Exquisite Clock (image above of the website) by Joao Henrique Wilbert at FABRICA is currently on show at Decode in London. The work is collectively created by ‘users’ who are invited:

to collect and upload images of numbers that can be found in different contexts around them – objects, surfaces, landscapes, cables… anything that has a resemblance to a number. The exquisite clock has an online database of numbers – an exquisite database – at its core. This supplies the website and interconnected physical platforms. The online database works like a feeder that provides data to different instances of clocks in the form of the website, and installations, mobile applications, designed products and urban screens.

The work makes direct reference to Exquisite Corpse which has been referenced and used time and time again in new media related works. The use of photographs of “anything that has a resemblance to a number” I suspect references the well known art / design school project that everyone (certainly everyone who’s attended an art / design degree in England) seems to have done at some stage, it was called Letters in the Landscape when I did it, where you took well framed, composed or close up photos of your surrounding environment to looks like letters or numbers.

Above is the physical clock designed for the 48th Furniture Fair in Milano between 22-27 April 2009 at Palazzo Borrromeo. Didn’t think much of the clock designed for the Decode exhibition itself and it was hung too high to see properly but this variant has striking similarities to some of the work I’ve posted about before that have a visible use of cables e.g. Less Than Three, Cablogramma etc.

Fuji, Spaces and Other Places (image above and below) by Nurit Bar-Shai is the latest Turbulence commission. The work is a durational piece which uses a live feed of Mount Fuji in Japan. Images are regularly archived to a server and then used to mix in real time.

FUJI examines the authenticity of networked, spatiotemporal experiences of distant nature, sacred sites, and sacred icons. The overwhelming immediacy and delirious variety of live broadcasts available via the Internet, as well as the current incitement to communicate with distant but real subjects, alter our experience of space which is invariably mediated through images. In FUJI, the gap between the real place and its representation no longer exists.

The work has some similarities to the works of Wolfgang Staehle, the most infamous being Untitled (images above) which recorded the World Trade Center throughout September 11th in 2001. Mount Fuji is an icon in Japanese culture, as is the World Trade Center in modern American culture, and has been depicted extensively in Japanese art (see here). This depiction allows a dispersed audience to view the mount in a remixed/recombined way, it becomes a combination of all previous views in all conditions and all seasons.

For related work (but in portraiture) see Perpetual Portrait.

Sensitive Rose is the second work (see also ROSAdosVENTOS.mobi) by Martha Gabriel which attempts to create a sort of net.art / mobile type art work. It is:

an interactive compass rose formed by mobile tags that map people’s desires. The interactions happen via cell phone and the results can be seen in a large screen projection (or computer large screen). The work intention is to “navigate” in the desires of the people, in a secret way, through a ciphered poetics of tags, which can not be deciphered with naked eyes.

While feeling awkward (why interact with a screen through a mobile phone when clicking through using a mouse is more intuitive and quicker) in its use, the work is one of the few attempts I’ve seen by an artist to leverage this technology in a non gaming context.

Originally seen on 2d Code.

SkypeMe! (image above) by Kim Asendorf and Philipp Teister is one of those works which is documented in print/video format, targeted at a gallery exhibition but uses a condition of the network, the tried and tested virtual identity game, as it’s premise. I’m mainly posting it due to it’s visual similarity to Hello process! and quite a lot of other new media/network related works that are using print as a means of embodying physicality (e.g. Murmur Study) and/or creating documentation which has permanence (flux or non-permanence being a network condition).

The work, also process based, is described by the artists as follows:

We created a character of a twenty years old girl for each of us: Silke and Sonja. Then we brought them to Skype. The idea behind that was to collect all incomming data to evaluate it at the end. We never opened the mic or the cam, we just used the keyboard to get in touch with all the strangers. We put the results together to a room-installation, consisting of a wall full of chatlogs, two monitors with the recorded videos and to pictures of ourself disguises as Silke and Sonja, which should show how easy it is to be someone else on the Internet. Basically we can say each guy who called us wanted to fuck with us.

Very sad news, I just saw on Networked Performance that David Crawford has passed away. David was probably most known for his work Stop Motion Studies (image above).