prosthetic knowledge

A Timeline of 20th Century Art and New Media, via Kyle McDonald

[Click for Hi Res version here]

Augenzeichnungen (Eye Drawings) 

Created by German artist Jochem Hendricks, a project started in 1992, where the artist would wear a helmet with eye-tracking technology, recording the eye movements and printing the results - from Media Art Net:

Eye-drawings, «Augenzeichnungen», are drawings done directly with the eyes, without the slightest interference of the hands - the organ of perception being turned into the organ of expression. By means of technical aids (infrared-, video-, and computer- techniques) human eye movements are traced and digitized during the visual process of looking at something, so as to be able to do an ink-jet print out of these movements eventually. The body of works called Eye-drawings not only investigates the process of looking at everyday objects in the form of photographs or real three dimensional items, but primarily circles around issues of research and the visualization of abstract motives and processes e.g., time, reading, writing, drawing, light, and afterimage, culminating in the denial of the gaze: nothingness - the invisible is made visible by means of a trace.

More Here and Here

Resonate Festival 2013 - Belgrade New Media Festival 

This festival and it’s line-up have just been announced, featuring many great projects and talented people who have appeared in this blog … I wish I could go …

Following the success of the first Resonate festival that took place in March 2012, Magnetic Field B in collaboration with CreativeApplications.Net and Dom Omladine in Belgrade are pleased to announce the new edition of the festival, taking place 21-23 March 2013.

In 2012 Resonate festival set a new milestone for art and technology conferences in Europe. Attracting over 600 visitors from abroad and providing a diverse cultural programme, Resonate has become a symbiosis and a bridge between culturally separated segments of the artistic and intellectual scene.

Continuing to explore the boundaries of art, media and technology the new edition of Resonate festival expands its programme to three days in March next year and will include over 40 participating artists and thinkers across a range of activities including talks, workshops, panel discussions and music performances.

This year Resonate is also partnering with a number of educational institutions and organisations to even further diversify programme and provide visitors with an in depth overview of current situation in the fields of music, visual arts and digital culture.

2013 participating artists include Casey Reas, Joachim Sauter (ART+COM), Zimoun, Moritz Stefaner, Zach Gage, Golan Levin, Raquel Meyers, Anthony Dunne (RCA), Revital Cohen, Karsten Schmidt, Spaces of Play, Memo Akten (MarshmallowLaserFeast), Andreas Müller (Nanikawa), James Bridle, Liam Young (The Unknown Fields Division), Andreas Gysin, Greg J Smith, Kyle McDonald, Peter Kirn, Studio NAND, onedotzero and many more..

More information about the festival can be found here

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: nOdalisque 

From the archive, a brief look at a classic Fine Art archetype in today’s world, from glitchy machinima, 3D animation, Kinect pornography, and the concept of the “opsieme” with the aid of eye-tracking.

Read the whole piece at Rhizome here

SOFTWARE - An Exhibition (1970) 

Fascinating art catalogue of an exhibition which explores the creative potential of communication technologies, with ideas and approaches which are relevant today.

Some hightlights:

The first three images above refer to a project called ‘Seek’ by M.I.T. featuring an enclosed space filled with toy blocks that are placed by a robotic hand. Also inside are some gerbals who navigate themselves around the changing environment they find themselves in.

“Notes on art and information processing” essay by Jack Burnham is worth a read, with some great highlighted quotes.

“The Crafting of Media” brief essay by Theodor H. Nelson also has some interesting points, inventing the term ‘cybercrud’ to refer to information shared to one another via computer, and the first time (I have heard) the term ‘hypergram’ used a visual relation to hypertext, which could be best understood in the way a photo in Facebook or Flick is tagged with additional information which is referenceable within it.

Tactile Film by Linda Berris.

There are many others (various sound art projects, one which employs solar panels), even conceptual billboard work.

You can get a link to a pdf download via Monoskop Log here (discovered via brown-and-son)

IRIS by HYBE 

Interactive installation is grid of transparent LCDs which display halftone and circular patterns whose display can emulate it’s viewers. A week ago, I covered a New Media exhibition in Seoul called ‘The Da Vinci Ideas Exhibition’ and was intrigued by this piece, hoping there would be a video of it. Well, the brilliant Creative Applications discovered it, which you can watch in the embed below:

Created by Korena collective HYBE, IRIS is a media canvas with matrix of conventional information display technology, that is a monochrome LCD.Through the phased opening and closing of circular black liquid crystal, IRIS can create various patterns and control the amount (size) of passing lights.

More Info and images can be found at Creative Applications here

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Computer Graphics & Art 1976 - 1978 

A brief look at a short-lived American quarterly publication, which gives a little insight into the practice of art with computers in the 1970’s. While a product of its time, there are some places with resonances to the practice of today.

More at Rhizome here

2012 Da Vinci Ideas Exhibition 

New Media art show at the Seoul Art Space … looks interesting …

Thanks to Google Translate, I’ve worked out: There is a machine that can take visual input and draw your face with (black) sand on a rotating surface (top image), a 3D-Printed hat with LEDs that reacts to gravity, a reactive wall that mirrors activity in front of it in visual patterns, an installation that can place you in a comic strip, and … I’m not sure, but it looks good …

I know it is a really lame description, but it’s the best I can do with the resources and energy I have right now - hopefully at some point there will be videos in the future …

More Here

Cleaning Nam June Paik’s “The More The Better” at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea

As you can see from the last two images, cleaning a 60ft media display featuring 1,003 television displays is quite a task in itself (it is fantastic piece though, a personal favourite).

Uncomposed (after Titian after Giorgione) by Georgie Roxby Smith 

Renaissance art piece composed as contemporary New Media machinima, a 21st Century Venus - watch below:

Uncomposed (after Titian after Giorgione) from Georgie Roxby Smith on Vimeo.

3D machinima, video, found image, found sound

Made specifically for Composite at Gallery One Three Uncomposed (after Titian after Giogione) deconstructs Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, itself a composite, the landscape and sky being completed by Titian following Giogione’s death in 1510. The work was a landmark of its era, reflecting a new shift in modern art with the inclusion of a female nude at its centre. Employing three-dimensional computer graphics and elements of Giorgione’s original masterpiece, Roxby Smith replaces his stylised renaissance figure with a fantasised digital body transplanted into an augmented hyper real landscape. In the likeness of her present day artist, the 21st Century Venus will not lie still for her voyeurs, obstinately returning the male gaze from her new digital paradigm, Sleeping Venus awakes.

Burn-In Portraits by Tivon Rice

Images created on CRT display surfaces with incredibly long exposure to a single image - the first one (top) shown the same image for 3 years, 10 months, and 2 days.

Burn-in Portrait #1 -(3 years, 10 months, 2 days)

On a shelf is a small cathode ray tube monitor, lit from within and bearing the image of the artist’s face. There is no actual video of the artist’s face playing; this is just the result of having played a video of his face so continuously on this screen—for 3 years, 10 months, and 2 days, according to the piece’s title—that it burned onto the screen. The subject is twice-departed; it’s strangely touching.

Burn-in Portrait #2

Burn-In Portrait #2 is the second in an annual project to create self-portraits through the process of burning an image into a television screen.  Much like an extremely long photographic exposure, a negative of the image is played on a small TV for one year.  After this duration, a positive image is indelibly burned into the CRT’s phosphors and can be seen without a DVD player attached.

More on the New Media artist’s work can be found at his website here

AppropriatingNewTechnologies - Course Notes 

Some great reading material if you are looking for some background in contemporary tech / media art. Put together by Kyle McDonald, it covers areas such as facial recognition, the Kinect, Glitch and 3D scanning. While not all of it maybe relevant to the regular reader, there are plenty of links of examples to works and some contextual information.

A seven week course, the final week includes examples of works completed by course attendees.

The full list can be found here.

Art of Bjoern Schuelke

Kinetic installation artist has been producing surveillance drone-like / solar powered pieces well over the last decade:

Björn Schülke pursues a creative style that is equally influenced by modern abstraction and instruments of scientific measurement. The slow deliberate movements in his sculptures spatially consider mass and weight of form. Also influenced by the Dadaist tradition and Jean Tinguely, the theme of an absurd machine is key in Schülke’s work.
Playfully transforming live spatial energy into active responses, his objects experiment with solar panels, infrared surveillance, and propelled wind power. Many of his larger kinetic sculptures combine elements of surveillance technologies, robotics, interactive video and sound.
Schülke’s active sculptures question the way in which we interact with modern technology: on entering the installation site, the audience becomes part of the ‘system’ as the works (some freestanding, others suspended) monitor or react to the human element.

You can find out more about the artist at his website here, including video examples and an informative pdf brochure.

En Plein Air by Rick Silva 

PK NOTE: UTTERLY ESSENTIAL project to follow for anyone interesting in contemporary technology and creativity …

Ongoing project involves artist creating digital works on his laptop on natural sites, using 3D software, glitches and animated GIFs - a very contemporary Impressionist. (There are some animated GIFs above, yet you may need to click on them to see them running).

From an interview at USED Magazine:

So, to start off tell us a little bit about yourself and your work

I’m a new media artist, my recent works explore landscape, remix and glitch. For my newest ongoing project enpleinair.org, I’m taking my laptop outside and seeing what I can create while reacting to the immediate terrain and elements.

En plein air, the french expression for in the open air, used in painting.. why did you choose to name it this?

Yes, it is a reference to that painting style. Taking a computer outdoors, using 3D software to create the images, and posting those images on a website is like an updated version of En plein air. Of course, making art outside has a history that goes back thousands of years, but the term En plein air has some specific connotations that I like. One is that it is often associated with the Impressionist painters, and a common technique of theirs was to work with the materiality of paint, to let it smear and pile up so that it looks simultaneously like a summer landscape and globs of paint. On enpleinair.org I let the digital processes show by including the rendering artifacts and polygon glitches.

Highly recommend checking out the project site here

Jeremiah Johnson: Submissions for Computers Club Drawing Society 

Jeremiah Johnson (AKA Nullsleep) has created a collection of highly abstract and high definition pixel art, existing somewhere between old and new technologies and aesthetics.

The above images’ resolution do not do them justice - better to see all of the works at Jeremiah’s website here (and his Tumblr blog here)