Exhibtion "Chain Reaction" -- details
From Develop
[edit] "et dukkehjem"/ rootoftwo - Cezanne Charles + John Marshall (Detroit)
'et dukkehjem' is a hybrid art and design installation that utilizes sensor controlled digital media embedded in specially designed pieces of furniture. The starting point of this work is a re-reading of Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" to explore user-object relationships and the piece seeks to question the function, identity and authority of objects. Objects are often anthropomorphized and in this case a rug, a stool, an armchair, a coffee table and a lamp each represent a character from the play. By inviting the audience to interact in various ways with these domestic objects we hope to remove them from the taken for granted and create multiple possible readings of this work. 'et dukkehjem' is produced in collaboration with Metropolitan Architecture Practice, PLY Architecture, Michael Rodemer and Sherman Finch.
[edit] “Locative Painting”/ Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel (São Paulo)
Locative Painting (www.locativepainting.com.br) is web artwork that forms a painting on the screen where the strokes are given according to the participant’s geographical position, creating so a locating media. Each stroke position on the painting is calculated using Google Maps and Brazilian Mail algorithms to transform the participants’ zip codes into absolute latitudes and longitudes. Each point is painted using the correct longitude and latitude related to each zip. The painting is formed by 3 levels of interactions: local (city), country and global. The 3 layers/maps are overlapped. By allowing that each participant creates a stroke based on his/her location, the work provides to each person his/her own moment in the painting. On the other hand, as all strokes connect people’s locations, generating in this way a multitude of crossing paths, the Locative Painting creates a community painting with digital connections that maybe would never happen in tangible life. The intention of this work is to create awareness about a) how easy it is to be located regardless any technological device, and; b) to extract in some ways the poetics revealed by locations and their emerging digital connections.
[edit] "Object of Desire"/ Yael Kanarek (New York)
Object of Desire is the third chapter of the Traveler's Journal, which is the diary of a traveler who searches, in a parallel world called Sunset/Sunrise, for a lost treasure. Fifteen diary entries combine, cross, and deconstruct themes and motifs born in the Near East and Mediterranean. While navigating, if you can't read, guess. During a family visit to Israel in 2002, I noticed that my mother was using the Internet entirely in Hebrew, i.e.: Operating system, browser and websites (right-to-left). Thus just as in "real" life, on the Internet as well, language functions as a border and space. I found the experience of browsing websites in a foreign languages similar to that of traveling in a foreign country. To experiment with the space of languages, I chose to author the chapter in English, Hebrew and Arabic (plus some French, Italian, Spanish and C). These languages define the semantic landscape of my childhood. Object of Desire contains fifteen diary entries that download from Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Izmir and New York. [www.donialrahba.ps; worldofawe.net]
[edit] “Digital Poetries”/ Silvia Laurentiz (São Paulo)
The project “Percorrendo Escrituras” has been nowadays developed in the ECA-USP Fine Arts Department. In general lines, it intends to study different structures of the digital information that share a same universe and are generators of a new aesthetics condition. The goal is to search which are the expressive possibilities of the computer among the algorithm functions and another of its specific properties. It is a project practically theoretical, interdisciplinary, where from the language evolutionary process study of programming, of the logic and of the mathematics are accomplished poetic experimentations. The focus of this research is the digital poetry, and these 5 poems are practical results of this research.
[edit] “Atmospheric Pollution”/ D.A.L. (Tijuana)
AP is a display about anthropogenic contaminants issued to our atmosphere. Through an interactive schematic model is represented the atmospheric space phenomenon as well as the chemical and Physics events. The structure of the display is composed with two navigation menus: The first one explores the atmospheric layers and the second displayed the anthropogenic residues, simulating its behavior. The descriptive information of each segment appears in a dynamic way when the cursor detects its transit. We seek the user visualize the dimension of the protective layer of the atmosphere and the effects of human intervention in it. The urgent problems of environmental pollution at present time like the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming and quality air in the cities, among others, are directly related to industrial activity and the laws of the countries to regulate such activities. Most of the pollution is generated by industrialized countries of the northern hemisphere, including USA, the most industrialize country that produces more pollution in the world and has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol. More than 10 years ago we are trying to reach international agreements to reduce emissions of polluting gases, unfortunately lack of awareness, the orthodox applications of the capitalist economy and international elite geo-strategies policies have block international agreements, hurting the environment in which we live all.
[edit] “Neurozappingfolks”/ Santiago Ortiz Herrera (Lisabon)
NeuroZappingFolks is a digital piece for the Internet. The lack of interactivity of the work can be seen as a neurosis of the application itself, simulating a frantic navigation through the web, in search of something unknown. The nucleus is constituted by an algorithm gathering information from the popular website del.icio.us, where thousands of users keep (for themselves, but in a public way) url’s from other pages in the Internet, associating them with specific tags, short words functioning as labels and giving the chosen link some minimum amount of information. The same words (art, sex, Internet, anime…) are usually referred by different people, allowing for unexpected inter-relations between several sites. NeuroZappingFolks is then a non-linear zapping through the web, a path leading to the inside of a web of relations, a web that can be explored from one tag to a site, to another tag, to another site... from word to image to word to image. NeuroZappingFolks is then the simulation of a brain lost in the web (lost between servers, but also lost in Internet's double identity: word and image).
[edit] “Turn Me On”/ Sean Arden (Vancouver)
Turn Me On explores the idea of electricity as information. The interaction of the user plays with the ingrained expectation of everyday technologies and their expected functions. The video content of the installation, created from appropriated television footage and live video, references commodity fetishism of modern technology, history of the screen, sensationalism of television, and the ubiquity of the moving image and its loss of format.
[edit] “Lightningstone”/ GRUPO POÉTICAS DIGITAIS (São Paulo)
A blue virtual environment on the web with a stone in its base. Interactor writes a word and chooses a place to put it. The words can superimpose itself, or to compose with other dispersed words and spread by the environment. In the gallery, there is a stone covered of blue Leds (8 x 8 x 8 led cube), that answer to the virtual interventions, varying with the light intensity and frequency, according to interactors nomination and location choices in the virtual space. The web-installation 'pedralume' (lightning stone) care for choices, registrations and partitions, the process to give name to the things, to put mark and choose territories, and to create spaces partitioned of light, provoking chain reactions in symbolic and physical way.
[edit] “Psychic”/ Antoinne Schmitt (Paris)
Psychic sees the spectators and describes what she sees using phrases printed letter by letter like by a typewriter which we can also hear. She has a distorted vision of reality and she is rather anxious about the motivations of the visitors who enter her space. http://www.gratin.org/as/txts/Psychic.html
[edit] “Antidatamining”/ RYbN (Paris)
ANTIDATAMINING is based on the recovery and the viewing/visualization of web-extracted data. It aims at creating audiovisual environments written, fed and updated in real-time. The goal of this project is to make emerge and to identify, using the Data Mining processing, several social and economic imbalance phenomena. ADM seeks to visualize these phenomena, and to tries to establish a global imbalance cartography. Forest shows the Capital Network Map, which tries to organize a network through more than 1200 referenced companies, searching the relationships between their capitalistic structure, and attempt to create links of ownership [www.antidatamining.net].
[edit] “Second Landscapes”/ Giselle Beiguelman (São Paulo)
The unfolding of the new mapping and locating systems are undeniable. The popularization of the GPSs devices and the accessibility of online maps are indicative of a new perception of space. Nevertheless, all those issues also point to new geopolitics dynamics and to a repetitive aesthetic redundancy which seems to pursuit the utopia of a map in a 1:1 scale like a sad Borgean character pictured in “On Exactitude in Science”.
[edit] “ink”/ Stefan Baumberger and Nicole Heidtke (Scotland)
ink is an interactive installation which derives from five inscriptions found in five printed books from five centuries. Handwritten by explorers, lovers, book owners, soldiers and authors, whose inscriptions express the wish to individualise printed, mass-produced books. The inscriptions are taken from a Bible, a copy of the Arabian Nights, a Songbook and books about Natural History and Botany. ink is an installation with five glass bulbs – partly filled with blue ink – suspended from the ceiling. When the visitor approaches the bulbs begin to rotate, causing a layer of ink to form on the inside surface. In the ink handwritten inscriptions become visible due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision. The blue ink refers to handwriting (and its loss) and the light characters refer to the digital age (its interchangeability and transience). The light shapes the book inscriptions due to an optical illusion as a comment on virtuality. The inscriptions are given to the visitor individually. The visitor's presence causes the gesture of handing over the inscription again. With kind support from the Dick Institute, the City of Edinburgh Council, the National Library of Scotland, the Library of the Royal Botanic Garden and New Media Scotland.
[edit] “≥1”/ Kire Trajkovski (Skopje)
The installation consist two parts: small portrait drawings (8 x 8cm) drawn with pen and an interactive application. Character drawing style – stone-like images in big dimensions compared to the vain space around them-reminiscence of a prehistoric religious sanctuary. Lone characters are presenting the artist’s view on the subject of intimate and social relations which came down to communication between a small number of people. The interactive installation is placing these drawings in a different context which allows the audience itself to create a relation between different images. The application is simple and it allows manipulation with the drawings. The drawings can be set in a different schedule; only the drawing in the center can be zoomed in, since we are talking about miniatures. Each of the sets depicts one whole, from a certain period of time that it has been created in.
[edit] "COINcidence"/ Danilo Mandic (Skopje)
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[edit] “s.h.e.”/ Natasa Teofilovic (Belgrade)
s.h.e. is an interactive ambience created through an installation and a 3D character animation. s.h.e. plays with virtuality and reality. Where does virtuality end and reality begin? The virtual space is emptied; its spatiality is defined by the virtual characters through their movement and behavior (the animation). In the void-space, the virtuals are left to explore their own virtual identities. That¹s why they knock on the insides of the screens, touch the boundary (the edge) of the picture and enter their own virtual bodies. They are “skins”, virtual membranes without any organs, with animated shaders. The elements of the personal, the private and the auto portrait are present throughout all the segments of the piece. The virtual actresses¹ portraits have been derived from my own. The digital lighting was captured (HDR IBL) from the ambient I am living in. The sound - the rhythm of the beating on the screen, the knocking on the glass surface of the screen on which the s.h.e.(s) were created. Mimics, movements and gestures are privately mine.
[edit] “Locations of Displacement”/ Tegan Bristow (Johannesburg)
A series of documentary photographs taken of the Internet Cafe's in downtown Johannesburg. This series shows the environment of these internet cafe's and the conditions under which they are run. In the Upgrade! Network, 'Johannesburg' is the only node in Africa. Though the conditions under which our node functions are far better then in these cafe's, we often face similar challenges. These cafe's show a highly inventive use of communication technologies which often rely on finding the cheapest and shortest means to an end. Set up by refugee's and foreign nationals as a means to communicate with friends and business people in their home countries, the cafe's have become centers of cultural connection and 'informal' business. These cafe's have also been quickly adopted by South African users as a cheaper alternative to the overpriced offerings of the local telecoms.
[edit] “No parking”/ Erhan Muratoğlu (Istanbul)
In ‘No Parking’, a 57 seconds animation, Erhan Muratoglu contemplates the current condition in Istanbul where human beings are clashing more and more with their physical surroundings. Some of the effects of globalisation such as increasing prosperity and expanding urbanisation are causing a shortage of public space leading to situations where people, cars are continually hindering each other. As Muratoglu says: “Istanbul is a self-running laboratory where the boundaries of social interactions are tested.” The video’s stylized 3D aesthetic resembles the computer game as Grand Theft Auto, with the difference that no protagonists are active here. The physical urban space is acting on its own behalf by swinging a wrongly parked car off the pavement and setting the car alarm off.
[edit] “Chain letter of reactionary love”/ tobias c. van Veen (Montreal)
This work consists of two parts. VIDEO This video documents the release of paper airplanes atop various peaks, glaciers and structures in the Pacific Northwest of Canada. Unable to bridge the distance, lost chain letters are released to drift in the wind. The artist wears a suit and top hat to demonstrate his sincerity. ACTION carried out by participants of Chain Reaction: + on a piece of paper, write a love letter to someone you miss and have not seen in many years, and would like to be here with you, where you are now. include your email address. + once all letters are ready, fold into paper airplanes. + scale the highest possible structure in Skopje, by whatever means available. + throw the letter in the direction of where you currently believe the person to be. [1]
[edit] “TODAY”/ CADA (Lisabon)
TODAY is a piece of generative art for mobile phones. It’s an application that visualizes personal mobile communication. It sits on the periphery of the machine, monitoring our connectivity through the number and type of calls we receive, subtly displaying them back to us, in the form of a generative graphic. Here, the visual result is a figurative and seemingly abstract picture – the story of your day. Some days will be colourful and wired, others quieter and more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatable and unique. What lies at TODAY’s core was the idea of using personal data as the basis for an aesthetic system, while providing individuals with a visual diary of their communication patterns. It’s an intimate piece that ‘lives’ in your pocket. Freely distributed for Symbian phones at today.cada1.net
[edit] "Interception”/ Roch Forowicz (Warsaw)
A surveillance camera being used to monitor public space was hijacked and reinstalled in a subway station. The camera was used intentionally to broaden consciousness concerning the problem of increasing lack of privacy. People entering and exiting the station were tracked by the camera, and their “capture” was projected on a station wall. The action was illegal. [2]
