FOURWALLING

walk the edit

2012-01-25T23:51:00.000-08:00

"‘Walking the Edit’ enables you to ‘walk a movie’ based on the shared audiovisual pieces that are virtually existing around us." walk the edit website, via nearfuturelaboratory

you are listening

2012-01-23T17:49:00.000-08:00

"You are Listening To is a website that mixes live streams of police radio chatter from New York, Los Angeles and other North American cities with SoundCloud ambient radio, creating a chilling score to accompany images of nighttime cityscapes." via architzer blog

amorphic robot works

2012-01-20T21:47:00.000-08:00

"The Inflatable Architectural Body.... attempts to further develop the Inflatables technology while creating a new dialogue between man, machine, and architecture. In this work, I am modeling nature on a microscopic, fractal level. It comprises a system of plug-and-play, inflatable, musculoskeletal modules which allow me to design a series of transformative organic structures influenced by the exhibition space." Chico MacMurtie, ARW website

bluebrain central park

2011-12-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

"Clamp on headphones, start up the iPhone app by the musical duo Bluebrain and walk into Central Park. The music does not begin until you pass through an entrance and head into the trees. Then it sounds like an orchestra tuning up, a chaotic jumble of wind chimes, electronic moans and discordant strings. Push farther into the park, and a sweet violin melody emerges over languid piano chords." James McKinley Jr. from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/arts/music/bluebrains-app-central-park-listen-to-the-light.html

david letellier

2011-12-07T08:40:00.000-08:00

"Versus is a sound installation consisting of two kinetic sculptures placed face to face. Each sculpture is made out of 12 triangular panels, hinged and powered by six linear actuators, controlled by a specific program. At the center of each corolla, a loudspeaker and a microphone allow to play and record sounds." david letellier

Zimoun

2011-11-14T20:53:00.000-08:00

«Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of curiously collected material, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life. Carrying an emotional depth, the acoustic hum of natural phenomena blends effortlessly with electric reverberation in Zimoun's minimalist constructions.» bitforms nyc image: 25 prepared dc-motors, wire isolated 1.2mm, Zimoun Website

5 stones

2011-10-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

"kymapetra consists of 5 stones arranged in a crescent around a central basin filled with water. The spectator, laying his hand on top of a stone resonates with her. The rustling body / matter is transformed into sound vibrations. They become visible on the surface of the water in a myriad of ripples. The propagation of acoustic vibrations on the surface of the water then draws a geometric composition consists of hollow bellies. The figures vary depending on the intensity of the contact person and stones." www.scenocosme.com (via google translate)

wifi painting

2011-10-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

"WiFi uses high frequency radio to set up a data connection between a base station and device with a WiFi receiving antenna. The WiFi signal strength describes how much of the radio waves that the base station beams off that is received by the mobile device. What you see in the light-paintings is the signal strength of a WiFi network represented as a light-painted graph." Oslo School of Architecture (Yourban), via Space and Culture

rooftop qr code

2011-10-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

"Phillips & Co.’s new proposition, called Blue Marble, offers a “space-accessible profile” for businesses, cities, schools — anyone who wants to raise their profile. In addition to catching the attention of the odd plane passing by, Phillips says in a statement that Google Earth has been downloaded 400 million times and “by integrating a readable code into the space-accessible profile, mobile users can access dynamic marketing programs, videos, digital coupons and other content while viewing the specific geographical location.” via mashable, Todd Wasserman

achim wollscheid

2011-09-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

redlight haze: "A portion of the facade is overlaid with a grid of red LEDs, which change lightness or pattern according to real-time sound analyses. This interface between architecture and the by-passers is created by the relationship between common sound sources (the voices of passers-by, the noise generated by local traffic) and the programme that regulates the transformation." selektion.com

Apo33

2011-09-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

"Le poulpe (the octopus) is an analogical and digital organism living in a network. Each branch constitutes a sonic installation which, out of a specific location, collects its own locally generated sound effects, transforms them via a digital automaton into a new arrangement of sounds. The outcome is then broadcast locally, through loud speakers, and on the Net, through streaming. Le Poulpe belongs in the city, where people live and make noise. It gives a virtual body to this city, expressing through sounds its invisible mouvements and its continuous flows." Apo33

coincidence engines

2011-05-28T23:54:00.000-07:00

"Coïncidence Engines, by the Quebecois [The User], with its 1240 radio alarm clocks — beyond its obvious homage to Ligeti’s metronomes — provides an interesting perspective on working in a duo. With the diversion of their materials, via the prism of new technologies and the new social relations they create, and the poetic overlapping of structure, space and sound, the aesthetic and exploratory universe of [The User] has discovered an ideal configuration for new growth."via Digital art i

tessel

2011-05-28T23:21:00.000-07:00

"The installation is constituted of a suspended and articulated topography of 4 x 2 m, subdivided into forty triangular mirrors. Twelve triangles are fitted with motors and eight triangles are equipped with audio transducers, which transform the surface into a dynamic sonic space. A dialogue between space and sound is created as the surface slowly modifies its shape, our perception of it altered through continuously changing light and sound reflection." d Letellier via LAb au

nine bells

2011-05-28T23:07:00.000-07:00

"Composed in 1979, Nine Bells explores the multiple combinations of 9 suspended bells in a 3×3 grid, each bell situated 6 feet from its neighbors. The music is produced by pealing the bells following precise walking paths around the installation. The piece induces a lot of walking around, more or less rapidly, and the sound of footsteps is an integral part of this recording." Tom Johnson, via continuo

field studies

2011-03-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

"Sound, harmony and music are intimately connected with culture and the question of good and bad sound is politically charged. Each revolution has its own music. If we listen, rather than look, there is a whole new and curious world to be discovered..... How can listening to the city and working with recorded sound become part of the creative process of making architecture?" via field-studies.org (london metropolitan university) image, Marc Behrens

the political economy of music

2011-03-13T23:35:00.000-07:00

"Attali's essential argument in Noise: The Political Economy of Music is that music, as a cultural form, is intimately tied up in the mode of production in any given society. For Marxist critics, this idea is nothing new. The novelty of Attali's work is that it reverses the traditional understandings about how revolutions in the mode of production take place." jameson via wikipedia, noise:the political economy of music (image: thurston moore, brooklynpaper)

Arsenij Avraamov

2011-03-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

"During the early Soviet era many artists attempted to integrate technology and creativity; Avraamov's work typifies this trend. He invented a graphic-sonic art which was produced by drawing directly onto magnetic tape. He also sought to overcome equal temperament and tonality by his creation of an ‘ultrachromatic’ 48-tone system. This method was proposed in a thesis entitled Universal'naya sistema tonov (‘The Universal System of Tones’) and was realized in his demonstrations which took place in 1927 in Berlin, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. He is considered a precursor of the musique concrète movement with his Simfoniya gudkov (‘Symphony of Factory Sirens’) which was performed in Azerbaijan in 1923 and later in Moscow." via sonification.eu

temporary personal urbanisms

2011-02-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

"PDPal is a public art project built around the PDA (personal digital assistant), using it as a mediating and recording device that reactivates our everyday actions, transforming them into a dynamic portrait of our urban experience." via eyebeam

hide and seek

2011-02-13T18:07:00.000-08:00

"Hide&Seek make social games and playful experiences. We expand the boundaries of play, reaching out into public space, new technologies, culture and media." hideandseek.net

blinkenlights

2011-02-05T13:23:00.000-08:00

"Blinkenlights, a large-scale installation created by the German hacker organisation Chaos Computer Club, first appeared on the Haus des Lehrers (House of Teachers) building at a public square in Berlin. It transformed that building into a giant computer screen, using the lights in 144 rooms (controlled via a switchboard) as ‘pixels’ to create simple animations and play ‘movies’. Participants and passers-by could then submit their own animations via their mobile phone which were displayed on the ‘screen’. Later, on the installation located at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, participants could use their mobile phones to play arcade games on the building’s facade." D Leorke, Locative Gaming and the Global City

soundwalk

2011-02-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

"Audio Tours for People Who Don't Normally Take Audio Tours. An innovative product appropriate to this new millennium, Soundwalk is a new form of media, whereas one virtually interacts with his or her surroundings. How is it done? Easy, you purchase the walk, go to the starting point, put your headphones on, press play, start walkin..." soundwalk website

betaville

2011-01-30T15:40:00.000-08:00

"“A living city is always in Beta. Let’s play.” That is the tagline of Betaville, a new “open source, multi-player environment for real cities” and the mantra of its developer, Carl Skelton, director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (BxmC) at NYU Poly" via urbanomnibus

urban informatics

2011-01-29T11:27:00.000-08:00

"So what exactly is urban informatics? Roughly said, the field includes a wide array of computation practices that are related to the shaping of city life. Topics vary from integrated software solutions that optimize high way traffic flows to the design of ‘smart public spaces’ to ‘citizen science’ projects that map pollution in a city neighborhood. Yet, urban informatics is not the same as urban computing. It is not so much about the technology (computing), but rather about its implications for (human) city life" Martijn de Waal (mobile city) image via Nicolas Nova

louisiana walk

2011-01-27T15:34:00.000-08:00

"This is the first walk that really became a filmic soundtrack and it created a format or style that I have been experimenting with ever since. The narrative uses the device of a man offsite watching a surveillance video of a woman walking in the garden. This woman, my voice, communicates with him through the image he sees." from www.cardiffmiller.com

Max Neuhaus

2011-01-27T15:26:00.000-08:00

"The first performance was for a small group of invited friends. I asked them to meet me on the corner of Avenue D and West 14th Street in Manhattan. I rubber-stamped LISTEN on each person's hand and began walking with them down 14th Street towards the East River." from www.max-neuhaus.info

aether9

2011-01-27T15:01:00.000-08:00

"Aether9 is a collaborative art project exploring the field of realtime video transmission. It was initiated in May 2007 during a workshop at the Mapping Festival in Geneva, Switzerland. Developed by an international group of visual artists and collectives working in different locations (Europe, North and South America) and communicating solely through the Internet, Aether9 is a framework for networked video/audio performance, and the collaborative development of dramarturgical rules particular to Internet modes of communication." aether9.org

loca lab

2010-11-21T17:12:00.000-08:00

"Loca: Set To Discoverable enables people to question the networks they populate, and to consider how the trail of digital identities people leave behind them can be used for good or ill. It asks what happens when it is easy for everyone to track everyone, when surveillance is possible using consumer level technology within peer-to-peer networks without being routed through a central point?" loc lab

walkspace

2010-11-21T17:05:00.000-08:00

"A walk route is generated based on your current location. Each walk has waypoints along the route and as you navigate your route you will be given the option to take a photograph at each one which will then appear as a pop-up on tapping the waypoint pin. When the walk is completed you can share a map of the route of your walk and the photographs you took along the way by email." walkspace.org

the silence

2010-11-21T16:59:00.000-08:00

"Launched at the Sonic Arts Expo and a pilot study in Boulder, Colorado. It enables you to capture and share your sonic experiences. You can record and collect sounds, create and share soundwalks and soundscapes, and use them as conversation pieces of a social dialogue about the places and communities in which we live and that we share. The result is an affective geography that changes over time according to participants' perceptions and interpretations of their environmental settings."

Thrift _ Beyond Mediation

2010-10-01T23:45:00.000-07:00

Nigel Thrift
Beyond Mediation: Three Material Registers and their Consequences

"Though it is true that the surfaces of materiality are being changed in line with the interests of the powerful, I hope to have shown... that what is actually emerging is something much less direct and much more nuanced, a materiality which still retains spaces for contingency, complexity, and a sense of wonder." three material registers, p249

field works

2009-10-26T12:25:00.000-07:00

"Field-Works" is a series of projects which reconstrusted collective memories into cyberspace as a kind of video archive by using position data captured by GPS and moving image captured by Video." a Masaki Fujihata project

digital street corner

2009-10-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

“The DIGITAL Street Corner” is not the kind of artwork that one simply looks at on the wall of a gallery or a museum. It’s an interactive environment that one can enter and explore from anywhere in the world. It’s an open window to an artistic net/work co-created in real time by people on the Internet." fredforest, www.webnetmuseum.org

hyperhabitat

2009-10-17T17:06:00.000-07:00

"Just like a digital network is made of nodes and connections, Guallart's model is a large-scale attempt to have all the elements of the physical world communicate with each other. The house functions as a small ecosystem, where each object is a piece of a widely distributed intelligence, able to interact with the others. Architecture becomes the interface that enables us to inhabit the world." Regine, WeMakeMoneyNotArt

spatial information structures

2009-10-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

"The impact of new information technologies on living space is explored here. We will construct real-scale prototypes in order to experiment with the integration of communication technologies into the physical spaces of the domestic environment by means of new interfaces using advanced data networks, integrating information into everyday life and approaching the construction of new spatial and information structures through the optimum combination of intelligent logic and physical form." Metàpolis / MIT Media Lab / Fundació Politècnica de Catalunya / Escola Elisava / I2Cat.

place blogger

2009-10-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

"Placeblogger is a site where you can search for local sources of news, information, and community near where you live, work and travel." placeblogger.com

place and memory

2009-10-11T18:43:00.000-07:00

"The Place + Memory Project is recreating those places from our past that made their mark on us–but no longer exist." placeandmemory.org

networked cultures

2009-10-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

"Networked Cultures investigates the cultural transformations under way in Europe through examining the potentials and effects of networked spatial practices. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London, the project collaborates with art, architectural and urban practices across Europe and beyond to look at ways in which contested spaces allow for a multi- inhabitation of territories and narratives across cultural, social or geographic boundaries." networkedcultures.org

tactical media

2009-09-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

"Tactical media plays with “the ambiguity of more or less isolated groups or individuals, caught in the liberal-democratic consensus, working outside the safety of the Party or Movement, in a multi-disciplinary environment full of mixed backgrounds and expectations.” It is also “about the art of getting access, hacking the power and disappearing at the right moment.” While “tactical media are opposition channels, finding their way to break out of the subcultural ghetto” it is also “a deliberately slippery term, a tool for creating ‘temporary consensus zones’ based on unexpected alliances." McKenzie Wark, Realtime Arts

sense of direction

2009-09-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

"...Birds rely on the location of the sunset to deter-mine which way to fly. To maintain that heading throughout the night, they sense the Earth's magnetic field, just like a pilot uses a compass at night or in bad weather. "It is the simplest and most foolproof orientation mech-anism we can imagine," Wikelski said." by Steven Schultz

wayfinding

2009-09-17T15:22:00.000-07:00

"The ideal wayfinding system dissolves into behaviour. It requires no inputs, and automatically knows our location and destination. Its feedback to us can take the form of subtle visual, audible or tactile cues – highlighting the path ahead on some display, or even providing a gentle tap on the shoulder when we move in the wrong direction." Johnny Holland.org

pachube

2009-09-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

"Pachube is a web service available at http://www.pachube.com that enables you to store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world. Pachube is a convenient, secure & scalable platform that helps you connect to & build the 'internet of things'." uh@pachube

pervasive information systems

2009-08-02T03:34:00.000-07:00

"... digital activity is a layer in interface with the city. It’s not a separate virtual space, as some seem to think, but it’s augmenting our physical space. As he points out, we’re hardly going to change or destroy all these existing buildings and spaces anytime soon – urban form just doesn’t change that quickly, but the profound changes in the way cities feel and function may be in this internet-enabled informational layer." Dan Hill, City of Sound (Carlo Ratti Associati)

street theater

2009-07-29T00:11:00.000-07:00

"NIGHT LIGHTS... pioneers the concept of a drive in stage... Drama by founder of Teatro Patologico portrays a precarious liaison between a female University professor and a male ex-convict in an urban street. Audience will view the live action from parked cars, listening with headsets." teatropatalogico.org

free visible network

2009-07-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

"The Free Network Visible Network project, propose to make visible the interchanged information between computers of a wireless network connected to Internet. The main objective is to ask for the free access to the net and at the same time to make actions in the urban landscape as a way to create new meanings in the public domain. Our intention is to contribute to the re-definition and re-vitalization of the concept of public space through the creation of visible connectivity networks that mix the physical public space with the digital public space." lalalab.org

the unworkable interface

2009-06-13T20:56:00.000-07:00

"The notion of the interface becomes very important for example in the science of cybernetics, for it is the place where ﬂesh meets metal or, in the case of systems theory, the interface is the place where information moves from one entity to another, from one node to another within the system. " Alexander Galloway, The Unworkable Interface

cybernetic future

2009-04-30T23:53:00.000-07:00

"Beesley is more concerned with modeling organic systems of behavior—processes of “communication and control,” to borrow a phrase from the cyberneticists of the 1940s and 50s.... This work is not meant merely to be looked at, but rather to act directly on the human occupant, evoking instinctive emotional responses." Joseph Clarke

anthony mcall

2009-04-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

"In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection. The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms." Serpentine Gallery

jenny everywhere

2009-04-19T23:46:00.000-07:00

"Jenny Everywhere is described both as existing in every reality and being able to shift between realities. This gives the character the ability to be inserted into the continuity of any existing or new work, such as various comics or webcomics. The concept may also be extended to other media as well." wiki

Corpus Extremus

2009-04-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

"Stelarc’s video is one the more grisly highlights of “Corpus Extremus (LIFE+),” an exhibit about the wonders and horrors of “PostNatural History,” and the ways in which technology is blurring the traditional notions of life, death and identity." Dennis Overbye, nytimes

www.exitart.org/corpusextremus

hyperlocal

2009-04-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

“Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.” Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation

relational effects

2009-03-25T12:27:00.000-07:00

"Proponents of Actor Network Theory (ANT) such as John Law (2002) and geographers such as Nigel Thrift (1996) have long argued that there are two basic approaches to space. One sees space as a container pre-existing the entities within it, and can be recognised as the projection familiar to Euclid, Descartes and what - for lack of a better word - could be termed as "the common sense opinion". Space here plays the role of a referential context - each entity within it is a priori defined byits reference to the spatial context - serving as an absolute determinant of the relations performed within. In other words,space is viewed as always primary to any relations that might be observed. The second approach in turn, sees space as a performative effect of the relations between entities... the relational attachments between entities perform the space, not vice versa. While the first projection sees space as a static referential context, the second sees space as a dynamic relational effect." Teodor Mitew

database logic and landscape art

2009-03-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

"For Delanda and before him Deleuze, virtuality is not merely a contemporary artifact of computation, but rather identifies the proximity of concrete attractors, realities which attract the actualization of systems, and which for Delanda replaces essences in philosophy. It is specifically because the virtual is real (or more real than real) that it can be explored computationally, where for example Plato's ideal forms simply can not be computed. In other words, virtuality implies a relationship to the actualization of systems in concrete terms, not transcendental terms." Brett Stalbaum

locative situations

2009-03-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

"During the last museum night in Amsterdam the Amsterdam architecture institute Arcam decided to have an evening about the situationists. Apparently the Dutch situationist Constant had (co-)written a pamphlet fifty years earlier about his ideal city. The pamphet, it was revealed, could just as easily be interpreted as a joke instead of as an actual serious statement. Those silly situationists, always up to mischief." tijmen

hole in wall

2009-02-22T23:47:00.000-08:00

"Dr. Mitra heads research and development at NIIT, a leading computer software and training company in New Delhi. Just outside his office is a wall that separates his air-conditioned 21st-century office from a slum. Mitra decided to place a high-speed computer in the wall, connect it to the Internet, and watch who, if anyone, might use it. To his delight, curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine. "When they said, 'Can we touch it?'" Mitra recalls, "I said, 'It's on your side of the wall.' The rules say whatever is on their side, they can touch, so they touched it."" via frontline/world Rory O'Connor

meta meta

2009-02-16T23:12:00.000-08:00

"The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it? The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous." Jaron Lanier via edge.org

telepathic infrastructure

2009-02-16T22:43:00.000-08:00

"Alongside this shift towards a more information-based, ephemeral physical city, the emergence of telepathic infrastructures is rapidly codifying, embodying and annotating what was once the most ephemeral aspect of urban living – social networks. And thus we’re seeing intense internal conflict as telepathic individuals augmented by these new technologies struggle to understand their identity within a world where every social action and relationship is recorded and visible." Anthony Townsend. via ubiwar.com

cognitive map

2009-02-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

"The new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion." Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

cloudmakers

2009-02-15T13:18:00.000-08:00

"....Cloudmakers was founded as a discussion group for the interative web game centered around the film A.I. We officially solved the game on July 24, 2001. Though the original game, The Beast, has ended, Cloudmakers now serves as a clearinghouse for online gaming...." cloudmakers.org

hole in space

2009-02-09T22:02:00.000-08:00

"Suddenly head-to-toe, life-sized, television images of the people on the opposite coast appeared. They could now see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk. No signs, sponsor logos, or credits were posted -- no explanation at all was offered." ecafe/1980

video environment

2009-02-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

"V1B3 is an artist-led project that explores the impact of media in the built environment through curated site-specific interventions, presentations and published documentation." www.v1b3.com

Christian Moeller

2009-02-09T12:42:00.000-08:00

"Christian Moeller is an artist working with contemporary media technologies to produce innovative and intense physical events, realized from handheld object to architectural scale installations. Over the past two decades, his body of work represents one of the original and most complex investigations of what is possible to be revealed by the intersections of cinema, computation, music and physical space" www.christian-moeller.com

experimental geography

2009-02-08T18:39:00.000-08:00

"Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide and possibly make a new field altogether. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer units, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography created by 19 artists or artist teams from six countries as well as the United States." Rochester Art... image: Ilana Halperin

here here here

2009-02-06T18:41:00.000-08:00

"Drawing with chalk and the aid of a GPS receiver, Pete Gomes outlines shadows, persons, trash bags, etc.; marks territories and defines borders for things both temporary and permanent. All while dutifully chalking latitude and longitude. In these often large scale and impermanent drawings, he points to the variable nature of position over time, unseen power structures and the arbitrary relationship between the physical world and the coordinate system." Bleecker, Knowlton

panoramic perspectives

2009-01-31T23:19:00.000-08:00

"Suppose we could represent at once the abstract patterns of movement and the particular journeys, searches, and tours that motivated individual experience. Suppose the structuring elements of this hypertext were Lynch's various paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks, the features around which so many spatial stories arise and play themselves out. Suppose this artist were to construct the perfect model of the urban experience, one that was truly totalizing in its perspective. Could we as spectators comprehend such a story? Would we have time or the interest to experience the complex interweavings of its various plot strands? Could we feel its rhythms and witness the unfolding of random chance, romantic predestination, and urban indifference? Could we stand over the sum total of human experience as if it were a panorama or a picture postcard? This would be a truly celestial --and inhuman-- perspective." Henry Jenkins

streetfilms

2009-01-31T22:45:00.000-08:00

A collection of films on streets and the people that traverse and inhabit them. streetfilms.org

year zero

2009-01-19T21:25:00.000-08:00

"Let's make this just a snapshot of something. And they came up with the mechanism, the fiction of a 20th of a second of the Internet got sent back in time and landed on our Internet. And what was nice about that was it eliminated progression of story. It eliminated the narrative." Trent Reznor

soundscapes

2009-01-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

"The Silence of the Lands enables participants to map and annotate the soundscape of urban and natural environments. Participants can record and collect ambient sounds, create and share acoustic cartographies, and use them as conversation pieces of a social dialogue about the places and communities in which they live. The result is an affective geography that changes over time according to participants' perceptions and interpretations of their environmental settings." thesilence.org

gps film

2009-01-18T23:06:00.000-08:00

"GPS Film is a new way of watching a movie that’s based on the viewer’s location. The system is a new media artwork from Scott Hessels and is released as an open source application that runs on any GPS-enabled mobile phone or PDA." gpsfilm.com

roadsworth

2009-01-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

Peter Gibson, aka Roadsworth, was recently commissioned by a Montreal neighborhood association to help revitalize the area, known as Saint-Pierre. The work symbolizes the ties between local residents that are the strength of the isolated community. The anchor points, which are painted on benches, garbage cans and flower boxes, symbolize people’s attachment to their neighbourhood. (brandavenue)

recollector

2008-12-16T00:19:00.000-08:00

(re)collector is a public art installation that generates films by using Cortazar’s story as a template. A network of cameras is installed around the city, programmed to recognize ‘cinematic behaviors’ corresponding to sequences in ‘Blow Up’, Antonioni’s film adaptation of Cortazar’s story. James Coupe

wi form

2008-11-28T14:51:00.000-08:00

"...As well as photo-essays, videos and in-depth interviews with users, and relating to this idea of making the invisible, visible, I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user (in this case a MacBook laptop and a Nokia e65 mobile phone), I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library."

mobile performance group

2008-11-15T17:07:00.001-08:00

"Mobile Performance Group is a collective of new media artists interested in finding new ways to present art outside of traditional venues. MPG disseminates their work by using automobiles, video projection, cell phones, FM transmission, wireless hotspots, and any other technologies that allow artist to engage the public." Matt Roberts

sound sculpture

2008-11-14T14:08:00.000-08:00

"The central theme of sound sculpture is a synthesis of questions that inevitably emerge when architecture and sound share a context: the creation of permanent forms through transient sounds and the deconstruction of time through space and form." Dana Karwas and Liubo Borissov

collaborative mapping

2008-11-14T12:01:00.000-08:00

GeoSIM (Geo Social Image Mapping) is an urban sensing system with which a group of individuals with camera-equipped mobile phones participate in collaborative/social mapping of the urban image (i.e., the texture of the urban environment) at some target geolocation. The participating group, which may either consist of dedicated individuals or the general public, manually capture geotagged images of the urban environment. The collected images are progressively used for documentation of the dynamic urban image in multiple spatial resolutions at different times.

participatory sensing

2008-11-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

"urban sensing is about people like you—equipped with today’s mobile + web technology—systematically observing, studying, reflecting on, and sharing your unique world. through discovery and connected participation, you can see the world anew. you can tell your local story. you can make change." urban sensing, ucla

gps workshop

2008-11-10T22:32:00.000-08:00

"Projects include tracking people's movements/average speed over a day or year- information collected by gps device (data record):- longitude- latitude- time- direction- altitude- speed."

spectropia

2008-11-09T14:47:00.000-08:00

"Spectropia is a hybrid work combining a theatrical event with a video game for multiple players. Motion detectors and voice recognition devices activate the video segments and soundtrack. During public screenings of the film, two tutor-players control the console and simultaneously affect the parts of the story attributed to the characters from the 20th and 21st centuries. The installation consists of several levels of interaction since the audience is asked to join in. Participants are therefore able to converse with the characters, share in their private thoughts and enjoy a panoramic view of the action. The video images are projected onto several screens arranged in an arc in front of the audience." Vincent Bonin

mediascapers

2008-11-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

"Grab your GPS and get out of the car. Look at it. It still knows where you are, right? Walk to the end of the parking lot. When you get there — instead of Turn left or Turn right — you'll discover a whole new dimension to reality. Mediascapes are rich in interactivity — full of sound and music, images and text, videos and animation, narrative and dialog, all embedded in the space where you’re standing."

Defamiliarizing Film

2008-11-02T18:08:00.001-08:00

"Defamliarizing the familiar by granting technology and pop culture equal privilege in artistic production, Grey points the way to new forms of cultural expression that he himself pioneered. True to form, Grey riffs on biology in 'Reentry,' 'a silent cellular film visualizing past, present, and future simultaneously within a matrix of animation cells forming the larger body of another film." Peggy MacKinnon

iphone camera view

2008-10-29T18:52:00.000-07:00

"Here is the source code to the cameraViewer. It’s ALPHA and not the greatest code, I only spent an hour throwing it together, so if anyone wants to help out and make it better, feel free. The concept is simple, when you load the main page “cameras.html” it pulls the images from your server." mavromatic tech blog

urban eye

2008-10-28T23:19:00.000-07:00

"A further perspective of understanding the increasing use of CCTV is the current trend of commodification urban space. Its increasing employment is described as part of a broader transformation of contemporary cities throughout Europe. Within the reconstruction of the old industrial to the new post-fordist city, which is characterised not by a mixture of functions, but first by the management of leisure and consumption, CCTV is understood as a tool of economic restructuring space." CCTV in Europe (#15,p21)

public surveillance

2008-10-28T22:59:00.000-07:00

"Surveillance of the public now extends well beyond video cameras to include vast systems of identification, data monitoring, and tracking. Public surveillance technologies are increasingly embedded in urban infrastructures, transportation systems, cell phones, identification documents, computer programs, televisions, medical and consumer products, and much more. Perceiving everyday technologies as “surveillance” requires a shift in dominant perspective, drawing attention away from supposedly isolated artifacts or experiences and toward larger socio-technical assemblages and power relations." Vanderbilt

hole in the wall

2008-09-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

"Whereas many artists... were working to metaphorically "break down" the limits of the gallery wall, Gary Hill, in his first video installation, did so concretely. Using a video camera, Hill framed part of the surface of an outside wall to the same size as a monitor. He then recorded himself as he cut into the various layers of the wall until he broke through to the other side. The videotape of that process was then replayed on a monitor placed in the hole he had created." Cleveland Museum of Art

the emancipated spectator

2008-09-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

"We should never forget this first statement of the issue which still underpins in fact all the critiques of theatre and all the wills to change theatre. Theatre is the transmission of the disease of passivity through the disease of looking. It is easy to find this original pattern underpinning theories as different as Brecht’s epic theatre or Artaud’s “theatre de la cruauté” . What Brecht stigmatizes is the theatrical illusion which keeps the spectator in a state of hypnotism and passivity. And he calls for an active spectator, meaning a knowledgeable spectator who refuses identification takes distance from what he sees and asks why it is so . What Artaud disparages is a theatrical practice which leaves the spectator untouched, passive. And he calls for a spectator who becomes a participant in the magical or hypnotic process of identification. The solutions are opposing but they grapple differently with the same problem : turning the passive spectator- the spectator who only sees - into an active participant...." Jacques Rancière Frankfurt , August 2004

sleepwalkers in amsterdam

2008-09-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

"...Nearuki (sleepwalkers), a series of slowmotion videoes of people crossing a street (one of the sequences is also in Night for Day). It was interesting to see how the slow movements interacted with the busy indoor space, and how it reflected onto the city outside." 2007 hc gilje

relief projection

2008-09-10T23:30:00.000-07:00

"I think the most spectacular callibration solution so far is the “automatic projector calibration with embedded light sensors” (pdf), a collaboration between people from Carnegie-Mellon, Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab and Stanford. They use fiberoptics and light sensors built into the objects/surfaces to be projected on, and by projecting a series of grey coded binary patterns, a custom-made software is able to adjust the image in less than a second to perfectly fit the projectionsurface." 2008 — hcgilje

loca lab

2008-06-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

"In the inverted logic of the post-Orwellian city, Loca agents, software and human, decrypt the hertzian passages of its own inhabitants. For better or for worse?" - Steve Dietz, Artistic Director, ZeroOne, via localab

projection bombing tutorial

2008-06-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

"Outdoor digital projection in urban environments is a great method for getting your content up big before the eyes and in the minds of your fellow city inhabitants. This tutorial comes out of trial and error and it works. But please be careful. Helpful comments on safety and alternative methods are encouraged. The majority of this tutorial is aimed toward using a 2500 lumen projector (or smaller), if you have access to something more powerful you might want to skip straight to step 6." via instructables

free visible network

2008-06-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

"Spanish researchers Clara Boj and Diego Diaz are working on the Free Network Visible Network (04),, an augmented reality project which aims to make visible the exchanged information between computers of a wireless network. First marks in the facades of the buildings will indicate the presence of a node, thus the possibility of connecting to the net, and at the same time to see the 3D representation of the information that we are interchanging with this node in real time." via wemake$

augmented reality

2008-06-17T19:21:00.000-07:00

"Based on an augmented reality system, AR_Magic System allows users to exchange head with their neighbours. You stand in front of the computer screen, next to one or more persons and after a few seconds, your head appears on the shoulder of someone else and you get a new face yourself." via we make $

public space

2008-06-15T19:43:00.000-07:00

"Atomized spheres of influence: This street, bus stop, and library in San Antonio have no relation to each other except for a shared sense of emptiness. But if we look upon these elements as interrelated components of a single place, we create more opportunities for local people to collaborate and jointly create a vision of what's best for the community. How can the street, park, library, and businesses support and strengthen each other?" PPS Placemaking

urban play

2008-06-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

"The Stadtlounge's red surfacing flows over benches, tables, and art objects throughout the Bleicheli. (A playground-style surface is used in pedestrian areas, while car routes are paved in bright red asphalt.)" St Gallen Visitors...

metropolis now

2008-06-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

“The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. The task was too great. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” From Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” 1927. (via A.O. Scott, nytimes)

brainwave tracking

2008-06-08T17:17:00.001-07:00

"A new headset system picks up electrical activity from the brain, as well as from facial muscles and other spots, and translates it into on-screen commands. This lets players vanquish villains not with a click, but with a thought." Anne Eisenberg, NYtimes

set pixel

2008-06-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

"Untitled Mirror is a Processing based program that reads incoming video from a camera and triggers particles from points of the video frame that have changed by a certain level. The result is an image that is fairly representative, yet disappears within moments. An important part of this work is the fact that it keeps completely "silent" while no one is interacting with it: the screen remains white. In a sense, if there is no viewer, the work is invisible, and irrelevant. Thus, the role of the viewer is a fundamental one.

constructing situations

2008-06-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

“The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle — nonintervention — is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity. ...The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing ‘public’ must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, ‘livers,’ must steadily increase.” —Report on the Construction of Situations

pixel pour

2008-05-31T22:33:00.000-07:00

"A wonderful instance of hybrid realities. Here, of course, the pixels are materialized through some medium that is not electronic and the hybridity is more about a semantic cross-over from pixel worlds of electronic games to the real world." By Kelly Goeller — http://www. kellotron.com) via futurelab via... fourwall

semapedia tagging

2008-05-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

"With Semapedia you can hyperlink your physical world with knowledge that matters. To do this you create small Semapedia Tags consisting of a cell-phone readable 2D Barcode that will link others to the content you provide. Or put simply: Mark things like buildings, books, airplanes, cars or whatever with small Semapedia Tags that let others be a entry-point for more information." semapedia.org

wikiplaza paris

2008-05-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

"The public plaza (square) of the future will be like an active node of the Internet, like an Operative System, like a crossroad of flows, physical and mental, electronic and electromagnetic. The public square of the future will be a hybrid space inbetween the physical and the digital, with multiple layers; and it will be a space in permanent transformation, a social production resultant of the desires and activities of its multitudinar, nomadic, cyborg inhabitants. A space such as the situationists once imagined; but new." With Benjamin Cadon, Labomedia & Ewen Chardronnet

ecoboulevard

2008-05-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

"Each air tree is easy to assemble and move to other locations and it consumes only the energy it creates thanks to the use of photovoltaic technology. A system of evaporation and condensation provides the air conditioning and ensures that throughout hot Spanish summers the inside of the building is 8 to 10 grades cooler than the outside." via wemake$notart