This Happened....

While I would have loved to be the first to find this amazing site - Cool Hunting's Brian Fitchner reported on it yesterday.
This happened... is a company that organizes events focusing on the stories behind interaction design. According to them having ideas is easier than making them happen so they delve into projects that exist today and how their concepts and production process can help inform future work.
Created in 2007 by a threesome of London based designers, this happened...encourages people to be more open in their methods and ideas in a fairly proprietary industry.

With over 30 different 20 minute talks online this site provides a wealth of information and inspiration for anyone working in design or interested in the creation of interactive art. Some of my favorites are the talks given by Dominic Harris who runs Cinimod Studio, a multi-disciplinary design practice spanning architecture, lighting and interactive design. He talkes about his collaboration with New York artist Peter Coffin, for which he designed and built a UFO that flew over the Polish city of Gdansk.

I also really

appreciated the talk given by Ben and Russell of

Really Interesting Group a multi-disciplinary organization working in post digital design who talk about Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet(TOFHWOTI). TOFHWOTI is a collection of things from the Internet they thought would work well on paper so they made it into a newspaper and had it printed with a limited edition run of 1,000 that they hand numbered.

Ben and Russell's impetus for this project was not only to work out Christmas presents for their friends but also to try to transfer web content into a more interesting and traditional forms that people are accustomed to. While they aren't the first to do it - company's like MacGloud and Tabbloit have been working it out for a while now The Really Interesting Group not only put an artistic spin on their project but also spawned a Flickr community of online collectors who are trying to capture images of all of the 1,000 newspapers.

Q-bert attack - The New Dark Age

Interdisciplinary artist Ben Jones of the East Coast art collective Paper Rad (whose primary deal is to combine multiple medias online and also to create books) solo show of crossover-media video sculpture, light painting, and “drawing in the digital age” is currently showing at the Deitch Projects. Ben explores new methods of pictorial storytelling through the drawn, projected, and sculpted line. Take a look at some of his work:

On a side note careful when visiting Paper Rad's site - it reminds me of a Q-bert game on acid: images jump at you and you get sucked in to the vortex of color and sound.

Mechanical Creatures of U-Ram Choe

Artist U-Ram Choe's sculptures are a mix of science, technology and art. Inspired by science fiction and anime culture, he mechanicizes nature — replicating flowers, insects, birds, and sea life.

Choe's deep understanding of robotics helps him in running his own lab, United Research of Anima-Machines (URAM, after his own name) where he designs and constructs his machine-creatures, equipping them with wings, fins, and propellers.
Choe gives his animatronic sculptures Latin names and creates narratives that suggest his creatures eat all sorts of electric waves.

Choe admittedly finds machines fascinating, yet fears the Matrix-like outcome of technology taking control of humankind.

Check out Choe's website here: http://www.uram.net/english/intro_eng.html

and view a time-lapse installation of the piece his bitforms gallery online.

Capturing Tigers and Elephants

I found myself re-watching the BBC Planet Earth series this weekend and remembered how remarkable the series was the first time I saw it. The great plains disc is by far my favorite not only because of the adorable Pikas (cousins of the rabbits) but because of the amazing HD film and infrared technology that was used to capture for the first time on film a pride of 30 famished lions leaping on the back of an elephant five times their size, mauling and gnawing until they finally succeed in running the poor defenseless elephant into the ground.
While I found the footage hard to watch the behind the scenes diary that explains both the technology and filming technique is beyond fascinating.

For over six weeks the team follow a pride of 30 lions as they attempt to hunt elephants, using the latest night vision equipment they were able to capture this amazing natural phenomena.
The infrared night vision used by the crew pushes filming technology to the limits. It works by augmenting and converting the available ambient light or in lay person terms collecting the tiny amounts of light, that are present but may be imperceptible to our eyes, and amplifying it to the point that we can easily observe the image without actually using a visible light source.

This technology and artistry made it possible for mass audiences to see the rare behavior that exists outside our realm of consciousness and that was previously unable to be captured on film.

Cloning Art

I was googling the words technology and art today to see if anyone is actually reading my blog or if it had any prominence in Google. To my dismay it didn't but what I found instead was an article from the technology section of the New York Times dated July 2004 about a french sculptor who wanted to reproduce a limestone sculpture of a loin's face for a line of fountains. Since carving each individual head was an arduous task that the sculptor was uninterested in, he instead worked with a new-stone mill in who technically mapped the original sculpture in 3D with a laser scanner and produced exact replicas of the loin's head. A task that would take any sculptor days if not weeks was completed in mere hours by the machine - without the subtle flaws and imperfections of handmade creations.

This story is an example of how technology is transforming the way sculpture, architectural elements and and even painting can be cloned. Computer aided design software and scanners are in some cases replacing the original artists creating detailed replicas from original works. While these replicas lack the inspiration and creativity of the original pieces they do paint a scary picture of what's in store for craftsmen.

Don't get me wrong I am all for advancements in technology but not at the cost of craftsmanship. Rapid prototyping pioneered by the automotive and aviation industry in the 1950's has gained traction in industries ranging from consumer package good design to toys, I guess it was only a matter of time before it infiltrated the art world.

Are artists fully prepared to embrace it though?

Drama: Sensory Overload

New York City performance company Big Art Group creates hallucinatory theatrical environments through real-time film projections. The company uses the language of media and blended states of performance in a unique form to build "culturally transgressive" works. As the action unfolds in their most recent work, a forest of technology records each scene from multiple angles and rebroadcasts them to the audience on a network of screens. The confluence of visual stimuli functions as a "discomfiting commentary on our times", evoking reality TV, digital data streams, screen addiction, and the future of virtual reality. Big Art Group's latest piece, SOS, uses the audience as an active editor, whose individual attention produces a unique narrative from the sensory overload. S.O.S. utilizes ten performers and a video matrix that inhabit a multi-camera, multi-screen installation. If you agreed with me that Ben Jones pieces in collaboration with Paper Rad's site were a lot this experimental piece is even more.

Ligths, Camera, Screens - Protect Protect

Lee Frank says "Jenny Holzer thrives outside the more traditional, brick-and-mortar art world of paint and photography, using LED and light projection as her medium."

Starting today, her exhibit PROTECT PROTECT lights up the Whitney. As with past works where she beamed poems on buildings throughout New York, Holzer continues using poetry in her work. However, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, this show also includes manipulations and projections of government documents, and covers her craft from the '90s to the present.

The show goes on from Thursday Mar 12 (11am–6pm) at the Whitney Museum of American Art (945 Madison Ave, 800.944.8639).

Computer Age Generated Art

This morning the New York times reported on the The New Museum of Contemporary Art's next month inaugural triennial exhibit of an international sampling of 50 artists who were born after 1976 and raised in the computer age. The show "Younger Than Jesus” will begin to examine the visual culture this generation has created to date.

In order to select the artists for this show the curators relied on their Internet savvy, reaching out to 150 writers, teachers, artists, critics, curators and bloggers worldwide, for recommendations. From around 600 suggested names, the team including Adjunct Curator; Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman cut the group down to the group to 50 artists spaning mediums from painting, drawing, photography, film, animation, performance, installation, dance, Internet-based works, and video games.
Kerstin Brätsch, a 30-year-old German-born artist and a part of a collective called Das Institute who will show computer-generated images that “can become anything."

“Younger Than Jesus” will capture the signals of an imminent change, identify emerging stylistic trends and provide the general public with an in-depth look at how the next generation conceives of our world. Revealing new languages, technologies and attitudes, the exhibition will comprise a portrait of the agents of change at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Insane Image Technology

My last post reminded me of a Microsoft image technology that was presented at the 2007 TED conference.

Some call this technology mind blowing, I find it insane and amazing. Essentially this Microsoft technology can change the landscape of photo sharing. Here is the video of Blaise Aguera demo-ing it at the conference:

Basically you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your photo is put right in your shoes, sharing in your experience, with detail and clarity impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.
Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to build a model of where the photos were taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos. Bonkers right?

Risque Internet Photos - Thomas Ruff

A classmate suggested I take a look at the work of contemporary German photographer Thomas Ruff for the purpose of this blog.

Ruff has been testing and extending the limits of photography for more than two decades, completing a dozen series of photographs that range from seemingly banal images of streets and buildings to computer-generated prints of sensuous psychedelic colour fields.

In 2003 as part of his exploration of the Internet and the "parallel visual universe" Ruff published a photographic collection titled "Nudes" that were based on borrowed images of Internet pornography, which were then digitally manipulated, processed and obscured to give them an abstract feel that often masked their erotic content. Here is one of the less risque images from this series:

While this series was received with much ambivalence in the art community and departs greatly from his earlier portrait work that highlights every pore and detail of his subject. This series of Ruff's work really underscores the belief that in our virtual age, that each photograph is a part of an ever changing whole that we all have the opportunity to participate in and change.