February 08, 2006
Weird vintage postcards
10:55 AM vintageOld postcards for every taste: postcards of giants, fat persons, midgets, big patatoes, "anti-woman", movie stars , zeppelin, etc.
Via Otomano.
Bacteria portrait
09:35 AM installationGFPixel is a "painting" made of genetically transformed bacteria. The organisms are cultivated in about 4000 Petri-dishes that are arranged as a portrait. Like on digital screens part of the bacteria produce the green light – the Green Fluorescent Protein-gene is switched ON and in the other part the GFP-gene is switched OFF.
The works plays with the border between living world and the digital world, the portrait seems to be digital but it lives and dies during the exhibition.
A work by Austrian media artist Gerfried Stocker and molecular biologist Reinhard Nestelbacher. More images (click "Gallerie und Details")
GPF Pixel can be seen at Medialab Madrid until April 2, as part of an exhibition of the most outstanding projects of digital culture which have won prizes in recent years at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.
Video Game - World 2
09:08 AM games + installation + transmedialeAnother installation from the Smile Machines show, Transmediale.
Stéphane Gilot's Video Game - World 2 associates surveillance technology with virtual worlds. The Video Game capsule on the one hand suggests a spaceship module, and on the other is inspired by pragmatic domestic architecture of the Seventies, one that made the most effective use of the limited space available. You can sit down in the lower part of the capsule and navigate a landscape, steering a small vehicle through what looks like a virtual 3-D world.
But in fact, the vehicle follows the track in the upper section of the capsule, and it carries a video camera. And at some point you're bound to notice that the landscape you're navigating is the one you've observed through a small window on the top of the capsule a few minutes before.
Transposition of the programmed architecture of video game space to the space of a real model is designed to sharpen the observation skills and attentiveness of the audience. The analog realisation catapults the player back into the real world again.
Emotion Vending Machine
08:23 AM transmedialeMaurice Benayoun's Emotion Vending Machine (part of the Smile Machines exhibition at Transmediale) reminds me of our less sophisticated Venting Machine.
The mechanics of the world’s emotions evolve in the zone where economics and politics converge, in the world of product placement. The Emotion Vending Machine takes internet data as a global pool of emotions. You can make your musical "cocktail" by selecting up to 3 emotions from a list (optimistic, overjoyed, alone, terrified, etc.) The emotions are represented by 3D-maps of word clusters, extracted in real time from the web.
The maps show the emotions of the world as they are present on the web at that moment, mapped onto the actual position of major cities on the globe, a mix which can also be read like a music score. The musical interpretation deciphers the cities and their emotional polarity to produce a particular musical tone by adapting rhythm, coloration and evolution to your choice of emotional states. The musical result can also be uploaded on your USB stick or MP3 player.
Amusing, but there are more stimulating projects on the artist's website.
Images.
February 07, 2006
SGM-Iceberg-Probe
04:22 PM installation + transmedialeAnd the winner of the Transmediale award this year is...
German artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis for SGM-Eisberg-Sonde / SGM-Iceberg-Probe.
The SGM-Iceberg-probe is a very poetical and totally fictitious tool to explore subterranean icebergs located beneath ice-scating-rinks and other worlds hidden under the surface of Germany's land! With the SGM-Probe [Subglacialis Montometer] subterranean life-forms and ecosystems can be studied in their natural environment.
I must say i found irresistible the non-sense of this work (though it wasn't my favourite piece): the fact that i could sit there, get swallowed by this slow and imaginary life, forget about the cold and feel like i was part of some fantastic dicovery adventure.
Multi-Touch Interaction Research
11:05 AM labsJefferson Y. Han has developed, together with Philip L. Davidson, Casey M.R. Muller and Ilya D. Rosenberg, a new project that investigates bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user input on a graphical interaction surface.
Multi-touch sensing enables you to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such system can also accommodate several users simultaneously, which is useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.
The sensing technology is force-sensing, and provides high resolution and scalability, allowing for sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accomodate both hands and multiple users.
The drafting table style implementation on the images measures 36"x27", is rear-projected, and has a sensing resolution of ~0.1" at 50Hz. Applications receive events and stroke information using the lightweight OSC protocol over UDP.
The China Connection - Transmediale
09:06 AM transmedialeThe China Connection (part 1)
This panel discusses the role that European media arts and technology organisations have been playing in the recent developments of a Chinese media-cultural agenda. It asks how Chinas new electronic media artists deal with the social potentials of globally connected media technologies - from CCTV through cryptography to open source software, with all their attached cultural dimensions.
Martijn de Waal, journalist and independent media researcher, made an interesting wrap up of the Chinese blogosphere and how people are using the internet in China.
He started his talk with an animation called iRepress.
There's over 100 million users of internet in China, making it the country with the most internet users in the world. The typical net surfer used to be male, urban, high-educated, in his 20-30. It's becoming less so. Active bottom up. Now more women and less educated people are catching up.
How people use the internet: in China there's a very lively amateur culture. What's different in China from other parts of the world is the huge sense of humour when writing about daily life and world/national events.
Many people make and exchange flash movies, swap lots of files. Commercial portal are thriving (big portals dealing with celebrities for example) but e-commerce hasn't taken off yet.
The Middle Landscape. The internet has become a middle landscape between the public sphere and the commercial sphere. These two separate realms merge on the internet. On blogs and bulletin boards that mostly discuss commercial matters, someone might start a discussion on a recent event (like a murder hidden by the authorities) and a long discussion will start.
The Middle Landscape in another sense: the internet as a middle landscape between the private and the public sphere. Bloggers and wikipedians against the governement. Governement is loosing control over the private domain (in the past, employees had to get an authorisation to get married, it's no longer the case.) The internet is very hard to control although there are rules to restrict what people can write. If you want to open a blog you have to give your name and address. Companies like Google, Microsoft or Cisco, help the governement to shut up the voices and restrict the new freedom.
On the other hand, Chinese have now a service they didn't have before. For each new rules imposed by the government, bloggers and wikipedians make a counter attack.
The Social Brain Foundation is inviting people in the West to adopt a Chinese blog on their personal web server to make it harder to control or block the blogs (only information i found).
Are public sphere and civil society emerging? De Waal asked several actors whom have different perspectives.
Jack Qiu: no, we’re not seeing this promised new freedom. In China, internet is given as a toy to people to play with, not to provide them with more possibilities of expression.
Michael Anti (who had his weblog shut down by the governement): yes, there's a gradual development. People are willing to see things change even if the governement doesn't agree.
Webloggers: maybe. People start to organise themselves on the web, give out opinions on small environmental issues for example (government issues are still too taboo). So maybe we're witnessing the beginning of a new civil society.
Floorcleaning robot
08:26 AM robotsOnce in a while, Konomi sends me a link and short translation to pictures of Japanese robot adventures.
This one features a robot presented to the press back in November, but it's the first time i see movies of it. RIDC01, by Temsuk , cleans streets and can give people directions using an embedded video projector (the projector can also be used to screen DVDs). The robot, which is just over 4 feet tall (1.3m), will start selling for 10 million yen ($85,000). Via Cnet.
More robots, streets and trash: Adrian McEwen wrote a piece to describe his encounter with Bins and Benches, the solar-powered robotic bins that move and chuckle and the benches that flock together and sing when the sun comes out.
February 06, 2006
Urban Media Panel - Transmediale
11:02 AM transmedialeMy notes and images from the Urban Media panel, yesterday, in the Salon, Transmediale.
Architecture and public space are increasingly permeated by media. Facades like the Spots light and media facade on Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, developed by realities:united architects, not only bring media art into public space, but they turn architecture itself into an audio-visual, often interactive medium.
Participants: Tim Edler, Thom Sokoloski and Christian Moeller.
Moderator: Geoff Cox (University of Plymouth)
Christian Moeller presented his completed and upcoming installations. “My work is not shooting for high degrees of complexities, i like to stretch the interaction between people and computers to interessino extents.”
For Cheese (which is exhibited upstairs, in the Smile Machines exhibition), Moeller casted 6 actresses from Hollywood and made the smile as much as the could. An emotivo recognition system was measuring the sincerity of their smile and would turn the light from green to red to remind the women that their smile was faiding and that they had to show more happiness.
Do Not Touch at the Science Museum in London, part of the exhibition on energy. Moeller was invited to create a piece in which energy was presented as a physical experience. Whenever a visitors touches the pole (which is surrounded by the words “Do Not Touch”), s/he gets electrocuted.
Projects Moeller works on now:
- At the Seattle airport (above, left), a monorail station is being built that has to be connected to the airport with a pedestrian bridge. Moeller’s idea was to install on the bridge a series of portals with red glass panels that can be easily spotted from the outside. When going to the airport the two main preoccupations are: time (too much time to kill or not enough because you’re late) and weather (bad weather and your flight won’t leave.) The upcoming installation will feature shadows of windscreen wipers on the red glass panels. It will use the existing flodlight to show them on the celing inside the bridge as well.
- Pump station. Moeller wanted to make a take on drinking water. Water is a political thing: there’s heavy competition to sell what should be obtained freely from the tap. Apollinaris was already shipping 2 millions bottles of his water all over the world in the 1860s. The waters are all the same, what differentiate them from one another is the design of their bottles. For the instalation Moeller had 250 000 bottles from different brands crushed to make glass stones. The stones will be fitted in a mesh and move slowly.
- Los Angeles harbour: oil digging machines and oil platforms all over the place and sitting in the sea. Moeller wanted to associated the beacon (like the one of a lighthouse) with machines. So he bought a robot for car factory, the robot is quite anthropomorphic. He’ll dress it up, put a light in its hand and the robot will be moving and shining it around forever until someone comes along: the robot will then direct the spot on the passerby and follow him (above, right.)
Tim Edler from Berlin-based Realities:united.
Bix: before working on this particular project the R:U studio didn’t care for public outside space and was more concerned with interior spaces. The Bix building in Graaz (Austria) was built by Peter Cook architecture studio who wanted to give a plexiglas skin to the building. R:U gave a justification to that desire. The BIX skin became an expression tool for the building, allowing it to communicate both way from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside. Fluorescent lights were placed under the the skin of the building. They chose fluorescent lights because the are very cheap: a large media facade had to be covered; it had to be inexpensive because R:U were supposed to work only on the interior of the building so the skin was not covered by the initial budget and fluorescent light cannot really get out of date because they are already “old.” Also the surface was conceived as a comunicating skin that can be used by other artists and architects to express themselves.
SPOTS on Potsdamer Platz. SPOTS was installed on an existing building no one wanted to rent. R:U were asked to make a media facade that would become a big landmark. Here again they put a layer of fluorescent lamps under a plastic sheet. The surface to cover was much bigger than BIX. The R:U studio managed to convince the commissionners not to use the surface for advertising. If you show advertisement no one will talk about it as a media facade. The first show was curated by Andreas Broeckmann (artistic director of Transmediale). More images.
Waedenswil Bus Terminal in Switzerland: a project still under way.
The bus terminal was created by Hausmarke architecture studio, Berlin. R:U will use the celing of the terminal as a giant clock that displays only the minutes and creates light.
Question by Geoff Cox:
What do you tink about the possibility of the advertising industry riappropriating artistic ideas and positions?
Seems inevitable and often it’s not a bad thing. Artists propose alternative ideas to simply glue a film or advert on the building. Too often people find ideas and concepts from traditional media and simply print or glue the on the facade. It takes no time to convolute a surface: put once for a limited period of time something ugly and people will never look at that building again. A huge building is like a big TV with only one channel with a boring programme that never changes. 85% of passersby on Potsdamer Platz do not notice SPOTS. Two possible reasons: whenever the see something blindino, the tino it’s advertising and watt nothing to do with It. Or the are people coming from provincial town and want to “keep their cool” by not looking impressed.
Question from the audience:
Can product placement and art coexist?
Tim Edler’s answer: At first the idea was to mix art and advertising. Artists would take a slogan from a famous brand and work on It. Take McDonald. Its slogan is “I’m loving It.” So the artist would have to create something around the “i’m loving it” concept. But R:U thought Chat eden if the name of the company is not mentionned or if the brand is criticised, McDonald would still be there on Potsdamer Platz, so the opted for the 100% artistic solution.
February 05, 2006
LAPD to throw GPS at fleeing cars
08:39 PM locativeThe LAPD will outfit cars with a device that propels and sticks a GPS onto a fleeing car.
The department will mount the StarChase LLC device in the grill of some squad cars. "Officers in the car would control a green lazar light, similar to an aiming device that fixes on your target," said LAPD Lieutenant Paul Vernon on Friday. "A small dart-like device is propelled from the officer's car."
The officer also will have a remote unit, about the size of a device that unlocks a car, when they're outside the patrol car.
Each StarChase unit can fire two GPS tracking devices in case the first one misses or does not stick to the vehicle. The GPS device consists of a battery and a radio transmitter embedded in an epoxy compound.
The GPS tag activates at impact. It transmits the car's exact position via a wireless modem. An encrypted cellular backbone delivers continuous position updates to the StarChase server that pushes location-based information to authorized users through a password-protected Web portal.
Via archinect < Information week.
'70s porn cards
07:56 PM sexAn indecent selection from the WWW Playing Cards Museum: Catchy/DUO Playballs.
Via wtbw.
Flux Smile Machine
07:26 PM transmedialeSmile Machines, the main exhibition at Transmediale presents a mix of --nearly-- vintage and very recent works which reflect on the relationship between art, humour and technology.
One of my favourite (although since i left my boring work i don't feel the need to buy one anymore) is the Flux Smile Machine that George Maciunas (one of the original Fluxus artists) ideated in 1972. This kind of gag forces you to smile or rather to makes an awful grimace, "making it an atavistic and threatening gesture directed against bourgeois society."
(image.)
Norman White on Mistakology
06:43 PM transmedialeJust listened to a great talk by Norman White in the Mistakology panel.
Every technology has its mistakes and accidents already built in. This insight is not new, but it is still consistently ignored in an approach to technology that demands it to be controllable and safe, functional and useful. Technical dysfunctionality is 'repressed' by modern society, in a Freudian sense. Functional discrepancies between people and machines are called 'human failures' even in cases in which the technology is making impossible demands on its human user. Machines and their mistakes are thus an inexhaustible source of humour and parody.
White presented himself as an "expert in doing things the wrong way."
He identified three kinds of mistakes:
- the mistakes of the moment (set watch at the wrong time, forget cigarettes at the bar, etc.) Such mistakes happen in a random way.
- Mistakes of tentative action. We know we're going to make a mistake but we act anyway and continuously try to adjust our technique untill we've got it more or less right. The Helpless Robot (a robot that gives you orders on how to move its and sometimes contradicts itself and gets angry even when you do things right, see images above) is an example of such mistake, it's not perfect, it's a never ending project, it still doesn't work the way the artist would like it to.
- mistakes of the era/age. Mistakes are quite often verified by our own peers. People do not always seem to recognise their own mistakedness.
Several examples of mistakes:
- confusing utility with function and not seeing the dysfunctionality of too much functions.
- we believe that we express ourselves better by maximising our control. But there's bound to be mistakes and diversion from what we expect. However mistakes helps you to transcend the original idea. Therefore a certain loss of control can be very helpful. People should learn to love these lacks of control.
- we forget that the limits of technology can be harnessed. Artists work with the limitations of technology and express themselves better when they are improvising around the technique. People throw slower and simpler system in the garbage (thinking that getting the latest update of the gadget is the right thing to do), White loves to bring the simpler systems back in use.
- 4th mistake: we tend to forget that behaviour is as important as appearance. Norman White drew a parallel between the Commedia dell' Arte and computers: 5 to 6 characters know to the audience have precise behaving moods (the priest, Arlequino, Pulcinella, etc.) BUT the emergence of the play comes from the improvisation between the actors. This mirrors the way computers work. Incidently the Helpless Robot works best if you do as it says but only once or twice diverge from its orders (instead of just spinning it for example).
White then showed short videoclips of his works:
- First Tighten up on the Drums, Facing Out Laying Low, Splish Splash 2 (image above), etc.
The talk ended up with this great statement "a fondamental mistake is to believe that a leading edge idea requires a leading edge technology." You can make cutting edge project with old tech.
More about Norman White.
2 pieces of informations
03:50 PM something about meActually three: i'm still at Transmediale, taking notes and making pictures and working with lovely Tim Pritlove on a video to post and give you a glimpse of what's happening here.
If there's any reader who strives with english and would rather check wmmna in chinese, there's a nice bunch of young Chinese new media art afficionados who are translating their favourite posts of wmmna in chinese on we-need-money-not-art.
Camille Dodson from the University in Colorado (Boulder) has met and interviewed Leah Buechley and Nwanua Elumeze and written a piece on their work yesterday (just discovered it today and really like it.)
February 04, 2006
Cool Effects Light Shirt
08:22 PM art + design + labs + wearableWritten by Camille Dodson
 |
Leah Buechley and Nwanua Elumeze have recently developed a light-shirt that plays the 'game of life' with cool blinking patterns. The lights come on and animate vibrantly, captured by me on video1 & 2 . The shirt also has an button for interacting with the lights, adding a blinker to the center of the shirt's grid to change the animating automata. |
At a recent demoing session I attended, people gathered around Leah to watch the show and learn about the development of this cyber-fashion wear. After viewers had played with the display for a bit, Nwanua pulled out his pda, revealing the wireless programming capabilities of the shirt. Users were excited to draw new patterns and watch 'life' grow and change. Behind the Scenes Look at this Magical Garment
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA |
||||||||||
Jobs for Young Girls
12:40 PM entertainmentJust arrived in Berlin in Transmediale after 2 fabulous days in Geneva at the LIFT06 conference organised by Laurent and Nicolas. Updates will follow, slowly. In the meantime...
Each weekday in February, BBC is featuring a classic public information film from the past 60 years.
Yesterday´s pick Jobs for Young Girls dates from 1970.
The animation was produced to highlight the dangers of girls leaving school without thinking about further education or training.
Thanks a lot Rory.
