bridell.com

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

Node.stockholm is a one-month festival of new media arts-related stuff. Read all about it at the site - nodestockholm.se

A beating heart in a jar

Kinetic sculpture produced at the Interactive Institute for the exhibition Man Machine 2 at the National Museum of Science and Technology (Tekniska Museet) in Stockholm. By artist Cristian Partos, Fredrik Bridell and Henrik Berggren. (2007)

These two gryphons were originally perched on top of the roof of Sweden’s national telegraph board. We found them biding their time in the museum’s back yard and decided to bring them in for the show. In the exhibition they are guarding a large glass display case filled with various objects from the museum’s collections. Thy are also each holding a plate with a glass bell jar, one containing a clock and one containing what appears to be a beating human heart. When the heart beats, is squirts out a red liquid from a tube. The liquid pours down into a small plastic funnel and from there back into the heart.

The piece is not really interactive, other than that it stops when there is nobody around. The sound part, which generates what sounds like a heart beat, is actually made by looping back the sound from the room, picked up by a microphone in the ceiling. In a way the heart needs a visitor to beat. (I am tempted to say something about how this relates to Duchamp’s claim that the viewer completes the work of art, but I’ll save that for later. It really is not the same thing.)

Cristian Partos did most of the work himself. I won’t divulge exactly how we did it, suffice to say I did some electronics, some micro controller programming and that I did the sound part. I also did some practical handy work. On one day I managed to combine woodworking, painting, soldering and programming. Tools include Arduino and pd.

The piece was made for the exhibition Man Machine 2, open 7 december 2007 - 28 april 2008. It also includes pieces by Ebba Matz and Matti Kallioinen. The show was produced at the Interactive Institute and curated by Björn Norberg.

All you see is light

Interactive art piece with Arijana Kajfes at Interactive Institute (2004)

Monochromeye is part of a larger art driven project, occular witness, in which the artist Arijana Kajfes has been investigating properties of light as an artistic material and as a carrier of information. Monochromeye is a wearable optical machine, consisting of a semitranslucent helmet and a pointing device that fits on your index finger. The finger piece picks up colors (using sensors for red, green and blue light) and transmits it to the light emitting diodes right before your eyes. What you see is not an image, but a pure color. This deprivation of resolution (and context) forces the viewer/wearer to find new strategies of forming meaning from the limited information that is available. Monochromeye is one of the pieces in the exhibition Touching the Invisible. My contribution to monochromeye was in making the electronics and programming the onboard microprocessor.

The larger project Occular Witness was awarded an honorary mention in the interactive arts category at Ars Electronica (2006). They even liked this picture enough that they used it as the logo for the Interactive Art category in 2007.

A paranoid web spider searching for the devil on the Internet.

Digital art piece produced at the Interactive Institute Smart Studio by Thomas Broomé, Fredrik Bridell and Olof Bendt. (2001)

Hellhunt contains a web spider, a computer program that goes to one web page, downloads all the images on the page and remembers all the links leading out from that page. It uses a corner detection algorithm to detect corners in images, and then tries to match those corners with the pattern of an inverted pentagram, a five-pointed star with two points on top, considered to be a symbol of evil. If it finds it, the image is saved along with a copy of the image with the pentagram filled in. In some versions the image is also printed out, and an e-mail is automatically sent to the owner of the page, saying that we have detected that they are posting satanic material on the web, and would they please be so kind as to remove it.

This piece (conceived by Thomas Broomé) was originally part of a larger exhibition called Lords of Legacy, shown at Art Node in Stockholm (2001). I did a lot of the programming (in Lingo, the curious programming language used in Macromedia Director).

Out there:
thomasbroome.com

Sharing a room with artificial creatures

Responsive environment made with the Interactive Institute Smart Studio, servo, and Pablo Miranda (2002)

The Interactive Institute Smart studio developed this piece in collaboration with servo, a research and development collective in the field of experimental architecture. They designed the actual “lattice archipelogics”, a spatial arrangement of over a hundred large plastic modules, suspended from the ceiling. The Smart studio (and, in particular, Pablo Miranda) developed the “responsive field”, an artificial life algorithm which populates the modules with organically responsive clouds of light. The arrangement responds to the presence of visitors (using agents that live in a virtual space aligned with the physical location). As the agents move around in (transreal) space, they leave traces which form a kind of pathways in space - a morphogenical process similar to many naturally occuring phenomena such as the the formation of river canyons, paths in the forest, urban landscapes, etc. The paths affect the future movements of the light patterns.

My role in the project was part coordination and planning, part software/hardware interfacing and (some rather rudimentary) electronics design. Not to mention a painstaking manual labour making cables and actually installing the thing.

The Responsive Field of Lattice Archipelogics was originally shown in the Latent Utopias show in Graz, Austria, 2002. It was later shown in the exhibition Architectures Non Standard at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France (2003) and in the show Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). It was awarded an honorary mention in Vida 5.0, a contest for art and artificial life (2002).

Catch virtual snow with your shadow

Interactive art piece by artist Sachiko Hayashi produced at the Interactive Institute in the context of the Man Machine exhibition (2005). Developed by Sachiko Hayashi, Fredrik Bridell and Olof Bendt.

In this piece, images of falling snow flakes are projected onto a projection screen. The visitor is invited to step in front of the screen, so that the visitor blocks the projection and casts a shadow on the screen. When a visitor’s shadow falls on a snow flake (as when you are holding up your hand and the snow “falls” on your hand), the snow flake vanishes.

There are different types of snow flakes. Some of the contain sounds (made by invited sound artists), and some of them contain interview clips featuring people telling you about their experiences of snow.

To let you in on the secret of the magic, there’s a video camera that watches the back of the projection screen. The projector and camera are aligned so that a certain pixel on the projected image appears on a certain (predictable) pixel on the camera image. This way it is a relatively simple task to grab a frame from the camera and look at the pixels around the areas where the snow flakes are. If they come back as almost black, somebody’s blocking the image. The snow flake is removed, and the sound is released. Other than figuring this out I also actually made it, using Macromedia Director and the Myron WebCamXtra.

See also:

• Flurry Project, at Interactive Institute
• Sachiko Hayashi, e-garde.net
• Myron WebCamXtra

Compete in doing nothing

Interactive art piece conceived and produced by all members of the Interactive Institute Smart Studio (1999)

Brainball is a game where you win by relaxing. Two players, sitting on opposite sides of the table, are equipped with EEG headbands that monitor brain activity. The game examines the players’ brainwaves to determine which one is more relaxed. If you are more relaxed, the ball on the table moves towards the opponent, and you win when the ball reaches the goal circle on the opponent’s side. Brainball has been shown in art exhibitions and other shows all around the world, and a number of tables have been sold to science centers and other venues. The original Brainball was made by the Smart studio (where I was part of the original concept development and did parts of the programming of the original prototype). In 2003 a commercial version called Mindball was introduced. Brainball was awarded an honorary mention in the Interactive Arts category at Ars Electronica (2001).

Photo: Technicus / Mathias Lindqvist.