A Sculpture Composed of Simultaneous, Web-Connected Dance Parties

DANCEPOD 2006: On September 9th at 11pm in Portland, 12 am in Guadalajara, 2am in New York City, 3am in Mexico City and 7am in Berlin, dancepod will present an entirely new kind of sculpture. A sculpture composed of simultaneous, web-connected dance parties. The parties, coordinated and developed in conjunction with artists and presenters from each city, will utilize identical dancepod installations. The installations will become the core of a shared physical and virtual experience, supporting streaming video and music as well as live DJÂ’s, VJÂ’s, and surprising guest artists. Moving bodies of dancing participants will complete the sculpture.

As part of the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s (PICA) Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival, in conjunction with PS122, Scene Downtown (Earl Dax), Harkness A/V (Nick Hallett), and technical directors Kraft + Purver, these 4 DANCEPOD sites will be linked by live video starting at 2:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. Continue reading

A Teatime Telepresence

Chit Chat Club is an experiment in bringing together the cafe and the online world. Chit Chat Club is now live. In a cafe in downtown San Jose, three inhabitable sculptures sit at tables, waiting to be brought to life. One is an undulating form, another a chair just starting its metamorphosis into human form, and the third is a giant spoon. Be one.

WHEN: August 7-13 :: 8am to 10pm Pacific Time :: WHERE: ISEA Interactive Cafe, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA and/or http://chitchatclub.org

Cafes are social spaces - they are places where people come to converse, to meet friends, to people watch. It is a physical space, rich with the smell of coffee and the sound of chatter, a navigable place that people must negotiate to find good seats, to see and be seen. The cafe is local, fixed in space and reflecting and defining the social structure of the neighborhood. Continue reading

the “internet of things”

Dear all,

Welcome to the August edition of the Architecture and Situated Technologies installment. Thanks Trebor for warming up the netwaves. I wanted to pull together a few threads that were begun in July and steer the discussion towards the objects that we as producers of things will be making. In light of the “internet of things” I thought it would be worthwhile to collectively characterize through examples the nature of these things. Will their mode of production differ from the way we have previously made things? Will they have agency beyond immediate service to users? What are some of these? How will these objects work at the scale of architecture? technically and socially? Will there be a further individualizing of ownership or will new types of public access/ownership to these objects emerge?

Bruce Sterling in his brief pamphlet manifesto Shaping Things …a good summary of the whole thing which unfortunately lacks a bibliography… it would be nice to come across a manifesto with a bibliography…calls these objects “spimes”. Setting aside the proselytizing Sterling makes a lucid observation of how information and the material object will become so enmeshed that: “you care little about the object per se; that physical object is just a material billboard for tomorrow’s vast, digital, interactive, postindustrial support system.” Continue reading

Weapons of Mass Distraction

The Earworm Assault Devices (EAD), by fur, are a set of weapons for the propagation of highly infectious sound or music (earworms).

Prologue: Sound is unavoidable (the ear can’t be shut like the eye) and evolutionary hardwired into our cognition apparatus, it can reach into the subconscious and arouse emotions. A well made sound can get stuck in the head of the hearer and loop for a varying time span. The infected person oftentimes repeats the sound involuntarily by singing, humming or whistling, eventually spreading the earworm like a virus. Messages can be modulated onto earworms like radiowaves on a carrier frequency, as a result earworms can be used to distribute messages or manipulate the individual. This fact is recognized and commercially exploited in various fields of modern life - like pop music, cellphone ringtones, audiobranding or elevator music to name a few.
Global brands are using huge budgets to propagate their earworms by means of multiple costly channels, the respectable citizen remains defence- and powerless. Until now: Continue reading

RFID and The Internet of Things

After a succesfull CrashCourse in May, Mediamatic now presents a second workshop on RFID and The Internet of Things :: 11, 12, 13 September 2006 :: Confirmed lecturers and trainers: Julian Bleecker (US), Timo Arnall (Norway) and Arie Altena (NL).

RFID allows for the unique identification of objects, and any kind of online data can be linked to these unique ID’s. If RFID becomes an open web-based platform, and users can tag, share, and contribute content to the digital existence of their own places and objects, we can truly speak of an Internet of Things. This opens perpectives for new sustainability scenario’s, for new relations between people and the stuff they have, and for other locative applications. Continue reading

Morphing Objects and Transforming Interfaces

…Talking to the Hand: an exploration into the interactive qualities of shape shifting technologies by Oren Horev, explores morphing objects and transforming interfaces. The project is driven by the thought that by changing their shape, computers and digital objects can provide the user with a clear understanding of their status, both tactilely and visually.

The first object developed to illustrate the concept is the cube-shaped InSync hard drive. It indicates the level of synchronization (percentage) with the source computer by twisting itself, misaligning its shape. The less overlap between the two file structures, the more the hard drive twists. To synchronize the drive and computer the user either clicks a button on the screen or nudges the mechanism itself to initiate the alignment.
Continue reading

What’s New in Books

The MagicBook explores seamless transition between reality and virtual reality. When users look at the pages of a real book through a hand held display, they are able to see virtual content superimposed over the real pages, that is augmented reality. When they see an augmented reality scene they like, users can fly into the scene and experience it as an immersive virtual environment. Currently the user can transition smoothly between these two fixed viewing modes: the augmented-reality view and the virtual-reality view.

The MagicBook also features functionality that supports collaboration: When several users look at the same book page they can see the augmented reality image from their own viewpoint. When one of these users decides to switch to the Virtual Reality mode and “fly” into the virtual model, the other users are able see him or her as a virtual character in the scene. Continue reading

Renaissance?

“…In any case, what strikes me in this “renaissance of things” is the creeping tendency to fetishise (to reify?) the object. This happens too in social software, and user-centred design. Both ‘the social’ and ‘the user’ become paramount, yet remain unexamined. More people are citing Latour’s influence, often summarised along the lines that objects have agency too, which is technically correct. But Latour isn’t interested in objects, he’s interested in relations - in actant-networks, collectives of humans and non-humans, and processes of translation.

If we actually follow Latour, or any of the critiques of ANT, then it’s not the things themselves that are interesting, but rather the imbroglios they comprise. Julian and Nicolas suggest this when they claim “a new kind of digital, networked ecology in which objects become collaborators,” but objects have always been collaborators. The word ‘object’ comes from Latin ‘to throw in the way,’ which may explain why people fall back on the idea that we now need to integrate all of these objects into our understanding of the digital. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, the digital is always already material and real. So why a “renaissance” at all?…” From Networked things and the old/new objectivism by Anne Galloway [blogged by Anne on Purse Lips Square Jaw] Continue reading

Under the Radar

Kill your television! Get ready for a totally wicked exhibition. Experimenta Under the Radar invites UK audiences to experience and interact with the high voltage works of AustraliaÂ’s best and most innovative media artists: 16 June - 28 August, 2006.

FACT, the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology is the UKÂ’s leading organisation for commissioning and presentation of film, video and new media art forms. FACT exists to inspire and promote the artistic significance of film, video and new and emerging media. Continue reading

Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions

Keynote: The Naked Interface - Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions by Luke Williams: Friday, July 21, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm.; Webvisions 2006, Explore the Future of the WebJuly 20 to 21, 2006 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.

Throughout the electronic age, people have become accustomed to interacting with digital media indirectly, mediated through screens and peripheral devices. But now, as digital technology becomes invisibly embedded in everyday things, the “feeling” of everyday things is also increasingly becoming embedded in digital technology.

In many senses, physical objects are becoming more important. In an immediate way, they can help us define new systems of relationships with digital information. This presentation will examine how perceptions and gestures formed through our experiences with physical products can effectively bring liberty to the relationship between brain, body and digital media interface. Continue reading