bridell.com

Autonomous installation by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Listening Post is a piece that listens to a number of online chat forums in real time. It extracts lines (those that contain the words “I am…”) and then displays these at the small displays, and reads the lines out using text-to-speech software.

While this sounds simple enough, it really is very nicely done. You should have a look at the page below and watch the videos to get the idea. This piece won the Ars Electronica Golden Nica for interactive art in 2004.

Further Reading:

• Listening Post (with videos) at Earstudio.com (Ben Rubin’s site)
• Mark Hansen homepage

Structured tagging: autonomous, installation

Fringe is a recurring gathering of people with an interest in stuff like new media art, physical computing, creative engineering, VJ stuff, etc., here in Stockholm.

At a typical Fringe gathering, there are a number of presentations, often followed by some sort of performance or DJ/VJ set, and usually a bar of some kind. We try to strike a balance between art and technology, and between “senior” artists/designers/researchers and new talents. At some point we also plan to start arranging workshops and other events.

One of the key ideas of Fringe is that it arranged by the community, for the community. This hints that while we have (so far) never stopped anybody from coming, we do want the people who come to be prepared to present something at some point. This is also why Fringe events are not announced in any other way than by direct e-mail to the people “on the list”. With one exception - since Fringe gatherings are usually hosted by some other organization, whoever is hosting an event is free to invite more people to that particular event.

To learn more about Fringe, check out the Fringe website: fringe.nu

The image above is one of the student pieces shown at Fringe #0003 at Konstfack, by Christer Chytraeus. This is only the inner mechanism of a odd machine that keeps a plant hooked up to the Internet. The dark box at the bottom is actually a beautiful accordion, modified to work as a sort of mechanical lung supplying the plant with fresh air.

For the record, this Fringe has no affiliation whatsoever with the Fringe festivals started in Edinburgh, but it is a direct continuation of the Fringe that ran in Gothenburg a few years ago. Fringe is an initiative by the Interactive Institute Art & Technology Program (where I work, when I’m not on parental leave, which I am at the moment). The main guy pulling the Fringe in Stockholm is Alberto Frigo.

Interactive installation by Jeffrey Shaw. In 1989-1991 he made three versions of three cities (Manhattan, Amsterdam, Karlsruhe)

In Legible City the visitor is seated on a stationary training bicycle in front of a 3d “city” comprised entirely of text. Using the pedals and handle of the bike the visitor can navigate the (virtual) city. There are also different audio clips that get played if the visitor follows certain tracks - a narrative dimension to this piece that seems to have been largely forgotten by the impact of the mixed (virtual/physical) reality interface.

Further reading

• From Jeffrey-Shaw.net
• From Media Art Net

Autonomous LED installation by Jim Campbell.

This low-resolution LED matrix display (32 x 24 pixels, all red) show a video of a person running and falling.

This is a piece from Campbell’s “ambiguous icon” series of LED works.

Further reading

• jimcampbell.tv

Sci-fi conceptual art by Jakob S Boeskov

In 2002 Boeskov traveled to China to visit a weapons fair, ostensibly representing the (fictional) company Empire North, looking for investors to develop the “ID SniperRifle” - a rifle capable of firing small GPS chips. Fire at anybody, and you can track them down!

The legend has it that Boeskov more or less had to flee the place after he started getting too many people seriously interested in backing the project - not knowing it was all an art project, or as some would call it, a hoax.

This is perhaps not so much a new media piece as it is a more conceptual piece, dealing with (the fiction of) technology. Oddly enough I have heard people talking about this piece, assuming it would be firing RFID chips.

Structured tagging: conceptual

See also

• www.jakobboeskov.com

Video installation by Bruce Nauman.

In Live/Taped Video Corridor, you walk down a long, very narrow corridor. At the end of the corridor there are two monitors on top of each other. The lower one shows a video tape of the corridor, the upper one shows a live (CCTV) video of the corridor, shot from a camera at a height of about 3 meters, at the entrance of the corridor. The effect is that as you walk down the corridor, you see yourself from the back, and as you approach the monitor you get further away from the camera so you never really get any closer to “yourself”.

Structured tagging: video, installation

Further reading:

• Some info from ZKM
• YouTube video

Autonomous robotic installation by Frank Fietzek and Uli Winters.

On two white pedestals we see two characters, a cat and a frog. They both look like some sort of odd low-tech cyborg versions of stuffed animals. When you walk closer you hear they are having a very serious discussion about language philosophy, quoting Kant and Wittgenstein and so on. From time to time they will lose their temper and resort to slapping each other.

I saw this piece during Ars Electronica 2005 and for some reason this is one of the pieces I really remember - more than some of the award winners.

Structured tagging: autonomous, kinetic, robotic, installation

See also:

• Watchendiskurs, from Frank Fietzek

Ergodic video piece by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.

The McCoys have worked with “database pieces” and in In Every Shot, Every Episode they painstakingly cut out and categorized 10 000 clips from Starsky & Hutch shows and put them on video CDs carrying the label of the category - “every extreme closeup”, etc.

Structured Tagging: ergodic, video, installation

Further reading:

• McCoy Space

Responsive installation by Daniel Rozin.

The “mirror” surface consists of 830 small wooden mirrors, each mounted on a servo motor. A camera is hooked up to a computer. The wooden blocks are used as a sort of large, mechanical pixels. They are tilted so that they reflect more or less of the light coming from above, so that they work as a sort of gray scale display.

Rozin’s wooden mirror seems to me to be the mother of a whole range of different low-resolution pixel displays.

Further reading

• www.smoothware.com/danny/woodenmirror.html
  

Structured tagging:

• responsive
• installation

Interactive audio installation by Marnix de Nijs and Edwin van der Heide

A large loudspeaker is mounted on a motorized arm. The arm rotates at varying speeds, up to 100 km/h. An ultrasonic distance sensor is mounted on the speaker, reading the distance to the nearest object (visitor!). As the arm rotates it is keeping track of the angle and distance to update a map and responds to changes - this is how it interacts with people. It can do different things, such as “stop and look” at approaching visitors, making different sounds when it’s doing different things.

I saw this piece at Ars Electronica in 2001 and really liked it. It’s one of those pieces that you really need to see in real life - a very visceral experience. The interaction also manages to hit that sweet spot between the boringly predictable and the boringly random, giving you the feeling that there is some alien intelligence at work here.

Further reading:

• Spatial Sounds at Edwin van de Heide’s site
• Spatials Sounds at We make money not art
• YouTube video of Spatial Sounds

Structured tagging:

• interactive
• installation
• audio