This is a QR Code, it's a printed link to this webpage on Network Research!
Using a web-enabled mobile phone with built-in camera and QR Code reader software you can photograph this printed page to display the original webpage. For more information on how to do this please see the short article here:
A colleague of mine lent me the August/October 2009 issue of Contemporary Music Review, (Volume 28 Issue 4 & 5 2009) as its theme is Network Performance. I’ve not managed to wade through it yet as almost everything in there looks interesting but a few things have caught my eye in particular; the article by by Jérôme Joy and Peter Sinclair, Networked Music & Soundart Timeline (NMSAT): A Panoramic View of Practices and Techniques Related to Sound Transmission and Distance Listening and the article by Chris Chafe, Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical/Musical Medium, the initial stages of which he presented at Subtle Technologies: Networks last year.
Below is the full list of articles. The journal is impossible to get hold of in print by the way (and the pdf format is more expensive than the annual subscription) unless your subscribed to it, know somebody who is or happen to have a local library that stocks it so I’ve included links to a few online pdf versions from alternative sources where possible.
Networked Music & Soundart Timeline (NMSAT): A Panoramic View of Practices and Techniques Related to Sound Transmission and Distance Listening by Jérôme Joy; Peter Sinclair
Long Distance Sitting #2: Untitled Sit for Multiple Virtual Bodies and You by Michelle Nagai
Now …and then? commissioned for Deep Listening Institute’s “Telemergence”– New works for the telematic medium by Kristin Norderval
Networked Music & Soundart Timeline (NMSAT) Excerpts of Part One: Ancient and Modern History, Anticipatory Literature, and Technical Developments References by Jérôme Joy
Decode: Digital Design Sensations is currently running at the V&A in London until April 11th. I’ve been waiting to see this in person, as one of the themes is Network, before I wrote anything about it here. I finally got around to seeing the exhibition yesterday so here goes.
First off let me state that the exhibition is clearly not aimed at somebody like myself. Onedotzero, known for their events / publications in the world of motion graphics / visual communications, curate the event with a certain awkwardness for me. It feels like a new media art exhibition or major event with some big international artists such as Golan Levin, Daniel Rozin, Ryoji Ikeda and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer but then there are a handful of relative unknowns and a few designers and agencies who are well respected in various design disciplines. This (and again I state for me) creates an odd combination of work which all sits under three loosely connected themes of Code, Interactivity and Network. The justification for the themes in the catalog is as follows:
Decode looks at three current themes within digital design: Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke and tailored, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool; Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence; Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.
Reading the catalog and short descriptions of the works as I went around I noticed that emphasis seemed to be placed on the artist, their research, work, where they have exhibited and sometimes the software employed in the works creation with no real depth about the works concept. While design features in the exhibitions title the use of the words art / design and artists / designers are used interchangeably.
The interview of Golan Levin for the exhibition does help to ’save’ some aspects of the exhibition. Golan draws a chronology from Cybernetic Serendipity to Decode explaining that computer artists, what we now generally call new media artists, are a dying breed due to the use of computers across art, design and media:
In the last few years, boosted by the creation of new programming tools made for artists, such as Processing and Flash, this number has grown to several hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, previous artforms such as film, video, animation, sculpture and even painting have slowly incorporated the computer as an essential tool. It is — almost — no longer meaningful to refer to oneself as a computer artist; we are all computer artists now. The artists in this exhibition at the V&A are perhaps in the last generation of people who could call ourselves this, before the term becomes meaningless. Our works are concerned, very specifically, with the social implications of computing technologies (technoculturalism) and the aesthetic potential of generative software (techoformalism). Soon, hopefully, we will all just be ‘artists’ again.
So who is this exhibition aimed at and is it any good? It’s aimed at primarily those who are new to new media and if you attend on a week day you’ll notice that this largely constitutes schools, colleges and students. For this audience the exhibition works very well as a first step in this area. Accessing the works is easy for young and old. Selection of interactive works has prioritised simple interactions which give highly visual, immediately reactive (excluding Venetian Mirror) and easily interpreted responses. I’ll be taking a bus of students to this in March and fell confident they’ll get a lot out of it.
Below are some of my photos of works in the exhibition.
Everyone Forever (image above) by Universal Everything. I quite liked this work, primarily as it had an element of the work of the Vasulkas in it, but I would have liked to have seen it presented on a bigger screen or projected.
Data.scan (image above) by Ryoji Ikeda which premiered last September at Surrey Art Gallery in Canada.
Dandelion (image above) by Sennep, a London interactive webdesign studio, was fun to play with but as a friend mentioned to me before the exhibition this seemed slightly derivative of some other more know works.
Weave Mirror (image above) by Daniel Rozin.
Audience (image above) by Chris O’Shea.
Mirror Mirror (image above) by Jason Bruges. This was one of a few works outside the exhibition hall which could be seen for free and in fact was the only work outdoors braving the English weather in the John Madejski Garden.
Videogrid (image above) by Ross Phillips was a work I shouldn’t have liked but proved very popular with those the exhibition was designed for, in this instance school kids. It was quite interesting to watch them battle for control of the camera and their 5 seconds of looped video on screen.
Below are excerpt videos from some of he works in the exhibition.
an urban, hand-held, augmented-reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art.
Using shape and motion detection the software can be taught to recognise individual advertisements. These adverts can then, viewed through the software, become a virtual ‘canvas’ which an artist can exhibit images or video. Visual documentation of the intervention can be immediately uploaded to on line galleries such as Flickr and YouTube.
While offering itself as a new platform for public art, The Artvertiser seeks to highlight the contradiction of Public Space in the context of what can and cannot be written on the surface of our cities. Neither graffiti or Fine Art, The Artvertiser exploits the inevitable redistribution of these surfaces in media such as digital film and photography, providing an alternative memory of the city. By leveraging the internet as a redistribution mechanism, The Artvertiser supposes that an urban site dense with proprietary imagery can be re-purposed as an exhibition space for art and archived as such in turn. Similarly, on-site exhibitions can be held whereby pedestrians are invited to use the looking device to view an exhibition on the buildings around them. Finally, non-live video can also be used. This enables artists to substitute advertisements in film and video with alternative content.
N Building (images above and video below) by Teradadesign and Qosmo is a QR Code augmented building facade near Tachikawa station in Japan which is accessed through a custom iPhone application.
By reading the QR Code with your mobile device you will be taken to a site which includes up to date shop information. In this manner we envision a cityscape unhindered by ubiquitous signage and also an improvement to the quality and accuracy of the information itself…If a QR Code is static, what could we do with a dynamic device like the iPhone? Our proposed vision of the future is one where the facade of the building disappears, showing those inside who want to be seen. As you press on the characters their comments made on online appear in speech bubbles. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons. Rather than broadly tagging, we display information specific to the building in a manner in which the virtual (iPhone) serves to enhance the physical (N Building). Our goal is to provide an incentive to visit the space and a virtual connection to space without necessarily being present.
Culmination is a month-Long project by Kristen Althoff, Mary Ayling, Katie Hogan, Whitney Larson, & Kelly Tucker in collaboration with Caro d’Offay & Laura Gilmore running at the Fill in the Blank Gallery in Chicago, America. Its creation, its process, which here is as much the work as whatever it will produce, is being broadcast live throughout the month of January on Justin.tv and will culminate on January 30th.
We are building something. We don’t know what it is. Each week we will be given a new set of instructions on how to build this mystery object. We’re dusting off our rulers, rolling up our sleeves, and interacting with our space as we never have before. The process will become the exhibit as we flex our ability to interpret instructions and collaborate on a single vision.
The work is part of some fascinating ongoing conceptual research by Caro d’Offay called Textaport which the artist defines as follows.
Textaport is a publicly generated TELEPORTING game in which a descriptive text is made available for participants. This text has all information necessary to interpret a mystery item back into reality from any location out of free materials (those found in the participants environemnt [sic]). Working to manifest a mysterious form or painting back into its original form, Textaport offers participants and observers the experience of perceiving something familiar as unfamiliar, (as if one had amnesia) to overcome possible ideological limitations that may be cramping our views.
As you would expect the research has nods to Exquisite Corpse and the Cutup where authorship becomes a shared collaborative process. However in this latest instance of the research the use of networked forms potentially distributes that authorship globally as Art by Telephone attempted to in 1968; ironically (or perhaps not) conceived by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Below is a live feed of the work in progress in the gallery (keep in mind after 30/01/10 this will no longer be live).
