Mapping the Union addresses

State of the Union (SOTU) provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2006. SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. SOTU focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. You are invited to try and understand from this information the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.

The Words: SOTU maps the significant content of each State of the Union address so that users can appreciate its key terms and their relative importance. The horizontal axis is simply alphabetical. The vertical axis displays the wordÂ’s significance, determined by comparing how frequently the word occurs in the document to how frequently it appears throughout the entire body of SOTU addresses (see appendix for details). Continue reading

Behold the Brain

BrainMirror, a Swedish-Hungarian co production by Adam Somlai-Fischer(hu) Bengt Sjölén(se) and Danil Lundbäck(se), is an interactive experience where the image of the visitors’ brain appears mixed with his/her mirror image, using natural head movement as an interface to explore volumetric visuals of the human brain. The interface allows exploration of complex MRI data. Volumetric renderings are explored by moving closer to the image.

The project was realized using open source and consumer electronics. It will be shown at Electromagnetic Bodies at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest. Continue reading

Past Remixed with Present

“Our experience of reality is strongly dependent on the synchronicity of our senses. We must, for instance, hear or touch what we see while we see it, in order to be able to determine reality and in order to decide what to do or how to react. The decoupling in time of sight and sound - like when we first see the lightning and then hear the thunder - can create a disturbing irritation when it affects our immediate surroundings: imagine that you would only hear the cars passing you on the street after they have already past, or that you hear conversations which were held minutes ago in a different location from where you are.

Sonic Interface experiments with human perception by amplifying and manipulating the synchronicity of auditory environment. Equipped with a portable hearing device made of a computer and headphones, the user is invited to walk around the city’s public spaces such as squares, shopping malls, and underground stations. The random urban sounds that he hears are first transmitted to the headphones without modification, but then the computer programme begins to create an artificial sonic environment from the sounds that it picks up. Continue reading

Live in 45 Minutes

BREAKING THE GAME :: THE PANEL :: Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 from 5:00pm to 8:00pm at the Society for Art & Technology in Montreal - Free. The event will be streamed live to the SAT as well as to an online audience.

Workspace Unlimited in collaboration with the Society for Art and Technology will host a public panel looking back at phase one of Breaking the Game, a series of interdisciplinary workshops and online symposium that brought together competing theorists and practitioners to build, debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience. The symposium was conducted exclusively through a variety of telematic technologies: iChat, Skype, virtual walkthroughs, an online forum, and email.

Taking place both online and offline, the workshops opened up the art of game modification to the contingencies of everyday life, where virtual technologies increasingly mediate physical spaces and human movements in very complex and dynamic ways. Continue reading

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Call for papers

ENGAGE: Interaction, Art and Audience Experience, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; November 27-29th November 2006–Call for papers: Deadline for submission of full papers 11th August 2006 (5pm local time).

ENGAGE is a Creativity and Cognition Symposium, sponsored by ACID, the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design. ENGAGE seeks original research papers by researchers and practitioners from the many disciplines involved in the fields of interaction, art and audience experience. The proceedings will be published by Creativity and Cognition Studios Press. Continue reading

Northern Solstice Marks One Year Duration

1001 nights cast is one year old today, the northern summer solstice. To mark the occasion Barbara Campbell, the artist, invited Anne Brennan to co-write the story, as she and Campbell did the very first story.

Each morning Barbara reads newspaper reports covering events in the Middle East. She selects a prompt word or phrase that leaps from the page with generative potential. She renders the prompt in watercolour and posts it to the site.

Last year’s prompt “the challenge of healing”; the prompt source was The Associated Press, ‘Opposition wins vote in Lebanon’, International Herald Tribune online, 21/06/05. Today’s prompt was “a year after”; the prompt source: Ewen MacAskill and Simon Tisdall, ‘A year on, Ahmadinejad’s popularity is soaring’, Guardian Unlimited, 21/06/06.

At the beginning of each webcast Barbara reveals the performance number stamped onto an individually-crafted tongue stud. Continue reading

Sound is image is sound is image

Contemporary experience’s conversion to digital is undeniable, the nomadic aspect of (new) technologies has become complete ubiquity and today everything can be thought of as zeros and ones, as information in its most abstract and immaterial version. Having that in mind what happens to the apparently ontological difference between sound and image, audition and vision?

Sound Visions intends to show this crumbling down of the differences between these two distinct modes of acess to reality. André Gonçalves and André Sier work from that place where it is impossible to define where one strats and the other ends. They use each one of those modes to stimulate the other, causing a generalized undefinition, from which it is no longer possible to tell what is cause and what is effect, if it the sound generating the images or if it is the images that are causing the sounds. The spiral is endless, sound is generating images that generates sound that again generates new images. the system replicates itself, always in interaction with the audience, pulled into the vortex of events taking place.

Sound Visions is a project developed specifically by the Upgrade! Lisbon for the Village Festival.

Sound Visions
Andre Goncalves/Andre Sier
Sala do Risco
June 16 - July 15
Tuesdays to Sundays, 10h00-19h00
For more info please go to
http://www.lisboa20.pt/upgrade
http://www.undotw.org/ctrl/fotos/xtras/lr/LR.htm
http://www.s373.net/babel/struct_5_060616_3.mov Continue reading

Upgrade! Lisbon meeting featuring Manuel Lima

Teatro S. Luiz welcomes next Thursday, June 22nd@20:00, The Upgrade! Lisbon monthly gathering featuring Manuel Lima, who will present his project Visual Complexity. The entrance is free and drinks will be served.

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they arenÂ’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. Continue reading

Grafitting the web

Sketcher is a firefox extension that allows you to draw graphic comments over web pages. You can link ’sketches’ to other ’sketches’, webpages or files, organize sketches by topic and add in-line comments. A tool for web-research. Or for grafitting the web.

For a Quick Start visit the Getting Started Chapter on the Help menu

‘Sketcher’ was a Gonçalo Tavares idea, awarded by Atmosferas ‘criação digital’ competition.

Credits
Made by: Atmosferas, Digital Arts Center
A project by Gonçalo Tavares
Producer: Sofia Oliveira (Atmosferas)
Developers: Pedro Afonso, Hugo Barbosa

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The primary concern in locative media has been, understandably, location. This has been a great new leap in terms of art, technology, science and narrative. Locative Media Art consists of artworks utilizing locative technology to trigger artworks in a specific physical space.

Locative media art goes back to early experiments such as Telepresent by Steven Wilson in 1997 that was an object equipped with GPS left to be communally interacted with and moved while continually sending images via the Internet. Continue reading