Thursday, December 06, 2007
Microsoft’s Zune Arts Site is a Hit
I never thought I’d be saying this as someone who loves Apple products, but Microsoft’s Zune Arts site is doing what Apple should have done on iTunes or via a separate site long ago. The content that has been missing on iTunes are the independent movies, experimental animations, and other new media experiments that never seem to get widely distributed. Whether you stream or download (some of) the movies on Zune Arts to a Zune or iPod/iPhone, they are clearly aiming toward the very creative market and it will be interesting to see how it evolves.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Softspace - Contemporary Interactive Environments (Tate Modern, London)
If you are in London on Saturday, September 8, 2007, this looks like a very cool event. They plan to archive it post-event as well.
The physically permanent identity of architecture has helped to define society for centuries. Now some practitioners have disengaged from tectonics as we traditionally understand it and are taking their discipline into the realms of ‘softspace’, a more fluid, ephemeral form of digitally-enabled design based on personalised experiences and responses. Softspace deploys new spatial systems including wearable computing, wifi, RFID and custom-designed digital software incorporating light, heat, sound and electromagnetic fields. These not only rely on people’s individual ways of interacting with them, but are enriched by narratives people contribute, creating new metaphors of use. Responsive environmental strategies of this kind have increasingly colonised museums and galleries like Tate, the Science Museum and the V&A
While the notion of a fantasy world made possible ‘on demand’ by new technologies is the theme of films like Minority Report and ExistenZ, contemporary softspace projects play a more subtle and open-ended influence on contemporary socio-spatial dynamics and our sensing abilities. Architects Usman Haque, Jason Bruges and Daan Roosegaarde and designer Despina Papadopoulos discuss the cultural implications of their work with Tate Modern curator Jane Burton and curator, author and critic Lucy Bullivant, guest editor of 4dsocial: Interactive Design Environments (AD/Wiley, 2007). Lev Manovich, the ground-breaking new media art theorist, is a keynote speaker.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Eric Rosner in the Reallusion booth at SIGGRAPH 2007
A conversation with Eric Rosner, Director of Animation at TV Land, in the Reallusion booth at SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego, California.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Color Changing Furniture at SIGGRAPH 2007
At SIGGRAPH, Japanese researchers displayed a very cool set of translucent furniture that changes color based on interactions. Check out our video below where we talk with Masaki Yagisawa, one of the designers, or the BBC News article about the product.
Furniture puts on chameleon show (BBC News)
For more information regarding availability of the furniture for purchase, please visit Mongoose Studio (Japan).
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Japan Media Arts Festival in Shanghai 2007 (China)
If you are in Shanghai next week, check out the festival being held August 19-26, 2007 at the Shanghai Sculpture Space (Shanghai, China). The show is a joint venture between Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs and the City of Shanghai and co-hosted by CG-ARTS Society and the Shanghai International Culture Association. There are approximately 100 works in the show, all by Japanese artists. The show will be divided into 3 areas: The Earth (installation-style with themes of the world, nature and information society; Tokyo (space for visual images that showcase life in Tokyo); and Expression (interactive art, games, manga, animation etc.).
CALL: Japan Media Arts Festival
Deadline: October 5, 2007
Call for entires for Japan Media Arts Festival to be held February 6-17, 2008 at the National Art Center, Tokyo. Submissions are in the following categories: Art, Entertainment, Animation or Manga.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
SIGGRAPH 2007 coverage from San Diego the first week of August
We will be at SIGGRAPH in San Diego this year and focused on video so check back here or on the YouTube channel for coverage. If you have a project in the show and are attending and would like to chat with us, please drop me an email at alexa@artfuture.com. See you there! Alexa
Monday, July 02, 2007
CALL: Transnational Communities Award (Mexico/U.S.)
The Electronic Arts and Video Festival Transitio_mx, the US-Mexico Foundation for Culture and Fundacion BBVA Bancomer open the call for submissions for the Transnational Communities Award
The Transnational Communities Award is open to artistic, cultural and social projects that creatively use the technologic and conceptual tools available in the web, broadening the channels of communitarian communication and interaction and giving rise to spaces online where practices and stories are shared. The purpose of this award is to foster the access to cultural goods and to the technologies involved in its production and distribution, to promote the diversity of expressions and to recognize the citizen participation of the Transnational Communities that link Mexico and the United States in a daily and permanent way.
The call for submissions is open to individuals, groups, associations, organizations and institutions from Mexico and the United States that develop artistic, cultural and social projects for which the Internet is both a sufficient and necessary condition of viewing, expressing and participating.
Among the fields of activity subsumed are: video (communitarian video, documental, videoart, videoclip, videomail, telenovelas/soap operas), net.art, citizen journalism, digital communities, online forums, weblogs social networks, online videogames , online artistic collaboration projects, electronic literature, digital narrative, online communitarian radio, podcasts, etc.
During the Festival, the winner will be awarded with USD 3,500.
For further information on the submission please visit www.transitiomx.net/concurso (Spanish) or http://en.transitiomx.net/competition (English).
Sunday, July 01, 2007
A big thank you to Apple for the iPhone
All forms of cutting-edge creativity are covered here at artfuture and over the years I’ve tried out quite a few interactive and gestural interfaces. The one question was, when would I be able to use this in my daily life? It was always a few years out but now it’s finally here. This is a big open thank you to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and everyone else at Apple and those abroad who physically produced the phone as it is a truly wonderful device. There have been lots of posts on what is or isn’t included on this first version and all I can say is, for me, it doesn’t matter. What isn’t there will happen over time and what is there is perfect for now. The most important part of the phone is the user interface. It is fluid and responsive and is the first phone that works the way my brain works. After using it for a day, all I can say is it immediately makes every other phone out there look old.
In August, I’ll be at SIGGRAPH covering all of the emerging technologies, art show, fashion event, and expo and from the looks of the advance program, gestural and interactive items will be a big topic once again. This time, I’ll be bringing one of the best with me 
Alexa
Sunday, June 24, 2007
The director Timur Bekmambetov turns film subtitling into an art
The 1994 Russian film, Night Watch, and the sequel, Day Watch (which is currently in U.S. theaters), are both really amazing films which have a treat for non-Russian speakers. The subtitles aren’t boring. They have character and become a part of the film. An article in the International Herald Tribune describes it best.
When “Night Watch” was a hit in Russia, Fox Searchlight, the indie subsidiary of the Hollywood studio, Fox, decided to release it internationally. Rather than dub the original, Bekmambetov insisted on subtitling it and took charge of the design process himself. He conceived the subtitles as “another character in the film, another way to tell the story,” rather than treating them as extras.
The result was sensational. Most of the subtitles in “Night Watch” are in clear, white sans serif lettering, but others adopt different guises to reflect the mood and action of the film. Some glide across the screen from different angles. Others glow in red, if a character is especially angry or agitated (as they often are in Bekmambetov’s movies). One explodes in a puff of smoke after an explosion. Another, uttered when a character heard voices in his head while swimming, dissolves like blood in the water of the pool. Anthony Lane, film critic of The New Yorker, described those subtitles as “the best I have encountered.”
For more about this very creative director, please visit IMDb or Wikipedia.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Which one is the simulated android robot twin of Zou Ren Ti?
RoboGames was held this past weekend in San Francisco. It’s the world’s largest robot competition and this year they added a larger display area for artistic robots. The image above is of Zou Ren Ti, head of Xi’an Superman Sculpture Research Institute (XSM) and his twin - a simulated android robot. The Institute was created in 1997 and its works are on display in major museums in Asia.
Check out the Video of my interview with him on YouTube.
For U.S. TV viewers, he is scheduled to be on Jimmy Kimmel Live! tomorrow (Tuesday, June 19, 2007).
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Microsoft’s PopFly at Maker Faire 2007
At the 2007 Maker Faire, I sat down with Dan Fernandez of Microsoft and went through a complete demo of Microsoft’s new visual tool, PopFly. After testing it out, I have to say it shows a lot of promise and it’s fun! It’s still in private alpha so it’s not completely stable yet (i.e. my Firefox browser kept crashing on a Mac) but you can see where it is going.
PopFly allows anyone to create mashups online without coding. You just drag and drop “blocks” and connect them together by dragging a line between them to create your result. For example, you can pick a block that searches through your photos online at Flickr and connect that block with one that displays them as a slideshow. The slideshow can then be embedded on your blog or shared through the social network within PopFly.
Check out this video for a good preview:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/media/en/popfly/PopFlyin15.wvx
The closest thing I’ve seen to this is Processing, the open source programming language released in beta in 2005 that artists have been using to program images and create interactions and animation.
Would you be interested in visiting a theme park devoted to the arts?
For the past few years, I’ve been working on the idea of a “theme park” for the arts. This isn’t in the sense of roller coasters but more like EPCOT, Maker Faire, SIGGRAPH, Exploratorium, and other interactive venues. I’ve posted the question on LinkedIn and submitted it to Digg. See links below if you would like to give me your thoughts on it or feel free to . Thanks! Alexa
Monday, May 28, 2007
CALL: Common Ground 2008 - Future Earth: Our Home in Peril?
Acclaimed and emerging artists from around the world will be selected for a Beijing premier to coincide with the Olympics in 2008. A touring exhibition to galleries, universities and museums then follows to Europe and North America through 2010.
Artists from around the world are invited to use the digital art medium to speak to the common issues we all face on this planet, regardless of where we reside or what language we speak or what tribe or nation we identify with. We cannot escape our interconnectedness with regard to the health of planet Earth and its ecosystems. For this collection of digital art, we are looking for compelling imagery that creatively communicates this cross cultural imperative to treat our home – Earth – as the sanctuary that it is for all of us.
Deadline: September 30, 2007
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Maker Faire 2007 - Is this the future? We hope so!
Here at artfuture we’re pretty jaded when it comes to festivals and conferences for art or technology. But we pretty much had our minds blown by the sheer number and range of DIY creativity on display this past weekend at the 2nd annual Maker Faire. This is the first show we have ever seen that had in one place a truly stunning array of “makers” of every imaginable combination of fine art, craft, design, fashion, tech, engineering, programming and robotics you could think up.
There were so many things that were unique to this experience. The hands-on environment everywhere on the San Mateo Fairgrounds, welcomed participation by people of ALL ages. Not just traditional crafts but even some of the geekier fun with technology integrated into projects you actually CAN do at home. And you got to take your project with you at the end of the session. Take aways—when was the last time you got something like that from an inexpensive weekend of entertainment?
Traditional crafts were right in alongside sensors of every sort hooked up to things that move, beep, play video, create music and maybe even allow your plants to give you a call. And through it all was the overriding theme of DIY (do-it-yourself) - imagine a place where they WANT you to touch things and roll up your sleeves and try things out. Yummy!
This feels like the time just before the computer revolution exploded, when everyone thought the garage tinkerers and hobbyists were nuts. But really, they were the advance wave of the next era. So, it makes you wonder - what’s going to come from all of this collaboration and interaction?
Stay tuned here and on YouTube in the artfuture and stylefuture groups, for some of the amazing mini-documentaries that we created with various “makers” throughout the show.
Posted by Alexa and MD