Rhizome

hello there!
sorry for the delay in the reply... i was around...

did you think it was silly? funny, possibly, but not at all silly or unfair.
as i tried explaining (using an awful english, i suppose) while i was there at the holy fire exhibit+debate the initiative was perfectly acceptable, on on eside, but totally out of the contemporary era, on the other.

good things first.

art is art. there are disciplines, methodologies, aesthetics, movements, currents. but art is art.

so calling vuc cosic's (and other artists') stuff "art" (not "new media", not "digital", not "net"...) is good. It's fair.

then comes the critique.

i approach the critique starting a bit backward in time. To say it with philosophy, it's something like this:

Kant -> Hegel -> Benjamin -> Heidegger/Sartre -> Adorno -> Derrida -> Bateson


there is a (philosophical) trend going towards something that can/sould/could be called Neo Virtual Realism (hence, the name of the website with my face looking back on it).

as walter benjamin recycled the concept of the flaneur found in baudelaire, we are probabily just in the right time to start re-using it in the contemporary context.

just as realism was the "answer" to romanticism in assessing the great changes provoked by the industrial revolution, our "Neo Virtual Realism" is the "answer" to the current ones.

changes that can be seen in many directions: environmental, anthropological, cultural. They are in media, in the air, in information, in what you eat/wear/buy.

art (just as philosophy) are sensorially very active in responding to such muations in the integrated ecosystem (mind/environemnt/economy/culture/information...).

So we have the avantgardes... there has been net.art in the 90s and we possibly/probabily have something boiling right in this moment, that will mature in the next few days/months/years and materialize itself.

now: avantgardes are a "materialization" themselves of the mutations of the integrated ecosystem perceived bythe artists/philosophers partecipating in them.

as an example: conceptual art in the 60s placed several fundamental concepts that are influencing even today's art and philosophy.

on one side: the process. The focus moved away from the "object", replaced by the process.

Sol Lewitt's simple instructions to draw the paintings ("Six white geometric figures (outlines) superimposed on a black wall.") are perfect in defining this mutation.

on the other side: mutation has an impact on the ecosystem.

the process of augmenting the distance from the gallery and the museums began with those avantgardes.

it is a deep re-definition of the concepts of art/artist, economic value, aesthetics.. and a lot more.

if we switch context and we analyze the contemporary era with the same level of detail (if possible at all, since we are "inside" of it) we will see that probabily the most fundamental statements performed in the "digital" era are:

- the end of dualisms (material/immaterial, organic/inorganic, true/false, art/not-art)
- visual(sensorial) fetishes as the primary means to define significance/value (methodological fetishism)
- methodological destructuralization

Now, to get back to the beginning: i have no problems in peoply trying to do their jobs in the best way possible, bringing "new media" into the "art" world, getting people involved, getting money circulating. The persons at holy fire actually did a really nice job in organizing/documenting/supporting everything. "Art" looks at all of this with raising interest and with everything that comes with it.

But i personally don't find any interest in it. By switching persons and asking questions in a silly way (were they stupid questions? are you sure?) i wanted to state:

- a simple discontinuity
- a total dis-interest

a simple discontinuity: art-market is based on "identity", "unicity", "limitedness". Which are things that are just not contemporary. Nor significative. Not any more. I am truly happy if someone makes some money that way, but it is truly not-significative on an artistic or philosophical point of view. By switching identities and artwork explanations, i used a silly-simpke mechanism to break at least a dozen of rules needed by an "average gallerist" to use an artwork commercially using the old models.

a total dis-interest: i actually got bored (conceptually and phisically) of it all, so i had some fun.. together with Vuc Cosic, Alexei Shulgin, and Olia Lialina, which all confirmed having a deep sensibility to all of these issues, and also of being some truly nice people to hang around with. Even Steve Sacks was truly nice to us harassing him in his exhibition space at Art Brussels. :)

was i clear? :)

ciao!
s

http://triptych.tv/
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Photo mapping and contest;
[Gaia Mapping 2008]
http://photo-en.plus1project.jp/

Hello All,
'Do you know Japan hosts the G8 Summit in July?' Ask kids in Japan, and many of them, even high school students, answer 'No'. Why does our next generation have so little interest? Environmental problems are
the challenges that every single person on the earth must face and take action. As the first step of '+ 1 Project', NPO Gaia Initiative asks everyone to send 1 photo of 'things you care', 'people you care' and 'what you want to hand over to next generation' taken by cell phone camera and digital still camera. The project aims to provide everyone with an opportunity to look around oneself and 're-think' about our beloved home, Gaia.

* '+ 1 Project' encourages every individual and organization to take 1 step forward to make the better future.

[Name]
Gaia Mapping 2008
http://photo-en.plus1project.jp/

[Overview]
Everyone can participate from all over the world. Take a photo of 'things you care', 'people you care' and 'things you want to hand over to next generation' by cell phone and digital camera. Mail it to us, and the photo will be posted on Google Earth/Google Map. An exhibition of selected photos is scheduled at FUJIFILM SQUARE, Tokyo. Many prominent figures will participate in photo posting.

[How to post]
Email a photo taken by cell phone or digital still camera to one of the addressed below.

"Friends of Gaia"
nakama@plus1project.jp

"People"
hito@plus1project.jp

"Goods & Wisdom"
mono@plus1project.jp

*To ensure print quality, please set a photo size above SXGA (1280X960)

[Schedule]
Posting: April 25, 2008 - June 8, 2008 (contest application due) *Photo posting on Google Earth/ Google Map is available till July 31.

"Gaia Mapping 2008" Exhibition
Date:July 2, 2008 (Wed)～July 30 (Wed) (Planned)
Place:FUJIFILM SQUARE (Tokyo Midtown West 1st floor, Akasaka 9-7-3, Minato-Ku, Tokyo)
About 600 photos will be selected among all the photos posted till June 8.

[Awards]
Date:July 2, 2008 (Wed) (Planned)
Judges: Ms. Shiho Fujita, Ms. Aki Higashihara, Mr. Tomoyuki Sugiyama,
Mr. Junichi Yamamoto,
Ms. Tomoko Tamogami,
Award includes special display at the exhibition and a present.

[Host]
NPO Gaia Initiative
Support：Ministry of the Environment, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (planned)
Technical Support：FUJIFILM Corporation
Planning Support：Hidenori Watanave (Associate professor of Tokyo Metropolitan University, and Visiting professor of Digital Hollywood University)
Cooperation：Google, Inc. , LSD Co. Ltd. Photon Inc.

[Contact]
Gaia+1 Project (http://plus1project.jp)
NPO Gaia Initiative (http://www.gaiainitiative.org/en/)
E-mail : mamoritai@plus1project.jp
Tel : 03-5772-7972 (for press) / Fax : 03-5772-7973
In charge: Chikako Fujita

The Result of Digital Design Competition:
http://archidemo.blogspot.com/2008/03/result-of-digital-design-competiton-by.html


Grand Prix : [THE MUSEUM OF THE GLOBE] by Atelier Ten

The Result of Digital Design Competiton by Nikkei Architecture was announced. This competition is the Final event of Archidemo - http://mapping.jp/archi/cat18/.

This was epoch-making design competition of Virtual-Worlds, by large amount of money prize (about 20,000 dollars in all) and famous cross-field jury member. Winners was elected from 55 application ideas.

The result of competition was published in the Website of Nikkei Business Publications and Nikkei Architecture magazine. All articles are only Japanese, but, the automatic translation version and more details can be seen here. http://archidemo.blogspot.com/2008/03/result-of-digital-design-competiton-by.html

Hi Again Vijay,

The abovementioned structures [especially the swarm variables/masses associated] will indeed be unpacked in future [url]augmentology.com[/url] entries. + Agreed regarding the frustrations of the plural.

Where you're questioning the validity of nominating objects/states as artificial, I'm afraid I can't help you - artificiality doesn't factor highly here, wheras syntheticism does. In terms of pinpointing the ends of the spectrum, agreed again that they are definitely *not* [intended to be viewed as] concrete. I'm not at all advocating information rigidity in any of the augmentology inputs. For instance, the latest augmentology entry is a case Study of a gamer who displays various states of "Afkism". I authorially peg those states as _hard_ + soft, but a switched on absorber will notice that this dichotomy is deliberately false.

chunks,
mez
xx

YMYI - You Move You Interact.
Space where the user interacts with a living image through his body movements.

Master in Technology and Digital Arts - University of Minho, Portugal

Joao Martinho Moura
Jorge Sousa

Project website: http://www.ymyi.org



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Conception:

YMYI (You Move You Interact) is an interactive installation, where one is supposed to build up a body language dialogue with an artificial system so as to effectively achieve a synchronized performance between the real user´s body and the virtual object itself. The project aims at exploring a spatial sphere,where the user/performer is invited to develop his own creative inspiration based on his own body gestures and movements.

During the whole time assigned to research related to both the development and the scientific foundation stone of the prototype itself, we realised, in so far as the expectations brought on the user of the YMYI platform were concerned, that we were dealing with two key conceptions - narrative and image. Underlying these concepts, in-between the dual dimension of the human body and its perception of itself and the surrounding environment,we truly believe that the definitions given on this subject by the scientist Antonio Damasio constituted a resourceful enlightement to the scope of our investigation.

According to Damasio, on the one hand "the images (mental patterns) may be conscious or unconscious (...) The unconscious images are never directly accessible. The images access is to be provided in a single first person perspective ( my images, everyone´s images). On the other hand, the neural patterns are to be provided in a third person perspective. If I considered the possibility of observing my own neural patterns resorting to advanced technology, I would be always doing it in the third person perspective." ( DAMASIO, 2000:362).

We have the pleasure of leaving you an excerpt of his book "The Feeling of What Happens", which sums up the idealised proposal to the users of the YMYI artefact:

"It narrates a story, the story of a living organism unexpectedly astonished by performing its own change status while representing an object. However, what strikes the most is the fact that the knowing entity responsile for the act of astonishing is only created throughout the astonishment narration process."

(Damasio: 2000: 202.)
(1) DAMASIO, ANTONIO R. (2000). The Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.
A Harvest Book
Harcourt Inc.







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Experiencing the YMYI artefact

The YMYI artefact proposes a body dialogue between a user and a digital system, based on a live performance with gestures and movements within an interactive space. Thus, YMYI aims at exploring a space where a user develops an ongoing creative process duly synchronised with his own motion actions.

By entering a so-called “stage”, where the YMYI interactive installation takes place, the user meets, at a first glance, a whole regiment of particles flying in diverse directions and speed throughout the digital system. Within the experiencing sphere of the interaction itself, the user sees his own anatomic silhouette embodied in the canvas, in the shape of lines and curves. Meanwhile, the user realises that his gestures and movements, actually synchronised with his own physical displacement within the interactive “stage”, migrate in real time to the canvas. The performance acquires new shapes and contours. The space opens itself to tridimensionality. By moving leftwards or rightwards, upwards or downwards, the displayed interactive “me” goes hand in hand with the user´s own theatrical actions. The system becomes a stage which lets the emotion and the creativity come in. The living experience is unique and subjective.




The dramatic emphasis of the performance deepens: gestures embed themselves in sounds created by the body, like breathing, walking, standing up, hiding, as if we one was dealing with a contemporary dance performance.

The huge number of particles moving around the user fill in the scene background. They seem to have a life of their own, featuring living, dynamic and electrifying properties. Such particles tend to concentrate themselves in the edges of both the superior and inferior limbs. Feet and hands become a converging magnet able to attract and join them in a collective “bubble”. It is as if they behaved as a physical extension of the user´s body or embodiment. Thus, both particles and user form a single, united element, shining glamorously throughout the interface.




In this interactive scope, the user realises that light/soft movements bring on greater interactivity and emotion. Such an experience is “affordable” by the natural convergence of the whole particles throughout the given parts of the user body as a result from his gestures. If we try moving the left hand or the right one, or even the left foot or right one, the particles flow to each one of their edges accordingly. If we try to put our hands or arms in a downwards position, the particles flow upwards until they reach an upper position – the user´s own head. The interaction is experienced in a richer, more creative and more artistic way.

Another outstanding feature belonging to the interactive experience is actually the sound. In the YMYI artefact, we experience a synchronising sound reactive to the gestures dynamics of the user himself. The sound emits low in pitch or sharp frequencies, responding in real time to the user´s position, whether he is standing (upwards) or sitting/hiding ( downwards), respectively. Right on the top of the canvas, a sensitive sound to the touching facility of the user has the ability to project a sonorous lightning flash whose energy goes through the inner self.




In the artefact YMYI, the sound is a sole element which travels in harmony through the flowing gestures of the user within the interactive space so as to provide guidance and “affordance” to the user himself, in its artistic dimension. If the user stops moving, the sound concentrates in itself an ongoing powerful energy which provides a growing amplitude, whether in low pitch or sharp frequencies, which on their turn, become reactive to and at the same time dependent on the inferior or superior position of the user´s embodiment limbs, respectively.

The sound provides a multimodal enrichment to the whole interactive experience and creates by itself together with image and movement an interactive guide to the appropriation, exploration, knowledge and live experience of the artefact.



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Human-computer interaction and enlightenment in the YMYI project

Keynotes: affordance (by J.J. Gibson); embodiment; animation; multimodal interaction; input vs. output; interface design heuristics; interaction paradigms; emotion.


The Project You Move You Interact magnifies an essential keystone within the human-computer interaction science: the interactivity itself, which in this particular project achieves a high standard of success in performing an evolving artistic interface design generated from affordances, interconnected with the relational actions between a user and a digital system. Such affordances are neither explicit nor visible in the interface. They result, otherwise, of an input based on the exploration/discovery of an actor´s body movements in an interactive “stage” as well as of an output based on his embodiment display in an interface full of small particles, which energize a close communication link with the user himself, either by moving towards him, or by concentrating themselves on the edges of both his superior and inferior limbs.




As for the interface design in the context of usability is concerned, we can actually acknowledge that the project YMYI fulfills two main outstanding heuristic rules: the visibility and the consistence of the whole system. The visibility of the system modus operandi, on the one hand, in the sense of providing information to the user at all times, is always immediate – the user is able to display what he is doing at the moment and how the system is processing his actions. The visibility of the system modus operandi, on the other hand, in the sense of being capable of providing a reply/an output in real time, induces a perception of spontaneousness or natural impulse, reassuring that the user is developing a constant focus on the system, so as to effectively display his embodiment contours drawn non-stop on the interface. Beyond that, the user does not need any sort of operation guidelines in order to learn how the system works. The project also conducts an effects consistency, being able to successfully harmonize prediction, i.e. specific actions result in a same effect in similar circumstances , for example, when the user leans himself onto the floor, the sound element becomes gradually lower in pitch, and on the contrary, when the user stands up, the same sound element becomes gradually higher in pitch. The way in to information/ visual cognitive analysis is achieved through a fundamental universal design rule – the multimodal interaction, which aggregates all the human senses.




In the project YMYI, the most outstanding senses are the following: vision, which enables the user to display the ongoing animation of the whole picture; the hearing of programmed sounds (high-pitch and low-pitch), which provide, on their turn, a growing efficiency to the monitoring process that the user makes of himself and of the sonorous events that are continuously being generated in the interface. Such sounds have a tendency to react to the user movements throughout the space and as such they can function both as meaningful analysis cues and attention focuses for the user to interact with the system. The sounds are also quite effective in deepening the emotional insight/experience of the user´s interaction; the haptic-kinestesic sense, which boosts the whole implicit input towards the system, allowing us to say that the project deals with the emergent areas related to perceptual interfaces, shaped by the use of computer vision techniques and motion tracking technologies. Quoting Ben Schneiderman ( 1998):

“When an interactive system is well designed, the interface almost disappears, enabling users to concentrate on their work, exploration, or pleasure. Creating an environment in which tasks are carried out almost effortlessly…”.

We truly believe that this definition applies itself on the whole to the YMYI project. YMYI is successful in putting together both the interaction paradigm directed to the user graphic interface and the interaction paradigm directed to natural means of communication, namely by using human gesture features, which definitely enlighten the physical interactive experience.









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Videos of YMYI





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Making of YMYI



first sketch


end structure design

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Exhibitions

22nd of February, 2008
Information Systems Department
University of Minho, Portugal

From the 29th of March to the 12th April, 2008
Forum da Maia - Maia town, Portugal

From the 18th of April to the 20th April, 2008
SIARC - International Creative Arts Fair - Oporto town, Portugal

From the 18th to the 20th June, 2008
International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging
YMYI Exhibition & Performance
Lisbon, Portugal

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Contacts


Joao Martinho Moura
joao@jmartinho.org
www.jmartinho.org

Jorge Sousa
jorge.sousa.j@gmail.com

University of Minho, Portugal

More information:
http://www.ymyi.org

INSULT?
WHAT ARE YOU!?!
PEOPLE SELl KIDNEY FOR LESSsss____
manik,may 2008.

Although I do agree with Virillo on a number of points including the one you pointed out. We could look at the 21st century as a liberating moment for many when it comes to the fine arts. The individuals choice to create goes beyond the act of pure labor for monetary gain. Personally I would rather spend the day thinking about painting than digging ditches.

i work in an office where brief period of time every email had "sent from iphone" or "sent from helio ocean" or "sent from Windows Mobile". I put "sent from desktop computer" on the bottom of all my emails and soon all those annoying signatures stoped.

A rainy day project for me (more like rainy month) is to start using Linux on my old PC. I'm bootstrapped into Windows right now because so much of the music software I use is from Europe and optimized for Windows. If I can find music and graphic programs I like as much that run on Linux I will make the switch and never look back.
I will read the Liu book. Another reason I use Windows for art is it's my workplace computer and it made sense to also use it at home (for handling .bmp files and the like). I am also attracted to the idea of artists using the OS of everyday knowledge workers (or misusing it if that's possible). I think all the time about how work drives art and wonder how the reverse could be achieved.

Happy May Day.
Workers of the World Unite.
Remember the Haymarket Martyrs.




Implicate Self
Think Locally Act Globally

Heh.. that sentence does a pretty good job of getting right to the central point of what I was talking about.

And yes, I think that for many people today, it is quite correct and I'm not saying that as a criticism of the behavior of others. I'll admit that I am one of those people. If I'm within range of a computer I can't go more than a half hour or so without checking a news site to see if I'm missing out on something. It's as if we think that if we don't catch that "live broadcast" or "breaking news headline," we've missed the news.

I have a hard time seeing Nude Studies as highly complex. Probably because I'm too involved in the work. No, it's not immediately obvious what's going on but it's up to the viewers whether they feel that they "require" more information than that which is given up front. What I wanted to do was create something that could provide relatively immediate satisfaction but still be "mysterious" enough to compel inquisitive viewers into wanting to dig up more information. By providing the information in the manner that I do I'm essentially pointing out that I don't really have to tell them, it's all revealed in the code and in rather plain English even. But it helps to know at least which lines to look at. The gallery version does a more complete job of drawing the viewer in. It's projected and draws the image 12 times simultaneously so that the viewer's visual field is filled. It also provides audio queues as new seismic data is received.

The spectator becoming curator; never thought about it that way. Interesting.

Pall

JODI's account ... hum , u mean JODI's account.... jodi.com or ....what else ? may be ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodi ... or may be.... hum some students working w/ .... nam jun paik? yeah, i c...

Marie Sester really does some great work on surveillance. Access is one to check. http://www.accessproject.net/

http://deepyoung.org/current/genesis/gumball.mov

Space: 1999

?

The links to the posts are:

Emerging Fields (official title = Senior Lecturer in Media Practice)
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/staffing/personnl/vacs/vac203.shtml

Photo (official title = Lecturer in Media Practice - photography Part Time)
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/staffing/personnl/vacs/vac202.shtml

My experience is that folks who Creative-Commons their work are usually pretty accommodating and inclined to share their work (otherwise they wouldn't have bothered CC-ing).

Whenever I've asked for a particular CC-term not to apply to something I using in one of my projects (the share-alike can be particular problem with sourcing multiple CC-items, each using a different set of restrictions), license-holders have always agreed. The CC-license is really establishes the most restrictive limitations from which exceptions can easily be made... so having non-commercial as a starting place seems fine by me .

Long forgotten,
long forgotten.
Back to the longing before blaze
rose from charcoal.
Oh, breeze!



-Ko Un