Another network related book work. Electrolibrary (this is the website part of the work) by Waldek Węgrzyn is a book that connects via USB to a computer to control a website. The work was designed for his diploma thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland.

The book can be browsed…by turning pages, you can navigate through the website, getting additional information, quotations, movies and animations appropriate to the currently open page.

The content of the book is Waldek’s diploma thesis discussing phenomenon of a book as an inteface. The text contains number of references to different works, but the major inspiration is the manifesto “The topography of typography” published in 1923 by a graphic designer El Lissitzky which has also influenced the design of the book.

Originally seen on Digital MediaArts Numériques.

Social Firefly by Jason McDermott, Liam Ryan and Frank Maguire is:

a community of friendly intelligent lights that influence one another. The fireflies are programmed to respond to light from their neighbours, popular fireflies become highly influential, whilst isolated fireflies must work harder to reach their friends. By shining lights on to the fireflies, audience members speak the same language and influence the interaction between community members.

Inspiration came from lateral and cellular communication systems such as those used by fireflies in synchronizing their rhythms and slime molds in movements through caves, which collided with network theories and cascading relationships between the parts and the whole.

Originally seen on the Creative Applications Network.

Feel Me by Marco Triverio is an iPhone app that attempts to connect people through a form of digitised touch and natural intuitive gestures. Mobile phones prioritise language and sound, what if we could touch people through these technologies?

Based on the finding for which communications with a special person are not about content going back and forth but rather about perceiving the presence of the other person on the other side, Feel Me opens a real-time interactive channel.

When two people are both looking at the conversation they are having, touches on the screen of one side are shown on the other side as small dots. Touching the same spot triggers a small reaction, such as a vibration or a sound, acknowledging that both parts are there at the same time. Feel Me creates a playful link with the person on the other side, opening a channel for a non-verbal and interactive connection.

The concept videos for the app are worth a look, Transmissions, reverberations, connections and movements.

Originally seen on the Creative Applications Network.

Last day in Paris and the second network related work I’ve seen here (there probably was more to see but I’ve been ill for a few days) was Pangée by the collective MU today at the Musée du Quai Branly. Normally an unlikely location as it’s the museum of ethnography there has been a week of conferences, exhibitions and events around the subject of new media and how it can be used to present the museums collection. Pangée, a sound installation in the gardin of the museum essentially serves this purpose and reuses sounds of the instruments (and their musicians) in the museums collection. The following is translated from the works text:

In the gardin of the museum, a sonic territory in movement retraces the aesthetic of musical instruments of four continents: Africa, Asia, America, Oceania based on recordings from the museums media library…During the week “Digital Museum”, visitors are invited to explore the gardin and the musical collection of the Musée du Quai Branly provided with a headset and audio captors. The movement of the visitors, their position and direction activates the sonic sources of the work.

The sound installation closes tomorrow the 22nd. More details about it at the museum here.

The following are a selection of four networked works by artist Winnie Soon from the last three years. The first two works employ mobile phones while the last three use Twitter creating some shared concerns and methods of presentation.

5-stars’ identity (image above, video below) is an interactive installation which uses mobile phones as ready made objects to create a connected work. It is the first of two works where mobiles play an important part in the work. The works purpose, research led, is to:

express the notion of transmediation, examine the properties of dynamic complex system in association with readymade object. The new aesthetic possibilities is explored by having the inter-relationship of technology, media and objects, leading to a hybridization in sensorial transformation.

The project starts with scanning the various Internet websites of news and blog, those content that is related to Chinese’s Identity will be translated into different language versions and send to the mobile device. The five mobile phones perform with different behaviors and this is subject to political and environmental events. It constructs a continuous and dynamic autonomous system.

Jsut Code (image above, video below), a collaborative work with Helen Pritchard, is an interactive installation using QR Code, mobile phones and Twitter. It is the first of three technically related work which uses live information from Twitter as its basis. The work prompts users to explore and browse online texts written by a combination of human and non-human writers.

Statements on life and death are gathered in real-time, from the social media site twitter and displayed as geometric images. Viewers encounter a continuously updating feed as the machine translates language to image and twitter message to QR code, each image “carries” a language of pattern and meaning, which is activated by the reader…We see code as a call to action, a call for execution. The playful activity of reading in ‘jsut code’ is a collaborative performance between human, machine and code. The installation explores a continuously evolving and mutating text which moves beyond and between language.

Net.Portrait (image above, video below), a collaboration with Sam Norgard also uses live information from Twitter as its basis. Net.Portrait is:

a live and network-based installation combined with fine-art painting, kinetic sculpture and collective network data. While you are watching the piece, the artwork is also dynamically watching you by having different emotive eyes painted on a collection of wall mounted cocktail umbrellas. The live happenings of happy and sad smiley faces from Twitter are being transformed from a text, static and virtual medium to a kinetic and physical sculpture. Every bit of spinning action amplifies the network behavior, resulting in a continuous and flowing net portrait.

Datascape (image above, video below) is an interactive installation / performance which is created through the latest text and emoticons from Twitter.