. media culture . art
art . privacy . psychogeography
Global Safari (Powered by Google), the formation of the world's image
"Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man" Villem Flusser wrote in his well-known 1983 book "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" which analyzed the transition from prehistoric, traditional images to posthistorical, technical ones. No longer formed by "authors", but by anyone who operates a camera or other apparatus, technical images have been opening windows to
... [ Continue ]
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art . interactive . visual
Phase = Order, escaping the screen
In the field of expanded cinema the two-dimensio- nality of the projection screen has long been a limitation that artists have attempted to overcome through many different strategies. Rotterdam-based Joris Strijbos, member of the ensemble Macular, has found a way to take audio-visual media out of its habitual constraints. Recovering the legacy of
... [ Continue ]
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art . music . sound art
Electromagnetic soundscapes, revealing the hidden environment
All around us the air is filled with silent signals. Our bodies bathe daily in streams of electromagnetic waves connecting hundreds of networks in the growing family of wireless media. Yann Leguay has been working with The GhostLab to establish a protocol for capturing radio frequencies spanning from VLF to UHF, including
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art . media . music . performance
Interferenze 2010 Rurality 2.0 report
Check the Interferenze photo set here.
The idea of the nonconformist as no longer the black sheep but the one now wearing a digital player and headphones admirably sums up the theme of the 2010 edition of Interference: "Rurality 2.0". This year the electronic arts festival was held July 23rd to 25th in Bisaccia, Upper Irpinia, a significant place for its (undoubted) rural features as well as it being home to
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art . book . preservation
Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook - Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013888, English, U.S.A., 2010After fifteen years of recurrent and animated debates about the peculiarities of new media art, it is still almost always considered as inappropriate in terms of classic museum and collector standards. There is also the undisguised frustration of being snubbed by the majority of the contemporary art world. Here is the best chance to start to definitively solve this ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . interactive
Tele-Present Wind, blowing somewhere else
The wind is a universal natural phenomena, and it's usually associated with weather conditions and forecasts. But it is still perceived as almost unforeseeable and invisible except for its physical impact on plants and for its sibilant sound. Wind has two characteristics in common with the virtual environment: the complexity of conditions needed to be generated (so, often being unforeseeable) and
... [ Continue ]
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art . privacy
Desire of Codes, the tentacles of the surveillance beast
We're accustomed to being under surveillance. We've taken for granted that cameras are everywhere "for our own safety". And we don't care anymore of being recorded in the street 30, 60 or 100 times (or even more) everyday. How has it happened? One of the reasons is that all these cameras around us are "passive". They're there, they record their memory, then they delete
... [ Continue ]
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art . music . sound . sound art
RHFID Speakers, a different directional sound
Speakers are neutral. They carry the sound from its decoded source to our ears, but they are firm, static and impartial. They can be adjusted to create a better listening experience, or multiplied and singularly managed to enhance it even more, but they are meant to stay where you placed them the first time they were used. RHFID Speakers by Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe, Filippo Cuttica and
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art . code . literature
Microcodes, the world without syntax errors
The descriptive, literary role of programming code has not being properly exploited, especially by writers and poets. Yet there's an incredible potential to create sense through the syntax and grammar rules of a programming language. Pall Thayer has started to rigorously write concepts in Perl in his Microcodes project. Slowly progressing from
... [ Continue ]
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art . book . science
Ingeborg Reichle - Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art
Springer Verlag, Austria, English, ISBN-13: 978-3211781609The laboratory as an atelier: this seems to be one of the paradigms of art and science. "Art" and "science" are two terms that have been juxtaposed way too often, sometimes describing either "creative" science or art only citing scientific elements. This book is far away from these misunderstandings. The work restricts its field of research to three areas (genetic engineering, ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . video . visual
Kapitaal, X-ray public space
In a black environment of shapes and garbled sounds someone is lurking. The viewer walks through an environment which could well be that of a first-person shoot-em-up videogame: a jungle of logos, text, bright displays and signs. It's not an imaginary place. It is an X-ray image of
... [ Continue ]
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art . dvd . magazine . media . video
ASPECT - Volume 14: Middle East
dvd, VOL 14, FALL 2009, U.S.A., EnglishThis is the usual excellent selection by Aspect (a bi-annual video-magazine on dvd) on a topic tough to explore: the Middle East. The format is usual: a collection of videos in a double version: the original work and one commented on by a renowned critic. Carefully avoiding stereotypes, focusing just on the hottest areas, and mostly including ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . biotech . preservation
Modern Fossil - Fossilization now
Sometimes they have evolved. Sometimes they have only appeared briefly and then mysteriously lost all their functionality and appeal. Obsolete technological objects, once cutting-edge, turn into modern fossils in the hands of Chistopher Locke. With a special technique, a mold made of a concrete-like mixture similar to real fossil stone, the phone becomes a
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art . book . media . visual
(edited by) Alka Pande, Nils Röller - Visual Arts, The India Habitat Centre's Art Journal
India Habitat Centre, volume 9, April 2008 - March 2009, India, English, 2009How much we really know about artists using communication technologies in countries not deeply involved in the art market? Not much, of course, and just thinking about that gives the impression that we're missing out on a lot of culture. India is certainly one of these territories. Since the Dutch-Indian establishment of Sarai in New Delhi, there was an entry point in a country ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . book . visual
R. Klanten, N. Bourquin, S. Ehmann, T. Tissot - Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design
Die Gestalten Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3899552782, English, Germany, 2010According to Olia Lialina: "Two ideas have occupied the minds of new media designers for several decades: humanization of computers and the materialization of digital phenomena." While the former is far from truly being realized, the latter is a huge trend, especially when it comes to data visualization. Quantities and relationships ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . interactive . videogame
Sleep Is Death, video playing with humans
Art games are usually meant to reconsider rules, but often this reduces to just playing with conventions. "Sleep is Death (Geisterfahrer)" by Jason Rohrer, famous for his early controversial "Passage" game, is a little masterpiece of interaction. It allows two players to construct a story, but in a revolutionary way: one of them is the "computer", the other one
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art . media . mobile . privacy . psychogeography
Habitar - Bending the urban frame 2010 report from Laboral
Check the Habitar photo set here. Invisible Architectures: the curiosity generated by this paradox is the starting point of Habitar - Bending the urban frame, the new stage of the broader curatorial path taken by Mediateca Expandida of the Laboral in Gijon, curated by José Luis de Vicente, with the help of Fabien Girardin. The aim is to show
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art . book . hacktivism . magazine
various editors - monochrom #26-34 Ye Olde Self-Referentiality
edition mono/monochrom, ISBN 978-3950237269, Austria, 2010, EnglishPrinting a 500-page book using the look and feel of a nineties xeroxed fanzine, with an impressive number of essays is a clear statement in 2010. This is not meant to be an outrageously expensive art book for collectors, nor a sleek coffee table book to be flipped through in an alternative club. It is ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . media . tv . visual
Curious Displays, digital display becomes part of the house
In the multi-faceted world of digital imaging the ability to connect on a visceral level with an audience is becoming a main concern of any production. Often we hear the phrase, "It jumped out of the screen" when hearing someone recall a spectacular scene from a film. Although this is usually just a figure of
... [ Continue ]
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art . book . music . sound
Caleb Kelly - Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262013147
, USA, 2009, EnglishSince John Cage we have started to prefigure what is now called the "aesthetics of failure." Reconsidering accidents as opportunities has been the conceptual terrain of different avant garde artists ever since. All the major musicians that have founded their own career researching the ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . music . sound
Fine collection of curious sound objects, everyday things that sounds unexpectedly
The sounds of everyday objects can be quite extraordinary at times. The din of a pan, the hum of a refrigerator or the barely audible metallic rattle of a neon light tube cooling down can provide attentive listeners with surprising aesthetic experiences. But in other cases ordinary things can simply sound
... [ Continue ]
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art . performance . sound
White Noise Machine, machine reaction
White noise is usually used for a couple of its unique properties: its being able to cut through background noise, which leads to it being implemented in emergency vehicle sirens, and the way it can mask other distracting noises in the environment, the reason for its use in small sleep-aid machines or
... [ Continue ]
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art . dvd . music . sound . video . visual
Yoshihide Sodeoka - Video Metal
C505, Content004, USA, 2009, EnglishThis DVD is a real visual and sound trip. Master of visualization concepts, Yoshihide Sodeoka, is here enjoying the freedom of experimenting with both visual forms and ideas. The three pieces launch the user into an obscure and hypnotising video universe. The heavy metal atmosphere is made precarious ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . hacking . mobile . net . privacy
Buttons, shooting somewhere else
When you take a picture, a moment becomes a memory. The memory becomes matter. Publishing photos, through services like Flickr, has added a new dimension to the photographic process for many people. Publishing a picture on the web becomes an intentional part of the shooting process. By
... [ Continue ]
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art . literature . mobile . sound
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, visual sound poetry for iPhone
As Geoff Huth wrote, "we are living through what might be the greatest age of visual poetry, in a time when the methods of production and distribution are such that the form can prosper without the need for extensive capital". A convergence of factors, including the Internet, print-on-demand publishing,
... [ Continue ]
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art . religion
Empathy Box, share your pain
Empathy Box, by the Italian iocose collective, is a device that generates pain that is meant to be shared. This is a box made out of both metal and wood, and is reminiscent of the type of vintage radios people used to sit around and listen to collectively. But instead of music or words, the users voluntarily share pain. An electric shock of an
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art . media . sound
Coincidence Engines, the world revolving around the clock
Clocks have their own aura. They quantify invisible and unstoppable time. And mechanical clocks have also interesting audio properties - in fact they scan time through their repetitive sounds. Coincidence Engines is a series of artworks by [The User], a group that became famous because of their Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers, composing
... [ Continue ]
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art . hacktivism . performance . privacy
How to build a fake Google Street View car and keep your data
Google Street View is an application that allows users to virtually dive into Google's popular Maps feature and travel around at street level. It uses millions of 3D photographs to give users a 360° horizontal and 290° vertical view of their location. The photos are typically taken via car-mounted
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art . code . hacking . hacktivism . software
Island2, a squatted computer memory zone
Conceptually, a computer's memory is not only the place where code and data are temporary hosted, but it is also the short term reference for everything that is rendered on the screen. In a way, it represents something like the computer's "awareness" at a given moment, more than its "short term"
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art . book . videogame
Mary Flanagan - Critical Play, Radical Game Design
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262062688, USA, 2009, EnglishAfter a few years of serious and prolific videogame studies, fed by the industry boom, the research is starting to focus on reconnecting with the history of games through strong links that would help to understand and expand videogame paradigms. In this articulate book Flanagan starts with a major ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . software
Artificial Smile, it's a happy world, after all
The digital representation of reality is technically and conceptually a fake, and this "fake" is more and more what we're used to. The process of reducing in pixels (causing a loss of details), approximating colors (causing a loss of tones) and sounds (causing a loss of frequencies) are definitively creating a
... [ Continue ]
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art . book . software . visual
Iman Moradi. Ant Scott, Joe Gilmore, Christopher Murphy - Glitch: Designing Imperfection
Mark Batty Publisher, ISBN 978-0979966668, USA, 2009, EnglishError, and even more importantly, its perception and visual beauty are at the heart of the "glitch art" movement. Be it ethereal, as with a few seconds of uncertainty in the graphic rendering, or fixed, as a more or less stable bug in a file, the glitch is a recurrent, yet peripheral visual component. This is the ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . music . software . sound
Sonicity, live data space
With the installation Sonicity, the English artist Stanza adds another significant chapter to his quest for new metaphors to translate the countless interactions produced by data passing through an environment into a sensory plane. Stanza's aim is to create a data space that is perceived as alive. To achieve this goal he has installed a great number of sensors that are
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art . book . net . preservation . software
Dragan Espenschied, Olia Lialina - Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect
Merz Akademie, ISBN-13: 978-3937982250, Germany, 2009, EnglishOlga Lialina and Dragan Espenschied have invested a huge amount of time in investigating something that others have simplistically dismissed as "mundane". They have been among the very few to understand the importance of a historic moment (the first years of the world wide web) and the birth of its "pop culture" - a history they appropriately define as "digital folklore". Beyond the recurrent naivete ... [ Continue ] email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0) |
art . privacy . visual
. PAGES: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15
Stolen Moments, a human webcam in New York
The process of getting used to being constantly watched and monitored by webcams, social networks and unscrupulous invaders of our privacy has certainly had an effect on our expressions and movements. Our everyday gestures have necessarily taken on an artificial quality due to the feeling of
... [ Continue ]
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Sonic Genoma
Suoni Futuri Digitali
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nordiC (Dissonanze)
Tecnologie di Liberazione (2001)
Virtual Light (1995)
Internet Underground Guide (1995)
Suoni Futuri Digitali
Wicked Style
nordiC (Dissonanze)
Tecnologie di Liberazione (2001)
Virtual Light (1995)
Internet Underground Guide (1995)
. colophon
editor in chief:
Alessandro Ludovico
assistant editor:
Aurelio Cianciotta Mendizza
contributors:
Josephine Bosma
Vito Campanelli
Jonah Brucker Cohen
Valentina Culatti
Michael Dieter
Daphne Dragona
Vicente Gutierrez
Matteo Marangoni
Paolo Pedercini
production and promotion:
Chiara Ciociola
infrastructure design
and consulting:
Paolo Cirio
translations:
Roberto Orsini
technical consulting:
Paolo Mangraviti
Alessandro Ludovico
assistant editor:
Aurelio Cianciotta Mendizza
contributors:
Josephine Bosma
Vito Campanelli
Jonah Brucker Cohen
Valentina Culatti
Michael Dieter
Daphne Dragona
Vicente Gutierrez
Matteo Marangoni
Paolo Pedercini
production and promotion:
Chiara Ciociola
infrastructure design
and consulting:
Paolo Cirio
translations:
Roberto Orsini
technical consulting:
Paolo Mangraviti
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"Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man" Villem Flusser wrote in his well-known 1983 book "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" which analyzed the transition from prehistoric, traditional images to posthistorical, technical ones. No longer formed by "authors", but by anyone who operates a camera or other apparatus, technical images have been opening windows to
...
In the field of expanded cinema the two-dimensio- nality of the projection screen has long been a limitation that artists have attempted to overcome through many different strategies. Rotterdam-based Joris Strijbos, member of the ensemble
All around us the air is filled with silent signals. Our bodies bathe daily in streams of electromagnetic waves connecting hundreds of networks in the growing family of wireless media. Yann Leguay has been working with 
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013888, English, U.S.A., 2010
The wind is a universal natural phenomena, and it's usually associated with weather conditions and forecasts. But it is still perceived as almost unforeseeable and invisible except for its physical impact on plants and for its sibilant sound. Wind has two characteristics in common with the virtual environment: the complexity of conditions needed to be generated (so, often being unforeseeable) and
...
We're accustomed to being under surveillance. We've taken for granted that cameras are everywhere "for our own safety". And we don't care anymore of being recorded in the street 30, 60 or 100 times (or even more) everyday. How has it happened? One of the reasons is that all these cameras around us are "passive". They're there, they record their memory, then they delete
...
Speakers are neutral. They carry the sound from its decoded source to our ears, but they are firm, static and impartial. They can be adjusted to create a better listening experience, or multiplied and singularly managed to enhance it even more, but they are meant to stay where you placed them the first time they were used.
The descriptive, literary role of programming code has not being properly exploited, especially by writers and poets. Yet there's an incredible potential to create sense through the syntax and grammar rules of a programming language. Pall Thayer has started to rigorously write concepts in Perl in his
Springer Verlag, Austria, English, ISBN-13: 978-3211781609
In a black environment of shapes and garbled sounds someone is lurking. The viewer walks through an environment which could well be that of a first-person shoot-em-up videogame: a jungle of logos, text, bright displays and signs. It's not an imaginary place. It is an X-ray image of
...
dvd, VOL 14, FALL 2009, U.S.A., English
Sometimes they have evolved. Sometimes they have only appeared briefly and then mysteriously lost all their functionality and appeal. Obsolete technological objects, once cutting-edge, turn into modern fossils in the hands of
India Habitat Centre, volume 9, April 2008 - March 2009, India, English, 2009
Die Gestalten Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3899552782, English, Germany, 2010
Art games are usually meant to reconsider rules, but often this reduces to just playing with conventions. 
edition mono/monochrom, ISBN 978-3950237269, Austria, 2010, English
In the multi-faceted world of digital imaging the ability to connect on a visceral level with an audience is becoming a main concern of any production. Often we hear the phrase, "It jumped out of the screen" when hearing someone recall a spectacular scene from a film. Although this is usually just a figure of
...
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262013147
, USA, 2009, English
The sounds of everyday objects can be quite extraordinary at times. The din of a pan, the hum of a refrigerator or the barely audible metallic rattle of a neon light tube cooling down can provide attentive listeners with surprising aesthetic experiences. But in other cases ordinary things can simply sound
...
White noise is usually used for a couple of its unique properties: its being able to cut through background noise, which leads to it being implemented in emergency vehicle sirens, and the way it can mask other distracting noises in the environment, the reason for its use in small sleep-aid machines or
...
C505, Content004, USA, 2009, English
When you take a picture, a moment becomes a memory. The memory becomes matter. Publishing photos, through services like Flickr, has added a new dimension to the photographic process for many people. Publishing a picture on the web becomes an intentional part of the shooting process. By
...
As Geoff Huth wrote, "we are living through what might be the greatest age of visual poetry, in a time when the methods of production and distribution are such that the form can prosper without the need for extensive capital". A convergence of factors, including the Internet, print-on-demand publishing,
...
Clocks have their own aura. They quantify invisible and unstoppable time. And mechanical clocks have also interesting audio properties - in fact they scan time through their repetitive sounds.
Google Street View is an application that allows users to virtually dive into Google's popular Maps feature and travel around at street level. It uses millions of 3D photographs to give users a 360° horizontal and 290° vertical view of their location. The photos are typically taken via car-mounted
...
Conceptually, a computer's memory is not only the place where code and data are temporary hosted, but it is also the short term reference for everything that is rendered on the screen. In a way, it represents something like the computer's "awareness" at a given moment, more than its "short term"
...
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262062688, USA, 2009, English
The digital representation of reality is technically and conceptually a fake, and this "fake" is more and more what we're used to. The process of reducing in pixels (causing a loss of details), approximating colors (causing a loss of tones) and sounds (causing a loss of frequencies) are definitively creating a
...
Mark Batty Publisher, ISBN 978-0979966668, USA, 2009, English
With the installation
Merz Akademie, ISBN-13: 978-3937982250, Germany, 2009, English
The process of getting used to being constantly watched and monitored by webcams, social networks and unscrupulous invaders of our privacy has certainly had an effect on our expressions and movements. Our everyday gestures have necessarily taken on an artificial quality due to the feeling of
... 

