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"Tap" Palm Art at The Whitney's Artport
technogamy writes: "Art.geeks -- check out The Whitney Museum of American Art's Artport, a 'portal to net art and digital arts, and an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects.' Note specifically Jim Buckhouse's Tap--part of Creative Time's Beaming Network, Tap's collaborative, evolving, quirky app hops on to your Palm-based device through a sleek silver beaming cube. (I freaked out when I saw one of the cubes at a local Barnes and Noble ... especially when I realized that I knew the person who made them. ;]) Here's how Tap works. Get some culture, people!"
...at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in Manhattan, yesterday. Each one has a Palm-OS device mounted inside, with the screen exposed, showing a simple animated loop. In this case, one showed the outline of a man dancing, the other showed a woman dancing.
:)
They had the rough, looped quality of an early kinematograph, or whatever those things are called (where you rotate the wheel and look through the slits to see the horse running). The softly glowing blue light in each cube was the port for beaming the artwork on to your own PDA. Cool stuff.
Of course, I saw something like this two years ago. I was working on a film set, and all the guys with Palms were beaming it to each other -- a short animation of a naked woman. Nothing like pr0n to define the bleeding edge of technology.
Break dancing on my PDA! Maybe "east-vs-west" competitions via IR between two PDAs.
My computing device could break and I wouldn't be mad.
:)
I forget their name, but the similarity just occurred to me. You have a little "being" on a digital device, that can be trained to perform tasks, and can interact with others.
They came out a few years ago in the US (maybe earlier in Japan). And they actually do more than this Tap program -- they can fight each other (certain models, anyway), grow if nurtured, and die if neglected.
Props to Tap's creator(s), but perhaps they are a little behind the curve.
The Whitney is running a biennial which is showcasing some of today's most notable artists. I was really excited to see a lot of internet installations. There are several computer terminals in the exhibition space pointed towards websites, and there are some more complicated ones with projection installations and other gizmos. I think the /. crowd would really appreciate seeing them treated as high art. I always believed it was (more in terms of literary theory though, but that's another story).
The rest of the exhibit is really nice. There is a comic book influence in several installations, and there's a whole gallery for Chris Ware of Acme Novelty Library Fame. There are some performance artists and I suggest scheduling your visit to catch them. When I went, Karin Campbell was performing "When I Close My Eyes" and it was a really surreal experience.
If you have never seen contemporary art before, this is one of the best examples of what's out there and I highly urge you to go. If you're not near Manhattan, I also suggest MOCA in Los Angeles and SFMOMA in San Francisco.
As for the geek side of art, I think artists are hackers in the same way as IT hackers. The strive to explore, research and often apply pedantic measures to get thing right. They expand their own minds and challenge the audience's mind. Sometimes they are hackers to, just watch the LED columns in the Bilbao Guggenheim. Fascinating, beautiful, cool.
And what about your home? When I was a kid, I had a poster for Tallgrass backup systems on my wall, because the leopard on it was cool. Now I'm and adult and want som art on the wall. It's not difficult. I have four artworks in a small apartment; One oil on canvas, one print, one litography and latex on clear plastic. Art is so much different things, something I'm trying to tell you here. In other terms, I have one horrendusly expensive original painting only one in existence, one framed dirt-cheap colour copy, one advanced numbered hand-crafted copy, and one anime cel. :) Art is so many things, most of them beautiful and often cool. Now go out there an nail a painting to yer wall! :)
Paper was orginally created for writing, but now it has a plethora of uses. Same would go for most other technologies. When rubber and latex were invented, few people thought an artist would use it as a medium, let alone play things of varying uses. Another manifestation of the maturation process is case modification and the new iMac. Computers started out as tools to make things like art, but now they are rapidly becoming art. The participation of computers in the process of art is changing and evolving.
there are a lot of net.artists which works are hard to find in galleries, and who themselves (more or less) call net.artists and that dot makes the difference...
:)
its work usually digs into political issues and specific issues of the media itself (net part of the net.art coin) rather then playing in the field of aesthetics and continuum of ugly and beautiful... media hacks are better thain paintings... just to start a little flamewar
links sometimes worths kilowords:
http://www.calarts.edu/~line/history.html
http://rtmark.com
http://www.irational.org
http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk
and few others in tribute to net.art: interview with the hacker... work in progress...
You'd probably be interested in BeamPro Exhibition, for the PalmOS.
It would be interesting to see a really cheap PIC-based solution, however - That would be what would bring beaming stations down from the one-off, rare item to standard usage.
Am I the only old timer around here? This Tap program for the Palm reminds me a lot of the Dancing Demon program for TRS-80, written in Basic by Leo Christopherson.
Good (?) game concepts don't die. They just reappear in the weirdest places.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/