As soon as I saw Liners I thought of John Maeda’s work Oneline.com or the One Line Project (images above, left the web based interface, right some of the lines drawn by users); similar ideas but visualised differently. The work is unfortunately not online anymore but I remember contributing to this work around about 2000. According to John Maeda it never quite reached its ambitious goal:
I had proposed a project called the “One Line Project” that would take lines drawn by people and connect all of those lines end-to-end. I was inspired in part by “Hands Across America” and was wondering also if it were possible to realize a line that was as long as the perimeter of the Earth. I wrote a classic server-backended system with a funky JAVA-based client that collected lines from people all oer the world. In 1999 the contents of the line database were reported in an exhibition called “oneline.com,” which was the name of the server…It turns out that after the two years that oneline.com ran, I had only collected around 4 kilometers of line data (using 72 pixels = 1 inch) whereas my goal was 40,000 kilometers.
Below is a video of the interface to the database of user lines.
Liners (image above, videos below) is a performance by Zach lieberman and Theo Watson (with video contributions) using the openFrameworks C++ library for coding within artistic contexts. The performance is, as the artists admit, more of a self running software or “demo” (software demo scene) than performance which connects videos which illustrate the creation of a line continuously to explore ideas such as linearity, continuity, mark making all summed up in Paul Klee’s famous quote “taking a line for a walk”. As such, a demo, the performance is also available to download as a stand alone application from the website.
Now I quite like this (lines, cables, connecting etc.) because even though the artists question whether it is a true performance it does visualise a simple idea well and engages an audience to watch a lot more than many a ‘performance’ I have seen. That said, and this is where I am a little critical, what is the audio? How does the audio relate to the idea of creating a collaborative line? Is this the audio that was embedded in the video? Has it been explored / taken for a walk (perhaps the line of the wave) in some similar / analogous way?
Miroir Aux Silhouettes (Mirror Space) is a tele-presence work created by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) which allows its users to both observe themselves and communicate with others remotely in a non-verbal way. The work (the following is extracted from HeHe’s website and translated):
consists of a screen with a micro-camera centrally placed. The image on the screen is a double image of both local and remote user communicating : an ultrasonic sensor detects the distance of each user from the screen (mirror) which affects the resulting image in real time. The reflection of each active space is superimposed on the surface of the mirror and transforms the visual contact between two users.
Urballoon (urban balloon) by Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena is:
a balloon equipped with a projector and wireless connection to the web that enables people to submit content online and broadcast it in public spaces.
Tethered in pedestrian areas the balloon becomes a means of displaying dynamic information on a technological par with advertisements yet avoids the infrastructure that controls these and it’s accompanying costs / censorship / fixed location.
Our conventional understanding of the urban condition and the distinction between private and public space has been blurred by the evolution of technology…Urballoon is a probe being introduced into the flows of our current urbanity. This experimental architecture seeks to juxtapose emerging notions of mobility, P2P networking, syndication and blogging with traditional uses of social space, broadcasting and outdoor advertising.
A political underpinning of the project is established by the commitment to excercise free uncensored speech, empowering citizens to seize it as an urban broadcasting channel.
Address a work produced by Mouna Andraos and Sonali Sridhar as part of an Eyebeam R&D Fellowship and currently being exhibited at Dislocate 2007 in Japan. It is a GPS enabled pendant which networks / maps its wearer / user with a location of their choice.
When you first acquire the pendant, you select a place that you consider to be your anchor – where you were born, your home, or perhaps the place you long to be. Once the jewelry is initialized, every time you wear the piece it displays how many kilometers you are from that location, using a GPS component built into the pendant. As you take Address around the world with you, it serves as a personal connection to that place, making the world a little smaller or maybe a little bigger.
Information about the work is scattered about the web on various sites promoting exhibitions etc. none on the artists sites that I could find. The most detailed source of information I could find is online here (update: some more info here).
