Vibrator by Prokop Bartonicek is another work I stumbled across via the Cycling74 Projects page a little over a month ago. The work:

is connected to the world’s most frequented porn video server. Vibrator pulses and shines based on the growth and decline of the top video’s ratings (views per second). A small button on the end of object [sic] can be pressed and held. This function will activate the previous vibration and light settings for comparison. The vibrator is controlled by a personal computer via wireless technology Bluetooth, and is powered with a chargeable battery supply.

It is a result of an investigation on:

“beauty” in networks [sic] of networks - the internet. I looked at how the widest audience today is seeing beauty in digital space. The beauty of feelings, ideas, curves of bodies. Global, anonymous and mass interest in pornography on the network led me to concentrate in my work on the pleasure and beauty for one person…The anonymous interest of the mass of users from the entire world is thus concentrated into an object for one.

The work bears a striking resemblance to FuckU-FuckMe, a net.art product with its own website which (to my knowledge) has never actually been available to buy.

I wrote a post in May about the TOTem (Tales Of Things and Electronic Memory) project RememberMe which was taking place as part of Future Everything in Manchester. Coincidentally they came to our faculty last week and gave a seminar about their research to date and some hints at its future direction.

There websites seem to have grown and come together well over the last month. This was the site I initially linked to which seems to be about the research in general while these two, Tales of the City and Tales of Things are two ongoing projects being developed. It was the second of these which was part of Future Everything and which was mainly used at the seminar.

Angelina Karpovich from Brunel University outlined the research while we got to interact with some of the ‘Things’ tagged as part of the Tales of Things project, notably the teddy bear in the image above.

Using an iPhone app (images above) we were able to scan the bears tag and read a text/tale about it. Angelina was keen to point out that the tagging technology involved was not new, the purpose was to explore it in ways that had really not been explored in great depth. What was a little disappointing was the inability for me to feed into the tale we were reading in the iPhone app but the project makes no such claim to do this and within the context it’s presented, as a method of story telling, works well.

It should be noted that the seminar was presented as part of a series at The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling and I have been told a video of the seminar will be posted to the website soon.

Wind-up Birds by HC Gilje are a flock of mechanical woodpeckers which seem to communicate through sound but in fact use xbee wireless networks. Originally created in 2008 the work is currently showing at Festpillene i Bergen 2010 in Norway until Wednesday the 9th of June 2010.

There is a Flickr set of the Wind-up Birds here and an explanation of how it all works here.

Related work (set in forests, using trees etc.) includes Untitled (Singing Tree) by Peter Coffin.

Future Everything has just finished in Manchester, England. I didn’t manage to get there as I’m buried in marking at the moment but there were quite a few installations, performannces etc. worth visiting. RememberMe (image above, video below) by the TOTem (Tales Of Things and Electronic Memory) project caught my eye in particular. At the Oxfam shop, near Contact Theatre:

a research assistant will be based in the shop and recording brief stories about the donated objects into a microphone: where they acquired it, the memories attached and any associated stories. This audio clip will be linked to an RFID tag and QR code. During FutureEeverything all tagged items will then join the shop’s stock. Customers, including conference delegates, will be invited to use our bespoke RFID readers, or their own smart phone to browse artifacts, displayed amongst the many thousands of other objects. Once triggered, RememberMe labeled objects, will replay the story through speakers located in the shop, evoking ghosts of the past. Tagged objects will be in the public domain for purchase by other members of the community. Our iPhone and Android apps will allow them to access the story for years to come.

Here a write up about the work on Wired.

Last December Esquire published an augmented reality issue (image above). Can’t say I’m an avid reader or fan of Esquire and yes we are wandering quite a lot off the topic of networked art however the idea of this issue intrigued me enough to find a copy. It only appeared in America so I’ve been trawling eBay for the last month trying to find a copy while the application you use with it can simply be downloaded from the Esquire site.

The number of markers used in the magazine is disappointingly low, five for content and one for a Lexus advertisement, but this is hardly surprising, it is a magazine after all. The first marker (three images above) triggers an introduction by Robert Downey Jr. What’s interesting here is not just that the application is detecting the marker but when tilted along two different axis it’s also detecting its orientation and the same marker triggers different content.

Almost the same technique is used in the style section (two images above) of the magazine, the four orientations of the marker here trigger animations of the same model wearing different clothes for different seasons, an interactive catwalk. The design of this section is quite good, lots of animation and the video of yourself holding up the magazine becomes the backdrop to the whole scene.

The last interesting section (I’ve skipped one as it simply plays an audio file) is the Lexus advert (two images above) which takes a completely different approach / design to using the marker. Instead of seeing a scene pop up from the magazine you see the video of yourself modified through a number of filters and overlaid graphics (think Terminator vision!). This machine vision is supposed to be how the Lexus can ’see’ and detect cars in front in order to reduce speed / apply automatic brakes etc.

Overall there are a couple of interesting techniques in the magazine. Its last page has a list of non computer things which are already ‘augmented’ versions of something and compared to the content is almost a profound way of finishing with the statement, Augmented Reality, it’s newness is really just in its method of presentation.

Below is editor David Granger demoing the interactive magazine.