ENTER 5: Datapolis

2011

international art | science | technology biennale prague

CENA / PRICE 290 Kč / € 11,–

2011

SCHEDULE 14/04/2011 – 17/04/2011 NTK

National Technical Library

Panel 8 | 17:30-19:30 | SOCIAL NETWORKAHOLICS

Datapolis Exhibition

Matthias Fritsch, Veronika Trachtová, Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet, Alessandro Ludovico & Paolo Cirio, Citizen K.

14.4. – 17.4. 2011

Datapolis Workshop 1

(Gallery)

Opening on Thursday, April 14, 18:00 Limited version of the exhibition will run until Sunday, April 24

Datapolis Symposium (Main auditorium)

15.4. – 16.4. 2011 Friday, April 15

(In front of NTK)

Friday, April 15 | 16:00-18:00

PSYCHOWALK

with Darina Alster and Daniel Vlček aka DJ Francois Perin

Datapolis Workshop 2

(Workshop room)

Sunday, April 17 | 12:00-17:00

Panel 1 | 11:00-12:30 | NEW CITYSCAPES

KINECT & COMPUTER VISION

Panel 2 | 14:00-16:00 | CAN YOU LOCATE ME NOW?

Datapolis Walk 1

Franco Torriani, Achilleas Kentonis, Dimitris Charitos Katharine Willis, Daphne Dragona, Stavros Stavrides, Aida Eltorie

with Javier Lloret (In front of NTK)

Friday, April 15 | 18:00-18:30

Panel 3 | 16:30-17:30 | SENTIENT CITY

SERENDIPITOR walk with Mark Shepard

Saturday, April 16

Archa Theatre

Erik Conrad, Mark Shepard

Panel 4 | 10:30-12:00 | STATUS OF THE DOUBLE Dominik Barbier, Ivan Chabanaud, Jens Piesk

Panel 5 | 12:30-13:30 | RESET YOUR DATASET 1 (only in Czech) Filip Dědic, Jana Písaříková, Ivan Floreš

Panel 6 | 14:00-15:00 | RESET YOUR DATASET 2

(only in Czech) Josef Šlerka, Petr Šourek

Datapolis Performances Friday, April 15 19:00 & 21:00 | ADAPT:act | EIRA, Lisbon & CIANT, Prague 20:00 | 15 STEPS | Věra Ondrašíková et al.

22:00 | premiere | THE OYSTER TOUR | My Name Is Ann!

locations Cross Club

Datapolis AV Performances Saturday, April 16

Cross club

20:00 | RESET NIGHT

†† );( †‡ ▲▲\\ Audiovisual performance line-up: Stellar Om Source (NL) Story of Isaac (UK) MUSHY (IT) o F F / GR†LLGR†LL (FR/DE) REVEREND D‡CK (CZ) Tempelhof (CZ) Performances & installations Darina Alster (CZ) Patrick Sedlaczek (CZ) DJ's Black Dumpling (A.M.180 collective) and Frozen Asscum 'O' (AMDISCS)

22presents

Sunday, April 17 Datapolis Dead Drop 17:45 | @ Mlynarska street

Datapolis Walk 2 18:00 | SERENDIPITOR walk with Mark Shepard

NTK - National Technical Library

22PRESENTS

Divadlo Archa

CIANT

ENTER: DATAPOLIS

5th art | science | technology biennale Prague, Czech Republic

April 14-17, 2011 LOCATIONS:

NTK Národní technická knihovna Technická 6, Praha 6

GPS: 50°6'14.083’N, 14°23’26.365’E

CROSS CLUB Plynární 1096/23, Praha 7

gps: 50°6'29.448"N, 14°26'35.44"E

DIVADLO ARCHA Na Poříčí 26, Praha 1

gps: 50°5'22.151"N, 14°26'2.714"E

22PRESENTS Mlynářská 4, Praha 1

Panel 7 | 15:30-17:00 | RESET YOUR DATASET 3

Georg Russegger, Marie Poláková, Radka Peterová, Peter T. Dobrila

http://festival-enter.cz

international

art

|

science

|

technology

biennale

prague

4 | 5 CONTENTS

contents Introduction

6

Mark Shepard: Sentient City Survival Kit

38

Pavel Smetana: Welcome from the Director

6

Mark Shepard: Serendipitor Walk

39

Pavel Sedlák: Welcome to Datapolis!

7

Erik Conrad: Bark Rubbings: City as Forest

40

Petr Šourek: Datatlantis

8

Erik Conrad: Palpable City

41

Timo Arnall & Jørn Knutsen & Einar Sneve Martinussen:

Exhibition

16

Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi

42

Anonymous: Dead Drops

18

Vojtěch Kálecký: EMF Piano

45

Josef Šlerka: Vanished Sudety 2.0

19

Anna Hrušková: Claude Debussy: Reverie

46

Dušan Barok: FaceLeaks

20

Mahir M. Yavuz: Urbansphere Wearables

47

Owen Mundy: Give Me My Data

21

Social Bits: Collective Data-Maps

48

Mahir M. Yavuz: Urban Mood

48

Secret Cooks Club Singapore: FoodMatch: Fridge Surfing for Facebook Addicts

22

h.o: Kazamidori

49

Paolo Cirio & Alessandro Ludovico: Face to Facebook

25

Kristýna Lutzová: Unfinished Business

50

MIT SENSEable City Lab (directed by Carlo Ratti): Trash Track

30

Prokop Bartoníček: Vibrator

50

Radka Peterová: DIY Environmental Monitoring

32

Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet: The Rhythm of City

51

Jaro Dufek: Reality Ends Here

32

Ricardo O’Nascimento & Tiago Martins: Rambler

52

Kristin O’Friel: CO2RSET

33

Marie Poláková & Jonathan Cremieux: MIMODEK

54

Lou Sanitráková: Symbiont

56

Achilleas Kentonis: Electromagnetic fields as a unifying chaos in which our body is submerged

34

Dardex Mort2Faim Art group: Machine 2 Fish

57

Pavel Kopřiva: Sound of CAMO

35

Niki Passath: Zoe

58

Jenny Chowdhury: 802.11 Apparel – WiFi Jacket

35

Saša Spačal: 7K: New Life Form

59

Caitlin Morris & Liza Stark: Whispers

36

Open_Sailing community: Energy Animal

60

Teresa Almeida: Modes for Urban Moods: Space Dress

37

Tomáš Rousek & Katarina Eriksson & Ondřej Doule: SinterHab

62

CONTENTS 4 | 5

Scott Hessels & Gabriel Dunne: Celestial Mechanics

64

Klára Jakubová & Anna Marešová & Andrej Boleslavský & Lukáš Blažek:

Aaron Koblin: Visualizing Amsterdam SMS Messages

65

A Registered Letter

81

Aaron Koblin: Flight Patterns

66

Pedro Miguel Cruz: The Morphing City

68

Performances

82

Emrah Kavlak: Some Kind Of Congestion

69

Inc.: Underfunded Moon Shot

84

James George & Alexander Porter: Depth_Editor_Debug

70

ADAPT:act

85

Pascal Silondi: Underground City 3D (UC3D)

72

Věra Ondrašíková et al.: 15STEPS

87

Javier Lloret & Daniel Artamendi: The Maze EV

73

My Name Is Ann!: The Oyster Tour

87

Julian Oliver: levelHead

74

Reset Night

88

Inc.: Laws of Nature

76

Barbara Dzieran´: Declination

77

Symposium

92

Akitoshi Honda: Glographer

78

National Technical Library

104

Darina Alster & Michael Markert: Broken TV E5

78

Workshops

106

Linda Čihařová: Migromat

79

1998–2011: CIANT Evolves

107

Michal Pustějovský: In the Own Shadow

80

Festival Partners

1 12

ENTER5 DATAPOLIS Catalogue of the 5th international art | science | technology biennale Editor: Pavel Sedlák Publisher: CIANT, Kubelíkova 27, 130 00 Prague, Czech Republic • http://ciant.cz • info@ciant.cz Prague, Czech Republic • April 2011 All rights reserved to artists and authors of texts.

Printed by: EkonoPrint ISBN/EAN: 978-80-254-9543-8

6 | 7 INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the 5th edition of art | science | technology biennale ENTER. The history of this unique showcase, of artistic practices employing new technologies, dates back to 2000. The biennale has always provided opportunities for various types of confrontations. It especially allows to bring high-level quality media art productions to Prague as well as to contextualize Czech media art within the international context.

As you may know, CIANT has supported production and promotion of technological art and culture since 1998. We operate as an international platform for research, production and presentation of creative use of information and communication technologies within the arts, often intersecting with various scientific domains. During the last 12 years we have established art/science/technology collaborations with research institutes, universities, art cantres as well as individuals across the whole of Europe and beyond. We are based in Prague, Czech Republic.

CIANT is a non-governmental non-profit civic association that invites artists, scientists, researchers, curators, and arts managers to get involved in various formats of short- and long-term exploratory research and production activities on both local and international level. With an assistance of public and private funding we initiate and implement projects that aim to transfer knowledge among different creative and research domains while resulting in concrete outcomes such as interactive applications prototypes, new software and hardware integrations or take a form of artworks. Many of our activities have strong educational and presentational aspect: Training sessions, festivals such as ENTER and RESET, exhibitions, performances and conferences. http://ciant.org I wish all artists, researchers and guests will enjoy 2011 ENTER biennale that has the intriguing theme of Datapolis. Check out this tag cloud generated via http://wordle.net using the full text of almost 40,000 words of this catalogue.

Pavel Smetana, April 2011

Pavel Smetana (CZ) is the founding director of CIANT. Since the beginning of the 1990s he has been artistically experimenting in the field of digital interactive media, creating installations “The Room of Desires”, “The Mirror”, “ The Cyber-Portrait of Dorian Gray” and “Lilith”. Since 2003 he directed several multimedia performances interconnecting science, contemporary dance and game technologies. During the past ten years he served as Professor of 3D, VR and Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Aix-en-Provence, France, and director of the international festival ENTERmultimediale (2000, 2005) and ENTER (2007, 2009). http://www.smetana.cz

INTRODUCTION 6 | 7

Welcome to Datapolis!

And big thank you to all artists and researchers who joined us for this exceptional journey.

Let me acknowledge inspiration and cooperation that has taken place during the last couple of months. Events of similar focus were organized in Weimar (MediaCity conference, October 2010), Istanbul (Amber festival with DataCity theme, November 2010) and Athens (Hybrid City symposium, March 2011), and there was a vivid discussion held at Yasmin on-line list. Namely, I would like to thank Michael Markert from Bauhaus University, Ekmel Ertan from Amber platform, Dimitris Charitos and Daphne Dragona from University of Athens for sharing knowledge and helping (perhaps without knowing) to shape Datapolis.

Our Prague perspective will hopefully provoke further investigations in the fascinating new cityscapes as they are formed by future and emerging technologies and inhabited by more and more of social networkaholics.

We made a call for participation seeking theory and practice based proposals addressing interactions of media technologies, novel visualization practices and urban realities. We encouraged artists to discover moods and rhythms of our cities, bodies and planet and to innovatively mash both visible and invisible data that re-present individual and collec-

tive lives and actions. We concluded a brief call with these keywords: data, city, communities, mapping, social, geographical, economical, political, sentient, ambient, mobile, ubiquitous, embedded intelligence, architecture, furniture, clothes, quantified selves, body & environment monitoring, robotic systems, trash, transport, pollution, open innovation & design.

And we received over 200 proposals. Added up pre-negotiated projects of both well-established artists from all over the world and some of the Czech media art and theory upcoming talents. The resulting exhibition features over 50 projects while the symposium hosts almost 30 speakers.

My personal thank you is also to all CIANT crew members and among them especially to Andrej Boleslavský who co-curated the exhibition and keeps on assisting young Czech artists to finish their new projects in the framework of our COALA programme (CIANT OPEN ART LAB). One more thank you is to Michal Mariánek, curator of RESET NIGHT series, who puts his personal efforts to build creative partnerships with educational institutions in our country. Yes, we need more synergies to raise export value of Czech media art.

So welcome to new datapolis where things may work differently.

Pavel Sedlák Chief curator (exhibition & symposium), catalogue editor

Pavel Sedlák (CZ) is deputy director of CIANT | International Centre for Art and New Technologies. He has worked as researcher, networker and fundraiser since 2001. He was chief curator of ENTER biennale in 2005, 2007 and 2009. Curated events in Buenos Aires, Moscow, Singapore. In 2007 he served as co-chair of MutaMorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences conference and as editor of its on-line proceedings available at http://mutamorphosis.org. In 2008 he was artistic advisor of the Ludic Times workshop conducted by Asia-Europe Foundation. Member of scientific/advisory/review committees for ISEA 2010, ARTECH 2008–2010, MediaCity 2010.

8 | 9 INTRODUCTION

Datatlantis Petr Šourek For I had myself been a sort of projector in my younger days.

— Gulliver Datascript 1.0 ::: To teach Nature to write Homines adhuc parvam in Experientia moram fecerunt… Until now men haven’t lingered long with experience; they have brushed past it; they have very little experience with experience, says Francis Bacon in 1620 in his New Organon (I, 112). In saying this, Bacon in the least doubts the experience of the Flemish printers who would later print his book. Neither does he belittle the experience of sailors navigating then around the world, or the skills of artillery men loading cannons in the battle of White Mountain.

When Francis Bacon says that people have so far paid little attention to their own experience, he has in mind experience that he describes several paragraphs above (I, 101): it is experientia literata – experience recorded in writing. Only when experience takes on a written form and when we learn to put it into writing, only then will arise, out of a bunch of data and information, experience worth bearing such a name: experience that can be read since it has been written down.

Only then will experience become what we call nowadays data. Francis Bacon did not call it data. He wrote New Organon a generation before the term data even “appeared” in scientific literature (the fact that we put “appeared” in inverted commas is because although the term did indeed appear, it was more different in meaning from what we call data nowadays than Bacon’s term experientia literata). Written experience, Bacon continues in the next paragraph, can be easily structured into tables that act as if they are alive. And that is when we are starting to discern a database; although we will have to wait until the 1960s of the 20th century to have this term for Bacon’s life-like tables coined.

Expanding a science’s data foundation is crucial to Bacon’s agenda. The front cover of New Organon shows a ship between two classical columns.

The columns are symbols of the rocks of Gibraltar. The ship leaves a safe

bay of the Mediterranean Sea to sail into the Atlantic Ocean. Bacon’s oceanic ship flashes a deeper keel and a bigger draft then Aristotle’s trireme.

The new science needs to have a larger and deeper scope and a broader range of vision than was possible within the knowledge of the classical world. This is not accidental, says Bacon, it is the workings of Fate, in Christian jargon Providence that the broadening of scientific knowledge coincides with overseas discoveries. The promise of the new world, according to Bacon, is the acquisition of new data and the creation of a broader foundation for sciences: “So far we haven’t had any foundations for experience (if it could be call so at all), or only very weak ones. No one has searched out and stored up a great mass of particular events that is adequate in number, in kind, in certainty, or in any other way to inform the intellect.

On the contrary, learned men – relaxed and idle – have accepted, as having the weight of legitimate evidence for constructing or confirming their philosophy, bits of hearsay and rumours about experience.” (I, 98) Voyages of discovery are for Bacon a symbol of success. Yet, what he finds more really promising is systematic research. Nature does not render its secrets easily and voluntarily. Nature must be systematically shaped, subjugated to cross-examinations and made to answer our questions.

Nature will give out its secrets when under stress rather than left to itself: “In the business of life, the best way to discover a man’s character, the secrets of how his mind works, is to see how he handles trouble. In just the same way, nature’s secrets come to light better when she is artificially shaken up than when she goes her own way.” (I, 98) Francis Bacon already draws up a data factory – an experimental natural history. An experiment is an extension lever for weak senses: “For the senses by themselves are weak and unreliable; and instruments for extending or sharpening them don’t help much. All the truer kind of interpretation of nature comes about through instances and well-designed experiments: the senses pass judgment on the experiment, and the experiment passes judgment on nature, on the facts.” (I, 50) Experientia literata, written experience is an indispensable component of experimental natural history. Writing is a good repository for enun-

INTRODUCTION 8 | 9 example, that we see the same wax when it is ciations from areas inaccessible to the senses before us, and not that we judge it to be the directly. Data, as most commonly understood same from its retaining the same colour and nowadays, are best acquired from recordings figure: whence I should forthwith be disposed – recorded with a needle of a machine into a to conclude that the wax is known by the act graph, entered manually by an officer or by an of sight, and not by the intuition of the mind unsuspecting respondent that filled in a survey. alone, were it not for the analogous instance of They are too monotonous, too scattered for us human beings passing on in the street below, as to be able to perceive them through our senses observed from a window. In this case I do not fail or to be able to make sense of them. On the surto say that I see the men themselves, just as I say face, Bacon’s experientia literata may seem to that I see the wax; and yet what do I see from be an ordinary sense experimentation written the window beyond hats and cloaks that might down; in reality, though, what it does is that it cover artificial machines, whose motions might creates space for new experience. be determined by springs? But I judge that there Initially writing seems to look like a record of are human beings from these appearances, and something; it even makes us view it as a mirthus I comprehend, by the faculty of judgement ror to the spoken language. Writing, however, alone which is in the mind, what I believed I saw is not subjected to any particular language, the with my eyes.” spoken parlance in the least. Sooner or later it It is exactly in his thought experiment where takes on a life as if being a new language of its René Descartes forces his mind to render data. own kind. Writing is technology. It brings about He exposes it to stress; brings it to doubt everya radical extension of possibilities and it delivers Workings of Providence: Providence in Bacon’s day was thing, including the existence of the world different experience. Experimental natural hisaround and the existence of God. Although the tory comes up with an idea: since Nature does a politically correct word for what we term nowadays as fate. According to Bacon, it was the workings procedure of the experiment is controlled by not speak, let us teach it to write. Writing will of Providence that brought about the voyages of senses, the experiment itself clearly heads into be a language common to things and to human discovery just when science experienced its bloom. an area where senses are of no use. We are to beings. Over thousands years of shamanic conjuration people have not succeeded in making Nature speak. The Great learn something about the nature of mind. Descartes carries out, in a mirMother has remained mute. In the end people took recourse to writing roring, reflexive mode, the Baconian programme. As Francis Bacon put it (Novum Organon, I, 36): “and you for your part must force yourself for a and made it, with scientific means, write something: data. while to lay aside your notions and start to familiarize yourself with facts.”

Therefore Descartes stresses the fact that things happen in quiet and in Cogito 2.0 ::: Data are a product of scepticism René Descartes, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, looks out of the win- silence. In a graphic medium, in the past, several codes that were independow only once. What is there to see? I am going to quote a famous excerpt dent of natural language were constructed; of which the first that needs (II, 13) from its very beginning: “But, meanwhile, I feel greatly astonished to be mentioned is geometry. In writing we develop a distance from the when I observe the weakness of my mind, and its proneness to error. For spoken language. However, we must radically decontaminate our thinkalthough, without at all giving expression to what I think, I consider all ing. That is why the philosopher hurries in the next paragraph to cleanse this in my own mind, words yet occasionally impede my progress, and I himself from the vulgar forms of speech of the people out there on the am almost led into error by the terms of ordinary language. We say, for street, as if he has dirtied himself just by merely glancing from out of the

10 | 11 INTRODUCTION window: “The man who makes it his aim to rise to knowledge superior to ference being well-known in Second Life). The Cartesian body is an avatar the common, ought to be ashamed to seek occasions of doubting from enabling me to experience what matter is. Thanks to my own body I am enabled to gain awareness of extension (an outdated philosophical term, the vulgar forms of speech”.

René Descartes creates his literary or, if you prefer, experimental alter which we can call it 3D). In the Cartesian world it would be no problem, ego very sophisticatedly. His mention of machines disguised as people however, to log into a different body or a different extension, into a differlooks to us, at first glance, like an unimportant procrastination, an incon- ent sensor of extension (3D). Consequently, human beings cannot really sequential look sideways; at most we could take it as the thinker’s sym- be seen because human beings do not possess this quality of extension. bolic way of expressing his distancing from the events on the street; In order for us to recognize a human being, we depend on a Turing test by that is especially in the case when we stop following Descartes‘ line of which we ascertain whether this particular extension is or is not inhabited by a spirit. Descartes tests a beta-version thinking and take (as general assumptions of this test on himself in his Meditations. go) machines and people as physically (or Employing scepticism towards the organically) different. But this is exactly natural language and towards generwhere René Descartes sees no differally assumed ideas, a philosopher breaks ence (VI, 17): ”And as a clock, composed of information (to see human beings) down wheels and counter weights, observes not to data (I can see hats and cloaks) and to the less accurately all the laws of nature interpretation (I presume that I see hats when it is ill made, and points out the and cloaks). Even though hats and cloaks hours incorrectly, than when it satisfies can be seen, reasoning comes up with the desire of the maker in every respect; something that cannot be seen. Based on so likewise if the body of man be considhats and cloaks one could presume comered as a kind of machine, so made up pletely different things (for example a and composed of bones, nerves, muscles, demographic development, growing prosveins, blood, and skin, that although there perity = more machines on the streets; but were in it no mind, it would still exhibit the Where reasoning materializes: According to Descartes, the pineal also one could draw judgements regardsame motions which it at present mani- gland is home to the sensus communis, an active counterweight to ing, for instance, rules governing the traffests involuntarily, and therefore without passive senses, imagination and also taste. fic, occurrence of traffic jams, changes in the aid of the mind”, says Descartes in a Latin edition of his work; in a French one he adds for the sake of complete- fashion, such as a rising tendency to wear hats and to shorten cloaks). Out ness: “only by the distribution of the bodily organs” (mais seuleument par of reasoning (based on data) thus arises something that is not commonly verbally expressed, something that is not a part of common conceptions, la disposition de ses organes).

Be it human beings or machines beyond hats and cloaks, they are no but something that can be imagined.

Arriving at imagination, we are getting to the most intriguing strucdifferent when it comes to their movements (stemming from the distribution of their locomotive organs). The commotion on the street around tural detail of the Cartesian body. It is in an epiphysis, pineal gland, where Descartes‘ house eventually comes down to the laws of nature; and they the spirit logs into the body. There is no need to throw doubts on Desgovern material machines like they govern anything else. The difference cartes because of the organ’s position; we can replace the notion of epiphbetween people and machines (since, for the sake of our ability to make ysis with the brain, since the placement of the epiphysis draws upon the judgements, there must be some) only lies in that that some of these knowledge of anatomy of the time, and it will not affect Descartes‘ line objects are equipped with a spirit whereas some others are not (the dif- of thinking in the least. Descartes envisages epiphysis (the brain) to be

INTRODUCTION 10 | 11 the centre and bodily organ of imagination (potentia imaginatrix – II, 14). ing City, is a good example of activating the template through which we Hence imagination is located in the body – precisely where body and observe life in a city. Pedro Cruz’s drew a relation between a Lisbon road spirit meet – a place where reasoning becomes physical. Descartes views networks plan and the speed of transport. Activating the template is the epiphysis as a differential (an advance of then technology), a sprocket that most outstanding feature of his visualization. Regardless of an indirect offsets the differences in the running of gears of various sizes or of the origin of the transportation system data, the new image of the city gives gears running on trajectories of varying sizes (for instance in a curve), thus a much sensual impression. The ground plan comes across like a temkeeping the whole gear assembly in a balanced state. Imagination works plate shortcut, a consequence of which is that we realize that this way as a counterbalance to the passive senses, and the differential of epiphysis we are completely unable to see the city (in the same way the Descartes controls them. The pineal gland (the brain) is an organ and imagination cannot see human beings, but perhaps just machines beyond hats and cloaks). Visualization is being able to share data in a that is located in it is a sense of its kind, too – sensus visual code. In his Empire Decline, which is our seccommunis, that is a sense which is communal, conond example and an effective visualization of the certed, shared, or also a sense for sharing, for a comrise and fall of European colonial empires, Pedro munity. This internal, active sense for unity is also Cruz used a biological coding of historical data. called taste.

When watching the elastic expanding and shrinking All the information coming from sensations in the of imperial bubbles (which could be described with Cartesian spirited body gets delivered to reason via Kant’s words from his Critique of Judgement (§54) as: a differential taste corrector. Taste formally shapes “eine wechselseitige Anspannung und Loslassung der it into information, makes it compatible with reaelastischen Teile unserer Eingeweide… alternating tenson. Data, however, as we know, are not subjected sion and relaxation of elastic bodily parts), it is imposto senses; on their own accord, they lack sense. Data sible for us not to laugh a Kantian laugh. The comical are invisible, they need visualization. Visualization, elasticity of bubbles (defined only by the country’s though, requires taste (active imagination). You area and political position on a time line) stands in might have seen numerous works of art that were Secret of smooth motion: The differential a sharp contrast to what we, in a sort of by-the-way created because of the easy convertibility of digital in a radiograph of an astronomical machine dating from the 1st century BC, European manner, assume there is behind it (an analogy to data into another format; you have seen all kinds of mechanics only reached the same level in the Cartesian mind): desire to expand, will to power sound visualization and sound distribution of light, the 16th century. and greediness. Manifestations of these can be seen or if possible, both at once, drawing on the NASDAQ index. Such creations, processing dynamic data under a false label of directly in a rise and fall of the colonial powers (similar to Descartes who interactivity, can still be seen around. A state in which their creators can “saw” human beings beyond hats and cloaks) or can be considered to be be found (though fortunately in the majority of cases this state is just a comically constant (what if they are machines).

Data create new images; they change our view of the world. Data are temporary one and occurs upon a first encounter with vast possibilities of digital data processing) can be diagnosed and called a digital synthesis. not given on their own accord and they are not for free. Data must be They act like people who are pathologically obsessed with certain smells conquered, gathered, preserved, polished, sorted… Although Descartes or tastes of certain colours or words, which are, however, far-off from the presents his view out of the window as a motion that is ordinary, or even accidental, unintended, out of control, instinctive, he does not renounce general associations that other people have.

Rather than dwelling on the products of passive imagination of this his method of systematic doubting and the view out of the window is not type, I am going to refer to two examples of active imagination. The different from the style of his Meditations. Descartes’ sceptical cogito in author of both of them is Pedro Miguel Cruz. The first one, The Morph- a philosopher’s hat and cloak, Cogito 2.0 – a doubt machine that crushes

12 | 13 INTRODUCTION However, it is not Francis Bacon’s least intention to disqualify technology as the main indicator of advancement (compare Novum Organum I, 129).

It just does not suffice for him to solely display a technologically more advanced civilization. He wants to demonstrate a way in which any civilization can be pushed forward. The history of the New Atlantis is not Datapolitic 3.0 ::: Data are unina mere enumeration of events; it formed information is not a random history of insular Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is endemism, it is a universal story of located, as a good true utopia, on advancement. Bacon is convinced an island. Strangers, who happen that advancement can be instituto wander in, are placed in quarantionalized. And this conviction is tine. The hygienic hospitality of The the message of The New Atlantis.

New Atlantis inhabitants is stipuThe crux of Bacon futurology lies in lated by law. Since no visitor has set a future perfect (when we have had foot on the island in a long time, a such and such laws and institutions, lot of money has been collected in we can hope to achieve advancea fund assigned by the island’s legment in science and technology). islator for running the quarantine.

When we look back to New The luxurious quarantine place is Organon and at what constitutes working like anything new on The this “when”, this precondition for New Atlantis – that is to point of the future, we should remind ourperfection. The Atlantis inhabitants selves that a prerequisite for scienhave a special fund for everything; tific advancement is according to they have specialists for everyBacon an expanding of knowledge thing. Everything is defined by law. and a creating of an informational Bacon’s New Atlantis is a utopia foundation. Science needs data. about law.

But data do not arise on their own In the first moments the Atlanaccord. Producing data requires teans look like angels to the visidiscipline. Data need a storage tors from Europe. The usual roles place. Data never suffice and they got switched. Advanced Europeans, need to be constantly purified. who were treated by backward And it is not only production that Indians like gods, get confronted Awaiting an arrival of automatons: Descartes’ era saw advances in ground and perspective plans, which led to the creation of a machine-readable landscape. The is hard. Equally demanding is data against more advanced Atlantis. Thirty-Years War notably rid Europe of people, automatons had their free way. conservation and protection from At first sight this looks like a classic sci-fi piece from the 1950s. They know everything about us, whereas them being misappropriated. Data are not stable, they are volatile, they we know nothing about them. They seem to be rather wise more than are easy to change their states of matter and they can leak away. In order technologically advanced. Their wisdom takes on mythical jurisprudence. for someone to be able to work with data, to fission information and to with its scepticism everything around it into data. Data are a product of systematic scepticism, it is information struck down by scepticism beyond a sense threshold; it is free information, liberated by scepticism from the language, open to new, multiple interpretations.

INTRODUCTION 12 | 13 go beyond the level of interpretation, such a person needs training on most attention since all the measures related to governance are derived how to handle dangerous material; such a person has to discipline himself directly from these. Measures regarding processing information must be (there is no doubt you know the dread of historians of uncovering archival gradual, individual steps must be backed up. Especially when (during the documents, they tend to believe that documents without the interpreta- experiment) information is broken down to data, it is necessary to prevent tion part should not be made available to the general public). Bacon said them from getting contaminated by outside interpretations. This requires directly that a human spirit, by its nature prone to draw false general con- a number of well-thought out and meticulously performed administration steps (doctrinarum administratio et politia scientiarum). Individual clusions, does not need wings (plumae) but lead weights (plumbum).

When we hold off on validity of interpretation, set aside general bodies of the state of New Atlantis are defined in relation to their funcnotions, successfully break down information and start, in an experimen- tions; they are separated from one another; and they are interconnected.

Space between them seems to be tally excited interspace, to receive infused with a colourless inert liqplentiful data, in that moment uid. Each New Atlantis institution Bacon advises to proceed with cauis a small Atlantis, an island – a tion. In New Organon he constantly body. There are islands for taking returns to the fact that it is necescare of services, islands for ensursary to abide by the rules (rite et ing reproduction, island overseeing ordine), to go forth systematically nutrition or immunity, and there (seriatim et continenter), to follow are sensory islands. from the bottom up and never to Two landmark examples dembypass a mid-level that renders onstrate how the New Atlantis the most profit to people. Illiterate system works. The first one is The experience arrived at through hapInstitute for Fallacies and Tricks of hazard groping in the dark must the New Atlantis Academy of Scigive way to experience shared in a ence. People can acquaint themcommon format. Technical equipselves with fallacies and tricks ment will straighten out differencAbout luminous wood: A long list of experiments that Robert Boyle intended to without falling prey to them. A es among individuals with various carry out on luminous wood. contact between the inhabitants levels of talent and everybody will be capable of an equally reliable performance. The methodology is verifi- of New Atlantis with the outside world is of similar nature; and that is our second example: espionage. The inhabitants of New Atlantis send able, the procedure is controllable, and the progress is measurable.

New Atlantis’ database (ima fundamenta) is broad and stable. Atlantis ships out into the most remote corners of the world, under other counhas more information at its disposal, for which reason – Bacon assumes tries’ flags, so that their specialists can carry out science and technology – it has to be more advanced than any other country. Being equipped espionage missions. Whatever they return with is stored in an appropriate with sufficient information one can carry out competent decisions. The storage box in the New Atlantis Academy of Science and is processed like whole procedure of information processing is recorded, and, therefore, it anything else that the New Atlantis people discover and invent. Spies do is not hard to track some possible misconduct. Consequently, governing is not adopt foreign opinions, they store them; they do not argue with forjust a continued processing of information. And here it is not just about eign interpretations, they collect information. A spy must not be moved politics, it is about policy; it is not about government, it is about gover- by motion that he detects; and as a visitor to The Institute for Fallacies and nance. Acquiring information and its administration receives naturally the Tricks a spy is not taken in by a trick that has been demonstrated there.

14 | 15 INTRODUCTION Commotions overseas do not cause commotions in New Atlantis. Its own motion is of different nature. New Atlantis progress is not motion somewhere, it is growth. And for that reason it requires more light, fertilizer and no replanting. Let us leave aside other vegetative and agrarian metaphors and let us look straight away at their political impact (New Organon I, 150): “There is a big difference between civil affairs (res civiles) and an area of technologies (artes): a new motion and a new light do not present the same danger. It is true that in politics even a change for the better carries in itself an implied suggestion that order might be disrupted since change is wanted from a position of power, with support of people; popularity and public opinion play the main role, a decision is not arrived at on the basis of evidence (demonstrationes). On the other hand, in science and technique let there be everything smelted like in a foundry and let there be noise of new things and advancement.”

If we put our ear to New Atlantis, it is more likely we could hear the grass grow rather that we would be reached by noise coming from one of the huddles of scientists. Nevertheless, ours is not an attempt to bash academic institutions and bureaucratic burden of institutionalized progress, these are well-known, despite of which it is likely that this kind of criticism will be attributed to us exactly for the reason that these problems are so well-known. Nevertheless, the two of Bacon’s works contain something much more worthwhile: a systematic datapolitics. Data production and their conservation is not just a private affair, it turns to be a communal, state-level matter, which determines success of the whole body and influences the future of Datantlantis. What is then the datapolitics of Atlantis?

Supersceptical, hypercritical, in one word maximal.

Experientia literata, which New Atlantis fully adhered to, creates perfect conditions for it to be that way: like any other written record it comes along with hypertext tools. New Atlantis is like a digital editing room: it edits in a non-invasive way. It allows back-tracking to source files. It tracks records of changes made and also stores these metadata. Digital editing rooms edit source documents without changing their locations or their properties. The result of such non-destructive editing is both the required result (the cut) and a session – a tiny text file, a recording of changes, and a spider web of hypertextual links. Being able to preserve sense of such a metafile basically means being able to conserve the whole area where its links have touched upon. Preserving metadata essentially means preserving everything and preserving it forever.

Source data, on the other hand, carry no trace of their previous use.

Data are never informed about how they have been utilized and that is exactly what makes them data. In a hypertext regime, data are anything that has been manipulated and that carries no memory of such manipulation. Data is uninformed information.

Datapolis 4.0 ::: What use is rhetoric for potatoes I am writing this text just when 32-byte IP addresses have run out. June 8th this year will be a big day since a new address system, IPV6 with 128-byte addresses, will be launched. A new address package will not get exhausted easily, it will contain 2128 of them – a decimal enumeration of this unimaginably high number would be so long that there is no need to lose time over it. When these 128-byte addresses spread out, nothing will be in the way to create the internet of things. IP addresses will be plentiful; any kind of attached idiocy will become a personage and will throw up individualized data. What this means in practice can be glimpsed at already now when looking at video-streaming from smart phones such as Qik, Flixwagon, Kyte and Next2Friends Live. This is an endless stream of irrelevant video recordings from all corners of the world. Nevertheless, whatever you send through these servers gets archived (with the respective IP and geotag). On top of that, there are electronic baby monitors, webcams installed in every laptop, and in the end, security cameras where each camera will have its own IP (in a building such as The Czech National Technical Library, CCTV system is made up of ten dozens of security cameras).

I am writing this article in the time when WikiLeaks has just turned the world into a truly global village governed by gossip. The essential information one gets from an article on a banana republic (including more advanced Euro-Atlantic banana states) even in a highly reputable magazine is what circulates within the American diplomatic circle about the president of the country. After “leak” web sites provide anonymity ensuring mechanisms, editors step in and carry out their regular work. The time has passed, though, when those websites were good just for whistleblowers. The leaked data are now awaited by specialized receptors.

I am writing this article in the time when researchers at University of Edinburgh developed a type of potato that lights up when it needs watering. Our knowledge of bioluminescence has made giant steps since the time of Robert Boyle who filled a page while listing things that needed to be experimentally attested on luminous wood. Nobody better fulfilled

INTRODUCTION 14 | 15 Bacon’s ideas about an experimental scientist than this man. And Boyle, being the man of experiments, naturally tried to put the luminous wood into a suction pump. In vacuum, the light went out. And this is how, since the 17 th century, we have known that bioluminescence is directly tied to air. As a consequence, this knowledge is utilized in such a way that absence of bioluminescence is a sign of a worsening of a state a microorganism is in: when it is being suffocated or poisoned, the light goes out. It seems logical, doesn’t it? However, it would be better if organisms started calling out for help and lights (preferably red) went on when still only nearly suffocated and nearly poisoned. No organism naturally does any such thing and every rescue person will tell you cynically that people who, in a pool of blood, are calling out for help the most still have enough strength and, therefore, we should hasten to help the ones who are lying around soundless. Therefore, genetic engineers at a university in Lausanne are trying to switch bioluminescence from happiness to stress; that is from optimal breathing to metabolic processes by which a bacterium tries to cope with poisoning.

It does not change anything about the fact that a bacterium, in order to be able to illuminate, will continue to need oxygen and other compounds.

However, by means of genetic manipulation we force an organism to expend the rest of its energy to produce an arbitrary sign that it does not understand. It renders a signal and kicks the bucket. Plankton with dying light could disclose to experts an enemy submarine under water or could detect pollution in water. These were data that had to be interpreted; experiments led biologists to constantly more accurate interpretation.

Bacteria spoke in their own language and that language had to be kept at a distance from the language of human beings so that bacteria would tell their maximum. In many respects this was not an easy task, susceptible to many drawbacks, the main one of which was that information was gathered in such an amount that the memory could not take it any more and it had to be recorded in writing. These were data. Now, however, we turn these data into a signal that constitutes part of our language.

Dimly lit bacteria were not telling enough, alarmingly lit potatoes convince more. What use is good rhetoric for potatoes? Luminous potatoes can, as opposed to burnt out bacteria, become part of our community.

Let us imagine how people get impressed by luminous potatoes. In desert farming we teach people in the Third World to pronounce the term “sus-

tainable” and we spare every drop of water. We grow Hydrope Cartesiana potato type; it gives out a good warning light when parched. Around are Bedouins whose day-to-day existence has been completely unsustainable for thousands of years. The Bedouins steal our potatoes. Therefore we guard our fields with an IP camera system. We share the video-stream on a popular server. People can see our fields day and night. We do not even need to guard our fields. As soon as the potato vine lights up, traffic on our web site increases and we set out to water the plants. We can see how the light fades under the sprinkling water. Literally we are “quenching the thirst of plants”, as one follower posted on our wall. A clear picture of this life-giving watering makes our desert farming popular and we receive generous support from people. Our popularity is increasing until a moment when a leak web site brings information that we continuously drill deeper and deeper artesian wells and that we are connected underground with multinational corporation Glowing Foods Inc., which, having irresponsibly manipulated with genetic information of some plants, put in danger health of the Bedouins who have been living sustainably for thousands of years and these days they are forced to eat stolen potatoes.

This is media logic. However, luminous potatoes and blogging pigeons, dogs in orbits and monkeys imitating people are not just a media noise. A small (genetic) manipulation will make things around us more eloquent and we will be willing to accept them into our community. They will have to comply with our taste, with the way we want them to be; they will have to speak our language. If they are to take seats in a “parliament of things”, if they are to meddle with the future, our expectations will be even higher: they will have to have a style, they will have to speak clearly, to the point and convincingly. Potatoes without good rhetoric will have no chance; and without water they will kick the bucket. Signal bacteria will kick the bucket, too, but they will be heroes. Data are quasi-objects (in Latour sense) and the “parliament of things” will seat nothing than just quasi-objects.

They can say whatever they want. But we will only listen to them when they give out a clear signal: quasi-data.

Petr Šourek (CZ) is theatre author, publishes and translates. His focus is on performing arts from many perspectives: scenic, para-theatrical, new media, conceptual. His theories test the significance of connections between technology, art and science in the history of culture.

18 | 19 EXHIBITION

Anonymous

Dead Drops ‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space.

Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is open to

participation. If you want to install a dead drop in your city/neighborhood follow the ‘how to’ instructions and submit the location and pictures. Aram Bartholl, a Berlin based media artist, started the ‘Dead Drops’ project during his stay in NYC at EYEBEAM as artist in residence, October 2010. ū http://www.deaddrops.com

EXHIBITION 18 | 19

Josef Šlerka

One of recent Prague dead drops installed on March 31, 2011 in Mlynarska street. Check the wall of 22presents showroom.

Aram Bartholl (DE) has been working in Berlin since 1995. He studied architecture at the University of the Arts UdK Berlin and graduated there in 2001. Bartholl worked as a freelancer for DMC, MVRDV, IEB Berlin and Fraunhofer Institut FOCUS among others. His installations and performances have been shown at numerous festivals, museum and gallery shows worldwide. Often he is invited to give workshops and to present his work at conferences and universities/art schools.

Aram is a member of the NYC based ‘Free, Art & Technology Lab’ a.k.a. ‘F.A.T. Lab.’ Net politics Institutions like the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) and the discussion on: copyright, DIY movement and the web development in general do play an important role in his work. Since serveral years Aram Bartholl collects impressions on streetart, games, privacy, copyright and neoanalogue culture in his blog. In his art work Aram Bartholl thematizes the relationships between net data space and public every day life. “In which form does the network data world manifest itself in our everyday life? What returns from cyberspace into physical space? How do digital innovations influence our everyday actions?” Through his installations, workshops and performances Bartholl developed a unique way to discuss the impact of the digital era on society. In his series of physical objects recreated from digital space and a series of light installations he questions the technology driven society and the tension of public on- and offline space. Workshops interventions and performances in public play a central role in his interest to create offline social platforms and situations to discuss day to day life in the era of Google, Facebook, Twitter and co. ūhttp://datenform.de/indexeng.html

Vanished Sudety 2.0 Virtual reconstruction of disappeared villages in Sudet area Have you ever checked-in on Foursquare venue that no longer exists?

And what do people recommend there?

Re-discover Sudet area on google map with a help of a special Foursquare layer.

Josef Šlerka (CZ) un-graduated in theatre, graduated in aesthetics, is a head of software development at Ataxo Interactive and a new media teacher at the Charles University. There is a unifying aspect to all his interests: a symbolic analysis.

He is focused on how we live through symbols and how symbols help us analyze our world. He reflects on these issues in semiotic texts as well as in development of analytical tools. Presently, he is mainly interested in machine analysis of natural language and in theoretical aspects of new media.

20 | 21 EXHIBITION

Dušan Barok

FaceLeaks The Firefox/Chrome browser add-on attaches a leak button to Facebook photos, allowing user to leak them to www.faceleaks.info website, in five easy steps: 1. Install FaceLeaks add-on.

2. Log in to your Facebook account.

3. Browse to the photo of your friend.

4. Look for the ‘Leak’ button.

5. Leak!

Tags: facebook, wikileaks, privacy, fun, software, plugin, firefox, chrome, friend, photo, images, sex, porn, leak, social network, internet art. ū http://www.faceleaks.info

Dušan Barok (SK/NL) has been involved in the independent critical practise in the fields of art, software, and theory. Currently he takes part in the Networked media programme at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, where he is engaged in the artistic use of social networks and peer-to-peer technologies. He has initiated and participated in many research-grounded projects in the context of media arts, network culture, and the commons. He lives in Rotterdam and Bratislava. ūhttp://bit.ly/dusanbarok ūhttp://nopopcornvideo.tumblr.com/

EXHIBITION 20 | 21

Owen Mundy

Give Me My Data Give Me My Data is a Facebook application that helps users export their data out of Facebook. Reasons could include making artwork, archiving and deleting your account, or circumventing the interface Facebook provides. Data can be exported in CSV, XML, and other common formats.

While clearly utilitarian, this project intervenes into online user experiences, provoking users to take a critical look at their interactions within social networking websites. It suggests data is tangible and challenges users to think about ways in which their information is used for purposes outside of their control by government or corporate entities. 큰 http://givememydata.com

Owen Mundy (USA/DE) is an artist who investigates public space and its relationship to data.

His artwork highlights inconspicuous trends and offers tools to make hackers out of everyday users. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University and DAAD fellow, currently based in Berlin. 큰http://owenmundy.com/

22 | 23 EXHIBITION

Secret Cooks Club Singapore

FoodMatch:

Fridge Surfing for Facebook Addicts FoodMatch helps strangers network over leftovers in their fridges which are uploaded and matched online into recipes with an invitation to cook dinners together. Leftovers, these sad reminders of the lonely lives most people live in the modern metropolises, become means of interaction that can balance various forms of virtual world addictions. Instead of feeding our Facebook doppelgangers we can start using Facebook to feed real people, to meet and cook together with friends and strangers. The matching is orchestrated by a Facebook food application on which people upload pictures and information on what is left in their fridge and has a close date of expiry. The food app then matches leftovers over Google recipe API into delicious meals and organizes people into food mobs to meet and cook dinners together. Such networking over refrigerators targets people addicted to social networking and gives them a reason to get out of their places and computers and meet real people over real food.

Food mobs of hungry and single people in Singapore are already turning sad, lonely tomatoes and veggies into delicious salads, and Face-

book addicts into dinner messmates. Fridge surfing over Google API and Facebook is transforming leftovers into feasts shared by friends that in turn leads to a sustainable practice of food consumption for modern social and digital nomads. Strangers who cook and eat together define new social units, a type of urban and technological food foragers. Immersed in the “networked” world in which refrigerators, food items and humans constantly interchange information and crowdsource, we still have a a reason to meet and have a common meal.

Facebook food app on which people share leftovers, meet new friends and learn how to cook in these impromptu dinners is a radical response to the culture that tends to go to extremes. It defines food as a social phenomenon rather than a substance that is either fast and junk or elitist and part of some slow food fetishization of food. We simply believe food is still the best social networking platform and most enjoyable form of interaction between humans.

History of “messing” together, communal eating and the social life organised around meals and dinning define our politics and society as a

EXHIBITION 22 | 23

SCCS (Secret Cooks Club Singapore) is a joint initiative of food and tech savvy members of Hackerspace SG and Interactive media & Food Studies group at the National University of Singapore. We work on various projects involving food & design: hacking rice cookers into cheap souv vide equipment for Paleo Dieters, organizing underground restaurants, experimenting with personalized dinners based on DNA profiles, food foraging and hopping or simply doing food ethnography in Indonesian wet markets (Batam, Bali) to support indigenous food practices with technology. We are hacking various food systems extending from the genome through individual bodies to social bodies, local and global ecosystems to study extreme food practices. Our speculative design prototypes look beyond the future of eating and reflect more generally on the role of design in arranging complex systems from farm and market to fork to phenotype.

series of metabolic exchanges that are biological and political at the same time. American fast food soliloquies, communal and family organised hawker style eating in Singapore and most of Asia, European restaurant enclaves for small elites mirror the various political and economic systems. FoodMatch is a response to the history of messing and organizing people around food.

It is not only an app but a social experiment with food and politics that is looking into new social rituals around dining and new political and social metabolism for a networked society. We believe in a culture of prototypes that empowers small and niche communities to organize

themselves and define their practices and rituals which do not need to be technoutopian nor dystopian. The project is part of a larger research (SCCS – Secret Cooks Club Singapore) into new “diet-tribes” and even “food-cults” that have begun to form around applications and tools ranging from the DIY sous-vide appliances used

by Paleo Dieters to geo-locative foraging services like Fallen Fruit for “freegans” to the crowdsourced bio-data visualizations of nutri-genomics enthusiasts. ū http://foodmatch.org/

ū http://apps.facebook.com/foodmatch/

Secret Cooks Club Singapore: Muhammad Farkhan Salleh (SG), Liyana Sulaiman (SG), Chua Yin Wen (SG), Tan Xiu Fang (SG), Augustus Loi (SG), Inosha Wickrama (Sri Lanka), Florian Cornu (FR), Denisa Kera (CZ) Consultant: Marc Tuters (CAN) About the Club: The first rule of Secret Cooks Club is: You do not talk about the Club. The second rule of Secret Cooks Club is: You DO NOT talk about the Club. One dinner event at a time.

Dinners will go on as long as they have to. If this is your first night at the Secret Cooks Club, you have to eat. ūhttp://www.secretcooks.org/

24 | 25 EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION 24 | 25

Paolo Cirio & Alessandro Ludovico

Face to Facebook Third piece of the 'The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy' 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. 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. ū http://www.face-to-facebook.net/

How we did it Through special custom software we collected data from more than 1,000,000 Facebook users.

What we collected is their “public data” – some of their personal data (name, country, Facebook groups they subscribe to) plus their main profile picture and a few friend relationships. We built a database with all this data, then began to analyze the pictures that showed smiling faces. The vast majority of pictures were both amateurish and somehow almost involuntarily or uncon-

sciously alluring. And they are almost always “smiling”.

It’s also evident that the majority of users want to appear in the best shape and look. They are acting on Facebook’s mandatory mechanism: establish new relationships. Facebook is based on the voluntary uploading of personal data and sharing it with friends. The more friends the better. Being personal and popular a Facebook user is exposing him/herself to many others, continuing to establish new relationships.

Once the database was ready, we studied and customized a face recognition algorithm.

The algorithm used self learning neural networks and was programmed to “group” the huge amount of faces we collected (and their attached data) in a few simple categories. The categories are among the most popular that we usually use to define a person at a distance, without knowing him/her, or judging based only on a few behaviors. We picked six categories (“climber”, “easy going”, “funny”, “mild”, “sly” and “smug” – working definitions), with some intuitive differences, for both male and female subjects.

SUCKER OF PROFILES The software effectively extracted 250,000 faces that were connected to the relevant public data in our database.

After grouping them, we started to dive into these seas of faces, with all the perceptual consequences. And we started to think about why we felt so overwhelmed.

In “The Love Delusion” essay, Dan Jones cites Martie Haselton’s research, which indicates that men typically overestimate the sexual interest conveyed by a woman’s smile or laughter. When men see someone of the opposite sex smile at them they tend to think “she must be interested.” By the way, women simply see a smile. [Dan Jones “The Love Delusion”, March 31 2007, New Scientist]. Further, Heather Rupp, a graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta completed a study about the difference between the reactions of women and men when looking at the same erotic images. Tracking the eye movements of study participants “the big surprise was that men looked at the faces much more than women did.”

Dr. Kim Wallen (who directs the lab where this experiment was performed) suggested that men scrutinize faces in pornographic imagery

26 | 27 EXHIBITION because a man often looks to a woman’s face for cues to her level of sexual arousal, since her body, unlike a man’s, does not give her away.

So the role of the face in establishing a potentially intimate relationship is stronger than generally thought. And this is also at the base of Facebook’s social system. A Facebook user is supposed to have increasing numbers of friends, but the website can also be used to actively look for a new relationship, by exploiting the illusory capital of accumulated relationships, signified by switching (mentally or often practically) into the “single” (i.e. available) status.

In “The Social Network” movie Jessie Eisenberg/Mark Zuckerberg becomes more and more excited as the concept of Facebook gets refined and he lets it be known that “I’m not talking about a dating website”. Facebook is not a dating website, but it works using the same triggering principles. And for a few million of its “500 million active users” it does become a dating website.

So by combining all this information we wanted to make this further step easier for everybody.

We established a dating website [www.

Lovely-Faces.com], importing all the 250,000 profiles. This step builds the virtual land that Facebook is always close to but never explicitly steps in, being just an enormous background to the active process of searching for potential sexual relationships. The profiles will be definitively “single” and available, in a fairly competitive environment, with real data and real faces that users have personally posted. Their smiles will finally reach what they unconsciously really want: more relationships with unknown people, attracted by their virtual presence. The price

users pay is being categorized as what they really are, or better, how they choose to be represented in the most famous and crowded online environment. The project starts to dismantle the trust that 500 million people have put in Facebook.

The project talks about the consequences of posting sensitive personal data on social network platforms, and especially the consequences in real life. These consequences are always underestimated because we still instinctively tend to confine what we do online in the visual space of the screen. Face-to-facebook practically questions online privacy through one of the web’s most iconic platforms. And as with GWEI and Amazon Noir we’re not just making a sophisticated critical action against another giant online corporation, but we are also trying to formulate a simple hack that everybody can potentially use. Everybody can steal personal data and re-contextualize it in a completely unexpected context.

And that shows, once more, how fragile and potentially manipulable the online environment actually is.

Theory Face-to-Facebook, smiling in the eternal party.

Social networking is naturally addictive. It’s about exploring something very familiar that has never been available before: staying in touch

with past and present friends and acquaintances in a single, potentially infinite, virtual space.

The phenomenon challenges us psychologically, creating situations that previously were not possible. Before the rise of social networking, former friends and acquaintances would tend to drift away from us and potentially become consigned to our personal histories.

Having a virtual space with (re)active people constantly updating their activities is the basic, powerful fascination of the social network. But there’s another attraction, based on the elusive sport (or perhaps urge) to position ourselves.

The answer to the fundamental identity ques-

EXHIBITION 26 | 27

tion, “who am I?” can be given only in relation to the others that we interact with (friends, family, work colleagues, and so on). And the answer to this question seems clearer after we take a look at our list of social network friends.

So an intimate involvement and (endless) questioning of our online identity (often literally juxtaposing with our physical one) is perpetrated in the social network game. But social network platforms are not public organizations designed to help support social problems but private corporations. Their mission is not to help people create better social relationships or to help them improve their self-positioning. Their

mission is to make money. Economic success for these corporations rests on convincing users to connect to the several hundred people who await them online.

The market value of these companies is proportional to the number of users they have.

Facebook is valued at around 50 billion dollars 1: it sports 500 million users 2. The game can often translate into a form of social binging in which the number of friends a user has is never enough to satisfy. But what kind of space is Facebook?

Facebook is not home – it is way larger and more crowded. And it’s not the street, because you’re supposed to know everybody in your space.

Facebook is an eternal, illusory party, under surveillance and recorded for all time. Its structure invites you to first replicate and then enhance your real social structures, replicating your experiences on your own personal “screen space”.

In this unending party, you meet and join old and new friends, acquaintances and relatives. As with most parties everything is private, or restricted to the invited guests, but has the potential to become public, if accidently shared.

Here the guests’ activity and interests are also recorded through their posts in different formats and media (pictures, movies, trips, preferences, comments). It’s an induced immaterial labour with instant gratification. Guests produce content by indirectly answering the question “who am I?” and they get new friends and feedback in the process.

In fact, Facebook’s subliminal mantra seems then to be “be personal, be popular, never stop.”

It has even gone so far as to make it difficult to notice when a friend closes their account (you need to check the friend’s list to have any idea).

The more successful (and crowded) the party, the more the private funders are happy to put money into it. The price the guests are unconsciously paying is that they are giving away their (constantly updating) virtual identity. Guests, in fact, organize their own space, and therefore their own “party”, offering the party owner (Facebook) a connected, heterogeneous group of people who share interests.

As such they offer what can be termed as “crowdsourced targeting” – the indirect identification of people’s targets and desires by the users themselves. In fact the spontaneously posted data provides an endless (almost automatic) mutual profiling, enriching and updating the single virtual identities, in a collective selfpositioning. But can profile data be liberated from Facebook’s inexorable logic? The answer is yes, but it’s important to focus on the core of the Facebook profiles and see how they are recognized as virtual identities.

First, the profiles sublimate the owners’ (real) social actions and references through their virtual presences. Second, they synthesize their effectiveness in representing real people through a specific element: the profile picture.

This picture, an important Facebook interface, more often than not shows a face, and a smiling one at that. Our face is our most private space and simultaneously the most exposed one. How many people are allowed to touch our face, for example?

And generally speaking, the face is also one of the major points of reference we have in the world.

There are even “special” regions of the human brain, such as the fusiform face area (FFA), which

28 | 29 EXHIBITION

may have become specialized at facial recognition 3. Faces are now so exposed that they do not remain private, but are thrust into the public domain and shared (they can even be “tagged” by other people). So any virtual identity (composed of a face picture and some related data) can be stolen and become part of another identity, through a simple re-contextualization of the same data.

Furthermore, “face recognition” techniques can be applied to group vast amount of Facebook pictures. This process is also quite paradoxical, because the “surveillance” aspects (face recognition algorithms are usually used together with surveillance cameras) here are not used to try to identify a suspect or a criminal, but to capture a group people with similar somatic expressions. The resulting scenario is that different elements forming the identities can be remixed, re-contextualized and re-used at will.

Facebook data become letters of an unauthorized alphabet to be used to narrate real identities or new identities, forming new characters on a new background.

And this is a potentially open process that anybody can undertake. It becomes more tempting when we realize the vast amount of people who are smiling. When we smile in our

profile picture, we are truly smiling at everyone on Facebook.

So any user can easily duplicate any personal picture on his/her hard disk and then upload it somewhere else with different data. The final step is to be aware that almost everything posted online can have a different life if simply recontextualized.

Facebook, an endlessly cool place for so many people, becomes at the same time a goldmine for identity theft and dating – unfortunately, without the user’s control. But that’s the very nature of Facebook and social media in general.

If we start to play with the concepts of identity theft and dating, we should be able to unveil how fragile a virtual identity given to a proprietary platform can be. And how fragile enormous capitalization based on exploiting social systems can be. And it’ll eventually mutate, from a plausible translation of real identities into virtual management, to something just for fun, with no assumed guarantee of trust, crumbling the whole market evaluation hysteria that surrounds the crowded, and much hyped, online social platforms. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jan/17/ goldman-sachs-facebook-private-placement http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=409753352130 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area 1

2

The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy Face to Facebook is 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.

The process is always illustrated in a diagram that shows the main directions and processes under which the software has been developed. We found a significant conceptual hole in all of these corporate systems and we used it to expose the fragility of their omnipotent commercial and marketing strategies. In fact all these corporations established a monopoly in their respective sectors (Google, search engine; Amazon, book selling; Facebook, social media), but despite that their self-protective strategies are not infallible. And we have been successful in demonstrating this.

There are other common themes in the projects. In all of them we stole data that is

EXHIBITION 28 | 29

Paolo Cirio (IT) works as media artist in various fields: net-art, street-art, video-art, software-art and and experimental fiction. He has won prestigious art awards and his controversial works have been sustained by research grants, collaborations and residencies. He has exhibited in museums and art institutions worldwide. As public speaker he delivers lectures and workshops on media tactics. ūwww.paolocirio.net Alessandro Ludovico (IT) is a media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine since 1993. He’s one of the founders of the ‘Mag.Net (Electronic Cultural Publishers organization). He also served as an advisor for the Documenta 12’s Magazine Project. He has ben guest researcher at the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. He teaches at the Academy of Art in Carrara.

very sensitive for the respective corporations.

With Google it was the “clicks” on their AdSense Program; with Amazon we started to steal the content of entire books, and with Facebook we stole a huge amount of public data profiles. In all the three projects, the theft is not used to generate money at all, or for personal economic advantage, but only to twist the stolen data or knowledge against the respective corporations.

In GWEI it was the shares obtained through the money created by the Adsense program; in Amazon Noir it was the pdf books distributed for free; and in Face To Facebook it is the collection of profiles moved with no prior notice to a dating website.

All the projects, indeed, independently claim that some of the corporation’s “crown jewels”,

including their brand image and marketing approaches, can be hacked, focusing only on their established strategies and thinking in a “what if?” fashion. Furthermore, the projects were all based on a “hacking” idea that, although pursued on a sophisticated level and with custom software, still could have been applied by anybody with similar results. This is one of the fundamental values of these projects. Finally, all the installations we exhibited did not use computers or networks, trying to be as coherent as possible with the projects, but focusing more on the display of the processes than on the technologies.

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MIT SENSEable City Lab (directed by Carlo Ratti)

Trash Track Imagine a future where immense amounts of trash didn’t pile up on the peripheries of our cities: a future where we understand the ‘removalchain’ as we do the ‘supply-chain’, and where we can use this knowledge to not only build more efficient and sustainable infrastructures but to promote behavioral change. In this future city, the invisible infrastructures of trash removal will become visible and the final journey of our trash will no longer be “out of sight, out of mind”.

Elaborated by the SENSEable City Lab and inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, TrashTrack focuses on how pervasive technologies can expose the challenges of waste management

and sustainability. Can these same pervasive technologies make 100% recycling a reality?

Trash Track uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust – networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems. These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

The project is an initial investigation into understanding the ‘removal-chain’ in urban areas and it represents a type of change that is

taking place in cities: a bottom-up approach to managing resources and promoting behavioral change through pervasive technologies. TrashTrack builds on previous work of the SENSEable City Lab in its exploration of how the increasing deployment of sensors and mobile technologies radically transforms how we understand and describe cities.

This project was made possible with support of The Architectural League of New York as part of the Exhibition, Toward the Sentient City.

Video credits: E Roon Kang: video / motiongraphics Carnaven Chiu: visualization Dietmar Offenhuber: visualization / proj. lead Armin Linke: videofootage Assaf Biderman: storyboard Carlo Ratti: storyboard / concept

How the trash tag works The trash tag periodically measures its location and reports that data to the server via the cellular network. The first generation of trash tags was based on GSM cellular phone technology that estimates the tag position by measuring signal strength from each cell tower in sight of the device and comparing it to a map of cell phone towers – a technique known as CellID triangulation. The location accuracy is not as good as GPS but tends to be more robust, as

EXHIBITION 30 | 31

cellular signals can be picked up inside buildings and from within piles of trash, not requiring an unobstructed sky view. Our second generation of tracking tags use the best of both worlds – GPS and CDMA cell-tower trilateration based on the Qualcomm inGeo™ platform in combination with Sprint’s cell phone network, utilizing Qualcomm’s gpsOne® technology to provide both accuracy and availability for position tracking applications like ours. Future generations of devices will work seamlessly across CDMA/GSM/UMTS networks, a feature that will allow tracking items across international borders.

In order to ensure a long enough lifetime to track the trash to its final destination, we developed ‘duty cycling’ algorithms, which we use along with inGeo™‘s “Low Duty Cycle” tech-

nology which provides hibernation capability that keep the tag off most of the time, turning it on only every few hours to sense and report its position. The tag also uses a motion sensor, which allows it to continue being in hibernation mode if no movement has been detected, thus further extending the battery life. If movement has been detected, the motion sensor wakes up the device to check and report its new position. Our algorithms vary the sampling rate in response to conditions sensed by the tag. In particular, the tag uses a set of orientation sensors to sense changes in position to increase the location sampling rate when the tag is apparently moving, and whenever previously unseen cell tower IDs are observed. ū http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/

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Radka Peterová

Radka Peterová (CZ) graduated from New Media Studies at Charles University, Prague and spent two semesters at School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser, Vancouver, BC. Her research interests are mainly ubiquitous computing, augmented reality and location-based services. In last years, she focused especially on participatory sensing phenomenon in contemporary urban context. Radka lives and works in Prague.

DIY Environmental Monitoring This project presents a DIY environmental sensing approach that empowers citizens to reinvigorate people’s awareness of, and concern for, pollution.

Technological advances in sensing, computation, storage, and communication now have the power to turn the near-ubiquitous mobile phone into a global mobile sensing device, and commence the participatory paradigm employing amateurs in

environmental data collection. To test the thesis, PAIR, a prototype with interchangeable sensor, was developed. It aims to enable people to sense environment on-the-go and provide users with immediate feedback. Such data can make people learn about their environment, make them aware of air pollution causes, and eventually even bring behavioral changes.

Jaro Dufek

Reality Ends Here Documentation of the public space installation A set of six everyday reality objects was installed while each of them having a GPS chip. As the objects were slowly appropriated by people and started moving, a dedicated website was showing the routes with details about time, speed and locations. The project was realized in a specific part of the Czech Republic with both social and topographical significance.

ū http://www.photo5.cz/realityendshere

Jaro Dufek (CZ) is working as a photographer, graphic designer, video artist and teacher. ūhttp://www.photo5.cz

EXHIBITION 32 | 33

Kristin O’Friel

CO2RSET CO2RSET is couture that monitors CO2 levels in the atmosphere and responds by tightening and loosening on the body. The project was designed to create an experience that changes our perception of environment data by engaging with atmospheric information in a direct and tangible way.

“I am interested in making wearables that enable you to feel information your senses are not acutely aware of. The CO2 Corset monitors carbon dioxide levels in the environment and provides physical feedback by tightening the bodice in relation to air quality.

Traditionally the corset is a rigid garment comprised of vertical boning that is worn under clothing for aesthetic or medical purposes. The article supports the torso and slims the figure by cinching the waist imposing a shallowness of breathe on the user, making it contextually appropriate as the wearable interface to air quality.

Projects that are influential include Smoking Jacket by Fiona Carswell and Living Glass by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang. The Smoking Jacket includes a built-in pair of lungs the smoker exhales into that darken over time reflecting the

internal process of the habit. Living Glass is a silicon window surface containing gills that open when the carbon dioxide levels in the environment become high. The CO2RSET is a smart fashion article for everyday wear.” ū http://www.kofriel.com/itp/blog/?p=263

Kristin O’Friel (USA) is a designer, artist, urbanist, and environmentalist from Hawaii currently living in New York City. She loves to problem solve and is inspired and informed by everyday interactions. Kristin is passionate about cities, sustainable practices, and believes that things in general work better when the people who use them everyday participate in their design. She experiments with applications and physical interfaces that engage people with the world in novel ways.

Her work aims to delight the heart, activate the mind, and reveal something about the world. She is: Principal, Co-Founder – Flying Wheel, LLC, Seattle, WA, and UX Design Consultant, New York, NY. Selected Exhibitions: MOMA, Talk to Me. New York, NY. July 2011 RoboDays Robot Festival‚ 2009 Odense, Denmark, September 2009 Conflux Festival. New York, NY, September 2009 NY Tech Meetup. New York, NY, June 2009 Maker Faire. Austin, TX, October 2008 Artbots. Dublin, Ireland, September 2008 ūhttp://www.kofriel.com/

34 |35 EXHIBITION

Achilleas Kentonis

Electromagnetic fields as a unifying chaos in which our body is submerged Decode it into sound and randomly present it based on the interactivity of the user We humans sense just a small portion of the things surrounding us due to limitations of our senses. Our bodies though are exposed to a series of invisible actions like the electromagnetic fields in a very broad spectrum. By collecting electromagnetic spectrums stored

in emf meters from different cities around Europe all signals are processed and “translated” into sound which can be “orchestrated” randomly by the interactivity of the user/visitor/audience. This can be done via a special software and a laser harp with midi

capabilities. The base sound which does not represent a city is a spectrum of the electromagnetic fields of the human body. Cities recorded so far are: Berlin, Athens, Nicosia. Istanbul and Prague and/or other cities will be added before the festival.

Achilleas Kentonis (CY) studied Engineering, Physics and Fine Arts in the University of South Alabama, USA and Universitad de Castilla la Mancha, Spain. As a researcher / scientist he participated in researches of NASA, the Cyprus University and the Aegean University in different European programs. As visual artist he was selected and represented Cyprus and Greece in different European and international Salons / exhibitions, such as Bienales and Trienales, at the fields of painting, photography, engraving, architecture, stage and costume design, installation, video art, short films (experimental, animation, documentary). In addition, he organized various international cultural events, symposiums, conferences, seminars and interventions and realized artistic publications. He received distinctions and awards for different kind of creation. With Maria Papacharalambous they are the founders and the directors of ARTos Foundation (contemporary Arts and Science www.artosfoundation.org) which was awarded with the University of Cyprus Award for the Contribution to Culture and Society in 2008.

EXHIBITION 34 | 35

Jenny Chowdhury My work is the bastard child of an engineering education, a suppressed desire to be an artist and an unwavering interest in pranks. I suppose that means that my work has three parents. Whether in the form of a website, installation, cellphone application or a performance, my projects call attention to how technology has altered the ways in which people communicate with each other and their surrounding environment. A New York City native, my work often involves applying and manipulating technology in the bustling cityscape of which I am so fond. I’m currently finishing my masters’ work at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and hope to continue producing thought provoking, amusing work. ūhttp://jennylc.com/

802.11 Apparel – Wifi Jacket 802.11 Apparel is a line of clothing that reflects wifi strength detected in the wearer’s immediate environment. It is intended to literally “bring to light” a portion of the invisible radio waves that pervade our surroundings. In each garment, up to five stripes are illuminated in accordance with the wifi signal strength. Pieces are created using a hacked wifi detector, an Arduino microcontroller, LEDs and extended electronic components.

The first piece from this collection is the wifi jacket. While I was originally working with basic light stripes, I ultimately decided to integrate

them with a flower motif. This design choice was made to recount the age old story of borrowing from the environment to decorate garments – think floral and animal print patterns.

Since wifi is so prevalent in the environment now, I thought it would be interesting to integrate this representation of a man-made part of our environment into a garment in that same way. In the end design, flowers referencing our natural environment are juxtaposed with technology from the synthetic environment. ū http://jennylc.com/802_11/

Pavel Kopřiva

Sound of CAMO Sound of CAMO investigates a possibility how camouflage could be listened to.

Graphical fractals of military uniforms serve as a source of sound composition. Digital pattern uniform becomes a musical score. Special electronic scanner reads the score and computer software generates adequate sounds. Interactive movement of a scanner around the uniform plays a sound composition: the sound of camo.

The project uses digital camouflage pattern (UCP – Universal Camouflage

Pattern) as data matrix. It is based on a special color scheme of the graphical fractal elements system developed by army labs. All fractals are derived from a positive feedback loop when the output is fed back into the system as input and looped over and over. Camouflage is an identifier, a uniform, it promotes a position of authority and conceals the user under the correct conditions. The point of camouflage is tactical effectiveness, not aesthetic appearance. Functional camo is not visible. But here you can listen to it.

Pavel Kopřiva (CZ) is head of DIGITAL MEDIA studio (http://www.digitalove.eu) at the Faculty of Art and Design, University J. E. Purkyně, Ústí nad Labem. His long-term interests include surface reflection, military logistics, UFO, space adventures, nanotechnology, and, on general level, intersection of art and science. ūhttp://www.pavelkopriva.name

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Caitlin Morris & Liza Stark

Whispers Whispers explores the connection between sound and structure, the unheard resonances of urban architecture.

Custom-made sound boxes containing piezoelectric antennae, amplifying electronics, and a headphone input jack are parasitically connected to metal surfaces via neodymium magnets. The sound boxes resonate with their host material, converting the motion of the environment into rich layers of sound, which users can access though personal headphones. An intimate environment is created in which the user is both physically and sonically connected to a space filled with sound data that was previously unheard and unknown.

Liza Stark (USA) is an artist and designer engaged in challenging social, cultural, and historical paradigms through playful interactions with technology. Combining a humanities background with an interest in physical computing, sound, language, and textiles, her work seeks to produce critical reflection by materializing new digital metaphors and infusing carnivalesque elements into hybrid spaces of individual and collective communication. Both artists are currently working toward an MFA in Design + Technology from Parsons the New School for Design.

Caitlin Morris (USA) is an artist with roots in architecture and perception research, working with physically embodied spaces and the cognition of interaction with society and environment. Her work explores the physicality of sound and thresholds of sensory awareness, as well as the role of interactivity in the built environment.

EXHIBITION 36 | 37

Teresa Almeida

Modes for Urban Moods: Space Dress Space Dress inflates according to its user decision and in specific situations. It is designed to cope with stress, anxiety and claustrophobic situations – or simply for comfort. It was originally designed for rush hour at NYC subway system.

Modes for Urban Moods are a suite of wearable coping mechanisms that explore relationships in public spaces and materialize invisible social networks. The suite consists of: Emergency Ring, Loud Bubble, Space Dress, and Wings.

Each addresses different needs – the need to escape, the need for space, the need to breathe, and the need to ask for help or reclaim attention. Each is designed to (re)act under a specific set of circumstances such as stress, claustrophobia, panic, or comfort. They are whimsical wearable accessories which aim to offer inhabitants of the city the ephemeral possibility of coping and circumventing the urban pressures imposed on their daily rhythms. Modes explore dynamic structures fashioned to the body for use in public space. ū http://www.banhomaria.net/modes.html

Teresa Almeida (PT/SG) is an artist/designer/ researcher. Originally from Portugal, she is currently based in Singapore, where she is Lecturer in Media Arts/Interactive Art at LASALLE College of the Arts. She holds a Master’s Degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and a BA in Theatre Design from the College of Theatre and Film in Lisbon.

She was artist-in-residence at Ljudmila-Ljubljana Digital Media Lab and at the Banff New Media Institute. Some of her projects include inflatables, sound reactive garments, and social coping patches. Her work has been showed widely, and it is published in the book Fashionable Technology and Future Fashion. ūhttp://www.banhomaria.net/

38 | 39 EXHIBITION

Mark Shepard

Sentient City Survival Kit The Sentient City Survival Kit consists of a collection of artifacts for survival in the near-future sentient city. As computing spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, information processing becomes embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of urban space. Ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban information systems that sense and respond to events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this “sentientâ€? city reflexively monitors our behavior within it and becomes an active agent in the organization of our daily lives. The project addresses the implications for privacy, autonomy, trust and serendipity in this highly observant, ever-more efficient and over-coded city. ĹŤ http://survival.sentientcity.net/

EXHIBITION 38 | 39

Mark Shepard

Serendipitor Walk Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for the iPhone that helps you find something by looking for something else. The app combines directions generated by a routing service with instructions for movement and action inspired by Fluxus, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono. Enter an origin and a destination, and the app maps a route between the two. As you navigate your route, step-by-step directions generated by the routing service and combined with suggestions for actions to take at a given location that are designed to introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route.

During DATAPOLIS, visitors will be able try out the app and participate in a serendipitous city walk organized during the festival.

(Reqs: iPhone w/ iOS 3.1.3+ dataplan). 큰 http://serendipitor.net

Mark Shepard (USA) is an artist, architect and researcher whose post-disciplinary practice addresses new social spaces and signifying structures of contemporary network cultures.

His current research investigates the implications of mobile and pervasive media, communication and information technologies for architecture and urbanism. His work has been exhibited at museums, galleries and festivals internationally. In 2009, he curated Toward the Sentient City, an exhibition of commissioned projects that critically explored the evolving relationship between ubiquitous computing and the city. He is the editor of Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space, published by the Architectural League of New York and MIT Press. 큰http://www.andinc.org

40 | 41 EXHIBITION

Erik Conrad

Bark Rubbings: City as Forest Bark rubbings is a site specific, mobile, visuotactile installation. I have imagined the city as a forest of textures, where architectural facades project out into the spaces that surround them as vibrotactile patterns to be experienced as one walks with the aid of a custom wearable interface. A walk through a forest is an immersive experience of living architecture. It is a medi-

um that forges connections across senses and scales, composed of varying patterns and densities of material life.

It is possible to view the city in a similar fashion. Certain areas are more or less dense with buildings and pedestrians. The buildings’ canopy is higher or lower depending upon use or neighborhood. Looking upon individual

buildings, each facade has its own unique texture. In bark rubbings, architectural facades project out into the spaces that surround them as vibrotactile patterns to be experienced as one walks with the aid of a custom wearable interface. ĹŤ http://peripheralfocus.net/rubbings/

EXHIBITION 40 | 41

Erik Conrad

Palpable City Palpable City explores the relationship between the abstract and concrete spaces of the city by allowing walkers to explore and feel the spatial form of the urban grid through vibro-tactile rhythms on their body generated by a GPS enabled, wearable tactile display.

Palpable City is a site specific installation that transforms an everyday walk through the city into an exploration of a new tactile landscape. Participants don a garment outfitted with a GPS, custom hardware and

software, and an array of vibrotactile actuators (vibrating pager motors). As they walk, and the shape of the ‘empty’ space around them changes, participants experience new rhythms of the city as tactile sensations generated by the vest. Changes in rhythm, location and intensity of vibrations on their body (tactil textures) change in relation to the spatial form of their surrounding environment. ū http://peripheralfocus.net/palpable_city.html

Erik Conrad (USA) is concurrently a PhD student at the Topological Media Lab, Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. His background is interdisciplinary, holding degrees in visual and performing arts, information design, and computer science. Conrad’s writings and installations exploring the relationship between gesture and vision, mobile tactile displays and tactual media have been presented and exhibited internationally, including the establishment of a temporary Theatre for Tactilism [Boston], Media City [Weimar, Germany], YoungCT [KAIST, South Korea], ImageRadio [MAD Emergent Arts Center, Netherlands], and Pixilerations, [Providence, RI] among others. ūhttp://www.peripheralfocus.net

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Timo Arnall & Jo/ rn Knutsen & Einar Sneve Martinussen

Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi The city is filled with an invisible landscape of networks that is becoming an interwoven part of daily life. WiFi networks and increasingly sophisticated mobile phones are starting to influence how urban environments are experienced and understood. We want to explore and reveal what the immaterial terrain of WiFi looks like and how it relates to the city.

Below Einar Sneve Martinussen goes into some details about the design and development of the probe and the techniques, and he also points towards how design research can contribute to understanding immaterial phenomena of networks and the city. ū http://yourban.no/2011/02/22/

immaterials-light-painting-wifi/

Radio and wireless communication are a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities. This generates what William Mitchell called an ‘electromagnetic terrain’ that is both intricate and invisible, and only hinted at by the presence of antennas (2004, p.55).

Investigating WiFi In order to study the spatial and material qualities of wireless networks, we built a WiFi measuring rod that visualises WiFi signal strength as a bar of lights. When moved through space the rod displays changes in the WiFi signal. Longexposure photographs of the moving rod reveal cross sections of a network’s signal strength.

The measuring rod is inspired by the poles land surveyors use to map and describe the physical landscape. Similarly, our equipment

allows us to reveal and represent topographies of wireless networks. The measuring rod uses a typical mobile WiFi antenna to measure reception, and draw out 4 metre tall graphs of light.

The size of the measuring rod and the light paintings it creates emphasises the architectural scale at which WiFi operates, and situates the networks in the physical environments that they are a part of. The light of the measuring rod pulses as it is being moved, which creates dashed lines rather than solid ones. This creates a semi-transparent texture that allows the visualisation to appear within the physical setting without covering it.

Material qualities of WiFi December in Oslo is dark, making it an ideal month for light painting. During a few weeks

EXHIBITION 42 | 43 of walking, measuring and photographing we visualised a number of networks in the Grünerløkka area in Oslo. The visualisations illustrate how WiFi networks in this neighbourhood are ubiquitous, but also fragmented and qualitatively different. The strength, consistency and reach of the network says something about the built environment where it is set up, as well as reflecting the size and status of the host. Small, domestic networks in old apartment buildings flow into the streets in different ways than the networks of large institutions. Dense residential areas have more, but shorter range networks than parks and campuses.

Our expeditions around Grünerløkka, and the time-consuming work of measuring networks by walking with a 4 metre tall instrument gave us a sense of the relationships between WiFi networks and the physical environment. Architectural forms, building materials and the urban landscape shape how networks spread into the city, and can make WiFi seem spatially unpredictable. The light paintings show how the network’s behaviour depends on where it is located and how the city around it is built.

WiFi networks can, both practically and metaphorically connect different environments. The radio waves from WiFi base stations flow from indoor domestic spaces and semi-private work places, into public parks, streets and bus stops. A typical example of how WiFi networks can bring new functions to urban environments is the case of a university network extending into a nearby park. This makes it possible for students to use the park as a networked area when the seasons allow it. However, this password protected park-network is both technically invisible and practically unavailable for anyone else.

The light paintings show how WiFi networks are highly local, informal and fragmented, but also illustrate how these networks make up a highly evolved, yet largely inaccessible urban infrastructure that is mainly created by its users. The visualisations demonstrate how WiFi is a part of the urban landscape, and how networks are both shaped by the environment and influence how urban spaces can be used.

This connects to Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish’s 2004’s research and discussions on how networks, computing and urban environments can be understood as interwoven layers of the urban experience: “The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given. Technology can destabilise and transform these interactions, but will only ever be one part of the mix.”

– Bell & Dourish (2004, p.2) Materialising the networked city WiFi networks are an early example of the technological phenomena that makes up the networked city. As new communication standards and pricing models get introduced WiFi may become obsolete, but it is has been one of the first examples of effective ways of bringing the internet into the city. WiFi also have characteristics that illustrate challenges and possibilities posed by networked cities: WiFi is invisible, complex and increasingly mundane.

Adam Greenfield discusses how ‘the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis’.

Greenfield argues for unpacking the technologies and systems of the networked city ‘demys-

44 | 45 EXHIBITION tifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them’.

The WiFi light-paintings can be situated within the discourses of the networked city as illustrations of how invisible, complex technologies may be contextualised and communicated through visualisation. This is taken up and discussed in a forthcoming book chapter about this work: “WiFi networks are both physically invisible and technically obscure, which makes them blackboxed on multiple levels. The detailed technical level of the infrastructures, data traffic and electromagnetic fields that our mobile devices are built upon are obviously complex and difficult to understand. However, there are also interactional and material aspects to how we experience these technologies that are similarly opaque and vaguely understood. This material level is especially important for design research as it is not only related to the technical and infrastructural properties of the technologies, but also to how they are experienced as spatial, material

and interactive phenomena in the city. Through visualisations and the process of creating them we have unpacked some of the qualities of WiFi networks and made them understandable as spatial and contextual phenomena. This process of making the phenomena material through visualisation shows how digital structures and physical environments are interwoven elements of the urban landscape. It also illustrates how our interactions with devices and networks are a part of the fabric of everyday urban life.”

– Martinussen (2011 forthcoming) Conclusions ‘Immaterials: Light painting WiFi’ points towards potentials for materialising and contextualising invisible technologies through light painting and visualisations. Hopefully, the film situates the networked city within the everyday environments in which it take place. The light paintings illustrate how the networked city can be both ubiquitous, messy, informal and seamful, and emphasise how the invisible landscape of net-

works is another layer of the dense and complex urban contexts we already know.

Acknowedgements ‘Immaterials: light painting WiFi’ is created by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen. The film joins together Touch, YOUrban and Einar’s PhD project on design, technology and city life. Einar is also writes about this work in a chapter for a forthcoming book titled ‘Design Innovation for the Built Environment – Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice’ edited my Michael U. Michael U. Hensel.

Timo writes more about immaterials and WiFi on the Touch weblog.

Thanks to Andrew Morrison and Jack Schulze (BERG).

References Bell, G. and Dourish, P. 2004. Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing on the Urban Frontier (Ubicomp 2004, Nottingham, UK.) Greenfield, A. 2009. The kind of program a city is [online]. Available at: http://speedbird. wordpress.com/2009/10/08/the-kind-of-program-a-city-is-2/ [Accessed 24 February 2011].

Martinussen, E. 2011 forthcoming. Making material of the networked city. In: Design Innovation for the Built Environment – Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice. Routledge, Taylor & Francis.

Mitchell, W.J. 2004. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

EXHIBITION 44 | 45

Vojtěch Kálecký

EMF Piano An interactive audio-visual object corporealizing harmful electrosmog that we are exposed to every day. An ordinary LCD monitor is transformed into an instrument capable of playing a full octave using images displayed on it.

Author’s aim was to highlight a current problem in a funny way. Invisible, inaudible, imperceptible. But it is here – electrosmog. Electromagnetic radiation doesn’t occur naturally on Earth in this intensity. It radiates in wide-spec-

trum from all electronics around us, especially from PC screens. Specific radiation is transmitted by specific patterns and received by an ordinary radio receiver. Certain patterns correspond to certain tones of the musical scale that calls for the construction of a musical instrument.

A broader sound scale can be made by changing the position of the receiver or by tuning it. EMF Piano enables us to make music using pictures.

Vojtěch Kálecký (CZ) (1991) is a student of Interactive media at the Faculty of Art and Design, UJEP Ústí nad Labem. He attempts to misuse media in order to change their original purpose to express a message. ūhttp://www.vojtechkalecky.cz

46 | 47 EXHIBITION

Anna Hrušková

Claude Debussy: Reverie Ligthing costume based on arduino controlled LED lighting system is destinated for a visual interpretation of classical music composition by dance performance.

The whole project heads for beeng shot and presented as a short film record. Inspirated by sign language interpretation the output should be similar open to perception of music to deaf people and hearing people. The costume object is designed directly for a specific

piano work Reverie. Its form is inspirated by musical fluxion and wawe using the organic shape, collouring follows the impresionist style.

It works with the effect of a lace shadow play emphasising the move. The lighting up and gloaming LED’s respond to musical dynamics.

It is pre-set by using the VVVV programming environment. All the programming matters were developed by a great support of the COALA program by CIANT.

Anna Hrušková (CZ) born 1988 in Prague, studies Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Faculty of Art and Design, Atelier Fashion Design. Interested in stage and costume design she participated as a costume asistant in the iscenation of Tvrdě/Měkce (DPB, Ostrava). Currently she gains experience in Katja Design Atelier. Anna attended an exchange Erasmus program at FHTW Berlin in 2009. Since then she has been interested in the field of wereable computing and new technologies used in fashion design. She admires contemporary dance performances and new ways of theater.

EXHIBITION 46 | 47

SOCIAL BITS Cities are like nerve networks. They are as much formed of interactions among the cells (inhabitants) as they are about their physical nature and architecture. Life in cities is built on these interactions and it is an endless progression.

The methods of interactions change, renew or evolve, but the underlying sociality endures. We create many bits of information during these chaotic interactions, information which is largely invisible to us. These bits can be seen as similar to the shadows of the people in the city. They

cannot exist without the citizens; however, they are different from the people themselves. They contain some pieces of meta-information that is related to the citizens, interactions and city itself.

These meta-information clusters are clouds that cover the entire spectrum of the city, and they continually move, scale and transform.

Today, we create the source information for these clouds on online platforms. We share our thoughts and experiences via social networks.

This trackable information we create in virtual

worlds merges into real life and becomes a part of our daily city life activities.

Social Bits aims to track the invisible information in shadows and explore the data clouds in the city. It researches on possible avenues of output and display for the information inthe cityscape via media art. In “Social Bits Prague” exhibition, the inhabitants of the city and the visitors of the gallery will be a part of the cloud and contribute to the formation of the works.

Mahir M. Yavuz

URBANSPHERE WEARABLES Urbansphere wearables aims to reflect the daily keywords of the city by utilizing the data streams of social networks as a source of fashion design. The project initiates “social sensors” (special filters and data gathering scripts that follows twitter) in order to collect

information on social networks created by different inhabitants of the same city. The data gathered is then visualized and turned into a fashion design that represents the recent topics and discussions of urban people. As every online inhabitant of the city becomes a part of

this production, the project brings online data to the streets, creating an ongoing interaction between the real and the virtual existence of the urban life. In the exhibition, visitors will see a set of unique wearables that contains the data from Prague.

48 | 49 EXHIBITION

Mahir M. Yavuz

URBAN MOOD Urban Mood aims to visualize the real-time mood of Prague’s citizens. It is a lighting, projection and sound installation situated in a small room. By publishing their personal thoughts on twitter, every inhabitant becomes a part of this mood production. The installation continuously collects the data from tweeters in Prague,

Social Bits

COLLECTIVE DATA-MAPS Collective Data Maps is an open mapping project for exhibition visitors. There are two Prague maps printed and prepared for collaboration within the festival place. With small cloud-

shaped pins, visitors will take part in creating physical data maps of Prague that reflect the most liked and most disliked locations of Prague as told by its citizens.

analyzing and summarizing each post in a single word. Through this keyword, the source tweets will create a typographic animation on the floor of the room, while lighting and sounds will change to suit the content of the keyword. The Urban Mood installation simulates the atmosphere of Prague for the festival visitors.

EXHIBITION 48 | 49

h.o

KAZAMIDORi kazamidori is a media gadget like weather vane to indicate the direction where visitors in a website are coming from in real-time. This social weather vane is designed as a bird, like traditional weather vanes, as it will face the direction where the virtual ‘wind’ is coming from online. Every day, visitors arrive at websites virtually and kazamidori

Social Bits is a research group based in Linz, Austria focusing on the artistic output of social interactions in real world locations; specifically in urban environments, public spaces and unique architectural complexes. Social interaction is a sustained presence in all societies throughout history; however, the methods of interaction have radically evolved in recent years, aided and augmented by both technological developments and the sense of comfort generated by these developments.

Our research studies and analyzes the collective information cloud created by humans worldwide, as well as introducing new mediums, materials and platforms to present the artistic results we discover. Social Bits is interested not solely in the social data itself. Rather, it is the means of producing the data, and how it can be reflected back on society that interests us. The process of turning a human thought into digital information, then in turn putting the information in a physical context is what is intriguing. ūhttp://socialbits.org

aims to physically display where the interested audience is, on a worldwide level. In the exhibition, the system will be pointed towards the website of the enter festival. As a result, visitors to the festival can see the direction of where ‘this location’ has been queried from, while imagining the subtle feelings of the virtual visitor.

Current members of Social Bits: Mahir M. Yavuz (TU/AT) is a designer and researcher who lives and works in New York City. He worked as a senior researcher of information design at the Ars Electronica Futurelab between 2006–2011. He has been giving lectures on interaction design, information design, typography and animation in Istanbul (Istanbul Bilgi University) and Linz (University of Art and Design) respectively since 2003. He is also engaged in doctoral studies in Interface Culture at the University of Art and Design Linz. He is the co-founder of newgray, a design and research company.

Jayme Cochrane (CA/AT) is an interaction designer currently based in Linz. After receiving a BSc in Interactive Arts (focus Interaction Design) from Simon Fraser University in Canada, he moved to Linz to work at the Ars Electronica Futurelab. He is currently also pursuing a master’s degree in Interface Culture at the University of Art and Design Linz.

h.o (Hide Ogawa, Taizo Zushi, Jun Yura and Emiko Ogawa) (JP/AT) is an international media art group from Tokyo who creates conceptual artworks using a mixture of media combined with digital technology. “h.o” derives from the chemical symbol for water, H2O, implying h.o’s interest in various forms of communication between people. The activities and ideas of the group are inspired by little awareness that appear in everyday scenes and criticism on information-oriented society.

Tim Devine (AU) followed artist residencies at Experimedia in Melbourne, Kitchen Budapest developing Newsleak and MediaLab Prado, Madrid where he developed The Mexican Standoff – Creating a Hyperreality. He presented papers at Technarte, Bilbao and Computer Space, Sofia. His work has been written about around the world, with interviews on national radio CBC Canada and radio Australia. He has been commissioned for interactive installations at the State Library of Victoria and Oxfam. He currently lives in Linz Austria following his Masters of Interface Cultures at the Kunstuniversität.

50 | 51 EXHIBITION

Prokop Bartoníček

Vibrator

Kristýna Lutzová

Unfinished Business We live in an endless flow of audiovisual impulses of the Internet. A desire for endlessness seems to be one of major features of new media. We dissolve in clicking just another new link finding ourselves yet deeper and deeper in a virtual space.

Kristýna Lutzová (CZ), student at Supermedia department of the VŠUP Prague (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design).

“Beauty in art” is no doubt an endless discussion that never reaches a crystallised definition, even less so in the context of data or information. But since the topic of the semester (Berlin UdK, 2008), where this work originates in, was not about beauty as such, but about interpretation of data in general, I turned to searching for “beauty” in networks of networks – the internet. I looked at how the widest audience today is seeing beauty in digital space. The beauty of feelings, ideas, curves of bodies. Global, anonymous and mass interest in pornography on the network led me to concentrate in my work on the pleasure and beauty for one person. The object is connected to the busiest porno server in the world. It vibrates and lights up based on the increases or decreases of the viewership of the most requested video sequences. The anonymous interest of the mass of users from the entire world is thus concentrated into an object for one. Roughly every several dozen seconds,

the object gets new information and changes its activity. If the viewership increased briskly, then the vibrator pulses upwards (fade in) more than in the case of a smaller growth of viewership. In the event of a decline of viewership, the object then pulses downwards (fade out), from slow to even slower intervals. When one holds a small button at the end of the device, the object is active according to the previous measurement, thus making it possible to compare the development of viewership. The vibrator is managed from the computer via Bluetooth wireless technology and is powered by a chargeable battery.

It is made out of glass and stainless steel, run by a microprocessor and a remote computer that is connected to the Internet.

Prokop Bartoníček (CZ), born in Prague, 1983.

In 2003, before grammar school graduation he was accepted to enter VŠUP (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design), sculpture studio Prof.

Beránek. In 2007–2008 he was a visiting student at Experimental design studio of Prof. Joachim Sauter at UdK in Berlin. Presently, he lives and works in Berlin and Prague where he completed MgA. studies at VŠUP. He mainly develops interactive installations (Vibrator ‘08, You can’t hide it all! ‘09) and experimental design projects (Urna ‘08, Worlds as fragments ‘10). As a former member of guerilla art-group Ztohoven he participated on action Media Reality ‘07 (hack in to the morning show of Czech state TV, now part of permanent collection of National gallery in Prague). ūhttp://www.prokopbartonicek.com/

EXHIBITION 50 | 51

Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet

The Rhythm of City The idea is to apply geo-located social data for describing a city in real-time. The initial plan with 10 metronomes has been realized. We have selected 10 cities (that could be as well changed if needed) and offering a acoustic and visual experience that is driven by geo-located social data from Twitter, Flickr, and Youtube.

Starting with the inspiration for the project, Bornstein & Bornstein discovered a positive correlation between the walking speed of pedestrians and the size of the city . Robert Levine demonstrated in his study the faster pace of life in the northern, economically developed and individualistic countries. In short, the studies proved that it is possible to describe a city and its culture by the speed of inhabitants and services, and its location.

Consequently, we assume that the digital geo-located social data can give us similar results: in economically developed countries bigger cities generate more digital social content rather than the cities of undeveloped countries. In other words, we believe that the analyses of geo-located social data will give similar results as have achieved Bornstein & Bornstein and Robert Levine. Thus, the aim is to artistically relate to these studies.

The goal is to metaphorically describe the locations by extracting geo-tagged content and translating it into a rhythm of physical metronome in real-time. In short, a metronome represents a city. The installation consists from the 10 modified metronomes whose rhythms correspond to the selected cities’ the digital pace of life of. The audience is given a chance to discover and experience an alternative way of perceiving different locations through a continuous performance of 10 metronomes.

To put in a nutshell, “The Rhythm of City” is an art installation that explains in original way digital geo-located social content and characterizes cities. Even more, the work is an ongoing performance that embraces different locations, digital social data, and physical kinetic motion.

The installation is a sonic, and at the same time visual, interface for perceiving the urban life and culture of different locations. Moreover, we would like to give an alternative meaning and purpose to the location-specific invisible online data. In short, the artwork makes invisible information visible and even audible. ūhttp://varvarag.wordpress.com/the-rhythm-of-city/

Varvara Guljajeva (EST) is a female artist from Estonia, who works with art, technology, and materials. Her main focus is on interactive installations and kinetic organic sculptures. Often Varvara’s works are her reflection on society, environment and cyber-age. She has exhibited her works in a number of international exhibitions and festivals. In addition to that, Varvara was teaching at Interface Cultures in the Art University of Linz and given a several workshops. Varvara has worked with children, youth, and artists who are eager to apply technology for creative purposes. ūhttp://varvarag.wordpress.com/ Mar Canet (ES) is a computer game engineer, designer and media artist interested in data visualization, computer games and new media art. Born in Mollet del Valles (Barcelona, 1981). He finished his BA in digital media design. He then spent two years as a fellowship researcher at the ESDI school of design (Barcelona), where he taught and organized workshops on media art and design. In 2006 he went to England to study computer Bsh games development at University Central Lancashire. Currently, he is living in Linz and working as a Creative Engineer for the Ars Electronica Futurelab and is also a Master’s candidate in the Interface Culture program at the University of Art and Design Linz. Since 2004, he was been intensely working in art and curatorships projects with his art collective Derivart (http://www.derivart.info) that focuses on the finance art, exploring the intersection of finance, art and technology. He has exhibited collaboratively with derivart and independently in many international festivals and museums.

52 | 53 EXHIBITION

Ricardo O’Nascimento & Tiago Martins

Rambler Rambler is a critical take on near obsessive microblogging habits and elicits reflection on the personal nature, amount and usefulness of information generated everyday through blogging and social platforms such as Twitter.

Rambler is a critical embodiment of the (until now) metaphorical notion of blogging every step you take. It aims to bring the practice of microblogging to one of many possible extremes, turning it into an automatic,

thoughtless act of diffusing large amounts of slightly ambiguous, repetitive and arguably useless personal information. Manifesting itself physically as a pair of sneakers, it mirrors the trendy, easy going philosophy of the most popular microblogging platform of the moment: Twitter.

This project presents a pair of trendy sneakers that take microblogging one step further, by literally posting your steps on

EXHIBITION 52 | 53 a Twitter account. Messages are comprised of repetitions of the word “tap” and the period punctuation mark, symbolizing the wearer’s steps and time in between these, respectively.

A sensor on the sole of the shoe measures the amount of pressure exerted by the wearer’s foot. This information is read and processed by a microcontroller, which transmits it wirelessly via a Bluetooth module with a Serial Port Profile. This three part setup is powered by two AAA batteries lasting up to 9 hours of continuous usage. Pressure sensor, microcontroller, Bluetooth module and batteries are all embedded into the sneaker. Their combined weight isn’t noticeable in comparison with the sneak-

er’s own weight and their location is chosen as not to cause discomfort to the wearer.

The name Rambler was chosen for the double meaning of the word “ramble”. On one hand, to ramble is to take a pleasant, even aimless walk; on the other, it is also to digress when talking, losing clarity or even turning aside of the main subject. While the first meaning relates to the usage of the Rambler sneakers as footwear (literally as shoes for rambling), the second meaning relates to the desultory usage of microblogging platforms – with a focus on Twitter – into which this project elicits a critical view. ū http://www.popkalab.com/ramblershoes.html

Ricardo O’Nascimento (BR) investigates bodyenvironment relations focusing interface development and autonomous adaptative systems for interactive installations, worn devices and hybrid environments. Since some years he is working on the intersection between fashion and technology in collaboration with other artists. He participated in many festivals and exhibitions in Europe, Asia and America.

Tiago Martins (PT/AT) works between teaching and researching for his PhD thesis he also finds the time to co-author interactive installations and media art projects that playfully explore bonds between the physical, digital and social.

54 | 55 EXHIBITION

Marie Poláková & Jonathan Cremieux

MIMODEK MIMODEK is a dynamic, interactive, and evolving artificial living system which is based on the principles of the natural world yet “grows” from the fabric of the city. As all living systems in nature, MIMODEK reflects its own environment.

It is site specific, formed by unique, locationrelated data sources, and by behaviour of the visitors. Every installation evolves into a unique “organism” reflecting its location. MIMODEK highlights the delicate relation between human beings and their environment, and their connection to other living beings with whom they share this environment. Apart from being displayed at the installation site, MIMODEK can also be seen online as, while exhibited, it regularly uploads images of itself to a dedicated website. The images are accompanied by records of the environmental data which had influenced the particular MIMODEK. ū http://mimodek.medialab-prado.es/

Conceptual project description Cities around the world seem to share the same pattern – their inhabitants highly value nature.

The prime location is always the one near the ocean, river or surrounded by greenery, while the concrete jungle is left for the less privileged ones. City dwellers seem to search natural habitats whenever they need to relax, unwind, comfort or re-centre themselves. Nature in the urban environment is cherished, protected and cultivated. What is the essential difference between the natural world and man-made (urban) environments? What is “it” we miss in our cities and find in nature? In nature, everything we lay our eyes on is either alive or it serves as a basis for life. Trees aren’t just logs of wood stuck in the ground – they are complex living systems which themselves are part of yet another complex living system, the forest. One of the essential attributes of a living system is the element of change. Living systems are changing continuously, on their cellular level and as whole entities. When looking at the social structures of a city, these function as living systems, too (and show attributes similar to those of the living systems found in nature). But at material level, cities are not alive and are not changing. Any change visible in the city is applied synthetically by humans and other living inhabitants. Change is not embedded in the very core of the matter of the city in the way that it is in nature.

The omnipresence of change might be the base of the difference between the man-made and the natural environment. The essence of what we – city dwelling humans – are missing in our otherwise dearly loved urban landscape. In nature, there is no distinction between entities and their environment which holds up to rigorous inspection. When we step into any natural habitat, we are immediately interacting with it.

We cannot remain detached observers, our mere presence is modifying the environment, and the environment modifies us in return. MIMODEK explores these elements of interconnectivity.

Physical Project Description At its essence MIMODEK is formed by every reasonably sized living creature (participant) present at the location of the installation and by the environmental conditions of that location. Information about participants is obtained using a camera, mounted in a suitably high location, overlooking the area directly in front of the

EXHIBITION 54 | 55 – an open source programming language and environment, originally developed by Ben Fry and Cassey Reas at MIT.

installation. The camera images are processed using computer vision techniques. The combination of camera input and computer vision is a common method for passing information about an audience in a public space into a digital installation such as this. The video footage is analyzed by “motion tracking” software, developed during the Open Up workshop at Medialab-Prado

by Chris Sugrue and Bruno Vianna with use of Open Frameworks, “an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding”. The motion tracking program assigns a numerical ID to each participant and tracks their movement within the viewed area. Continuously updated information about participants and their locations is passed over a TCP/IP network to the main MIMODEK software using the TUIO protocol. This information is used to create an immediate response to the participant’s behaviour which in turn forms the persistent MIMODEK organism. The MIMODEK simulation and rendering software is written in Java. It is packaged as a library for Processing

Environmental influences As described above, the motion tracking software provides MIMODEK with information about the position of the participants.

MIMODEK monitors the temperature and the humidity in the location where it is running. To make the system flexible and to keep its installation simple, this is achieved by querying a free Internet weather service, the Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com).

Optionally, if the information is available for the particular location, an external application (written for MIMODEK by GatoPan) on MIMODEK’s server obtains data about the air quality. In Madrid, this data has been obtained from (http://www.mambiente.munimadrid.es/ opencms/opencms/calaire/red/indicehorario/ ultimahora.html).

Life simulation The MIMODEK system is loosely based on “ant fungus mutualism”. This form of agriculture, which involves cultivation of fungi and, in some cases, symbiotic relationships between insect and fungi, was developed by Attine ants some 50–60 million years ago. This pattern of symbiosis was chosen for MIMODEK because it is an elegant yet simple representation of the complex dependencies we all share with our environment. MIMODEK relies on participants who come to the installation area. Information about their presence is translated into flakes of “food” which appear on the display as white dots.

This food then nurtures the whole system and

enables it to grow. Firefly-like creatures carry the “food flakes” to the root cells of the main MIMODEK organism. A creature which discovers a food source, leaves a virtual pheromone trail behind it so as to inform its fellow creatures of the presence of food. The changing colour of the creatures represents their state, they are either “empty” and appear white, or they are carrying food and appear colourful. The creatures, however, don’t eat this food by themselves, they deliver it to the fungus. The creatures rather feed on a particular type of cell within the fungus organism. When the creatures are sufficiently nourished, they can reproduce and more creatures mean more carriers of nutrition for the main fungus. When the nutrition is insufficient, the creatures begin to die out and the growth of the whole system is slowed. The growth process of the fungus organism is based on diffusionlimited aggregation (DLA) and is constrained by the amount of free space. DLA is an algorithm that generates highly branched and fractal structures. Among others, it has been used for modelling the growth and form of natural structures such as coral. MIMODEK’s growth is only possible when a sufficient amount of food has been absorbed. When food is delivered by the creatures, the organism decides how to use the new energy. It can either grow a main body cell (cell A) or a leaf cell (cell B). The decision process follows a set of rules known as an L-system.

The A cells remain in the structure, whereas the B cells, when mature, can be carried away by two of the creatures and be eaten by them.

The maturing process depends on the amount of B cells in relation to A cells and length of time that a given B cell has been growing. MIMODEK also continuously responds to changing environ-

56 | 57 EXHIBITION mental data. The colour of the A cells responds to air temperature at the installation site while the relative air humidity defines how much the organism expands or retracts. When pollution data is available, it influences the colour of the B cells. When this information is not available, the colour of the B cells is determined by the tem-

perature, similarly to A cells, but a unique colour scheme is used.

Marie Poláková (CZ) is a wanderer who ones a while creates some artwork. She holds a bachelors of art degree in Digital Screen Arts from UCA, Farnham, UK. She had exhibited and performed in United Kingdom, Holland, Czech Republic, Finland and Spain. Her work is mostly software based and often interactive. Inspiration for her work emerges, simply, from the “web of life”. ūhttp://marura.wordpress.com/

Jonathan Cremieux (FI/FR) is a Designer/Programmer with interests in Creative Programming, Generative Graphics, Interaction Design and Computer Graphics. Currently doing a masters of art in New Media (MediaLab Helsinki, Finland). He has previously studied computer science. His personal works emerge from the study of natural phenomena, the practice of old games and the observation of everyday life interactions. ūhttp://j-u-t-t-u.net/

Lou Sanitráková

Symbiont Parasiting existence… These objects reminisce game console from a cult movie eXistenZ by David Cronenberg. Symbiont fullfils my idea how to bring parasiting art into public space.

One by one getting through the building in search for other symbionts…

Lou Sanitráková (CZ) graduated from FUUD – Faculty of Aplied Arts and Design in Usti nad Labem and from AAAD – Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Study visit to Hogeschool Maastricht. Programme coordinator of the AniFest 08, 09. Author of intermedia works.

Display MIMODEK was originally created for the Digital Facade of the Medialab-Prado, Madrid. This facade is 14.5 m (48") x 9.4 m (30") yet has a res-

olution of only 192 x 157 pixels. Approximately equivalent the screen of an older mobile phone. This combination of large physical size and very low resolution was a big challenge for the visual design. The complex representation had to be achieved with extremely simple graphical elements. MIMODEK can however be easily adapted to higher resolution displays such as projection, which then reveals further levels of detail invisible on the Medialab-Prado digital facade.

Licenses MIMODEK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. The source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

EXHIBITION 56 | 57

Dardex Mort2Faim Art group

Machine 2 Fish Machine 2 Fish is an installation in which the movements of a true living goldfish are being robotized by an experimental robotic system.

Thanks to its prosthesis the goldfish can move as if in an earthly environment. The fish and the machine combine into a smart autonomous device inspired by cyborgs and bio-mimetism.

This installation was realized during a residency at La Maison Numérique in Aixen-Provence, with support of M2F Créations and the participation of Ivan Chabanaud, Julien Marro Dauzat and Grégoire Lauvin. ū http://dardex.free.fr/index.php/category/

machine-2-fish/

The Dardex-Mort2Faim art-group gathers several artists, Quentin Destieu, Romain Senatore, Sylvain Huguet and Stephane Kyles (all FR). They are engaged in an exploration of the notion of play, reprocessing popular aesthetics and underground culture, thus underlining the frailty of social relationships and the human body confronted with today’s world. Because they appreciate the video game “8 bits” universe and the computer and networks revolution, they express themselves in installations and happenings using interactivity and games. Creator of M2F Creations association and GAMERZ Festival, in Aixen-Provence, they collaborate with the International Centre for Art and New Technology in Praha (CIANT).

They have also presented their works on a regular basis since 2003 in various exhibitions and festivals in France and abroad. ūhttp://dardex.free.fr

58 | 59 EXHIBITION

Niki Passath

Zoe “Zoe” is the attempt to represent human and interpersonal relationships in form of machinery and the attempt to consider social phenomena in movement principles even though the causes of these principles are (still) unknown. I use autonomous acting or reacting objects which have a formalized behaviour which seems to trigger emotion and lifelikeness in the human.

Machines are neither intelligent nor do they have feelings. Emotions exist entirely on the human side. This means that the machine / robot has no own emotions, which does not mean that it could produce as a result of his behavior, emotions and feelings. It urges, therefore, the question how the robot must be designed to create exactly the lifelikness that ultimately evokes feelings in the recipient. What patterns, which behavioral processes, which errors in the ‘system’ can generate emotions? Are just the mistakes the key, and if so, how far I can abstract this?

Basically, it can be stated that due to the materiality of the machine and the sounds which are produced by it, it is extremely difficult to trigger emotions. But what happened in the moment when the viewer tries to interpret behaviour of machines that can not be explained purely rational? Just at that moment – as my self-experiment shows – the machine triggers emotions in humans: If the machine behaves in a way that man can not understand, emotions are creat-

ed. When the robot runs away without reason for the machine and fled like a timid creature crawling into a corner, this creates feelings. My conclusion from this: emotions are attempts to interpret behavior or movements of machines.

Due to the fact that I have build the objects / robots by myself, I’m learning how they work. Only through the real creation process, by knowing which items are connected and ultimately emerge as complex motions, I can understand how the robot is produced by me.

Those machines built by myself, I see them sometimes as tools for gaining knowledge.

The interesting thing is: Even if I have builr the ‘thing’ by myself and know how it works, I can not necessarily understand it. Oswald Wiener emphasizes continually that we can only understand what is working like a machine. Beyond this, it remains diffuse. So i created something to reflect on unpredictability.

Continuing playing with emotions: emotions, as outlined here, take place on a surreal perception and reception level. So I try to play with my emotions in the robot character (meaning archetypal audition). The robots act and react to their environment. Creating emotions in the viewer, once it is fear, other times it is joy or pain.

This aroused feelings correlate with the alleged behavior of the machine. The feeling or the not-feeling emerges at the moment in which

I attempt to interpret the movement of the robot, the behavior of the robot. What emotions are specifically triggered, or whether the trigger is based, is the moment of self-reflection.

An indeterminate number of individual robot objects whose ‘corporeal’ is defined as swarm.

Each of these individual objects is self-sufficient, but is in an “intelligent” connection with all other objects of the swarm. This swarm without its own physicality, defines his nature over the generated social ‘group. The ability of man to anthropomorph creates the appearance of a lifelike swarm in the recipient. ū http://niki.xarch.at/

Niki Passath (AT) is a robotics artist and is engaged in his work with the sculptural conditions of robots and the idea of artificial intelligence. 1977, born in Graz, he lives in Vienna, Austria and teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Studied ‘Violoncello’ at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria, ‘Architecture’ at the Technical University in Graz, Austria and at the École d´Architecture Laungedoc Rousillon, Montpellier, France and made his degree in ‘Digital Art’ at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. He has received numerous awards including the ‘Theodor Körner Prize’ for his work on ‘Architecture Mules’, which translates generative design capabilities of 3D software into real space.

EXHIBITION 58 | 59

Saša Spačal

7K: New Life Form 7K: new life form is an interactive audio visual art installation in which visitors find themselves immersed in a unique techno-ecosystem. A world also inhabited by plant life, microscopic organisms and a strange new class of engineered nano-beings. 7K’s vision of future reality features a custom-built photosynthesis chamber, electronic sensors and purpose-shot footage of life under the microscope to create an autonomous system in which visitors become active participants.

Saša Spačal (SLO) is a intermedia artist and graphic designer, who is currently working in the fields of real-time interactive video production and intermedia art both in Slovenia and abroad.

She has taken part in exhibitions in Museum of Modern Art, Škuc Gallery, National Gallery, and Alkatraz Gallery. As a member of Temp group she had participated in public interventions, in the development of strategies for alternative use of abandoned spaces, and in various exhibitions Pogovarjanja/Conversations/Conversas, Odprti Rog, Mapiranje/arhiviranje/analiziranje izginulih prostorov umetnosti. As a researcher, she had taken part in the international research project Performing the City. Art Actionism in Public Space in 1960s/1970s that had made its rounds in Munich, Naples, São Paulo, and Paris. Presently, she is studying the connections of various media, technological and biological organisms in the field of interactive visualization.

Welcome to the technobiosphere, a place full of proliferating microscopic life which is invisible to the naked eye yet so important for everything that exists and evolves. Life is no longer just a biological category. Human beings have lived in an organic environment which we classified as biological and sorted all of the beings into six organic kingdoms; with our will to survive and procreate we became the origin, the maker of another kingdom, a kingdom much less ecological and biological, a kingdom of technology. This kingdom has been evolving alongside us and has formed new life which grows by its own accord.

Technology has a life that we explore, use and learn about just as with the organic kingdoms.

The two have become so intertwined that technology itself has become nature. ū http://www.kiberpipa.org/seventhkingdom/

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Open_Sailing community

Energy Animal “The best way to predict our future is to invent it.� (Alan Kay 1971) The oceans covers more than 74% of the surface of the earth. The annual budget for space exploration is more than a thousand times the ocean exploration budget, yet there is so much to learn from the oceans and to do there. Life started in water, the majority of humans live at less than 150 km from the coast. We urgently need a new generation of semi-permanent affordable and sustainable architecture to explore and study the oceans, understand biodiversity, monitor climate change, address marine pollution, invent new modes of sustainable aquaculture, create data mesh networks, produce renewable energies, for navigation safety purposes and much more.

Open_Sailing is an international community trying to develop the International_Ocean_Station as an open-source project, developing hardware and software to enable intelligent human activities at sea. The project started as an apocalyptic design response unit, but has evolved into a voluntary exploration community of passionate amateurs, inventors and scientists. We believe that in a matter of months and with a modest budget, we can challenge the civilization symbol of the International Space Station that produces today semi-secret data, that costs more than 150 billion $ to tax payers and was developed over decades by a closed group of rocket scientists. We believe that with a modest budget, in a few years, we are able to develop an Open-source architecture We can do it. It is not a utopian project we are working on it everyday.

Open_Sailing is divided into several labs investigating novel technologies: > Instinctive_Architecture: an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself. > Energy_Animal: an independent module that generates energy from the waves, wind and sun, providing continuously off-grid energy and being a node for environment and data mesh networking.

> Nomadic_Ecosystem: engineering a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea. > Openet.org: forum to formulate a global standard for a purely civilian internet, an internet moderated by its users, not by the governments nor the industries nor the militaries. > Life_Cable: a simpler unified standard for energy, water, waste, information in a complex built structure. > Swarm_Operating_System: a customizable decision assisting software, using real-time environmental data and global threats or personal interests. > Ocean_Cookbook: making the experience at sea not of a survival quality but a truly yummy experience.

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We are inviting you to join our labs or create your own within Open_Sailing, host your research on this soon to be built structure. ū http://www.opensailing.net

Energy_Animal The Energy_Animal is a device that produces renewable energy from the wind, the sun, and the waves. The Energy_Animal can produce energy is a variety of irregular weather conditions, producing a reliable output. Mostly made of free recycled materials, attracting and concentrating marine life instead of repelling it. One Energy_Animal can be part of an energy farm, or it can drift on its own. It is going where there is more energy to be collected, or where energy

is most needed. It is cheap to build, the design of the Energy_Animal is open-source, so there can be many concurrent or merging versions of different Energy_Animals. There is no development time, generation after generation a better design is emerging. The idea is to produce cheap reliable green energy evolutive devices for a rapidly changing world. We need a green energy revolution now, and we are responsible for it.

Concept characteristics of Energy_Animal001: > Hybrid renewable energy > Recycled materials > Probiotic Impact > Distributed Intelligence > Lightweight & Reconfigurable > Open-Source & Evolutionary ū http://energyanimal.org

Cesar Harada (FR/JP) is the founder and coordinator of Open_Sailing. Cesar graduated as Section Major in the Applied Arts section of Ecole Boulle with historical results (special Mention‚ “Tres Bien”) in 2001. In 2006 he completed the animation course at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs Paris (ENSAD Paris), and studied graphic design at Central Saint Martins, London UK as an exchange student (A+ grade). He studied industrial design at the ENSCI Les Ateliers Saint-Sabin as a part time student, building a trimaran boat on which he travelled and made an animation film. He wrote his ENSAD thesis on the subject of “Troubles in Space Perception” (2005), and wrote the first version of ‚“Open_Architecture” (2009) at the Royal College of Art. He taught graphic design at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Architecture (ENSA Versailles) while taking a Masters degree in ‚“New Media Arts” at Paris 8 University. He published “HARADA” an retrospective book about the work of his father the sculptor Tetsuo Harada, launched at the Pompidou Center. Cesar studied Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, his final project is Open_Sailing, collaborative project with which he won the ARS Electronica [Next Idea] grant, the Sustainable art Award BASH, the earthcam awards… His films, performances have been screened in many festivals and international venues such as the Pompidou Center Paris, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Niigata museum of contemporary Art JP, Miller Galery Pittsburgh US, Polychronopoulos art center in Athens, ArtEz Academy NL… He lectured at the V2_ Institute for the unstable Media Rotterdam, Barbican London, CCCB Barcelona, Goldsmiths University London, MIT Cambridge, KAIST Korea… Recently Cesar was project leader at MIT Senseable City Lab in Boston. Cesar is currently a TED Senior fellow.

Cesar is based in the Gulf of Mexico and is collaboratively developing Protei (http://protei.org) an Oil Spill Cleaning Sailing Robot. ūhttp://cesarharada.com

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Tomåť Rousek & Katarina Eriksson & Ondřej Doule

SinterHab This project describes a design study for a core module on a Lunar South Pole outpost, constructed by 3D printing technology with the use of in-situ resources and equipped with a bio-regenerative life support system.

The module would be a hybrid of CLASS II and III structures, combining deployable membrane structures and pre-integrated rigid elements with a sintered regolith shell for enhanced radiation and micrometeorite shielding. The closed loop ecological system would

support a sustainable presence on the Moon with particular focus on research activities. The core module accommodates from four to eight people, and provides laboratories as a test bed for development of new lunar technologies directly in the environment where they will be used. SinterHab also includes an experimental garden for development of new bio-regenerative life support system elements. The project explores these various concepts from an architectural point-of-view particularly, as they con-

stitute the building, construction and interior elements.

The construction method for SinterHab is based on contour crafting by sintering of the lunar regolith. Sinterator robotics 3D printing technology developed at NASA JPL enables construction of future generations of large lunar settlements with little imported material and the use of solar energy. The regolith is processed, placed and sintered by a the Sinterator robotics system which combines the NASA ATHLETE and

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Architect Tomas Rousek (CZ) is CEO at architecture and design company A-ETC.net based in EU and Japan. He focuses on terrestrial and space architecture, digital design and internet development. He cooperates with NASA Habitation Team, NASA New Media Innovation Team and Neuroscience laboratory at NASA Johnson Space Center. He is also co-founder of non-profit organization Futura Pragensis and presented his work in 16 galleries in Europe and America. He has graduated from Masters Studies at the International Space University in France and from Master of Architecture and Urbanism studies at Czech Technical University Prague.

the Chariot remotely controlled rovers. Microwave sintering creates a rigid structure in the form of walls, vaults and other architectural elements. The interior is coated with a layer of inflatable membranes derived from the TransHab project. The life-support system is mainly bio-regenerative and several parts of the sys-

Architect Katarina Eriksson (SE) has an M.Arch from the School of Architecture in Lund, Sweden.

The studies included courses in aerospace design, partly at NASA, JSC, Houston, and an internship Umbilical Design, a Swedish company focused on space design. The Master project was a conceptual study for a visitor center for Esrange Space Center in Northern Sweden. Katarina has just graduated from Masters Studies at the International Space University, ISU, in France. The program concluded with an internship at NASA Ames, California, where she developed a concept for a Mars base simulation computer game.

tem are intrinsically multifunctional and serve more than one purpose. The plants for food production are also an efficient part of atmosphere revitalization and water treatment. Moreover, the plants will be used as a “winter garden” for psychological and recreational purposes. The water in the revitalization system has a multifunctional use, as radiation shielding in the safe-

Ondrej Doule (CZ), architect from Czech Republic has obtained his doctoral degree from Czech Technical University, Faculty of Architecture in June 2010. In his thesis he focused on Architecture in Extreme Environments on Earth and in space. He also graduated from the International Space University in September 2008 in Space Management and gained valuable experience at NASA Ames Research Center working on a Martian base concept. Ondrej’s professional experience includes cooperation with number of studios including the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Paris. Ondrej is currently employed as a faculty member at the International Space University located in Strasbourg, France where he performs research and teaches space architecture and related subject.

haven habitat core. The garden module creates an artificial outdoor environment mitigating the notion of confinement on the lunar surface.

Fiber optics systems and plasma lamps are used for transmission of natural and artificial light into the interior.

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Scott Hessels & Gabriel Dunne

Celestial Mechanics Celestial Mechanics is an artwork created by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne intended to be viewed in a planetarium dome. Instead of stars and planets, the ‘night sky’ program reveals many of the aerial technologies hovering, flying, and drifting above us. The project mixes science, statistical display, and contemporary art by presenting these mechanical patterns and behaviors as a dynamic visual experience.

The sky is filled with aircraft that transport people from place to place, perform utilitarian duties, assist in communications, enact military missions, or wander above us as debris. With help from government agencies and the science community, the artists worked with accurate tracking and protocol statistics to create 3-D models of the airborne systems. They then led a team of top animators to visualize those models in a style that reflects the chaos, force, and influence of these technologies.

At any given moment, there can be 30,000 manmade objects in the sky above us—planes, helicopters, satellites, weather balloons, space debris, and other diverse technologies. They watch, they guide, they protect, they communicate, they transport, they predict, they look out into the stars. In less than 100 years, the deep blue has become a complex web of machinery.

Our lives are closely tied to these networks in the sky, but a disjunction has occurred between us and the aerial technologies we use every day. We rarely consider the hulking, physical

machines that have now become core to our lifestyle. By not being aware of the hardware we use every day, we may also not be aware of the social, economic, cultural, and political importance of these technologies. By visualizing them, it may lead to a better understanding of the forces that are shaping our future. ū http://www.cmlab.com

Gabriel Dunne (USA) was the lead programmer on Celestial Mechanics. His work ranges from traditional design and art to experimental programming works. He studied Design|Media Arts at UCLA, and experimental print making in Pont Aven, France. His work has shown at CiberArt in Bilbao, and has won multiple international awards. For the past two years he has worked as a resident R&D and designer for Motion Theory, a design firm in Venice, CA, developing various music videos and commercials for clients including Beck, Nike, HP, and RESfest.

Scott Hessels (USA/HK) is an internationally recognized filmmaker and media artist who merges cinema with new technologies to create innovative media experiences. Over 30 years, he has released artworks in several different media including film, video, web, music, broadcast, print, kinetic sculpture, and performance. His films have shown in hundreds of international film festivals and his new media installations have been presented in exhibitions around the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, CiberArt in Bilbao, The Ford Presidential Museum, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and Japan’s Media Art Festival as well as been included in several books on new media art and magazines like Wired and Discover. His recent projects have mixed film with sensors, robotics, GPS systems, and alternative forms of interactivity and have included partnerships with NASA, The Federal Aviation Administration, Nokia among others. His current series are types of experimental cinema generating systems–players. These pieces include movies generated through topology (“Mulholland Drive”), environmental data (“Brakelights”), data sets (“Celestial Mechanics”), and viewer location and movement (“GPSFilm”). He has also designed cinema players that are powered with sustainable energy sources (“The Image Mill”).

After previously teaching in the Design|Media Arts department at UCLA and at the School of Art, Design and Media in Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, he is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. ūhttp://www.dshessels.com

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Aaron Koblin

Visualizing Amsterdam SMS Messages A visualization tool for SMS messages.

Data studies with MIT Senseable City Lab, Salzburg University Z_GIS and Current City. Data provided by KPN Mobile. Interactive tool built with Processing and OpenGL. ū http://sandbox.aaronkoblin.com/projects/

amsterdam/index.html

Aaron Koblin (USA) is an artist specializing in data and digital technologies. Aaron’s work takes realworld and community generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and technology.

His projects have been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science foundation’s first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Two of his music video collaborations have been Grammy nominated.

He recieved his MFA in Design|Media Arts from UCLA. In 2010 Aaron was the Abramowitz Artist in Residence at MIT and currently leads the Data Arts Team in Google’s Creative Lab. ūhttp://www.aaronkoblin.com/info.html

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Aaron Koblin

Flight Patterns The paths of air traffic over North America visualized in color and form The Flight Patterns visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne.

FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/ or Maya.

Flight Paths Flight Paths visualizations are the result of collaboration with Wired Magazine and FlightView Software. These flight path renderings show the altitudes, makes, and models of more than 205,000 different aircraft being monitored by the FAA on August 12, 2008.

큰 http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/

큰 http://sandbox.aaronkoblin.com/projects/

flightpatterns/index.html

flightpaths/index.html

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68 | 69 EXHIBITION

Pedro Miguel Cruz

The Morphing City The Morphing City is a visualization study where a city mutates its shape accordingly with the traffic on its main arteries. Those morphs tend to translate the actual perceived distances within a city, bypassing the common perception based on its geographical mapping.

This visualization model was executed for the city of Lisbon. To attain it, topological information was gathered from OpenStreetMap to build a skeleton for the city based on its main arteries. The bones of the skeleton are springs that get compressed or distended accordingly with the detected velocities over it. Those distortions affect all the neighboring points and springs as the system is all interconnected.

The data concerning the velocities was gathered in the context of the CityMotion project, and it pays respect to 1534 vehicles in the city of Lisbon during October 2009. That data was averaged to a single day, and aggregated by periods of one hour. Those periods overlap in 50 min, meaning that they are iterated by ticks of 10 min.

What is being displayed are the distortions on each artery that affect the entire city. If the current speed on that artery is below its average global speed, the artery is compressed (the higher the velocity, the smaller the perceived distance). Similarly, if the speed is over the computed (during pre processing) global average, the artery is distended. The colors also reflect those distortions, with positive deviations translating warm colors, and negative deviations translating cold colors.

Another way to perceive the morphs in the city during the day it’s the deformed grid on the bottom right corner of the artifact.

Pedro Cruz (PT), MSc is Assistant Lecturer in the University of Coimbra’s Department of Informatics Engineering (DEI) and a researcher at the University’s Centre for Informatics and Systems (CISUC). His is interested in innovative ways to portray information. He won the ACM Student Research Competition at SIGGRAPH 2010, and can find his work featured at MoMA’s Talk to Me exhibition catalogue, WIRED magazine UK and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine. Pedro started his academic activity when he enrolled in Physics Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. He later changed his course to Informatics Engineering at University of Coimbra. In Coimbra he started collaborating with the communication design atelier FBA, doing motion and interactive installations. He spent a year in Belo Horizonte – Brazil, taking an internship at the creative studio 3bits, working in web and interaction design. He later concluded his master thesis in information visualization and aesthetics in Coimbra. ūhttp://mondeguinho.com/master

It’s interesting to notice how the city stays compressed during the evening, and how it abruptly expands during the rush hours: 8h–9h and 18h–19h. It’s also interesting to see that the 8h–9h period is by far the most problematic. ū http://mondeguinho.com/master/

information-visualization/the-morphing-city

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Emrah Kavlak

Some Kind Of Congestion Some Kind Of Congestion is an installation about the traffic of Istanbul. It is comprised of two displays, visualizing various types of information regarding the congestion in the city.

The concept is to create an observation space – a control panel – to monitor urban congestion, not only physical ones – i.e. traffic – but its effects towards urban life as well.

The work shows multiple visualizations that can be acknowledged singularly or relatively.

Developed in Processing development environment, these visualizations represent: > Live tweets about congestion and traffic, with a chart on how many tweets are sent during the day. One can observe if tweet conEmrah Kavlak (TU) is a visual communication designer from Istanbul. He had his bachelor degree in Computer Science and master degree in Visual Communication and Design programs at Sabanci University – Istanbul. During this period, his interactive projects were exhibited in international conferences such as Siggraph, ISEA and Amber Fest. He is focused in the field of information design and seeks new means of visual clarity and meaning for better communication. He designed for Sulukule Platform, 2009 Rotterdam Architecture Biennial, “Open City” exhibition – Istanbul, and Istanbul University Medical Department. Currently, he is about to enroll in a PhD program in KU Leuven University – Belgium to further his studies and research on public visualization of urban data.

tents are related to the amount of traffic or location, or compare if the amount of tweets is related to the amount of traffic at a certain time. > Live traffic on a gridded Istanbul map displayed as a vague space in order to approximate the effects of traffic towards its surrounding.

> Aggregated traffic in the day, where mountains and hills on the map are slowly created by morphing the topology based on traffic, which can be read in two ways: To find out locations where most congestion happens during the day; or to relate time spent in the traffic to time spent crossing a hill or a mountain.

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James George & Alexander Porter

Depth_Editor_Debug In October of 2010, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling gave the keynote speech concluding the Vimeo Festival + Awards in New York. He described his prediction of the future of imag-

ing technology. Regarding how a camera of the future may function, Sterling said: “It simply absorbs every photon that touches it from any angle. And then in order to take a picture I simply tell the system to calculate what that picture would have looked like from that angle at that moment. I just send it as a computational problem out in to the cloud wirelessly.”

One month later, Microsoft released their new video game controller, the XBOX Kinect.

Kinect is unique in that it uses a depth sensing camera and computer vision software to sense the position and actions of gamers. A group of developers released an Open Source device

driver that allowed programmers to access the Kinect’s data on a personal computer.

Visualizations of space as seen through Kinect’s sensors can be computed from any angle using 3D software. When the drivers were made available, online creative software developer communities were flooded with artistic and novel interpretations of this data. The images were often characterized by depictions of people as clouds of dots and wireframes representing human figures moving in time.

In mid-2005, six weeks after the tragic subway and bus bombings in London, New York’s

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Metro Transit Authority (MTA) signed a contract with the high-tech defense and military technology giant Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin promised the MTA a high-tech surveillance system driven by computer vision and artificial intelligence systems. The security system turned out to be vaporware and the contract collapsed under lawsuits. As a result, thousands of security cameras in the New York subway stations sit unused.

It is in this technological atmosphere that we chose to collaborate. We soldered together an inverter and motorcycle batteries to run the laptop and Kinect sensor on the go. We attached a Canon 5D DSLR to the sensor and plugged it in to a laptop. The entire kit went into a backpack.

We spent an evening in the New York Union Square subway capturing high resolution stills and and archiving depth data of pedestrians.

We wrote an openFrameworks application to combine the data, allowing us to place fragments of the two dimensional images into three

Alexander Porter (USA) is a digital documentary photographer. He works internationally; photographing archaeological digs in Greece, personal projects in Sweden and New York while working for a photo agency covering the art world in New York City. Alexander recently completed a project documenting Muay Thai kickboxing tournaments in the New York City depicting the moments of calm before and after combat. His work has been most recently published in the Guardian & NYTimes.com. His work in video was chosen as the audience choice award at the New York Independent Film Festival in 2009. He holds a BA in Media Studies from The New School University focusing on media theory, design theory and photojournalism. ūhttp://www.alexanderporter.net/

dimensional space, navigate through the resulting environment and render the output.

These prints are selected renderings from this process. ū http://www.alexanderporter.net/

project-archive/depth_editor_debug/

James George (USA) is a media artist who works with generative graphics, video processing, and interactive systems. Collaborating to create experimental film, live performances and installations, James is interested in the way technology reflects and influences the cultures that create it. He is also an active participant in creative software communities and a contributor to open source initiatives. He holds a BS in Computer Science with a focus on Digital Arts and Experimental Media from the University of Washington, Seattle. He currently lives and works in New York.

James’ projects and collaborations have been exhibited in festivals and galleries internationally, including Beall Center for Art and Technology (California, USA), the FILE Festival (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Art Basel (Florida, USA), the Directors’ Lounge Film Festival (Berlin, Germany), and Pixilerations Film Festival (Rhode Island, USA). ūhttp://www.jamesgeorge.org/

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Pascal Silondi

Underground City 3D (UC3D) Equipped with a “Lamparna” (lantern) and a hammer increased by motion sensors, the new twenty-first century minor can here enter, interact and navigate in different Underground City 3D (UC3D) online environments created with technologies usually dedicated to 3D games. Participants can discover different types of cells connected to the “Rhizome architecture” of the 3D Labin ex-coal mine tunnels reconstructed from laser measurements. It’s a vision of the being projected in abstraction, in architecture of messages and data structures.

It’s a 3D multimedia environment where to question identity when surrounded by digital autonomous agents and emerging visions of contemporary network society and interactive digital Cities. Since May 2010, Underground City 3D (UC3D) project directed by Pascal Silondi, aims to establish a specific cultural, artistic and educational virtual community structured as an online collaborative and interdisciplinary 3D platform. ū http://www.silondi.net/uc3d/uc3d.html

Pascal Silondi (FR/CZ) was born in Paris in 1973, lives between Prague and Paris since 2000. As artist he developed various interdisciplinary projects where meet virtual and real environments.

He founded the association LIBAT (Hybrid laboratory for Arts and new technologies) in November 2002. For several years, he’s developing various artistic and cultural projects with, as scour objective the exploration of the complex Art-sciencenews technologies of information. He’s interested in systems’ architecture and in particular interactive multimedia storytelling in 3D shared environments. His artistic and technological culture evolved as a trans-disciplinary walk-through, exploring contemporary languages and fields like cinema, video, scenography, sound, robotic or data processing, using sensors’ systems like motion capture and other to connect performers, (dancers, actors, public…) within 3D digital spaces. He’s directing LIBAT since 2002 and he’s leading the interactive media department of Prague College since 2006, where he developed with students and other lecturers a creative approach to interactive media and fine art, exploring animation techniques, 3D, web, film, sound, interface design and more… ūhttp://www.silondi.net Collaborators: Marie Silondi (CZ), Jakub Grosz (CZ), Rajmond Berisha (Kosovo), NxGraphics (FR), Stefano Cavagnetto (I), Bruce Gahir (UK), Aurélie Besson (FR), Peter Marencik (SK); Production: Libat (FR), Prague College (CZ); UC3D was supported by European Cultural Foundation (ECF) and the culture program of the European Commission.

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Javier Lloret & Daniel Artamendi

The Maze EV The Maze EV is a two player installation game.

Visitors are able to play 2 opposite roles: they can create a space and to have total control of it or they can choose to feel completely lost and try to get out of a maze. One player designs a maze with some plastic walls on top of a multitouch table.

He can also sets the entrance and exit of the maze with some special pucks. The other player appears inside that maze and tries to reach the exit before the time runs out. His hints: light comes from the exit and sound gets more intense as he gets closer. But the “Maze designer” can change the maze

during the game. Each time he adds or removes a wall the other player gets some extra time. If the new walls completely close the “Inside the maze” player’s path to the exit, the resulting maze would be considered invalid. If the player reaches the light the game is over. If the time runs out the game is over. Each game is different.

The Maze EV was developed with the support of Medialab-Prado Madrid by Javier Lloret with the collaboration of Daniel Artamendi. ū http://vimeo.com/16275034

Javier Lloret (ES) is interested in the intersection between art, tangible games, films, and new media. Born in Alicante, Spain (1983) he is about to finish his Master’s Degree in Interactive Media Arts at the Art university of Linz, Austria. He also studied Computer Science at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. He has worked for institutions and studios like Ars Electronica Futurelab, Banff Centre, UCM University of Madrid, Lummo, Grey advertisement agency, etc.. He has exhibited his projects in digital Arts festivals and exhibitions like: Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), Media Facades Festival Europe (Berlin and Madrid), Node 08 festival (Frankfurt), Robot festival (Bologna), Tweak festival (Limerick), Santraistambul (Istambul), Medialab-Prado (Madrid). ūhttp://javierlloret.com/

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Julian Oliver

levelHead levelHead is a spatial memory game. It uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit. Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms? There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door.

Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again. Someone

once said levelHead may have something to do with a story from Borges… ū http://selectparks.net/~julian/levelhead/

levelHead Conceptual Basis Frances A Yates, in her book The Art of Memory, traces a geneaology of memory systems, practiced as an art, from the ancient Greeks through to the late mediaeval period.

In a time without printing and paper for taking notes, these memory arts were of vital importance, both to the recollection of cultural artefacts (prose, theory, philosophical treatises) and practical tasks involving the storing of patterned information (numbers, names, dates).

Of the many earliest methods used was the construction of imaginary architectures (memory loci) that were designed to specification

precisely for the purpose of storing information such that it could be retrieved by ‘walking through’ the building in the mind. So it follows that the relationships between objects of memory were configured as being spatially associative, with the walking imaginary self acting as a reader. This system was deployed widely result-

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ing in memory architectures that were famously used to store and recount vast bodies of information whether that be events In a story, numbers or the names of people.

Cicero, pioneer of this technique, here describes what constitutes such a memory architecture:

We use places as wax and images as letters [...] Consequently ( in order that I may not be prolix and tedious on a subject that is well known and familiar) one must employ a large number of places which must be well lighted, clearly set out in order, at moderate intervals apart and images which are active, whch are sharply defined unusual and which have the power of speedily encountering and penetrating the mind.

Quintillian, a prominent teacher of Rhetoric in the 1st Century, Rome said of the art of memory: I am far from denying those devices may be useful for certain purposes as for example if we have to reproduce many names of things in the order of which we heard them. Those who use such aids place the things themselves in their memory places: they put, for instance, a table in the forecourt, a platform in the atrium, and so on for the rest and then when they run through these places again they find these objects where they put them.

Today, in modern times, we enjoy the luxury of domestic printers, digital tagging systems, address books and journals (on and offline) that do the remembering for us.

These systems have us storing what we need to remember in indexed and exterior locations like remote databases or local filesystems. As a result we find ourselves both reliant upon (and conditioned to) access information in a pointillistic, on-demand fashion.

It is the great advances in data management, database design and search engines that allow us to both store and access information in this way, by ‘moving’ from one location of externalised memory to the next. As such we need not know how to return, how to find our way through data as even the navigation is being managed for us, a path through the data.

So it follows that the describing of one object’s structural and mnemonic relation to another is no longer a valuable part of the data itself, instead it is work done by by way of an abstracted proxy like a server, history list or state-ful file-browser.

Similarly, navigating in the real world increasingly tends toward dependence on external media and locative technologies, remembering not just places but even describing vectors of movement and spatial associations for us. It is in the spirit of Memory Loci, of the configuration of place as both an associative location and

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container of memories, that the design for levelHead begins. It prioritises the notion that moving from one site to another inevitably produces an imaginary architecture of varying clarity and positions this memory architecture as the primary means of navigation. Only one side of the cube will reveal a room at any given time and so a memory of the last room – of the positions of entrances and exits, stairs and other features is necessary in order to build a logic of safe forward movement.

Inc.

Laws of Nature Coming back to Newton’s cradle these augmented pictures play with collision balls. This pair of augmented pictures demonstrates the laws of nature in a delicate manner. Coming back to Newton’s cradle we play with collision balls. We avoid killing cats and deploy human subjects.

It is this navigable accumulation of spatial associations in memory that is configured as the core mechanism of play in levelHead. Rather than the computer containing these relationships for the player it is the memory architecture of the human player that describes the scope of their free movement. It is a game that in order to be played relies on the imaginary and unseen architecture being of equivalent relational resolution to that of the digital architecture displayed.

The tangible interface aspect becomes integral to the function of recall also: as the cube is turned by the hands in search of correctly adjoining rooms muscle-memory is engaged and, as such, aids the memory as a felt memory of patterns of turns: “that room is two turns to the left when this room is upside down”.

The Rubiks cube has been described to operate in a similar fashion. This may explain the great many likenesses drawn in journals and blogs between levelHead and the Rubiks Cube.

Julian Oliver (NZ/DE) is a New Zealander based in Berlin. He has been active in the critical intersection of art and technology since 1998. His projects and the occasional paper have been presented at many museums, international electronic-art events and conferences, including the Tate Modern, Transmediale, Ars Electronica and the Japan Media Arts Festival. His work has received several awards, ranging from technical excellence to artistic invention and interaction design. He has given numerous workshops and master classes in software art, augmented reality, creative hacking, data forensics, object-oriented programming for artists, virtual architecture, artistic game-development, information visualisation, UNIX/Linux and open source development practices worldwide. He is a long-time advocate of the use of free software in artistic production, distribution and education. In 1998 Julian established the artistic game-development collective Select Parks. ūhttp://www.selectparks.net/~julian/

Inc. (CZ) had been an integral part of Satyricon Inc. since 2003. It was responsible for looking into ways to incorporate ground-breaking ideas and it has been conducting massive insider trading operations ever since. In 2006 Satyricon Inc. was already considered too big to fail. Satyricon Inc. became so interconnected due to insider trading network that its failure would have disastrous consequences for the marketplace of ideas.

In 2009 it was forced to split. Even so, in boom years of insider trading Inc. grew so fast that it went too big to fail again. Market regulator now considers splitting Inc. into I, N, C and dot. Inc. is Eva Holá, Vladimír Burian, and Petr Šourek. ūhttp://www.scart.cz/

EXHIBITION 76 | 77

Barbara Dzieranę

Declination Five inhabitants of the same city were asked to use datalogger GPS for two-week-long period.

Selected people differd in age, occupation, the way of spending free time and the social life.

GPS device documented their everyday activities drawing a line of movements of each person. The output is a contour drawing which is a ‘personal’ map of the city.

The the legend of each map also constitues a part of the work. The marks were put in places that selected people visited at least three times and transfer information that gives the drawing different meaning. The perception of the drawings is therefore changed with the information.

Project was made in Kraków, Poland.

Barbara Dzieranę (PL) studied in Fine Arts Academy in Cracow, Poland and in Linz, Austria. Currently she is preparing her master thesis in the Graphic Department of Fine Arts Academy in Cracow.

She took part in numerous new media workshops e.g: Liwoli Hacklab for Art and Open Source 2009, Robotic Workshop with Time’s Up Labolatory for the Construction of Experimental Situations 2009, Fassaden Festival Ars Electronica 2009, Media Lab Chrzelice 2010 and design festiwals such as Art of Packaging 2008 or Przetwory Recyckling Design Festival 2010 Warsaw. Her generative visualizations were shown on Electronic Sound Festival Lublin 2010. ūhttp://cargocollective.com/barbaradzieran

78 | 79 EXHIBITION

Akitoshi Honda

Glographer Glographer is modified analog camera that shoots a news photo from foreign countries that the camera is pointing at. The user can point at the physical direction to a country and use the lens zoom to adjust distance. This work tries to call people to rethink their relationship

Darina Alster & Michael Markert

Broken TV E5

Audiovisual installation consists of a big old television with a broken screen. The TV shows visually combined streams of CNN and Czech subtitles that are token from RSS link of Britske listy newspapers. Subtittles will be spoken out by a female Czech voice while analyzed by Markov Chain

with news and their consciousness of geographical coordinate. As a homage to the glory days of press photo in the mass media, an analog single lens reflex is used in this project. ū http://www.ahonda.org/home/glographer

Akitoshi Honda (JP/DE) was born 1977 in Okayama, Japan. He studied Interaction Design and Computer Generated Images by Prof. Tomohiro Ohira at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. 2007–2010 he studied “Experimentelle Mediengestaltung” at UdK Berlin. Since 2010 he is doing Meisterschueler by Prof. Joachim Sauter at “Kunst und Median” at Udk Berlin. He is interested in the relations between human perception and media in the realm of art, design and science. Akitoshi worked with physical computing and programming for several of his projects. He has had exhibitions in Tokyo, Berlin, Utrecht and Karlsruhe. He lives in Berlin since 2007. ūhttp://www.ahonda.org/

Darina Alster (CZ, 1979) is visual artist, performer, educator, curator and coordinator of cultural events. She lives and works in Prague.

She is mostly working with performance and video. Main topics of her artistic interest are Time, Identity and Relationships. In her performances, she exceeds borders of known reality, interrupting real situations with unknown and irrational things, so that they become subconscious. She is mostly experimenting with new media, combining them with archaic media such as Astrology, Tarot, Mythology, Fairytales or other kinds of Archetypes. Her more known projects include: Treasure, Piet, Confessional, Personal Tarot and Naked Lunch. She was art educator at private secondary school for several years, assistant curator at NoD Gallery Prague, currently she is production manager and co-curator of CIANT Gallery Prague.

Michael Markert (DE) is a media-artist specializing in programming and electronics. He is living in Nuremberg, Germany. His research in intuitive musical interfaces started with a diploma in Multimedia / Communications Design. Since then he has developed various interactive sensory devices which he has used for installations and as musical instruments. The focus of his work is exploring harmonic musical control through intuitive and interactive realtime sensory processing thereby overruling hierarchic receptional mechanisms in art. Since 2005 he has been a member of the Urban Research Institute for Public Art and Urban Ethology (Intermedia), founded by Georg Winter. 2008 he graduated with a second diploma at the College of Fine Arts Nuremberg and is currently teaching at the College of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and at the Bauhaus University Weimar / Faculty Media. ūhttp://www.audiocommander.de

Generator. The generator deconstructs real text to arrive at single words and then recreates random sentences with grammatically correct structure. The Broken TV E5 will

be processing news stream throughout the festival and so will create a continuous audiovisual event with effect of de(con)structing intelligibility of the TV object.

EXHIBITION 78 | 79

Linda Čihařová

Migromat Interactive projection Migromat is inspired by neverending changing of the landscape. The whole cycle of abstract patterns representing the powers as well as real landscapes is divided into parts and each is started with near passing visitors.

Creatures moving around in any environment leave behind traces of their presence.

They consume, multiply, adapt the landscape to their needs, and leave their bodies behind for others to live off. Can a place be changed just by our presence or movement within it?

The installation of Migromat uses the kinetic energy of your movement, which can start off the subtle process of transforming a space. ū http://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=G9HoH_5mL8o

Linda Čihařová (CZ) was born on 2. 7. 1982 in Prague, where she is also living and working. She graduated at the University of Art, Archuitecture and design in Prague and also experienced studies on FAMU in Prague, University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and Academy Beeldene Kunste in Maastricht, Netherlands. Although Linda Čihařová is in a way an muliinstrumentalist of new media, almost all her projects have base in land art and concept art. While working on her ideas, she is mostly using video, photography, drawing, painting, instalations, an interactivity with a viewer and their combinations. Unifying element and main inspiration source she almost always finds in landscape, nature and a point of reflection of a human energy on it. Recently she is focused on communication of humans and their surrounding. ūhttp://www.lindacihar.com/

80 | 81 EXHIBITION

Michal Pustějovský

In the Own Shadow The work is inspired by Platonic study of the Ideas. It brings together a state of the probable and of the improbable. Artificial space of the digital shifts position with a space of perception. The digital world seems to be much more real. The reflection of the Idea, here a fragment of chance, is a shadow cast by this fragment. The shadow itself is a singular state despite the fact the idea can be endlessly multiplied. The idea multiplication is a projected image derived from an arduino-based constantly generated shape of the shadow consisting of particular pixels.

Michal Pustějovský (CZ) is a student of New Media I department of the Academy of Fine

Arts in Prague. His focus is on the relationship between digital and analogue. He seeks funda-

mental principles in humans through various combinations of old and new media and media archaeology. His works tend to minimize tech-

nical complexity, to avoid black box effect, and

to by rules by chance. For image generation he usually employs simple microchips. ūhttp://www.pustejovsky.net

EXHIBITION 80 | 81

Klára Jakubová & Anna Marešová & Andrej Boleslavský & Lukáš Blažek

A Registered Letter The film creates a possibility for healthy individuals to temporarily immerse themselves in a world of people suffering from schizophrenia and to experience a fragment of reality that patients who do not undertake treatment may live with every day.

This experimental interactive film attempts, with the help of audiovisual stimulants and by connecting the viewer’s reality with the fictitious environment presented in the film, to give the viewer an idea of what feelings and perceptions experienced by people suffering from schizophrenia. The film’s screening takes place in a special screening booth meant for one viewer at a time. The viewing is controlled by a touch screen. The film is seven to nine minutes long, depending on the viewer’s perceptivity and ability to respond to stimulation at the right moment. The interactive installation is a collective art piece realized by students and graduates of the Faculty of Arts and Design of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic. The artists are Klára Jakubová, Anna Marešová, Andrej Boleslavský a

Lukáš Blažek. The project’s expert supervisor is the Associate Professor, Jan Vevera, Ph.D. The screening booth is an original art piece in itself, an art installation created by Anna Marešová and Lukáš Blažek. Zdeněk Košek, the artist whose works are displayed in the exhibition The Embodiment of the Spiritual, created the design of the computer keyboard that constitutes a part of the screening. Motifs from his visual art work were used in the film. When the PARALLEL EXPERINCES project ends, the film A Registered Letter will remain at disposal of the Psychiatric Clinic of the General University Hospital, Czech Republic, and the First Faculty of Medicine of Charles University. It will continue to be used not only as an educational resource for students but also as important informative material for the patients’ families, enabling them to better understand symptoms the patients experience.

We recommend that individuals who have received or have been receiving psychiatric treatment consult with their doctor before taking part in the interactive screening.

A Registered Letter (2010) created by: Klára Jakubová, Anna Marešová, Andrej Boleslavský, Lukáš Blažek story and expert supervision by: Associate Professor Jan Vevera, Ph.D., Tereza Uhrová, M.D. produced by: Radka Prošková, Kateřina Riley screenplay, director: Klára Jakubová, Anna Marešová cinematographer, editor: Klára Jakubová interactive effects: Andrej Boleslavský second cameraman: Dominik Žižka cast: post woman: Anna Marešová neighbor: Jindra Vlčková counter clerk: Ivanka Synková / Tomáš Bém / Petr Haas / Hynek Jakub / Marie and Emmička Laburda / František Loskot / Michaela Loskotová / Terezka Loskotová / Milena Marešová / Jana Nová / Annina Ondráčková / Jan Papež / Radka Prošková/ Martina Sotonová / Eliška Stuchlá / Michala Svobodová / Anička Viktorová / Přemek Šanovec / Jan Richter / Petr Vrba / Veronika and Eliška Zemánek voices: Ondřej Bauer / Pavla Drtinová / Klára Jakubová / Anna Marešová / Ivanka Venclová We thank all those who helped bring the film to fruition. We especially appreciate the assistance of: Vojtěch Krepindl, the director of Česká pošta (Czech Post s. p.) , region of Severní Čechy, Czech Republic / Květa Filipová, the postmistress of the post office in Ústí nad Labem and Jiřina Brožíková, the department manager of the post office in Ústí nad Labem.

84 | 85 PERFORMANCES

Inc.

Underfunded Moon Shot As NASA prepares for the end on an era with the final shuttle flights, we launch an ambitious, even though slightly underfunded plan to return all social network users to the Moon and on to Mars and Venus where they come from, respectively.

There have been five space-worthy shuttles.

Now, following terrible accidents that destroyed Challenger and Columbia, there are three. We buy all of them (including Challenger and Columbia trade marks) with a reasonable discount. We move beyond fossil fuels to web 2.0 based energy and user-generated fuel. Social media will provide useful tools for lifting a fully manned

spacecraft out of the Earth’s gravity without the need for fossil fuel. The spacecraft without heavy fuel could escape the gravity using far less energy and thus far less cost. Finally, space shuttle will become the low-cost reusable ride into space for very ordinary people. The idea behind returning to the Moon is to have a good time. We are scheduled to play golf on the Moon like Alan Shepard. We have got more serious stuff lined up as well – to teach our kids a lesson in gravity from space shuttle, stepping in the footprints of the high school teacher who was selected from more than 11,000 applicants for 73 seconds into flight of space shuttle Challenger.

Inc. Petr Šourek, Eva Holá, Justin Svoboda, Tereza Tausingerová, Jakub Hubert, Jakub Hybler, Michal Doležílek, Vladimír Burian…

Inc. had been an integral part of Satyricon Inc. since 2003. It was responsible for looking into ways to incorporate ground-breaking ideas and it has been conducting massive insider trading operations ever since. In 2006 Satyricon Inc. was already considered too big to fail. Satyricon Inc. became so interconnected due to insider trading network that its failure would have disastrous consequences for the marketplace of ideas.

In 2009 it was forced to split. Even so, in boom years of insider trading Inc. grew so fast that it went too big to fail again. Market regulator now considers splitting Inc. into I, N, C and dot. ūwww.scart.cz

PERFORMANCES 84 | 85

ADAPT:act The ADAPT:act performance explores interconnections of basic elements of perceivable world through fusion of life performance/contemporary dance and interactive virtual scenography.

ADAPT:act shows the basic components of light, sound and movement and superimposes them to create complex multilayered experience of actual moment. Plain white light composes of few basic colours (for example red, green, blue), our visible space composes of 3 dimensions and according to Empedocles, the material world consists of 4 basic elements (fire, water, earth and air). The world pulsates between the

state of absolute unity and a state of complete division. Our world is only possible between these two extreme states. The ADAPT:act performance presents exploration of these extremes.

The performance was created during the research conducted in international cooperation of CIANT (Czech Republic), EIRA (Portugal), PERSONA (Romania) and TRANSCULTURES (Belgium). The research focused on new techniques of interconnection of life performance and interactive artificial or virtual environments.

Sound design same as the virtual scenography is

created by the dancers on the stage in real-time.

Their movement (being their artistic language) is automatically translated into the visual language of lighting, architectural language of space and musical language of sound. Performers are not set into the state of full freedom but searching for ways to interact with and adapt to new tools for shaping the multi-sensory experience.

There are 4 dancers on the stage. Each of them is equipped with a magnetic deflector, which enables the motion capturing system to discern position of each of the dancers. As they

86 | 87 PERFORMANCES

General & Artistic Coordination: Pavel Smetana Choreography: Francisco Camacho Co Creation & Performers: Johana Matoušková, Mariana Tengner Barros, Tiago Cadete and Rafael Alvarez Interactive Sound Design: Ivan Acher Interactive 3D & Video: Andrej Boleslavský Motion Capture Techniques: Michal Máša Technical Manager: Roman Trochta Light Interaction: Matěj Sychra Video: Henrich Žucha.

Costumes: Carlota Lagido Photography: Vera Batozska General Administration & Manager: Stephane Kyles Zoosystemicien: Louis Bec Duration: 30min

get closer to each other, various sounds are automatically started or music modulated. Their movement also influence projection on the background screen, creating complex interactive environment. The virtual interactive space is completed by a laser positioned in the centre of the stage and aimed at the audience, which is being captured into these conic virtual spaces built of light and manipulated by dancers. The performance is built from 5 main acts each representing unique section of world.

ADAPT:act was already presented in Mons, Lyon, Prague, Lisbon and Bucharest and is the result performance of the ADAPT Project.

PERFORMANCES 86 | 87

15STEPS A collective authorial project that deals with the topic of decision-making, direction and navigation. The authors use light and sound as a partner for the dancer and reveal new relation between movement, music and light.

Project was presented at Czech Dance Platform, Small Inventory Festival, Bratislava in Movement, Off Europa in Dresden and Leipzig.

Jan Jiřík deals in his essay “Small Inventorying in Little Categories” with the 8th annual Small Inventory festival, he praises the experiment 15 Steps in the Experimental Space Roxy–NoD where the dialogue takes place between dancer and light, projections or electronic music (Svět a divadlo 3/2010).

Concept and realization: Věra Ondrašíková, Patrik Sedlák, Michal Rydlo Live music: Michal Cáb, Stanislav Abrahám With support: Roxy/Nod, City of Prague, Ministry of Culture, APCOM, Tanzplan Dresden, IIM. ū http://www.dance-tech.net/video/

15-steps-trailer

My Name Is Ann!

The Oyster tour After the tour for the first album Reciclatge (2007) with a dancer, UV decorations and reflexive costumes, My Name Is Ann! will present a new stage aesthetic on a tour for the second album The World Is My Oyster in 2011.

A band leader KnofLenka (music, sax, vocals, nintendo, laptop, children pianos) performing live with Šárka Kobzová (vocals, keyboards, synth) will be joined by a dancer Galaxie whose bizzare performance through the space of the club, stage and public is providing an essence for the visuals. The roles are switched and everybody becomes a conspirator for the final visual image of the concerts. Public becomes the hero just for one show.

Upcoming tour of Mniann! is a grrrlz natural wilderness through interactivity – so close to your thoughts, so deep that you won’t want it.

Objective reality does not exist and the nature takes it all. AGAIN. Welcome to Annworld!

Mniann!crew: Fashion design: Hanele Poislová Visuals and graphic design: Beatriz Marin http://www.beatrizmarin.es Technology: Jakub Hybler/IIM, Andrej Boleslavsky/CIANT Photos: Estaban Torres

Make-up: Laila Alshaane ū http://www.mynameisann.com

90 | 91 PERFORMANCES

RESET NIGHT The night of audiovisual performances, the moonless night of ocultism, the night of witch house.

LINE UP Stellar Om Source (NL) Story of Isaac (UK) MUSHY (IT) o F F / GR†LLGR†LL (FR/DE) REVEREND D‡CK (CZ)

Stellar Om Source Stellar OM Source is the moniker of The Hague, Netherlands-based musician Christelle Gualdi.

Gualdi takes the synthesizer to a new level of awesome-ness through a number of juxtapositions and contradictions. Her music is new-agey but contemporary and certainly not cheesy. It’s ambient in a sense but it’s not quite so unobtrusive; it’s delicate and soothing yet quietly abrasive and captivating. ūhttp://www.myspace.com/omsource

Tempelhof (CZ) PERFORMANCES / INSTALLATIONS Darina Alster (CZ) Patrick Sedlaczek (CZ) DJ’s – AMDISCS SELECTION (http://www.amdiscs.com/) Black Dumpling (A.M.180 collective) Frozen Asscum ‘O’ (AMDISCS) The program was created together with AMDISC Publishing.

Story of Isaac Named by Ethan of Crystal Castles, Story of Isaac began as a solo project, but founder Sloww Ddeath has now been joined by a lead singer (who wishes to remain anonymous for now) and the band has evolved into a heavier darker sound. Born out of a love for the london squatt rave scene and an obsession for crystal castles and salem gigs, the sound combines elements of dragged trance, dustup and lo-fi punk. ūhttp://soundcloud.com/storyofisaac

o F F / GR†LLGR†LL o F F and Gr†llG†ll met while singing along to the Backstreet Boys songs in a club and since managed to transform an internet affair into a full blown musical marriage. They describe their collaboration as “like being six years old again and playing in the backyard. Two guys who need a warm hand to hold.” Their epic track “Emo Dancers”, a sprawling early ‘90s rave monster that reeks of 808 State, was praised on the web in late 2010.

Since then they have concentrated on building EMOTIONAL live shows, playing in bed, or in a circle of roses. Their first 7’ emodancers/happy face will be released in May on Clan Destine records and as a digital EP by Recorder. ūhttp://wrangelkiez.org/2011/03/grillgillandoff

PERFORMANCES 90 | 91

Mushy Mushy is a solo experimental electronic project based in Rome. Among the head figures of the industrial music scene renewal, Valentina F uses the medium of musical expression in order to produce soundscapes which open the door to strangely nigthmarish illuminations. The sound architecture is a mixture of loops, burgeoning analog drones, tempestuous noises, spectral chants which rise at the surface. ūhttp://www.myspace.com/mushyrhum

Tempelhof TEMPELHOF is obviously inspired by junkies of SALEM. So obviously that it can make the mean people make fun of them. On the other hand, if it was just a vacant copycat, the teen weirdo Mon Insomnie from Pardubice (Czech Republic) wouldn´t be able to become one of the performers. And moreover, Tempelhof is the first, pure witch house group, that’s fo’sure! ūhttp://cultoftempelhof.tumblr.com

REVEREND D CK A music band founded in 2010 in Prague. Unclearly set between witch house, freak folk and distorted romantism. Using analogue synthesizers, effects and 70’s – looking organs. NO LAPTOPS! The instruments are being modified according to performers´ moods and successes in purchasing stuff in online auctions. Visually inspired by tumblr blogs, junks from flea markets and randomly found internet and / or communal trash. Reverend is not religion, Reverend is magic. ūhttp://reverenddick.tumblr.com

AMDISCS AMDISCS label is natural extension of A.M.180 collective, born in 2007 but the label itself took its present form in the year of 2010. Arty Maniac Discs reborn from its ashes and is coupled to this by the acronym Amdiscs, applying the beast cardiac treatment with high levels of amphetamines and a line of cryptic conduct, shapes the philosophy of the label, ignoring both national and artistic borders. Varying styles and fun from zombie surf, lo-fi psychedelic pop through spiritual witch house and all delicious perversion to hypnopompic drones. ūhttp://www.amdiscs.com

94 | 95 SYMPOSIUM

DATAPOLIS SYMPOSIUM FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2011

SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2011

Panel 1 | 11:00–12:30 | NEW CITYSCAPES Franco Torriani (IT): Labyrinth of the World Achilleas Kentonis (CY): We as In-Habit_Ants of Our City and Our Electromagnetic Shadows Dimitris Charitos (GR): Hybrid Urban Spatial Experiences

Panel 4 | 10:30–12:00 | STATUS OF THE DOUBLE Dominik Barbier (FR): The Strawman in the Dark Forest Ivan Chabanaud (FR): SelfWorld Jens Piesk (DE): Mobile Social Games

Panel 2 | 14:00–16:00 | CAN YOU LOCATE ME NOW? Katharine Willis (DE): Hybrid Places: Flashmobs and Foursquare Daphne Dragona (GR): Mapping the Commons, Athens: A Cartography of Alternate Economies and Practices in Times of Crisis Stavros Stavrides (GR): Hybrid Spatialities – Cities in Turmoil Aida Eltorie (EG): How to Revolt Intelligently: Revolution 2.0

Panel 5 | 12:30–13:30 | RESET YOUR DATASET 1 (in Czech language) Filip Dědic (CZ): Urban Gamespace: On the Relationships between Image of the City, Urban Planning and Game Designing Jana Písaříková (CZ): Metamorphosis of Maps and Mapping – Artistic Visions of the City and Society Ivan Floreš (CZ): Dead Drops

Panel 3 | 16:30–17:30 | SENTIENT CITY Erik Conrad (US): Palpable City Mark Shepard (US): Pathetic Fallacies and Category Mistakes: Making Sense and Nonsense of the (Near-future) Sentient City

Panel 6 | 14:00–15:00 | RESET YOUR DATASET 2 (in Czech language) Josef Šlerka (CZ): City as Dataset Petr Šourek (CZ): Datatlantis Panel 7 | 15:30–17:00 | RESET YOUR DATASET 3 Georg Russegger (AT): Coded Cultures: The City as Interface Marie Poláková (CZ): MIMODEK – Artificial Life in Urban Landscape Radka Peterová (CZ): DYI Environmental Monitoring Peter T. Dobrila (SI): Pure Energy – Culture Is Generator of Evolution Panel 8 | 17:30–19:30 | SOCIAL NETWORKAHOLICS Matthias Fritsch (DE): Technoviking – a Story from the Web 2.0 Veronika Trachtová (CZ): The Identity Construction and Presentation within Social Networking Sites Varvara Guljajeva (EE) & Mar Canet (ES): The Rhythm of City Alessandro Ludovico (IT) & Paolo Cirio (IT): Face to Facebook Citizen K. (CZ): If We Do Not Wish to Fear Our Own Face, We Must Save It!

SYMPOSIUM 94 | 95

ABSTRACTS FRANCO TORRIANI: Labyrinth of the World How data are connected to the polis. Koolhaas’s works on “Delirious New York” and “The Generic City”. “How to embrace new media technologies and nature? Are cities really getting better or just brighter?

How to design Hybrid Cities and Sustainable Living?” Multiple identities of the city: are data indifferent to the polis memory and condition? A new Comenius’s “Labyrinth of the World”? Any authentic polis confronts itself in a frame of similar entities. A plasma of data has transformed this chaothic and borderless eco-system: no polis is autonomous from data and wireless technology is reconfiguring our life. Around 1960s, the first megastructure architects (i.e. Yona Friedman, Constant, the Japanese Metabolists) stimulated the encounter “between architecture and computer technology” (Rouillard, Interactive Cities). “How to embrace new media technologies and nature? Are cities really getting better or just brighter? How to design Hybrid Cities and Sustainable Living?” [Adaptation: designing the future city (Shanghai, 2010)]. In the chance-like nature of the city, data enters a metropolis in perpetual motion. Koolhaas brought us from Delirious New York, decennia later, towards “The Generic City”(1995). How to focus on data in a general urban condition which happens everywhere? How to integrate datapolis based on a tabula rasa, like many cities in the Far East?

In our “post-utopiasness” age, data bring us to a pur, city in sanskrit ( i.e. Singapur), to disquieting multiple identities: are data indifferent to the polis memory and condition? Will a Comenius’s Labyrinth of the World be built again?

Franco Torriani (IT, Torino, 1942). Graduated in Economics at Università di Torino, he studied the relations between economy and social environment. Independent consultant in external relations and communication strategy, he worked on setting up several cultural events and contributed to many European publications. From the 1970s, he studies the interactions between science, technology, old and new creative media.

He is member of the Board of “Pépinières européennes pour jeunes artistes” (Chairman from 1998 to 2007); member of Ars Technica (Turin, Paris), founding member of ArsLab (Turin) and editorial consultant for Noemalab.org.

ACHILLEAS KENTONIS: We As In-Habit_Ants of Our City and Our Electromagnetic Shadows A noise we have been submerged in and store our traces... For the last 12 years I have been studying in my research Lab Multum In Parvo the electromagnetics of human body and the surrounding electromagnetic “dynamic cloud”. They both have been studied as data, as noise but also as a “shadow” which in a way is left behind in the surrounding environment. We humans sense just a small portion of the things surrounding us due to limitations of our senses. Our bodies though are exposed to a series of invisible interactions like the electromagnetic fields in a very broad spectrum. Emotions, thoughts and body actions interact at a level of non awareness with the natural and techno environment. What happens though with its traces? Can they be erased? Can they be modified?

Should we investigate these more? Can we see that as a “fluid meta-data” and a dialogue between nature and technology?

Achilleas Kentonis (CY) studied Engineering, Physics and Fine Arts in the University of South Alabama, USA and Universitad de Castilla la Mancha, Spain. As a researcher / scientist he participated in researches of NASA, the Cyprus University and the Aegean University in different European programs. As visual artist he was selected and represented Cyprus and Greece in different European and international Salons / exhibitions, such as Bienales and Trienales, at the fields of painting, photography, engraving, architecture, stage and costume design, installation, video art, short films (experimental, animation, documentary). In addition, he organized various international cultural events, symposiums, conferences, seminars and interventions and realized artistic publications. He received distinctions and awards for different kind of creation.

With Maria Papacharalambous they are the founders and the directors of ARTos Foundation (contemporary Arts and Science www.artosfoundation.org) which was awarded with the University of Cyprus Award for the Contribution to Culture and Society in 2008.

DIMITRIS CHARITOS: Hybrid Urban Spatial Experiences This presentation will focus on the concept of hybrid space and more specifically on the spatial experience afforded within the urban context,

96 | 97 SYMPOSIUM when this experience is mediated and appropriately augmented by the use of information and communication technologies. Firstly, the concept of hybridity, as it relates to the spatial experience, will be investigated from the perspectives of new media and communication theories. Secondly, a series of different conceptions regarding the hybrid nature of the urban spatial experience, which were presented in the Hybrid City symposium (March 2011) in Athens, will be discussed, in an attempt to identify common ground or certain differences between them.

Dimitris Charitos (GR) is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens. His artistic work involves electronic music, audiovisual, interactive, site-specific installations and virtual environments. He has studied architectural design, computer aided design and has a PhD on interactive design and virtual environments. He has authored or co-authored more than 70 publications in books, journals or conference proceedings.

KATHARINE WILLIS: Hybrid Places: Flashmobs and Foursquare How do we understand and engage with the new behaviours that are emerging in hybrid spaces? This talk will investigate activities and behaviour in the spaces of the hybrid city; reflecting on how online and mobile socially networked spaces and real-world places are connecting and converging in numerous and complex ways. It will draw on two empirical studies of foursqaure.com and flashmobs. The presentation will address the tensions that are arising in hybrid spaces in order to understand and respond to the changing nature in urban space and study how urban informatics creates new challenges and opportunities for society. We therefore propose to address both theoretically and empirically three key aspects of the hybrid city where we recognise that tensions between space and technology are emerging.

Katharine Willis’s (DE) recent research studies the changes in everyday behaviours of people using locative media and is based on the premise that our spatial environment provides orientation and structure to our movements and actions. She has developed both a theoretical approach to understanding the characteristics of layered media spaces and also a series of inter-disciplinary methodologies for investigating the perception and experience of mobile and wireless technologies in urban public space. Katharine Willis’s academic career has been advanced in an interdisciplinary environment; she attained a doctorate (magna cum laude) in the Department of Media and Bachelor and Masters (commendation)

in Architecture. She completed her doctoral research initially in the project ‘Spatial Cognition’ at the University of Bremen, and after this in the department of Media on a two year interdisciplinary MEDIACITY project at Bauhaus University Weimar (Urban Sociology, Media and Architecture), where she was an EU Marie Curie Research Fellow. Since 2008 she has worked on the interdisciplinary Locating Media Graduate School, FB3 ‘Mediawissenschaft’ at the University of Siegen, Germany.

DAPHNE DRAGONA: Mapping the Commons, Athens: A Cartography of Alternate Economies and Practices in Times of Crisis The paper will aim to present and discuss the concept, the process and the results of the workshop “Mapping the Commons, Athens” which took place in the National Museum of Contemporary Art from the 1st until the 8th of December 2010. Can the commons be mapped? Which is the new common wealth of the contemporary metropolis and how can it be located? What are the advantages and the risks of such a cartography in times of crisis? A project by Hackitectura.net, Mapping the Commons, Athens – which was commissioned by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens – was developed as a collective study, a contemporary reading and an online open cartography of Athens and its special dynamic. In a period that the particular contemporary metropolis seems restless and vulnerable at the same time, the workshop group seeked for, examined and studied areas where alternative, autonomous and decentralised practices are being developed. Seeing beyond the “public” and the “private”, different types of commons were mapped based on collectivity, sociability, open and free access, gift and peer to peer economy. http://www.emst.gr/mappingthecommons/index.html

SYMPOSIUM 96 | 97 Daphne Dragona (GR) is a media arts curator based in Athens, Greece.

Her exhibitions and events in the last few years have focused on forms of critique and tactics of resistance expressed through net based and game based art. She has worked with Fournos Center for Digital Culture (Athens), LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre (Gijon), Alta Tegnologia Andina (Lima) , the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens) and the festival of Transmediale (Berlin). She is also PhD candidate in the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies of the University of Athens. http://www.ludicpyjamas.net STAVROS STAVRIDES: Hybrid Spatialities – Cities in Turmoil Hybrid urban spatialities can be created through urban practices which essentially involve: A. Information exchanges that potentially coordinate those who participate in them (immaterial aspect), B. The creation of material signs (through diverse processes of inscription) that weave shared points of reference in space and time. Hybrid City, thus, can be understood as a process of collective urban invention. Innovative combinations of immaterial and material signs produce emergent public spaces.

Three instances of a potential Hybrid City will be analyzed in this presentation as they have emerged in recent urban uprisings: “Pasalo” (“Pass it on”) Mobilizations: Barcelona and Madrid, 2004, “December Uprising“: Athens and other Greek cities, 2008, “Jasmine Revolution”: Tunis and other Tunisian cities, 2011. It will be shown that in those three instances important common defining characteristics appear: 1. Definition of metastatic meeting points (social media and interactive technologies in support of inventive coordination acts), 2. Creation of memory locations (temporary urban markers), 3. Diffusion of invented traces (graffiti, stencil and other forms of urban inscription) throughout the city. Out of the described urban practices, the city is transformed to an always-in-the-making structure of trajectories and nodes in which instant information is combined with ephemeral inscriptions. This presentation will attempt to explore the hybrid spatialities which characterize such practices, show their inherently relational and communicative character and investigate the role which modern interactive technologies play in the inventive creation of such volatile urban environments.

Stavros Stavrides (GR) is Assistant Professor at the National Technical University of Athens, School of Architecture. http://courses.arch.ntua.gr/stavrides.html

AIDA ELTORIE: How to Revolt Intelligently: Revolution 2.0 The Cairo Case: History repeats itself – a line used across various disciplines is a proven liturgy to contemporary compendiums. When you detail the visual narratives, it is the region that becomes the medium designed to mark your place in history. Whether in the Stone Age or the Digital Age: Information is your power, and revolution is your tool. Egypt just

‫مالبس و أدوات‬ ‫ضرورية‬

‫ فهو يساعد‬،)‫سويت شيرت أو سويتر (أبو زعبوط‬ ‫على إبعاد غازات القنابل املسيلة للدموع عن‬ .‫وجهك‬

‫نظارة واقية (ميكن‬ ‫شرائها من أي محل‬ )‫حدايد وبويات‬

‫ ميكن إستخدامها‬،‫غطاء حلة‬ ‫كدرع ضد ضربات األمن املركزي‬ .‫بالعصا أو الرصاص املطاطي‬

‫كوفية حلماية فمك‬ ‫ورئتيك من الغازات‬ ‫املسيلة للدموع‬

‫ كي نعمل اللي‬،‫وردة‬ ‫علينا ونبدأ بتجمهر فى‬ .‫منتهى السلمية‬

‫ علشان لو‬،‫دوكو رش‬ ‫حدث ضرب من قبل‬ ‫ نرش الدوكو‬،‫السلطات‬ ‫على زجاج اخلوز واملدرعات‬ ‫حلجب رؤيتهم وشل‬ ‫حركتهم‬ ‫ تساعد على حماية يداك من‬،‫جوانتيات محارة‬ ‫حرارة القنابل املسيلة للدموع‬

10

‫حذاء مريح للجري‬ ‫واحلركة السريعة‬

98 | 99 SYMPOSIUM witnessed its first revolt since 1952: A revolution against autocracy and oppression, a revolution against social scrutiny and silence. The 17 days it took to unravel Egyptians in the reality of exhaustion and humiliation, triggered by what initially arose in Tunis, and now running through the veins of Algeria, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen, to say the least; the Egyptian Revolts became the global emblem of civil freedom sparked by a postmark on facebook. But will the future of a promise continue what the rebel had started? And will information technology be their tool? In address-

‫خطوات التنفيذ‬ ‫ التجمهر مع األصدقاء والجريان يف الشوارع‬-1 .‫السكنية البعيدة عن تواجد قوات األمن‬ ‫ الهتاف بإسم مصر وحرية الشعب (هتافات‬-2 .)‫إيجابية‬ ‫ تشجيع سكان العمارات لإلنضمام (بشكل‬-3 .)‫إيجابي‬ ‫ الخروج يف مجموعات ضخمة إىل الشوارع‬-4 .‫الرئيسية لجمع أكرب حشد ممكن‬ ‫ السري نحو املباني الحكومية الهامة (مع الهتاف‬-5 .‫اإليجابي) لإلستيالء عليها‬

4

ing Egypt, we specifically look at the v-log that helped spark the Egyptian revolution by a young female activist, Asmaa Mahfouz, followed by a well illustrated document that spread through the streets like wildfire titled “How to revolt Intelligently” and it is from here we learn about the artist inside every rebel.

Aida (EG) is an independent producer and director of Finding Projects.

Org, was also the Editor-in-Chief for Contemporary Practices Journal: Volumes 4, 5, and 6, and has worked with a myriad of galleries, museums and cultural agencies in Cairo, New York and San Francisco. She has worked with The Townhouse Gallery of contemporary art, The Brooklyn Museum, The International Museum of Women, Christie’s auction house (New York), and independently produced a number of international projects with artists and cultural practitioners from the Middle East and Europe, with the support of ProHelvetia Swiss Arts Council, The Ford Foundation and The American Center Foundation. She holds a Bachelor of visual arts and mass communication from the American University in Cairo and is completing her Masters degree in Islamic Art and Architecture.

ERIK CONRAD: Palpable City More information on page 41 of this catalogue.

MARK SHEPARD: Pathetic Fallacies and Category Mistakes: Making Sense and Nonsense of the (Near-future) Sentient City The near-future “sentient” city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring its environment and our behavior within it, becoming an active agent in the organization of everyday life in urban public space.

This talk will unpack some of the tacit assumptions, latent biases and hidden agendas at play behind new and emerging urban infrastructures. As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, we increasingly find information processing capacity embedded within and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. Artifacts and systems we interact with daily collect, store and process information about us, or are activated by our movements and transactions. Ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban infrastructure capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this near-future “sentient” city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring its environment

SYMPOSIUM 98 | 99 the wrong direction. There might be soon the terrifying remembrance of men in fire. Men in fire for freedom. Into madness, the soul takes its flight.

In the dark forest, one can dream of another life.

Dominik (FR) works with electronic arts: video, sculptures, interactive installations, and multimedia spectacles, Since 2010 he conceives and realizes ”electronic scénographies” for museography, architecture and public space. He also teaches video and electronic scenography at the Marseille’s Fine Art School and is the Artistic Director of FEARLESS MEDI@TERRANEE.

and our behavior within it, becoming an active agent in the organization of everyday life in urban public space. This talk will unpack some of the tacit assumptions, latent biases and hidden agendas at play behind new and emerging urban infrastructures.

More information on page 38 of this catalogue.

DOMINIK BARBIER: The Straw Man in the Dark Forest «Halfway along our life’s path, I was standing in a dark forest…» The poet’s dark AVATAR, the Divine Comedy’s Dante wonders in a cruel game through the different levels of a virtual world called Hell. And you, and me, are we just AVATARS? Of ourselves? Wondering through the different levels of what cruel game that we, men, designed for ourselves? Is it called Hell as well? In the dark forest, can we still dream of another life?

Half way, in a mad race. Mad, frantic, against the clock, for life. The race is the “madness” of the walk. Aristoteles said a man who throws a stone will never bi able to take it back. Chrysippe said inside madness the soul takes its flight and a running man cannot stop in one go without falling. In this project there might be the remembrance of a naked man. Running in front of Muybridge’s millimetered decor, in a machinery anticipating the inevitable invention of the cinema. And of the kalachnikov. There might be the remembrance of Cherno’s cleaners, running with showels and backets. In

IVAN CHABANAUD: SelfWorld Internet space dedicated to the live broadcast, SelfWorld can share in real time and configure audio-video through a web page simple to use.

It consists of 64 spaces (rooms) distinct content varies according to the occupants and broadcast events. Intended for use event, it is built on the mode of the extended video-conferencing (chat and video-archiving system). Users who attend events may participate through the web interface. The principle which allows to link different units is its modus operandi. Its implementation requires places with an internet connection broadband. The dissemination of rooms that communicate allows them to share a common emotion. The mobility of the device enables it to adapt to conditions live.

Ivan Chabanaud (FR) studied in Paris in “Beaux Arts” and “Metiers d’Arts” and started to work with the classical painting stuff. Around the 1992 year his first approach of numerical work start with video computed “Hero Logo” about the mythological trip of Ulysse. Further he makes computed animation on the Marcel Duchamps “Etant Donnés” work. After this, real-time appear more essential on his work, through virtual reality immersion and network streaming. Like Icare installation (virtual immersion) and Selfworld (numeric motel). He has been working during a time in the CICV structure in Montbeliard and the last years on stage for choreographic projects. He develops experimentations on 2008 with the R.A.N (Réseau Art Numérique) with physiological sensors.

JENS PIESK: Mobile Social Games Mobile and social games like Angry Birds and FarmVille are disrupting the traditional video game industry. Mobile Social Games are expected to have an even bigger impact and success. What are mobile social games?

What will be the key drivers for its success? Social Games have been prop-

100 | 101 SYMPOSIUM sered mainly on social networks like facebook, because facebook and other social networks know “Who are your friends?”. Location “Check In” services like Foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Places etc. know “Where are your friends?” So, who will “Mobile Social Games” look like.

The first generation of “Mobile Social Games” are games like “Farmville” on a smartphone (iPhone, android phone, etc.), but as those games will be played e.g. at the bus or train station and the gamers can be located via GPS and check in their current position. This presentation will 1. Look at the future of social gaming, 2. Give an overview over current game mechanics of social games, mobile social games, location-based mobile social games, and location-based mobile social augmented reality games, and, 3. Present some mobile social game concepts.

Jens Piesk (DE) is research director and founder of Nuromedia and co-founder of the Laboratory for Mixed Realities and has been chairman of the executive board of the legal subject and financial agent of LMR GFKI e.V. from 2004 to 2009. Born 1969 in Lemgo. Studied computer science, electrical engineering and economics with focus on image processing, user interfaces and business computing in Paderborn, Seville and Edinburgh.

FILIP DĚDIC: Urban Gamespace: On the Relationships between Image of the City, Urban Planning and Game Designing Lecture is focused on visions and images of city in video games and virtual game spaces and at the same moment on a such forms, phenomenas and principles of architecture, that are close to these. Examples of historical urban utopias, architectural fictions and processes will be presented along with examples and principles of virtual gaming worlds. Can our experience with virtual gaming worlds shape our perception of city and urbanism or affect designing process of emerging architecture? Are the virtual gaming worlds only plain representation of architecture forms, or could they highlite some urban phenomenas and principles?

Filip (CZ) is currently living in Brno. He studies at the Faculty of Arts (Theory of Interactive Media), focusing on connections between graphic design and architecture. He is also a regular contributor to web-magazine http://www.czechdesign.cz/ and currently preparing series of multidisciplinary events in cooperation with Faculty of Architecture and other schools and institutions in Brno.

JANA PÍSAŘÍKOVÁ: Metamorphosis of Maps and Mapping – Artistic Visions of the City and Society I want to focus on an artistic use of maps in the context of urban social cartography and statistics. The main questions is how the maps and mapping tools are connected with the issue of power and surveillance and how are used like an artistic expression. The paradigm of maps and mapping is changing. Map is not just a neutral reprezentation of territory. But it is also an explicit tool for transformation and prediction of social, economic and political spaces of the city, country and its borders. Through the map‘s objectivity particular representations of society and the city are vizualized. In the same time the alternative and marginal interests are silenced. Artistic kinds of mapping and maps are able to set up different visions and informations about the city, society, migration and mobility.

The talk is going to pay an attention to John Snow (Map of cholera), The Situationsts International, the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute; Artistic projets’s of Ingo Günther (Refugee Republic); Marco Peljhan (Makrolab); Peter Nold (Biomapping) Each of the projects introduce different approaches to the work with geographical and statistical datas.

Jana (CZ) gained one year working experience with a artistic project Work in motion during her Erasmus working scholarship by Interactive Art e.V. in Germany. She has been trying to realize an exhibitons like an independent curator since 2009 (realizations: Marketing meets Performance, 5/2009 City Gallery Blansko; Přistiženi v Ohni, Old Brewery Brno: 3/2010, Cupboard of Matthew Barney City Gallery Bratislava 4/2010.)

SYMPOSIUM 100 | 101 She also develops her own artistic works in field of literature. She looks forward to visiting USA this summer and she is curious about her life after studies.

IVAN FLOREŠ: Dead Drops Ivan Floreš installs “Dead Drops” in the Czech Republic… And he will do it in Prague too... His participation at the symposium will introduce circumstances of “Dead Drops” origin and site-specific Czech recent developments.

Ivan Floreš (CZ) is student of Theory of Interactive Media at Masaryk Univesity in Brno. He is interested in information technology with main focus on the topic of utilization of software system in music production and interactive installations. His extracurricular activities are predominantly audiovisual and music production. http://nopopcornvideo.tumblr.com/ JOSEF ŠLERKA: City as a Dataset The city Datamining – in which way cities can be a database? And how can we reach data from them? What can we find out about city and their inhabitants throught internet datamining?

More information on page 19 of this catalogue.

PETR ŠOUREK: Datatlantis More information on pages 8– 15 of this catalogue.

GEORG RUSSEGGER: Coded Cultures – The City as Interface This Paper will try to show examples and theoretical descriptions to come closer to an understanding what codes and programs underly creative cultures from a non-economical and non-business oriented perspective. The media format and environment of the future seems to be the city itself. How a city can be an interface, workspace, playful environment and media disposition can be observed in several cultural movements and artistic projects. One of the main interests will be to show examples of new forms of artistic practice and ability profiles using the city as a laboratory, exhibition space, communication platform or hackspaces. Based on examples from the festival CODED CULTURES and the project LUDIC INTERFACES these two elements should foment a deep

and critical understanding of what code and culture can be how broad a definition of interfaces can be outlined within this perspective. I want to reflect about the future of humankind and its development within the city.

Georg Russegger (AT) is Scientific Manager of the research and development project “Ludic Interfaces” (www.ludicinterfaces.com) at the Interface Culture Lab, University of Art and Design Linz. Together with the association “5uper.net” he is artistic director of the CODED CULTURES festival (www.codedcultures.net) in Vienna. Georg Russegger received a Ph.D. in media- and communication-theory and did a Post Doc. at the Graduate School for Film and New Media (Tokyo National University of the Arts). His last book is titled “Smartject” and focuses on creative delineation-practices in human-mediated processes of selforganization within complex media environments. As an artist he received a diploma in media arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and works under the alias Grischinka Teufl (www.datadandy.net). Since 1999 he is active in artistic and scientific fields based on the research about new artistic practices, mediaintegrated knowledge-cultures and its greater impact on project design and individual selfempowerment.

102 | 103 SYMPOSIUM

MARIE POLÁKOVÁ: MIMODEK – Artificial Life in Urban Landscape In this talk I shall be exploring a-life artwork created especially for public(city) space. Such work is, rather then artwork in traditional meaning of the term, generative and creative processes: metacreation. Principles of the natural world, location-related data sources and influences from its immediate surroundings are used to create interactive-evolving and changing artificial living system, which as all living systems in nature, is modified by its own environment. And, again similarly to nature, its presence is modifying the environment in return. The talk is based around MIMODEK project.

More information on pages 54–56 of this catalogue.

RADKA PETEROVÁ: DIY Environmental Monitoring More information on page 32 of this catalogue.

PETER T. DOBRILA: Pure Energy: Culture Is a Generator of Evolution Culture is a creative energy with ecological and socially responsible attitude towards the world. Culture is a generator of evolution and development and a medium for social involvement. It’s about the cooperation among education and technology, culture and research, art and science domains. Digital culture in economy, transport and environment should be taken for granted. The digital gap between the urban and rural environment, and between different groups of people is bridged with the general

accessibility to information-communication technologies (ICT). Machine producers should not dictate the commercially oriented development, therefore it is necessary to stimulate authors and programmes based on the open code, as this seems to be the only European potential advantage in programming.

Peter Tomaž Dobrila (SI) is an IT engineer and a musician who focuses on the creative use of the new technologies. He has shown all over the globe. He cofounded the Multimedia Centre KIBLA, Maribor. He initiated Multimedia Center Network of Slovenia – M3C, he started the X-OP – eXchange of art Operators and Producers as European project and ASEUM – Asia-Europe Media platform. He did the winning candidature for the European Captital of Culture 2012 for Maribor. He initiated winning candidacy for the World Book Capital 2010 for Ljubljana. He was a member of a committee for the National Program for Culture 2008–2011. He was appointed as a General director of the Directorate for Arts at the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. He’s working at the Maribor 2012 – European Capital of Culture.

MATTHIAS FRITSCH: Technoviking – a Story from the Web 2.0 What is the video of TECHNOVIKING? It is a short art video produced by Matthias Fritsch at the Fuckparade in Berlin in July 8th 2000. It’s original title is “Kneecam No.1.” Since it’s dramaturgy and way of filming blures the border between fiction and documentary the original intention of publish-

SYMPOSIUM 102 | 103 ing this art video was raising the question if the sequence is real or staged.

In 2007 the video was discovered by the You-Tube community and posted by users in various other platforms. After being linked and discussed in different web sites and internet forums it got uploaded on break.com, a big american media portal “for guys” where the video had it’s peak on September 28th with more than a million viewers in one day. In the following 6 months the Video got more than 10 Million clicks under the new name of “Techno Viking”. The video became an Internet Meme. Arround christmas 2009 the video’s protagonist send a lawyer to the filmmaker in order to stop all further publication of the clip. After not being able to find a compromise outside court the filmmaker is still waiting for the trail to come.

The personality rights claim resulted in a temporary annontiations block of the original video on youtube and a limitation to an only internal use of images which show the protagonist within the Technoviking archive. Ever since the attention on the video is high up and hunderts of remix versions and responses to the video are published in the internet. Fans imitate the video’s dramaturgy and re-enacted it in their homes, in clubs or on the streets. A selection of remixes is published on the website Technoviking. tv. From his experiences on the Technoviking Phenomenon Fritsch developed his following Work Music from the Masses. http://subrealic.net/mftm/ Matthias Fritsch (DE) lives and works in Berlin. He studied Media Art at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HfG) in Germany and Film, Fine Art and Curating at Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), New York State, USA. Has made several short and long films and mediabased installations.

VERONIKA TRACHTOVÁ: The Identity Construction and Presentation within Social Networking Sites This paper analyses the means by which we create our identity within social networking sites (especially the narrative ones) and considers the impact of networks on its participants.

Presented paper analyses the identity construction within social networking sites which is (unlike previous forms of an online identity) closely related to our offline identity. Within social networking sites we generally present ourselves by indirect means, but what really attracts our attention to participate are the narrative features of sites. We overpass the fragmentarity of the information flow by cognitive mechanisms which we use

in our everyday life. The size of network indicates who the target of our message is and presentation of our identity depends not only on ourselves but also on network of people that we are connected with.

Veronika Trachtová (CZ) is currently web editor and internal communication specialist in public administration. Occasionally is co-organizer of conferences, volunteer promoting new media in NGOs and analyst of FootbalForDevelopment.org. She has studied Sociology, Information science and New Media Studies at Charles University in Prague and at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. All of which increased her interest in social networking sites, construction of social worlds, education policy and information visualization. Her Master thesis at New Media Studies was focused on the construction of identity, adaptation mechanisms and narrative qualities of online social networks. She likes green color, comics, and snow.

VARVARA GULJAJEVA & MAR CANET: The Rhythm of City More information on page 51 of this catalogue.

ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO & PAOLO CIRIO: Face to Facebook More information on pages 25–29 of this catalogue.

Citizen K.: If We Do not Wish to Fear Our Own Face, We Must Save It! I have returned from places where I beheld myself and realised that it is mainly us that matters! We are all a society, we all create the system and we watch one another. We are all involved in the fear that keeps us at a standstill. For all of us I entered the places that others fear to enter and perceived the vanity, the absurdity of obedience. How frail and how easily abused is that which should serve us. We are not numbers, we are not biometric data, so let us not be mere pawns in the hands of the big players on the game board of these times. If we do not wish to fear our own face, we must save it! Speech searching for a answer to question: How far to our privacy are watching growing surveillance todays schemes.

The public have had chance to meet Citizen K. (CZ) many times in history, especially speaking to us through many of writers and artists mainly between the lines and by another nick name. In summer 2010 he talked to Czech society at an eponymous exibition. Followed his brutal apprehension and destruction of the exibition by Czech police. Citizen K. is under criminal investigation waiting for trial in these days.

104 | 105 NATIONAL TECHNICAL LIBRARY

National Technical Library The idea of building a new technical library originated in the 1990’s. On behalf of the State Technical Library, the Czech Ministry of Education sponsored an architectural competition in 2000. Projektil’s design was awarded First Prize from among approximately 50 proposals. Then there was a pause until 2004. After the plans were finished in 2006, the developer Sekyra Group was awarded the construction contract in a PPP-like program. The building contractor was the partnership Metrostav + OHLŽS. Building construction started in 2006, was finished in January 2009 and the inauguration took place on September 9th, 2009.

There are several sources influencing the architectural concept for the building. First, there is the influence of the site context, which addresses the historical urban plan for the whole area, as well as its present configuration.. Second, we asked “What is an “institution?” and “What is the role of the library in today’s society?” That is why on the ground floor there is a minimum of the library itself, unlike all the complementary services such as the cafeteria, exhibition hall and congress hall. Third, we chose a shape and a materials that would simultaneously express modernity and monumentality. The fourth influence informed the use of the area around the building – social space to the west and a green park to the east. Fifth, the interior and graphic design aspire to act as “technological text books”, so many design and construction elements are consciously revealed to better show how the building was designed and how it functions. Finally, and most importantly, we strove to make an energy-efficient and formally expressive design.

Several innovative technological strategies were used during construction – some to improve flexibility, others to reduce energy demand.

The concrete structural system is a 15m x 15m two-way grid with pre-stressed 30 centimeter thick slabs. The colorful floor pattern inside is based on the floor slab loading deflection diagrams. A concrete core activation system is used to heat and cool the building. Plastic piping is embedded in the slabs and filled with a temperature-variable water/ glycol medium. This system perfectly suits the large, open space of the interior. The building can be pre-cooled during summer months via natu-

ral ventilation through operable windows. The main façade is divided into glazed and solid segments on the surface in a near 50/50 ratio in order to optimize solar reflectance/absorbance. Recuperation of air and sun blinds are standard solutions. Here, thanks to an external double façade, the sun blinds are sheltered from the wind. The ground floor surfacing material is an asphalt-based floor covering (bitu-terrazzo) significantly reducing noise levels in the building. For building and asset protection, fire-prevention is addressed through an automatic, water mist spraying, fire extinguishing

NATIONAL TECHNICAL LIBRARY 104 | 105

Awards: GRAND PRIX ARCHITECTS 2010, and many more...

Location: Prague-Dejvice, area technical colleges Client: The State Technical Library – Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports Architect: Projektil architekti s.r.o. http://www.projektil.cz/c Roman Brychta, Adam Halíř, Ondřej Hofmeister, Petr Lešek) Co-author interiors: Hipposdesign, R. Babák, O. Tobola Graphic designer: Laboratoř, P. Babák Main artwork: Pas, Dan Perjovschi Planning: Helika a.s.

Energy analysis: Jan Žemlička Developer: Sekyra Group a.s.

system eliminating the need for a large-capacity storage tank. The roof is covered with extensive planting to create fifth façade, improving views from surrounding higher buildings. It also acts as water-retention, slowing down roof drainage during heavy rains.

For the interiors, art and graphic design were considered critical components and follow the technical schoolbook concept. An art curator with the PAS group (Production of Contemporary Activities) prepared a wholebuilding art scheme. Currently, due to budget limitations, only the central artwork has been installed. An international competition was tendered for a site-specific installation in the atrium and was won by the internationally renowned Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi. http://www.techlib.cz/

General contractor: Sdružení Metrostav a.s., OHL ŽS a.s.

Competition: 2000 Competition entry authors: R. Brychta, A. Halíř, V. Králíček, P. Lešek Total ground (or site) area: 11,740 m2 Built area – Ground Floor: 4,740 m2 Total floor area: 51,434 m2 Enclosed volume: 115,613 m3 Total enclosed volume: 168,187 m3 A number of readers: 1,200

A number of books on shelves: 500,000 A number of books in reserve: 600,000 An estimated number of visitors per year: 900,000

106 | WORKSHOPS

workshops Introduction to openFrameworks, computer vision and Kinect – workshop with Javier Lloret

The aim of this workshop is to show what computer vision (with and without Kinect) can offer to artists and designers and to help them start using this technology. The code samples will be delivered for openFrameworks. The workshop is divided in three blocks of 1.5 hours. The first one will be an introduction to openFrameworks for people that are not familiar with it or have no experience programming. The second block will

be an introduction to computer vision and in the last one we will check the possibilities and play around with some code samples that make possible to interact with Kinect.

The workshop is divided in three blocks of 1.5 hours. The first one will be an introduction to openFrameworks. OpenFrameworks is a framework developed for designers and artists to learn about and experiment with computational form in a visual context. We will go through the basics checking and modifying some code examples. People that are already familiar with openFrameworks don’t need to attend to the first block of the workshop.

In the second block we will first see some concepts about computer vision and the technology needed and then we will start checking and working with different computer vision code samples for openFrameworks that use OpenCv library,

Psychowalk Workshop with Darina Alster & Daniel Vlček aka DJ Francois Perin This collaborative workshop will provide opportunity for (not only) parents with children to resist a hectic city life. In haptic relaxation, participants will bring form to inner images, deprived visually from outer chaos. Leaving workshop should intensify perception of e.g. exhibited artworks.

Passers-by are welcome to enjoy the “contrast

happening“, watching and comparing those who temporarily focus on their inner selves and those who rush in search for books or else. Scenario: You will build your intuitive sculpture, blinded and guided by special music set developed solely for this workshop by DJ Francois Perin who expands on his previous Relaxcore project.

TUIO protocol, etc. During this part of the workshop we will use the webcams of our laptops.

The last part of the workshop will be an introduction to the Kinect camera. We will see how Kinect is changing the way people used to work in computer vision projects. Then we will start playing with some code examples for openFrameworks. In this part of the workshop the audience will work in groups sharing the available Kinect cameras.

People can attend to any of the blocks that are interested in. It is recommended to bring openFrameworks already downloaded and installed following the instructions on their website: http://www.openframeworks.cc/download http://www.openframeworks.cc/setup More information about Javier on page 73 of this catalogue.

ENTER5 106 | 107

1998–2011: CIANT evolves...

With many new initiatives and programmes, CIANT has recently established several cooperation networks in its major creative research and development areas: Multimodal interaction tools, interactive stage design and choreography, motion capture systems, brain-computer interfaces, 3D cinema, digital preservation, new technologies for sustainable development etc.

For more information visit ūhttp://ciant.org

reset platform

coala

Locally, CIANT organizes events for public on a continuous basis. We feature lectures, workshops, exhibitions and performances while trying to integrate educational institutions, both public and private, into the creative and collaborative actions.

COALA is part of our scenario for personalized support to individual artistic projects in their development phase. We provide free consultancy-based and hands-on assistance in order to help bring forward projects of emerging artists and students. Some of these works are shown in the Datapolis exhibition this year.

Check upcoming events and partnerships at ū http://www.platforma-reset.cz

(ciant open art lab)

Join us at ū http://www.platforma-reset.cz/coala.html

These are selected international cultural cooperation and research projects CIANT has recently been involved in. Without great synergies with our partners all over Europe and beyond not a single ENTER festival would have ever taken place. Here, we would like to thank all our partners and supporters.

108 | 109 ENTER5

x-op eXchange of art Operators and Producers X-OP is a gradually growing network of artists, researchers, operators, producers and cultural institutions with the aim to establish a European platform for the creation of art. With its places, spaces and its user accustomed technological infrastructure it fosters mobility of the participants, while strengthening the collaborative productions and interdisciplinary approach to art.

Consortium: leader - KIBLA, Slovenia | Apartment Project, Turkey | CIANT, Czech Republic | Egon March Institute, Slovenia | Instituto Politecnico de Tomar, Portugal | Media in Motion, Germany | MMSU, Croatia | MOKS, Estonia | Taidekoulu MAA, Finland | Transforming Freedom, Austria Supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union. Co-financed by the Czech Ministry of Culture and the City of Prague.

Project events selection: Date: October 2008 Venue: Maribor, Slovenia Title: Kick-off meeting of partners and introductory symposium Date: January 2009 Venue: Berlin, Germany Title: Conference True Art/Truely Merchandise Date: January 2009 Venue: Berlin, Germany Title: Electropera Act 1

Date: September 2009 Venue: Novigrad, Croatia Title: X-OP partners meeting Date: September - November 2009 Venue: Helsinki, Finland Title: Artists talk lectures at MAA School Date: August 2009 Venue: Istanbul, Turkey Title: Marko Kosnik residency at Apartment Project Date: October 2009 Venue: Maribor, Slovenia Title: Electropera Act 2

Date: February – March 2009 Venue: Istanbul, Turkey Title: John Grzinich residency at Apartment Project

Date: November 2009 Venue: Istanbul, Turkey Title: X-OP Events - 11th Istanbul Biennial Parallel events, Marko Kosnik premiered new production of Electropera Act 3: Operabil Para Istanbul

Date: April 2009 Venue: Mação, Portugal Title: NoWhere symposium on landscape, technology, art, identity and (human) nature

Date: November 2009 Venue: Maribor, Slovenia Title: Marko Batista and Ana Pečar residency at KIBLA

Date: August 2009 Venue: Novigrad, Croatia Title: Goran Tomćić residency at Museum Lapidarium

Date: August 2010 Venue: Mooste, Estonia Title: Marko Kosnik residency at MoKs

ENTER5 108 | 109

Date: August 2010 Venue: Mooste, Estonia Title: AVAMAA art symposium Date: December 2010 Venue: Prague, Czech republic Title: Michal Kindernay and Guy van Belle residency at CIANT Date: December 2010 Venue: Prague, Czech republic Title: RESET festival Date: April 2011 Venue: Prague, Czech republic Title: ENTER: DATAPOLIS 5th Art|Tech Biennale Prague Date: June 2011 Venue: Vienna, Austria Title: "Future Fluxus" - Networking in the Arts // Art working in the Nets Date: June 2011 Venue: Ljubljana, slovenia Title: Electropera final Act Date: August 2011 Venue: Rijeka, Croatia Title: Residency at MMSU Date: August 2011 Venue: Maribor, Slovenia Title: Final project meeting

110 | 111 ENTER5

Global Gateway Part of Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture.

CHANCE Challenging Networked Communities

Besides promoting the EU-Turkey Civil Society Dia-

Straw Man The Straw Man project is an experimental artistic and cultural project connecting digital art practices and technology-oriented body-centred performances thematically based on the intercultural dialogue about the symbol of straw man. The main purpose of the project is research, intercultural dialogue and

logue as such, one of our main objectives is to fos-

realization of new forms of artistic creation around

ter the role of Istanbul as a cultural catalyst within

The project aims to harmonize and utilize the best

the theme of human body, its basic inner process of

emerging creative domains such as experimentation

of current social networking technologies in order

self-identification and its connection to the Avatar (a

with new media interfaces and techniques. Partners

to stimulate intercultural dialogue with concrete

computer user’s representation of him- / herself in a

have formed both a network for an efficient transfer

artistic and cultural results visible and circulated

virtual environment).

of knowledge and a platform for implementation of

around Europe on a trajectory from virtual to physi-

innovative artistic and cultural projects. Such effort

cal domain. In order to catalyze creativity, we inte-

Consortium: leader - Fearless Medi@Terranee, France |

includes bringing together visual and sound artists,

grate a set of tools making it possible to effectively

CIANT, Czech Repulbic | I.B.I., Palermo, Italy |

dancers, architects, designers, curators, interdisciplin-

announce, manage, circulate and bring visibility to

ary researchers, cultural operators, and policy makers

cultural operators, groups of artists as well as cre-

Supported by the Culture Programme of the European

while forming a sustainable multilateral partnership in

ative individuals, across all regions in Europe. We

Union. Co-financed by the Czech Ministry of Culture

the field of innovation-led arts and culture.

envision the construction of an open-source CHANCE

and the City of Prague.

ūhttp://globalgatewayproject.eu

platform that will support user-friendly mass collaboration (also called peer production) and promotion of artistic and intercultural values while the major

Consortium: leader - CIANT, Czech Republic | ARTos,

creative work within the project will be dedicated to

Cyprus | BIS, Turkey | Persona, Romania |

artistic experiments with and critical contextualiza-

U.R.I.A.C., Greece |

tion of the platform tools and concepts.

Supported by the European Union. CFCU, Turkey, is the

ūhttp://www.chance-project.eu/

Contracting Authority. CIANT is the beneficiary.

Co-financed by the City of Prague.

Consortium: leader - CIANT, Czech Republic, BIS, Turkey | M2Fcreations, France | Nuromedia, Germany Supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union. Co-financed by the Czech Ministry of Culture and the City of Prague.

ENTER5 110 | 111

MOB

StudioLab

TransISTor

The MOB project focuses on the mutations of cities in

Artscience Lab Network

2011 is the year of the 7th edition of our interdisciplininterdisciplin

artistic approach to mobile and wireless technolo-

Inspired by the merging of the artist’s studio with the

We provide workshop opportunities to experience and

gies. At the crossroads of creation, art education and

research lab to create a hybrid creative space, Studio-

master some of the advanced technologies that shape

awareness of technology as mean of expression, the

Lab proposes the creation of a European platform for

contemporary cinema, for instance 3D & stereoscopy.

project presents a cross and sensible look on 5 cities

creative interactions between art and science. Studio-

in Europe. MOB invites artists and citizens to explore

Lab brings together major players in scientific research

new realities and urban changes.

with centres of excellence in the arts and experimen-

Europe. It addresses issues of mobility and explores the realities of urban cities in Europe, fostering an

ūhttp://www.mob-platform.eu/

tal design and leverages the existence of a new network of “hybrid” spaces to pilot a series of projects at

ary training initiative that is focused on emerging techniques and practices in the audiovisual industry.

Throughout the spring, you can apply at

ūhttp://transistor.ciant.cz

the interface between art and science. Developed by

Supported by the MEDIA Programme of the European

Consortium: leader - Dedale, France | CCF Timisoara,

a group of practitioners breaking new ground, in this

Union. Co-financed by the City of Prague.

Romania | CIANT, Czech Repulbic | Hangar, Spain |

space, across Europe, these projects will integrate

Makata, Poland

processes of incubation, education and public engagement to develop actual products and activities with an

Supported by the Culture Programme of the European

educational, social, cultural, or commercial value. Fur-

Union. Co-financed by the Czech Ministry of Culture

ther integrated by three over-arching themes – Future

and the City of Prague.

of Water, Future of Social Interaction and Synthetic Biology the projects will provide a template of innovative art science collaborations as well as a unique programme of activities that promote 21st century learning skills and creativity among Europe’s citizens.

Consortium: leader - Science Gallery, Trinity College, Ireland | Ars Electronica, Austraia | Bloomfield, Israel | CIANT, Czech Republic | ERG, Belgium | ISI, Italy | Le Laboratoire, France | Leonardo, France | Medialab Prado, Spain | Medical Museion, Denmark | RIXC, Latvia | Royal College of Arts, United Kingdom | Studio Optofonica, The Netherlands Supported by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union.

112 | 113 ENTER5

| ORGANIZE ORGANIZER ER

| INTERNATIONAL COPRODUCTION

| CO-ORGANIZER AND MAIN FESTIVAL VENUE

| FESTIVAL VENUES

| PARTNERS

| ME MEDIA EDIA PARTNE PARTNERS ERS

| CO-FINANCED This project is funded by the European Union.

CFCU is the Contracting Authority of this project.

CIANT is the Beneficiary of this project.

ENTER5 112 | 113

Pavel Smetana — Director of CIANT

Terezie Chlíbcová — Graphic designer

Pavel Sedlák — Chief curator of exhibition and symposium, catalogue editor

Matěj Sychra — Graphic designer

Andrej Boleslavský — Co-curator and technical production manager

David Münich — Graphic designer

Michal Mariánek — Curator of Reset Night

Vera Batozska — Photographer

Roman Trochta — Head of technical production

Henrich Zucha — Video

Jakub Hybler — Technical production assistant

Klára Jakubová — Video

Tomáš Dvořák — Financial manager

Šárka Pavelková — Guest service

Šárka Maroušková — Communications manager

Sylvie Milerová — Guest service

Jan Pražák — Web manager

Ivan Nemeth — Office manager

Karolína Brosková — Project manager Michal Máša — Project manager

Special thank you goes to the team of the National Technical Library, namely to Pavel

Stephane Kyles — Project manager

Procházka, Renata Šebková, Naděžda Nová, Milan Mikuláštík and Radim Labuda,

Kristof Slussareff — Project manager

for their intense and kind support: conceptual, administrative, and technical.

114 ENTER5

new location new face

5

www.lasershow.sk

E5 IENNA11L, 2011 B E U G A PR y 19 - september ny), Czech Republic ma

vensk Ceskoslo

eho exilu

no 4, Pra

ha 4 (Mo

info@kvant.sk www.lasershow.sk tel.:+421 (0) 918 632 028 fax: 00421 (0) 2 654 113 55

dra

praga5piccolo.indd 1

transistor ctvrtka.pdf

31/03/11 09.57

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Get ready for the new online t-shirt creator experience.

Enter coromoro.com.

prolight+sound

R

1

4.4.11

19:51

SCHEDULE 14/04/2011 – 17/04/2011 NTK

National Technical Library

Panel 8 | 17:30-19:30 | SOCIAL NETWORKAHOLICS

Datapolis Exhibition

Matthias Fritsch, Veronika Trachtová, Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet, Alessandro Ludovico & Paolo Cirio, Citizen K.

14.4. – 17.4. 2011

Datapolis Workshop 1

(Gallery)

Opening on Thursday, April 14, 18:00 Limited version of the exhibition will run until Sunday, April 24

Datapolis Symposium (Main auditorium)

15.4. – 16.4. 2011 Friday, April 15

(In front of NTK)

Friday, April 15 | 16:00-18:00

PSYCHOWALK

with Darina Alster and Daniel Vlček aka DJ Francois Perin

Datapolis Workshop 2

(Workshop room)

Sunday, April 17 | 12:00-17:00

Panel 1 | 11:00-12:30 | NEW CITYSCAPES

KINECT & COMPUTER VISION

Panel 2 | 14:00-16:00 | CAN YOU LOCATE ME NOW?

Datapolis Walk 1

Franco Torriani, Achilleas Kentonis, Dimitris Charitos Katharine Willis, Daphne Dragona, Stavros Stavrides, Aida Eltorie

with Javier Lloret (In front of NTK)

Friday, April 15 | 18:00-18:30

Panel 3 | 16:30-17:30 | SENTIENT CITY

SERENDIPITOR walk with Mark Shepard

Saturday, April 16

Archa Theatre

Erik Conrad, Mark Shepard

Panel 4 | 10:30-12:00 | STATUS OF THE DOUBLE Dominik Barbier, Ivan Chabanaud, Jens Piesk

Panel 5 | 12:30-13:30 | RESET YOUR DATASET 1 (only in Czech) Filip Dědic, Jana Písaříková, Ivan Floreš

Panel 6 | 14:00-15:00 | RESET YOUR DATASET 2

(only in Czech) Josef Šlerka, Petr Šourek

Datapolis Performances Friday, April 15 19:00 & 21:00 | ADAPT:act | EIRA, Lisbon & CIANT, Prague 20:00 | 15 STEPS | Věra Ondrašíková et al.

22:00 | premiere | THE OYSTER TOUR | My Name Is Ann!

locations Cross Club

Datapolis AV Performances Saturday, April 16

Cross club

20:00 | RESET NIGHT

†† );( †‡ ▲▲\\ Audiovisual performance line-up: Stellar Om Source (NL) Story of Isaac (UK) MUSHY (IT) o F F / GR†LLGR†LL (FR/DE) REVEREND D‡CK (CZ) Tempelhof (CZ) Performances & installations Darina Alster (CZ) Patrick Sedlaczek (CZ) DJ's Black Dumpling (A.M.180 collective) and Frozen Asscum 'O' (AMDISCS)

22presents

Sunday, April 17 Datapolis Dead Drop 17:45 | @ Mlynarska street

Datapolis Walk 2 18:00 | SERENDIPITOR walk with Mark Shepard

NTK - National Technical Library

22PRESENTS

Divadlo Archa

CIANT

ENTER: DATAPOLIS

5th art | science | technology biennale Prague, Czech Republic

April 14-17, 2011 LOCATIONS:

NTK Národní technická knihovna Technická 6, Praha 6

GPS: 50°6'14.083’N, 14°23’26.365’E

CROSS CLUB Plynární 1096/23, Praha 7

gps: 50°6'29.448"N, 14°26'35.44"E

DIVADLO ARCHA Na Poříčí 26, Praha 1

gps: 50°5'22.151"N, 14°26'2.714"E

22PRESENTS Mlynářská 4, Praha 1

Panel 7 | 15:30-17:00 | RESET YOUR DATASET 3

Georg Russegger, Marie Poláková, Radka Peterová, Peter T. Dobrila

http://festival-enter.cz

2011

international art | science | technology biennale prague

CENA / PRICE 290 Kč / € 11,–

2011