The 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, at the Venice Biennale which closed yesterday the 23rd November 2008 had an interesting installation entitled Maeve (image above and video below) which was developed by the Interface Design team of the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam. The installation was created with Processing and reacTIVision (of Reactable fame) along with several other technologies.

The website for the installation provides some great documentation. It described the work as connecting:

the entries of the Everyville student competition and puts them into the larger context of MACE (http://www.mace-project.eu/) content and metadata…The installation consists of an interactive surface and a large projection area. While users are interacting with the contents of the installation on the interactive surface, the network and the media files are displayed on the large projection…If a card is placed on the interactive surface, a contextual space is opened around the project. Within this space, media files, related projects and keywords are visualized. When a second card is placed on the surface, the space turns into a network displaying similarities between the projects…interaction with the cards is not limited to the one person, entire groups and teams can explore the content together.

Below is an image illustrating the table interface of the installation with a video of its workings.

Originally seen on the Processing website.

Arithmetik Garden by Sato Masahiko and Kiriyama Takashi is another work which was exhibited at ICC in Tokyo last year, this time as part of the Open Space. Users enter the garden with a numbered RFID smart card:

Passing through the gates (with the calculating formulas shown) starts the “garden’s” calculations of your number. When their sum becomes exactly 73, you are finished, and can leave the “garden.” “Arithmetik Garden” was created to substitute a concrete idea of calculation for our usual abstract one. Becoming numbers ourselves allows us to experience calculating and being calculated via the position of our own bodies in this space.

PEIR (image above) is a Personal Environmental Impact Report system which allows its user to leverage existing technology on their mobile phone to explore and share how they have an impact on the environment and how the environment impacts them, essentially revealing the network between us and our environment.

Below is a video explaining how PEIR works. PEIR was recently exhibited at Wired NestFest, at the bottom of this post is a video tour of PEIR by it’s creators for NextFest.

What follows are two works by two artists employing weblogs and automated bots.

Blogbot by Alex Dragulescu (image above) is a bot which generates an experimental novel by harvesting text from weblogs based around a specified theme:

What I Did Last Summer is the first experimental graphic novel generated by blogbot, using cached versions of My War (written by a U.S. soldier deployed in Iraq) and the now famous Baghdad Blogger. The protagonists of What I Did Last Summer are military and civilian units from the game Civilization 3.

Blog Bot Platform (image above) by Andy Broomfield unlike Blogbot doesn’t use blogs to generate work it enables objects to connect and potentially communicate:

Blog Bot Platform is a system, created with a Java program, that allows hobbyists to connect simple sensors to objects and give these objects ‘voices’ we can ‘hear’ via web 2.0 services, such as ‘Twitter’. Hobbyists can attach the different sensors to objects they have an interest in, and allow them to broadcast messages through text micro-blogs. These stream of text messages are then encountered in the public timeline, enabling the objects to express themselves amongst the streams of other tweets.

Almost a direct, albeit simplified, implementation of Bruce Sterlings Spimes as described in Shaping Things, Blog Bot Platform is an interesting invesigation into the internet of things. Although now finished Light Blogger Bots twitter page can be seen here, Storm Blogger Bots twitter page can be seen here and Explorer Blogger Bot can be seen here. Source code for Blog Bot Platform can be downloaded from Google Code here.

Network Notebooks #2: The Internet of Things has just been published in print and pdf form by The Institute for Network Cultures, Geert Lovink’s media research centre within the School of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (Amsterdam Polytechnic). The publication is one of (very few) which looks at aspects of The Internet of Things. The blurb on the back reads as follows:

Cities across the world are about to enter the next phase of their development. A near invisible network of radio frequency identification tags (RFID) is being deployed on almost every type of consumer item. These tiny, traceable chips, which can be scanned wirelessly, are being produced in their billions and are capable of being connected to the internet in an instant. This so-called ‘Ambient intelligence’ promises to create a global network of physical objects every bit as pervasive and ubiquitous as the worldwide web itself. Some are already calling this controversial network the ‘internet of things’, describing it as either the ultimate convenience in supply-chain management, or the ultimate tool in our future surveillance. This network has the power to reshape our cities and yet it is being built with little public knowledge of consent. Here Rob van Kranenburg examines what impact RFID, and other systems, will have on our cities and our wider society; while also ruminating on what alternative network technologies could help safeguard our privacy and empower citizens to take power back into their own hands. It is both a timely warning and a call to arms.

The institute has published a steady stream of publications including two of the most important network related publications of the last few years, Uncanny Networks and Dark Fiber (all of the institutes publications are listed here).

As with the the first Network Notebook (and a few of the other publications), this edition is free in print form to order from the website. Mine’s in the post but I’ve already had a look at the pdf version and it is definetly worth a look.

Originally seen at Nearfield.