Tuesday, December 14, 2004
‘Unzipping Codes’ showcases techno-arts
If Korean techies can have their phone, MP3 player, digital camera and Internet access morphed into one, Spanish digerati are here to prove that they can fuse sound, digital images, software and hardware online while also performing live offline.
The exhibition “Unzipping Codes,” which opens today at Art Center Nabi in central Seoul, showcases conceptually cutting-edge digital work and audio-visual performances, both online and offline, by 15 visiting artists from Spain, Mexico, Uruguay and Italy. The exhibition/event, which runs until Dec. 23, offers participants a rare opportunity to experience what a group of avant garde techies can do to entertain digitally.
The Human Form Divined
Anatomy is revealed as art by an awe-inspiring new book that weds photography with high-tech scans.
[snip]
The assembled images, by artist and writer Alexander Tsiaras, are the focus of a new book, The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman ($50, Doubleday); a forthcoming Discovery Health Channel documentary, and an exhibit that opened last week at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington.
What makes the bodily depictions so novel is that they are 3-D-seeming visualizations built partly from images once limited to radiology departments and research labs. To create them, Tsiaras merged and layered X-rays, computerized tomography (CT) body scans, magnetic resonance images (MRI) and electron microscope and molecular surveillance views, using software he developed with his colleagues at Anatomical Travelogue, a privately held company in New York.
“Portraiture hasn’t changed in 100 years,” said Tsiaras of his rendering of the human body. “This is where art meets science.”
[snip]
“Separation of science and art is a 19th-century thing,” said Tsiaras. “Before that, scientists and artists worked together. ... If you talk to great scientists and great artists, they think similarly.”
Monday, December 13, 2004
The Revolution Has Begun: VectraSense Releases Verb for Shoe
A synthesis of high fashion style and cutting-edge technology, Verb for Shoe provides a completely different way of looking at shoes for style-conscious trend-setters. In an exclusive Hollywood preview, VectraSense took the town by storm with many celebrities calling Verb for Shoe the “next big thing.”
The fashion-forward shoe not only provides computerized shoe adjustments according to the wearer’s movements, but also provides a number of new VectraSense innovations including:
-- A wireless link that allow the shoes to link with your PC. Through a new computer peripheral, called a Thinkpod, the shoes can interface with your computer;
-- ThinkShare, a new feature that creates an exclusive community of Verb for Shoe users, who can exchange business cards and other information through wireless communication between their shoes;
[snip]
-- Introduction of optional features for building your shoes—a Sports package, a Rich-Media package, and an Exotic materials package.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
instant city music building game table by rosen & spademan enterprise
instant city is a music building game table. One or more players at a table can create architecture using semi-transparent building blocks and in the process make different modular compositions audible. Every performance is unique because the sequence, timing and combination possibilities are completely in the hands of the players!
Via near near future
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Moving image in Mäori visual art
Students of the Mäori Visual Art programme are benefiting from the guidance of tutor Rachel Rakena, who, new to the Mäori Visual Arts programme in Te Pütahi-ä-Toi, has brought with her a passion for digital art and the moving image.
Ms Rakena was captured by computer art as an arts student in one of the very first classes offered in New Zealand, and she shares this passion with the first young artists in the course to chose the discipline as a creative focus.
Her students were given a project brief of He Hihi Hiko Hikoi, with the notion of hikoi, and of movement and time. Their final work was exhibited in an end-of-year show, in a dark room bright with the light of projected images, film, and sound.
Rewiti Arapere took a projector and a passion for grafitti bombing to public spaces in Palmerston North. In the night, with help from friends, he projected his images onto bus shelters, skate-park walls and the side of a train. The transient images, for the time they were there, realised his ambition to put more Mäori language out there. He filmed the animated process of the bombing, starting with an outline which then filled and was layered in colours, for a documentary shown at the exhibition.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Interactive Snow Globe
From the woman who brought us “Text Rain”, comes this interactive piece from the Potent Objects series. Camille Utterback has created a snow globe with a woman inside who responds when the globe is shaken.
http://www.camilleutterback.com/potentobjects.html
Via near near future
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Second Career for Old Robot: Art
Assembly-line robots can do more than just build cars. A European art group claims they can draw, dance, even DJ a party.
Robotlab acquires industrial robots—the metal arms on factory floors that wield welding torches and other manufacturing tools—and reprograms them to become performers in public spaces. Some of the reprogrammed beasts spin tunes, others paint, and still others perform intricate dances to music.
Monday, December 06, 2004
When technology gets personal
In 2020, whipping out your mobile phone to make a call will be quaintly passé. By then phones will be printed directly on to wrists, or other parts of the body, says Ian Pearson, BT’s resident futurologist.
It’s all part of what’s known as a “pervasive ambient world”, where “chips are everywhere”.
Mr Pearson does not have a crystal ball. His job is to formulate ideas based on what science and technology are doing now, to guide industries into the future.
Inanimate objects will start to interact with us: we will be surrounded - on streets, in homes, in appliances, on our bodies and possibly in our heads - by things that “think”.
Forget local area networks - these will be body area networks.
Ideas about just how smart, small, or even invisible, technology will get are always floating around. Images of devices clumsily bolted on to heads or wrists have pervaded thinking about future technology.
But now a new vision is surfacing, where smart fabrics and textiles will be exploited to enhance functionality, form, or aesthetics. Such materials are already starting to change how gadgets and electronics are used and designed.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
Intelligent clothing inspired by pine cones
A new type of ‘smart’ clothing which adapts to changing temperatures to keep the wearer comfortable is being developed by two universities using nature as a guide.
The clothing will use the latest in micro technology to produce material which will let in air to cool a wearer when it is hot and shut out air when it is cold. This is similar to a system used by pine cones to open up and emit seeds.
The University of Bath and the London College of Fashion are jointly researching the material, which they think could be in everyday use by people within a few years.
The project has been chosen as one of eight to represent UK science at the Expo 2005 in Japan from March to September next year, whose theme is Nature’s Wisdom.
[snip]
The design is being carried out by Veronika Kapsali, who is studying for her PhD in design at the London College of Fashion, part of the University of Arts London.
Saturday, December 04, 2004
Animated Children
The children huddled around the computer screen, hearing their voices coming out of the speakers and watching with amazement the colorful, one-dimensional figures with big heads dance across the screen.
For two New Britain residents and one Plainville resident, supplying the voices for characters in an animated film represented an experience outside the traditional middle-school spheres of drama and athletics.
The youth were part of a cast of nine that supplied the voices of characters for the Hartford Animation Institute’s inaugural full-length cartoon show, which premieres on television in December.
The half-hour film, called “It’s Christmas, Dr. Joe,” is based on the “Scruples” cartoon characters created by Hartford animator Joe Young. The characters are a group of sensitive orphans who are trying to find the real meaning of Christmas while dealing with bullying, diversity and other social issues, Young said.
[Six] Artists Selected for the Anne Landa Exhibition [Australia]
Six young and innovative artists have been selected for the inaugural Anne Landa Exhibition and Award - the first award exhibition in Australia for moving image and new media work. The award has been established in honour of Anne Landa, a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales who died in 2002. This is the first in a biennial series of exhibitions, each with an acquisitive award of $25,000.
[snip]
Van Sowerwine’s engaging animated girl invites us to play with her at a tea-party. As you interact with her screen image she responds to your suggestions, but playtime unfortunately becomes sinister as each decision you make on the doll’s behalf has consequences. David Rosetzky’s confessional videos consider how we represent our lives to ourselves and how our experience of self is affected by relationships with others. In Untouchable we look into three rooms whose inhabitants speak about an emotionally charged experience that is preoccupying them.
A subtle politics infuses Peter Hennessey’s digital animation of the Voyager space probe and soundtrack of messages recorded for anyone in outer space who may encounter the voyager, greetings from earth to aliens. Guy Benfield constructs room environments and in a mock-ironic reprise of 70s performance art, he pours, splashes and rolls around in paint to make visceral, humourous, sexually charged art works recorded on video and played back in the final gallery installation.
Craig Walsh’s projections of surprising images onto the Gallery’s architecture confuse what the mind knows and what the eyes sees. A poetic beauty haunts Shaun Gladwell’s low-fi videos of skateboarders, bike riders and break dancers as they take ownership of urban spaces, even momentarily, suggesting alternate ways in which we can we can live in a highly regulated physical environment.
The Next Frontier - As Venues Dwindle, Local Arts Organizations Turn to Cyberspace
Since its inception in 1999, George Fifield’s wildly successful Boston Cyberarts Festival has been uniting Boston’s technology and arts communities, showcasing Bostonians’ pioneering work in new media arts and bringing that work to an ever-increasing slice of the populace. But in a city that’s short on funding and even shorter on new media venues, it’s the work that Fifield does in the years between Cyberarts festivals that’s helping to establish The Bean as a leader in the technological arts.
Boston Cyberarts is a member of Art Technology Boston (atBoston), a consortium of 10 local arts organizations - Art Interactive, the Berwick Research Institute, Boston Cyberarts, the Collision Collective, Do While Studio, iKatun, Mobius, 911 Gallery, New Radio and Performing Arts’ Turbulence and the Somerville Producers Group’s Dead Air Live - that work in new media and art technology. They advance new media arts in Boston and reinforce each other’s efforts by pooling resources, trading mailing lists, partnering on advocacy, sharing project ideas and residency openings, and working collectively to overcome Boston’s space shortage.
Interactive art may become bored with viewer [by Wafaa Bilal and Shawn Lawson]
Art can inspire us, entertain us, educate us and inform us; but is it meant to insult us by yawning at us, rolling its eyes and then just walking away?
A somewhat astonishing version of Eduard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergère is showing now at the Arizona State University Computing Commons art gallery. Those who don’t want to see the French barmaid, who is front and center in the work, express her boredom and contempt for them should stay home.
[snip]
She looks back at the viewer and may express a certain distaste by rolling her eyes, or she may become obviously bored by the person and yawn, or if two people are watching her she may assume an expression of displeasure, turn and walk right out of the picture.
Or if nobody is standing in front of the painting, she may pat her hair into place or adjust her dress.
The Next Runaway Industry
Scott Ross’ company has produced some of the most distinctive visual effects in recent Hollywood history, from the vast inhospitable sea of “Titanic” to the hurtling meteors of “Armageddon” — effects that linger in the memory long after the images of those films’ actors fade.
“So why,” Ross asked me not long ago in his Venice office, “aren’t visual effects companies being paid like movie stars?”
The question wasn’t entirely rhetorical. As chairman and chief executive of Digital Domain, one of the leading visual effects houses in the industry, and as a former executive at Lucasfilm Ltd.’s Industrial Light & Magic, the Bronx-born Ross, 53, has been grappling with the economics of special effects for 20 years.
More precisely, he has been grappling with the irony that as digital effects have grown into a dominant factor in the success of major studio blockbusters, the independent companies that produce those effects have been getting squeezed.
“You’d think we’d be rolling in dough,” he says, “but this is an industry with zero margins.” The result, he warns, is that effects firms looking for ways to save money will start shipping more of their work overseas, following the information technology industry to places like India, China and South Korea.
“What happened to IT will happen to us,” he says.
Online artworks go up for grabs
A contemporary artist has set up a virtual gallery where art lovers can buy a piece of digital art that comes with its own unique web address.
Stephen Rumney’s “online art installations” form part of his Domain Art exhibition.
As well as the online image, the buyer becomes the legal owner of its integrated website address and an art gallery installation of the image.