Golan Levin is a creator, performer, innovator, engineer and MIT graduate whose work has been seen around the world, and FITC gave you the opportunity to ask him anything via Reddit. Golan has answered your questions in the video below, which was created by James George (@obviousjim) and Jonathan Minard (@deepspeedmedia), artists-in-residence at Golan’s lab who are researching new forms of experimental 3D cinema.
The work of James George and Jonathan Minard explores the notion of “re-photography”, in which otherwise frozen moments in time may be visualized from new points of view. Despite the sometimes wildly moving camera, the video was in fact shot with a stationary Kinect-like depth sensor coupled to a digital SLR video camera. To compose their shots, the filmmakers developed custom openFrameworks software that aligns and combines color video and depth data into a dynamic sculptural relief.
In a process of “virtual cinematography”, James and Jonathan rephotographed Golan’s 3D likeness — selecting new angles, dollying, and zooming — to compose new perspectives on the data as if playing a video game. Fixed camerawork is thus transformed into a malleable and negotiable post-process, in which shots can be carefully recomposed to highlight and inflect different latent meanings.
This experiment developed out of concepts and collaborations born at Art && Code, a conference on 3D sensing and visualization organized by Golan’s laboratory, the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Artist-hackers assembled to explore the artistic, technical, tactical and cultural potentials of low-cost depth sensors, such as the Kinect. As an outcome of the conference, James George, a creative coder interested in cinema, and Jonathan Minard, a documentary filmmaker interested in new-media technology, are now collaborating on the development of open-source tools and techniques for augmenting high-resolution video with depth information.
W.W. Norton & Company is the oldest and largest employee-owned publishing house in the U.S., and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with their college textbook department on a variety of incredibly inspiring projects. One of those collaborations has just been published, and is hitting campuses across the country as we write this case study.
The 8th edition of Introduction to Sociology features a series of 20 full-page information graphics designed by Kiss Me I’m Polish, covering a vast array of topics such as internet connectivity, incarceration rates, and gender empowerment. As an added bonus, a few our initial concepts for a timeline of key sociological works, ultimately led to the design of the book’s cover, the accompanying poster, and a set of promotional buttons featuring prominent sociologists. The poster and cover are, respectively, text and non-text representations of a conceptual map delineating all of the topics and sociologists featured in the textbook.
The Emmy award-winning team at Brainstorm Digital has put together the before and after shots from season 2 of HBO’s hit series “Boardwalk Empire”. Boardwalk Empire is an American television series from cable network HBO, set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition era.
Still Life by Scott Garner is an interactive gallery piece that takes traditional still life painting into the fourth dimension with a motion-sensitive frame on a rotating mount.
The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web hosting provider that was modeled after a city and where you could get a free “piece of land” to build your digital home in a certain neighborhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neighborhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighborhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few.
Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of “homesteaders” as the digital tenants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bit torrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.
The installation is an interactive visualization of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighborhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain.
Anarchy Dance Theatre + UltraCombos
安娜琪舞蹈劇場 + 叁式
Nov. 2011, TAIWAN.
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Choreograph by Chieh-hua Hsieh
AnarchyDanceTheatre@gmail.com
This piece is still under progress. Premiere on Nov. 2012, TAIWAN.
Oterp is a mobile phone game project using a GPS sensor to manipulate music in real time, depending on the player’s position on Earth. It generates new melodies when traveling. The objective of Oterp is to mix the reality of our everyday environment with a video game. This is a new way to imagine our movements in a society increasingly on the move and dependent on mobile interfaces.
Performing Data, the exhibition, was a review of Fleischmann and Strauss´ body of work from Virtual Reality (Home of the Brain) up to Mixed Reality (Murmuring Fields or Energie-Passagen), from Fluid (Liquid Views) to Rigid (Rigid Waves) up to Floating Interface (Media Flow).
Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss from the Fraunhofer IAIS Research Institute show an intersection of the body and immaterial digital data. From Body Space (Virtual Striptease) to Knowledge Space (Semantic Map): Interactivity as an extension of touch is a central strategy of their work – interactivity with its complex relationship to reality, re-presentation and presence.
The body as interface and intersections to the disembodied digital information. Immersion in data flow causes productive moments of disturbance and suspension, and consequently – a feeling of real physical presence.
The exhibition Performing Data included works from the early 1990s, when the artists/scientists were co-founders of the ART+COM collective in 1987 in Berlin. Since 1992 they developed their work as research artists at KHM and GMD – the German National Research Center for Information Technology, since 1997 as directors of the Media Art & Research Studies (MARS) department and since 2001 at Fraunhofer Society, in the Institute for Media Communication (IMK) and the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems in Sankt Augustin, Germany.
The installation Seeing with Eyes Closed concerns the visual experience of flowing images induced by stroboscopic light behind closed eyes. Being aware that the seen images have no foundation in external reality, one experiences them as hallucinatory. This ‘conscious quasi-hallucinating’ challenges our sense of the real in its alternation and its permeability with the imaginary. Each person’s experience differs from that of others, and each ascribes different dimensions to the perceived space in constant transformation. Communicating the content of this ephemeral flux of unpredictable percepts stretches the limits of acquiring a subjective report to extremes, and challenges the scientific aspiration to precisely measure the timing of conscious phenomena.
With the unpredictability of visual responses to light stimuli, participation in the art installation raises the question of subjectivity and authorship. The final “work” happens in our body and depends on our experience as well as on the boundary between the public and intimate space.
Video documentation of Seeing with eyes closed, 2011
Edit: Luka Goreta, Dominik Markušić
Sound: Mika Vainio “Radio”
Exhibition opening and talk: 14/02/2012 at 19.00 h
Art and Neuroscience in dialogue
Invited speakers: artist Ivana Franke, neuroscientist Ida Momennejad, neurosurgeon Ulrich-Wilhelm Thomale
Moderator: curator Sunčica Ostoić
The talk will be in English.
Call it automated photograph station, seven-camera system, 3-D model showcase, or digital reconstruction tool. OrcaM is being described as all these things. Whatever the tag, the “OrcaM” name stands for Orbital Camera System, according to its Germany-based developers NEK GmbH. A video demo was making the rounds of web gadget blogs and news sites this week as a camera system to watch.
The OrcaM system involves a large sphere, likened by one viewer as a giant maw, inside which one places the desired object for 3-D scanning. Once the object is placed inside, the sphere is sealed shut and the seven cameras and lights go to work. The cameras take simultaneous high-definition photos of the object at different angles. Serving to define the object’s geometry, various combinations of lights illuminate the object differently for every shot, capturing the finest details. After the photo processing, computer processing of the image creates the 3-D model. Observers say the end result is a highly impressive agreement of the real object.
This video demonstrates the OrcaM 3D reconstruction system, developed in the context of a project of the department Augmented Vision of DFKI (http://av.dfki.de)
In this video it is shown how the hardware is opened to insert an object to be reconstructed. Currently the maximum size of objects is limited to 80cm diameter and a weight of approximately 100kg.
After closing the sphere again the acquisition process is fully automatic, though tuneable to account for complicated object geometries. Please note that the acquisition process has been extremely condensed and only drafts some steps necessary to acquire the respective information for a single camera position. I.e. horizontal and vertical fringe projection, directed illumination with light(patches), rotation of the carrier, etc. After the acquisition process the reconstruction of the object is computed fully automatic. A rendered result of the vase can be found at the end of the video. Note first that the rendering has been performed using a real world high-resolution HDR environment, which is reflecting in the vase and which introduces a pretty high amount of blue sky color to the rendering. Secondly note that the reconstructed vase is NOT symmetric, which is in perfect agreement with the original.
‘Angry Women’ by Annie Abrahams, 2011. (From photograph by Michael Szpakowski)
Since the mid-90s computers have changed our way of being together. First the Internet then mobile networks have grown as cultural spaces for interaction – wild and banal, bureaucratic and controlling – producing new ways of ‘being social’. Visitors are invited to view art installations, software art, networked performances and to get involved with creative activities to explore how our lives – personal and political – are being shaped by digital technologies.
Being Social is the opening exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park in North London. Furtherfield has established an international reputation as London’s first gallery for networked media art since 2004. With this exciting move to a more public space Furtherfield invites artists and techies – amateurs, professionals, celebrated stars and private enthusiasts – to engage with local and global, everyday and epic themes in a process of imaginative exchange.
This exhibition brings together artworks by emerging and internationally acclaimed artists: Annie Abrahams, Karen Blissett, Ele Carpenter, Emilie Giles, moddr_ , Liz Sterry and Thomson and Craighead.
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes.
CREDIT: Creative Commons | The Opte Project
The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won’t be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost.
Physical destruction
A vast behemoth that can route around outages and self-heal, the Internet has grown physically invulnerable to destruction by bombs, fires or natural disasters — within countries, at least. It’s “very richly interconnected,” said David Clark, a computer scientist at MIT who was a leader in the development of the Internet during the 1970s. “You would have to work real hard to find a small number of places where you could seriously disrupt connectivity.” On 9/11, for example, the destruction of the major switching center in south Manhattan disrupted service locally. But service was restored about 15 minutes later when the center “healed” as the built-in protocols routed users and information around the outage.
Written by Natalie Wolchover at Life’s Little Mysteries. ContinueHERE
Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. It comes as a kit so that you can hone your soldering skills (or teach someone else) while you build a line of communication between you and your houseplant!
This kit comes with everything you need to get your plant tweeting in no time. The ATmega328 comes pre-programmed, but you can customize it with your own messages. The only thing you need to provide is a plant, network connection (and Ethernet cable), and a power outlet.
Leonardo Electronic Almanac in collaboration with Watermans and Goldsmiths College in occasion of the Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012 announces a special issue titled: Touch and Go.
The Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012, will coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics in London, and Watermans is pleased to host a Festival of ground-breaking installations exploring interactivity and participation in New Media and Digital Art. This year long project is showcasing the work of six international artists and collectives and initiates discussions around the impact of technology in art as well as the meaning, possibilities and issues around human interaction and engagement inviting responses from artists, academics, students, art professionals and the public. The project will include a series of seminars in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London and a publication with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.
Touch and Go, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
“Codecademy was created out of the frustrations Zach and Ryan felt with learning how to program. Tired with less effective text and video resources, Ryan and Zach teamed up to create Codecademy, a better, more interactive way to learn programming by actually coding. This is just the beginning. Join us as we make it easy for everyone to love and learn how to code.”
The current state of the newspaper industry is unsettled at best: more than two hundred newspapers have either folded or stopped publishing their print editions since 2007. Even the most acclaimed newspapers in the country are downsizing their newsrooms or suspending home delivery of physical newspapers. Even after embracing social media, newspapers are still struggling with paywalls and subscriptions. As a result, the typical argument calls for supporting newspapers historically have been based on the idea of newspapers as a sort of civic institution that we, as a society, must preserve in the name of ideals (always capitalized) like Truth. But what if, instead, we begin to think of newspapers in perhaps a more mundane manner — as algorithms for solving problems?
This idea of “newspaper as algorithm” builds on a larger secular trend: the widescale appification of the media industry. As Nicholas Carr pointed out in a brilliant piece for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard in December, one of the biggest trends of 2012 will be the continued segmentation and splicing of online newspaper content into apps for mobile devices:
“Appification promises to be the major force reshaping media in general and news media in particular during 2012. The influence will be exerted directly, through a proliferation of specialized media apps, as well as indirectly, through changes in consumer attitudes, expectations, and purchasing habits. There are all sorts of implications for newspapers, but perhaps the most important is that the app explosion makes it much easier to charge for online news and other content. That’s true not only when the content is delivered through formal apps but also when it is delivered through traditional websites, which may themselves come to be viewed by customers as a form of app. In the old world of the open web, paying for online content seemed at best weird and at worst repugnant. In the new world of the app, paying for online content suddenly seems normal. What’s an app store but a series of paywalls?”
Written by Dominic Basulto at Big Think. Continue HERE
Within ‘Somewhere’ We are transported to a time where the boundaries between what is real and what is simulated are blurred. We live online and download places to relax, parks and shopping malls. We can even interact with our friends as if they were in the same room with simulated tele-presence. Everyone is connected and immersed in nanorobotic replications of any kind of object or furnishings, downloadable on credit based systems. Distance and time become as alien as the ‘offline’ The local becomes the global and the global becomes the local. Consumer based capitalism has changed forever. A truly ‘glocolised’ world. The singularity is near.
The film places us into this vision, observing an average inhabitant within the ever changing environment of the latest SimuHouse. From a painting to a park and from a telephone call to a shopping mall. That is until there is a leek in the system and everything malfunctions. The film concludes with the house being forced to reset, giving the character and viewer a stark reminder that nothing is ‘real’ even her dog, which re-materialises in front of her.
CREDITS:
Directed By: Paul Nicholls
3D, 2D, Tracking, Post Production, Compositing, Camera Work: Paul Nicholls
Cast: Indre Balestuta, Iffy
Sound Design: Jesse Rope
Narration: Robert Leaf
Greek Vocal Talent: Lia Loanniti
Serbian Vocal Talent: Mina Micevic
Store Voice: Guillaume Nyssens
System Voice: Anita Shim
Music By: Kourosh Dini, Twighlight Archive, Pete Berwick http://www.factoryfifteen.com/
Darren Tofts essay has proved to be a really interesting reading, and I’m grateful to him for writing it. Ideas that were still dispersed and fragmentary in my mind found an order there. However, the essay left me with a couple of concerns, both related to the term “virtual”. I must confess that I’m allergic to labels in art, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not just that.
Tofts brilliantly addresses a whole line of thinking in Western culture, that goes from Henri Bergson to Philip K. Dick through Cicero and Baudrillard, in order to address a complex, layered reality of which the actual reality, for lack of a better term, is just one of the many manifestations (and dreams, “the palace of memory”, parallel universes, simulacra, the Matrix, Truman’s world, media spectacle and virtual environments are just a few of the others).
I’m wondering about the opportunity of reducing this extraordinary complexity, that Tofts knows and describes very well, to the classical, binary opposition “real vs virtual”. Contemporary life is already beyond this binary opposition: we live parallel lives in parallel worlds, some “real”, some simulated; we move fast from the one to the other, simply switching on and off our mobile phones. We kill monsters in videogames and help a disabled person to cross the street. We are kind here and perverse there. We adapt to different environments, different living conditions, different languages. We eat cheeseburgers every day, and drink Barolo during the summer holidays. We store our memories in tiny, well designed gadgets that we add to our key-case. What is real? And what is virtual?
Furthermore, and this brings me to my second argument, though having a long and honored history, the term “virtual” has strong roots, in our… ehm… memory, in the Eighties and Nineties technology and media theory. When I read it, I recall data-gloves and virtual reality; and when I read “Virtual Art”, I recall Frank Popper and Jeffrey Shaw. I find no way out of it. So, my question is: does it make any sense to rescue this term from its (un)glorious past? Why not use another term? Or simply call it “art”? If Tofts is right when he says “contemporary art is always already virtual”, why do add this prefix at all?
The answer, of course, can be that the term is needed by those who recognize themselves as “virtual artists” in order to promote their work against the limitations of the art system, against the requirements of the art market and outside of the tight borders of the art worlds. My opinion is that they don’t need it. They are already on the right way. As the “Manifesto of Virtual Art” proves, they have an understanding of the structures of contemporary life that is way more advanced than the one of most “traditional” fine artists. They understood that it’s not a matter of medium, but of understanding and picturing the world we are living in; but they are framing themselves in a way that will probably bring only artists using “virtual technologies” such as synthetic environments and augmented reality to join the crew. The binary opposition “real vs virtual”, if kept as such, can be a curse for them, and for a better understanding of their work.
I’m aware that I’m writing this in the columns of the inaugural edition of an ambitious editorial project called The Australian Journal of Virtual Art (AJVA), to which I wish long life and success. So, what I’m writing should not be intended as a critique, but as an invitation for my host to clarify its assets, and to answer some questions that, I’m sure, are not harassing my own mind only.
i-weather.org is an international consortium created in 2001 that has set itself the goal of creating the world’s first artificial climate to satisfy the metabolic and physiological requirements of a human being in an environment partially or completely removed from earthly influences: mediated reality, networks and netlag, the disruption of the body clock that comes with air travel, as well as with extra-terrestrial trips and holidays.
Accessible everywhere and to everybody thanks to the Internet, this artificial climate called I-Weather makes it possible to live in a situation completely removed from natural locations by producing an artificial circadian rhythm synchronized to match the inner cycle of the human hormonal and endocrine system. In the absence of the natural terrestrial cycle of day and night, it becomes apparent that this inner cycle in fact lasts around 25 hours, and that body temperature, the alternation between sleep and wakefulness, and the accumulation and secretion of substances such as cortisone and oligopeptides, all depend on it. i-weather.org has therefore put together the first specifically human climate.
This version of I-Weather operates solely on the basis of fluctuations in the rate of melatonin, which in turn is influenced by variations in the intensity of light received by the retina. i-weather acts as a kind of personal artificial sun, oscillating over a 25-hour 7 minutes and 40 seconds period between a maximum light frequency of 652 THz and a minimum of 503 THz.
The original version of I-Weather was launched on 26 October 2001 (version 1.0). It has been improved on June 5, 2009 (version 2.0) as scientific knowledge of biological rhythms has evolved, demonstrating that melatonin regulation is enhanced by using a minimum wavelength of 460nm (blue) and a maximum wavelength of 597nm (orange) rather than between 385nm (deep purple) and 509nm (green). Actually, blue light suppresses the diffusion of melatonin in the body, while orange light allows performing actions without altering the body clock.
I-Weather is an open source, speculative architecture and art project. Its code exists for several platforms and can be downloaded for free to be used in personal projects (light installations, web sites, mobile phone applications, etc).
For “10,000 Pixels”, artists were asked to create three artworks using a 10,000-pixel “allowance”. The extremely low resolution becomes an aesthetic and conceptual challenge, resulting in ultra-low-resolution photographs, carefully crafted digital abstractions, blocky representations of physical objects similar to early Atari and NES sprites, or other unexpected solutions.
The Aesthetics of Low-Res
10,000 Pixels is about the creative strategies that emerge from limitations. For this exhibition, artists were given an “allowance” of 10,000 pixels and asked to create three images using only those pixels. The results range from tiny geometric forms, hotdogs/shit, tiny animations, and reminiscences of NES graphics and the early web.
We experience digital images in a kind of bracketed time. Current technologies look clean and crisp, whereas images from a few years ago seem inadequate and embarrassing. When looking at a video I made only a few years ago, I noticed the huge differences in quality between the older piece and more recent projects made in HD. Yet as a two-dimensional surface, even a seemingly low-resolution image contains a gigantic amount of information. A crummy YouTube video might have had 320×240 pixels, but even such an unacceptably low-resolution image contains 76,800 pixels [1]. The works in this exhibition explore the limitation of resolutions that are several orders of magnitude lower, having more to do with historical influences than the promise of 4k projectors.
Art Micro Patronage is an experimental online exhibition space enabling you to view and support artwork that is ideally experienced on the internet. Built on the generosity of people like you, AMP is a vehicle for a new generation of art patrons, who are willing to associate their appreciation of great work with actual dollar amounts, no matter how small.
Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.
Each cubelet in the kit has different equipment on board and a different default behavior. There are Sense Blocks that act like our eyes and ears, Action blocks, and Think blocks. Just like with people, the senses are the inputs to the system.
Designed by Bruno Zamborlin. Mogees is a project that uses microphones to turn any surface into an interactive board, which associates different gestures with different sounds. This means that desktop drummers could transform their finger taps and hand slaps into the sound of a marimba or xylophone.
Users plug any contact microphone onto a surface — be it a tree, a cupboard, a piece of glass or even a balloon. They can then record several different types of touch using their hands or any objects that cause a sound — so one sound could be a hand slap, another could be a finger tap and another could be hitting the surface with a drumstick. Users can train the system to detect new types of touch recording them just once.
The different gestures can then be associated with different sounds. Then when the user wants to perform, the Mogees software will recognize which of these types of touch is closest to the one that the user is doing and then enable the corresponding sound engine or synthesizer. The tone of the synthesized sound is influenced by the actual sound picked up on the microphone. So you could use the same gesture — for example a tap — in different places on the surface and it would create the sound in a different key.
Mogees currently uses two audio synthesis techniques — the first is physical modelling, which consists of generating the sound by simulating the propagation of the sound wave through different physical materials such as strings, membranes, or tubes using a piece of software called Modalys. The second technique is mosaicing, where the user loads a sound folder and then the audio coming form the contact microphone is analyzed and the software looks for the closest segment within the sound folder. So if a sound folder of voices is loaded, touching the surface gently would provoke a whispering while scratching it will cause a sound similar to screaming voices.
The idea of using contact microphones comes from the desire to turn ordinary objects into percussive instruments. The goal is to allow musicians and performers to take full advantage of electronic music without losing the feeling of touching a real surface.
Wearable displays have been used to make a high-tech game of tag, and some have been made into tattoos. One tinkerer in Arizona decided to make one that could be worn as a jacket and show his favorite characters from The Simpsons.
David Forbes, an electrical engineer by trade, wanted to build something really cool to wear at the Burning Man festival. So he re-purposed a relatively simple flexible circuit board covered with LEDs. He made the first with 30 rows of four LEDs each and then contracted a manufacturer to build 175 more of them. He attached them to an old coat and was able to build a display with a 160 x 120 resolution, which he notes on his blog is exactly
Part of the set-up is the same kind of chip used to scale down the images for security cameras, and another is the same type of chip used to control the big LED signs used for advertisements. Adding a small set of circuits that convert the video output of the iPod to the smaller resolution, he was able to put together his wearable display.
The only down side seems to be getting through airports. Forbes also noted that he wasn’t able to create a pair of pants, as the curves over the thighs proved complicated. But he has designed vests.
If you want a coat like this it will be expensive, largely due to the cost of the LEDs. For $39,995 Forbes will make you one that is a full wrap-around display; a front-only will set you back $24,995. Wait time is about four months.
Besides creating a walking billboard one idea is to attach a camera that transmits a picture of the scene on one side of the wearer, creating a kind of optical camouflage. On the other hand, it could be great dance club wear — this might be a big seller among trance music and Daft Punk fans. Text by Jesse Emspak. Via Discovery News
Super Art Modern Museum (SPAMM) has recently opened its doors. The first exhibition is featuring 50 artworks from 50 artists for only 1 Super Art Modern Museum!
SPAMM Manifesto
“Visual arts have entered a new era. It’s a place where immediacy rules, where visual arts becomes virtual, a place that links the world together. A new era for artists who have invented new concepts, using digital medias, from video to graphism, static, animated or even computer-programmed. They have created a flamboyant design for a super-society created in the Web’s image.
Therefore, if “contemporary art” isn’t “from today” anymore, but just a continuing period of the XIX° century “modern art”, we can proclaim – without hesitation – the existence of the Super Modern Art. It has existed for 10 years now across the web and new technologies. Super-modern art is a virtual museum.”
By creating the Super Modern Art Museum (SPAMM), Systaime, Thomas Cheneseau and the Silicon Maniacs’s team, merely made up for the the indifference of cultural authorities and the need for society to understand the MUSEUM in another way. In 2012, the Museum has to tackle new issues as to the place of art, questionning the way to SEE it and to BUY it. The SuPer Art Modern Museum is an experiment to answer all those questions.
This is the reason why SPAMM takes up theses challenges. SPAMM is not only a new form of museum, it would like to encourage new forms of digital creation.
The Art of SPAMM is the art of Museum, the art of SPAMM is the eye of the collector, the art of SPAMM is the scream of an artistic movement, the art of SPAMM is collaborative and generative, it’s an art that gets out of homes and lives in the heart of machines, a new art for a new generation of artists, collectors, gamers, geeks, buzzers, actors and amateurs alike.
In the midst of this stream of creation, Thomas Cheneseau, Systaime and Silicon Maniacs select SPAMM artists. Systaime, Thomas Cheneseau and Silicon Maniac’s team travel the world of virtual creation, from the Venice Biennale to lafiac.com, and they gather all their experiences together in a single place : SPAMM, a museum and an art manifesto.
As a participant speaks into an intercom, their voice is automatically translated into flashes of light and then this unique blinking pattern is stored as a loop in the first light of the array. Each new recording pushes all previous recordings one position down and gradually one can hear the cumulative sound of the 288 previous recordings. The voice that was pushed out of the array can then be heard by itself.
Rows of motorized measuring tapes record the amount of time that visitors stay in the installation. As a computerized tracking system detects the presence of a person, the closest measuring tape starts to project upwards. When the tape reaches around 3m high it crashes and recoils back.
Each hour, the system prints the total number of minutes spent by the sum of all visitors. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
These works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer are on view at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney until February 12, 2012.
The social network is soon to be filled with stars…not celebrities, but actual celestial bodies. The GLObal Robotic telescopes Intelligent Array (GLORIA) is a €2.5 million project (~$3.4M USD) that will, for the next three years, provide open access to research class robotic telescopes around the world. Spear-headed by Francisco Sanchez at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, GLORIA will eventually include 17 telescopes on 4 continents, gathering mountains of data that users can help analyze and discuss. Yet the project will be more than simply crowd-sourcing data crunching to the internet: through a system of social karma, participants in GLORIA will be able to actually direct the robotic telescopes and control where they look in the sky. By combining astronomy with Web 2.0, GLORIA aims to gather widespread interest from the internet, and perhaps even accelerate science with the power of the crowd.
Those that speak Spanish may enjoy the following interview of Francisco Sanchez as he discusses GLORIA in Spain:
Officially started on October 1st of 2011, GLORIA will be rolled out fairly slowly, with probably only six or seven of the telescopes available in 2012. Two of the seventeen telescopes haven’t even been installed yet. Despite the staggered launch, Sanchez and his colleagues are operating from a well-established model. The Montegancedo Observatory (affiliated with the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid) is a 10 inch robotic telescope that can already be accessed online via special software called Ciclope Astro. Developed in part by Sanchez, Ciclope Astro is capable of controlling and managing accesss to the telescope, as well as organizing its images and collected data. As GLORIA expands to eventually include all seventeen of its planned telescopes, Ciclope Astro should be able to serve as the hub for the evolving social network that will form around the project.
Text by Aaron Saenz from Singularity Hub. Continue HERE
Alex McLeod constructs hyperrealistic 3D environments filled with crystalline mountains, fiery lakes, and rotund clouds, all rendered in a sickly sweet and gooey candy-colored palette. Recalling the wide-open vistas of Romantic landscape painting while at the same time staging otherworldly dystopias, McLeod’s CGI prints act as hybrid spaces that imply an almost infinite recombination of the past and present, the real and virtual. Beneath their seductively polished surfaces, of glimmering fortresses and floating geometric abstractions, lies a haunting stillness that comes forth in the aftermath of cataclysmic events. The cause of destruction remains unknown in these depopulated spaces -there are no people in these images, however much human traces remain in the rickety railways and empty fortresses.
And yet, from the twilight of devastation shown in these strange dioramas lies possibilities for hope and rebirth in our own digital milieu through the artist’s new approaches to concepts as varied as ecological responsibility and the shared intersections between photography and painting. Text taken from his website
Creative Applications: Visual programming languages, languages that create programs by the manipulation of graphical elements, as opposed to specifying lines of text, have seen an increased popularity in recent years both in audio and video synthesis. Some of the more well-known environments, ones that are regularly used for projects that are featured on CAN, include VVVV (real-time motion graphics and physical IO) MAX/MSP (real-time music and multimedia), Pure Data (ostensibly an open source equivalent of MAX/MSP) and Quartz Composer (video synthesis for MAC).
Visual programming owes its many of its conventions for the representation of information and programs from Flowcharts – a lesser used term for these kinds of environments is Data-flow Programming. VPL’s date back to the late 60′s. A good example is the GraIL system (GRaphical Input Language) a flowchart language entered on a graphics tablet developed by the Rand Corporation in 1969.
‘Angry Women’ by Annie Abrahams, 2011. (From photograph by Michael Szpakowski)
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes.
Suguru Goto, Cymatics
鳳凰 / ほうおう / Ho-o by Alexander Peverett
DMX-LED Patches – Kalle Karlen
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