rep.licants.org is:

a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From a different set of techniques, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users.

The bot does not born [sic] with a fictitious identity, but will be added to the real identity of the user to modify it at his convenience. Thus, this bot can be seen as a virtual prothesis added to an user’s account, with the aim to build him a greater social reputation. Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who on the cyberspace and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.

Above is an example conversation created by an instance of the bot (see more here). For similar work on artificial lifeforms / bots (albeit visualised very differently) see EKKAH.

rep.licants.org is currently showing at the Robots and Avatars exhibition at Fact in Liverpool until 27/05/12.

Some screenshots of the Make-shift performance last Friday. Many thanks to Frédérique Santune for taking these.

Tomorrow there is an opportunity to see a live performance of Make-shift, “a networked performance about connectivity and consequences” by Helen Varley Jamieson and Paula Crutchlow.

The performance takes place simultaneously in two separate houses that are connected through a specially designed online interface. Paula and Helen (one in each house) stage their part of the work with the help of local audience members. Scripted and visually poetic performance is interspersed with webcam videography, avatar puppetry and audience interaction in the format of a performative salon. Everything that happens in the houses is streamed to online audiences who can also contribute text chat visible on the interface to everyone throughout the event.

Below is a screenshot of the performance interface mentioned. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to attend the performance but hopefully I can get somebody to take a few screenshots so I’ll post again on this.

The performance takes place tomorrow 15th March 2012, 2pm UK / 7.30pm India (find your local time here). To access the interface to the performance visit the works site and click on the link ‘LIVE LINK HERE’ in the right of the page.

Originally seen on the Spectre mailing list.

The last post on visual interfaces for the moment (until I find other works) is Ouroboros by Alvaro Cassinelli which was posted as a comment on the Urban Echo post. Ouroboros is:

a shared virtual space, a world-scale tunnel built by chaining video-conferencing cameras and projectors in a closed loop around the world. This virtual space comes into contact with the Earth at several entry points or “Gates” situated in different cities, each standing in a location particularly representative of the place (public squares, markets, private homes, etc). Each Gate is simply composed of a (portable?) projection screen, a video camera a little far away, and an “interstitial” public space in between. The camera captures the whole view – that is, the passersby and the standing projection screen blended in the background – and the resulting live stream is sent over the Internet to be projected onto a similar structure – in a different city, in a different country, in a different continent. The process repeats itself until the loop is completed, as the final video is projected back onto the first screen – only to restart a tour in an eternal circulation. In its (almost) instantaneous travel around the world, the video stream will gather “souvenirs” of the visited places. People from all around the world will appear on the screen as standing in the middle of a tunnel whose walls are composed by an infinite recursion of (Matryoshka-like) nested video windows; one can recognize the actual location of the shooting in each of these rectangular frames.

The work has similarities to Urban Echo and The Tunnel under the Atlantic however is, in my opinion, far more sophisticated in concept and ambitious in its goal. It employs a combination of video capture, delay and feedback to great effect. Still in concept form, the artist is currently developing this into a finished piece so hopefully there will be a post here at some point in the future with the finished work.

Still on the theme of visual interfaces, Augmented Window designed / directed / curated by Thierry Fournier is:

is a “sensory observatory”. Different artists and authors have been invited to produce a critical reading or original work on the landscape itself…The observed landscape is the starting point for all these contributions, from the critical approaches and questions it raises to the very modes of observation it evokes: immersion vs. distancing, surveillance, geo-localization, etc. Invited authors produce these contributions either while exploring the landscape (in situ with a smartphone), or remotely (via an online content management system). They are superposed to the live video feed of the landscape seen from the window.

The screen acts like a window, framing the landscape as a real-time video. By zooming in and scanning the window intuitively through touch, visitors explore the different contributions, comparing and contrasting them. The choice of a fixed and vertical frame favors rich and comprehensive interactions via a sensory experience. Augmented Window thus produces a curatorial, collective and prospective representation of a landscape, where typically separated approaches (art, geography, architecture, documentary, fiction…) overlap in a common critical perspective, implemented through the principles of “augmented reality”. In this sense, augmented reality is not addressed here in terms of immersion or additional layers of information, but rather questioned as a possible means for creating a field of tension between different points of view.

This particular work is similar to previous works posted in that it provides an impossible vision for its user. It is not a vision of distance and so less about connecting distance places instead it is about a means of viewing local space in a new way.