"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
locative situations
hole in wall
"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
"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
"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
"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
"....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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
A collection of films on streets and the people that traverse and inhabit them. streetfilms.org
year zero
"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
"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
"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
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
(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
"...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
"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
"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
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
"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
"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
mediascapers
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
relief projection
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
“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
"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
"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
“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
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