Exquisite Clock (image above of the website) by Joao Henrique Wilbert at FABRICA is currently on show at Decode in London. The work is collectively created by ‘users’ who are invited:

to collect and upload images of numbers that can be found in different contexts around them – objects, surfaces, landscapes, cables… anything that has a resemblance to a number. The exquisite clock has an online database of numbers – an exquisite database – at its core. This supplies the website and interconnected physical platforms. The online database works like a feeder that provides data to different instances of clocks in the form of the website, and installations, mobile applications, designed products and urban screens.

The work makes direct reference to Exquisite Corpse which has been referenced and used time and time again in new media related works. The use of photographs of “anything that has a resemblance to a number” I suspect references the well known art / design school project that everyone (certainly everyone who’s attended an art / design degree in England) seems to have done at some stage, it was called Letters in the Landscape when I did it, where you took well framed, composed or close up photos of your surrounding environment to looks like letters or numbers.

Above is the physical clock designed for the 48th Furniture Fair in Milano between 22-27 April 2009 at Palazzo Borrromeo. Didn’t think much of the clock designed for the Decode exhibition itself and it was hung too high to see properly but this variant has striking similarities to some of the work I’ve posted about before that have a visible use of cables e.g. Less Than Three, Cablogramma etc.

I just stumbled across Untitled (Singing Tree) by Peter Coffin in Vitamin 3-D; New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation. I’ve been thinking about the potential to connect trees to their environment (or perhaps each other) recently, not sure how this will take form i.e. primarily visual or an actual site specific work.

Descriptions I’ve found of Untitled (Singing Tree) are a bit thin (can’t locate video or audio anywhere which is a shame), Vitamin 3-D describes the work as using:

scientific instruments to give a tree a singing voice, encouraging audiences to consider the tree’s conscious potential and capacity to communicate - as well as its musical ability.

While online I just seem to find technical descriptions:

Pin electrodes (sensors), signal amplifier, computer with custom software, amplifier, horn speakers. (with David Robert)

Not networked art but related to the last post, Urban Cursor, is the WindFire Cursor Kite. Why am I posted this? Well it’s not an obsession with kites but the implication of a giant cursor hovering in the sky of a world within / below a world. If your a sci-fi fan like me think The Thirteenth Floor, if your religious God’s OS?

Urban Cursor (image above) by Sebastian Campion is a GPS enabled Apple cursor as public furniture designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space. The work was first shown at the Festival Ingràvid Figueres, Catalunya/Spain in September 2009.

The object…was placed on a square in Figueres…Here, people could touch it, move it around and sit on it as an alternative to the benches. Despite being removed from its normal screen based environment, the cursor was still in touch with the digital world. Via an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted its geographic coordinates to a website. At the website, the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps thereby documenting the cursor’s movements in the physical world and making it possible for participants to see how they collectively helped move the object around. During the festival participants could also upload photos of the cursor at the website. The photos were automatically placed on the map by matching the photos’ digital time stamp with the GPS coordinates.

The image below shows the movements of the Urban Cursor on the 23rd of September.

Igor Stromajer, known for his guerrilla performance work with Brane Zorman as the Ballettikka Internettikka, Internet Ballet (image above), will present his work next Thursday (18/02/2010) at the Thursday Club, Goldsmiths. Ballettikka Internettikka is:

is a series of tactical art projects which began in 2001 with the exploration of Internet ballet. It explores wireless Internet ballet performances combined with guerrilla tactics and mobile live Internet broadcasting strategies.

Since 2001 twenty different Ballettikka Internettikka actions have been performed at various locations across the world, all broadcast online.

Ballettikka Internettikka uses impossible connections to develop the possible strategies of resistance and disobedience. The project participates in the already existing protocols of communication, yet without being servile to these protocols, it opens up links between emotionality and technology, production and ethics, desire and organization, imagination and institution. The distribution of politics and intimacy without any reason and purpose, with the use of limited, defined, and controlled protocols is a dystopia and an unsubmissive revolt to the world of capital, which can be disarmed only by the use of its own tactics.

Above is the latest performance by Ballettikka Internettikka in 2009, Nipponnikka, on the Japanese island Minami Torishima, 23 November 2009.

The event is being held at the Ben Pimlott lecture theatre, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, London. Location details can be found here.

Originally seen on the Sonic Arts Network (Sanlist) Mailing List.

Sjansmachine (flirtmachine) (image above, video below) by Rolf van Gelder, Carmin Karasic and Olga Mink is an interactive photo installation which uses face recognition software to match users.

Like many social networking tools on the internet these days, Sjansmachine enables you to connect with other people. It plays with the idea that the virtual world is replacing our social life and therefore wants people to connect in the real world again…The custom software (written in Processing, including face detection and motion detection functionality) takes a picture of the face in the booth. The photo is immediately visible on the projections (one face per square). If the screens are filled with photos the oldest photo will be replaced by a new one. The images are constantly animated and every now and then two of the faces will be ‘matched’ by the software. During M.A.T.C.H mode the machine doesn’t upload any pictures, but displays its match in front of the live audience. When Sjansmachine is back in “chance-mode” you can step into the photobooth again.

Originally seen on the Network Research Vimeo Group.

Aristotles Office (image above, video below) by Tom Keene and Kypros Kyprianou is a set of networked / connected office objects including an answer machine, bin, fan, filing cabinets, lamp, plant, telephone and watercooler ready for the internet of things. The works aim is:

to investigate potential relationships between everyday objects using simple universal rules. How will the office plant respond to the advances of the fan? Will the water-cooler shy away from the flashing office light? Throughout an increasingly wired and wireless world, objects are being embedded with communicating technologies, and are increasingly drawn into networked behavior where previously they were independent. Objects are no longer passive receivers of one-sided instruction. The machines talk amongst themselves but who knows what they are saying and how our relationships with them evolve as they slowly begin to talk.

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
• Network Musics: Play, Engagement and the Democratization of Performance
  by David Kim-Boyle
• Dramaturgy as a Model for Geographically Displaced Collaborations: Views from Within and Views from Without
  by Franziska Schroeder
• Dramaturgy in the Network
  by Pedro Rebelo
• On the Evolution of Music Notation in Network Music Environments
  by Georg Hajdu; Nick Didkovsky
• Not Being There
  by Miller Puckette
• Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical/Musical Medium
  by Chris Chafe
• The Telematic Music System: Affordances for a New Instrument to Shape the Music of Tomorrow
  by Jonas Braasch
• Networked Music: Low and High Tech
  by Pauline Oliveros
• Here Right Now
  by Monique Buzzarté
• 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

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.

The Artvertiser (image above, video below) by Julian Oliver, Clara Boj, Diego Diaz and Damian Stewart is:

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.

Originally seen on the Spectre mailing list.