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Originally from New Art on May 22, 2006, 6:23pm

David Bierk, Petrified Tree, California (1989) Oil on photographs on canvas

At the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.

ps. David Bierk was the father of Sebastian Bach, leader of the band Skid Row. So strange…

Originally from New Art on May 25, 2006, 9:35am

Gellage No. 49




Gellage No. 5

Michal Macku makes me think of Abakanowicz and some of Beksinski’s later works. Both of them are Polish - and Macku, Czech. He is quite Central-European, I suppose. There is this heaviness about the body, the despair, but a despair that becomes poetic, beautiful, that frees us from itself. He also reminds me of the Portuguese Helena Almeida in his plays with the form, the frame, the “content”. But Almeida is much more conceptual, she likes lines, pure forms. Macku goes for the distortion, he seems attracted to the surrealist dream of an un-body, a body that outdoes itself, that lives an autonomous life. I suppose this could be a proof of the existence of the soul, through the negative: if we can imagine a living, functioning body without a soul, and it is different from who we are now, than we need something to describe what we are now. The technique Macku developed, which he called “gellage”(a collage using gelatin), leaves no doubt: this is not digital. This is all too real, we almost hear the fabric tear, we sense the bodies come together and seperate. Of course, one could do it digitally. But this once, let me stay with my old-fashioned analogical rhetoric.

You also need to see his newest type of work, “glass gellage”, 3-dimensional glass installations. See the flash animation here.


(via the excellent Art of Love blog)

Originally from New Art on May 24, 2006, 6:09am

Showing at the Cybersonica 06 Sonic Art Exhibition, created by Seulki Kang & Kenichi Okada (under the name atoyfactory).

EtchASound is an installation inspired by the world famous toy Etch-A-Sketch. By interacting with EtchASound audiences can have the unique experience of drawing with their own voice.

user creates a 2 dimensional image in real time with his or her voice, and after a few moments the computer converts this into a 3 dimensional drawing. Then when you wear anaglyph glasses (3d red and cyan glasses) users can see in real space the drawing that you have created.

The user’s voice is input through four microphones. Volume controls the vertical and the horizontal variables. Pitch controls the depth. Therefore by using nothing but your voice you create a 3d drawing.

Voice is one of our most defining characteristics, we can usually recognise a person just by his or her voice. In addition, in this project we aim to let people discover a new and creative application for their voice, namely drawing. The artist usually uses his hand to draw, but in EtchASound our voice plays the role of the hand.

A technique called Pepper’s Ghost makes the 3D sketch appear to be floating in space.

Photos.
Movie.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on May 14, 2006, 9:43am

a system that amplifies the heartbeat of a car driver in real time through a special interface with a beefed up car audio aftermarket system, to achieve an ultimate unity between car & driver. the ‘pimp my heart’ system consists of a ‘heartbeat bling bling’ sensor that is clipped to the ear lobe, & a ‘heartbeat bass booster’ that amplifies the heartbeat sound with its high power amp & subwoofers. the BPM of songs is adjusted by the heart beat rate in real time. a computer LCD monitor on the car displays a visualization of the heartbeat sound in real-time.
see also heartbeat bracelets & heartbeat water bowl & heart songs & heartbeat virtual worlds.
[takehitoetani.com|via we-make-money-not-art.com]

Originally from information aesthetics on May 22, 2006, 5:16pm

Industrial Designer Marcel Neundörfer has designed a urinal that features a pressure-sensitive display screen for some gaming fun in restrooms.

When relieving yourself into this interactive urinal, you launch a mini-game that focuses on a target, with your stream acting as the input device. By targeting a specific area, you are prompted to control a character or object on the screen. In addition, the benefit of this interactive urinal is that people now really focus on hitting the urinal and not outside, as Neundörfer explains:

The reduced size of the “target” improves restroom hygiene and saves on cleanings costs (like the “fly in the urinal” at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport). It also makes a trip to the urinal “fun and games” – more than just a necessary nuisance.

We now wonder why Nintendo spent so much money on designing a freehand controller when every man already has a revolutionary controller.

Story from teamxbox

The You’re In Control (Urine Control)

An MIT project from a few years ago, ‘You’re In Control’ system uses computation to enhance the act of urination. Sensors in the back of a urinal detect the position of impact of a stream of urine, enabling the user to play interactive games on a screen mounted above the urinal.

See Video

Pissoir

Allan Giddy and Steven Greenwood , in 2002 used pre-existing urinals in a gallery toilet sensitised to allow participants (both male & female) to draw using their urine. As the urine passes through a light field it is tracked by computer. The resulting line drawings are traced life-size in real-time on monitors in an adjacent gallery space. The colour of each line drawing is determined by the pH value of the drawer’s urine. Each completed drawing is then uploaded automatically onto a website. This work celebrates the private, intimate, DIY act of urination as a creative activity. It provides all participants with, as it were, a canvas, giving them the opportunity to draw/paint their own works of art. Urine incident upon a sensor is sampled for its unique pH level, giving each participant the chance to leave his/her own colour pH signature for the first time.

via wmmna

Originally by Ruairi from Interactive Architecture dot Org on May 20, 2006, 3:06pm

LAb[au]’s installation ‘Point, Line, Surface computed in seconds ‘, (2005) the user creates out of simple interactions a sound and image environment. Interaction is similar to drawing on a plane. A sonic / visual composition is gradually build out of the drawing movements of the user resulting not only in visual objects moving on the screen and the projection but also to sounds moving thanks to the 4 speakers setup and sound spatialization algorithms. The installation is an instrument which like any instrument has its own codes and modalities. The aesthetic work consists here to build this codes, linking shapes [ shapes are “types” or “topologies”, in this case: point, lines, planes,… ] with colors and sounds. Out of this linking is created an aesthetic order producing meaning.

Each created soundscape can be recorded and called back at any moment. The recording takes in account the parameter of time [third axis=z] in the creation of a 3d display of the composition. Each of these times based towers are place on a common grid according to two parameters: 1: the % of density and the % of motion. These two parameters qualify in different manners the audience interaction while confronting it to time/space related parameters of the sonic construct. The common grid slowly creates a geometric pattern of space-time indexed objects_ the sound towers. Here the grid directly refers to Mondriaans synaesthetic ideas of the ‘boggie woggie’, in-between color sound and space, as on indexing parameters, the two dimensional grid. But the simple display of the grid and the isometric towers turns spatial through the topprojection and quadraphonic sound, immerging the user in his individual space of sound & motion as on the common level in a collective space, the installation as the grid indexing, the collective sound database.

Originally by Ruairi from Interactive Architecture dot Org on May 11, 2006, 3:23pm

a collection of 10,000 unique sheep, hand-drawn by workers hired via the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. each worker was paid 2 cents to “draw a sheep facing to the left.” average time spent drawing sheep: 105 seconds. average wage: $0.69 / hour.
see also essence of rabbit & visual brand recognition memory. [thesheepmarket.com|via we-make-money-not-art.com]

Originally from information aesthetics on May 23, 2006, 5:42pm

Love the shoes:

(Click pic to go to Borat’s “Homesite”)

(Thanks to Bedazzled for the pic and link)

Originally from I’m Just Sayin’ on May 25, 2006, 6:25pm

a visualization of all all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2006, showing how specific words gain & lose prominence over time, & linking information on the historical context for their use. the graphic representation focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document.
the vertical position of the words is determined by a statistical measure of significance (of the word in the document as compared to the word frequency in the whole corpus), the horizontal position is alphabetical, & the size is based on raw frequency in the document.
see also parsing state of the union & power of words.
[onetwothree.net|thnkx Brad]

Originally from information aesthetics on May 29, 2006, 9:02pm

a graphical visualization map of the websites people are visiting, updated every second with where people are going & coming from. as sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm & grow larger. conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center & grow smaller. website traffic is symbolized with thin lines: each line symbolizes a move from one site to the other.
see also google browser.
[swarmthe.com]

Originally from information aesthetics on May 26, 2006, 1:46am

several graphical visualizations of the hyperlinks of a particular website that illustrate the link structure 2 levels down into it. how the web pages are written in HTML defines how the links are displayed in the graphic. these maps can be read as so-called “dance notations”, in which each link is “performed” depending on how the individual node is defined in the graphic. for example, if a link shows 70 sub-links (HTML), the performance will consist of 70 movements.
[ursenal.net|via turbulence.org]

Originally from information aesthetics on May 24, 2006, 7:06pm

a collaborative net art piece in which the numbers of each visitor’s IP address are added to a single image. the 4 sequential 8-bit numbers that make up the address are recontextualized into particular PHP shape functions in the order they are required: x,y,w,h (x,y coordinate pair & width/height), as well as color: r,g,b,a (red, green, blue, alpha) to create a rectangle of a specific color (& transparency) at a specific location. viewing the piece changes it permanently.
see also data paintings.
[aphid.org|via turbulence.org]

Originally from information aesthetics on May 24, 2006, 6:57pm

Click to play Desmond Dekker’s biggest hit, Israelites, and go here for more about “The King of Ska.”

Originally from I’m Just Sayin’ on May 26, 2006, 6:07pm

We posted the NY Times story about mock Iraqi villages in Nevada, and now here’s Wired reporting on Baghdad, USA, a.k.a. the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

“The 4,000 guardsmen here for these late-winter exercises will encounter 500 soldiers from the 509th, 500 support staff, a dozen Apache and Blackhawk combat helicopters, 30 tank-like Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 1,000 jeeps, Humvees, and sundry other things with wheels. Commanders on the ground get video feeds from simulated surveillance planes flown over 3-D maps of the battlefield. In-game journalists produce three daily newspapers, a radio show, and a nightly reel of video highlights. More than 200 of the role-players are Arab Americans, many of them Iraqis, bussed in from around the US for extra realism. A three-week exercise can cost up to $9 million.

The environment, too, is eerily detailed. Many of the ‘towns’ are rough models: a handful of corrugated aluminum and wood-frame buildings with an upright drainage pipe serving as a minaret for the mosque, for example. But the most elaborate town, Suliyah – officially named Shughart-Gordon, after two soldiers killed in Somalia – has dozens of multistory concrete buildings, including a school with a playground, an open-air market, and a convincingly equipped hospital. There’s even a cemetery. During exercises, the pumps at the gas station can explode in a 30-foot fireball. Rooftop concussion cannons throw in random bursts of noise and flame. Fog machines and speakers fill the buildings with smoke and the sounds of gunfire or barking dogs. More than 900 cameras record it all.”

Wow. Personally, I found myself thinking a lot about the guys who plan the structures and paths, paint the anti-American grafitti on the buildings, publish the newspapers. You know, the designers. No doubt they’re masters and commanders of the persona - that singular, official version and vision of the Iraqi people that soldiers will carry into battle. But the situations in which these personas act must be quite complex: “We’ll never win by killing all the insurgents. We have to get the support of the population.”

Cubic, the defense contractor involved in the training, treats combat as somewhat of an affective spectacle, while the military focuses on the minutia of everyday life:

“They’ve staged bloody aftermaths of bomb attacks, applying gory makeup to Vietnam veterans with missing limbs to make extra-convincing bomb victims. Teams of ‘firemarkers’ zip around the Box on all-terrain vehicles, rigging up Hollywood-style pyrotechnics for roadside bombs and explosives-laden cars. Prevatt reminisces about a mass grave they created, a charnel pit of bound mannequins with simulated head wounds. ‘We put a bunch of bones and meat in there and buried it for a couple days so it would smell right,’ he says.

The JRTC expends enormous resources on elaborate scenarios that try to replicate, predict, and manipulate human behavior. That can mean gunshots, but more often it means subjecting troops to hours of entirely prosaic jobs. Trainees at Polk spend days guarding gates, maintaining security at demonstrations, and placating civilian leadership. ‘It’s all about building and developing relations with the locals,’ says Petraeus of the Combined Arms Center. ‘Knowledge of the cultural terrain is as important as knowledge of the physical terrain’.”

But, really, I just have to wonder why the official JRTC & Fort Polk website prominently displays phone numbers to report child and spouse abuse or sexual assault. Is pseudo war and hatred during the day making these folks freak out on their loved ones when they get home at night?

Originally posted by Anne from Space and Culture, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 27, 2006 at 08:15 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 27, 2006, 8:15pm

The green fingered designer Julian Lwin is back with another fertile creation. Those of you who are familiar with his Galapagos Table and Urban Oasis will know that Lwin’s designs grow on you quite literally! This time he has created a bench from recycled cardboard cylinders which are embedded with seeds using a cellulose liquid. This seems a lovely idea, reminiscent of the cardboard grass chair which can be assembled and then planted with grass seeds so you can watch it grow. However, the grass chair appears rather more durable than the Biotube bench. Inhabitat tells us that this bench is designed specifically to biodegrade into ‘a rich mulch layer’ and turn into an ‘instant garden.’ As writer Sarah Rich says, ‘What is this thing going to look like in 6 months, while it is in the process of bio-degrading?’

(This post continues on the site)

Originally from Treehugger, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 29, 2006 at 10:27 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 29, 2006, 10:27am

Lindsay Lawson is a Los Angeles-based artist whos work I love. Her website has amazing videos, including her reenactment of the Challenger disaster. –JH

Originally posted by JoelHolmberg from del.icio.us/tag/awesome, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 27, 2006 at 10:13 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 27, 2006, 10:13pm

free avant-garde movie downloads

Originally posted by NoOffense from del.icio.us/tag/art, ReBlogged by eteam on May 29, 2006 at 08:56 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on May 29, 2006, 8:56pm

Terminally Ambivalent Over You (2002, 26.1MB, 3:19 min)

Based on Stephen Coates’ song from the album “When Psyche meets Cupid”,
this animation tells the story of a prisoner who works in a prison’s gramophone
factory and while assembling gramophones thinks of his girlfriend.
More neat stuff from Alex Budovsky, aka Aleksey Budovskiy.

Originally by doron golan from DVblog on May 24, 2006, 11:00pm

iua met I (2005, 46MB, 6:43 min)

inside us all, winners of 2005 diesel music VJ competition.

Originally by editorial from DVblog on May 23, 2006, 11:00pm