Live Video Streaming from Artists’ Studios

During the autumn of 2005, Localmotives will be organizing a project which aims to stream live video imagery from several artists’ working spaces (aka ?studios?). The project is named Why Bother and will be produced in collaboration with i/o/lab and Atelier Nord. The video streams will be part of localmotives’ 11th themed publication. The publication is titled 1:1 and will be physically manifested at Rogaland Art Centre (Rogaland Kunstsenter) from the 15th of September to the 27th of November.

We would like to get in touch with artists who already enjoy a high bandwidth connection to the internet, and would like to participate in Why Bother. You don’t need to know a lot about video streaming. We will provide the technical assistance to make things work.
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Can artistic approaches and aesthetic experience nurture discovery in the sciences?

Ecce Homology is an interactive installation that bridges art and science through the use of dynamic media, computer vision and computer graphics. Named after Friedrich Nietzsche?s Ecce Homo, a meditation on how one becomes what one is, the project explores human evolution by examining similarities ? known as ?homology? ? between genes from human beings and a target organism, in this case the rice plant.

Experience Ecce Homology during SIGGRAPH 2005, July 31 – August 4, 2005 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Five projectors present Ecce Homology?s calligraphic forms across a 40-foot wide wall. A novel computer-vision interface allows multiple participants, through their movement in the installation space, to draw their own calligraphic characters and select genes from the human genome for visualizing the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), a primary data-mining tool used worldwide in comparative genomics. Results are presented as two superimposed pictograms. Ecce Homology asks: Can artistic approaches and aesthetic experience nurture discovery in the sciences? Read an article.

Two Way Radios [2WR]

“Each receiver a potential transmitter”. It was not only Hans-Magnus Enzensberger who imagined radio as a two way medium: Brecht’s dictum of “radio as an apparatus for communication” is more than famous. Freeing radio from its centralized and mono-directional broadcast structure has been a strong claim since radio’s early days. And it has been especially the Internet, which made two way radio-structures become a serious possibility.

Based on the thoughts and utopies of Brecht, Enzensberger, but also on “La Radia” by F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata, the Belgian sound and media artist Guy van Belle created his series of performances Two Way Radios [2WR]. Premiered in Prague on April 14, 2005 this set-up of sound and communication architecture was performed in a new version on “Radio_Copernicus”, a German-Polish artist radio on July 28, 2005. Several bi-directional audiostreams, generated by four performers (Guy van Belle and Barbara Huber in Stralsund, Akihiro Kubota in Tokyo, Code 31/Okno Brussels) were mutually altered within this group. [more]
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Rigid and Soft Bodies for Realistic Haptic Interaction

Virtual Canoe is a real-time water simulator with a database of 3D fluid dynamics. The system introduces realistic and interactive water into virtual worlds with haptic characteristics that enhance interaction.

The system combines a pre-computed database and a real-time simulation to establish a realistic waveform. The real-time component is a wave-function simulator that transmits water pressure and velocity. The database provides a force pattern for a point on an object’s surface at a constant input velocity. The pressure from the database effects the velocity of the water in the real-time wave simulation, which keys the query to the database. This enables the system to create a realistic waveform. It carefully decomposes the original Navier-Stokes equation into a simple real-time function and a complex pre-computed function considering the area and the phenomena. Video. Virtual Canoe will be presented at the upcoming Siggraph conference. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

We Call Your Moves

Join the eighth Human Scale Chess Game in Oakland on Saturday, August 06. The organizers need 32 volunteers with working cellphones to play the roles of the chess pieces. Sign up now by email to select the role you will play. To participate, you will need a working cellphone and a couple of free hours on Saturday August 06. Costuming is strongly encouraged; the campier, the better.

SMS simulcasting and webcasting will likely be used during the Oakland game and there will be an afterparty. Check the site for updates as more details become available. Human Scale Chess is a project of Glowlab contributor Sharilyn Neidhardt. [via Glowlab]

The Brand is Itself a Platform

“In the essay ?The Poetics of the Open Work,? Umberto Eco details a postmodern phenomenon wherein performers are allowed judgment in the performance of a work. Rather than acting as merely talented automatons, the performers are ?allowed? by the composer to change the fundamental material of the work as they perform it; they become the work. The usual power dynamic between composer and performer is changed. By inviting the performer into the process of composition, the composer becomes something closer to a platformist. What remains unchanged in this equation is the position of the audience, whom Eco calls that ?addressee?bound to enter into an interplay of stimulus and response.? Participatory art brings the audience into the work, but might not address the position of the venue in how the work is conceived, crafted, and disseminated. In the art of platforming, composer, artist, and addressee determine the foundation and full realization of the work, changing the definition or specific role of each in the process. Traditional institutional power dynamics are upended and a multivalent balance is struck between each element in the equation of culture: the venue, the presented, and the audience.” From A General Theory of Platforming by Nicholas Frank, NYFA Current.

Artistic Virtual Environments, Aesthetics and Experiences

Guest Editor: Dena Elisabeth Eber, Artistic Virtual Environments, Aesthetics and Experiences: This special issue of Intelligent Agent presents six essays that explore the aesthetics connected with virtual environments created and presented as works of art, works about art, or related genres. The essays primarily focus on the aesthetic experience for participants, aesthetic analysis, content, emotional content, emotional experiences, and the qualities of the medium.
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The In & Out of the Sound Studio Conference

Thursday, July 28 – 7pm – free: The Upgrade! Montreal presents the In & Out of the Sound Studio conference on gender and sound technology, in collaboration with Concordia University. Featuring performances by artists Sylvie Ch?nard, Ellen Waterman, Airi Yoshioka, Shona Dietz & ?veline Boudreau. With hosts Liselyn Adams & tobias c. van veen.

Grants for Indian New Performance Artists

New Performance Programme: Are you a performing artist or group? Are you seeking funds to develop an innovative new production in theatre, music, dance or other forms of performance art? If so, this programme is addressed to you. Please read on.

Scope: This programme supports exciting new productions in the performing arts. These productions could straddle different genres in the performing arts, explore multilingualism in performance, use new media innovatively, or address subjects that have not been widely explored in performance. These are only examples, however, and do not exhaust the possibilities offered by this programme.
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Continuous Computing

“…After a decade of hype about “mobility,” personal computing has finally and irreversibly cut its bonds to the desktop and has moved into devices we can carry everywhere. We’re using this newly portable computing power to connect with others in ways no one predicted–and we won’t be easily parted from our new tools…

There is something different about the latest tools. They are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and fundamentally social, built to enable new kinds of interactions among people. Blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and Web surfing from a smart phone are just the earliest examples. Almost below our mental radar, these technologies are ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous computing–continuous in the usual sense of “uninterrupted,” but also in the sense that it’s continuous with our lives, in all their messy, social, biographical richness…” From Social Machines by Wade Roush, Technology Review, August 2005.