A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (image above) by Caleb Larsen is a work which perpetually auctions itself on eBay accumulating (or not) value as art markets and the perceived value of the artists work rises.

This sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

To view the current auction of the work (image above) visit its eBay page here.

The work will be showing at the Lighthouse in Brighton from the 28 August - 5 September 2010 as part of the digital design conference, dConstruct.

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.

There is a good video of this work online here.

There, Now, a mixed reality installation about space/place by Garrett Lynch opens tomorrow the 11th of August at 1pm SLT (9pm GMT) and runs until the 23rd of August at Push in Second Life. To attend, point your browser to the Push sim here (http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Push/197/58/24) click on the link to launch the Second Life viewer and you will arrive at the installation.

This is the last work to be shown at Push so come and show your support for all the fantastic work that has happened at this sim.

This started out as two separate posts on separate works which were going to be posted in sequence however when a third work came through a mailing list that had similar ideas underpinning it I decided to group the three together into one long post. What follows is a few ideas I’ve been thinking about myself recently (albeit in a completely different context) and how these works explore essentially the same.

I Am Sitting in a Video Room (images above) by Patrick Liddell is by way of reference to Alvin Luciers work I Am Sitting in a Room an exploration of the form and space of YouTube as a means, site and context for the creation of performance work (and of course it’s video documentation). The work investigates:

the ‘photocopy effect’, where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying.

The performance of was stretched out over the exact period of a year from May 27th, 2009 to May 27th, 2010 and each upload and download was performed manually. The videos embedded below are the first, the original, and the 1000th version. All 1000 videos can be viewed on Patricks YouTube page although disappointingly the account is not dedicated to this project alone.

Netrooms: The Long Feedback (image above) is an participative network audio performance by Pedro Rebelo and distant global collaborators contributing to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the internet.

The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations which receive a common sound source. Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.

Always a sucker for a diagram, the image below details the technical set up for Netrooms: The Long Feedback.

Infinite Stream Loop (image below), part of the Laps series by Art of Failure (I’ve previously posted on AV Permutations) is a very recent work which explores the effects of an audio stream traveling through the world wide web since the 1st of July 2010.

A sound is streamed by a server and goes through several locations on the web. Captured at the end of a loop, the sound is played and then resent out through the web with no additional modification. We have modified the streaming tools to keep all the distortions of the original material that occurred during the process (artefacts, transmission errors, missing data…). To emphasize the changes caused by the network, the sound used at startup is deliberately very simple - a digital silence. Then it evolves endlessly.

The above works (particularly the sound works) bear some similarity to the research of Chris Chafe from Stanford University concerning sound, distance and delay. Chris presented his research in progress at Subtle Technologies in 2009 and subsequently published a paper in Contemporary Music Review, Volume 28 Issue 4 & 5 (the same issue as a paper by Pedro Rebelo) entitled Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical/Musical Medium.

Why do I group these works together? Each is different in form and presentation, i.e. one video work, two audio; one documentation of an extended performance, one a live performance and the last a generative work etc. yet the three works use what would normally be considered negative effects of the network in creative ways. Delay and degradation of quality as a result of coping becomes an exploitable feature of the network. Copied forms can be combined, sequenced, superimposed, layered to create a new composition yet the coping process, what should in a digital environment be flawless often contains “artefacts, transmission errors, missing data….”. The technically undesirable becomes desirable to the artist enabling a unique aesthetic.

Copying, originality and reproduction, layering and what is ‘real’ have been something I’ve been working on for the last few months within Second Life. My premise is somewhat different from the above works i.e. reproductive degradation as an aesthetic, instead I’ve been thinking and working on how digital forms simulate ‘real’ forms (and the issues therein i.e. levels of precision), how copies relate back to originals, what the differences are and how to collapse and merge these. These are still on going thoughts…

I Am Sitting in a Video Room originally seen on Mashable.com, Netrooms: The Long Feedback originally seen on Pedro Rebelo’s weblog and Infinite Stream Loop originally seen on the Spectre mailing list.

The following is the SymbioticA workshop which took place at the University of Latvia’s Faculty of Biology last Saturday (19/06/10) as part of the Transbiotics Festival in Riga.

The workshop was run by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from SymbioticA and ran from 10am to 6pm. During the day we had an introduction to the history of tissue engineering, a lecture to give us context as to what tissue engineering is, what it does and currently where it is in it’s development and then the workshop proper started.

Before lunch Oron explained the different types of sterile environments, indicated by levels one, two and three (image above). Then groups of us built a series of DIY ’sterile’ hoods (image below) to perform the work tissue engineering work in, at least this was the intention. I don’t think we were terribly successful but this was largely a demonstration in practice as to the procedure that needs to be taken when working with biological samples.

We had liver and bone to extract samples from (image above), luckily there seemed to be no vegetarians present, which were then used to employ a number of basic tissue culturing techniques, passaging / subcloning etc. In the image below you can see what was essentially step two once the sample was extracted, adding nutrients to the sample and then, the image below that, a number of techniques such as separation, cleaning etc. (this time in a real sterile environment) to get the final sample of cells which were viewed under a microscope (last image).

All of this was new to me and while I’m never anxious about learning new things I’ve never had much of an interest in biology so that type of learning curve is all the more difficult. It’s interesting however when it’s framed within an art context it suddenly becomes quite interesting and potentially a ‘medium’ worth exploring.

The workshop has certainly fueled my interest but also underlined my ignorance in this area so for the moment I’m going to think about how / if I can take this forward in any way. Consideration of materials and equipment really needs to be priority number one for any artist to engage with this ‘medium’ as the equipment used in the workshop makes a DIY approach for any serious or sophisticated work all but impossible.