Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
erasing a presence
photographer greg allen has compiled a series of google street map photos in which an unidentified man was captured in the duality of assertion and removal.
In the Summer of 2009, an unidentified young man came upon the Google Street View Trike preparing to map the Binnenhof, the center of the Dutch government, in The Hague. He decided to tag along. The man walked alongside the Google Trike, persistently inserting himself in the foreground of its nine computer-controlled cameras’ panoptic fields of vision. Meanwhile, Street View’s automated panorama generation system read his presence as a data anomaly and consistently attempted to erase him from the photos. The resulting images, extracted from nearly every Street View panorama of the Binnenhof complex, reveal the history and process of their own making. They are at once a minute detail in Google’s extraordinary, ongoing portrait of the entire world, and one man’s wresting of control of his own image and his audacious assertion of his own presence.
expanded cinema in the oil tanks
Coined in the mid-1960s by Stan VanDerBeek, but with its origins in the experiments of early twentieth century avant-garde filmmaking, media-technologies and performance art, the term Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema’s historical and cultural ‘architectures of reception’ into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined.
Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator’s construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on filmmaking, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.
via tate modern
camouflage yourself
Humans hide themselves with the intellect as simulations to have power in society; these could be fake images and signs of vanity and emptiness. They simulate the truth and even deny the chance to unfold their inner truth to the world. In this sense, covering appearances of themselves could be compared to animals’ “camouflage” that is effected by using color, pattern and melting into the environment in order to protect themselves from predators or danger. However, animals have just one fundamental reason, survival rather than other reasons such as earning profits or fame. They have no deceptive consciousness, simulated appearance, or sense of preservation of their vanity. Only the human uses camouflaging as a way of deception.
Why do human beings deceive and camouflage themselves and what makes them hide? The primary purpose of camouflage is to hide the defects that cause one to be caught by one’s enemies. For humans, camouflage prevents them from being disturbed as a person in society. Camouflage is usually for animals that are vulnerable to predators. However, humans use it with diverse layers to cover appearances and create the simulated, metaphysical, and meaningless world as society or architectures. They take refuge inside of the fake dorm without any attempt to find out the clues of truth. Humans camouflage themselves with disguising and hiding their defects, characteristics.
Throughout these concepts of camouflage and media art, I focused on the “camouflage” as the context of my personal art project by using the metaphor of natural camouflage, “pupa.” This was inspired by people’s disguising appearance and behaviors as I discussed above. However, I’m not presenting the negative way of camouflage. I’d like to allow people to be aware of that it’s all of humans’ way of surviving lives. For me, the way of decorating the surface of one’s vanity was truly impressive and interested in terms of the approach to cover it, therefore I decided a pupa as the metaphor among all of the natural creatures.
My project is specifically an art installation work with a form of pupa and projection images. The pupa is made with fabrics, and it leads participants to remind of a white cocoon. If one enters inside of the object, the color of projection is slightly changed through sensors attached on the object, and the color will be altered. One person inside of the pupa feels comfortable and safe because of the warm and fitting shape, and people outside of it might confuse and cannot discriminate whether or not someone is inside of the pupa figure. As the change of environment and the existence of oneself, interaction and communication are formulated and changed.
camouflage yourself is an installation by UCLA MFA student yoon chung han.
staalhemel (steel sky)
sound artist christoph de boecks has created staalhemel, an installation that is literally a reflection of the viewer’s mind. as viewers walk through the space, signals from their head-mount EEG scanner are sent to produce rhythmic percussions on a grid of steel plates on the ceiling. it is an experience that is at once introspective and alien.
ocean of light
The Ocean of Light project explores the creative and immersive possibilities of light-based visualisation in physical space. It uses bespoke hardware to create dynamic, interactive and three-dimensional sculptures from light.
Surface is the first artwork to be exhibited using the Ocean of Light hardware. It uses minimal visuals and sound to evoke the essence of character and movement. Autonomous entities engage in a playful dance, negotiating the material properties of a fluid surface.
The Ocean of Light project is a collaborative research venture, led by Squidsoup and supported by the Technology Strategy Board (UK). Partners include Excled Ltd and De Montfort University. Additional support and resources have been provided by Oslo School of Architecture and Design (Norway), Massey University, Wellington (New Zealand) and Centre for Electronic Media Art, Monash University (Aus).
vintage inspiration – the way things go (1987)
by swiss artists peter fischli and david weiss
LED kimono
created by composer and performance artist miya masaoka, the LED kimono displays animation using 444 LEDs that were sewn on the a kimono’s sleeve. the result is a curious juxtaposition of technology and tradition, detachment and sensuality.
mindtouch – mobile networked performance
mindtouch is a fascinating research project by university of east london smartlab phd candidate camille baker. using mobile phones, body sensors, and custom software, baker creates a platform for collaboration and exchange of visuals and non-verbal experiences.
The intention of this project is to contribute to performance technology studies by investigating’liveness and presence’ within the context of a specific networked, mobile media performance research project, currently underway, in order to uncover any new understandings that may have emerged from the use of new wireless and mobile technologies.
This project involves creating a mobile networked performance that utilizes a database of archived of streamed and/or archived video clips created by video enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved, streamed and remixed during a live visuals performance(s). The event or events will form a performative, collaborative, non-linear narrative montage or remix, that will possibly be streamed back out to anyone’s phone and the internet, and then archived. These events will be starting in London, UK in July + October, Vancouver in Aug/Sept, and possibly Perth and Asia next year.
This research explores mobile video/media on phones for their immediacy, low quality – imperfectness, but spontaneity, at the speed of thought – with its rewriting, superimposing, and remixing of ideas, flashes and clashes of images and emotion, layering of meaning and stream of consciousness and equivalent – or simulation of telepathy and collective, if chaotic intelligence.
gravitymax in transition 