Over the next month I’ll be involved in quite a few things Second Life related. The first of these is happening next Wednesday (04/08/10) at 9:30pm GMT (1:30pm Second Life Time) as part of the 2010 Odyssey Performance Art Festival running from today (31/07/10) until the 10/08/10.

The performance (image above) will take place at Odyssey Art and Performance Simu. Documentation of previous performances are online here.

For full details of the schedule for the complete festival, see the Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance weblog.

What follows is a chronology of telephony performances by Robert Whitman.

In 1972 Whitman produced his first telephone/radio piece, NEWS. Participants were provided with coins and sent to particular pay phones in Manhattan. Each person moved from phone to phone, reporting about what they saw and the resulting audio was mixed by Whitman and broadcast live on WBAI radio.

Over the next two years, NEWS was also performed in Houston, Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other cities.

Cell Phone Performance (image above) by Robert Whitman performed in 2002, Leeds, England is an updated performance of his 1972 performance, News. This time performers were provided with cell phones to call in reports of their location and what they observed. More than simply a re-enactment of the performance with updated technology, use of cell phones allowed participants to explore their location more freely and to report while on the go.

Local Report (images above), the third and most recent series of performances occurred in 2005. Once again participants employed cell phones but this time to shoot video clips which were sent on to the artist to be mixed both visually and aurally.

There is what looks like a very interesting exhibition opening tomorrow night at a selection of venues across the University of California Digital Arts Research Network (UC DARnet). Scalable Relations, curated by Christiane Paul (bio here), aims to bring together:

works that explore digital media’s capability of representing a growing amount of data in constantly evolving relations. Addressing a range of issues, the projects in Scalable Relations illustrate the complexities and shifting contexts of today’s information society…The format of the exhibition itself, in its distribution across multiple venues, mirrors the relational theme of the exhibition and the inherent connectivity of the digital medium.

Division of the works across venues breaks down as follows:

The six works featured at the Beall Center explore patterns, complexity, and generative algorithmic process with regard to nature, organic processes, and urban development, as well as representations of online communication and sharing. UCSD’s gallery@CalIT2 exhibits three pieces that use the framework of computer gaming for exploring social and belief systems and expand the usually confined simulated world of a game to the ‘real world.’…The grouping of works at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA examines issues surrounding science, ethics, public health and social conditions…The satellite exhibition at UCSB addresses complex behaviors and transmodalities, featuring three pieces that, respectively, investigate sensing and perception, the geometries of the invisible connections in our lives and our environment, and the multi-scale, multi-modal experience of revealing internal structures within genomics data.

The following is a selection of works (old and new) which primarily focus on the relationship between people (users of the artworks) and their environments.

Conversation Map v.2.0 (images above) by Warren Sack is quite an old piece from 2000 which has once more become quite relevant in light of the surge of interest in social networks. The work maps the evolution and development of discussions by producing:

an interactive diagram of hundreds or thousands of email messages sent to online public discussions. The diagram includes three parts: a social network visualizing who is exchanging messages with whom; a list of discussion themes, a menu of topics being discussed; and, a semantic network that shows which topics are discussed in similar terms; or, in other words, the synonyms or metaphors that are emerging from the discussion.

Cell Tango (image above) by George Legrady and Angus Forbes, follows in the tradition of much of Legrady’s work in its use of the database as form of expression and the artists desire to create archives representational of the users that interact and contribute in a variety of different ways (i.e. Pockets Full of Memories). In this work images are contributed by users from their camera enabled mobile phones.

The received images are organized based on cellphones’ area codes, carriers, time and date of transmission, and participants’ contributed categories and descriptive tags…The received images are visualized within a virtual 3D architectural structure and organized based on a number of metadata criteria such as cellphones numbers (original contract locations), carriers, time and date of transmission, and participants’ contributed categories and descriptive tags.

The installation strives to answer some of the following questions:

Will cellphone technology transform how we create/use images produced “on the fly”? In what ways do online visual databanks such as Flickr recontextualize the images we create and share? Can such online images be used creatively as components in artistic works that explore the construction of visual narratives through the juxtaposition of sequenced images? What may be relevant implementation of voice annotation to add metadata to images?

CO2 Playground (image above) installation by Greg Niemeyer:

is a site of exploration for visitors to observe changes in air quality due to human and plant activity. It allows visitors to affect air quality measurements through their activity and is monitored via the website of its parent project, Black Cloud. The activities involve active exercise, still contemplation, human presence and absence (due to gallery opening hours). The slides facilitate exercise (as allowable by venue regulations) and encourage a form of activity—to climb up slowly and slide down fast—that expresses the slow process of Oxygen generation and the fast process of burning Oxygen. The plant activities involve CO2 absorption and Oxygen production through photosynthesis, which is regulated by the quantity of available light. The proportion of plants and slides address how many plants are required to sustain human life. The project website shows continuous live feeds of data from the air quality sensors, which have been placed in several of the exhibition venues.

ATLAS in silico (image above, video below) by Ruth West is an interactive virtual reality installation which visualises the Global Ocean Survey.

Participants may simply observe, or individuals can step forward and use their own movements to animate and maneuver the colorful 3D images and audio…onscreen images and multichannel audio are created by a unique process that combines genetic information from microorganisms collected by the Global Ocean Survey with environmental and social data from the geographical locations in which the organisms were found…By interacting with the luminous and colorful 3D graphics and a responsive data-driven sonic microworld, participants explore relationships within data that spans from the molecular to the global.

Walleye by Simon Penny and Tom Jennings is an interactive light installation employing photo-sensors and an array of incandescent bulbs:

The project consists of an array of photo-sensors and an array of incandescent bulbs, spaced on a 10″ grid on walls facing each other. Each photosensor drives one lamp directly opposite of it and the lowering of light to the sensor-by people walking past and blocking it-will result in the lowering of light emitted by the corresponding lamp. Visitors moving between the wall array of photo-sensors and the wall array of lamps see a low-resolution pattern, more temporally coherent than spatially resolved. Moving close to the sensor wall, their image becomes sharper, moving closer to the lamp wall, their image is more diffuse.

Difficult to visualise this work as I could not find any images online but it sounds similar to Masaki Fujihata’s Light on the Net.

Originally seen on the NetBehaviour mailing list (website here).

more&more (image above of the performance, image below of the software) is a performance by Hans W. Koch for an infinite number of laptops, playing without a pa. The performance uses software built in max/msp which progressively crashes the computer it resides on and in so doing creates a unique performance.

in failing, the machines produce sounds, impossible to obtain with mere software. each participant has the same program installed on his machine, which progressively overloads it: new windows are created in random positions and colours, each representing a simple fm-synthesizer. after a while, the computers start choking, dropping and/or distorting sound, the window creation stumbles. when the computers produce almost no sound anymore, the piece terminates by all participants purposely crashing the software…each window contains a synthesizer, represented by the shape of an envelope and producing a random fm-sound. at first, creation of windows and sound is synchronized. after a while, the computers start choking, first the beat gets irregular, then sound starts dropping and/or distorting, the creation of window stumbles. the longer the process runs, the more the computers become silent, resorting to emitting random pops and clicks once in a while, stuttering in visuals, trying to catch up with an impossible task.

Originally seen at VVork

Shiftspace is a firefox extension which it’s makers call:

An Open Source layer above any webpage

It deserves mention here amongst the last few posts about Art Browsers as it gives users the potential to intervene, modify and subvert existing websites within the spaces used by all Shiftspace users, essentially mashing up content. So it’s a platform which promotes mashups but what’s interesting is that it does not preference any particular type of content such as images and it does not lock the content in as so many of these so called platforms do which are made in Flash or something else which instantly renders them useless.

Shiftspace has already got a lot of attention from artists working in new media with it’s honorory mention in the Prix Ars Electronica in 2006 and Turbulence commissioned artworks in 2007.