Art Events Data Table

The Promotion Center for Audiovisual Culture AVEK was founded in 1987. Its duty is to promote Finnish film, TV and video production and culture by redistributing the copyright income (the so-called blank tape levy) to artists’ audiovisual productions.

The support program of AVEK is divided into three sections:
– to subsidize audiovisual production and distribution;
– to support the advanced studies of professionals working in the fields of film, TV, video and media art; and
– to support the audiovisual culture in general: to fund research, publications,
festivals and other activities.

The major part of the annually allotted support, about 80%, has been directed to production and distribution. The sections of education and audiovisual culture have received about 10% each. During the season1993/94 the total amount of the upport was FIM 14 million.

AVEK has a personnel of four with one part-time presenter of applications. AVEK works and is located in conjunction with the copyright organisation Kopiosto.

Production support
The founding of AVEK made the regular support of Finnish experimental production possible. Right from the start a strong emphasis was put on promoting those productions that have been left outside of the traditional art supporting institutions: short films, documentaries, media art and other experimental productions. Full length feature films aimed for theatrical distribution and music videos do not thus qualify for AVEK support.

With its production support directed to independent production companies AVEK aims to strenghten the production structure outside the TV companies. Along with independent Finnish companies, also international co-productions are being supported by AVEK.

The support can be allotted at different phases of production, starting from the preliminary research and script writing. At these stages the support is granted by a production councellor. Applications for production support are considered by the production councellor and a group of four specialists; the final decision must be confirmed by the board of AVEK. The support can also be granted afterwards both as a support for screening and for distribution. The support has to be specially applied for and it is granted after selection. It can be either direct support without obligation to pay it back, or loan without interest.

Support for the media arts
The support for media art is presented in AVEK by a special presenter,who works together with a group of three experts. The support is quite small in amount, approximately FIM 1 million. According to Tarja Koskinen, the executive director of AVEK, it is nevertheless of great importance: “The prospects for the future are altogether bright. There are, even internationally speaking, a few outstanding video artists in Finland, who’s working conditions seem quite good. Yet the support offered by AVEK is not enough; for instance the Finnish Broadcasting Company could take a much more decisive role in financing media art.”

Instead of video art only, Koskinen wants to broaden the discussion to include other forms of media art. “The quite narrow field of video art is expanding rapidly. Artistically ambitious works that apply CDROM technology are already under way, and the possibilities offered by this technology seem limitless. At the moment artists in this field need to have international contacts with their colleagues. The International Symposium of Electronic Arts in Helsinki 1994 offers an excellent opportunity for this. In addition, the increasing number of co-productions in the the field of media art offer possibilities to reinforce the resources of a small country.”

Audiovisual support and the media arts
AVEK promotes media art not only by supporting production. Artists can also apply for personal grants for education and for attending to festivals. In the case of research and publications grants, the emphasis lies both on studies on the production structure and on new communication technologies and their impact on the whole field of art. In collaboration with other organisations, e.g. universities, AVEK also arranges further education for professional film, TV and video makers.

One of the audiovisual festivals promoted by AVEK festivals is the MuuMediaFestival, the only annually organised international media art festival in Finland. Having started as a video festival, MMF has broadened its focus to encompass the whole field of the electronic arts, including itself this year in ISEA’94.

HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE is an arts and media project in three parts: live tvbroadcast show, documentary project and interactive CD-Rom project. HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE studies the language, esthetics and contents of electronic and media environment. HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE will be realizied by 40 professionals on media and 70 finnish art students of Theatre Academy, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Sibelius-Academy, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki University of Technology and Radio- and TelevisionInstitute of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE). The patron of HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE is the Director General of Finnish Broadcasting Company, mr. Arne Wessberg.

HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE is a large collaboration on media art and media culture between KROMA Productions Ltd, the Finnish art academies and main national tv-channel TV 1. Project will be completed and produced within a centre of media arts, The Magnusborg Studios where the high quality production facilities will be provided by the companies of the centre. The production company in charge, KROMA Productions Ltd. is spesialiized in media arts and cultural programs.

Project in three parts
The first part of the project will be released in Helsinki 22nd – 25th August 1994 during the 5th International Symposium on Electronic Art – ISEA ’94. The live tv- show will be tv-broadcasted from the Cultural House STOA in 24th August 1994 at 7 – 8.30 pm. It is an interactive tvexperiment containing six different works. Blue Box is a electronic staging where the performers can be set into the environments by trick images made on video and computer techniques. The tv-broadcast presents a telematic concert and an interactive dance performance during which the audience can vote and changes into the choreography via tele voting.

The second part completes the 52 minutes tv-documentary “Mediascape”. It will present the work process, realisation and the back grounds of the project. The art students portrays their concept of the world and ideas about media culture. Documentary collects also the high lights of the live tv- broadcast. The material will be collected during the work process in the summer 1994.

The third part completes an interactive CD-Rom documentary. The contents will be a collection of the mediaworks, interactive applications of the parts of the live tv-broadcast show and information about the works and authors.

From idea to realisation
The production team of HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE consists of several producers of audiovisual culture and media arts. Besides of the artistic activity they are also known of their long experience as teachers in art academies and institutions. In fact, the basic idea of completing HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE was brought up in discussions about art education. The discussions launched a wish to create collaboration in the field of media art in interaction with the arts and between the academies. Because of its nature, media art education calls for an act which crosses the boundaries of conventional forms of arts and education.

Art students joined HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE with enthusiasm. The Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE TV 1 joined right after and showed an interest towards this experimental project. The final scale of the realisation was created when Telecom Finland Ltd made the descission to provide the telecommunication network system. A similar media project has never been carried out before in the Nordic countries. HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE will get an international forum within the ISEA ’94 conference.

Selection of the works and towards the final completion
The idea to complete the HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE works was based on various ideas and propositions made by the students. The selection criteria were based on the variety of applications of contents and esthetics. The concept of media culture presented by the works of art students is not homogeneous nor it doesn’t represent the today’s media flood. On the contrary – the propositions represented the variety – and even an opposite picture of the world and ideas about the language and communication. The young artist generation owns a critical ability to read the audiovisual language and courage enough to create a new media expression.

Carrying out HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE as a three part project is a challenge for students and the production team. The working groups have had interesting discussions about the future, esthetics and forms of art and media culture. The audiovisual language and dramaturgy will inevitably undergo a great change because of alteration from the unidirectional mass communication, linear story into the intercative communication. I am glad to state that the students have accepted the challenge without prejudice and with courage. All the six works have their own theme which as an entity presents fairly well the general content of the propositions.

The works
INTERFACE is a ‘media theatre’, analyzing today’s information environment in the spirit of Jean Baudrillard. The video staging is scratch – grated audiovisuality. Fragments of images are picked from ordinary tv programmes (news, sports, documentaries, The Bold and the Beautiful-simulation). The work studies the act of watching tv and the onthology of viewer and the object. It makes a statement about tv’s internal logic and criticizes the unidimensional world picture of the mass culture. Where goes the board between the fact and the fiction?

PARADOX goes into the history of image, observation and interpretation of the visible. It compares the images of the classic art history with the painting act of children. The authors build tension between the scientific analysis and subjective observation. In the words of Dziga Vertov: “I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine will show you the world as I can see it…My way leads to creation of the fresh observation of the world. So this is how I explain you the unknown world in a new way.”

EMMENTHAL SOCAPEX is a telematic concert performed by the performance group with the same name. It uses sources of synthetic sounds but also selfmade instrumets. The work creates three different and interactive music events. Performance debates the sound reality of the natural environment, mechanic and electronic environment. The group calls for the audience to become more sensitive to listen and observe in a versatile way. Emmenthal Socapex don’t fear to use the newest technology nor the primitive instruments or sound sources which are not included as music instruments.

THE INSULT THAT MADE A MAN OUT OF MAC studies the dimmering boundaries between man and technology. The performance proceeds in a rythm of techno beat and creates a viewer a vision of cyber space which questions the sense of balance and the ability of outlining the space. The authors debates the development of man and technology. The development is inevitable and far beyond from the individual to control the process. The role of the machines as a part of the modern human existence is quite unconscious. So it is also quite impossible to abandon the machines.

“…THROUGH AN EMPTY SPACE” , the series of songs composed by Johan Tallgren is based on the poems of Göran Sonnevi. Music is performed by the soprano vocalist, the vibraphone and oboe. The metaphors of the lyric poetry were as the wells of the inspiration for the themes of image: rooms, spaces, urban landscapes… The elements forms a serial entity presenting the landscape of the mind. The work studies the concept of the time and space and stresses the preseptible observation. Realisation is abstrac and leaves space into the sensual lyrics and the association of the viewer / explorer.

MEDEIA is an interactive dance work. TV audience tele votes three times for the continuition of the story and representation. The choice will be made in one go between two different scences.So there will be many recreations of the choreography. The performance is based on the classic myth of Medeia – the barbar queen who killed her children because of her husband remarried a younger wife. The issue is approached in every scene from a different view and with different representation. The structure debates the affect of the interactive narration into the dramaturgy.

There are three additional student groups in the project. These groups concentrate on the dramaturgy of the entity, documentary work and the design and lay out of the publications. ESCAPE produces the vignettes and the signs of the dramatised entity which will work as audiovisual guides. ONE MAN CAMERA UNITS makes a documentation of MEDIASCAPE realisations and gathers the thoughts behind the project. FULL POWER LIFE designs the lay out of the publications. This very moment, seventy art students and the production team are preparing towards the highlight of the project, live tv- broadcast from STOA. The work process has been outstanding and intensive experience for the group. We deeply thank all individuals, institutions, communities and companies for their support. It is time to welcome the audience to the journey to the media landscape.

The formation of the Media Lab at the University of Art & Design Helsinki was a logical step in our University’s evolution. Like any faculty bearing the name ‘Media Lab’ there is a certain amount of irony in adopting that title. But having witnessed the changes brought about by the use of computers in many of our departments in the last decade it was clear that there must be a place within UIAH where the problematics and advantages of digital media could be investigated, unrestricted by allegiance to any existing professional doctrine.

Drawing on our successes of recent years we set to plan the department which would not only play home to its own Masters degree programme but would be the driving force behind the successful integration of new digital tools into the university as a whole. In a time of economic depression there was a need to consolidate existing resources, both human and technical, and to strive towards wider allegiance with both other universities and industrial partners. The Finnish climate of education is rapidly changing and no better seen than in UIAH during the last decade. We have gained openness through internationalization and through this have begun to learn the meaning of the phrase, ‘the competitive world of higher education’. Our education has become more relevant to the needs of modern society and academic values have had to be reassessed in the light of industrial dependence and sponsorship.

The Media Lab has many roles to play. It is a place for teaching, research and production of what we now term ‘New Media’, but more specifically we hope that the Media Lab will be successful in
applying the traditional skills of our university towards developing that media and the interface of man and machine. Much technology has come to us as the spin-off of an official desire to attack or
defend, whatever the cost. It is not surprising that the nature of this technology is somewhat hostile. Now that the silicon chip and the Internet fall within our more peaceful budgets we would be wise to seek peaceful uses for our new tools which will ultimately increase our understanding of each other.

The ELECTRONIC CARNIVAL is a network project that will take place all over the world from August to November, with a grand Openning Ball – a Carnival Cry – during ISEA’94. This network event will be hosted by UNICAMP – Instituto de Artes, in Campinas, Brazil.

To join this project, participants should create as many characters as they wish and subscribe them to the following list:

carnival _I

Characters will be introduced from all messages that arrive to the list. If a character wishes to communicate in private with another character, he should inquire about the availability of that character’s address by sending a message to the list manager. Characters whose authors have not explicitly authorized the list manager to identify them will not have their address sent to other characters. Still, nothing keeps a character from trying to obtain another one’s address through public messages: persuasion and seduction are part of the game. If two or more characters do communicate in private, we ask that messages be copied to the following Iist:

private_I
so that they interact in several ways: linearly in time, in the order of message arrival; or by interactions of characters, in the order of specific exchanges, like in a hypertext.

The Ball
A one day Opening Ball will occur during ISEA’94, when the characters around the world will be invited to act. ISEA’94 attendees will also be invited to create characters and join the body. To join, please send a message to

listserv@cesar.unicamp.br with subscribe carnival-I

My work can be understood in the context of language art and visual poetry, two genres that explore the fusion of word and image. I create what I call “holographic poems,” or “holopoems,” which are essentially computer holograms that address language both as material and subject matter.

I try to create texts which can only signify upon the active perceptual and cognitive engagement of the reader or viewer. This ultimately means that each reader “writes” his or her own texts as he or she looks at the piece. My holopoems don’t rest quietly on the surface. When the viewer starts to look for words and their links, the texts will transform themselves, move in three-dimensional space, change in color and meaning, coalesce and disappear. This viewer-activated choreography is as much a part of the signifying process as the transforming verbal and visual elements themselves.

The temporal and rhythmic structure of my texts play an important role in creating this tension between visual language and verbal images. Most of my pieces deal with time as non-linear (i.e., discontinuous) and reversible (i.e., flowing in both directions), in such a way that the viewer/reader can move up or down, back and forth, from left to right, at any speed, and still be able to establish associations between words present in the ephemeral perceptual field.

The use of computers and holography reflects my desire to create experimental texts that move language, and more specifically, written language, beyond the linearity and rigidity that characterize its printed form. I never adapt existing texts to holography. I try to inves-tigate the possibility of creating works that emerge from a genuine holographic syntax.

Definition
Exreme Low Frequencies are elctromagnetic waves, generated by athmospheric discharges in weather fronts (sferics) or by electrotechnical events (technics). In the range of neuronal frequencies (EEG, EMG), they are considered to be the cause of weather disease and the trigger of the biological clock.

Instrumentation
ELFes are catched by an frame antenna (on the roof of the trawlhouse), selected, amplified and pulses counted per second over a certain amplitude.

Evaluation
The numerical material is examined for nonlinear chaotic regularities by means of the theorem of takens. The fluctuation of this regularity is looked out for.

MS Stubnitz, a former deep-sea fishing trawler, was restaured during 1993 into a mobile forum for the arts. The ship has been equipped with a spatial and technical infrastructure for cultural production, studios for design and new media. Under the patronage of the Council of Europe and the Lord mayor of the City of Rostock, the ship launched cultural projects in Germany in 1993.

1994 is the year of MS Stubnitz’ Baltic Tour. From July to September, the ship cruises the Baltic Sea, providing cultural platforms for different events: St. Petersburg International Forum, Malmo Baltic Jubilee, ISEA’94 Helsinki and Hamburg. During the Baltic Tour, a cultural contact forum for the Baltic countries will be founded. The ship will activate cooperation between the cultural interest groups of the Baltic countries by organizing Contact Media workshops during the tour.

In ISEA’94 Helsinki, MS Stubnitz will present works from the Baltic Tour’94. The show of permanent works and artist-inresidence projects will be completed with works by Baltic artists from St. Petersburg, Malmo and Helsinki. The main focus of the Baltic Tour works is on ecology and environment.

Log In: VNS Matrix
Password: aberrant

Now connecting to host network RAMpage.

RAMpage: bentnet belladonna.stone.plant. 666 ? Welcome to CorpusFantasticaMOO! ?

Running Version alpha of CorpusFantasticaMOO

CorpusFantasticaMOO is a colonised body, where entities without number meet. You may not understand some of the language you encounter in this body, and it would be advisable to familiarise yourself with other methods of constructing meaning. Never assume that you are speaking to a member of a privileged class, race, gender or species. We provide mindnet access for entities with particular needs. What resident or guest entities say or do may not always be to your liking. Beware – there is no moral code in this *place*.

Type: ‘connect ‘ connect to your character ‘connect Guest’ connect to a guest character ‘@who’ see who’s currently logged in

connect Geneva Convention xtreme

Okay. Geneva Convention is in use

The Limen

You are at the threshold of the corpusfantastica. Seemingly infinite and infinitely small, neither here nor there, with half remembered snatches of your Iife or is it? It is darkly seductive here, and you could stay, but you choose to slide through the cartesian reality grid and enter the spaciousness of the corpusfantastica.

@who

BigBrain is in the Thymus Bar sociopathic cyberslut is in the Lung Lounge Manko is in the Wandering Womb Matrix Green Guest Wandering Womb Matrix Oracle Snatch is in the Wandering Womb Matrix FireWalkWithMe is in the Wandering Womb Matrix

@look socio

You see before you a walking pincushion, hardly a piece of flesh that hasn’t been pierced. The jewellery is a cross between Cyberdada circuitry and fishing tackle, useless, meaningless with a strange retro allure. The three breasts are a turnoff, mostly because they are eyeing you nastily. There is a permanent scowl on her face, and her pupils are the size of bowling balls.

@join sociopathic cyberslut

Spectator actor enters the MARQUEE
makes his way between dwarf trees,
level of Earth
mounts the platform, turns the wheel
level of Man
to hoist and spread out the screen,
to cover the skylight and adjust focal
distance,
level of Sky
to watch the sequence of angeled
skyscapes,
projecting from the top of the structure
level of Cosmos

Ambient – surrounding, on all sides

Ambient music is a most fruitful crossing between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Ambientlike sound structures have been brought out in contemporary music since the 1950. Ambient is music in space and as space, “intelligent background music”. Static and meditative, it is music for the soul.

The AMBIENT CITY project is divided into three-week transmission periods, the second of which (August 20-September 12) coincides with ISEA’94. The radio station is situated in the Museum of Contemporary Art. The AMBIENT CITY sign, a 33000 watt ‘lamp’ glows on the outside: a lightgrid with a transmitter antenna in the middle, directed out to the ether. The visually effective lightpiece works as an AMBIENT CITY symbol as well as an outdoor advertisement.

The station functions through computerized IBM equipment; each three week period is preprogrammed into the software. The exhibition hall also has a computer monitor with text and picture information concerning the music. The room is filled with soundscapes from the radio and the glow of the lightsculpture. AMIBENT CITY combines music, environmental and visual art.

AMBIENT CITY is the first internationally significant radio experiment in Finland. The audience is Helsinki and its surroundings, though the project does not end at its reception areas. Ambient musicians are a group of talents keeping closely in touch with each other and communicating through the latest electronic media. Their ideas and projects spread immediately through networks all over the world.

Thanks to Tommi Grönlund of Sähkö (=electric) Recordings, AMBIENT CITY can present the most important Ambient music makers. The programme features large amount of commissioned pieces and special versions from all over the world (Atom Heart, Christian Vogel, Fred Gianelli, Muslim Gauze, Patrick Pulsinger, Pete Nam look, POL, Mixmaster Morris, Mouse on Mars), from Finland (RinneRadio, SIN O, Jimi Tenor) and Ambient ‘classics’ (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Klaus
Schultze, John Cage, etc.)

Lailah is a piece of interactive art, which we would classify as interactive expressionist fiction. (As interactive art productions are few and far between at the moment, classification becomes tentative.)

Lailah is a multimedia production, which with the use of graphics, photography, simple animations, recited poetry, sound effects and music involves the participants in a poetic interactive experience.

It is developed both as a production that can be experienced via the computer screen with use of 3 -channel sound or as a room installation with use of 3-channel sound, a video projector and a surface for the mouse navigation.

Lailah is based on the idea of engaging the participants in a fictionary universe by letting them interact with a black & white photography of a woman’s torso covered with flower petals. With the mouse the participant can control a coloured dot. By touching the picture in a particular place, the petals come to life by taking on different colours accompanied by music, sound effects and poetry. These respond to the particular colour combinations in the picture. The sound effects are integrated so that the 3-channel sound control lets the sound follow the movements in the picture.

The poetry and colour combinations are never the same (statistically the possibility of the same combination is very low), which means you will get a new experience every time you try it out. Emotionally the atmosphere changes according to the nuances of the colours, gloomy colours change the poetry towards moodyness, while bright and lively colours give a more positive experience. Impatient and vulgar actions change the experience in a nightmarish way, patience and gentle behaviour let you go further with the process, which sums up the basic point in Lailah: the participant is responsible for his or her own experience.

Paradise Tossed or Paradise Lost?
“Paradise Tossed” is a computer animated survey of technological terrain, idealism and design from four women’s points of view. It uses MacroMindDirector’s lingo to access segments of a 12 Minute Animation on a SonyLaser Disc Player. The Menus are presented like pages from a photo Album, and by touching the screen the participant can not only choose animated segments to be played on another screen, but can also construct timeless associations.

I started out to explore the notion of “timelessness desire” and the “redundancy of technological utopia” which led me to a series of archetypical assumptions in “Paradise Tossed”. For some time I have been researching and comparing eras. After talking to my grandmother, my mother, and my sister about their attitudes toward technology I concentrated on four time zones. 1900, 1930, 1960 and 1990. Even though these eras exist a generation apart, together they encapsulate the tremendous extent of environmental and domestic change we have witnessed since the beginning of this century. It occured to me that interactivity could provide people with archetypal scenarios that they would be curious to visit and in doing so may question the reason for their choices and why so many people’s ideals were so similiar.

In “Paradise Tossed” participants can enter Dreamhomes from the history of design. When selection occurs, four animations with architectual styles; Art Noveaux, Art Deco, Op Art and Space Age unfold accordingly. The choices are redundant enough to affirm utopian cliches, but through the interactive design they all can transpose time and stand together as current valid options of desire, even today. The viewer is helped to travel through time via signifiers like colors, catch phrases and hand gestures to help them locate themselves.

This timelessness of desire is emphasized by the title itself “Paradise tossed”, which indicates the “mixing of desire”, from which part of the proverbial “salad of idealism” will the participant choose to “eat” next.

Another section provides a set of choices within the technological terrain. Here domestic technology is used as a metaphor for the history of the machine-human interface and so the changing nature of women’s workplaces become apparent, as domestic appliances seductively present themselves over landscapes, which flow with the curves of the female body. A very typical advertisement slogan is used to reaffirm this, the viewer is asked “Just step into into the technology of tomorrow”.

At another point the viewer can “Flip through these eye-catching headlines”, which gives them authentic pages, displaying magazine headlines from the eras of 1900, 1930, 1960 and 1990.

Another menu displays the caption “Travel with us into another world” and this allows the viewer to witness transport on a boat, a train, a car, a plane respective of the shift in mobility development that took place in this century.

The heraldic statements are intentionally seductive and reminiscent of the selling methods used to convince the average buyer. It was hoped in “Paradise Tossed” that the participant would see through the seduction. A key to this criticism is obvious in the attract loop of the interactive, where a set of women’s hands hold the revolving globe of our blue world- “Where do we go from here,” says the caption.

“Paradise Tossed” is a section of a larger interactive work which will encompass questing stories from 8 women’s lives (two from each era) and four sets of archival photographs the participant can brouse through.

The objective of Media Museum has been to develop the first extensive Finnish hypermedia information source in CD-ROM format for the school-aged. It illustrates different media and their history, creation, usage, influence and future directions with hypermedia files containing linked hypertext files, sound, video clips and still pictures. In addition, the reader can use interactive simulations for instance to compose his own video.

ABC hyperbook?
Media Museum is a hypermedia ABC book of a sort. It is the first Finnish complete presentation of media and especially directed at a wide audience. Its goal is to familiarize the audience with new media technology as an extension of old media technology and to bring up aspects in the old media that often go unnoticed. Media Museum aims to educate its readers in critical media literacy — to recognize and avoid manipulation, to teach navigating in the jungle of media ecology and to extract useful contents for our lives from media products. Media Museum has been published as a CD-ROM to be used at home and at school.

The Content
The interface of Media Museum is a computerized television display that allows the reader to enter nine different scenarios. Each of the scenarios – media spaces – occupies 40 – 60 megabytes on the CD-ROM. The user interface is implemented as a room metaphor: each scenario or its element is pictured as a room. The user interface and all media scenarios are accompanied by hypertext help windows and a general media vocabulary. An animation character, codenamed Agricola (the ‘father’ of written Finnish Ianguage from 1540), will aid the user in getting used to the material and make it even more interesting.

The planned scenarios and media-spaces are:

– The future Living Room
– The Hypermedia space – The Computer hall – TV and Video corner
– The Cinema – The Radio – The Press Room
– The Printing House – The Birthplace of writing

CinePlay is a simple, interactive educational program with which individuals can creatively explore the filmmaking process by combining digitized images and sounds in multiple ways. From a database involving four characters and cinematic action centered around one object (a giftwrapped package), users can construct an edited sequence of their own design. Thousands of possible sequences emerge from these image/sound combinations, spanning the range from conventional narrative scenarios to more experimental forms.

CinePlay is designed to operate on any Quicktime-compatible Macintosh computer, and is appropriate for installation in a variety of learning environments including classrooms, libraries and other public settings. CinePlay enables users to acquire and develop a wide range of media literacy skills including editing, scripting, sound design, narrative construction and increased familiarity with the basic symbology of the audiovisual lexicon.

ISEA’94 provides a rare chance to look at the evolution of computer games and interfaces. Cute Museum at CompuCafe presents a full view to computer games; from the beginnings the field in the late 1970’s to the most recent 3D games like Doom and Myst.

The rise of games, like Ping Pong and Spacewar, is presented with workable machines, like Altair, VIC-20, Sinclair and Spectrum. The user sees the most thrilling and addictive games, which are based on a couple of visual bytes on the screen, but take hours to play.

The second generation of console games – the mid-1980’s – is mapped with early Nintendo dataglasses and data glove PowerGlove of Sega. The Museum shows also a rare (and powerful) Japanese PCEngine console, which was never launched to the European market.

Cute Museum presents the beginning of the Internet network games, like Nethack, which is text-based and one of the most addictive computer games ever released. There is also real-time access to MUD (Multi User Dungeons) which is one of the most popular ways to spend time on the Net nowadays.

Computer games are a significant part of the evolution of computer as a medium. Usually the new computer interfaces – like Windows – are developed only when the producers think that it is time to release a new version. Quite silly and difficult interfaces are in use just because there is nothing else to use.

The essential part of making a good game is the design of a good interface, or playability. As can be seen at the Cute Museum, computer games are leading interface developers and for example the newest games have nearly ubiquitous interfaces at the moment – a phenomena which will come to other computer interfaces only after a while. You don’t see any menus or icons – all you have to do is
to click where you wants to go or what to do-like in real life.

Another important feature of games is 3D. The newest games, like Wolfenstein, provide us with a full real-time three dimensional environment, where the user can move freely. The first virtual reality will take place in the homes, in computer and console games.

This work is a kind of interactive sound installation however it may look just a group of lemons on the ground. Acid of fruits works to generate electricity. Lemons are connected to digital sound tips. Visitors can smell fresh citrus and hear sounds when they open the pods or cups since the electric circuits are opened by sensors. Exhibitions of electronic arts usually need a lot of plug-in sockets. But this piece does not need them because the work itself can generate electricity. When I face to electronic arts, I consider about power generation, not only to consume electricity.

motive
I think foods in ecosystem are joints of circulatory system. Thus recently I have been pay attention to food culture and use local foods for my art works. When I worked in California, I though let lemons whisper a song using their acid as battery. 1 found Japanese characters “export Japan special” on the box of lemons which I bought there. When we ingest foods from remote area, our body may assimilate, switch, mediate with unknown culture, in different phases from those of politics or economy.

background
Local farm products tell me a lot about the places, such as clime and history. Outside-people often misunderstand local information but it sometimes can lead a deeper understanding. It looks the same in cultural exchange, the first step always starts with a trifle. Japan imports a great quantity of Californian citrus. TV commercials of such famous company Sunkist amplify the fictional Californian image among Japanese people. But a Californian said me “the best lemons is Floridian.”

process
Studio I made this piece was a former missile base area (HEADLAND ART CENTER). I made an outline of a missile in the actual size with lemons, in the same number of people and dogs who used to work at there, wishing to be a peacemaker after cold war. I directed it’s head point to Japan since they were exporting to Japan. [taking of?, and landing] In 2000, this work was shown at a gallery in San Francisco (SOUTHERN EXPORSURE). In 2002, the missile-shaped lemons landed to a gallery in Tokyo, using California lemons imported. In Fall it will be launched to Nagoya port. Citrus fruits of California, sometimes metamorphose into processed foods such as juice or candies, are circulating in markets over the world, coming and going through digestive system in our bodies even this day.

Various colors are changing in the street. This work is expressing change of the color in the street with the animation and sound in which balls are bouncing. The expression of the street – signboards of stores, people’s dress which goes back and forth – is photoed with video camera. The photoed image becomes the animation in which balls bounce on realtime. And it is projected on the surface of a wall of a building. People passing through the street can participate in change of the color of a town, and can enjoy the ball and sound which bounce.

Birds Singing other Birds Songs is a sound and video piece, which has been produced using various digital and multimedia programmes (Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash). The conceptual basis for the work is an exploration into the idea of the translation process: from birds’ sounds into language and back to birds’ songs via the human voice with the knowledge of language, These birds are animated ‘text bids’ singing the sound of their own text while flying in the sky. The letters, which create their physical outlines, correspond to the transcribed sound made by each of the birds. Nevertheless, the sound doesn’t correspond to the visual representation of the real bird. The sound is produced by the human voice slightly manipulated in the computer. The birds appear on screen in a random manner. This work is also in the form of an interactive piece where the user can choose the birds he/she want to see flying in the sky. Installation space: projection onto a covered window, giving the impression of a window or onto a big glass window.

32000 Points of Light is an immersive audio-visual environment exploring impossible but plausible levels of experience, points of light being the only visual aid. Creating a place where sound is both your guide and your surroundings, 32000 Points of Light is a journey from thought to thing – starting inside your own thought processes, stepping outside to see the effect, moving towards the physical, and finally outside into the experience. Each step challenges both the expectations and, awareness of your own reaction to sound.

Though effective in a variety of formats the 32000 points of light experience has been conceived for performance inside a motion simulator to explore motion within 3D audio environments. Its starting point and basis is firmly in sonics and sonic manipulation, but its purpose is to investigate the effects of a combination of visuals and motion on the sonic experience – to generate a completely four dimensional universe where sound, motion, time and vision all have a common reference point and symbiotic relationship – an opportunity to (re)discover the real identity of sound. By allowing the viewer to experience the navigation of a sonic waveform where the only guide is a shifting matrix of points of light, the effects of motion and perception of travelling through the sound will become a vital point of reference for the sonic experience.

STACK is a collective self-modificating virtual environment that allows small groups of participants to interact with autonomous objects and with each other in real time as they go up through the levels of the datastack. Humans are represented by the results of their activities. Wile crossing different nodes of the STACK, they move through the space, teleplaying with objects and others participants. The objects compete each with other, one retracting to the other, or provoking the other’s verbal or symbolic interchanges. The objects are not entirely frozen in advance, but it is possible to change their tissues, sources and sequences. What arises is a dynamic system of variable’s quantities and awareness.

The signals are picked up by the system of sensors.After the digitalization they are sent to the programs which operate the installation. This is a kind of neural-net which is the original program created by R. Lisek and Sz. Kuzniarz. Its practical value will only be determined through extensive experimentation. It would become truly overpowering if the system became to rewrite its own source code and transformed itself into something entirely different than it once was.

Networked Rockers consists of two pairs of rocking chairs, each located in a different part of the C4F3. The chairs each emit a different part of a sonic score according to how they are rocked. People sitting next to one another are able to create harmonies and rhythms together, encouraging communication and play. Each of the of chairs has a partner chair in the other location. When a person sits down and starts rocking, a tone is emitted both locally and from the partner chair. This way, people can communicate remotely, both through movement and by creating songs with one another.

Moveable Types and Instant Spaces explores how temporary types of architecture, “pod types,” can define an experience, and alternatively how social or personal actions and objects can change the perception of a space. Working off the idea of wearable architecture, these pod types strive to create personal space in the public realm.

The online project Love Virus was started in August 2004 with 8 artists from various artistic disciplines such as photography, moving image, interactive art, performance, and painting. Love Virus is run not only as a popular art blog site, but as an organization for young artists and their fans to meet through various fun-filled offline events. Their focus is to make unique human relations through media and art. Among the 21 original participating artists in Love Virus, Kim Joon and Jang Woosuk will perform the art project “Delivery.”

A computer is connected to a Yamaha disklavier grand piano, so that it can be fed a series of electronic musical scores that have been found on the world wide web. Unprepared Piano performs each score from beginning to end, randomly choosing the piece’s orchestration.

Light From Tomorrow is a continuous feed of tomorrow’s outdoor light readings, from the Kingdom of Tonga, across the international dateline, to a light panel installed in one of today’s gallery spaces at the San Jose Museum of Art.

The macrophotograph of a silicon memory chip is digitized and stored in an external EPROM which is continuously read by a computer. The pictorial information contained in it is displayed on the computer monitor. The EPRPOM is placed in front of the computer monitor with its light protection removed, and is thus irradiated by the light from the computer image. The memory content of the EPROM is progressively destroyed. Contemplation of its own image dissolves the information of which it is composed. Realization: x-space.

Light Bead Curtain is a visceral interactive installation of light, sound and beads, which aims to amuse and affect visitors’ senses of play and wonder. Each bead illuminates when touched, while adding a unique tone to an ever-evolving soundscape.

Conceived by Amichi Wolf and Jin-Yo Mok, Designed and Engineered by Amichi Wolf, Sound Design by Dan Overholt

IN[]EX, an interactive, city-wide collaborative audio sculpture involving a shipping container and thousand of smaller modules, which distributed through an array of interventions that reference early models of instruction-based participatory works. As the blocks circulate throughout the city, they transmit data which is processed to create a constantly remixed sound environment in the shipping container.

How Stuff Is Made is a visual encyclopedia that documents the manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental impacts involved in the production of contemporary products. It is a free, independent, academic resource published by engineering and design students, who research and produce summative photo essays describing these conditions of creation.

Altitude Zero consists of 6 monitors camouflaged as cabin windows. The video images show ocean waters and drifting materials such as abandoned and polluted objects. The drifting materials remind us of the remnants of different cultures and times and symbolize detachment and alienation from mainstream cultural domains. Video images are activated according to audience movement.

@Silicon_Valley: SJC-MEX links people walking and talking in the former “garden cities” of San Jose and Mexico City. It is a model for interaction and communication across geo-borders and tech platforms and a forum for exploring paradoxes of natural, cultural, and virtual identities.

enCODe is a tabletop projection that uses machine vision to guide virtual fish around any objects on the table. The fish can also swim between tables, carrying a message, which has been uploaded by visitors to encOde.org. The project is both a fun interaction that takes advantage of natural activity over tabletops, and a communal bulletin board recording thoughts and reflections.

In DriftNet, Hirakawa uses “information flotsam” from the worldwide web by surfing links with an information agent. The installation space is a “virtual surf,” where websites surge constantly like waves. The texture of each wave is generated by a screen shot of a real website, and the magnitude of the wave is determined by the length of the download.

The snows that crown the peak of Fuji Melt on the mid-June day And that night it snows again. _Takahashi Mushimaro in the Manyoshu.

“Sensing Speaking Space”, is an interactive installation that focuses on the notion of the “intelligent space”, a space that knows you are there and reacts to the presence and movements of multiple spectators sensed through a custom camera tracking system. The image is projected on a large screen, the sounds are spatialized around the audience through a 6 channel surround-sound based on their locations in the gallery.

The visualization consists of the play between the noise, randomness and order, through multiple layerings and subtle changes that build up over time and in response to spectators movements. There is a back and forth transition between two images that is produced dynamically as a consequence of the spectators’ actions. The first state is a textured image surface continuously being covered by white visual noise, like film dust, or snow falling on a windshield. The noise is made up of ascii characters that must be wiped away by the spectators’ movements to activate further events. Enough action must be generated so that the transition to the other state is possible. The second state is a green blurred image, from which readable texts are drawn to the surface through the spectator’s movements. The audience’s movements advance the events from one to the other evoking metaphorical acts of “wiping” and “breaking through” in the white noise screen mode to “bringing forth” and “revealing” in the green text screen mode.

The sound consists of several layers (drone, singer, water sounds, yells, speakers, etc.) with variations for each of the two visual states. The vision program send messages over a network to a Supercollider program that controls the sound synthesis and mlxing. The work is intended to focus on reflexion and self-realization of one’s presence. It is an abstract work meant to be contemplative like a Japanese garden. Technical contribution for “Sensing Speaking Space”, include Gilroy Menezes for motion sensing, and Gary Kling for OSC communication.

This project was realized in Macromedia Director, OSC and Supercollider. A presentation of the prototype took place at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in February 2002, produced for the “Activating the Medium” festival coordinated by David Prochaska and Randy Yau.
Sensing Speaking Space, 2002 George Legrady and Andreas Schlegel Visualization, Stephen Travis Pope, Sound.

Panoptical Identity started from the observation that France’s electronic phone book contains 33 Xavier Lambert at various addresses. This piece uses the concept of archiving to establish a file of the various lives that have been fictionally given to all these Xavier Lambert. The raw material came from a stock of over a thousand black-and-white photos, mostly from the late nineteenth century, acquired here and there at flea markets. Photos from my own personal history were then added. In a broader context of identity and otherness, this work questions tools insofar as it represents the paradigm of archiving from both technological and ideological viewpoints. An administrative-type filing system turn these 33 fictional lives of 33 different peoples into 33 potential variations on a single life (as though only on Xavier Lambert existed or, more accurately, as though “Xavier Lambert” was a term referring to a generic species). The home page was designed to make it impossible for viewers to determine a precise order for accessing these various lives, eliminating all possibility of classification among them, even though the very conception of the script necessarily implied classification itself. The principle of navigation generated a special relationship to the concept of archiving, notably the classificatory aspect, since it is not organized (in the specific context of this script) along a linear arborescence, as is often the case in normal archiving methods.

Drift Bottles is Huang Shi’s reinvention of a lost legacy when medieval sailors communicated by drifting bottles. Today, broadcast media, cell phones, and the Internet and have radically altered our patterns of communication and instantaneous connectivity is simple. Drift Bottles reintroduce the notions of surprise and chance in our daily interactions.

disCONNECTION uncovers, through Xing Danwen’s unforgiving eye, the story underneath mountains of electronic garbage. Xing traveled many times to southern China to photograph a population of over 100,000 living on the fringe of life, recycling thousands of tons of electronic waste dumped in China by the West.

CNNplusplus is a tactical media project that alters a CNN newscast through subtle, automated media juxtaposition and replacement. The newscaster remains positioned in the right corner, while the News Enhancement Program selectively replaces the other two regions of the screen. Headlines from independent news sources replace the scroll and also trigger a keyword Google image search. Viewers can customize the news by submitting their own headlines and keywords at CNNplusplus.com.

Chit Chat Club is an installation consisting of three telematically inhabitable chairs. Each chair is placed at a table, and can be accessed by a remote visitor who, through the chair, participates in conversations with visitors seated in the C4F3. One chair is humanoid, and its facial expressions are determined by the remote users voice and actions. Another employs expressive typography, using large scale to give this everyday medium dynamic presence. The third chair uses graphics and voice to enable a rich communicative experience.

Call is a normal-looking telephone sitting on a table in C4F3 with a small LCD display that says “lift handset.” When picked up, it randomly dials the number of a project participant. These volunteer participants come from a wide variety of backgrounds and communities. The ensuing interaction is not recorded or otherwise determined in any way.

Breeze is an ambient robot inhabiting the body of a tree. Unlike humans, Breeze can visually sense and react through 360 degrees, allowing her to reach out to others wherever they are near. Breeze introduces issues concerning body and machine, anima and robot to the C4F3 environment.

Taking the form of a paper based, tick-box survey, (or PDA based software) visitors to a New Media gallery or exhibition complete a simple questionnaire as they enjoy the gallery experience. The questionnaire is based on a visual taxonomy for New Media Art (developed by the artists), which attempts to identify typical configurations for New Media Art pieces including technical set up, media content and user experience. The completed questionnaires are collected by the art establishment as a documentation of the show. Throughout the duration of the show the completed forms may also be displayed in the Untitled Media activity area as an ongoing review to the artworks and an insight to the public perception of the event.

In response to the ongoing debate by mainstream art establishments, contemporary art theorists, practitioners and the art going community, to define what constitutes a New Media Art practice – Untitled Media is an attempt to document and categorize examples of artworks that might or might not fall into the domain of New Media Art. Unlike traditional artworks such as painting or sculptures, New Media Art is often difficult to describe or identify. Untitled Media is a participatory classification system that will attempt to address the mutability of contemporary, digital enhanced New Media artworks.

A location based activity the Untitled Media event can be attached to any New Media arts festival or conference. A small team of Untitled Media artists and volunteers will collect information from visitors to New Media artworks at a gallery or festival location. The collected information is fed into the Untitled Media database; the resulting information is then visualized as dynamic information system and made available for public consideration and feedback.

Visitors complete a simple questionnaire as they enjoy the ISEA exhibitions. The questionnaire is based on a visual taxonomy for New Media Art (developed by the artists), which attempts to identify typical configurations for New Media Art pieces. Throughout the duration of the show the completed forms may also be displayed as an ongoing review of the artworks and an insight to the public perception of the event. This information is also fed into a database, which is dynamically visualized as the survey continues.

1. art has ever been comprehended as a process of expression. the internal status of the brain-body interrelation of the given artist had to be processed into form, content and gestalt to communicate with the outside world.

in the metaphor of externalisation of the mind, the bio-electrical activity of the brain itself (EEG) is being used to control a cursor on a computer screen. this channel of communication from the inside of the body to the outside world must be loaded with information. this information stems from pure imagination only.

with the brain-computer-interface (BCI) an interface to the physical world is provided. the body itself has become the computer screen. the cursor has become the tool to reincarnate the “dead parts” of handicapped bodies by mental activity only.

“imagineering” is grounded in complete analogy to the expressionistic concept of the artist but based in an information assisted environment. in this environment the real new artist is a truly handicapped, but information assisted figure. in trying to communicate with the world he/she must imagine the action only, the realisation is being executed by the information assistants. this is in correspondence with the arts from the inspiration to the final realisation in an artwork, but executed by the artist, or at least signed by him/herself. this artistic structure of processes mustn’t be further understood as an extra-ordinay mental procedure. as “imagineering” can demonstrate, this brain-body activity is ordinary to all the human internal and external processes, even though the realisation looks extraordinary.

In order to demonstrate the realisation of the art metaphor of “imagineering” the audience has been invited to a 30 minutes training with the brain computer interface (BCI) in the exhibition. according to the power of imagination -and training procedures- the users had been able to steer an electric train either in the one or the other direction, at will.

2. “imagineering”, comprehended as the common ground of advanced artistic and basic ordinary expressions, has been pushed forward to an experiment incorporating five ‘truely handicapped artists’ (blind, left hermisphere paralized, right hemisphere paralized, two wheelchairdrivers.) the mental processes of each of the five artist have been communicated via internet to finally create a ‘complete virtual body’ by means of communication.

We unconsciously demand the application of certain elementary principles in the arrangements which surround us in daily life. These principles are so simple that when they are complied with, one is not even aware of the source of one’s satisfaction. On the other hand the violation of these simple principles will give rise to a feeling of disappointment which is none the less actual for being, sometimes, quite indefinable.

The success of each project in my site,  depends in a measure on correct balance in every sense this medium – digital art website – has to offer. What I build is a collage or an assemblage of interrelated short art pieces that although seemingly detached from each other, in whole, express a complete thought or statement. My site remains  a “work in progress”.

While returning the physical phenomenon which is non-linear [linear/]-alike, is generated, and changes in work space to sound and light a focus is given to the information of those space normal positions. While an experience person makes the memory which precipitates in self evoke, he will experience very everyday consciousness experience of being stimulated by the external phenomenon which is always updated and shakes, in the environment where only the information to which it was restricted here is given. The trial which performs the rendering of new consciousness experience, and mapping of memory through scanning to the detailed difference in the phenomenon which has happened around a nerve us.

MATRIX is an interactive Installation which uses patented retinal after-image technology to create virtual light sculpture within the mind of a viewer. Formed within a new perceptual world, sculptures exist in an altered dream like reality. Created from the absence of photochemicals within the eye, the mechanisms of the viewer’s vision, firstly construct then erode the fonn.

MATRIX is an advancement on ‘Retinal Memory Volume’ an artwork using the same technology which has toured widely in Europe ‘The Gestalt Psychologists, in the early part of the 20th century, made much play of perceptual organisation: that there are principles, largely inherited, by which stimulus patterns are organised into ‘wholes’ (Gestalten). Lines of dots which converge, are perceptually organised in three dimensions.’ ‘The Intelligent Eye” by R.L. Gregory p.18. The image attached can be seen as a set of spots converging on one another, decreasing in size up the page. But our brain reads this pattern as a set of identical spheres seen in perspective. Our brain likes to perceive and count identical units.

Experience for the viewers.
1. Viewer enters a dark room. Their attention focuses on a small red LED in front of them.
2. With an interval of 10 seconds between each emission there are 3 flashes of light emitted from photographic flashguns placed 1.Sm in front of the viewer.
3. Still in blackness, the viewer perceives a grid of multi coloured light spheres hovering in front of them and receding into the void.
4. A dim strobe light comes on, lighting up the installation room. Due to Emmert’s law” the viewer perceives a huge matrix of floating light spheres which appear to be solid and defining the dimensions of the installation space.
5. Strobe light goes off, the viewer leaves the room.

As the work is formed inside the viewer, documentation of the sculpture is impossible. The work allows people to observe their own eyesight, and asks the question, at which point does perception end and memory begin?

I am going to show two movies edited at 24 frames per second. I set myself two rules en making these movies.

Rule 1: Even though both movies, “People Coming & Going In Town “and “People Relaxing In A Cafe”, are made up of many short scenes, I wanted to create the same situation in both.

Rule 2: Divide each scene into 24 frames. From scene to scene, the transition should take exactly one second. I followed both these rules.

Despite the subtleness and uncertain flickering, there is a calculated moment of certain existence.

“metroscope” is an interactive installation that seeks to integrate the perceived space of the subway with the perceived space of the city and its inhabitants. It incorporates a projected film and a touch panel monitor with a map of the Tokyo subway, with a list of icons that identify each of the subway lines. This panel allows the audience to alter the projected film, which is a traveling shot (first-person point-of-view) of the land above ground that parallels the path of the subway. The images, undergoing DirectX processing, are rigorously framed and rapidly projected, paralleling the speed of the train.

However the images are not completely natural but rather ‘discretely bundled’ into frames, rather like a set of dominoes. Since the spectator does not have to follow the path of the subway but can veer off the line if he or she so chooses, the framed images provide a very ‘sharp’ image of its movements. (The vanishing point of the Image moves away from the center of the screen in response to the veering movement of the viewer). This allows the viewer to orient himself even as s/he moves away from the line of the subway. Needless to say, all interactions are done in real time.

I met with one driftwood at the dry riverbed in Kiso-River. Where had it extend its roots, and how had it spent? There are much information about the kind of the tree on books and website. However, they do not answer the thing which I want to know truly. They do not approach me with the tree’s lively being. We accustomed ourselves to the information sucked out of the thing too much. I want to find the intrinsic information in its being. But it is very difficult. At least, I want to hear the tale of silent voice by touching it calmly.

How is our identity shaped by our language and communication? Increasingly, we are immersed in high order simulacra that offer more intimate relationships with our media than those that have been possible before. Simulation has become integral to reality itself, and we adopt the beings and experiences of these simulations into our own lives. We have developed the ability to shift perceptually between the real and the hyperreal. Artefact explores this shift in perception by accentuating errors, or “artefacts”, in the representation of reality.

The interactive sculptures of Artefact: Mixed Reality are extrusions of the virtual into the real, modelled after the icons and characters of computer games. Their shiny, plastic form is both familiar and disorientating, accentuating our own ontological remediation and the dynamic between the real and the virtual. Digital media have become more real. At the same time, real life has become programmed, encoded and more artificial.

Artefact explores the “language” of computer-mediated space as it is expressed in games – its unique internal logic and properties. It investigates elements such as gameplay – the abstraction of reality into a system, artificial life – which models complex systems that have the capacity to learn, grow and evolve, generative systems – which allow new structures to be made from a set of basic forms, and new modes of perception enabled by electronic space.

On another level, Artefact is part of an ongoing investigation of the semiotics of digital space and human-computer interaction. In a virtual world, both the elements that constitute the world, and the wodd model or system, are equally important in signifying meaning. In the process of investigation, elements such as characters, objects, and icons are identified, decoded, and transmuted into a world model, which combines iconic ideals with personal specific imagery. Artefact: Semiomorph actualises a hybrid model such as this into a coherent alternative world.

Artefact: Semiomorph explores “semiotic morphism”, a “systematic translation between sign systems” in which signified messages can be mapped onto various signifiers, multiplying and mutating instances of semiosis. The term captures the shape-shifting plasticity of relationships between sound, image, text, and users in virtual worlds; the interactions through which meaning is made, transformed and remade dynamically and synaesthetically in real time. In the translation between the real and the simulated, a new kind of space emerges. Artefact is an instance of this new space, driven by its alternative logic and artificial aesthetic.

The future is being made by image.

<The picture of the future expectation> wasn’t drawn by the special person one day, it began to be drawn by the unspecified people little by little. Therefore, <the picture of the future expectation> itself become the picture of purpose, and it doesn’t matter who and how produce it. It become to have such power that can decide the destination of the world though it was only a imagination.

Therefore, GUNDAM doesn’t appear. So, EVANGELION and TOTORO, DORAEMON are also the world of imagination after all. On, well! The future waiting for us is such a wonderful and boring world. It was made bored by us, so it will go on expected – harmoniously, and end.

Don’t forget, however, the future isn’t decided.

The future dreamed in the past days made us recall the sweet world irresponsibly. All is solved there, there is nothing to matter, and the technology is all-round on the all things. Whether it’s good or not, those days were running at full speed in the all things. That is completely opposite days to now. That’s it. I see. That’s right. We forget it, but it’s so. The technology can solve all, so the world is still filled with happiness and affection. There are no diseases and the poverty. Well, we shall disappear from the world. Then, we shall run at full speed for the future. We will head to the sweet world like a dream with throwing away all our belongs. With the understanding that we have self-contradiction, it’s only one choice of the alternatives.

In this way, a story is added to <the picture of the future expectation> again, today.

Based on a sentence taken from the seminal book of Jacques Derrida, French philosopher, “Speech and Phenomena” translated by David B. Allison, I produced first video “Talking to Myself” in 1978 (revised in 2001). The video was highly appreciated as “the strongest, most effective statement one could make from the work of Derrida” by Professor Allison. The sentence I quoted, that Derrida calls “phenomenological essence” is that I hear myself at the same time that I speak.

The new DVD, not just a transfer of video, extends further with the text, and the graphics which work interactively. In “Hearing / Speaking”, for instance, you can choose among the monitors with the picture of a face, head, ear and mouth in the video-installation, and you can read/see different programs. So you can perceive and localize “Hearing I Speaking” with the organs. Together with “Seeing” in this DVD I could combine the perception of “Seeing” with “Hearing / Speaking”. Other three related videos are “Talking to Myself: Phenomenological Operation (1978), “Talking in New York” (1981 revised in 2001) and “Talking to Myself at PS1″(1985).

Throughout these videos I try to question the validity of the notion of an identity in video, which is different from the actual voice, between “the I who hear” and “the I who speak.”

The text includes “A letter to Takahiko limura” by David B. Allison, and “On Talking to Myself” by Takahiko limura.

According to the advancement in mobile-communication-systems such as broadcloth and personal digital assistant devices, the environment around us has been changing rapidly into the ubiquitous network society where people can accede to any information from anywhere, and in anytime they want. The technology of IPv6 and other constituent of this ubiquitous society has been introduced, assigning each IP address to every stage of life environment. Not long before, people may gain every information at home, without fear of being out of date. Since the purpose of this type of society is to make our life more convenient, by letting people free from the ‘space and time’ restrictions, so-called direct communication will be widely influenced. The more people become free from these two restrictions, the less they can enjoy direct communication.

To avoid this danger, the ‘spatial memory architecture’ has been introduced. This project is to create new type of direct communication by using new technology of mobile-communication-systems and of GPS. In the society where the ‘share model of knowledge or information’ hasn’t been materialized yet, it’s necessary for a person to make a direct contact with anybody who has the information. People highly depend upon the ‘space and time’ there. It has been significant to experience something that could only get in a ‘specific space and time’. These two elements have been indispensable media of communication. On the contrary, people can experience new system of direct communication on network by adopting the above mentioned project. The ‘position information’ extracted by GPS will be send to the server, then the server sends adequate information to that position back to the client vice versa.

In other words, this project offers people some virtual experiences of the ‘share model’ before materialized. By gaining additional device acceded only in a specific situation, GPS puts much value upon the ‘space and time’. The ‘position information’ makes it possible to arrange information virtually in the actual city. Nobody may be in the place extracted, yet all the people who accede the same information at the same time may have the new ‘share model’. The ultimate purpose of this project is not to build virtual community on servers, but to provide opportunities for people to share their discoveries and impressions so that they can have the feeling of togetherness finally.

Introduction
Follow the Mouse is a multimedia installation that portrays a contemporary work environment with a twist. The desktop in this office cubicle features “liveware, ” or an actual mouse in place of standard hardware. The title of the piece, Follow the Mouse, is a common behavior that computer programmers use to make an object trail the mouse pointer around the monitor. It is also, more colloquially, what we all do daily in front of our screens as we work, play, and communicate.

Mice
The formulation of the concept of Follow the Mouse grew out of my early experiences working to create drawings on the computer with typical input devices like trackballs and mice. I have a formal background in painting and experienced a real physical adjustment when I turned in my brushes for the keyboard. The “mouse, ” invented at the Stanford Research Center in 1963, is thought to be one of the great breakthroughs in computer ergonomics because it freed users from the keyboard.

The mouse ignited an explosion of drawing programs that allowed us to transfer gestures to the computer. Despite this supposed freedom, my work with the mouse made me even more aware of physical limits. I began to make experimental input devices for the computer. I also decided to create input tools that would generate art through chance or random occur-renca In Wow the Mouse, a live animal controls the placement of drawn shapes on a monitor.

Monotypes
Each drawing represents a unique collaborative effort between mouse, artist, and computer. Every half second, a spy camera records the mouse’s position while the computer compares that location to the next. Specific mouse actions produce different marking patterns. Quick darts from side to side in the cage produce long horizontal shapes. When the mouse is very still, shapes will begin rotating clockwise, marking the position of the animal at rest. Hourly printouts capture an archive of incremental motion on paper.

‘of day, of night’ is an interactive work that is part narrative and part game, part memory and dream. It explores intersections between new media and the nature of dreaming – the collisions and juxtapositions of the everyday within dream experience, and dream as a model for database narrative.

In ‘of day, of night’, a woman has lost the ability to dream. Setting herself a series of creative tasks, she attempts to regain it. Collecting found objects from various locations in the Day, and imagining their fictional traces and histories; the objects and their stories collide, transmute and create new meanings in a regained, reimagined dream environment of Night.

‘of day, of night’ moves across a range of languages – cinematic, textual, new media -in a manner which inherently involves exploration, uncertainty and intersection. Structurally and thematically, ‘of day, of night’ is associative, intertextual – across text, sound and moving image; across game, cinema, hypertext and new media forms; across memory and dreaming; across the activities of Day and the dreams of Night.

Wandering is a key notion within ‘of day, of night’. On first entering the work, the user or audience finds themselves within Day, a map of sorts revealing locations, activities and states of mind to wander through; as the woman, Sophie, and her circumstances, are revealed. The map updates as the audience explores, revealing a range of activities to be undertaken and further areas to investigate. There is then a gradual slipping away of the prominence of Sophie, and a growing emphasis on the discovered objects and their traces, histories, intersections and juxtapositions. After completing a range of activities, dreams return and the audience is thrown into Night . The dreams found here represent a set of interweaved narratives comprising aspects of various cultural traces and identities, where the objects and their histories are refracted and reconfigured to create new stories and meanings.

For some time I have been interested in the intersections of interactivity and narrative, in the texts made possible when narrative is shaped in new media. Fragmentation, multiplicity, collision, wandering – these are the sorts of qualities I seek to play with. For me, memory and dreaming represent particularly alluring themes in this regard. The fragmented nature of memory, the unexpected collisions of dream experience, their shared qualities of intertextuality, of referencing and reconfiguring a range of sources and influences; resonates strongly with the nature of new media.

Crossworlds presents sampled images and audio in an interactive computer installation that continually varies its content and compositional parameters with materials acquired through a web-based database portal and on-site performance and media acquisition. The installation uses a circular table as a projection surface to display a computer monitor image. The table is equipped with twelve photo sensors. Visitors wave variable-density filters attached to wands over the sensors to control the installation.

In the installation, images and sounds of nature mix with images and sounds of human cities and technology. Reduced to patterns, natural and man made imagery merge in a hypnotic kaleidoscope; however, when visitors begin to interact with the display, topical images from communications media erupt. The images come from a continually updated database open for contributions from the public throughout the year. The artist will also collect new materials in Nagoya in performances with a laptop computer.

Crossworlds is an intermedia work, where sounds and image events are controlled by the same underlying parameters, and an interactive work, where each visitor creates a new configuration. The publicly accessible database and the performance element further emphasize the role of the artist as a mediator of social processes, as opposed to an isolated creator of objects.

Crossworlds attempts to examine how the “comings and goings” of communications technologies are mixing geographical locations and persons together into new constellations. It is easy to be hypnotized by the speed and momentum of these changes, by the transformation of the world into patterns of information. Fortunately, our state of technological distraction is continually interrupted by events, large and small. Will our dearest desire be to return to distraction, or will we waken to the construction of a more just world?

Piktomovies are short stories told with animated pictograms. They introduce a willful individual grammar and syntax into the standardised system of pictographic signs. In the film, the pictogram, which is recognisable because it is codified, does not stand idle in accordance with the rules, but is instead turned against the codes. The Piktomovies borrow the strictness of a social convention in order to simultaneously go playfully, poetically, comically or absurdly against the grain. The rigid, regimented world of the pictogram is replaced by a poetical one.

Against the definition of pictograms? pictograms are impersonal symbols? Piktomovies presents the position that pictograms are always evaluated in a strongly subjective way, because we humans are people and develop relationships with everything that surrounds us in order to explain our world. Everyone sees the world from their centre.

Piktomovies profit from pictorial language in contrast to the written language, in that this type of language offers the opportunity to interpret their content verbally in various ways. Here, the requirement is much more that there is a shared world of ideas rather than a shared language. Through the effort to exclude every subjectively tinted pictorial language in the formation of the pictograms, a space for fantasy is created in Piktomovies, which enables the viewer to come up with their own interpretations of pictures and their contextual relationships.

When I was a child I enjoyed tampering with an ant swarm in the park. In their small world it is certain they have also created rule and order. I thought of their world as a smaller scale of mans. Placing a stone in their path would create momentary confusion and panic in their small world, but instinctively they would react quickly to restore the lost rule and order. At the time it seemed like fun, how I could impose on their small world.

From this childhood experience I have recreated the dominant patterns of swarm movement observed in both insects, such as ants and mosquitoes, and birds. My concept is designed so that each person will create a different experience and point of view depending on which area and object their hand decides to disturb in this small world.

The installation consists of a steel wire structure that is suspended horizontally and under tension across an exhibition space. To this structure, 256 LED’s are simply clipped into place, forming a grid. A waxed paper drinking cup acts as a diffuser for the LED’s, and turns each light into a little lamp. Each LED is powered from the grid, whilst one single wire cascades down to the floor where it meets the controller board. A computer reads the information coming from the windmills, calculates and then instructs the controller board to switch each light on or off. The lights suspended in space will fade up and down in fluid movement depending upon the speed of the windmill. A small blow will be transformed into a static image onto the grid, whilst a stronger blow will cause a faster more dynamic movement of light and sound. The work materialises a light weight, three dimensional, transparent, floating screen. The screen, usually considered as virtual and contained within an object, here becomes part of the physical world and is embedded within the architectural space. By blowing on one of the paper windmills, the spectator triggers a movement of light and sound. The installation breathes, and this notion is embodied in the gesture of the spectator, the interface, the response of the installation and its effect on the space itself. When interacting with the installation the spectator becomes both audience and performer, both watching the installation and controlling it hom under the spotlight.

The extended shading system of raytracing provides a look at new aspects of illuminated objects. Using numerous (30 to 500) light sources, I am creating the series, Light=Shade, which reveals images of Light integration. In the algorithm, lighted regions can be easily transferred to shade and vice versa by parameter manipulation. The potential of computer as an image generator meets my creative interest in the realization of images we can not see in the actual world.

SONIC FABRIC is an audible textile woven from recycled audiocassette tape. Many pieces incorporating SONIC FABRIC can be included in an installation, including the “sonic shaman/superhero” dresses, a large SONIC FABRIC umbrella, and the “tell-tail thangkas”, strings of silkscreened flags (based on the idea behind tibetan prayer flags).

SONIC FABRIC is a textile woven from recycled audiocassette tape that has been recorded with a collage of sounds collected from a wide range of sources, including music, ambient nature and urban noise, spoken word, etc. The material can actually be made audible by running a tape head over its surface. A dress made from the fabric was worn and “played” on stage by Jon Fishman, former drummer of the band Phish, on April 16, 2004.

The making of SONIC FABRIC was inspired by two things: Tibetan prayer flags, which are silkscreened with mantras that are “activated” by wind, and by small strands of cassette tape often used on sailboats as “tell-tails”, or wind indicators. Sailors often use cassette tape for this purpose, as it is durable, sensitive, and dries quickly. As a kid growing up on racing sailboats, i remember imagining that if the wind hit the tape in just the right way, i could hear The Beatles or Cat Stevens or whatever had been recorded onto the tape wafting out onto the breeze.

Some yardage of SONIC FABRIC is now being produced at a small textile mill in Rhode Island, and more is being woven by hand at a women’s craft cooperative in Nepal.

We live in the beginning of a “new” century in which the public sphere in California has shrunk, been compressed, and themed to the point of annihilation of any fixed point of authenticity. The current institutionalized regional development of the I-5 Freeway – the connective tissue between Los Angeles and San Francisco – is narrowing the bandwidth of cultural programming, social interaction and environmental concerns to that of lifestyle, market dynamics and branding. The next paradigm of social space, just now emerging, is a broadened spectrum ranging from the banal to the ecstatic – from contested visions of suburban utopia to suburban dystopia.

We find ourselves now living in a “flat-space” where 20th century notions of living have taken on wholly different and contested meanings. Whereas “flat space” once evinced a topographical description of the central valley, it now references an intensified agglomeration of big box stores, highway infrastructure and parking lots in which space is corporate, Tyvek wrapped and hyperefficient.

It is a space now teeming with powercenters, carcooning, dashboard dining and fastfood  clusters, which dot the edges of quaint 20th century towns and clusters along I-5.
The question soon becomes – where does one find oneself amidst the multi-channel, hermetically sealed, and wired living fueled by such an existence. This “main street of California” finds itself in a cultural moment hinged on the precipice of an unprecedented and dramatic upheaval. One could easily state that it is a moment which may become unrecognizable in the next…. a moment from which the future has been launched. This is a future that is strangely familiar but remains a work-in-progress. It is a future which houses residents alien to themselves – subjects on the run but stuck in traffic – seemingly going nowhere in particular – but not quite standing still.

The strategy of the installation of I-5_Passing identifies fragile signs of regional cultural signifiers and changes within the environment and engages them as programmatic drivers. My aesthetic inquiry posits questions such as what lies beyond and between our collective overexposed, telematic imaginary? To me, there is little progress being gained in the current efforts of re-purposing re-theming, or refacading the topography.

This installation is a hybrid digital media and locative project utilizing the intersections and commonalities of physical and virtual spaces created along I-5. This installation consisting of projected video and audio is more or less a reverie, a collaged flow of live action video footage. This is viewed in tandem with seemingly unconnected fragments generated from an animation of still images of the iconic banal Food Marts dotting I-5. A custom-designed software program renders a visualization of alternating data streams of pollution levels such as Carbon Dioxide, NOX, Sulfur Dioxide, and Ozone which generates this live animation. Sensors are placed periodically along the corridor of I-5 itself and levels transmitted wirelessly to the main server, which then serves as the primary distribution point. These levels are detected and transmitted hourly.

In this landscape of extreme and rapid prototyping of (sub)urban development there is no whole, as such. Each behavior appears to be in aggressive competition or symbiotic relation to one another. I see evolution through re-thinking – rethinking our relationship to the swarming of hyperurbanism and psycho-geographic dynamics. The strategies inherent in I-5 _Passing (re)imagines a public realm of “passing“ erupting out culture(s) of productive frictions… and fictions.

Transcoded Nature: The Origin of Order is the first in series of projects (Transvergence artworks) which observe movements and changes of transcodabilities in nature. Transcoding is not observed as a change in a code or a format, but as a change of the whole through the order of the transformed code. While trying to address and frame those data metamorphoses, this project results in intentionally formal outcomes. Manifestations and forms are aiming for monumentality, formalism, and unquestionable transcodability. The effect often includes conceptualized and contextualized reactions to the previous data mutations. The first project in this series analyzes the origin of the order by transcoding the signals from a semi-eco system, or an eco simulation, in which rodents live and play. In this environment, some data from the physical space are shared with the data from a computer game and then transcoded into sound output.

To define the origins of the order, there are few types questioned:

1.  Order as something opposed to chaos; stability, everything in place
2.  Order as a rank or subclass of species,
3.  Order as a political, social, religion based, and economical system,
4.  Order as a set of regulations and laws which rules are obeyed,
5.  Order as an authoritative direction or a command.

Transcoded Nature: The Origin of Order is a project that creates and simulates situations which could depict and bring to life the discovery of the order. It is an interdisciplinary exploration of the emerging environments for inter-species communication in gaming. It is aimed towards the configuring of new beneficial relationships, progressions, and evolutions.

This gaming system consists of a physical space where two rodents are placed in a plastic box: this works like a commoditization of a comfortable pet house. Their positions and movements, as well as the terrain, are depicted in a computer game, enabling visitors to directly engage with the system. While being in the computer environment, players are searching for the game bots/rodents players, which are both in the physical and computer space. When they get close to each other, various conditions occur. The sound will be determined by analyzing distances between the players, but at the same time will (in) directly affect them. In all of these interchanges between the various data types, communication plays a very important role. When the communicational transcoding occurs, all of the relationships between species and their languages form an order. This order acknowledges, cancels out and also balances things. It sets a new code, which could result in an infinitely transcoded order.

Tripwire is a site-specific installation responding to the unique relationship between the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and downtown San Jose. Custom-built sensors hung from trees at several public locations monitor noise produced by overflying aircraft. Detection of excessive aircraft noise triggers automated telephone calls to the airport’s complaint line, on behalf of the city’s residents and wildlife. Documentation of noise incidents is archived for later analysis.

Traffic Island Disks is a radio programme about music, people and places. We invite you to roam the streets of the city with us looking for people wearing headphones, stopping them, and interviewing them while recording whatever they are listening to. Then you can use the website to upload, download and mix the results into a musical tour of the city.

Leading up to ISEA, The People Speak team will hold a series of one-day workshops, travelling the VTA bus route 73 around San Jose, recording what passengers are listening to, and what they have to say about it as they ride through San Jose. Then we’ll mix together an audio tour of the route. This will be the first episode of a San Jose Traffic Island Disks show called ‘Electric Light Radio’.

This tour will be available from our website, and from a wireless kiosk on the Electric Light Tower at Kelly History Park, where participants can find out how to record their own interviews and contribute to an ongoing musical map of San Jose.

Workshops
Traffic-Island Disks is a radio show format every city should have: a channel for people’s musical tastes to spread from the street onto the radio, rather than the other way round. It’s also just a great way to meet interesting people and find new music! Because we can’t be everywhere, talking to everyone, we want to show other people how to do this show – so for ISEA, we’re going to design some manuals and run workshops to show people how to use easily available technology such as old, abandoned apple ipods to create and share a Traffic-Island Disks radio show.

Listening
Listeners can access the show in a number of ways:

1. Via the Website
   The website will allow people to upload and download Traffic Island Disks recordings easily, and to plot where the recording was taken on a city map.
   The website will also be one way to listen to the recordings, or to download them and listen as you walk or ride around a tour.
2. Via a live performance during ISEA
   For the final night of the ISEA Symposium, The People Speak will do a live show, mixing the tunes we’ve found in San Jose and some of the interviews into a live show.
3. Via the Electric Light Tower
   The Wireless network node on the Electric Light Tower is intended to remain after the event if possible, as a repository of the music and interviews collected through the process, and as a way of continuing to collect and redistribute them. Visitors can access this via wireless-enabled laptops and mobile devices, or in a workshop environment at the visitor’s centre.

Other Outcomes
We hope to form a relationship with a local radio station to try and get the programme on air, and if the workshop group is willing, to continue to broadcast the show to San Jose.

The Electric Light Tower
This monumental reconstruction of the famous Electronic Light Tower of San Jose is the emblematic logo of this edition of Traffic Island Disks ? titled ‘Electric Light Radio’. Although it was never a radio transmission tower, the ambition ? to light the whole of downtown San Jose at night from a single point ‘as if it were day’ is inspirationally insane. Our ambition ? almost as ambitious is to gather and redistribute music from all over the city via a wireless network node on top of the the ELT.

The wireless network node will contain a local version of the Electric Light Radio website, allowing people to upload and download new recordings which will then be synchronised online. This diagram explains how visitors will access Electric Light Radio from the tower and at the history park:

Beginning March 1st 2006, the web site will provide participants with information on the San Jose Voices project, along with a San Jose phone number to call in order to participate. This number will be programmed to only accept calls from San Jose’s 408 area code, making it a readymade reflection of the San Jose community. Anonymous callers will be able to leave one-minute messages on any subject, which are then converted into MP3 files. These voices are then brought to the public soundscape in two ways. First, calls are archived and made available anonymously on the sanjosevoices.net site, individually or as downloadable podcasts. The site acts as both distributor of information about the work and as a listening post for those on the Internet to experience the diverse voices of San Jose. Second, during the ISEA2006 symposium, calls will be broadcast anonymously in public space through a large sculptural speaker installed in an appropriate public location such as the Plaza Caesar Chavez. These voices are amplified by a solar-powered, horn-like fiberglass sculpture to a volume level sufficient to dominate the immediate soundscape.

SOUNDBIKE is a portable sound piece that uses motion-based generators mounted to an ordinary bicycle to broadcast the sound of laughter as the bike is pedaled through the urban environment. The laughter is generated by playing sequences of short source clips that start when the bike reaches a cruising speed and then respond to the bike’s velocity. The piece is exhibited by loaning the bike on an honour system. During the symposium, several SOUNDBIKES will be available for loan to members of the general public.

SOUNDBIKE was curated into Art Projects, Art Basel Miami Beach by Natalie Kovacs

Tact marries technology with tactility, sounds and images. It belongs to a space somewhere between stills and films. The piece consists of a large mirror and an inset circular screen displaying what looks like a moving pinkish blur. The viewer is invited to touch the screen. Once touched, the image is suddenly still and reveals the face of a woman pressed against the screen. As the viewer drags his/her finger, she/he also drags and distorts the face. Via the process of rubbing the screen and controlling the image, a strange and uncomfortable relationship develops between the participant and this image of the other.

The word “tact” means the sense of touch but also means an intuitive, spontaneous and thoughtful way to behave in a human relationship. This aspect of interpersonal communication is not always shared in mediated interactions through electronic devices and messages (e-mails, news groups or chat rooms). Tact attempts to suggest the lack of tactfulness that often occurs in situations of virtual rather than physical presence, when we are not actually face to face with another person. In the piece the viewer is trapped by the image response when he/she has touched it and is thus forced to adopt an uncomfortable role – even if it seemed playful at first.

Tact is a multimedia device, embedded into the wall, which is made of a custom manufactured mirror, a computer, two stereo speakers, a touch screen display and an audiovisual interactive program. As soon as the viewer touches the surface of the screen, the program selects and displays in real time the video shot that would seem most naturally to follow the movement of the hand. To emphasize the friction of the flesh, a set of event sounds is randomly played as the image of the face is being scrubbed against the glass of the screen.

The name Electric Sheep comes from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the Internet. The project is an attention vortex. It illustrates the process by which the longer and closer one studies something, the more detail and structure appears.

When the software is activated, the screen goes black and an animated ‘sheep’ appears. In parallel, the screen-saver client contacts a server and joins the distributed computation of new sheep. This idea was inspired by the SETI@home project, but instead of searching for aliens, electric sheep brings artificial organisms to life.

The screen-saver is a window into a visual space shared among all users. Clients render JPEG frames and upload them to the server. When all the frames are ready the server compresses them into MPEG. The clients download the MPEG sheep and display them one after another in a continuous, ever-changing sequence. Both clients and server are open source software.

Each sheep is specified by a genetic code, and the flock as a whole is subject to aesthetic evolution. The creation of new sheep is dictated by a genetic algorithm with mutation and crossover, where mating and survival are influenced by votes from the users.

Electric Sheep investigates the role of experiencers in creating the experience. If nobody ran the client, there would be nothing to see. As more clients join, more computational muscle becomes available, and the quality of the graphics increases. The more people who participate, the better the graphics look.

As more users vote for their favorite sheep, the evolutionary algorithm more quickly distills randomness into eye candy. Perhaps attention acts on information the same way gravity acts on mass: attraction begets attraction and a positive feedback loop is formed.

The Night Sounds consists of four corrugated metal water buckets, each approximately half-full of water, which are suspended from the ceiling by piano wire. The buckets are each placed in the corner of an 8′ to 12′ square space in the room. Attached to the top of each is a length of piano wire whose tension is supplied by the weight of the bucket, and is regulated by the amount of water in the bucket.

Striking the piano wire is a thin cord attached to a small motor, which strikes the string once every revolution of the motor. A micro-controller controls the acceleration/deceleration and overall speed of each motor independently. The speed of the motors varies widely, from only a few revolutions per second (simple ticks) to several thousand revolutions per second (in the audio range, causing complex interference patterns between the frequency of the motor and the resonant frequency of the piano wire). The buckets themselves serve as a “sounding board” to amplify and radiate the sounds.

The sounds produced are designed to “coexist” with other environmental sounds in the gallery, and thus the piece does not require complete isolation (but a reasonably quiet location is best). The patterns of the piece as well as the nature of the sounds is modeled after crickets and cicadas found in the Midwest, both here in Chicago, where I now live, and also in Western Pennsylvania where I grew up. In both these locations, these sounds are ever-present in the summer, literally at times taking over the entire landscape with their sonic intensity.

The means of sound production in this piece is, for me, highly organic, and extremely spatial in nature, with the metal buckets themselves serving as the resonators and sounding boards for all the sounds produced.

Scratch Studies is the latest in a series of new works which create sound through physical means (in this case, the rhythmic sounds of scratching) rather than using speakers. The individual works in Scratch Studies make use of piano wire connected to digitally controlled stepper motors which scratch steel plates in various ways. These “scratching machines” in this series are of different sizes, ranging from 4′ x 4′ square floor pieces to smaller 6″x18″ pieces which are hung.

These pieces explore the rhythmic territory between “mechanical” and “natural” rhythms as caused by various kinds of imitative behaviors. Each work contains its own embedded micro-controller programmed to control the motor’s movements (and thus the scratching activity) by simulating various natural processes such as Brownian motion, LFnoise, and bird song rhythms.

Each of these works also electronically “listens” to the others, with each “scratcher” imitating the others in various ways. Various forms of imitation utilized include reductive imitation – where details are removed, elaboration – where details are added, and literal imitation where patterns are exactly copied.

What is particularly interesting is how the group dynamic takes on complex emergent behaviors simply as a result of listening and imitating each other. If these works are turned on without any communication between them, they will simply each do exactly the same thing in unison (as they are all programmed identically). However, once these scratching machines are programmed to listen and imitate each other, the behavior of each individual immediately veers from that of the others (even though they are still programmed identically). Once this process begins, the group begins to develop a “collective memory” of rhythms which is passed from one machine to the next. None of the individuals possess this “memory” for very long: these “memories” only exist as they are passed from one machine to the next, constantly mutating and transforming during the process.

This project deals with the discrepancy between an individual’s surroundings in everyday life and the internal “spaces” which he/she imagines and lives out. Its objective is an architecture designed to develop an adaptable mode of building. The point of departure is how human beings move about. Points of reference are then to be derived from easily observed magnitudes; these, in turn, lead to the modelling of characteristics as the result of interaction.

“memory” of space is one stage within the framework of the inoutsite project that depicts space in its temporal alterations and explores how individual experiences of “space” generate into the social construct of city. To what extent is the experience of a public space conditioned by me and my (unique) memory – to what degree conditions it conventions that result from social intercourse with others and with architectonic/geographic realities?

In this case, an ample, much-frequented square is being monitored by a central camera. The video’s signals are passed on to two computers, which edit the video. One of them screens the picture for the movements of people who were crossing, meeting andlor lingering on the square. On the basis of these movement data from the past hours, the other computer calculates a picture describing the qualities of the place.

The installation “memory of space” links local and geographic dimensions. An aerial view underlying the virtual scene enables the visual scrutinization of the virtual picture with regard to potential relations to open-plan axes. At the ground of the virtual picture is a grid system of co-ordinates which depending on the place’s usage can be pulled over a selforganizing map (a simple, neuronal net). By doing so, walking speed and direction are applied to the co-ordinates, pushing them into their direction. A videotexture with the videopicture of the tracked place is mapped upon the coordinate system, offering the user references to the real place. On the basis of these inquiries, the monitored place is divided into “territories”: areas of rest and walking lanes. These lanes are inscribed as “network of corridors” (grey lines) on the distorted by the movements) reproduction of the square. In the remaining spaces those places where peoples showed a tendency to dwell (walking speed = 0) were marked red.

This cyber-sculpture installation exhibits the recent achievements brought about through the close co-operation, communication and growing understanding that has developed between fine art sculptor Keith Brown, and the Imaging Technologies Group at De Montfort University (DMU). Over the past two years they have worked closely together to produce cyber-sculpture using different aspects of integral imaging and specialized hardware and software developed at DMU. This work is an installation of a 3D integral large screen projection of 3D computer-generated objects into real space.

The 3D image is a single frame from a twelve minute animation sequence, which was especially generated with a view to explore the potential of integral image projection. The integral image makes visually manifest cyber objects that would be extremely difficult to realize by other means.

The Imaging Technologies Group at DMU have developed a system capable of real-time capture and replay and methods of computer generation of synthetic integral images. A computer generated synthetic integral image exhibits continuous parallax within a viewing zone dictated by the field angle of an array of micro-lenses. The replayed image is a volumetric optical model, which exists in space at its generated location independent of the viewer’s position. These images may be interrogated optically to obtain an accurate depth map. 3D integral imaging offers a new means to realize cyber-sculpture as full three-dimensional optical constructs, facilitating a potential application of computer generated objects for use in sculpture installation and architectural contexts. Large screen integral projection of cybersculpture allows the viewer to see participants occupying the same space as the projected 3D cyber object, uniting the virtual and the actual.

The cyber-sculpture was created in 3D Studio Max and then rendered as an integral image using the in-house software at De Montfort University (DMU). The 3D integral image is replayed through a wide-aperture integral camera/projector (developed by the Imaging Technologies Group at DMU) using a high-gain retro-reflective screen to position the virtual object in real space beyond the viewing window.

Page/tile # 0114: Xetas, a real-time two channel video installation portraits the extinction of an indigenous tribe from Southern Brazil. My father, a coffee farmer with a large number of japonese families working on it, used to tell me stories about the day he first saw a group of indians, not yet colonized. At that time, late fifties, the Xeths were first identified by the scientific community as a group of indians living in a stone age state. I went back to the Paran region and most of the Araucaria pine trees, a hard wood tree taking 150 years to mature, were also not there anymore, I captured only the cattle grazing on an empty land. Today, forty years later, the Araucaria pine trees are scarce and the Xeths are extinct. The video monitor broadcasts the short news left from this vanished culture.

I remember as a child, to look for hours the tall and lonely Araucaria Pine trees in southern Brazil.

I have heard there is one member of the tribe still alive and living in a mental hospital of a small town in southern Brazil. This installation inserts the presence of this individual, perhaps, a female, through a video projection. The digital image constructs the labyrinth of this woman’s psyche as I find, working in the computer, the maze of our isolation.

Playas, New Mexico has always been a virtual construct. With past lives as a railroad town, mining town and ghost town, it is now slated to be used as an anti-terrorist training facility for the Department of Homeland Security. This installation uses the metaphor of the mirage to investigate the “reality” of our constructed meanings. The game player explores the remnants of this shell and discovers tracings of previous lives, all the while, avoiding those who might present harm. Viewers of the installation are unable to avoid contribution to the scenario as they instigate the spawning of in-game characters, some innocent, and some malevolent. Similarly, as they move through the environment their presence has repercussions, perturbing the vision like a mirage. In the end, there are no winners, but hopefully there exists a set of questions about our place in the world, our constructions, and our personal responsibility for the end result.

Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart’s Delight consists of five life-size cutout portraits. of people that were responsible for advancing the technology of Silicon Valley. These cutouts will be implanted with GPS devices and then abandoned in public places, two of them across the U.S. and three in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a request for passers-by to deliver them to a prescribed location in San Jose. Real-time information about them and their whereabouts will be presented in South Hall.

PI (personal interpreters) is a set of small robotic devices, which deconstruct TV broadcasts’ audio signals. The robots interpret the regular audio signal as control code and translate it into abstract rhythmic sounds using the actual TV set as resonant body. In this translation process they create surprising image/sound relationships, challenging the audience to watch well-known TV content in novel ways.

Courtesy Mirko Mayer Gallery, Cologne

“Nanofabric is the new black in fashion apparel and accessories.” _Hugo Boss, 2005

“Patenting particles makes everyone smile around here.” _Harris & Harris Group (Nasdaq:TINY), Sep. 21, 2005

Particles of Interest is a 3 stage event: an online Open Particle Patenting System, a Particle Tale installation to be constructed in San Jose, California, and a Trans patent campaign in collaboration with an invited artist, artists groups, scientist, activist and stock traders around the planet.

1. stage one, an on-line Open Particle Patenting System;
2. stage two, a Particle Tale installation to be constructed in San Jose, California;
3. stage three, Trans_patent campaign in collaboration with invited artist, artists groups, scientist, activist and stock traders around the planet.
4.  

Think small, think really small and then think even smaller and you will almost hit the little trans-b.a.n.gs (bit, atoms, neurons and genes) at the core of pragmatic tales of particle transvergence today. We are now caught in the rush of patented particles that can now be found in cosmetics, baby lotions, sunscreen, fabrics, paints and inkjet paper. We now control the vertical and horizontal of structures far smaller than ever before. The nano-world derives from nanometer, a billionth of a meter, or about one 25-millionth of an inch. That is far smaller than the world of everyday objects described by Newton’s laws of motion, but bigger than an atom or a simple molecule, particles ruled by quantum mechanics. We are now surrounded by little trans b.a.n.gs that are rapidly transforming everyday reality particle by particle. It is these transverse tales of the global Matter Market that we want to capture, re-tell and re-own in Particles of Interest.

Loca: Set To Discoverable is an artist-led interdisciplinary project on mobile media and surveillance.

A person walking through the city centre hears a beep on their phone and glances at the screen. Instead of an SMS alert they see a message reading:

“We are currently experiencing difficulties monitoring your position: please wave your network device in the air.”

Loca: Set To Discoverable sets out to expose the disconnect between people and the trail of digital identities they leave behind. Loca opens up a conversation with passers by, responding to urban semantics, the social meanings of particular places:

“You walked past a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park, are you in love?”

Whereas many Locative art projects are about positioning, Loca is interested in the spaces between readings, the distance between embodied spatial experience and its digital representation.

A major component of the Loca project is the deployment of a cluster of interconnected, self-sufficient Bluetooth nodes that enable Loca to track anyone with any device that has Bluetooth set to discoverable. Inferences based on analysis of the data guide communication with these Bluetooth users. Other components include maps that illustrate people’s habits as inferred by data collected by the Loca network, strap-on devices that alert users to detect otherwise anonymous Bluetooth scans, stickers that allow people to record the presence of digital identities in their physical environment, and the surveillance or counter-surveillance of Loca pack.

Loca is an exercise in everyday surveillance, tracking digital bodies in physical space. It explores an emerging ecology of disclosure and surveillance that has arisen with developments in mobile and pervasive media. It looks at what happens when it is easy for everyone to track everyone, when surveillance can be effected by consumer level technology within peer-to-peer networks without being routed through a central point.

Pervasive surveillance has the potential to be both sinister and positive, at the same time. The intent is to equip people to deal with the ambiguity and find their own conclusions.

As computer games increasingly include affordances for player creativity, new art forms are beginning to conflate consumption and production, practices that constitute a kind of digital folk art emerging within online game worlds. For ISEA, Ludica proposes to create virtual art park within the online world Second Life, designed to showcase these new forms of cultural production. Ludica. will solicit proposals for ‘site-specific’ installations, performances and interventions from current Second Life artists and designers, the ISEA and electronic arts community, and international digital arts and game programs at Universities. We and would wish to create a parallel space within the teen server of Second Life in conjunction with workshops for Middle and High School Students. We will also host in-game workshops at the exhibition venue within Second Life to teach the building tools to prospective contributors to encourage new voices to emerge. Within the physical exhibition, The New West would comprise a portal into cyberspace within a darkened room with a projection of the art park entirely covering one wall. On either side of the screen along the walls would be 6-10 computer stations, both Mac and PC. The large screen display would be controlled by visitors, who could also sit at the individual stations and navigate the virtual exhibition. The goal is to extend the ISEA electronic artssymposium beyond its geographical location, making it accessible to a wider audience beyond those who can physically attend the exhibition in San Jose.

Amidst the torrent of edgy art descending on San Jose this week is a new frontier of artists working totally within the virtual realm.  All their art is built within a multi-player online universe called Second Life. The arts game collective, Ludica  has curated some of the best of these virtual arts works for a show called “The New West” which is being projected in the South Hall of the convention center during the ZeroOne festivities.”

The Paper Cup Telephone Network (PCTN) is a free communication system. Just like the games played by children, anyone can put the cup to their ear to listen, or to their mouth to speak. However, the difference between the PCTN and the original game is that the ‘string’ is connected to the world wide web where your voice is streamed to all the cups on the network carrying it blocks or even miles or a continent away.

The Paper Cup Telephone Network is a free communication system that allows group communication between all points on the network at once. The PCTN is a complex technology reduced to a globally understood form. On one level the network is transparent and visible because the paper cup telephone is something that many of us have made and used ourselves. However, PCTN also hides a complex underlay of communication technologies that most of us have never used nor understood. The question of interactivity is then raised – on what level are participants interacting? With which technologies are they engaging; a child’s simple toy or a complex global technology?

The PCTN challenges the idea of locality. The paper cup is an effective vehicle for simple communications but there is no scope for augmented information. How do we know where the person on the other end is from? Are they close, a block away, on the other side of the world? To determine this we must participate with the network of speakers. The technology provides no additional information but is instead a ‘dumb’ receptacle. No caller ID, no address book, no traceroute. Instead you have to rely on the other people in the network for assistance and information. The more people on the ‘line’ at once, the more interpersonal communication needs to be regulated by those using it at that time. Just like all of networked society, whether mailing lists, chat rooms, P2P, Wiki, or the web itself, its users will govern the system.

The Paper Cup Telephone Network can also be viewed as a reaction of the loss of cheap public telephones in our urban environment, forcing people to rely on cellular communication outside their home as long as they can afford it. The PCTN will be installed in various spots in San Jose, and the surrounding Bay Area, enabling communication between ISEA participants and people within San Jose.

Nocturne is an interactive media installation focusing on animals such as opossums, gophers and the endangered kit fox that have found successful niches within the urban and suburban landscape. Footage of these animals is captured using video live traps and surveillance equipment. In the gallery, each captured video plays on a LCD screen or projection scaled to the creature’s actual size. The video responds to the presence and actions of the human viewers visiting the gallery, becoming a mediated exchange between co-inhabitants of urban spaces. The project’s intention is not only to acknowledge the individual lives of the animals represented, but also to forward the idea that they have an important presence in our contemporary city space’s presence that insists that the boundary between man-made and natural remains permeable.

An interactive exhibition of videos created in a series of workshops at cultural centers in two impoverished shantytowns in Buenos Aires and in an ISEA organization-based workshop in San Jose. Workshop participants use cheap disposable digital video cameras to document their daily lives and a custom-built web application that allows them to edit, tag and publish their video online. The workshop focuses on strategies for collective self-representation using software designed to allow participants to discover relationships and make connections between their personal stories. Thus, communities not traditionally thought of a scholarly or academic, produce and interpret knowledge using media and information technology.

Palabras employs the tactics of DIY technology and the philosophy of participatory culture by adapting and developing media and information technologies as tools for collective self-representation for a variety of communities.

The project was based on the concept of the ‘community computer’, first proposed by activist Bruno Tardieu. The ‘community computer’ is a social and technological system much like a typical computer system in which words can make things happen and associative memory evolves over time. While the ‘personal computer’ provides a communications gateway to the Internet where communities of interest can evolve regardless of distance, the concept of the ‘community computer’ is intended not to bypass, but to strengthen, communities of place?particularly marginalized communities – and to enable and empower them.

To this end inexpensive disposable digital video cameras were transformed into re-usable cameras (using instructions and free software found on a DIY technology website) and a web application was developed for editing, tagging and publishing the video produced with these cameras online. These tools were designed for use in workshops at two cultural centers that serve shantytown communities in Buenos Aires.

Workshop participants used the transformed disposable digital video cameras to document their daily lives. The workshop focused on strategies for collective self-representation using software designed to allow participants to discover relationships and make connections between their personal stories. Workshop participants worked in groups using this custom-designed free software to edit and organize their video clips. The workshop focused on strategies for collective self-representation and the software was designed specifically to allow the participants to discover relationships and make connections between their personal stories and images. The interface provides access to the videos through folksonomies (folk + taxonomies) participants create. Thus, communities not traditionally thought of a scholarly or academic, produce and interpret knowledge using media and information technology.

With  participants from El Envion at Villa Tranquilas and Fundacion Crear Vale la Pena in Buenos Aires, Community Works West, Children of lncarcerated Parents Proiect, San Francisco, CA

Related ISEA2006 Paper: Sharon Daniel – The Public Secret Information and Social Knowledge

The interactive other[wize] stories will be imparted through the use of still images, video, animation, audio, and text – including Yugambeh language. The ‘objects’ are representative of important people or events and they transport the viewer to a story about someone from the past. The ‘stories’ will also include animals, landscapes, seascapes and others.

Events evolve in a non-linear way, grasping at the unknown, not sure of what will be found or how it relates to other information, until perhaps another time. This concept reflects how many Aboriginal people experience family histories. The viewer has the opportunity to experience a similar ‘fragmentation’ of history and they might think about their own relationship to place and times.

“I have never heard of such a force in existence against the Blacks in any other Australian colony. Why should it be necessary in Queensland? Even if necessary, its action ought to be discriminating, so as not to involve the innocent in the punishment of the guilty...”
wrote Father Duncan McNab in 1881, a Scottish Catholic Missionary and lonely protester for Aboriginal cause in Queensland. His brochures were censored back then, but have come to life in other[wize] a screen-based research project by artist Jenny Fraser.

Based on the Mununjali Ancestors of her family from around Tamrookum and Rathdowney close to the SE “Queensland” and NSW border, other[wize] highlights an era of 1800’s colonial Australia and explores the prickly issues of Native Policing, Dispossession, Displacement, Massacres and Survival.

It is also a celebration of the Land, Language and Lives of Jennys family members that were moved from their traditional homelands to work on properties further north in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The 9 stories are offered through a non-linear narrative by the use of old family photographs, Yugambeh Language and historical documents, with further exploration through audio, video and text. “Such oral record does disrupt white Australia’s history that slavery didn’t happen – these movements were not the choices of free people.” writes Linda Carroli in her catalogue essay about other[wize].

Mr. Jones Watches is a series of seven wristwatches which seek to question the social currency of the watch and also propose some alternatives to the conventional representation of time. They were all produced as one-off working timepieces.

The design critic Del Coates notes that: “it is impossible, in fact to design a watch that tells only time“.

Watches have specific values that are at least as important as timekeeping. The design questions underpinning this series of watches were inspired by investigation into the cultural messages that the watch expresses. The design questions underpinning this series of watches were inspired by investigation into the cultural messages that the watch expresses. The answers to the questions posed below are intended to be both playful and provocative. The series is an attempt to propose some oblique evolutionary paths for the watch.

The watch is worn on the body and this fosters a powerful association between wearer and object. The watch is consulted many times a day and the wearer is (perhaps subliminally) affirmed by the action of looking at their own watch. The owner of an expensive watch enjoys a thrill akin to possessing a secret – aware of something that others are blind to. One could argue that this is even more important than the impression a watch makes on others given the prevalence of fakes. The subliminal aspect of the watch object was used to formulate a first design question: how could a watch undermine it’s wearer?

The idea that a watch is a fundamental communicator of personality is expressed forthrightly in an advertisement for Seiko watches, the text reads, It’s not your music. It’s not your handshake. It’s not your clothes. It’s your watch that says most about who you are. The wearer of an expensive watch can luxuriate in recognition from another connoisseur the shared thrill of standing apart from the masses. From this understanding of the watch a second design question was formulated: what if the watch could express some of the negative aspects of the wearer’s personality?

Watches are homogenous in their representation of the time – analogue watches for example refer to the prime time-telling device the sundial. Even the advent of the digital watch represents a semantic change rather than a fundamentally new representation. Digital technology supports the translation of information from one form to another, yet watches are tied to a singular convention tracking the movement of the sun. A third design question was: how can the watch represent time in a different way?

All of the watches in this series are produced in a spirit of critical design. They are not primarily proposed as consumer objects, rather their intent is to provoke reflection about the watch and its cultural functions. The watches are not purely speculative, all have been produced as one-off working timepieces.

Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive (GCVMA) consists of a dynamically growing archive of cell phone transmitted images with metadata contributed by participants from anywhere within the reach of cellular transmission and reception in the world. The project’s aim is to highlight individual to community, or local to global participation through cellphone transmission technology. The community of participants create a visual archive of images without spatial-geographical boundaries, submitting contributions from the private space of their living room, to the public space of Times Square, to any wilderness area that may have cellular transmission.

Reception
The received images are to be visualized within a virtual 3D architectural structure, their organization based on a number of metadata criteria such as cellphones’ numbers (original contract locations), participants’ contributed keywords, image titles and other. The images are to be viewed projected large scale within a public space onto a spherical surface, or some other form of 3D spatialization with interaction through wireless devices, and locally on 3D computer screens with mouse interaction to retrieve metadata or request re-organization, and accessible on the internet.

Research Developments
Research addresses methods of wireless cellular technological telecommunications devices, methods of data assembly such as self-organizing, neural-net, networks models, swarm intelligence algorithms, and the visual interface by which the images and their data are to be accessed and interacted with.

Production Details consist of the 3 sections

1. Reception and Storage of cellphone transmission through open source and proprietary software (Linux environment + MMSC Wireless technology)
2. Organization of incoming data (SQL for images and their metadata)
3. Visualization and interaction (3D projection and public interaction to reorganize data)

Artistic Precedents
GCVMA follows in the footsteps of ‘Pockets Full of Memories’ (PFOM) and ‘Making Visible the Invisible’ (MVI) for the Seattle Public Library. GCVMA is a wireless version of PFOM. Whereas PFOM required the public to visit the museum to contribute an object and data, GCVMA can receive its data from anywhere. MVI’s emphasis is on data analysis and its visualization and GCVMA will use methods learned from its data analysis. GCVMA’s contribution will be in spatializing the data into a 3D virtual environment.

Statistics and the Algorithmic Image
Currently I am focusing on database collection and statistical analysis of cultural information as a means to consider how computation can provide a descriptive cultural perspective. In contrast to the Information Science specialist, my intention is to go beyond informational illustration through aesthetic framing, with the intent to reveal the formal, structural forces by which statistical data becomes information.

For instance, ‘Pockets Full of Memories’, an installation commissioned in 2001 by the Centre Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, Paris consists of the public contributing data (an image of an object and semantic descriptors) to a database whose data get organized by a neural-net based self-organizing mapping algorithm. The algorithm basically looks at all the data and organizes them within a 2D space so that every object is surrounded by others of similar semantic attributes with order achieved at the local and global state.

‘Making Visible the Invisible’ is a permanent commission for the new Seattle Public Library, designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas. The project consists of visually mapping on a daily basis changes in what the public is reading, to be presented on 6 horizontally positioned plasma screens in the main technology research room called the ‘Mixing Chamber’.

The Leistavian FBI will create an online survey form which allows for the input of multiple cultural identifications. Those that register one main cultural identity will become a control group, while those that register two or more cultural identifications, in particular those with at least one affiliation to a Pacific Rim nation, will be the target group. The form also collects information on attitudes to cultural identification issues. The data will be presented online as statistical summaries, in the installation area as large scale vinyl imagery (non-rectangular, adhered directly to wall, where image component size registers survey responses), and as a projected animation which registers change in survey responses.

The Leistavian Federal Bureau of Information acts as a data gathering and collation unit, providing hard data on cultural issues. At ISEA2006 the Bureau wants to interrogate the hidden by gathering statistics on the culturally invisible of the Pacific Rim: people of multiple and hybrid ethnicity.

The San Jose region and Silicon Valley is now home to diverse cultural groups including Indian, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and to a lesser extent, Polynesian peoples. While these cultures have significant heritages and identity maintained under the conditions of diaspora, this project aims to locate people whose cultural identity falls in-between: Hispanic-Vietnamese, Japanese-Hawaiian or Indian-Chinese for example.

Wherever cultural groups have cohabitated, hybrid individuals have resulted.

Artist comes to San-Jose with her assistant-scientist and her assistant-graffer. They study the density and the quality of electromagnetic fields. They meet local graffers and they explain to them the landstream project. Together the team realizes an in-city fresco with the real time field’s capturing.

Land-stream comprises a term “stream” which means ‘flow’, or, in the data-processing terminology – the continuous flow of information in real time mode. “land” comes from “landscape”, because this project introduces a new category of landscape’s representation.

land-stream it is an experimental program, which creates a representation of landscape through the analysis of flows (stream) which cross a given space (land). The work takes a pictorial form, which can be static or animated. In this landscapes their initial scientific data are transformed into visual information. Today, when our identity is defined especially by our position in the network, by the information which we emit and which we receive, we fix our attention on these invisible flows and we try to determine their importance, their form and their direction. Thus, the landscape – land(scape) – is not any more one simple relief. It becomes an association of the waves and signals (stream): land-stream.

Actually, it is not by questioning a form, that we create new forms, but by producing the new conditions of their emergence. Then, new forms and new possibilities appear. Our protocol places the action of ‘making’ like act of translation of reality to its representation. Consequently, the scientific thought brings a procedural displacement from the emergence of the image in the field of reality to its mode of production in the field of pictorial.

It is no more a question to represent or to reproduce, but to re-play the stake’s production of the pictorial representation in our contemporary world.

To represent is to define, to define is to analyze, analyze is to understand. Also, rather than to reproduce or represent the world we build the subjacent image, than the world is given, but that it does not post. The result will not be more abstract than figurative; it will be the field even where the image occurs visible.

Hidden Ecologies is a field experiment by architect Chris Benton, microbiologist Wayne Lanier and independent curator Marina McDor.rgall. Fusing views assembled through aerial kite photography with on-site micro-cinematography, Hidden Ecologies maps transitional salt- marsh geographies of the San Francisco Bay. Equipped with a mobile field laboratory of note- books, field microscopes, GPS devices and an array of photographic equipment, the team works in the field to record aspects of the local environment that lie beyond everyday percep- tion-local landscape features, the invisible composition of micro-communities, or forgotten cultural histories. Field research is joined with archival materials and cultural commentary on a website that is designed as a living organism, inviting annotations from within as well as outside the team.

Homes project enters the private world of Iranian families living in the Bay Area, creating physical and virtual spaces that narrate stories of their everyday lives through portraits of space, objects, and people. Audiences` interaction with the archives interconnects the stories of these individual homes.

Homes is a project of CrossConnections residency at the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts

With special thanks to Farzad Naimi, Kayvan Alikhani, Ahmad Kiarostami, Amir Borna, Mehdi Mortezai, Nariman Riahi, Zohreh and Ghasem Malekmadani, Navid Ghaem-Maghami, Donna Schumacher and Shadi Yousefian for their contributions to the project.

To save people time in the search for interesting clouds, a computer watches the sky all day, every day. Viewers can interact with the computer via the Internet. It establishes individual relationships with each person, developing an idea of the kinds of clouds they like. When they return to the site they are shown the clouds that have passed that would have been their favourites. Their reactions help refine the computer’s idea of their taste. It will also show the greatest clouds by popular opinion.

The computer and camera will be in Wellington, New Zealand.

The cloud shape classifier consists of a computer and a camera, which is tilted skyward. Every few seconds, an image of the sky is captured. Each image is analysed and classified according to shape, texture, and colour, and saved to disk.

The images are presented via a website. Visitors to the site will see a selection of the most popular clouds. If they choose to identify themselves, they will be shown selections of clouds from which they can choose favourites. As they make selections, the machine will attempt to show them new clouds that ought to be to their taste.

Internally, the machine views its images as points in a vector space with several hundred dimensions. Similar clouds will be close together in this space, and the coordinates within it will be fed to neural networks which will learn the preferences of each person.

The cloud selection interface is likely to be an array of nine images. Clicking on any of the outer 8 images re-centres the array on that image, as a way of navigating through the vector space. Clicking on the central image enlarges it to fill the screen, and casts a vote, modifying the neural network in its favour.

The most popular clouds will be determined by committees of these neural networks. Therefore a cloud which has not previously been shown to a human may be selected as the most popular.

The machine is going to be installed at the Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand, at around the time of ISEA2006. There will be a projection in the Enjoy Gallery, as well as the web interface. The Enjoy people would be happy to share the exhibit with ISEA/ ZeroOne San Jose — given that it is primarily web based, this is easy. Perhaps a camera could be installed in both cities. Alternately, it could be installed in San Jose just before or after the Wellington show.

The software will be written in C and python, and run on Debian Linux.

The Drift Relay is a collaborative psychogeographic experience in the form of a 24 hour relay-style exploration of San Jose. Participants (“Drifters”) will drift through new and familiar city spaces with a Glowlab coach and a mobile kit of recording tools, contributing to a collective journey of endurance and discovery. Project headquarters at ISEA will continually broadcast the remote group’s location and status. Data and artifacts will be returned to the headquarters for processing and display throughout the duration of the Drift Relay. Taking the phrase “the city that never sleeps” to heart, together we’ll locate the joys and difficulties of documenting ephemeral urban experience.

Ethermapping explores the electromagnetic dimensions of the landscape – the flow of radio waves forming the ‘radio atmosphere’ within which we live. As human and economic life concentrates in cities, so do radio waves, intensifying in areas of economic activity.

Ethermapping reveals the pervasiveness and ownership of intangible resources, suggesting the paths and patterns of the invisible radio landscape. It does this with an interactive flash map, and a site for people to contribute stories of the own experiences in interacting with radio waves, and their understandings of the relationship between radio waves and their own environment.

Ethermapping illustrates the density of the radio atmosphere, representing the frequencies of registered radio transmissions and the physical points from which they originate. Transmitters are the visible manifestations of radio waves, extending into invisible electromagnetic dimensions. Ethermapping illustrates interactions between these visible and invisible aspects of radio waves.

The project is based in New Zealand, where licenses to use most radio frequencies have been sold at auction since 1989 – the first frequencies in the world to be treated as economic resources in this way. Access to radio communications here is largely economically determined, particularly for powerful commercial broadcast and cellular phone frequencies.

Ethermapping is an interaction based representation of registered radio transmissions in Auckland, New Zealand. The focus of ethermapping is a map of the city, on which users can select transmission points in order to see the frequencies transmitted from them, their approximate coverage areas, and the ownership and technical detail of the transmissions. There are 1800 transmitters in Auckland, with over 6000 transmissions emitted from them. This kind of interaction is the only means by which all of this information can be represented to a user. The map is navigable by transmission points, and by the uses represented by different owners.

The Auckland ethermap will be connected to a wide-band scanner, so that it will be possible to listen to frequencies in Auckland, from San Jose, creating a kind of tangible radio connection between these two Pacific Rim cities.

The map is city focused, because radio transmissions tend to be city focused. It is not conceived as a gallery installation, although it has already been displayed as such. Instead it is to be an open access tool by which the residents of a city (in this case Auckland) can learn about a dimension of their city that they live within, but are unable to sense themselves. In New Zealand this information is publicly available, but in an obscure and very technical database, so the mapping project transposes the transmission data into a more tangible and accessible form.

Access to radio frequencies provides a means of interacting with a city – its broadcast and phone networks, communications between transportation providers, and its major telecommunications links with the world beyond its border. Ethermapping reveals opportunities and dimensions of broader interactions with the city.

The DEFENDEX-ESPGX is an interactive art object that combines real-time audio and video synthesis processing with physical interaction. The DEFENDEX-ESPGX is designed to simulate the look and feel of 1950’s technology. The content draws on nostalgic reference to bring about implied comparisons between the fearful culture of the Cold War and the culture of fear associated with the current War on Terror.

The DEFENDEX-ESPGX combines real-time audio and video synthesis processing with physical interaction. The DEFENDEX-ESPGX provides a meaningful interface that connects the virtual and physical.

The context of the DEFENDEX-ESPGX, which is that of 1950’s technology, affects the user’s manner of interacting with the medium. The device has a familiarity of a past era in which technologies were seemingly simpler and less abstract. This nostalgia is compelling and draws the user to interact with the device. Users understand how to use the controls even though they are not aware of the virtual system behind the interface. Because of this the continuum between the physical and the virtual becomes transparent.

Unlike conventional technologies where interaction with the device is predictable, the DEFENDEX-ESPGX may usurp the user?s expectations. The device may have compelling nostalgic value, but is interweaved with modern technology. The combination transforms the device to something alien. It leaves its familiar context and becomes foreign.

The message is redefined through this contradictory medium. Parallels between past and current technologies and the eras they represent resolve this contradiction. These parallels are reflected in the content fed back to the user by the virtual system. The content is not meant to be pedantic or convey a particular message, but it draws on nostalgic reference to bring about implied comparisons between the fearful culture of the Cold War and the culture of fear associated with the current War on Terror.

The device also performs surveillance functions. The device grabs control data and content from an external video camera and microphone. The control data is derived from motion detection and audio information, while the content can be displayed with or without processing. Thus the system has two modes of interaction, active and passive. Users who interact with the system directly through the DEFENDEX-ESPGX are active users. The subjects of surveillance within the system are passive users. This means that the system encompasses more than the DEFENDEX-ESPGX itself, but also the entire space in which it is contained (the sensor space). Active users control the surveillance device while being watched at the same time. In order to watch you must be watched.

Physically the DEFENDEX-ESPGX is a stand-alone unit approximately five feet tall with a surveillance camera mounted above and a microphone attached. It has a data feedback panel, three master faders, and several switches and knobs. At head height a monitor provides a visual interface. Speakers are mounted to the sides of the DEFENDEX-ESPGX providing stereo sound. Haptic feedback is provided via vibrating motors located within the DEFENDEX-ESPGX.

The source material includes pre-recorded political, military, and other footage, as well as audio and video streamed from the sensor space. With physical interface components, users navigate through different modes arranged in a non-linear narrative. The DEFENDEX-ESPGX rests in a default mode until engaged by a user. Once engaged, the user can navigate the narrative terrain of the DEFENDEX-ESPGX. The narrative terrain of the DEFENDEX-ESPGX is constructed of several modes that are each one of three types: an action mode, a consequence mode, or a narrative mode. In an action mode the user must complete tasks to move to the next mode. After successful completion of tasks, the user might move to a consequence mode where the ramifications of their actions become apparent. Otherwise, the user is taken to a narrative mode consisting of playback of prerecorded media, which delivers clues as to the secrets behind the DEFENDEX-ESPGX. To be clear, progress through the modes does not occur in a linear fashion. The current mode does not necessarily predetermine the next mode. The route for each user will be unique.

The eyes of the robot collect up snippets of video and transmit them to the body when the buses they are on come within range of an appropriate wifi node.

The body sits in an art gallery. On the wall is a projection of its stream-of-consciousness editing, and on a separate screen are finished films which it completes nightly. Video received from the eyes is split into individual frames, which are analysed and stored. The output of the robot is made from arrangements frames and false memories that the robot forms from its favourite images.

The Filmmaking Robot was first exhibited in Wellington, New Zealand, in July 2004, and shown again in Auckland, July 2005. In each case the eyes were installed on local buses.

The eyes consist of a small computer with a camera and wifi card. Whenever the bus is on they are collecting video, and when an
appropriate access node is detected, the video is transferred to the body.

For about 12 hours a day the robot dwells on its memories, recalling well liked or pertinent imagery, and attempting to connect it through a sequence of frames, which is shown as video. Each frame is analysed to give 20 numbers summarising its qualities, and these numbers are treated as coordinates in a 20 dimensional space. Proximity in this space is used to determine similarity for the purposes of creating a video sequence. These numbers are also feed to neural networks which have been trained to like selections of fine art and images identified as well-composed by human subjects, and the response of these networks determines whether the robot likes an image.

At the end of the day, it looks over its production, and picks out a few minutes to release as a finished film. This is made available via http, and is usually burnt onto DVD and put on a screen in the gallery.

If it finds itself using an image too often, or finds a lonely image in a sparse part of the 20 dimensional space, it creates false memories based on that image. These confabulations are created by applying simple filters, such as blurring, recolouring, sharpening; by zooming, distorting or mirroring; and by blending different images together. This is intended to help the robot develop a full visual sense, beyond and between what it has seen.

When the robot’s memory is full (at 5,000,000 images, which has not happened yet), it will begin discarding the pictures it least likes or least needs, just as it reproduces the images it most likes and needs. This means that in its mature stage, the robot will produce more and more characteristic and stylised work.

The Filmmaking Robot retains memory between showings, so in Auckland it incorporated Wellington imagery, and in San Jose it will mix New Zealand images in with local footage.

Despite its name, the robot avoids autonomous movement.

Free Network Visible Network is an urban intervention project that uses the possibilities of the new technologies to create new landscapes in the public space by means of the visualization of the data that flow between digital networks. It changes our perception of the world with the ?invisible meanings? that are around us.

Free Network Visible Network is a project that combines different tools and processes to visualize, floating in the space, the interchanged information between users of a network. The people are able to experience how colorful virtual objects, representing the digital data, are flying around. These virtual objects will change their shape, size and color in relation with the different characteristics of the information that is circulating in the network.

In the last 20 years the digital information has flooded the world in which we live. No matter where we are, even if we are not able to see it, we can imagine ourselves surrounded by data. This data, in spite of its digital nature, is connecting people by communication, is full of information that contains knowledge, ideas, feelings and emotions. The space of digital networks is also the space of invisible meanings that represents relations between people and a very dynamic knowledge interchange.

But unfortunately not everybody is able to access to this knowledge because of technical, economical and sometimes political limitations. The great part of the digital networks is restricted and sometimes the information is filtered depending on economic or ideological criteria that affect the final receiver.

By the metaphorical representation of these invisible meanings, this project wants to act in the urban landscape as a way to create new strategies in the public domain and to claim, by means of artistic actions, the freedom of citizens to accede and control the digital space of communication, to create Free Networks that provide open and free transit of information to everybody.

The C5 Quest for Success is an urban game about testing the analysis, management, and decision skills necessary for success in Silicon Valley. The goal of the game is locate the C5 Corporation Mobile Office through a process of navigating through pre-defined geo-cached sites where location clues are revealed. On each of three evenings the winner has an opportunity to pitch their proposal to an individual who can change their destiny and provide a golden opportunity: an Artist Residency at the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program at the Montalvo Arts Center

Over three evenings of the ZeroOne Festival, five GoCars are used in a competitive urban street game involving navigation and decision strategy. Potential competitors submit their qualifications online in a pre-festival process and are publicly profiled. From the pool of candidates C5 selects 15 competitors based on a list of published criteria. There are three competitions in which five competitors are paired with 5 C5 drivers.

Each vehicle is equipped with on board database of audio clues and instructional information that can be activated by the location and behavior of the GoCar. The ZeroOne Festival footprint will be thoroughly mapped for shared interaction and specific geo-cached locations established specific to each GoCar experience. The objective is for the competitor to interact with the C5 driver to navigate through the set of geo-cached clues that indicate where the C5 Mobile Corporate Office is. The clue system is embedded with useful and non-useful information. The game design is structured to test the creativity, analysis, problem solving, management and communication skills of the competitors.

Inside the C5 Mobile Corporate Office are guests who are in a position to offer the winner both the opportunity to pitch themselves, their idea or their project and a substantial reward if the so determine. C5 intends to use the process to provide a service to interested industry, art and culture organizations to help them identify the best qualified candidates.

Example: Gordon Knox, Christiane Paul, Barbara Gordon are in the C5 Mobile Office with a C5 facilitator and together they determine if the first to arrive receives a residency/project opportunity or if they are rejected in favor of the next arriving competitor. The process is clearly designed to also challenge the evaluators’ evaluating.

The project requires a home base of operations. Here the cars can be on display along with C5 Quest for Success support and collateral materials. Each evening competition begins with an introduction of the competitors and the exiting of the GoCars into San Jose.

[from the website:]

Invited project

The C5 Quest for Success

“Anyone on foot in suburban California is one of four things: poor, foreign, mentally ill, or jogging.”
– Hari Kunzru, Transmission

08/11/06
After 3 nights of breakneck competition and a great performance delivered by all contestants, the finalists were determined:
Lizabeth Rossof
Mill Valley, USA
Joseph DeLappe
Reno, USA
Julian Bleecker
Venice, USA

08/12/06
C5 would like to extend its congratulations to the winner of the C5 Quest for Success:
Lizabeth Rossof
Mill Valley, USA
Final judging took place on Saturday, August 12 at the ZeroOneSouth First Street block party.

The C5 Quest for Success is a suburban game that tests the analysis, management, and cooperative decision making skills necessary for success in Silicon Valley. The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program at the Montalvo Arts Center in cooperation with C5 Corporation and a to be named corporate partner provided a substantial Artists Residency opportunity as the grand prize award. The C5 Quest for Success is a game of strategy and tactics, executed while taking a literary excursion through the back-stories of entrepreneurialism associated with San Jose, the metropolitan center of Silicon Valley. More than just a race, The C5 Quest for Success is a personal challenge to comprehend the moment and seize the opportunity.
San Jose is the 10th largest city in the United States with a population of 1,000,000. It is the safest big city in the nation, is close to a lot of things, and has good schools, convenient shopping and plenty of parking. Although expensive, San Jose represents a unique platform for high stakes/low point entrepreneurs.

The Game:
The C5 Quest for Success was structured around three ZeroOne San Jose Festival opportunities: TALK, DEMO, PERFORM. Contestants had the opportunity to present their pitch through any of these three modes. Imagine the prospect of being invited to do any of these at a major international festival. Over the course of three evenings, a total of fifteen contestants (five per night) selected from an open call for qualifications competed against the streets of San Jose for just such an opportunity. Contestants navigated the streets of San Jose exploring GPS controlled narratives in an attempt to locate the C5 Corporate Limo. Once there, they had the opportunity to pitch their proposal to a panel of distinguished experts. A single winner from each evening’s competition then advanced to the final round on Saturday, August 12th. Three finalists, one from each of the three evenings ‘presented’ their pitch live on-stage during the ZeroOne San Jose culminating celebration. The grand prize winner was selected by an international panel of art administrators, curators, and technology experts. Contestant evaluation was somewhat of a public process, but not entirely.

The C5 Quest for Success was conducted in 3 wheeled gas powered vehicles in which contestants were joined by a C5 chauffeur with whom they operated as a team to interact with an on-board GPS driven audio narrative system. Location information of the vehicle activated narrative descriptions of the city and presented choices for selection, each particular series of choices resulted in the creation of a misguided tour of San Jose. The game was not a race against others, although it was. The smart player, played the game well by taking cues from the on-board narratives and improvising their planned presentations informed by the back-stories and expertise of C5. Each contestant determined the best tactical tour of the city that would determine both an arrival time and useful information that would best compliment their presentation.
In order of arrival, contestants had a seven-minute opportunity to present their proposal, have a drink, a tasty snack and be interviewed by expert evaluators. The evaluators elected to accept or pass on each pitch they were presented. However, they had to select one and only one each evening. The game ended when a selection was made and that contestant moved to the second round: a presentation at the festival culminating celebration. Arriving first did not necessarily give the contestant the advantage, especially if they lacked the rhetoric.

Cellphonia: San Jose is a cellphone karaoke opera about Mexican wholesale nursery workers, hotshot Indian coders, Vietnamese dragon boat builders, Silicon Valley desk jockeys, and Filipino airport workers. Visitors or locals can choose which group’s song they want to sing. Cellphonia’s libretto is delivered via RSS newsfeeds relevant to the subject. The music is algorithmically generated in ibalon, cancion, Bombay pop, Misery pop, and chiptunes. Every fifteen minutes the opera song cycle restarts. A festival caller hears a fragment of the libretto on his/her cellphone and is cued to repeat it, karaoke-style. At the end of the song, he/she is directed to the festival location of the Cellphonia: San Jose 24/7 streaming opera to hear the entire performance.

Abstract:
BIOTEKNICA is a fictitious corporation, generating designer organisms on demand. Irrational and grotesque, our specimens are modeled on the Teratoma, a cancerous multi-tissue growth. Initially virtual, our organisms are now under laboratory development using living tissue. BIOTEKNICA both embraces and critiques biotechnology, considering the contradictions and complexities that these technologies offer the future of humanity.

Full Description:
BIOTEKNICA is a fictitious corporation, which projects its viewers into the future, where designer organisms are generated on demand in a virtual laboratory. The organisms produced by BIOTEKNICA, however, do not adhere to the structures and functionality normally manifest in nature. Similar to mutations depicted in The Fly, Rosemary’s Baby, and Alien Resurrection, our specimens are irrational and grotesque. They are modeled on the Teratoma, an unusual cancerous growth containing multiple tissues like hair, skin, and vascular systems. Monstrous as this may seem, scientists today see the Teratoma as an instance of spontaneous cloning, and are conducting research on the Teratoma with the goal of developing future technologies. BIOTEKNICA both embraces and critiques biotechnology, considering the contradictions and deep underlying complexities that these technologies offer the future of humanity.

In the past, BIOTEKNICA has manifest as a purely multimedia production/installation. However, we are now taking steps to bring our theoretical specimens out of their virtual environment and in to the laboratory. In Summer of 2004 we were invited to work as Research Fellows at the Symbiotica Art/Science Laboratories at The University of Western Australia, where we began preliminary investigations into growing organic prototypes that serve as new representations of our product line. Here we commenced research with tissue culture protocols in the production of artwork as pioneered by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, of the internationally recognized Tissue Culture and Art Project, and SymbioticA founders. BIOTEKNICA: Organic Tissue Prototypes will be completed in 2006.

Bounce is a non-competitive conversation game in which two people separated by at least 20 years of age connect by phone and answer a series of AI-supported questions about life experiences that they have in common, such as, ? What is something you BOTH think has changed for the better in the last 20 years??

Conversations happen by phone, with one participant entering the answers in the game interface. The authors secure the participation of residents of at least one Retirement Home in San Jose, and place Bounce markers on “Conversation Points” (such as the site of the first Radio Broadcast in San Jose) in the City of San Jose. These markers encourage conference visitors and residents alike to call up seniors participating in the game. They will be carefully selected by the seniors in collaboration with the game designers. Sites of special interest are places where seniors used to work, places where things happend that changed their lives, sites which no longer exist, but were replaced by a highway overpass. Seniors will ask passers-by site-related questions as a starting point and exchange their experiences through game-generated follow-up questions.

The goal of the game is to exchange as many experiences as possible, which will be reflected in a “Poem in Common”. These Poems in Common will be posted online and at the Conversation Sites after the conference, creating a lasting memory of the exchange.

The stimuli of text or voice message from visitors to the exhibition via their mobile phone elicits a chemical response from a colony of archaebacteria. This response is translated into text that the supplicant (or gallery visitor) is able to interpret and apply to everyday life.

The archaebacteria response is actually a physical alteration that can be read as one of a series of numbers. These numbers are mapped using code-breaking principles of repetition and predicability onto corresponding lines of an ancient text to create an apparently meaningful response to the problem posed. The text that will be utilised as the source of wisdom is the Apocrypha (an ancient collection of sacred texts excluded from the canonised version of the Bible). Originally, apocryphal writing was considered to be a text of sacred origin, designated to be hidden until the due time of its revelation.

Apocrypha is a satirical work that posits a colony of prehistorical archaebacteria as an ‘oracle’ able to divine answers to questions posed by ‘disciples’ who contact the archaebacteria by mobile phone.

Apocrypha utilises the research and mapping of the protein codes of ancient bacteria (archaebacteria) undertaken by TIGR (The Institute for Genomic Research) www.tigr.org in Maryland, USA and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, UK over the past decade. Simply, this research extends the traditional sense of the ?family tree? beyond now acknowledged relationships within the animal kingdom to include the vast, numerous genera of bacteria that precede and coexist with Homo Sapien.

New discoveries of ancient archeabacteria – the earliest life forms on the planet continue to take place, deep in the core of the earth or embedded in ancient glaciers, for example. It is these life forms scientists hope to discover with interstellar probes. Interestingly, incarnations of these ancient archaebacteria also appear in our own cells as mitochondria, symbiotic energy-producing slaves to the nucleus that give us human form, and part of the continuing chain that links us to life?s earliest origins.

Now is that time, made possible by the convergence of biological and computer technologies.

Cities are not merely collections of buildings; they are the living, breathing, teeming product of the human bodies who inhabit them. A city razed to the ground may recover, but a city emptied of people is dead. Yet emphasis is always given to the locative nature of a city – the neighborhood you live in, the street, the floor, the unit – an assertion of a Cartesian primacy which ignores the more profound natural relationships of the city: the coming together and parting of human beings living social lives. Cities are their people; souls are the bricks from which a city is constructed.

BlueStates: Exploring Relational Space is an attempt to reverse the figure and ground of the city, ignoring its visible nature as a locative, Cartesian space, creating, instead, a view of the city purely as a social space. In this work, the trope of absolute location is abandoned in favor of the idea of relational proximity. BlueStates does not show you where you have been, but rather, it shows you who you have been with – a more perfect metric for the inner life of the city.

The inspiration for BlueStates is drawn from the recognition that most of us, most of the time, carry that most common of 21st century appliances, the mobile phone. Most of these mobile phones are equipped with a wireless technology known as Bluetooth. A Bluetooth mobile phone user creates a radius of electronic awareness – what we call a “bluesphere” – extending as much as ten meters from their body. When two Bluetooth devices pass in proximity to one another, each senses the other. Data is exchanged – and promptly ignored. BlueStates: Exploring Relational Space uses its own, custom software sensors – which run on mobile phones, PDAs and computers – to listen intently to the bluesphere. These sensors contribute to a database record of proximal encounters, and this data is then used to build views into the social life of the city’s residents.

BlueStates is by its nature a highly participatory work. Anyone will be able to visit the website and create their own views into relational space. Residents of cities around the world will be encouraged to add their own sensors to the global network of sensors, expanding the database to incorporate the inner social life of their own cities. Beyond this, the work’s creators have committed to releasing all software developed for the project as as free and open source software (under the GNU General Public License), believing this will encourage others to create their own projects in relational space. Finally, artists will be provided with tools to that will allow them to permute the data gathered by BlueStates: Exploring Relational Space in new and unique ways.

The two artists behind BlueStates have spent their careers exploring the intersection between art and technology.

Through various experiments, installations, and online software, the abstractmachine project asks the question of how we as artists and users can create, manipulate, and ultimately enact digital algorithms. If the specificity of the computer comes not only from it’s digital aspect, but even more so from it’s algorithmic aspect, how does this hyperprogrammable nature transform the media we manipulate – i.e. the images and sounds we design using these machines? Amongst the many machines available within the abstractmachine project, two creation platforms will be presented to illustrate our response to these questions: one dedicated to the creation and manipulation of algorithmic cinema, the other designed around algorithmic musical composition.

^3, a.k.a. ‘cubed’ is a musical sequencer integrated into a Rubik’s Cube. By manipulating the colors on the cube, users generate different sound algorithms within the sequencer. Using specially-designed soundfonts from Jankenpopp (cf. www.jankenpopp.com), math geeks can finally become the speedcubing breakcore supernerds they always feared were lurking underneath. With ^3 we are working against the idea that a musician has to create music with audio software where building the musical algorithm and manipulating the digital algorithm are two different processes. Often, making digital music looks a lot like someone working on their spreadsheet. In ^3, all of the notes of the musical process are visible and intrinsically intertwined. Using a universally known interface, a series of simple gestures cascade into a complex multitude of musical possibilities.

Concrescence is a platform for creating and manipulating moving images outside of the traditional linear time-code. Images grow in spatialized mosaics, allowing for infinite recomposition while avoiding purely random associations. This specialized software is then projected onto the Abstractmachine Hypertable: a multipurpose interactive table which allows multiple users to interact with the non-linear narratives by simply placing their hands on the surface. For the San Jose festival, two uses of the Concrescence platform will be presented: a fully developed algorithmic narrative entitled “The Signal”, accompanied by a simplified version of the Concrescence authoring software where the public can record their own audiovisual clips and create collective non-linear patchworks.

My interest in robotic art grew out of the desire to add behavior and interactivity to my sculpture and installation work. My training in basic engineering technologies and computer science methodologies has made it possible for me to experiment with notions of embodied interactivity and interactive narratives as new means of expression. Cello is a robotic sound installation, which combines autonomous behavior with interaction. The piece concerns itself with the act of learning, performing, and adapting oneself to external pressures.

Cello consists of an automated acoustic cello that alters its behavior in response to computer generated sine wave tones and to the position of visitors in the space. The cello tunes itself. String after string tightens and loosens slowly on motorized pegs, while being bowed and compared to the sine wave tones emitted by a speaker. A pick-up microphone transmits the cello frequencies to the computer program, in which their relationship to the “right” frequencies is evaluated. The pegs, in response, will turn in one direction or the other until each string is approximately in tune.

Once the cello has approximated the goal of self-tuning, it performs a set of simple phrases by manipulating and adjusting its own bodily elements. The cello advances slowly from phrase to phrase, while being monitored by the program and compared to a predefined sequence. Each phrase is repeated until it has been correctly performed before advancing to the next one. However, the physical predisposition of the instrument does not allow it to ever fully meet the expectation of a perfectly executed musical performance. To complicate matters further, if approached by a visitor too closely, the cello interrupts its current behavior (tuning or playing) and performs a random “irritated” behavior. If provoked over a long time, it eventually “untunes” itself and reverts back to its starting point. Once left alone the cello begins to retune itself and attempts to perform again.

While there has been a history of automated mechanical instruments such as player pianos, and early century musical automata, a technological structure has not been created that can fully replace human presence in the musical performance process. Cello not only addresses the history of human desire to replace and extend human activities with machinery and the importance of embodiment within intelligent systems, but incorporates both of these subject areas in an interactive metaphorical narrative, performed by a computer, a cello, a speaker and the visitors.

Electronic clothes and audio uniforms

In 1982 Benoit Maubrey started building Audio Jackets in Berlin. These electroacoustic clothes (30 watts, 12 volts) are individually equipped with amplifiers, loudspeakers and batteries that permit the wearer to use a variety of electronic instruments: their principal musical “tool” is a digital memory that works like a sampler and permits them to record, amplify and play back local sounds instantaneously. Additionally, they can plug in “Walkmans” with pre-recorded cassettes, radios, contact microphones and photo-voltaic sensors.

In 1984 Maubrey founded DIE AUDIO GRUPPE and began creating a series of such clothes – the Audio Uniforms – which are electronic suits conceived “on site”. The material of the suits, the sounds they produce, and the choreography of the actors are chosen with a specific context in mind and are meant to subvert the daily routine of their environment. A few examples:

– AUDIO HERD (Berlin 1985), two-piece suits of synthetic animal skin that play the recorded animal sounds while strolling through parks (see photo).
– AUDIO STEELWORKERS (Ars Electronica 1986), uniforms borrowed from the local steel plants and equipped with electronics that play the industrial sounds of their work places.
– GUITAR MONKEYS, a trash music band wearing electronic vests that amplify electric guitars.
– AUDIO CYCLISTS (Festival Arts Electroniques, Rennes 1988), 10 members of a bicycle team are equipped with electro-acoustic sportswear and play a word-collage from a famous bicycle racer.

John Whitney Sr was one of the most important pioneers in computer art. He is known for his music generated animations; his animations are also compositions. He showed his most recent compositions during SISEA.

This work explores surrealistic animation. An infinite reflection model creates a mirror environment. The work depicts the world of my dreams. When you reach out to touch something in the dream, it moves away like a mirage. We are often deceived by the real world, as if our material world of economic systems is the ultimate goal. We strive for money and social position. Our pure and honest heart is whispering in our dreams that there is something more precious than plutocracy.

We are surrounded by a constantly changing world. This world belongs to the universe, which has been in existence for a long, long time. Our lives are so short, like a single flash of light, that we, humans can neither imagine nor understand. Yet, we encounter so much laughter and sorrow. At any moment in time, people are born and die. People die because of diseases, wars, and murders. We never seem to understand “peace”. This abstract animation work is produced to expresses these personal messages. The images do not resemble any scenes from the real world. They are all synthesized and artificial.

A mad scientist creates the ultimate computer virus and finds an unsuspecting computer geek to test the virus on, with unexpected results.

This one-minute cell and computer animation in live action was based on the techniques of drawing and painting. It is a moving painting. I wanted the viewer to examine the animating image. That is why I closed in on the details of the overall composition.

Pierres de Foudre: These are only prehistoric flints were considered as the very essence of the arrow and the spark and as such, they were venerated and piously conserved. The lightning stones are themselves forces full of magical, fetishistic, intrinsic power. At the very depths of the universe, in the land of erring souls, the stones are loaded with their spirituality. The budding soul freezes in them. The stones will cross the cosmos and will become a symbol of message and oracles. Then it is up to us, beings of dust, to transform them into objects of peace or violence.

Nothing broke but the Heart: This work compulsively, hypnotically, runs through distorted icons of “love”, heart always “center screen”. A chaos of color and light, individual frames flash like memories. These hearts – hearts of stone, burning hearts, wooden hearts, “mutated” hearts, hearts that are only words – are punctuated throughout the video by medical images of my body’s real heart – breathing, pumping, catching in its rhythm. This video uses the hardness, the rationality of electronic technology and its processes – the antithesis of emotion – as the language with which to express emotion.

Music: Carmina Burana by Carl Orff

The world is surely a ‘circle’. (In Japanese ‘en’.) The universe, as well as the structure of the molecule, consists of circles and spheres. So, one wonders, what is the world made of? And the answers are endless. Everything that one can imagine helps to form the world. Choosing two among them and setting them side by side, one can glimpse a certain aspect of the world.

In the net-space “O[én]”, there is the small circular world. Visitors who enter the internet site can at first create their own original ‘Shapes’ to make semicircles transform at the <‘Shape’ Creator>. When they send the ‘Shapes’ to the <O[én] world> based on IP address of the sender, every ‘Shapes’ make couples as ‘perfect circles’ with the other. Each couple has a peculiarity of behaviour and a sound according to the color and shape of the ‘circle’ and IP address of the visitors. It looks like a creature produced by two senses. When a new ‘Shape’ of a new visitor join in the , the couples are recombined.

At <0[én] Communicator>, the each two owners of the each couples which are combined according to certain rules can communicate with the partner. It is the secret small communication space only for the couple who knows the partner through the ‘Shape’, but never known even about its name, age and sex. However you have to take care, since sometimes the partner will be changed. We can always peep this small changing in every minute, and besides, we can also try to see every possibility in the combinations of couples at <‘Partner1 Simulator>. Every ‘Shapes’ which sent to the would be in the catalog on this internet site, and they are put together as if the scientists make genetic recombination. Visitors are thus able to find the ‘perfect circles’ for themselves by experimenting with different combinations inside the vast world of the Internet.

Plato believed that human beings were originally spherical in shape. But their power was too great as spheres, so the gods sliced them in two to create human beings as they are today. Hemispherical humanity has been in search of its other half ever since.

Self Adjust is an interactive installation that explores the concept of the ever-changing identity of the self made possible by technological innovations. The machines born of new technologies at first facilitate the tasks for which they were intended, then gradually evolve to generate variations of our very own identities as these machines become reconfigured and improved to suit our needs over time. As a raw technology first emerges, it is endowed with basic functionalities that accomplish specific goals. When the parameters are altered to recontextualize the existence of the system, the user of the technology is placed at the threshold of a different identity. These systems recombine, making improvements in their performances to adapt to new tasks. The issue of our identities is further multiplied and complicated. These technological mechanisms eventually reach new states of automation and become labeled as “self-adjusting”. At the same time we begin to ponder whether it is truly our own selves that are being adjusted.

To convey this concept to the audience, Self Adjust is designed as an interactive environment where the participant is immersed in a catalog of abstract machine parts. These parts constitute the assemblages encased in a series of pedestals. The display of the physical objects within the installation space allows the participant to first become acquainted with these mechanisms. He or she is invited to metaphorically “scan” his or her identity into the digital space by pressing on surface of each case. This action releases an iconic twin of the physical object on the projection screen. The icon then drifts freely, awaiting to be combined with another machine icon which can be activated by the same or another participant. When they combine, the participant is “adjusted’ to a new self as depicted by a series of photographic images. These images contain different scenes of movement improvisation by two performers as they interpret the conjunction of the iconic objects. When more of these images begin to appear, they collectively form a new identity of the participants through a collage-like manifestation of a cyborg. As more people begin to participate in the installation a new community of selves is formed.

Amy and Klara have similar interests. They both read Cosmopolitan and Salon.com, for example. But they do not get along. Not at all. Maybe Klara’s thick German accent bothers Amy. And neither of them particularly likes the color pink. Unfortunately for Amy and Klara, they live on the same block and have pink houses! And when they become agitated they tend to fall into mutual accusations and even rants. Yes, it can get rather nasty at times. Best then just to leave them be and to stay clear of the hissy fits. Else you risk being drawn into the fighting.

Amy and Klara are named agents capable of synthetic text to speech generation and automated speech recognition.

Anyone who has ever listened to computer generated speech knows the strange feeling of hearing a voice that sounds human but feels alien. Synthetic speech has achieved such levels of ‘naturalness’ that it can be confused with the voice of a living human being. However, this naturalness is shallow; not even skin deep. The naturalness of the sonic experience implies a human presence that does not exist. In synthetic speech we are confronted with a new fallout of automation technologies.

It is not only the disconnect between a human voice and a box that produces it that can make one feel uncomfortable. It is also what these voices have to say to us. The language of synthetic speech recognition and synthesis systems is a highly selective subset of the full, rich and messy body of linguistic corpora that comprise our oral and written languages. Exclamations are absent, questions are rare and the vocabulary is generally optimized for commerce.

This work selects a different slice of language and a different approach to language use in machines. Here the charged world of foul language is under investigation. Swearing offers several interesting conduits into a critique of the under-exposed normative tendencies in automated language representation and social robotics. Why are most smart gadgets and toys friendly and playful, why are they usually modeled as pets or servants? Machines that curse and pick a fight might offer a more realistic preparation for a shared future between machines and humans.

Mutator is a still from the 3D computer animation A Sequence of the Evolution of Form. See SISEA Screenings.

Alchemy is an interactive illuminated manuscript, inspired by medieval books such as Les Tres Riches Heures de Duc De Berry. The theme of the book is the alchemical practice of creating homonculi, small human like creatures, in test tubes. The work is metaphorically addressing issues arising from contemporary technologies such as Genetics and Artificial Intelligence, casting these practices as not dissimilar to previous medieval experiments.

Interactive digital video installation: 2 interactive laser discs under computer control, colour, silent

The raytraced scenes were processed by a homebrew machine and original software. Bump mapping and texture mapping on the sliced parahyperboloid surfaces. The images have a resolution of 2048 * 1536 and 24 bit colors.

Computer images generated by mathematical process introduce us to the world we have never seen. The images are not reproductions of our real world, but actually exist in the world. As telescopes and microscopes extended our aural and vocal powers, computer graphics provides the perceptual breakthrough. For myself, computer is not a painting/drawing brush but the image generator. That is why I am using only math-based programs.