gesture

"...the work of art, its very "formation", is based not so much on a model of creativity or construction, much less on one of expressivity, but rather on a process of separation, by which an intentional, teleological movement -call it a "plot"- is arrested, dislocated and reconfigured. Reconfigured as what? Precisely as gesture." Samuel Weber

doors and passages

"If anything is described by an architectural plan it is the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace it records--walls, doors, windows and stairs--are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited space." Robin Evans

wall of silence

"The installation tackles questions of control, surveillance, transparency, permanence and the role of the public. A high wall in the shape of a pentagon is erected on Vaterlandtorget square. It consists of a wooden frame with the sides covered in a material that will disintegrate during the course of the exhibition. Initially the wall is smooth, while the weather and the interactions of birds and passer-bys transform it over time. Writing on and penetration of the wall is encouraged." oslo.urban-interface.net

from work to text

"The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends... on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically speaking, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end...this passably empty subject strolls...on the side of a valley, an oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogenous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique..."

Roland Barthes, "from work to text"

Brian Eno and the "Quiet Club", Peter Suchin

fluid life

"If we say that "LIFE" was an experiment conducted in opera's linear, modern form at the end of the 20th Century, then the installation configuration of "LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible..." must surely be a non-linear, decentralized flow of audio and visuals which the visitors themselves enter to experience."

ambient music

"Writing in the 1960s, Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander argued that: Under present conditions men are beginning to lose the capacity to discriminate between sound and noise - between the desirable and the irrelevant...The problem of isolating undesirable sounds is technically so hard to solve that acoustics engineers now recommend the simpler expedient of providing artificial background noise in one's own domain as an acoustic cushion or muffler. Making more noise is the only economical way, apparently, of drowning out unwanted noise and of not being overheard. It seems that the illusion of quiet can only be maintained in noise." www.slashseconds.org

panoptic fantasy

"The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once.... Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower."
Tony Schultz, http://thewinger.com/words/category/tony/

sensual body

"The sensual body finds itself living amidst an expansive set of technologies. In this ever-evolving computational world we encounter texts of varying forms and functionalities -- visual, sonic, and code-related. Text may also take physical and/or environmental form. The continuum that bridges distributed bodies with the recombinant communicative and associative functionality of technology is charged with the potential of extending humankind's ability to experience, generate, operate on, store, edit, and disseminate meaningful patterns of experience."

unregulated urban landscapes

"Destruction of communities (foreign and local) are lamented and eulogised in the songs that follow, culminating in the album closer: an ode to the empty railyard terrain adjacent to the neighbourhood where the band, along with many other Montreal musicians and artists, have lived for a decade or more. This land is now being swallowed up by big box and condo development. This is Our Punk-Rock... addresses the local/universal demise of uncontrolled and unregulated urban landscapes -- a demise that stretches from the docile walls of superstore complexes and protest 'pens' in the West to outright military surveillance, harassment and murderous 'surgical' strikes by Western-backed armies in South America and the Middle East."

los angeles

"Last night, again, I dreamed
my children were back at home,
small boys huddled in their separate beds,
and I went from one to the other
listening to their breathing --- regular,
almost soundless --- until a white light
hardened against the bedroom wall,
the light of Los Angeles burning south
of here, going at last as we
knew it would." ralphmag.org

red wind

"Named after Southern California's Santa Ana Canyon and a fixture of local legend and literature, the Santa Ana is a blustery, dry and warm wind that blows out of the desert. In Raymond Chandler's story Red Wind, the title being one of the offshore wind's many nicknames, the Santa Anas were introduced as "those hot dry [winds] that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."

locative media

"Jeremy Hight, one the first locative media theorists, coined the term, "Narrative Archeology," a concept which became a corner stone of locative media. It refers to the process of peeling back layers of a place, and finding the stories underneath." photo:mlab.uiah.fi

los angeles

"If history is any guide, vast areas blackened in Greece's deadly wildfires eventually will sprout anew -- with luxury villas, fancy hotels and expensive vacation homes.
Among the most insidious triggers, according to officials and environmentalists, is a practice by unscrupulous builders of deliberately setting fire to forests to render the land available for development."

los angeles

"No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you're fine: that's just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both. That's how we dooz it." by Geoff Manaugh, BLDBLG

computer vision

"Messa di Voce, created by this article's author in collaboration with Zachary Lieberman, uses whole-body vision-based interactions similar to Krueger's, but combines them with speech analysis and situates them within a kind of projection-based augmented reality. In this audiovisual performance, the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are visualized and augmented in real-time by synthetic graphics."

immigration museum

"It’s hard to say who will go to the National Center at the moment, save for bored schoolchildren on compulsory field trips, although the place has the potential to be a constructive troublemaker. Mr. Toubon promises, in time, a program of events to add meat to the bare-bones display, which he says will also change. Clearly the place needs to do more than cheerlead, feign scholarly impartiality and make vague noises about past injustices to have any impact. It needs to try to steer a debate that is reshaping France and the rest of Europe."

dumb type

Founded in 1984, the artist collective Dumb Type is based in Kyoto, Japan. Members are trained in varied disciplines, including visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music composition and computer programming. Their work ranges across such diverse media as art exhibitions, performances, audiovisuals and publications.

the parking garage

"He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human. He encodes all this, or hardwires it, into the actual landscapes of his novels. You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilisation." Geoff Manaugh, BLDBLG "Too many car parks – always a sign of a troubled mind”. JG Ballard

ballard

Reality and fiction were crossing each other.

"Yes, they’d begun to reverse — the only point of reality was our own minds. It seemed to me that the only way to write about all this was to meet the landscape on its own terms. Useless to try to impose the conventions of the 19th-century realistic novel on this incredible five-dimensional fiction moving around us all the time at high speed. And I tried to develop — and I think successfully — a technique of mine, the so-called condensed novels, where I was able to cross all these events, at right angles if you like. Like cutting through the stem of a plant to expose the cross section of its main vessels. So this technique was devised to deal with this fragmentation and overlay of reality, through the fragmentation of narrative."

mediastorm

MediaStorm's principal aim is to usher in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media.

mologogo

Mologogo is a free service that will track you and your friends using GPS-enabled mobile phones.Use Mologogo to:

• See where you are and where you've been
• Find friends who are close by and chat with them
• Search for local points of interest
• Check real-time local traffic and weather
• Share your location info on blogs or web pages
• Post your location to Twitter
• And whatever else you dream up...

terminal beach

"This obsession with strange, liminal zones of possibility is explored often in Ballard’s short fiction, notably ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1963), These beach fictions, in which the beach is figured as a marginal zone: ‘I think the psychological role of the beach is more interesting. The tide-line is a particularly significant area, a penumbral zone that is both of the sea and above it, forever half-immersed in the great time-womb. If you accept the sea as an image of the unconscious, then this beachward urge might be seen as an attempt from the existential role of ordinary life and return to the universal time-sea’..."

ghostbustour

"Listen! do you smell something? Sites relevant to the original 'Ghostbusters' compose the tour path, with ... geography and history of New York comprising the tour. Watching film footage on a portable media device, while standing in the site of its creation some 20 years ago, 'media memories' become real memories and mediated experience becomes actualized. ghostbustour is an attempt to re-attach "media memories" with our real experience of space and time."

body augmentation

"Cyprus-born Stelios Arcadiou, known as Stelarc, says his extra ear, made of human cartilage, is an augmentation of the body's form."

sensescapes

"The study of ‘SenseScapes’ is a newly emerging interdisciplinary field focussing on sensorial studies of human interaction with physical environments. Challenging an ocular-centricism that arguably underpins much scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences, a new multi-sensory research agenda is being critically developed. The concept of ‘sensescapes’ incorporates the full range of sensory experience in the broadest range of disciplines as sensual experience is mediated through hearing, smell, touch, taste, as well as sight. Including the visual, the auditory, the olfactory, the gustatory and the haptic, the concept of sensescapes enables an interrogation of everyday life that incorporates the meeting of mind, body and environment."
Dr Mags Adams, senses and societY, senses and the city

sense of the city

"The most banal and ubiquitous phenomena," remarked curator and CCA director designate Mirko Zardini, "like asphalt, the second crust of the earth, cacophonies of everyday sounds and smells, competing light effects, manipulations of temperature and climate, heat and cold, the junk and graffiti that disfigure buildings and streets, as well as the subtle, mostly hidden signs of regeneration in the urban environment, will be presented through artefacts and images that collectively suggest the rich array of urban experiences and behaviours lying just beyond traditional interpretations of the city."

buildering

Main Entry: builder
Pronunciation: 'bil-d&r
Function: verb
Etymology: from boulder, to climb boulders.
Date: circa 1970
Synonyms: urban climbing, stegophilism

1. to climb a man-made structure, of which the design is for purposes other than climbing.

cartography

"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself."

Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra"

Tonic

"Sound installation transforming street noise into musical harmonics in real time. The sound of traffic resonates a 12-foot tuning tube on the wall just around the corner and the resulting harmonies are played from these two cement loudspeakers. There is no tape or CD. What you are hearing is the music hidden within the traffic's roar at this very moment."

2002. Bruce Odland, with Compound Design Collective

Urban Sampling

"For some," we read, "living in a city is a loud, unpleasant babble of intrusive noise. For others it is a soundscape of calming tones that lift the spirits and brighten the day. Now a £1m, three-year research project is building a database of noises that people say improve their environment. It will translate those findings into design principles to help architects create sweeter-sounding cities."

(photo:http://www.soundwalk.org/06photos/sw06Photos.html)

navigation

"Ipunkt is an interactive navigation interface and is an attempt to free control systems out of their static appearance focused on the individual needs of the users."
2006 by Jeffrey Gold & Oliver Ellger as a research project about navigation.

animal

"In other situations the concrete physiological borders are blurred. Wellknown anatomics are revised in a way that doesn’t quite correspond with knowledge aquired in primary school’s biology-classes. Troels Carlsen manipulates with genes resulting in a fusion between chimpansees and gibbons on one side and the human body on the other. This genetic hybrid makes it difficult to distinguish man from animal and animal from man."

death of affect

"As Marc Augé has said, ‘non places are the real measure of our time…. The airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets.’ ^[5] So the landscape of this utopia is dominated by unreal architecture, liminal zones of artificiality; and these regions of ontological uncertainty are dominated by an uncanny and perverse logic that manifests itself in both the landscape and the psyches of those contained within them- an unholy fusion of place and mind in which normalised notions of affective human relationships are distorted, undercut by the alienating environment."

Rick Mcgrath, Psychic Landscapes, Physical Environments

questioning the frame

"Terms such as “ mapping,” “borders,” “hacking,” “trans-nationalism,” “identity as spatial,” and so on have been popularized in recent years by new media theories’ celebration of “the networks”—a catch-all phrase for the modes of communication and exchange facilitated by the Internet. We should proceed with caution in using this terminology because it accords strategic primacy to space and simultaneously downplays time—i.e., history. It also evades categories of embodied difference such as race, gender and class, and in doing so prevents us from understanding how the historical development of those differences has shaped our contemporary worldview."

Coco Fusco, Questioning the Frame

locative media

"Broadly speaking, locative media projects can be categorized under one of two types of mapping, either annotative—virtually tagging the world—or phenomenological—tracing the action of the subject in the world. Roughly, these two types of locative media—annotative and tracing—correspond to two archetypal poles winding their way through late 20th century art, critical art and phenomenology, perhaps otherwise figured as the twin Situationist practices of dÈtournement and the dÈrive."

Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis

landscape

"Although Sian Pile's work is purely 'photographic', she presents - in almost minimalist style - a sense of gesture within the landscape. The red cordon ribbon holds nothing 'in' or 'out' other than the space it defines. The subject - as in other images of the same series - is not randomly chosen neither it is documentary in nature."

by sian pile, via axisweb.org

vito acconci

"I can't help being commited to words, narratives, movies, even though I no longer believe in them, superseded as they have been by numbers, equations, diagrams, graphs & models."

"autonomy can be an intention but never a goal. 'Belief' & 'Utopia' & 'Autonomy' might be the impetus for a design, but the finished design should never be 'believed' or 'Utopian,' and it can never be 'autonomous.' Design stops when people start; design is never the final solution, because the world gets in the way."

Vito Acconci, 32 magazine, issue 7

urban sketches

"A hidden camera records the space and its inhabitants the mirror like screen becoming the visual palette for an altered version of the captured reality. The volume of people, their movements and their spatial relationships generate the 'treatment' of the final piece. Watch yourself literally melt into the crowd, before bursting into fire and cruising down the street aflame."

urban samples

"It is as if we had wandered around a city, cutting sections from the urban environment and brought these fragments inside for exhibition. When touched or examined, the elements create music with the sound emanating from within the plinth itself. Each element creates a part of the sound environment and every experience is unique, as our generative programme creates new compositions based on location, pressure and duration."

Nadja

"The believing subject is stranded between two ideal points of a cause--effect sequence: the author and the text, or the author's intention and the text in which the intention is communicated. For Breton, the phantoms circulating in the area between the ostensibly stable poles of author and novel afford an ironic self-recognition. Breton's subject becomes a shuttlecock, batted between the cause and effect of the author and the text (or the text and the author). Although the notion of an author and a text may blur in the subject's confusion, this does not reflect merely a reversal of agency, but instead a complication of the preconditions necessary in speaking of Breton's subject. Subjectivity, or the self-recognizing "me," relies on this tension between the "I" (or the public, authoring self) and the text. For Breton, phantoms fluctuating between these formerly stable poles of subjective intent and textual product represent symptoms to be monitored in probing the subject."

Kendall Johnson, Haunting Transcendence

michael sheridan

Distant Views, Culture Catchers

"Installed as Distant Views for the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival and subsequently as Culture Catchers at the gallery G-A-S-P. Shortwave radios, digital recorders and players, motion detectors, micro computers and antennae were hung by suction-cups on a wall of windows or sheets of plexiglass. The movement of visitors triggers sounds from around the world to fill the environment and to be twisted together. At any one moment one might hear, for example, Persian music, Christian proselytizing and the day's news in Korean. They are a sequence of non-linear ideas that, with time, leave an impression of the continuous course of life that is speaking from all corners of the globe."

locative video

"The films can be seen as comments to process of place marketing and branding. In choosing the places, the aim has been to mix both geographical locations that are seen as tourist attractions and locations off the beaten track. In the digital manipulations, made by Anders Weberg, the visual raw material is transformed to highlight a dreamlike and surreal imaginary geography. All films are basesolely on sound and video from the different geographical points."

mobile and locative links

"i keep loosing track of, then stumbling across, then losing track of again dr reinhold grether's directory to mobile art and locative media. this is a great, probably canonical list of mobile and locative media art projects over the ages, or at least last several years."

julian bleecker (2006)

habitat perspectives

"The idea behind Habitat Perspectives is visualizing spatio-temporaly the places we inhabit. You will be able to follow the participants live, posting imagery to this application from the road through gps enabled mobile media. The target is to conceptualise how the perception of the city differs from participant to participant depending on their everyday habits. Though in a beginning only a black background will predominate in the application, as participants post more and more content, a map of the city, and the map of each of the participants "places" will slowly start emerging."

www.marumushi.com

geo reference photography

"The easiest way of linking photos to locations is to combine the time-stamps from both a digital camera and GPS receiver or other location-aware device. If this data is available (over the same period of time) it’s possible to process a series of images and location tracks to stamp each image with location metadata."

Timo Arnall,
http://www.elasticspace.com/tags/mapping

beyond locative media

"Locative media has been attacked for being too eager to appeal to commercial interests as well as for its reliance on Cartesian mapping systems, yet if these critiques are well-founded, they are also nostalgic, invoking a notion of art as autonomous from the circuits of mass communication technologies, which we argue no longer holds. This essay begins with a survey of the development of locative media, how it has distanced itself from net art, and how it has been critically received before going on to address these critiques and ponder how the field might develop."

Beyond Locative Media

by Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis