The “DIY, plant!” research project (by Sander Veenhof) aims to design a multitouchscreen interface for plants so they can control their supply of water and light themselves by pressing touchscreen-button controls with their leaves.

“For a while how, there has been a rise in the amount of bio-art projects connecting pieces of living nature to mechanical or computerized environments. It is a popular approach in times when digitally there aren’t any limits or boundaries anymore. Everything is possible, and nothing really excites. The involvement of insects, animals or plants into art projects provides new difficulties to solve, thereby re-challenging artists. And their audiences. With spectators becoming largely indifferent to faster or bigger or newer technologies, the touchscreen-plant arouses the attention of an audience because of its contrast to our digitized contemporary world and its ultimate slowness. An upcoming button press could be a cliffhanger of days.

But the “DIY, plant!” project is more than an application of bio-art for the sake of the spectacle. Beyond the visually intriguing form is a bio-art piece focused on achieving truly functional dynamics between plant and technology. Acknowledging the extreme complexity of true scientific biological adaptations of the involved plant, and foremostly, respecting the wisdom that nature does possess, the approach taken is not aimed at changing nature and forcing the needs of a touchscreen onto a plant, but the plant is taken as the point of reference, and the interface is being reshaped and refined according to the plants’ needs.”

read more here: http://sndrv.nl/DIYplant/

Bitquid, by Jeroen Holthuis, is a complex system of about 800 meters of transparent hoses through which digital information will flow in the form of ‘analogue’ fluids. In a really darknened and quiet surrounding this information becomes visible and alive because of the use of an fluorescent component in the fluid. With blacklights this fluid lightens up in a green/yellow color. Everytime one of the 32 valves open you hear clicking sound and at that moment one bit becomes an collection of atoms. In the fluid the digital information is still present, though it will be transformed by our analogue environment leaving a stain on the information.

http://www.jeroenholthuis.nl

In Full Throttle, by Artie Vierkant, a six-screen video installation and continuing series, action and suspense scenes from major Hollywood films are recorded streaming over the Internet at very slow connection speeds.
Each film is a major part of our collective pop culture consciousness but is made available publicly only through means which are morally and institutionally spurned by physical-object-oriented capitalism.
As a result, this type of content is nomadic, always existing somewhere without restriction but perpetually needing a new haven. Here, through the process of recording these over a throttled Internet connection, they become abstracted and formalized versions of their original images, dispelling or intensifying the tension created for the scene by the filmmaker and redirecting the aesthetic focus to the medium of display.

[Installation shown at Extra Extra in Philadelphia for Artie Vierkant & Constant Dullaart, August 6 – 29 2010]

http://www.artievierkant.com
http://thestate.tumblr.com/post/943316142/artievierkant

The MoshPit Amp, by Fur, is an automata that converts headbanging movements into metal music. Through style and intensity of your head banging, you are the conductor of a virtual metal band consisting of four instruments: vocals, bass, drums and guitar. you can control the volume as well as the pattern of each instrument to create engaging musical arrangements. If you mosh really hard you can trigger a guitar solo for the ultimate rock experience. Your performance in front of the amp will additionally be supportet by a lightshow with smoke, flash and pyrotechnics.

http://www.fursr.com

UTV, by Rob Duarte, is the transposition of our Internet identities from Twitter feeds to an over-the-air TV broadcast.
UTV is part of an exhibition entitled “Ill Communication”, which examines the role of technology in our understandings of community and communication. The format of the exhibition is such that each of the participating artists presents a work that spans two halves of the gallery space – essentially, an “interface” and an “output”.

http://www.robduarte.com/utv.html

Cell Phone Disco, by Ursula Lavrenčič and  Auke Touwslager is a surface that visualizes the electromagnetic field of an active mobile phone. Several thousand lights illuminate when you make or receive a phone call in the vicinity of the installation. Cell Phone Disco makes an invisible property of the environment perceptible to our senses. It reveals the communicating body of the mobile phone.

http://www.cellphonedisco.org/

In January 2010 the Cologne based design agencies Grosse8 and Lichtfront presented their cross-media installation “Augmented Sculpture” for the first time to a public audience.
The core of the installation is a 2,5m tall wooden sculpture that builds the screen for a 360° projection with virtual content. The projection constantly augments the sculptures outside within a 2:32 min. long, dramaturgically structured edit of video content to a track by musician Jon Hopkins. The sculpture becomes a mirror of changing realities. As a result, a kind of real virtuality arises to confront virtual reality.

http://www.lichtfront.com

The Wifi Camera is a camera that takes “pictures” of spaces illuminated by wifi in much the same way that a traditional camera takes pictures of spaces illuminated by visible light. The camera reveals the electromagnetic space of our devices and the shadows that we create within such spaces, in particular our wifi networks which are increasingly found in our daily lives, in coffee shops, offices and homes throughout cities of the developed world.
With the camera we can take real time “photos” of wifi. These show how our physical structures are illuminated by this particular electromagnetic phenomenon and we are even able to see the shadows that our bodies cast within such “hertzian” spaces.
Wifi Camera is an ongoing research project initiated by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai Fischer with Usman Haque.

http://wificamera.propositions.org.uk

Zimoun focuses on creating installations and sound sculptures, usually in connection with mechanical features, movement and physically generated sounds. His creations are graceful, mechanically harmonized works of poetic playfulness – simple yet complex, the result of repetitions with slight irregularities caused by routine and coincidence.
Zimoun uses simple components. Through mutual interference and interaction these generate complex sound structures and movements. He often works with a great number of identical mechanical industrial elements, which he then manipulates and prepares for his creations. His interest lies in the artistic research of resonance, space, movement, simplicity, materials and generative systems. The result is an artificially generated yet seemingly organic behaviour of these installations and sound sculptures.

http://www.zimoun.ch

Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) is a project by Gebhard Sengmüller, in collaboration with Jakob Edlbacher, Johannes Obermayr, Gerhard Proksch-Weilguni, Ludwig Ertl and Andreas Konecky.

“Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) is a new television format that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television (SSTV), an image transmission system used by Ham Radio amateurs. VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain television system and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system: Just as a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create various hues, VSSTV utilizes a plotter-like machine to fill the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT colors, turning them into pixels on the VSSTV “screen”. Large television images with a frame rate of one per day are the result, images that take the idea of slow scan to the extreme.”

http://www.gebseng.com/02_vsstv

They Watch, by Workspace Unlimited, is an immersive art installation with virtual characters literally watching visitors. Several duplicates of the virtual characters – one man, one woman, and both portraits of the artists – surround and interact with visitors, who are tracked as they move about the physical space, and even projected into the virtual space. Years of research and development with game-technology have resulted in a 360° audio-visual environment, exploiting a 15-meter-wide panoramic screen and a 32-channel sound system. The subtle collaboration of the real and virtual agents and environments conflate to engender a hybrid space where the observer becomes the observed.

http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2009/fall/workspace/
http://www.workspace-unlimited.org

Amphibious Architecture is a floating installation in New York waterways that glows and blinks to provide an interface between life above water and life below. It was developed by the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Environmental Health Clinic at New York University, and it was commissioned for Toward the Sentient City by the Architectural League of New York.
Amphibious Architecture submerges ubiquitous computing into the water—the substance that makes up 90% of the Earth’s inhabitable volume and envelops New York City but remains under-explored and under-engaged. Two networks of floating interactive tubes, installed at sites in the East River and the Bronx River, house a range of sensors below water and an array of lights above water. The sensors monitor water quality, presence of fish, and human interest in the river ecosystem. The lights respond to the sensors and create feedback loops between humans, fish, and their shared environment. An SMS interface allows citizens to text-message the fish, to receive real-time information about the river, and to contribute to a display of collective interest in the environment.

http://www.thelivingnewyork.com/amphibiousarchitecture.htm

Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled object designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space. The object, which is shaped as an oversized 3-dimensional computer cursor (pointer), was placed on a square in Figueres, Catalunya during the cultural festival Ingràvid. Here, people could touch it, move it around and sit on it as an alternative to the benches.
Despite being removed from its normal screen based environment, the cursor was still in touch with the digital world. Via an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted its geographic coordinates to a website. At the website, the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps thereby documenting the cursor’s movements in the physical world and making it possible for participants to see how they collectively helped move the object around. During the festival participants could also upload photos of the cursor at the website. The photos were automatically placed on the map by matching the photos’ digital time stamp with the GPS coordinates.

http://urbancursor.com/

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

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

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/

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

The installation bios [bible] consists of an industrial robot, which writes down the bible on rolls of paper. The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision. Like a monk in the scriptorium it creates step by step the text. Starting with the old testament and the books of Moses, bios [bible] produces within seven month continuously the whole book. All 66 books of the bible are written on rolls and then retained and presented in the library of the installation.
bios [bible] is focussing on the questions of faith and technical progress. The installation correlates two cultural systems which are fundamental for societies today – religion and scientific rationalism. In this contexts scripture has all times an elementary function, as holy scripture or as formal writing of knowledge.
The installation received an Honorary Mention from Prix Ars Electronica 2009, in the Hybrid Art category and it’s currently installed in Linz (Cyberarts exhibition, OK Centrum. 3-09-09 / 4-10-09).

http://www.robotlab.de

Public Avatar, by Martin Bricelj, is a project documenting the relationship between virtual reality and our perceptions of self and society. This installation will allow a global audience to explore real-world locations remotely, and to interact with objects and people in those locations through real-time control of a human test subject. As digital and physical worlds collide, the boundaries between self and other, reality and simulation are constantly challenged and redefined.
Public Avatar will be available online on special events during the year. The dates and times will be announced online. During these events, users will be able to login at www.public-avatar.com. Each logged in user will be placed in a queue and wait for his turn, when he/ she will be able to give simple instructions (such as ‘Turn’+’Left’, ‘SAY’+’hello’ etc) to the avatar for a limited timed period. Users will be able to see and hear what Public Avatar sees and hears via live video stream.

Upcoming performance: 12.- 13. September 2009 MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Paraflows Festival- Saturday 8PM

http://www.public-avatar.com
http://www.martinbricelj.com