"Go to Haifa and play soccer with the first Palestinian boy you see on the street." emily jacir
interactive graphics
"Apart from video-cutting... this typo-animation is triggered by slow-motion movement of a dancer. There we go, a hi-res version using pixel-motion frameblending for nice slow-motion of lisa. The letters are actually generated by a program i wrote in vvvv. You simply feed in some video and according to the amount of bright pixels it will generate the typo animation. The letters are taken from the words ‘Ballett Kiel’ and ‘Mario Schröder’ to have some sort of relation." Wirmachenbunt ( Chris Engler)
Labels: dance, interface, motion graphics
drift net
"The motion of audience is analyzed and conveyed to the wave as the vector of the plural forces with location, direction and integer value. The audience is able to interact with data-wave without any device or physical limitation. It doesn't differ from dabbling in the actual beach. It is realized by original program with OpenCV". HIRAKAWA Norimichi
Labels: interactive, multi-place
click opera
"So I watched the Hide and Seek Festival documentary, which is an introduction to this thing we're going to call PUG, or pervasive urban gaming. What is PUG? According to the Sandpit site, "pervasive games transform the city into a playground, make your heart race, change the way you see the world, get you playing nicely with others". imomus, click opera (image:cliostraat)
Labels: pervasive urban gaming, play, situationist
constructed situation
"What is a situationist? It's a big question, but an initial answer would be: someone who constructs situations. And what's a "constructed situation"? Helpfully, the first issue of the Situationist International provided us with a glossary in order to resolve that question: it's a "moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a unitary environment and a game of events". Constructing a situation thus implies collective construction of a moment - collective involvement in and modification of all the aspects of a moment in time, from the decor to how those involved are acting....A situation in this sense is somewhere between - more precisely, somewhere beyond - art and politics. Where art is predicated on a division between art work and spectator, the situation demands total involvement in its construction and cannot allow spectatorship." Phil Edwards
Labels: construct, situationist, spectatorship
tentative architecture
"In 1960, Constant Nieuwenhuis presented an architectural and social utopia, New Babylon. In New Babylon work has given way to a nomadic lifestyle of creativity and play, and traditional architecture has disintegrated. It is a response to the urbanization of the city, an out lash to our exploitation by bourgeois and avant-garde high culture.... The architecture of these cultures, where all activity takes place, is the main antagonist to disappear in New Babylon. These anti-social spaces influence the behaviours of the inhabitants; therefore static architecture gives way to spontaneous spaces defined by interactions and desires." vague terrain: xárene eskandar
Labels: constant, tentative architecture, vague terrain, vj
automobile visualization
"Cascade on Wheels is a visualization project that intends to express the quantity of cars we live with in big cities nowadays. The data set we worked on is the daily average of cars passing by streets, over a year. In this case, a section of the Madrid city center, during 2006. The averages are grouped down into four categories of car types. Light vehicles, taxis, trucks, and buses."
Labels: automobiles, visualization
ballardian
"I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels." J G Ballard (bartlett unit15)
Labels: ballard, crash, slow space
expanded cinema
"When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded
consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films,
video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded
cinema isn't a movie at all: like life it's a process of becoming, man's
ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his
mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can specialize in a single
discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its relationships in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind." Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema... Image: Werner Herog, Fitzcarraldo
Labels: expanded cinema, herzog, media, network
wearable identity
"Man has been for ages carrying different objects with him, holding them, wearing them and taking them to where ever he goes. The advancements in technology has made it possible for him to carry various electronic devices with him. The birth of these portable devices posed a set of new questions on the relationship between an object and the person's body on or around which it is worn. In an era where gadgets are transcending the limits as a device and getting closer to reflect a person himself, the significance of how a device relates to its user is of great importance. Can an object represent an individual's identity and personality? Can it establish itself as a signifier of the person himself through its distinct use and the value associated to it?"
manifesto for cctv filmmakers
"The manifesto establishes rules, procedures, and identifies issues useful for filmmakers who want to the costs of creating a movie - by using images captured by CCTV cameras. Her text follows closely the Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998 and related privacy legislation that gives the subjects of data records access to copies of the data. The manifesto can be adapted for different jurisdictions. The artist demonstrated the validity of her manifesto with the movie Faceless... Under the DPA, one has the right to retrieve data which is held upon oneself, while the faces of anyone else captured on it have to be blacked out. She therefore claimed the as much CCTV footage of herself as she could and created a story set in the future, in the "faceless world" - with herself as the only woman with a face." we make money not art
Labels: cctv, street art, surveillance
light criticism
"Between October 2006 and December 2006, the City of New York has removed or obscured 59 illegal banners on sidewalk sheds. In that same period,
Citibank Chase was forced to remove all illegal sidewalk projections at branches around Manhattan. And now, years into NYC’s crackdown on graffiti writers and protesters, after we’ve watched our friends be detained, arrested, beat, fined, tried, and given real jail sentences, not a single corporate toy from any ad firm has had to do any time." graffiti research lab
Labels: graffiti research lab, outdoor advertising
building on cinematic vision
"Sonny Astani walked into a Westwood movie theater in 1985 and saw the film that changed his life: "Blade Runner," the science-fiction tale that imagined a dystopian Los Angeles where jet-powered cars zoom past skyscrapers covered with enormous, cinematic advertisements. Decades later, the Iranian-born businessman is determined to bring some of those futuristic images to life. His plan? Attach an animated sign 14-stories tall on the 33-story condominium project he is building in downtown L.A." David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times
Labels: blade runner, outdoor advertising, sonny astani
Akousmaflore
"Akousmaflore is a garden made with real musical and interactive plants or flowers. Each plant reacts to the human touch of a spectator by a specific sound language.Our aura is hot, electric and invisible. It can act here on the vegetable foliages by offering the experiment of a reactive environment. When the spectators caress the plants, they start to sing. Become sensitive musical instruments, they make it possible to compose a floral orchestration." scenocosme.com, thanks manuel
Labels: acoustic, biological, interactive
mediascapes design review
"The MediaSCAPES design studio final review took place on December 13, 2007. We were joined by a diverse range of critics attending from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco- Jason Anderson, Juan Azulay, Benjamin Bratton, Christian Bruun, Jean Michel Crettaz, Rene Daalder, Blair Ellis, Jeffrey Inaba, Carla Leitao, Marcos Novak, and Scott Perry." Ed Keller
Projects were presented by:
Kenneth Cameron. Nina Marie Barbuto & Bjork Christensen. Jordan Kanter, Arthur Switalski & Bao Quoc N. Doan. Christopher Norman. Guillermina Chiu & Sepehram Khamjani. Jihyeun Byeon. Saman Hosseini-Pou & Salman Masmouei. George Labeth. Hao-yun Ambrose Chuang. Valentina Vasi
Labels: gestural interface, thesis project
color like no other
"Y'know that bouncy ball add wasn't actually very original - every year at Reed College in Portland, OR (for as far back as anyone can remember bouncy balls) they've had a midninght "ball drop" down Woodstock Ave. in front of the college - it's an amazing experience and part of an even more amazing experience called Renn Fayre - which, despite the name is more like a techno-geek-mind-altering-drug event than a fantasy-D&D-fair." MOR, davidweiss.blogspot.com/
Labels: color like no other
Graziano Cecchini
"Mad-hatter artist Graziano Cecchini has struck again. The public-art prankster who filled the Trevi Fountain in Rome with blood-red dye last October released 500,000 brightly colored plastic balls Wednesday from the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome."
Labels: color like no other
wooster collective
The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.
Labels: ephemeral, street art
flow
"Flow 5.0 is an interactive sculpture made out of hundreds of ventilators which are reacting to your sound and motion. By walking and interacting an illusive landscape of transparancies and artificial wind is created. Moving through Flow 5.0 the visitor becomes conscious of himself as a body, in a dynamic relation with space and technology." Daan Roosegaarde
Labels: body, interactive, landscape
gravity and resistance
transarchitectural topography
"I will define transArchitectural Topography as the substrata or virtual/physical topography which underlie all connected virtual and physical spaces. transArchitectural Topography encompasses a physical location, virtual location(s), and any infrastructure that connects the two. Specifically, the transArchitectural Topography extends from a single physical space, into a single virtual space uniting the two."
michael ditullio, via marcos novak http://transtopography.blogspot.com
Labels: novak, transarchitecture, virtual space
double negatives
"An attempt to extract autonomous architecture responding to the environment through information network: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) holds a new installation“Corpora in Si(gh)te” by “doubleNegatives Architecture.” doubleNegatives Architecture is an architectural group who is engaged in crossover activities in a new area of architecture, making good use of various media and information technologies."
Labels: augmented reality, crossover, media
haecceity
"You are longitutde and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non subjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration) - a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at least you can have it, you can reach it." Delueze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
motion perception
"The simplification of space in Three Studies of Lucien Freud, (1969) is a necessary and typical element of all his images. With a more complex elaborated environment, the bodies would become more specifically disfigured rather than contorted by painterly motion being stretched towards its limit." Michael Betancourt ctheory.net
Labels: bacon, motion, painting, perception
contour
"The contour in Francis Bacon is what Deleuze describes as a "place of an exchange in two directions: between the material structure and the Figure, and between the Figure and the Field. The contour is like a membrane through which double exchange flows" (13). This exchange links the different aspects of the painting together in a way that subverts narrative: "If a painting has nothing to narrate and no story to tell, something is happening all the same, which defines the functioning of the painting" (13). The contour in Bacon's paintings establish a relationship through which things are linked together." Lindsey Collins nwe.ufl.edu
fourth dimension
"The third bridge between design and science fiction is based on the postulate of the existence of a fourth dimension, that of time, which, when associated with the other three dimensions, becomes a gateway to a parallel world. Breaches in space-time may be found through these “wormholes”, teleportation doors and other black holes. Neither anticipation nor prediction nor retro-future, these parallel worlds are juxtaposed with present reality." (image:AntFarm) via egodesign.com
Labels: ant farm, portal, science fiction, time
the new public
open work
"The poetics of the “work in movement”... sets in motion a new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience, a new mechanics of aesthetic perception, a different status for the artistic product in contemporary society. It opens a new page in sociology and in pedagogy, as well as a new chapter in the history of art. It poses new practical problems by organizing new communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art." Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work” (via "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" by Claire Bishop)
Labels: art, authorship, relational aesthetics
surveillance
"Surveillance cameras by necessity record interzones, the hot spots where crime might breed or deviance might spontaneously generate, in locations beyond the reach of our unenhanced optic nerves, or where everything and everyone has simply shut up shop. Business parks at night, city squares cast in gloomy shadow, empty swimming pools, the hooded entrances of hospitals, the city-like scale of airport perimeters, motorway feeder roads where human interaction is factored out of the landscape and the only transaction occurs between speed and machinery. Ballard’s work precisely records such territory, a rich topography inset with mysterious ley lines, weaving a grid to support shadowy lifestyles enacted far away from mainstream thought." Simon Sellars , ballardian.com SurveillanceSaver
Labels: privacy, public space, surveillance, urban space
concrete island
"As we drive across a motorway intersection, through the elaborately signalled landscape that seems to anticipate every possible hazard, we glimpse triangles of waste ground screened off by steep embankments. What would happen if, by some freak mischance, we suffered a blow-out and plunged over the guard-rail onto a forgotten island of rubble and weeds, out of sight of the surveillance cameras?" J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Concrete Island, 1994
lab[au]
"Instead of considering this infrastructure as a flat screen (surface) displaying pre-rendered video loops, the project is working on the architectural characteristics of the tower and its urban context. The characteristics of the building; orientation, volume, scale... are used as parameters to set up a spatial, temporal and luminous concept, which moreover allows people to directly interact with the tower.." www.lab-au.com
Labels: interactive, public space, urban
surveillance
"Researchers and security companies are developing cameras that not only watch the world but also interpret what they see. Soon, some cameras may be able to find unattended bags at airports, guess your height or analyze the way you walk to see if you are hiding something..... "If you think of the camera as your eye, we are using computer programs as your brain", said Patty Gillespie, Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md. Today, the military funds much of the smart-surveillance research." Associated Press, msnbc
Labels: military, security, surveillance
big shadow
"Shadows of the participants movements are projected upon a massive wall of a building, 7-stories high. When participants perform particular actions such as raising their arms over their heads, a giant dragon shadow appears out of the participants' shadows."
Labels: advertising, interactive, play, public space
remix
"Remixability becomes practically a built-in feature of digital networked media universe. In a nutshell, what maybe more important than the introduction of a video iPod, a consumer HD camera, Flickr, or yet another exiting new device or service is how easy it is for media objects to travel between all these devices and services - which now all become just temporary stations in media’s Brownian motion." Lev Manovich
interception
"A surveillance camera being used to monitor public space was hijacked and reinstalled in a subway station. The camera was used intentionally to broaden consciousness concerning the problem of increasing lack of privacy. People entering and exiting the station were tracked by the camera,and their “capture” was projected on a station wall. The action was illegal." Roch Forowicz, via rhizome
Labels: private space, public art, surveillance
the logo
There is a growing relationship between the corporate logo and the religious symbol. Each symbol proposes a direct relationship with the entity that it represents. Mutilation of that representation is strictly prohibited. Whereas simply representing religious iconography can result in death, the use and abuse of a corporate logo can lead to innumerable lawsuits, bouts of unemployment and banishment to the fringe of capitalist culture. (photo courtesy of rhizome.org)
Labels: icon, logo, situationist, symbol
gesture
"Artist Christian Jankowski... noticed a Hula-Hooper practicing regularly on a rooftop across from his apartment on Division Street. He rang her doorbell; she introduced him to other practitioners, and a performance piece was born, with performers sharing coordinated gestures from blocks away. Whatever you call the results art, aerobics, dance it was one of the most thrilling sights I’ve seen in the city all year, and one of the most poignant. The choreographer Trisha Brown did a similar piece, minus Hula-Hoops, on the rooftops of SoHo just before that neighborhood was effectively lost to artists." Holland Cotter, NYtimes
Labels: art, gesture, performance
the culinary event
"The meal was open to just 40 people. They had to sign up before they could learn the address, that of a vacant bank in this city’s industrial-chic Georgetown neighborhood. Inside, a video projection played an endless loop of two women kissing. Diners sat at a long table lighted by votive candles and covered with a tablecloth made of blouses from the Salvation Army. As they passed dishes from “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,” guests read aloud from Gertrude Stein’s “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” David Hochman, NYtimes
Labels: communucation, culinary, events, food
walter murch
"On every film I try to think as deeply as I can about the implied acoustic space of each scene; I then try to tailor the reverberant quality of the sound, and the tonality, to the spaces that we’re looking at. It’s endlessly fascinating, particularly because this technique flies “below the radar” of the audience. The filmmaker can have an effect on the audience without the audience knowing where that effect is coming from. Which I would guess is something that architects enjoy playing with, too." Walter Murch, on BLDGBLOG... 4/6/07
winer and karwas
"WA is a site-specific video installation created for Knoll InternationalGabriel Winer and Dana Karwas. Large-scale architectural projections turn the existing seventeenth century facade into a drive-by cinema and pedestrian spectacle."
interface
"Interactive computer music improvisation duo -interface- creates sonic textures ranging from delicate imperceptible noise to a high energy wall of sound. They have extended, surrounded, and obscured their electric stringed instruments with a variety of technologies, creating an organic, gesturally powerful computer music." arts.rpi,edu/crb
Labels: dance, gestural interface, music
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
Labels: gesture, interruption, mid-term, narrative, theater
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
Labels: doors, passages, thresholds