Found via Textually.org > Engadget Mobile > Make (nice trail):

Artist Jorge Colombo (Portugal) made a couple of cityscapes by drawing with his fingers in an application called Brushes on an iPhone. He also posted a short movie showing in speed-up how he created his drawings. You can see all of the drawings on his website. Not only do these drawing look really nice, they also come quite close ‘the urban experience’ of neon lights, big structures, and a blurry sense of movements and speed. The medium indeed perfectly fits the subjects depicted. It also possible to relate this to the theme of “urban computing”, as an artistic way to ‘write’ one’s experience of the city, as Greenfield and Shepard call it (though, granted, this experience doesn’t ’stick’ to the location as a kind of locative tag; that should be the artist’s next step!).

What I think is really interesting about is how the mobile device gradually becomes a platform for creative production and playfulness, like the (desktop) computer has been for much longer. A similar kind of creative production on mobile devices has existed for a while in the digital music scene. Here, the iPhone is used as an interface for music sequencing, tracking and beat creation. And in a related field called Chiptunes or 8Bit music, much older portable devices such as Gameboys have been given a brand new second life in being used to make electronic tunes. Also, as posted elsewhere on this blog, the mobile phone is increasingly being used to make (short) films. Last example: the mobile phone is used to not only read but also write texts and even entire novels. This has to do with the fact that many Japanese make long commutes by public transport.

It’s really nice to see how the mobile phone develops from a platform for consumption of services to a medium for creative production as well. Moreover, some of these examples clearly indicate that there is a relation between artistic creation on mobile platforms and the physical surroundings and urban experience, apparently much more so than with fixed computers.

category short films/animations for mobile devices:
Mobile Fest Festival for Short Film
Pocketshorts Funding for Short Film makers
Mobilemediafest Short Film Award
Cellflix Festival for Short Film

category locative:
The Milk project
Amsterdam Realtime
Graz Mobile Landscape (see earlier post)
Interdisciplinary project on mobile media and surveillance

Wednesday evening, November 9, I was at the opening of the exhibition “Alter Ego” at Home Gallery. I was kinda late, supposed to meet my GF there at 21:30, but got stopped along the way by a police woman for cycling without light. She gave me a ticket, what a bummer… }:-(.
Anyway, the gallery is located in a nice old canal house between Leidsestraat & Spiegelstraat. About 25 large images are dangling from fish cords on the wall, each displaying a photograph of a ‘real’ person on the left hand side and a screenshot of his/her virtual personality on the right side. The split-images are accompanied by a text that tells the individual’s story: who he/she is in real life, who she/he is online in what game, and what motives he/she has for choosing this particular character.

The people portrayed are pretty diverse, considering that game culture appears to be mostly restricted to Asian and Western – American – cultures: there are pictures of physically disabled people, two black men, quite a lot of females (Asian & Western) and of course the (stereo)typical geek.

A lot of people make their online character into a ‘better self’: the men often create a sort of super-hero character and the women a strong, beautiful female warrior. Not everybody though: there is a portrait of this US redneck kinda guy who plays a beautiful heroine, and two good-looking Asian girls tell that they switched to playing ugly creatures after being harassed all the time by men in the game.

The stories can be roughly devided in stories that are about “becoming” in the sense of developing oneself: from being a bit shy at first to becoming more and more friendly and sociable, from being averagely handsome to being beautiful. Another theme is “escape”: escape from boredom (the trucker fantasising about playing a spaceship), escape from physical constraints (the handicapped people), escape from social/cultural pressure (the Chinese gay boy playing “guys he wanted to meet” & the US macho-guy playing a woman). The theme of “sameness” in the sense of “living one’s identity”, or simply “being” is apparent too: someone says he behaves the same way online as offline, and the Texan business woman tells she likes bossing around online just like in real life. Finally, attention is given to the economics of gaming culture: a few people explain that they make quite a bit of money from gaming, whether it’s by developing characters for other people, or by writing software that can upgrade players levels by playing for them at night, or a girl that has become popular through gaming and has become a professional model.

Some critical remarks: the split screen portayal of people & their online identity suggests that people have only one online identity instead of multiple. By choosing a form of presentation that juxtaposes offline and online identities, the artist stresses the devide between them in a visual way, although the artist probably intented otherwise. On the other hand, the split-screen portayal suggests that offline and online characters are equal in some way: the online character being the ‘mirrored image’ of the real life character. And finally, the artist seems to have deliberately wanted to portray a diverse group of people, while underplaying the homogeneity of game worlds, as apparent from one of the group photo of an ‘old’ game guild (I forgot the name) that is almost totally white and predominantly between 20-40.

The exposition is sponsored by EA (Electronic Arts – the largest (?) and best-known game developer in the world); Playstation2 by Sony. The gallery itself is a space owned by Dutch party/event-organiser Duncan Stutterheim from ID&T. Certainly no marginal players in the leisure economy …;-)

The BBC has an article about the project: news.bbc.co.uk.

The pictures (and even some more than exibited) + stories can be dowloaded as a PDF file from
www.seeingtakesasecond.com/images/examples_preview.pdf (9 MB).

Below the notes I made

051103 Lev Manovich @V2

from www.v2.nl:
Lev Manovich is the author of Soft CInema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), which was hailed as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” He is a Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, and a Director of The Lab for Cultural Analysis at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. This Fall he is a researcher in residence at Piet Zwart Institute | Willem de Kooning Academy | Hogeschool Rotterdam.

————
“scale”
When increasing quantity, qualitative effect will arise.
Wikipedia:result of scaling up. number of people; speed of editing.
Visual examples:
- BBC Archive online.
- Video iPod
Publicly available content will scale up.
Not isolated, but interconnected. Bruce Sterling – Shaping Things. “All object will become smart and interact” ['spimes'] http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/26/bruce_sterlings_desi.html
new technologies (qualitative change) – upscaling existing technologies (much harder to think about consequences – quantitative change). McLuhan wrote about the scale-effect of the railroad.
scale effects:
1. speed – e.g. processor power & computer games. Algorithms for representing image existed already since middle ages: representation of image in ‘pixels’ (example: Dührer).
2. size/resolution – more details, larger screens, wall-sized images leads to new ontology of image: new knowledge of surroundings and world. [effects on perception of "realness" > more detailed, introducing different patterns and textures; effects on representation of reality as 'narrative' > visual]
3. volume – real time streaming of content
(Lev keeps on throwing numbers at the audience – part of his rhetoric strategy to argue for quantitative approach to understanding new media)
4. memory/storage – nevertheless compression will remain

All human art can be thought of as compression: condensing individual collective experience into smaller files: experiences, narratives, images. Compression of world view, of habitat into small file.
Example: hat with build-in webcam: recording your life (in low-res).
Language as form of compression. Art used to be doubling: creating a mirror, but could never be a full mirror, always limited by medium. Now, for the first time in history, you can capture anything at full-res. (E.g. film shot in Hermitage St.Petersburg 2hours, 2 Terabytes large.)
—–
Q&A/ debate:
Q: scale has changed, but our perception of space/time hasn’t.
A: New media forms create new forms of perception. people want more information, that’s why they live in cities.

M. will put chapters of his new book online on his blog.

Q: It is Cartesian and Newtonian
A: ??
Article by … in 1920’s: One point in perspective, same vertical horizon. Later replaced by image of multiple viewpoints.

Q:
15 november – lecture at Overblaak 18:00

Q: scaling up & narrowcasting: new possibilities? Motivation? How ‘narrow’ can you go?
A:

I am just home from a really interesting mini-seminar in Eindhoven, organised during the Dutch Design Week 2005. The meeting was about Ambient Intelligence and ways in which artist make use of these tools. The organiser René Paré had invited a couple of interesting speakers to tell about their work: Elmo Diederiks from Philips Media Interaction, Edwin van der Heide, an autonomous artist that explores the relations between architecture and sound, and Alex Vermeulen, an artist working on the faultline of technology and art.

Especially interesting was a remark made by Edwin that he tried to avoid the notion of narrativity in his work, as he feels that it constrains him too much. Instead he explores the creation of interacting and learning environments.

A little more info about the workshop at:
http://www.dse.nl/~mad/events/WAA/index.html.

Read the full notes I made of today below.

051018 Ambient Intelligence Eindhoven @TAC – Temporary Art Centre

// Elmo Diederiks – Philips

What is AI?
1. Embedded
2. Personalised
3. Adaptive
4. Anticipatory
It’s a new interaction paradigm: intuitive, familiar; it’s how products behave in interaction with human behaviour. (E.g. windows used at night as screens for television). How to use the environment as medium for experience. (E.g. wake-up call adapted to optimal moment, directed by brain activity).
“Augmented reality”, or “replaced reality”.
Outdoors: e.g.: personalised advertisements outdoors; buildings with projected fronts; personalised jogging laps, with timing.
In musea: personalised guided tours.

Technology enablers: what makes this all possible?

- Moore’s Law: processor capacity; disc capacity; RAM, etc. (battery capacity lags behind!!)
- Computing platforms are getting more powerful, real time, some sort of rudimentary artificial intelligence.
- Media processing/interaction technology: quality of image in video; speech recognition (problems of social acceptance in talking to apparatuses); DRM/copyright protection;
- Ubiquitous connectivity: how to connect all these devices? RFID with unique numbers;
- Storage: next step = blu ray (hi-def DVD); nano technology
- Lighting: energy efficiency and lightness of screens, esp. outdoors; solar powered.
- Displays: digital paper, large projection areas, e.g. room walls.; mood enhancing lighting while watching TV (via colour analysis of screen), needs perception research; lightning incorporated in textiles, e.g. linked with cell phone as indication. >> “Soft way of communication”.

Personalising time and experiences through technology (stopping/recording/playing a TV show with taking with you a pen from room to room).
- iCat = cute little cats with facial expressions (affective computing) – more human-like communication channels. > computers showing what they are doing in a human-like fashion, in order to change use patterns according to the state of the device, e.g. computer having a hard time doing intensive tasks and showing it. [technology dictates human interaction?!?]
- Content adapted to personal taste. Involving art.

// Edwin van der Heide – artist SON-O-House house Eindhoven
“Different perspectives to real-time”

Traditional Concert:
- fixed order
- beginning & end
- uniform experience
- composer, score, notes: it’s not about the result, the performance, but the artwork is the score, detached from performance & audience.
- architecture of the music hall creates the conditions for the performance (acoustics, quite, non-obtrusive, etc.)
- hall has a front: audience sits in same direction facing the stage.
[same characteristics as 'narrative', as opposed to 'play']

work:
Water Pavilion at Neeltje Jans, Zeeland
“Liquid Architecture”
- space & sound content design was originally unrelated; new cooperation between architects and sound artists to create a communicating “sounding building”. Speakers integrated in building, shaped like building, hidden. Spatialised sound creating individual experiences, sensors.

SON-O-House
Interactive architecture & sound. Visitors were challenged to relate themselves to building, building & sound is not supportive, but_IS_ the work. 24 Sensors indicate the activity across the building. Intention was to interfere with natural behaviour in building and redirect people to other parts, by using sounds. Sound was generated in RT. “Meaningful sounds” vs. “non-menaingful sounds” > building learns to control peoples behaviour, develops intelligence.
Is an ever-changing building getting the same after all?

// Alex Vermeulen

States if humanity – project: different chapters wherein content itself looks for appropriate technology to use. E.g. solar cells that generate magnetic field that can make things move > Alex made a pond filled with figures that move up when sunny and go down again in the evening.
Other project SOH 10 – the Opera: story about scientist experimenting with AI, exchanging organic material with computer, but then her brain crashes. Multimedia performance with live-edited film, story, dance, theatre, music, video.

—————-
break
—————-
Q: Very much supply-driven applications? Why would people want this? Is it only for ‘new experiences’?
A: Involve end-users in early stage; get ’softy scientists’ in the company; follow marketing & consumer trends, globalisation, individualisation. E.g. ambi-light television.

Technologists know everything about small parts of making things work, artists are more generalists. Who’s in between, who translates between them? How do you integrate art & technology > through design.

Edwin tried to create a integration of architecture & sound, not sound in a room. But how do you place speakers? How do you avoid of them being perceived as objects that produce sound? One solution: use only interference, as in SON-O-House. Edwin didn’t want a narrative approach: sound telling a story and directing people through space. Instead E. created parameters that make it more complex, more room for general expression and possibility of change and learning by system. “Structural approach”, “organic”; our perceptions are often non-linear: sound between A and B is not perceived as ‘in between’, it’s another experience. Creating a changing, emerging individual experience.
How do you make change that is not equally different (i.e. at the same distance from the same)?
Q: in what way is space different, how do users experience space?
A: Very complex, no maps. Your own perspective dictates the space. BY entering, you become part of environment, influencing parameters, you’re co-responsable for next stage of the building, more or less consciously. Creating a “meaningful different context”.

Push < -> Pull: creating possibilities for users to act upon/with: appropriating the technology and the meanings it creates

Different carriers have different information possibilities: visual cues are used most of the time, auditive signals are relatively little explored.

Q: How about other senses than only visual/aural?
A: Sometimes it can be very overwhelming [sometimes technology should clearly stand apart from ourselves _as_ technology, not as part of us, because it could be too overwhelming].
Difficulty of experience: how do users perceive this?