Happy Things is another “speed project” by Theo Watson and Kyle McDonald. The software captures positive human reactions to the Internet, analyzing your face through the computer’s webcam when you are browsing. Every time you smile, it posts your screenshot online, along with the web page that you found amusing.

http://kylemcdonald.net/happythings

114.psd Type, by Emilio Gomariz:

“114.psd Type is a simple typography which I designed once again thanks to Mac OS X (maybe it reminds to Folder Type, also created with Mac OS X). The idea for this type came in when seeing that this operative system memorizes the position of any file or window when you minimize and maximize it. So I created 114 photoshop files (I only used six colors, I played with all possibilites in RGB with the numbers 0 and 255, excepted 0,0,0 and 255,255,255). Then I placed and ordered the files in the right position before minimizing them on the dock. And finally I captured the screen maximizing every file.”

Face to Facebook is the latest project by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, the third work in a series that began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir. These works share a lot in terms of both methodologies and strategies. They all use custom programmed software  in order to exploit (not without fun) three of the biggest online corporations (Google, Amazon and Facebook), exploiting conceptual hacks that generate unexpected holes in their well oiled marketing and economic system. Face to Facebook is currently on view as an installation at Transmediale Festival in Berlin.

This is how the authors explain this new, provocative net artwork:

“Stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software and then posting them on a custom-made dating website, sorted by their facial expression characteristics.
In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook’s exclusive property we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures).Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of  thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering  expressions. After a few weeks we had to face the evidence. All that people wanted was to attract new people, have more  relationships, to express and receive love through their digital traits. But they were trapped by Facebook  owning their data and restricting their actions with primitive privacy rules. They wanted more than just their restricted circles of “friends” and they wanted it quickly and easily.
Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules. So we established a new website (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data.
Now they are there, in full effect, free to keep in touch with a whole world of men and women and anything in between. And we accomplished our mission: the final piece of the free relationships interface is now running.”

http://face-to-facebook.net
http://lovely-faces.com
http://www.transmediale.de

Drowning NYC, the new Recombinant Fiction piece by Paolo Cirio.
This is an attempt to weave a fictional story into the daily reality of the residents of Lower East Side Waterfront in Manhattan. They found themselves surrounded by an over-layering of mediated narrative information. Drowning NYC is a cross-media story; an experimental pilot that is told by actors and through narrative devices that are staged over the Internet and in the public spaces of a few chosen New York City neighborhoods. The genre and the art type are theorized by the artist as being “Recombinant Fiction”, a political and pervasive form of cross-media fiction.
This project proposes new pedagogical instruments, innovative activist strategies, elaborate media experiments, cutting-edge forms of theatre and cinema, questions about reality perception/construction and, above all, a new form of conceptual art.

http://www.drowning-nyc.net

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

Ryan Trecartin just launched his new project, named Riverthe.net, a collaboration with Tumblr founder David Karp (programming by Nick Hasty and Sergio Pastor). Trecartin explains the concept in this interview:

“In River The Net (riverthe.net), [first conceived as Project Ten back in April] you can upload a ten second or less clip, anonymously, and you have the option of giving that video three tags. When you go to the website, there’s no interface, you’re immediately confronted with a video playing full-screen. It picks a tag randomly, and follows that tag. Basically, it creates a situation where there’s a movie made by everyone and the plot arc is the life of a tag. One of the things we kept talking about was wanting to see the interface move inside the content, rather than surrounding the content. “

Sorry I Havn’t Posted is the latest blog project by Cory Arcangel:

“I’m please to present on “the internet” a new blog I started (actually its been up for half a year, I just haven’t written bout it yet),…..It’s called “Sorry I Haven’t Posted” and is a blog which re-posts posts of people apologizing for not posting to their blogs…aka “Inspiring Apologies From Today’s World Wide Web”. I sift through about 50 posts a day on my reader so I do tend to find some really interesting stuff…”

http://sorry.coryarcangel.com
http://www.coryarcangel.com/2010/08/sorry-i-havnt-posted

Monkeyfy, by Michael Schieben, is a public webservice for face-detection based image manipulation. A small bookmarklet allows you to select an image on every website to have it modified by monkeyfy.com. The image manipulation utility detects faces in the images and replaces the them with monkeys. The manipulated images (and a link to the original source) are saved on the twitpic gallery.

http://monkeyfy.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/

Masterpiece 2.0 is a social media art project by Baschz and Selfcontrolfreak and the first ever unique painting made with a Web 2.0 approach. In the summer and fall of 2009 a multilayered canvas and animation was created which could be influenced and followed by website visitors online 24 hours a day.
Six weeks long and through actions like Introduce Object, Shirt ‘Em and Cameo Appearance website visitors could interact with leading character Selfcontrolfreak. Each sent in gesture added a new animated interaction as they were painted layer-by-layer into the growing animating canvas by Baschz. Every new layer was photographed seperately and together with the other frames created the stop motion animating canvas, leaving the end canvas consisting of well over 100 different painted layers.

http://masterpiece20.com

All Over, by Samuel Bianchini, is an online artwork based on a series of images composed of typographic characters in the manner of ASCII art, that is using the display techniques of the first computers. In this case, however, the figures and letters composing the images are dynamic and keep changing: they are generated in real time following the rise and fall of stock market indexes around the world. The originally still images change according to the volume of financial transactions, which simultaneously feed and disrupt the photographs.

http://www.dispotheque.org/allover
http://www.jeudepaume.org

The typical browsing experience is conducted through a single application window. This is indeed a useful, practical thing. Browser Pong instead exists between a collection of windows. During play the negative space between windows is transformed into a playing field—the abstracted tennis court of Pong. The idea of thinking inside or outside some “box” is of course a dead and beaten horse. Browser Pong attempts to think with the boxes. (Stewart Smith of Stewdio).

http://stewdio.org/pong

JODI’s ongoing performance project, The Folksomy Project, takes YouTube as source material, with the artists utilizing custom software to select and manipulate user-generated videos from the popular website. Armed with a virtual “juke-box” of video clips, JODI focuses on YouTube users love-hate relationship with new technologies, from iPod love ballads to laptop smashing. As with much of JODI’s work, The Folksomy Project is a study in how online systems (dis)function.

http://g33con.com/
http://eyebeam.org/projects/the-folksomy-project

Tweeting Colors, by Brian Piana, is webpage comprised of vertical color bars created by special tweets from Twitter users. Anyone can view the piece, but a Twitter user in the public timeline can add bars by following the simple directions linked to from the bottom of the page. The newest bars appear from the left. The page auto-refreshes a few times a minute, so sit back and enjoy the Color Feed.

http://www.tweetingcolors.com

Virtual data isn’t subject to decay like traditional media. Despite this, we can still lose personal data to disk failure, viruses, or accidental deletion. Unlike personal data however, data on the internet has a seemingly infinite shelf-life. Between search-engine caching, cloud-hosting, re-blogging, plagiarizing, and the way-back machine, the net collects and eternally stores vast amounts of information.
Temporary.cc, by by Zach Gage, schews this paradigm. For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.
Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.

http://www.temporary.cc

Seppukoo is the new artwork by Les Liens Invisibles. The website is designed to help people commit a symbolic, ritual suicide, killing their virtual identity. The main purpose of the project is to inspire a ludic introspection about using social networks, beginning with the most popular one: Facebook. The site also provide a memorial page on which users can write their last words. In the end, it all turns into a game, as you can score points by inviting your friends to committ a virtual suicide too.

http://www.seppukoo.com
http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org

Panoramic Dioramas are environments which do not strictly enforce orientation or perspective. Viewers can move within the space to see new things, or old things differently. This project was created by Mitch Trale — an artist living in Oakland, California. New work is currently being published twice weekly.

http://mitchtrale.com/panodios

Onlythegood.org, the automatic newspaper that serves only good news, is a new net-artwork by Antonio Riello and Donnachie, Simionato & Son. The artists, with the programmer Reinier Feijen, created a website which removes all the bad news while evolving its own emotional database. The works is now in public beta.

http://www.onlythegood.org
http://www.antonioriello.com
http://www.donnachie-simionato.com

Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. All the voices are assemble to sing “Daisy Bell” (the song that HAL is singing at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey).

http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com

I Got Your Internet Explorer Right Here is a net art project by BJ Warshaw. “An immersive, randomly generated, psychedelic animation backed by a collage of audio loops designed to lovingly fry your eyes and ears.” (Firefox reccomended!)