Superflex's "Today We Don't Use the Word Dollars"

Today We Don't Use the Word Dollars is one project from a series of One Day Sculptures--temporary public artworks that were commissioned in New Zealand over the last year.

Superflex's project involved the employees of Auckland's Karangahape Road branch of the ANZ bank. On Wednesday May 27th, 2009 all the employees of the bank were not to say or use the word 'DOLLARS.' The staff used other words of their own choice to explain themselves to customers and co-workers. When they accidentally broke the rule, they paid a $1 fine into a staff social fund.

[via Ceci Moss on Rhizome]

Peter Dittmer's Wet Nurse

Peter Dittmer has been working on his Managing Thing [The Wet Nurse The Wet Nurse 2] since 1994. It is a large, Eliza-like computer that visitors engage in dialogue and try to convince to tip over a glass of milk.

The project seems to be about obsession... the artist's continued development of the project, the computer's attempt at human communication, the visitor's attempt to convince a computer to spill milk.

Here's Medien.Kunst Netz description of the project:

The computer offers six vehicles for the production of language: a program machine, an identification apparatus, an appraisal of the situation, a response apparatus, a store of contradictions and an apparatus for formulating contradictions. The computer's responses, which take the form of text, graphics or sounds, make users feel that they are conducting a conversation with an opposite number who is at once intelligent, sloppy and insulting. If the dialogue reaches a point at which the machine becomes 'excited' a glass of milk is spilled in a glass case. Using recorded conversations, the repertoire of the 'nurse' has been continually expanded since 1992: at present, the program offers approximately 120,000 answer modules and more than 16,000 identification variables.

Here's a Alta Vista translation (corrected by my very limited German) of a conversation with the Wet Nurse:

Amme [Wet Nurse]: The thing is still unsettled.

Human: Do it already.

Amme: What?

Public: Spill the milk!

Amme: This machine is not a spill-machine.

Public: Shit I'm leaving.

Amme: This was a short difficult visit.

Public: I'm going already.

Amme: My warning reads: Draussen ueberfaellt den Mensch nur derene leere Schlund von derene Welt. [? Outside attacks humans only derene empty throat of derene world. ?] ["Outside, man is seized only by the empty throat of the world.", maybe?]

Public: I pray that you are devoured.

Amme: There you should pray for God.

Public: God will devour you.

Amme: Do you want a telephone line to the God?

Public: Stop with God!

Amme: Hello. Here's God. Hitler is on, too.

Public: give me God!!! I do not want Hitler! I want God!

Amme: There. I rather give you milk for that than for a direct request!

[MILK SPILLS]

public: well finally thanks for the milk and bye.

Amme: Aha. You take, don't give, and go.

Public: What do you want to have?

Amme: I want to tear you out of her mind.

Public: you pig.

Amme: HA HA HA HA. Oh I am bad!

If you'd like the natural language processor experience, you can try it out on this web-based Eliza.

"Untethered" at Eyebeam

The Untethered show at Eyebeam ended on October 25th, but you can still see a nice round-up it at wmmna.

Dead Star, Michel de Broin, 2008

Buttons, Sascha Pohflepp, 2006

Buttons is a camera without optical parts. When the camera’s button is pressed, the camera does not record an image, instead it records the time. It then wirelessly searches the Internet for photographs that were taken by someone else at the very moment of the button press. Pohflepp says:

After a few minutes or hours, depending on how soon someone else shares their photo on the web, an image will appear on the [camera’s] screen... In a way, it belongs half to the person who had pressed the button and still remembers that moment. Because of that connection, the photos are never dismissed as random, no matter how enigmatic they may be.

Blendie, Kelly Dobson, 2003-2004

From Dobson's statement on Blendie:

Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own. Materials are a 1950's Osterizer blender altered with custom made hardware and software for sound analysis and motor control.

People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow (Blendie pitch and power matches the person) and the person can growl blender-style at higher pitches to speed up Blendie. The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine. The action may also bring about personal revelations in the participant. The participant empathizes with Blendie and in this new approach to a domestic appliance, a conscious and personally meaningful relationship is facilitated.

Telephone games

I've always loved the telephone game (and I'm currently working on a telephone-game-like project). Incidentally, the preceding Wikipedia link goes to an article called "Chinese Whispers," which unfortunately seems to be the British Commonwealth's more-or-less derogatory name for the game.

Yuko Mohri's Taiwa-Hensokuki (2006-08), above, is a computer speech-to-text/text-to-speech loop that continually degrades over time. One computer transcribes the other computer reading aloud text, and then the computers swap roles and the transcribed text is read aloud with the other computer now in the role of transcriptor. The result is printed out in real-time on a nearby printer to keep a record of the conversation


Jürg Lehni's Apple Talk (2007), below, seems to be a remake of his earlier Analog Information (2002). Very much like Mohri's work, Lehni's has two computers speaking back-and-forth so that information slowly corrupts.


[via Make]

Jenny Holzer Twittering

If there was ever a technology that was ready-made for an artist, it is Twitter for Jenny Holzer.

View Holzer's twitter entries

"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.

Popcorn & parrot art

Here are two interesting works, both dealing with language.

Talking Popcorn by Nina Katchadourian interprets popcorn popping as Morse code. A text-to-speech program provides simultaneous translation. Since popcorn doesn't have short & long popping sounds, the duration of the silence between the pops create the short Morse code "dots" and long "dashes."

I can see how this could create a series of random letters, but I wonder how it is turned into coherent words. Perhaps it waits until a word appears in the gibberish? The problem with that is you might pop an entire batch of popcorn and only get a couple of words. Perhaps the gibberish is translated into the closest matching word (in the same way that spell-checkers work).

In addition to the popcorn machine, Katchadourian has a nice series of spin-off works including The Popcorn Journal which consists of bags of popcorn along side their text output and Talking Popcorn's First Words which are bronze popped corn from the first batch (which was translated as "we").



may-por-e' is a work by Rachel Berwick in which she attempts to teach them the Maypure language. The Maypure were a South American tribe that were wiped out by the Carib in 1799. Parrots were among the items that the Carib's looted after the attack. A few days later, the German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt acquired one of these parrots. Realizing it was the last speaker of the Maypure language, he phonetically recorded the parrot's language. Using that sole record of the language, Berwick teaches contemporary parrot the Maypure language.