Spotted this morning on a french railway station in remote small town:
Why do I blog this? 1) looks like Bitman 2) it’s gorgeous, the cables are intriguing, going form the ground to this intriguing flashing character (meant to prevent you that a train is arriving)
Hello, world! is an installation for the virtual globe of the software Google Earth (carried out by students from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany):
A Semacode measuring 160 x 160 meters was mown into a wheat field near the town of Ilmenau in the Land Thuringia. The code consists of 18 x 18 bright and dark squares producing decoded the phrase “Hello, world!”.
The project was realized in May 2006 and photographs were taken of it during a picture flight in the following month.
See the weblog of the project here.
Why do I blog this? I may be an old fart about this project but I found interesting to have a visual code (i.e. a connector between the first world and the second “virtual” world) of such dimensions.
A Swedish artist has asked experts to help design one of Sweden’s iconic little red cottages - but this one will stand on the Moon. Mikael Genberg has recruited the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) to help plan the operation. The little red houses are found across the Swedish countryside, but Mr Genberg says he wants this one to become “an international symbol”. He says if everything goes to plan, the house may appear on the Moon in 2011.
Mr Genberg has arranged a competition for students and companies to design a house that could be contained in a small, light package, that would open up once landed on the Moon’s surface. The state-owned SSC has been happy to get involved in the project, which could cost 500m kroner (£36m).
There is a very interesting piece by Marc Tuters in the Glowlab zine about inflatable art. It’s actually a critical summary of the”Movable Feast/ Fête Mobile” project at ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006.
At its most conceptual level, the Movable Feast/ Fête Mobile project extrapolated current techno-political issues into a possible future scenario in which communities are locally connected through peering protocols while disconnected from Internet as a whole. The project was thus presented as a prototype for an arts satellite for a world in which the digital public realm is increasingly corporate and surveillance is ubiquitous, in which participants would remotely view their surroundings via an onboard camera, as well as exchange media files through a wireless local file server.
What is interesting IMO is also the description of the future iteration of the project as described by the authors:
…as a gravitational node for a reality-based video game. The rules of the game itself will be simple. Teams, situated on playing field, vie for control of the intelligent blimp, much as they would a ball in the sport of rugby. Participants thus attempt to control the blimp’s navigation on the field by organizing themselves, on the fly, into shapes and patters of movement recognizable to the blimp’s onboard vision system. While the latter may seems a departure form the more high-concept approach we developed for ISEA, at its core it remains theoretically informed by our interest in exploring new forms of collectivity in urban space. The phenomena of emergent self-organization is as central to terrorist networks as it is to popular democratic uprisings. As artists, we have thus settled on “play” as our chosen approach to explore facets of our individual and collective relations within the space of networked art.
Why do I blog this? first because I liked the project and second because of this game concept that seems pretty curious and relevant to explore ideas related to people’s relation with space and networks.
I found Michael Leung’s “mass storage stone” stunning:
Mass Storage Stone - prototype, 2005
A portable 4 GB hard drive that fits into your pocket, and has similar qualities to a stone - textured and slightly cold to touch
53 x 40 x 25 mm - synthetic resin
There seems to be a new version of the Astronaut Jesus: the Flocked Green Jesus Astronaut is an intriguing add-on:
Argentinian design group Doma has partnered with Hong Kong toy geniuses AdFunture Workshop to put out this otherworldly limited edition of 200 figures. Removable helmet.
Let the passion of AstroChrist fulfill our lives and hearts once again.
Why do I blog this I ran across this artifact during a break after writing the chapter XXX of my dissertation, found it curious and “self-revealing”. It actually made me think of all the sort of future people imagine related to religious issues: jesus as an astronaut…
Déplacements is an interactive art project by Manuel Braun:
“Déplacements” consists of 24 computer case fans forming a rectangle. Each fans is “pixel”, its number of revolutions and the intensity of the light of its LED varies according to the level of gray corresponding to the pixel of reference. This screen of fans is controlled by a computer simulating a cellular automata entitled “The game of life” (created by John Horton Conway in 1970). It is a mathematical model where each fans is a cell. “Displacement” is a hijack of this object, a component of the computer becoming image. It is not a question of a physical “displacement” but of a movement, a flow.
Why do I blog this? I liked the idea of having a physical instantiation of the “Game of Life”. Besides the notion of “détournement” is interesting too: how would the repetition of hijacked objects let emergent phenomenons happen?
I have to admit that I am a great fan of project about visualizing electromagnetic waves. That’s why I like Ian Haig’s Brain Tumour Helmets with microwave:
Exploreing the impact of microwaves and electromagnetic energy and their role in producing brain tumors as a form of body mutation, as in technologies such as mobile/cell phones. The work also explores the notion of the television as a form of ‘haunted media’. Consisting of two specially designed helmets with infared headphones and a large video and sound installation and an assortment of antennas.
Why do I blog this? I find intriguing this idea of “the head as an antenna”. As Regine reported it “The work addresses the impact of microwave technologies, not in order to highlight the evils of microwave technologies in society, but to engage notions of technology, which is potentially modifying the structure of our bodies, in this case through the brain tumor, as a catalyst of human/machine evolution/devolution“. The project is a bit old but IMO more and more relevant.
In good rezonance with UFO-like architecture in Geneva (see here), here is the Oslo version of the flying saucer:
Why do I blog this? left over in a curious part of the city, this rusty unflying saucer is a very nice object from a future yet to come, yet to envision but that some folks there do not want to forget. I quite like it and the gloomy atmosphere around adds a lot to my first impression of steampunk scifi.
Scott Blake is an artist who plays with barcode; maybe one of his bets piece is this Jesus portrait made out of barcodes. In Scott’s words:
This is the Bar Code Jesus that I created using my first refined bar code halftone program. The bar code images used look like regular bar codes, but they go beyond the normal density allowed by the bar code technolgy. I created a bar code signature, in the lower left corner using the bar code from a Pepsi 2-Liter.
Why do I blog this? Using barcodes as patterns la Roy Lichtenstein dots to create new structures seems to be curious. With all those folks trying to find the face of whoever in whatever, it’s strikingly curious to see artists taking it the other-way around: employing non self-revealing pieces like barcodes to create the face of Jesus. What’s next? This is about using everyday artifacts to creat higher-level representations.
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The last issue of Stanford’s Ambidextrous magazine features an interesting article about Survival Research Labs (heavy pdf): |
Survival Research Labs (SRL) has built its reputation on providing “the most dangerous shows on earth”—it is an art collective that specializes in staging performances, starring enormous robots that beat the crap out of each other. You may think you’ve seen robot wars on television, but there’s a crucial difference: These exhibitions are explicitly designed not only to entertain
hundreds of paying viewers, but also to threaten their lives.
Then the writer (Angie Heile) reports some interesting thoughts about their motivations:
“Our shows aren’t for humans, they’re for machines.” But this only hints at the real answer: SRL’s shows aren’t done for the audience—they’re for the creators.
(…)
Observers often wonder why so much engineering genius doesn’t get applied to something more beneficial—after all, people who can make a self-propelled fire-breathing monster from scrap could probably use their spare time to design life-saving-appropriate technologies for the developing world—rather than just blow things up. But SRL’s creators seem to feel that using their skills to play with fire is a more exciting challenge.
Why do I blog this? SRL has always been interesting to me and I am intrigued by this argument about the “why so much engineering genius doesn’t get applied to something more beneficial”. Actually the author could have elaborated a bit more about the importance of stuff like SRL; even though it’s exciting for the creators, there is a lot more to think about that: what they do convey relevant messages with regards to tech usage, the future of its use and dissemination and how it plays out in extreme contexts.
I like the DA/VE (insect eye visor) by Nikita Pashenkov
da/ve was my first electronics project at the media lab. The starting idea was an image of an insect eye made out of disrete leds. The addition of fiberoptic elements transformed the display surface into a rudimentary visual matrix, which was recorded by camera and analyzed in computer software. At some point in 2001 da/ve was accessible on the internet via a network-enabled microprocessor module
Why do I blog this? I like the appearance of the device (and the internet-enabled controller).
Virtual Hole by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec:
By employing digital technology, a virtual hole is created in the roof, through which the rain is allowed to fall through. The installation also allows the visitor him/herself to create rain inside the building, by dripping water drops on rain sensor, installed in the middle of the installation.
Virtual Hole is addressing dynamic duality of protection and exposing in a playful, naive and totally unpractical, absurd way. By doing so, it aims to create a short circuit in reasoning and therefore give space to more poetic interpretation of this ongoing duality.”
Why do I blog this? I like this project as a metaphor of flows (be it water or information); the absurdity is quite good and pertinent in the sense that a passersby is immersed into a world of flows
In the 2004 edition of the Venice Biennale, there was this intriguing piece of work by Motohiko Odani and called Berenice:
Thomas Kramar:
Ein Stockwerk höher, unter anderen räumlichen Krümmungen dieses so seltsam in sich gekrümmten Kunsthauses, liegt eine Art Ufo: eine Kugel, wirr verkabelt, schon leicht angerostet, aber immer noch vibrierend, wie kürzlich gestrandet auf einem gleichgültigen Planeten: “Berenice” heißt das Objekt von Motohiko Odani - nach der antiken ägyptischen Stadt?
Why do I blog this? I like this big white sphere plugged with cables; it looks like a left nuclear weapon that is curious, intriguing and maybe about to explode (a la Akira); or pulsing “information”. In the end it interrogates people about its role: would it be the “consciousness” (the place where information flows converge) of a place? To me, it can be the server of a city district that would enable to host what is needed to have a mixed reality. And of course, it might be left in an old cave that nobody can access.
One of the recent project of Adam Somlai-Fisher, Usman Haque and Bengt Sjölén is “ Wifi Camera Obscura“:
Wifi Camera Obscura reveals the electromagnetic space of our devices and the shadows that we create within such spaces, in particular our wifi networks which are increasingly found in coffee shops, offices and homes throughout cities of the developed world. We will take realtime “photos” of wifi space.
(picture taken from the original project, courtesy of Adam Somlai-Fisher, Usman Haque and Bengt Sjölén)
Why do I blog this? not because it’s made up of wasabi cans but rather because I find the idea of revealing the “the electromagnetic space of our devices”: visualizing the info cloud is compelling to me; both in terms of tech awareness in the environment as well as for aesthetical issues.