art

Would you be willing to give up your DNA data as part of an identification system? Cool design project by Jamie Thoms.

Product Designer Jamie Thoms has released a new public engagement project which invites the general public into the world of science and identity. The D.N.A Stamper, offers the public the chance to contemplate the impact of granting someone access to their biological data. The aim of his project is to challenge the public to think about how much they value their identity. Who should have access to this information. Your partner? Family? The police?

The D.N.A. Stamper simulates extracting a sample of the users D.N.A. and uses this to stamp a consent form, to verify the user’s identity and offer tissue for hypothetical testing. The owner of the sample will have to fill in the consent form expressing how much of the information in the D.N.A. the holder will be privy to.

Mr. Thoms has taken inspiration from companies such as “23andMe” which process peoples D.N.A. for a fee and films such as “GATTACA” which offer an extreme view of where we could end up if the use of the information contained in D.N.A. becomes public.  more...

Theorizing the Web 2011 featured several projected installations.  In this post, I want to highlight the Twitter visualize produced by Vicky Lai, an undergraduate at the University of Maryland. Vicky explained her project to me, saying:

The tweet cloud generator was inspired by research with the Social Media Micro-Modeling group at UMD and started as a final project for a Digital Cultures and Creativity course. Originally designed to visualize popular words in a Twitter user’s social network (of followers/following to a certain depth), the project was modified to collect tweets containing “#ttw2011” and visualize the most frequent words. Word clouds are generated by IBM’s word cloud generator, the program used on the popular Wordle site.

The visualization automatically regenerated a couple times each minute, which enabled attendees to watch different words trend over time as the conversation in the conference itself shifted. more...

Installation at TtW2011

Saturday was Theorizing the Web, the culmination of weeks, nay, months of planning, organizing, and seemingly endless design work. In addition to building the website, laying out the programs, designing collateral and getting personalized nametags completed, I added on another project to my list called Public/Private. Projected in the main atrium, it consisted of a Twitter feed styled to match the TtW branding, and an ever-changing image next to it.  This project was far more experimental than anything I’d attempted before, and like many experiments it had mixed results.

Functionally, it did exactly what I wanted it to do; it took all of the conference-related tweets with the hashtag #ttw2011 and performed a Google image search for non-common words, then displayed the first medium-sized result along with the feed. As I hoped, some of the images directly illustrated the words searched while others left us either scratching our heads or laughing.  One of the great aspects of the search function is the image cache, which has left me with a permanent record of what words were searched and all the images displayed with them. more...

PJ: First, begin by telling us the title of your installation. Then, please give brief description of what you are trying to accomplish and of the mechanics behind it.

Artist: Ned Drummond

Ned: The title of the installation is “Public/Private,” which refers to the increasingly public nature of our private data. On a daily basis we offer up intimate details of our lives to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Myspace. It’s really amazing how much we’re willing to share with strangers over the internet, and how it can wind up being profitable in some cases and damaging in others. What I want to achieve with this installation is a visual distillation of that.

The heart of the Public/Private is a website that displays a twitter feed and a set of images pulled from the content of that feed. Twitter is the perfect venue for this because of its hashtag feature which allows users to search for given topics, and anyone who knows the hashtag can participate. The code for the installation takes that data and uses Google Images to search the words in the tweets, in essence taking them completely out of context. The most important part of the search to me is the “anything goes” mentality; there’s a size filter on the image results, but otherwise it displays the first image from that set of results. Sometimes it’s humorous, other times it’s gross or offensive. For example, in the testing phase for this project, I tweeted the phrase “some of the weirder art related stuff is falling into place”. The image result for the word “falling” was an icon image of a man falling from the World Trade Center in NY on September 11. This is the sort of random association I wanted, because at the end of the day, anything you say in a public forum can be taken out of context. more...

There will be a special event the evening before Theorizing the Web at the important intersection of theory and art. Admission is open to all and is free of charge.

When? This Friday, April 8th, 6:30P
Where? Irvine Contemporary Gallery, DC, 1412 14th St NW
Why? Art plays a prominent role on this blog and also with this conference. The media-prophet Marshall McLuhan argues (see 10:58 in this video) that only the artist has the “sensory awareness” to tell us what our changing world is “made of.” While many of us are not willing to go this far, it very well might be the case that artists are uniquely prepared to give insight on this new, augmented reality that social media and other new technologies are creating. In a sense, artists sometimes precede theorists and academia. And in this spirit, Theory Meets Art literally precedes Theorizing the Web.

We begin with a brief performance by ambient musician Yoko K. Then, we will screen a feature film that we feel should be centrally important for thinkers on technology, art and society. The film is a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning documentary called We Live in Public that chronicles the story of one Josh Harris while also making important theoretical points about privacy, publicity, capitalism, identity and much more through the lens of art. For more on the film, see my review in a recent edition of Surveillance and Society. After the film, we will have a discussion on art and social media with world-renowned street artist Gaia. The night will be hosted by Dr. Martin Irvine, who is giving a talk on street art and social media on Saturday. Last, there will be a social reception at the gallery.

We are very excited to start this conference at this wonderful gallery in the heart of DC. Away from the concrete spectacle of downtown, the gallery is situated in a beautiful section of the city, a short subway ride from College Park. We encourage everyone to come to this event and begin a wonderful weekend of Theorizing the Web! more...

Jan Robert Leegte‘s scrollbars in physical space are another example of augmented reality art. More info and images here.

I’m a fan of artists using Google Earth or Street View images, such as Jon Rafman’s compelling Street View images or Google’s Street Art View. Here, check out Clement Valla’s “Postcards from Google Earth, Bridges” project. Google Earth renders bridges quite imperfectly, and when these images are shown together, they remind us that Google’s project is not a pure and perfect digital simulation of our world, but, instead, the creation of something new. Something that can be judged aesthetically on its own standards even if they are created as, to quote the artist, “the result of algorithmic processes and not of human aesthetic decision making.”

As readers of this blog know well, this new creation born out of the intersection of the physical and digital is what we refer to as “augmented reality.” Sometimes augmented reality is the reality we always find ourselves in: physical, but always and increasingly influenced by digitality. Sometimes this augmented reality is a collection of imperfectly rendered bridges. For me, Valla’s art provocatively reinforces this important theoretical conceptualization.

More augmented reality art: Augmented EcologiesSiavosh Zabeti’s Facebook book; Michael Tompert’s photography of destroyed Apple products; Aram Bartholl’s embedding USB sticks into public spaces. And all of Valla’s “Postcards from Google Earth, Bridges” are found here.

The integration of biological and technological systems in the design of an interactive human interface is explored through an installation where plants rigged up with sensors provide a kinesthetic user experience based on movement, touch, sound and light. Human interaction with the system affects an algorithmic projection and soundscape.
More images after the jump. more...

Visualizing the immaterial landscape of Wi-Fi networks reveals a layer of our augmented reality.

Cool tool that uses Google’s Street View to allow users to tag street art from around the globe. Check it out.

Expect more on street art and social media right here on Cyborgology in the near future.