The Lens-Less Camera by Akihiko Taniguchi is a simple web app for the iPhone designed to ‘take’ a picture without using the built in camera. The following text is from the artists site in Japanese and translated by an online translator:

Gets the current position by GPS that is built into the iPhone, and remove the photo from google streetview of the surroundings. Do not use the camera, (roughly) you take a picture of where you are. The streetview is an error if there is no data or was close to the countryside.

The work, called a study by the artist, is reminiscent of Buttons by Sascha Pohflepp. While Buttons however is a custom built device in the shape of a compact camera with the lens noticeably missing, the Lens-Less Camera considers a device already in the pockets of many users and how that can become a means of seeing the current location in a different time.

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.

Some screenshots of the Make-shift performance last Friday. Many thanks to Frédérique Santune for taking these.

Tomorrow there is an opportunity to see a live performance of Make-shift, “a networked performance about connectivity and consequences” by Helen Varley Jamieson and Paula Crutchlow.

The performance takes place simultaneously in two separate houses that are connected through a specially designed online interface. Paula and Helen (one in each house) stage their part of the work with the help of local audience members. Scripted and visually poetic performance is interspersed with webcam videography, avatar puppetry and audience interaction in the format of a performative salon. Everything that happens in the houses is streamed to online audiences who can also contribute text chat visible on the interface to everyone throughout the event.

Below is a screenshot of the performance interface mentioned. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to attend the performance but hopefully I can get somebody to take a few screenshots so I’ll post again on this.

The performance takes place tomorrow 15th March 2012, 2pm UK / 7.30pm India (find your local time here). To access the interface to the performance visit the works site and click on the link ‘LIVE LINK HERE’ in the right of the page.

Originally seen on the Spectre mailing list.

The last post on visual interfaces for the moment (until I find other works) is Ouroboros by Alvaro Cassinelli which was posted as a comment on the Urban Echo post. Ouroboros is:

a shared virtual space, a world-scale tunnel built by chaining video-conferencing cameras and projectors in a closed loop around the world. This virtual space comes into contact with the Earth at several entry points or “Gates” situated in different cities, each standing in a location particularly representative of the place (public squares, markets, private homes, etc). Each Gate is simply composed of a (portable?) projection screen, a video camera a little far away, and an “interstitial” public space in between. The camera captures the whole view – that is, the passersby and the standing projection screen blended in the background – and the resulting live stream is sent over the Internet to be projected onto a similar structure – in a different city, in a different country, in a different continent. The process repeats itself until the loop is completed, as the final video is projected back onto the first screen – only to restart a tour in an eternal circulation. In its (almost) instantaneous travel around the world, the video stream will gather “souvenirs” of the visited places. People from all around the world will appear on the screen as standing in the middle of a tunnel whose walls are composed by an infinite recursion of (Matryoshka-like) nested video windows; one can recognize the actual location of the shooting in each of these rectangular frames.

The work has similarities to Urban Echo and The Tunnel under the Atlantic however is, in my opinion, far more sophisticated in concept and ambitious in its goal. It employs a combination of video capture, delay and feedback to great effect. Still in concept form, the artist is currently developing this into a finished piece so hopefully there will be a post here at some point in the future with the finished work.