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.

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.