Another device for distant non-verbal interaction (similar to Feel Me) is Kissenger by Dr. Hooman Samani. Created under a the research umbrella Lovotics (Love and Robotics) at Keio-NUS CUTE Center, a collaborative artificial intelligence lab between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Keio University of Japan, the Kissenger are a pair of devices you use with your loved one to transfer a kiss over distance. Kissenger:

provides a physical interface enabling kiss communication for several applications facilitating intimate human tele-presence with the real and virtual worlds…With the aid of digital communication media and advanced robotic technology, the system takes the form of an artificial mouth that provides the convincing properties of the real kiss.

The system propose and enables three modes of possible kiss interaction:

1. Human to Human tele-kiss through the device: bridges the physical gap between two intimately connected individuals. Kissenger plays the mediating role in the kiss interaction by imitating and recreating the lip movement of both users in real time using two digitally connected artificial lips.
2. Human to Robot kiss: enabling an intimate relationship with a robot, such technology provides a new facility for closer and more realistic interactions between humans and robots. In this scenario, one set of artificial lips is integrated in a humanoid robot.
3. Human to Virtual character physical/virtual kiss: provides a link between the virtual and real worlds. Here, humans can kiss virtual characters while playing games and receive physical kisses from their favorite virtual characters. Further, Kissenger can be integrated into modern communication devices to facilitate the interactive communication between natural and technologically mediated environments and enhance human tele-presence.

This is an interesting concept but is essentially drifting into the area of teledildonics. It’s not unique as I’ve seen devices similar to these before from the very serious to artistic parodies however I’m not sure what the thinking is behind making it look like a cute pig.

Originally seen on Valentina Tanni’s weblog.

Feel Me by Marco Triverio is an iPhone app that attempts to connect people through a form of digitised touch and natural intuitive gestures. Mobile phones prioritise language and sound, what if we could touch people through these technologies?

Based on the finding for which communications with a special person are not about content going back and forth but rather about perceiving the presence of the other person on the other side, Feel Me opens a real-time interactive channel.

When two people are both looking at the conversation they are having, touches on the screen of one side are shown on the other side as small dots. Touching the same spot triggers a small reaction, such as a vibration or a sound, acknowledging that both parts are there at the same time. Feel Me creates a playful link with the person on the other side, opening a channel for a non-verbal and interactive connection.

The concept videos for the app are worth a look, Transmissions, reverberations, connections and movements.

Originally seen on the Creative Applications Network.

The Descriptive Camera by Matthew Richardson at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program is another camera to add to the growing list of networked enabled cameras I’ve been posting about (see the Lens-less Camera and Buttons). Using it is the same as other cameras, simply point and click, however the output produced is very different. Instead of producing a photographic representation of the space in front of the lens, the camera produces (via a mechanical turk) a description of the scene printed to paper. The rationale for the work is as follows:

Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they’re doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don’t yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities

The camera utilises some similar technologies to the cameras posted about previously however particular to this is the human element, an amusing use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service:

The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete. The developer sets the guidelines for each task and designs the interface for the worker to submit their results. The developer also sets the price they’re willing to pay for the successful completion of each task. An approval and reputation system ensures that workers are incented to deliver acceptable results.

An example image converted to text description output is shown below.

Originally seen on Today and Tomorrow.

Networked performance has now got the major arts institutions seal of approval with the series of online performances initiated by the Tate titled BMW Tate Live at Tate Modern. The first of these was on the 22nd of March and seemed to go largely unnoticed in many networked / new media art circles however the second Pablo Bronstein’s Constantinople Kaleidoscope (images above and below) broadcast tonight received a lot more publicity through a variety of mailing lists.

Tonight’s performance was pretty good, well worth watching. It consisted of a clever use of several mirrors choreographed movement by performers to reveal all points of view of the space the performance was occuring within. The mirrors allowed action from different parts of the space to be composited together within the broadcast screen space, sometimes creating optical effects and sometimes simply dividing the screen into parts similar to video split screen effects. What was particularly interesting for me was how the mirrors revealed the camera capturing the event, the result being the distance audience was effectively pulled into the space of the event as we were identified as having that initial point of view. In addition what would nomally have been off stage in a performance like this, prompters providing directions for sequences of movements, were also clearly visible and audible. All three spaces of performance, support and audience colapsing together. The simplicity of the performances execution enabled the clear concept of spaces, point of view and vision to be understood in the work.

What was unclear and not revealed through the question and answer session with the artist after the performance was how the subject matter of the performance, a heavily costumed sequence of dance like movements, related to those concepts. References such as 1920′s Russian performances were briefly mentioned (such as those developed by the Constructivists) however ideas of how optics were explored in those and perhaps related to this performance was unfortunately not developed any further during the Q&A.

If you missed the live event the full performance and Q&A is already online on YouTube (embedded above). Below is Jerome Bell’s performance of Shirtology, the first performance at BMW Tate Live.

Last day in Paris and the second network related work I’ve seen here (there probably was more to see but I’ve been ill for a few days) was Pangée by the collective MU today at the Musée du Quai Branly. Normally an unlikely location as it’s the museum of ethnography there has been a week of conferences, exhibitions and events around the subject of new media and how it can be used to present the museums collection. Pangée, a sound installation in the gardin of the museum essentially serves this purpose and reuses sounds of the instruments (and their musicians) in the museums collection. The following is translated from the works text:

In the gardin of the museum, a sonic territory in movement retraces the aesthetic of musical instruments of four continents: Africa, Asia, America, Oceania based on recordings from the museums media library…During the week “Digital Museum”, visitors are invited to explore the gardin and the musical collection of the Musée du Quai Branly provided with a headset and audio captors. The movement of the visitors, their position and direction activates the sonic sources of the work.

The sound installation closes tomorrow the 22nd. More details about it at the museum here.

I’m in Paris at the moment trying to see as many exhibitions and conferences as possible. The best work I’ve seen all week is Videodrones (image above), an audio-visual installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at the Collége des Bernardins.

The work uses live video feeds from five cameras placed in the street outside the gallery to generate constant drone audio within the space. The imagery is unmodfied however projections of the videos are placed out of order making it difficult to follow movement in the external space and in a sense abstracting it across all five projections. Movment / changes in light controls the audio, passers-by become unknowing participants in the work. The installation closes today the 15th of April so if you’re in Paris go see it without delay.

I wasn’t aware that I knew of this artist however Les Oiseaux de Céleste (video below) shown at the Barbican in 2010 does look very familiar.

Many thanks to Frédérique Santune for taking me to see this installation.

PCMs

Years ago I designed a PCM, this was around 1970 maybe. PCM stands for Parameter Control Module; the idea was to create a unit which could connect and control other similar units. PCMs were digital but they didn’t need to be. There were any number of inputs and outputs. The idea was that anything could be connected to anything else. In other words, there were standardized simple protocols in terms of voltage and bandwidth; every-thing functioned like blood in the veins of some untoward ganglion. In order to enter the PCM array, translation was necessary from an outside world into the protocols; this was the job of an input interface which could be tailored for particular situations. The interface was divided into two sections: the outer section was tailored to the world, and the inner, to the emission of protocols. So the input interface was generous in its acceptance. At the other end of the array, there was a similar output interface, divided into two sections; the inner section was tailored to the protocols, sending the signal current to the outer section, which was tailored to the world, and generous. For example, an audio input interface might take microphone signals and standardize them, sending them to the array; an audio output interface might take the array protocols and send them simultaneously to audio amplifiers and a lighting board. What made the array of greater interest, of course, is that input and output signals could also be applied directly to any particular PCM, bypassing the standard interfaces. The array as a whole, as a ganglion, would be in effect a ganglion open to the world at any place or space, both for input and output. One might think of the PCMs as formal neurons. Internally, the components of the PCMs might be smoothly voltage-control-led, with the possibility of directly inputting different equations; one might begin with standard smooth trigonometric functions and replace them with discontinuities of all sorts, including chaotic behavior. I believe to this day that designing the PCMs would have been a relatively trivial matter. Although the project remained stillborn, the concept behind it remains of interest to me. I’ve begun to think of the arrays, inputs and outputs, as an affair in which anything might modify or influence any-thing, including, reflexively, itself. The arrays in fact might be virtual and one thinks only of empty, undefined, space or air, a distant model of the real and external world, where such things happen. Thus anything here and now has the potential for affecting anything else, and anything might seem to turn around and talk directly with you, listening, at the same time, to your innermost thoughts, whatever you choose to reveal: here are the input and output interfaces. What goes on in such virtual arrays is only the ideality of the world itself, the ability to take-for-granted that there are always relatively stable domains for communication or dwelling, for work or discourse, and so forth. Any dynamic action, any action which changes in time, might be considered to be modeled thus; any static action might be one which leaves the virtual array quiescent. The size and power of the virtual PCMs are also of interest; as they decrease, one might argue that the granularity of the world is increasingly differentiated, just as their increase transforms the granularity into rougher constructs handled by integration. In the middle lies everyday life, where processing of this sort is kept to a minimum. I can imagine in this fashion thinking of the world as a vast complex of fundamental operations on the ordering of everyday life, just as Aristotelian logic and its laws of distribution appear to deal well with the uncanny lack of transience of everyday objects. The edges of such modeling, however, are always limit-points which a different kind of roughness appears, for example quantum phenomena or color vision or even corrosion. To some extent, these rough processes, including unknown one, can be imagined within the virtual array which would have additional signals, alarm signals, that anomalies were working their way into or out of the array; there could be, in fact, virtual interfaces utterly open to the real, whose sole purpose would be the conversion of such anomalies. One process would be that of the name, beginning with the proper name, and working towards untoward generalizations; another would be that of radical smoothing, and a third might be the cessation of array activity altogether. I think of this as burrowing or death, depending on the degree of destruction or rearrangement encountered. Likewise, there would be inverse processes, those of birth or emerging, in which partial identity transformations would remain and perhaps even be backwards-traceable, backwards-compatible in terms of the protocols. The whole, virtual and real, is a form of metaphor ready to be implemented. I can only conclude that the same is already in the world, and perhaps always already in the world, it is there and here, it is operational or quiescent as you like. And such would be the world and its dynamics; it is only a question of looking over your shoulder, back into the space you have just left behind, forward into the space your are about to enter. If you have the time, of course, without catastrophe or disruption.

- Alan in Omaha

It’s worth noting how cutting edge the PCM discussed was through comparison with similar contempory ideas such as Gordon Pask’s Universal Constructor.

The full text can alternatively be read on the Nettime-l mailing list archive here.

Selfsurfing by Jonas Lund is a Google Chrome extension for networked performance. The extension:

creates a self-surfing, auto-updating clone of my browser in real time. My browser has a server extension installed which transmits the current state of my browser to a intermediate server, which holds all relevant information. This information is then picked up by Selfsurfing extension.

Originally seen on Trianulationblog.

For related work (extensions for Firefox) see Disorganiser and Shiftspace.

5-stars’ identity (image above, video below) is an interactive installation which uses mobile phones as ready made objects to create a connected work. It is the first of two works where mobiles play an important part in the work. The works purpose, research led, is to:

express the notion of transmediation, examine the properties of dynamic complex system in association with readymade object. The new aesthetic possibilities is explored by having the inter-relationship of technology, media and objects, leading to a hybridization in sensorial transformation.

The project starts with scanning the various Internet websites of news and blog, those content that is related to Chinese’s Identity will be translated into different language versions and send to the mobile device. The five mobile phones perform with different behaviors and this is subject to political and environmental events. It constructs a continuous and dynamic autonomous system.

Jsut Code (image above, video below), a collaborative work with Helen Pritchard, is an interactive installation using QR Code, mobile phones and Twitter. It is the first of three technically related work which uses live information from Twitter as its basis. The work prompts users to explore and browse online texts written by a combination of human and non-human writers.

Statements on life and death are gathered in real-time, from the social media site twitter and displayed as geometric images. Viewers encounter a continuously updating feed as the machine translates language to image and twitter message to QR code, each image “carries” a language of pattern and meaning, which is activated by the reader…We see code as a call to action, a call for execution. The playful activity of reading in ‘jsut code’ is a collaborative performance between human, machine and code. The installation explores a continuously evolving and mutating text which moves beyond and between language.

Net.Portrait (image above, video below), a collaboration with Sam Norgard also uses live information from Twitter as its basis. Net.Portrait is:

a live and network-based installation combined with fine-art painting, kinetic sculpture and collective network data. While you are watching the piece, the artwork is also dynamically watching you by having different emotive eyes painted on a collection of wall mounted cocktail umbrellas. The live happenings of happy and sad smiley faces from Twitter are being transformed from a text, static and virtual medium to a kinetic and physical sculpture. Every bit of spinning action amplifies the network behavior, resulting in a continuous and flowing net portrait.

Datascape (image above, video below) is an interactive installation / performance which is created through the latest text and emoticons from Twitter.

The Lens-Less Camera by Akihiko Taniguchi is a simple web app for the iPhone designed to ‘take’ a picture without using the built in camera. The following text is from the artists site in Japanese and translated by an online translator:

Gets the current position by GPS that is built into the iPhone, and remove the photo from google streetview of the surroundings. Do not use the camera, (roughly) you take a picture of where you are. The streetview is an error if there is no data or was close to the countryside.

The work, called a study by the artist, is reminiscent of Buttons by Sascha Pohflepp. While Buttons however is a custom built device in the shape of a compact camera with the lens noticeably missing, the Lens-Less Camera considers a device already in the pockets of many users and how that can become a means of seeing the current location in a different time.