Sunday, March 25, 2007

Border Crossings

This months Border Crossings (issue no. 101) contains an interview with Max Dean (the robotic chair which falls apart and assembles itself) as well as an article about second life. Anyone interested should check it out at the library.

Friday, March 23, 2007

user generated content, collective invention

Here is the information from my presentation last week.

Wikipedia, Folksonomy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy


Wikipedia, user generated content
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_generated_content


http://www.noprogram.org/postcard/postcard2.htm
Postcard Performance
artist : Douglas Gast
500 postcards are being, or have been, mailed to people that are somehow related to the fine arts community. The text on the postcard reads: “This postcard is part of a work of art. Please tell me if you got it.” It then lists the artist’s physical address and email address and further indicates that “responses will be posted on noprogram.org.”
The website is comprised of an image of the postcard, a brief explanation of the project and a list of recipients including the date the card was mailed, name, occupation and, if one was sent, a response.
The postcard project was conceived in the spirit of the Fluxus movement, incorporating such ideas as social/political activism, chance, playfulness and the unity of art and life. It directly draws from and incorporates many of the long-established themes of mail art including, like that of the earliest works, and to a lesser degree contemporary works of Internet art, the deliberate positioning of art outside of the rigid art/museum/gallery system.
Those within this system, however, who will be/were unknowingly targeted by the artist to receive the postcard, are the ones who are, or will be, providing the content of the project, that of access (exclusivity), hierarchy (importance) and commercialization of art. Out of the 500 to whom the postcard is addressed, who will actually receive it, who will choose to reply and in what fashion? An analysis will follow.
The project does find its home within, and is certainly an exploitation of, the commercial space(s) of the internet and direct mail advertisement. The postcard is glossy, obviously professional printed and will undoubtedly arrive with several unsolicited offers for credit or other forms of "junk mail." The webpage is clean, inspired by the design of Google, and with the utilization of bookmarks or tabs, could simply be one click away from sites such as Ebay or Amazon.
Lastly, while the public exhibition of mail art has occurred numerous times over its comparably brief history, the postcard project deliberately takes that which is by nature private, mail and email correspondence, a physical address, and makes it intimately available to a mass public, a community of individual users.


http://philadelphia.placeinplaceof.net/
"this was lost this was found"
artists: J. Meredith warner and Jeremy Beaudry
"This Was Lost, This Was Found" marks lost items of clothing (textile) found on the streets and sidewalks of Philadelphia, especially in the Fishtown and Kensington neighborhoods. Small red and white arrows are deposited beside the lost items, pointing in the direction of the Coral Street Arts House. The CSAH building’s original function as a former Textile Mill is lost, but a new use for it has now been found. The process of marking lost textile items in relationship to the CSAH building connects the outside world of the city with questions of waste/reuse, loss/gain, and how to revitalize former sites of industry


http://www.mrwong.de/myhouse/
"MrWong's Soup'Partments"
406 participants
template for download
users create a visual and virtual community
cartoonish pixel art with each floor representing a users creation.
there are rules in participation:no anti-aliased images, no ads, no plagiarism, no animation, no politics, no porn


http://www.communimage.net/
"communimage"
artists: Casqueiro Atlantico Laboratorio Cultural (Teresa Alonso Novo, Looks Brunner, Malex Spiegel) in collaboration with Johannes Gees, and the help of Roger Luechinger, Gino Esposito and Silke Sporn.
A community whose interface accepts static images which assemble to form a giant grid of square patches. This project has been running since 1999. The electronic collage is reminiscent of traditional quilting circles, with each member bringing pieces of fabric, time, labour and stories.


http://www.telegarden.org/tg/
telegarden
artist: ken goldberg
Telegarden users contribute their effort in tending a real-world garden. The interface allows virtual gardeners to control a robotic arm equipped with a view camera, a pneumatic trowel for planting seeds, and a watering can. On the site users can choose to sow virtual seeds and pour virtual water which controls real seed and real water. Participating on a global scale to a local ecosystem.


http://learningtoloveyoumore.com/
learning to love you more
artists: Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher
Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.


http://homepage.mac.com/joester5/accidentalmpeg/index.html
"accidental mpegs"
artist: joe mckay
Accidental Mpegs are a collection of short video clips taken by mistake. The clips were shot on digital still cameras when the photographer accidentally switched to movie mode instead of still mode. Holland Cotter of the New York Times said that "The results have the unflattering awkwardness of old-time candid snapshots and are just as funny and touching."


http://www.15x15.org/
15X15
artist: Richard Vickers
In 1968 Andy Warhol stated that; In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. Using Warhols statement as a premise, 15x15 advances the statement into the 21st century; with new media technology anyone and everyone can be world famous....for 15 seconds.
Participants can contribute to the piece using a standard mobile camera phone that can capture video, and can send video clips directly from their camera phone using MMS (Multimedia Message Service), via email or upload from your personal computer to the online database.
In the 21st century art is being fundamentally realigned for anyone and everyone. 15x15 is a homage to Warhol, a realisation of the artistic utilisation of new media technology and the democratisation of art in the age of digital production.

www.perpetualartmachine.com
[PAM]
artists: Lee Wells, Raphaele Shirley, Chris Borkowski and Aaron Miller.
Perpetual Art Machine is a community for video artists, curators, writers, therorist, educators, collectors, and enthusiasts.
Perpetual Art Machine is an on line gallery and database of video art
Perpetual Art Machine is a traveling video installation.
The website feeds our installation machines. Both the database and video content work together at exhibition venues displaying works simultaneously and individually. The works play off each other, informing each other by association or differenciation, highlighting through the display system their individual qualities.
living archive, 1000 videos of over 500 artists from over 50 countries.
streaming video, database technology, large scale installation.
created in dec 2005

wikipedia, photoshop tennis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoshopping#Photoshop_tennis


http://kollabor8.org/
Kollabor8
artist: Corey Eiseman
Kollabor8 is an artists’ hub functioning as a collaborative art piece. Kollabor8 explores the transitory nature of Internet content and the capacity for spontaneous creative synergy between unassociated artists. Images and themes change quickly, with no outside communication or planning. Any given chain of images has infinite potential for change as each artist leaves his or her mark. Social commentary may become irreverence, or innovation humor. Kollabor8 invites artists to take and then relinquish control as their peers reinvent, destroy, or expand upon their work.


http://www.sito.org/
sito.org
promotes artists works, an art archive for people to publish their visuals online.
collaborative projects in SYNERGY.
online communities established with forums to facilitate mass communication between members.

http://www.thesheepmarket.com/
The sheep market
artist: aaron koblin
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a system for harnessing the power of distributed human intelligence. Intended for corporate use, MTurk exploits the notion that certain tasks are simple for people and difficult for computers. The system represents an automated work force in which computer and human processing are intertwined. The individual workers remain alienated from the larger process they are contributing to, aware only of their simple task. This organizational format, typically implemented by corporations, tends to yield highly organized, efficient results for the purposes of targeted economic gain.
The Sheep Market is a web-based art project which appropriates the MTurk system to implicate thousands of workers in the creation of a massive database of drawings. From one simple request, submitted to the MTurk system as a 'HIT' or Human Intelligence Task, workers create their version of 'a sheep facing to the left' using simple drawing tools. The artist responsible for each drawing receives a payment of two cents for their labor.
Within the inspiration for The Sheep Market is the urge to caste a light on the human role of creativity being expressed by workers in the system, while illustrating the massive and insignificant role each plays as part of a whole.


http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/self-portrait/
self-portrait
artist: Ethan Ham
The photos in Self-Portrait come from a software search through the millions of photos on flickr.com. Using facial-recognition, the software seeks out photos that are likely to contain the artist Ethan Ham. Self-Portrait takes the mechanical process of photography and extends the machine's role to include editorial selection.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

avoiding the storm

This can be put in the data visualization category I guess but what I think is more important about this video is the context that the imagery is put in.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6886880938991195179&hl=en

The addition of music and a personification (antificaton?) of the little planes avoiding the storm shows how in a sense we can identify with information being presented to us. The creative use of such representations is a pertinent question for visual artists.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

More Data Visualization

I just came across another interesting interpretation of data visualization. This is a map of all the facets of science and how they relate. It looks like a deep sea creature!

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/uploads/scimaplarge.jpg


and also, an entire book on one screen.

http://textarc.org/Alice.html

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Game related information.

Gaming:
Silicon Valley has showed us the computer and as well has developed computer clubs. These clubs were for a collaboration of people to have an open forum and more accessibility to computers. Silicon Valley is well known for computer clubs and the first club named Homebrew Computer Club involved members Gordon French, Fred Moore and Stephen (Slug) Russell. Hobbyists with programming and engineering backgrounds collaborated together to talk about computers such as the Altair 8800 that would later kickoff the personal computer. This group was close to the people at MIT who would challenge and ask particular tasks of the new computers. MIT wanted a program that would tax the limits of the computer system and as well have intriguing interface to an audience thus Wayne Witanen, J. Martin Graetz created the perfect testing grounds to push the limits of the technology, a videogame called space-war. Space-war was not very complicated however at the time it filled the needs of MIT.
Human Computer Interaction has developed extensively from space-war. Game consoles such as Colecovision, Atari and various Sony and Nintendo systems have puzzled and entertained us for decades. The founders of the Homebrew Computer Club were not ready for what was to come. The 21st century has shown us conceptual art using previous games and modifying them to produce art. As well a shockingly enormous cultural phenomenon called Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games or MMORPG. Sitting in a dark room with a emanating glow from a terminal, sounds of battle reach out to the very corners of the setting, this is where MMORPGs are found and played. The question that arises is are these people wasting lives or are they experiencing new ones? Hearing remarks such as, “I can not stand culture and would rather play an MMORPG then go to a bar and drink my face off” makes a person wonder whose morals are in the right place. This multimillion-dollar industry has changed the world of thousands of people. It has created an economy on false currency as an example the term farming is used to explain people who collect this online currency by completing tasks within the MMORPG and selling the “gold” for actually money. Is this industry as addictive as gamboling or is this only a pastime like playing cards? MMORPGs have also been subjected to modifications or conversions. These conversions are used as advertisements for the game, mockery of popular culture or even making personal videos from the games interface. A few examples you can find at this site, http://world-of-warcraft-gold.com/world-of-warcraft-videos.html as well an excellent display of gaming clubs can be found on an episode of South Park at http://allsp.com/s10/1.html that demonstrates the lives of MMORPG players.
Gaming has become an interface for artists to create unique interfaces such as fly-guy seen at www.trevorvanmeter.com/flash.html or modified skins, patches or simply changing the setting of Duke Nukem to an art gallery. These types of modifications are quite conceptual and each with different attempts at disrupting the way we preserve a game. This way of thinking is best exampled by Cory at http://beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2003/mario_clouds_2005.html who makes a painting from the Mario Brothers Nintendo game changing an interactive experience into clouds slowly, endlessly drifting across the screen.
In conclusion the world of entertainment is still developing and will continue to do so. Where an individual takes this genre is up to them, to be lost in a world of pixels or to create something new from the old.


Gaming related sites:
http://www.gamescenes.org/
http://www.selectparks.net/rebecca/?Art
http://qotile.net/files/catalog/combat.mov
http://arttorrents.blogspot.com/
http://www.unr.edu/art/delappe.html
http://www.trevorvanmeter.com/flash.html

MMORPG related sites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chc9DwDkWn0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MMORPGs
http://www.mmorpg.com/index.cfm?bhcp=1
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000228.php

Free trail 3D animation site:
http://www.inivis.com/index.html

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Data Visualization



Hello everybody, welcome to my journey through data visualization! There’s a wide range of stuff here that I didn’t get to touch on in my presentation, so make sure not to miss anything. This is media delight!

The first attempts of data visualization I could find were pre-computer. Experiments with ASCII art, an early form of digital imaging using computer text and symbols, actually started on typewriters. http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/07/27/ascii-art-1939/

ASCII art relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1967. Since early computer printers didn’t have graphical capability, text had to stand in. For ASCII art, the formal qualities of data are of utmost focus. An image is made through the composition of shape, position, and weight of text, numbers, and punctuation.
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~mnaylor/ascii/
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/new.htm#new

There are also several ASCII generators these days: http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/

Ben Fry http://benfry.com/

From our gaming class we looked at machine code art and the exploration of “what’s under the interface.” Ben Fry’s first ventures into data visualization stemmed from documenting the computational data used to process videogames. He developed a Processing applet to map the executables from popular Atari games. They’re beautiful. http://benfry.com/distellamap/

Here’s a similar pursuit into video game speak: http://assembler.org/

Jonathan J. Harris http://www.number27.org/

1) A characteristic of data visualization on the internet is that is tends to often contain a geographical element. We see a collapsing of distance and depth, and are reminded of our proximity.

2D representation: http://www.number27.org/work/maps/index.html

With hypertext data visualization becomes interactive and user relevant.

http://www.number27.org/work/maps/traveltime/index.html

Postal Map:
http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/zipdecode/

Cabspotting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B05e9B5QLzY

US Flight Patterns over Florida
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0iAgNfc3dg


2) Data visualization with the aide of hyperlinks has opened up new forms of visual representation of relationships. Some things aren’t so easy to consolidate, and often things grow.

Ben Fry - the Genome Project: http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/index.html
The sites I focused on in my presentation are here. They are all very interesting projects by Jonathan J. Harris, and raise several comments on the blogosphere. He has created search engines that scour the web for sentences and images from blogs that depict feelings. His interest is to “see what love and hate looks or sound like”.
(sites are in chronological order)

Understanding Vorn:
http://www.understandingvorn.org/

Word Count:
http://www.wordcount.org/main.php

Love Lines:
http://www.love-lines.com/lovelines.html

We Feel Fine:
http://www.wefeelfine.org/

His newest project was just uploaded a couple days ago! It appears to be a mind-web of topics and images on the web using the metaphor of constellations.

Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology
http://universe.daylife.com/


3) Data Visualization often focuses on habits and environments, and thinks about digital space like a physical entity. What would it be like to live amongst the data?

The Internet Environment:
http://packetgarden.com/

BumpTop Desktop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ


These next sites are looser form of data visualization. With the Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) phenomenon there are more and more people giving in to their virtual lives. Many people tend to prefer the freedom of their online lives. A company is trying to cash in on this interest by milling items from the game Second Life. Essentially, if in the game you have a spaceship, you can have it in real life too- or at least a statue.

Second Life Milling:
http://www.selectparks.net/modules.php?name=News&new_topic=37
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/3d-printing-for-second-life-residents-174778.php


4) Another element I found pertinent to data visualization was that it often requires participation and input for a generative visualization to be made.

Hypertable:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8yFAS2GQQ8

The new Nintendo Wii has a revolutionary remote that can sense hand movement. If has two accelerometers, a gyroscope, and 3d location imaging sensors, so it can tell the speed, pitch, and location of the remote. Several programmers are interested in modifying the use of the remote it to make highly interactive applications. Those of you interested in interactive media should pay attention to these: they are cheap and have a bunch of very useful technologies in them!

Wii Control:
http://www.usmechatronics.com/usmgarage/WiiBot.html


5) The last thing important to data visualization in that there needs to be some sort of hierarchy. If information is too evenly spread compositions tend to be static, so data visualization often has competitive elements.

This isn’t visualization per-se, but if to see is to feel, then this is an interesting form of data visualization.

PainStation!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-tffzJNK84
http://www.painstation.de/

Hamster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyG9mvkR0Ws&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Evideogamesblogger%2Ecom%2F2007%2F02%2F19%2Freal%2Dlife%2Dhamster%2Dvideo%2Dgame%2Ehtm

Lukas

Sunday, March 11, 2007

loop investigations.

hi.
these are the links of works i presented in class.

body language series
martin arnold
adad hannah
oscar guzman
oscar guzman x2
bettina hoffmann
kelly mark
if you are interested in my investigations in the loop, you can download my presentation notes.

annie