prosthetic knowledge

Computer Rooms

Book put together by Goto80 features photos of computer set ups, personal spaces of computer culture:

This is what computer culture really looks like. A collection
of photos that show the messy reality behind the shiny online facade. Where we make our living and spend our free time. And try to be creative. Or maybe even worse.

Very few people get to see these spaces. It’s not the kind of place we take photos of, or show to visitors. Maybe we don’t even see it ourselves. It’s a sort of secluded area hidden in plain sight, full of secrets, now on display in this book.

The project began in 2009, when I started to collect photos of 8-bit computers. Gradually, I got more interested in the context rather than the machines. For me this book is actually not about technology. It’s about the things around the computer - the room and the context. Our living conditions. Because it’s in places like this that books are written and scientific research is done. These kinds of places lead to political actions, fantastic music, art, new friends, inventions, love, and so much more. This is IRL!
/ Goto80, Bräkne-Hoby, April 2013

More Here

Computers Club - New Works

Online software artist community just released a set of new work on their twitter feed.

Some of it is good, some of it is weird - just like any other painting art show.

You can see more at the Computers Club Twitter profile here

MATAERIAL

A 3D Printing system that can create forms without the hindrance of gravity - video embedded below:

A brand new method of additive manufacturing. This patent-pending method allows for creating 3D objects on any given working surface independently of its inclination and smoothness, and without a need of additional support structures. Conventional methods of additive manufacturing have been affected both by gravity and printing environment: creation of 3D objects on irregular, or non-horizontal surfaces has so far been treated as impossible . By using innovative extrusion technology we are now able to neutralize the effect of gravity during the course of the printing process. This method gives us a flexibility to create truly natural objects by making 3D curves instead of 2D layers. Unlike 2D layers that are ignorant to the structure of the object, the 3D curves can follow exact stress lines of a custom shape. Finally, our new out of the box printing method can help manufacture structures of almost any size and shape.

More at the project’s website here

MakerLove

It was bound to happen, proving how all tech eventually gets sexualized in some way ….

Website hosts 3D printing files to make your own sex toys …

More Here

Two 3D Printing Based Art Exhibitions

A good reason to keep up with netartnet …

First, Aura of the Synthetic by Matt Chalker, recreates well known art into minitures and displayed in a shop window:

Aura of the Synthetic, is an exact 1:12 scale replica of a museum gallery created using a variety of digital manufacturing and rapid prototyping tools and techniques. The exhibition includes replicas of Balloon Dog (Jeff Koons, 1994-2005,) Steel Structure (Sol LeWitt, 1975/1976, SFMOMA,) Tire (Roy Lichtenstein, 1962, MoMA,) New York City I (Piet Mondrian, 1942, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou,) Banana (Andy Warhol, ca. 1966, Private Collection,) Noguchi Table (Isamu Noguchi, 1947,) and Nelson Platform Bench(George Nelson, 1946). The exhibition also includes two 1:12 scale 3D prints of Chalker, examining his work. Chalker utilizes his background in Art History and Engineering to digitally recreate famous artworks with a variety of 2D and 3D software. He then uses digital manufacturing tools such as vinyl cutters, laser cutters and 3D printers to take the objects from the virtual world to the physical world. Chalker selected a scale of 1:12 because it is the traditional scale for dollhouses, where one inch represents a foot in the “real world.”

The exhibition title references Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In this work, Benjamin uses the phrase, “the aura of the authentic” in reference to the value of experiencing real works in person over photographic reproductions. In Aura of the Synthetic, Chalker asks what happens to this critical theory when the reproductions are much more accurate than a photograph. Aura of the Synthetic playfully questions what is real and what it means to experience a piece of art.

More Here

Second, Open Shape, where artists create objects which can be ordered through the 3D Printing service Shapeways:

Exhibition of 3D printed objects by Alex Dolan, Yngve Holen, Matthew Johnstone & Max Wérner, Katja Novitskova, Ilya Smirnov and Jasper Spicero in collaboration with The Composing Rooms.

More Here Here and Here

Many thanks to Anthony Antonellis for the heads up.

The Pirate Cinema

Installation displays films currently pirated on peer-to-peer networks, sometimes corrupted:

* The Pirate Cinema reveals Peer-to-Peer information flows.
* The Pirate Cinema is a composition generated by the users of Peer-to-Peer networks.
* The Pirate Cinema connects you directly to network flows.
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In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” makes visible the hidden activity and geography of Peer-to-Peer file sharing. The project is presented as a control room, which reflects Peer-to-Peer exchanges happening in real time on networks, which use BitTorrent protocol. The installation produces an improvised and syncopated arrangement of files currently in exchange. The immediacy of the presentation of digital data, including fragmented information about source files and their destinations, depicts the topology of digital information use and the global reach of data dissemination.

More Here

Quotidian Record 

Data sonification: a years worth of location data turned into electronic music, by Brian House. Video embedded below:

Quotidian Record is a limited edition vinyl recording that features a continuous year of my location-tracking data. Each place I visited, from home to work, from a friend’s apartment to a foreign city, is mapped to a harmonic relationship. 1 day is 1 rotation … 365 days is ~11 minutes.

As the record turns, the markings on the platter indicate both the time as it rotates through every 24 hours and the names of the cities to which I travel. The sound suggests that our habitual patterns have inherent musical qualities, and that daily rhythms might form an emergent portrait of an individual.

More Here

DressCode

Programming language created for designing decorative artifacts:

Computational design is the practice of using programing to create and modify form, structure and ornamentation. Through computational design it is possible to create unique, beautiful, functional and personal objects and experience a rewarding creative process through programing. Unfortunately, use of programming as a medium for art and design, especially by young people and non-professionals is limited. Many people consider computer programing to be a highly specialized, difficult and inaccessible activity that only has relevance as a career path rather than as a mode of personal expression.

By finding ways to connect programing to the production of personally relevant beautiful physical objects, it is possible to expand the number and types of people who are both interested in and empowered to participate in creative programming.

More Here

Kinect Powered Purchasing Behaviour Analysis System

Prototype in-store data gathering tool to analyse purchasing decisions - via DigInfo:

This marketing analysis tool, under development by Fujitsu, uses technology to sense people’s movement. By analyzing how customers behave in response to merchandise, entirely new kinds of marketing information will be obtainable.

“This exhibit is designed with retail stores in mind. The system determines how people choose products, whether they were interested in a product already, and what products they compare, using Kinect and a camera.”

With regular POS systems, the only information obtained is how much merchandise has been sold. But by using this system, it’s possible to find out how customers acted while contemplating the purchase of a product. This system could help with marketing by showing how customers behaved when they were thinking about buying a product, but didn’t complete the purchase.

More Here

Run Computer Run: Economics + The Immaterial - AR Markers

As the show opened yesterday, the AR Markers for the exhibition have been released for all the artist’s submissions.

This means, if you have the Layar app on your iPhone or Android device, you will be able to see a piece of the artist’s work via this code.

You can find out more about Layar here

I’ve included all the available codes in previous posts here here and here.

Slogans For The Early 21st Century

Novelist, designer and visual artist Douglas Coupland has summed up the uniqueness of the early 21st century—as opposed to the 20th century—succinctly with funny yet thought-provoking slogans. 

Reblogged from escapekit

(Love Douglas Coupland :) )

(via notational)

3D Printed Photographs

Instructables walkthrough from amandaghassaei on converting black and white photographs into 3D printed images complete with relief texture:

The 3d printer in our office (an Objet Connex500) prints with a rigid, semitransparent white material that can be used to create these unique black and white photographic prints.  These prints may be indecipherable when viewed from the side, but when backlit with a diffuse light, they recreate images with surprisingly high precision and even add some subtle dimensionality and texture to the scene.

By varying the thickness of a region of this semitransparent print you can control the amount of light that is able to pass through, thereby controlling the brightness (thinner regions of material will appear brighter and thicker regions darker).  In this project, I’ve mapped each individual greyscale pixel value of an image to thickness, allowing me to precisely reproduce any greyscale image.  The photos I’ve printed include an adorable picture my mom took of our cat Teddy (fig 4), Saturn and its moon Titan taken by the Cassini space probe (fig 5 and 6), and a huge print (19x16”) of Mt. Williamson by Ansel Adams (fig 1, 2, and 3).

Read how they were put together here

RUN COMPUTER RUN

Art and Tech festival held at RUA RED gallery, Dublin, opens this Friday 24th to July 13th.

RUN COMPUTER RUN @ GLITCH 2013 is an arts festival focused on examining artistic responses to cultural, economic and social factors that currently affect the evolution of the Internet. The festival features four exhibitions, eight workshops, a symposium featuring leading thinkers and curators in the field of New Media Art, and a showcase of short films.

One show, ‘Examining Aesthetics’ features creatives and groups in the top of the field: FIELD, Pixel Noizz, Casey Reas and Marius Watz.

Another show, ‘Economics + The Immaterial’, is an augmented reality exhibit by design to explore the value of immaterial goods:

How do we give value to immaterial goods? How do we buy and sell digital images? What is the relationship between economics and digital aesthetics? How can curators and artists create new platforms and models for the creation of economic exchange? These are some of the questions that this show attempts to answer. We are currently accepting artwork (video, jpg, gifs, 3d models or HTML content) that will feature in a unique gallery-based exhibition. The exhibition is composed of two parts – a gallery-sited virtual show, and the online production and distribution of materially-realised limited-edition goods.

A collection of great creatives have contributed here: Francoise Gamma, Yoshi Sodeoka, Lorna Mills, Benjamin Gaulon, Rollin Leonard, A Bill Miller, Emilio Gomariz, Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Emilio Vavarella, Debbie Guinnane + J. M. Bowers, Pinar & Viola, Chiara Passa, Reed + Rader, Daniel Rourke + Alex Myers, Alain Vonck, Jonas Lund, Emilie Gervais, Raquel Meyers, Benjamin Berg, Eutechnik, Andrew Healy, Linda Kostowski and Sascha Pohflepp, Geraldine Juárez, and … err … me …

If you have a smartphone with the Layar app, you will be able to see the submissions when the corresponding AR markers for each artist will be available from the website.

The third show, ‘Beyond The White Cube’, looks at art outside the gallery space and on the internet:

The goal of Beyond The White Cube is to explore and question how artworks made for Internet and mobile platforms can be transformed and reconceived for the gallery. Taking work that was originally conceived for other platforms of viewing and interaction and placing within a gallery context raises questions about the relationship between the digital and the physical.

It features works from Constant Dullaart and Evan Roth.

The fourth show, ‘Remaining Anonymous’, looks at artist works looks at the connection between online + offline life:

As the Internet increasingly embeds itself within our everyday lives, our online identities have begun to connect to our offline lives, making public information and our activities. The Internet is a space where data is archived, indexed, and often made publicly available. With the rise of identity-centric social networks like Facebook, it is increasingly difficult to remain anonymous online. The inherent sociality and default to public nature of these platforms leave our digital traces freely available to be collected and manipulated beyond our control. As our online data fuels commercial concerns how much of our digital identities do we really own, and what is the true price of giving away our access or control? How can we circumvent the policies these platforms put in place to regain the rights to our privacy? Are our rights to anonymity slowing fading? As part of our online exhibition, the curator has selected work by Paolo Cirio, Benjamin Gaulon and Martial Geoffre-Rouland. These works serve to highlight how traces of digital data left online can be commodified and re-appropriated questioning privacy online.

You can find out more about the exhibitions, artists and events at the official website here