We think we see an unlimited number of colours in nature, but in fact our brain sensory functions combine only three light waves. We take the illusion of colours for reality when, in truth, this assumed reality is a mental construct, one of many generated by ourselves day- by-day, minute-by-minute. When these processes are clearly demonstrated, we may re-examine our relationship to the world we thought was predetermined.

true is a new sound, light and dance performance that explores the relationship between the brain and the reality we face. true also looks at new possibilities of and evolution in sound, lighting and performance, made possible only with today’s technology.

Performed by dancer-choreographers Tsuyoshi Shirai and Takao Kawaguchi, this poetic journey is a sensory experience in which the use of high-technology devices such as LED lights, oscillators and myoelectric sensors creates a highly enhanced sound and light experience, and the theatre space becomes a flickering and vibrating extension of the performers’ bodies.

true was premiered in September 2007 at Japan’s Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] by 10 artists from different fields under the direction of Takayuki Fujimoto of Kyoto collective Dumb Type. The collaborators include dancer and winner of the Toyota Choreography Awards 2006 ,Tsuyoshi Shirai of AbsT/baneto, dancer Takao Kawaguchi of Dumb Type, last seen in D.D.D. in The Studios last year, music composer Daito Manabe and visual, video and visual designer Takuya Minami. This will be the premiere performance of true outside of Japan.

A project of Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses, Lumens is an installation of lamps networked across three spaces: Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery 51, and Turbulence.org. Scores of personal lamps that usually inhabit and illuminate the interiors of homes and shops have been borrowed from the residents of Adams and North Adams, Massachusetts, filling two gallery spaces: Greylock Arts in Adams and MCLA Gallery 51 Annex in North Adams. In addition, their images and stories are represented on turbulence.org, which also serves to connect the two locations telematically.

Clusters of lamps have been outfitted with proximity sensors and arduino microcontrollers. Lamps illuminate in response to a visitor’s presence and simultaneously illuminate lamps in the counterpart spaces. Thus, an individual in Adams can communicate his/her presence to an individual in North Adams, and vice versa. Additionally, as visitors investigate the history of a particular lamp online it will also illuminate in the physical gallery space.

Lumens (re)connects North Adams and Adams — originally a single community — through an exploration of location, influence, history, and the present.

Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses is a collaboration of Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery 51, and Turbulence. Lumens has been made possible through the generous support of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the LEF Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Physical interaction consultant Tom Igoe.
Special thanks to: Larry Alice, Michael Chapman, Abbi Hermosa.

Located in downtown Florence outside the Fortezza da Basso, The Cloud is part of the “Redesigning Fashion Trade Shows” project that Pitti Immagine launched with MIT Mobile Experience Lab in January 2007. It is a long-term project that will creatively rethink the trade show concept and will propose innovative technologies, perspectives and sensory experiences for fashion trade shows.

EOD 02 is an installation by Frederik De Wilde created in collaboration with LAb[au]. EOD 02 is a new-media installation exploring the capacity of special species of living blind fishes to perceive (electrosense) their environment and communicate with each other by emitting electric signals, either in pulses or waves. The installation is based on four aquariums of taintless mirror, each presenting a specific composition of fish producing different electric signals. In each aquarium antennas capture the electric communication between the fishes and render these signals into sound. Under each aquarium a matrix of leds is placed pulsing according to the intensity and rhythm of the emitted signals. In this manner the electrical impulses of the fishes drive sound, light and an entire audiovisual space. More info.

Seth Riskin is an artist, researcher and teacher of light. A former U. S. national champion gymnast, Riskin brings his physical ability to his Light Dance art. In silent, space-defining performances, Riskin’s precise movements articulate light effects that extend from his body. He “sculpts” space, shaping fluid architectures of light around viewers who find themselves within the “dance.” The work has been presented widely, at venues such as the São Paulo Bienal, The Kitchen in New York City and India’s National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay.

Riskin’s research is described as “anthropology” of light. For example, in 1993, with support of a Fulbright Scholarship, he studied concepts and practices of light in Hindu India, with particular focus on fire dancing. Riskin’s teaching concerns light as an expressive medium, worked through the wealth of possibilities afforded by emerging technologies. His curriculum and educational philosophy of light reflect his interdisciplinary approach to the subject/medium. Courses such as The Culture of Light, Light Art Studio and The Architecture of Light engage the senses, new technologies and historical and cultural perspective. Currently, Riskin directs the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the MIT Museum, where he brings cutting-edge technology research to public understanding through exhibitions and events.

Upgrade! Boston is curated by Jo-Anne Green for Turbulence.org in partnership with the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. It is one of 27 nodes currently active in Upgrade! International, an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. If you would like to present your work or get involved, please email jo at turbulence dot org.

Renowned composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda (Japan 1966) will create art projects for Dream Amsterdam. Ikeda’s hypnotic work plays with human perception through installations, performances, live concerts, recordings and album releases. Ikeda will use pure light as the material for his interventions in various secret locations across Amsterdam. Intensely bright light installations will appear mysteriously, connecting a constellation of points across the cityscape. The energy used for the light installations is generated from sustainable, recycled resources. The site-specific art projects can be viewed from June 6 until June 21, 2008 in the evening hours. A detailed map with the locations and a route can be found here from June 6.

His work has been exhibited and presented worldwide, including Tate Modern / Queen Elizabeth Hall (London) and Centre Pompidou / Museum of Modern Art (Paris). He has won important prizes, including the Ars Electronica Golden Nica (2001). Ikeda’s commission for Dream Amsterdam Foundation presents his first large-scale artworks for public spaces and marks a new direction in his artistic career.

On June 7, the SILENT NIGHT event presents a unique opportunity to experience the city as never before: Amsterdam switches off her lights. The darkness maximizes the contrast with the bright light of Ikeda’s installations spread over the city. Ryoji Ikeda and Dream Amsterdam Foundation invite residents of Amsterdam and visitors to actively participate in the SILENT NIGHT event and help contribute to the realization of Ikeda’s Dream, promising to deliver an extraordinary transformation of the city of Amsterdam for one night only.

A co-production by Dream Amsterdam and Forma Arts and Media

New technologies constantly emerge as mediums for artistic practice and thus, bring forth a reconsideration of terms and redrawing of territories. RFID, WiFi, WiMAX, networked objects, reactive spaces, distributed actions, and psycho-geographic interventions are amongst a few contemporary artistic strategies and technologies that touch the borders of what once encompassed free103point9’s scope for Transmission Arts. Furthermore, there is always room for stretching non-technological conceptual definitions of Transmission Arts.

In light of such ongoing developments, free103point9 recognizes the need to engage a practice of inquiry that reaches beyond it’s own organizational limits of understanding. We are inviting practitioners and supporters involved with transmission ideas and activities to expand or challenge our articulation of Transmission Arts. Please help us expand our practices and galvanize our community by taking a few minutes to share your experience with us.

To submit your work for inclusion in free103point9’s archive of Transmission Arts (contemporary artist and works), please submit the following text to archive [at] free103point9.org with a subject header (Transmission Works) by the deadline March 15, 2008:
• Artist statement and links/documentation to specific works with titles and description of works. (500 word max)
• A response to, or definition of, the term “Transmission Arts.” (500 word max) Historical works and artist cited as influences. (500 word max)

2. The second tier of this archive will seek contributions from artist, curators, writers, and researchers to reflect, critique, consider, and respond to specific issues and topics related to transmission. We are inviting artists, scholars or curators working with New Media, Sound, Performance, Inter-media, Conceptual Art, Video, Installation, Social Activism, or Collective Strategies to identify artists (historical or contemporary) relevant to a discussion of Transmission Arts and to interject and engage in a larger discussion on Transmission Arts as a genre.

To learn more about this conversation, please submit a short bio (300 word max) with a general inquiry to archive@free103point9.org subject heading (Transmission Arts Discussion) by March 15, 2008.

free103point9 is a non-profit arts organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts. free103point9 activities support and promote artists exploring transmission mediums for creative expression.

The meetings will focus on conceptual discussions and project presentations and, as far as possible, on the development of prototypes and tools.

Schedule: A monthly session will be held on the following Thursdays from 4:30 to 9 pm.

Core subjects:

• Light and the city. Urbanism, media-façades, the fusion of physical and digital urban spaces.
• Augmented Reality, the use of projections on three-dimensional surfaces and physical objects, the use of light as a material.
• Set and stage design and the creation of atmospheres through the projection of light: perspective, optical illusions, etc.
• Investigation of the qualities of our visual perception and its limits.

For:

-architects and urban planners interested in the use of light in public spaces
-visual artists
-set and stage designers
-programmers (applications in real time, generative and visualization systems…)
-physicists and specialists in optics
-sociologists, anthropologists
-psychologists, neurophysiologists
-other interested persons

Participants will be chosen according to the following criteria:
-Personal interest, artistic and/or research experience in the aforementioned areas

(more sessions will be scheduled for Fall)

Context:

The sun’s shadow is the earliest type of projection known to us, and Egyptian and Greek sun dials are the origin of controlled projection. With the advent of artificial light sources, controlled projections were developed, such as shadow plays and magician’s illusionary techniques. In recent history, controlled artificial light sources and their use in photography, the cinema, and moving pictures have multiplied new projection possibilities. These include the use of light as a material to the projection of moving images on a variety of surfaces: buildings used as screens, research in physics on the qualities of light or ways of altering visual perception through controlling light.

The exhibition draws on SLAC’s continued interest in developing an awareness of the interconnectedness of space and material, with a goal of extending established notions of volume and scale. The gallery is fitted with sensors that draw real-time data from the installation and the people within the exhibition, which is then synchronized with streamed real-time data of solar activity and nuclear processes provided by SLAC and NASA. This information is then fed back into the object through layers of LED strands, re-visualizing the space in order to create an dynamic spatial experience.

Quasar Exhibition from Aaron Bocanegra on Vimeo.

The word “quasar” is a contraction of the term quasi-stellar-radio-source, used historically by astronomers to describe entirely unknown cosmological objects. Today, it is believed that quasars are the most distant, and yet still detectable, objects in the universe. Giving off enormous amounts of energy produced from massive black holes in the center of their own galaxies, quasars are intensely bright; their emitted light drowning out all other stars in the same galaxy.

“Quasar is an artificial counterpart hovering in response to the currents and activities of the visitors, and in doing so, stretches and collapses the horizons of the known. The possibilities of interrelated synthetic and natural processes begin to define new emergent ecologies. quasar questions the boundaries of scale and the psyche, offering immersion into a vastly expanded space which renders perception permeable, and in the end, disperses identity.”

Quaser will be exhibited at SCI-Arc until 9th March 2008 [posted by Ruairi Glynn on Interactive Architecture dot org]