The piece (by Daniel Franke & Christopher Warnow) is inspired by VR-sculptures, though technically and conceptionally transcending the helmet-like “90ies data-glasses”. The basic thought is to re-organise the relationship between “the viewer and the viewed” whose traditional functions are expanded technologically; the starting point however remains set in “real space”.
A portable screen is used to visualise the soundsculpture; a camera attached to the screen collects information of the space surrounding it from markers distributed on adjacent surfaces.
The screen becomes a transmitter superimposing a digital layer -the sculpture onto “real space” (the unmanipulated space that greets the naked eye). The process allows the viewer to abandon the passive position of the “merely on-looking” consumer; he is enabled to visually and acoustically intervene with the sculpture, to model and module it. His changing positions and movements affect the visualisations on the screen, rendering an “extended reality” accessible. The sculpture generated is individually linked to each observer and thus singular.

http://vimeo.com/7893992
http://www.daniel-franke.com
http://www.brian-steen.com/blog/

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

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

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 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

Artist Rob Matthews turned Wikipedia into a physical object. A very tall book, composed by 5000 pages, fully printed with Wikipedia Featured Articles. “Reproducing Wikipedia in a dysfunctional physical form helps to question its use as an internet resource”, he writes in his website.

http://www.rob-matthews.com

Oh why so serious?, a computer keyboard transformed into a symbolic language cemetery, is an artwork by Paul Chan. It is part of Alternumerics, a project that “explores the relationship between language and
interactivity by transforming the simple computer font into an art form that explores the fissure between what we write and we what mean. By replacing individual letters and numbers (known as alphanumerics) with textual and graphic fragments that signify what is typed in radically different ways, Alternumerics transforms any computer connected to a standard printer into an interactive artmaking installation.”

http://www.nationalphilistine.com/alternumerics

http://www.emailerosion.org

L’installazione Scrollbars di Jan Robert Leegte prende spunto dalle barre di scorrimento che caratterizzano le finestre di dialogo dei sistemi operativi più comuni. La forma delle barre viene proiettata su vere strutture scultoree che così “materializzano” un elemento generalmente solo grafico-simbolico. Trasferendo una componente del paesaggio virtuale del computer nello spazio tridimensionale di una galleria. Il lavoro di Leegte è una riflessione sul punto limite dove la mente comincia a confondere la realtà con l’illusione, con l’intenzione di riprodurre questa sensazione di spaesamento nel pubblico che osserva le sue sculture. La ricerca dell’artista olandese sui componenti grafici dei browser e dei software (barre, bottoni, finestre) ha avuto inizio nel 1997 e si À concretizzata in numerose installazioni, oltre che in progetti fruibili on line. Jan Robert Leegte sarà ospite presso il Medialounge di Huddersfield il prossimo 22 aprile.

www.leegte.org
www.druh.co.uk/medialounge
www.mcnetwork.co.uk/creative.html