et dukkehjem / rootoftwo - Cezanne Charles + John Marshall [Detroit]
'et dukkehjem' is a hybrid art and design installation that utilizes sensor controlled digital media embedded in specially designed pieces of furniture. The starting point of this work is a re-reading of Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" to explore user-object relationships and the piece seeks to question the function, identity and authority of objects. Objects are often anthropomorphized and in this case a rug, a stool, an armchair, a coffee table and a lamp each represent a character from the play. By inviting the audience to interact in various ways with these domestic objects we hope to remove them from the taken for granted and create multiple possible readings of this work.
'et dukkehjem' is produced in collaboration with Metropolitan Architecture Practice, PLY Architecture, Michael Rodemer and Sherman Finch.
Locative Painting / Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel [São Paulo]
Locative Painting (www.locativepainting.com.br) is web artwork that forms a painting on the screen where the strokes are given according to the participant’s geographical position, creating so a locating media. Each stroke position on the painting is calculated using Google Maps and Brazilian Mail algorithms to transform the participants’ zip codes into absolute latitudes and longitudes. Each point is painted using the correct longitude and latitude related to each zip. The painting is formed by 3 levels of interactions: local
(city), country and global. The 3 layers/maps are overlapped. By allowing that each participant creates a stroke based on his/her location, the work provides to each person his/her own moment in the painting. On the other hand, as all strokes connect people’s locations, generating in this way a multitude of crossing paths, the Locative Painting creates a community painting with digital connections that maybe would never happen in tangible life. The intention of this work is to create awareness about a) how easy it is to be located regardless any technological device, and; b) to extract in some ways the poetics revealed by locations and their emerging digital connections.
Object of Desire / Yael Kanarek [New York]
Object of Desire is the third chapter of the Traveler's Journal, which is the diary of a traveler who searches, in a parallel world called Sunset/Sunrise, for a lost treasure. Fifteen diary entries combine, cross, and deconstruct themes and motifs born in the Near East and Mediterranean. While navigating, if you can't read, guess. During a family visit to Israel in 2002, I noticed that my mother was using the Internet entirely in Hebrew, i.e.: Operating system, browser and websites (right-to-left). Thus just as in "real" life, on the Internet as well, language functions as a border and space.
I found the experience of browsing websites in a foreign languages similar to that of traveling in a foreign country. To experiment with the space of languages, I chose to author the chapter in English, Hebrew and Arabic (plus some French, Italian, Spanish and C). These languages define the semantic landscape of my childhood. Object of Desire contains fifteen diary entries that download from Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Izmir and New York.
The project “Percorrendo Escrituras” has been recently developed in the ECA-USP Fine Arts Department. It intends to study different structures of digital information that share a common universe and are generators of new aesthetic conditions. The overall goal is to explore the expressive possibilities of a computer's specific properties and algorithmic functions. It is an interdisciplinary, theoretical project, in which the evolutionary process of studying the language of programming and the logic of mathematics become accomplished poetic experimentations. The focus of this research is digital poetry. 5 poems that are practical results of this research will be presented.
Atmospheric Pollution / D.A.L. [Tijuana]
Current urgent environmental pollution problems such as the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming and compromised air quality in cities, are directly related to industrial activity and the laws of each country to regulate such activities. Most pollution is generated by industrialized countries in the northern hemisphere, including the USA, which is the most industrialize country, produces the most pollution and disturbingly has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol. Beginning more than 10 years ago, attempts to reach international agreements to reduce the emissions of polluting gases have unfortunately still not been achieved. This is due to a lack of awareness, the orthodox applications of capitalist
economy and to elite geo-strategical policies that block international agreements, hurting the environment in which we all live. AP is a display about anthropogenic contaminants within our atmosphere. This interactive schematic model represents atmospheric phenomenon as well as chemical and physical events. The information is displayed by two navigation menus: The first one exploring atmospheric layers and the second displaying anthropogenic residues and simulating their behaviors. The descriptive information of each segment appears in a dynamic way when the cursor detects its transit. We seek to enable the user to visualize our protective atmospheric layer and the effects of human intervention in it.
Neurozappingfolks / Santiago Ortiz Herrera [Lisbon]
NeuroZappingFolks is a digital piece for the Internet. The lack of interactivity of the work can be seen as a neurosis of the application itself, simulating a frantic navigation through the web, in search of something unknown. The nucleus is constituted by an algorithm gathering information from the popular website del.icio.us, where thousands of users keep (for themselves, but in a public way) url’s from other pages in the Internet, associating them with specific tags, short words functioning as labels and giving the chosen link some minimum amount of information. The same words (art, sex, Internet, anime…) are usually referred by different people, allowing for unexpected inter-relations between several sites. NeuroZappingFolks is a non-linear zapping through the web, a path leading to the inside of a web of relations, a web that can be explored from one tag to a site, to another tag, to another site... from word to image to word to image. NeuroZappingFolks is the simulation of a brain lost in the web (lost between servers, but also lost in Internet's double identity: word and image).
Turn Me On / Sean Arden [Vancouver]
Turn Me On explores the idea of electricity as information. The interaction of the user plays with the ingrained expectation of everyday technologies and their expected functions. The video content of the installation, created from appropriated television footage and live video, references commodity fetishism of modern technology, the history of the screen, the sensationalism of television, and the ubiquity of the moving image and its loss of format.
Lightningstone (Pedralumen) / GRUPO POÉTICAS DIGITAIS [São Paulo]
A blue virtual environment on the web built with LEDs In the shape of a stone. Public interactors choose a point In space to place a word. The words can be superimposed, or combined with other dispersed words and spread throughout the environment. In the gallery, the installation consists of a cube made of blue LEDs (8 x 8 x 8 led cube) with a void In the shape of the stone. This cube reacts to the virtual interventions, varying Its light intensity and frequency, according to the interactors choices in the virtual space. In this way the web-installation 'Pedralumen' (Lightningstone) reacts to choices, and language decisions, recording these elements within its territories, and creating spaces partitioned by light, provoking chain reactions in a symbolic and physical way.
Psychic / Antoine Schmitt [Paris]
Psychic sees the spectators and describes what she sees using phrases printed letter by letter like by a typewriter, which we can also hear. She has a distorted vision of reality and she is rather anxious about the motivations of the visitors who enter her space.
ANTIDATAMINING is based on the recovery and the viewing/visualization of web-extracted data. It aims at creating audiovisual environments written, fed and updated in real-time. The goal of this project is to make emerge and to identify, using the Data Mining processing, several socially and economically imbalance phenomena. ADM seeks to visualize these phenomena, and tries to establish a global imbalance cartography. The forest shows the Capital Network Map, which tries to organize a network through more than 1200 referenced companies, exploring the relationships between their capitalistic structures, and attempts to create links of ownership.
Second Landscapes / Giselle Beiguelman [São Paulo]
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 On Exactitude Science. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley. The unfolding of the new mapping and locating systems are undeniable. The popularization of GPSs devices and the accessibility of online maps are indicative
of a new perception of space. Nevertheless, all those issues also point to new geopolitical dynamics and to a repetitive aesthetic redundancy which seems to pursue the utopia of a map in a 1:1 scale like a sad Borgean character pictured in “On Exactitude in Science”. Through the combination of different spaces, all recorded with cell phones, like Rio de Janeiro (Brasil) and Toronto railways (Canada), the project discusses the phenomena of Locative Media beyond the hype, building possible imaginary scapes that make sense in nomadic culture.
The installation consist two parts: small portrait drawings (8 x 8cm) drawn with pen and an interactive application. The drawings are stone-like images with large dimensions compared to the blank space around them, reminiscent of a prehistoric religious sanctuary. Individual characters present the artist’s view on the subject of intimate and social relations, an exploration on communication within small groups of people. The interactive installation places these drawings in a different context, allowing the audience itself to create relations between the different images. The custom application is simple and allows users to manipulate the drawings, arranging them in different formations and zooming into them from their miniature forms. Each presented series depicts one certain period, the time that it was created in.
COINcidence / Danilo Mandic [Skopje]
In the artist's culture, and presumably in many others, when one finds a coin that means he is lucky, or at least he will be lucky in the near future. People do expect luck. In that regard, COINcidence is intended to incite a process where random people will get lucky. But this is only the beginning of the chain of reactions to follow. A coin is usually a piece of hard metallic material, usually in the shape of a disc. The words for "Coin" and "Currency" are synonymous in some languages. This work experiments with how and how much the author is capable of initiating "luck" and what the significance of this may be. The "non-existence" of the work opens the question of it's nature, duration, non-spatiality, coincidence. Ultimately, possesion of the work (or a piece of the work) is not targeted at any specific group and it is not controlled by the artist. As an author, Mandic has placed himself as he is the initiator of exchange, circulation and transmission. By working in this way he has made certain unpredictable reactions and variable processes the focus of his work. He will start off the processes of chain reaction by dispersing the coins in random places, and leaving space for coincidence.
s.h.e. / Nataša Teofilović [Belgrade]
s.h.e. is an interactive ambience created through an installation and a 3D character animation. s.h.e. plays with virtuality and reality. Where does virtuality end and reality begin? The virtual space is emptied; its spatiality is defined by the virtual characters through their movement and behavior (the animation). In the void-space, the virtuals are left to explore their own virtual identities. That's why they knock on the insides of the screens, touch the boundary (the edge) of the picture and enter their own virtual bodies. They are “skins”, virtual membranes without any organs, with animated shaders. The elements of the personal, the private and the auto portrait are present throughout all the segments of the piece. The virtual
actresses' portraits are derived from the face of the artist and the digital lighting was captured (HDR IBL) from the actual ambience of the artists home. The sound - the rhythm of the beating on the screen, the knocking on the glass surface of the screen on which the s.h.e.(s) were created, mimics the unique movement and personal gestures of the artist herself.
Locations of Displacement / Tegan Bristow [Johannesburg]
A series of documentary photographs taken of the Internet Cafes in downtown Johannesburg. This series shows the environment of these internet cafes and the conditions under which they are run. In the Upgrade! Network, 'Johannesburg' is the only node in Africa. Though the conditions under which the node functions are far better then in these cafe's, they often face similar challenges. These cafe's show a highly inventive use of communication technologies which often relies on finding the cheapest and shortest means to an end. Set up by refugees and foreign nationals as a means to communicate with friends and business people in their home countries, the cafes have become centers of cultural connection and
'informal' business. These cafes have also been quickly adopted by South African users as a cheaper alternative to the overpriced offerings of the local telecoms.
No parking / Erhan Muratoğlu [Istanbul]
In ‘No Parking’, a 57 seconds animation, Erhan Muratoglu contemplates the current condition in Istanbul where human beings are clashing more and more with their physical surroundings. Some of the effects of globalisation such as increasing prosperity and expanding urbanisation are causing a shortage of public space leading to situations where people and cars are continually hindering each other. As Muratoglu says: “Istanbul is a self-running laboratory where the boundaries of social interactions are tested.” The video’s stylized 3D aesthetic resembles computer games such as Grand Theft Auto, with the difference that no protagonists are active here. Rather the physical urban space is acting on its own
behalf in ways including swinging a wrongly parked car off the pavement and setting off the car alarm.
Chain letter of reactionary love / tobias c. van Veen [Montreal]
This work consists of two parts. VIDEO This video documents the release of paper airplanes atop various peaks, glaciers and structures in the Pacific Northwest of Canada. Unable to bridge the distance, lost chain letters are released to drift in the wind. The artist wears a suit and top hat to demonstrate his sincerity. ACTION carried out by participants of Chain Reaction: + on a piece of paper, write a love letter to someone you miss, have not seen in many years, and would like to be here with you, where you are now. include your email address. + once all letters are ready, fold into paper airplanes. + scale the highest possible structure in Skopje, by whatever means available. + throw the letter in the direction of where you currently believe the person to be.
TODAY is a piece of generative art for mobile phones. It’s an application that visualizes personal mobile communication. It sits on the periphery of the machine, monitoring our connectivity through the number and type of calls we receive, subtly displaying them back to us, in the form of a generative graphic. Here, the visual result is a figurative and seemingly abstract picture – the story of your day. Some days will be colourful and wired, others quieter and more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatable and unique. What lies at TODAY’s core was the idea of using personal data as the basis for an aesthetic system, while providing individuals with a visual diary of their communication patterns. It’s an intimate piece that ‘lives’ in your pocket.Freely distributed for Symbian phones at today.cada1.net
Interception / Roch Forowicz [Warsaw]
A surveillance camera being used to monitor public space was hijacked and reinstalled in a subway station. The camera was used intentionally to broaden consciousness concerning the problem of increasing lack of privacy. People entering and exiting the station were tracked by the camera, and their “capture” was projected on a station wall. The action was illegal.
Ignotus the Mage : El Mago Ignotus / Paul Hertz [Chicago]
Ignotus the Mage IN SKOPJE
Some interpret the past, others foretell the future. Ignotus interrogates the present. The present is known for its absence.
Know your present! Ask Ignotus. Readings daily, 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. or by appointment (email to ignotus@ignotus.com). Ignotus the Mage brings together various processes that have long informed Paul Hertz's work: induction of the audience into the creative process, pattern-making games, intermedia composition, remixing as a metaphor for memory, and collaborative interaction.
Ignotus the Mage was originally a one-on-one performance with a deck of punch cards designed to generate geometric patterns that
Paul Hertz used in paintings and drawings. In order to give something back to participants for helping to generate new patterns by acting as “random variables” in the algorithmic procedures run on the cards, he created the persona of Ignotus the Mage, dysfunctional fortuneteller. Ignotus can “read the present” (since he can’t tell the future or recall the past) in the patterns of the cards. Subsequently he used the card game to gather not just patterns, but the voices and faces of participants. Materials gathered in the performances have been used for interactive installations, digital prints, and audio compositions.
Visual and audio design and software by Paul Hertz.
.jpg)
