The “Corporatization” of User-Generated Content

An article by Jon Pareles in the Times (December 10th, 2006) brings to mind some points that have been risen here throughout the year. One, is the “corporatization” of user-generated content, the other is what to do with all the material resulting from the constant production/dialogue that is taking place on the Internet.

Pareles summarizes the acquisition of MySpace by Rupert’s Murdoch’s News Corporation and YouTube by Google with remarkable clarity:

What these two highly strategic companies spent more than $2 billion on is a couple of empty vessels: brand-named, centralized repositories for whatever their members decide to contribute.

As he puts it, this year will be remembered as the year in which old-line media, online media and millions of individual web users agreed. I wouldn’t use the term “agreed,” but they definitely came together as the media giants saw the financial possibilities of individual self-expression generated in the Web. As it usually happens with independent creative products, large amounts of the art originated in websites such as MySpace and YouTube, borrow freely and get distributed and promoted outside of the traditional for-profit mechanisms. Continue reading

The Porous Border Between the Real and the Mediated

Parsing tons of papers, articles, documents and pdf that I accumulated in the last few months, I ran across this article in VodafoneÂ’s Receiver: Big Games and the porous border between the real and the mediated by Frank Lantz.

In this short piece, the author describes what he means by “big games”, i.e. “Big Games are human-powered software for cities, life-size collaborative hallucinations, and serious fun“. Some excerpts I find pertinent regarding my research:

Imaginary places, constructed from code, are now being represented not just as pixel grid windows into synthetic 3D environments, but mapped onto the actual 3D environments in which we live. Called “Big Games”, these large-scale, real-world games occupy urban streets and other public spaces and combine the richness, complexity, and procedural depth of digital media with physical activity and face-to-face social interaction. Continue reading

Support new media art

Call it new media art, interactive art, call it any way you like, just go, spend money and support the art we like. Here’s my mini-list:

Turbulence because they’ve been consistently commissioning net.art for ten consecutive years and because they have a great blog called networked_performance that documents better (much better) than me the calls, essays and events that interest the whole new media art community. Net artists, activists and digital artists have been contributing books, DVDs, CDs, archival prints, T-Shirts and the kind of fancy little mask i’m proudly donning on the left of this post (because that’s what matters to me today, really. Not net.art but something to cover up the spot on the chin i woke up with.) More >> [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art] THANKS EVERYONE FOR GIVING US ANOTHER YEAR OF TURBULENCE! Continue reading

Hurricane Katrina and its Aftermath

LivesConnected, an interactive data visualization by Peter Mayer, was recently launched to coincide with the end of hurricane season (Nov. 30). It is an oral history repository documenting the experiences of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The interface allows access to video narratives of 44 different people, and connects them by thematic associations. Continue reading

The Jury Is Still Out

[Image: Veronica Brown is able to make a living selling her digital fashions in the online world Second Life. Photo Credit: Linden Lab] Where Real Money Meets Virtual Reality, The Jury Is Still Out :: By Alan Sipress, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, December 26, 2006; A01.

Veronica Brown is a hot fashion designer, making a living off the virtual lingerie and formalwear she sells inside the online fantasy world Second Life. She expects to have earned about $60,000 this year from people who buy her digital garments to outfit their animated self-images in this fast-growing virtual community.

But Brown got an unnerving reminder last month of how tenuous her livelihood is when a rogue software program that copies animated objects appeared in Second Life. Scared that their handiwork could be cloned and sold by others, Brown and her fellow shopkeepers launched a general strike and briefly closed the electronic storefronts where they peddle digital furniture, automobiles, hairdos and other virtual wares. Continue reading

Playing Pong walking with a laptop

“The tilting sensor embedded in some of the latest Apple laptops has induced many projects focused on experimenting new interaction methods. netPong by Oriol Ferrer Mesià, is a software that allows to play Pong physically tilting the computer to control the paddle. Playing alone is the basic possibility, but it’s decidedly funnier to play with another likewise equipped opponent in a local network, moving around the room with the laptop firm in the hands. The laptop itsellf is then transformed in a control device. But there’s no external visible sign of that: its whole hardware seem the same but acts differently, and its complexity and multi-purposing are re-shaped on-the-fly by the software. A 21st century laptop is then used as a minimal analogue paddle from the late seventies and its ‘mobility’ attitude is not anymore related to the place of working but it is then emodied by the machine, exploited to play. The (universal) pong paradigm, as already investigated in the Pong Mythos exhibition, is based on essential rules being also able to instinctively activate our ancestral playing instincts. And a laptop game that have to be played walking here and there is something precious for our physical and mental health.” Neural. Continue reading

Sounding Balloons

Ballonnenveld, an installation by Martijn Tellinga, displays a sounding and vibrating body of helium-filled balloons. The balloons function as resonance-chambers for a trimmed spectrum of sine-waves that are fed through strings, connecting the balloons with double-coned carspeaker-elements. Each balloon holds its own resonance-frequency that changes over time as a result of varying temperature in the space, amount of helium in the balloon (decreasing over time) and length of the string. Hitting the resonance-frequency the balloons start to get bumpy, as well as the connecting strings, clearly showing the waveshape of the soundsignal going through. This of course causes an acoustical process, perceiveable in the space. Carefully balancing the level between direct sound from the carspeaker-elements and the acoustical-qualities produced by the balloons, creates a musical mechanism that bridges between instrumental and electronic sonoroties and, gently directing the balloons, between acousmatic music and instrumental playing. Continue reading

Continuous Stream of S O U N D for John Cage

John Cage Special - part ONE :: Continuous Stream of S O U N D for John Cage - non structure voyage acoustique avec armes et bagages (with bag and baggage) … Duration 38′39

“I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.” - John Cage

voices : John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, George Koehler, Saba Tewelde (singer), Todd Weinstein, birds, cats, tv-voices, radio-voices, laughing, children voices, the composer

instruments: piano, prepared piano, percussion, cymbals, gurgle shells, timpani, trumpet, glockenspiel, bells, radio, tape collage fragments, triangle, turntable sounds (record scratch and crack), whistle, horns, toy robots, eggshells, gong, bowed gong, strings, soda bottles, double bass, bowed e-bass, dishes, church bells, acoustic feedback, subway sounds (new york city), tools, paper, machine sounds, audio tape transport sounds, electronics, cardboard tubes, software instruments (spongefork), xylophone, bowed umbrella, composer eating, composer walking, fingers, clapping, computer mouse, video cut up machine sounds, computer keyboard, trucks, cars, rain, edding writing sounds, applause, siren, ambient recordings (Frankfurt, New York, Zurich, Berlin), wind, water, echinocactus grusonii (Golden Barrel)

Poduced by musique trouve - frankfurt … Recorded: March, April, September and November 2006 … Copyright 2006 by Ralph Lichtensteiger [blogged on espace sonorite] [via] Continue reading

Copy-paste (net.)art

Last May, i blogged about Plagiarismo, an exhibition that tried to demonstrate that the appropriation and re-formulation of other artists’ ideas is an essential component of culture.

Vuk Cosic - who’s having a solo exhibition at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana- wrote me then that he was putting together a show called CTRL-C on a similar subject. The show has just opened at the galerija Simulaker in Slovenia. Here’s the gist:

From Duchamp and Benjamin to Beuys the art of the previous century has asked the question of copying and multiplying as a legitimate artistic practice. The advent of the internet has dramatically placed the digital original and digital copy in the very center of artistic but also economic frictions. Continue reading

How two groups of scientists coax music from nature

“From Led Zeppelin to Wolf Parade, rock music owes a debt to science—and to the scientists whose fascination with sound art spurred them to create new noises. A Russian physicist named Leon Theremin developed the world’s first electronic musical instrument: a box with antennae (appropriately called a “theremin”) that used electric circuits to create a range of otherworldly sounds. Four decades later, in 1964, an engineering physics Ph.D. named Robert Moog invented the synthesizer that bears his name. Now, a new generation of scientists and musicians continue to push the frontiers of musical possibility.

Since 2003, Hungarian astrophysicist Zoltán Kolláth and composer Jenő Keuler have been working on what they call the “Stellar Music Project,” using pulse patterns generated by stars to compose musical pieces…” Continue reading Rock Stars (And Proteins, Too) by Lydia Fong, Seed. Continue reading