Analogue Pixel Displays

The German architect and urban artist Aram Bartholl presented some of his projects at the Ars Electronica Brucknerhaus. Both deal in a nice way with the simplicity/complexity topic.

Random Screen is a flickering pixel display that works completely without electricity. 25 Beer cans and 25 tea lights are put together in a certain way to create the turning light-sources.

Papierpixel follows a similar approach, but in this case the analogue display can actually be used to show letters, numbers or little graphics – everything that fits on a 8×8 pixel matrix. There is an electric light that illuminates the display from the back and a mechanism similar to a hand organ that shows the light only to certain pixels.

filed under: ars electronica  installation  pixelart

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Tracking People, tracking Urban Space

While I was visiting this year’s Ars Electronica, there has been a very interesting panel at the Sky Media Loft. Among others (like Andrew Shoben from Greyworld and Horst Hörtner from Futurelab) Carlo Ratti, representing MIT’s senseable city lab, talked about a project that has been presented at the 10th International Architecture Biennial in Venice: Realtime Rome (pdf).

Basically it is about visualizing the „breath of the city“ in real time by tracking people’s position, cell-phone usage and the public transportation system of Rome. The data to do so comes from Telecom Italy. In the presentation he showed data-recordings of certain events, like a Madonna concert, or the soccer-match between France and Italy. To see the flow of people in the city and the ability to measure and analyze it in real time was quite impressive.

I can imagine that there is a lot of potential for all urban planners, politicians and commercial surveyors in this approach. But I am quite sure that this also drafts an image of a big surveillance technology, that can be used for unwanted purposes. Ratti admitted that this kind of data tracking could be „somehow dangerous for people’s privacy“, but he said that this threat depends on the location of filters that avoid being tracked.

If you’d ask me I am more pessimistic about this and I would bet that the average cell phone user won’t have or make use of such a choice. While I don’t share the rather grime perspective concerning technology that the Frankfurt-School introduced last century, I do think that a little bit more consciousness among “Media Artists”/Researchers would be great.

filed under: ars electronica  privacy  urbanity

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paint and animate

the installation drawn by zachary lieberman uses both analogue and digital techniques to create an intuitive experience:

drawn takes us back to one of the most simple and ancient expressions of creativity: painting.
in this case, the analog process is connected to a real time digital animation system. figures drawn with pen and ink seem to take on a life of their own and interact with the hands of its creators.

filed under: ars electronica  software

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'drawn'

the installation drawn by zachary lieberman at ars electronica 2006.

filed under: ars electronica  me  video

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'maschine-mensch'

interview i did with tobias zucali about the installation ‘maschine-mensch’ at ars electronica 2006.

filed under: ars electronica  interview  me  video

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humans, controlled by machines

the installation ‘maschine-mensch’ by christopher rhomberg and tobias zucali is located on the central plaza near linz’ art school. It has won a honorary mention on the ‘next idea’ category of last years prix ars.

the installation focuses the relationship between humans and technology: the machine (an assembly line and a computer) transports coloured cubes and forces the human to remove cubes of a certain colour by stimulating its muscles with electric shocks. This makes the human slave of the machine which controls its private movements.

This simple concept of removing a cube from the moving line is quite complex to realize since the human body is not as easy to dominate as mechanical machines. this contrast fits exactly into the concept of this years ars electronica: ‘simplicity – the art of complexity.

Additionally i did an interview with tobias zucali that includes some takes of the ‘machine’.

filed under: ars electronica  interview  me  video

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ars electronica 2006

today i arrived at the ‘lovely town’ linz in upper austria. the reason is ars electronica 2006 – the media arts festival which fascinated me last year when i went there with sebastian.

But this time I have more ambitions and the next three days I’ll try to see a lot and write and videoblog about it. So please check back soon!

filed under: ars electronica  festival  me

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kakerlaken-mobile-story

letztes jahr war ich zum ersten mal – zusammen mit sebastian – auf der ars electronica in linz und ziemlich geflasht von allem. jetzt hat mein momentaner lieblingsblog ‘we make money not art’ ein mini-interview mit dem entwickler eines kakerlaken-gesteuerten fahrzeuges durchgeführt und erstaunlicherweise die selbe frage wie wir damals gestellt – ‘warum eigentlich kakerlaken?’

uns hat er damals gesagt, dass einige japaner schon so ähnliche tiergesteuerten fahrzeuge gebaut hätten und dass er kakerlaken ‘irgendwie’ cool fände. wir dachten uns: aha, man muss also nicht immer den medienkunsttheoretischen background mitbringen um auf der ars electronica zu landen; einfach sachen weiterentwickeln, die andere schon gemacht haben, reicht mitunter aus…

im interview hat er dann aber etwas anderes – dem medium eher entsprechendes – gesagt:

“Everyone has some kind of understanding of roaches. Each one has a history, a reaction, comes with an opinion about roaches. So i was meaning to develop something funny about this past. Another reason why i got interested in roaches is that they are often used in connection with biomimetic robotics, for their networking capacities, to guide autonomous vehicles, etc. I wanted to put these abstractions of the cockroaches into hardware, to invert the biomimetic concept.”

filed under: ars electronica  media art

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