In response to Artreviews community announcement of user content censorship on the 6th of September I have created an online petition to gauge interest in how the community (and generally artists who use the internet) feel about this. To read the full details of the announcement email and sign the petition point your browser to:
Please forward this announcement to lists, family, friends, colleagues etc.
A protest forum thread has also started on the Artreview site called AUTHORIZED NAKED where users are being encouraged to add images of their own art which includes nakedness. Ownership of the work and it’s rights is crucial authorising artists to be naked as personal choice and effectively giving Artreview more content to censor.
Urban Echo (to my knowledge nothing to do with Urban Echo) by LUSTlab is a work for urban environments which uses common place European publicity boards as windows to vistas of other urban environments. Urban inhabitants see in real time inhabitants from other urban spaces which may be in other cities, countries or even continents.
Urban Echo brings some of (the physicality of our interaction) back to real locations, connecting public places and therefore people, cities and cultures. It extends space beyond our once concrete parameters. Webcams allow you to see into another space, mirrors allow you to see your own space. Using billboard screens and cameras, Urban Echo creates a hybrid of these two things, allowing not only see into another city but maybe see yourself transported into another city or culture. A mid point between transparency and reflection, introspection and extrospection. Placed in public areas, the screens have a variety of modes. Sometimes they create a recursive loop allowing interaction between people in multiple cities and sometimes they are just a window to another place, that might intrigue a passer by. They can connect regardless of distance, folding locations together and rearranging our perspective of public space.
Pulse by Markus Kison is a real time visualisation of emotional expressions from posts in weblogs.
Weblog entries are compared to a list of emotions, which refers to Robert Plutchik’s seminal book Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion published in 1980. Plutchik describes eight basic human emotions in his book: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. He developed a diagram in which these eight emotions, together with their weakened and amplified counterparts, form a three dimensional cone, consisting of 24 areas. The cone is the basic form of pulse, which can enlarge in the 24 directions of the different emotions. Each time an emotion tag, or a synonym of it, is found in a recent blog entry, the shape-shifting object transforms itself in such a way that the new volume represents a piece of the overall current emotional condition of surfers on the Internet.
REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory published in Italy by DeriveApprodi and FakePress has just come out this month with some of my work in it. Yes any publication of my work is a good thing but I’m particularily proud of this one due to it being a connected/augmented publication which has used free/open culture software right through its creation, publication and how the end user interacts/reads the publication.
The publication has been published with the byline:
The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment.
however is itself a reinvention of what a ‘book’ such as this can be and do these days through combinations of innovative new/print media, tags of various types, augmented reality and pervasive networks. Building this publication has from the start been a collaborative process between the editorial team and contributors (artists, writers etc.) who could, through a wordpress website and a plugin designed specifically by Fakepress (more info on that here) for this style of next generation collborative publishing, constantly add to/amend/correct and ultimately compile the book as a print ready pdf for publication from the site. Now, post-publication, the website is part (the online part) of the finished book but the site has also been the ‘site’ of collaborative networking to make this very forward thinking publication happen.
The print version contains Fiducial Markers and QR Codes. The Fiducial Markers can be used to view extra augmented reality content on the website via a computer with a webcam (click into the section Augmented Reality). The iPhone/iPad app can be downloaded and used to access the QR Codes. These connect to online multimedia including extra texts, music, videos, photos and maps of the book’s contents/authors.
The image above shows me using the augmented reality section of the site with one of the Fiducial Markers featuring my work (I don’t have a copy of the book yet so I had to improvise with a marker on my iPhone).
Above a screenshot of the iPad app and below a Flickr slideshow of the iPad app in use at the preview launch of the publication at the Share Festival, in Turin, Italy.
An innovative book of course needs an innovative foreword and who better than Bruce Sterling to write it:
Right now, the behaviors and activities commemorated in this book are bizarre. Very. They are so peculiar that they are inherently difficult to describe, because they come from the outer reaches of an emergent network-culture…Basically, they resemble the activities of time travellers. Time travellers don’t actually exist. However, they can be hypothesized. They can be faked. Time travellers would be people among us who come from a different historical epoch. By their nature, they have a different set of attitudes and expectations from our own. Time travellers would be people behaving differently, and also effortlessly. They are not being perverse, arcane or difficult. The time travellers have just as much custom and logic as we do. Their behavior would make perfect sense some day. Only, not just yet.
The 2010 Odyssey Performance Art Festival ran officially from the 31/07/10 until last Tuesday the 10/08/10. This has however been extended with a few more events today (12/08/10) including Ceci n est pas une voiture by Ze Moo at 2 PM SLT (10pm GMT), the performance takes place here, and on Saturday (14/08/10) at 3 PM SLT (11pm GMT) with Flesh Meat – With Coastal Avatars by Alan Dojoji/Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin (exact location on Odyssey to be announced).
The last ten days have seen some really interesting performances including the following.
Night Gardening (images above) by lizsolo Mathilde/Liz Solo and Fau Ferdinand/Yael Gilks was a mixed reality performance happening in Second Life (first image) and at Liz’s east coast backyard (second image) where several other artists joined her to contribute. I quite liked the two windowed online approach to this which required spectators to use the Second Life viewer and have livestream.com open at the same time to see the ‘real’ garden. Lots to be explored in this type of combination but I left wanting to ask the artists about it.
Piano Drop (image above) by Man Michinaga/Patrick Lichty was without a doubt the conceptual performance of the festival. Stripped right down to just the essential, pianos, the thumping noise and the resulting chaos amount the in world audience, the performance consisted of numerous pianos falling from the sky over Odyssey.
Leap of Doom! (image above) by DanCoyote Antonelli was hilariously enjoyable. The audience arrived to an Evil Knievel style event, a bus jump on motorbikes, but rather than simply watch the artist do it were themselves invited to jump in a provided motorbike or any vehicle of their choice. This of course played irreverently with the idea of a daredevil stunt and it emptyness when you risk no physical harm in a virtual space.
A Space to Chat (images above) by Selavy Oh was the work (so far) which I was the most impressed by. The work was interactive in a very clever way which took advantage of how audiences talk at performance events in Second Life. The artist introduced the event explaining it lasted as long as we, the audience, participated, started the performance and then watched it unfold. As the audience chatted wondering what was going to happen we noticed that constructed letters were being created overhead in a series of archs. Zooming out from this the letters were clearly legible as parts of the discussion that was taking place so this was a performance which only occurred a) if there was an audience and b) if the audience participated – risky but spectacularly rewarding. At the end of the performance the letters floated away and this allowed the audience the possibility to hop on and fly above Odyssey.
This is a QR Code, it's a printed link to this webpage on Network Research!
Using a web-enabled mobile phone with built-in camera and QR Code reader software you can photograph this printed page to display the original webpage. For more information on how to do this please see the short article here:
