Google is the main hub of an emerging data-driven world. It is a beast with many faces, impossible to grasp all at once and growing new limbs every day. It is also the name of many contradictions: a centralized traffic control in the (supposedly) horizontal and distributed Internet; a supporter of data openness and accessibility that relies on secret algorithms; and a ranking technology that is based on finding out popularity while it simultaneously determines it. “Google Variations” is a series of approximations of some of these diverse aspects of Google. It is a collection of formal and conceptual micro-experiments, a fly-eyed view of an entity so pervasive that it tends to be invisible while it radically changes our lives. “Google Variations” employs multiple strategies to de-naturalize our relationship with the brand, the corporation and the technology.
“Google Variations“, by Leonardo Solaas, is a 2010 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

http://turbulence.org/Works/google

“A raster manipulation unit or ‘wobbulator’ is a prepared television which permits a wide variety of treatments to be performed on video images; this is accomplished by the addition of extra yokes to a conventional black and white receiver and by the application of signals derived from audio or function generators on the yokes.
The unit is a receiver modified for monitor capability; all of the distortions can thus be performed either on broadcast signals or, when the unit is used as a monitor, on images from a live or prerecorded source. Although the image manipulations cannot be recorded directly, they can be recorded by using an optical interface. The patterns displayed on the unit are rescanned; a camera is pointed directly at the picture tube surface and scans the display. The video signal from this rescan camera is then input to a videotape recorder for immediate recording or to a processing system for further image treatment. The notion of prepared television has been investigated by a number of video artists and engineers; this particular set of modifications was popularized by Nam June Paik.”

[read more here - found here]

Designer Jon Stam has transformed a View-Master by replacing its film slides with a tiny digital screen to create an imaginary museum with continually updated content:

“There is no doubt that the memory function of the Museum has been superseded by the digital archive. Today, networked technology allows us to access information anywhere and at anytime, but a meaningful exhibition format for this information is far from commonplace. In this Imaginary Museum I try incorporate the new possibilities of the network while still retaining an intimate viewing experience and reassuring effect on the hardcopy.”

http://www.curiositycabinet.info

Fracture is an iPhone application that allows you to paint cubist style portraits using your own photos. Aesthetics employed by abstract masters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque have been studied and recreated in this fun creative app. Simply use your camera or search your image gallery for 1 or more photos, adjust the settings to your specification and you are ready to start painting

jamesalliban.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/fracture-cubist-iphone-app/

[via creative applications]

Tardigotchi is an artwork featuring two pets: a living organism and an alife avatar. These two disparate beings find themselves the unlikely denizens of a portable computing enclosure. The main body for this enclosure is a brass sphere, housing the alife avatar in an LED screen and the tardigrade within a prepared slide. A tardigrade is a common microorganism measuring half a millimeter in length. The alife avatar is a caricature of this tardigrade, its behaviour is partially autonomous, but it also reflects a considerable amount of expression directly from the tardigrade’s activities (like eating).

http://www.tardigotchi.com

The Bird Watcher is the latest work by software artist André Goncalves:
“Several accounts where created on Twitter, one for each of the birds listed below. A Java application, developed in processing, is used to update the twitter status for each of the birds according to each species particular behaviour (ex. owls can only be heard at night, roosters sing at sunrise…). The application also gets xml weather reports from the Yahoo Weather Report which also diferently affects the species behaviour.This application is running 24/7 from a dedicated computer installed at my studio. A Master account called The_BirdWatcher follows all birds tweets.”

http://www.andregoncalves.info/installations/thebirdwatcher/

Every day the same dream, by Molleindustria, is a slightly existential riff on the theme of alienation and refusal of labor. The idea was to charge the cyclic nature of most video games with some kind of meaning (i.e. the “play again” is not a game over). Yes, there is an end state, you can “beat” the game.

http://www.molleindustria.org

Stephanie Syjuco fabricated a selection of “sculptures” designed by anonymous users of Google SketchUp, a free 3-D modeling program: “Many–but not all–of the digital designs are created by non-artists who are just trying to figure out the software (”Something I made while I was bored”), but some are very earnestly made (”best sculpture ever!”) and all are lovely in their own way. Using their designs, I became the “unsolicited” fabricator of their work. The final sculptures are cleanly made from simple materials such as cardboard, plastic, Coroplast (a stiff, corrugated plastic material), paper, and tape.”

http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com

Evan Roth is distribuiting free stickers to anyone interested in taking part in his project “Available online for free“. He writes: “Instructions are simple…. email your mailing address to stickers[at]evan-roth.com When the stickers arrive in the mail put them up in a location that you find appropriate, take a picture and email me back the photo to the same email address. All photos will be added to a loop on display in the gallery for the length of the exhibition.”
The show, called “One Every Day“, will be on view from November 5 through December 19, 2009 at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York. The exhibition foregrounds the relationship of printed ephemera to cultural and artistic production, and marks the curatorial debut for Printeresting.org.

http://blog.ni9e.com
http://evan-roth.com
http://www.printeresting.org

Where is your art? is a kinetic sound installation by András Juhász Márton, Melinda Matúz, Gergely Kovács and Barbara Sterk. Once a visitor enters the room hacked toy robots start to chat about art, reading the most recent lines of twitter community. Each tweet that contains the word “art” will be translated with a text to speech software. So the toy robots can talk in tweets about art.

http://pressmeprocess.blogspot.com/
http://kitchenbudapest.hu/en/node/745

“This performance is going to be about ‘Continuous Partial Awareness‘ — a phrase that was first described to me as meaning ‘you know, like, when you have 3 IM windows open, 2 email inboxs dinging away, are txting 5 different people, and also have 5 tabs open on your browser, each with updated content.’ It is about paying attention to everything all the time, but not really concentrating on anything. It is different from multitasking, because with multitasking, one actually is expected to concentrate on tasks at some point, even if in small doses.
Continuous Partial Awareness is the eroded degenerate modern version of multitasking. I still don’t know how this performance will take shape, it might be a lecture, a music show, a broadcast, a chess game, etc, etc, but what I do know is that the feeling of ‘non-concentration’ that has seeped into today’s life through our flat screen displays and wifi will be its starting point.”

(Cory Arcangel)

Flying False Colors (The Sixth Day) is the new installation by Carlo Zanni, currently on view at Chelsea Art Museum. Presented by The Project Room for New Media at CAM from October 1 to October 31, this multimedia project loosely refers to the 1975 espionage film Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sydney Pollack, which was one of the first films to suggest a link between covert US military operations and the control of oil production in the Middle East.
Like many of Zanni’s past projects, Flying False Colors relies on the fluctuations of live digital information to affect the outcome of his artwork. Flying False Colors consists of a flag set in a wind-generating base that Zanni has programmed to blow at particular speeds and in certain directions based on online data streams that correlate to the number of oil barrels requested by a particular country and the current weather in that country’s capital. The flag is a replica of the universal Ecology Flag that was designed in 1969 and depicts the Greek symbol of Theta, which derives from thanatos, meaning death. However, Zanni’s flag is fabricated with a pigment that will flake off over time as it is blown, leaving a pure white flag by the end of the exhibition.

Flying False Colors (The Sixth Day) will travel to Marselleria, Milan in December 2009.

http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org/exhibits/2009/zanni/index.html
http://www.zanni.org

My Lover the Server is an exhibition by the digital art duo Champagne Valentine (Anita Fontaine & Geoff Lillemon). The show explores the phenomenon of Internet romance which has exploded online in the last 5 years. Drawing on real digital communications with web stalkers, strangers and actual lovers and re-interpreting them for the Concrete gallery space (Amsterdam), the exhibition will feature a series of 4-6 digital flat-screens inside CNC-milled custom frames. Against a backdrop of dedicated wallpaper designed by the artists, the frames will feature looping animations and text-based works running continuously off memory cards, as well as 1-2 pieces that will be connected online to the outside world, inviting the public to remotely interact with the artwork. My Lover the Server transforms the artist’s canvas into a new form of cultural expression and offers an increasingly powerful interaction between viewer and artist.

http://www.champagnevalentine.com
http://www.concrete.nl
http://mylovertheserver.com/

Remembrancer, by Alberto Gaitán, is a unique, net-aware sculpture that observes and records data collected over the Internet and sensors within the gallery. Over the first six weeks of the exhibition, (currently on view at Taubam Museum of Art) for 6 hours every day, three networked, robotic painters will deposit dollops of paint on three panels, creating unique paintings in the process. The amount of paint placed at a given moment will be controlled by a computer program that interprets the incoming data. Along with the daily development of these paintings, a field of sound will be similarly generated in response to the same data. The completed panels–displaying an accretion of overlapping monochrome fields of color–will be exhibited over the final two weeks of the exhibition.

http://selforganizingsystem.org

“This piece is ultimately about loss,” explains Gaitán. “Nobody has the capacity for total information awareness so we relinquish big chunks of our understanding to black boxes of knowledge whose provenance we don’t fully understand. We make important decisions and base stacks of assumptions on these. Our memories are rife with inaccuracies, placed there by similar simplification processes that are part of how our minds work. Forgetting or ignoring becomes a significant aspect of remembering.”

The Artificial Moon is a large-scale installation by Beijing based artist Wang Yuyang. The giant, suspended moon is made of thousands of low-energy bulbs. First created ad hoc few years ago on an industrial complex that now totally disappeared, this installation is now travelling worldwide.

http://www.shearts.org
http://arthubasia.org
http://www.bjartlab.com
http://www.strozzina.org/

Action Painting (Masculine Expressionism), by Jeremy Rotsztain, is a series of “action paintings” in the style of Jackson Pollock, composed using data from action movies as material. Thi work uses popular action sequences from cinema – when Jason Bourne drives backwards through the streets of Paris in a nail-biting police chase, when the underdog Rocky Balboa battles Apollo Creed, when a helicopter chases a high speed train through a tunnel in Mission Impossible. It takes these sequences from the adrenalin-filled culture of action cinema and playfully transplants them into the highbrow cannon of modernist painting. Action Painting runs with custom authored software (written in C++ with openFrameworks) that uses computer vision to analyze movies for motion.

http://www.mantissa.ca/projects/actionpainting.php

The Augmented Sculpture Project, by Pablo Valbuena, focuses on the temporary quality of space, investigating space-time not only as a three dimensional environment, but as space in transformation.
For this purpose two layers are produced that explore different aspects of the space-time reality. On the one hand the physical layer, which controls the real space and shapes the volumetric base that serves as support for the next level. The second level is a virtual projected layer that allows controlling the transformation and sequentiality of space-time.
The blending of both levels gives the impression of physical geometry suitable of being transformed. The orverlapping produces a three-dimensional space augmented by a transformable layer suitable to be controlled, resulting in the capacity through the installation of altering multiple dimensions of space-time. These ideas come to life in an abstract and geometric envelope, enhanced with synesthetic audio elements and establishing a dialogue with the observer.

http://www.pablovalbuena.com

AFK Sculpture Park is an exhibition organized in Berlin by Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas from art group Aids-3D (September 18th-October 18th).

“Bleary-eyed and disoriented, seven brave net-artists escape from the hypnotizing glow of their computer monitors, venturing forth boldly into the Material Realm. For this exhibition, curators Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas (Aids-3D), have decided to open the gardens of Atelierhof Kreuzberg to these cyber-refugees, so that they may fill them with their sculptural creations. To complete this odyssey across the mind/body divide, the sculpture park will be recorded in glorious ultra-accurate 3D point cloud data with state-of-the-art laser surveying equipment, so that the works remain eternally, online.”

http://www.afksculpturepark.com
http://ww.aids-3d.com
http://www.vvork.com/?page_id=17100

Latent Figure Protocol, by Paul Vanouse, is a media installation that uses DNA samples to create emergent representational images. The installation includes a live science experiment, the result of which is videotaped and repeated for the duration of the gallery exhibit. Employing a reactive gel and electrical current, Latent Figure Protocol produces images that relate directly to the DNA samples used. Each performance lasts approximately one hour, during which time audience members see the image slowly emerge.

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~pv28/electart.html

Donkijote.org, the winning entry of the open competition Digital_LAB 2009 (curated by Roberta Bosco and Stefano Caldana), is an analogue/digital project that will gather data using altogether innovative techniques during four journeys taken by the artist Cristian Bettini a.k.a. P.ankh and the donkey Minuto through different areas of Asturias.The donkey will operate as a living interface equipped with digital hardware such as a GPS, a mobile Internet connection, a computer, a camera and a video camera with which it will create a memory of Asturias, producing and collecting information, re-mapping the territory and geo-categorising knowledge. The rules of the journey are determined by the natural rhythm of the donkey’s pace, giving everything that enters into our perception a measure of human attention.
The people that cross their paths, as well as Internet users, will participate in the project by providing advice and suggestions, contributing to the evolution of the project and the enrichment of the audiovisual and anthropological patrimony of Asturias. The travellers will return to LABoral after each journey where they will carry out activities using the material they have collected. In this way, the exhibition, located in the gallery Platform 1 of LABoral, will evolve and grow throughout the length of the journey and the advancement of its digital representation, connecting virtuality to reality in an indissoluble way.

http://www.donkijote.org
http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org