Ethan Ham

There may be a pause in blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:10:00 +0000

This blog is published using Blogger, but is hosted on my own site. Unfortunately, on May 1st Blogger is discontinuing the ability to host one's own blog.

So I'll be switching to Word Press... I'm a bit busy at the moment, so it may be a couple of weeks before I'm able to do the change.

Thanks for reading!

The Virtual State of Jefferson

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:07:00 +0000

The Virtual State of Jefferson (above) by Ethan Miller and myself is being included in an upcoming show at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art.

The State of Jefferson is a proposed 51st state that would be carved out of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Many residents of this region feel alienated from the rest of their state and see the movement either as a tongue-in-cheek protest or a serious libertarian movement towards self-determination.

The Virtual State of Jefferson is a wireless router. Laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries can connect to the internet through the router and browse the web. Whenever a webpage displays the address of a town that is in the proposed borders of the State of Jefferson, the router changes the state name to be "Jefferson." In this manner, the "City of Ashland, Oregon" website automatically becomes the "City of Ashland, Jefferson."

The Virtual State of Jefferson explores how the internet has become one of our primary windows for viewing the world and how the realities it presents can be authoritative, fictive, self-deluding, and enlightening.

Addendum:

Here is an example of how the router changes the web pages it servers. Immediately below is the results typically given when searching for "ashland, oregon" on Google.

click to enlarge

However, when using The Virtual State of Jefferson router to connect to the internet, these are the results that are returned:

click to enlarge

Jan Vormann in New York

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:24:00 +0000

Jan Vormann, who I blogged about a couple of times before, made some art interventions in New York last month in conjunction with the art fairs.

These works are a part of a series where he repairs walls using Legos:

At Wooster & Broome Streets

I think my favorite of these latest involves repairing a subway mosaic:

In Times Square subway station

Favorite work from the Armory Show

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:05:00 +0000

I absolutely LOVED Hans Op de Beeck's 22 minute video, Staging Silence. I'm usually an impatient viewer when it comes to video art, but I paused my Armory Show wanderings to watching nearly the entire video.

I wish I could have it on DVD, but since it is only available in a BlueRay edition of 10, I'm pretty sure I can't afford it. If I could, though, it would be running non-stop on a dedicated monitor on my wall.

It can be watched on de Beeck's website by click on Main Menu > Artworks > 2009 > Staging Silence (unfortunately de Beeck's site is in Flash, so I can't provide a direct link).

How to get accepted to an MFA in Studio Art program

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:19:00 +0000

A couple of years ago I wrote How to apply (and not apply) to an MFA program. If you're interested in the topic, I'd suggest taking a few minutes to read the advice in that post. What follows expands on what I wrote there.

To have a really effective application you need to understand that people have many motivations for applying to an MFA program. Some of the reasons people have for going back to school do not necessarily lead to a great educational experience. There's a good chance that whoever is looking at your application is trying to figure out what kind of student you will be.

What kind of students are professors looking for? Generally, professors want students who are making interesting work, who are ready to experiment and break out of their artistic routines, who are open to feedback & critique, who have some self-direction & backbone, and who are ambitious for their art to be successful.

What kind of students are professors looking to avoid? Ones who are defensive and do not want to investigate taking their art somewhere new.

So when looking at a portfolio and artistic statement, the admissions committee are not only trying to figure out if you're a promising artist, but also whether you'll benefit from graduate education.

Here are some particular things for you to consider when putting together your application:

In my earlier posting I suggested that the portfolio should be 2-4 series of work. It is important not have only one series of works. Why? Because if all the artworks in your portfolio are too similar, the admissions committee may take that to mean that you've settled on making art in a particular way and are not interested in exploring new avenues.
If you are an artist who is already experiencing some success, be careful about how you present that. The admissions committee may worry that in light of your success you may be reluctant to try new things and may be unresponsive to their attempts to guide you. Also, graduate school is intended to be a safe place where you can explore without worrying about how the outside world reacts to what you're doing. If you're showing and selling work you may be a bit risk-adverse (or more responsive to the market place than the education). You should try to make it clear that you truly want to be a student and that you're ready to take your art somewhere new.
As mentioned in the earlier posting, avoid mentioning teaching as a motivation for going to graduate school. There's nothing wrong with that being something you'd like to do, but if it's your primary motivation then it may indicate that you're not onboard for going on the artistic journey.

Before applying to graduate school, you should ask, "Why?" If the answer isn't to take your art somewhere new and/or deeper, then you should not go to graduate school. Also ask yourself whether you're prepared to be pushed and pulled and have your art challenged. If the answer is no, then you should not go to graduate school.

Be honest with yourself. If your art is in a place where you're happy with it, and you're not interested/comfortable with taking it somewhere new, there's not necessarily anything wrong with that artistically, but it isn't going to lead to a happy MFA experience.

Anthroptic at the National Portrait Gallery (AU)

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:59:00 +0000

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.

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"

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:54:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:02:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:52:00 +0000

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

Addendum:
Incidentally, let me say this about IGI Global for any academic considering contributing a chapter to one of their books. It's pretty much a one way street. No complementary copies, no pay (of course), and very little consideration.
When the book was published I received an email from them saying to let them know if I'd like a printable pdf of my chapter (they did provide a non-printable, non-editable, non-savable pdf of the book). Why they don't just assume every author would like that and simply go ahead and send one, I don't know.
Anyway, I've emailed them quite a few times ever since saying, "Why yes, I'm coming up for tenure and it would be wonderful to be able to print out a copy of the chapter to include in my tenure review packet." I've never received a response.
Frankly, if I had it to do over I would have simply skipped being in a book and would have made my chapter freely available online.

Electronic Literature: What Is It?

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:25:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:19:00 +0000

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)"

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:00:00 +0000

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

Blogging notice

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:46:00 +0000

I've been busy helping my students wrap up the semester, and my blogging has suffered. Regular blogging with resume next week!

Tumbarumba at Videomedeja

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:37:00 +0000

Tumbarumba, a literary / artistic collaboration between Benjamin Rosenbaum and myself (and twelve contributing authors) is being shown in the Videomedeja Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina.

From the festival's website:

The festival focuses on narrative or abstract art projects which combine image and sound, communications and networks, from video art works, documentaries and short films, digital animations, media installations, url and network projects, objects, interactive and robotized objects, open source applications, audiovisual performances, mobile technologies, electronic music, advanced technologies in art practice.

The festival runs December 11 - 13 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia.

Tumbarumba is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Tim Hawkinson's "Das Tannenboot"

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:10:00 +0000

Christmas tree, fabric, elastic, string, and metal
66 × 70 × 43 in., Whitney Museum

To kick off the Christmas season, here's Tim Hawkinson's Das Tannenboot (1994).

David Crawford (1970-2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:41:00 +0000

Via Turbulence's Networked_Performance blog comes news of David Crawford's death:

David recently received a PhD in Digital Representation from the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at Göteborg University, Sweden. He studied film, video, and new media at the Massachusetts College of Art and received a BFA in 1997.

In 2000, his Light of Speed project was a finalist for the SFMOMA Webby Prize for Excellence in Online Art. In 2003, Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies project received an Artport Gate Page Commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art, an Award of Distinction in the Net Vision category at the Prix Ars Electronica, and became part of the public collection of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (SMS - Series 6). In 2004, he received an MSc from Chalmers University of Technology and taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. David’s artwork has been featured by the Guardian and Leonardo. His writing has been published by Princeton Architectural Press and SpringerWienNewYork.

Interviews with David and links to his work are available on Networked_Performance.

An unusual input device

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:20:00 +0000

This Japanese clock comes with games that are played by, well, sticking a finger into a hole. More information (including a movie of the clock in action) is available at Asovision.

[via Ludology]

Pixelstorm award

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:45:00 +0000

I'm a finalist for an award from Swiss art/design group... the ceremony is happening right now via video conference. Feel free to drop in, though unless you speak German (or perhaps more specifically Swiss German) you may be like me and only have a vague idea of the proceedings.

Video conference at:
http://tinychat.com/pixelstorm

Better sound at:
http://www.tv.dock18.ch/wp/

Pixelstorm website at:
http://www.pixelstorm-award.ch/

Axiom presents "Riders on the Train"

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:06:00 +0000

I have a little web-based animation (if you go to the animation, make sure your speakers are on) that's included in the Riders on the Train show curated by Nance Davies.

The opening reception is tonight (Friday November 13th, 2009) at 6:00 pm. I'm not able to make it to the openings, but if you're in Boston you might want to drop by.

From the press release:

'RIDERS on the TRAIN' is an interdisciplinary art exhibition exploring new relationships between artist, audience, site, and context. Drawn from an international call for submissions, these artists and writers explore 'the private within the public' experience of mass-transit in Sweden, Australia, South Africa, India, Switzerland, NYC, London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, LA, DC, Portland, and Boston. The poetics of acceleration, compression, fragmentation and sensory immersion are explored as the artists record, collaborate, and devise small scale tactical interventions - juxtaposing high with low technology. 'Riding Artists' sample their 'ride' and generate an aggregate description of the mass-transit experience through a diversity of lenses and media including video, sound art, photography, web-based interactivity, performance, installation and writing.

Artists in the show include Manuel Vazquez, Sarah Rushford, Stephen Cady, Jeff Morris, Jesse Malmed, Nance Davies, Andrew Sempere, Denise Marika and Dana Moser, Henry Gwiazda, Francois de Costere, Ethan Ham, Colleen Alborough and Joao Orecchia, Scott Hall, Marc McNulty, Dylan Mortimer, Zehra Kahn, Erick Conrad, Ben Chaffee, Jason Nelson, Nita Sturiale, Ximena Alarcon, Sherry Karver, Marianne Fourie, Lia Chavez, Yuri Stone, Helene Zuckerbrod, Marian Berelowitz, Lisa McCarty, Katherin McInnis, Jamie Waelchli, Guy Telemaque, Gary Duehr, Susan Bregman, Carolyn Lewenberg, Yetti Frenkel, Harvey Loves Harvey, Alexia Mellor and Sarah Banasiak, Fred Wolflink, Jerel Dye, Jake Lee-High, Sean O’Brien and writer/poets Jeremy Hight, Kamarie Chapman Leora Silverman Fridman, Sarah Goodman, Gordon Fearey, Colette A. Shumate-Smith, and Jonathan Powell.

Gallery Hours: Tuesdays, 2-5 pm, Wednesdays 6-9 pm, Thursdays 2-9 pm, Saturdays 2-5 pm, alternative visiting hours can be arranged by appointment

Cost/// FREE and Open to the Public

Where/// AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media - 141 Green Street
located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line

Jack Daws's Golden Penny

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:40:00 +0000

A couple of years ago Jack Daws, a Seattle artist, made ten copies of a penny (each using about $100 worth of gold). Daws put a patina on the pennies, so their shiny gold color would be masked, and used one to buy a Hustler at LAX. Daws assumed this circulated penny would be lost forever. But Jessica Reed, a Brooklyn artist, found it.

As reported on the NY Times website:

Late this summer, when Ms. Reed was paying for groceries at the C-Town supermarket in Greenpoint, she noticed the penny because the gold color had started to peek through. A fan of unusual coins, she slipped it back into her change purse and tucked it into the recesses of her mind.

Then recently, while doing research about a 1924 Mercury-head dime, she remembered the penny and typed "gold penny" into Google, which returned information on science experiments to give a penny a gold color. She added "1970" and found an item about how Mr. Daws had put a 18-karat gold penny, dated 1970 with no mint mark, into circulation. It was heavier and smaller than a real penny.

In disbelief, she weighed the penny on a digital scale. It came in at three grams, one gram more than similar pennies from 1970. And it was slightly smaller than a normal penny, owing to the shrinking after the casting process.

She traced Mr. Daws's phone number through the gallery and left him the message. When he called back, he knew it had to be his penny as soon as she described it to him.
Ms. Reed will keep the coin. She is thinking of having it framed. It's was a curious way to display a sculpture, she said. "I can’t imagine being an artist who does something like this," she said. "It's the opposite of having your stuff shown in a gallery. It could be tossed."

Coincidentally the day before reading about this, I found myself contemplating a 1970 penny that I received as change. Hmm... I wonder where it went?

[via Jennifer Lee @ NY Times City Room blog]

Steven Shearer's "Improved Geometric..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:20:00 +0000

Steven Shearer's Improved Geometric Mechanotherapy Cell for Harmonic Alignment of Movements and Relations (2009) is an interesting work. I think the 2009 date on it might be wrong though... I'm pretty sure I saw it at the New Museum in 2008 (or at some point anyway).

Here's an excerpt from the Shearer's 2008 New Museum show's catalog:

The new sculpture I'm making is...based on an old picture of a jungle gym that was constructed out of four-inch PVC sewer pipe. I liked the idea that this utopian object was constructed out of plumbing material and maybe it is now the plumber taking on the role of the social-engineer-- this is his meditation on how to create equilibrium and harmony amongst young people!

...

The full-sized PVC version will be about nine square feet, and it will have a sound component to it that will generate subtle vibrations and tones that I plan to make with a bass guitar, kind of like chimes trying to summon people. Speakers along with tactile transducers will be housed within it to create an illusion that the tones become louder when you touch the sculpture. I like the idea of a sculpture that tries to turn people's bodies into instruments.

[via Rhizome]

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:25:00 +0000

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).

Chu Yun's "Constellation"

noreply@blogger.com (Ethan) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:40:00 +0000

Constellation, 2006, Chu Yun

The animated gif is a slowed down version of one created by Ilia Ovechkin.

[via Rhizome & Rhizome]