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.

We are living in a time in which the ‘made’ and the ‘born’ are fusing. Hypoallergenic cats are already on the market. Plants are used as sensors, information displays and chemical factories. Animals are being augmented and branded. Young girls are provided with hypernatural vaginas, modeled after the photoshopped vaginas seen in Playboy magazine. In response to donor organ shortages, researchers are working on a 3D organ printer. Real nature is not green. It is out of control. Games have become jobs. Second life is not sustainable. Digital world metaphors are boomerang into our physical environment. Everyday robots give massages and take care of the children. RFID chips open doors, they might be infected, but nonetheless are edible.

The extent to which new technologies are intervening in the constructive, material, aesthetic and social practice of everyday life can hardly be underestimated. Highways, airports and supermarkets are part of our natural environment. Our established image of nature needs to be updated.

Next Nature; the nature caused by human culture. Nowadays, children know more corporate logo’s and brands than bird or tree species. Our technological world has become so complex and uncontrollable it has become a nature of its own. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.

With: Manuel Castells, Kevin Kelly, Rob Schroder, Michiko Nitta, Tinkebell, Susana Soares, David Kremers, Rene Daalder / Folkert Gorter, Floris Kaayk, Julian Bleecker, Erik Davis, Peter Lunenfeld, Hendrik-Jan Grievink, Judith de Leeuw, Luna Maurer / Roel Wouters, Arnoud van den Heuvel, Rolf Coppens, Christian Bramsiepe, Helena Muskens, Quirine Racke and more…

In the weeks towards the Biggest Visual Power Show 2008 we post a few video’s of earlier power show presentations. Philosopher Prof. Dr. Jos de Mul – author of countless articles and books like ‘Cyberspace Odyssey’, ‘Domestication of Fate’ and ‘Database Delirium’ – was a speaker at the Biggest Visual Power Show 2005 in Paradiso, Amsterdam. Inspired by the images of Basia Knobloch and music of Lauri Anderson, professor De Mul decided to sing his lecture.

The Center is pleased to host Fritz Haeg and his project Animal Estates. While at MIT, Haeg will give a talk on his work and, with the help of MIT students and artists, build one installment of Animal Estates, a new series of dwellings thoughtfully designed to welcome an animal back into the city. These environments are made for displaced wildlife or for animals that have been domesticated. The Center will host one of eight estates—the first was built in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial while others will appear at Arthouse, Austin, TX; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Cooley Gallery, Portland OR; Alaska Design Forum, Fairbanks, AK; and Casco Projects, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Haeg writes: “As animal habitats dwindle daily, Animal Estates proposes the reintroduction of animals back into our cities, strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards, parking lots and neighborhoods… As the human domination of the planet continues, animals are alternately viewed as exotic specimens to be treated as spectacle, cartoon characters that are anthropomorphized, friendly companions to be coddled, objectified resources to be exploited, inconveniences to be tolerated, pests to be eradicated or anonymous unseen creatures to which we are indifferent. Animal Estates intends to provide a provocative 21st century model for the human-animal relationship that is more intimate, visible and thoughtful.”

Fritz Haeg is an architect and artist based in Los Angeles whose work combines strategies from architecture, art, ecology, and education. Known for his geodesic dome and the lively Sundown Salons that attract emerging artists, musicians, and performers, Haeg’s projects challenge conventional ideas about where art should go and what art can do.

Botanicalls is a system that was developed to allow plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics. Call 212.202.8348 to hear more about each of the plants. What you need >>.

Last year I began my honors thesis, which is series of conceptually-based animations. As I investigated the history and process of animation, I decided to concentrate on animation as it is integrated with new technology. As a part of this series, inspired by a class called “computing in the wild”, I decided to use GPS technology.

Familiar with the work of C5 group, and the website gpsdrawing.com, which showcases drawings people make with their GPS units – elephants, snails, spiders, text, etc, I realized nobody had made an animation from these drawings, and that each drawing on the site could potentially be one frame of animation.

As far as the “wild” part of the “computing in the wild” class, we had a weekend planned at the White Mountain Research Station in which we would conduct our experiments. I liked the idea that walking these frames off in a remote location would be a performance in itself.

The shape of the animation was also shaped by the idea of a performance. The drawing was to be made from tracking a walk, so why not make the drawing be of what I was doing? Furthermore, the icon of animation itself is the walk cycle – precedented by Muybridge and made famous by Mickey Mouse. Also from a technical standpoint, walk cycles are relatively easy to make.

Finally, I knew about the Nazca geoglyphs and the Blythe geoglyph, the latter of which I could use as a template when I would go “into the wild.” I place “into the wild” in quotations, because I executed my first GPS animation in downtown San Diego, using the confines of the city grid as my guide.

This urban precedent really influenced my design and provided a pleasant contrast to the movements of my “natural” geoglyph. The urban walk cycle ended up resembling an Atari character, while the “natural” geoglyph was much more free-form and organic.” From EDGERIDERS: Christin Turner.

In our project in Maine, we will deploy cell nodes for calling and recording owls, and provide an interface for the public to vicariously participate in the census from the internet. We hope to gain insight into the social networking processes of collaborative interpretation and annotation of a shared database; and knowledge representation for the bird-census domain. The cellular-based survey may also provide insights into the hearing range of owls, duplication of vocalizing individual responses in adjacent experiment sites, the response rate of owls due to current weather or human presence, and comparison between trigger-based and naturally occurring responses in surveys. In addition, we will compare the performance of the participants, the machines and the collaboration between both. [blogged by Cati Vaucelle on Architectradure]

Nature Version 2.0 is a survey of artists who reinvent environmentalism for a digital age in a number of ways: by examining how digital technologies can make ecological problems more salient, by reusing and recycling obsolete technologies for new uses, and by exploring how digital spaces and the public domain may require environmental protection much like nature. Re-imagining the relationship between nature and technology, Nature Version 2.0 suggests an ethics of the network and an environmentalism of natural, built, and digital spaces.

This exhibition is in conjunction with Environmental Art and New Media Technologies: Imagining Sustainable Futures, a two-day symposium on interdisciplinary, digital, and networked art and research that draws upon environmental science, computer science, design, hacking, gameplay, engineering, and ecocriticism. Following the Nature Version 2.0 artists’ reception on February 8, keynote speaker Natalie Jeremijenko will launch the symposium. 90 Degrees South, a multimedia performance by Andrea Polli will follow at 9pm in the Clifford Gallery.The symposium will resume in Golden Auditorium on February 9 for a day of talks and presentations by critics and exhibiting artists, 9am-5pm.

Nature Version 2.0 was curated by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir (aka EcoArtTech.net).

[This work was] inspired by William Cronon’s article, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” which argues that the concept of wilderness is a historical and cultural construct and relying on it as the basis of environmental ethics fails to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and the environments they actually inhabit.

Next, CRAB FU, an animated short by I-Wei Huang (crabfu.com). No crustaceans were harmed, we promise.Editor’s note: This BBtv episode is sponsored by Dell’s regeneration.org project — but purely by coincidence, a Dell PDA appears in the opening sequence of “Wilderness Trouble.” This is not product placement or advertorial. EcoArtTech produced this film in 2007, and the air date of this excerpt was not planned to coincide with the sponsorship campaign. [posted on Boing Boing]

Several of the bottles are being tracked using GPS technology and are programmed to send their longitude and latitude coordinates back to Ramsgate every hour. The information they transmit is used to create a real time drawing of their progress.

If you have found a message in a bottle please report it here. Once you have reported finding the bottle please replace all of the bottle’s contents, reseal the bottle and release it back into the sea to continue its journey to The Chatham Islands.

Each non-GPS bottle contains a message from residents of Ramsgate to the residents of The Chatham Islands, a pencil and an instruction leaflet which requests anyone finding a bottle to report to this website and record where and when the bottle was found. In addition they are requested to document their find on a form inside the bottle before returning the bottle to the sea to continue its journey. Details of found bottles may be viewed on the view found bottles page.

Essay by Jeremy Millar

The function of art is to imitate nature in her manner of operation, and nature operates from chance. Simple minds cling to the illusion of an orderly, powerful universe because it gives them a sense of security. - John Cage, American composer, writer and artist

Layla Curtis’ work has often been about the attempts we make to order the world, to chart it and the security that this brings; or rather, the insecurity that results from our inability to do so. This is made particularly evident when Curtis manipulates maps until we become aware that that which we thought familiar is instead strange, as when a map of Britain is constructed from a series of European road maps (The United European Union, 1999) or, perhaps more appropriately, that a world map is made of a collage of American topographical maps (World State, 2001).

This fascination with charting the earth, and the creation of forms of positioning and time-zones which result, have played an important part in the development of this new commission for Turner Contemporary, one in which the local and the global are invited to engage with one another.

Upon first visiting the nearby Ramsgate Maritime Museum, Curtis was struck by the panel above its entrance exclaiming that Ramsgate time was five minutes and forty-one seconds faster than Greenwich Mean Time, a reminder that until the late nineteenth-century, most of the world still operated on local times, based upon astronomical observations and other variations and traditions. It was the rapid development of the railway - and the rapidity of travel that it allowed - which necessitated a change, and in 1847 the first standard national time was introduced in Britain, with other countries with rail travel following shortly afterwards. (However, even in 1870, a passenger travelling from Washington to San Francisco would have had to have reset his/her watch over two hundred times to remain in all the time zones en route.) Curtis was also fascinated by the longitudinal line set within the floor of the museum, which marks a line 1º 25.4′ east of the zero meridian at Greenwich. While to some extent determinedly local, such a marking also positions the local within a global system of measurement, and in doing so suggests its relationship to places far away. Indeed, once Curtis had the longitudinal and latitudinal values of the museum, it was a matter of simple arithmetic to determine those of the place antipodal to it, that is, the opposite point on the earth.

The closest inhabited land to this abstract mathematical position was found to be an island about 800 kilometres east of mainland New Zealand which, until 1791, was know as Rehoku. However, in that year Captain Broughton ‘rediscovered’ the island and, with an arrogance all too familiar in such matters, named this already-inhabited island after his ship, HMS ‘Chatham’, which had been built in Dover. It seems as though Curtis’ mental voyage had not only taken her to the opposite side of the world but had also, upon arrival there, brought her back to Kent.

Over two hundred years after this early - indeed defining - connection between Kent and this remote Pacific island, Curtis decided to instigate another. Of course, it is far easier to communicate between these two places now than was even conceivable in the late eighteenth century. Instead, Curtis decided to employ some of these advanced communications technologies - such as mobile phones and global positioning systems - within a far older, and certainly less-directed, means of communication - a message in a bottle.

Usually one does not send a message in a bottle to a specific place but rather it is left to make its way to any other place, any place other than that from which it was sent, that is. Indeed, it is scarcely a means of communication at all, as we might now understand it, as most often the sender has no means of knowing whether his or her message has been received and by whom. For Curtis to release fifty one bottles off the coast of Ramsgate - forty five containing a message from children at the local Northdown Primary School, and five containing GPS devices which will track and transmit their position - seems an act of the utmost folly, particularly if we consider the wealth of communications technology contained within a number of the bottles. Yet, if we deem Curtis’ attempt in advance as a failure - that the bottles will never reach the Chatham Islands - perhaps it is because we have misunderstood how art, and Curtis’ art in particular, might be said to operate. Indeed, let us be clear: art is not a simple communication of information (any more than it is the expression of pure emotion), and so while Curtis may fail to communicate as she had intended, it does not mean that her art has failed likewise. John Cage also remarked, with regard to both art and nature, that ‘the highest purpose is to have no purpose at all’.

Indeed, it is through the very lack of direct communication that a space is opened up through which can travel not only the bottles themselves, and our imaginations, but also many new possibilities; the many other people in many other places who may now come across them, noting their position online or within the bottle, before returning them on their way. This is the chance to which Cage referred to at the beginning of this piece, a chance that lies at the very heart of how both art and nature might be said to operate. What is particularly pleasing in this regard is that while Curtis has imitated nature in the manner of her operation, rather than its appearance, leaving the movement of the bottles subject to the forces of wind and wave, the lines which we see projected upon the wall at Droit House, do indeed bear a strong formal relationship to waves themselves, their swirls and folds, eddies and falls. It is a drawing of elegance and fragility that is produced by some of the most powerful forces that act upon our planet, a drawing that is both topographically accurate and yet resolutely abstract, a drawing in which the bottles appear both now-here and nowhere. Standing within a small circular room on the edge of England, we are invited to imagine ourselves drifting through a far greater space. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote that ‘to think is to voyage’, and I would suggest that the complementary statement is also true, that to voyage is to think, and that the voyage of these bottles very much encourages us to do just that.

Jeremy Millar

Antarctic Animation is the site of inquiry. Water freezing and melting - with Christine McMillan and Jack Colwell - bridges the fields of Visual Art, Movement Improvisation and Data Visualisation. Animations are being made through human movement, drawing, writing, sound and assemblage, in response to scientific data and poetic texts of Antarctic expeditioners. Animations are revealing cycles and transformations that have been observed and experienced in the Antarctic landscape. Drawing the Antarctic landscape to human scale through human gesture allows for profound connections to be made with changes. There are more animations here, and a blog, maps, and much more on the site.