REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory published in Italy by DeriveApprodi and FakePress has just come out this month with some of my work in it. Yes any publication of my work is a good thing but I’m particularily proud of this one due to it being a connected/augmented publication which has used free/open culture software right through its creation, publication and how the end user interacts/reads the publication.

The publication has been published with the byline:

The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment.

however is itself a reinvention of what a ‘book’ such as this can be and do these days through combinations of innovative new/print media, tags of various types, augmented reality and pervasive networks. Building this publication has from the start been a collaborative process between the editorial team and contributors (artists, writers etc.) who could, through a wordpress website and a plugin designed specifically by Fakepress (more info on that here) for this style of next generation collborative publishing, constantly add to/amend/correct and ultimately compile the book as a print ready pdf for publication from the site. Now, post-publication, the website is part (the online part) of the finished book but the site has also been the ‘site’ of collaborative networking to make this very forward thinking publication happen.

The publication is essentially in three parts;

1. The print version (available here).
2. The website.
3. The iPhone/iPad app (click here to download via iTunes).

The print version contains Fiducial Markers and QR Codes. The Fiducial Markers can be used to view extra augmented reality content on the website via a computer with a webcam (click into the section Augmented Reality). The iPhone/iPad app can be downloaded and used to access the QR Codes. These connect to online multimedia including extra texts, music, videos, photos and maps of the book’s contents/authors.

The image above shows me using the augmented reality section of the site with one of the Fiducial Markers featuring my work (I don’t have a copy of the book yet so I had to improvise with a marker on my iPhone).

Above a screenshot of the iPad app and below a Flickr slideshow of the iPad app in use at the preview launch of the publication at the Share Festival, in Turin, Italy.

An innovative book of course needs an innovative foreword and who better than Bruce Sterling to write it:

Right now, the behaviors and activities commemorated in this book are bizarre. Very. They are so peculiar that they are inherently difficult to describe, because they come from the outer reaches of an emergent network-culture…Basically, they resemble the activities of time travellers. Time travellers don’t actually exist. However, they can be hypothesized. They can be faked. Time travellers would be people among us who come from a different historical epoch. By their nature, they have a different set of attitudes and expectations from our own. Time travellers would be people behaving differently, and also effortlessly. They are not being perverse, arcane or difficult. The time travellers have just as much custom and logic as we do. Their behavior would make perfect sense some day. Only, not just yet.

Read the full foreword here.

More works with a textual/language theme. SMSlingshot by VR/Urban is

an autonom working device, equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in the also [sic] wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a colored splash with the message written within. The text message will also be real-time twittered – just in case.

For similar work see The Media Cartridge, TXTual Healing, Light Attack and The Artvertiser.

Originally seen on Networked_Performance.

We Read, We Tweet by Justin Blinder, another language based work however this time not visualised as such, is a Twitter / Google Maps / New York Times mashup work which:

geographically visualizes the dissemination of New York Times articles through Twitter. Each line connects the location of a tweet to the contextual location of the New York Times article it referenced. The lines are generated in a sequence based on the time in which a tweet occurs…The articles and tweets are constantly being aggregated and stored in a database, making use of the Twitter, Backtweets, Google Maps, and New York Times Articles API. Every 10 minutes, the Backtweets API is queried to find the most recent New York Times articles that have been tweeted about. For each article found, the New York Times Articles API is queried and if a contextual location is found, that location is then geocoded using the Google Maps API. Every tweet that mentions this article is also geocoded using the Google Maps API, and both the article and tweets are stored in a database.

Back to works which have a textual/language emphasis for the moment.

Delicious Poetry by Art is Open Source (xDxD.vs.xDxD / Salvatore Iaconesi and penelope.di.pixel / Oriana Persico) is a net.art work which assembles itself from popular links on Delicious to:

visually build a chaotic poem. An everchanging complex composition built on people’s wishes, desires, tastes and emotions…The generative poems composed by the work produce pages that are a dynamic assemblage of the things that internet users deem as being interesting at a certain time. This is why search engines and content aggregators seem to find these chaotic poems so interesting, finding them completely filled with the “hot” keywords of the moment. So much that they tent to spider, cache, index, rate and categorize them.

Further information about the work can be seen here and here.

An interesting tag/marker based work I’ve been following through various versions on the Network Research Group is Jeongho Park’s Boxes (although it seems to have previously have been Rearwindow with reference to the Hitchcock movie). Images posted here are of the initial prototype while the video below is of a more advanced version. Video of the initial prototype can be seen here.

The work uses tracking of Tuio tags on the rear of each box and projects the resulting assembled video on the front of the boxes. Back and front view can be seen in the image above.