iBand is a curious Nintendo DS+iphone band:

Check the YouTube video too.
Why do I blog this? although it is very basic, I found the minimalism appealing (small instrument, small band, minimal tunes). And I love Elektroplankton. Somehow related to device art.

Currently in Brussels where I gave a talk yesterday at iMal, a center for digital cultures and technology. The presentation entitled “Device art as a resource for interaction design and media art” was about the fading boundaries between interaction design, new media art and academic research. As a matter of fact, the hybridization of digital and physical environments (through locative media, urban displays, augmented reality or mobile games) is explored by a large variety of people and institutions. It’s not only engineers and academic researchers but also artists and designers. The talk looked at why the projects from the new media art/interaction design/device art are relevant and what they tell about the design of future technological artifacts.

Slides can be found on here (.pdf, 20Mb):

In a sense, this presentation emerged from the sort of things that appear on this blog, a mix of pasta (academic or R&D stuff coming from the research world) and vinegar (weirder projects coming form the design/new media art world). It was then about why vinegar is important for pasta. The presentation went through 7 reasons why projects form artists and designers are important, especially for academic researchers and engineers:

“ (1) avantgarde: as they can announce things to come (new practices, new artifacts)
(2) challenge existing practices (for example by highlight new interaction partners beyond the classical and canonical “human computer interaction”: blogjects, animal-controlled video games)
(3) criticize the state of the world by making explicit invisible/implicit phenomena or certain aspects that are hidden (like pollution mapped on cityscape)
(4) address issues in novel way that are not possible in academia or in private R&D: by using fakes, humor or non-utilitarian perspectices.
(5) “breaching experiment”: When trying to predict or design the future of technologies, you can’t just rely on what exist today… you want “disruptions” as the literature about innovation states. So technologies developed in new media art / device art contexts are often DISRUPTIVE platforms that allow to investigate what changes.
(6) arts+design do better to convey desire and emotions (and less mechanistic vision of humans who do not always want automation in their lives for example)
(7) the design process: something is investigated in the construction of hypothetical artifacts, the design process itself is important and bring lessons. A totally different approach than engineering and academic research.“

Thanks Yves Bernard for the invitation.

Street encounter in Lyon: a phone booth turned into an aquarium (by Benoit Deseille and Benedetto Bufalino), as part of the Lyon Light Festival:

As the designers express it:

“With the advent of the mobile telephone, telephone booths lie unused. We rediscover this glass cage transformed into an aquarium, full of exotically coloured fish; an invitation to escape and travel.“

Why do I blog this? an interesting way to explore how artifacts from the 20th century can be turned into other sorts of objects in the city of the near future.

Had a glance this morning at Eric Kabisch’s Masters Thesis called “Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild“. He basically describe 4 technologically enabled artworks that explore ways in which digital technologies impact society and culture, focusing particularly on the impacts of information technologies on physical and cultural geography: Datascape, Sonic Panoramas, Unexceptional.net network visualizer and SignalPlay.

What I found interesting is the framework provided for analyzing these works of art:

“To develop a framework for investigation of the processes by which digital technologies, their affordances and their artifacts shape and embed themselves in the world, I will break the process into three stages: the measuring and capturing of natural processes (sensing); the mining, analysis and representation of captured observations and models (narrative); and the introduction of these models into the world through physical or methodological means (propagation).

This framework is useful because it successfully corresponds to many of the individual cyclical and triadic frameworks that inspired the individual artworks composing the body of this thesis work. (…) It parallels notions of geographic information gathering, map production, and map-based decision-making. And it is congruent with Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the functional cycle (or Funktionskreis) whereby an organism’s subjective environment is continuously constructed through its sensing of the environment, processing of the information, and continued engagement and action within the world.“

Why do I blog this? It’s interesting wrt what I discussed here and what Fabien’s reactions. See for instance the parallel between Funktionskreis and wiki city.

Besides, I quite liked this part of the conclusion:

“Our digitization of the world thus far is coarse, leading to gaps and pixelation. As we fill in those gaps through models and assumptions we blur certain details, while artifacts of the process are categorized as anomalies. In geographic information systems, this grey area is referred to as “uncertainty” and is not often reflected in end- user representations such as maps. The wild, ultimately, is that which we cannot record, understand, represent or control“

The presence of illusion on the streets of Geneva, a glimpse of entertainment on your daily stroll to work. What if urban signs were based on different reading levels?

When street graffiti looks like low-fi equalizer visualizations.
Seen in Lyon, France last week.

The august issue of ICON featured an article about the physical customization of cities by Scott Burnham. It describes how the frustration towards municipal policies against street art has led to a “fresh wave of guerrilla urban design”/interventionists to focus on “physical objects, media channels and aesthetics of the city as source material.”

“The current physical city is seen merely as a starting point – its streetscapes malleable and interactive.
(…)
Scott Wayne Indiana: “Parking meters, sidewalks, fences, gates, awnings, alleys, manhole covers… there is a list of things that could be designed in such a way as to engage with cities [and shift] the focus on the urban environment as a vibrant place that inspires the imagination, intellect and wonders of the human experience.”
(…)
Yet in the face of such work, the authorities remain largely unforgiving – intervention equals vandalism, and many of the cities coming down hardest are those that lust most for “creative city” status.“

For example, it’s interesting to hear about Jason Eppink’s motivation and methods:

“I started looking at the city in a completely new way. The urban landscape was suddenly full of potential. Objects weren’t just objects anymore; they were opportunities. I occasionally stumble upon an area so devoid of either life or humour that I have an incredible urge to contribute something. This is when I take pictures of the area, study them and develop a piece around what exactly is missing from the space. I look at it like a tailor measuring a client to make the best fitting suit, or a doctor examining a patient to prescribe the right medication.”
(…)
“One advantage of working outside of the traditional graffiti media is that cops aren’t really looking for guys attaching grids of foam board to giant TVs.”“

Why do I blog this? It’s interesting to see how street arts evolved form graffiti/sticker to much more elaborated practices because of various factors ranging from form novelty (beyond graffiti), security issues (cops, municipal policies) and possibly the need to craft/DIY more concrete stuff.

Picture taken by myself in 2005 in Geneva, some folks here hang up paintings in the city.