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Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism (26 unread)

links for 2008-04-29

Posted: April 29th, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- The internal 'orchestra' of the earth - The Boston Globe Listening earth vibrations (tags: science sound)
Street Radio, oral tradition digitally spread

Posted: April 27th, 2008, 11:56pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

The public installation project Street Radio has been recently launched by Armin Medosch at the central Southampton railway station, and it'll last till November 2008. Medosch has realized a radio network drawing on Hivenetworks technology and Alexei Blinov consultancy (Raylabs artists who contributed to countless media artworks). The network has ten public nodes, broadcasting some stories selected from the Southamptons Oral History Archive and adapted to match the site's characteristics, where the nodes has been implemented. Street Radio uses a set of technologies that have become usable out of the scientific research "sancta sanctorum" thanks to the free software movement's virtuous dynamics. Now they lend themselves to various DIY approaches, as this one. Every installation node is made up of a small weather resistant box (weather in this harbor city is far from being a mild one); the inside hardware/software combination is made by Hivenetworks, enabling the loop playing of audio files through FM radio waves (89.0 MHz). The boxes are supplied with a small USB charger and they can spread the audio waves up to 30 meters away, being also able to register the presence of a Bluetooth enabled mobile. Remote connections are used only for machines' maintenance, so the devices are definitively not access points. One of the most interesting aspects is the oral tradition involvement, so often endangered in a society obsessed by the future, the newest forms of communication and the technical innovation. The Street Radio project can then be interpreted as the nth disproof of the short-sighted forecast stating that oral tradition would have been wiped out by the computer society. Today we can notice an emergent new form of orality that should be defined as a "tertiary", in the School of Toronto tradition, that taught us to consider the electronic-era orality as a secondary one.
Vito Campanelli
links for 2008-04-26

Posted: April 26th, 2008, 2:30pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- One Second Video Festival The shortest (digital) video festival (tags: video tv net)
links for 2008-04-25

Posted: April 25th, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- The Echo Nest Web service to deeply and visually analize an uploaded mp3 music file. (tags: music software sound)
BeatBox, the rhythmic desktop

Posted: April 24th, 2008, 5:10pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

Karl D.D. Willis, known as a Japanese label Progressive Form leading act and for Sonasphere project with Nao Tokui, is also appreciated for realizing some innovative prototypes, as this BeatBox. As its name might suggest it's a small box created to give voice to our desktop's sound universe. Usually when we're sitting at our own (home or work) desk, we're too busy to lapse into considerations about the amount of small sounds we produce typing on the keyboard, madly moving the mouse, drawing, flipping a book or simply nervously pattering with our fingers. Willis, indeed, gives respect again to this aural background, building a tool able to transform these small noises into musical beats. BeatBox uses some contact microphones to record sound vibrations produced on a flat surface, while a quite simple software transforms them in audio samples then played back by the small box speakers. Definitely this is an unusual tool, useful to have fun with the rhythms enlivening our work stations that, despite the indifference characterizing our coexistence with them, are the real soundscape of an average working day.
Vito Campanelli
links for 2008-04-24

Posted: April 24th, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Mental Detox Week - formerly TV-turn-off Week - Adbusters Switch off your personal and mass media for a week. (tags: hacktivism media tv)
- Open Space 2008 at ICC Tokyo The new annual exhibiton and artist conference series at the ICC Tokyo. (tags: art media)
links for 2008-04-23

Posted: April 23rd, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Preemptive Media :: AIR Helping people self identifying pollution sources. (tags: art hacktivism media mobile)
P2P Art, making scarcity a thing of the past.

Posted: April 22nd, 2008, 1:26pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

With the advent of efficient peer-to-peer protocols and applications that support them (such as BitTorrent) becoming a more prevalent means of distributing copyrighted and non-copyrighted content on the Internet, it's not surprising that this phenomenon is spreading into the art world as well. Taking this to heart, Anders Weberg has created "P2P Art - The aesthetics of ephemerality", a collection of art made for and only available on P2P networks. In this project, the "original" artwork is first shared by the artist only until someone has downloaded it, after that happens the original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist. This presents an interesting challenge to the idea of the "original" artwork as the only way to experience the work is to see its copy distributed across the Internet.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
links for 2008-04-20

Posted: April 20th, 2008, 2:30pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- LAX will use body imaging scanning - Los Angeles Times Scaring 3D body scanning device for airports. (tags: hacktivism visual)
links for 2008-04-17

Posted: April 17th, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Live in the Living A public concert in your spacious living room. (tags: media music)
Brian Mackern - Living.Stereo - Soundcode.Sketches & Cinema.tik

Posted: April 16th, 2008, 10:54pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

cd-rom
Strings of codes and images, recontextualizations integrated by GUI interfaces, a development paradigm aimed at allowing an interaction with a computer by means of graphically manipulating objects. Relations that, in the 'prologue', detourning 'Introducing Stereophonic Phonograph Records', an advertising short movie shot in 1958, cite the first industrial products explicitly produced for the new mass markets, bringing us back to a seminal and 'immersive' relation between humans and technologies. The main sections are two, with the titles 'SoundCode.Sketches' and 'cinema.tik', in this project by Brian Mackern, a net artist from Uruguay of great professionalism and depth. In the first ones, the code process is strictly bound to its representations, with minimal sounds reflecting the equally skinny readapted code sequences. In the other ones, the video materials used, even if they subtend the same processes, are invested by the iconographies induced by loops-fragments of historical films (Stalker, Solaris, Vertigo, Love Flower...) tightly connected to the artist's own history as consumer of cultural imagery.
Aurelio Cianciotta
Neural 29

Posted: April 15th, 2008, 6:46pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

The new Neural issue is out. Subscribe now (and get a free fanzine "Ludic Society, GoApe Issue #5 + FM3 Buddha Machine sticker") or buy it from the closest store. A back issues pack is available.

Issue 29, spring 2009

Free: centerfold 'Constellation' by Chu Yun.

new media art
.Yao Bin interview.
.8gg interview.
.We Make Money Not Art/We Need Money Not Art interview.
.The Paradox of Chinese Art in the Age of Technology.
.Continental Drift.
.v2_zone MOCA Taipei.
.11th Microwave Hong Kong.
.news: WINDscale, Privileges, Feed, Spinal Rhythms, Life.
.reviews:
..books/dvd/cd-rom: Home-Made, Conexoes Tecnologicas, Two Films, Database Aesthetics, MediaArtHistories, Intimate Transactions.

emusic
.FM3 interview.
.Zen Lu interview.
.news: Torcito Project, Sonic Wargame, Akousmaflore, Plink Jet, Isaidif.
.reviews:
..books/dvd/cd+: Cultura VJ, Continuity, Messy, Living Sterea & Cinema.tik, Tricycle.
.cd reviews: Frank Rothkamm, Minoru Sato + Asuna, Tim Blechmann, Oh Astro, Dorninger, Al Margolis, Shinkei, Gavin Bryars, Jorge Haro, John Luther Adams, Uusitalo, Snog, martyn Bates & Max Eastley, Savvas Ysatis + Taylor Deupree, Roam The Hello Clouds, Periferico, Zaum, David Watson, Einstuerzende Neubauten.

hacktivism
.Made in China, dagongmei and the global it factory.
.The Great Firewall of China
.Post Revolutionary Glimpses
.news: new American Dictionary Security/Fear edition, Constrain City, Breaking the News, Transborder Tool, Parallel Rethoric.
.reviews:
..books/dvd/cd-rom: Peers, Pirates and Persuasion, Infotopia, Netporn, Depford.tv Diaries, Wired Shut, Panel de Control.
Memetic Simulation no. 2, memetic shoot 'em up

Posted: April 14th, 2008, 8:21pm GMT by Valentina Culatti

Shoot 'em up (or shmup for short) is a computer and video game genre where the player usually controls a vehicle or character and fights large numbers of enemies with shooting attacks, typically of a highly stylized nature. In Japan, where the genre is still a lively one, they are simply known as "shooting games" and they are focused on avatar actions using some weapons. But what could happen when the weapons are instead "memes"? The game might become a memetic simulation as in Joseph Hocking’s memetic simulation no. 2.. Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the “meme”. Started from a metaphor used in Richard Dawkins popular writings, it has later turned into an approach in the study of self-replicating units of culture. In The Selfish Gene (1976) Dawkins used the term "meme" to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture. It is a pattern that can influence its surroundings – it has causal agency – and can propagate. Based on this concept Hocking developed a game prototype where the characters "shout" at each other "expelling" words as if they were fire breathing. This work uses interactive 3D graphics and a recombinant narrative system, with touch-screen interaction. When a character is hit by a words' stream, he incorporates those words in his database of ideas. So characters will start to say similar things, and they'll evolve till the entire community will end up saying the same things. "When the simulation detects that this endpoint has been reached, the screen fades to black and everything starts over from a random distribution of ideas, repeating the process of the society's homogenization" Hoking says. What's missing here is the definition of memes as variance. Indeed memes are information copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and so human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by mimicry, and they compete for space in our memory and for the vital chance to be copied again. Since the process of social learning is different for each person, the mimicry process can’t be an accurate reproduction. The same idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it. So the mutation rate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and every interaction of the imitation process. This is why Memetic Silmulation no. 2 is more likely a metaphor for mass communication aggressive behaviors then a metaphor of the society’s coalescence. More properly it's a "shout them up" game.
Valentina Culatti
links for 2008-04-14

Posted: April 14th, 2008, 2:32pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- The World Is Daft A fan-based collectively produced bootleg dvd of a Daft Punk live concert. (tags: mashup video music media)
Rom Check Fail, ultimate videogame remix

Posted: April 12th, 2008, 8:44pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

You don't need to be a videogame fan or being a teenager in the seventies / eighties to know videogame classics like Space Invaders, Pacman or Tetris. Their iconic power is still intact in the public imagination, also thanks to many reinterpretations and updates. Their patterns are often used by game artists as metaphors to create new connected sense: Mario Bros. can be restyled with a new graphic, so you can take your cue from it to discuss immigrant labor conditions, Space Invaders can be used to represent the never ending battle among Linux and the proprietary operating systems and so on. Sometimes the action's target is the algorithm itself. In "Basho's frogger", "Mario Battle no.1" and "Tetris 1d" the hack is s pure conceptual practice that intentionally kills the ludic component: In the best software art tradition, the program functionality (entertainment in this case) is attacked with Luddite fervour. The Retrosabotage project is less "artistic", but in a way more sophisticated: every week it publishes a famous arcade variance. The algorithms are treated as if they were jazz standard, falling short of player’s expectations, still maintaining well-known mechanisms. Mokumentary speculates about a never released Pacman version, where you control the ghosts, Incompatible Visions is an impossible mash-up between Tetris and Duck Hunt, while variances on Space Invaders theme variations push to the absurd the tragic spaceship destiny. Sometimes the "sabotage" generates new game patterns: "Compomise" is a Tetris short circuited for two players, "Build On" and "Balance" turn over the tedious Break Out with new original features. Retrosabotage is a little more than a collection of jokes but nevertheless it gives pleasing disappointments to the Skinner's mouse hosted in our brain. But probably the most radical experiment in this tradition is probably Rom Check Fail, a sort of psychedelic remix of a dozen classic arcades. Graphic, enemies, scenes and their respective dynamics are randomly remixed by a software gone crazy. Every game is a frantic zapping among unpredictable situations but oddly playable. Remix culture, contaminated the video and now invades videogames. With astonishing achievements.
Paolo Pedercini
links for 2008-04-11

Posted: April 11th, 2008, 2:32pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Ten Thousand Cents Thousands of individuals drawing a 1/10.000 of a 100 bucks dollar for its theoretical value: one cent via the Amazon Mechanical Turk (tags: art media hacking visual)
links for 2008-04-10

Posted: April 10th, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Soundwagon Portable Record Player The one used by Staalplaat Soundsystem. (tags: music media sound)
Totemobile makes Transformers seem tame

Posted: April 9th, 2008, 7:01pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

The "Totemobile" by Brooklyn- based Mexican - American artist and roboticist, Chico Macmurtrie, is a kinetic transforming robot that morphs a Citroen DS automobile into a 20-meter tall "totem" with human-like features. Similar in conception to the giant robots from Michael Bay's summer blockbuster film "Transformers", MacMurtrie's machine instead trades CGI mastery for mechanical performance and hydraulic lifting in order to suspend this creature into the air. The Citroen was chosen for the project because MacMurtrie saw its connection to Mexican-American "low-rider" culture where people modify their cars as a mode of personal expression that ultimately resulted in intricate artistic cultural icons. In any case, the resulting form is an ominous vision into the future of artificial intelligence and advanced mechanization.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
links for 2008-04-09

Posted: April 9th, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) PALAOA - Livestream Hydrophones sound streaming from below the Antarctic Ocean. (tags: music science sound)
Victims' Symptom, media and traumatic perception

Posted: April 8th, 2008, 5:37pm GMT by Valentina Culatti

“I went back home, but I couldn’t keep calm. I went down the street and started running, fast, faster and faster [ … ] I felt as if I took all the blood I saw on the ground back, lost as from a tap open to break the knob, I felt it in my body” (Roberto Saviano, Gomorra, 2006). Could we consider Roberto Saviano, the Italian writer who grew up near Naples and started writing about the Camorra because of his anger, revealing disturbing secrets about it and now living under escort, a victim? While the average reader, safely far from the author's world, can’t help feeling like a “war tourist”, Saviano could easily be either a case study or one of the theorists participating to Victims’ Symptom (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Culture). This project, commissioned as a special initiative to mark LabforCulture one-year anniversary, analyses the meaning of a victim who has survived a traumatic event, becoming both a witness and a suffering subject. The aim is to move forward the notion of PTSD from psycho-traumatic diagnosis to a symptomatic term in media studies. The Victims’ Symptom project is based on Ana Peraica's text "War profiteers in art", a critique of the biennialisation and commodification of images of victims in response to Robert Storr’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale this year. The full project, accompanied by critical texts, documentation, commissioned artworks and reflections by the curator will be online in April 2008. The commissioned artworks approach the topic in specific ways. Indeed, there are key thought provoking questions artists and theorists involved are asked to answer and commissioned artworks will serve as triggers. The meta-archive "Landscape 1995" by Marko Peljhan, for example, investigates the strategic and tactical battleground on the Bosnia and Herzegovina fronts from 1992 onward, with a special focus on one of the largest European massacre after World War II – Srebrenica – where victims were used, though not supported by the media, and which was even denied by some theorists. Colombian artist Mauricio Arango presents "Day After Day", a cartography of victims as reported by several international online news media outlets. It consists of a world map showing the usage of the word "victim" in news from around the globe. Andreja Kulunčić’s project – "Bad News" – is focused on our relationship with bad news as the media broadcast it daily. Olia LIalina’s net.art classic "My Boyfriend came back from the war" is revisited in a web 2.0 version by Alejandro Duque building a specific and individual storyboard of collateral victims, with the help of a psychotherapist, prove that victims are not just numbers, but individual stories. Moreover Martha Rosler's "Bringing War Home" re-connects the war in Vietnam and the American living rooms which have been fallaciously separated. Among the theorists, Stevan Vuković writes about reliable witnesses (PTSD and victim), confronting us again with the Srebrenica massacre. Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, reflects upon how to reconstruct a victim individual story, starting from its base number status in the media. An article by Sezgin Boynik researches how activist e-mailing networks influenced the production of the Kosovo art scene in the late nineties, while Geert Lovink addresses the issue of blogging as therapy. There will be the opportunity to comment on and discuss these texts in a live debate with their authors in spring 2008.
Valentina Culatti
links for 2008-04-08

Posted: April 8th, 2008, 2:30pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- YouTube - DJ Ramsey Scratch Tape Decks Scratching tapes. (tags: hacking music sound media)
(edited by Katharina Dohm, Heinz Stahlhut, Max Hollein and Guido Magnaguagno) - Kunstmaschinen Maschinenkunst, Art Machines Machines Art

Posted: April 5th, 2008, 12:37pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

book - Kehrer Verlag - ISBN 9783939583400
Art Machines Machine Art photo set
The autonomous physical production made by a machine has often been perceived as "magic". The perception that a non-organic entity would produce something "new", when not "original" has already been vastly debated, but the fascination of the results is still a matter of fact, underlying some inscrutable "intelligence". Basically this kind of machines are moving (=giving a sign of life), receiving some input (=processing data) and producing an output (=assembling live something new). This is a potentially endless loop, further explored by artists, often focusing on how to make the output unpredictable. Jean Tinguely is in this sense the ancestor of the modern "automatique" involving everyday objects in a new functional/useless structure. The (surprising) mechanisms all of a sudden generate sense. How much this sense can be "original" it's an open question, starting a controversial debate about the "uniqueness" of the work of art. The curators of "Art Machines Machines Art" (that took place at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt) elegantly escaped this unimportant question, claiming that their choices were done taking care of the artworks "processual" character. The latter can be found in every exhibited artwork from automatic drawing machines to the beautiful alien polyethylene sculptures produced by Roxy Paine "Scumak no.2 (Auto Sculture Maker)". Virtually this sense has been produced by almost every piece of software art, that can be easily considered as a virtual machine. Software based artworks, indeed, implement a different level, where the conceptual approach to the machine construction is abstracted in code. This is evident in the included Miltos Manetas "Jacksonpollock.org", or Lia's "I said if", till Cornelia Sollfrank's "Net Art Generator" abstract art machine, one of the few (generative) software that was able to shake the concept of authorship up.
links for 2008-04-03

Posted: April 3rd, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Gregory Chatonsky » My hard drive is experiencing some strange noises composing with hard drive noises (tags: sound art hacking)
links for 2008-04-02

Posted: April 2nd, 2008, 2:32pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Audiosurf: Ride Your Music play and listen your mp3 collection (tags: music software sound videogame visual)
links for 2008-04-01

Posted: April 1st, 2008, 2:31pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- animula Otolab's elegant sound and vision (tags: art visual sound music)
Amalgus Cycle Process1, digital genesis

Posted: April 1st, 2008, 11:25am GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

Amalgus Cycle by Laura Zajac is an environment made up of parasitic processes triggered by organic inputs, which permeate and interconnect with organics and non-organics entities, through digital encoding, in a self-sufficient and finite mode. Process1 is actually the first step towards such environment. The interactive installation tracks the audience movements and maps them out in a multi-cellular colonies form. Human movements are a further input for an organic interaction. Infrared sensors detect the human presence and activate accordingly a set of heating elements. Those elements heat up a container of wax which melts down and start to flow over a slide made out of muslin and paper. The melted wax running over this structure creates new forms and landscapes of generative sculpture. These shapes keep changing according to the audience presence till the cycle ends because of a resource (wax) lack. Laura Zajac skills are used here binary relationships with the organic one, using the former to ascribe the genetic code to the latter. The installation is quite complex, but the wax sculptures combined with the cellular colonies projections on the walls create a unique environment, able to metaphorically breath, thanks to the movements of people crossing its physical space.
Tony Canonico