A Collaborative Biography

Shirley Bassey Mixed Up is a collaborative biography: an illustrated biography of the legendary diva, where the reader helps to ‘mix’ the illustrations online, using Internet searches. The biography was inspired by an incident on a TV awards show last year, where Bassey was publically humiliated. I felt sad to see this happen, and wanted to know more about what led up to this. All illustrations are built on-the-fly from live Yahoo searches. By specifying different searches and playing with the customisation options, the reader creates the illustrations themselves. This is a traditional (linear) 14-page story built on top of a generative composition tool, that uses Internet search data as its input.

The work can be described as a networked narrative, as a story partly created by networked data. Adding unexpected and uncontrolled elements to the story influences and changes the presentation, how it’s experienced and what we take away from it. This shapes the story, changing fact into fiction, sometimes disrupting the story. As the networked elements are dynamic and largely unpredictable, every version of the biography is unique. Your version of the story is packaged into booklet form, for you to print and keep.

About Dave Miller: Dave Miller experiments with illustrated stories and networked media. More of his work can be seen here. [Related] Continue reading

Art and Culture in Times of Expediency

Liverpool Biennial Conference :: City Breaks? Art and Culture in Times of Expediency :: 19 – 22 October, 2006 :: Static, Liverpool

Today, the idea of culture as an expedient has gained legitimacy in West and underpins the enormous capital investment in a contemporary art infrastructure (of late in China). Increasingly, culture is supported as a purveyor of economic development and a tool to remediate social inequality. This trend has produced a contradiction for art whereby accountability and visibility jar with self-organisation and open-ended processes of valorisation.

Biennial exhibitions are habitually criticised for spectacularising the presentation of art. However, in recent years the proliferation of Biennials has yielded different models that distinguish themselves notably in their relation to place. Where on the one hand this multiplication follows the logic of globalised capital on the other a revaluation of our relation to the global has generated renewed attention to the local situations and translocal existencies. In addition new alliances between art, science and fe. ngoÂ’s, cunning, trickery and ruses displace rugged nostalgia for oppositionality. Arguably some Biennials have contributed to the creation of new public spheres and a meaningful critique therefore needs to be precise about the ways in which the relation between the local and global is constituted. How does this new generation of Biennials fare? Continue reading

Conference Heads East

Aaron Delwiche of San Antonio’s Trinity University and the Terra Nova blog posts the news that the next State of Play conference will be held January 7-9 in Singapore. “We are convening thought leaders from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas to engage in a lively discussion about the unique regulatory and cross-cultural challenges posed by the growth of transnational virtual worlds.” It’s an interesting choice of location for what’s probably the most forward-thinking conference on virtual worlds. Asia has more virtual world “residents” than any other region of the world, and has seen a number of legal decision handed down that treat virtual worlds more like real places — with real property laws — than any in the West. Singapore will be tough to get to for many Western-Hemisphere VW pundits, but it also opens the dialogue to people we haven’t heard that much from on te other side of the world.
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Where Art Thou Net.Art?

Conference Report: Where Art Thou Net.Art? On Zero One/ ISEA 2006 by Randall Packer :: Commissioned by Rhizome.org :: The long awaited Zero One/ ISEA 2006 took over San Jose, California, two weeks ago in a sprawling, city-wide, mega-festival celebrating art and technology in the heart of Silicon Valley. Much has already been written about it, from daily observations in the local papers to a feature in the New York Times, from the Blogosphere to the listservs. As one who has been immersed in the new media scene since the late 1980s, I would like to contribute a bit of historical context to the discussion: I offer my commentary from a pre-millennial perspective, when the dream emerged in the 1990s, during an era of optimism and promise, the dream of a new art form that would side-step a mainstream art world mired in curators, museums, galleries, objects, and old aesthetic issues. This was the dream of Net.Art, a revolutionary new international movement of artists, techies, and hackers, led in large part by the unassuming, unabashedly ambitious new media curator from the Walker Art Center, Steve Dietz, now director of Zero One. Continue reading

Urban Interventions + Cultural Exchanges

aMAZElab: Urban interventions, workshops, films, debates, cultural exchanges, publications :: aMAZElab is a non-profit cultural lab based in Milano, which works for the diffusion and knowledge of contemporary cultures. Founded and directed by Claudia Zanfi and Gianmaria Conti, promotes projects and events on social-territorial research, cultural interchanges and micro-geographies. At its 5° birthday, aMAZElab develops over 2006 summer/autumn a series of activities and appointments for reflection and research, such as:

20 September/10 October 2006 :: Nicosia, Cyprus :: Transcrossing memories (urban installations) :: “The Memory Box” is a mobile device to collect popular history from the common people. This bilateral intervention will serve as a travelling public space open to everyone, and will host various presentations, artistic projects, readings, video, debates, performances etcÂ… The project is held in collaboration with Artos Foundation Nicosia, Ashik Mene Studio, Art schools, theoreticians, architects and artists in Cyprus, from both sides.
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A Symposium in honor of Allan Pred

[...] I am totally unconcerned with the disciplinary limits of geography, but fully concerned with geography as an ontological condition, as an inescapable existential reality. Everybody has a body, nobody can escape from their body, and consequently all human activity — every form of individual and collective practice– is a situated practice and thereby geographical. I regard the invisible geographies of power relations and meaning/discourse as every bit as “real” as the visible geographies of the built landscape and actual human activity. Whether exploring the historical geography of past and present urban modernities, or the production of gendered and “racial” difference, I am always preoccupied with the complex and multi-scaled processes through which visible and invisible geographies emerge out of one another. [...]

I take writing and questions of representation very seriously, believing that there should be some congruence between my textual strategy and the subject matter I am dealing with, between the way in which I write and what I am writing about. I look forward to the day when the watchdogs of academic style lose their teeth and it will not be considered out of line to submit Ph.D. dissertations in CD-Rom format, where text, sound and image are fused with one another. [...] [via nicholas senn on critical spatial practice] Continue reading

Environment of Deception and Uncertainty

Dislocation, by Alex Davies, attempts to create a mixed reality environment in which the virtual world inhabits the viewers’ physical reality. The exhibition room is empty, apart from four small inset screens. Concealed from the visitors, a camera is embedded in the rear wall, and an array of eight speakers is mounted within the walls around the floor of the room.

Visitors need to approach the monitors closely to see what they are showing. After a moment they realise that what they see is their own back (recorded by the hidden camera), and those of the neighbours peering at the adjacent monitors. After a while, the screen flickers slightly, as if there is a minor disruption in transmission, and people — pre-recorded and superimposed onto the live image — enter the gallery, one can even hear their movements within the room. It is easy to mistake to pre-recorded images as people in the room with you at the same time. Continue reading

Robotic Art

You Move Me (Work in Progress) by Lara Greene [cable tests movie 58MB - requires QuickTime] :: The figure is a fully articulated machine that moves via cables extending out from within the body to multifunctioning levers that can be pushed pulled and twisted to create various movements and affect it’s position in space. A group of up to 6 people will be required to operate the piece, these being visiting members of the public. The figure has the capacity for elegance or awkwardness, dependent upon the level of people’s control and ability or desire to co-operate with each other. People will struggle with or surmount this challenge, as she responds and embodies these conditions the character will come to life allowing people to empathise and respond in return. You move me is a tool for expression that draws people together in a web of interdependency provoking many forms of communication. [via Interactive Architecture dot Org] Continue reading

How is the idea of a community changing?

My Building and the Sheher, by Abhinandita Mathur and Venu Mathur, presents a visual essay on our building, where about 100 Mathur families reside. Shree Ganesh Group Housing Society is one of the many housing Societies in Patparganj that came up in the 80’s, defining a new way of life for middle class Delhi.

The Mathurs are a close knit community and have a special relationship to the city of Delhi. Most families from this building can trace their history to the old city or Sheher.

This relationship between the community and the city was once well known and evident. It was apparent in the way of life, language, food, clothing and culture. The photographs document how the community has adapted to suburban living while continuing with some of its traditional ways. The project also contains an archive of these old traditions, such as typical songs and recipes of the community. Continue reading

Body as Screen

The little black dress as erotic playground for pong? Max Moswitzer and Margarete Jahrmann alias Marguerite Charmante of the Ludic Society (and of the Nybble Engine fame) have crafted a Pong Dress to dissolute the boundaries between body and screen.

White LED’s shine through the black front of the dress. At hip level, two retro-game consoles are offered to players to play Mini-Pong on a 5×7 LED screen worked into the dress. Two pixels move up and down as rackets to the left and right along the waist. With every achieved point, the green score display blinks at chest level.

Hit the dot back and forth with two sticks - this time all new on a 3D playing field, that is moving, chatting and laughing. we hit the dot with some spin from the height of the belly button and aim at the left nipple. Continue reading