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.

Just ran across this nice mouse pad in a shop in Lausanne:

Why do I blog this? I quite like cardboards and “cardboard hacking culture”, this one is an example of how people reshuffled an old piece of cardboard to another purpose.

Via aeiou, Internet Soul Portraits is a project by Mark Callahan:

Internet Soul Portraits (I.S.P.), net art project

I.S.P. is a tongue-in-cheek treatment of web design as pure representation. In this project, familiar images are altered by the application of essentialist, reductive approaches from a painterly tradition. The images are derived from the home pages of some of the most popular sites on the Web: Yahoo, Google, MSN, Amazon, CNN, eBay, The Weather Channel, MapQuest, Best Buy, and MySpace.

Removing the content of this virtual place, it reminds me some art projects such as “Floating Logos” by Matt Siber (on the left) or Christoph Steinbrener et Rainer Dempf’s “Delete!” project or Cedric Bernadotte’s “A town without writings” (below):

Why do I blog this? I like the parallel between virtual and real place.

Via Ektopia, this art project Jesus2.0

Mario Soup is an information visualization project by Ben Fry that aims at “revealing a beautiful soup of the thousands of individual elements that make up the game screen. It used the “the unpacking of a Nintendo game cartridge, decoding the program as a four-color image, revealing a beautiful soup of the thousands of individual elements that make up the game screen“.

Any piece of executable code is also commingled with data, ranging from simple sentences of text for error messages to entire sets of graphics for the application. In older cartridge-based console games, the images for each of the small on-screen images (the “sprites”) were often stored as raw data embedded after the actual program’s instructions.
(…)
The images are a long series of 8×8 pixel “tiles”. Looking at the cartridge memory directly (with a black pixel for an “on” bit, and a white pixel for an “off”) reveals the sequence of black and white (one bit) 8×8 images. Each pair of images is mixed together to produce a two bit (four-color) image. The blue represents the first sequence of image data, the red layer is the second set of data that is read, and seeing them together produces the proper mixed-color image depicting the actual image data

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of “soup” and intertwined individual elements that eventually constitute a game screen: destructuring the game display.

WhoWhatWhenAIR is a blog that follows the development and fabrication of a 40ft interactive/kinetic tower (by Philippe Block, Axel Kilian, Peter Schmitt, John Snavely).

The project was submitted for the mini-Skyscraper competition in the Department of Architecture at MIT. As winning entry we received $7,000 to build it in a month.
(…)
We wanted to connect the culture of the hack at MIT with a personified miniskyscraper. To bridge interactivity and personality, we created a language. You can speak to the mini skyscraper by operating a bicylce pump and it responds with movement. Coordinated efforts produce unexpected structural choreography.

Pneumatic muscles allow the structure to move in all directions. They pull the structure out of an equilibrium position, creating three-dimensional curvature in the central core. By stacking several units, the mini skyscraper can curve in several directions at once. This core acts as a spine to keep the structure upright when none of the muscles are actuated. The pneumatic movement is graceful and precise.

Also check the movie (.mov, 3.62 Mb).

Two curious projects related to bringing nature into cityscape. The first one is by Buster Simpson and it’s called “Portable Landscape”: it consists in plastic suitcases and sod with salvaged plants on pallets. The second one (on the right) is from a project by Iain Mott called “Sound Mapping”:

The second one is by n55, it’s called “City Farming Plant Module” (2000):

Why do I blog this? week-end browsing…

Nils Norman explains here what he wanted to achieve with his “Gerard Winstanley Radical Gardening Space Reclamation Mobile Field Center and Weather Station Prototype (NYC Chapter)” in 1999.

a prototype of a bicycle with a small solar powered Xerox machine on it and a library of books. The books are a very special library on urbanism, architecture, city design, experimental gardening, alternative energy and also alternative city design. You could travel around, stop at any place and people can Xerox parts of the books if they wanted to. On the bike is also a weather station so that you can measure the humidity, the windrate etc. when you stop at gardens.

Flip Frogs is a curious project from 2004 by Meridith Pingree:

rainbow ribbon-wire, green LEDs, MDF, conductive nickel paint, backflipping plastic frogs, aluminum foi.

An image of water in conductive paint covers the surface of the shelf. Every painted line feeds into one of the strands of rainbow ribbon-wire, either positive or negative, which intersect on the wall with an LED. When people play with the foil-footed frogs, they are crossing wires and activating various locations on the wall with limited control.

Why do I blog this? an intriguing example of location activation of toy-like artifact. A model for a weird wires-apparent board game?

I saw this in Geneva today, a sticker on a wall that invite people to “Drop a note: tick here”:

Why do I blog this? a curious action in the urban practice. What happened here? I am looking forward to get back their and see if someone ticked and put more annotations.
This sort of message is more than just a sticker or a graph, I like this invitation to participate.

While doing random searches on google image, I ran across the work of Ingrid Hora. I like her research agenda:

There is a whole category of people living on the order of madness and normality. I want to narrate the life of a disordered (or hyper ordered) society, a life of people left on their own. People builds walls around themselves to create oder and borders. I am interested in showing what happens behind these walls, where obsessions, desires and fantasies hide. I want to show the anarchic constructions initiated by the individuals to accommodate their strange desires and needs.

For instance, see those two pictures:

I basically found them on Regine’s blog and I have nothing to contextualize (more than just the outline of her work described above) and I definitely makes me thing about how people modify (”détourne” in french) for other purposes that makes sense to them and not always for others.

Why do I blog this? this is a topic very interesting to me because of (1) cultural feeling, I tend to be interested in such borderlines experiences and how they are translated into behaviors/craft (2) how this affect technology usage research: what Ingrid Hora is nothing more than extreme users (or tinkerers) of technology.

Besides, see this rhetorical vision in her description: how “space” features (walls, borders…) are deployed? No space is not dead.

Regine pointed me on this cool event: a opera for nabaztag at the Web Flash Festival on May 27th. It’s a kind of flash mob with communicating artifacts: 100 Nabzatags (Wifi rabbits) brought by their owners will play an opera created by Antoine Schmitt et Jean-Jacques Birgé at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Why do I blog this? a flash mob of objects is surely a 2006 technosocial situation.

An interesting call for submission from artists, designers, architects, tinkerers and makers at www.fastuk.org.uk and www.folly.co.uk. They are looking for 9 existing works and in addition will be commissioning 6 new works

perimeters, boundaries and borders’ is an exhibition of contemporary art and design practice. It is especially concerned with object and spatially oriented disciplines, the use of digital technologies and the convergence of sculpture, product design and architecture. This exhibition will bring emerging and existing contemporary practitioners and technologies into the public arena and help to make cutting-edge developments in art and technology more accessible. ‘perimeters, boundaries and borders’ will be held from 29 September - 21 October 2006 at venues across Lancaster city centre in the North West of England. The main exhibition space will be the new CityLab development in Dalton Square. The aim of this exhibition is to present the very latest examples of work that blur the conventional boundaries of arts and design practice through the use of technology. The exhibition will include works which explore these creative perimeters, boundaries and borders including: computer-designed or manufactured objects and environments, visual and audio installations, pervasive and locative interactive artworks, computer games and 3D net based works. More at www.fastuk.org.uk and www.folly.co.uk

Dates:
Exhibition: September 29th-October 21st, Monday to Saturday only, 12-6pm
Symposium: September 28th, 10am to 4pm
Private View: September 28th, 6-9pm

Why do I blog this? Now that we’re into space/place discussion, boundaries, perimeters and borders are certainly relevant because it allows to ask new questions regarding the relations between art and technology.

Just found this on information aesthetics: Free Network Visible Network, a project by the Mixed Reality Lab.

Free Network Visible Network is a project that combines different tools and processes to visualize, floating in the space, the interchanged information between users of a network. The people are able to experience in a new exciting way about how colorful virtual objects, representing the digital data, are flying around. These virtual objects will change their shape, size and color in relation with the different characteristics of the information that is circulating in the network.

Why do I blog this? this is something very important to me: the possibility to visualize the dataflows, showing the overlay of information in various environments. This would nicely depicts what we were discussing yesterday at the conference: how a certain place now has different meaning: given that in one place you can be there physically and virtually meeting people on IM, MMORPG or something else, the inherent simultaneity of this situation can be visualized through this sort of project.

So let’s start a review about this kind of projects:

Related projects:

• SOUP: the Shapes Of [Un]warped Packages by Alejo Duque and his colleague Lorenz Schori
• Tunneable Cities project by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
• Invisible topographies by Usman Haque
• The Orb by Restate Media

Any others dataflowviz?

(via), Danielle Aubert’s 58 Days Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel is very appealing to me.

Microsoft Excel is a program designed to track and compute information, but here I am using Excel as a drawing tool. These drawings are a part of a series of sixty drawings that I executed (more or less) every day for fifty-eight days. Each drawing is in a new ‘worksheet,’ which is automatically set up as a grid. These drawings were made by changing cell preferences for background color, fill pattern, and border styles and from time to time inserting ‘comment’ boxes and letters or words. Other manifestations of these drawings are 58 Days Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel as Rendered for Web and Animated Daily Excel Drawings (2005, ongoing). A year’s worth of drawings will be featured as part of a group show at Gallery Project, in Ann Arbor, Michigan (May 10 - June 18, 2006). They will be published as a book over the summer of 2006

Why do I blog this? it definitely reminds me how game designers were doing level design 4-5 years ago. They were basically using excel spreadsheets to create spatial topographies and I found it nice and interesting at that time. This art project then nicely reflects the aesthetical practices of excel. The two I put there are gorgeous.What thismakes you think? Would it be the representation of something? For me it’s an instanciation of an imaginary world.