Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.

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Electronic Popables is an interactive pop-up book that sparkles, sings, and moves. The book integrates traditional pop-up mechanisms with thin, flexible, paper-based electronics and the result is a book that looks and functions much like an ordinary pop-up with the added element of dynamic interactivity.

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The new sculpture I'm making is...based on an old picture of a jungle gym that was constructed out of four-inch PVC sewer pipe. I liked the idea that this utopian object was constructed out of plumbing material and maybe it is now the plumber taking on the role of the social-engineer-- this is his meditation on how to create equilibrium and harmony amongst young people! I first constructed a small-scale model out of half inch copper plumbing pipe that followed the design from as much as I could see in the photograph, and then I extrapolated the rest of the design. The preliminary model sort of took on its own life. We polished it up and there was something jewel-like about it and also something crazy about its endless maze of plumbing fittings. I thought about plating the model after it was done too, but I liked the idea that it was totally Home Depot, just copper plumbing pipe and Brasso. The full-sized PVC version will be about nine square feet, and it will have a sound component to it that will generate subtle vibrations and tones that I plan to make with a bass guitar, kind of like chimes trying to summon people. Speakers along with tactile transducers will be housed within it to create an illusion that the tones become louder when you touch the sculpture. I like the idea of a sculpture that tries to turn people's bodies into instruments.

-- EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST PUBLISHED IN THE CATALOG FOR "DOUBLE ALBUM: DANIEL GUZMAN AND STEVEN SHEARER"

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The debut Abandon Normal Devices (AND) launched in the North West of England, 23rd -27th September 2009. The inaugural festival was centred in the city of Liverpool with satellite events taking place in Manchester. AND, a collaboration between FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, folly in Lancaster and Cornerhouse in Manchester positions itself as a mixture of new cinema, digital culture and media art, showcasing work in partnership with galleries, venues and public spaces around the city. Over five days, the festival featured a broad array of conferences, talks, exhibitions, screenings, performances and online works, with artists and practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds including, The Yes Men, MARIN (Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network), Blast Theory, DJ Spooky and Michael Connor. FACT acted as the central hub for the festival and hosted the majority of screenings, talks and events; it also celebrated its 20-year anniversary on the opening night.

In line with its snappy title, the festival set out to discard all that is typical, regular or average, seeking to question normality in an array of forms. There was a particular focus on exploring disruption to traditional methods of production and distribution in cinema and media art. Interfering and interrupting the familiar and ordinary were played out in public space, on screen and through performance.

The festival opened with a new performance/lecture by Carolee Schneemann, renowned for her performance work of the 60’s and 70’s that challenged the normalised perceptions of the body, sexuality and gender. In a work which took the format of a lecture, titled Mysteries of the Iconographies, Schneemann went on a journey through the creative products of her life from early childhood drawings, through painting, to performance and video installation. The performance was accompanied ...

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Text Rain (1999) by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv

Known for her "physical-digital systems" that call attention to the body in an increasingly mediated culture, Camille Utterback has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. The artist describes Text Rains (1999) as "an interactive installation in which participants use the familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what seems magical—to lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist.".

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Rhizome is a proud media partner of New York's annual psychogeographic festival Conflux, which kicked off yesterday evening. See below for the festival's jam-packed schedule this weekend, you can also download a pdf version here or check out their interactive schedule here. All the events are open to the public, and they suggest a $5 donation.

Friday, September 18 11:30am-8:30pm

Unless otherwise noted, all workshops begin in NYU Steinhardt’s Barney building (34 Stuyvesant Street).

11:30am

Christina Ray & David Darts . Opening Remarks (Commons Gallery, Barney building)

12:00pm

Tianna Kennedy . Swimming Cities of Serenissima

Jessica Thompson . mobile performance device

Marc Horowitz . NYCommercial

Jeff Stark . Subway Theater

Joseph Grima . Storefront for Art and Architecture

2:00pm

Transportation Alternatives . POP.Park: Reclaim Your Street

College of Tactical Culture (CTC) . College of Tactical Culture

Leon Reid IV . An Afternoon With Leon IV

What We Know So Far . Probability

Waterpod . The Waterpod: Life afloat, on the edge of the grid *Begins off-site

4:00pm

Caroline Woolard . OurGoods

Not an Alternative . Occupations and interventions on the urban/cultural landscape

Eve Mosher . Insert _____ here

6:00pm

Theodore Bouloukos . Memes and Temes

Mark Shepard . Sentient City Survival Kit

7:00pm

Elizabeth Streb . PopAction

Andrea Reynosa & Kevin Vertrees . Time Based Landscape Studies *Begins off-site

7:30pm

Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena . Urballoon *Begins off-site

8:30pm

Starting at Conflux headquarters in the Barney Building, Conflux and Foursquare present Foursquare @ Conflux, an interactive iPhone-driven social networking event that will lead participants on a tour of hidden East Village locations.

Saturday, September 19 10:00am-6:00pm

All workshops begin in NYU Steinhardt’s Barney building (34 Stuyvesant Street).

10:00am

Dara Greenwald, Olivia Robinson and Josh MacPhee . Spectres of Liberty

Julia kaganskiy & An Xiao . E-Derive: Psychogeography and the Digital Landscape

Matt Knutzen . Rebuilding the Historical City

Meredith Johnson . Creative Time

12:00pm

Natalie Jeremijenko . Fish ‘n microChips

Sal Randolph . Free Money & Other Urban Money Actions

Brooke Singer . Demolition Drugstore!

Kurt Braunohler . Urban Disorientation Game

Britta Riley & Rebecca Bray . Windowfarms and R&D-I-Y;

2:00pm

Sharilyn Neidhardt . Human Scale Chess Game

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, L.M.Bogad & Andrew Boyd . Fantastic Politics: Art as Political Campaign

Marc Horowitz & Peter Baldes . Google Maps Roadtrip (NYC)

Andrea Reynosa & Kevin Vertrees . Time Based Landscape Studies

Jason Eppink . Adventures in Urban Alchemy

4:00pm

Greg Trefry . Gigaputt: The City is Your Golf Course

Reverend Billy & Savitri D. . Breaking in to Public Space

Tom Angotti . Reclaiming the City, Community Organizing, and Planning

Moses Gates . What’s Your City Horoscope?

Cassim Shepard . Urban Omnibus

7:00pm

From 7-10pm Conflux Founder and Producer Glowlab hosts a party at their 30 Grand Street location in SoHo to coincide with a related exhibition entitled Modern Ruins by artist Emily Henretta.

Sunday, September 20 10:00am-6:00pm

ConfluxCity - city-wide!

Sunday, September 20 from 6-10pm at the Delancey Lounge (168 Delancey St, www.thedelancey.com), a chance to unwind, connect with other Conflux participants and reflect on the weekend’s happenings.

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When artist and curator Hilla Rebay hung Vasily Kandinsky’s paintings at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which she convinced her lover Solomon R. Guggenheim to open in the late 1920s, she created a sensual environment for them with colored walls, faint music, and perfumed air. It was an approximate construction of an inner, spiritual harmony unencumbered by reminders of nature, in keeping with the ideas of Kandinsky’s influential tract “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” While multimedia updates of art from an older period risk becoming mere bells and whistles on a body of work that stands on its own merits, Kandinsky’s intense interest in synaesthesia—and his exhibition history with Guggenheim’s collection—make it seem like he might be sympathetic to opportunities for multiple sensory stimulation afforded by today’s data processing technologies. Perhaps that’s why Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum commissioned an immersive light-and-sound piece from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to mark the opening of the museum’s major Kandinsky retrospective, the first for the artist in more than twenty years. Levels of Nothingness, which Lozano-Hemmer developed in collaboration with philosopher Brian Massumi, takes its inspiration from Kandinsky’s 1912 essay “Yellow Sound.” The installation generates visuals from phonetic data produced by reading philosophical texts by Kandinsky and others. (At the performance, Isabella Rosselini will kick off the readings, and audience members will be encouraged to continue). Rather than translating one kind of information into another to spell out a neatly servable metaphor—as Lozano-Hemmer did, for example, with Pulse Park, which presented Madison Square Park as a living organism by animating it with lights activated by the heart rates of passers-by—Levels of Nothingness promises to be more meditative and fuzzy, suggesting the connection between thought and ...

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