prosthetic knowledge

New Media - New Environments

This was my entry for the Transfer3D - Speed Show WROCŁAW, an experiment with Autodesk 1234D and a televised interview from 1967 with technology theorist Marshall McLuhan:

Brief:

Create a piece of work for the Transfer3D SPEED SHOW WROCŁAW, around the concept of 3D

Idea:

Advances in 3D imaging and technology has provided interesting possibilities to explore. In particular, there is a service which can convert multiple still digital photographs into a virtual 3D object called Autodesk 123D Catch.

With some understanding of the principles of how it works, it somehow lead me to connect to one of the most important figures in technological thought of the last 50 years: Marshall McLuhan. Having ideas with no single fixed viewpoint, employing ‘Probes’ to understand technological phenomena from various angles, and an influence from the texts of James Joyce and the concepts of Modernism, a connection can be made between both the thinker and the machine.

In 1967, he undertook a televised interview, sitting in a revolving chair in the centre of the stage, surrounded by an audience asking questions from all angles (see video embedded below):

Herbert Marshall McLuhan @ CBC 1967 from Sergey Teterin on Vimeo.

I took various frames from the footage to form the necessary collection to help create a potential model, all from various angles and different levels of proximity.

The results are a product of matching images and manually places points connecting the images to one another on particular key features of the person.

(See animated gifs above)

Result:

Admittedly, I was hoping to produce a virtual sculptural bust of Marshall Mcluhan, but the 1234D Catch service is designed for colour photography - the images I have used are black and white, grainy, and have been processed from original recording, to video, and eventually digitally processed onto online video services. Also, the subject must be completely still - it is difficult to find exact poses from various angles from someone who is in conversation with his audience throughout the recording.

Many of the attempts are, in relation to my initial plans, extremely disappointing in a representational sense, as well as some questionable orientations - upside down or positioned to the side as opposed to standing upright as would be expected.

My only consolation with the various outputs I have collected are that they still connect to the ideas of multiple viewpoints, abstract forms created from various points and time - machine vision generating pseudo-Cubism virtual sculptures.

The project should be considered a fully-finalized product, more of an experiment which, in theory, could provide other objects with continued practice, trying out different frames and combinations.

You can check some of the examples on my Autodesk 123D Catch profile here

maxcapacity:

Speedshow: Never going to GIF you up | openhere

https://www.facebook.com/events/229992597118329/

When: Sunday 1st of July
Where: Central Internet Café
Cost: FREE

Never going to GIF you up
The Internet is funny
A speedshow curated by Nora O Murchú

avec:
beeple
laurel schwulst
sabrina ratté
paula roush
leah beeferman
agathe de trémontels
brandon blommaert
max capacity
tara sinn
daniel leyva
ivan twohig
jessica Kelly
Benjamin Gaulon
Mr Gif
+ more tbc

here’s the info about that speedshow!

gifmarket - new online speedshow from Kim Asendorf

Gifs are sold and kept online with the owner’s name, and affects the cost of the other gifs

How to set up a SPEED SHOW via fffff.at

1. Curate a show, make a call or  invite your friends to show their works.
2. Announce the show all over the internetz!
3. Go to your local Internet shop and rent all machines they have.
4. Exhibit for one night screen based pop.net.art in your city!

Go for it! It’s an open format! Let’s meet up in your local shop!
SPEED SHOW manifest here

Its a fantastic idea - digital grassroots happenings in Internet Cafes!

From the curatorial statement:

net.art is dead? Long live pop.net.art!

The Internet browser a key element to the success of the web in the beginning of the 90’s has grown mature in the last two decades. Technical development, open standards and open software made the browser a very powerful tool. It seems soon it will take over the operating system and there will be nothing left than apps in the cloud.

It’s about time to revisit net.art in an era of 500 million Facebook user. net.art never really found it’s way out of the media art bubble. The browser was the promising canvas in the early ’90s and is today more then ever capable to do what ever you like. Within the last let’s say 5 years the Internet arrived and became totally mainstream. The social web unfolded it’s power and became part of everyday life of hundreds of millions users. Their massive real time information flow began to have a huge impact on mainstream media and political structures.

The potential size of an audience for on-line art work has grown infinitely large. Technical barriers, limited access, little bandwith or lack of skills are not an issue any more. In an era of Internet memes and 20+ million Youtube views on one video in a day artists need to reconsider the web from a different perspective. A new generation of creative minds picked up the field of net.art and expanded it to the next stage: pop.net.art (coined by Aram Bartholl 2010) emerged under the influence of social web monopolies, highly flexible open software, amateur meme cult and pop culture. A wide range of coders, designers and artists including the pop.net.art experts from F.A.T. Lab experiment in this genre with great success. ‘Classic’ net.art is appropriated and gets remixed with web activism, DIY philosyphy, sharing culture, easy to use browser ad-dons and open source beliebers on a state of the art technical level.

The first SPEED-SHOW vol.1 represents a wide selection from well known net.artists to a young generation of web savy coders and Internet renegades. From youtube interventions and social web critique to pixel celebration and gif.pop 12 artists (or artist groups) will show recent and new works.

net.art never died! It just moved to your local Internet-shop! Come and join the party!

Aram Bartholl 2010

Thought this would be of inspiration to some of you (thanks to Sarah Badr for pointing this out)