Tiananmen Square Augmented Reality: Smartphone App Revives Statue of Democracy + Tank Man at Tiananman Square by 4 Gentlemen via Exile Diary:

Although it has been more than twenty years since Tiananman Protest took place in 1989, the authority persistently uses all means erasing the facts that Chinese people pursued democracy in this democratic and anti-corruption movement. In China, nowadays, young people are not aware the courageous actions, such as ‘Tank Man’ and erecting ‘Statue of Democracy’ facing Mao’s portrait on Tiananman Tower, emerged during student movement of 1989. Nonetheless, history should not be forgotten.

Information and communication technologies have inspired people to express their thoughts freely. We as artists, taking advantages of the development of mobile phone technology and smartphone applications, have revived the history of 1989 Tiananman Protest that has tremendous implications waiting for further examinations by our contemporaries. Continue reading

Face to Facebook — A project by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio: Stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face‐recognition software and then posting them on a custom‐made dating website, sorted by their facial expression characteristics.

In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook’s exclusive property we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures). Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions.
After a few weeks we had to face the evidence. Continue reading

FluxRadio — a podcast curated by Joe Gilmore and Rhiannon Silver — explores some of the concepts and ideas behind the music and performance pratice of Fluxus. Featuring sound pieces by George Maciunas, La Monte Young, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, George Brecht, Yoko Ono and others, the programme charts the emergence of Fluxus through 60s avant-garde New York, examining the relationship to John Cage, Zen Buddhism and European avant-garde music.

Summary: The Fluxus movement was an international network of artists which emerged in New York in the early 1960s. Artists who were at some time involved include: Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson and Jackson Mac Low. Many Fluxus artists met through the various experiments which were happening in musical education in 1950s America – most notable amongst these for the emergence of Fluxus, was John Cage’s class in musical composition at the New School of Social Research in New York. Continue reading

The Twitter Revolution Must Die by Ulises Mejias:

Have you ever heard of the Leica Revolution? No?

That’s probably because folks who don’t know anything about “branding” insist on calling it the Mexican Revolution. An estimated two million people died in the long struggle (1910-1920) to overthrow a despotic government and bring about reform. But why shouldn’t we re-name the revolution not after a nation or its people, but after the “social media” that had such a great impact in making the struggle known all over the world: the photographic camera? Even better, let’s name the revolution not after the medium itself, but after the manufacturer of the cameras that were carried by people like Hugo Brehme to document the atrocities of war. Viva Leica, cabrones! Continue reading

Extimacy: Art, Intimacy And Technology – curated by Pau Waelder, with Gazira Babeli, Clara Boj, Martin John Callanan, Grégory Chatonsky, Diego Díaz, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Laurent Mignonneau, Paul Sermon, Christa Sommerer, Carlo Zanni :: until May 1, 2011 :: Museum Es Baluard, Placa Porta Santa Catalina, 10, 07012 Palma, Spain.

Inside the immense flow of data exchange, the new technologies have facilitated an interdependency between the spheres of what is private and what is public, between interior and exterior, leading us to reveal, in an increasingly natural manner, our experiences, thoughts and feelings, enlarging the circle of intimacy to the point of sharing our inner life with the invisible, abstract audience of Internet users. Continue reading

CTheory Interview: Digital Inflections: The Einstein’s Brain Project — Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow in conversation with Ted Hiebert:

“[B]odies are never event bound and event defined, but event defining — and always at the point of becoming. This is a continual shudder across our work — the body as an ever-receding event horizon. A hole in the fabric of the world, a non-alibi, a white hole.” — Einstein’s Brain Project

Introduction: What does the world look like when we turn out the lights? Does it not first surprise us — not with nothingness but with a dance of after-images which, fading, are transformed into patterns of visual noise? Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: This and that thought. by BFFA3AE [Needs Speakers]:

This and that thought. takes the form of a narrative. Visually, the project consists of the hex codes of the 216 web safe colors and a colorless box next to each, arranged in a grid. The arrangement is based on the van der Corput seqeunce which orders the colors from black to white through an unintuitive trajectory. The user is invited to click on any hex code which triggers an aural narration based on a fictional narrative of an episodic nature, jumping from subject to subject through connections sometimes obvious, sometimes oblique. Each segment of the narrative is visually associated to one of the colors by a reveal in sync with the narration. Continue reading

[An image from “Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced,” a Web collaboration between Ohio State and William Forsythe] Algorithmic Reflections of Choreography: From Choreography to Software and Back Continue reading