TELE_TRUST by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat: How do we trust each other as networking bodies? Do we need to look each other in the eyes? Or do we need to touch each other?

In TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat explore how in our changing social eco-system we increasingly demand transparency; while at the same time we increasingly cover our vulnerable bodies with personal communication-technology. For TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat designed a hybrid play zone for a vulnerable process, of balancing between fear AND desire for the other. In a visual, poetic way they explore the emotional and social tension between visibility and invisibility; privacy and trust. Continue reading

Watch online until May 31, 2010. Continue reading

MindTouch by Camille Baker, SMARTlab Digital Media Institute:

The intention of this project is to contribute to performance technology studies by investigating ‘liveness and presence’ within the context of a specific networked, mobile media performance research project, currently underway, in order to uncover any new understandings that may have emerged from the use of new wireless and mobile technologies.

This project explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments. Continue reading

Chapter 1 - The Discovery by Félix Luque :: November 13-29, 2009 :: Opening: November 12; 6:00 pm :: iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology, 30 quai des Charbonnages, 1080 Brussels.

Chapter I - The Discovery invites us to to discover an unidentified artificial entity emitting a code of light and sound. Its shape is a pure platonic solid, a dodecahedron, a geometry often associated with philosophical theories, esoterism and sci-fi culture. After visioning a series of videos staging the discovery of this alien object in several places, we end up in an encounter with a physical interactive object which co-opts information flows, sound and light transmission. Continue reading

WHITE NOISE III: Pandora’s Sound Box curated by Lara Pan for PERFORMA 09 :: November 2 - 22, 2009 :: Opening: November 2, 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: White Box, 329 Broome St., New York City.

Pandora’s Sound Box is an interactive multimedia exhibition conceived to destabilize and reactivate our vision of the current global political landscape through performance, sound, video and site-specific installations. The exhibition demonstrates a kind of experiment of the associative imagination by which the viewer may explore other dimensions of experience while simultaneously becoming a performer. The title of the exhibition was inspired by Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s controversial 1929 film Pandora’s Box, which exposed and explored the fear of female sexuality. Continue reading

They Watch by Workspace Unlimited :: October 30 - November 20, 2009 :: Opening: October 30, 2009; 5:00 - 9:00 pm :: Lecture/Panel: November 18; 7:00 pm :: Studio 1, EMPAC, Troy, New York.

They Watch is an immersive art installation with virtual characters literally watching visitors. Several duplicates of the virtual characters - one man, one woman, and both portraits of the artists - surround and interact with visitors, who are tracked as they move about the physical space, and even projected into the virtual space. Continue reading

Thierry Fournier: Un geste qui ne finit pas (A Never Ending Gesture) :: October 10 - November 16, 2009 :: lux Scène nationale de Valence, 36 bd du Général de Gaulle, 26000 Valence, France.

By exploring figures of trace, appearance and disappearance, Thierry Fournier’s works challenge presence and otherness, by way of spaces and the time-frames they introduce. Whether they take the form of visual or sound projects, interactive installations or performances, they usually develop within the perceptible - even physical - experience which they propose to their spectators.

‘Experiencing present time, but, even more so, trying to formulate what it is, is like wanting to catch a fish in the water of a river with your bare hands. Continue reading

Paulo Majano’s The Valley addresses the idea of virtual presence through computer generated virtual figures that reflect back to us our own shifting notions of what constitutes authentic experience in the age of avatars, immersive virtual environments, and other forms of mediated and remote interaction.

A digital projection installation of two virtual computer generated characters that mimic human appearance and characteristics. The Valley takes viewers to a distant, yet familiar place, where the virtual exists alongside the physical. In recent history, the idea of convincing, human-like entities has captured humankind’s collective imagination time and time again. This is evident in our fascination with characters such as Frankenstein’s monster and Star Trek’s machine-human Cyborg. Continue reading

Tele_Trust_Test_Lab — Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat :: June 11, 2009; 8:30 pm :: Theatrum Anatomicum, Waag Society, Nieuwmarkt 4, Amsterdam.

Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat will present their performance-installation Tele_Trust. The public will participate in the installation and at the same time a Tele_Trust data-veil will roam the Amsterdam public space being in constant connection with the event at the Theatrum. Both the artists will extensively test and tell the meaning and function of Tele_Trust. The evening will start with an introduction to the work by Eric Kluitenberg, author of Delusive Spaces and head of the media department of De Balie, Amsterdam. Continue reading

www_hack — by Rui Guerra — is a creative intervention onto specific web sites. A script installed on the host site allows all visitors to a single page to observe each others mouse movements at any one time. On a technical level, the work is based on a javascript that contacts a server where all the individual mouse positions are stored, displaying all the cursors in ‘real-time’. Users experience the virtual presence of others, as controlled by a server.

Web platforms are being promoted as a privileged arena for emerging communities and open collaborations. www_hack, on the other hand, aims at exposing the internal architecture of the web as well as the protocols that reflect a server client hegemony in which users are separated from information and from each other. Continue reading