Hydraulophones

A hydraulophones are musical instruments that uses pressurized hydraulic fluid, such as water, to make sound. They were invented by Steve Mann ( who is perhaps best known for his work in wearable computing). I particularly like the instrument's public art incarnation:


Pachelbel's Canon being played on the hydraulophone:


Overview of the instrument including early prototypes:


A variety of hydraulophone-related videos, photos, & links can be found at Steve Mann's wearcam website.

Oblivious

Olivia Robinson's Oblivious is a naked man on a table who reacts to touch.

Robinson described the work:

A naked man is sleeping on this table. As you touch the soft surface of the table, the man reacts physically. He wiggles, leans or rolls over in response to your pokes, prods, caresses, tickles and slaps. In response to the intensity and frequency of your touch, as if shrinking from this unbidden intimacy, his image fades away. Oblivious touches on issues of power, vulnerability, potential for abuse or intimacy, as well as our level of comfort with a naked male body.

The image of the man fades in the areas that have been touched the most. Over time, as more and more people interact with him, those areas will become rubbed or "touched" away. His evolving body becomes a record of people's hands and where they have chosen to touch him. At the beginning of an exhibition he will be completely opaque, present and oblivious of your existence; over time he will change in accordance with the collective interaction.

Is it just me, or does that guy look a bit like a young Jean Tinguely?


Inbed (2008) is a similar (perhaps derivatively so) project by ITP student Drew Burrows.




Burrow's describes the project:

In the piece a person climbs into an empty bed with a projected woman sleeping on it. Though the bed is empty, the projection gives the feeling of having someone there beside them. As the person climbs into the bed the projected woman moves close to cuddle and reacts accordingly as the person moves around on the bed. I wanted to give both the sensations of being alone and having someone in the bed with the viewer at the same time.

The aim of the piece was to speak on the feelings of loneliness, affection, and intimacy.

I'm also reminded of You Are Now Becoming Who You Are To Be (2004), a non-interactive work by Holly Andres. That work consists of a video of a young woman projected upon a bed. She shifts around on the bed and her silk chemise slowly changes from white to red.

More Songs About Buildings...

David Byrne building-based musical instrument, Playing the Building, is being installed (in collaboration with Creative Time) at Battery Maritime Building, New York, NY (10 South Street at Whitehall Street).

Playing the building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure -- to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes -- and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

Visitors can play the building organ during the show's run (May 31 - August 10, 2008). I believe the show is only open on weekends, so double-check that before heading to visit it.

This is the installations second outing--it was installed in Stockholm several years ago. A photocam recording from the Stockholm show opening (9 October 2005):

Ewa Berglund playing the building (recorded by Emma Karlsson), Färgfabriken, 29 October 2005:

"Cantata Park" by Metamatic Collective

Second Life has been attracting a lot of attention as a platform for media artists... some of the work isn't all that interesting (especially if it mainly depends on the aging novelty of avatars virtual spaces)... but some of it is quite interesting such as Eteam's Second Life Dumpster (Marisa Olson describes it here);

Turbulence's Networked_Performance blog reported on another intriguing Second Life project:

Cantata Park 1 (2006) [Teleport to Mashup Park, Marni (206, 35, 23)] — by Metamatic (Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash) — is an interactive, spatialised sound sculpture built in the virtual world Second Life. The sculpture is made from 256 individual nodes in a 16 x 16 grid. Each node is embedded with a single word, triggered by a participant’s movement through the work. Each participant creates a random narrative, assembled on-the-fly, and in real-time.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a “cut-up narrative”. By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. The cut-up technique was popularised by Beat poets in the 1950’s-70’s as a method to “break the linearity” of written language, with William S. Burroughs using it extensively in his works. Burroughs believed non-pictorial languages contained a virus. By using non-linear writing techniques he believed the true meaning of language could be exposed, and the spoken word used as a weapon.

Cantata Park uses a passage of 256 words from Burroughs’ The Electronic Revolution (1971) and transfers the cut-up technique into a real-time 3D environment.

The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life’s construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar.

A day without the mobile-phone

Recordings of the sculpture made by Andrew McKenzie, h3o

Eve Arpo & Riin Kranna-Rõõs coordinated "a day without the mobile-phone" last September in Tallinn, Estonia. The project is a an installation made up of cell phones collected from the people in the city. The phones are hung on a tree where they create a light- and sound-installation. Through out the night the phones light up, ring, & vibrate as they receive phone calls--some inadvertent and some specifically to trigger the sculpture.

The artists are organizing a second installation for June 2008 in Edmonton, Canada as part of of The Works Art & Design Festival.



Part 1: TV coverage in top evening news, Reporter, Kanal2.
Part 2: documentation from the installation, recorded by Üllar Luup, Reporter, Kanal2

The Ebb and Flow of Movies

The New York Times has a cool interactive graph of movie revenues since 1983. It very noticeable that revenue spikes become choppier as time progresses--the hits become higher, more individually defined peaks. That's probably related to inflation (as the movies become more expensive, the revenue differences become more extreme), but perhaps it also reflects a growing addiction to a hit-driven model.


[via Leisure Guy]

Ayiti: The Cost of Life

Ayiti has been called the most depressing game ever... it's a surprisingly addictive "serious game" (i.e., socially relevant) in which the player tries to improve the life of a Haitian family of five. The best I've done so far is the keep the family relatively healthy and to get them slight improvements in education, material goods, and jobs.

The concept was developed in a workshop with Brooklyn high school students.

Assignment art

My graduate students and I investigated assignment art yesterday.

We started with Yoko Ono's instruction pieces, but none of her instructions (from Grapefruit) were practical to implement.

We then moved on to Erwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures and Sculptures to Embarrass (circa 1997). The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Can't Stop music video incorporates several of Wurm's sculptural assignments.

Here are our implementations of Wurm's sculptures.

Shani:


Rachel:

Trotsky:

Seung Ae:


And myself:



What I find most interesting about his work is the decision of what aspects of his sketches are key and what aren't. It reminds me of when I was learning Japanese katakana and hiragana. It was often difficult to determine what is a key trait of a character and what is an eccentricity of the particular font. For example, here are two different renderings of the hiragana for "fu."


Finally, we took a look at Harrell Fletcher (who introduced me to Erwin Wurm when I was in grad school) and Miranda July's Learning to Love You More website.

We choose their Assignment #23 Recreate this snapshot. Here is the original photograph:


And here is our recreation:

Reading clouds: Vihreä Pilvi

A some of my readers interpreted an earlier post as a general condemnation of data visualization art. It wasn't intended as such... my point was that data visualization art as an artistic practice needs to step up its game. It isn't enough to simply make a pretty graphic--if the goal is art, then there needs to be an intention beyond effective data communication.


Vihreä Pilvi is an interesting data visualization/manifestation artwork. It's a Finnish temporary art project that ran from February 22-29, 2008. Each night the Salmisaari power plant's vapor cloud was illuminated with a laser. The less power being consumed by Helsinki, the larger the cloud illumination, which seems counter-intuitive. I guess the idea was to reward conservation with a bigger light show, and perhaps the green color of the laser's light is considered to signify green in the environmental sense (though green is also the stereotypical color of toxic sludge in movies, comic books, etc.).

I love how Vihreä Pilvi combines aesthetics, an environmental agenda, and ostranenie. I do wish that it had equated higher energy consumption with a larger cloud, but maybe that is nitpicking.

Note, the videos below have a playback problem for first few seconds, but it quickly clears up:





[via Pall Thayer's post on Rhizome]


Not that it has anything to do with Vihreä Pilvi, but I highly recommend David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: A Novel.

Absolut sound sculptures

Absolut Vodka has sponsored two sound art installations: Absolut Quartet in NYC and Absolut Choir in Stockholm. Both installation are interactive via the web.

I have mixed feelings about corporate sponsorship of art. It is helping artists create and promote their artworks (and corporate sponsorship of museum exhibits has certainly become common-place). But imposing the vodka's name on the artwork's titles seems too intrusive to me. At least it isn't as obnoxiously promotional as some corporate art events.

Absolut Quartet (see video above) is the more interesting of the two works. It seems inspired by the Animusic "Pipe Dream" computer animation (see below), which became an urban legend (claiming that "Pipe Dream" was a physical sculpture).

[Via Make]

Musical tables

I'm gearing up to do a series of acoustic artworks and have been looking at what is out there. Golan Levin's Scrapple (2005) is quite cool:



Surprising similiar to Scrapple is the Reactable (see video below) which was developed at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Since the two projects came out at almost the same time, it seems they the artist/developers simply came up with similar ideas independently, with a couple of notable differences.

Scrapple's table acts as a score and objects placed on it are interpreted into sound chronologically, whereas the Reactable is more amorphous in terms of how objects' sounds relate to time. Also, the Reactable has specific objects that are dedicated for generating or manipulating particular sounds, whereas Scrapple will interpret any object placed upon it (which seems particularly interesting to me). I suspect that the Reactable is more flexible in the sounds it can create, while Scrapple is more intuitive in its usage.

Complexification

Complexification is an interesting (and well designed) site that I found via Make Magazine's blog. It is a gallery of generative artworks done in the Processing programming language by Jerry Tarbell. If you check it out, be sure you not only view the static images but also launch the applets so that you can trigger Tarbell's generative algorithms and see new artworks being formed.

A thought that has been in the back of my head lately is how New Media art often seems to be automatically considered Contemporary. But that isn't always the case... for example, generative art (such Tarbell's) is often focused on formal aesthetics in a way that I'd characterize as Modern.

I suppose the temporal names all these art categories have (new, contemporary, modern) does nothing to help clarify... Many, many people (including those who should know better) seem to think that Contemporary refers to a time period (i.e., art being made today is Contemporary because it is contemporary). But that's not really any more true than all art today is Modern because we're modern. Post-Modernism seems to confound as well... more than once it's been argued to me that there can never be another art movement because everything that comes after Modernism will be post-modern (I usually counter by pointing out by the same logic we're all making Post-Impressionist art). And of course the cherry on top is the Pre-Raphaelites who were founded 300 years after Raphael's death.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia currently has a particular bad definition of Contemporary Art. I spent a week or two discussing it with the folks who edit the entry... I managed to convince them to mention the idea that Contemporary doesn't not simply mean "art made today." But overall, the entry tries to describe the movement as a moment in time. For example:

The institutions of art have been criticised for regulating what is designated as contemporary art. Outsider art, for instance, is literally contemporary art, in that it is produced in the present day.

The idea of outsider art always makes me a bit queasy. I find the category patronizing and overly focused on the human-interest aspect of the artists' lives (i.e., the artist is insane, has a low IQ, a murderer, etc.). Oddly, while I agree most "Outsider Art" isn't Contemporary Art (because the intention behind the art isn't really Contemporary), faux-Outsider Art (which is Contemporary) was a fad for a few years recently. If this seems wrong-headed, consider this... a child's scrawling might be reminiscent of of Picasso or a Pollock, but that doesn't mean the child is a Modern artist (because the child isn't trying to address Modern concerns).

Webphone

I just posted my proposal for this year's Rhizome commission (which I posted about earlier). Here's the proposal.

Flow

More than once I have been at an electronics surplus store and paused at a pile of computer cooling fans and thought, "hmm... what could I do with those?" Here's an artist who had an answer for that. Very cool stuff!

See the video on the artist's website.

Reblogged via Rhizome.org (who reblogged it from digitalexperience.dk):

Flow 5.0 is an interactive art installation consisting of hundreds of ventilators, each being controlled individually by various sensors.

Microphones and other sensors control the direction and speed of the fans as visitors pass through a corridor. The fans form the walls of the corridor, and they remain off until a visitor moves in front of them.

Daan Roosegaarde, the creator of Flow 5.0, describes it as an interactive landscape made out of hundreds of ventilators which reacts on your sound and motion. By walking and interacting the visitors creates an illusive landscape of transparencies and artificial wind.

Visit Studio Roosegaarde's website.