Below is a link to the work I briefly mentioned in class on Friday.

On view September 23 – October 10th for the ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan at The B.O.B.

A Line Through the Center of Space (2008 – 9) is a hybrid digital animation scultpture that serves as a platform for contemplative experience through the poetic presentation of repititious forms.

Honeypumper is an interactive installation that fits into the category of the “transforming mirror” that we just studied. It exists as such: you walk up to a video screen displaying yourself and what is around you, which has a pump in front of it. When you pump on the thing your image slowly disappears from the video feed. If you stop pumping for a while your image will slowly reappear. I saw this piece in Florida and it was very satisfying. It is nice to be able to disappear.

By the way, most of the people he transported were from villages and have never seen such a big art show in their life before.

Japanese Whispers - Usman Haque

“As an experiment into the way information is changed by being digitally processed and transmitted through electromagnetic space, up to 20 mobile phones were laid nose-to-toe in a circle. During the performance event, calls between the phones were initiated in a variety of patterns (neighbour to neighbour or across the circle) and the ambient sounds and voices of participants were input into the mouthpieces to be propagated through the phones and mobile phone network. The resulting feedback loop delayed and distorted the sounds through the iterative process of being digitised, transmitted, output and re-digitised, creating echoes of the room and nearby people that sounded much like chirping birds.” (quoted from the Haque Design+Research website)

This is a rather old piece by Usman Haque, a London-based architect and artist. Currently Haque ‘s design and research studio creates massive public installations, on a very different scale than this early work. The underlying concepts often remain the same, however. Haque’s current work may be seen at http://www.haque.co.uk/index.php.

Nadav Assor

http://www.raaf.org/projects.php?pcat=2&proj=4

Bion

http://www-symbiotic.cs.ou.edu/projects/bion/

TCA "Disembodied Cuisine"

http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/disembodied/dis.html

Ken Rinaldo is an artist and theorist who create interactive multimedia installations that blur the boundaries between the organic and inorganic. He has been working at the intersection of art and biology for over two decades working in the categories of interactive robotics, biological art, artificial life, interspecies communication, rapid prototyping and digital imaging.

It consists of fifteen robotic sound sculptures that interact with the public and modify their behaviors over time. These behaviors change based on feedback from infrared sensors, the presence of the participant/viewers in the exhibition and the communication between each separate sculpture. This series of robotic sculptures talk with each other through a computer network and audible telephone tones, which are a musical language for the group. The interactivity engages the viewer/participant who in turn, effects the system’s evolution and emergence. This creates a system evolution as well as an overall group sculptural aesthetic.

the telegarden

“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” Voltaire

Co-directors: Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana
Project team: George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary Morris Carl Sutter, Jeff Wiegley
Ars Electronica team: Erich Berger, Gerold Hofstadler, Thomas Steindl, Gerfried Stocker
Archivist: Hannes Mayer

[Note: after 9 years of continuous operation and exhibition at the ars electronica museum in austria, the telegarden was retired in August 2004. ]

The TeleGarden is an art installation that allows web users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the tender movements of an industrial robot arm.

The Telegarden was developed at the University of Southern California and went online in June 1995. In its first year, over 9000 members helped cultivate. In September 1996, the Telegarden was moved to the lobby of the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, where it remained online until August 2004 (see update above). The Alternate Village Square chatroom remains available with archival photos and other information.

“In linking their garden to the World Wide Web and creating an intuitive interface for the control of the arm and camera, the artists transformed what most would consider a fit of over-engineering into a subtle rumination on the nature of the Commons.” — Peter Lunenfeld, Flash Art , XXIX, 187, March 1996.

Homographies is a large-scale interactive installation featuring a turbulent light array that responds to the movement of the public. The installation consists of 144 white fluorescent light tubes which are hung from 72 robotic fixtures on the ceiling of the exhibition space, equally spaced. Each light tube measures 1.83 m long and is rotated using a computer-controlled stepper motor. All lights are always on and typically constitute the only lighting in the exhibition hall, except for the natural light that spills into the space.

Originally developed for the Entrance Court of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and exhibited at the Sydney Biennale 2006, the piece can cover an area of between 240 and 420 square metres.

The piece uses a surveillance tracking system with six tiny panoptic cameras placed on the ceiling; these detect the presence and position of people in the exhibition space. As they walk through, the system automatically rotates the light tubes very slowly to create labyrinthine patterns of light that are “paths” or “corridors” between people. In Homographies the “vanishing point” is not architectural, but rather connective, i.e. it is determined by who is there at any given time and varies accordingly. This gives a reconfigurable light-space that is based on flow, on motion, on lines of sight, —an intended contrast to the cartesian grids that organize most modern architecture.

The fluorescent light tube is found in just about any default architectural space: offices, schools, hospitals, museums, prisons, factories. The ubiquitous presence of these strip lights refer us to our cold experience of architectural normalization (i.e. homogenization, globalization). Very often, especially when found in corridors, fluorescents line-up and index a direction. Homographies attempts to pervert that linearity and “privileged point of view” and instead offer a plurality of points of contact.

Funky Forest is a wild and crazy ecosystem where children manage the
resources to influence the environment around them. By using their bodies
or pillow “rocks” and “logs”, water flowing from the digital stream on the
floor can be dammed and diverted to the forest to make different parts
grow. If a tree does not receive enough water it withers away but by
pressing their bodies into the forest children create new trees based on
their shape and character. As children explore and play they discover that
the environment is inhabited by a variety of sonic life forms and
creatures who appear and disappear depending on the health of the forest.
As the seasons change the creatures also go through a metamorphosis.

Over six pieces comprising kinetic sculpture, projections, visceral jokes, total immersion sensory works, whole room architectural installations and, with ‘Opera for a Small Room’ (pictured), an awe-inspiringly perfect sound sculpture, Cardiff and Bures Miller evoke worlds within worlds. Each separate work is capable of subsuming an open-minded viewer in its hinted-at narrative, from the simple beauty of old-book mustiness, ‘The House of Books Has No Windows’ to the self-indicting dystopian horror of ‘The Killing Machine’. Crawl in, peep, crane, marvel, and let each piece take you back to a childhood state of imaginative possibility. In terms of sensory experience, it’s this year’s Fuerzabruta. And it’s free.

Fruitmarket Gallery 2008