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The Electronic Man by Art is Open Source (Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico) is an iPhone / iPad app as distributed global performance which refers to Marshal McLuhans concept of the electronic man.
Stickers with QRCodes and the image of the Electronic Man have been disseminated in cities all over the world. People from all nationalities have agreed to participate to the planetary performance by scanning the codes using their smartphones and contributing their emotional states to the connective body that took shape through their contributions…whenever anyone scans one of the stickers, everyone else’s phone vibrates. A vibration, a physical stimulation right in the pockets of people, stimulating their bodies as a new synthetic sense instantly reacting to a digital interaction happening anywhere in the world. A suggestive example of how technologies can interconnect people from all cultures, nationalities and backgrounds. As of today, whenever anyone scans one of the QRCodes of the performance, around 40 thousand people’s smartphones vibrate, across all continents.
The Electronic Man is currently showing at the Robots and Avatars exhibition at Fact in Liverpool until 27/05/12.
LIMINAL Reality part of a larger research project called Building w/immaterials:
an association of architects, programmers and curators doing independent research into digital media, visual arts and built environments : spatial inquiry for the invention of new structural typologies.
was a group exhibition in 2008 of artists working with ‘virtual’ worlds, notably Second Life. The exhibition:
opened a window between two worlds: technically between a physical world and a virtual world, and metaphorically between an art world (a specific milieu of digital art in Paris) and the artists immersive environment (on the Sizigia Island, Second Life). Its Mixed Reality infrastructure permitted the creation of multiple points of view for both simultaneous (albeit asynchronous) interaction in each world, through their representation as polyvalent, spatially compatible, creative environments. By obfuscating the distance and differences between them using this infrastructure, the project became a “a device based on a triple duality of context (real/virtual), process (immersion/emergence), manufacturing (active/passive). This autopoietic system is both a reading machine, a window, and a decoding grid, between the real and virtual worlds. Using this to reveal its unconscious, the project is also a protocol to reconstitute data, a generator of network connections and a cultural accelerator.”
This is yet another work as visual interface for connecting two or more places separated in time and / or space. This time it is the types of space, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, which are considered seperate in order for the work to function as a window between them. There are noticable similarities with The Gate however in this instance the metaphor of window (used by the artists themselves) seems to not be quite enough as it is not just a framed area to peer through but rather a whole space that is stepped into and merged with Second Life. Below are some more images of the exhibition in the form of a Prezi presentation.
Metaverse papers #3 (part of ISEA2011) is a talk about Building W/immaterials new project INFRA|VERGENCE_WIP. For details see the video below.
Over the last few months I’ve gradually trickled out a few posts on works which are audio-visual interfaces for connecting two or more places separated in time and / or space, e.g. Hole in Space and Urban Echo. These have stuck in my head, not because of how conceptually sophisticated they are but because of how simple they are and how people can very intuitively use them to communicate. There are many works over the duration of this weblog which could be grouped into this same category (e.g. here) and part of the reason for this is that they are have a direct line back to the very first telematic works (e.g. here). The following few posts will add to this collection of works that I know of.
The Tunnel Under the Atlantic by Maurice Benayoun is a televirtual art installation which established a link between Montreal and Paris in 1995.
The Tunnel enabled hundreds of people from both sides to meet. From each side, a two-meter-diameter tube, made us think of a linear crossing of our planet, as if it were dug under the ground, shouting up in the middle of the Contemporary Art Museum in Montreal on one side, and in the lower floor of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The route that lies between the two spots is no simulation of the ocean underground, it is a block of symbolic matter in which the geological strata leave the place to iconographic strata. They are layers of pictures taken in the history of the two cultures that everybody can reveal each time they dig. The collective exploration uncovers fragments of rare or familiar pictures, which are as may opportunities to wake up the collective memory of the participants. Helping us to loitering and talking to people, these remains transform everybody’s digging route into a unique experience, into a personal assemblage made up of sounds and pictures amidst a three dimensional space architectured through their moves. While digging, the visitors can talk with their partners across the Atlantic Ocean. The sounds of their voices are anchored in space and they enable everyone to find out the directions where to meet the other. I takes six days to built and pave the symbolic space before the de visu meeting of the two-continent diggers…The televirtual event -i.e. a remote connection of people in an interactive symbolic space- is filmed with four virtual cameras. What they get is automatically mixed and edited and that takes into account each participant speech. They can discover, in the event of a counter-shot, their own live pictures floating within the space they have just dug up. They will not be able to see each other before the two sides of the tunnel meet. The exchange, essentially made up of sounds so far, then becomes visual. When the meeting is achieved, other persons can at last take the same way or create new ones as if they were in a collective quest of a shared memory.
The text above is an edited text taken from e artists statement on his website. It’s well worth visiting the site to read the full text.
Thanks for the link to Frédérique Santune.
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.
