Archive for the ‘Experience’ Category
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Yesterday the yearly “light in architecture” GLOW 2016 festival has started in Eindhoven. This is only two weeks after the Dutch Design Week (DDW) ended on October, 29 also in Eindhoven and visited by around 300.000 visitors during 9 days!
So there is quite a lot to do these months in my home town. To keep up, I want to look back on the most interesting exhibition of DDW 2016 in my opinion: Will the Future Design us? organized by MAD emergent art center and ViolaVirus, working together as Manifestations@DDW. This exhibition was somewhat hidden in the MicroLab at the Strijp-S area and curated by Viola van Alphen of ViolaVirus, also know as multimedia artist Sandwoman.
The theme of the exhibition was Hyperreality: a new vision of the future. Will We Design the Future or Will the Future Design Us? with Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master as a subtitle. On the exhibition website it says:
“Will the Future Design Us? Man is limited in observations, what happens in a world when these can be manipulated? Do we need an update in perceptions, do we need exoskeletons and other digital plugins? Are digital observation systems more absolute? In a society with Nervous Systems, our behaviour is predicted and affected. How do we regain control on our devices and systems? Will the Future Design Us or can We Design the Future? Manifestations shows the future 10 years ahead, in passwords, virtual reality, artificial social intelligence, hacker culture, digital valuta-mining, internet-of-women-things, it makes a statement and takes you into a world where you actively create your own future. It wants to design the future together, before the future designs us.”
This interesting topic was explored by art works related to robotics, virtual reality, digital fashion, biohacking and artificial intelligence. This short video (in Dutch….sorry) gives a quick overview of the contents of this exhibition:
Freek Wieringa demonstrated his impressive new Android/Humanoid exoskeleton robot in the exhibition..:
And Erik van Veen showed his Mental Institute for Robots in which caged modems and furbies were behaving very unpredictably, asking the question if robots can have mental disorders?
But by far the most impressive piece on display was Harper, the worlds first artificial intelligence experience developed by Johannes Teuns and the Technical University of Twente:
Harper is a 3D projection of a head to which you can ask questions in Dutch and English. It will provide answers to your questions, enabling you to have a real dialogue with an artificial intelligence artifact. I have seen 3D avatars in the past, but never so lifelike as Harper. Harper did not only answer the questions asked to him but also asked questions back to the asker. In effect, a real conversation with the avatar was established.
So far not much information is available on the Harper project of TU Twente: just two very basic websites, with some pictures and an e-mail form, but no videos or any background information. However, this is such a stunning art work (?), that you really want to keep track of it once you have seen and experienced it (in person). So check out these links below. And don’t forget to visit GLOW this week if you are in NL..
More information
- Harper Experience
- Harper 2016
- Johannes Theuns
- Freek Wieringa
- Erik van Veen
- Manifestations @ DDW
- MAD emergent art center
- ViolaVirus
- Sandwoman
- Dutch Design Week
- GLOW 2016
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Every technology has its own accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch media artist who focuses on visual artifacts created by these kind of accidents in digital media. The visuals and installations she creates are the result of glitches, compressions, feedback and other forms of unplanned noise.
Although most people perceive accidents as negative experiences, Rosa Menkman emphasizes their positive consequences. By combining both her practical as well as academic background, she merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory (“glitch studies”), in which she strives for new forms of conceptual synthesis of the two.
Glitch art seems to be an art form which requires a considerable amount of – rather obscure – explanation. According to Menkman, “glitch art is best described as a collection of forms and events that oscillate between extremes: the fragile, technologically based moment(um) of a material break, the conceptual or techno-cultural investigation of breakages, and the accepted and standardised commodity that a glitch can become. […] Glitch genres perform reflections on materiality not just on a technological level, but also by playing off the physical medium and its non-physical, interpretative or conceptual characteristics. To understand a work […] of glitch art completely, each level of this notion of (glitch) materiality should be studied: the text as a physical artifact, its technological and aesthetical qualities, conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of artists”.
and audiences.”
If this description confuses you: it is – more or less! – explained by Rosa when interviewed for the Digital Manifesto Archive:
So much for theory. How does this actually look and/or sound? Below are a few video’s included of works made by Rosa Menkman.
Pattern Recognition, Beyond Resolution
This video was apparently commissioned by the Dutch railways to be played on big LED ‘Urban Screens’ in train stations all over the Netherlands. However, when finished it wasn’t used because it was classified by the railway company as being “to strange for train passengers”:
DCT:SYPHONING
This installation is part of the Transfer Download exhibition of the Minnesota Street Project in Transfer Gallery in San Francisco, which ends on September 9, so next week. So you are actually still able to see/experience it if you are living near SF!
According to the Transfer Gallery website this work is inspired by the 1884 novel ‘Flatland’ by Edwin Abbott Abbott. Rosa Menkman tells the story of a father who introduces his son to different levels of compression; they move from dither, to lines, to macroblocks (the realm in which they normally resonate) to the ‘future’ realms of wavelets and vectors.
Xilitla
Xilitla is a software game/application for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms which enables you to view the videoscapes of Rosa Menkman in glitchy way outside the confines of YouTube and Vimeo (or this blog page..). The app can be downloaded for free on the Xilitla/Beyond Resolution website. In the About Xilitla video below she explains the goal and concept behind the app:
All in all, a very interesting Dutch media artist,who combines art theory and practice in her work and has in doing so already produced an extensive body of media art pieces around the concept of “glitch”. Below are some links – in random order, of course – to get you viewing, playing and reading:
More info:
- Rosa Menkman blog
- “Resolution Disputes: A Conversation Between Rosa Menkman and Daniel Rourke” interview on Furtherfield
- “The Glitch Moment(um)” book by Rosa Menkman published by the Institute of Network Cultures
- “The Glicht art genre” article by Rosa Menkman on Fluxo
- Digital Manifesto Archive
- Xilitla/Beyond Resolution website
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Found today while browsing on YouTube: a video of the Parallels installation of Nonotak Studio, one of the highlights of the STRP Festival 2015 edition:
Nonotak Studio is a collaboration between illustrator Noemi Schipfer and architect musician Takami Nakamoto. Nonotak was created in late 2011.
In early 2013, they started to work on light and sound installations, capitalizing on Takami Nakamoto’s approach of space & sound, and Noemi Schipfer’s experience in kinetic visual design.
Parallels is an audio visual installation that was commissioned by the STRP festival. It explores interactions between light, space and people within the room of the installation. The boundaries and notion of space, become abstract as the audience crosses the room, but in doing so, the audience also affects the space by breaking the light. This installation is strongly connected to the space in which it takes place; it lives within it. But as soon as the light hits the walls that define the space, it reaches its limits and stops reproducing itself.
More info:
A new laser-and-sound installation by Robert Henke a.k.a. Monolake: Fall.
Fall has apparently been inspired by the drowned Bavarian village Fall, as can be read on Robert’s website:
“In the 1950s the village of Fall in the south of Bavaria slowly disappeared under the rising waters of the newly built Sylvenstein water reservoir. In 2015 the reservoir had extremely low water. Ruins of the old village became visible again; remains of walls forming broken grid-like structures, usually submerged below the water surface. These images became the inspiration for this installation.”
It was premiered at the LEV Festival in Gijon, Spain in April. In his tech blog, Robert Henke explains how it was done.
More information:
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I first saw this rather aggressive and intimidating installation of Edwin van der Heide in the Klokgebouw (Eindhoven) at one of the first STRP festivals several years ago. Today, I accidentally stumbled across it while browsing the web on a dull day. Thought I’d share it as a new post:
In this engine-powered installation, a speaker is mounted onto a rotating arm that is several meters long. Like a watchdog, the machine scans the surrounding space for visitors. Closer investigation would be tempting fate, with the rotating arm swinging so powerfully round. You hear the impressive sound of the mighty motor turning faster and faster. You can feel the displacement of air as the speaker whizzes past you, and you better step out of reach. The machine slows down and you start exploring the space, with your movements manipulating the sound it produces.
More information:
nnnoises.com 