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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)

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

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

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

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
  

Interactive kinetic sculpture by Greyworld (2007)

 This huge piece, installed inside a 10-story atrium, has a number of artificial flowers that open and close in response to people moving through the space. The flowers also open up in response to the sunlight.

 Further reading

• www.greyworld.org

Structured tagging: kinetic, interactive, large-scale