Staying with works of a largely textual nature for the moment Wandern im Wissen (Wandering in Knowledge) is an installation currently installed in the stairwell of the State and University library Bremen in Germany created by the University of the Arts Bremen.

The work is similar in several ways to LPDT2 (the last post), the most important being that it sources literary information for its content, in this instance not the online Gutenberg Project but the catalog of the library it is installed in. In a sense it is an interface, a screen, to the libraries content making it more visible and immediate to its users/visitors.

Searching and retrieving information are the main requests of the library’s visitors. An almost endless flow of information inquiries are obtained and fulfilled on daily basis. In this respect, the students of the University of the Arts Bremen granted an aesthetic and poetic expression to this invisible procedure…a sculpture of folded paper demonstrates the connection between the traditional storage medium and the digital information world. The permanent flow of information inquiries at the SuUB runs through on a vertical axis between four floors of the building. The random results of the inquiries release corresponding visuals of text and pictures which cause curiosity for the various activites in the library. The media sculpture highlights the abundance of the mental processes, which take place simultaneously in the library. The retrieval inquiries result in new collages of visuals of text and pictures, which form an aesthetic translation of the search procedure. The searched words, then, fill the pool of data at the ground of the stairway. Altogether the media installation poses questions about the function of the information in the age of the increasing communicational isolation. In regard to the title, the visitor literally passes through the world of knowledge.

Made with VVVV and Ruby, the work is a collaboration between Niruba Balsingam, Manuel Dreesmann, Freja Enholm, Linda Freybott, David Grünwald, Andreas Haller, Stefan Ihmig, Claudius Kirsch, Shushi Li, Henrik Lippke, Maha Mahmood, Isabel Micheel, Josef Rissling, Dawei Wu, Marek Mateusz Majewski, Silke Bussen, Prof. Roland Lambrette, Peter Gombac and Eno Henze.

There are numerous sites online documenting this work. A wordpress weblog, a Tumblr weblog and a Flickr set.

Work originally seen via Henrik Lippkes website.

LPDT2 (all images and video in this post) is more than a reincarnation of Roy Ascott’s 1983 work La Plissure du Texte (The Pleating of the Text), it is a reworking, a version 2, of said works ideas within the space of Second Life.

The full original title of the work La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale:

alludes to Roland Barthes’s book Le Plaisir du Texte, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation ‘distributed authorship’, a term coined by Ascott has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2. Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by a number of human storytellers positioned around the globe; in the three dimensionally embodied metaverse the storytellers show novel and unexpected attributes: An emergent textual architecture/geography, as well as a number of autonomous ‘bot’ avatars which dwell inside this bizarre, literary landscape are pleating the text by acting as communication nodes between the narrators of this new version of the tale: The persistent distributed authorship is now accomplished by many writers throughout the ages: A text generator telling a non-linear, multi-faceted, often times poetic, story harvested from the famous online Gutenberg Project is now distributing its output amongst architecture and its inhabitants, generating dialogues and iterations taking their trajectories from masterworks of classical literature. The pleating resembles musical sampling, the connection between the sentences fades, text becomes noise, from which the audience generates meaning. The structure on the simulator adds yet another layer of pleating by visually mixing the different sources of text, while yet another layer of textual input will be provided through a contribution by i-DAT.org from the University of Plymouth, UK, by means of which Real Life visitors will be able to contact the LPDT2 by sending SMS messages. Thus all pleated text - the generated, the contributed, and the stored - is simultaneously visible as a massive, ever evolving literary conglomeration.

In La Plissure du Texte, version 1, the network allowed performers from distant locations to share a networked ’space’ where they could collaborate. Authorship was live and originated from distributed locations. Within this new version, distributed authorship has undergone dramatic changes. The network itself becomes the principle performer. Authorship is distributed across both distant spaces/places and times as text for the space is retrieved from digitised copies of classic works from the whole of documented English language.

The work is open to the public from today, September 1st. It has been co-authored in Second Life by Selavy Oh (programming and architecture), MosMax Hax, aka. Max Moswitzer (architecture and terrain) and Alpha Auer, aka. Elif Ayiter (avatar design). Further associates are Frigg Ragu, aka. Heidi Dahlsveen (avatar animations) and i-DAT from the University of Plymouth, UK (Real Life SMS input).

More images of the installation can be seen here.

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.

The following is the SymbioticA workshop which took place at the University of Latvia’s Faculty of Biology last Saturday (19/06/10) as part of the Transbiotics Festival in Riga.

The workshop was run by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from SymbioticA and ran from 10am to 6pm. During the day we had an introduction to the history of tissue engineering, a lecture to give us context as to what tissue engineering is, what it does and currently where it is in it’s development and then the workshop proper started.

Before lunch Oron explained the different types of sterile environments, indicated by levels one, two and three (image above). Then groups of us built a series of DIY ’sterile’ hoods (image below) to perform the work tissue engineering work in, at least this was the intention. I don’t think we were terribly successful but this was largely a demonstration in practice as to the procedure that needs to be taken when working with biological samples.

We had liver and bone to extract samples from (image above), luckily there seemed to be no vegetarians present, which were then used to employ a number of basic tissue culturing techniques, passaging / subcloning etc. In the image below you can see what was essentially step two once the sample was extracted, adding nutrients to the sample and then, the image below that, a number of techniques such as separation, cleaning etc. (this time in a real sterile environment) to get the final sample of cells which were viewed under a microscope (last image).

All of this was new to me and while I’m never anxious about learning new things I’ve never had much of an interest in biology so that type of learning curve is all the more difficult. It’s interesting however when it’s framed within an art context it suddenly becomes quite interesting and potentially a ‘medium’ worth exploring.

The workshop has certainly fueled my interest but also underlined my ignorance in this area so for the moment I’m going to think about how / if I can take this forward in any way. Consideration of materials and equipment really needs to be priority number one for any artist to engage with this ‘medium’ as the equipment used in the workshop makes a DIY approach for any serious or sophisticated work all but impossible.

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.