DIYcity is a site dedicated to finding ways people can make their cities work better with the use of emerging web technologies.

What do I mean ‘making cities work better’? I mean making them more efficient, more effective, more sustainable, better able to respond to problems, friendlier and generally more accessible to the individual user. DIYcity aims to accomplish these goals with user-built applications created on top of existing web technologies. It is a site where problems are posed and solutions are offered in the form of functioning apps, submitted by anyone and for use by all.

This is an exciting time to be launching this project for two reasons: Continue reading

I’ve been playing around with various twitter mashups, tools and toys lately, and I just had to give this one a quick mention. Unusually for me, I am about to talk about some art…

Gregory Chatonsky’s work L’attente/The Waiting (warning, Flash-heavy), part of a series called “Flußgeist”, the “spirit of the flow”, mashes up twitter posts with Flickr photos whose tags match keywords in the tweets, along with an ambient soundtrack (pulling in data from Odeo) and video footage of urban pedestrians waiting at the lights, lost in thought, walking, or just standing around.

The overall effect is quiet and beautiful, of course, and it’s a nice comment on the ambient intimacy we are learning to associate with twitter. Continue reading

Double-Taker (Snout) — by Golan Levin, with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White — deals in a whimsical manner with the themes of trans-species eye contact, gestural choreography, subjecthood, and autonomous surveillance. The project consists of an eight-foot (2.5m) long industrial robot arm, costumed to resemble an enormous inchworm or elephant’s trunk, which responds in unexpected ways to the presence and movements of people in its vicinity.

Sited on a low roof above a museum entrance, and governed by a real-time machine vision algorithm, Double-Taker (Snout) orients a supersized googly-eye towards passers-by, tracking their bodies and suggesting an intelligent awareness of their activities. Continue reading

Seeming somewhat gimmicky at first, “Taiwa Hensokuki,” a 2006 work by Mohri Yuko, is comprised of two IBM laptop computers that have speech synthesis software installed - one set to move from text to speech; the other set to speech recognition. Mohri’s work, included in the Extended Senses exhibition, provides a new setting for a technological function by challenging the computers to interact with themselves rather than with the typical human user. The two wall-mounted computers are set up to have a conversation by transmitting and exchanging their data, which in turn cycles and morphs into something mundane and incoherent. In fact, Taiwa means ‘dialog’ in Japanese, and Hensokuki can be translated as ‘transmission.’ Continue reading

Olafur Eliasson - Yellow Fog … a permanent intervention in public space, daily at dusk :: Verbund, Am Hof 6a, 1010 Vienna, Austria.

32 fluorescent tubes are embedded in the pavement along the 48 meter façade of the Verbund headquarters, emitting a specific yellow light, attuned by the artist himself. Daily at dusk fog rises up the façade in yellow light at regular intervals, shrouding the building in an ephemeral veil for one hour.

The fog serves as a fleeting projection screen for the light. It not only obscures the view of space, but also creates a more precise experience of distance and spatial relations. Continue reading

“In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a “global accident” that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 — exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 — is it possible that Virilio’s “global accident” has itself been accidented? Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective “no” at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation.” — Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

“It is surely the fate of every engaged political theory to be overcome by the history that it thought it was only describing. So too, Paul Virilio. Continue reading

Dorkbot Canberra (CBR) - ACT Dorks show their stuff! :: November 6, 2008, 6:00 pm :: Canberra Contemporary Artspace Manuka, 19 Forneaux St. Forrest, Canberra, Australia.

Prepare to be astonished by ’speaking’ collars, artworks that produce and destroy themselves, recycled organisms, teenage memories ignited by science, interactive deception, drawing without beginning or end and The Bible … as you have never seen it.

Dorkbot Canberra is one of around 76 chapters in an international ‘collective’ of like-minded groups bound by the catchy bi-line people who do strange things with electricity. Dorkbot CBR was founded by media artists Alexandra Gillespie and Tracey Meziane Benson in December 2007 and they celebrate their first year with a group exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space.

Playground - Live Art Festival :: October 31 - November 7, 2008 :: STUK Artscentre, Naamsestraat 96, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.

For the second edition of Playground STUK once again focuses on artists exploring the boundaries between various art disciplines. This international live art festival presents performances, installations and live actions. Many of these performances are new productions, often produced in collaboration with other institutions. The program consists of two closely linked and overlapping parts: a series of performances and an exhibition.

The Playground exhibition brings together several installations and films that investigate the notion of play, movement, performance and theatricality. Continue reading

Opening Performance Lecture & Museum Hall Meeting launching Automatic for the People: ( ) - a new project by MTAA (part of The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now curated by Rudolf Frieling) :: November 8, 2008; 3:00 - 5:00 :: SFMOMA, D-Space, Koret Visitor Education Center, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA.

Dictate the details of a contemporary art performance! Each week, from November 8 – January 21, vote in a new poll to determine different elements. On February 7, the artists perform live using the script shaped by your votes!

During the Opening Performance & Museum Hall Meeting the audience will have a chance to vote on the first element of the performance: location. Plus, there will be a slide lecture featuring the history of MTAA, vague thoughts on voting and a drawing!

Liminal Zones - The Nicosia Seminar with Aristide Antonas, Haim Bresheeth, Celine Condorelli, Armin Linke, Maria Loizidou, Angela Melitopoulos, John Nassari, John Palmesino, Yiannis Papadakis, Ines Schaber, Florian Schneider, Eyal Sivan, Pelin Tan, Eyal Weizman and Phillipe Zourgane :: November 5-7, 2008 :: Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus, 68 Ledras Street + Goethe-Zentrum Nicosia, 21 Markos Drakos Street, Nicosia, Greece.

Any attempt to understand the rapid transformation of territories in the 21st century reveals shifting landscapes and moving boundaries, thus a continuous struggle for their redefinition through conflicts and exclusions. Different conditions of mobility and migration encouraged by the so-called ‘globalised world’ inscribe in material environments social and psychological borders. Continue reading