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I wrote about this at length here:
  "Re: Do artifacts (even money) have politics? (German WWII example with Hans Posse)
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/62929d07d2c68be5
but this goes to show the unexpected creative sparks that can fly from these sorts of efforts.

From there:
"""
So, yesterday, I looked at probably thousands of thumbnails, just flipping
through page after page of the uncategorized ones for over an hour,
occasionally looking at enlarged ones. I saw smiling faces and people proud
of their accomplishments in agriculture, construction, sports, child-rearing
and so on. My parents are both from the Netherlands (Holland), but I
undoubtedly have ancestors from Germany at some point given my last name,
and I learned German in school as it was the closest thing offered to Dutch,
so I could guess at some of the captions for the few I looked at.
I kept seeing faces here or there which reminded me of relatives. My wife
agreed this one looked a lot like me: :-)
"Dr. Hans Posse, 1910"
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2003-0709-500,_Dr._Hans_Posse.jpg
"Scherl Bilderdienst Dr. Hans Posse, der neue Direktor der Dresdener
Gemäldegalerie. 1910. ... Scherl picture service Dr. Hans Posse, the new
director of the Dresdener picture gallery. 1910." ...
But here is a picture of him standing next to Hitler I just found this moment by coincidence through
Google as I tried to look up his bio:
      "Posse (links [left]) mit Hitler"
      http://residence.aec.at/rax/kun_pol/UND/BIOS/posse.html
Thought-provoking stuff to see someone who looks a lot like you standing
next to Hitler... Especially if you *also* have relatives who perished in
concentration camps... ...
As I flipped through those pictures, and knowing a little about history, I
realized that WWII could not have happened without the manufacturing
competence of the German people; they needed their tanks and submarines and
synthetic fuel from coal plans to work well. They also needed effective
logistics for their military plans, and so they needed intellectual
competence too. But, the Germans would not have invaded other countries
without some less positive world views too -- both a sense of superiority
and a sense, from World War One, of previous unfair treatment. (Echoes of
Iraq for the USA?) It's been said that intelligence is knowing how to do
things, wisdom is knowing what is worth doing, and virtue is actually doing
it. So, the Germans in WWII and the times leading up to it then had
intelligence and a sort of hard-working virtue, but not a lot of good wisdom. ...
If the Germans had not been individually and collectively competent at
industrial arts, WWII would not have happened. But if they had not had gone
beyond pride into arrogance (thinking collectively they had a right to
others land from some innate superiority), then it would not have happened
either. Anyway, that's a lesson for US Americans to reflect on too, with all
too many parallels to those times in some ways. ...
"""

What if your smart house remembered important dates like birthdays and sent cards and balloons, baked special cakes and chilled the champagne on the right days? Would you feel good if you received a card generated by your lover's house? If your otherwise always forgetful lover started remembering your birthday would you become suspicious? Would it be possible that you would break up with your lover based on the forgetting or the remembering to program their smart house to send a birthday card?

If it turned out that you would get 25% discount on the price of your home if instead of paintings, you had to place advertisements on the wall, would you do it? How about if the advertisements were controlled by your smart house and changed depending on what you were doing during the day? In what ways do you consider a T.V. to be different from a painting? What if you could get 75% discount? If your house had the license to make McDonald hamburgers how many times a week would you have them?

Can a house built with modern computer technology still be expected to work ten years from now? Do you currently have any ten-year-old computers in your house? Do you expect your children to live in your house? Your children's children? Your children's children's children? Will your smart house still be smart then?

I tried it out at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. It didn't work that well. You had to press the brush pretty hard against the object, the camera wasn't oriented correctly (probably from repeated misuse) and out of focus. I expected more from it but usage was rather tedious and not very intuitive.

I work at the Ars Electronica Center and I can confirm that it's not really news, the I/O brush having been exposed there for a rather long time.

Like most exhibits in the AEC, the I/O brush is not meant to be useful in the praxis, but rather to show new ways of interaction that new technologies offer - like 'moonies', a project where you can chase butterflies projected on a screen of vapour, or 'scrapple', a kind of reversal of virtual reality (which is basically a music sampler, only you create music not by editing the track on the screen, but by putting real objects of various shapes on a grid projected on a table). And lots of others, which are along the same lines - 'conspiratio', 'music box' etc. See for yourself on http://www.aec.at/en/festival2005/programm/allproj ects.asp

It seems like especially kids love the I/O brush, resulting in high amounts of tear and wear on the hardware.

That thing was featured in the Austrian Ars Electronica Festival from 2004.

More information about the Brush from this website

There's actually an OGL wrapper that does exactly this, i've played with it a bit but i didn't have even any red-blue glasses with me so it was kinda moot, its got linux support also. worth checking out

its called VRiser
http://futurelab.aec.at/vrizer/

Speaking of hamster projects, check this one out:

Hamster project shows a symbiotic exchange of hoarded energy in aiming to establish a symbiosis between a population of hamsters and a group of vehicles with intelligent steering units. It is a documentation about the development of the project. There are photographs and a few streaming Real videos. The installation was part of the "Cyberarts 1999"-exhibition in the "OK- Museum of Contemporary Art" during the "Ars Electronica 1999/ Life Science"-Festival in Linz/Austria (September 4-18). /. rejected my submission. :P

hi,

this is slightly off-topic, in that it doesn't answer the question directly, but recently, working on a multiple machine installation art project

http://www.aec.at/sap_web/de/index.htm

we discovered KVM over cat 5 as a solution to working remotely. The machines could stay in the server room and we could be anywhere in the building. it's about $1000 bucks, but it was crazy worth it. It is essentially a KVM box on either end connected by cat5 in the middle.

- zach

Darn, I meant the AEC center, which
is part of the AEC concept :-)

But there is already a museum of the future , the Ars Electronica Center ! It's in Linz, Austria. :)

And here's what's left for the next CAVE version: force feedback! When someone shoots a rocket at you, you'll feel like you're blowing up.

Well, a charge attached to the ceiling should do it - if you die in the game, it detonates and buries you in all the exhibits from the upper floors plus the concrete to go along with them...

Problem solved.

(Of course, the AEC's rubble right next to the Danube might look a bit strange, but it'll hardly look stranger than the Lentos building on the other side...)

np: Plaid - Crumax Rins (Spokes)

http://www.aec.at/en/futurelab/projects_sub.asp?iP rojectID=2904

hehe... =)

Unfortunately the Ars Electronica site is rather complex :/ For those who weren't able to find out (it's a lot of clicking), the Prix Ars Electronica, which is awarded in six different categories, is worth 5.000 Euros. Winners this year are:

• Net Vision: Creative Commons
• Interactive Art: Listening Post (This one is really cool when you're standing in front of it IRL)
• Computer Animation: Chris Landreth (CAN)
• Digital Musics: Thomas Koener (GER)
• Digital Communities: Wikipedia
• u19 freestyle computing: GPS::Tron

Many of the installations sent in for the Prix are exhibited in the OK museum in Linz as well as the Ars Electronica Center.

Unfortunately the Ars Electronica site is rather complex :/ For those who weren't able to find out (it's a lot of clicking), the Prix Ars Electronica, which is awarded in six different categories, is worth 5.000 Euros. Winners this year are:

• Net Vision: Creative Commons
• Interactive Art: Listening Post (This one is really cool when you're standing in front of it IRL)
• Computer Animation: Chris Landreth (CAN)
• Digital Musics: Thomas Koener (GER)
• Digital Communities: Wikipedia
• u19 freestyle computing: GPS::Tron

Many of the installations sent in for the Prix are exhibited in the OK museum in Linz as well as the Ars Electronica Center.

Unfortunately the Ars Electronica site is rather complex :/ For those who weren't able to find out (it's a lot of clicking), the Prix Ars Electronica, which is awarded in six different categories, is worth 5.000 Euros. Winners this year are:

• Net Vision: Creative Commons
• Interactive Art: Listening Post (This one is really cool when you're standing in front of it IRL)
• Computer Animation: Chris Landreth (CAN)
• Digital Musics: Thomas Koener (GER)
• Digital Communities: Wikipedia
• u19 freestyle computing: GPS::Tron

Many of the installations sent in for the Prix are exhibited in the OK museum in Linz as well as the Ars Electronica Center.

Unfortunately the Ars Electronica site is rather complex :/ For those who weren't able to find out (it's a lot of clicking), the Prix Ars Electronica, which is awarded in six different categories, is worth 5.000 Euros. Winners this year are:

• Net Vision: Creative Commons
• Interactive Art: Listening Post (This one is really cool when you're standing in front of it IRL)
• Computer Animation: Chris Landreth (CAN)
• Digital Musics: Thomas Koener (GER)
• Digital Communities: Wikipedia
• u19 freestyle computing: GPS::Tron

Many of the installations sent in for the Prix are exhibited in the OK museum in Linz as well as the Ars Electronica Center.

Unfortunately the Ars Electronica site is rather complex :/ For those who weren't able to find out (it's a lot of clicking), the Prix Ars Electronica, which is awarded in six different categories, is worth 5.000 Euros. Winners this year are:

• Net Vision: Creative Commons
• Interactive Art: Listening Post (This one is really cool when you're standing in front of it IRL)
• Computer Animation: Chris Landreth (CAN)
• Digital Musics: Thomas Koener (GER)
• Digital Communities: Wikipedia
• u19 freestyle computing: GPS::Tron

Many of the installations sent in for the Prix are exhibited in the OK museum in Linz as well as the Ars Electronica Center.

Unfortunately the Ars Electronica site is rather complex :/ For those who weren't able to find out (it's a lot of clicking), the Prix Ars Electronica, which is awarded in six different categories, is worth 5.000 Euros. Winners this year are:

• Net Vision: Creative Commons
• Interactive Art: Listening Post (This one is really cool when you're standing in front of it IRL)
• Computer Animation: Chris Landreth (CAN)
• Digital Musics: Thomas Koener (GER)
• Digital Communities: Wikipedia
• u19 freestyle computing: GPS::Tron

Many of the installations sent in for the Prix are exhibited in the OK museum in Linz as well as the Ars Electronica Center.

Yeah, the plant growing stuff is pretty cool. I live in Linz, Austria, and have been to Ars Electronica Center at least 10 times since they opened it. The plant growing installation was one of the first installations there, established in 1996, and ran until August 2004. Their CAVE was also the first one in the world that was publicly accessible. It's so cool, with your 3D shutter glasses on, standing in a 3x3x3 m cube with 3D projections on the walls in front of you and left and right of you and on the ground, and you're playing Quake or Unreal Tournament 2003! No joke, they ported these games to their CAVE, and since I know one of their programmers, they let me play these games once. It was just awesome, and I'm sure every /. reader will envy me. ;-)

May enjoy Prix Ars Eletronica - The international CyberArts competition

Also,has anyone ever used a Synthagram monitor? The adverts make them look awesome, and it's only $500 more than this one.

1. Why, oh why, is their watermark not "placed" into the virtual image... in the virtual image it is very blurry :-\ 2. How do they deal with the mouse cursor? I.e. on what plane does it move around, and how does it interact with the screen? In particular can you still use it to aim? Or does it appear to point to the wrong place? Still... way cool.

The Ars Electronica Center in Linz has a CAVE installation. I had the chance to use it on a guided tour. Graphic quality was not too great, esp. when compared with todays FPS, but the experience was really cool!

I'd say the main areas of use for a CAVE system are design and construction, for example cars or houses. Anything that needs to been seen with the spatial component but is too expensive to build as a prototype. Just imagine building a house and then having to tear it down again because in the computer room you couldn't place the surround speakers correctly...

The Ars Electronica Center in Linz has a CAVE installation. I had the chance to use it on a guided tour. Graphic quality was not too great, esp. when compared with todays FPS, but the experience was really cool!

I'd say the main areas of use for a CAVE system are design and construction, for example cars or houses. Anything that needs to been seen with the spatial component but is too expensive to build as a prototype. Just imagine building a house and then having to tear it down again because in the computer room you couldn't place the surround speakers correctly...

Yesterday I submitted A Plan For A Wireless Park in Portland. Portland is re-designing its Waterfront Park.

They liked it! I got an immediate response from the people in charge who said they'd CC the wireless ideas to everyone in the department and include it in their newsletter.

I like the idea of interactive, engaging and site-specific applications. The Dialtone Symphony (.ram) is wholly produced through the choreographed ringing of people's own cell phones. Here are some other ideas:

• Talking maniquins
• Interactive Sculpture
• Triggered light/sound sequencers
• City Clouds
• 360 Live Video at public events
• Wi-Fi in Stadiums
• Traffic Maps
• Visitor Information and Narrated Neighborhood Tours
• Videoconference to linked Kiosks around the state or in nearby hotels.
• Real-time Location Information for event managers with devices like Vocera's communicator badge
• Jogging kiosks with comparitive times, personal history and bio monitor
• E-mail/picture kiosks
• RF-ID wrist bands for kids ($2.99) or "find friends" (free)
• Weather, news and park info
• Recreation Bulletin Board
• Live bird cams
• Events triggered by cell calls
• Jam sessions
• Card tournaments
• Yahoo games

The Public Review Draft of Portland's Waterfront Park Master Plan is available on-line.

The Morrison Bridge, in the center of Waterfront Park, has phone line access. An Orinoco 2500 ($1000) could drive Wi-Fi repeaters on the north end (near Saturday Market) and the south end, (near the Alexis Hotel), providing blanket coverage. The repeaters could be camouflaged as animals or Oregon historic figures. Waterfront Park also has a direct shot to the Council Crest tower where Winfield Wireless has a wireless ISP.

Rent out Segway Scooters with built-in Pocket PCs. Your GPS position would trigger Oregon Historical Society's Narrated Neighborhood Tours, Portland Visitor's Association's Self-Guided Tours, Portland Metro Maps or Lewis and Clark Maps. Wireless cameras could be helpful for the police, too.

Jacksonville Florida's free wireless hot spots provide tourist information as well as internet access. Multi-lingual kiosks, incorporating webtablets with language translation are available now. Text to speech can be output in a variety of languages. And it sounds good. Human voice samples are now incorporated into text to speech. Choose a language, respond by voice.

Don't give up! Put some wireless ideas together and send it to your Parks Department.

Dreams DO come true!

Interactive, engaging and site-specific applications are a click away. The Dialtone Symphony (.ram) is wholly produced through the choreographed ringing of people's own cell phones. Here are some other ideas:

• Talking maniquins
• Interactive Sculpture
• Triggered light/sound sequencers
• City Clouds
• 360 Live Video at public events
• Wi-Fi in Stadiums
• Traffic Maps
• Visitor Information and Narrated Neighborhood Tours
• Videoconference to linked Kiosks around the state or in nearby hotels.
• Real-time Location Information for event managers with devices like Vocera's communicator badge
• Jogging kiosks with comparitive times, personal history and bio monitor
• E-mail/picture kiosks
• RF-ID wrist bands for kids ($2.99) or "find friends" (free)
• Weather, news and park info
• Recreation Bulletin Board
• Live bird cams
• Events triggered by cell calls
• Jam sessions
• Card tournaments
• Yahoo games

The Public Review Draft of Portland's Waterfront Park Master Plan is available on-line.

The Morrison Bridge, in the center of Waterfront Park, has phone line access. An Orinoco 2500 ($1000) could drive Wi-Fi repeaters on the north end (near Saturday Market) and the south end, (near the Alexis Hotel), providing blanket coverage. The repeaters could be camouflaged as animals or Oregon historic figures. Waterfront Park also has a direct shot to the Council Crest tower where Winfield Wireless has a wireless ISP.

Rent out Segway Scooters with built-in Pocket PCs. Your GPS position would trigger Oregon Historical Society's Narrated Neighborhood Tours, Portland Visitor's Association's Self-Guided Tours, Portland Metro Maps or Lewis and Clark Maps. Wireless cameras could be helpful for the police, too.

Jacksonville Florida's free wireless hot spots provide tourist information as well as internet access. Multi-lingual kiosks, incorporating webtablets with language translation are available now. Text to speech can be output in a variety of languages. And it sounds good. Human voice samples are now incorporated into text to speech. Choose a language, respond by voice.

Parks have not caught up with the wireless society. Let's make it happen!

This wasnt even close to the coolest thing at SIGGRAPH! Takeo Igarashi's work on predictive interfacing making easier 2d and 3d drawing tools was cooler. Digiplasty , a kind of 3d exquisite corpse as shown by Stewart and Makai was cooler. (For that matter the Studio, manned by Makai, Stewart, Scott and many others, where you could create 2d and 3d art and print 2d and 3d was AWESOME - you could work in there for hours, vs. the few seconds of playing with a silly virtual sword.) Scotts Dodecahedron was a wonderful example of taking something abstract and virtual and making it real and usable. Isa's overview of wearable tech and cyberfashion (she took out the notes, dammit!) was refreshing, if not so new to a frequent slashdotter. (She's a burner too!) Some of the mixed reality work being done at the University of Singapore was really neat. (This is an example of some of the most exciting stuff there. Several researchers showed some great work being done in augmented reality, and combining that with some of the reasonable priced wearable and wirelessable computing, we can see some real headway being made. One researcher even composites a virtual face back onto a fellow participant in the augemented reality environment, masking the HMD, even going so far as to track the eyes and simulate the gaze.) The results of last years meditation chamber research installation was an interesting and possibly VERY useful application of VR technology. W. Bradford Paley's work on applying alternative interfaces to explore other media was fascinating, where you can use this LARGE java tool named TextArc to examine graphically over 400 literary works. The Web3D Consortium's release of the final working draft of X3D (with tools) could end up being much more important than the newest video card from ATI. Dietmar Offenhuber's work on non-isotropic spaces at wegzeit was an interesting approach to mapping and representing real places. Zachary Simpson et al's delightfully simple shadow interactivity was many times more fun than the virtual swordfight. Fabric.ch's knowscape was also exciting, both for the viewers and the presenter, as he would find additions from his European counterparts each morning when he logged on to the shared 3d space. Kenneth Huff's beautiful art using maya was just one example of some wonderful digital work being done. Lastly, Michael J. Lyons soon-to-be-published research on the aesthetics of Tokyo's Kyoto Gardens was both informative and inspiring. And this is just a TINY PART of what happened there!

Really, SIGGRAPH was NOT just an exhibition floor with cheesey swag (although the little green LED lights were very nice) and some cool new toys. It was presentation after presentation by resesarchers, some barely able to speak engrish, but all excited about their work and open to collaboration. It was hours and hours of animation, some (Like Allain Escalle's "Le Conte du monde flottant") were so stunning as to make you forget where animation ended and life began. Disney's work on replacing one actors face with another, retaining ALL facial expression, was downright scary. And the Spiderman gag footage, his spidey-suit oddly replaced with a fully reflective silver surface, like most of the rest of SIGGRAPH'S less entertaining presentations, were surely an indication of things to come.
Take the time to go to SIGGRAPH2002 and look around. If you find something interesting, write the author. This is where the new VR and AR comes from - not ATI!

Some hints to get you started: First start to read "The Wire", which is not "Wired" (go to The Wire). It's a magazine that knows what happens from month to month. Subscribe, get the subscribers-only CDs they send you, find out what you like, and explore. Don't listen to people who tell you that Trance is the big one these days, or that their old heroes have defined your listening future.

Buy samplers with different artists on it. One that fits the topic is Electronic 01. Try also the Click'n'Cuts compilation series.

Go to festivals like Sonar, Ars Electronica and Mutek, or at least find out what's hot there.

Follow as many leads as you can, be open-minded.

Check out special interest web shops and sites like Brainwashed, .

What you will find is probably that European, especially German, and Japanese artists are pretty much top of the line these days, but that this keeps changing. My most used line at Sonar this year was "We can see that, at least they're German".

Oh yeah, and the recent "Wired" article about electronic music was about five years out of date.

Noise, all.

Of course, the argument is centuries out of date. The examples are decades old. Let's make it more relevant! Art and Technology has been around for a long, long time. Incidentally Art Technology Group (ATG), which among other things created Dynamo which is now a huge application server product, is from the MIT Media Lab.

For example,
1965: Sony introduces the first monochrome half-inch tape Video Rover portapak-used almost immediately by New York video artist Nam June Paik.

And the contemporary media art scene is not about using photoshop. Even if you just count using digital technology, this has been around for years and it is vibrant. One well-known artist (Ingo Gunther) has used satellite transponders in his work, and one project (Kanal X) involved setting up a pirate TV station in Leipzig the transmitter of which was a sculpture. Ars Electronica has been going on for 20 years. DEAF has been held since 1986. ZKM has been open since '97 though many of its exhibitors have been active for far longer. The Getty has a collection of art and technology works from 1966 to 1993. Japan has one of the best media art infrastructures (hurt by the economy to be sure) which draw artists from Japan and overseas to places like the ICC, the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), and other spaces. Often the artists are in fact visiting professors who teach technology students (especially programmers) in universities.

Not only have artists always sought to make use of the latest media, but media artists often have to develop the cutting edge themselves in order to get their message across. This is true now that we use supercomputers like the Silicon Graphics Reality Engine, as it was when bromides and daguerrotypes took advantage of advances in industrial chemistry. Art drives science and vice-versa. I don't think you can point to any time when art and technology were not closely related.

While I don't usually have so much trouble with Mr. Katz' work, this time I'd have to say that sweeping generalizations without any enlightening examples must be hurtful to slashdotters' potential enjoyment and participation in some of the most exciting art in the world. Where's the beef? Many cutting edge artists work with very talented programmers and need their help badly. In particular, people who have a flair for networking, opengl, and hardware setup/troubleshooting (oh don't forget circuitry and wireless!) are really needed. Linux is extremely relevant now that machines have gotten so powerful, and the preemptive kernel sounds great for art! Artists who are interested in technology might like to check out MAX which is a great MIDI music and device controller.

It would be useful to point this out with substantial explanation of what this means for this site's users. Art gives context and meaning to budding researchers. And talented artists often come up with the new concepts that drive innovation. A public artwork can drive personal study and honing of one's technological skills like nothing else.

I think the reason it seems new now is that we've got so darn many computers now but little funding for artists (in the U.S.). There are also some very talented young artists who are taking advantage of the latest technology. More about them on Slashdot might be fun! How about a new icon and a media art section? Here are some neat online exhibits at the NYC MOMA.

Following up, here's some more related info.

Although not what I was originally talking about, the "Net Sound" paragraph described in it is much like it. http://www.aec.at/prix/1997/E97gnW-sensorium.html

You're right about the inertia though - you have to watch your speed carefully, or else...

gl03.-

If you like big monitors, you should go for the VideoDesk project of Myron Krueger. It was a desk with a projector and a camera above. It could recognize gestures. So you dragged a virtual (or a real object) and dropped it on another, all with your two 5-fingered hands.

An ideal version could OCR any page you put on the desk. You cut and paste text pointing at it and dragging it to a blank real paper page.

I find it fascinating.

It's hard to find good links (Google) about Myron Krueger's Videodesk, but I think it very interesting.

In the early 90s, Krueger had a prototype of an actual desk (as in wooden) that was watched by a videocamera and projected upon.

The computer detected things like paper sheets and your fingers on the desk and projected virtual (he called it "artificial reality") things over it. You could see virtual text on a real sheet and move text by forming a box with your fingers and moving it to the new location. Of course, to input a document into the system you would just put it on the desk.

I'd like to see something like that. It would be cool (and more ergonomic than staring to a 14" TV).
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I am surprised that nobody links this to the pioneer work of Myron Krueger in artificial reality. He was using video recognisation (word?) as an input in the 80s.
__