Muddle by Hannah Greely.
Via artkrush.
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Jeppe Hein's Invisible Maze installation is just what its title says: invisible.
The promised maze is there but it only materialises as we move around in it. Visitors are equipped with digital headphones operated by infrared rays that cause them to vibrate every time they bump into one of the maze's virtual walls. Thus, the exhibition is perceived as a both minimalist and a spectacular playground. The maze structure spans six different variants, all of them referring to labyrinths from our common cultural history. From the medieval labyrinth in Chartres to Stanley Kubrick's fateful dead end from the film The Shining to Pac-Man. The maze changes from day to day, inviting visitors to make repeat visits.
Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen will present Jeppe Hein: Invisible Maze 10 June - 27 August 2006.
The exhibition represents a further development of the exhibition Invisible Labyrinth which attracted 50,000 visitors during its two-month run at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris last year.
Via Art Daily. Thanks Joshua.
Other work by Jeppe Hein: Distance.
More sound-based spatial installations: audio space + audiotag + audio graffiti, Mapamp, Sonic city, sound mapping, Aura, Akitsugu Maebayashi's audio work, Audio Viscera, electrical walks, aetherspace, etc.
clickable culture informs of an article in Harvard business review about Avatars-based marketing.
The strong involvement of Second Life (and other virtual worlds)??™s residents with their virtual environment (from personalized avatars to virtual businesses, scheduled celebrity book signings, etc.) constitutes a dream marketing venue. Commerce is already an integral part of the game. Residents spend??”in Linden dollars??”the equivalent of $5 million a month on transactions for in-world products and services. Introducing real-world brands is just a logical step.
Whom do marketing efforts target? The members who gave their credit card numbers to register for the game??”or their avatars? If the real-world human controls the real-world wallet, the avatar represents a different "shadow" consumer, one able to influence its creator??™s purchase of real-world products and conceivably make its own real-world purchases in the virtual world.
The real-world marketing potential of online worlds is suggested by the virtual commerce that already takes place within them. In Second Life, you find avatar-run businesses such as virtual clothing and real estate brokering, but also detective agencies, which keep an eye on virtual infidelity; a notary public, who guarantees the legitimacy of avatar contracts; sex shops, which sell not only racy paraphernalia but also computer code that allows two avatars to enter into a passionate embrace, etc.
Lessig in Second Life
The line between virtual and real worlds is blurring in other ways. In Second Life, the BBC recently broadcast a segment of its Newsnight program from within the world. Lawrence Lessig gave a speech to a full house and signed virtual copies of his latest book. A proliferation of "Impeach Bush" signs??”that were installed by an avatar on tiny plots of land he had purchased, blocking many people??™s views??”created an uproar.
Furthermore, many residents import real-world company logos as props or decorations. Coke machines are common. Evian was advertised at the concession stand of a recent U2 tribute concert. An iPod store sells virtual players loaded with tunes audible when your avatar wears one of the devices.
The combination of virtual-world commerce and the growing overlap of virtual worlds and the real world suggests opportunities for creative real-world marketers. So far, there have been a few interesting brand-building experiments. In the Sims Online, McDonald??™s installed fast-food kiosks, complete with employees working at the counter and able to serve up (free) burgers and fries to residents who made their selections from a clickable menu. Intel incorporated its logo into the screens of virtual computers that, when purchased by Sims Online residents, helped them improve their game skills. In There, Levi Strauss promoted a new style of jeans by offering virtual versions for sale to avatars, pricing them at a premium to the generic virtual jeans that avatars otherwise could purchase. Nike sold virtual shoes that allowed wearers to run faster than other avatars.
Habbo Hotel
Organizations have also sponsored branded events in virtual worlds. Kellogg??™s sponsored a competition, in Habbo Hotel, in which residents were asked to decorate their personal rooms in various Pop-Tart??“related themes. In a noncommercial sponsorship, the American Cancer Society staged its Relay for Life event in Second Life. Resident avatars walked a virtual course, lighted virtual luminaries, and raised virtual cash, which was converted into more than $5,000 in real cash and donated to the organization.
Companies have also created entirely branded virtual worlds??”"adverworlds." Wells Fargo bank recently launched Stagecoach Island to educate teens about money matters through games and social activities. In a similar vein, DaimlerChrysler has a site for preteens called Mokitown to educate players??”called "mokis," short for mobile kids??”about road and traffic safety through a shared social experience.
Mokitown
Patrice Varni says the 2003 campaign in which residents of There outfitted themselves in Levi??™s virtual jeans was an interesting experiment but one she had hoped would yield more data. Technology is improving, though, and she can envision placements in which users could, by making an in-world purchase of an appealing style of jeans, effect a real-world online purchase.
In the meantime, there may be little to lose from experimenting. Massive Incorporated, which sells real-world advertising in a network of computer games, recently signed a deal to place ads in the online virtual world Entropia Universe. In Second Life, marketers can simply become residents and have their avatars try out marketing initiatives for free??”something a number of companies are already doing, according to David Fleck, from Linden Lab. ???People think they need to create a partnership with us, but all they have to do is join, go and buy a chunk of land, and then do what they want to do,??? says Fleck.
Screenshot from Massive Incorporated website
For starters, avatars are certainly useful subjects for market research. "Marketing depends on soliciting people??™s dreams,??? says Henry Jenkins. "And here those dreams are on overt display." For instance, a company could track how inhabitants of a virtual world interact with a particular type of product, noting choices they make about product features, wardrobe mix, or even virtual vacation destinations. It could then use those choices to create profiles of potential customer segments.
UPDATE: One Second Life denizen has created three ad spots to stimulate demand for the Nylon 35mm, the Nyloid Super Color 1000, and the Nylonic VHS Camcorder. (more in unmediated)
The FlirtBunnies never get tired of sending flirty signals of love to each other, even when they are apart. Whenever both ears of a FlirtBunny are pressed, wireless signals of affection are transmitted to the other. The other FlirtBunny then recognizes the flirtatious signal of affection with sounds of intrigue and excitement.
The bunnies are a matched pair (a boy and a girl). When one user holds both ears on the bunny they are wearing, a wireless signal is sent to the other bunny and on to aknowledge that wireless flirt, the receiving bunny will play a sound, sort of a "mmmm..ooooo..ahhhh". The other bunny-wearer can then press their bunny ears in the same way and the flirt signal is sent back. The first bunny then makes its own sound. The bunnies have similar sounds, only in different pitches (lower pitch for the boy bunny and higher pitch for the girl bunny).
Each FlirtBunny hat contains a wireless transmitter, a wireless receiver, an antenna, 2 switches (one in each bunny ear), an ISD voice chip (holds recorded bunny flirting sounds), a speaker, an Amp chip (amplifies sound from ISD chip to speaker.)
Created by Chip Beck and CK Chan as the final project for the Making Toys class, led by Yury Gitman, in December 2005.
plastic trade-off, by Sylvie Eckermann and Gerald Nestler, is a light sculpture that visualizes of one of the most influential and controversial systems of our times: the global financial markets.
The work could be described as a visual approach to the oscillating growth of markets and their diverse connections and dependences. The project traces the social life of the (im)material values of trading.
The real-time data of specific markets are translated into abstract light flows which dynamically reflect this global system. The coordinates of selected places of the market system were marked on a globe and connected as regards fundamental markets. Thus a 3D framework emerged ??“ the structure of the sculpture.
The work is part of the Working_world net exhibition that will open on June 6, Museum Arbeitswelt Steyr, in Austria.
I'm spending my last day in Slovenia (tomorrow i'll be in Graz to see the BIX facade and the Island in the Mur, two building i was dying to see for such a long time now). Here i fell in love with the K67 kiosks designed in 1966 by Slovenian architect Sasha J. M?¤chtig. They are all over the city and used as newspaper kiosks, parking-attendant booths, market stands, shelter booths, fries and hamburger stalls, ice cream stalls, lottery stands, etc.
The polyfibre reinforced modules can be used as single units or combined into large agglomerations.
Patented in 1967, K67 was prepared for its serial production in 1968 with the first exhibition of prototypes in Ljutomer (Slovenia). In April 1970 K67 was published in an English design magazine with the article "Low life from the streets" and the Museum of Modern Art in New York included it into its collection of 20th century design. The K67 was sold in large quantities not only to the countries of Ex-Yugoslavia, but also to the COMECON countries and other continents (eg. Japan and New Zealand). Due to the fact that the K67 principle is copied several times by other companies, K67 came to embody the Eastern European kiosk culture.
In the early nineties, the production stopped due to radical changes in the Slovenian economical system.
See also K67 - The Kiosk Shots that collects and maps the kiosks -both, the original design and its several copies all over Eastern Europe.
I maniacally took pictures of the kiosks but there are better images here.
Thanks Corto for the background information!
To design his Contemporary Emblems Mauro Ceolin extracted and re-combined figures, symbols and places from the universe of videogames. An emblem is very peculiar medium. It is a symbol of power, nations, corporations, etc.
Mauro Ceolin offers a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the military-entertainment complex that shapes the contemporary imaginaries, from cinema to digital media.
Via Videoludica . Thanks Matt.
The installation is shown at the AFTERDARK exhibition in Huashan Art &Culture District, from May 19th to May 28th, 2006.
Sharing the Meal revolves aroung a Chinese round table for five people. The conception is quite simple, animation shows and inspires people around to share the food on the rotary table. Another key idea is to strengthen the traditional table manners with the amusing visual effects. It also brings out the conversation at the table. When someone sits down and the turntable rotates, animation would appear and reacts with the rotation. Take users A and B for example, when A sits down at the dish of clam soup and the turntable rotates, in front of him a thermometer appears. At the same time, a large clam appears in front of B, which makes a pair with the thermometer. When A keeps on rotating the turntable to pass the clam soup to B, the temperature on the thermometer rises continuously. When the thermometer meets the large clam, the temperature is above 100 F, so the clam??™s cooked. The animation of a cooked clam dancing at B??™s ends, and the next turn of sharing the meal starts. There??™re five dishes on the table, each has three kinds of interacting animations. The total 15 animations lead people to rotate the turntable to make interactions, describing a situation or imagination.
In this case, Ah Kwan took the responsibility of the whole conception, animation, vision and the design of interactive system. Daniel wrote the process and did the system design, as well as detail works. The installation mainly depends on ActionScript, and the most difficult point is to deal with the rotation angle and the calculation of the animation position according to the round table. The 15 animations do not use the same interactive system. So it was an interesting challenge for Daniel who??™s not good at maths. For the hardware part, three kinds of sensors are used to sense the rotation angle of the turntable, the condition of five seats and the gesture of people rotating the turntable.
The dream behind the installation is that one day there will be a Chinese interactive restaurant which offer creative service and better dining experience. However, people still need a long time doing experiments and research to reach that aim, or it could only be an installation inside the exhibition hall. The main direction of this work is finding a way to get into ordinary life and attract people to use it continuously. So people who have chance to see the exhibition recently please give Ah Kwan your feedback and comments.
updata:video
Related stories: Tool's Life (2001) by minim++; Dining Table That Shows Where Your Food Came From by Kyoko Yamakawa.
Via daniel[at]arch.nctu.edu.tw
Waves is a sound installation that uses buoys to connect wading pools in two different locations and create sound compositions generated by the energy of waves in a wading pool.
An accelerometer in each buoy measures the magnitude of waves through x- and y-axis position changes caused by the rocking back and forth of the buoy on the water's surface. The accelerometer's readings are converted into sound waves by a microcontroller connected to a SPEAKjet sound synthesizer IC. The SPEAKjet's output is then amplified and sent to a speaker integrated into the buoy. Each buoy plays a electronically generated minimalistic tone that reflects the participant's movements in the wading pool.
Each group of waders create their own audio composition as they influence the magnitude and frequency of waves in the pool with their splashing and playing. When no waders are in the pool, the buoys reflect their environment by responding to the waves created by wind blowing through the park, or silence when both air and water are still.
By Shannon McMullen and Fabian Winkler.
Images courtesy of the Fabian Winkler. Other work by this artist: Dielectric.
Founding Editor/Author, Wired Kevin Kelly gave the final key note at IFTF's Tech Horizon conference in San Mateo yesterday and finished the conference perfectly by tying themes like transdisciplinarity, intentional biology, and simulations of health, energy sources and ecological systems together in a long term view of future technology.
To touch on the former theme, the scientific pursuit to understand and unlock such complexities as the math of Mother Nature, you are not only in need of interdisciplinarity but scientists who speaks more than one language of science methodology, understandings and intuition. A new group of people is required, that have the ability to navigate in fields such as math, biology and engineering all at once. New science fields like nanotech, biochemistry and biomimicry are all boundary objects for this need of transdisciplinarity among the research community if millions of years of evolution are to be decoded and reengineered.
Kevin Kelly finished the key note with some thoughts for action about wider distribution of failures, like the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, so you sort of speak can follow the evolutions of successful technologies or just dead end paths.
I think that??™s an interesting point-of-view and another area where scientist can learn from artist since a painting is like 20 layers of failures and one layer of success or a mix somewhat in between the last layer of failure and the first layer of success, if paintings like the Mona Lisa and her smile are to be explained for its attraction.
bitforms gallery has just opened an exhibition with works by Bjoern Schuelke and by R. Luke Dubois.
Drone 6 and Installation shot
Schuelke is showing 12 of his Solar Kinetic Objects, sculptures powered and adorned by solar cells, some which employ tiny red blinking lights and propellers.; Nervous a fluffy bright ball of fur that shakes, emits beeps and funny sounds as viewers move closer to it (video from Beap04); the Aerophon #4, a motorized pipe organ that responds to motion with bellows of sound and compression of the instrument??™s body.
R. Luke Dubois' works explore the constructions of pop-cultural ephemera and its temporal value structure.
Billboard, a 37-minute sound installation for iPod, uses all the songs that topped Bilboard??™s Hot 100 chart chronologically since August 1958. Each of the 857 songs plays for one second, representing each week the song stayed at #1.
Billboard and Academy
His video installation Academy arrays algorithmically determined visual averages of all the past Academy Award "Best Picture" winners since 1927, smearing film sets and actors together in time. In a third installation, Play, the flickering faces of every Playboy Magazine centerfold from the publication??™s first 50 years (1953 to 2004) meld together, emerging with a collective portrait.
The exhibition runs until July 15, 2006, at the bitform gallery, New York.
Via see art/make art. Images courtesy of the gallery. PDF of the press release.
Japanese company promotion campaign spotted in Osaka
Spotted on flickr by Las Insolitas Aventuras del Pez.
genetec is a proposal by UK based artist Stanza, to build an articulating DNA structure telematically controlled from the internet and responding to unique user input data. The data would be translated into 3d emergent systems thereby creating a personalised dna large scale sculpture.
Once built this space with unique patterns and shapes would move around as you move around, based on your dna. These shapes will be changed via motion and sensor control. The sensor ie, camera tracking position control, temperature control will mediate the flow of data output onto the displays. The work focuses the merging of the human interface with new architectural philosophies, networked intelligent data and new materiality.
So far, Stanza has established links and partnerships with UCL, and also Vector Foiltec Architecture. A number of specific DNA tests have been carried out for the artist by scientist Mandy Fisher at Hammersmith Hospital, and these tests have given him his own DNA data to begin work with.
See his now legendary Genomixer project, an online artworks inspired by the human genome sequence and developed from dna profiles which were sequenced from his own blood. He also "infected" with his DNA website like the one of the BBC, the ICA and the Tate .
Check also: Peter Yeadon's Transgenic Zoo.
Two days ago, curator and architect Carson Chan was kind enough to give me a little tour of the building works for the upcoming Berlin - Tokyo/Tokyo - Berlin, an exhibition that will open on June 7 and run until October 3 in Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery).
Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo traces the cultural links between the two capitals from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day. A first part of the it has been exhibited at the beginning of this year at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Toyo Ito had been invited (or should i say "challenged") to design the internal architecture of the glass and steel lobby created by Mies van der Rohe in 1968.
The Japanese architect came up with a structure that is in total contrast with the usual order, clarity and simplicity design of van der Rohe's temple. Ito used the floor of the lobby as a 120 x 120 grid and covered it with a wooden waving floor, creating a striking hilly landscape. When finished the plan is to paint the structure in white and let visitor explore it at their whim. Looking forward to see the end result.
There's a few images on flickr (the nice ones are by Carson, the crappy ones i mine.)
I've met several talented interaction designers and new media artists who have to accept jobs they are not exactly thrilled about in order to be able to "work on their own stuff" in their leisure time. Fortunately i've also met creative practionners who were brave enough to set up their own practice and do not look back. David Kousemaker, Thomas de Bruin and Tim Olden from the interaction design collective Blendid are three of them. They met at the HKU (Utrecht School of the Arts) and over the past few years they have cooperated on a number of projects about experimental interfaces.
Among the works of the Amsterdam-based studio is Demor, an immersive outdoor game experience for visually impaired children; Robotract, an augmented reality game; TouchMe, an interactive installation that allows the public to leave a personal imprint in the public space. Experimenting with the whole body of a dancer as an input device they also created the Mocap Performance.
You set up a company right after having graduated. That's a very bold move. Did you do it because you felt there was a need on the market for the works you develop or was it because there wasn't much alternative: you think you wouldn't have found a job interesting enough?
In our graduation year we considered our future options, it seemed pretty hard to imagine landing a job out in the real world that would allow for the kind of experimentation we value. Because of our shared interest in connecting the digital with the everyday reality it seemed like a good idea to combine our skills. We figured that Blendid would help us to develop our own ideas and that this format would allow us to work in both commercial and autonomous contexts.
Any advice for young creative who would like to start their own business right after school?
It is very tempting to set up a business after you graduate as it seems like a good way to live of your creativity without having to deal with someone who tells you what to do. For some this might be exactly how it turns out but there are some drawbacks to be aware of too. Starting a business means spending a lot of time on non creative stuff. Getting to know rules and regulations that you, as a creative person, might not have any interest in.
Having to deal with finding costumers and setting up an office can be a drag sometimes, but in the end, if this is what enables you to do the kind of work you enjoy, it is definitely worth it.
How many opportunities does The Netherlands offer to young creatives? Do you feel limited by the size of your country? Or does it make it easier to get noticed?
The Netherlands currently has quite a few initiatives to stimulate the creative industry. So far these initiatives haven??™t yet translated into any concrete support for Blendid but we hope that will change. Right now we are noticing a growing interest for our expertise from the commercial sector that should lead to some interesting projects. Size wise, Holland might be small, but so far this has not been a limiting factor. We try to make our message as international as possible anyway.
Robotract
As you write in your "about us" page, so far your "approach has led to a diverse collection of work that cannot easily be boxed into a single category." What drives such variety: do you get bored with one technology once you've explored it, are you just too curious and want to try everything or is it because you are/were three individuals which each have their own interest?
The main reason for the diverse nature of our work has to be our wide interest.
We just really enjoy investigating new and different topics when they come on our path. Also, when we encounter new technologies, we always get excited by the cloud of possibilities and potential they can have for new projects, when we take them apart, or combine them in unusual ways. Our different projects do have something in common, because at the core of all our work, there is a vision of a more natural interaction between people and computing technology.
Which new technologies or social aspect would you like to explore next?
At the moment we have a growing interest in flocks, meshes and clusters. It seems that we, as people, will have to start understanding more about how our individual actions connect to the whole community. Technology, specifically when networked can possibly be a very effective tool to support insights in this area. To keep our technological toolbox up-to-date we do a lot of (online) research and try to attend relevant workshops, like for instance the RFID & the Internet of Things workshop at Mediamatic we went to recently.
MoCap Lab
You're also teaching, how do you keep the balance between your "duties" as a teachers and your creative practice?
Our job at the HKU (Utrecht School of the Arts: Faculty of Art, Media & Technology) mainly consists of tutoring both bachelor and master students in their graduation year. Being around young talent is creatively stimulating as we get introduced to, and made to think about, a range of topics that might have otherwise escaped our attention.
Next to the half day a week we spend tutoring the students, we also give seminars that allow us to communicate much more of Blendid??™s design perspective. In this context, one of our older projects, a motion capture performance experiment has grown into a reoccurring series of MoCap Lab seminars.
Demor
Demor has been designed for both blind as sighted players. How difficult was it to work for the blind? Did the experience influence successive works? Did you have to refine/redesign the project after the first user tests?
Although each group of users always has particular limitations that should be considered when designing any application for them, in the case of visually impaired people, this limitation seems more challenging. This was in fact not the case with Demor, as the blind teens where a perfect audience for an augmented audio environment.
The user testing we did during the early stages of development turned out to be very helpful in the process of making design decisions. In the end of the project we only had limited time for iterations, but thankfully there wasn??™t any necessity for major redesigns. The basic principle of the game worked very well, as most of the players really enjoyed making their way through the first level and were remarkably successful at doing so.
It was incredibly rewarding to see how naturally our target audience played the game, often doing better then we did during our own practice runs. At the time this really helped crystallize our thoughts on how invisible and direct we would like any interface to be. Finding these types of natural ways to directly augment our everyday world with digital information has remained one of our key ambitions.
TouchMe
Would you feel confident to permanently install TouchMe in a public space like an airport or a train station? would it imply constant maintenance? How reliable/robust is the technology?
It would be great to see TouchMe set up permanently in the kind of public space the piece was originally designed for!
The technology behind the installation is definitely solid enough to run without hitches for extended periods of time. However, we would probably build a moderation tool for periodically removing less interesting contributions.
During the STRP festival last March, the installation ran for 3 days in a row capturing more than 2000 imprints of different people. This indicates that people really enjoy interacting with the piece and underscores to us the premise the piece was build on.
TouchMe
Your work is very playful: games, installations that I'm sure kids must love, etc. Is that playfulness an essential component of your work?
Games are great platforms to get users involved with any type of mediated experience. In the case of Demor, where we choose to build a new interface around a generic FPS concept, it became clear to us that the ???flow??™ of a simple game really help the user to focus on a task while ???forgetting??™ about the interface.
That playfulness is a reoccurring component in our work is more of a collateral phenomenon then a premeditated design goal. We always aim to construct the kind of interfaces that require a very direct manner of interaction of the user. This usually means we try avoiding menu structures and other types of abstract GUI??™s, but rather focus on interaction modalities that borrow their behavior from unmediated, real-world tasks. That such types of interactions turn out to feel very playful to most users is often just an added bonus.
What are you working on now?
At the moment we are working on a couple different projects about which we can??™t disclose much for now. For one of those projects our designs have to contribute to an enjoyable ???experience??™ with tangible and interactive aspects, another project involves an installation for a more commercial setting.
Next to these and other projects that we do for third parties we are trying to do some autonomous work with a project to make what we call ???Wixels??™. In the academic context we are involved with helping to shape the curriculum for the new studies of Ambient Experience Design at the HKU.
Demor
Which place do you think your practice should take in society? How do you see your "role"?
As interaction designers it will always be our task to build bridges between people and technology. For most interaction designers this might have mainly consisted of the design of interfaces for websites and software or for devices like mobile phones. With the arrival of pervasive computing new layers of functionality can be added to everyday objects and environments. This promises to be a fascinated domain for those who share our interests, but can potentially also be somewhat of a nightmare for those who are less adept when it comes to technology. As can be seen in many of the projects on display at WMMNA, the best designs don??™t simply add buttons to object to access this new level of functionality but utilize a broader set of tools to find the most suitable interaction modality.
Can you point us to some Dutch interaction designers, artists or other creatives we should keep our eyes on?
There are a few Dutch designers and artists we like to keep track of ourselves.
Although she only graduated last year, Lotte Meijer already has an interesting collection of small sparkly interaction design projects to her name.
The guys of grrr don??™t only have a cool name, they also manage to be consistent when it comes to the high quality of their mostly web-based interaction design work.
We love Live Cinema, and are always impressed with the work of both Telcosystems and the brothers Brecht and Boris Debackere .
It is hard not to be stunned by the work of Marnix de Nijs who is obviously one of the frontrunners when it comes to (Dutch) interactive art.
Last but not least, we much enjoy PIPS:lab , a group that incorporates experimental interaction design in extremely entertaining theatre.
Thanks a lot Tim and David!
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