the largest color LED display worldwide, & the first photo-voltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China. the display requires zero external energy, as the facade harvests solar energy by day & uses it to illuminate the screen after dark. the display comprises of 2,292 color (RGB) LED’s light points comparable to a 24,000 sq. ft. (2.200 m2) monitor screen for dynamic content display.the polycrystalline photovoltaic cells are laminated within the glass of the curtain wall & placed with changing density on the entire building’s skin. the density pattern increases building’s performance, allowing natural light when required by interior program, while reducing heat gain & transforming excessive solar radiation into energy for the media wall. you can play with the online simulator, or watch a movie after the break.[link: greenpix.org|via engadget.com] [posted on Information Aesthetics]

[Worldview is an urban installation for tourists that enables them to record their experience with both an instant-print postcard and a video clip and look through realtime windows into public spaces in other cities.] Fitting in with the surveillance theme in the last few posts but also some older work discussed here (World Bench, Miroir Aux Silhouettes, Intimate Transactions and the work of Paul Sermon), Worldview (by Haque Design) allows users to engage with both the spaces around them, subsequent users to the installation and users interacting with a similar installation elsewhere. Continue reading

For Internal Message Search: A Performative Installation, opening Friday, April 18th, pioneering video and internet artist Nina Sobell will install her Location One artist residency studio in the not-for-profit art center’s project space, where she will carry on her practice for the duration of the show. Visitors will be able to see Sobell’s recent wax sculptures and drawings, interact freely with the artist, and even accompany her for impromptu musical sessions (Sobell is a skilled improvisational guitarist and keyboardist). Continue reading

Shoot ‘em up (or shmup for short) is a computer and video game genre where the player usually controls a vehicle or character and fights large numbers of enemies with shooting attacks, typically of a highly stylized nature. In Japan, where the genre is still a lively one, they are simply known as “shooting games” and they are focused on avatar actions using some weapons. But what could happen when the weapons are instead “memes”? The game might become a memetic simulation as in Joseph Hocking’s Memetic simulation no.2.

Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the “meme”. Started from a metaphor used in Richard Dawkins popular writings, it has later turned into an approach in the study of self-replicating units of culture. Continue reading

You don’t need to be a videogame fan or being a teenager in the seventies / eighties to know videogame classics like Space Invaders, Pacman or Tetris. Their iconic power is still intact in the public imagination, also thanks to many reinterpretations and updates. Their patterns are often used by game artists as metaphors to create new connected sense: Mario Bros. can be restyled with a new graphic, so you can take your cue from it to discuss immigrant labor conditions, Space Invaders can be used to represent the never ending battle among Linux and the proprietary operating systems and so on. Sometimes the action’s target is the algorithm itself. Continue reading

How do you find the spirit and play of exploration in an optimized geography?

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates. Continue reading

[Image: Still from “Amongst Fables and Men” Tonight artist Eddo Stern will host “QQ More”, a screening he curated of offbeat fan-made machinima dealing with real-life issues such as drugs, pornography, and death at Brooklyn’s Light Industry. The show begins at 8pm and will be followed by a discussion between Stern and Alexander Galloway. I conducted an email interview with Stern about his interest in the phenomenon and its relevance to his own art practice. - Ceci Moss

In gaming parlance, what does “QQ More” mean? How does this relate to the concept behind your program “QQ More”? 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

Made partly in a Generator.x 2.0 workshop, Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s ‘A week in the life’ is a three dimensional visualisation of movement and communication made with a cell phone during a week roaming around Berlin. Using bespoke software written for his mobile phone, Andreas was able to record the longitude and latitude of his position in the city. The data was then passed to a Processing sketch, which resulted in the 3D representation. WMMNA extracted the following info regarding the journey from Processing to final data sculpture:

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work.’ Continue reading

The International Dance Party, an installation by Niklas Roy and Adad Hannah, is a complete plug ‘n’ play party in a box. Equipped with radar sensing technology, the system can sense activity nearby and quickly transform from an idle box into a psychedelic light and laser dance machine with a 600W sound system that will make the room bounce with excitement. The machine even taunts its audience with ambience with a built-in smoke machine that spews fog onto the dance floor. When everyone has left the room, the machine quickly transforms back to its static state and waits quietly for the next party to start. Watch the video. [blogged by Jonah Brucker-Cohen on Coin-Operated]