Global Safari (Powered by Google), the formation of the world’s image

Global Safari, Wellington Cançado, Renata Marquez, global_safari_2.jpg "Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man" Villem Flusser wrote in his well-known 1983 book "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" which analyzed the transition from prehistoric, traditional images to posthistorical, technical ones. No longer formed by "authors", but by anyone who operates a camera or other apparatus, technical images have been opening windows to our contemporary world. Images meant to be maps for the world became screens according to Flusser and people learned to trust these images and the situations captured as extensions of their own sense data. But, how were technical images able to change our perception and imagination of the world when they simultaneously became maps, screens and interfaces ? How was our view of the globe modified when a geographic information program took over the role of the apparatus operator? Global Safari by artists Wellington Cançado and Renata Marquez is an exploration and a deep dive into one of the most popular contemporary apparatuses, Google Earth. A navigation film shot within the program itself takes us on a journey in 10 different cities around the world in 12 minutes. Starting from Chicago, ending in Tokyo, moving vertically and horizontally, zooming in and out in city locations as Google Earth allows, the film is at the same time a visual narration and a documentation of a performative mapping. It is a safari of images, where the artists discover the possibilities and the limits given for seeing places and moments in the internet reality of our times. "What is the meaning of making a photographic safari without a camera in the streets chasing the capture of the decisive moment?" the artists ask while remembering the magic and unique moments saved in time by photographers like Henri Cartier Bresson. What do Google's satellites, aircrafts and cars really capture? There is no author, no specific photographer deciding which images form the world within Google Earth; there is instead an automatic and trustworthy process of capturing images as well as a matrix of related user-generated images. In this frame, where Google programs seem like the outmost sovereignty of Flusser's automata for their imagery, Global Safari looks for situations and moments that entail intimacy within them. Passengers at the streets, people playing tennis photographed by chance and appearing as the closest zoom into a city life through Google are being re-captured by the artists. Their moments are being purposely refrozen and the presence of the eye taking the picture returns, questioning a new authorship on a found photo through a program. Global Safari is a project exploring the changes to the formation of the world's image, its influence by the continuous advance of technology as well as on the demolition of the value of scale. The project reminds us of "Powers of Ten" (1968/1977), a film by Charles and Ray Eames which - if watched today - seems like an prophesy of Google Earth. The camera in Eames' film also moves steadily back and forth, zooming in and out, with the aim of revealing the relative size of things. From the human scale of a man lying in a park, to the image of the globe, "Powers of Ten", like Global Safari, is a film about our desire and capacity to imagine the world. Cançado and Marquez's direct referral to Eames' film intends to show how the possibilities for this imaginary world journey changed in the era of googols. While the technologies of Google have made a journey around the world possible for anybody with a computer and an internet connection, at the same time Google Earth territories follow a new form of scale and pose new questions around what the artists call Myopia Index. The scale of cloudiness varies in the different territories captured; resolution changes from centers to peripheries. How is this defined? Which geopolitical mechanisms finally influence our view on the world today? Why is the world accessible but filtered? In the networked era, the roles of photographers, cartographers and explorers interweave but can they/we influence what we see? Maybe we are still in the need of the critical awakening and approach that Flusser was discussing. Global Safari's artists take such a stance, one that requires a critical attitude towards digital culture itself, that questions the liberation we are faced with when navigating within virtual geospatial environments. A call for restructuring, rethinking while being involved is what we need today. "Freedom equals playing against the apparatus".
Daphne Dragona
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Phase = Order, escaping the screen

Phase = Order, Joris Strijbos, phase_order.jpg In the field of expanded cinema the two-dimensio- nality of the projection screen has long been a limitation that artists have attempted to overcome through many different strategies. Rotterdam-based Joris Strijbos, member of the ensemble Macular, has found a way to take audio-visual media out of its habitual constraints. Recovering the legacy of optical and kinetic art and taking the lead from László Moholy-Nagy's "Light-Space-Modulator", Phase = Order is an installation in which a single light source is projected on an array of mobile panels. It employs ninety-six transparent screens mounted on servomotors and arranged in a twelve by eight matrix on a neutral white surface. Carefully controlling the rotation of each panel through an algorithmic process, the system creates quickly evolving patterns of shade and light, reflection and refraction. Structured through organic relationships and governed by feedback principles, the interplay between the individual elements generates a complex visual field in which the eye is invited by endless trajectories to experience the limits of its own cognitive capabilities.
Matteo Marangoni
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Electromagnetic soundscapes, revealing the hidden environment

Wire Less, Yann Leguay, Wire_Less_Yann_Leguay.jpg All around us the air is filled with silent signals. Our bodies bathe daily in streams of electromagnetic waves connecting hundreds of networks in the growing family of wireless media. Yann Leguay has been working with The GhostLab to establish a protocol for capturing radio frequencies spanning from VLF to UHF, including emissions from mobile phones, radio and television broadcasts, wifi networks, satellite communication and power lines. Systematically charting out the EM landscape Leguay reveals the intensity of a new form of pollution that is sometimes referred to as electrosmog. Many people fear that there may be long-term negative effects on health associated with this phenomenon. In his project Wire_Less Leguay has created a quadraphonic installation that scans the EM spectrum on site and composes a soundscape of modulated tones, bips and shifting drones in real time, transposing the signals traveling through the air into the audible domain. With Louise Drubigny he has devised a special technique to archive and publish the captured information on paper discs. After recording the audio material on a vinyl matrix it is then printed on square sheets of paper with a Gutenberg press. The sheets of white paper appear deceptively blank, but just as with the air around us, they are full of information. Surprisingly enough, they can be played back on a regular turntable. An edition of 250 handmade copies has been released under the title Wire_Less_Archives and is available through phonotopy.org.
Matteo Marangoni
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Interferenze 2010 Rurality 2.0 report

interferenze_2010.jpgCheck the Interferenze photo set here. The idea of the nonconformist as no longer the black sheep but the one now wearing a digital player and headphones admirably sums up the theme of the 2010 edition of Interference: "Rurality 2.0". This year the electronic arts festival was held July 23rd to 25th in Bisaccia, Upper Irpinia, a significant place for its (undoubted) rural features as well as it being home to a large wind turbine site. These (modern) mills, imposing witnesses of innovation, sometimes epiphanic sometimes blind, became an important feature of the event. Bianco-Valente’s installation, "Untitled", was created ad hoc from data extrapolated from the wind turbines, whereas they facilitated introspection in Sawako Kato’s group 'sound walk’. Here Kato led participants around the stones and lanes of the old town, becoming an unintentional harbinger of unfamiliar sounds, both from a physical point of view, because the wind generates different sounds each time and conceptually because people rarely stop to "listen around" in everyday life. The ducal castle of Bisaccia, in the town center, overlooking the valley, hosted several installations (Interferente - Roll Multimedia Design, The Bird Watcher aka Hakkaisan - Andrè Goncalves, Talea - Alessandro Capozzo, Souther Ocean Studies - Corby, Baily & Mackenzie, Nijika: TokioIrpiniaEarth - Sawako), while the afternoon brought a selection of videos. In the same location, a series of conferences analyzed examples and experiences of local territorial development through new media and new technologies. Among those making up the panels were Regine Debatty, with his international experience; Ian Chambers, who analyzed the rapid infiltration of art into Molise in recent times; and finally Yukiko Shikata, artistic director of Interference Seeds Tokyo, who gave a Japanese interpretation of the festival. The other (traditional) star was the food, considered "economically" (with detailed tracking of the supply chain), and "culturally", as a magnet for sustainable local development and tourism, and as an important part of the “Slow Life” philosophy. For the section Click'n'food ', for example, in the performance "Foodjob: Frequencies to dissolve under the tongue" (Enrico Ascoli + Pompeo Limongiello) sounds extrapolated (and mixed live) from the sizzle of a dish, introduce the audience to the next and (perhaps) more delicious tasting.
 The program was complemented by multifaceted live evening shows. Starting with Bitzmob (from Bari ) Electronic Appetizer, there were performances with experimental sounds (from the fairy sound generated by friction of paper cones and stone by Teresa Dillon, to the more subtle and refined sound of objects by Novi_sad) and delirious dj-sets (from, among others, Byetone, Ikonika, Shackleton and Fennesz). The enthusiasm generated by the event gave an invigorating spirit to a local area that, on a larger scale, was able to combine its best features with a truly international spirit.
Chiara Ciociola
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Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook – Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media


Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, rethinking_curating.jpg The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013888, English, U.S.A., 2010
After fifteen years of recurrent and animated debates about the peculiarities of new media art, it is still almost always considered as inappropriate in terms of classic museum and collector standards. There is also the undisguised frustration of being snubbed by the majority of the contemporary art world. Here is the best chance to start to definitively solve this situation: share this book. It should be titled "Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Curating New Media But Were Afraid to Ask". Graham and Cook, in fact, have not only founded the CRUMB always active mailing list on these topics, but have also organized countless initiatives and conferences in UK and abroad. What matters here is that they coagulated the accumulated experiences in three hundred pages, with a scientific methodology. The book is divided into two main parts: the first dedicated to defining the specificity of new media art, with plenty of real case studies, and its legacy to the history of art. The second is devoted to methods of curating new media art - also with an impressive amount of contextualized artworks and practices. Furthermore the book is written in a very clear style that makes it accessible to a wide public. The shared hope is that this book, and hopefully others following on the same lines, will be studied by new generations of curators, ones who will take over sooner or later, finally giving the art world a less nostalgic and “modern antiques” face than today, revamping its absolutely pivotal role in contemporaneity.
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Tele-Present Wind, blowing somewhere else

Tele-Present Wind, David Bown, tele_present_wind.jpg The wind is a universal natural phenomena, and it's usually associated with weather conditions and forecasts. But it is still perceived as almost unforeseeable and invisible except for its physical impact on plants and for its sibilant sound. Wind has two characteristics in common with the virtual environment: the complexity of conditions needed to be generated (so, often being unforeseeable) and its proliferation in an incorporeal dimension, so being invisible in reality. "Tele-Present Wind" by David Bowen is a installation consisting of twenty-one tilting devices hosting dried plant stalks in the gallery. They are connected with dried plant stalks outside, all connected to an accelerometer. The wind causes the outside stalks to sway, inducing a real time replica of the phenomenon inside the gallery, almost in unison. This very realistic "wave" of stalks is not simulating a real phenomenon, but replicating it through transmission. In a way, as the title suggest, it's tele-presence wind, carefully revealing to the gallery guests exactly how it is blowing somewhere else. Although the wind has been explored as an input in a few installations (as in the Wind Array Cascade Machine by Steve Heimbecker), this very poetic implementation is fairly new. The movement of stalks is instantly and anthropologically recognized by our senses as a primary sign by nature, although coded through different devices. The pattern made by the stalks swaying is a wave, able to mesmerize, even with the uncertain movements of the mechanical devices.
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Desire of Codes, the tentacles of the surveillance beast

Desireof Codes, Seiko Mikami, YCAM, desire_of_codes.jpg We're accustomed to being under surveillance. We've taken for granted that cameras are everywhere "for our own safety". And we don't care anymore of being recorded in the street 30, 60 or 100 times (or even more) everyday. How has it happened? One of the reasons is that all these cameras around us are "passive". They're there, they record their memory, then they delete it, again and again. We can be there, but not forever (maybe). So this passiveness is making them disappear in our landscape. But what if they would start to act or react to our presence? And what if they would have a different shape than the usual neutral white ones? "Desire of Codes" by Seiko Mikami is a large scale installation commissioned by YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media). It's made of different elements: ninety mechanical moving "objects" that sense a visitor and start to flicker and to record him with small built-in cameras; six robotic "search arms" equipped with cameras and projectors, suspended from the ceiling, they are pointing and recording the visitor as well as projecting images of him/her on the floor; all the images plus more retrieved from surveillance camera from around the world are combined in a "compound eye" constantly updated. The soundtrack is made by mixing sounds recorded in this big room, including servo-motor noises and the whispering of visitors. The database is made of data, and so, Mikami says, of "desire", accumulated in an automatic memory, potentially omni-comprehensive and combing parts of the bodies the machine is interested in. In front of belly of the surveillance beast, we are not indifferent anymore, but targeted, and so fulfilled by an attention that is dangerous, but satisfying.
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RHFID Speakers, a different directional sound

RHFID_speakers.jpg Speakers are neutral. They carry the sound from its decoded source to our ears, but they are firm, static and impartial. They can be adjusted to create a better listening experience, or multiplied and singularly managed to enhance it even more, but they are meant to stay where you placed them the first time they were used. RHFID Speakers by Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe, Filippo Cuttica and Jacek Barcikowski are basically questioning this neutrality. Equipped with RFID tags their classic hi-fi speakers are sensitive to their positions, changing the sound they are playing accordingly. Instinctively they remind of old FM radios that would change their output because of their new reception/location, and "R" stands for "Radio" in RFID... When placed close to each other they play the same song, this time in stereo. But their relationship between sound and position opens different possibilities and generally speaking is significant of how radio waves can carry sound, data and data influencing sound. That old FM radio, if properly modified, would now play a different song, depending on its neighborhood.
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Microcodes, the world without syntax errors

Pall Thayer, microcodes,microcode.jpg The descriptive, literary role of programming code has not being properly exploited, especially by writers and poets. Yet there's an incredible potential to create sense through the syntax and grammar rules of a programming language. Pall Thayer has started to rigorously write concepts in Perl in his Microcodes project. Slowly progressing from the initial versions of Exist.pl, discussed on the Rhizome mailing list, the work has progressed considerably, including a few peculiar short codes, which can even be modified and saved again to the website. Referring to the tradition of conceptual art (symbolic processes described by a few words), Thayer has taken a different direction, because his code is always executable, enriching his sense with an output that ranges from the expected nothing to the freezing of the machine. Properly licensed under the GNU GPL version 3, the elegant, essential codes, resemble dictionary definitions with dynamic, processual ones, that can be acquired, modified and executed, with all that this metaphorically entails...
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Ingeborg Reichle – Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art

Ingeborg Reichle, Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art,Springer Verlag, Austria, English, ISBN-13: 978-3211781609, art_age_technoscience.jpg Springer Verlag, Austria, English, ISBN-13: 978-3211781609
The laboratory as an atelier: this seems to be one of the paradigms of art and science. "Art" and "science" are two terms that have been juxtaposed way too often, sometimes describing either "creative" science or art only citing scientific elements. This book is far away from these misunderstandings. The work restricts its field of research to three areas (genetic engineering, robotics, and artificial life) maintaining a meritorious consistency. These areas cover entities that can be considered as "alive" both by our senses and cultural categories, but Reichle is not filling pages with speculation. Instead she connects artworks and practices, carefully chronicling (including symbolic anecdotes) amalgams she thinks have been worthwhile in the last few decades. And she has been successful in assembling a substantial body of work. The book is a useful and rich reference point for this barely defined cultural field, where playing with "life" and technology has often meant visible manipulation of "organic" fluids and materials, and the invisible manipulation of the "digital". Although the author ends her text with a questionable statement (we'd be prepared "for the emergence of biocybernetic humanity") she tracks a useful, though admittedly only one of the possible paths to explore this disputed art territory. Finally it's worth noting that there's also a sort of book within a book: the illustrations section is 165 pages long, collecting famous and less known artworks.
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