Hypertemporality Animations

Hypertemporality Animations, a project by Peter Baldes, are a series of gif files laid out in a table that due to network conditions, browser idiosyncrasies, and the userÂ’s own behaviour act dynamically. These simple, animated shapes and colors load sequencially, a typical web browser behaviour, giving birth to dynamic images that are the result of factors other than the artist’s will. Reloading them or using different browsers will make them load differently everytime. Slower or faster Internet connection speed will influence how the animations are viewed.

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Shared Individual and Collective Sound Cartographies

Silence of the Lands enables participants to collect ambient sounds, then to create and share individual and collective cartographies. These sounds represent subjective interpretations of the soundscape of the urban or natural settings that affect the everyday life of the community, and act as conversation pieces about natural quiet.

1. Data catching: ambient sounds are collected using a PDA. The sounds are linked to the person that collected them, and associated to GPS data; 2. Data description: the sounds are then stored in a database, visualized on a GIS map, and made available for audio-streaming in the web community as individual soundscapes. Participants can access, manage, and eventually modify their own individual soundscapes, associating to them several descriptors; 3. Data interpretation: participants can interact with the collective soundscape. By playing with physical objects in an interactive environment, participants are encouraged to interpret the collective soundscape and create an idealized, virtual one. Continue reading

Become a Target of Heightened Surveillance

The purpose of the Counter-Surveillance Headdress, by Gloria Sed, is to empower the wearer by allowing him/her to claim a moment of privacy in the Big Brother world.

The design of the headdress borrows from Islamic and Hindu fashion to comment on the racial profiling of Arab and Arab-looking citizens that occurred post-9/11. The design of the headdress is thus a contradiction: while its goal is to hide the wearer, it makes the wearer a target of heightened surveillance.

The laser tikka (forehead ornament) is attached to a hooded vest and reflective shawl. The laser is activated by pressing a button on the left shoulder of the vest. When pointed directly into a camera lens, the laser creates a burst of light masking the wearerÂ’s face. The wearer can also use the reflective cloth to cover the face and head. The aluminized material protects her/him by reflecting any infrared radiation and also disguises the wearer by visually reflecting the surroundings, rendering the wearerÂ’s identity anonymous. For more information on camera zapping with lasers. At the itp Winter Show, on December 18 and 19, ITP, 721 Broadway at Waverly Place, 4th Floor, South Elevators, New York. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art] Continue reading

Hearing a Colour Wheel

Neil Harbisson is, quite literally, a man who has always viewed life in black and white. The 22-year-old Spaniard, who moved to Totnes in south Devon in 2003, was born with achromatopsia, a rare condition that affects only one person in 33,000 and causes monochromatism, or complete colour blindness.

But last year, he was able to see – or, more accurately, hear – colours for the first time. Neil has been fitted with a machine that turns colours into soundwaves, with a different sound representing each hue. The Eye-Borg, as it is known, features a head-mounted digital camera that reads the colours in front of Neil and converts them into sound. A scale of musical tones represents the spectrum of colours – light hues are high-pitched, while darker colours sound bolder. It is, in a way, forced synaesthesia; its creator, 24-year-old digital multimedia expert Adam Montandon, describes the invention as “like hearing a colour wheel”. Continue reading

In the ‘gap’ Between Physical and Electronic Volume

Lacuna is a response to the relationship between body and architecture in the cyborg era. Existing in the perceived ‘gap’ between physical volume and electronic volume, Lacuna is customised software that communicates between the visual medium of the screen and a high resolution electronic skin of real world architecture. This in turn creates virtual counterpart architecture, enhancing the electronic Cybrid dimension of construction.

Lacuna–by HMC MediaLab–is a new architectural experiment that allows physical architecture to extend itself into the realm of zero physicality to become a Hyperflexible Space. Movement, temperature, gasses, wind, sound, data, water usage, electrical information, fans, and lift position are among a few of the hundreds of sensors used to alter the Lacuna software in real-time, allowing a unique representation of the building not in traditional space and time or virtual electronic space, but somewhere between the two. Continue reading

Hallunication, Synaesthesia and Technology

The Audio Visual Orchestra–an HMC MediaLab project–explores the relationship between hallucination and technology, between the natural and the artificial and between the everyday and the mystical. It recreates an altered state of consciousness in the viewer solely through technological means. It is fractaline, chaotic and self-organising in form. These pieces represent a shared space between the physical and the virtual, the brain and the mind.

The Audio Visual Orchestra brings together dancers, musicians and video artists, working to create stunning live art pieces, with an emphasis on combining the spiritual with the technological, culminating in artworks that will react dynamically to your presence. As you stand in the space huge screens show an image of you with colours and shapes flying around your body. The visuals are complimented by strange echoing sounds that react to any noise you make. The sounds and the visuals can be intrinsically linked creating a true synaesthesia. Continue reading

Ubicomp/Everyware

“I’ve seen a great deal of techno-optimism and even -utopianism around ubicomp, including a fair amount from people who should know better. But despite a deep folk understanding of some of the risks involved – Philip K. Dick was writing stories featuring recalcitrant doors and dilatory automated taxis in the late 1950s, and we’ve all heard of HAL9000 – there hasn’t really been much in the way of people pushing back against the idea of ubicomp, in a measured and knowledgeable way. And so I’ve started to make some noise about what I see coming down the road, describing the reality I see lurking behind the marketing hype that’s already beginning to build about the ostensible “conveniences” that await us.”-Adam Greenfield interview on Studies and Observations. Continue reading

Condition of Emergence

D>Art.06 is the ninth edition of Australia’s premier screen and digital media arts festival. This year’s festival will feature new and experimental video and web art as well as works using mobile technologies presented in a month-long program of screenings, a forum and an exhibition at the Sydney Opera House Studio and Exhibition Hall in April 2006.

Under the theme Condition of Emergence, dLux media arts is now calling for works in the following categories of D>Art.06: D>Art.06 Screen: Experimental video works with a maximum duration of 15 minutes; D>Art.06 Web: Online works suitable for exhibition in a gallery environment; D>Art.06 Locative/Mobile: Artworks specifically made with or for mobile technologies. The nature of the artwork may range from video to games to locative and social networking applications. Continue reading

new.media.art, e.music, hacktivism

The new printed Neural issue in English is available: Neural n.23:

new.media.art . interviews Tom Betts/Nullpointer . Socialfiction.org . //////////fur/// . Paper and Pixel . news (Flickr Peep Show, PostSecret, Sequences, Mindbending, inc., Silver Cell). reviews (Art meets Media, Aspect, Internet Art, Situated Contemporary Art Practices, read_me, Digital Homo Ludens, Feelings are always local) . centerfold: Movement of Movements.

e.music . interviews. Radioqualia. Janek Schaefer . Circuit Bending . news: (FontanaMixer, The Unauthorized iPod, MIDIbox SID, The Continuator, MPF) . reviews: (Hexstatic, Robin Fox, Akuvido, Steinbruchel, Thomas Brusa, The Dawn of DIMI) . reviews cd: (Christian Marclay, Musica Futurista, Phon.o, Si-cut.Db, Agents of Impurity, Koji Asano, Oh Astro, Transient Travels, PXP, Kiritchenko, JDS, Forbidden 80s, Electric Lounge Orchestra, Noise Tank, Pirandelo…) Continue reading

The Dance of Dripping: Auto-Generating Text

The Rules are no Game [MAOD] by Markus Huemer: The ZKM/Center of Art and Mediatechnologie will house a networked installation based upon Jackson Pollock’s image »No.32«. The floor of the area is covered with a reproduction of Pollock’s said picture as a reference to »The Dance of Dripping« and to »All Over«. Two text projections with auto-generating sentences are randomly projected on two screens. The visitors are both receptors and producers of the projected texts. In order to read the text, the audience will move to and fro, triggering an Internet-mechanism through the sheer act of walking on Pollock’s picture. It is this mechanism that generates the text, and each visitor’s movement will lead to the generation of a new line of text. Additionally, when the visitors approach one of the projections in order to read the texts, the sentences will be generated on the second projection. Thus the two projections communicate with each other and the visitors, paraphrasing the relative positions of the visitors within the exhibition space from a point-of-view that is situated on the Net, i.e., outside the exhibition. Continue reading