The final piece in the Emergence Exhibition is “Sniff” by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George. Sniff is an interactive projection: an animated dog follows passers-by, discerns their behavior as friendly or aggressive, tries to engage them and forms a relationship with them based on the history of the interaction. As the viewer walks by the projection, their movements and gestures are tracked by a computer vision system. Sniff is an exploration of the moment of engagement.
It partly grew out of interest in philosophical discussion about the mind and mind theory, particularly in what’s termed the “commonplace” understanding of mental states and inferring of agency. Our automatic interpretation of behavior as social interaction is especially emblematic in a non-linguistic engagement with the ‘other’, which in case of Sniff produces a hybrid space of virtual and real emotions, social guess-work and mind modeling. Sniff is an attempt to trigger an intense, playful and insightful level of engagement at which we solve the “other minds” problem in everyday life. Sniff is inserted into our physical reality and follows its rules.
I’ve just returned from California where I’ve installed Performative Ecologies at the Beall Center for Art + Technology for the Emergence Exhibition alongside the work of Marc Bohlen, Leo Nuñez, Karolina Sobecka and Jim George. Over a couple of posts I’m going to give a run down of the work on show but I recommend if your in the area to see it in the flesh. The exhibition opens to the public on the January 9th until May 7th 2010.
Curated by David Familian & Simon Penny, “this exhibition features international artists exploring both the biological and computational manifestations of emergent behavior arising from dynamically changing, interactive sculptures. We as human beings are created and create through a process of emergence. Whether these emergent forms originate organically or are man-made, they can illustrate to us the rich variety of mutating systems with all their variety and ability to adapt to a changing world.”
The Universal Whistling Machine, Marc Bohlen.
Marc Bohlen
Under the moniker REAL TECH SUPPORT, Marc Bohlen has been designing and building, over the past decade, information processing systems that critically reflect on information as a cultural value. He calls this “REAL TECH SUPPORT because technology, the dominant vector in the 21st century, cannot solve all the problems generated in its wake; its needs support. REAL TECH SUPPORT attempts to contribute to such a support system.”
Marc’s huge series of investigations over the past decade.
His work is informed by a long apprenticeship in the crafts (stone masonry), humanities (art history) and the engineering sciences (electrical engineering and robotics). The systems he designs are experiments and artworks found here and here and his texts are critical reflections on the works and the contexts they operate in.
The Universal Whistling Machine
Whistling is a communication primitive in most human languages. Whistling is a kind of time travel to a less articulated state. Inhabitants of Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, use a whistling language, el Silbo Gomera, to communicate from hilltop to hilltop. Their powerful whistles travel farther than the spoken word. We share whistling and song with many animals. Mammals and birds carry the means for whistling in them. Just as we carry physical remnants of our bodily evolution in us, we carry the capacity for whistling in us.
U.W.M (The Universal Whistling Machine) is an investigation into the vexing problem of human-machine interface design. Whistling is much closer to the phoneme-less signal primitives compatible with digital machinery than the messy domain of spoken language. As opposed to pushing machines into engaging humans in spoken language, U.W.M. suggests we meet on a middle ground. Whistling occurs across all languages and cultures. All people have the capacity to whistle, though many do not whistle well. Lacking phonemes, whistling is a pre-language language, a candidate for a limited Esperanto of human-machine communication. Beyond alternatives to computer interfaces, U.W.M. also offers the potential for a new approach to human-animal communication. U.W.M. is capable of imitating certain bird whistles as easily as it can synthesize human whistles. Could this lead to new forms of human-machine-animal exchanges?
Living Light by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (aka “The Living“) is a permanent outdoor pavilion in the heart of Seoul with a dynamic skin that glows and blinks in response to both data about air quality and public interest in the environment. The skin of the pavilion is a giant map of Seoul with the 27 neighborhood (gu) boundaries redrawn based on existing air quality sensors of the Korean Ministry of Environment—each shape in this new map encloses the air closest to one of the sensors. Then the map illuminates to become an interactive, environmental building facade. Citizens can enter the pavilion or view it from nearby streets and buildings, and they can text message the building and it will text them back.
This structure in a public park not only provides a canopy and a tactile enclosure, it also suggests that a building facade itself can become a new kind of public space. It can offer important real-time information about our shared resources and our collective concerns. The Living are also showing their work at the current Toward the Sentient City exhibition in New York. See previous post for more details.
By far one of the most interesting urban screens project I’ve seen to date, Chris O’Shea’s describes his public art “Hand From Above” as encouraging “us to question our normal routine when we often find ourselves rushing from one destination to another.”
“Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, we are reminded of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand from the BBC Big Screen. Passers by will be playfully transformed. What if humans weren’t on top of the food chain? Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.” Hands from Above was built using openFrameworks & openCV.
Tetsuro Nagata, a recent graduate of the Bartlett’s Interactive Architecture Workshop, has created a series of pedagogic installations Inspired by Frances Yates’ “Art of Memory”, exploring physical manifestation of various concepts of memory. The final installation “Computing an Identity” is a Memory Theatre (a reference to Giulio Camillo’s Renaissance masterpiece), which uses delayed images of the self to question the observer’s own memory.
The installation is a processional experience, beginning with a spotlight that initially appears to display your shadow. The shadow then begins to delay questioning the observer’s perception of things that we take for granted. If the observer stays still, his shadow is merged into one of a previous occupant of the space.
The procession moves on towards a delayed mirror, which shortens its delay the closer you get to it. At a certain distance, the reflection becomes clearer, and the observer is able to directly compare their delayed reflection with their real one.
The piece culminates with a ‘rose window’ which captures observers’ faces, and reveals to the individual, his position within the long-term memory of the space. When left alone, the installation begins ‘dreaming’ – reconstructing its previous memories.
The piece instigates a conversation about image, identity and story-telling in a secular world. The individual procession references that of a church; from nave, to altar, and exiting through the West door. Nagata explains that “One of my initial aims was to question where bodily and facial images have gone from contemporary architecture, and as devices that trigger your memory, what their role is in a society obsessed with storing memories in external appliances.”
Another great project by LAb[au], “fLUX binary waves” is an urban and cybernetic installation based on the measuring of infrastructural ( passengers, cars…) and communicational ( electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio…) flows and their transposition into luminous, sonic and kinetic rules.
This relation between the installation and the urban activity happens in real time and sets each person as an element of the installation, as a centre of the public realm. The installation fLUX, binary waves is constituted by a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed every 3 meters to form a kinetic wall.
The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white. Their rotation is controlled by microprocessors, allowing to determine precisely the rotation speed and angle, while their networking allows to synchronise the movement of the 32 panels.
The microprocessors are connected to infrared sensors, capturing the surrounding infrastructural flows, defining the frequency and amplitude of the rotation. According to this set up, each impulse is transmitted from one panel to the other, describing visual waves running from one side of the installation to the other, and then bouncing back while progressively loosing oscillation. All these principles relate the ‘micro-events’ happening in the area to a unified play of light, colours and sounds directly derived from the rhythm of the city flows.
As such, the installation proposes an urban sign having as subject the ‘urban’ and as message to be a catalyst of urbanity via the transcription of urban flows in a contemporary play of kinetics, lights and sound.
