serial consign (5 unread)

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  MUTEK 2011 A/Visions

  Posted: 21-June-2011, 4:42pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Sculpture's Reuben Sutherland / photo: basic_sounds]

  Another year, another MUTEK. I've posted my review of the most recent edition of the Montreal festival at Creative Applications and, as was the case in 2009, I've focused on the A/Visions program. A/Visions is dedicated to showcasing integrated audio visual performance projects and given that these collaborations are usually realized as visualizations or forays into post-cinema experimentation, this is really where my heart is within the festival. While Murcof and Simon Geilfus's (of AntiVJ) realtime graphics were utterly stunning, I found it a bit curious that my other favourite acts this year were crafted with tape loops and zoetropic discs (Sculpture) and an automated piano (Seth Horvitz) – truly innovative/groundbreaking work that was hardly new media (let's jettison that term already). Cruise on over to Creative Applications to check out my overview, I was able to compile a pretty thorough selection of videos of the work presented and some of these endeavours are truly remarkable.

  
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  Border Town

  Posted: 16-June-2011, 6:58pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Illegal immigrants appear on a night vision monitor screen of Hungarian border police / photo: Bela Szandelszky/AP]

  I'm excited to have signed on to participate in Tim Maly and Emily Horne's "independent research and design workshop" Border Town this summer – the first session is tonight. I've been mired in large client projects for the last year and while that is going pretty swimmingly I can't actually remember the last time I did research outside a writing project (we worked on a Wikileaks timeline last summer with Tim Groves – but that was commissioned.) So, it goes without say that I am really keen to dive into gloriously complicated exploratory research – especially as I now know that the answer to all design problems is not to, er, build a building.

  Tim and Emily have outlined the M.O. for the studio as follows:
  

  We believe that a great deal can be learned by investigating the strange edge cases of the world. Border towns are the extreme edge of where geography and politics collide. They throw the abstractions of governance into sharp physical relief. They are a fertile site for investigation into questions of security, freedom, architecture, immigration, trade, smuggling, sovereignty, and identity. Border Town is a 10-week, multi-participant collaborative design studio that will investigate the conditions that surround life in cities situated on borders, divided by borders, or located in conflict zones. By investigating these strange specimens of political geography, we can being to think and design about the interaction of legal and physical architecture and how these forces shape the built environment and the lives of the people living in it.

  … and that mandate is rather nicely summarized in the below teaser video.

  I am fortunate to be able to count my partner-in-crime Jordan Hale amongst the studio participants and the inclusion of our talented peers Cyrus Irani and Jay Hurtig Fraser (and new chum Andrew Lovett-Baron) will in my opinion make for a dynamic multidisciplinary production environment. Also, now that I'm teaching regularly I have to admit that I'm thrilled that this whole enterprise is happening outside of the parameters of a formal institution. Although I'll undoubtedly share some news about whatever we cook up soon, consider keeping tabs on the studio blog if this milieu is up your alley.

  One of our assigned readings for the first week was Eyal Weizman's recent classic "Walking through walls: Soldiers as architects in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict" – check it out if you've never encountered this revelatory/disturbing text on contemporary military strategy before.

  
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  .txt/110615

  Posted: 16-June-2011, 5:15am CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  Recently noted:

  • Joshua Noble presents a brief overview of the work of Japanese media artist Daito Manabe (pictured above) for Creative Applications. Noble: "What?s so refreshing about Daito's work, particularly in contrast to many North American computational artists, is his willingness to engage the body as a canvas, as a site of action, rather than the engine of action. He might be one of the most interesting post-screen artists working today quite simple because of the canvas on which he?s chosen to work and the playfulness with which he approaches the body as a canvas."
  • Much less playful: Charli Carpenter and Lina Shaikhoun debunk the entire suite of stock anti-UAV sentiments for Foreign Policy – a sobering read.
  • Tom Armitage explores buttons as a facet of 'the game design of everyday things' for Kill Screen.
  • Facial recognition, real time data and customer metrics – together at last. Dan Rowinski discusses a new startup called SceneTap for ReadWriteWeb in what is undoubtedly a glimpse of the near future of business analytics.
  • Nathan Jurgenson dissects 'the faux-vintage photo' phenomenon as an offshoot of his dissertation research. Jurgenson: "The quickest way to invoke nostalgia for a time past with a photograph is to invoke the properties of the physical, which is done by mimicking the ravages of time through fading, simulated film grain and scratches as well as the addition of what appears to be photo-paper or Polaroid borders around the image."

  I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web (and beyond). Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items.

  
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  Re-Drawing Boundaries

  Posted: 14-June-2011, 5:32pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Stanza / Sensity / 2004-09]

  Those that have been reading this blog for a while know that I tend to keep an eye on the work of artist/theorist Jeremy Hight (interviewed on Serial Consign here), an individual who has undoubtedly defined his practice by keeping his ear to the ground when it comes to location, narrative and media. Re-drawing Boundaries is an online exhibition hosted on the Leonardo Electronic Almanac web portal curated by Hight (with Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul) dedicated to cataloguing the work of key-innovators in locative media and the nebulous constellation of related practices that has emerged over the last decade. The exhibition will unfold over the course of the summer by showcasing selected works from an impressive roster of artists including: Kate Armstrong, Mez Breeze, Jonah Brucker Cohen, Douglas Repetto, etc. The selected practices are quite incisive and varied enough that I anticipate the final body of work could serve as a handy crash course in the recent history of media art and—as far intergenerational mashups are concerned—it is great to see Natalie Jeremijenko and Buckminster Fuller's names in such close proximity.

  I'm particularly interested in the high percentage of Re-drawing Boundaries participants whose work deals with mapping and representing urban space. Work from the archives of Carlo Ratti (SENSEable City Lab) and Stanza has already been posted with more to come from Esther Polak, Christian Nold and Sarah Willams (Spatial Information Design Lab). Also, note the interviews (PDF'd) with many of the practitioners conducted by Hight – I like this statement by Stanza where the UK-based artist encapsulates the context of his work:
  

  The patterns we make, the forces we weave, are all being networked into retrievable data structures that can be re imagined and sourced for information. These patterns all disclose new ways of seeing the world. The value of information will be a new currency as powers change. The central issue that will develop will be the privilege and access to these data sources. Uses of this information and data should allow rich new interpretations of the way our world is built, used, and designed.

  …that is definitely a mission statement I could get behind. Consider tuning into Re-drawing Boundaries this summer as I anticipate the attention will be well rewarded. I plan on posting an essay response to several of the featured works so I'll revisit this curatorial project later in the summer.

  
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  Reality *is* Plenty

  Posted: 12-June-2011, 6:09pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  A few weeks ago twitter was buzzing with excitement about a Kevin Slavin talk at Mobile Monday Amsterdam. Slavin is well known as one of the founders of Area/Code (he left when social games behemoth Zynga purchased it in January) where he did some pioneering work on 'big urban games' (see this brief post from last year where I link to a few of their projects). The video for Slavin's talk Reality Is Plenty, Thanks is finally online and I couldn't resist sharing it as it is essential viewing for anyone working in or thinking about media, representation and perception.

  I saw quite a few heated discussions on twitter in the days following this talk and the initial buzz was slightly misleading as it suggested that the presentation was an outright dismissal of AR. I don't really think this was the case though as any time you stick a thoughtful media practitioner in front of an audience invested in monetizing a medium/platform this kind of friction is inevitable. My reading of the talk is that Slavin is extremely curious about augmenting reality—as praxis—and suggesting we (startups, developers and consumers) need to be considerably more thoughtful in our application/exploration of the emerging medium and consider how it might activate other senses – AR should not distill down to "an overlay for all seasons". I think the key takeaway point is in Slavin's suggestion that "reality is augmented when it feels different, not looks different" – which basically echoes Marcel Duchamp's (almost) century-old contempt for the 'retinal bias' of the art market. If AR development (thus far) is lacking imagination, perhaps the problem is that we're very much tethering the medium to our antiquated VR pipe dreams and the web browser metaphor.

  Regardless, if DARPA aeronautics design projects, the HUD in Terminator, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play, the search metaphor and theories of perception are of interest to you – this talk is well worth a half hour of your time.

  Bonus round: See Slavin's equally provocative talk on algorithms from LIFT 11.