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Autonomous installation by Tim Horntrich and Jens Wunderling.

The piece self.detach - decomposing identities continuously scans whatever is being posted to Flickr. Images that are understood as being self-portraits (pictures tagged as “me”, “moi”, etc) will be extracted. They are then shredded into RGB pixels, which in turn are translated to physical colored grains that fall out of the machine.

Visually it first makes me think of Felix Gonzales-Torres’ famous Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) from 1991 - a huge pile of colored candy, weighing 175 lbs (80 kg) like Gonzales-Torres’s partner Ross before he started losing weight. I guess Horntrich and Wunderling are not aiming for quite that level of serious contemplation, but still, perhaps it is more than a jab at postmodern deconstructionism. At the project website the talk about the Buddhist practice of laying mandalas with colored sand, ephemeral paintings that are just brushed away into candy-colored piles of sand after they are done. With that in mind this piece does become a rather beautiful image for thinking about the futility of posting images of yourself at Flickr. “Look, this is me”. So?

Structured tagging: autonomous, installation, mixed reality

Further reading:

• selfdetach.net project website
• Tim Horntrich (udk.rgbdeluxe.de)
• Jens Wunderling (sport4minus.de)

Just so you know, there will be a new edition of Electrohype in Malmö, Sweden, this fall (2008). The call for entries is out on the electrohype website, electrohype.org

Interactive mixed reality game by Animaatiokone Industries.

Kick Ass Kung-Fu is a mixed reality fighting game. You perform your real martial-arts type moves in front of a camera. On screen you see both yourself and your virtual opponents. Fight!

I’m particularly impressed by the way they managed to mix physical motion with game-like physics on screen (super high jumps, super fast moves, etc). It’s also really liberating to do this sort of gaming without having to strap on any type of sensors, glasses or other gadgets, and at the same time allow you to use any physical object as a weapon. There are some videos on the site below showing all the nifty features.

Further reading:

• kickasskungfu.net