Hallucinations (and the real) (image above, video below) by JD Walsh is audio-visual work which composes itself as a result of search engine query results based on key phrases from a text taken from Albert Hoffman’s recollections of early experiments with LSD. A database cinema of sorts.

The result is a dual-channel projection of the software’s output - the text on one screen and the image on the other. Sound is projected into the room. Because of the random elements in the software, the perception of the images are always changing. Each image seems to take on a new meaning depending on which text is next to it and which sound accompanies it.

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.

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.

Kool-Aid Man in Second Life.com by Jon Rafman is surreal and absolutely mesmerising. The work which is (although it seems never clarified) an ongoing performance consisting of Rafman’s alterego Kool-Aid Man exploring Second Life and seeking out kitsch. There is a good write up Kool-Aid Man in Second Life.com on Not Possible in Real Life with an interesting trail of comments. Rafmans states in an interview there:

I see Kool-Aid Man as a self-conscious professional web surfer “breaking through walls” into various Second Life communities and subcultures. He never fully fits in, but he empathizes with whatever he passes. Like Baudelaire’s Flaneur, wandering the arcades of Fin-du-Siecle Paris, Kool-Aid Man keeps a cool and curious eye, strolling through the virtual world in search for the banal sublime. Kool-Aid Man’s motto is best summed up by a line at the beginning of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil: “I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.’

Below is a extract of video documentation of the performance however the (almost) 22 minutes or 130mb of performance on the artists site is well worth watching.

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.