prosthetic knowledge

user632

Public installation piece from undef in public window collects data of of it’s audience with a Kinect sensor - video embedded below:

User 632 is an installation that stores the behaviour of the people who look at it by monitoring them in return. It wants to know when and how a person passes by or if they stop on the way.

All data is being tracked and displayed publicly. Passers-by are stored as an anonymous number without any hints to their identities. Whoever comes to close to the camera though will be stored with a photograph next to their id.

The installation is made up of three Kinect depth cameras that constantly look for movements which are then reduced to a simple directional line in space. When a visitor enters a specific area, the algorithm is looking for a face. As soon as one is found a countdown appears that shows the time until a photo is taken automatically. At the same time the time a user is in the visible area is stored.

This data (time, path and eventually image) are stored in a database, interpreted and displayed as real-time statistics.

Link

Instant Art Career

Public art installation from Niklas Roy is a manual painting machine for anyone to create their own work of art, made for the Katowice Street Art Festival - video embedded below:

There are many artists in this world, but also many people who could be artists, although they are not. These people might just be stuck in their daily business, being unaware of the exciting possibility to lead the prestigious life of a professional artist. We tackled this issue at the Katowice Street Art Festival by providing anyone with the opportunity to become an artist instantly.

For that purpose, we constructed a “Public Painting Machine” and installed it inside a gallery window. People on the street could paint with the machine by pulling on ropes which were hanging outside. The machine bridged the gap between ordinary street life and the glamorous world of art. It launched hundreds of art careers and created skyrocketing fame which finally culminated in cash revenue for the artists.

More can be found at Niklas’ website here, including photos and even the construction files to construct your own.

The Pirate Cinema (Video)

I covered this last week, but now you can see the installation in action.

An installation displays films currently pirated on peer-to-peer networks:

In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” makes the hidden activity and geography of Peer-to-Peer file sharing visible. The project is presented as a monitoring room, which shows Peer-to-Peer transfers happening in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol. The installation produces an arbitrary cut-up of the files currently being exchanged. This immediate and fragmentary rendering of digital activity, with information concerning its source and destination, thus depicts the topology of digital media consumption and uncontrolled content dissemination in a connected world.

* Site: http://thepiratecinema.com/
* Video: https://vimeo.com/67518774
* Flickr: goo.gl/VSNQh

oscillating continuum

Audio visual installation by RYOICHI KUROKAWA:

Orchestra Da Camera

Musical installation featuring several carillons connected to mouse wheels, where several mice randomly play the music - video embedded below:

Orchestra Da Camera is a musical installation in wich the 40 elements of the chamber are mais running on their wheels.
Each wheel its connected to a carillon and when it turns the carillon starts playing its musical note.
The great number of carillons and the random actions of the living creatures makes unrecognizable the melodies (lullabies by Brahms, Schubert and Mozart ) creating an unexpected musical carpet determined by the mice.

Link

Facebox 

Physical installation with claims to be the worlds smallest social network - video embedded below:

Friends: How many of them do you have? On facebook the „how many“ seems to be more important then the „who“. For some facebook users the amount of friends seems to be an indicator of their own popularity. But how can you have a deep relationship with hundreds of friends? It‘s just impossible!

facebox is the world’s smallest social network. It is an artifact to rehabilitate social network geeks, an ironic statement to the massive increased social network madness. It‘s time to make a change: Erase your facebook account today and switch over to facebox! With facebox it‘s easy: By stucking your head into one of this old computer monitors you will dive into this real world network. Find a friend and talk to him in a intimate face to face situation. facebox provides everything a former social network addicted persons needs to reactivate his social skills which are necessary to have an intense human to human conversation.

More Here

bit.code

Mechanical installation from 2009 is a physical 1-bit glitch display - video embedded below:

BIT.CODE plays with the re-encoding of information and the recognizability of signs. It works with the infinite possibilities for combination of a finite number of bits, the smallest units of information.
The bits appear as black and white elements on the individual segments of the string. Each string is coded with the same bit pattern, which is reminiscent of Morse code. If the strings are moved in parallel, words seemingly appear (for a certain period of time) from ‘out of nowhere’ and disappear again. The perceived information causes a short opportunity for pause, a moment of serenity, of clarity – before the incessant flow of constellations, motions and changes starts anew.

Link

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Arrays and Matrices

A collection of examples from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive on installation artworks which can be characterized by geometric or networked arrangement.

You can read more at Rhizome here

Angles Mirror by Daniel Rozin

Interactive installation using a triangular method of representation with a motorized array:

The “Angles Mirror” rejects the idea of building a picture based on relative lightness and darkness. Instead, it explores a system of linear rotation that indicates the direction of an object’s contour. A wall-mounted sculpture, the “Angles Mirror” is a sharp triangular block of steel, dotted with yellow indicator arms that pivot. Based on the isometric grid, its structure favors the patterns and angles found in an equilateral triangle. The arms, which do not have the ability to change brightness or luminosity, use input from a camera and reconstruct the view with areas of varying angles. The negative space surrounding a viewer is translated into horizontal lines on the picture plane. Rather than creating a photorealistic image, the three-dimensional movement of a figure is represented, visualizing optical flow as viewer’s proximity to the sculpture changes. A nuanced contour results, as the viewer shifts back and forth, altering how the structure of space is perceived. Similar to “Fan Mirror”, in the “Angles Mirror”, the sequence of movement across the picture plane is directed in part by its audience. When the viewer walks away from the work, or chooses to view the sculpture from a distance, a series of predefined images and transitions cover the object’s surface.

There are more examples of Daniel’s interactive and alternative ‘mirrors’ at the Bitform Gallery’s Vimeo page here

Infinite Type Trooper 

Interactive installation displays animated type from a vintage keyboard - video embedded below:

Infinite Type Trooper from lettersaremyfriends on Vimeo.

From Letters Are My Friends in Berlin comes an installation that enables you to experience their animated and generated Buchstabengewitter Typeface with a haptic tactile interface - an old Rheinmetall Typewriter from the 1920s. We used the Arduino based USB Typewriter Kit by Jack Zylkin to convert this machine into an USB keyboard and give it a long deserved upgrade after almost a century. The keys are send to a PC that is running the Buchstabengewitter vvvv-patch that animates the glyphs. We gonna use it as a realtime comment tool for talks and events.

Link

Firewall

Interactive installation by Aaron Sherwood is a spandex wall which projects disruptions when touched - video embedded below:

Firewall from Aaron Sherwood on Vimeo.

Firewall is an interactive media installation created in collaboration with Mike Allison. A stretched sheet of spandex acts as a membrane interface sensitive to depth that people can push into and create fire-like visuals and expressively play music. More information available on the project’s blog.

Link

Aaron is also responsible for the Glockentar which I posted about here

Installing “Random Access” - Nam June Paik: Global Visionary - Time-lapse - American Art Museum

This time-lapse video shows the installation of “Random Access” in Nam June Paik: Global Visionary at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“Random Access” by Nam June Paik
1963/2000
strips of audiotape, open-reel audio deck, extended playback head, and speakers.

Exhibition website: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/paik/

Abstract Christmas tree sparks protests in Brussels 

An updated version of a post made earlier today, now with a video from BBC News

A minimal voxelesque Christmas tree with projection mapping and a staircase to view from it’s top hasn’t gone down well with some …

Thousands of people have signed a petition against an abstract light installation replacing the traditional Christmas tree in Brussels city centre.

More than 11,000 signatures have been gathered in the online petition and a Facebook page attacking the new feature has been launched.

Critics accuse officials of opting for the installation for fear of offending non-Christians, especially Muslims.

Maddy Savage reports.

Lunar Trails 

Game art installation which plots every gameplay of a 1970’s arcade machine onto a wall:

Lunar Trails from Seb Lee-Delisle on Vimeo.

From Seb.ly

Lunar Trails is an interactive installation, first commissioned by the Dublin Science Gallery for their GAME exhibition, running from November 2012 to the end of January 2013.

It features a full size arcade cabinet running the vintage 1979 game Lunar Lander. As you play the game, the path that you take is rendered on the wall with a large hanging drawing robot.

The trails build up to produce artworks that are solely created by the game players, and is a reflection of all their individual journeys to the surface of the moon.

More Here

Windswept by Charles Sowers 

Art installation fixed outside a gallery’s wall, displaying natural flow and turbulence of the wind - via dezeen:

Hundreds of spinning blades reveal the invisible patterns of the wind in American artist Charles Sowers’ kinetic installation on the facade of the Randall Museum in San Francisco.

The installation, titled Windswept, consists of 612 rotating aluminium weather vanes mounted on an outside wall. As gusts of wind hit the wall, the aluminium blades spin not as one but independently, indicating the localised flow of the wind and the way it interacts with the building.

“Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon,” said Sowers. “Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction.”

You can find out more at Dezeen here, with photos and a video of the work in action.