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[Note: For more artworks on this platform, be sure to check Jonah Brucker-Cohen's series on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad art "Art In Your Pocket" on Rhizome, the first installment can be found here and the second here.]
In an era of Google Maps, our first engagements with places are often anticipated by technology. That is, our experience with a place often comes with pre-emptive associations from aerial pictures -- our possible routes predetermined and mapped; personal narratives and exploration are displaced for utility. So, what happens to our individualized explorations in time and space when GPS technology intervenes? This is the inquiry of GPS artist Jeremy Wood’s body of work and his current show “Mowing the Lawn” at Tenderpixel in London.
Treating his body like a “geodesic” pencil, his daily routines are documented as lines in space via GPS technology. In turn, Wood’s performative rituals are data visualized as densely packed line drawings and animations. Having spent ten years developing a system for tracking and translating his everyday movements, the resulting pieces are one part drawing, one part diary and one part critique of the technological system’s accuracy/inaccuracy and how that intervention enables/limits our perception of the spatio-temporal.
While his work ranges from tracking large-scale transatlantic flights (Star Flights, 2008) to tracing and superimposing quotes from Melville onto two meridians in London (Meridians, 2005), in his latest show, Wood focuses on documenting the simple act of mowing the lawn in different intervals of time. Here, Wood emphasizes how banal repetition offers “individual narratives that express a freedom of movement generated from an act of garden maintenance”.
What may be more compelling, though, is how a digital trace can bring to the fore the problems of technology. Looking at Lawn 2005 Scale 1:300, we see multiple lines drawn where a house already exists. In Nine Years of Mowing, we see inaccuracies of GPS technology heightened over the course of nine years. While it is true that these processes will constantly be refined and updated, the question to ask here is at what point should we allow their utility to shape our spatio-temporal relationships with the land. Yet, perhaps in true sousveillance fashion, Wood flips the potential for technology to prefigure our perceptions and uses it to document his personal journeys.
On June 19th artist Jeremy Wood will hold a talk at Tenderpixel. "Mowing the Lawn" closes on June 22nd.
As part of the supporting program of ART HK, Hong Kong International Art Fair, I/O (Input/Out) and I/O Off-Site presented a performance by Hong Kong artist Samson Young. VernissageTV was on site to document Samson Young leading the iphone musicians through a music score of matrix notations on the opening day of the art fair. Everyone owning an iPhone and battery powered computer speakers could apply to participate in the performance after an hour of rehearsal. The participants were given instructions and the necessary free iPhone software.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM VERNISSAGE TV
In the summer of 2009, I wrote an article here at Rhizome about the burgeoning activities of media artists creating new works or updating versions of their older interactive screen-based projects for Apple's iPhone and iTouch mobile devices. As the article made its way throughout the blogosphere, comments surfaced ranging from criticism of the "closed world of Apple's App Store and iPhone devices" to a championing of the availability of inexpensive multi-touch technology now available to artists who had been waiting for a platform that could adequately display and allow for the type of interaction their projects demanded. A year after the article came out, the draw of these devices and their potentially expansive audience has become even more irresistible to artists enough so that several more "apps" have surfaced. The following article catalogs several new iPhone works which have emerged over the past year, works that are pioneering the next generation of portable media art.
"I've been dreaming of this opportunity since the mid-nineties, a distribution platform for screen-based digital work," explains San Francisco Bay Area based media artist Scott Sona Snibbe, "It's why I abandoned doing this work in the mid-00s, because of a lack of a distribution model. [It] seemed silly hacking apart laptops to put on the wall." This quote exemplifies the reasons why the iPhone and iPod Touch have become key instigators for driving media artists to revisit their past work and release new versions for the devices. Snibbe has since released three "Apps" for the devices, including Gravilux, which was originally written for desktop computers back in 1998 and now exists as a free app that produces a starscape from thousands of small points that can be dragged around and played with using multitouch points on the screen. Gravity can be customized using the settings as well as heat amounts, antigravity, and the total amount of stars that are displayed. Snibbe's other classic software piece, Bubbleharp (1998) is also available as an app and allows for the user to drag their finger across the screen to create cell-like bubbles on the screen that animate based on the path the user moves while creating them. This work is an organic display that resembles the natural movements of single-cell organisms squirming around a petri dish.
Since 2006, the two artists have been collecting films from mobile phones in the public sphere. It is the mixture of amateurish documentation of your own life, of a direct, unhampered view on your own reality, of unmotivated, unguided camera movements as the expression of boredom but also of directed little scenarios that aroused our collector's instincts. Paulitsch and Weyrich are accepting all films into their archive uncensored. This is increasingly developing into a fascinating document of our times, to a sort of evidence-gathering on and siting of the present. Above all, however, it resembles a bizarre album of weltering digital imagery.
For the exhibition YOU_ser 2.0 in the ZKM | Media Museum, the two artists make their mobile film archive accessible for visitors via mobile tagging. The mobile films are concealed behind the colourful QR codes, which visitors can decipher with their own WLAN-mobiles or with the mobiles provided by the museum. In this way, the content of the films Paulitsch and Weyrich are collecting on the street and publishing on the Net returns to the private sphere and into the medium where they originate. The video blog serves to show new extracts from this archive and offers a platform to films currently being collected.
Each code represents a visual enryption of a search on 'Aram Bartholl' in a specific language on Google.
A Google Portrait is a drawing which contains the Google URL search string of the portrayed person in encoded form. Any camera smart phone is capable to decode the matrix-code with the help of barcode reader like software. The result points the mobile phone browser to a search on the portrayed person's name at Google.
A large number of people can be found by name on Google today. Everyone who is working on a computer and uses the internet regularly can be found on Google. Even people who don't use computers can be found sometimes because their names appear in 'old' media (i.e. books) on the net.
'Egosurfing' is a popular way for a user to find out what websites and information Google returns on his/her name search.
How many hits does Google show on my name? Am I popular? Do I want to be found at all? Who writes about me? What do people find out about me when they google my name? Am I in concurrence to other persons with the same name? Do I rely on the results Google shows me on a person's name? In which way do I relate to someone which I only known by Google results?
I chose to create an embroidered version of a barcode to represent how technology has become interwoven, fused with our lives and our identity- to represent how we have become one and the same with technology.
Through new technology cell phones are now capable of scanning and decoding barcodes. However, these barcodes are a little different than the ones you see scanned at the grocery store: they are called 2D barcodes and are composed of black and white squares that encode the URLs to any website of creator's choice. In other words, these Data Matrix format barcodes are a physical hyperlink. Through my research I have learned how to create and program 2D barcodes with embedded text messages. I have also discovered that these barcodes can be reproduced in a variety of materials and are still capable of being scanned/read with a mobile phone.
N Building is a commercial structure located near Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district. Being a commercial building signs or billboards are typically attached to its facade which we feel undermines the structures' identity. As a solution we thought to use a QR Code as the facade itself. By reading the QR Code with your mobile device you will be taken to a site which includes up to date shop information. In this manner we envision a cityscape unhindered by ubiquitous signage and also an improvement to the quality and accuracy of the information itself.
-- PRESS RELEASE FOR "N BUILDING"
TXTual Healing was created in the early days of 2006 by Paul Notzold and has become a collection of interactive public projections and performance formats that encourage creation of dialog through text messaging from mobile phones. Whether interacting with custom digital signage, or live performers TXTual Healing builds community through public story telling via the mobile phone.
F.A.T. Labs have declared this week "Graffiti Markup Language Week" on their blog - and each day they've posted GML-related updates. What exactly is Graffiti Markup Language? It's an XML file type developed by F.A.T. Labs that stores the motion data created by tagging -- allowing graffiti writers to share, study, and catalog their tags. Check the below for a brief overview:
What has GML week brought us so far? Over the past few days, F.A.T. Labs introduced:
► An iPhone version of Graffiti Analysis DustTag v1.0 - this handy App allows users to trace their tags and add them to the GML database http://000000book.com/ using an iPhone.
► Graffiti Analysis 2.0 - the new and improved Graffiti Analysis includes the aforementioned iPhone App DustTag v1.0, along with updates to the tracking, playback, controls and graphics, as well as previously unreleased source code and downloads to Windows, Mac and Linux versions of the playback and capture applications.
► FatTag Deluxe - the Katsu Edition - an updated version of the Fat Tag App made in collaboration with graffiti legend Katsu.
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TextBild MMIX curated by Agnes Altziebler, Werner Fenz, Evelyn Kraus & Birgit Kulterer.
Text plays a special role in the complex make-up of the public space – even if it is often barely perceptible in all the densely packed visual overlaps. The “TextBild MMIX” project liberates it from different contexts, isolating it and thus helping it achieve its own effect: A sentence appears in the form of neon writing on a single day in a single place in Styria – then the van, vehicle of this unfamiliar, foreign text, which is a synonym for strangeness as a social source of irritation, vanishes again. In this way, Styrian artists and writers inscribe their own specific texts into the various places, thus seeking to achieve a radical concentration. The subject is strictly the present: MMIX are the Roman numerals for the year 2009.
Brighton-based interactive media artists' group Blast Theory posted a call for both their residency and internship program. Interns will have an opportunity to work in Blast Theory's studios on specific projects while residents will be given space to research and develop new work in a supportive and collaborative environment. For the residency program, Blast Theory are looking for individuals working in:
- Pervasive & location based gaming & interactive media
- Mobile & portable devices in cultural & artistic practice
- Games design and theory
- Interdisciplinary and live art practice
The deadline for applications is January 31, 2010. More information can be found on Blast Theory's site.
Never mind that the decade really ends in a little over a year, it's time to take stock of it. Today's post looks back at the decade just past while tomorrow's will look at the decade to come.
As I observed before, this decade is marked by atemporality. The greatest symptom of this is our inability to name the decade and, although commentators have tried to dub it the naughties, the aughts, and the 00s (is that pronounced the ooze?), the decade remains, as Paul Krugman suggests, a Big Zero, and we are unable to periodize it. This is not just a matter of linguistic discomfort, its a reflection of the atemporality of network culture. Jean Baudrillard is proved right. History, it seems, came to an end with the millennium, which was a countdown not only to the end of a millennium but also to the end of meaning itself. Perhaps, the Daily Miltonian suggested, we didn't have a name for the decade because it was so bad.
-- EXCERPT FROM "A DECADE IN RETROSPECT" BY KAZYS VARNELIS
It's time for my promised set of predictions for the coming decade. It has been a transgression of disciplinary norms for historians to predict the future, but its also quite common among bloggers. So let's treat this as a blogosphere game, nothing more. It'll be interesting to see just how wildly wrong I am a decade from now.
In many respects, the next decade is likely to seem like a hangover after the party of the 2000s (yes, I said party). The good times of the boom were little more than a lie perpetrated by finance, utterly ungrounded in any economy reality, and were not based on any sustainable economic thought. Honestly, it's unclear to me how much players like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Larry Summers were duplicitous and how much they were just duped. Perhaps they thought they would get out in time or drop dead before the bubbly stopped flowing. Or maybe they were just stupid. Either way, we start a decade with national and global economies in ruins. A generation that grew up believing that the world was their oyster is now faced with the same reality that my generation knew growing up: that we would likely be worse off than our parents. I see little to correct this condition and much to be worried about.
-- EXCERPT FROM "THE DECADE AHEAD" BY KAZYS VARNELIS
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, professor and writer. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications including WIRED Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been shown at events such as DEAF (03,04), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05), UBICOMP (02,03,04), CHI (04,06) Transmediale (02,04,08), NIME (07), ISEA (02,04,06,09), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Whitney Museum of American Art's ArtPort (03), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), Chelsea Art Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5),Museum of Modern Art (MOMA - NYC)(2008), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008). He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an adjunct assistant professor of communications at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and in the Media, Culture, Communication dept of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development.
2009 was an important year for the Internet as a whole. The advent of web 2.0 and "crowdsourcing" initiatives has enabled a much richer array of content from users who might never have ventured onto the Internet in previous years. My top 10 sites for this year cover a wide range of topics from art made for mobile devices with iPhoneArt.org to evidence of both information saturation with Information Aesthetics and physical and pseudo intellectual abundance with This is Why You're Fat and There I Fixed It, to strange observances of mistakes in the public realm with Fail Blog. In addition to these crowdsourced content sites, I also see some ongoing potential with artist-created sites such as Brett Domino's lowtech approach to music making, VVANK's clever use of everyday objects as installation pieces, Spam Poetry's method of turning garbage email into clever and substantive literature, and Rotterdam's Moddr group who have created a novel DIY aesthetic to hacking and recycling outdated electronics. Below are my top links for 2009, enjoy and remember that the Internet is only as good as we make it, even if our brain power is feeding someone else's click-through rates and embedded ad revenue. For 2010, bring on the revolution with Web 3.0!
Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., a small, not-for-profit experimental arts organization whose current projects include Turbulence.org, Networked_Performance, Networked_Music_Review, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) and Upgrade! Boston. She is also an artist, writer, curator, and Adjunct Faculty at Emerson College.
Helen Thorington is Founder and Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. She is a sound artist and radio producer whose works have been aired internationally and received numerous prestigious awards. Helen has also created compositions for film and dance, including the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company. She has exhibited, performed, published and lectured world-wide.
► "Natural Fuse" by Haque Design + Research
► "Tantalum Memorial" by Graham Harwood, Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji on Network Research
► "Video Vortex" Institute for Network Cultures
► V_2 Test_Lab: Intimate Interfaces
► fibreculture #14: Web 2.0: Before, during and after the event
► Public Sphere_s by Steve Dietz on Medien Kunst Netz
► "Primal Source" by Usman Haque on Interactive Architecture.org
Amerika describes himself as a "thoughtographer", an "artist-medium", a "fictional philosopher", a "remixologist", a "network conductor", a wanderer who constantly changes identities and roles in a fragmentary world where time acquires an a-synchronic and non real dimension. By trying to express the complexity and the interest of contemporary digital reality, he delves into different aspects of himself and draws on elements and traits that he transfers to the characters of his works, by using the media, the technological platforms of our time. Developing projects on the net, filming with mobile phones, remixing common moments and figures of today's culture in a VJ-like audiovisual rhythm, Amerika redefines the characteristics of today's culture and opens up the possibilities for new interpretations and thoughts from the audience itself. -- "UNREALTIME" at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens
Rick Silva: The announcement for your retrospective in Greece (your third retrospective right?!) says "The exhibition will also include the European premiere of his most recent work, Immobilité, the first feature-length work released in his 'Foreign Film Series.' I really liked this quote you told me once, I think it was by Atom Egoyan, that "every film is a foreign film"... how does that quote resonate with this new work/series?
Mark Amerika: "UNREALTIME," the exhibition in Athens, is by far the most comprehensive of all of my prior "retrospectives." In 2001-2002, we were having some fun with the notion of "Internet time" and tried to play with the idea of a retro-spective in relation to a lot of the net art I had created in the 90s. Those shows were at the ICA in London and the Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo. Two more followed in 2004, one in Bilbao and one in Sao Paulo, but just in terms of size, the way my work is distributed throughout the museum space, and the variety of work covered -- net art, digital video and surround sound installation, the new mobile phone works, and various language art pieces, going through the show in Athens feels like a very intense experience.
This is partly due to the inclusion of Immobilité. The work runs 75 minutes and is being projected as a wide screen cinematic installation in the big Project Room in the museum. As I was making Immobilité, I was intentionally modeling it after what in the past we have called art-house films or, for the purposes of my new body of work, foreign films. For me, all films are foreign because they take me into another world that defamiliarizes my own and, in the process, exiles me from myself so that I too can become foreign and enter that altered world I need to immerse myself in when creating.
The Basic Plan - On Sunday September 20 at 2pm, MTAA, Mike Koller and anyone else who wants to join us will set out a brightly colored blanket surround by a circle of chairs at McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They will have amplified iPhones on which they have downloaded touchscreen drum and bongo applications. They will have open amp jacks that you can plug into. For the next hour we will attempt to "jam."
As explained by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead "The main objective (of a drum circle) is to share rhythm and get in tune with each other and themselves. To form a group consciousness. To entrain and resonate. By entrainment, I mean that a new voice, a collective voice, emerges from the group as they drum together."
As explained by M.River of MTAA "The main objective of the iPhone Drum Circle is to get a total stranger to do a little dance on our blanket. That and hopefully enjoying the last summer Sunday in the park this year for an hour."
As the niche genre of software art expands beyond the web and into mobile devices, media artists are finding ways to integrate their work into a new form of business model. Instead of giving away your work for free on the web, Apple's iPhone and iTouch devices provide an ample platform for distribution (through the Apple App Store) and hardware support for novel ways to experience screen-based work. Since the App Store was unveiled last year, the over 30,000 available applications have taken the form of everything from mock cigarette lighters (Zippo's App) to mobile flutes (Ocarina) to utilitarian apps such as Urban Spoon (Restaurant finder) to social networking in physical spaces (Loopt). Noticing this trend, media artists who once found their free and limitless distribution platform through a desktop computer browser are now turning their attention and creative efforts toward the mobile space of the iPhone.
Noticing this shifting dynamic toward the mobile space, early pioneering web and software artist Lia began the website, iPhoneart.org, which aims to aggregate several artist-created applications that use the touch-screen and accelerometer functions of the devices in new and imaginative ways. Like her web-based work from the late 1990s, Lia's PhiLia 01 is an iPhone and iTouch application that integrates sound and simple motion graphics that the user can influence through touch and orientation of the device to create unique audio-visual compositions. Steph Thirion is another artist working in the abstract art realm of iPhone sound art. His application Eliss is both an innovative game and music creation app that features an odd array of geometric shapes or "blendable planets" that the users have to manipulate to "fit" together. This abstraction is reminiscent of 80s arcade games graphics and adds a nice alternative retro look to the iPhone's slick GUI operating system.
Telephone Trottoire is a publishing system for communities to share news, stories, and opinions over the mobile phone. The system dials members of the Congolese community and plays them a recording in the Lingala language. The recording might be a story, song, or joke, or it could be a discussion of a serious issue. The recipient of the call has the option of leaving a comment in response or forwarding the call to someone else, allowing the system to grow virally. It was developed on behalf of Congolese communities in London by MediaShed, a 'free-media' organization based in Southend-on-Sea, England.
At 01SJ 2008, three artists Graham Harwood, Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji (formerly Mongrel ) presented Tantalum Memorial, an art installation based on Telephone Trottoire. This same installation will be on view at the art and digital culture festival transmediale in Berlin this week. Tantalum Memorial is one of eight projects to win the transmediale 2009 Award. I met up with Harwood at a Peet's Coffee in San Jose last June to discuss these two projects. He wore a hat with the word 'ADDICT' emblazoned across the front (his son's) and ordered an herbal tea. - Michael Connor
Michael Connor: Telephone Trottoire was inspired by something called radio troittoire, correct?
Graham Harwood: That's right, pavement radio in Lingala.
What is radio trottoire?
Well, it's pavement radio – it's the idea of standing on the street corner and then giving news to people as they pass by.
How do you use this idea in Telephone Trottoire? Is it a kind of broadcast through the telephone?
No... It allows, yeah maybe it does kind of broadcast through the telephone. But it also enables people to comment. See, there’s no culture of freedom of speech in the Congolese community. So the idea for them of just exposing themselves and their ideas or their thoughts in a kind of public way wouldn't be appropriate to them.
And so the telephony system allows them to have conversations that they couldn't otherwise, because as a group of asylum seekers, that's their main method of being in touch with each other – the mobile phone. And they normally have two or three each.
So have you found that it has encouraged free speech?
Yeah, I mean the statistics on it are amazing, during the first three days it was running there were over 80 comments on it.
Can you give me an example of one of the stories you might find on Telephone Trottoire?
Well, there might be something about childhood witches, or about how --
Childhood witches?
Yeah, childhood witches. You know, about why it might be wrong to think about your kid as a witch just because they're misbehaving in a certain way.
Can I look online and see the stories?
From the first version only. For me, what's really important is that this is a system developed for the Congolese. I don't really understand the Congolese community, and I don't particularly care to either. But I support people within that community, and have done for a period of time. Those people know what that community is about, they know what's needed.
And so they say to us, "Well, you know, it would be great to develop a media system that can do this, because that's what we think we need." And then we're able to think about that on a systems level. That's the most important thing.
We're not trying to represent the Congolese in any way, shape or form. That's why they're not present in the gallery installation.
How long has Telephone Trottoire been running?
The first time it ran, it ran for about, I think, six weeks. It went from a database of 30 telephones to 500. And, of course, the network grew right round Africa and back up to London. It was really successful as a project, and we thought, great, we can turn this into a social project, and we can raise money on it, and the Congolese will be happy because they'll actually get paid, because they only got like 2000 pounds for running the whole Congolese culture thing for three years, you know, something really stupid. So we thought after the first time we'd be able to turn it into that kind of project. But the more and more we tried, we couldn't find funds for it, outside of the art scene. So we ended up thinking, "oh ok, we'll do it as an art project again. But this time what we'll do is we'll find a way to represent that within an art space as well."
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