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Crazy/Nerdy Computer Art Installations
Gernot Ziegler writes "After having read a report on the fusion of Art and Technology, I somehow ended up on Perry Hoberman's page. I don't know this guy, but I've always been fascinated by techno art, and these ones are clearly intriguing.
There is the Workaholic, a pendulum with a bar code scanner over a carpet with bar codes and an attached projector that overlays images on the carpet, or the ZOMBIAC (Zone Of Monitor-Based Inter-Amnesiac Contact) that lures the visitors into thinking that the machines react to them directly. You might also want to have a look at this weird auction (that's where I got this link from) ! :)"
DeadTech
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Users can attempt to steer the pendulum, but it will always remain somewhat unpredictable. At all times, the scanner/pendulum works as a TOOL that operates on the image below. Sometimes the pendulum acts like a kind of CHISEL or ROUTER, cutting grooves through images to expose other images hidden below. Repeated passes will widen these grooves until certain images become completely exposed and dislodged. At this point the pendulum becomes a kind of MAGNET, dragging bits of images along its path. At other times the pendulum acts as a kind of RADAR, updating the parts of the image that it swings over, or a VACUUM CLEANER, sucking up images; a distorting LENS; a BRUSH, a BROOM, and so on. These various functions are reinforced by the use of appropriate sound effects
.. even after looking at the pics, I can't decipher what the hell they're talking about.. let alone why the usual use of CAPS in the text..
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
Check out this band - it consists of old 386DX computer having a SB... :-D
The music is quite fun, as it consists of classics rendered in the adlib-style sounds and top of that the SB speech synthesizer is singing the vocals.
As can be seen in the pages, they have done many "live concerts" which could be defined also quite nice computer art installations - just the computer sitting on street, playing out its music.
--
In the old days, art copied things - but as photography came about, the necessity of that dropped away, and art began to *comment* on things.
One thing that art looooves to do is to comment on art itself. (basically one generation of art comments on the previous generation: e.g. post-modernism art being mostly comments on the modernism, etc (for the nit-pickers - i really forgot which "ism" comments on modern-ism, so if the fact is a little off, don't flame, ja?))
What it really boils down to is that for many years now, art has been very seclusive stuff - stuff commenting on previous stuff which were themselves comments on ever earlier stuff. For the non artist, besides the above as a background, one very, very important word of caution - unless you intend to keep track of what is the current subject of comment, and understand all the crap that came before that, I'd seriously recommend against spending money on the stuff. Besides very few items that eventually ends up famous for famous' sake (Mona-Lisa, for example, is viewed to be "famous because of it's fame" - that's another thing I got out of the class, btw), all you will be receiving in the end is a comment without any context to go with it, kinda like spending money for a single comment of slashdot, without knowledge of all its beowulf cluster of running jokes, previous stories with evil bits set, and you bought it just because it was moderated highly.
anyway, for decoration purposes, there are many decorating art you get at even malls these days. let me repeat: don't ever spend money on what *real* artist produces, unless you are very sure of what you are doing. (this in response to the auction site)
not to mention, most of the real art nowadays are crap anyways...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I never really understood the pricing for a lot of art, I mean I can understand why a really nice picture might be worth a couple hundred dollars -- prints cost money, mounting them costs money and the artists needs to make some money on it. I could easily see paying a couple hundred or more for a picture I really like. Some of these though are ridiculous. Like this print, it says retail price $1200!!! Besides the fact that I can't imagine anybody actually wanting to own that picture I just don't understand where that value comes from. Anybody could make a picture of a Windows XP dialog box saying something like that... it's not even an original idea! Things like that are put up on the web all the time! This one's just as bad and it's $2000.
That's ridiculous.
This is an interesting fact which I learnt the other week.
The word "Techno" actually MEANS "Art"
Therefore Technology is infact "The study of art." I was distraught when I learnt this, since I am an engineering student and despise those lowly arts students...
I am not stubborn. I am right!
Another way technology plays into poetry is Aleatory Poetry. I experimented with this a bit in this dynamic poem, revelation to pi.
by Arthur Ganson
Interesting... I don't have a disdain for the arts (art itself that is) but arts classes at universities. AKA the "Bachelor of Attendance." I fail to see the relevance of most of the drivel that exists in those classes. But I think that my greatest complaint with an arts student happened in my first year. In the first fortnight to be precise. At this time I was doing 30+ hours a week at uni, and this bloke was complaining about all of the hours he was going to be spending in class. It transpired that he was an arts student, and had to do a whole 10 hours a week. He dropped a class because he just could not take the pressure of all that work. That is probably where my disdain for the arts comes from. That was really off topic
P.S. Leonardo DaVinci, one of the greatest artists ever to have existed in the world, and one of the most intelligent and insightful, was infact a millitary engineer by profession.
I am not stubborn. I am right!
..what someone will pay.
Nothing more, nothing less. If you like good art, there are better places to look - chances are if you ask around you can find someone who paints who would be flattered if you wanted one of their pictures.
..don't panic
Everyone knows that when presented with an inexplicable piece of "art", one must immediately feign understanding, lest he be lumped with the great mass of society who can't understand either. You are, of course, better than the rest of society, yes? And if you can't "understand" art exhibitions, you might as well be an animal or a redneck or a cracker! If you don't want to be one of those, make up an explanation of why you think this artwork is deep and immensely thoughtful. And better yet, publish this opinion where others can see it, so that ye may better be recognized at parties as the guy who understood the piece of art that nobody else could appreciate!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Bah. So hate that guy, don't generalize about the people working and educating those in the field. My girlfriend is a recently-graduated Art History major, with a secondary focus in studio art, specifically sculpture. She worked HARD for her degree, at a state school, in the art department...and got a good education under professors making a pittance and working in one of the most underfunded departments in the US. (Colorado state school art depts.)
I've seen her put more hours toward a sculpture piece than I ever put toward a program in the CS curriculum at the same school, one that is reasonably well-respected. I had the same disdain, until I found that most CS students were rock-stupid slackers, and most art students were rock-stupid slackers...
You'll find lazy people everywhere. Keep that in mind.
http://www.somalounge.net/obsolotron.php
Neat idea.
- David Rokeby
- Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
- Simon Penny
Who are yours?Rand of course being an entirely unoriginal pseudo-philosopher ripped mind-body of descartes.
I think her reaction to all this would be somewhat around the reaction I got once trying to bring her up in a philosophy tute... Something like "Thats nice shayne, but Ayn Rand is not a philosopher, she was a cult leader."
Trust me, I dont think the serious world of art academics'd give a fuck what a half baked angerhead like rand would say.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
if you sail on over to lowtech.org you can see a group in the UK using redundant technology both in art and in society.
the group a2rt (www.a2rt.org) are also starting up something similar as well.
The reasoning behind using lowtech computers in art and social projects was given by James Walbank the founder of the lowtech project in this speech to an arts conference with the theme of revolution. James correctly pointed out that you can't have a revolution with a price tag of over £1000.
favourite pieces include redundant array, and the video wall that was reprised in even better fashion here at fort lux
Art is what you make it, found art is what you find and what you make it, lowtech art is finding art in skips.
sparkes
blog and junk
I remember, years ago, when I went along to the AIMIA awards with a friend, on the Gold Coast in Australia. The two of us wandered slowly around the space in white paint-protection suits (very high tech) with Powerbooks running PixelToy mounted to our chests. People could speak into the screens and see the psychedelic screen change. Fun, and hanging out in the green room with the other weirdos was a laugh.
Oh, and someone else gave me money to develop an early version of this thing identikit into what you can see today. All done with QuickTime VR object movies. Full experience from the main page at funwithstuff.com.
it's not about the karma, it's about the whuffie
The link in the parent post is a little out of date. This is the correct link, which has up-to-date concert listings and CD's.
Check out scene.org viewing tips.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Another approach to computer art, which recognizes its roots in computer culture as well as in "art" - is software art. Lots of cool stuff over at runme.org... and read_me, an entire festival devoted to software art, is coming up in a couple weeks in Helsinki..
interaccess in Toronto is an amazing gallery.
The Seemen and SRL in San Francisco will blow your ass up.
xraylab in Seattle/Chicago/New York does some great interactive work.
Norm White has been kicking art/tech ass for since before you were born.
David Rokeby's work is totally amazing too.
Beige Programming Ensemble in Chicago/St. Louis/New York can make your Atari/C64 do backflips.
and for some amazing reading... Stephen Wilsons information arts book has no comparison.
rhizome.org is a pretty good site for all things art/tech (esp. web art)
And for validation by the mainstream art world check out the whitney's artport.
Heil Sig! -Rob
I'm learning programing and System Administration on the job after getting a Masters in sculpture. They're really rather similar fields.
First, some notes for those that have an out-dated or tv-inspired understanding of the art world:
Most artists are really very down to earth. Much of what they make is not, but the people themselves are not flaky astrologer hippies. (like most hackers. vs. their television counterparts.)
Many museum and gallery directors are rather flaky. (like your boss.)
Art is largely self-referential. Artists make art knowing art history for people that know art history.
Art is a lot of problem solving - where the artist generates and solves the problem.
Art has been around for centuries and was changed radically by the camera.
When hacking is five hundred years old, it will seem a lot more like art that it does even now. Already, an experienced coder is not impressed by some newbie's new chat program (like mine) that introduces no new functionality to the genre.
But if that chat app made comments on what everyone said, maybe that would be new and interesting. If it added something to the genre of chat apps while commenting on chatting, it would be self referential, new, and interesting. And regular users all over the world would call it elitist, weird and stupid, claiming it was just designed to make them look ignorant.
Right now, programming is already looking a lot like art. New guys mock Cobol programmers the same way new art school students mock figure painters. No one is interested in my chat program for the same reasons I'm not interested in looking at paintings of mountains - I've seen it a million times before, there's nothing new here.
It takes all types to make the world go around. I'm growing bored of the elitest attitude that so many geeks sport twoards people who move towards a fine arts or a liberal arts field. Lazy and geek are not mutually exclusive just as it is possible for people who aren't in an engineering field to actually be *gasp* intelligent. Sorry for the rant. It's not directed at anyone specifically, just an overall attitude I've seen lately.