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

Kenny Marshall's "prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices"

Kenny Marshall has portfolio full of interesting kinetic work. He describes his prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices as being:

... a group of small robotic sculptures, each connected to its immediate neighbors via wires, that together form a net of robotic life that spreads across the Garden at the Mattress Factory and over nearby structures. These twenty-five mechanical crickets fill the garden with sound as they listen to their neighbors and act accordingly during Pittsburgh's Robot250 festival. Using Dr. John Conway’s rules for The Game of Life, each robot activates when a preset number of his neighbors is active and deactivates if too few or too many of his neighbors are active.

The Game of Life is an interesting simulation of simple life that been a favorite of geeky-types since 1970. Worth checking out (if you're a geeky-type).

Demirjian & Seldess's "Nitrogen Cycles"

I've been meaning to blog about Andrew Demirjian & Zachary Seldess's Nitrogen Cycles (2009) ever since I saw it early this year at Gallery Aferro.

A video of the artwork can be seen on Demirjian's website.

Here's how Andrew Demirjian describes the work:

Nitrogen Cycles is an 8-channel sound art installation that sonically maps the daily activity of live fish into the gallery space. A rectangular fish tank stands in the center of the gallery and each fish is assigned a unique tone that spatially travels through the rectangular gallery corresponding to that fish’s activity. The music generated is a reflection of the dynamic shifts in the location, speed and the relationship between the fish in their daily lives. Through motion and color tracking a sonic transposition is created that immerses the listener into an aural experience of the movements inside the fish tank. This twists the visitor's traditional sensory experience by putting their ears inside the tank and the eyes outside of it.

Four speakers are low to the ground and an additional four are over six feet high in the air, so we hear the fish sound travel and pan with height fluctuations as well as width. The pitch scales from low to high on the y-axis, and the x-axis controls a tremolo effect that is fastest at the center of the tank and slower at the edges. When a fish moves quickly the sound is processed with a filtering effect that emphasizes their sharp movement.

Henrik Menné

I've become an instant fan of Danish artist Henrik Menné. His sculptures have a poetry that is often missing in technology-based art. He seems to have something in common with Tim Hawkinson and Olafur Eliasson.

75P. 2004, paraffin and iron, 150x150x150cm (Cone: 70x100cm)
Fotograf Anders Sune Berg

Description of 75P from the kunstdk.dk website:

The machine is an iron construction on which a small rotating iron disk is mounted. Onto this rotating disk, small drops of hot wax are poured. The rotating disk swirls the drops creating a shape on the floor. The rotating disk is 15 centimetres in diameter and placed 80 cm above the floor. With these measurements, the drops will create a shape of approximately 1 m in diameter. After a few days, the wax will have created a thin cone-shaped shell.

Stone. 2001, marble, water, fibreglass, 70x130x180cm (Stone: 36x36x50cm).
Fotograf Anders Sune Berg

The white marble cube is hollowed out and floats on the water.

Beholder (Container). 2005, ventilators and foamed polysterene, diameter 210 cm
Photograph: Anders Sune Berg

[via Make]

Edith Kollath's "disport."

Edith Kollath has a series of works about breathing.  Here's her disport. (2009, mixed media installation):

Kollath writes about disport.:

As you approach this room installation (diameter app. 14'2", height app. 10'6") you'll recognize an organic   movement resembling a breath movement executed by free-flowing textiles.  These textiles form a cell, which is based on the shape of a pentagon. Its walls consist of white transparent chiffons organized in layers within a trapezoid.  Each trapezoid module continually slides away from the center and returns again in a regular rhythm. Opening - closing, inhale - exhale.... Simultaneously, the light inserted in the central pentagon shape shifts from a warmer darker tone to a brighter cooler white.

You are invited to enter the cell. How do you perceive the room, how do you perceive yourself? How does the cell affect the encounters with other people? By creating an immersive accessible room installation fully controlled by an Arduino Microcontroller I explore phenomenological questions.

Ada Lovelace Day: Sabrina Raaf

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

Today is Ada Lovelace Day--the day to blog about a woman who works in technology. I'm one of 1,680 folks who pledged to do so. I chose Sabrina Raaf to write about. Raaf is a Chicago-based artist who works in experimental sculptural media and photography.


Raaf's Translator II: Grower 2004-6 (v2) is a robotic artwork that is activated by chance.

The robot navigates around the perimeter of a room, hugging the walls. A sensor near the ceiling detects the room’s CO2 level and transmits the information to the robot. Every few seconds the robot draws a vertical green line on the wall--the higher the level of carbon dioxide, the taller the line. The lines become both a representation of grass and a bar graph tracking the amount of carbon dioxide in the room over time. The act of observing the artwork literally changes it.

Raaf writes:

The height of the ‘grass’ directly reflects on the human activity or traffic in the space. The more people that visit that space, the more amenable that space is to my machine’s ability to create. This piece therefore makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them ‘healthy’ spaces for new art to evolve and flourish within.

Drunkard's Walk vs. PMU

When I was at PS1 the other day, I came across Simon Ingram's Drunkard's Walk (2008) as part of a group show by Minus Space in the Boiler Room:

Drunkard's Walk, 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk (detail), 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk (finished painting), 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk seems to be a poor-man's version of Roxy Paine's PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit) 1999-2000:

PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit), 1999-2000, Roxy Paine

PMU, Roxy Paine

PMU, Roxy Paine

I take Drunkard's Walk to be a commentary of some sort (satire perhaps?) on Paine's work. However, when I watch an interview with Ingram (see below) he makes no reference to Paine's PMU. It would be interesting to hear Ingram's thoughts regarding Paine.

NYU's ITP Winter Showcase

The Interactive Telecommunications Program's showcase is on view today and tomorrow... Just seeing the sheer mass of techno-projects (about 200 the last year) makes the visit worthwhile.

A two-day festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP.

http://itp.nyu.edu/show <--- now dynamic listing all of the students' projects! Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists. This two-year graduate program gives 220 students the opportunity to explore the imaginative uses of communications technologies - how they augment, improve, and bring delight and creativity into people's lives. Housed in the studios of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, ITP takes a hands-on approach. Students learn to realize their ideas through a hands-on approach of building, prototyping, and testing with people. Interactive Telecommunications Program Kanbar Institute of Film and Television Tisch School of the Arts New York University 721 Broadway, 4th Floor, South Elevators New York NY 10003 Take the left elevators to the 4th Floor This event is free and open to the public No need to RSVP For questions: 212-998-1880 email: itp.inquiries@nyu.edu http://itp.nyu.edu/show

Tom Thayer at White Columns

Tom Thayer has a piece in the Looking Back group show at White Columns (the show runs until December 13th).

His contribution to the show is adapted from one of his live performances. It consists of a bird puppet which dips its needle/head down onto a record (which was recorded by Thayer), to play a random excerpt.



In a performance, Thayer would control the bird by hand, but for White Columns he has automated the motion. A microcontroller & servo turns a spindle that, in turn, pulls & releases a string through a pulley to raise & lower the bird's head.


I assisted Tom a bit with the automation. It was a lot of fun... he wanted to a way to record his manual manipulation of the string. I particularly liked this approach because it keeps a human touch in the motion--and I don't think it would have occured to me to do this, I probably would have simply directly programmed the motion into the controller.

I also really appreciated that this is an artwork that was conceived before the technical solution was applied. All too often we see work in which a technical challenge seems to be driving purpose and the artistic concept an after thought.

I can't wait to see what Thayer does next!

"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.

Steamboat Ed's calliope

Steamboat Ed left this comment on my post about my vocoder project:

Ha! Interesting timing! Got a Stamp-controlled mini calliope working today; only took a year to get the bugs out, hehe. I suspect it'll take another year to make it as elegant as your slide whistle tho... ;-)

Below is his calliope project... I like his use of sprinkler parts for controlling airflow.

Study for a Vocoder

I recently concluded a residency at LEMUR with a performance Study for a Vocoder. For quite a while I've been wanting to build a few vocoder-like sculptures/musical-instruments... and this is the first step towards the first of them.

It's built out of a ink-jet printer and a slide-whistle. It replicates whatever sounds are spoken/sung into a microphone. It can also play pre-recorded music ala a player piano. Its main short coming is being a bit slow in changing notes, but a more powerful stepper motor should help improve its response time.

Heidi Kumao: Misbehaving

I recently came across Heidi Kumao's very interesting (and poetic) kinetic and cinematic machines. From Kumao's Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out, 2002-2008 statement:

Misbehaving is a series of three female "performers" for intimate installations. In each tableau, a hybrid machine "being" performs: a kinetic, electronically controlled machine speaks with a visual voice of erratic physical gestures and video imagery. As a combination of performance and robotics, they represent girls and women who disobey or resist expectations. Unlike machines designed for perfect job performance, these machines will declare their fallibility, impatience, approval, and disapproval through small gestural acts and embedded video sequences. In contrast to the precise technique and tireless efforts of a robot that plays chess or constructs automobiles, my robotic performers "act out" and misbehave. In these tableaus of protest and transformation, the machine is spirited, emotional, thoughtful, yet irregular.

From Kumao's website:


Translator, 2008, Heidi Kumao
Aluminum legs, plastic bowl, half-scale chairs with video projector heads, wooden table, parts from garage door opener and bicycles, 82 x 168 x 36 inches.

Viewers hand-crank a garage door opener to move the girl between opposing armchairs that have video projector heads. As she moves from one projector to the other, two different sets of imagery appear on her bowl-shaped torso. Like a child caught between two feuding parents, a political mediator, or a mind that alternates between two thoughts, the body of the "translator" switches identities from chair to chair. On one side, the "go-between" unzips her clothes to reveal herself, and on the other side, she closes her torso to conceal whatever information might have been visible.

Resist, 2002-2004, Heidi Kumao
Girl's shoes, aluminum, motors, customized electronics, microphone, wood and plexiglass platform.

A machine portrait: audio-activated 6-year-old girl's legs. As viewers speak to this character, the legs begin a series of random behaviors from imperceptible movement to violent and fast kicking. Her actions leave permanent marks on the floor.

See more work by Kumao

I'm performing tonight at LEMUR

I've spent the last four weeks as a resident at LEMUR (the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots). It's been a great experience! LEMUR's own work is very inspiring and having a residency (and access to LEMUR's tools) was very motivating.

I spent my residency building a study for an interactive sculpture I've been wanting to make. The eventual sculpture is intended to work like a vocoder.

I'm pretty pleased with the prototype... it's a slide whistle which replicates whatever sounds are spoken/sung into a microphone. It can also play pre-recorded music ala a player piano. It's main short coming is being a bit slow in changing notes, but a more powerful stepper motor should help improve it's response time.

Here are some quick snapshots of the Study for Vocoder. I'll try to post a video of it in action before too long. Or if you're in NYC and free tonight (Thursday Oct 9, 2008), you can see it in action at a performance by the LEMUR residents. It starts at 8pm and should be fun. I heard fellow-resident Adam Matta (warning, his website automatically plays sound) rehearse last night and he sounded great! Details about the performance here.




related post: Vocoders

Roman Haefeli's "Solenoid Concert"

A nice little musical installation by Roman Haefeli using solenoids what looks to be Pure Data or Max programming language.

It reminds me a bit of David Byrne's Playing the Building and the work of League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR). Incidentally, I'm just finishing up a residency at LEMUR and will be wrapping it up with a performance at 8pm on Thursday October 9th.

[via Boing Boing]

Related:
More Songs About Buildings

Studio 360 on New Media art

This weekend the public radio show Studio 360 had a interesting segment on new media art. The piece focuses Jonathan Carroll, who collects computer-based art, and deals with the difficulty tech-based art has had finding a commercial niche.

Here's the segment's audio:


Here's one of the works in Carroll's collection:

Eye Contact, Rafael Lozano Hemmer

Eye Contact shows 800 simultaneous videos of people at rest. When someone walks in detectable view, the miniature video portraits "wake up."

Ball-bearing balancing

Here's a neat project... the folks at the Real-Time Systems Laboratory (RETIS lab) of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa has a touchscreen platform that detects the position of a ball bearing. Two servo motors tilt the platform in order to keep the ball from rolling off.

[RETIS Lab via AI Robotics via BotJunkie via Electronics Lab via Make]

Sachiko Kodama's ferrofluid sculptures

Sachiko Kodama's odd magnetic sculptures are included in a group kinetic sculpture show at Atlantic Botanical Gardens.

Morpho Tower, 2008, 18" x 23" x 23", steel, marble, ferrofluid and electronics

[via LeisureGuy]

Laurie Anderson's "Hearring"

I'm a huge fan of Laurie Anderson and her Hearring (1997) always makes me smile (it plays her voice repeatedly saying, "Hey you! I'm right behind you!"). The wearable art was done in an edition of 150 for Parkett magazine. Inexplicitly, the edition is not sold out (perhaps art collectors think of Anderson a musician?) and a Hearring is available for the bargain price of $600.

To create the piece, Anderson worked with jeweler Josiah Dearborn and engineer Bob Bielecki. Bielecki has collaborated with Anderson before on such things as her magnetic tape violin:

Markus Copper at PS1

Markus Copper's Kursk (2004) is probably the creepiest piece of art I've ever come across. It's set up as a formation of old-fashion diver's suits hanging just off the floor in a unlit room in PS1's basement. When I first peeked into the room, I wasn't sure it was an exhibition space or if there was even anything in it... then I saw a jerking motion and heard a clanking. It was an uncomfortable feeling being in the room--it was barely larger than the installation itself, so there is no buffer space between the viewer and the the suits.

The suits occasionally make a spastic, unexpected motions. The sword-like tools in their hands might suddenly move, or a light inside a helmet might switch on or off. Even though I was alone in the room, there was the overwhelming sense of someone else being there, inside one of the suits.

It wasn't until the next day that I realized that the title refers to Russian submarine that sunk in 2000 with all hands lost. The installation certainly communicates the grimness of that event.

The images of the installation on Copper's website are fully lit. I wonder if this is how the installation was originally shown (or if it is just so that the photographs can capture all the detail). I'm glad I saw the the installation in the dark--I think a lot of its power came from the unsettling environment.

Kursk is part of a very interesting "Arctic Hysteria" exhibition of Finnish art that's at PS1 through September 15th. Also included in the show is a room that explores the work of Erkki Kurenniemi. I'll probably be blogging more about him later on.

PS1 Director Alanna Heiss made an interesting about contemporary Finnish art: "Finnish artists are independent from the contemporary mainstream, and open to new ideas and materials but not addicted to the new..."

Tristan Perich

Tristan Perich is musician, artist, & hacker. Marisa Olson posted about his work recently on Rhizome:

Unsurprisingly descended from Warhol-era conceptual artist Anton Perich, the younger Perich has become a fixture in the local avant garde scene, bringing his own brand of circuit-bent instruments to the contemporary music sphere. His band, The Loud Objects, have made a very well-received international magic-show of their singular work, which involves soldering musical chips together atop an overhead projector--clad in futuristic sunglasses, no less!

I have a copy of Perich's 1-Bit Music (2004-2005), pictured above. It is a clever bit of electronic hackery that is contained in a CD jewel case. Plug in headphones, flip a switch, and you have lo-fi electronic music that puts many 16-bit works (the bit-depth that compact discs are recorded at) to shame. I picked up the Whitney Museum store's last copy, so if you'd like a copy of 1-Bit Music your best bet is Perich's online store (which sells a variety electronic, musical goodies).

Tonight (Wednesday June 18th), Perich is premiering his untitled (Bernadette Mayer) 5 voices and 15-channel electronics at 8pm in the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

Here is Perich's Active Field, 10 violins, 10-channel 1-bit electronics (2007)

See The Village Voice for another profile of Perich.

Meridith Pingree

Meridith Pingree makes cool kinetic sculptures.

My hard drive is experiencing some strange noises

Gregory Chatonsky's project uses sensors to translate (using Pure Data) the vibrations from a malfunctioning hard drive into sound.

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:

What it is without the hand that wields it

Riley Harmon's What it is without the hand that wields it is connected to a game of Counter-Strike (see image below for an idea of what the game is like).

Here's what Riley says about the artwork:

Violence is an inevitable, mechanical function of the human brain, hard-coded down through time by culture, genetics, and evolution. Mediated experiences of killing change our perception of violence and death. As players die in a public video game server for Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, the electronic solenoid valves spray a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of nebulous kills.

In simple terms it is about manifesting experiences that are purely virtual, or only ‘real’ in a psychological sense, into the physical world - physical computing.

During the show's run (April, 2008?) people who have a copy of Counter-Strike can join the game and cause the sculpture to active:

To connect and play on the server while it is being exhibited during the week, launch Counter-Strike Source and type this command in your console:
“connect 129.15.76.103:27015″

[via Make]

Vanity ring

Under the theory that Google hits count are more precious than gold in an information society, this ring allows you to show off your notabilty/nobility.

The artist, Markus Kison, has the ring's utility program do a simple Google search on the wearer's name. Unfortunately, this could give a false impression of the user's Internet reputation. For example, I'm not the only artist named Ethan Ham... there's also a photographer Ethan Ham who lives in Austin. I do occasionally wonder how often people looking for one of us finds the other.

Something like Career Distinction (thanks to my dad for that link) might work better when calculating the Google hits for the ring. My rating is 8.8 out of 10 (based on my goal of being "VP, Highly-regarded Consultant or Acknowledged Thought Leader"). What's your score?