Education, Interactivity, Play and Emerging Cultural Forms from Andy Polaine.
Troika is on Cloud, er, Five
If you haven’t already explored the background behind Troika’s cloud for BA’s Terminal 5 - “a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture” - Pixelsumo has got the goods and also images of the Processing pattern mock-up tool.
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re/act 4th International Student Festival for Media Art
Monika tells me this is a great festival for student media-arts work. It looks good to me and I think I saw some work from it last year.
It’s a good opportunity because media-art work can be expensive to build and often students are overshadowed by artists with grants who can afford some kind of techno utopian vision. So, crack out those Arduino boards and Processing and submit something.
Re/Act 4th International Student Festival for Media Art
In 2008, re/act, the international student festival for digital media art, takes place for the 4th time. Art and design student from all over the world are given the opportunity to make their works known to a wide audience and to make new contacts with a network of curators, cultural policy makers, gallery owners, professors, students, and the media.
re/act’s competition addresses students of artistic study programs. An international panel of experts will select the world’s best works from all entries.
Awards go to works from the following disciplines:
This BeatBearing project on YouTube by Peter Bennett is one of those physical interaction ideas that sounded great on paper, but is a bit useless in the flesh.
It’s a “tangible sequencer” but because it has so few slots, the actual rhythms you can produce are pretty clunky early 80s action (which is now old skool twice over - he’ll have to wait for the third 80s revival).
I’m sure it was a great exercise to build it, but it’s kind of what happens when you do a PhD and lose the joy and play. I’d prefer a Tenori-On personally.
Sometimes you have to love the Wisdom of YouTube, This comment caught my eye:
bl4h1: we just spent hundreds of years evolving away from this sort of thing. whats next actual instruments?
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The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris
Whatever your opinion on commercial whaling, substance whaling is a totally different affair. It’s been part of aboriginal Eskimo life for thousands of years and has deep roots in their cultural life, beliefs and survival.
Jonathan Harris, whose work I find consistently beautiful, has created a mesmerising project called The Whale Hunt documenting the ten days he spent with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, during their annual spring whale hunt.
Taking 3,214 photos, each at five-minute intervals he has created what he calls a “photographic heartbeat” of the experience. During moments of heightened activity, the “heartbeat” would quicken to a maximum of 37 pictures per minute.
The mass of information and images (almost all of which are, amazingly, beautiful photographs) can be viewed in different ways through different interfaces and constraints, something that characterises Harris’s work.
Be warned, some of the shots are pretty grisly, but you will also see the beauty of the landscape and a sense of the ritual. Visit The Whale Hunt site for the background or dive right in and play.
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Greyworld’s Monument to the Unknown Artist
Greyworld have unveiled their project, Monument to the Unknown Artist. Andrew Shoben showed me the maquette of it in Geryworld’s studio early last year and I was really wondering how and if they were actually going to make it.
You really need to take a look at the video on their site to see it in action, but basically it looks like a statue but is, in fact, a robot that can mimic your stance. It’s installed by the Tate Modern, so if you’re in town go and strike a pose.
UPDATE: There is an accompanying microsite for the project with many more images and info.
United Visual Artists have a lovely new piece called Hereafter, which is very similar to elements of my Time Sketches in that it layers frames from a video stream with minimal opacity so that it builds up over time.
They’ve done it much better than I did, though, not only because of the wonderful setting and the custom housing by Based Upon but because they use a high-speed camera to massively slow down your ‘ghost’ image. I can see it changes the style of the interaction and gets people moving around in space in interesting ways.
There is a basic element of interaction which is about seeing the results of your actions. This seems to always be the most fruitful with cameras - we’re all narcissistically fascinated by our own images of course. But there’s another aspect that I think Hereafter and Time Sketches (and plenty of others) plug into and that’s the idea of warping time. Slow motion and time-lapse cinematography are both fascinating and I think it’s because they’re on the fringes or outside of our normal senses of perception. X-Ray and infrared are also interesting in this respect, but there’s something about messing with time that seems to engage people, especially when it’s their own image.
Hereafter is part of the English Heritage Picture House exhibition. You can view more images and a video on UVA’s website.
(p.s. I did another Podcast with Matt Clark from UVA for Core77 that will be online soon. I’ll post a link when it’s up.)
[tags]UVA, camera, interactivity, installation, time sketches[/tags]
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