Anthroptic at the National Portrait Gallery (AU)

I'm very pleased to announce that Australia's National Portrait Gallery purchased a copy of Anthroptic and will be including it in a show this summer (or would that be winter?):

Present Tense
21 May 2010 - 22 August 2010 

Technology has been a major influence on art since the invention of the camera, particularly in the field of portraiture. The digital revolution of the 1980s-1990s has altered how portraits are made and what a portrait might be. This exhibition will explore how new ways of imaging reflect the individual in this digital world and the mechanisms of imaging that are used.

Anthroptic is a collaboration between Benjamin Rosenbaum and myself. It originated as an artists' book commissioned by The Present Group:

TPG still has some copies of the book available (it was an edition of 80), for anyone wanting to follow the National Portrait Gallery's example.

Alternatively, you can be experienced it in via a website version of the project.

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Addendum
Here's what Ben has to say on his blog about the show:

Anthroptic is still lounging about the high art world, wearing a black turtleneck, eating canapes, drinking flutes of champagne and occasionally sending me and Ethan a drunken postcard. It was at the JavaMuseumthe other day. Wouldn't it be interesting if that museum endured long enough in the future for people to be confused by its name? "Java" already no longer really has the connotation "new, flashy, internet" -- already, it sounds more like if they'd called it the CobolMuseum. It's like calling a movie studio Twentieth Century Fox, or a magazine that's supposed to have technical flair "Wired" or "Analog".

Anyway, now the robot in the black turtleneck is packing its bags to head Down Under, where one of its instances has been acquired for the permanent collection of the Australian National Portrait Gallery, where it will lounge and eat canapes with the other artworks at the vernissage of the show "Present Tense". (It tells me it is looking forward to meeting the young woman in the red Lycra suit with the chainsaw.)

Koblin & Kawashima's "Ten Thousand Cents"

This engaging project took advantage of Amazon Mechanical Turk.

As I explained in an earlier posting about Andy Baio's Faces of Mechanical Turk:

Mechanical Turk is Amazon's new service where you can post a task you want completed, along with the amount you'll pay for it, and folks will do it--Amazon calls it "artificial artificial intelligence." The service is named after an 18th century chess machine hoax.

The Ten Thousand Cents website explains their project this way:

Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase (to charity) are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.

This video replays the anonymous artists' act of drawing:

Ten Thousand Cents - Section close ups


[via Furtherfield Review]

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.