Flock is a work by digital artists KMA (Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler) and choreographer Tom Sapsford. Inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and specially commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Flock premiered in Trafalgar Square in February 2007. Watch in HD.

KMA’s mission is to apply leading digital innovation to large-scale live environments in order to expand the audiences’ experience of theatrical work beyond the physical environment in which it is presented. Within the last few years KMA has become a leading and prolific innovator across stage, film and public environments, expanding expectations of how technology can interface with these fields and how audiences ultimately experience the work.

KMA’s interactive work stems from their joint areas of interest in patterns of social behavior and digital technology as a vehicle for public theatre.

KMA’s most recent large-scale interactive installation projects (Flock, Trafalgar Square, 2007; The Hive, Grand Canal Square, Dublin, 2008) have expanded the horizons for how technology can interface with theatrical activity in an emotional and playful way. These pieces are set out of doors, in large urban spaces, without prepared actors or formal participants. The scale of the work creates a vast aesthetic impact on the urban environments in which these works reside, drawing audiences to it, quite often by chance as people go about their daily lives, curiosity draws people in but it is the intelligence of the language structures which layer within these installations which holds the public attention and engages them in problem solving, play and social engagement. By arresting time and space within the public arena and blurring the distinction between performer and audience, KMA’s work is opening up new and vast environments in which art and audiences meet, equally on each other’s terms.

This show will feature new and experimental works in dance, music, and video art. Each artist/team came up with a work based on meditations on the word “SPACE.” The artists with works being shown are:

Nina Barnett & Robyn Nesbitt, Jessica Feldman, David Jensenius, Hiram Navarrete, Jessica Noe & Kate March, Blithe Riley, Kathleen Stanard, Carl Testa.

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.

Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited (2006-2008) is a live performance series, which utilizes Web code as choreography. In these performances Endlicher embodies the “character” of a Website - this time she has a cast of performers joining her! - and performs its html code, which is fed in from the Web “on the fly”. During each of the performances the source code of the website is immediately translated into ongoing movement instructions, representing different html tags. These instructions derive from the html-movement-library, an online database of user-submitted movement suggestions, and from other parts of the html language. The sound accompanying the performance is another translation of the code - it is interpreted as a musical score. The audience on location is invited to participate in the html dance.

Credits:
Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited #10, #7, and #1
Concept / Stage / Video Projection / Music / Web Programming: Ursula Endlicher
Choreography: html-movement-library / live HTML code
Performers: Nancy Agabian, Robert Appelton, Ursula Endlicher, Laura Meyers
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION ENCOURAGED!

Gekitora choreographs both dancers and avatars. It is fantastic experience for him to choreograph avatars, because artist can share only pure movement of motion with many users in Internet. Now, A series of four dances can be tested with the dance-pad. A free body expression act is done in the weightless space. Those expressions reminds users of the space suit of “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

I think that Metaverse tends to imitate space recognition of the physical-world with gravity, and those expressions might be able to works in more multi-dimensional environment after the development of virtual environment, such as Second Life. This challenge produces the space recognition with the movement of the body without the wall and the floor might be a prototype of “Architecture in Metaverse”. The activity of Gekitora in the future will come to be excited.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGjEvpq1m7Q

Everyone can test it freely at NikkeiBP here.

CUTTING THE EDGE. Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, Sandy Baldwin and Gary Manes have been working for the past several months at the Virtual Environments Laboratory, West Virginia University, Morgantown. Sondheim will be presenting the results of that research, which involves avatars, human modeling, phenomenology of virtual lives, choreography, motion capture, and a host of other issues.

Some of the work has been completed with renowned dancer / choreographer Foofwa d’Imobilite, based in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. The modeling includes distorted and misconfigured mappings, crystal and other radio mappings of the environment, and other material which literally cut the edge, live on the edge of software, hardware, and real-life environments, including Second Life, Brooklyn, West Virginia, and spaces internal to 3D modeling programs. This work is supported by National Science Foundation (WVU) and New York State Council On The Arts grants.

The prolific Alan Sondheim has been a regular part of the Personal Cinema Series for many years and this program contains his usual collection of surprises, sexual meditations and formal adventures. He has been constructing audio and video, performing, and inscribing within cyberspace since 1994. Since that time he has been working on an “internet text,” a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body and virtuality.

Suna no Onna, adapted from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s mysterious 1960s cult movie, is a dance installation that merges virtual and real images of a life of existential entrapment in an inhospitable habitat. The ominous sand dunes of Teshigahara’s desert are transformed into virtual realities that shape the unconscious ground where the Woman (Katsura Isobe) meets a scientist-foreigner who stumbles into her life to become a captive.

The work combines dance, interactive video and animation, fashion design, electronic music and specially developed sensorial and interfacial garments (built with intelligent materials), which respond to movement qualities, energies and emotional gesture. Work originally was commissioned for the INTIMACY festival (LabanCentre / Goldsmiths) .

Conceived and directed by Johannes Birringer and Michele Danjoux, the stage production features new fashion concepts by Danjoux and digital designs by a group of collaborating artists including Paul Verity Smith, Doros Polydorou, Maria Wiener, and Jonathan Hamilton. Original music composed by Oded Ben-Tal, scenography by Hsueh-Pei Wang, and lighting design by Miguel Alonso.

Suna no Onna is performed by an international cast - Japanese dancer Katsura Isobe, British dancer Olugbenga Taiwo, and Chinese dancer Helenna Ren.

In 2008, the Republic of Estonia will celebrate its ninetieth anniversary. As part of the festivities, the government, together with the embassy in Berlin, is organizing an event series called e wie estland in Baden-Württemberg from January to June 2008. A dance and new media lab headed by the Estonian choreographer Taavet Jansen will be set up in cooperation with the ZKM | Karlsruhe and will enable a one-week studio collaboration. Public performances will offer a multifaceted insight into the state of the art of choreography and media art in Estonia. Festival program here.

Axel Bruns - The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage

In the emerging social software, ‘Web2.0’ environment, the production of ideas takes place in a collaborative, participatory mode which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as much as producers of information and knowledge, or what can be described as produsers. These produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage – the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement. This paper examines the overall characteristics of produsers and produsage, and identifies key questions for the produsage model.

Mitchell Whitelaw - Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice

This paper makes a critical analysis of new media art working with data interfaces and visualisation – data practice or data art. Pursuing the distinction between information and data, it is demonstrated that data art often turns away from information in an attempt to present the data itself. In the process, data art constructs figures of data as unmediated, immanent, material and underdetermined. A critical analysis of these figures underpins reflections on the wider significance and potential of such data practices.

Jim Bizzocchi - The Aesthetics of the Ambient Video Experience

Ambient Video is an emergent cultural phenomenon, with roots that go deeply into the history of experimental film and video art. Ambient Video, like Brian Eno’s ambient music, is video that “must be as easy to ignore as notice” [9]. This minimalist description conceals the formidable aesthetic challenge that faces this new form. Ambient video art works will hang on the walls of our living rooms, corporate offices, and public spaces. They will play in the background of our lives, living video paintings framed by the new generation of elegant, high-resolution flat-panel display units. However, they cannot command attention like a film or television show. They will patiently play in the background of our lives, yet they must always be ready to justify our attention in any given moment. In this capacity, ambient video works need to be equally proficient at rewarding a fleeting glance, a more direct look, or a longer contemplative gaze. This paper connects a series of threads that collectively illuminate the aesthetics of this emergent form: its history as a popular culture phenomenon, its more substantive artistic roots in avant-garde cinema and video art, its relationship to new technologies, the analysis of the viewer’s conditions of reception, and the work of current artists who practice within this form.

D. Fox Harrell - Cultural Roots for Computing: The Case of African Diasporic Orature and Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System

Cultural practices and values are implicitly built into all computational systems. However, it is not common to develop systems with explicit critical engagement with, and foundations in, cultural practices and values aside from those traditionally privileged in discourse surrounding computing practices. I assert that engaging commonly excluded cultural values and practices can potentially spur computational innovation, and can invigorate expressive computational production. In particular, diverse ways of representing and manipulating semantic content and distinctive relationships between humans and our (digital) artifacts can form the basis for new technical and expressive computing practices. This idea is developed using the example of the GRIOT system. GRIOT is a platform for implementing interactive and generative computational narratives. Its underlying theoretical bases are in algebraic semantics from computer science, cognitive linguistics, and semiotics. Initial systems built in GRIOT enable generation of poetry in response to user input. GRIOT is deeply informed by African diasporic traditions of orature and socio-cultural engagement.

Caroline McCaw - Art and (Second) Life: Over the hills and far away?

This paper will consider possible connections between the emerging art practice, environment and economy of DC Spensley (aka Dancoyote Antonelli) working in Second Life, with particular colonial art histories documented over the last 150 years in order to consider emerging features of new spaces for art.While the main centre for development and discussion surrounding Second Life appears to be San Francisco, USA, this paper considers how examining an online art practice may provide a tool to better understand the role of artists in new places. Can emerging art practices in online environments such as Second Life point out gaps in the ways that we think and talk about art? Or are traditional theoretical and methodological values surrounding art reproduced?

Scott Rettberg - Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature

The Dada movement was a multimedia avant-garde art practice that began in Zurich during World War I and flourished in Berlin, Paris, and New York from 1916 until 1920. Beginning as a disgusted response to the war and the blithely nationalistic bourgeois attitudes the Dada felt were at the root of the conflict, the Dada developed and refined the notion of “anti-art” as an expression of dissatisfaction with the dominant contemporary ideology. Although the period in which Dada was an active organized cultural movement was quite short, its legacy is widespread and profound. Through readings of works of electronic literature, the essay argues that while techniques have been adapted to the media-specific affordances of the networked computer, many of the practices popularized by the Dada during the early twentieth century form the basis of methods utilized by new media artists and writers today. By comparing the art and activities of early Dadaist artists to the work of contemporary digital writers, the essay advocates a critical approach to new media writing that both accounts for the specific properties of literature produced for networked computer environments and also examines these artifacts within the contextualizing historical framework of the avant-garde.

Simon Penny - Experience and abstraction: the arts and the logic of machines

This paper is concerned with the nature of traditions of Arts practice with respect to computational practices and related value systems. At root, it concerns the relationship between the specificities of embodied materiality and aspirations to universality inherent in symbolic abstraction. This tension in embodied in the contemporary academy, as embodied arts practices interface with traditions of logical, numerical and textual abstraction in the humanities and the sciences.

The computer may be viewed as the reification of a rationalist world view in that the hardware/software binarism, and all that it entails, is little but an implementation of the Cartesian dual. Inasmuch as these technologies reify that world view, these values permeate their very fabric. Social and cultural practices, modes of production and consumption, inasmuch as they are situated and embodied, proclaim validities of specificity, situation and embodiment contrary to this order. Due to the economic and rhetorical force of the computer, the academic and popular discourses related to it, are persuasive.

Where computational technologies are engaged by social and cultural practices, there exists an implicit but fundamental theoretical crisis. An artist, engaging such technologies in the realization of a work, invites the very real possibility that the technology, like the Trojan Horse, introduces values inimical to the basic qualities for which the artist strives. The very process of engaging the technology quite possibly undermines the qualities the work strives for. This situation demands the development of a ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre).

Brian Degger - Technology transfer present and futures in the electronic arts

We are entering an era where creating the fantastical is possible in the arts. In the areas of mixed reality and biological arts, responsive works are created based on advances in basic science and technology. This is enabling scientists and artists to pose new questions. As the time between discovery and application is so short, artists need imaginative ways of accessing new technology in order to critique and use it.

These are the new paints that the majority of artists cannot afford or access, technology to enable cloning of DNA, to print channels on a chip, to access proprietary 3G networks. Currently, partnerships or residencies are used to facilitate artist’s access to these technologies. What would they do if technology was available that enabled them to make any art work they so desire? Are the limitations in current technology an advantage rather than a disadvantage in some of their works? Does interaction with technologists make their work more robust? Are there disadvantages? How do they get access to the technology they require? Open source or proprietary? Or have they encountered the situation where their vision is greater than technology allows. When their work breaks because of this fact, is their art broken? Blast Theory (Brighton,UK), FoAM(Brussels, Belgium and Amsterdam, Netherlands), SymbioticA (Perth, Australia) are organisations pushing technological boundaries in the service of art. This paper addresses some questions of technology transfer in relation to recent artworks, particularly I like Frank in Adelaide (Blast Theory), transient reality generators (trg) (FoAM) and Multi electrode array artist (MeART) (SymbioticA).

Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Celia Pearce - A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space

The techno-fetishism of computer game culture has lead to a predominately male sensibility towards the construction of space in digital entertainment. Real-time strategy games conceive of space as a domain to be conquered; first-person shooters create labyrinthine battlefields in which space becomes a context for combat. Massively multiplayer games offer the opportunity for non-linear exploration, but emphasize linear achievement within a combat-based narrative. In this paper, we argue for a new gendered, regendered and perhaps degendered poetics of game space, rethinking ways in which space is conceptualized and represented as a domain for play. We argue for a more egalitarian virtual playground that acknowledges and embraces a wider range of spatial and cognitive models, referencing literature, philosophy, fine art and non-digital games for inspiration. Reflecting on a variety of sources, beginning with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, feminist writings of Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Janet Murray, and including contemporary game writers such as Lizbeth Klastrup, Mary Flanagan, Maia Engeli, and T.L. Taylor, we will argue for a new gendered poetics of game space, proposing an inclusionary approach that integrates feminine conceptions of space into the gaming landscape.

Jaakko Suominen - The Past as the Future? Nostalgia and Retrogaming in Digital Culture

Digital culture of today is becoming increasingly a field of retrospection. James Newman draws attention to this issue in his recently published textbook on digital gaming (2004). In a chapter on future gaming he mentions three modern trends in gaming: mobile games, on-line games and retrogaming. Newman refers to retrogaming at two levels: firstly, retrogaming means present-day gaming with the genuine, 1970s, 1980s and the early 1990s game devices and applications. Secondly, it means the use of emulators in playing the games. On the other hand, Petri Saarikoski (2004), who has studied the history of computer hobbyist cultures, defines retrogaming somewhat broader as a general term for subcultures that appreciate old computer games. This phenomenon includes the collecting of old games and game devices as well as their active playing. Both scholars see retrogaming as a form of gaming culture that is partly marginal but which is becoming more common. Typically current retrogaming refers particularly to the use of game devices that were used before the PCs (common since the early 1990s). In this paper I will seek answers the following questions: Does the change in computer user groups explain why retrogaming has become more popular? Has retrogaming had an influence on the contents of contemporary games and the appreciation of gaming? What sorts of different hobbies are associated with retrogaming? How has the increased interest in retrogaming been used, then, to benefit financially? Finally, I conclude and discuss how familiarity and nostalgic interests in “older” technologies are incorporated to technological change and innovation.

Kenneth J. Knoespel and Jichen Zhu - Continuous Materiality Through a Hierarchy of Computational Codes

The legacy of Cartesian dualism inherent in linguistic theory deeply influences current views on the relation between natural language, computer code, and the physical world. However, the oversimplified distinction between mind and body falls short of capturing the complex interaction between the material and the immaterial. In this paper, we posit a hierarchy of codes to delineate a wide spectrum of continuous materiality. Our research suggests that diagrams in architecture provide a valuable analog for approaching computer code in emergent digital systems. After commenting on ways that Cartesian dualism continues to haunt discussions of code, we turn our attention to diagrams and design morphology. Finally we notice the implications a material understanding of code bears for further research on the relation between human cognition and digital code. Our discussion concludes by noticing several areas that we have projected for ongoing research.