Usually work produced as part of a short workshop tends to be quite a routine testing of process and technique and not a fully fledged work/performance however intensive workshops can provide that opportunity to explore very directed ideas which may not have been possible for the artist due to knowledge or access to materials. Nathalie Fougeras’ wearable object/performance, Breast, What is the Breast to Choose (image above, video below) is without a doubt a fully fledged work with considerable reflection.

Created at Hybrid Scrapyard, part of the iMAL New Brave World series of workshops about the Internet of things, hybrid world and networking & locative media, the work is a technical exploration of Arduino and Xbee but conceptually explores ideas of feminine sexuality, intimacy and gratification in relation to what is most predominantly a domain (as previously media forms have been) seen through masculine eyes, the internet. The wearable device allows the artist, through self gratification, to trigger visual internet searches related to the part of the body she is touching, the breast, mimicking, parodying and subverting the male act of self-gratification and the internets role in the contemporary variant of that.

I’m not suggesting the work is related to it but the work reminds me of Rebecca Horn’s Cornucopia, Seance for Two Breasts.

The new Vimeo Toys caught my eye a few days ago on vimeo.com, they are visualisations of what is going on within their network. It’s interesting to see how these big players in the web are starting to open their systems to the possibilities of mashups / blended services etc.

Video-matic (images above of the installation and below of the interface, video below) is an interactive vj-ing installation for a new building in Sint-Oedenrode in the Netherlands by Olga Mink which is accessible on site through a touchscreen and online via its website.

The projection is visible from both inside and outside the building. Interactivity is a crucial part of this installation, and is accomplished via the Internet or a touch-screen located in the main hall. The ’spectator’ is invited to create a VJ-mix that is uploaded to the server in Sint Oedenrode. An automated video database ensures an ongoing supply of images, which makes this installation a dynamic piece of work evolving over time, creating a real synergy between image, light and the environment.

Another RSS project (see Time Slip, Semaclock, Monument & Whose Life is it Anyway?, Blogbot and Blog Bot Platform, Twittgenerator & Net.art.box and “Quote me!”) Missed Connections (image above, video below) by Cristobal Mendoza is a work which considers the elements of language often omitted or excluded by networked computers and how important they are to meaning. It is:

a 2-Channel internet-aware software piece that continuously fetches the latest posts in the “missed connections” section of Craigslist.org. Each post is presented one at a time, and is filtered by looking for so-called stopwords. Computer Scientists define stopwords as those words that do not convey the meaning of a message. In essence, they are considered signal noise in the stream of potential information. Each post is presented simultaneously in two ways: one just with stopwords, the other with non-stopwords, and in both cases the filtered words are displayed as dashed lines, akin to the way words are presented in the game Hangman. Thus, both posts present the same “graphical” structure, but have the potential for very different readings.