As part of the exhibition Glitch moment/ums at Furtherfield Gallery an online exhibition 0P3NR3P0, is asking for glitchy submissions.
I submitted the film below. It was originally made to be projected in to a book (this project is still under construction and will be in an exhibition in September so more info to follow) and consists of male bodybuilders trapped in their little boxes, forced to consistently perform their poses for the viewer.
At the beginning of this week, Mon, Tues, Weds, I attended a conference held at Brighton Dome as part of Brighton Digital Festival. The reason I was able to attend was due to a friend winning a ticket but then being unable to go. In return for the ticket I sent her sum up emails of the days speakers and I will attach that below in case it is useful to anyone else and it is definately useful for me to have all the relevant links and comments together and not in my appalling primary school child handwriting!
Day 1
Kevin Warwick:
Really interesting cyborg guy who looks very normal but was a pioneer in getting technology implanted into himself, such a copper implant that would act as a keycard when he entered his work building and it opened the doors and lights for him!
He asked at the beginning of the talk if anyone would like to have an implant of some technological extension of their body and asked for a show of hands, I thought I wouldn’t want something, thinking of some kind of Terminator situation but then he mentioned that most of us have our pets micro chipped and that these class II implants are becoming increasingly common with nightclubs even using them so customers don’t have to pay for drinks, just scan their implanted chip, say in their arm, at the bar and their account is charged automatically.
He also spoke about some research he and some of his students are undertaking into sensory substitution, e.g having magnets implanted in the fingertips which vibrate as you get near to objects and having electrodes in the shape of letters placed on the tongue and the shape of the letter gets transmitted to the brain, both would be beneficial to blind people for instance.
Relly Annet Barker:
She did a presentation about giving presentations and metioned some interesting things like ‘barcamp’ where first time speakers can go to talk about a chosen subject. This talk was particularly helpful for me as I am, like quite a few people out there, shit scared of public speaking!
She also runs Supernice Studio, which I gather is about helping people to get stuff done and to have the confidence to it, the link below is to a project to help give people a kick up the back side over the next 30 days with regards to web content and there are still a few days left to sign up:
Memo Akten:
Epic visual artist, links will do more justice than words – epic!!!! (This is what I wrote in the email to my friend and it still applies here)
Stefanie Posavec:
Data Illustrator working with extracting data by hand, e.g. she goes through a book and counts the number of words and sentences and then represents it by hand or using illustrator. She was very apologetic about not knowing how to code and wanting to learn, I also often suffer from this feeling but really I think she has great way of doing things and I agree with her low tech approach. This is something that I will come back to in a separate, future post.
He did a talk about the Application Cache for html5, I dutifully sat through the whole talk but had no idea what the hell happened in that hour.
I managed to understand that it was something about making sites useable offline and obviously need to look into this!
Although he is part of the team that set up this site for tracking going to events: http://lanyrd.com/ Bjarke Myrthu:
He brake danced onto the stage!
He was talking about the fact that people don’t use the internet to mix up genres of use, such as having a film playing with images over the top, he gave some examples: http://moodstream.gettyimages.com/ http://stormingjuno.com/
He didn’t use this as an example but it’s that same sort of thing, a linkin park video that uses your facebook photo, it’s quite hilarious! http://lostintheecho.com/
He also is making a website to help people be able to interact all of these mediums, youtube, still photos, sound files, etc together www.storyplanet.com Day 3 Gimme 5:
Which is loads of speakers coming on within the hour to talk about what they do or an idea for 5 mins
Will just list the most interesting ones Luke Whittaker http://www.stateofplaygames.com/blog/ Adam Onishi http://www.onishiweb.co.uk/ Pete Hochkin http://www.headloose.com/ Maikel Sibbald http://www.yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperiencea3dreality.com/
Then there was Simon Collison for the whole hour
Talking about less being more when putting out web content
He has a music website which the background images are inspired by found records in the street but then he set up these photos to get the ones he wanted
urgh can’t find the music site but thought it was called ‘rushmore’
here is his personal site: http://www.colly.com/
He also mentioned that he loves art using found objects and said he likes the idea of ‘using what’s around and making more of what is little’
His twitter is @colly so maybe tweet him a link to foundism?
Foundism is the site of the friend I was emailing, it asks for submissions for found objects:
We just had another lesson on processing and I was intrigued once again by the possibilties!
Now I am not even purporting to know what I’m doing in processing but here are a few experiments below, I was particularly drawn to the colours and how they made me think of stained glass windows, again drawing on my ideas around how the old and the new can work together or enhance each other.
‘Kinetica Art Fair is a yearly event produced by Kinetica Museum. It brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on universal concepts and evolutionary processes though the convergence of kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology.’
I attended this years Art fair as a volunteer on the Intuition and Ingenuity exhibition stand, which consisted of art inspired by computer pioneer Alan Turing, celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth. The exhibition will shortly be at Lighthouse in Brighton, so I will save mentioning this further until a later date.
There was a vast array of works on display from Tim Lewis’ animatronic works (below), which consisted of freakishly concocted creatures that jolted and strutted around, to moving images, such as Sandra Crisp’s (http://sandracrispart.com/) film Oceanic, which explored 3D layers of the environment (2nd below).
Some of my particular favourites were:
Andras Mengyan http://www.andrasmengyan.com/ who is a Hungarian artist working with concerns around simultaneous perception. He was using lasers and animation, combined with a special liquid that he had developed with chemist to create his desired effect.
Sophie Cullinan’s installation was both provocative and yet innocent. Her sock paintings consisted of used socks that could be pumped up by various pumps, such as bike pumps or balloon pumps that had been painted an pink, udder type colour, to eventually inflate and look rather nipple like. Her blow up doll piece, Worn, again conjures up ideas of blow up sexual aids for me, even though there is something quite frumpy and childish about her patchwork exterior. Cullinan describes Worn as a ‘domestic machine’ on her website, I also agree that the idea of a woman made out of worn fabric who is continuously at work, work which is dictated by the viewer who has to press a button to make her inflate, is deeply symbolic of a woman’s struggle and of having to work under the ‘gaze’ of others. there is also something unnerving about the industrial hoover sound for the inflation.
Another film that enjoyed was a short film by Laura Jean Healey called The Siren described as:
‘The Siren is an exploration of the notion of the Other. It explores the nature of the feminine mystic within the screen and the seemingly active male gaze. The Siren, both alluring and terrifying, embodies the duel nature of all women throughout time and confronts the audience, asking if ‘I do not exist in my own right. If I am merely a symptom of male desire, then ‘what am I?’’
Lastly Nichola Rae (http://www.a2arts.co.uk/) had a projection of sonic frequencies that would interact and change pattern when a guitar was strummed or a mic sung into that were connected to it:
All in all it was a very inspiring day and I would strongly recommend next years fair to anyone interested in art/science/electronics/computing/pretty things etc…….
There were two versions, both eventually using the colours of each area of the picture to make up the whole picture. One version let you make the the picture by moving the mouse and the other quickly made the shapes appear and created the picture for you.
The picture that I used was A Sweet Lullaby (c.1915) by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale (no copyright infringement intended, was testing out an idea!) Which looks like this:
For White Night in Brighton I was invigilating Alex May’s work at the Phoenix Gallery. The exhibition, titled Like Shadows: A Celebration of Shyness, was exploring ideas of participant interactivity and the different levels of participation people are willing to get involved in.
Interestingly enough I agreed to invigilating when slightly tipsy, and when I actually thought about it, I was nervous that I would be expected to force people to interact and generally be a pushy invigilator. Luckily this was not the case. Alex’s work, was a kinect sensor which sensed the persons shape and projected it as a colour onto the wall, with a dripping paint effect, the shape became more solid the longer that the person stood there.
It was a contemplative piece of work, which gave the viewer a chance to stop and and see the work take shape right in front of their eyes. It was quite a romantic piece of work with sad, solo silhouettes being joined by others as time went on, only to drip away and leave a smudge as the only trace that anyone had been there.
As the night went on, and the drinks flowed, it was amusing to see people come in and run in front of the sensor expecting an immediate result. At one point we also spelt out YMCA……..
I have been thinking of using PIR (Passive Infrared) sensors for a future project, where I plan to project images onto a photo album and have the images change when the pages are turned, this is the photo album:
Jennifer Milarski-Stermšek 