Becoming Dragon, a mixed reality, durational performance by Micha Cárdenas in Second Life and at Calit2 :: Beginning December 1, 2008; 7:00 pm; runs for 365 hours :: The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), Atkinson Hall, Visiting Artist Lab #1613, University of California San Diego.

Becoming Dragon questions the one year requirement of Real Life Experience that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive Gender Confirmation Surgery (Sexual Reassignment Surgery), and asks if this could be replaced by one year of Second Life Experience to lead to Species Reassignment Surgery. Continue reading

Shadowlands - A Talk by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer :: November 15, 2008; 4:00 pm :: ICA Theatre, London.

To tie in with Under Scan, the large scale public installation in Trafalgar Square, the artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is giving at talk at the ICA. He will curate a screening of moving-image works that have inspired his work.

Following an open discussion, join the artist to experience his latest interactive shadow-installation Under Scan, in Trafalgar Square. Lozano-Hemmer develops large-scale interactive installations in public space, usually deploying new technologies and custom-made physical interfaces. 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

Altroequipe presents WORKSHOPMOBILIGENCE :: November 25-27, 2008; 12:45 - 5:45 pm :: Auditorium delle Scuderie Aldobrandini Piazza Marconi 5, Frascati (Rome), Italy :: Deadline: November 15, 2008.

The WORKSHOPMOBILIGENCE is based on the interactive process between choreography / dance, sound, light, architecture, motion capture (VICON Real Time), motion graphics (3D animation with MAYA and LEMUR). The purpose is that of stimulating a formation which is able to react to the continuous mutation of the media project, live show, television, and cinema. The workshop introduces to the use of motion capture as interface able to inform the outside with the inside of the human body and of the performing bodies in general. In this sense we research the increase of the proprioceptive quality of the living body through the coexistence with the 3D mutation of the architecture and performer. Continue reading

Toni Dove: Spectropia :: November 13, 2008; 8:00 pm :: EMPAC Theater, 110 8th street, EMPAC Building, Troy, New York.

Spectropia is a highly imaginative live-mix cinema event, a “scratchable” movie performed by video DJs playing a movie “instrument”. Toni Dove’s sci-fi hybrid, features time travel, telepathy, and elements of film noir in a drama set in England, 2099 and in New York City, 1931, following the Great Crash. Live performers orchestrate onscreen characters through an original mix of film, performance and a unique system of motion sensing that serves as a cinematic instrument, creating a narrative form that is part video game, part feature film, and part VJ mashing. The audience sees through characters’ eyes, hears their interior thoughts, and even talks with characters via Dove and her co-performer, R. Luke DuBois, in a post show Q&A.

Moving by numbers :: October 16 -18; 5:00 - 8:00 pm (every 10 minutes) :: VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival, Palazzo dei Pio, Cortile d’Onore, Corso Canalgrande, 103, Carpi.

Moving by numbers is an opportunity to experience reciprocal body reactions between a spectator and a dancer. The performance takes place in an enclosed original architecture, where the spectator and the dancer inhabit two distinct spaces. They are invited to communicate through a two-way mirror, onto which a graphic display reflecting the dancer’s movements is projected. Communication is enhanced for the spectator through this vision and sound interface, and for the dancer through a luminous costume and a motion-capture system. Continue reading

Before I leave the room, tired and ready to go home, I look back in after Ihave turned the lights off. The 8 cameras positioned all around the room, on the walls and in the ceiling grid splay their red light across the floor, the computers, the chairs, staying on, always capturing, always seeing.

I am working on a project that I call Becoming Dragon. The aim of the project is to do a 365 hour immersive performance in Second Life, using a Head Mounted Display so I will only see Second Life and a Vicon motion capture system to map my physical movements back into Second Life. The project is a collaboration between myself, Chris Head who’s writing the mocap code, Kael Greco who’s working on the stereoscopic code for the HMD, Anna Storelli, our modeler and Ben Lotan, our documentarian. Continue reading

At Dislocate06, Hamilton, Southern, and St. Amand will present Running Stitch a project which explores how a track made with a GPS device changes our awareness and experience of place through the new vantage points and perspectives afforded by the use of satellite navigation. Visitors to the exhibition are given a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks result in individual GPS ‘drawings’ of the visitor’s movements that are then projected live in the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city.

Each individual route is sewn, as it is taking place, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that reveals a sense of place and interconnection. The walker, who is aware of the line they are producing and of the audience at a distance, also becomes a performer of their relationship to a local place. It is only through being live and participatory that the audience perceives the push and pull of the relationship between themselves, the stitcher who sews the route onto the canvas, and the viewer at a distance and sees the city emerge from the canvas.

S[t]imulation: an interactive painting by Marc Tuters: In completion of the class of 2008 USC SCA IMD MFA, S[t]imulation is a 12×8 foot interactive painting in which the texture of the actual painting was virtually processed in Derivative’s Touch Designer and then projected back onto itself to scale. (It remains temporarily on display at the thesis space just north of campus, please contact me via the comments section for a viewing.)

The piece was designed to privileged calmness in the viewer, using motion sensing to disrupt the image. However, unlike a game, interactivity here was not intended to be indexical. Continue reading

Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology by Susan Kozel — In Closer, Susan Kozel draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. Trained in dance and philosophy, Kozel places the human body at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing, asking what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers–as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching.

Performance, Kozel argues, can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. Continue reading