Not networked art but related to the last post, Urban Cursor, is the WindFire Cursor Kite. Why am I posted this? Well it’s not an obsession with kites but the implication of a giant cursor hovering in the sky of a world within / below a world. If your a sci-fi fan like me think The Thirteenth Floor, if your religious God’s OS?
The Artvertiser (image above, video below) by Julian Oliver, Clara Boj, Diego Diaz and Damian Stewart is:
an urban, hand-held, augmented-reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art.
Using shape and motion detection the software can be taught to recognise individual advertisements. These adverts can then, viewed through the software, become a virtual ‘canvas’ which an artist can exhibit images or video. Visual documentation of the intervention can be immediately uploaded to on line galleries such as Flickr and YouTube.
While offering itself as a new platform for public art, The Artvertiser seeks to highlight the contradiction of Public Space in the context of what can and cannot be written on the surface of our cities. Neither graffiti or Fine Art, The Artvertiser exploits the inevitable redistribution of these surfaces in media such as digital film and photography, providing an alternative memory of the city. By leveraging the internet as a redistribution mechanism, The Artvertiser supposes that an urban site dense with proprietary imagery can be re-purposed as an exhibition space for art and archived as such in turn. Similarly, on-site exhibitions can be held whereby pedestrians are invited to use the looking device to view an exhibition on the buildings around them. Finally, non-live video can also be used. This enables artists to substitute advertisements in film and video with alternative content.
Originally seen on the Spectre mailing list.
N Building (images above and video below) by Teradadesign and Qosmo is a QR Code augmented building facade near Tachikawa station in Japan which is accessed through a custom iPhone application.
By reading the QR Code with your mobile device you will be taken to a site which includes up to date shop information. In this manner we envision a cityscape unhindered by ubiquitous signage and also an improvement to the quality and accuracy of the information itself…If a QR Code is static, what could we do with a dynamic device like the iPhone? Our proposed vision of the future is one where the facade of the building disappears, showing those inside who want to be seen. As you press on the characters their comments made on online appear in speech bubbles. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons. Rather than broadly tagging, we display information specific to the building in a manner in which the virtual (iPhone) serves to enhance the physical (N Building). Our goal is to provide an incentive to visit the space and a virtual connection to space without necessarily being present.
Originally seen on Alexander Reeders Vimeo profile.
Hand from Above (image above, video below) by Chris O’Shea is a work for public screens which motion tracks and interacts with pedestrians. The work:
encourages us to question our normal routine when we often find ourselves rushing from one destination to another. Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, we are reminded of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand from the BBC Big Screen. Passers by will be playfully transformed. What if humans weren’t on top of the food chain? Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.
Originally seen on the OpenFrameworks Vimeo Group.
Babelswarm (image above, video below) by Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds, and Adam Nash is a Second Life real-time generating installation. The work bears visual similarity to the artists work Autoscopia currently showing in the Doppelgänger exhibition.
Babelswarm was exhibited:
simultaneously in-world and at the Lismore Regional Gallery in New South Wales, Australia…Activated by the voices of visitors in the realworld gallery and chat messaging from virtual visitors in Second Life, a swarm of letter cubes - programmed to seek out their original word position - slowly builds a morphing, virtual Tower of Babel. This tower is constructed from the utterances of visitors to it, constantly reconfiguring itself according to the artificial studpidity of the individual letter forms.
