Art Events Data Table

Reach combines aesthetics, pattern exploration, and interactive qualities to create a new language for wearable expression. Areas of investigation include person-to-person communication, proximity, reaction to environments and weather stimulus. Reach is a part of a larger project platform, ‘IT&Textiles’ at the PLAY studio of the Interactive Institute in Gorg, Sweden. With this research project, we aim to join two different areas of design and technology development: information technology and textiles. On the one hand, we are looking for new applications and areas for textiles; on the other, we want to give information technology new clothes and expand the design space of everyday computational things.

Reach focuses on investigating new forms for wearable communication and expression through creating ‘wearable sketches’ or prototypes that test both material and interactive qualities. Through this iterative process we aim to incorporate our findings into new ‘smart’ clothing or textiles. The wearable sketches include everyday worn items such as hats, bags, scarves, and skirts that react or interact with the environment or persons within the environment. In addition, they explore both additive and subtractive pattern-making processes where patterns grow or are revealed in response to changes in one’s personal, social or environmental space. Material samples and prototypes include the use of cottons, woven linens, conductive materials, UV-sensitive textiles, thermo-chromic materials and electro-luminescent wire.

Jennifer Steinkamp’s colorful digital projections envelop museum visitors in a three-dimensional sensory experience. Steinkamp, a Los Angeles-based installation artist, works with 3-D animation in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and phenomenological perception. This exhibition offers a comprehensive view of this important artist’s work beginning in 1993.

The project Seven Mile Boots consists of a pair of networked, interactive shoes with audio. One can wear the boots and explore like a flaneur in the physical world and in the world of the internet. Chatting on the net has become something of a phenomenon during the last decade. There is an endless communication among online communities in online chats. The Seven Mile Boots piece is built upon using feet and shoes as an interface with which to move in the text-based, non-space of the chat room. The physical aspect of the piece consists of a pair of boots containing a computer with wireless network access, sensors, amplifiers and loudspeakers. The boots are ready to function in any location with an open wireless network, and operate via two different modes: walking through the net and standing/listening to chat-activity.

The user wearing the Seven Mile Boots becomes a kind of a super-voyeur, who is able to search in several places and observe various situations simultaneously on the net. They can observe the life on the net and listen to on-going conversations between people in chat rooms. As users walk in the physical world they simultaneously stroll through the net in search of chat rooms. As the user walks around it is possible to locate an active chat through audio. You will hear yourself passing ‘through’ a chat and decide yourself whether or not to stop, listen, or join in. The boots automatically log into the chat rooms under the name “sevenmileboots”.

The Seven Mile Boots project was created by the artists Laura Beloff, Erich Berger and Martin Pichlmair, all of whom are currently living and working in Oslo, Norway.

In the ISEA2004 Fashion Show, the Seven Miles Boots enabled the wearer to walk simultaneously in the physical world and in the Internet.

Saturday is a sound-based artwork that participants experience through a bone-conductive glove interface. Saturday forms a uniquely intimate portrait of Chicago through a composite presentation of conversations “stolen” on Saturdays.

With the overuse of radio frequencies for wireless communications, there comes the increased occurrence of ‘crossed lines’ where a private conversation becomes accidentally shared. To create the interactive sound piece Saturday, Sabrina Raaf used walkie-talkies, CB radios, and various other forms of consumer ‘security’ technology in order to actively harvest such communication leaks. Saturday, therefore, forms a uniquely intimate portrait of Humboldt Park, Chicago through a composite presentation of conversations stolen on Saturdays in the park.

Participants experience Saturday through a custom-designed glove interface. In order to hear the audio, participants press their gloved fingertips to their forehead and they ‘hear’ the sound without the use of their ears. Each glove is fitted with cutting-edge audio devices called ‘bone transducers’. These transducers translate sounds into vibration patterns which then resonate through bone. This piece permits a new way of listening. The user places their fingers to their forehead — in a gesture akin to Rodin’s The Thinker or of a clairvoyant — in order to tap into the lives of strangers. Pressing different combinations of fingers to the temple yields plural viewpoints and group conversations. These sounds are literally mixed in the bones of the Listener.

WEARABLE EXPERIENCE in Public Space

Hats’ Dreams is a wearable art project by Sala Wong and Peter Williams. This piece explores the possibilities afforded by technology to merge our experiences of art, fashion and everyday life.

Hats’ Dreams (2004) is a celebration of every day life. Art, life, technology and fashion come up with a pair of dazzling hats. Nobody can take their eyes off of those who are wearing these remarkable chapeaus. The hats feature moving images – snapshots of city scenes and everyday life. We live in our experience, and our experiences reshape the way we perceive the world. Hats’ Dreams captures fragments of our surroundings. Those who encounter the wearers of Hats’ Dreams will see themselves on the hats. They become participants in an unedited, real-life performance – and are seen on the HEAD – in the HAT. The brims have pinholes through which cameras capture images from the outside world. These images are then fed to a custom display – distorted and merged with changing patterns on the surface of the hat for all to see.

Peter and Sala extend their special thanks to Yuet Wai Leung of SOMA Costume Design Ltd., Shiu Ming Lai, Joe Tsui and Carl Wong for their help in realizing this project for ISEA2004.

The Millefiore Effect concentrate on making work using interactive devices and environments to elicit and facilitate emotional responses and communication between people. Their projects rely on and disrupt our codes of behavior and interaction with others.

Front is two lightweight wearable suits that both contain offensive and defensive inflatable air sacs. Attendants help participants (gallery visitors or other members of the public) into the suits, which strap around their shoulders, over their clothes. A microphone in each suit picks up the wearer’s voice. When their voice exceeds a certain volume, small fans cause their own offensive sacs to inflate, along with the other participant’s defensive sacs. If both players are above the volume limit, both suits will be entirely inflated. When both players are below that level., the fans suck all the air out of the suits.

“Front developed from the idea of creating something wearable that would change in response to the wearer. We thought of analogies to certain animals that have the means for very physical expressions of their internal state. We set out, not to dress the user as an animal, but to create a similar means of expression for humans. As we worked on the suits and saw them used, they presented ideas around conflict and violence: they suggested a ritualized, ceremonial form of combat that defused aggression at the same time as it played with it”.

The Millefiore Effect was formed in the year 2000 by Ralph Borland, Jessica Findley & Margot Jacobs. They met as graduate students in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University (NYU), USA.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 computer and Fischer Price Loom to be defining objects of her childhood. She makes visceral representations of binary numbers in candy and knitting.

Eatable Codes invites visitors to take a chocolate but leave the wrapper, thus revealing a code in the form of chocolate/no chocolate, or zeros and ones. The punchcardesque image is translated in real time into binary digits revealing the code of chocolate. The 127 chocolates correspond to the 127 characters of the ASCII keyboard.

“Binary numbers are the language of computers”, Egenhoefer explains. “These numbers ideally achieve my goat as an artist constantly: to make the intangibte tangible while translating that into the visual image. I have used binary codes both physically and conceptually. Some of my work directly stems from the actual zeros and ones, other works relate more abstractly through the ideas of order, structure, memory, and communication.”

Imagine travelling through an unknown land, through its cities and natural reserves, without relying on overbooked hotel-rooms, intricate tent-structures, or camping sites. With DressWare the traveler of the future will be able to trek around the globe fully ‘off-the-grid’, independently and comfortably.

DressWare is a long-term design and development project, concerned with mobile, wearable and self-sustaining shelters for contemporary nomads. Following the legacy of Archigram and Michael Webb’s Suitaloon and Cushicle, the project evolves the idea of clothing as portable architecture in random ‘you never know WEAR?’ situations. For example, the SleepingBagDress prototype is a multipurpose kimono-dress that can be inflated to form a cylindrical inhabitable container.
The DressWare research has been conducted in two main threads, one dealing with powering the shelter in its inflated form, and the other focusing on materials that can respond to external stimuli and adapt their functionality to fit the needs of the wearer/inhabitant. The current availability of solar panels, efficient batteries and fuel cells as `green’ sources of energy has been incorporated. The use of ‘smart materials’ is being explored for the purpose of camouflage, thermal and physical protection, as well as increased wearability and sleeping comfort. This research has been documented and sampled for integration at a later point.

The presentation at ISEA2004 will involve a documentation process from urban interventions in the cities of Brussels and Tallinn.

Ensemble was also presented as a workshop for children, with Christina Gadegaard Nilsen

Ensemble is a set of wearable wireless musical controllers created for children. It investigates the use of simple sensors as a means of playing a piece of electronic music, and is played by a group of children in a installation/ workshop environment.

A small group of children are playing in a theatre space. One of them, a four year old boy, is carefully investigating a man’s hat. The hat is making a singing sound that changes pitch when it is moved. He plays with it on his own turning the hat slowly or shaking it and listening to the different qualities of the sound, changing from calm singing to percussive noises.

Ensemble has been created to investigate how analogue sensors in tangible interfaces are perceived and understood through the emerging intuitions of children. Each piece of clothing includes a simple sensor that modifies a sound or a voice. The sensor is incorporated into a garment which possesses its own individual possibilities for movement and control… The position of a mans hat, the swoosh of a dress, the darkness inside a Ladies bag…

Ensemble is a ‘walk-in’, participatory installation. There is no audience -everybody plays, creating is a Live sound-piece played by the orchestra of those who dress up.

Ensemble was developed at STEIM by Kristina Andersen with assistance from Frank Balde, Jorgen Brinkman and Michel Waisvisz.

A(D)DRESS.MOV is a work in progress – a wearable screen for musicians. It is conceived to be a platform responsive to past and present environments -where the use of video projection, sampling technology and interactivity widens the performative range available to any artist who wears it.

Inspired by film soundtracks and performance art, A(D)DRESS.MOV was originally devised to enhance electronic sound performances and to create a more meaningful connection to screening video. To date, the skirt has featured remote video switching, wireless spy cameras, Max/MSP patching and multiple speakers, but never all of these at the same time. The long-term goal for A(D)DRESS.MOV is the integration of all these elements into one wearable instrument.

A(D)DRESS.MOV forms the second part of a projected trilogy of skirt works. The first is called The Other Velvet and is a voluminous velvet skirt worn by a musician performing with a dancer secreted inside the garment. The third skirt is yet to be developed.

This presentation will expand on the concept of the skirt trilogy, trace the emergence of the audio-visual duo cAVity, and discuss and demonstrate the approaches taken and the results achieved in the research and development of A(D)DRESS.MOV since the original prototype was developed in 2002. It will include video and audio footage of various performances and research environments in which the prototype has been presented or tested.

cAVity is an audio visual duo consisting of Anne Walton and Cat Hope from Perth, Western Australia. They are pursuing alternatives to the convention of the flat, vertically oriented, rectilinear screen whilst also playing with the typical relationship between sound and video.

INTERFACING SOUND

Sonic Spaces – the kinetics of sound is a computer interactive audio installation. It translates the motion of individuals within an active space into a quadraphonic, algorithmically controlled soundscape through the use of a video camera, computer software, and loudspeakers.

Sonic Spaces consists of a 7m X 7m area with a speaker positioned in each corner. Above the centre of the room are a video camera and three coloured spotlights. The installation allows participants a wide range of sonic and performance possibilities. The use of one’s motion as an interface allows the work to be accessible by everyone if they feel the inclination to play and explore. The closest analogy would be that it is a kind of musical instrument that is played by changing one’s spatial position in a room, and the characteristics of that motion over time.

In some ways Sonic Spaces is a microcosm of the physical world. We move from place to place with an ever-changing sonic landscape accompanying us. Sonic Spaces is about listening to the environment around you. It attempts to sensitize individuals to this aspect of our daily life by bringing a feeling of creativity and awareness to the motions of people going about their daily tasks. Perhaps individuals who happen upon this work will slowdown for a moment to become aware of the changing soundspace around them.

Tina Gonsalves and Tom Donaldson will be wearing Medulla Intimata: responsive video jewellery in the bar, simply chatting with other barflies. Medulla Intimata reflects, comments and interacts with the artists’ conversations, displaying its bored, neurotic or flirtatious thoughts in generated video on a screen inside the necklace.

INTERFACING SOUND

Within Sub_scape ISEA2004 the system’s custom algorithms transcode data sets from the Baltic Sea (bathymetry, pollutants, fish finds, sea temperature) and ‘maps’ these into audio and video data modules (Australian desert) in real time.

Sub_scape takes Baltic data and desert-as-video data and plays with the reflexive synthesis of seemingly alternative spaces – the northern sea and the southern desert. Yet the sea and desert – are isomorphs: with metaphysical, aesthetic and political connections between them. The western imagination represents the sea and the desert as -non-place- and negative space. Yet mapped with lines of force and communication, trade and theft, disease and DNA, development and exploitation, they are highly political spaces. Both the sea and desert are -deep space” (a combinative trope of physical place and social connectedness) onto which we project our deepest, most troubling collective histories and desires. Environmentally, the desert was once a seabed; both have similar geomorphologies. Sub_scape is a conjuring and evocative work aiming to transcend the interstices between metaphorical and material space. It is a playful and ironic critique on the traditional politics and power dynamics of knowledge through-mapping. By mapping one space into another, and playing on the dynamics of turbulence, balance, recursive effect and pattern formation in the environmental data, and by mixing scale, perspective, subjectivity and time frame Sub_scape creates affects more baroque than cartesian.

INTERFACING SOUND

Soundings is an electro-acoustic installation which replaces the traditional muzak of elevators with samples from the port cities, sea, and vessel. The environment, ship and radio frequency spectrum will be interfaced through low- and high-tech means. Steve Bradley and Timothy Nohe will present an electro-acoustic audio installation in the Silja Opera ferry elevators. The work will directly utilize the ISEA 2004 conference ferry and the forces of the environment. Content will be gathered during the transit between Helsinki and Tallinn, reshaped through performance gestures, and embedded in the ferry lift system.

The ferry will be considered as an instrument to be sensed, sampled, and performed. The environment of the Baltic Sea and port cities will be captured, with emphasis given to the potential of: fauna, air/sea luminosity, hydrophonic and acoustic sound signatures, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum in the extremely low frequency range (aurora borealis, lightning, etc.) and radio frequency range (radio, television, satellite, etc.). This range of sources will be interfaced and sampled to produce a matrix of sound. The source recordings will be manipulated, mastered and played back as the conference progresses.
Bradley and Nohe, employing high and low technological means, have designed a range of instruments and interfaces from hydrophones to solar powered instruments.

Sailing for Geeks takes a sailing boat with a crew of self-confessed geeks on a journey through the Turku archipelago and into navigational software code.

Sailing for Geeks will explore code while navigating the open sea, creating a situation which, for geeks in the process of exploring code, is highly unusual, The group’s open source of exploration and inspiration will be free nautical navigation software, communication at sea and WiFi performances.

The project is an attempt to collectively consider issues of mapping, routing, maritime communication, communication history, and navigation, while maintaining contact with the sea environment that is the object of all these issues. The project will thus add an experiential layer to the development process, which the group expects to result in the development of free, open-source navigation software.

Another aim of the project is to navigate through the labyrinthine Turku archipelago using only instruments and the classic navigation system. For communication the crew will use existing technology – the Inmarsat Mini-M. The Mini-M will provide the bandwidth to transmit video-clips and visual materials to the ISEA conference boat via a server located on a stratospheric balloon!

Proposed route:

1. Departure from Airisto on 12.8.2004 at 16:00
2. Navigation through the archipelago
3. Arrival in Mariehamn on 15.8.2004
4. WiFi performance via stratospheric balloon in Mariehamn, 16.8,2004, 19-
23:00h.
5. Return to Airisto on the 18.8.2004 am

All the people involved in this project are excellent sailors, though they have very different backgrounds. They variously have backgrounds in the non-commercial internet, the history of science, wireless art, social hacking and performance.

Combining a love of travel with a long-standing fascination with expressing and organising time, Narcissus explores the timeline of a journey. Photographs or music can evoke the memory of a trip; Hand-held devices can record the position of every step we take. Together these ideas produce a novel twist ? a recording of a journey that plays as you travel.

Narcissus represents a prototype for further exploration into how we might record our travel_ in the future. Using simple data collected from the Global Positioning System [GPS) worldwide network [including time, location and speed), Narcissus presents on screen our current Location, as well a record of our progress in a thoughtful and compelling manner. A variety of information pertinent to the current position is overlaid on the screen ? references to the locations of friends or family, places previously visited, the path of a previous journey. Accompanying this is audio reflecting the movement of travel itself; a unique, true -soundtrack” for the journey.

As the majority of the material is generated in real-time the resulting installation and archive simultaneously reflect and record the journey itself. From this Narcissus aims to provoke the discussion of such questions as: Would we adapt our travel plans to alter the record? Would hints from a record really remind us of previous journeys taken? Would other travelers choose to share the experience of our journey? our record becoming their map?

The machines of Machine Therapy have wisdom and empathic opportunities resident in their grumbling, roaring, squeaky membranes. Make a sound, scream or sing with the machines and uncover your deep forgotten fears, joys, and desires!

The on board Machine Therapist will facilitate Live action psychotherapy sessions between people and machines. Among the machines available for one-to-one sessions is a blender whose motor is controlled by the growling of the person using it. The people participating may empathize, vocalize or move in any way with these machines. They can try to understand them or perhaps come into harmonic resonance with the machines, and thus come to find in themselves a recognition of energies not otherwise accessed or consciously acknowledged.

Long before implants, splicing, and cyborgs, people and machines have lived as companion species, co-evolving. It is evident that machines are not neutral parties, and there are important elements of machines that we did not consciously directly design into them: the sounds they make, the vibrations, the movements and gestures. Machines influence our self-conception, expression, social perception, and perception of responsibility or action. By accessing and vitalizing the interplay of people and machines through psychotherapeutic techniques, a social awareness is brought out, and individuals are invited to reinvent their own existence and their relationships with the machines sharing their space.

In Ideal Word text becomes image. The typographic characters become strokes of the drawing and are incorporated into the composition, stripping words of their meaning.

The new typographic culture, the development of hypertext as a browsing model (specific usability), the prose of code or the compiling languages used by programmers are just a few examples of how the written word acquires prominence in digital environments.

idealword.org provides a space for simulating artistic traditions within digital environments. It is a space where idealword.org items are mutually and happily sampled and redefined with the sole goal of confusing the technical genre.

All the contents of idealword.org are implemented for [slow) dial-up and (fast) DSL or cable connections. Images larger than 100K are interwoven so that they progressively appear on the screen, thus relaxing the always-anxious viewer.

The contents of idealword.org can be printed on-line, generating a physical version of their digital counterpart. Therefore, the user of digital environments gains a double artistic experience.

LifeBoat is a prosaic title indicating both the physical reality (the project is contained within a ship’s lifeboat) and somewhat more conceptually, as the lifeboat has become home to a Biotechnology lab; to the processes of life itself. On a metaphorical level, this project is designed to deal with concepts of sustainability, survival and notions of biological, cultural and ideological re-generation, and naturally its obverse, the degradation of life and all its manifestations.
When the Maori people of New Zealand first encountered Cook’s ship (the Endeavour) they thought it to be a floating island. Although at first this may seem a ‘quaint’ reaction, the Maori were perfectly accurate. As a device of European expansion and exploitation [and as a scientific voyage) the Endeavour was in fact a highly compressed version of English culture. This was no simple floating transport, but a microcosm of language, mathematics, philosophy, foodstuffs, social and political structures, religion, not to mention sexual appetites and exotic diseases. If England itself had somehow drifted into the South Pacific, the effect would have not really been any different!

On board of Silja Opera, The SymbioticA crew inhabits a standard (fully enclosed) ship’s lifeboat and develops a working Biological Laboratory that focuses on tissue culture of elements of the local marine environment. The lab produces small biological survival packs as well as [instructional) starter packs for re¬establishing and/or deconstructing cultural and political structures [e.g. starter packs for alternative democracy seem to be a good idea in the current political climate!). In addition to exploring life on the Baltic, the LifeBoat crew will carry out preparatory lab work at Heureka’s Open Lab.

Despite being an internationally famous hit after its performance at Expo67 in Canada, the English version of Kino-Automat has, quite literally, not been seen since 1974. Christopher Hates will make a presentation about the context of the film and show several sequences from the footage.

In 1967 – at the Expo67 in Montreal – the world’s first interactive film system, Kino-Automat ran for 150 performances. Created in Czechoslovakia and directed by Raduz Cincera, it was no coincidence that the democracy of the film the audience ‘votes’ at several moments) reflected the democratic upsurge in Czechoslovakia around that time. The film’s seminal interaction and narrative scheme has been much discussed in the academic literature – despite the fact that it has never been publicly performed since 1974. Interactive cinema was most certainly kick-started by the Kino-Automat, even though it predated the use of digital technology (it was shot on film and shown using synchronised projectors).

After 30 years in the shadows, during which time most of the makers and actors have sadly died, Christopher Hales has undertaken an in-depth archaeology of this neglected film, and is completing an interactive DVD of the original film, together with a detailed collection of written articles.

For this ISEA event, Hales will give a factual and very detailed study of Kino-Automat, including plenty of original footage – which has not been seen in a public format since 1974. The talk will therefore bring to an end 30 years of silence.

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

Each department of ICOLS will generate weapons, scenarios, position papers on the best way to wage war/gain objectives/maintain a defense. There is no unitary (imagined war) scenario, rather each contributor is free to pursue their own directions.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s work a designer of weapons, tanks, flying machines, military complexes and bridges for the Duke of Milan and Cesare Borgia has become an exemplar of an ‘ideal’ relationship between artistic production and technology, which by the development of a technological culture is seen as somehow fatally disenfranchising arts practices. A desire to reinstate this relationship can be seen in the naming of the USA technology-based arts journal after the Italian artist.

Technology-based art stilt sees itself as operating on various advanced, transformative edges, using the teleological imperatives as a master narrative to inflect the rhetoric of the practice with the urgency of an otherwise discredited modernism. This combines with concurrent ideas of social engagement, and the rhetoric of resistance – opposition, guerilla, hacker-culture, info-war and so forth. The default positioning of the techno-artist is modeled on that of the terrorist – a techno-Trotsky moving covertly against hegemonic oppressors: a Microsoft Mujuhadeen. But every Mujuhadeen needs a Kalashnikov.

Artists are in a complex relationship with the military/industrial/technology and entertainment industries. The ‘COLS Arms Fairaims to make overt these narratives and histories. COLS aims to reveal hidden programs and arsenals for our defense, security, future and safety.

ICOLS (International Corporation of Lost Structures) is a creative international space which utilises as a structural device the dominant contemporary model of the corporate structure. Within this structure the departmental titles create contexts for analyses of history, the present and projections for the future.

In Float, the ship is the play-head and the route is the track. Depth, direction, speed and the surrounding islands build the score for the sound installation. The ship plays the track as it moves across the Baltic Sea. The sea, especially the deep unknown, retains an aura of mystery in this era of easy and extreme travelling. There is a fascination for the vast dimensions of oceanic bodies of water and the secrets they possess. The power of a storm, the long horizon and the incomprehensible unknown raises respect and awe among many of us.

On the surface, there are the shapes of islands and the coastline, drawn against the horizon. The multitude of ship routes and passages that connect countries and cities weave a vast invisible network of paths. While crossing between the various locations, the ISEA voyage provides a lots of information which can be neither seen nor heard. This sound installation makes some of the invisible dimensions and the silent layers of data, audible.

The ferry travels across a map, moving high above the sea floor, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep. This passage in time generates various data. All these data streams: the GPS coordinates, distance to islands, depth, direction and speed are translated to sounds. The result is a slowly developing soundscape that invites the traveller to listen to his or her location in time and space.

Facade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, single-act interactive drama. During an evening get-together that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of a marriage.

This work is unlike hypertext narrative or interactive fiction to date, in that the computer characters actively perform the story without waiting for you to click on a fink or enter a command. Interaction is seamless as you converse in natural language, move and gesture freely within the first-person 3D world of Grace and Trip’s apartment. Al controls Grace and Trip’s personality and behaviour, including emotive facial expressions, spoken voice and full-body animation. Furthermore, the Al intelligently chooses the next story “beat” based on your moment-by-moment interaction, what story beats have happened so far, and the need to satisfy an overall dramatic arc. An innovative text parser allows the system to avoid the “I don’t understand” response all too common in text-adventure interactive fiction.

Facade is an attempt to create a real-time 3D animated experience akin to being on stage with two Live actors. By the end you have changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – providing motivations for you to re-play the drama and find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently.

Humans have a fundamental need for contact with other humans. Our interactions and relationships with other people form a network that supports us, makes our lives meaningful, and ultimately enables us to survive. The Human Connectedness research group explores the topic of human relationships and how they are mediated by technology. Our mission is to conceive a new genre of technologies and experiences that allow us to build, maintain, and enhance relationships in new ways. We also aim to enable new kinds of individual bonds and communities that were not possible before, but may be beneficial or fun.

Drift is an interactive installation in which the viewer is able to elastically manipulate time and space throughout the course of the ferry journey. The familiar guise of a sightseeing telescope is utilized as an interface that enables the user to examine their surrounding environment in a very unique manner.

The telescope presents the viewer with a real-time 180 degree panorama of the scene. Looking forward through it to the front of the craft provides a real-time live depiction of the scene. As the telescope is panned around towards the rear, time stretches and slows enabling the viewer to fluidly examine their environment with considerable detail. As the user continues to pan further towards the rear of the vessel, time not only slows, but reverses, drifting back over the previous journey. When the telescope is aligned back along the previous course of the ferry, the user can explore the collective experiences of people traveling together across the sea. Just as our own memory is not completely under our control, the telescopic views become smeared and distorted as the dimensions of time and space interfere. The user is readily able to return to the ‘normal’ temporal state by panning back towards the front. By doing so, time elastically slides the scene back to the present.

Drift alters individuals’ perceptions of the journey by being able to examine aspects of the past in significant detail.

In stark contrast to the slow journey of the ferry, the flow of communication is almost inconceivably rapid. Whilst the ferry and its passengers follow a single course, broadcast transmissions move in every direction at once.

WIRELESS EXPERIENCE

Haunt>Pass (Kiasma version) recalls the sensuality of sea passage and calls for the passage of narrative via Bluetooth. The narrative here considers the ferry story and passage as transformation and memory, of haunted devices, haunted histories, in haunted space.

LeslieSharpe’s Haunt>Pass is a multimedia ‘ghost story’ created for viewing on witiretess handheld devices. The project has two parts: one for the ferry and one the KIASMA exhibition.

Haunt>Pass at Kiasma is a tale of a ghost found on-board the Silja Opera Ferry, drifting from device to device in the form of electronic data. Haunted by its own memories of embodiment, place, and moments of transference, the ghost relays the story of how it appeared on the Silja Opera, recalling (among other things) that ship’s transformations. Thoroughly displeased with the comforts of the embodied, the ghost disrupts the story occasionally, with memories of earlier electronic and physical disturbances and signals — such as stories of naval collisions, lurking presences in the Gulf of Finland, the bursts of the first naval distress signals sent via wireless, the ‘pings’ of sonar, and ‘sensor ghosts’ appearing and disappearing on radar screens.

‘Passing…’ Kiasma museum-goers may experience the work semi-privately reclining in the gallery on a large soft wave. They can also engage the public and social space of the museum by passing story files to others with bluetooth devices. Ensuing social or file exchanges are thus dependent on peer-to-peer interactions (or lack of them) and will determine the social or private nature of the exhibition space (and the work).

Threads and Cords is a musical drama by Swedish composers Jens Hedman and Erik Mikael Karlsson consisting exclusively of sounds from the human voice and from the voice-synthesis program CHANT. The piece is based upon poems by Erik Mikael Karlsson, and can be described as surrealistically apocalyptic; a journey beyond time and space to another reality where life and death are blended together to form a new existence of being or nonbeing.

Charangas Delirantes: The idea of the piece is a fictional perambulation through the varied and contrasting sound colours and rhythmic world of dancing, applying to these aspects a distorted perspective as a means for possible discovery. Most sounds are derived from sampled and processed piano music materials by Haydn and Chopin. Additional sounds such as brass, percussion and certain piano colours were created by the composer. Charangas are popular dance ensembles in Hispanoamerica, particularly in the Caribbean.

A sequence is built, it crowds together, it wriggles, and it flies about, like an insect.

Identity of Color is a Flash movie based on Agricola’s poem. The work is developed according the principle of SAMAC (Simultaneous Associative Media Art Composing), which describes Agricola’s particular way of developing multi-media art works of experimental writing. It is a composition of words, vector graphics, sound and voice executed and performed by Agricola de Cologne.

Interaction: end on demand. Directed and produced by Agricola de Cologne.

btd x is an experimental video composition -a study of the concept “model”. The artists worked with surface and space, playing with concepts of reality in three scenes. As an example of possible connections between sound and image, the artists had software at their disposal whose basis on physical modeling allowed sound to be constructed and a simultaneous visualization of this sound to be observed – a representation of the fundamentally responsible structures over time. This principle of sound and image production served as the impetus for the development of an artistic project which united both the elements of sound and image while presenting parameters for a creative process in which each element would only receive justification for its presence through its relationship to the other. The images to be seen and the sounds to be heard are the result of this virtually symbiotic process. A thematic complex was chosen to serve as a further structural principle: surface and space, layers and rows, the opposition of the artificial with an assumed reality. Detailed work with the physical models led to a questioning of the concept of reality, of framework models and of complexity. Although sound and image were subject to constant change by the influence of the other element, each of the elements tells its own story and is based on the biography of the individual.

Claudia WESTERMANN (image), Sean REED (audio)

Actors:
– a courtyard facade in Karlsruhe, Germany
– various architectural models on the scale of 1 :100
– line animations fmm the physical models created with the software

Genesis by the ACROE institute in Grenoble
– Nik Haffner (Frankfurt Ballet)

The work was created in August of 2000 at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. Completion of the revised version October 2000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfP6pfqpQWU

A woman tells the story of a journey she made on a cargo boat to the Middle East. A video commissioned by the International film festival Rotterdam for the project “On the Waterfront” (ARTE prize for Best European Short Film, 48th Oberhausen Short Film Festival / First Prize, Video-ex 2002, Festival of Experimental Film and Video, Zurich.)

Additional statement about the work
“CARGO” is the story of a journey, I made on a container ship with a group of Rumanian and Phillipino sailors, who were delivering cargo to the Middle East. I stayed on the ship six weeks. The sailors weren’t allowed to leave the boat and they spent their days waiting, singing karaoke and telling me stories in a small TV room. In Syria, the ports were military zones. I hid at a porthole and secretly filmed the life below: a man stealing wood, a soldier fishing off the edge of an abandoned submarine. Later, I took the most abstract images and made a narrative, that falls between reality and fiction. It was my way of showing the limbo these men were living in.(Laura Waddington 2001)

Single’s bar 01 offers a series of parallel hedonistic narratives without any obvious closure. The camera toggles furiously between multiple views of clubbers involved in a serious dance floor session. The strobing effects never allow the viewer’s gaze to grasp any given character for more than a millisecond, before they merge back into a melee of winks, smiles and pelvic thrusts. The protagonists are flirting, sometimes with one another, sometimes with the camera. The white background suggest a dreamlike state. They are submerged in light, and not entirely sober. ..

In my work I speak about communication between spaces, animals and humans?/ two houses are travelling in different places, collecting / saving animals / save like the computer function / virtual / keeping them as files and taking them to a safe place / server / the moon / the pattern on the houses / a sample from the ceramic of the old mosque of my childhood town Constanta / a link between the real space and the virtual story/

a) the-phone-book.com b) the sketch- book.com c) live chat discussion on content development for wireless

a) the-phone-book.com is a one year old, server based publishing organisation that commissions international new works of ultra-short fiction for quarterly distribution by wireless and traditional internet. We take the technical limitations of the format and turn them into a challenge for our writers. Our longest stories are 150 words and our shortest, 150 characters. Because of our desire to publish quality content we pay professional rates while charging our readers nothing.

b) the-sketch-book.com is a new commission following the same process as the-phone-book.com for isea2002, Japan. Students from Aichi Prefectural Art University Fine Arts and Music Design and Craft course develop ultra-short-animations for i-mode foma & 3g.

c) Part of a series of discussions following the developments of thephone- book Limited as we produce three of our main commissions utilizing the limitations – and potentials – of wireless interfaces across the world.
the-phone-book.com was conceived by creative director Ben Jones and producer Fee Plumley, and is edited by publisher Ben Stebbing of Clinamen Press, all based in Manchester, UK. the-phone-book Ltd (the umbrellacompany) as launched in March 2002 by Ben Jones and Fee Plumley to enable ongoing research and distribution of innovative content opportunities across international convergent platforms.

Flora Petrinsularis associates to a real book an other one, a virtual book to be flipped through on the screen. At any moment, the computer “sees” the page where the book is open to offer other levels of reading. The real book is composed of two parts, with quotations of The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a small herbarium including flowers collected in the very same places where Rousseau botanized. The virtual book opens interactive sequences of animated images and sounds. For each quotation, there is a video illustration, like an engraving, focused on a character from the short love scenes, in the very moments of outburst, selected from The Confessions. For each flower, the memory of the plant gathering and its metamorphosis into an image is presented. The work underlines the passage between two forms of books, or movies, one of a traditional and the other of a future format, and is based on a literary masterpiece which is always to be discovered. The interactive setting tries to make an interpretation of The Confessions that refers exclusively to the text itself, to its secret or revealed motivations as an exemplary self-analysis.

“Peoples Screen”. In November 2015 Public Art Lab Berlin commissioned a new version of “Occupy the Screen” for the Guangzhou Light Festival in China. Sharing the same time zone, the installation was connected for 12 evenings with the Northbridge Piazza public video screen in Perth, Australia and was extensively reworked to converge scenes from the cities of Guangzhou and Perth. Renamed “Peoples Screen”, the installation was hugely popular, involving over 25,000 participants in Guangzhou alone. For the fist time the citizens in Guangzhou, China and in Perth, Australia were brought into exchange through an artistic real time performance on public screens from the 15th to 29th November 2015. “Peoples Screen” was presented during the Guangzhou International Light Festival on the screen at the Flower Garden Square and on the Northbridge Screen in Perth, offering public audiences the opportunity to co-create coincidental encounters and spontaneous interactions between these two cities. This installation builds on practice-based research and developments of previous interactive works for large format urban screens including “Occupy the Screen” for “Connecting Cities Urban Reflections” in September 2014 between Supermarket Gallery Berlin, Germany and Riga European Capital of Culture, Latvia.

This new installation pushed the playful, social and public engagement aspects of the work into new cultural and political realms in an attempt to ‘reclaim the urban screens’ through developments in ludic interaction and internet based high-definition videoconferencing. By making use of illustrated references to site-specific landmarks in Guangzhou and Perth, audiences were invited to occupy the screen. The concept development of “Peoples Screen” was inspired in part by 3D street art as a DIY tradition, referencing the subversive language of graffiti. The interface borrows from the ‘topoi’ of the computer game, as a means to navigate the environment; once within the frame the audience becomes a character immersed within the environment. “Peoples Screen” linked two geographically distant audiences using a telematics technique; the installation takes live oblique camera shots from above the screen of each of these two audience groups, located on a large 8 x 8 metre green groundsheet and combines them on screen in a single composited image. As the merged audiences start to explore this collaborative, shared ludic interface, they discover the ground beneath them (as it appears on screen as a digital backdrop) locates them in a variety of surprising and intriguing anamorphic environments, where from a particular position the characters can look as if in precarious situations. In “Peoples Screen” this included suspended on a planplank high above a lake, or on an over sized wooden bridge. The installation was designed for the audience to engage in an intuitive way and there was no preconceived ending. The position of the urban screen as street furniture is ideally suited to engage with people going about their everyday life, and often the most interesting outcomes are discovered through the ways that the public interprets and re-appropriates this environment. The interaction is an open system aiming to offer the audience a means of agency to be creative and make individual decisions. The area of play was clearly demarked as a space via the green screen groundsheet in both Guangzhou and Perth, identifying a theatre of play once in the space the participant engages as they wish. The environment may suggest activities or events but the audience are free to respond as they choose, which is key to the characteristics of an open system, that there is much opportunity for the unexpected and that chance encounters can change the direction of a narrative that is unfolding.

We used our experience of previous installations to inform elements of the design to include objects that people can engage with, but also playing with perception and illusion. This included a Pop Art inspired tunnel, which participants intuitively jumped into, and steps, which disappear into an underground bunker. From our observations optical illusions acted as a signifier of play, people inherently recognized the environment as playful and inviting. We also used the notion of the computer game as a design reference, incorporating box hedges suspended in space, which participants recognized as a game platform to jump on and between. The environments often implied a physical response such as jumping, diving or climbing, including a swimming pool to dive into, coloured boxes to climb across and a bridge to jump off. This contributed to the active approach that the majority of the participants took.

In both “Peoples Screen” and “Occupy the Screen” people of all ages took part and adults were as likely as children to engage. We observed an uninhibited willingness to play from children. One girl played for hours engaging with the set, pretending to sit at the table, jumping into the tunnel, walking the plank etc. She engaged in a very performative way, with confidence and exaggerated movements. We also observed this enhanced ability to perform in adults as well as responding to the environments they tended to engage with others, pretending to scratch someone’s head, or hold hands in order to jump into the tunnel together, or lift someone up from the pool. The remoteness of the installations appeared to give confidence to cross into personal space that might otherwise be seen as a physical invasion of space. In many ways “Peoples Screen” broke down cultural and social barriers, both in the local communities, but also between two cities, where new collocated spaces and creative encounters could be founded and occupied.

Through this research project, we have developed a framework for open participatory artworks for urban screens to maximize audience agency through play, engaging the public in new ways in the urban environment, offering the public agency and developing events that create community memory. Levels of openness were measured, from which we were able to define key characteristics, to provide a framework for open interactive systems for urban screens. “Peoples Screen” aimed to include the widest range of urban participation possible and aligns to a ‘Fluxus Happening’ in a move away from the object as artwork towards the street environment and the ‘every day’ experience. It also borrows from a tradition of early 20th century media developments where audiences were transfixed by the magic of being transported to alternative realities though early films at the traveling fairs. Lumière contemporaries, Mitchell and Kenyon, whose films of public crowds in the 1900’s present a striking similarity to the way audiences react and respond to “Peoples Screen”. These pioneering fairground screenings of audiences filmed earlier the same day possess all the traits of live telepresent interaction, albeit through the latency in processing, whereby the audience play directly to the camera and occupy this new public space by performing to themselves and others when screened later.

Floating Territories uses a series of screen based games to explore issues of migration, territorial boundaries and border protection.

A swipe card, issued to ISEA ferry participants, arbitrarily assigns a tribal allegiance and suggests an associated social activity. When the player swipes their card at the computer located on the boat, a game is activated that is moderated by the card’s particular code. The game also acts as a portal for participants to map their own personal family migration history, which leads to a visualisation of all previous players’ accumulated data.

SR c is a sound-periodical with episodes one can return to. SR c is a radio channel for art, culture and ideas, and an audio-magazine in themes with visual landscapes to go into and to find radio in. We want to explore new ways of presenting radio and new ways of listening and perceiving radio. SR is for Swedish Radio, the National Public Radio, and c is for seeing. Seeing as in the programs we produce, programs that evoke imagery, like radio drama and documentaries. And of course as in the visual content you get at the website ; graphics, drawings, animation, video etc. Also c is for see as in understanding, and seeing through; “truths”, cultural preconceptions and smartness. [-you can never be too intelligent, but you can be too smart]. And it’s about see-through. A wish to strip bare the voice, make it free of professional tone, so that it is just the person there in the radio studio with a wish to talk. Not to everyone, but directly to each and someone.

Drum-Fi — A wireless laptop driven interactive sound installation, using the California urban drum circle as the musical and social networking model. You are invited to bring your wifi – enabled laptop, enter the scene, download the software, connect to the network, be the performer and audience, and make ‘beautiful’ music together. Come and engage in a large dynamic musical exchange and see/hear what happens. So bring your WiFi laptops and charge your batteries! The Drum-Fi group: Steve Dude, John Bruneau, Chris Head, Michael Araya, Rita Hunjun, Veronica Ramirez, Rob Riddle.

Rick Walker’s Loop.pooL is a fascinating and creative one-man journey through the world of sound and rhythm. Using digital live looping technology and a lot of audience interactive participation, Rick is able to play a completely different set of instruments on every single song in this early twenty first century version of a “one person’s band.”

Matt Davignon has developed a unique form of improvisation over the last 10 years, focusing on textures, arrhythmic patterns and musical imperfections. Combining acoustic and electronic elements, he attempts to create dynamic, biological music from seemingly limited source material.

Alien Hand is an evocative and intimate portrait of the struggle with memory loss. Fairy tale, poetry, voice, and mysterious atmospheric sound take the viewer through an intense, emotional journey which shifts between the real and the surreal. The struggle is personalized in the artist’s father but then universalized and reflected in the confused dementia of residents in a nursing home. The artist has become a traveller both as observer and as participant in a strange and foreign landscape where language and habits must be re-interpreted to be understood.

“It’s a generated image,” she said. any tracing, texture mapping-” She stared as the face smiled out at her from the m eof the dome, beyond the slow-motion hurricane of lost things, minor artifacts of countless lives, tools and toys and gilded buttons.” -William Gibson, Count Zero 1986

Screen is a tele-robotic boxed construction, which sporadically comes alive for screenings and interaction. The piece is viewed and controlled simultaneously via a Web page interface and is also enhanced through a performative element which consists of live manipulation of the image and audio elements of the streaming video/audio feed.

The work consists of robotic armatures, which control a series of events inside a boxed grid-like construction. There are four elements, which are controlled via remote manipulation. These are:
1. The watering of a small plant (referencing popular telegarden works such as Ken Goldberg’s at Ars Electronics).
2. The sprinkling of water on a small piece of bread, which in turn generates mold, thereby forming a rudimentary form of life I ecosystem.
3. The control of a clothesline-like apparatus laterally moving the wings of a butterfly in one direction and an old photograph of a plane in the other.
4. The control of a drawing machine which endlessly transcribes circles on a wall of the box.

Screen acts as a kind of micro-theatre where enigmatic elements coexist in an elemental shadowbox world. The construction jitters to life as a result of a users input, an anonymous telepresence which enters into the box’s universe of successive layers and references to both the fictive and actual. Beginning with the telescope to early TV signals, vision over distance has gradually developed into action over distance and has supplanted earlier models of perceiving and engaging with the world. In Screen’s Cornell-esque scenario resides the blurred and jerky remnants of early cinema recalling the stop action animation of Ladislaw Starewicz or The Brothers Quay (Screen even houses a small book Penstes de Rousseau, signed by Timothy Quay). The reality being manipulated here is in fact that of a virtual world, as when one tries to stay afloat while “flying” in a dream. Screen can be considered as a collection of signs that refract, like the shattered sparkle of crystal in light, a trellis of inference and allusion imploding in a hall of mirrors.

A tribute to the heavy & powerfull atmosphere found in the music of the industrial band FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY. An exploration on FEAR & death, an essay to illustrate the emotion created by FEAR?

This is a short documentary video about Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of atom bombing. On August 6th, 1945, one of the worst horrors happened in history. Hiroshima became the first city in the world to be struck by an atomic bomb. At 8:15 in the morning, most of the city was destroyed, and estimates of the number killed outright have ranged upward from 70,000 to 200,000. Deaths from radiation injury have mounted through the years and the numbers of survivors have been on the decline. Setsuko will share her experience in Hiroshima and show how important to learn what happened to people there. By learning the fact, we will know about the results of the bomb and start thinking what we can do for stopping wars and avoiding another tragedy caused by nuclear bombs. What she’s saying is not only the past, but also it might happen in the future, as long as we keep nuclear weapons on the earth.

This work is a continuation of experimental research into the inherent relationship of image and sound in the medium of digital video. Coming from a graphics and post-production background, I wanted to create work that’s message could only be expressed via the experience of the work. The subject of the video is a silent protest conducted by practitioners of Falun Gong in Melbourne, Australia. I wanted to express my impressions of their patience and quiet determination, through the simple yet precise manipulation of digital video. The resulting audio seemed to me both stoic and determined, whilst expressing certain individual characteristics. The visual treatment seems to concisely express the sense of small determined actions having powerful ramifications.

These experimental pieces were created in an attempt to explore what is “Listenable’ and “watchable’ in abstract electronic audio/vision. I was interest in creating work with qualities inherent to the medium of digital video, so I turned the medium into itself, delving into hypnotic states of video feedback These works were created using 2 short lengths of video feedback footage. The sourced audio was panned either left or right as I wanted utilize the stereophonic spectrum, playing with the “beating” that occurs with panned and slightly out of sync frequencies. The resulting footage was then cut and overlayed in an attempt to create “pop pieces” where the “watching” and “listening” experiences were not exclusive to one another.

The town where I live has maintained a quaint appearance with full of bright season’s flowers. The beauty and the quaintness, however, easily tend to be veiled in a hectic daily life and are not be cared so often. Only time goes by. I feel empty and lonesome for that the ordinary scenery and even my own feeling have just gone somewhere. To capture and fix the image of time in which the tranquil town and these beautiful flowers exist, I created my video work, just obeying my feeling.

1. Binary
Binary is a principle of separation by two and this separation already carries process of unification. Each binary opposition is penetrated into the other side through membrane and transformed into their opponent. Becoming through interpenetration …. Here/There, You/Me, East/West, Good/Bad, Reality/Virtuality and Performer/Audience…

2. Interpenetration
I see numerous “interactive sounds” in Korean traditional performances. “Eolssigu!”, “Ulssu!”, “Eoi”, “Jouta” … we call them “Chuimsae”, which reflect Korean live philosophy from ancient times. These words don’t have clear meanings, instead, act in confirming of existence, YouIMe. It is to blow energy into performer and simultaneously, substantiates oneself like our act in front of mirror. We confirm our existence from our opposition. I feel something transcend language and social boundary in “Chuimsae”. It is neither “yes” nor “no”. It is instinctive reflection towards the other self, arising from our subconsciousness. It shows our desire of interaction. Interaction is unique pathway to become onething with our binary opposition. Paradoxically, binary system exists to erase itself, with tremendous potentiality of transformation and metamorphosis, rather than immovable separation. In English, I also observe similar kinds of interactive sounds: “Umm-hmm!”. In fact, these sounds exist in every language with different form. I name them “Chuimsae”, quoting from Korean traditional terminology. However, people are hard to aware “Chuimsae” in their use, for the reason that it’s so natural Like air surrounding themselves.

3. Hybrid
I have interview with people in different culture with a Korean oral traditional story, “Hungboga”. I tell them this story, carrying Korean traditional fan. When they listen my story, they interact with me, using lots of “Chuimsae”. When my story comes to the end, I ask my interviewers to tell this story back to me. My interviewers become the performer and tell me back the story in their memory, using a Korean traditional fan by their hand. My interviewers and I exchange position between performer and audiences. I become audience and listen their story with “Chuimsae”. Story is being moved, changed, evolved and distorted. Therefore, story is kept alive …. This work is about the process of interpenetration and hybridization between the binary pairs, Herenhere, You/Me, East/West, Good/Bad, and Performer/Audience. This process blur the distinction line between and allow them to become one thing with potential energy of movements. Shamanic relationship is created between audiences and my animation on screen, through continuous interaction by “Chuimsae”.

How we feel young people in the middle of the war. To stay in own country, but? It’s war, no conditions for Live, to continue the Me, not for exist. But if I go on the way from my country where? why? To be refuges? Should I stay or should I go ….

In a world of realistic fantasy, my work stands before this serious visionary reality, of which I am merely an observer.

“the freeway system in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life”

Reyner Banham

8 Bits or Less is a string of existential vignettes representing the record of events as seen through the wristcam eye. He states, “I am Blind”, and whether this relates to actual blindness or a metaphorical ‘blinding’ technophilia is unresolved. Nevertheless, in a McLuhanist shift, our protagonist now sees the world through his technological prostheses, “Eyes on my wrist/Ears on my hip”. And in stating this, it is revealed that the resolution of his devices is only “8 Bits or Less”. The journey begins. What ensues is the series of events overlaid with various readings that self-referentially mix paraphrased passages from Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” with earnest revelations about alien abduction, panoptic surveillance, textual/information bodies (Hayles) and paranoia being an enlightened state of being. In the end, not much is resolved except an abject understanding that once the process of surveillance began, there is no turning back. “It’s more of a journey, not much of a tale. But then, what did you expect for 8 Bits or Less?”, relates to consumerist expectations of technology and inexpensive consumption. In the end, the protagonist states that an upgrade is in order. 8 Bits or Less is the first video to be created with the Casio Wrist- Cam. Although this fact may not be remarkable in itself, it does explore the potential for upcoming creative applications of wearable technologies, suggesting the forebears of William Gibson’s description of future media star Tally Isham’s prosthetic video camera eyes. It considers the ability of the user to capture imagery in a wide variety of applications from sharing imagery as an illumination of social issues in the larger community to a form of personal countersecurity measure. Also, it shows that creative utilization of 8-bit technology in contemporary artistic practice is extremely viable (and questions the agendas of technological determinism that more sophisticated imaging systems present). The bottom line in the case of 8BoL is that it argues that the application of technology to creative solutions, although it mitigates the following, is still dependent on the creative use of technological solutions.

A motionless body faces agitation, sometimes from within, sometimes from without.

Artistic concept:
Where It Wants To Appear/Suffer is a presentation of abstract phenomena. Simple surfaces meet. Their slow movements, their often fibrous textures, the chosen colors, the small amount of light that makes them appear … give the impression that different scales of representation are condensed: the three natural kingdoms (animal, vegetable and mineral), different environments (underwater or intra-body). Unexpected and unknown visual sensations are aroused more directly, in a strange intimacy, as if it would emanate from the origin.

Technical realization:
Where It Wants To Appear/Suffer (World Tool Kit, C language) is the first step towards the creation of a virtual environment using real time 3D computer graphics. It will be immersive (a 360 degree panorama) and interactive: phenomena will react to the viewer’s behavior, the speed of his rotation, and his angle of vision. This explains why a little arrow appears sometimes, it allows the shapes to be approached or moved. It will disappear in the end. I animate one to three grids (10 X 10) by displacing their points (vertexes). My work concentrates on the sensitivity of texture, light, and color.

Our present-day cities are in a state of transition: from a post-industrial space to a technological era. In the highly mediatized space that we now inhabit the physical and temporal boundaries, which define the real world, are disappearing. Our perceptions are conditioned by the mechanisms of a technical culture, one that transforms, condenses and draws these perceptions into a world in which reality and fiction are melding to the point of inextricability. Gradually a new world order is unfolding, and the landscape that springs from it is beyond time and space, both everywhere and nowhere. These non-specific landscapes, these non-sites, reveal much about this transitional state. As sites of instability and change, lacking roots, they are infused with both our presence and absence: we transform them but do not inhabit them. Proliferating around the city’s edges are vague and chaotic spaces full of disconnected events. Hesitating between city and country without opting for either, these unclassifiable areas often go unnoticed. And yet they illustrate the tensions, clashes and disappearances that characterize the soda and urban fabric. These forms of urban disorganization are reflections of our era and expose certain ills of our societies. Sources of revelations and challenges, they appear to vacillate between several possible courses, awaiting a new plan. This notion is central in my recent work. 1 document wastelands, urban fringes, abandoned industrial sites and modified “natural” environments. I track down the signs, traces and artefacts which reveal the contradictions and ruptures in contemporary landscapes. Vertige has been produced from shots in an Asbestos mine (Black Lake, Quebec, Canada). My approach goes beyond the simple documentation of such sites as I alter my photographs and footages to extend their meaning. I use digital photo montage and compositing to create a world on the edge of two realities: between nature and civilization, between documentary and fiction. These constructions reiterate the constant interference that human activities enact upon landscape creating disturbing new possible worlds. The reconstruction of the landscapes by image-transformation techniques underscores our ability to act upon the world and to intervene in the course of events. They should be seen as expressions requiring deeper analysis, as visions that inform us about the state of the world and ourselves.

Enter the realm of the Shadow Dweller. His dwelling has undergone transformation. His dwelling is no longer his alone and as such he is no longer in control of its future destiny. This is the realm of the Shadow Dweller. He must endeavor to execute his task as the mediator between the world from where he comes and those worlds and forces that are foreign. It is speculated hat through this mediation, within the space of the threshold, new emergent realities will materialize. The Shadow Dweller undergoes perceptual transformation in order to reconcile the narrative relationship between himself and the worlds he monitors and measures. The multivalent experience of both the known worlds and foreign worlds will transform the relationship of ‘being observed’ to that of ‘being within’. The Shadow Dweller dynamically engages the organically codified objects within the foreign and unfamiliar environments. The Shadow Dweller begins to apprehend an abstracted amalgam of familiar and foreign orders of geometry, surface, color, motion and sound. He begins to mutate and take on new characteristics of behavior. This hybridization process reveals traces of the invisible forces that are integral to his material existence and through these creates a heightened sense reality outside of any defined measure other than that of the experience Itself. The Shadow Dweller’s experiences reveal new orders of Architecture by analysing and interpreting the interrelationships between image, sound, movement, projection, interactivity and construction.

In the short film “PASSAGE” both the psychical and physical skills of the man and the stallion are fused into a perfect, aesthetic performance. Into a dance.

When hibernation culminates in a scenic trance allowing us to imagine a cosmic landscape which we can explore, we all become Shamans.

Hypnomart depicts the rituals of shoppers as observed by security cameras in a shopping mall. The artists have used this covert footage as source material for their own manipulations of unsuspecting consumers. In these comprehensively surveilled and clinical retail environments tiny gestures are magnified and transmit virally through the crowd. Are the shoppers in Hypnomart just buying things or are they fulfilling other, more primordial needs? Observing people as they go about their shopping often reveals an apparent state of hypnosis; malls are designed to be (or at least appear) contained and safe. The proliferation and awareness of cameras heightens the sense that one is on a set, and on display. Is this justified surveillance or authoritarian voyeurism? Whether the subjects of surveillance are shopping in a trance or enacting compulsive rituals for the cameras, sometimes they align themselves in patterns like microbes or herds, or create dances that last mere seconds.  Characters were selected from hours of DV footage and removed from their original environments to generate loops of movement and behaviour. The mall was then re-populated to create a bizarre yet logical new environment. Sampled sounds from the mall were similarly selected, manipulated and reorganized. The film was entirely made by digital means. It was first broadcast on British national television in November of 2001.

The works produced explore the transient ambiance of existing in a digitally interconnected society that is multifaceted and non-linear. To achieve this goal we have created audio-visual psycho-geographical maps based on the experiences of living in a modern urban environment. The realization of these audio-visual maps has been achieved by the advances in computer based media creation. The visual spaces are captured using digital video equipment and are edited and encoded using Apple’s FinalCut Pro and Terran’s Media Cleaner 5. After the footage has been edited and properly encoded it is then manipulated, mixed and projected during the live performances on two Macintosh G4 laptops using a stand alone application that incorporates Max/msp with Nato modular video objects. A network is created through a midi interface with the musicians so that signals can be passed back and forth between the computers that are generating the music and imagery. The signals are recognized by each computer as triggers that can modify the source material, creating an interactive environment. By escaping the confines of linear based media a new dialogue can be created that is more akin to the way our minds filter and perceive society.

Video-performance in which ocular circumventions of the performer with a static face, races at the rhythm of a small mechanics.

Hiroshima
In the morning of 6th August 1945, a bright light invaded the edge of the floating world The chock, A violent blast. Bodies that stretched out the pain. The dreams of the past in the present, The visions of the future in the past. The child who he was, before… Before the flash struck. Before the world was disturbed…

Production notes:
“The Tale of the Floating World” is an animation film composed of the real characters shot in Japan and the mixture of new and traditional (film, video, photo, illustration and artificial images etc) techniques. A free evocation and surrealist of Japan and of the atomic bomb, in the form of an imaginary story, cruel and childlike. The dark visions, light, calm even agitated by the strange fantasy of the mutated world.

Eyes look, observe; a tangle of signals / information in real and virtual space, which are to be deciphered to be understood. What is to be seen? -What is seen? – What is to be heard? – What is heard? – What can be perceived, can be understood, how and from whom? Something seems to irritate. The picture is breaking down and somebody is asking: ”Do I have to take tests already now?” Who is controlled by whom? Text information is faded in: “Tessa’s Herz zog sich zusammen. Sie bekarn ein eigenartiges Gefuhl in ihrem Magen. ‘Welch schmutzigen Dinge, und wer ist wer?’” Somebody called Babel Fish translates: “The inner side of Tessa has concluded an agreement. Basic counting utilities grew in her stomach. ‘What sort of dirty things and who is who?’” What has happened? Fact is: the translation is totaly wrong … or is it a matter of codification? – A true story, its topic is interpretation – Towards less information.

Concept arts video for Marathon Graz 2000, commission of Werkstadt Graz. Here I intend to express the sensual impression of running in a Marathon in visuals and sound.
“Go into trance, change of view turns into limitation of view, to be relevant through the repetition. Image-sound.” _Anderas Weixler

Visuals realization at Video Viual Design Lab/Nagoya City University, khool of Design and Architecture, Japan sound realization at Atelier Avant Austria

Technical Realization
1x projection wall
1x video projector analog VHS (PAL & NTSC)] or dlgital [DV (NTSC) and DVD) playback system
2x active loud-speakers

Dimensions of the work production by Computer, analog & digital video recording & playback system and audio stereo reording & 2-channel speaker system. software: Paniwnic Quick Cutter version 2.02101, Nagoya City University, School of Design and Architecture, Japan

“Reality is only a convention that almost never coincides with what is tangible around us. A large part of what we consider reality, including those closest and nearest to us, is nothing but the product of self-deceit, whether induced by the “system” or not. Thus the word “reality” is no more than a panacea, a great Pandora’s box. This idea has inspired this video installation, entitled “Pandora’s Box (revisited)”. It is set in a black box, a revisited Pandora’s box in which unreality supplants, not reality as such, but unrealities that have been presented to us as reality. The viewer will visit this black box and see a small black checker – a metaphor for the cosmic chessboard, in which the fragment is all. Two video projections operating as windows show us what is inside and what is outside of Pandora’s box. There is no physical contact between the characters living in the videos, but they are connected by their behavior. They exchange experiences, they practice sexual rituals, and they even reproduce.”

Jose Carlos Casado & Harkaitz Cano, from the article “Reality”, Artificial Reproduction and Sexuality. Leonardo Award of Excellence 2001. Leonardo Journal. MIT.

Color objects flit about in the space filled in light. It aimed at expressing the world only in computer graphics that we have never seen before. We expressed the original motions that are applied by simulation models that reproduce motions of groups and springs. The software we use is “Maya”. “MEL” script and “Expression” in Maya control all motion.

How They Get The Way They Are

on the day of departure we leave our stories behind

passing each other for no reason at many different choices of cross roads travelers spin out new tales

stories that have no story that get emptied when one gets home seeking moments of freedom

not sure we step into unknown fields a clock ticks away at irregular intervals perception strained brand new scenes feebly reflected

scent of comforting memories waken us where am I? one asks, no one replies

fragmented heaven, fractal memories encountering reality necessary for rebirth whom is this for?

what do you do if the unknown blocks your pass?

the place of departure has already moved

please imagine your favorite place or travel route

“How They Get The Way They Are” is a sound and visual work, produced and performed by toru yamanaka + softpad. “information” is the archive of the sounds and the images used in the “how they get the way they are” project, which was a collaboration with Toru Yamanaka.)

The “Dice Instrument” is created by communication and collaboration of two persons or more at different remote stations. This can be described as a piece of network art incorporating “painting, ” “written characters, ” “a percussion instrument, ” “an interface between cyberspace and real space, ” and more. Let’s take its “painting” aspect as an example. The strength of each brushstroke and the brush movements (the movements of the painter’s hand) are captured by the sensors attached to the cube and transformed into sound. The sound varies with the strength and length of the touch of the brush. A person creates a painting, paying attention to the “strength of each brushstroke, and taking “Ma” (intervals) between brushstrokes, the “breath” of the brush movements and “silent time”(rest) into musical score. And he/she collaborates on the work with the other person via communication. The overall process is like a live performance where the sounds develop into a piece of music. The name of the game is to understand the importance of “exchange of inner messages” with people through” communication with people, ” and to explore an artistic approach to “a state beyond technology.”

Features of this work are:
1. A work through “exchange of inner messages” between people in a state beyond technology.
2. A collaborative work– a dialogue or participatory type of art by means of the IP Broadband network.
3. A work created by connecting or combining “cyberspace” with “real space”; anyone can enjoy or even participate in the live art performance using the Broadband Internet wherever else he may be in the world.

Although Hiragana characters are particular to Japan, they originated from the Chinese writing system in the form of Kanji. Before Kanji spreads from China, Japan lacked a uniform system of writing and indeed any real culture of writing. However, Kanji was inadequate as a means to express Japanese sounds although it was useful for writing. This is because the original kanji character was simply too complicated to represent the Japanese sound system. Unconsciously and over time, simplification of the brush stoke led to the origins of a secondary system, Huagana. But I would argue that the causal relation between Kanji and the birth of Hiragana is algorithmic, which in turn represents the essence or ‘deep structure’ of the computer. Thus the point of my transformation system is to allow the user to experience this structure, this algorithmic essence, by exploring dynamically and?in real time how one character from one system can change into a corresponding character in another system. And this experience is personal because the viewer selects and draws the character of his or her choice.

“about so many things” randomly displays the activities of “He” and “She” without bias to gender. That is, the activities are drawn from the same pool of possibilities. Any line of text could be applied to either subject. In essence, the work explores the release of societal constraints regarding gender roles. The resulting narratives can be funny, sad, ironic, poignant, banal, or whatever condition the mindset of the viewer brings to the text. It is a minimalist soap opera “about so many things.”

The human body functions within a set of parameters that reside very much within a closed circuit. In this circuit, the brain receives stimulation such as touch and smell from nerves throughout the body, which acts as an intermediate agent between the outside world and the mind. The brain relies on the perception of tangible materials and/or occurrences in the outside environment to generate appropriate reactions. Such a relationship between the mind and body faces a huge challenge with the introduction of mechanical inventions into human life and art practice. The emergence of digital and imaging arts has challenged us with the diminishing of physical sensations in art. The real world is solid; the virtual one is void. It seems that virtual reality falls into no category; i t is neither three dimensional nor two dimensional. Our bodies are extended to places where they have never been before. The passage of process from the mind, to the body, to the finished artwork is distanced and segmented by the intervention of modern technology. In Encased, various levels of technology merge together, creating a series of reflexive events through light, shadow and touch. The use of live-feed video through a tiny wireless camera allows for a seamless closure to the feedback loop which is set up between the participant, the animation, the light, the video and the environment as a whole. By using real-time compositing through the Macintosh computer and the Imageline software, the aesthetic of the video matches that of the line-drawn animation and the shadows on the wall. The intentional simplicity of the hand drawn animation matches the high-contrast visuals of the composited video and also the shadows cast by participants onto the walls. Overall, the use of a variety of technologies ranging from physical manipulation of light to real-time video compositing has the effect of creating a spectrum of visual experiences and physical interactions. Through their aesthetic similarity, these visual elements create an environment that blurs the boundaries between virtual and real.

Special thanks to Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo, Ellen Handler-Spitz, Chung Sum, Teri Rueb, Lisa Moren, Timothy Nohe and Jon Routson.

CONTRA is made up of scenes looking for mental and physical balance and goals under-stood as various alternatives. In CONTRA life forces and their counter forces are played out against each other. The narration of CONTRA is based on the dramaturgy of symbolic level of situations and actions.

In the fast-pace immaterial realm of cyberspace, one often neither have the time to reflect upon the impact of new technologies on power relations, nor the space to consider the ethical implications of our actions on virtual objects (notions of responsibility). This work seeks to create an interactive context within which one’s ethical stance towards violence becomes problematized by the presentation of seemingly ‘virtual bodies’ of ‘real people’.

This project borders the line between the analog and the digital. The essence of this artwork is about combining the visual effects and the real time interactive nature of the computer technology and how it interprets the sound and transforms it into a line and animates. The ultimate aim of this work is to be exhibited in public areas such as subway, atriums, and shops where there is a large open space and unspecified number of people are able to experience the work. This idea came from a poetic image of a sound transforming into a line. The image of this work brings back sweet memories of one’s past and inspires their imagination. The warmth, beauty and the approachable aspect of a line drawing promote, the audience’s participation, by observing how a line transforms, interacting with the work. When a person plays a toy trumpet, a line will appear. The line starts to bend and wiggle accordingly to the sound of the trumpet like a snake charmer charming a snake with his flute. The lines start to transform into animals, insects, birds and human forms. They start to animate and disappear. For this work, I used pictorial representation. Drawing (with a line) is very analog. It is a direct form of expression and has a primal quality. I included a device, which transforms a sound created by an instrument into a drawing. An instrument is also analog and one does not need to deal with any complexity. The part of digital, a huge cube image could be projected on a wall, ceiling or floor. The idea of the cube’s visual effect came from an image of turning a picture book. Each surface of the cube becomes a screen and the audience can turn it with the sound of a shaker. The surface will have an image of a land, sky, sea and a line drawn. With the sound of toy trumpet it will start wiggling like a spring and transforming into the most suitable animal for the chosen environment, will animate. My aim is to create a piece of work that is enjoyed by people of all ages. They simply see, feel and experience without going it much thought.

Half a century has passed since the globe jungle first appeared in Japan, and it can now be found in most neighborhoods. Children become absorbed while playing on the globe jungle; some turn it powerfully using their whole body, some cling to the top, and some squat down inside. This artwork was inspired one day when the silhouette of children playing on the globe jungle appeared like continents: the circling shadows looked like a miniaturized earth.What if the children playing on this playground toy reappeared in the same place at night? What if the globe jungle could also mean something to adults as well as to children? These thoughts lead to another perspective on this playground toy: the globe jungle as a visual installation.

Images of children in the daytime appear on half of the globe jungle, and park scenery filmed from inside the globe jungle appears on the counter half. This becomes an interface linking two comparatively distant spectacles: day and night in a park, inside and outside of a playground toy, and the viewers’ past and present A nostalgic illusion Is created by: the use of the newest projection technology, the rotation of a primitive object, and the result of an afterimage on one’s retina. This unique dimensional sensation is new as well as old, and obscures the division between the unusual and usual, real and virtual – something which cannot be experienced on any existing screen today.

Interactivity with computers or sensors is not important for this artwork. Rather, through the action of turning the globe jungle, the viewer can enjoy how the images appear and flicker, a onetime experience accompanied by physical sensation. The action of turning the globe jungle becomes the meeting point with the viewer’s own childhood memories. A space emerges where technological recording and memory are linked and naturally fused together. The installation acts as a bridge between memories and feelings beyond space and time. It stirs up rich imaginings and feelings of those who happen to be there, which in turn touches memories of the viewer’s youth as well as primordial memories through which Man knows the shape of Earth. This kind of system of exchange and circulation has true characteristics of “interactivity” as portrayed in this artwork.

Upon approaching my installation entitled “Ouch” members of the audience are faced with a dozen young girls who hang in suspended animation. Navigating the space will be impossible without impacting the figures, however with the slightest contact I each touch sensitive figure exclaims “OUCH”. The life size figures in “OUCH” are cast in flexible poly-eurathane foam from a sculpted original. They are covered in a cloth and rubber skin with woollen hair. Each figure is equipped with a sensitive switch, which when the girl is moved from her hanging axis, triggers a chip to play a voice recording through the speaker in her chest.

A white shelf six feet in length hangs from the wall about five feet from the floor. Fluorescent light shines up from the shelf through the eleven plastic mechanical animals atop it. The shelf is equipped with a motion sensor. When the sensor is triggered it sets off a pseudorandom program, which ensures that the animals will respond in a different order every time. One animal will go on, then another and another until almost all of the creatures are barking and straining at their wires. At the end of the short time cycle, the critters stop simultaneously. The animals are store bought, originally battery operated and furry. They have been stripped down to their plastic skeletons and wired to accept AC power and signals from a “basic stamp” microcontroller.

Altzero explores issues to do with control and authorship in interactivity, and what we understand and expect from recorded media, by creating audiovisual compositions that are experienced spatially as well as over time. This is done in a variety of ways, but in particular by trying to evolve audio composition from its traditional form as an experience controlled almost entirely by the composer into one that is determined in part by the will of the listener. The musical experience is transformed into a 3-dimensional spatial journey where the listener chooses the route they take. By transferring the time component of sound into space, a linear path through a piece of music is transformed into an infinite array of possibilities. If one such navigable audio structure is perceived as a representation of a moment of music time in space, then a sequence of these structures represents individual key-frames of an audio animation, highlighting the development of the linear piece over time. In altzero4, each spike represents a single sound fragment (much as in altzero3, where sounds have a physical appearance as columns of bubbles). The whole 3D structure is a soundscape in this case an explorable freeze-frame of a moment of sound. By moving through the structure, listeners hear a dynamic mix of all the sounds within earshot over time this becomes their experience of that moment of sound. Altzero4 consists of several such structures, time slices of a fictional soundtrack. Taken as a whole and explored in sequence, they reveal another dimension to a recording, as the piece can be explored over both time and space.

Projections of wild animals are shone out of moving vehicles onto buildings in San Jose. The animal’s movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car. Aggressive or passive driving is reflected in the behavior of the animal.

SVEN is the project that asks the question: If computer vision technology can be used to detect when you look like a terrorist or other “undesirable” – why not when you look like a rock star? The SVEN system is set up in public places where a surveillance system might be expected – like a van on the street. A custom computer vision application tracks pedestrians and detects their characteristics, looking for possible rock stars. A real-time video processing application receives this information and generates music video like visuals from the live camera feed. The resulting video and audio are displayed on a monitor in the van’s window, interrupting the standard security camera-type display each time a potential rock star is detected.

Four 7′ high by 2’x2′ square white wooden “Memory Columns” are placed throughout the metropolitan area. The columns provide permanent marker to induce dialogue from passers-by. A physical and virtual social interaction develops around each column, as thoughts and sentiments flowing by are deflected from their usual path and are projected onto the column.

Semaphore consists of four ten-foot wide illuminated circles that continually shift and turn to spell out an encoded message. A low-power AM radio broadcast provides a soundtrack that can be picked up within a radius of two or three blocks. Each wheel of the Semaphore can assume four distinct positions, giving it a vocabulary of 256 possible combinations to communicate its encrypted message. Only the artist knows its content. Cracking Semaphore’s encryption technique and deciphering the message is posed as a challenge for the public.

Saint Joe participants can board the train and use their mobile phone to hear a dynamic audio history that references a variety of landmarks along the way of their specific route. The landmarks however, are not your standard tourist fare. San Jose history is elaborated as an audio and visual construction while the viewer travels from station to station.

Ping Genius Loci is built up from 100 radio-networked, solar-powered, self-sustainable intelligent analogue pixels that are placed on a 10 by 10 meters grid. These pixels function in the bright sunshine, and respond to pedestrians in the grid.

In Parking Spaces the Mobile Performance Group will move through the city looking for empty parking lots from which they will record and collect both audio and visual materials. In the evening, they find a space to park and create an improvised performance using custom real-time audio video software.

Park View Hotel is an installation that provides focused optical communication between Cesar Chavez Plaza and the Fairmont hotel, neighbors in downtown San Jose. Using devices mounted in the park, the audience can “light up” interior hotel spaces in their line-of sight. In response, these interiors “leak our their properties—onto the exterior of the building, onto other public and private properties, and into the park below.

This work was developed in collaboration with Sun MicrosysteMs Inc., Menlo Park, using SunSPOT ™ embedded technology, and is a residency project commissioned by ZeroOne San Jose and the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs at the Montalvo Arts Center.

P2P is a 30-foot interactive marquee that hangs on the façade of a building. 125 light bulbs that comprise the marquee can be turned on or off with 125 corresponding switches across the street. By engaging in the everyday almost unconscious activity of flipping a light switch, passers-by can express themselves, forming any patterns they choose in the hanging web of lights.

Neighborhood Public Radio is the community radio station for ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose. Using a remote broadcast unit and a broadcast booth at the Camera 12 cinema at 2nd Street and Paseo San Antonio, NPR will broadcast symposia and debates, as well as live events, in order to represent the neighborhood within and surrounding the Symposium.

MISSION ETERNITY is an information technology driven cult of the dead.

etoy digitally sends TEST PILOTS across the ultimate boundary to investigate the afterlife, the most virtual of all worlds. The short-term plan (2006-2016) is to install an interactive city of the living and the dead that reconfigures the way information society deals with memory (conservation/loss), time (future/presence/past) and death.

Under the protection of thousands of MISSION ETERNITY ANGELS (the living who provide a few mega bytes of their digital storage capacity) the MISSION ETERNITY PILOTS (pioneers of the information age who contribute their personal data and mortal remains) travel space and time forever.

5 etoy.AGENTS come to Silicon Valley to inaugurate the MISSION ETERNITY SARCOPHAGUS, a white 20 foot cargo container that hosts an immersive screen made of 17,000 LED lights and the ashes of the first TEST PILOTS. The SARCOPHAGUS is the physical link to the ARCANUM CAPSULES, the digital vehicle that enables the PILOTS to travel.

Fingering is a reactive video installation in a public window space, which uses computer visualization to track the audience’s movement and create a dynamically responding illusion inspired by the last sequence of Edwin A. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1904) as well as contemporary Hong Kong action movies.

Baby Love is a participatory installation that consists of 6 autonomously mobile teacups with 6 clone babies. The teacups are modeled after spinning carnival rides, playing out loud love songs uploaded by public via the web at babylove.biz and transmitted to the babies via wireless network.
The love songs collected are coded as ME (memory and emotion) data for the clone babies. By taking a teacup ride with the babies, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes. Baby Love situates human and baby clone riders in a perpetual spin of the familiar fairground with contemporary remix pop culture.

Baby Love is a National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts commission. US exhibition liaison: Taipei Cultural Center (TECO), New York

Through Acclair, a company providing brain-testing services as part of an exclusive security clearance for air-travelers, we explore a situation wherein people freely accept a highly invasive, highly authoritative manipulation in return for financial, tangible rewards and an upgraded social status. We illustrate the financial and social benefits of such a system.

99 Red Balloons is a live action multi-player street game about flying perspectives inspired by “Midsummer Nights Dream” and the 1980s pop song “99 Red (Luft) Balloons” by Nene. Teams control 18 inflated red weather balloons, nine equipped with wireless cameras designed to record the game and broadcast to the lounge in the Tech Museum.

Feral Robotic Dogs is an open source robotics project designed to enable distributed and co-located teams of lay participants to ‘upgrade’ low-end commercially available toys with chemical sensing equipment, additional microprocessor hardware to enable environmental data collection and coordinated flock (or pack) behavior. The adapted robots “sniff out” environmental toxins.

The Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit [TSG] is an open source software platform for cultivating public “sound gardens” within contemporary cities. It draws on the culture and ethic of urban community gardening to posit a participatory environment where new spatial practices for social interaction within technologically mediated environments can be explored and evaluated. Addressing the impact of mobile audio devices like the iPod, the project examines new gradations of privacy and publicity within contemporary public space.

Move Here utilizes the open resources of the web to build a database of historic and contemporary film clips originally designed as strategies for luring people to the West Coast and the Bay Area. Multi-disciplinary artist Ricardo Rivera assembled an eclectic array of clips promoting the people, weather and landscape as well as the promise of work, wealth, status and clean living afforded by the region. Designed as a databank of desire and opportunity, each film is projected anamorphically (or obliquely) onto a surface, requiring viewers to shift their physical position in order to receive the full impact of its message to resolve the moving images, viewers must find to the right viewing angle. Move Here alludes to the perception of social space and status by requiring viewers to “change position” in order to understand the desires of others.

LiveForm:Telekinetics creates experiences in transgeographic temporary performance zones, centred around wireless Internet access points that are now ubiquitous in the urban landscape. No longer tied to a terminal screen and keyboard, nomadic groups pack mobile feasts of sensors, antennas, robotics, food, and music, and head out on the town. Networked telepresence picnic parties unfold in vacant lots, roadsides, cafe’s, alleyways, bars, and hotel lobbies – wherever bandwidth is plentiful and security guards scarce. The events are not meant as entertainment for an audience, but as experimental and collaborative acts of creativity, research and development of new social forms, and interventions in public space.

For ISEA2006, artists Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran proposed their LiveForm:Telekinetics project. The project will be presented as a series of mobile interventions in public urban space, within range of the WiFi hotspots near the main Festival Area, over the course of the symposium.

At each location where stories are available, a green [murmur] sign with a telephone number and location code marks where stories are available. By using a mobile phone, pedestrians are able to listen to the story of that place while engaging in the physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze. The stories are told by people who know the stories, in their own voices. English translation are offered when the story is told in a non-english language.

Project PlaceSite introduces a new way of using wireless networks – to create digital community services by, for and about people who are together in the same physical place. PlaceSite is an open platform for a new breed of Web service tied intimately to physical places. It lets people share information locally, apart from the global Web. PlaceSite is built upon what already exists — users don’t need to install new software or purchase new hardware. It also enables location-based services without relying on participation by cellular carriers or Internet service providers.

Cranked-up bass sounds leaking from cruising pimped cars are a familiar annoyance of the city streets in the world. What if the bass sounds are the drivers’ real-time heartbeat instead of beats of music? Does our relationship with the vehicle/driver and the pedestrians change? The HBBB system amplifies the heartbeat of the driver in real-time by interfacing the car audio with a heartbeat sensor. By hacking on the technology/hobby that is often used as psychological armor, territory-marking tool, the project turn the body/vehicle relationship inside-out, addressing the vulnerability of human body and emotion and aims to understand our obsession on automobiles and it’s modification rather than dismissing the culture as something aggressive. A group of local car enthusiasts will be involved in developing the design of the demo vehicle, as well as driving around the visitors to night cruises on their own vehicles with HBBB.

“City-dwellers would never be able to get rid of their fellow urban inhabitants even if they wanted to, as anyone who has ever seen weeds push up through a crack in the tarmac will know“. _Herbert Girardet, The Gaia Atlas of Cities. New directions for sustainable urban living

Airports are awe-inspiring places: concentrated, tangible examples of the wider notion of “technology,” the application of scientific knowledge for practical purpose; to travel from point A to point B. But while we are in awe of them, dumbstruck at the noise and spectacle of a jetliner taking off or the dizzying complexity of an air traffic radar screen, scratch beneath the surface of these massive man-made structures and you start to find a much more intimate, human-scale landscape. A family of burrowing owls, for instance, that live between parallel runways, unfazed by landing aircraft, or the weekly baggage handlers’ barbeque–the grill positioned just out of sight of the trapped, air-conditioned passengers waiting in the departure lounges.

DataNature is a multi-site electronic artwork that reveals and celebrates the strange, secret beauty and interconnectedness of seemingly disparate natural and man-made aspects of Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and its environs.

The physical system of DataNature will consist of two elements:

two “ticket machines” with animated revolving signage to attract passers-by a series of remote cameras and other sensors selectively placed around the airport .

The public will be invited to push a button on the DataNature “ticket machine” to receive a souvenir ticket. The dispensed ticket will superficially have the look and feel of a flight ticket/boarding card, but on closer inspection it features a montage of live and pre-collected images and stories from the Airport and its environs. Each ticket will be dynamically and uniquely createde. The data generated by the Airport’s day-to-day workings will be selectively mixed with data from strategically placed sensor interventions to create thought-provoking visual juxtapositions. For instance, the printout may juxtapose the latest infra-red images of nocturnal Airport wildlife with “traffic graphic” showing the statistical ebb and flow of recent airplane movements.

The artwork is located both outside the domestic arrivals terminal at the Airport and at the intersection of the Paseo San Antonio at Market St. The intent of the dual locations is to reinforce the connection between the Airport, as one of the major gateways to the ZeroOne San Jose Festival event, and Downtown.

As artists we are inspired by people’s (local residents’, frequent travelers’, airport employees’–and our own) love-hate relationship with airports, and with technology in general. DataNature is an attempt to capture and visually articulate this tumultuous relationship … our emotional zigzagging between nostalgia for a simple life and cyberpunk fantasy for being connected to everything everywhere …

50 – 100 San Jose locals selected from 3 primary language-speaking groups (English, Spanish and Vietnamese), representing a cross section of their language group (age, gender, origin), are interviewed to collect and map points of cultural importance, including home, work, faith and social obligation.

Karaoke Ice is an ice cream truck-turned mobile karaoke-unit. Participants karaoke for an audience using a customized karaoke engine as the truck makes it way to a variety of festival locations. Free frozen treats lure prospective performers to participate, distributed by Remedios the Squirrel Cub, who also participates in his own special way.

Survival Research Labs (SRL) brings a newly conceived performance full of its legendary machines, flame-throwers, and bombastic sound to ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006 Symposium. Some things are purely mythic, like Survival Research Labs, which springs from the shell of abandoned buildings and monster robotic history. Humans are only present as audience or operators; in this show it’s all about the large scale. As described by founder Mark Pauline an SRL performance is comprised of “ritualistic interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices.” Whatever else you call it, (and the title won’t be announced until just before the show); we call it big fun, exciting, and something you won’t want to miss. It’s monster machine, meets hovercraft, meets huge sculptural creatures, meets fire… see you there.

Ho Fatso is an interactive installation consisting of inflatable fat suits and a wrestling ring controlled by motion sensors. Made of rip-stop nylon, powerful leaf blowers and motion detectors, audience members are encouraged to don the fat suits, enter the ring and wrestle each other.

Animalia is part game, part installation designed for four people. A combination of readymade and environmental data constructs animal body parts, sounds and images, and a team of digital magicians have remixed and relocated them in local, oversized video contexts for participants to try on, literally as well as figuratively.

Fête Mobile is an autonomous robotic blimp equipped with a camera and wireless capabilities that can sense the landscape from above, display text messages on an LED panel mounted on blimp, and interact with the people below. Participants use their laptop computers to connect to the blimp’s “sneaker network” to control its flight and optics. An onboard wireless local-file server allows the public to exchange media files.

Calling for Ba Ba (Mrs, Ba) is a collection of anecdotes of Mrs. Ba from the Vietnamese diaspora in Vancouver and San Jose. Mrs. Ba is a woman who sells noodle soup at Bai Sau Beach in Qui Nhon, the artist’s hometown in Vietnam. They are transcribed into one cohesive history (in Vietnamese and English) installed in San Jose Vietnamese noodle restaurants.

ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006 partnership program with UNESCO DigiArts – Young Digital Creatures Program (United Nations Education, Science & Culture Organization) celebrates over 60 teen communities that participated this spring and summer. Our flagship program engaged teens worldwide who investigated their urban and cultural environment in order to share their view of their cities through digital and audio creative artistic exploration. Global Youth Represent!

1. North America: San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Maui, Hawaii representing island style, and Canada
2. Africa: Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Mali, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Senegal
3. Arab States: Egypt and Tunisia
4. Asia and the Pacific: Australia, Bangladesh, India, Korea, Pakistan, and Singapore
5. Europe: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, Moldova, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and United Kingdom.
6. Latin America: Argentina, Colombia & Brazil
7. The Caribbean: Jamaica

Global Youth Ambassador Program
Global Youth Ambassadors were selected from participants of the, “Scenes and Sounds of My City” program as a second tier of opportunity inviting 10 local youth and 10 international youth to be in-residence during the Festival. This week-long cultural and artistic residency program includes an art program on the Adobe downtown campus, with artist Et arts educator Marisa Jahn Er her Throw-n-Sow Project throw-n-sow.org, with assistant artists/ educators Rachel McIntire Er Steve Shade. The ambassadors will represent global youth everywhere at festival receptions and activities. Meet the Ambassadors online at 01sj.org or in the Global Youth Lounge.

Theme: Community Domain

A performance installation featuring computer activated sensors and mechanical devices that will produce a rotation of sounds and images gathered by the artists. The sounds (composed and recorded) and video interviews will reflect the ethnically and culturally diverse communities in the South Bay. Each of these communities will be asked to articulate their personal vision of a future as individuals and as members of a larger community domain. Each artist, filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez and composer Guillermo Galindo, will bring their unique vision to the project while working collaboratively to create an impromptu symphony incorporating shared audio and visual material. The project will be presented as a one day performance installation.

A video of paradox: European architectural symbols of Western grandeur in the streets of Bombay, India. Actions become game-like and dangerously repetitive. In this endless loop sounds oscillate between intense suctions, through military parades where cheering become gunshots and turn into a drone of game sounds.

Curator: Johann Pijnappel

For several years, JD Beltran has been soliciting secrets, asking “What is a secret that defines you?” Beltran sets these secrets to her own video footage, resulting in a series of intriguing and revealing short films. In C4F3, these secrets are revealed on tiny LCD screens hidden in unexpected places. Participants can submit their secrets without revealing even their e-mail addresses at seekingsecrets.com.

Pacific Washup is a video of a performance carried out during Australia’s repressive legislative response to refugees and the inflamed political debates that ensued. The work reflects the artists’ continuing interest in migration and immigration. Substantial Maori and Pacific Island communities in Sydney face cultural dislocation. Dynamic issues of migrant identity politics are reflected in video footage of performers encased in cheap bags being gently washed to shore.

Curator: Deborah Lawler-Dormer

Phenakistoscape adopts the idea of intertextuality in movies, creating a montage with running scenes and camera movements, be they pan shots or tilt shots or zoom shots or track shots. The camera movements of the movie clips take control of a custom-made robotic video projector, specially constructed for the project. The robotic projector pans left when there is a pan-toright shot, and tilts up when there is a title-down shot. Apart from the pan and tilt action, the robotic projector walks around the container space, which facilities the zoom shots of the moving images. Ultrasonic sensors are placed around it to sense obstacles, including viewers.

Curator: Ellen Pau

SPECFLIC is an ongoing creative research project (2003-present) in a new storytelling form called Distributed Social Cinema.

Usually, in a performance or cinema experience, the audience is admonished to turn off their cell phones and cease conversation. With SPECFLIC, I seek to integrate these gadgets (cell phones, laptops, mp3players, etc) with live tele-matic performance, pre-recorded media elements, street performers and the audience’s own social activity to create a multi-modal story event.

Each iteration of the series is held in an iconic public space and is free and open to the public. SPECFLIC stories are all set in 2030, and arise from research-based speculations about the near future of that particular public institution.

Camera 12. Director’s Cut

Danish director Morten Schjodt presents the U.S. premiere of his interactive film, Switching, winner of the Prix Mobius Nordica 2005 in France, and the Cyberloup Prize at the Festival International du Nouveau Cinema et Nouveau Medias 2003 in Montreal. Switching is a love story that allows you to slip into a storytelling labyrinth where you simultaneously unfold and disrupt the narrative. Released on DVD in April 2003, Switching is one of the first commercial successes to radically insert interactivity into storytelling and narrative technique.
Frida and Simon live together, but something has changed. They can’t really communicate any more. One night, Frida turns on the light in their bedroom to try and understand what is wrong. Frida starts the difficult process of creating a new story around herself and Simon. A process in which we often feel that ourselves and others are adversaries. As a user of the film, you are drawn into this game. The process – the creation of a story – is therefore an important part of the experience.

Desire Management is a collection of five short films about the use of objects as vehicles for dissident behaviour. In the film, the domestic space is defined as the last private frontier, a place where bespoke appliances provide unorthodox experiences for alienated people: An airline hostess with a unique relationship to turbulence, an elderly man who enjoys being vacuumed, a couple who engage in baseball driven fantasies, a man who is forced by his partner to cry into a strange device. Based on real testimonials, the film presents the inherent need for self-expression in the face of socially imposed conformity.

Desire Management is a project celebrating the use of products as platforms for dissident behaviour. In the project, the domestic space is defined as the last private frontier, a place where alienated people use bespoke appliances to engage in unorthodox experiences. The research involved two years of investigating communities engaging in unique behaviour as a means of individual self-expression. These communities often possess a remarkable gift for addressing their exceptional needs through design by creating the objects, costumes or spaces which help them access their form of expression. The aim of the project is to take the research and turn it into a self-initiated design proposal whose dissemination will be accessible to a wider audience. As a result, the objects and stories created are based on real testimonials and newspaper articles and attempt to reveal the inherent need for self-expression in the face of imposed social conformity. The project is divided into two phases, both of which have been funded by the Research Department of the Royal College of Art. The first phase is the production of three working prototypes for exhibition which were first exhibited during the Venice Architectural Biennale in the summer of 2004.

The second phase of the project is the production of a professionally produced film in which the objects serve as protagonists, revealing the intimate psychology of the respective clients. The film is made up of five short stories, each around two minutes long, and was premiered at the CNAC Pompidou in June 2005.

Multi-screen moving image projection describing the mise en scene of a dynamic volcanic geothermal environment in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, at the extreme southern edge of the Pacific ‘Rim of Fire’. Hissing sulphuric yellow fumeroles, an active marine volcano, bubbling mud pools, caves and warm streams depict the location while Maori cosmological and ancestral stories intertwine with environmental impacts of a pulp and paper mill. The soundtrack derived from digital storytelling will draw out multi-strand narratives from local Maori, mill workers, townspeople, and environmentalists telling of the destruction of the eco-system and desecration of sites of significance.

This made travelling painfully slow; so slow, that the sun caught him where he now stands. In the full light of day he could not go on and advertise his intentions to the world. He looked back and saw his wife weeping for him. This made him more ashamed. He could not go forward and he could not go back; so he stayed where he still is, at Kawerau, with his child. Tarawera still weeps for him and her tears filled his footsteps and formed the Tarawera river. The child is the foothill to Putauaki.

Much later, the Maori chief Tuwharetoa and his people settled in the area attracted by the geothermal activity which provided constant warm water for bathing and hot steam for cooking. And much later again, newcomers from over the seas, also attracted by the geothermal steam, established a different kind of puffing trembling giant that would scar the land anew.

Born in Kawerau at the foot of the mountain Putauaki, I grew up with the smell of sulphur in my nostrils, playing in the steaming mud and sulphur pits on my way home from school. The fragile crust of the earth could burst open at any time, sending forth vents of steam and reveal the boiling world below. The stories of my childhood were populated with the gods and goddesses of Maori cosmology and with the knowledge that volcanic mountains were prone to running off in pursuit of distant lovers. There were caves once inhabited by historic ancestors and on the mountain, caves that held the bones of past occupants. As teenagers, we swam at night in enigmatic warm steaming streams and now, the smell of sulphur triggers a pang of homesickness. I learnt that the unborn child of Papatuanuku the Earth Mother, was Ruaumoko, the God of earthquakes and all geothermal activity. The name literally means the Trembling Current that Scars the Earth. R’ is an earthquake, while Moko is the art of tattoo.

The volcanic plateau of this activity is the extreme edge of the Pacific tectonic plate and is the most southern end of the Pacific Rim ‘Ring of Fire’. On the other side of the Pacific lies California and the San Andreas faultline. We share volatile environments that can erupt with great trembling should Ruaumoko, stamp his foot. Our Maori cosmology recognizes through the stories of mountains that move, the scientific understanding of seismic activity and the relational of all things above and beneath the earth.

The romance of the place of my birth was always overshadowed by the giant Tasman pulp and paper mill that provided employment – and ironically poisoned our river and our bodies with dioxins and organochlorines. The site for the mill was selected in 1952 for its geothermal reservoir of steam and the Tarawera river water supply. The hot pools that once were a local bathing place of Tuwharetoa’s people are now polluted with waste, and downstream from the mill the river is referred to by locals as the Black Drain and is the most serious dioxin contamination of any waterbody in NZ.

The mill is identified on the Greenpeace toxics-map as a dioxin polluted site and has both historic dioxin pollution and ongoing dioxin emissions.

The seismic activity below the earth was matched by the labour and employment volatility above ground, with union strikes stretching out from days into weeks and months, at times threatening an end to the small town of 8000 where I lived. The Single Men’s Village established it’s own modern myths, common amongst temporary workers in a precarious labour force. The mill with its billowing chimneys was also the Great Provider, not only of jobs but also of clothing and many other perks, and so the benevolent title of Uncle Tasman was bestowed.

The project I wish to bring to San Jose is a multi-screen moving image projection that describes the scene of this dynamic environment. The mise en scene is compelling, a site of great beauty, and masses of international tourists come to New Zealand to look at bubbling mud and to see the local Maori people utilize the environment in their daily lives. The viewer will be offered poetic and luscious images of hissing sulphuric yellow fumeroles, scenes from an active marine volcano, bubbling mud pools, of caves and warm streams. Suggestions of cosmological and ancestral stories may make their way into the final work as visual metaphors for the environmental impacts. However, it is the sound tracks will draw out narratives from local Maori, mill workers, townspeople, and environmentalists who can tell of the destruction of the eco-system and the desecration of sites of significance. Greenpeace has documented evidence disproportionately high cancer deaths of young people of the region.

The soundtracks could be discrete and available though headphones. This is a new work under development therefore not all details are resolved at this stage. Some of the imagery has been shot but the soundtrack is yet to be undertaken.

Kaitiakitanga or guardianship is Polynesian concept integral to the caretaking of land and sea. When taonga, or cultural treasures, including artwork, travel to a location outside of the home territory, this is enacted through the appointment of cultural guardians to look after the representations of the ancestors. In San Jose, I would want to work with both the First Nations People of California and with people of the Pacific diaspora, who would become the guardians for the work for the time it was there, fulfilling cultural role of kaitiakitanga. The Pacific diaspora communities of California is one of the highest Polynesian populations in the world and Auckland, New Zealand has the largest Polynesian population the world. Making connections between these communities will contribute to the success of this project.