+Commissioned by Rhizome+

Conference Report: Futuresonic 2007 Festival
Social Technologies Summit
May 10-12, Manchester, UK
http://www.futuresonic.com

by Jonah Brucker-Cohen

2007 marked the 12th year of Futuresonic, a festival that began as a
sound art/ music festival and has morphed into a media art/ mobile
communications-themed event with concerts, exhibitions, talks, and
screenings staged all over the city of Manchester, England. This
year's festival focused on topics ranging from "Free Media" to "Urban
Playgrounds" to "Network Infrastructures" and featured a wide array
of speakers, artists, musicians, and thinkers from around the globe
converging on this urban landscape.

Futuresonic featured a new addition to its exhibition this year,
called "Art For Shopping Centres," which included three
newly-commissioned art pieces staged inside the city's "Arndale
Shopping Centre," a large indoor mall in the center of Manchester's
bustling inner city. British artist Graham Harwood's "NetMonster" is
a net-scraper application that searches and compiles data on the
Internet for historical information related to the 1996 IRA bombing
that devastated the city centre near the Arndale, injuring over 200
people. Meanwhile, Dave Valentine of MediaShed (in which Harwood is
also involved) created "Methods of Movement: The Duellists" a
videography of two "le parkour acrobats" running through the empty
Arndale at night, in a continual "duel" that was filmed entirely
though the shopping arena's CCTV camera system. This project marked
the first use of MediaShed's "GEARBOX Free-Media Toolkit", an open
source software application co-developed with Eyebeam's Production
Lab, that allows for video editing on free platforms. New York-based
artist Katherine Moriwaki's piece, "Everything Really is Connected
After All," consisted of a flock of mobile devices that, when brought
within radio range of each other, produced emergent audio narratives
about the shopping and downtown areas of the city (as told by
Manchester locals). The intent of the piece was to focus on the
shopping mall as a "non-place" or location that is both unique but
still identical in any location around the world.

In the panel discussions and artist talks, lively debates ensued
about the state of mobility in public spaces and how, through
technological interjections into these spaces, new forms of dialogue
can occur. Ottawa-based Anthropologist and avid blogger Anne Galloway
organized the conference speakers this year which ranged from
sociologists to engineers, social scientists, and corporate
researchers, all examining urban space with a critical viewpoint on
topics ranging from wireless networks to urban gaming to mobile
systems that propagate across economic and social boundaries. The
conference itself examined how technology use has become a "social
practice" from open hardware and software platforms to collaborative
applications that allow multiple users to engage in the creative
process at once. This "Socialization" of technology was evident
through the various speakers that presented on how distributed
systems can enable new forms of urban interventions and
collaborative interventions into the city space as an organic
creature. This year's festival also held Manchester's first Dorkbot
event. Local artist Steve Symons spoke about his MUIO
(http://www.muio.org) interface, a real-time, multi-platform, and
open source hardware system (similar to the popular Arduino but
without the need for any programming) that allows for sensing the
external world and inputting data into applications like PureData,
Max/MSP, SuperCollider, and Processing through a standard USB
interface.

Although FutureSonic is in its 12th year, the festival is still
struggling with defining itself amongst the now multifarious amounts
of events focused on how "media arts" meet mobile technologies and
platforms. This year's line up of impressive speakers and interesting
commissions added some interesting discussions into the mix. Through
the next few years, it will be interesting to see how the festival
grows and adapts to the current changes in media arts and how
successfully it retains its focus on mobile technologies in order to
steer away from the larger, all encompassing events that include
every form and category of media art practice.

+Commissioned by Rhizome.org+

Report from ARS@ARCO
Madrid, Spain
Feb 8-9, 2006
by Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah_at_coin-operated.com)

During a temperate February in Madrid, the 25th
annual ARCO Art fair descended on the Spanish
Capital with close to 180,000 visitors, including
museum and art centre directors, gallery owners,
and representatives of international
institutions. The work of over 2,000 artists was
included in the event. From artwork in booths at
the convention center to those scattered in
galleries around the city, as well as many
speaking engagements, the fair was a massive
homage to the art industry as both a global
business venture and a cultural phenomenon. This
year's specially-invited country was Austria,
which brought along a wide array of digital art
projects curated by the Ars Electronica center in
Linz. Accompanying this exhibition was a
symposium on the theme of the "Future of Media
Arts" with artists from Austria and other invited
international visitors, curators, and theorists.

Located north west of downtown Madrid, the Conde
Duque complex housed the "Digital Transit" show
featuring interactive projects in an exhibition
curated by the Ars Electronica Center. Included
in the show were some projects from the
interactive art canon, such as Camille
Utterback's "Text Rain" and Christa Sommerer and
Laurent Mignonneau's "Life Species II." Other
projects in the show included John Gerrard's
"Watchful Portrait," two 3D portraits whose gazes
follow the sun or moon through each day and
night, and in the bio-art domain was
DNA-Consult's "GFPixel DH Portrait," a painting of
4000 Petri-dishes filled with genetically
transformed bacteria that produce green light.
Also in the show was Christian Moller's "Cheese,"
a video installation of six young actresses
attempting to hold a "smile" for over an hour
while video tracking measures the "sincerity" of
their smiles. An alarm sounded if their
"happiness" fell below a certain level. Most of
the projects in the exhibition had strong visual
components, including Norbert Pfaffenbichler,
Michael Aschauer and Lotte Schreiber's "24!," a
spatial audio-visual installation consisting of
24 pedestals in a grid formation with a
projection of a black pixel on the surface of
each. The pixel's movement is based on a simple
mathematical structure giving it 24 possible
movements to cover all corners of the square,
thus creating a cascade of sounds during these
movements. Examining public data sets was
Ubermorgen.com's "Vote Auction," a website that
offered US citizens a chance to sell their
presidential vote to online bidders during the
2000 elections which resulted in several states
issuing temporary restraining orders for "illegal
vote trading."

Across the plaza from the Digital Transit show
was the "Condition PostMedia" show curated by
Elisabeth Fiedler y Christa Steinle. This
exhibition featured projects attempting to bridge
boundaries between preconceived notions of media
art and more traditional art forms. A highlight
of this exhibition was the "Shockbot Corejulio,"
by Austrian artists Emanuel Andel and Christian
Guetzer, which consisted of a computer that ran a
program instructing it to "shock" itself by
lowering a metal instrument on top of its exposed
video card. The result was garbled video output
that attested to the frailties of modern
technology and its obedience to succumb to its
own demise. This project also recently won an
award at the Transmediale 2005 festival in Berlin.

North of the city, the Ars@ARCO symposium got
underway at the ARCO fair. The intent of the
panelists was to give their vision of where Media
Art will be in the next five to ten years.
Gerfried Stocker, director of Ars Electronica and
organizer of the panels and exhibitions began the
day by stating that the term "media art" is
problematic because it harbors too many
definitions such as "cyber art," "digital art,"
"virtual art," "software art," "net.art," or
"interactive art." The main focus seemed to be
that digital art had moved away from the gallery
as the only way of seeing the work and was now
more integrated in arenas such as the Internet
and other "happenings" in public spaces. Heidi
Grundmann opened the panels with a presentation
of her work in "Radio art."

Focusing on media art in an international
context, the second panel featured artists,
curators, and facilitators representing work from
Africa, Asia, South America, and India. Jose
Carlos Mareitegui, from Peru, spoke on how
technology enables the "de-materialization" of
information that has created a new artistic space
for artists who can update their work on a
continuous basis. Geetha Narayanan, director of
the Srishti School for Art and Technology in
Bangalore, India spoke about how new media art
from post-materialistic societies will be
different than those from developing countries by
shifting from "consumption" to "quality of life"
oriented approaches. Elaine Ng, director of Art
Asia Pacific Magazine, spoke on how Japan is not
reflective of the greater art scene in Asia and
how Korea and Taiwan are beginning to follow the
technological lead of Japan. Focusing on the
African continent, Marcus Neustatter, curator and
artist in the "Trinity Session" of Johannesburg,
South Africa, spoke about how future media
artists are a mixture of everything from
entrepreneurs, to musicians, to filmmakers and
how the distinction between media artists and
those trained technically is decreasing.

The third panel featured artists and art
historians working in various media arts fields.
I spoke about my work in deconstructing network
relationships and how the future of media arts
relates to open systems and reconfigurable
rule-sets that change dynamically based on user
interaction. Beijing-based game artist Feng Meng
Bo spoke about his work in alternative gaming
interfaces and his project "Q3," in which he
digitally inserted himself carrying a camcorder
into the Quake 3 gaming environment. Also on the
panel was Dr.Katja Kwastek, an assistant
professor of Art History at the University of
Munich, who spoke about media arts from an
historical perspective. Derrick De Kerkove,
director of the Marshall McLuhan Program in
Culture and Technology, at the University of
Toronto, wrapped up the session saying that "More
and more the consumer has the capacity to modify,
shift, and obtain ownership of art," and that the
"Art" is the act of this manipulation itself,
where rules are broken by consumers. In the
larger sense, most, if not all, interactive media
art has rules associated with it and the future
will see the audience redefine and break those
rules through their interaction. The resulting
system will then be integrated back into the work.

As the ARS@ARCO event wound down, it was obvious
that the future of media arts remains a difficult
subject to clearly articulate. From commercial
and private research centers to art labs
releasing projects for the public domain, to the
independent artist working in their studio, the
creators of this type of art propagate from so
many different outlets and outlooks. With trends
in the blog-o-sphere pointing at DIY aesthetics
and "amateurs" creating inventive hacks to
existing consumer electronics products, the idea
of what "art" consists of, in this field,
constantly needs redefinition. The artists
involved in the symposium came to the conclusion
that media art is not only about using a medium
to express oneself, it is also about questioning
the very circumstances, time, place, and most
importantly, method and culture in which they are
working.

I think we should rename Net Art News:

"PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART"

That would definitely get the point across
jbc

SimpleTEXT: Oct 26 @ NYU

* Below is information about the next SimpleTEXT
peformance on October 26 @ NYU*

Please forward to those who might be interested in attending!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SimpleTEXT
*a cell phone enabled interactive performance* by Family Filter
URL: http://www.simpletext.info

When:
Wednesday, October 26, 2005 (8 pm)
Bring your Cell phone and Wireless Laptop!

Where:
New York University (NYU), NYC, USA
Kimmel Center for University Life
in the Beverly and Arthur Shorin Performance Studio
8th floor, 60 Washington Square south
Corner of 4th St and LaGuardia Place (on Washington Square Park)

Location: http://www.nyu.edu/kimmel.center/
Map Link:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q`+Washington+Square+South,+new+york,+ny&spn=0.006488,0.016328&iwloc=A&hl=en

THIS EVENT IS FREE TO ALL

More info on the Handheld Event: http://www.osa.nyu.edu/programboard/

About SimpleTEXT:
SimpleTEXT is a collaborative audio/visual public performance that
relies on audience participation through input from mobile devices
such as phones, PDAs or laptops. SimpleTEXT focuses on dynamic input
from participants as essential to the overall output. The performance
creates a dialogue between participants who submit messages which
control the audiovisual output of the installation. These messages
are first parsed according to a code that dictates how the music is
created, and then rhythmically drive a speech synthesizer and a
picture synthesizer in order to create a compelling, collaborative
audiovisual performance.

SimpleTEXT focuses on mobile devices and the web as a bridge between
networked interfaces and public space. As mobile devices become more
prolific, they also become separated by increased emphasis on
individual use. The SimpleTEXT project looks beyond the screen and
isolated usage of mobile devices to encourage collaborative use of
input devices to both drive the visuals and audio output, inform each
participant of each other's interaction, and allows people to
actively participate in the performance while it happens.Our purpose
with the performance is to create the possibility of large-scale
interaction through anonymous collaboration, with immediate audio and
visual feedback. SimpleTEXT encourages users to respond to one
another's ideas and build upon the unexpected chains of ideas that
may develop from their input..

Support/Sponsors:
SimpleTEXT is created by Family Filter, a collaboration between Jonah
Brucker-Cohen, Tim Redfern, and Duncan Murphy. It was originally
funded by a commission from Low-Fi, a new media arts organization
based in London, UK and has been performed in 5+ countries worldwide.
This event is sponsored by NYU's Program Board and the "Handheld"
show.

URLS:
About SimpleTEXT: http://www.simpletext.info
Low-Fi http://www.low-fi.org.uk/

Jonah Brucker-Cohen - http://www.coin-operated.com
Tim Redfern - http://www.eclectronics.org

Report from SIGGRAPH 2005
Los Angeles, CA
July 31-Aug 4, 2005
by Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah_at_coin-operated.com)

In the heat of the LA summer, SIGGRAPH 2005 opened its doors to
50,000+ computer graphics technologists, animators, musicians,
artists, geeks, curators, and digital media professionals. This
year's Art gallery and emerging tech sections featured hundreds of
projects that aimed to showcase the "future" of computer graphics and
interaction. Since I was active in this year's conference, I didn't
get a chance to visit every presentation or try every demo, but here
is a report from the projects and talks that I saw.

This year's main event was the keynote address by acclaimed filmmaker
and special effects innovator, George Lucas. Widely considered as the
"father of digital cinema", Lucas proclaimed himself as a storyteller
before anything else. In order to realize the worlds he envisioned he
turned to computers as an enabling technology. He calmly stated that
he was "not a computer person" and had "no idea what SIGGRAPH people
do." He referenced Akira Kurosawa as a filmmaker who triumphs in
creating an illusion that fantasy worlds exist and proclaimed the
secret to this as "immaculate reality." Lucas's humble moment was
when he admitted to the audience, "I don't know how you do this
stuff, but it allows me to tell a story so I'm happy you're doing it."

On the ground floor of the convention center was the SIGGRAPH Art
Gallery: "Threading Time", which featured a wide range of interactive
and other digital artworks from artists around the world. On the wall
in a red frame was Boredom Research's "Ornamental Bug Garden" a
small, animated screen-based ecosystem that reacted as visitors
approached. Also interactive was Camille Utterback's "Untitled 5:
External Measures Series", a collage of painterly shapes and images
that animated according to visitors movements tracked from overhead.
On the opposite was John Gerrard's "Watchful Portrait", a 3D portrait
that followed the sun's ascent and descent. On the other side of the
wall Gerrard's "Saddening Portrait" was another 3D figure who's face
gradually saddened over a 100-year period. Perry Hoberman's "Art
Under Contract" consisted of a large metal case on the wall with a
small, motor controlled shutter door. After each visitor clicked the
"agree" button of a simple contract, the door would open exposing the
art, but then suddenly shut after the viewing time was over. This
project was a good example of a piece of media art controlling its
viewing audience.

In the "Emerging Technologies" section, projects ranged from new
types of interactive displays to tactile control mechanisms for
interacting with the screen to more artistic uses of technology. The
highlight of the show was Japanese artist Toshio Iwai's (in
collaboration with Yamaha) "Tenori-On" a physical interface that
allows people to create musical compositions visually by pressing on
a dense array of lighted buttons. The instrument's simple, yet
elegant output was a nice reminder that the increasing complexity of
digital interfaces often clouds basic creativity. Other interesting
creative projects included "Exhale: Breath Between Bodies" a series
of networked skirts that collected the breath of the wearers and
transmitted the data to fans in corresponding skirts.

Upstairs from the keynote, art galleries, and other lecture rooms,
the Guerrilla Studio was a place where visitors to the event could
create projects from various different media. I co-ran a workshop
there with Katherine Moriwaki called "DIY Wearable Challenge",
co-hosted by the Ludica Gaming Atelier, where we invited conference
attendees to create simple wearable projects in a few hours from
basic electronics and sensors. The best creations made their way to
the cyber fashion show, hosted later on at the event. This type of
dynamic creativity was evident in other areas of the studio where
visitors could create board games, 3D prints of designs, and even
on-the spot motion capture animations.

As the conference continued, I managed to attend a few of the panels
and presentations. The ISEA 2006 meeting was an organizational
meeting and open forum for the upcoming ISEA symposium and media art
event in San Jose at the end of 2006. The panel featured curator
Steve Dietz, Cynthia Beth Rubin, Peter Anders and others involved
with the conference's organization and curation. In addition to
speaking about the ISEA event, the panel was also meant to launch "01
San Jose", a new, US based bi-annual media arts festival to take
place in San Jose. The prospect of a larger festival occurring in
northern California is nice evidence that there is still money left
in Silicon Valley.

Moving into West Hall B, the "Extreme Fashion" special session
included speakers working with fashion and technology from varied
disciplines. International Fashion Machines (IFM) founder Maggie Orth
began with a presentation about the definition of extreme fashion and
how the true fashion technology object includes input, processing and
some type of display mechanism. She gave the example of the "Voltaic
Jacket" which includes solar panels on its back to harness power to
charge portable data devices worn on the body. Orth saw the main
roadblocks to wearable technology as 1) No standards of wash ability
2.) Little commercial activity and 3.) lack of good display
materials. Professor Thad Starner of Georgia Tech spoke about his
"Free Digiter", proximity sensing device can detect simple movements
of its wearer and be mapped to control functions such as volume
levels on car and portable MP3 players. Dr. Jenny Tillotson spoke
about her "Second Skin Dress" which attempts to "create a personal
scent bubble around the wearer". This would help to prevent bad moods
and add an emotional quality to everyday experience. Elise Co of
Minty Monkey showed some of her current work including the "Lumiloop"
bracelet that illuminates based on patterns created by its wearer and
the UFOS shoes that light up according to specified movements. "Your
outfit shouldn't be the technology, this is something that could go
with the rest of your stuff" explained Co. Also on the panel was
Katherine Moriwaki who spoke about her PHD work into "Social
Fashioning" and several of her projects that monitor the environment
and attempt to create social relationships between people occupying
similar spaces.

This session ended as the "SIGGRAPH Cyber Fashion" show began. The
show, hosted by wearable tech artist and enthusiast, Isa Gordon of
Psymbiote, featured a collection of wearables that resembled
everything from a post-Tron utopia to a trip to the Sharper Image.
Every model on the floor had a piece of electroluminescent glow wire
as standard garb. Some of the highlights included Luisa Paraguai
Donati's "Vestis: Affective Bodies" a full body suit with tubes
surrounding the wearer that expanded and contracted as personal body
space and "comfort zone" was infringed upon. Similarly, Simona Brusa
Pasque's "Beauty and the Beast" is a pair of plexiglass shoes that
include a stun gun embedded in the toe of one, and an alarm system in
the other activated by wearer stamping their feet. Overall there was
an interesting mix of clothing that reacted to outside stimuli and
those that protected its wearer.

As SIGGRPH 2005 came to a close, the conference seemed to be stuck in
a continual challenge between how to smoothly integrate the corporate
graphics world into the fringe artistic spectrum. This was evident
with the chaotic scene at the Cyber Fashion show and the low level of
artistic input into the Electronic Theater. The panels seemed more
dense with artistic input this year, but the separation between
disciplines seemed more evident as crossover participation waned.
Perhaps if the new ZeroOne conference in San Jose is successful it
will draw the artistic spectrum away from SIGGRAPH and let it regain
focus back onto the graphics industry. I guess time will have to be
the instigator in that debate.

--- Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah_at_coin-operated.com)