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.

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.

Via FITC

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.

Via Kiss Me I’m Polish

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.

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.

Text via The Deleted City

Anarchy Dance Theatre + UltraCombos
安娜琪舞蹈劇場 + 叁式
Nov. 2011, TAIWAN.
——————————————
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.

Books

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.

More info via Lauba

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)

For OrcaM Reconstruction Sequences (“Female Torso” Wilhelm Lembruck) see:
http://youtu.be/h320lM5DYlY

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.

Text and Images Via Physorg

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.

Via Furtherfield

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. Continue HERE

From SparkFun:

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.

Via ScienceBlogs

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

319 Scholes presents Art Hack Day :: January 26-28, 2012 :: 319 Scholes Street, Brooklyn, NY.