I’ve posted about the ground breaking work of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz before and mentioned their work Hole in Space in a post elsewhere and how it has inspired other more recent works. Somebody has now posted historic video documentation of the work to YouTube which is well worth seeing.

The images above show the original work and a more recent reconceptualisation of it. More information about the work available here.

Originally seen on Turbulence.

Light Painting WiFi by Timo Arno of Touch is a four-metre long measuring rod with 80 points of light to reveal:

the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs.

Of all the uses of light-painting (far too over used as a technique) this is the most creative I’ve seen to date.

For related work see Drawing invisible wireless network fields and Immaterials: the ghost in the field.

Infinite Glitch is a online automated system that generates a live audio-visual stream from media files freely available on the web.

Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch is a stream-of-conciousness representation of this overwhelming flood of media, its fractured and degraded sounds and images reflecting how little we as an audience are able to retain from this daily barrage…Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of popular media hosting sites, torn apart, and recombined using collage and glitch techniques to create an organic, chaotic flood of sensory input.

A discussion at an art gallery recently about utilitarian ceramics (specifically teapots) and their relevance in a gallery (just to be clear I defended their right to be there) coincided with seeing this online.

Google Vase is a vase conceived and created as a result of the most popular/relevant images retrieved from Google image search. The process of creating the work is described as follows:

A vase created by the work with the term itself. Researched pictures were collected and analized. The rotation outlines of 8 vases were arranged around a centre and connected by minimal surfaces in a 3D construction software. Afterwards the textures were set on the surfaces and the vase was printed by a 3D-Printer.

Reinventing a ‘traditional’ form through new media technologies, Google Vase is certainly relevant to any contemporary art gallery.

Originally seen at Triangulation Blog.

My little piece of privacy by Niklas Roy is a ‘smart’ curtain:

The curtain is smaller than the window, but an additional surveillance camera and an old laptop provide it with intelligence: The computer sees the pedestrians and locates them. With a motor attached, it positions the curtain exactly where the pedestrians are…The whole setup works really well. But in the end, it doesn’t protect my privacy at all. It seems that the existence of my little curtain is leading itself ad absurdum, simply by doing its job very well. My moving curtain attracts the looks of people which usually would never care about my window. It is even the star of the street, now!

Originally seen on pietmondrian.com.

Luminous Earth Grid is an array of 1,680 energy-efficient fluorescent lamps installed across ten acres of undulating landscape, fifty miles north of San Francisco in America. The artist states:

I see the project as a poetic statement on the potential harmony between technology and nature…The glowing green grid can be seen as an icon of computer imaging technology, which in this ‘real life,’ incarnation, gently melds with the flowing shape of a lovely landscape…a dream-like vision of symbiotic unity.

Hard to believe that this stunning work is eighteen years old. This isn’t the typical type of work I’d post about here but it’s very clear and justified the connection the artist makes with technology. The mesh created reminds us of the simple underlying structures used in 3D applications. Here, mapped onto a real landscape, we are reminded how no landscape is natural anymore and how technology often influences their shape.

Originally seen on I like this art.

Ivy Noise by Daniela Di Maro (DDM) and Roberto Pugliese is an interactive sound installation consisting of 87 speakers, 2 microphones, 16 MP3 players, notebooks and MaxMSP software.

Electric wires climb the white walls, following not a casual pattern, but a defined one, after an accurate study of the growth of the ivy. Black lines design organic forms; brances form which unusual flowers blossom: conical speakers of various dimentions. A previously defined soundscape is given forth by some of these peculiar buds which acts as a background to the acoustic improvisation, determined instead by the human presence. Every noise is being captured by a series of microphones and random samples are taken in real time by a custom designed software, and rendered back through the speakers. Voices, steps, movements, nourish the installation. The totally synthetic sound, generated by this technological parasite creates however the illusion of being in a natural environment. A psychoacoustic journey, in which nothing stands still; everything is being transformed in an unstoppable and impromptu process of metamorphism. An experience which through multisensory stimulation creates a relation between man and technology, hypothesizing not only a peaceful coexistence of the two elements, but even an eco-sustainable hybridization, reinforced by the use of recycled materials.

I’m particularly interested in the visual presentation of this work which is similar to many works I’ve posted about in the past e.g. works which visually are a rhizomic or mesh based network. It’s worth having a look at the artists MySpace site as they have several other works that use cables or have drawings which are similarly rhizomic/mesh like.

Thanks to Frédérique Santune for the link.

SYN by Artereazione.

SYN is a synchronization request packet on the Internet. SYN means “together” in ancient greek. SYN is the synapsis. Through the synapses a neuron exchanges informations with other neurons within a neural network managed by the brain. SYN installation is a “social brain” activated by new feeds posted on thematic blogs or web community pages.

Users can send impulses to the installation by leaving comments on the projects page.

Opening next Thursday in New York is a show titled Notes on a New Nature where I’ll be exhibiting Netscapes (image above) for the first time. This all happened very quickly about a week after the work was completed and if I had set out to target an exhibition or festival with Netscapes I couldn’t have matched the work more appropriately than Nicholas, the curator, did.

The exhibition is not a new media exhibition per se, it’s a post-new media exhibition – new media is no longer a defining characteristic but artists and works are informed by it. The exhibition bridges the transition from analogue to digital media and uses a very traditional subject, the landscape, to understand how the digital changes/reconfigures that subject. All the artists works participating in the show do this in different ways, for my part it is how a network (collapsing time and space) has a knock on effect on what a landscape can be, how networks allow us to see other places in combination from a distance.

Above: Depth Mapping (The Mountain) by Kate Steciw

The exhibition forms part of the ongoing research of the curator Nicholas O’Brien. It:

critically examines and compares the relationships that contemporary artists working with digital media have to practices started in Modernist Painting – specifically the pursuit of capturing the virtual qualities of what constitutes a landscape. How does an artist depict a space faithfully enough to show its affect on a subject? Can art capture the space between the viewer and the horizon, and where does that horizon reside now that we can digitally circumnavigate the globe? Can the digital reconcile the physical?

One way that we know how to understand the natural is through the domestic spaces of our daily lives. The interior shelter allows for reflection on what is “outside,” and as a result positions civilization away from the natural. However, as various digital and virtual landscape permeate the domestic space, our notion of what constitutes the natural has become more complicated than a simple inside/outside dichotomy. We use all forms of digital and analog technologies to simulate the natural world daily, and artists in this show point to how these tools affect the ways in which the “realness” of the natural is no longer as simple as locating it outside your window.

This newfound complication highlights the central argument of Notes on a New Nature: our varied notion of what constitutes the natural is shaped by technology, which is a narrative that can be traced all the way back to the advent of agriculture and the dawn of civilization. Through employment of various digital approaches, artists in this exhibition reference this long-standing problem we face when attempting to represent landscape and acknowledge the ways in which digital technology has forever changed our understanding of nature.

Above: Antlers Wifi by Rick Silva

Participating artists include: Duncan Alexander, Mark Beasley, Chris Collins, Petra Cortright, Theo Darst, Marjolijn Dijkman, Paul Flannery, Joe Hamilton (aka Hypergeography), Jan Robert Leegte, Sara Ludy, Garrett Lynch, Michael Ray-Vaughn, Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Nicolas Sassoon, Rick Silva, Pascual Sisto, Kate Steciw, Wes W Wilson, and Krist Wood.

319 Scholes Brooklyn, NY
November 10 – November 20, 2011
Opening: November 10, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Gallery hours: Friday and Saturday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm and by appointment

Above: Hypergeography by Joe Hamilton

Above: Strange Situation by Chris Collins

Quintetto by Quiet Ensemble is an installation which employs the:

casual movement of objects or living creatures used as input for the production of sounds. The basic concept is to reveal what we call “invisible concerts” of everyday life. The vertical movements of the 5 fishes in the aquarius is captured by a videocamera, that translates (through a computer software) their movements in digital sound signals.

Originally seen at Colossal.