Augmented Reality

ArtFutura’s theme this year is Augmented Reality. It’s taking place now in Barcelona [October 28th-31st]. The programme includes Howard “Smartmobs” Rheingold, Blast Theory who will perform Can You See Me Now?, the SimpleTEXT performance, Dublin?s MediaLab Europe and Montreal?s SAT will be showcasing installations and developing experimental projects, Richard Marks, creator of EYETOY, Greyworld, Fiona Raby, etc. (via)

Saturday October 30, 2004 – 4PM – 8PM, Live from Barcelona, SAT presents Ph?romones, the Art Futura’s closing show. Ph?romones is a network multichannel audiovisual techno performance regrouping musicians Alain Thibault, Physical Noise Theatre & Champion and VJ jocool , Ladyroll & Le couple in Barcelona as well as Yan Breuleux, Nuclear Ramjet & Johnny Ranger in Montreal.
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Call of the Wild

A project by Amos Latteier, Call of the Wild ” is a series of audio tours of downtown Portland that are accessed by cell phone. The tours focus on plants and animals in downtown, contrasting them to their human cohabitants. Using natural history, philosophy, and humor the tours reveal urban biological systems that we see everyday but seldom notice.

Urban ecosystems demonstrate how technology and the urban environment mediate nature. Starlings, pigeons, and moss show us how to adapt, survive, and flourish in changing and artificial surroundings. Call of the Wild examines urban wildlife with an eye to the lessons it can teach us about our own technologically mediated lives.

Cell phones provide a unique, practical, and fun venue for conducting audio tours. Cell phones are already an integral part of the urban environment, and using them for audio tours transforms a device that normally removes people from the environment into one that help focus attention on it.”

A wonderful concept, and an effective example of the possibilities for creative content delivered to the public via cellphones. (Posted by Michelle Kasprzak)

Teletaxi

A project by the Year Zero One collective, Teletaxi is a site-specific media art exhibition in a taxicab. The taxi is outfitted with an interactive touch screen that displays video, animations, music, and information triggered by an onboard GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver which allows the displayed artwork to change depending on where the taxi is in the city. With the combination of the media/gps technology, the mobile environment and the passenger/audience inside the cab ? the seven artists in teletaxi are offered a unique set of possibilities for showing their work – both technically and thematically.

Teletaxi exposed interactive media art to a normally passive audience, by presenting works that explore notions of intimacy, mapping, subterranean space, simulated cities, information architecture, data-visualisation, public interventions, surveillance and psychogeography.

Of note is David Jhave Johnston’s project, Gridlock, which was included in the first public presentation of Teletaxi. Gridlock treats GPS as a number, which may be changing or not changing, rather than a number that refers to a location. Therefore, when the number does not change for a period of x seconds, the taxi is not moving, and there is a possibility that you are stuck in traffic. The Gridlock piece is triggered by this lack of movement, and offers a Flash-based game for frustrated taxi passengers. (Posted by Michelle Kasprzak)

Melt

Melt, by Slavica Ceperkovic and Nicholas Stedman, is a telematic installation in which the touch of a person in one country melts a block of ice in another. A table with embedded sensors registers the touch of installation visitors in France, which is then transferred and translated through the Internet and activates heat sensors embedded in a block of ice in Canada. The ice traces the presence of the visitors through melting and refreezing. The image of the ice can be seen via a live web stream projected in the space in France, so that the visitor can see their impact. This piece was installed with the sensor station at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Lille, France, and the receiving station at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Canada. To see documentation stills and video visit the websites of Slavica Ceperkovic and Nicholas Stedman. (Posted by Michelle Kasprzak)

The Interactive Art Gambit

“Going back even farther in time, looking for cultural formations which are now familiar aspects of interactive art, I was struck early on by the essentially interactive nature of shrines, and other somehow consecrated public places. What differs here from the contemporary interactive artwork which relies on, as Crichton said, temptations and sources of curiosity–here the encounter is ritualized and made into theater. It is performative, highly prescribed and passed on from generation to generation. In the ritualized encounter, there is quite often an actual physical exchange which is also a symbolic exchange. One leaves something, in a certain way, and takes something away–usually as a mark upon the body. It is generally performed by simultaneous actions of touching and looking, but here, very importantly, and in most cases completely absent in interactive art, the voice of the participant plays an important role.”

Read “The Interactive Art Gambit” (“Do not run! We are your friends!”) by Ken Feingold, Technology in the 90s presentation, The Museum of Modern Art, NY, April 7, 1997.

Also from Ken Feingold’s web site:
The History of the Interface in Interactive Art, S?ke Dinkla, 1994
Seeking Deeper Contact: Interactive Art as Metacommentary, Erkki Huhtamo
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Sharing the Technical Gaze

“The concept of gaze has taken a radical shift over the past 50 years. With the advent of the CCD, surveillance cameras have spread numerous gazes across our cityscapes. The gaze of technology is different than the gaze of biology. The technical gaze can hold, record, and re-present the images before it. Most importantly, the technical gaze can be shared – either through re-presentation of the recorded images, or through live transmission.

From 1994-1996, Steve Mann, the grandfather of wearable computers, wore a wireless camera and receiver for almost every waking minute of his life (he took them off only swim, shower, and sleep). Both the camera and display were connected to the Internet so visitors to Steve’s www site could see what he was gazing upon, and if a visitor sent him an email, it would pop up in the display before his eyes. Steve tells jokes about viewers to his website telling him to say hello to people the recognized or chastising him for “ogling cleavage.”” Read Reckless Eyes by Kirk Woolford.

Social Computing, Maps and Storytelling

Last week, we attended Warren Sack’s lecture at Rhode Island School of Art and Design (RISD). Sack referenced the writings of Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community), Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle or see this translation online), and Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (information and communication theory + translation + A Mathematical Theory of Communication) to locate two of his well-known projects Translation Map, and Conversation Map, and a project that has gone through various phases and is still under development, Street Stories.

About Street Stories: For geographically-based community members, many local places have stories associated with them. Some of these are commonly-known stories; others are personal narratives associated with, for example, the house of one?s childhood or the place along the old train tracks where the sweetest blackberries grow. But when people move elsewhere or (sub)urban development paves over an area, the stories are decoupled from the places and the places lose their vernacular particularities and are transformed into much more generic spaces. As increasing numbers of geographically-based communities are displaced by network-based communities, the places of community?and their associated stories?are lost.
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WORKSHOPS at SPACE

Workshops will be run by SPACE’s Media Technologies Specialist Peter Chauncy in partnership with practitioners working in related areas. Workshops will cover the following:

Thursday 18th November: Wireless Free Networks – desktop 2 rooftop Omni Directional Antenna Building; with James Stevens from Consume.net
Tuesday 23rd November: An Introduction to Wireless Networking-A Wireless Rig; with Psand
Thursday 25th November: Portable Devices – iPAQs, mobile phones and GPRS; with Giles Lane from Proboscis
Monday 29th November: Locative Media – Global Position System (GPS) devices; with Ambient TV

Each workshop will include:
*An introduction to the technology
*Examples of practice
*Discussion around related concepts and critiques
*Instruction in using equipment and an opportunity to test it
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Why Geo-Annotating Location?

The blog Future Now dealt with the use of geotagging. I have always been amazed by this topic, especially with regard to how people will use it. There are many projects like Urban Tapestries, GeoNotes, Mauro?s projects?

The author proposes a kind of typology of geotagging uses (listen mauro!): There are 2 types of messages: “I was here” or “You are here”.

People will take the time to compose a message and tag that message to a place because they want you to know that they were there, or because they have information that will be relevant to you later when you?re in the same location, or some combination of both.

From pasta and vinegar, October 25, 2004
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Touch Through the Wires

Wirefire was an online performance and communications environment. The project, by entropy8zuper’s Auriea Harvey and Micha?l Samyn, utilized technology they developed to faciliate ‘touch through the wires’, combining chat, sounds, images, animations and live camera streams to form an interactive, improvisational expression that went beyond words. Wirefire is currently available in RANDOM FIRE/REPLAY VIEW only. [Flash 5 plug-in required.]

Wirefire was LIVE online every Thursday night at Midnight to Friday 1am ( Belgian time). Wirefire was meant to be performed and viewed online but non-virtual Wirefire performances were presented in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Walker Arts Center; Minnesota; GMI screen, London; and Passage44, Brussels.