A tool for exploring extrasensory perception
Interactive installation by Ulrika Sparre (2007). Produced at the Interactive Institute with Sparre as Artist in Residence. Programming and interface design by Fredrik Bridell.
Mental Radio contains an archive of drawings. The viewer is invited to try to guess the current drawing, hidden from view, and try to make a similar drawing.
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:
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:
Structured tagging: autonomous, installation
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
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
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:
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:
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:
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
Structured tagging:
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:
Structured tagging: