“Michael Jackson 4 Ways“, by Chris Howlett, is one of a series of video art works which are designed to activate an immersive space from which to critically and creatively consider how reality and simulated environments both construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of subjectivity and identity.
The video work explores these new phenomenons through Sims 3, which is a strategic life simulation video game where players construct and control their Sims in various social activities and form relationships in a manner similar to real life. Sims 3 does not have a defined final goal and its gameplay is open-ended. Michael Jackson was a person who cut across international racial and gender divisions with his music and lyrics, but whose personal life created intense contradictions between his private life and his role as a musician.
As the copies of the Michael Jackson Sims play out their animated roles in Paris Hilton’s house, the accompanying audio tracks expose the political and moral debates surrounding accusations of paedophilia. “Michael Jackson 4 Ways” questions the slippery position the viewer inhabits, to make informed, truth based decisions over these personal and moral online statements. Where does one locate one’s moral and ethical decisions based on the artists aesthetics?

http://www.chrishowlett.com.au
http://vimeo.com/user1098496

Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch, by Ben Baker-Smith, is a stream-of-conciousness representation of this overwhelming flood of media, its fractured and degraded sounds and images reflecting how little we as an audience are able to retain from this daily barrage.
Infinite Glitch is an automated system that generates an ever-changing audio/video stream from the constantly increasing mass of media files freely available on the web. Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of popular media hosting sites, torn apart, and recombined using collage and glitch techniques to create an organic, chaotic flood of sensory input.

http://infiniteglitch.com
http://bitsynthesis.com

Body Dysmorphic Disorder is a Kinect hack by Robert Hodgin. Made with Cinder and the Kinect sensor. Runs in realtime.

http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=472

White Glove Tracking, by Evan Roth:

“On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively. Please email links to your apps, video, source code, and/or screen shots to evan[at]eyebeam[dot]org. Work will be exhibited in an online gallery and depending on popularity and interest potentially in a forthcoming physical gallery exhibition as well. Huge thanks to everyone that contributed to the data collection.”

http://whiteglovetracking.com
http://evan-roth.com

Life Across Words, by Rachelle Viader Knowles, is a 24-channel synchronized video installation. A creative response to Georges Perec’s novel Life A Users Manual, an experimental, conceptual game of a book, where the narrative travels from room to room within a fictional Parisian apartment building. Life Across Words consists of 24 tv’s in the form of a crossword puzzle with 5 intersecting words, each the name of a project participant, who moves through the tv’s that spell out their name, performing an action for each letter. Where words cross, the participants perform an action together. Shot at the Elsewhere Museum in North Carolina, a ‘living museum’ and art centre based on a ethos of ‘play’ as a serious strategy for human interaction, learning and engagement with the material world.
The back end consists of 8 networked computers running quicktime and MaxMSP. Video delivery and synchronization system designed by David Ogborn. Constructed into a looped 30 minute cycle, each cycle begins and ends with images of books on shelves and the whole piece begins and ends as a library.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Dr Carmen Robertson and Stephanie Sherman. Project participants: Danna Rooth, Stephanie Sherman, Eliza Fernand, George Scheer and Dan White.

http://uregina.ca/rvk

[via gameart]

Degeneration is a video work by french artist Hugo Arcier:
“All my 3D objects are afflicted with a degenerative disease. Gripped by terror, they understand what fate awaits them. Gradually they disintegrate, face after face they lose their appearance, with a fatal outcome. In this way the 3D objects die.”

http://www.hugoarcier.com

“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]

Nonmanifold_mandible, by Ben F. Carney, investigates loss of control over human emotions. To parallel unreasonable human behaviours, control over a digital charachter’s facial expression is given to four channels of emotive audio, allowing for violent reactions and a loss of identity.

http://www.benfcarney.com

The MIDI Opera by Manuel Bürger is an homage to the MIDI file format:

“Due to its limitation composing songs with the MIDI synthesizer of my laptop was always an attraction to me. The sequencer software is simple, and cheesy melodies are clicked within a second. After clicking this link you’ll find a compilation of songs squeezed into a little story about Gérald Midi, a hard working businessman, who is caught in his dreams of a colorful, exciting life. Maybe similar dreams are shared by MIDI files themselves as well.”

http://www.manuelbuerger.com/2010/themidiopera.php

[via ilikethisart]

How will be Gloogle Earth without Earth? Over Data, the latest video work by Marco Cadioli (aka Marco Manray) is a machinima shot in Google Earth, but the images of the Earth are extinguished, annulled in a white neutral surface. Data, information and icons are the only ones that design, define and create the new landscape.

http://www.marcomanray.com

http://vimeo.com/user3345994

In the Long Run (2010) by art collective IOCOSE is a reconstruction of a possible future high profile media event. The death of pop star Madonna is described in a BBC News special edition, with a journalist and studio guest who go over the details of the fatal car accident, the statements of the VIPs and the reactions of fans around the world.
It is not a true story, but neither is it improbable. All TV networks prepare obituaries about famous people to put on air in the event of an unexpected death. The death of an international figure is not just predictable, it is actually predicted in the video files kept up to date in their archives.
In the Long Run is not a fake; it does not attempt to look realistic and it does not expect the viewer to believe in the contents or that the video actually belongs to a famous news network. But it undoubtedly says that when the event takes place, it will be reported in these terms. In reconstructing the future in the past tense, In the Long Run is a catalyst for endless narratives and interpretative developments. Likely or unlikely, inevitable or imminent, but existing in potential form, like the narration of an event that never took place.

http://www.iocose.org
http://www.reakt.org/in_the_long_run/index.html

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. “

Iterating my way into oblivion is the new project by Carlo Zanni, a Server Side generated movie where a guy is listening to a voice reading YouTube Terms of Service.
“When YouTube changes its Terms of Service, the server behind the movie gets the new text and through a text-to-speech software renders the voice over which is then imported into the filmed sequence.The movies are always different while maintaining their narrative.
This project loosely refers to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, speculating on the relationships between creative energies and corporate policies evoking the morphing of enlightened arcana into established powers.
This work follows two previous experimental movies done in the past four years for which I coined the neologism “DATA Cinema”, suggesting a new way to approach filmmaking and narrative forms at large based on the use of live Net data, to create ever changing cinematic live environments.”

www.zanni.org

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

Inside a Dead Skyscraper is the newest project by Molleindustria, a music video game for the song “The building” by Jesse Stiles.

“The game and the song are based on Jesse’s brief tenure as a videographer in the partially destroyed buildings surrounding the World Trade Center site. Ideally, it is meant to be a critical answer to the proliferation of rhythm games ‘a la Guitar Hero. These karaoke-derived products simply capitalize on already successful music, generating royalties for a dying record industry and reinforcing the mythology of the rock star as super-human that common people should identify with.
An alternative approach to the musical game form would link the independent music and independent games scenes. Indie music games could promote unknown bands to the multi-tasking, hyperactive, interaction-addicted new generations. They could enhance the listening experience while being autonomous works as the best music videos have been done in the last 30 years. ”

http://www.molleindustria.org

Originally created for the Darklight Festival’s ‘4 Day Movie’ project, Avatar Days is a portrait of four online gamers in Dublin whose daily lives contrast with their virtual identities. Advanced 3D technologies and Motion Capture animation were used to insert the players’ in-game characters in place of their real selves against the backdrop of the banal urban landscape which they inhabit.

http://vimeo.com/9157869

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

SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network), by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma and Vincent Rabaud, is a system comprised of a camera, monitor, and two computers that can be set up in public places – especially in situations where a CCTV monitor might be expected. The software consists of a custom computer vision application that tracks pedestrians and detects their characteristics, and a real-time video processing application that receives this information and uses it to generate music-video like visuals from the live camera feed. The resulting video and audio are displayed on a monitor in the public space, interrupting the standard security camera type display each time a potential rock star is detected. The idea is to humorously examine and demystify concerns about surveillance and computer systems not in terms of being watched, but in terms of how the watching is being done – and how else it might be done if other people were at the wheel..

http://deprogramming.us/sven

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

Peter Nitsch just launched his new project: ASCIImeo, a web application that renders Vimeo’s videos in different textmodes.

“The player is an evolution of earlier video experiments I was doing in Alchemy. Still using Jari Komppa’s TextFX7 engine for the glyph conversion and AS3ANSI for the rendering, this version features improved speeds and a control UI including fullscreen mode.When this project was first conceived, I had considered using the Youtube API, but after reading through their TOS that idea quickly vanished (obstructing the video is a violation). Vimeo didn’t pose the same problem, and in retrospect, it was a wiser choice considering the greater quality and style of most of their videos.”

http://www.asciimeo.com
http://www.peternitsch.net