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.

Hallucinations (and the real) (image above, video below) by JD Walsh is audio-visual work which composes itself as a result of search engine query results based on key phrases from a text taken from Albert Hoffman’s recollections of early experiments with LSD. A database cinema of sorts.

The result is a dual-channel projection of the software’s output - the text on one screen and the image on the other. Sound is projected into the room. Because of the random elements in the software, the perception of the images are always changing. Each image seems to take on a new meaning depending on which text is next to it and which sound accompanies it.

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.

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (image above) by Caleb Larsen is a work which perpetually auctions itself on eBay accumulating (or not) value as art markets and the perceived value of the artists work rises.

This sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

To view the current auction of the work (image above) visit its eBay page here.

The work will be showing at the Lighthouse in Brighton from the 28 August - 5 September 2010 as part of the digital design conference, dConstruct.

This started out as two separate posts on separate works which were going to be posted in sequence however when a third work came through a mailing list that had similar ideas underpinning it I decided to group the three together into one long post. What follows is a few ideas I’ve been thinking about myself recently (albeit in a completely different context) and how these works explore essentially the same.

I Am Sitting in a Video Room (images above) by Patrick Liddell is by way of reference to Alvin Luciers work I Am Sitting in a Room an exploration of the form and space of YouTube as a means, site and context for the creation of performance work (and of course it’s video documentation). The work investigates:

the ‘photocopy effect’, where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying.

The performance of was stretched out over the exact period of a year from May 27th, 2009 to May 27th, 2010 and each upload and download was performed manually. The videos embedded below are the first, the original, and the 1000th version. All 1000 videos can be viewed on Patricks YouTube page although disappointingly the account is not dedicated to this project alone.

Netrooms: The Long Feedback (image above) is an participative network audio performance by Pedro Rebelo and distant global collaborators contributing to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the internet.

The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations which receive a common sound source. Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.

Always a sucker for a diagram, the image below details the technical set up for Netrooms: The Long Feedback.

Infinite Stream Loop (image below), part of the Laps series by Art of Failure (I’ve previously posted on AV Permutations) is a very recent work which explores the effects of an audio stream traveling through the world wide web since the 1st of July 2010.

A sound is streamed by a server and goes through several locations on the web. Captured at the end of a loop, the sound is played and then resent out through the web with no additional modification. We have modified the streaming tools to keep all the distortions of the original material that occurred during the process (artefacts, transmission errors, missing data…). To emphasize the changes caused by the network, the sound used at startup is deliberately very simple - a digital silence. Then it evolves endlessly.

The above works (particularly the sound works) bear some similarity to the research of Chris Chafe from Stanford University concerning sound, distance and delay. Chris presented his research in progress at Subtle Technologies in 2009 and subsequently published a paper in Contemporary Music Review, Volume 28 Issue 4 & 5 (the same issue as a paper by Pedro Rebelo) entitled Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical/Musical Medium.

Why do I group these works together? Each is different in form and presentation, i.e. one video work, two audio; one documentation of an extended performance, one a live performance and the last a generative work etc. yet the three works use what would normally be considered negative effects of the network in creative ways. Delay and degradation of quality as a result of coping becomes an exploitable feature of the network. Copied forms can be combined, sequenced, superimposed, layered to create a new composition yet the coping process, what should in a digital environment be flawless often contains “artefacts, transmission errors, missing data….”. The technically undesirable becomes desirable to the artist enabling a unique aesthetic.

Copying, originality and reproduction, layering and what is ‘real’ have been something I’ve been working on for the last few months within Second Life. My premise is somewhat different from the above works i.e. reproductive degradation as an aesthetic, instead I’ve been thinking and working on how digital forms simulate ‘real’ forms (and the issues therein i.e. levels of precision), how copies relate back to originals, what the differences are and how to collapse and merge these. These are still on going thoughts…

I Am Sitting in a Video Room originally seen on Mashable.com, Netrooms: The Long Feedback originally seen on Pedro Rebelo’s weblog and Infinite Stream Loop originally seen on the Spectre mailing list.