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

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Upgrade! Wellington: Tag Orbitals- Social Networks: The Close Distance by Bernard Kerr :: November 14, 2007; 7:00 pm; School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.

Bernard Kerr is a Senior Interaction Designer at Yahoo! and is currently the lead designer of the social bookmarking service, Delicious. Prior to working at Yahoo!, he was a Strategic Designer at IBM Research where his research focused on designing advanced concept software applications and visualizations for collaboration. One of the significant projects he worked on while at IBM was “Remail”, which centered on reinventing the email experience. This work has been published in various places, including the Infovis and CHI conferences. Continue reading

Brenda Laurel writes: “[…] Rachel has described our interest in how people leave marks on places. We wanted to give people the ability to “mark” the virtual environments, and we arrived at voice as a convenient modality for doing so. Voice offered several advantages over writing or drawing. Through prosody, voice permits greater expressiveness and personalization than writing; it is also more immediate. Most people are less self-conscious about speaking than about drawing. While drawing would require that we build special virtual drawing tools, capturing voice was relatively easy to implement.

Where and how could voices be stored and re-played? We designed the Voiceholders as virtual record / playback devices. A Voiceholder would capture and store an utterance, called a Voicemark. A “full” Voiceholder (that is, one containing a Voicemark) would play its contents when touched. Continue reading

RFID and the Tagged exhibition by Space Media Arts

The Spychip Under Your Skin by Armin Medosch: Commissioned by [ space.media.arts ] to accompany the Tagged exhibition, Armin Medosch writes about RFID, first introducing the technology and its context. Briefly introducing Bruce Sterling’s ideas about ’shaping things’ Medosch adds to this some of my his reflections about the contentious notion of techno-social ‘progress’. Based on this contextual analysis the text formulates some of the challenges and possibilities for artists who work with technology in general and the routes chosen by the selected artists in the Tagged exhibition. [PDF] Continue reading