Commissioned for Interact 15, Clouds of clouds — by Miguel Leal and Luis Sarmento — is a random generator of cloud images. Each new cloud is unique and indexed to a particular time (GMT) on a particular day. It was developed in Perl + MySQL; the database has more than 1,000,000 photos gathered from Flickr between September 10-13 2008, using Flickr API.

“This is randomness, and that is altogether different. If absolutely necessary, you can count the stars. A catalogue has been kept of them since Antiquity. But if you ask for a catalogue of the clouds, people laugh at you. There is no such term as cloud, defined as permanent, defined by its borders, by its terms or its terminations. [?] Clouds, whirlwinds, flows, noises, all primary masses without qualities.” — M. Serres. Continue reading

Thursday Club Autumn Term 2008: Murray McKeich: Computational Creativity :: September 25, 2008; 6 -8 pm :: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, South East London.

Murray McKeich is a New Zealander currently resident in Melbourne Australia who has established himself as a leading practitioner of digital media in Australasian contemporary art. Working with digital photo-media, his exhibition projects include printed imagery and animation. Described as both macabre and darkly seductive, Mckeich’s art weaves visions of surreal fantasy and magic from the tiny pieces of every-day debris found in urban and domestic environments. His recent practice uses generative software to autonomously breed art-works. Continue reading

“There is a strain of net art referred to among its practitioners and those who follow it as “pro surfer” work. Characterized by a copy-and-paste aesthetic that revolves around the appropriation of web-based content in simultaneous celebration and critique of the internet and contemporary digital visual culture, this work — heavy on animated gifs, YouTube remixes, and an embrace of old-school “dirtstyle” web design aesthetics — is beginning to find a place in the art world. But it has yet to benefit from substantial critical analysis. My aim here is to outline ways in which the work of pro surfers holds up to the vocabulary given to us by studies of photography and cinematic montage. Continue reading

The Order of Things :: September 11, 2008 - January 4, 2009 :: Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp [MuHKA], Leuvenstraat 32 2000, Antwerp, Belgium.

The Order of Things is an exhibition on the uses of archival images, image archives and image banks (and various other manifestations of a classificatory, encyclopaedic impulse) in contemporary art. It takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver photo-artist Roy Arden titled The World as Will and Representation, an online image archive consisting of a staggering 30,000+ jpegs from which Arden, who helped to flesh out many of the germinal ideas for this exhibition, selects the visual motifs for his recent digital photo-collages. Continue reading

Writers and their works in a virtual space: Trope — promoting new writing in Second Life :: Invitation to Melbourne Writers’ Festival roundtable :: August 28, 2008; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: ACMI Cinema 1, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, Flinders Street, Melbourne, Australia.

Trope promotes new writing within virtual space, and launched as an imagetext gallery within Second Life that coincided with the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May 2008. Trope creatively intervenes in the ways that readers engage with literary texts and aims to expand writing networks and to further develop virtual literary community. Continue reading

S[t]imulation: an interactive painting by Marc Tuters: In completion of the class of 2008 USC SCA IMD MFA, S[t]imulation is a 12×8 foot interactive painting in which the texture of the actual painting was virtually processed in Derivative’s Touch Designer and then projected back onto itself to scale. (It remains temporarily on display at the thesis space just north of campus, please contact me via the comments section for a viewing.)

The piece was designed to privileged calmness in the viewer, using motion sensing to disrupt the image. However, unlike a game, interactivity here was not intended to be indexical. Continue reading

Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky / MATRIX 225 :: until September 14, 2008 :: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA.

We have always contemplated the night sky with awe, envisioning ties to mythic pasts or space-bound futures. The night sky of the present is pregnant with these associations. At the same time, it cloaks in plain sight constellations of technology employed by the United States government’s “black world” of covert military and intelligence activities. Trevor Paglen, trained as both an artist and a geographer, deploys an array of tactics—from data analysis and on-the-ground exploration to long-distance photography and astronomy—to map this shadowy world of secret bases, unspecified budget allocations, stealth planes, assumed identities, and secret satellites on land and in the heavens. Continue reading

A Recent History of Writing and Drawing - A collaborative project by Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich :: July 9 - August 31, 2008 :: ICA, London.

A Recent History of Writing and Drawing is an exhibition that explores the evolving relationship between technologies of communication and their users. It is a project by the programmer / designer Jürg Lehni and the graphic designer Alex Rich, curated by design historian Emily King, and involves a variety of interactive and non-interactive devices for writing and drawing.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Viktor, a large wall-drawing machine that is controlled by an adapted version of ordinary design software and powered by small industrial motors. Continue reading

MY YARD OUR MESSAGE is a collaboration of the Walker Art Center and mnartists.org for the UnConvention and Dialog City during the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

Beginning May 23, artists and designers are invited to submit yard signs to MyYardOurMessage.com around the theme of what it means to actively participate in a democracy. Starting July 1, the public will be invited to vote on the artist-created design submissions. Continue reading

How to Talk to Images - Exhibition by Richard Wright :: July 4 -August 3, 2008 :: Opening Reception: July 4; 6-9 pm :: HTTP Gallery, Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Road, London N4 1LD.

No one is sure how many images there are on the Internet. Google has nearly a billion. Some say it is hundreds of times more than that.

For How to Talk to Images, Richard Wright has compiled a database of 50,000 random Internet images as the raw content for two artworks. “The Internet Speaks” and “The Mimeticon” use this database to create a world where we can “read” pictures, browse “libraries” of endless images or learn to draw with alphabets. Continue reading