Gebhard Sengmüller's A Parallel Image

The Transmediale site writes this about Gebhard Sengmüller's sculpture:

A Parallel Image is an electronic camera obscura. This media-archaeological, interactive sculpture is based on the fictive assumption that the contemporary principle of electronically transmitting moving images, namely by breaking them down into single images and image lines, was never discovered. The result is an apparatus that attempts a highly elaborate parallel transmission of every single pixel from sender to receiver. This is only possible by connecting camera and monitor using approximately 2,500 individual cables.

The work is an excellent example of the notion of atemporality, in its supposition of a parallel timeline, in which the technologies of today, don’t exist. In this parallel timeline, a technique of the past is required to create an effect which is oddly futuristic in its sensorial impact. Unlike conventional electronic image transmission procedures, A Parallel Image is technologically transparent, conveying to the viewer a correspondence between real world and transmission that can be sensually experienced.

A Parallel Image was made in collaboration with Franz Büchinger, supported by Fels-Multiprint.

Michael F. Chan's Visions of the Amen

This is an interesting sculpture... It is activated by sound (the singer in the video is Ashleigh Semkiw). Each string is activated by a different note and is has spin velocity based upon volume. It was done using Processing.

Pretty cool, but I wish the video was better at showing the strings transitioning from one shape to another.

Somewhat related: my Study for a Vocoder

[via Make]

Randomness, Chance, & Art

Below is my the Google Book's view of my chapter ("Randomness, Chance, & Art") in The Handbook of Research on Computational Art & Creative Informatics. The chapter can also be viewed on Google's Book site.

I'm pretty proud of the essay and would love more people to have a chance to read it. The Google view of the chapter is missing a few pages. Please email me if you'd like a summary of the missing pages.




Go to Google for Larger View

Electronic Literature: What Is It?

N. Katherine Hayles (my favorite literary/technology critic & a contributor to Camera / Chimera) wrote this essay for The Electronic Literature Organization.

Here's the essay's abstract:

This essay surveys the development and current state of electronic literature, from the popularity of hypertext fiction in the 1980's to the present, focusing primarily on hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, "codework," generative art and the Flash poem. It also discusses the central critical issues raised by electronic literature, pointing out that there is significant overlap with the print tradition. At the same time, the essay argues that the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works. A final section discusses the Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination (PAD) initiative of the Electronic Literature Organization, including the Electronic Literature Collection Volume I and the two white papers that are companion pieces to this essay, "Acid Free Bits" and "Born Again Bits." Intended audiences include scholars, administrators, librarians, and funding administrators, respectively, who are new to electronic literature and for whom it is hoped this essay will serve as a useful introduction. Because this essay is the first systematic attempt to survey and summarize the fast-changing field of electronic literature, artists, designers, writers, critics, and other stakeholders may find it useful as an overview, with emphasis on recent creative and critical works.

Read the entire essay 

Find the oldest object in SL

The oldest object presented in the research blog at present is: 'Coffee Table, Glass & Steel', created by Alberto Linden on Tuesday, October 8, 2002 at 11:56:19 pm. It was found by Pitollus Swindlehurst on November 16, 2009 on the island 'The Hospital'.

I've never dived very deeply into Second Life, probably because it reminds me of my work on The Sims Online--a project which proved very frustrating.

That being said, The Last Days of Second Life has an interesting competition going on:

The literary research project "The Last Days of Second Life" will reward the finder of the oldest existing object in Second Life with 25,000 Linden Dollars. The project is based on the extremely audacious assertion of the researcher Pitollus Swindlehurst, who boasted that he had already found the oldest object: "Coffee Table, Glass & Steel", created by Alberto Linden on Tuesday, October 8, 2002 at 11:56:19 pm. Late in the wee hours of the morning of a party, the research leader Muji Zapedzki [aka Susanne Berkenheger] characterized this assertion as "ridiculous". At present, she is betting all her belongings to disprove this claim.

...

The deadline is January 31, 2010 (CET), that is: January 31, 2010, 3 pm (PST). The winner will be announced on the blog www.the-last-days-of-second-life.de. He or she will be able to blow the prize money from the middle of February onward.

Tobias Rehberger's "(Work in progress)"

I'm spending the week after Christmas in Denver and the mountains to its west... I'll be skiing for the first time in my life, so wish me luck!

While in Denver I stopped by the Denver Museum of Art, which is a quite nice museum chock full of all sorts of good arts. It's doing the regional art museum's job of attempting to cover the entire history of art, and is doing a pretty good job of it.

Among its current exhibitions is "Embrace This" which is a celebration of its new wing. Artists were invited to create installation works that react/interact with the new building's odd angles and nooks.

My favorite work in the museum is in this exhibition. It's Tobias Rehberger's (Work in progress), 2009. It's a room that has a grid of bungie cords that are strung from ceiling to floor. Visitors are welcome to force their way between the cords and walk through the room. It's a bit claustrophobic, but fun.

The photos came from Yo-Yo Ma Creations blog.

Von Bismarck & Maus's Perpetual Storytelling Machine

Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus have created an interesting work: The Perpetual Storytelling Machine.

From the project's website:

The "Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus" is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.

The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents -- linked by over 22 million references -- form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext.

New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.

The actual method is that the machine downloads the text for a recent best selling novel and then using the book's text as keywords for looking up patent drawings.

I have been playing around with similar ideas... My focus, however, was on generating a perpetual story using short stories posted to news groups as source material. The illustrations were going to be photos from Flickr found via keyword search (we did a similar thing in Benjamin Rosenbaum and my Tumbarumba project).

The use of patent drawings is brilliant... Much more satisfying than Flickr photos. However, it doesn't appear that the novel's text is presented along side the drawings... which seems too bad. More interesting, I think, then seeing semi-random connections between the drawings would be to have insight into how the drawings relate to the text.

Related: my earlier post in which I took issue with von Bismarck's The Image Fulgurator