Monthly Archive for July, 2008
abstract Aceti and collaborators are developing a technology that can look at how virtual reality affect emotions. It is his goal to get to an experiential idea of how to affect emotions. He is actually trying to measure the responses, eeg, perspiration, etc, the reaction.
This is quite a powerful idea, but one that comes into all artworks, but I don’t think it has actually been done for art at a quantitative way.
In the PING, an alternate reality of control (Eelco Wagenaar, Arjan Scherpenisse) talk (abstract here). It was exhibited at mediamatic amongst others.
Games are about fun rather than winning. They have made a simple ping game, simple in technology, but not content. The structure is two pingpong ball throwing devices and two players, two screens, and a small bit of software.
Margaret Schedel, Elizabeth de Martelly 117 Realizing the Moment: Towards a Continued Role for Technology in Art.
The need for scores in art has become important in the preservation of the art. Video documentation is not the work, and does not recreate the work. It was interesting that one example that was used was that 9 evenings. If there had been a score for the pieces, they may have been able to recreate it. Wish she had Variations VII has been recreated this year at AVFest08.
Margaret Schedel describes one of the works she made as part of her study and the process that is involved in making a score for this piece. She admits that of course making scores is not fun, but it is important and allows the replaying of the work, or at least the intent of the work. This may be why there are so few scores of electonic arts. Too rigid scores are almost as bad as no score.
Image via WikipediaSteven Pinker and SWAMP are really interested in Phineous Gage, who suffered from a railway spike passing through his brain, he didnt die, but his personality changed for the worse. This runs counter to the idea of the noble savage.
Matt and Doug from SWAMP talked about Vladimir Vernadsky and the noosphere. The theory that humans have been extended by technology.
However, now we have technology based diseases.
Metahuman is the now, the reach of the internet, satellite networks. Technology that uses people without much concideration of the humans. In the conflict between Metahuman vs Human,the Metahuman corporation often wins.
Walmartathon, 24hrs in a walmart consuming. The idea of the corporate organism and by doing this action they are interrogating the metaorganism.
spore1.1, 2004
SWAMP seeks to kill a rubbertree plant from home depot (with its garanteed money back offer), it is fed by the homedepot stock value, if it goes up, then it gets watered. During a bull market the plant died because of too much water, after enron the plant died because of too little. From this they worked out that this simple system was too likely to go to extremes as it was based on a single variable. In real life, multiple factors keep organism
I went to the artsactive panel yesterday that had representitives from SymbioticA, Arts And Genomics Centre, Ectopia, DSHED, Transgenisis, Artists in Labs. Artsactive has been set as an international network of partners interested and active in setting up art and science residency.
One thing brought up is that currently residencies are too short. there are a few different structures, one in which there is a lab and the artists are brought in, one where the organisation is a matchmaker, one where it is a commissioning agency. more later…….
Smell? Cut Grass, Burnt Hair, Cadaverine, Motor Oil (bio-fi).
Touch? Pierce, push, press, heat. (improvised empathetic device IED) This piece is amazing.
A custom software application continuously monitors a website (icasualties.org) that updates the personal details and numbers of slain U.S. soldiers. When new deaths are updated on the website, the data is extracted and sent wirelessly to custom hardware installed on the I.E.D. armband. The LCD readout displays the soldiers’ name, rank, cause of death and location and then triggers an electric solenoid to drive a needle into the wearers arm, drawing blood and immediate attention to the reality that a soldier has just died in the Iraq war.
The Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production( s.w.a.m.p.) transform imaterial light data (from web scraping, facts about the calories in a big mac etc) into a physical visceral things that affects the player generally in an uncomfortable way. They seem to be the guinea pigs for their own creations. So its nothing they wouldnt experience first. A nice do unto others as you would have done to you kind of moment.
Go visit there site……
Douglas Easterly at the Biofi workshop. Here he is holding an arduino and explaining how great microcontrollers are.
I am attending the Bio-Fi workshop at Republica Polytechnica in Singapore, run by Doug, Matt and Kathrine from swamp.nu
During the workshop we are learning about php and how it can be used for data scraping (e.g. maybe we want to get the pollution/particulate value for a LA highway from the pollution website).
What do we want to do with that?
Well……we can use it to activate an arduino board. The arduino can drive a simple transmitter that talks to a Bio-Fi module. This module is attached to a essential oil vapouriser…. Cool!
Di Ball has a picture of the back of my head at the workshop here.
Ah, Singapore, where the weather is balmy. Its my first Asian country. My fellow passenger David from www.xm-asia.com described it as Asia on Training wheels. It is certainly that. I was at the Sleepy Sams only an hour after getting off the plane, no queing for passport control, bag already on the luggage carousel, easy to obtain travel card, and quick. Compared to the hours lost in other countries post the plane, this was great. Now to tell my body that it is not 1.30 in the afternoon.
So now off to find some food…probably Malaysian.
I take up the nomadic art/researcher mode today. Leave sunny Newcastle (yes its actually sunny!) travel down to london to catch a plane to Singapore for the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts(ISEA) conference. In the nature of these events I will cross paths with researchers/practitioners/curators from Lancaster(imaginationLancaster), Manchester(Cornerhouse&Futuresonic), Sunderland(Crumb) and Newcastle(Culturelab).
There will be a large contingent of Australians too. Compared to Europe, Australia and Singapore are practically next door.
What I am looking forward to are the discussions by new media networks and platforms for collaboration between arts and other fields of inquiry. It is not that art has the sole role of making work about social worries, environment or addressing aesthetics, but it is disenginious to say that it has none.
One project that inspires me is Luminous Green, initiated by Fo.am. It asks what are the possibilities and realities of using technology and know-how to envision a luminous green future rather than a dull grey one(this article is interesting on a factor 4-10fold reduce in the use of resources.
I will be talking about locative games in my paper Location! Location? Location!! (10am Nanyang Technological University B1-3 27th July 2008) These are games/experiences that have a sense of place, may use technology like GPS, mobile phones), what it promises and what the reality is.
This activity is supported by the National Lotterry through the Arts Council England Grant for the Arts (hence the logo).
time
Jennifer Sheridan talked about the pooch.
The pooch/(now bigdog interactive) are into extreme prototyping, one day minimal time and cost. They also like to inhabit the social space of the festival, this bring with it constraints and challenges, of making their products portable, selfpowered and able to withstand the harsh environment (portability,heat, noise).
They make adult sized swings as interfaces for their works, and have a deep interest in re)search, having a background in interaction and theatre studies.
They describe their work as digital live art, the intersection of live art, computing and hci. Interested in non-talk based uses of technology as embodies in highly portable systems for example the uPoi, a ball on a string that has a multi input accelerometer built into it. This influences layered sound and visuals
A major concern of theirs is the women are abandoning engineering and technology, they are not making outside of fashion design. The other concern is that kids don’t know about working/programming the the smaller, cheaper, ubiquitous computers that are in everything. What options for computing and kids is there?
