodies are shot and projected into a scaled down model of the same cabin. Peeking through a small window the visitors can look at the movements of their own projections and at others made by other persons. The crossed game of shooting and projecting pushes everybody to have a visual contact with a different ’self’, that could equally be a real person or his own avatar, assuming the role of a spy and, unconsciously, of a person kept under surveillance. Despite the architectures and the scenario are friendly and accessible, the interactive experience immediacy remains pending and ambiguous. Probably one of the inhibiting elements is the same interactive fulcrum. The eye and its artificial replacement often carry uneasiness, because they are connected to the surveillance and control feeling. Furthermore, in this case, the holistic lyricism, made by the consciousness raising of one’s own being in the world is suffocated by the voyer’s sense of guilt. This role is evidently assumed by the observer, enhanced because it’s not a hidden spying activity, but an a vile act, made for all the world to see.” Francesca Tomassini, Neural. Continue reading

MediaArtHistories MA

Danube University’s Department for Applied Cultural Studies, Center for Image Science is now accepting applications for the 2006/07 class of their MA Program in MediaArtHistories starting november. This two year low-residency degree provides students with deeper understanding of the most important developments of contemporary art through a network of renowned international theorists, artists and curators like Steve DIETZ, Erkki HUHTAMO, Lev MANOVICH, Christiane PAUL, Paul SERMON, Oliver GRAU, Gregor LECHNER, Jens HAUSER and many others.

Artists and programers give new insights into the latest and most controversal software, interface developments and their interdisciplinary and intercultural praxis. Keywords are: Strategies of Interaction & Interface Design, Social Software, Immersion & Emotion, Artistic Invention. Continue reading

Clues Woven Into Cloth

If you find yourself wearing clothes from a new company called Edoc Laundry, beware: Strangers may walk up to you on the street to examine the intricacies of your shirt’s patterns. That’s because Edoc Laundry’s first line, expected to launch March 1, literally weaves an episodic, multimedia game into the fabric of the garments. The Seattle-based company is believed to be the first to attempt such a fashion feat.

The idea is an extension of so-called alternate-reality games, or ARGs, in which people try to solve puzzles that are propagated online but require players to team up to find clues in the real world. Usually, the games are promotional vehicles for other products, including video games and movies. Examples of ARGs include 2004’s “I Love Bees,” which was a lead-in to Bungie Studios’ “Halo 2″ for Xbox, and 2005’s “Last Call Poker,” which promoted Activision’s “Gun.”

Edoc Laundry’s line integrates an ARG into its shirts, hats and accessories. The story involves the mysterious death of the manager of a fictional band called Poor Richard. Players find clues such as words and symbols embedded in the clothes. They then head to a Web site where they can unlock complex elements of the overriding story of Poor Richard and its music…” Continue reading Wearable game weaves clues into cloth by Daniel Terdiman, CNET News.com. [via Jim Downing on Smart Mobs] Continue reading

Pop! Goes the Weasel

“From closed circuit TV and video monitoring, email snooping software such as Carnivore, tracking through credit card usage and location mapping via GPS enabled cell phones; surveillance is omnipresent. It may not be the act of surveillance but rather the collection, storage and use of our ‘data identitiesÂ’ in a centralized database that presents the greatest threat. Who will have access to the database? How will the data be used? How will people be protected from data profiling and marginalization? Widespread concern for public security is generating significant support for surveillance, authentication and information gathering systems. The possibility of the convergence of databases of collected surveillance and other information presents serious threats to personal privacy and freedom.

Pop! Goes the Weasel, an interactive art installation exhibited in Nagoya, Japan in 2002, explores resistance to the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as a human tracking system. Identities are blurred as RFID tags are shared. The significance of the collected data is shifted as visitors repeatedly interfere in the system. A video projection containing the implantation of an RFID microchip into the artistÂ’s hand and a visible real-time reflection of visitors being tracked accentuates uneasiness. Continue reading

Multi-Touch Interaction Experiments

While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

Since refining the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) sensing technique, we’ve been experimenting with a wide variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities that utilize multi-touch input information. These go far beyond the “poking” actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based interactive interfaces. It is a rich area for research, and we are extremely excited by its potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. It’s also just so much fun! Continue reading

An Experimental Genetic Programming Synthesiser

Fastbreeder is essentially a 4 button synth. The idea is to grow code by choosing from a range of automatically generated variations of functions, you don’t have to know how they work, but each function creates a sound which can be selected by you. The following generation is then created containing mutants of your chosen sound. You can refine and develop the sound just by auditioning and choosing the best one each time.

The interface shows you the code graphically, as a tree. These trees are attempts to clearly represent code structure, giving you some feedback on what is being evolved. Conventional listings are not that informative with GP (genetic programming), as deeply functional code such as this is hard to read linearly… Continue reading

DEADLINE APPROACHING

Turbulence.org is pleased to announce its New England Initiative II, a juried, networked art competition. Three projects by New England artists will be commissioned and exhibited on Turbulence and in real space (venue to be announced). Each award will be $3,500. The jury consists of Julian Bleecker, Michele Thursz, and Helen Thorington. This project is made possible with funds from the LEF Foundation.

PROJECT CONCEPT: Net art projects are “art projects for which the Net is both a sufficient and necessary condition of viewing/expressing/participating” (Steve Dietz). They live in the public world of the Internet. Recently, however, wireless telecommunications technologies have enabled computation to migrate out of the desktop PC into the physical world, creating the possibility of “hybrid” networked art, works that intermingle and fuse previously discrete identities, disciplines, and/or fields of activity such as the Internet and urban space. (See the networked_performance blog—specifically the categories Locative Media and Mobile Art and Culture.) Borders are disintegrating and new identities are emerging. We encourage applications by net artists and artists working on networked hybrid projects. Continue reading

New Rules of Tenancy _within_ the Internet of Things

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between space and networked things as I write this report with Nicolas Nova for our workshop on objects that blog and I’ve realized (without too much surprise) that that workshop and my thinking about “place” and networked publics are pulling together, particularly in the context of the Internet of Things.

When the place group presented its thinking on the role of place in the context of networked publics, I felt that it was important to consider how a world in which Things will alter the patterns of usage, movement and mobility with space. (I’ll capitalize for now to distinguish between networked Internet of Things things and non-networked things, and so as to be succinct I’ll do an end-run around Heidegger, Kant and Latour, but not for long Anne!) And I’ll call the differentiated kind of movement and rules of occupancy within this different kind of place, motility, so as to emphasize what I think is a safe speculation: a world in which Things that co-occupy physical space are known (by the other occupants of that space) or assumed to have the ability to disseminate, record, and perhaps even put in context what happens in that space and circulate such within the network will change the patterns of use, the kinds of social practice that obtain, and the imaginary about that space. This kind of space and the rules of tenancy are different from space in which such “blogging” characteristics are not assumed about things. Continue reading

Yamaguchi Noriko is Under Our Skin

Emerging Japanese artist Yamaguchi Noriko gets under our skin thanks to what covers hers. Currently in her last year of an MFA program at the Kyoto City University of the Arts, this 22-year-old artist from Kobe tackles issues as diverse as technology, mythology and feminism through bodily transformation and endurance. Yamaguchi uses her body to challenge present-day social mores by quite literally camouflaging herself with materials such as red azuki beans, golden thumbtacks and silvery cell phone keypads which become a constructed second skin that acts as a meaning-laden barrier against the world beyond. The art world in Japan has already recognized Yamaguchi as an up-and-coming talent: in 2004, she was selected by famed photographer Hosoe Eikoh as a recipient of the Panel of Judges Award at the 21st-Century Asia Design Competition award held by the Kyoto University of Art and Design and again by Morimura Yasumasa as a winner of a young artistsÂ’ competition hosted by the Osaka Contemporary Art Center. Continue reading