INTERArChTIVE has commissioned Mette Ramsgard Thomsen (School of Architecture and Design, University of Brighton) and Karin Bech to develop the interactive installation Slow Furl for the Architecture 08 festival in June at Lighthouse in Brighton. The proposal is to make a room size textile installation that acts and reacts on its inhabitation. The installation exists as a soft and pliable skin that lines the Lighthouse space. The skin shifts. As guests enter and move within the foyer, the skin moves imperceptibly at deep timeframes, creating new cavities and spaces, revealing slits and apertures. Continue reading

Until May 3, 2008, Improbable Architectures is at Translations|Traduções, WARC Gallery, Toronto :: part of the 21st Images Festival.

Improbable Architectures deals with Second Life as a space without parallel in the material world. It is a project developed by Noema Gallery team for the exhibition Memory of the Future, produced by Itaú Cultural. In different terrains, we build improbable architectures: in suspension, transparent, without columns, using only liquid and aerial sources to compose original forms which allow to anyone to navigate in its interior and exterior spaces, crossing its walls and merging with its structures. Continue reading

Amalgus Cycle by Laura Zajac is an environment made up of parasitic processes triggered by organic inputs, which permeate and interconnect with organics and non-organics entities, through digital encoding, in a self-sufficient and finite mode. Process 1 is actually the first step towards such environment. The interactive installation tracks the audience movements and maps them out in a multi-cellular colonies form. Human movements are a further input for an organic interaction. Infrared sensors detect the human presence and activate accordingly a set of heating elements. Those elements heat up a container of wax which melts down and start to flow over a slide made out of muslin and paper. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Imaging Beijing by John (Craig) Freeman [Part of the Mixed Realities exhibition, on view until April 15, 2008] - Imaging Beijing is the latest installment of Imaging Place, a place-based, virtual reality project that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and virtual worlds to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. When a denizen of Second Life first arrives at Imaging Beijing, he, she or it can walk over a satellite image of central Beijing where they will find a networks of nodes constructed of primitive spherical geometry with panoramic photographs texture mapped to the interior. Continue reading

This is a call to collect videos, sounds, texts and images that witness the attempt to contact the abandoned areas of the brain. The reason for this call is a series of videos found on the Internet using the keyword cronovisore.

The Chronovisor is a machine for viewing past and future events. It was invented in the ’40s by Father Pellegrino Ernetti together with a group of twelve world famous scientists. The Chronovisor was portrayed as a large cabinet with a normal cathode ray tube for viewing the received events and a series of buttons, levers, and other controls for selecting the time and the location to be viewed. Continue reading

This Friday, February 8, I will be leading a panel discussion at the Mixed Realities symposium at Emerson College. The panel is titled “Immersion, Presence and Place.” Participants include John (Craig) Freeman, Usman Haque (via Second Life), Pierre Proske (via Second Life), Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker, and David Steele. Each of the artists on the panel will have their work displayed in the Mixed Realities exhibit that opens the night before. With the quality of each of the pieces represented, I’m confident that we will have an interesting discussion. The panel starts at 1pm EST at 216 Tremont Street, Boston, MA and here in Second Life. Continue reading

Mixed Realities: An International Networked Art Exhibition and Symposium :: Opening Reception and Performance: February 7, 2008; 5-7 pm :: Huret & Spector Gallery, 10 Boylston Place, 6th Floor (Tufte Center), Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts; Turbulence.org, and Ars Virtua (Second Life: Teleport) :: Floating Points 5: Mixed Realities Symposium - February 8-9, 2008 :: Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont St., Emerson College; Emerson Island (Second Life: Teleport); or watch the webcast.

Participants include: Burak Arikan, Drew Baker, John (Craig) Freeman, Eric Gordon, Usman Haque, Drew Harry, Scott Kildall, Gene Koo, Pierre Proske, Michael Takeo Magruder, Victoria Scott, and David Steele. Continue reading

On January 28th, 2008, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, and Janez Janša performed Signature Event Context at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, a walking action in the corridors of the Memorial. Each one of them, equipped with a GPS device, covered a different path within the Memorial’s structure this way, together assembling a common signature visible only in the internet. During the performance artists continuously repeated “Jaz sem Janez Janša, Jaz sem Janez Janša, Jaz sem Janez Janša…” (”My name is Janez Janša”). Continue reading

The Beall Center for Art & Technology, at the University of California-Irvine, has recently commissioned an ambitious installation entitled, in a thousand drops… refracted glances. The work was created by Aleksandra Dulic, Martin Gotfrit, and Kenneth Newby, members of the Computational Poetics Research Group, a collective of artists, engineers, and scholars based at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.

The premise of their work is that by creating new tool sets and scenarios for “interdisciplinary computational media performance,” they can “enable creative and performing artists to enter into new collaborative relationships with encoded systems.” Continue reading

4th IET International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE 08) :: University of Washington, Seattle :: July 21 - 22, 2008 :: Call for Papers - Abstract Deadline: January 31, 2008 :: Notification of Acceptance: March 17, 2008 :: Submission of Final Papers: April 17, 2008.

The conference aims at contributing to the realization of the Ambient Intelligence vision, where physical space becomes augmented with computation, communication and digital content, thus transcending the limits of direct human perception. Types of Intelligent Environments range from private to public and from fixed to mobile; some are ephemeral while others are permanent; some change type during their life span. Continue reading