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Items by Valentina Culatti

The Reconfigurable House, how to remain smarter than your house.

Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 9:26pm GMT by Valentina Culatti

The Reconfigurable House, Adam Somlai-Fischer, Ai Hasegawa, Barbara Jasinowicz, Bengt Sjölén, Gabor Papp, Tamás Szakál and Usman Haque, the_reconfigurable_house.jpg

Have you ever dreamt of going home after a long day at work and being able to change the colour of your walls according to your mood? Well, this is what the Reconfigurable House 2.0 will allow you to do. The interactive installation by Adam Somlai-Fischer, Ai Hasegawa, Barbara Jasinowicz, Bengt Sjölén, Gabor Papp, Tamás Szakál and Usman Haque, is an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be "rewired" by users. It is not the traditional ‘smart house’ that acts on your behalf, cooking the meal while you are having a hot bath. Devices constructed from hacked low tech toys and gadgets are everywhere. There is a wall made of Cat bricks that meow when you stroke them. And if you raise your eyes up you’ll see a ceiling with small penguins flashing their eyes. There is no need to water plants here because the flowers are LED lilies that change colour when touched. Mist Lasers replace more predictable scented candles to warm the ambient, responding to breath and movements. All these low tech components can be reconfigured by visitors with a simple touch screen interface. Each specific performance or reaction is associated to a different input or interaction and if the House is left alone for too long with no user interaction, it gets bored, daydreams and reconfigures itself! Compared with traditional ‘smart houses’ that limit people’s decision making by being pre-set by engineers, the Reconfigurable House can be endlessly re-invented by its inhabitant. The authors have revisited the ‘smart house’ concept in a pro-active way to keep the technology user friendly and the attention focused on people making decisions. The software used is constructed with Processing, and Arduino, an inexpensive micro-controller, controls the electronics. All code used on the project is open source. By using Arduino, Usman Haque is extending his research from the boundaries of the house to the entire world. Pachube (pronounced "patch bay") is a web service available that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. Pachube acts between environments to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators). Connections can be made between any two environments, facilitating even spontaneous or previously unplanned interactions. So with the amazing developments in our future lifestyles will users always remain smarter than technology and more importantly will they remain smarter than their own homes?

Modi 2.0, Modigliani historical art hoax remake

Posted: May 7th, 2008, 5:00pm GMT by Valentina Culatti

Modi 2.0, Modigliani, Livorno, modigliani_2.jpg

It is twenty four years since four students from Livorno played their part in one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of Italian art. Their childish prank involving the rescue of Amedeo Modigliani’s lost sculptures fooled some of Italy’s most imminent art historians. It is believed that the 25 year old Modigliani thought that his sculptures would never be as good as his paintings and in a moment of despondency tossed them into the Fosso Mediceo, a local canal. In 1984, the 100th anniversary of Modigliani’s birth, Livorno’s Museum of Contemporary Art organised an exhibition of his sculptures. The Museum’s Curator Vera Durbè declared a challenge to find the legendary heads that had been thrown in the canal. One night after sculpting a stone head with a black and decker drill the students, Pietro Luridiana, Pierfrancesco Ferrucci, Michele Ghelarducci and Michele Genovesi secretly placed it in the canal. The next day, as the dredging began, workers found a sculpted head in the style of Modigliani. But to the students amazement it wasn’t the head they had made! The real sculptor was Angelo Froglia, a dockworker and artist, who later declared that his actions were a work of conceptual art that unmasked the faulty mechanisms of the art world . The head made by the students (Modì 2) was the second to be discovered and immediately had the country’s leading art historians confirming it’s authenticity! Twenty four years later, one of the hoaxers Michele Ghelarducci has decided to remake the head. The plan is to make it better than the first attempt. The new fake Modí 2.0 will be on auction on Ebay. The proceeds of the sale will be donated to the Grazia Focacci Foundation where the oncologist and researcher at the European Oncologic Institute Pier Francesco Ferrucci works today.
Valentina Culatti

Memetic Simulation no. 2, memetic shoot 'em up

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

Joseph Hocking, memetic simulation no. 2, memetic_simulation_n_2.jpg

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

Victims' Symptom, media and traumatic perception

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

Victims' Symptom, Ana Peraica, victims_symptom.jpg

“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

Intellectual Property Donor, let ideas outlive the body

Posted: March 17th, 2008, 11:36am GMT by Valentina Culatti

Intellectual Property Donor, ni9e, intellectual_property_donor.jpg

The term "intellectual property" (IP) denotes the specific legal rights which authors, inventors and other IP holders may hold and exercise, not the intellectual work itself. Under the intellectual property laws, the holder of one of these abstract "properties" has certain exclusive rights concerning the creative work, commercial symbol, or invention. The basic rationale for intellectual property laws is to somehow protect the inventor, author, or creator rights. However, various school of thought are critical on the "intellectual property" concept and how to deal with it; indeed, some argue that use of the term "property" in this context is itself misleading. Some characterise IP laws as intellectual protectionism and critics, like those belonging to the free culture movement, categorize it as intellectual monopoly, and argue that public interest is harmed by protectionist legislation such as copyright extension, software and business method patents. Like other forms of property, intellectual property (or rather the exclusive IP rights) can be transferred or licensed to third parties. But copyright gives its holders the exclusive right to control reproduction or adaptation of their works for a certain period of time (a few decades, usually). A fascinating alternative would be the copyright to expire with the holders, like in the ni9e's Intellectual Property Donor action. Based on the assumption that current copyright law prevents anyone from building upon others’ creativity for years after their death, the aim of the project is to make an intellectual property donation into the public domain. To make sure IP holders’ ideas outlive their body, ni9e invite holders to download and print their own IP Donor sticker, fill it and stick it on some other ID card. It becomes a sort of testament of his/her intellectual production of a whole life, keeping it alive and functioning. Will this practice become popular like organ donation?
Valentina Culatti

PleaseSpam.US, serving spam as a revenge.

Posted: March 4th, 2008, 5:33pm GMT by Valentina Culatti

PleaseSpam.US, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, please_spam_us.jpg

Transmediale 2008 invited participants to "conspire" and, during the festival, the intrinsic potential of this call was extensively explored. One of these opportunities was undoubtedly offered by Jonah Brucker-Cohen with PleaseSpam.Us project. It is a web (2.0) based collaborative filtering project and voting system that encourages people to submit email addresses and vote on whether those addresses are worthy of attracting spammers. Email spam, also known as unsolicited bulk email (UBE) or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted email messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients. Email is an extremely cheap mass medium, and professional spammers have automated their processes to a highly extent. Millions of email addresses can be cheaply purchased from an underground industry harvesting email address and selling then huge databases. The so called Spam Bots, web crawlers gathering email addresses from websites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations, collecting them endlessly. Email addresses have a distinctive format, so spambot software is easy to write. Thus, spamming can be very profitable even at extremely low response rates. The PleaseSpam.Us website acts as a locus for conspiring against the oppressors at large. Receiving enough "votes", the email address is then placed on the project home page, coded to attract "spambots" that will eventually send unpredictable amount of spam to them. With this project Jonah Brucker-Cohen feeds his work on "Deconstructing Networks". His research includes projects that critically challenge and subvert acknowledged perceptions of network interaction and experience. And this work seem to give back to the user the voice to claim public attention on email abuse as a new mass broadcasting system. Revealingly, the President of the United States is at the top of the potential spam recipients list.
Valentina Culatti

Skinstrument, how to generate sound with human skin

Posted: February 12th, 2008, 11:25am GMT by Valentina Culatti

Daan Brinkmann, Skinstrument, skinstrument.jpg

People are used to the sound of skin played by percussion instruments. Most of them consist of at least one membrane (skin) that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with parts of a player's body, or with some sort of implement, to produce sound. But what if the skin is human? Percussion denotes the collision of two bodies producing sound. Then what if both the two colliding bodies are human? This scenario is not a morbid fantasy but the core of the latest Daan Brinkmann’s creation: Skinstrument. It's a musical instrument that can be played by two or more people. It works using skin resistance as a parameter to generate sound. Perceiving a subtle, almost imperceptible flow of electricity players become part of a circuit, and touching each other's skin the circuit starts to trigger a sound generation. It's crucial then that the touching intensity determines the sound frequency. So the electric tension is not only translated into sound but also into sexual tension, ironically inspired by the shape of the instrument that resembles a breast and instinctively generated by the touch of other people’s skin. The result is an unpredictable choreography based on human interaction.
Valentina Culatti

Transborder Tool for Immigrants, locative media and art

Posted: January 9th, 2008, 8:00am GMT by Valentina Culatti

Immigrants, locative media and art, Ricardo Dominguez, transborder_tool_for_immigrants.jpg

In the 1999 Headmap Manifesto, often mentioned as an earlier manifesto for locative media, Ben Russell describes an incipient new world where “real borders, boundaries, and space become plastic and malleable, statehood becomes fragmented, and global.” But in the present world borders between states are still present and patrolled. The U.S/Mexico border, for example, has the highest number of both legal and illegal crossings of any other land border. It is also very dangerous – hundreds of people died trying to cross it, due to the lack orientation that undermines the ability of reach their destination safely. With multiple and distributed geo-spatial information systems (like Goggle Earth), GPS (Global Positioning System) and the developing Virtual Hiker Algorithm by artist Brett Stalbaum, the Transborder Tool for Immigrants is born. It would allow a virtual geography to mark new paths and potentially safer routes across this desert of the real. The Transborder Tool, recently awarded the Transnational Communities Award, is being developed by Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) now researcher in the UCSD Calit2 lab, along with colleagues Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas and Jason Najarro. The device tries to reduce deaths along the border helping immigrants to locate important resources like water and safety beacons. The tool is built on a Motorola i455 mobile phone, a cheap one, easy to unlock and able to install new software, like the Staulbam's Virtual Hiker. The interface, actually a compass, has to be simple, visual (icon based) avoiding different languages confusing migrants, more often than not coming from indigenous communities and not necessarily speaking Spanish. The mobile phone also vibrates according near landmarks like water or a highway, letting the user focus on the environment instead of constantly looking at the screen. The project is a mix of art and activism, an example of ‘artivism’ as Dominguez would call it. Using the art context preventing the tool development to be stopped by authorities. The algorithm would suggest the most "aesthetic" crossing to the migrants, so the artivists identify the project as an experiment of “walking art.” Even if this context somehow a "frame," could be also considered as a boundary, the essence of locative media offers a conceptual framework to examine technological assemblages and their potential social impacts. Unlike net art, produced by a tech class for an elite audience, locative media strives, at least rhetorically, to reach a mass audience, attempting to engage consumer technologies, and redirecting then their power. It is the electronic civil disobedience that brings methods of civil disobedience to virtual space.
Valentina Culatti

Inside / Out, wereable tecnologies social potential

Posted: January 8th, 2008, 8:00am GMT by Valentina Culatti

Katherine Moriwaki, Inside / Outside, inside_outside.jpg

In the art world, authors like Stelarc and Krzysztof Wodiczko have produced worrisome images of technology and body integration ignoring the expressive and aesthetic potential of wearable technology. Actually, thanks to the interchange among fashion, technology and art, artist / designer hybrids are developing works that question disciplinary boundaries, blur the borders between digital and analog, and try to expand our communicative possibilities. Katherine Moriwaki is an artist and researcher investigating this kind of potential, that is clothing and accessories as active channels for people building networks in public space. One of Moriwaki’s projects is Inside/Outside, a handbag that integrates an air quality sensor and audio microphone input connected to a microcontroller. As the user carries the bag through the city, changes in ambient air quality and noise levels cause conductive embroidery on the bag surface to heat and subsequently cool. Thermo-chromic pigments mixed with acrylic paint applied onto a fabric substrate create a visible color change that is both controlled and programmable. From a conceptual perspective, while an ordinary handbag collects very personal physical objects, Inside/Outside collects digital data about the outside environment, generating awareness, and possible actions to create an intimate relationship with the city and / or other individuals in the urban space. From a social point of view sensitive data can be used by a community to monitor their own neighborhood and public spaces. This pro-active interpretation of fashion could also be read through the words of Otto von Busch who calls “fashion renegades” the marginal fashion actors who use unconventional, hacking, strategies to modify and break the system. “But they do not oppose the inherent power or code processing of that system. Not boycotting fashion or scorn it as “the emperors new clothes”, but instead celebrating the magic and desire flowing through that system, reconnecting it to empower instead of regarding it as an enslaving culture”. Inside/Outside is in fact, the intersemiotic translation of a fashion accessory into a personal environmental monitoring tool. The handbag becomes a metaphor for information storage and retrieval. As Moriwaki writes “We are looking at what we carry, collect, and how we make sense of our inner and outer worlds”.
Valentina Culatti

'Feed: interactive installation to show how life is fed by media

Posted: November 27th, 2007, 5:11am GMT by Valentina Culatti

According to Pier Luigi Capucci, nowadays the relationship between arts and life follows two different paths. The first and more ancient is deep-rooted in the organic matter and is inspired by scientific disciplines: biology, biotechnology and genetic. The second path, more recent, comes from different approaches: artificial life and robotics. The essential difference between the two (apart from tools, approaches and technologies in use) is that in the first path life is presented as it is, while in the second it is represented, i.e. simulated. Shane Cooper’s installation ‘Feed’, recently displayed at Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei’s Zone_V2_ Unstable Media, combines the two paths. The work is composed of two halves. The upper half is a video wall of television screens, each tuned to a different channel and playing at low volume. The lower half is a garden of ferns that can survive under conditions of extreme lighting. The television screens provide the light to the plants, which grow towards them in a constricted space, eventually colliding. People interact with the installation because the garden survives thanks to the people presence as infrared cameras convert images of visitors into light. Cooper presents life as it is through growing ferns but also applies the biological network to social network, which is deeply influenced by technological civilization. ‘Feed’ sums up the relationship between new media and human beings poking fun at people who spend their days laying in front of television, fed by TV meals and news, believing that the tv screen is the only source of knowledge and entertainment.
Valentina Culatti

Contemporary rethoric through audio/video installation

Posted: November 23rd, 2007, 2:00am GMT by Valentina Culatti

‘Parallel Rethoric, Coming and Going, Zachary Poff, parallel_rethoric.jpg

‘Rhetoric’ is usually understood to be the art or technique of persuasion through the use of oral, visual, or written language. However contemporary studies of rhetoric have a more diverse range of practices and meanings than in the past. Rhetoricians now argue in fact that the classical understanding of rhetoric is limited because persuasion depends on communication, which in turn depends on meaning. Thus the scope of rhetoric is to include much more than simply public, both legal and political, discourse. This emphasis on meaning and how it is constructed and conveyed particularly through media is part of Zachary Poff's (zachpoof) latest installation ‘Parallel Rethoric: Coming and Going’. This piece extends the investigation of public speech that he began in 2005 with "Parallel Rhetoric: 2001 + 2005". The artwork consists of a software-driven installation that continuously mixes up the Inaugural and Farewell speeches of three US Presidents (Johnson, Carter, and Reagan). A pair of video teleprompters mirrors the image of each President, with the Inaugural speech on the left and the Farewell discourse on the right. A single microphone, modified as a speaker, is placed between each pair, amplifying one speech or the other but never both. Whenever there is a moment of mutual silence the sound switches to the other speech, randomly editing a meaningless conversation. The video keeps following the timeline, so the bouncing from one direction to another is even more puzzling for the observer. The emphasis placed on the emptiness of political discourse is then a vehicle to reveal the structures and artifacts of media itself.
Valentina Culatti

A dictionary as a timeline for privileges

Posted: November 13th, 2007, 5:43am GMT by Valentina Culatti

‘Privileges’, Diane Landry, privileges.jpg

Diane Landry’s installation ‘Privileges’ consists of the readymade object ‘book’ semantic alteration. A dictionary is in fact changed into an automated flip book in order to animate the education privileges metaphor. The number of pages of this universal book determines the animation's quantity of images. Each page in fact displays a frame of a cliché sequence where the protagonist is the artist herself cutting an apple in job gloves. The logical connection is quite immediate: the access to culture allows the privileged to fed up. Landry intends to provoke a surprising relationship between objects and their usual meaning, thus breaking the usual link between our reading of an object and the memory of it. By recycling the meaning and the primary use of everyday objects, she hopes to upset and interrupt people's thoughts infiltrating her works into their minds thanks to the simple surprise effect. In this case she uses a dictionary as a timeline.
Valentina Culatti

Dynamic Abstraction, the beauty of randomness by Joshua Davis

Posted: July 31st, 2007, 2:00pm GMT by Valentina Culatti

Joshua Davis, Dynamic Abstraction, dynamic_abstraction.jpg

Joshua Davis said in a Wired interview: "Pollock showed that there was beauty in randomness". But if Pollock argued that the process of abstraction, not the end result, is what is dynamic (in his case a static painting), Joshua Davis’ work is never static: the painting is never the same. The compositions are beautifully software generated. 'Dynamic' and 'Abstraction' are in fact the two words that define the process he uses. Dynamic because of the programming property of outputting an endless array of compositions. Abstraction is defining multiple meanings in the process itself. As Joshua points out: "I was abstracting the act or process of being a designer and doing design, but also my personal visual aesthetic is rooted in abstraction". Dynamic Abstraction is a website that collects the ideas presented and the files produced in workshops Davis teaches around the world. Here the source files are released and the code explained. There are even instructions for ripping the .swf files for print. The print option includes a sort of contradiction. While Davis believes that his creativity is in the code behind his artwork, museums and collectors still emphasize the print. As John Maeda puts it, this might be due to the fact that no one wants to play the maintenance man or service technician role ad infinitum. Freezing in print the generative code visual representation is on a certain extent quite contradictory: the work wants to 'live' in the running machine. Dynamic Abstraction interacts with both the generative aesthetics and the designing processes. It shows how generative strategies can be used to create dynamic systems with aesthetic parameters. At the same time proves that a computational approach to design changes static objects into dynamic processes. Plus it has the collaborative approach of “software by creative for creatives” sharing the code as if ti was OpenSource. For a credible generative abstraction.
Valentina Culatti

The Sentiment Machine, machines with no sentiments

Posted: July 5th, 2007, 7:48pm GMT by Valentina Culatti

The Sentiment Machine, N. B. Aldrich, the_sentiment_machine.jpg

In 'The Sentiment Machine', a self-regulating sound installation by N. B. Aldrich, a dozen of speakers dangles from the ceiling, broadcasting audio clips from TV (talk show interviews, news briefs, and soap operas). Developed for the Soundmarks show at Art Interactive, this un-interactive artwork is based on a database of TV soundtracks and on a computer program that cross-edits and remixes audio clips on-the-fly mimicking conversational rhythms. The clips are randomly played back with the intent of proofing that "The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining..."(Neil Postman). Aldrich's work usually aims to break the chain of experience, refiguring the events' timeline or geography, creating new, juxtaposed experiential relationships. Here, the purpose is quite obvious: to show how machines designed to foster communication often end up obstructing sentiment. But is it still necessary to proof that computers can't provide us with meaning? Probably this assumption cannot be considered true anymore.
Valentina Culatti

Sound Jewelry, networking with sound

Posted: June 26th, 2007, 6:07am GMT by Valentina Culatti

Sound Jewlery, Takuya Yamauchi, Toru Iwatake, sound_jewlery.jpg

Merging music and mobile technology indicates promising future developments in a rapidly emerging field. The walkman, the mobile phone, and the iPod have already integrated music into users' social and geographic erratic locations and they have also reshaped users' urban landscape experience. With ad hoc networking, Internet connection, and context-awareness, mobile music technology offers countless new artistic, commercial and socio-cultural opportunities for creating, listening and sharing music. But which new forms of music interaction lie ahead in this context? Takuya Yamauchi, reasearcher at Keio University, with his professor Toru Iwatake, a well known electronic media composer, explores one of the possible paths with “Sound Jewlery”, a sound installation supported by spatial sensing system within a Personal Area Network (PAN). Presented as "An Interactive Musical Installation through Spatial Sensing", the installation consists of an interactive sound system where all the participants hold a sensor in their hand (also wearable as a necklace, according to the title). Each sensor/participant has a peculiar sound that changes according to distance. Data are computed in real time reflecting changes and in the end producing two layers of sound. In the foreground layer, 'melodies' are dynamically generated measuring the distances between participants. In the background layer, 'accompaniments' are generated using the distance data and support the ambient environment. So users are finally able to originally experience the environment feeling the others' presence differently, in a totally immersive music experience.
Valentina Culatti

Sonar 2007

Posted: June 14th, 2007, 10:41am GMT by Valentina Culatti

Tags: media

Sonar 2007, at its fourteenth edition, will be held in Barcelona this year from the 14th to the 16th of June. As usual the event is based on music and multimedia art, featuring bands such as Beastie Boys, Devo, Cornelius, Mogwai and Sunn o))) on the music side and including international artists like Luis Nieto, Zach Lieberman, Julien Maire, Phillip Worthington, and Mago Julien. While the music programme is eclectic, ranging from electronica to hip-hop in order to cover today's sound aesthetics, the multimedia events revolve around the idea of magic. Sonarmatica, the visual art section, takes inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Organised by well established curator Jose Luis de Vicente and cultural producer OscarAbril Ascaso, SonarMatica decided this year to focus on something different from the new concept of contemporary territory developed during last three edition (micro-nations in 2004, settings of the 21st century in 2005and the mobile project of 2006). In an era when people are more and more disenchanted with the potential of technology, the aim is to rediscover the magic involved in invention and science with references to the spectacular experience of magic shows and cinema experiments of the late nineteenth century. Apart from the exhibition which consist mainly of interactive installations, interesting tricks of magic and technology, under the title ‘Et Voila!’, are scheduled throughout the day. Completing the event a series of talks like Digital à la Carte, “a showcase of interactive menus where music, audio and new softwares collide to reshape the meaning of contemporary art”, featuring Mediateletipos.net, Niu and Alessandro Ludovico.
Valentina Culatti

Cut Chemist video scratching the audience.

Posted: June 7th, 2007, 10:54am GMT by Valentina Culatti

Tags: video

Cut Chemist, Lucas MacFadden, live at the El Rey, cut_chemist_video_scratch.jpg

Cut Chemist (aka Lucas MacFadden) is one of the most sophisticated solo turntablist. It's not by accident that his first full-length album, labeled Warner and including a Apple iPod nano advertisement recently featured theme, is called ‘Audience is listening’. Despite this apparently mainstream profile, he's also one of most famous and respected hip hop Djs. And if video scratching is becoming a sort of mandatory outcome for turntablist then Cut Chemist has found his own way to embody this trend. His live at the El Rey in Los Angeles was a 'first time ever' on-stage video scratch experiment involving video of the audience. During the encore Cut grabbed a digital camera, pointed to the audience, then proceeded to scratch the obtained live video footage. The video shots were manipulated two minutes after recording, perfectly in synch with the music rhythm. The audience is not barely listening anymore, appearing on stage in the form of images on the big screens behind the Vj, but it starts to act and behave like a protagonist. Is the Vj a director then? As far as the performance allows it, he probably then really is a director, being in control of time through the rewinding and fast-forwarding processes. However on the top of performance there's the improvisation element, and scratching live video almost in real time is an act of pure and spontaneous creativity.
Valentina Culatti

Blogged, the bubble inflated by blog traffic

Posted: June 6th, 2007, 7:15am GMT by Valentina Culatti

Is 'blog' the new ‘bubble’, ready to blow out? According to the metaphor used in ‘Blogged’, an interactive installation by Bill Shackelford the answer is: yes. This piece of 'web 2.0 art' consists of red balloon (a bit less than 2 meters large) blown up using traffic generated by linking blogs during a specific day. Like in a flash mob, Shackelford uses the efficiency of communicating information on the net, exploiting online communities to spread the word and so determining the event success. The installation was opened on Thursday May 31, 2007, live from The Ohio State University Art and Technology show 'Digescape'. During this 24 hours event Shackelford submitted his link for consideration to a number of blogs, hoping that they would have blogged it including a link back to the Blogged home page. Each visit logged in a MYSQL database, counted one second of compressor-generated air inflation into the balloon. Visitors joined and monitored the balloon status through a live video feed. Schakelford explains that he's concerned to understand the way things actually are, to determine what is valid and important: "The questions that I find most interesting deal with our place in the natural world and how it has changed over time with technology, invention and human ingenuity". 'Blogged' shows clearly how quickly artwork spread from blog to blog and, simultaneously, how fast the artwork is forgotten the day after. It’s instantaneous joy what the ranking causes. And however blog is where the debate on net art goes on.
Valentina Culatti