_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ by Mez Breeze
Dec 6 2011
TouchMe: An Augmented Reality Based Remote Robot Manipulation
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_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ by Mez Breeze
Nov 14 2011
Weavrs: Manufactured Artificial Beings from Social Web Data
(Pr) David Bausola from Protein®.more
_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ by Mez Breeze
Sep 28 2011
Augmented Haptics: Etienne Mineur
“Today Disney announced a new iPad game that uses physical objects on top of an iPad. How does it work? Well, here I visit the inventor, Etienne Mineur, who shows me how it works. More on the Disney game here: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/41tKaH6G4rw There’s something deeper here, though. Etienne is an inventor who comes up with simple [...]more
Ars Virtua: Look Art hours
Jul 24 2011
We want to make “look art” as available and accessible as possible, so I have hired a gallery sitter for the next couple of months. The lovely and talented Chibubu will be gallery sitting at the following day/time combinations:
summer hours
sunday 10:00-12:00 pacific 10:00- San Jose, 19:00- Berlin, 03:00 Mon- Sydney
tuesday 13:00-14:00 pacific 13:00- San Jose, 22:00- Berlin, 06:00 Wed- Sydney
thursday 19:00-21:00 pacific 19:00- San Jose, 04:00- Berlin, 12:00 Fri- Sydney
Chibubu can help people get use to the MUX, as well as answer questions about the work.
RS
look art opens Sat July 16
Jul 13 2011
Opening July 16: look art
Ars Virtua pleased to announce the opening of look art, an art show in a multi-user dungeon commissioned by Turbulence.org.
Receptions are scheduled in the space at 10am Pacific and 6pm Pacific time on Saturday July 16, 2011.
You can connect as a visitor via telnet or mud application our server is named turbulence.sjsu.edu and our public port is 2860.
Request an account http://bit.ly/look-art-login to have your own login/password. We also have a http to telnet gateway from Mosha.net (works with firefox and IE): connect as visitor, or to connect and enter credentials(your login and password).
Featured artists are Thomas Asmuth, Alejo Duque, and Christopher Poff. Artwork represents a conceptual re-interpretation of the portrait through ascii text, a distopian data exchange platform and an interactive artists manifesto.
For more information “look” at the site on July 13 (5pm) http://turbulence.org/works/lookart/
_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ by Mez Breeze
Jul 12 2011
“Fleet Commander”: Real-Time Interactive Strategy Interactions in a Multi-user, Multi-touch Environment.
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_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ by Mez Breeze
Jun 19 2011
AKB48’s Eguchi Aimi: An Augmented Synthetic-Human Amalgam
“The features of Eguchi’s face were taken from the members, which consists of Oshima Yuko (hair/body), Takahashi Minami (outline), Maeda Atsuko (eyes), Watanabe Mayu (eyebrows), Itano Tomomi (nose), and Shinoda Mariko (mouth). Twelfth generation AKB48 member Sasaki Yukari is confirmed to be the source of her voice as well.”more
Interview with Jeremy James Hight
May 27 2011
Email Interview with Jeremy James Hight about being the Curator for: LEA New Media Exhibition Re-Drawing Boundaries…
By Jeremy Owen Turner on May 02-10, 2011…
JEREMY T: What key moments from your past led towards your active interest and participation in Locative Media?
JEREMY H: I wrote an essay years back for the Sarai reader about how maps come from conquest and war as much as from pragmatic measure and how much carnage and prejudice is often tied to “borders” these arbitrary invisible pencil lines..and how the map needs to be defanged somehow like a snake. Then, I was in 2 group shows in Russia with a series of images I made that pushed it to the responsibility held in ignoring this….and of how the landscape knows none of this. Then, doing “new media ” and “locative media” for years led to more and more head scratching going what the hell is each one? When does it start? End? and then watched corporations pounce on IM [Instant Messaging] and AR [Augmented Reality] in the most base dumb way and make tons of cash ….
JEREMY T: Which themes and issues inspired/motivated you after being accepted as the curator of this exhibition?
JEREMY H: I thought wow..why not get a bunch of amazing people together that do works that in their way deal with space, place, locations, data, narrative…..but often are in fields that are not supposed to cross….and have a show about them and these concepts but also the larger issues of maps now becoming open and apps but is it changing anything and are we instead seeing these barriers on places and art stay the same
JEREMY T: The featured artist Mez Breeze particularly comes to mind when asking this question...What are your personal opinions about artists who cross disciplines to the point where the historical distinction between “real” and “virtual” become completely blurred into a “synthetic” ontology? Do you feel that more artists should make the word “virtual” more obsolete in favour of “synthetic” or is there still value in addressing the “virtual” as distinct from “real”? Perhaps historically, there always has been an imperative for these disciplines to eventually cross into a hybrid mixed-reality discipline?
JEREMY H: Excellent question. I grew up as a kid reading little cartoons in the Sunday comics that told quirky origins of words. It was fascinating as well as entertaining and in elementary school I collected them in a drawer under my bed. It was many years till I knew this was etymology. The seed was sewn in that little kid with meteorology gear humming by his window and a Paul Brown image from Scientific American stuck on the wall like a Hendrix poster. Words can be like jellyfish , even dead ones floating in the sea; they sometimes are there, hold identifiable form, but are transparent and you see other things in them. The round about point I guess is that the naming or ontology to me is subjective. Ask 30 strangers what Car means and you will get a basic definition. Ask the same 30 people the first thing they associate and a wide variety emerges. “Real “ to me is about as subjective as language and its associative tonalities can get. Unreality is perspectual just as reality is the same. Virtual has some heavy connotations of a guy with long dreads making too many promises back in the 90’s, but again this is just so much ballast like in any language.
JEREMY T: In terms of the “locative media” movement as a whole though, where are some of the more prominent artists guiding consumers/prosumers towards with regards to subjective perceptions of the ‘real” and “virtual”? Do you see a significant change in cultural attitude from the ‘90s concept of virtual reality and towards something unique to the work being pioneered by those artists who engage in Locative Media? Perhaps you can give some examples from your exhibition?
JEREMY H: Locative Media as a trope to me has long moved from any sort of labeled “avant garde” that comes with playing with new tools as it is ubiquitous. VR was actually more maligned ten years ago as some claims were still not met by people that were self proclaimed “Visionaries “ that many say hurt the public perception of the field and after several years turned seed money folks away too out of frustration.. The door opened for ways to combine elements of screen based VR and the physical world. This aspect of a section of Locative Media for better and for worse got a sudden buzz as it was seen as a new place that took the sedentary physical being beyond goggles and gloves and put them in the world itself. VR has come to be extremely important in fields such as medicine and still produces solid works now and the frustration over those big promises has subsided. Augmented Reality is facing similar issues now. There are 3 kinds of AR really, the line behind a hockey puck on tv, the screen based apps tagging places and the long standing deep AE with goggles (now glasses and as I have been waiting for since 2000..lenses like contact lenses). I personally don’t like terms like “movement” or “generation” as semiotically that is a video game of spinning wheels as to multiple contexts, connotations and fields of scope and inclusion/exclusion. Each field to me has opened many doors and now are all out there, oscillating and fusing at different junctures and projects. Jeremy Wood played many years ago with making drawings from his moving around cities and introduced a whole new area now used for art and art education. He now has moved into collapsing video of plane trips to abstracted forms using a special camera. Christian Nold took the forgotten and maligned concept of bio-feedback and opened a whole new area where you see reactive maps as well as how one moves as map augmentations. Teri Rueb was one of the first to see the possibilities in the young field. Kai Syng Tan is a younger artist, but has done a series of locative works that are all within the lifespan of an avatar, not her. She has really introduced a lot of vr/ second life examinations of identity and body into locative work. Her character “lived” and “died” in the physical world but was not the artist. Esther Polak has broken the walls of documentary and awareness raising along with locative media in an important way. Jen Southern and Kate Armstrong have done early locative narrative works and pushed their work since into newer areas infused with multiple fields of art and media.
JEREMY T: In your personal opinion, do you feel that Locative Media as a practice and genre is dependent on recent technological advances with GPS and similar applications? In a way, is Locative Media practice (including “New Media” as an art-historical discourse) a novelty and trend or is there something more to it? In other words, would you have feasibly been inspired enough to curate artists dealing with Locative Media, even if this mobile technology had not existed and become relatively ubiquitous?
JEREMY H: The danger of codification is in such memes as the novelty or “flash in the pan” which is more shaped by many forces such as exposure, associations pinned to the entity and, sometimes, overexposure too quickly. Locative media has roots as old as “new” media. Go back to early cartographic tools, to the dozens of more creative and even obtuse and farcical maps from hundreds of years ago, take a gander at pouring colored sand to not get lost and to how ships navigated on strange seas. Locative Media is also the folks who for years were already doing location specific works , Easter egg hunt like adventures etc. Locative Media art has seen many sub-genres in the last 15 years and continues to. It also has merged out into many other areas including augmented reality (which also has the same connected issues if not more so in the last year or so). Robert Smithson changed my life as a teen. He saw things that many of us are beginning to grasp in this field. I am deeply honored to have works of Buckminster Fuller in the heart of this show for the same reason. He was thinking 50 years ago of a layer of live triggering data over a globe. He saw that locations could not only yield the smaller nodes of narrative, or pure data, but that it could also reach a skin across the earth with a crucial immediacy. I never dreamed in 2001 that the field would come as far as it has but I saw what was possible. It is thrilling to see.
JEREMY T: Hypothetically, if all of your artists practiced within a locative framework that was entirely offline, what would have been your criteria and personal inspiration for artist and artwork selection?
JEREMY H: Oh wow. Hmmm. I think that could go many interesting ways. You could see place as archive, you could go older and lost infrastructure as saved and grafted onto maps online and offline as core resonant subject, you could go global connectivity and have works from many places and hopefully some being several from same cities ( a tiny piece of Buck’s vision and what some see as a possible web 3 or 4.0). I would love to see the artists in a show make collaborative works and frames and then we see them placed in a new form of mapping or space. I lastly spoke at MIT years back on how locative media art can and should embrace the more humble spaces: deserts, open lands, towns, hills …not just the cities and their semiotics and presence.
JEREMY T: Would “mail art” have a place in an exhibition as an offline example of “Locative Media”?
JEREMY H: Hmmm…depends on how it was framed in each piece. To tie a specific location,locations, track, larger conceptual underpinning playing with tropes and expectations would make it interesting. I have done mail art and as cool as it is , the focus being more on sharing and even exploding the base functionality expectations of shipping art and the joy of letters takes it about too far out of range.
JEREMY T: If the same curators invited you to curate this “Locative Media” show in a parallel universe where GPS and even the internet never existed, would you have agreed to curate such an exhibition? Would your own background and influences made you feel comfortable acting as a curatorial authority for such an exhibition? Why or why not?
JEREMY H: Wow. Love this one. Hmm..well the creator of this specific show was little ol me but if others asked me to do what you suggest I would have to pass. They would probably have something way better than what we have anyway. I developed this show to both show the great range of works that deal with location that are not always labeled as “locative” per se along with works firmly in its core; the show also was to hopefully look at borders on maps, borders of art and science and borders of self and information and how they can be explored as well as questioned.
JEREMY T: Are there any further comments or parting thoughts you wish to make before concluding this interview?
JEREMY H: We are arguably in a historic cartographic moment. We also are arguably in a dystopic use of technology (texting while driving etc..). Our sense of space and data on a pragmatic level is changing radically including a more malleable sense of mapping but how much of this is the gizmo level of narcissistic apps and the quite old notion of maps augmented with images? What does the art world (whatever that nebulous grouping of a million different things is…) do to push how we see art? how we exhibit it? What can emerge that is perhaps even a third space (not just AR or mixed reality but something…more…)?
BIOS:
Jeremy James Hight (b.1969, Panorama City, U.S) Is a Co-Director of ISEA Istanbul as well as New Media Curator and an editor for LEA. His essay “Narrative Archaeology” was named one of the 4 primary texts in locative media. He created locative narrative in the collaborative project “34 North 118 West”. His work has been shown in galleries and museums internationally.
Jeremy Owen Turner (b. 1974, Victoria, B.C., Canada) is a PhD student in Interactive Arts at Simon Fraser University (Surrey, B.C., Canada). Since 1996, he has practiced as an avatar performance artist and music composer in virtual worlds such as Second Life. He has interviewed artists and composers for such publications as C-Theory and Intelligent Agent. He currently lives in Vancouver.
_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ by Mez Breeze
May 17 2011
Augmented Reality Guerillas Hijack Bruce Sterling’s ARE 2011 Speech
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