“Basically its a low budget breakfast bar controlled by the daily habits of a bunch of hens on Gorgie City Farm in Edinburgh. Each time an egg gets laid a signal is sent to the web enabled toaster (courtesy of arduino and my excellent colleague Ian Campbell!) sets the coils in motion and returns the action of egg laying to the gallery goers as hot toast for consumption! Not only that, on the breakfast table is a peck controlled iTunes soundsystem, each peck on the piezo mic’ attached to the chicken feed bowl causes the ‘Cock Rock Disco’ playlist to skip forward a track - perpetual flutterings of chicken inspired songs!

Online the same egg laying response generates a single random number, after six numbers are generated / eggs are laid a lottery ticket is purchased online, therefore returning back to its source a percentage of funds received for this project! and hopefully making me a millionaire! genius eh?!

I like it anyhow, in fact I am really please with it, it utilises all the same sophisticated technology as other more respectable sophisticated projects, it pushes the uses of these networks to the limits, with realtime biological actions governed by an equally random factor (the chickens), its a project, its a happening, an event and most importantly at the end of all this it manifests itself as something so spectacularly simple and commonplace (a slice of toast), people would ask why ever bother at all! lol”

Jaygo Bloom is a UK based multimedia artist whose practice includes audio visual installation, game hacking, film making and physical computing. Over the past year he has been developing a wide variety of new online and offline projects ranging from his globally aware interactive games console ‘Tao Joystick’ to his 8bit latino percussion interface ‘Marrackattack’. Working independently and also as part of the Glasgow based audio visual team ‘Pointless Creations’. Popular for his public interventions, blue screens and old sports car, other successful projects have included Glasgow International05, Pixelache05, Recontres Paris/Berlin, and Pong.Mythos.

Artists of diverse backgrounds are involved, working mainly through performative strategies. Sceneries involving the passers-by in every city are created. For example you may see four people of four countries at the same time on four screens, communicating via webcam their wishes oder questions as a sort of statement.

The artists are still in dialogue about the common strategies. Given the same rules, the differences of the mentalities in the participating countries are going to be shaped more clearly. A Day in a Life is an international networking project. It gives a lot of space for discoveries, pushes accidental development in communication, letting emerge irritating and surprising connections.

The performances will take place on 19th and 20th of July 2008 at Wittelsbacher Platz. At the same time at ZKMax, Passage Maximilanstrasse / Altstadtring, video works of the participating artists will be shown. Sponsored by the Department of Culture of the Bavarian Capital Munich. Some participating artists are supported by the „Artist-in-Residence“ programme of Villa Waldberta.

A DAY IN A LIFE builds bridges, highlighting the familiar in the foreign and the foreign in the familiar.
Curation and Coordination: Horst Konietzny

CALL FOR PROPOSALS/PROJECT PARTNERS

Further development of a streaming event between nodes of Upgrade! International. The first version was held between Munich, Istanbul, Boston and Oklahoma City as part of the annual Upgrade! International gathering on November 30, 2006.

The project A DAY IN A LIFE (DIAL) locates the global in the local. The peculiarities and characteristics of each location are contrasted with those typical and atypical to other locations, other cities, other countries, coalescing their similarities and differences into a poetic fusion. Enabled by the growing power of the Internet - all locations are networked together via broadband technology.

DIAL was begun as a multimedia bridging of peoples and locations world-wide. Its second version will be specially aimed at the theme of Munich’s 850th birthday: “Building Bridges.” Artists in various places will interpret the theme in cooperative interventions in daily life both in their home locations and on-site in Munich. The 3rd annual gathering of Upgrade! International can help to bring oversees artists to Munich as stopovers on their way to the gathering in Skopje, Macedonia. The following is a description of the basic concept which should be further developed by the participating artists.

THE SETTING

Publicly accessible spaces in participating cities around the world will be connected via Internet for a span of several hours. At any given time, streaming video and audio from at least two participating partner locations can be seen and heard in these spaces, projected next to each other on screens or monitors and audible over speaker systems.

The spaces should be locations that play a role in the typical everyday life of each country – cafes, squares, city streets. These snapshots of daily life from diverse cultural backgrounds are given meaning by the selective eye of the streaming camera, the defining frame of the screen and the juxtaposition with similar but different scenes from another city. Stimulated by the tendency of the viewer to fill a formal frame of reference with meaning – in Marcel Duchamp’s words, “It is the viewers who make the pictures.”

Meaning is constructed not only by the formal framing, but also by focusing the action on specific themes. This is done through targeted media interventions and actions that take place at both locations simultaneously and which at pre-arranged times react to a common theme.

The simultaneous artistic interventions bring the snapshots into sharp juxtaposition with each other. The performance creates a medial and performative bridge of prepared performance, chance occurrence and the inevitable intercultural differences between the locations.

THE ACTION

The events in each location are structured spatially by the eye of the camera and the image frame, and the chance occurrences are given meaning via medial interventions such as a soundtrack or subtitles. Interactions between the local and the distant participants are particularly interesting and stimulating, as our event last year in Oklahoma City has shown. For instance a simple sandbox of red earth served as the site for a lively exchange for visual and textual feedback as artists in both locations mirrored and developed on each other’s words and images drawn in the sand.

The interventions may make use of various formal methods, but all will deal with the common theme “bridges” and the intervention from each city will illuminate characteristic local references to this theme.

The interventions may be executed using differing formal strategies but will all treat the common theme “bridges.” The interventions from each city will reflect on characteristic local references to this theme.

Examples of possible performances:

All performances should incorporate direct interaction with participants in another location. This can be visual, textual or audio, but the mutual interaction should be directly recognizable to non-participants watching only the screen view showing the two streams.

* Annotating everyday life: Participants and passers-by write or draw on a glass surface (for instance a café window) while a camera records the scenes of daily life visible through the glass frame.

* Bridging texts: The streaming camera records text banners as they are unfurled across the two participating locations. In each location only a fragment is visible; the full meaning only becomes clear when the videostreams of the two locations are viewed simultaneously on a screen.

* Express yourself: Passers-by are requested to jot down personal wishes for changes in the political, economic, private, ecological etc. situation and drop the notes into collection boxes. These texts can be held directly in front of the camera as the streaming image itself, or inserted as “subtitles” into the streaming video of the scene.

* Do it yourself political protest: Passers-by are requested to demonstrate spontaneously for or against something, or can write their own slogans on placards.

* Street happenings: Passers-by are handed leaflets requesting them to perform specific actions. Within the anonymous stream of pedestrians new patterns of motions and behavior arise.

* Multi-local choreography: Dancers are linked to each other with a common time code. The complete choreography is only visible when viewing both videostreams together on the screen.

ACCOMPANYING EVENTS For those who are able to come to Munich, we will arrange art talks and if possible workshops and an exhibit in cooperation with institutions in Munich.

GAULON’s project also points out how an increasingly spreading technology of surveillance can be smartly used to acquire data from other surveillance technologies. The detournement as a way of creating conflict within society was a practice widely experimented by the situationist movement (whose theories directly inspire RECYCLISM). But actually the theories of Michel De Certau and his ‘practices of everyday life’ are maybe more appropriate to interpret 2.4Ghz experience. It changes usage patterns whose consumption is normally assigned to, converting an establishment tool into a weapon potentially useful for our daily practice of liberation.

Surveillance cameras were also at the core of the Interception performance, where the cameras’ physical hijacking and its use in other more explicit contexts pushes people to easily realize their privacy invasion. But 2.4Ghz tries to make more explicit those signals freed in the air, claiming their accessibility by anyone with a wireless video receiver being not only an observation target but also a more conscious observer. It’s interesting the way the whole RECYCLISM™ project is publicly presented: the device is attached to street lamppost, to reveal live the presence of cameras around broadcasting video signals. The project is somehow making a statement about the open economy of the trash (defined as material without owner), which allows people and artists to acquire new stuff and transform it into something with a value. Nevertheless, this position is sarcastically contradicted with all the ™ symbols accurately added to any project’s name, establishing a private property claim that trash had originally lost.” - Tony Canonico, Neural.

On the scene two igloo tents. Two spaces in the shape of a sphere shelter two artists who devote themselves to a play in which they are the others living doll. Inside their tents they are face to face via a system of two webcams. The public is able to follow the hidden face to face via an interface, developed by Clément Charmet, that permits to project the webcam images of the two artists side by side on the wall behind the tents.

As in a virtual world (a video game, Second Life) the artists give orders to their avatar played by the other. But contrary to what happens in the virtual world, here the alter ego is well alive. It has its own capacities and it can agree or not to give flesh to the projections of the other.

“The soft hazy pastels of the webcam images created an impression of otherworldliness, where the walls of the tents evoked two floating worlds, miles apart, occupied by two solitary humans preoccupied with opportunities for intimacy. In this enthralling half hour performance, I forgot about the accretion of skills, tools and protocols, necessary to enable the performance, so that all that remained for my conscious consideration was a contingent and vulnerable human interaction expressed through request, action, request, action. I found this work poignant and moving.

L’un la poupée de L’autre is a performed installation that straddles two kinds of public space, physical and virtual, in an exact and specific way to set the scene for an unscripted but closed (non-participative) interaction. Perhaps we could consider it scripted (in the sense that computer code is script) in that it deploys a simple rule set - but it doesn’t have a preset narrative or dialogue.” - Ruth Catlow, intimate collaboration, 9-12-2007.

Download the video on http://lenougat.free.fr/ Username: fan Pass : puppet.

Contact Annie Abrahams a(at)bram.org if you want to show the video, present the installation or performance.

The technique chosen to be used for the reconstruction of the camera images is the eigenface method which, along with other similar face recognition techniques, is mainly used in surveillance systems for finding blacklisted or wanted individuals computationally. Countries such as US, Canada and some EU countries require biometric passport or visa photographs which are taken according to strict rules and guidelines in order to be stored in the governments’ databases in a standardized way. This way, the appearance of a person who gets in front of the camera can be compared to the people previously stored in the system. In this project, the previously stored face images are those of the members of the Turkish National Assembly. The face of the viewer in front of the camera is reconstructed by computer algorithms as if that viewer were one of the members of the Turkish National Assembly although he or she does not resemble to any of them and the result is directly shown on the screen

ContainerArt, co-produced with Enzimi, organizes in Rome an itinerant exposition of contemporary and avant-garde art. Displaying – in various containers scattered through the city – art installations, pictures, videoworks and sculptures of the most innovative artists. For this occasion some members of nITroStudio in collaboration with Javier Ideami realized Priva(te)cy…

Virtual Narcissus: interconnected faces :: Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible (Paul Klee) - Sensuos and melancholic, the reflection of the unaware Narcissus evokes the beginnings of the image concept and all theories of representation, as suggested by Leon Battista Alberti in his De Pictura (1435-36). The abstraction of our own image is, indeed, a way to apprehend the reality which leads to one’s own conscience, through a primal journey in the inner self.

The reflection of the digital face today takes place in the mirror of the ocean of information, endlessly changing and gains a numeric and telematic physical dimension. As David Lyon says, our doubles become then some electronic «data-doubles» generated by observing individual’s flesh and blood: our electronic souls surf into virtual paths drawn by credit cards, magnetic cards, mobile phones, security camera’s, webcam, cookies, hard disks and all other electronic devices we daily use. The synergy between computer and telecommunication seriously endangers the privacy, which is now accessible only to those economic lobbies that steer the information flows.

The topic of electronic surveillance arouses therefore a lot of interest between artists and activists; it questions the undefined boundaries between social security and intrusion of the State or private individuals. At the same time Internet represents the extended site of the collective intelligence described by Pierre Levy and dynamic interconnection of data in real time is certainly a decentralized system that knows no restrains and goes beyond any settled power.

Evoking the association power-knowledge of Foucault, the intrusive eye of the surveillance camera’s can be then reversed and given back to the “victims” through Art, making visible the invisible. The self-reflection will therefore double in an ongoing process to end up multiplying itself and gaining an incredible cognitive potential when set in the internet as shared information and detectable by the a-dimensional environment of the web.

It is a new identity space. The image of one’s own face will disintegrate in discontinuous and quantifiable fragments of a specific numeric set that becomes a visible image, creating itself again at any moment, somewhere else, anywhere.

Priva(te)cy invites to join this initiative of “self surveillance” and collective awareness: let’s renounce to privacy and let’s offer out of our own will our face to the shared journey in a global knowledge. Getting to the other side of the yellow mark makes the difference between staying in the queue at the post office behind a line, under the passive eye of a surveillance camera, and dare to jump in space and time instantly spreading our own memory inserted into the circuit of thoughts of an interconnected memory.

In the darkroom of the container, the meaning of the captured image will reverse and it will start the emotional process while recognizing itself in the vertigo of the exploration: the virtual Narcissus will offer his ubiquitous reflection in an unexpected moment and will recognize it inside the collective interactive work, built in a dynamic web publishing. Each participant can decide individually to decrypt his own hidden image and let it be an active part of a conscience of the net.

From Rome to Jerusalem to the entire world the space is compressing, the time is accelerating in this act of freedom of the interconnected faces.

Paola Ruotolo (translation by Paola Palma)

About the exhibition: N3krozoft Ltd is one of the most challenging collective efforts in the field of media art. Building upon a lineage of continuous projects reaching back to the early days of the computer age, their work encompasses live visual performance, public art, and critique of software and its relationship to contemporary culture and politics. This major survey provides an unprecedented opportunity to reassess their ambiguous work, which is characterised by its obsessive subject matter and experimental approach to media and techniques.

Beginning with early videos, participatory works and performances, the exhibition showcases some of the group’s most influential multimedia pieces in an unprecedented, monumental installment. It also features a number of new works made specially for the exhibition. This exhibition explores N3krozoft’s core themes of technology, control and isolation, and demonstrates that the group continues to defy convention.

Entering the exhibit, the visitor delves into a dark space illuminated by a huge glass monolith, glowing with a radioactive green. This box contains an impressive holographic rendering of Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia (an engraving from 1514), the result of a collaboration with Kyjuku Optics, a leader in high-precision laser technology. Through its unearthly presence, this sculpture functions as the nodal point of the whole exhibition, providing an enigmatic allegorical centerpiece.

Another holographic piece can be found in the next room, where the acclaimed video installation LOL (laughing out loud) is presented in a new scenic surrounding. The phantomatic silhouette of “ripper” - a teenager deceased during a drug-induced online chat session - floats above the scenery, while the log files of his last chat flicker on a translucent screen.

Beyond the presentation of classic multimedia pieces and artifacts from the N3krozoft group’s early years (including ONYX, NO SIGNAL and KERNEL PANIK), the exhibition features some new works, such as the video installation NULL+VOID, which offers a breathtaking ride through video-streams captured in realtime from anonymous internet webcams. The viewer is also offered some glimpses of the long-term project UBIK, a “retro/avant-garde” science-fiction movie based on Philip K Dick’s cult novel. N3krozoft presents the latest segment, UBIK - Chapter 6, which was filmed in July 2007 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

In the last section of the exhibition, a comfortable video lounge, designed like a video surveillance control room, allows the visitor to browse through a selection of 128 titles, including music videos, live performances and other original items from the N3krozoft Archive.

Nocinema.org (1999-2007) is an automatic process, drawing upon strings of live streaming webcams across the world, transmitting live scenes collected from different locations with added panoramic movements and temporized on-line editing, into which some black shots are inserted (listening without visual). The sound, each time offering a different sequenced overlay, comes from a shared sound files database which is fed and updated by a team of sound artists / partners, including Magali Babin, DinahBird, Christophe Charles, Yannick Dauby, Chantal Dumas, Emmanuelle Gibello, Jérôme Joy, Luc Kerléo, Alain Michon and Jocelyn Robert.

Presented in its first version at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis at the end of the nineties, nocinema.org is an ever- evolving streaming application developed by Jérôme Joy: French artist and composer. This project is a net-based documentary / fiction of web interludes that appear differently each time. Nocinema.org can be interpreted as an improbable cinema or a movie in which both actors and action appear to have wandered out of shot, having no beginning and no end, no participants and no storyboard, except perhaps subjective interpretations born of an impulse to impose purpose and meaning upon random stimuli.

From the introduction by Susanne Jaschko: The exhibition Travelling Without Moving deals with the changes in today’s notions of travelling due to an often mediatized perception of the surrounding world. Technological innovation has increased the speed of travel and the range of distances that can be reached in real time. By the same token, the modern traveller has developed a strong desire to feel a connection with home. Mobile devices fulfill this desire, but also disconnect the traveller from his or her surroundings. One might argue that today’s mobility implies movement on the surface - the surface of the city, the surface of culture. That it means travelling without moving - and perhaps without being moved. The six selected artworks can be regarded as results of, or comments on, this changed perception and conveyance of the world. More than this, they are representatives of a new aesthetics of digital minimalism and condensed experience.

See Press Release.

imaginary friend - amie imaginaire is a webcam adaption for lala. “In this performance piece, I use my childhood doll as an interface for engaging with text projected on a screen. The language is inspired by the relationship between a child and her doll or imaginary friend. A recursive algorithm is used to fill the space of the screen with pre-written verses, which appear in random order. The doll is fitted with an accelerometer, a sensor that can detect position in space and speed of movement. As the doll is moved, the way text appears on the screen changes.”

Only 30 places available, please don’t connect too late - and don’t forget to register on the site if you didn’t do that yet.

Aya Karpinska is a digital media artist and interaction designer. She creates interactive experiences through installation art, digital text, sound, and game design (but not all at the same time). Aya is the 2006 recipient of the Brown University Fellowship in Electronic Writing; she splits her time between Providence and New York City.

In this series Annie Abrahams and panoplie.org propose Web-meetings of about 20 minutes long using chat and streaming to experiment new ways of being together. Each meeting starts with a performance of an artist. The entrance of the web-salon is limited to 30 people. People registered on the site of panoplie (it is free) can take part in the chat (English or French) and will have priority over the others, which can nevertheless assist as “voyeurs” within the limit of the places available. Breaking solitude is a project of Annie Abrahams and panoplie.org.

Pattern recognition has already been used in several other projects, but this is a new way of using it, and a new way of thinking of the technology. The idea behind the game itself is rather simple. When the cube is tilted the avatar moves in the corresponding direction. The goal of the game is to guide him through a maze of rooms connected by doors, and lead him to the outside world.

According to the creater, Julian Oliver, the game is currently in development, but will be released as open-source soon.

Check out the explanatory video.

Related projects: Handheld Augmented Reality, Magic Book, Magic Cubes, Pet Shop Boys Include QR codes in new video, Semapedia, and Tagtracker.

Via Gizmodo. [blogged on Digital Experience]