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Voxphoto says, “Great instructions showing how Zach Stern hacked a cheap $30 digital camera to see infrared light, giving the dreamlike results here.” Link.

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Originally from MAKE Magazine on September 4, 2006, 2:50pm

Eric Rautio made this drawing robot that takes information that people give it over the web and draws it out for them. The drawing implement is a sumi brush that is hacked together to connect to a reservoir above and to the right of the robot.

Artpainter stands for adaptive resonance theory painter, also known as the painting machine. This device takes user input through a website and local tablet pc’s, which it then “learns” through system of neural networks. The machine then improvises using what it has learnt.

Link

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Originally from MAKE Magazine on September 3, 2006, 8:44pm

Voxphoto says, “Will digital photography kill off film? Not soon–but if worst comes to worst, you can follow this simple chemical recipe and start coating your own glass plates.” Pictured here is a print from a glass plate negative using a handmade silver bromide emulsion, by Terry Holsinger. Link.

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Originally from MAKE Magazine on September 3, 2006, 11:13pm

Mark says, “Instructions on how to make a bar stool completely out of cardboard! Very simple and elegant design.” Link.

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Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by Ben Engebreth on Sep 5, 2006 at 12:34 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on September 5, 2006, 12:34pm

Originally posted by rsg from del.icio.us/rsg, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Sep 5, 2006 at 11:21 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on September 5, 2006, 11:21am

Back in July, LOT-EK announced their Container Home Kit, a prefab, do-it-yourself assembly unit that “combines multiple shipping containers to build modern, intelligent and affordable homes. 40-foot-long (13.00m) shipping containers are joined and stacked to create configurations that vary in size approximately from 1,000 to 3,000 square feet (90m2 to 270m2).”
Watch the video.

“Each container is transformed [by] cutting sections of its corrugated metal walls,” they explain. “Incrementing the amount of containers allows the house to expand from a 1 bedroom to a 2, 3, and 4 bedrooms home. The landscaping around the houses uses additional containers to configure a swimming pool, a pool house/tool shed and a car port. CHK™ houses can be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere.”
Here’s a poster-sized PDF to guide you through the options, including several dozen external colors:

I want a bright yellow one that I’ll park somewhere in Los Angeles, serving as both BLDGBLOG’s new home office and as a space for public architectural lectures. Archinect, Pruned, Subtopia, and Inhabitat will open up similar containers next door; then Edgar Gonzalez, gravestmor, and The Dirt will move in. Soon, a color-coded microcity of container high-rises, run entirely by architecture and design bloggers, will appear – a media complex for the 22nd century, covered in satellite dishes, winning grants and producing documentaries – eventually awarded urban landmark status from the Californian government years later.
things magazine and The Kircher Society set up shop. Ballardian. Abstract Dynamics. MoCo Loco. And so on.
We’ll serve too much wine, issue counterfeit passports, discuss seismology and the structural fate of the avant-garde – then design, in secret, an archipelago of hovercrafts the exact size and shape of Hawaii.
Then we’ll invade Hawaii.

(Elsewhere: Architect’s Newspaper and BusinessWeek. Earlier: LOT-EK’s library of airplanes).

Originally from BLDGBLOG on September 5, 2006, 10:11am

Equal parts banjoist, laptopper and pop cultural scream therapist, the warm whirlwinds of Kevin Blechdom have reached our shores thanks to the Dual Plover label. Brisbane, Sydney and soon Melbourne all under the spell of the tunesmith behind http://kevyb.com. ( @ The Corner Hotel, Thu Sep 7th )

>>How’s the unlikely marriage of max/msp software & the banjo working out for you?
Well, I don’t use Max/MSP as much as I used to, I still use my computer a lot, mostly General MIDI (Quicktime) and Logic to write songs, and then a traditional recording studio to record them. I like the contrast of the software world and the REAL instrument world. Keeps the future in check with the past.

>>How has max / msp changed your perceptions of sound?
It definitely brought me closer to the physics of music. Sine waves and signal paths… It’s a fun way to get to the basics of sound and then build back up again… I like the new Jitter software as well. It’s fun animating in real time. There is something about a pure sine wave really loud that makes me extremely happy.

>>And of music?
I really go back and forth in terms of what I’m focusing on. A few years ago I was really obsessing with software and weird sounds and weird ways to put the sounds together, but the past two years, I’ve been caught up in chord progressions and song structure and lyrics… And I like spending time in both ways, but then taking what I learn from one world and bringing it to the other… So when I start programming again, I want to build software that focuses more on chords and song stuctures and less on sounds and sequencing… just like a different magnification level on the microscope… keeep changing the scope and seeing which patterns are similar and which ones are different. So much in music is about waves, about periods of time… from frequency to rhythm to phrase to chorus to song to album to career, it’s all just waves, and I like trying to mix these different levels together as much as I can while still being able to perceive it…

>>What are the limitations / benefits of playing solo versus the band environment?
Playing in a band is a full on relationship… I benefit from playing solo by maintaining the creative control, and being able to afford to travel and play more shows. Adding travel for one more person and sharing the fee cuts money in half, and more people it gets cut even more. I don’t know how any bands survive like this… losing so much money in the beginning.

As for the bad parts of being a solo artist: when I work with others it’s easier for me to believe in the material more whole-heartedly. For instance with my solo stuff, sometimes I do the typical thing of doubting myself, etc… but with other people somehow it’s much easier for me to believe in myself if I’m working with someone. And of course, when you work with people ideas can bounce back and forth and really grow, there’s more outside influences to pull from. But then again, it can be hard to maintain and nurture creative connections with all the stresses of the music world mixed with exhausting traveling circumstances…

>>Who have you really enjoyed collaborating with?
My brother Lumberob was my first collaborator, and we still work together. I used to write the music and he would write the words, or we would write songs together and then fight over who wrote them later, both wrongly remembering that we had written them alone. He’s been a huge inspiration, and always gives good critiques – he understands what I’m trying to do unlike anyone else. I toured with Jad Fair in 1999-2000 and he got me singing, before that I was too shy, but he’d ask me to sing with him, and it just opened up a lot of performance possibilities, also a huge influence. Working with Blevin Blectum was super fun, because we were exploring music worlds we’d never heard before, and we would always end up making music we didnt expect to make, and it was great to be a “girl” band, because you can just tell the rest of the world to fuck off and do your own thing. Other people I’ve worked with who were awesome: kid606, jamie lidell, fred frith, mocky, heidi mortenson, ad hawk, max tundra, taylor savvy, planningtorock, phon.o, evans hankey, andre vida, eugene chadbourne, lucile desamory, the organlady, my robot friend… I’m sure I’m leaving some out… hmmmm… I really like collaborating…

>>Australian song most embedded in your subconscious?
“I come from the land down under” or kylie minogue “can’t get you out of my head” or Olivia “Hopelessly devoted to you” or the Kate Bush song about Australia (I know she’s not Australian) – - – > POP CULTURE DID IT

>>Donning your directors hat, what’d happen in Kevin Blechdom : the Musical?
I made a musical on the last record “Eat My Heart Out” called “Countdown to Nothing” – a surrealist auto-biographical self-help musical… that’s where I’ve left off. I’ve been working on some new musicals, the last one we did was “the Cosmic Baby” about the first baby born in outer-space. I don’t know what I would do if it were really about me, I think I need to live a little more to clarify the themes…

>>Can you tell us more about your upcoming duet with David Hasselhoff?
You can’t keep anything a secret these days… Well, we both really like power ballads, so we just get two mics and sing our hearts out! I just look forward to the sweaty hugs at the end of the song!

>>What do u..
Whatever you want!
(Questions cut off at the end of an email never deter an open minded, banjo wielding interviewee~! – jp )

Tags: kevin blechdom, banjo music

Originally by jean poole from { { { { - - Sky Noise — >>> on September 3, 2006, 10:33am

a decorative data visualization installation that presents up to the minute headline news from around the world as a series of pleasant animations, allowing gallery visitors to keep informed while contemplating this kind of ready-made sculpture or automatic drawing. exists as gallery projection & a stand-alone ultra-bright LED screen.
see also cyclone newsgroup visualization.
[thomson-craighead.net & thomson-craighead.net (movie) & druh.co.uk]

Originally from information aesthetics on September 4, 2006, 2:41am

Tevye - clip (1939, 32.1MB, 1:27 min)

Prior to WW2 there were between 10 & 13 million speakers
of Yiddish. Today there are probably less than 2 million.
Here is an image of a lost world, the flowering of Yiddish culture
in the years of the twentieth century before the Holocaust.
This is a clip from the 1939 film Tevye by Maurice Schwartz based on
the work of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem
The film has recently been restored and is available for hire or to buy.

Originally by michael szpakowski from DVblog on September 4, 2006, 11:00pm

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has an excellent chart that shows you exactly what you need to do to opt out of online informational directories, such as AnyWho, InfoSpace, the White Pages, and Zabasearch.

Information includes the opt out URL, the opt out mailing address, and the information you need to get your information deleted. — Wendy Boswell

Originally from Lifehacker on September 5, 2006, 10:00am

At a time when China’s water prospects are quite dim, the country’s available water sources are growing darker. Roughly two weeks ago, a local chemical company polluted a tributary of the Songhua River in the northeastern province of Jilin with a 10 ton bubbly, red slick of a chemical called xylidine. This week, SEPA, the State Environmental Protection Administration, announced it had launched investigations into the chemical company at fault along with five other major polluters. Though the watchdog group is getting stronger, reaching its tentacles into localities where dirty officials tend to be as rampant as dirty water, and locals are fighting back, even taking polluters to court, the toxic tales keep creeping in. Yesterday, the New York Times sneaks into an Inner Mongolian town overrun by a chemical spill essentially ordered by local officials—two years after federal orders to close culprit factories or build treatment plants went unheeded, largely to “protect” the local economy. Someone get them an economics lesson. Ahead of this month’s World Water Congress in Beijing, the government (which has grown quite zealous about throwing money at its environmental problems lately) just announced it would spend US$5 billion on improving water quality over the next five years, in order to “far exceed” its UN Millennium Development Goal. As with (and related to) the country’s other problems, solving the water issue depends depends on getting the money where it needs to go, in the face of the ubiquitious “corrupt local official.” Otherwise change will keep flowing slower than a stream of sludge. : : Xinhua and : : The New York Times.

Originally from Treehugger on September 5, 2006, 12:27pm

The seaweed is crushed, then made into slurry by adding dilution water, and then fermented using microorganisms to produce methane.

Seaweed is great stuff in sushi or miso soup, but too much of a good thing, rotting on the beach, can get a bit smelly; disposal is a big expense for Japanese coastal communities. Tokyo Gas Company is now collecting it, fermenting it in vats and generating methane gas, which then is used to produce electricity. Seaweed also absorbs a lot of CO2 while it grows, so using it as a biomass fuel produces energy without a net gain in greenhouse gases. This gives new meaning to the phrase “power plant”, the first of which will open next year. ::Trends in Japan

Originally from Treehugger on September 5, 2006, 7:42am

Pop culture’s current obsessions with ‘reality’ television and fictional ‘re-enactment’ coincides interestingly with debates currently transpiring in the new media community regarding the nature of simulation. Some argue that many digital media both reference real events and surpass them by presenting images or experiences that never really happened. This confluence of ideals has triggered a number of special publications, listserv discussions, and exhibits on re-enactment. Most recently, the show, ‘Playback_Simulated Realities,’ open through November 5 at Oldenburg’s Edith-Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, seeks to investigate ‘the influence and impact re-enactments and simulations have on society,’ raising ‘questions about the function of… substitute worlds developed in computer games’ and discussing ‘the yearnings for authentic experience which are also addressed in reconstructions of past eras.’ The show includes a number of artists who are, themselves, quite legendary, including Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco, Christoph Draeger, Omer Fast, Lynn Hershman, and Eddo Stern, among others. Each selection carefully constructs a symbiotic relationship between the simulated scenario and the media employed in these (re)constructions. The organizers argue that ‘the works shown in the exhibition examine… how experiences and memories are at once individually experienced and culturally construed,’ thus reminding each of us of our binding role in these mediated charades. - James Petrie

http://www.edith-russ-haus.de/

Originally from Rhizome News at September 4, 2006, 03:00, published by Marisa S. Olson

Type commentary
Genre show
Keywords exhibition, futurism, representation

Originally from Rhizome.org on September 4, 2006, 9:53am

Richard Solomon is an artist who works exclusively with plant materials. His he does flat-pressed pieces and scultures. We particularly like the former, and since an image is worth a thousand words… ::Richard Solomon

Originally from Treehugger on September 5, 2006, 12:50pm

• Free Speech Internet Television   - Massive Archive of Alternative video which can be watched on the Net.
• Alder Image - A personal exhibit of Joshua Banton’s video work, along with information about the work and the artist.
• Andrew Demirjian, video artist - Stills and descriptions of the video artists work.
• Androgyne, Mon Amour - A dance/music video by composer Barry Truax based on homoerotic poetry by Tennessee Williams, as performed by bassist Robert Black and dancer Walter Kubanek, in a celebration of gay love.
• Bianco-Valente - Art production, images, texts, videos, biography, bibliography and project information.
• The Blind Eye - Dedicated to videos designed to deflect attention from the screen, for relief from TV and Internet addiction.
• Britshorts - A collection of downloadable alternative shorts produced within the UK and Europe. Also accepts submissions from film makers.
• Busybox - Offers original video shorts, panoramic photography and assorted creations.
• Carolyn Speranza - Biography and archive of her video installations.
• Catherine Ross artist - The portfolio of New York based artist Catherine Ross, who works in video and drawing.
• Center for AudioVisual Research - CAVR constructs previously unavailible experiences via the re-structuring of our media landscape.
• [More….]

Click-through for dozens more artists and arts organizations related to video…

Originally from artificialeyes.tv reblog at September 4, 2006, 22:31, published by Marisa S. Olson

Originally from Rhizome.org on September 5, 2006, 9:38am

Pall Thayer:

Hi, I’m going to see if I can get back into this. The responses have been great and I’m glad it sort of came back a bit after withering away. I’m not exactly sure any more why I posted the original, but I had good reasons at the time. So I’m going to see if I can get back into “the mode”. It had something to do with previous discussions about Internet art being dead or old or whatever we’re calling it these days. So I began wondering why such a young medium, still in its infancy really, could be dying and came to the conclusion that perhaps it’s being misunderstood. Perhaps when people think that Internet art is a “been there, done that” sort of thing, they’re talking about something that was at one time perceived to be Internet art but wasn’t in the sense that it was somehow related, but the primary medium was actually something entirely different. I used the terms “technology” and “digital” because I’m sure they suffer from the same problems, but I was primarily thinking about Internet art because, hey, that’s my thing. I think also, that in the technological, digital and Internet realms of contemporary art, a lot of people are trying to do too much too soon and this is something that is put forth so well in the Sol Lewitt excerpt re-blogged on Rhizome’s front page yesterday that it should be repeated over and over again so here it is again:

“New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. There is nothing worse than seeing art that wallows in gaudy baubles. By and large most artists who are attracted to these materials are the ones who lack the stringency of mind that would enable them to use the materials well. It takes a good artist to use new materials and make them into a work of art. The danger is, I think, in making the physicality of the materials so important that it becomes the idea of the work (another kind of expressionism). “

It’s like he’s asking, ‘Would you still feel comfortable about calling yourself an artist if you quit prepending it with “New Media”, “Digital” or “Internet”?’

In fact, the whole article makes several good points and I suggest everyone read it and then tell everyone else to read it. You can find it at http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/Stu/kswenson/lewitt.htm

Pall

– Pall Thayer p_thay@alcor.concordia.ca http://www.this.is/pallit

-excerpt from conversation on digital art on Rhizome’s email list RAW — For full thread: http://www.rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=22573&page=2#43998

Originally by Pall Thayer from Rhizome.org Raw at September 3, 2006, 15:22, published by Lauren Cornell

Type commentary
Genre theory
Keywords digital

Originally from Rhizome.org on September 5, 2006, 8:31am

Andy Cameron is the Head of the Interactive Department at Fabrica, the Benetton research centre on communication located near Treviso, in an old villa wonderfully restored by Tadao Ando. Each year Fabrica invites young artists, photographers, designers, musicans, writers, interaction designers from all over the world to closely collaborate to “uncover the future.” His role at Fabrica alone justifies an interview of Andy Cameron. But there’s more to Cameron. He is also a founding member of the Hypermedia Reseach Centre at the University of Westminster in London. In 1994, he co-founded Antirom, a studio that investigated the nature of interactivity - how it operates as a language, what forms and figurations of rhetoric it makes available, and what novel structures of spectatorship it offers. The award-winning interactive agency worked for clients like Levi Strauss (more information about their Levi’s kiosk and its interactive toys), but also as an arts collective, with productions and performances at, among others, Sonar in Barcelona and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. IN 1999, with two founding membes of Antirom, Andy Allenson and Joe Stephenson, he participated to the creation of studio Romandson Interactive Design in London.

Andy Cameron also edited one of the books which was most useful to me when i started investigating what interactive art and design could mean. The Art of Experimental Interaction Design is a great presentation of works by Ryota Kuwakubo, Antenna Design, Boutique Vizique, Ear Studio, ART+Com, Tmema, and other individuals or collectives whose works have left a mark on the interaction field.

I’d just advise that you browse through their website to get an idea of what they are doing at Fabrica. One of their latest projects i really liked was Home Entertainment at Colette in Paris, constructed out of industrial storage shelving and stacks of obsolete technologies from the 1980s – dial telephones, VHS tapes and old school ghetto blasters, recreated in perfect detail in flawless white ceramic. Like a place where old technologies go to die. Oh, yes! And please do waste some of your precious time on doodle.

In the center of all this obsolescence flickered an electronic screen, the only sign of life within the installation space, that showed a moving image sequence of hundreds and hundreds of ghostly faces, peering out of the window and trapped in a never ending video loop. These are the faces of passersby in the street who, by touching a sensor set into the window, have triggered a video camera to record a short sequence of themselves to add to the exhibition.

Home Entertainment at Colette in Paris

One of the goal of antirom which you founded in 1994 was to “explore interactivity and try to understand what made an interactive experience engaging.” You admitted at the time that it was “a simple question but one that proved difficult to resolve.” 12 years on, is the answer to that question any clearer?

It’s one of those questions where the answer seems blindingly obvious from one perspective, and yet it’s hard to work out what the answer actually means. The short version is that interactive experiences need to be playful to be successful - if you want people to use your stuff and keep using your stuff, make it playful. Play is the thing. Play is the basic drive behind interactivity - it’s the big ‘what if?’ aspect that keeps a good interactive experience humming along.

So now everyone’s talking about play. It reminds me of the 90s, how everybody used the word ‘narrative’ all the time - everything had to be narrative this and narrative that - but nobody really explained what it meant or why everything had to be narrative. Narrative is actually a very simple thing at one level - a format for telling stories - but it became this almost metaphysical quality, this magical, indispensable… something.

Now the buzz words are play, playfulness, ludic and so on. I find myself using these words all the time and hearing these words all the time and yet I’m not sure we really know what their implications are.

In one way play is like narrative - play is a simple, formal thing, a way of setting things up. It’s a way of positioning your audience in front of something so they know how to deal with it. So too is narrative, even if the formal methods of narrative and play are pretty much the opposite of each other. They don’t mix very well. They are like two sides of the same coin - play is a technique that helps people construct stories, and stories are a way for people to recount and give meaning to what happened when people played a particular game at a particular time together. But formally they are very very different and very hard to mix together.

I’m increasingly interested not so much in what play is, but in trying to work out what makes it good - what makes this toy, this game, this installation, better than others. Thinking of interaction design not in terms of novelty or innovation but rather looking at each piece critically, in terms of the values and meanings and pleasures it can offer us. Are there any great works of interactive art? Which are they? Why are they so good? These are the questions I’m interested in finding answers to at the moment.

Has the interaction design scene changed since you joined it?

It’s changed and it hasn’t changed. There’s still the same crossover between commercial design and more experimental artistic design - people doing corporate websites in the morning and insane installations in the afternoon. I think this is a good thing and I hope it stays like this. You can read about this kind of crossover on your lovely website every day. There’s lots of superficial, technological change, but I don’t think this is as important as it seems. The fundamentals of good interaction design don’t seem to change much.

People are more and more interested in connecting interaction design with everyday life, everyday play. I mean in not really starting with certain kinds of technology in mind, but starting with certain kinds of activity in mind. And finding that interaction design, or making up games, doesn’t always need complex technology.

10×10 and Barcode Installation

How much has the reaction of the audience evolved over time? Are they used to interactivity now, is it more difficult to surprise and entertain them? Is their feedback different from place to place (more difficult to please in London than in Bologna for example?)

I haven’t noticed it evolving. It used to be really hard to surprise and entertain people and it still is. That’s not going to change.

There are some cultural differences but I guess they’re kind of obvious. Ross Phillips, who used to work at Fabrica, and who now heads interactive at ShowStudio in London, made a wonderful project with me at Fabrica called Face - the installation lets people control a camera to record a few frames of themselves and add it to a kind of collaborative ever looping ever growing movie. It’s really simple and very deep at the same time - a really rich piece of interaction design. We did it in a gallery in New York as well as Benetton store windows in Italy, Hong Kong and Istanbul. We did a version in Colette in Paris. Ross did the same thing in London - in Liberty’s window just off Regent’s Street - and London was the only place where women flashed their breasts for the camera. It’s something to do with the way they booze it up in London. And the fact that English women never seem to feel the cold.

How do you think interaction design/art is to evolve over the next few years? Do you see new frontiers, new aspects to explore?

I think ‘frontiers’ is the wrong word. I think we have to get over the whole idea of exploring new territory and boldly going where no man has gone before… Maybe this is a personal thing, maybe I’m talking to myself here. The idea of being a pioneer is such a very compelling one. I remember at Antirom there was a real competitive energy around the idea of coming up with original stuff, being the first one to do this or that. I started thinking about all this seriously a few years ago when I met the great Myron Krueger at Ars Electronica. We talked about his work - (when you’re with Myron you tend to talk about Myron and his work) - and I was completely knocked out by a) how important he is as an artist and b) how completely ignored he’s been by the mainstream art world. Why isn’t he in the permanent collection at the Tate, at MOMA? Why isn’t he in the art history books? And what I think it comes down to is this relentless rhetoric of exploration, of discovery, of trailblazing and groundbreaking and being in the vanguard. When you look at someone like Myron Krueger and his life’s work you get the feeling that he was so busy exploring new frontiers that he didn’t really take the time to exploit the extraordinary interactive scenarios that he invented. You also get a sense of how easy it is for an unsympathetic critic to dismiss Myron’s work as being that of a crank inventor rather than a serious artist. I suppose this is what the geek ghetto is for. I wrote about this last year in a piece called “Dinner with Myron Or: Rereading Artificial Reality 2: Reflections on Interface and Art”*.

None of which answers your question. What I’d like to see happen is for interaction designers and artists to let go of the relentless search for the new and try and make work which is as good as work in any other medium. I suppose what I’m saying is I’d like to see interactive art and design grow up a little.

You edited “The Art of Experimental Interaction Design” in 2004. I’ve always been surprised by the fact that you chose to put two words like “art” and “design” together. I thought that the art and the design worlds didn’t like to be mixed together. Did i miss something?

My idea was to try and cram as many buzzwords into the title as possible so that as many people as possible would buy it. Of course it didn’t work like that - artists were put off by the word design and designers were put of by the word art and everyone else was put off by the word interaction which apparently is so passé. I’ve never really felt that art and design are so far apart - this implies a romantic notion of what art is and especially what an artist is. But the real reason for the title was a cunning marketing ploy and I can tell you it failed miserably.

Which exhibition space do you regard as ideal for your installations? The window of a trendy shop in Paris or a new media art festival? How about a museum?

Does Benetton gives you carte blanche? Can your projects for fabrica be as experiemental as you want? Or are there any limits you should respect?

You know what - I’m grateful for any chance to put the work we do in Fabrica out in the world. I really don’t see a shop window as less of an opportunity than a new media arts festival or a gallery or a museum. They’re different audiences and they have different problems and different advantages. The web too - some of the more interesting work done at Fabrica in the last few years has been online - I’m thinking of Juan Ospina’s Flipbook or Jon Harris‘ 10×10 or the Hatemap project by Harun Alikadic which aggregates extremist websites in a fun-to-use Flash interface. And we’ve just done benettonplay.com which is an experimental games site for Benetton, and which I am very proud of - check out Hansi Raber’s doodle toy to see what I mean. Although Fabrica is wholly owned by Benetton, they really do have a very light touch when it comes to setting limits. Which is actually incredibly smart of them.

Fabrica invites young creatives from all over the world to join its research centre. They stay a year or two. What is the plus side and the down side of having people come and go so regularly? Don’t you feel that a more long-term collaboration would be better sometimes?

The plus side is that we get a constant turnover of some of the best new talent, under 25 years old, from across the world. Yes, it can be frustrating to lose people after a year or two, but actually it’s not so clear cut - people go out and get on with their creative careers and at the same time maintain a continuing relationship with Fabrica and what’s going on there. Fabrica is situated in the countryside outside Treviso - far from the bustling creative centres of the world - so we work hard to build and maintain relationships with ex-fabricanti and with other artists and designers.

You told me about your respect for Nicolas Bourriaud, one of the few critics who understand the use of performative and interactive techniques. How much does his thinking influence the works developed at the interaction unit of fabrica?

Bourriaud doesn’t influence what we do but the way we think about what we have done. I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t aware of his work until a couple of years ago when Angela Vettese, the critic and curator and head of a contemporary art centre in Venice, the Fondazione Bevilacqua, gave a lecture on relational art at Fabrica. She didn’t talk about interactive art or art that uses computers per se, but what she said had incredible relevance for the issues of spectatorship and authorship and language that have concerned me for a long time - since Antirom and before. She referred quite a lot to Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’. I read the book and found that here was a critical theory - and a body of work - that was struggling with precisely those questions which we were struggling with - how to deal with the fact that the artwork is not made by the artist but by the audience? What is the aesthetic? How do you know if it is any good? How to deal with banality? How to let go? It seems to me that the work of artists like Rikrit Tiravanija or Liam Gillick provides a real opportunity for interactive artists to think about what they are trying to do with technology, but from a different perspective. A perspective which has absolutely nothing to do with technology.

It was also a kind of validation, which I know sounds a bit pathetic, but there it is. Not of any particular piece of work - I’ve no idea if Bourriaud likes or even knows about interactive computer based art, or media art - but of an approach to making art and a way of thinking about what art can be. I’ve long been perplexed by the ghettoisation of interactive art and Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics seemed to me to offer a way out of the ghetto. It offers a critical approach to interactive art which doesn’t rely on technical novelty but on broader questions of audience and agency.

We’ll see. A new Fabrica group show, curated by Silvia Marini, Ann Poochareon and myself, called “I’ve been waiting for you” which explores the links between relational art and interactive art, is opening at the Triad gallery in Seoul in November this year. And we’re showing several relational/interactive pieces at the Pompidou Centre in Paris as part of a major exhibition of Fabrica art and design this October.

Can you name us 3 interactive works you find particularly interesting? Why?

The Composition Station by Andy Allenson with Joe Stephenson, at the Science Museum in London. The piece is a table with 4 touch screens embedded into it - each screen has a musical grid which lets you compose a simple repeating pattern of notes. The key thing is you can change the number of notes in your grid and let it slip away from the other grids. So you get these really interesting patterns emerging from the combination of simple numbers - a 3 against a 4, a 7 and an 11 for example will give an unbelievably complex sequence. Andy Allenson was inspired by his experience of playing in a Balinese Gambelan orchestra - but the piece also seems to owe something to the music of Steve Reich. The Composition Station lets you explore something really fundamental about time, numbers and music - it’s a glorious piece, rich and hypnotic and fascinating. You can get a taste of it on the Rom:One CD-Rom, (Mac OS 9 version only)
And you can see more pictures at http://www.pickledonion.com/cs/index.htm

Marie Sester’s Access, made at Eyebeam in New York in 2003 and shown at Ars Electronica in the same year, is a piece for public spaces in which a robotic spotlight tracks a person as they walk across an area. It’s funny and scary at the same time - it’s got this deliciously double edged quality to it. As Sester comments in her notes about the piece “beware. Some individuals may not like the idea of being under surveillance. beware. Some individuals may love the attention.” It’s a great example of how interactive work can be meaningful without making a statement - the work is concerned with issues of surveillance, but it’s not making a statement about surveillance, rather it’s staging a mise en scene of surveillance and doing it in a way which manages to be playful and profound at the same time. Photos of Access and videos.

And finally I’d have to include Videoplace created by Myron Krueger right back in the 1970s. He came up with the supremely elegant idea of having the spectator stand in front of a screen and a camera and seeing the image of themselves projected back onto the screen in real time. The result is a literal embodiment of the audience within the artwork where the body itself becomes the interface to kind of self portrait. It’s a basic blueprint for some of the best interactive art created in the last decades - I’m thinking of work by artists like Scott Snibbe, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and many others. Videoplace helped us to recognize what Krueger called “a new category of beauty” in the world - an aesthetic which is properly interactive - and for this I am truly grateful to him.

Thanks Andy.

Catch up with Andy’s Interaction Unit at the Fabrica: Les Yeux Ouverts show at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, it opens October 6 until November 6. They have another piece at Triad in Seoul opening November 15 2006.

Interactive Fabrica promo poster found at Ann’s place. Pictures of Fabrica’s installations courtesy of Andy Cameron.

*Cameron, Andy. “Dinner with Myron Or: Rereading Artificial Reality 2: Reflections on Interface and Art”. In aRt&D: Research and Development in Art, ed. Joke Brouwer et al. V2_NAi Publishers, 2005. ISBN: 90-5662-423-7.

UPDATE: i couldn’t resist. As soon as i saw the image that Ann had blogged of the ten Antirom guys, i knew i had to post it as well. Congrats to Mister Roope for the lovely Hawaii t-shirt.

Originally from we make money not art on September 4, 2006, 4:31am

I've just got back from Ars Electronica after an enjoyable weekend meeting many artists and others interested in the whole field of digital art. A total of six Golden Nicas were awarded out of a total 3,177 entries from 71 countries. I will be reporting on some of the projects I saw at Ars Electronica but in the mean time here are the winners of the Golden Nicas.

'458nm ' by Ilija Brunck, Tom Weber and Jan Bitzer from the Film Academy of Baden Württemberg were the winners of the Computer Animation / Visual Effects category.

'It’s midnight. A smattering of moonlight falls upon the forest floor. Two mechanical snails move slowly through the darkness. They confront one another and briefly take the measure each other’s powers before uniting in love play. With mounting ecstasy, their transparent bodies begin to glow,but just before climax a dark shadow looms over them'

The Digital Music category was awarded to sound pioneer Eliane Radigue for a contemplative piece entitled '“L’îIe re-sonante.'

According to Eliane Radigue, “L’îIe re-sonante” (The Resonating Isle) was inspired by a moment in which the musician saw an island in a lake while the water reflected her face. Such an image is twoelements in one— a “real” picture and an optical illusion. The depth of the water is reflected by thedeeper tones; the higher tones float above them like the island jutting out of the water.

Eliane Radigue composes electro-acoustic music. In the early ‘50s, she was one of the pioneers of this genre (together with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry). The same consistency and economy with which she works exclusively with an ARP synthesizer has characterized her musical mode of expression for decades. Lately, she has been discovered as a model by a younger generation of musicians.

Interactive Art winner was Paul DeMarinis for his installation '“The Messenger'

E-mails from all over the world are received by a computer and distributed to three systems of bizarre output devices that enable installation visitors to experience the messages sensorially. First, to 26 washbasins arrayed in a large oval; the number of basins is identical to the number of letters in the alphabet, and a different voice is assigned to each one. Built-in loudspeakers serially in tone the individual letters of the incoming e-mail.

Second, there’s a chorus line of 26 dancing skeletons;each skeleton wears a small poncho prominently displaying one of the letters of the alphabet. The individual letters of the message activate the corresponding skeleton and the chorus line’s dance reproduces the text of the e-mail.

And third, there’s a series of 26 electrolytic jars with metalelectrodes in the form of the letters A to Z that oscillate and bubble when electricity is passed through them and let the letters of the e-mail glow in color.

The system stores no information and has no data processing capabilities. If the signals are not observed, written down and interpreted, then the installation is the end of the line for messages that had traveled around the world to meet their demise here. The installation thus becomes an allegory for messages whose final destination is a total void —a phenomenon that has become a standard component of everyday life in the modern world. According to DeMarinis, “The Messenger” is based on early ideas about telegraphy and especially those of Catalan physician and naturalist Francesc Salva. He designed an “output device” for his telegraph equipment that involved an array of 26 servants who, following “stimulation” in the form of an electrical shock, would each call out a particular letter of the transmitted message, which could then be understood by a listener. The installation takes this as the point of departure for a consideration of the interrelationships between electricity and democracy, and how electronic communications technologies have led to loneliness and isolation just as they have contributed to the enrichment of our lives and experiences.  

“The Road Movie” by the Japanese artists group exonemo takes the Golden Nica in the Net Vision category.

“The Road Movie” is what might be called a mobile installation that originated in conjunction with a live project entitled “MobLab” in which young Japanese and German artists undertook encounters with art and communication during a journey by bus through Japan. While the group was traveling through a wide variety of landscapes, the webcam mounted on the bus produced five images of the surroundings every five minutes. The image files were uploaded to the Internet in the form of a piece of origami art.

canal*ACCESSIBLE was winner in the Digital Communities category

As its name suggests, canal*ACCESSIBLE addresses the accessibility or inaccessibility inherent in the topographical surroundings of people who have difficulty walking. The city of Barcelona is taken as an example. 40 handicapped individuals document the problems they encounter on their waythrough the city by using images and, in a few cases, sound recordings. This material is posted to the website, and the places at which each one was created are specified on a city map. These locations can then be accessed using a built-in “find” function. The result is a map of Barcelona’s inaccessibility for those confined to wheelchairs, a cartographic representation of the parts of town that are closed to people with handicaps. In this way, 3,336 architectural barriers and stumbling blocks have been documented on canal*ACCESSIBLE since December 2005 —thus, empowerment of disadvantaged segments of the population as something other than empty phrases for once.

The winning project in the u19– freestyle computing competition for young people was “Abenteuer Arbeitsweg,” an animated film by Alexander Niederklapfer, David & Magdalena Wurm and Ehrentraud Hager, Linz youngsters age 13 to 15. The project also featured a highly polished website including a trailer and a news service. 

images are copyright of ars electonica

Originally by Ruairi from Interactive Architecture dot Org on September 4, 2006, 6:12pm

Here are some images from the first flight of Open Burble by Usman Haque

images taken by Kiat Tan  

Originally by Ruairi from Interactive Architecture dot Org on September 4, 2006, 5:24am

(Click to listen to “Banksy’s own rudimentary composition,” That’s Hot)

Bristol, England “guerrilla graffiti” artist Banksy “smuggled 500 doctored copies of Paris Hilton’s debut album into music stores throughout the UK, where they have sold without the shops’ knowledge.

In place of Ms Hilton’s bubble-gum pop songs, the CDs feature Banksy’s own rudimentary compositions. On the cover of the doctored CD, Ms Hilton’s dress has been digitally repositioned to reveal her bare breasts; on an inside photo, her head has been replaced with that of her dog.”

(More pics here)

A copy of the fake CD sold for $750 on ebay.

Here’s Banksy in action:

(NSFW)

Thanks to stereogum and freakgirl.

Originally from I’m Just Sayin’ on September 5, 2006, 11:46am