we’re at the dutch pavillon. aernout mik shows some recent works, where he reflects on the situation in a nationstate during ‘the age of paranoia’. multichannel video screens, severe police training, kids wearing uniforms, all in all overwhelmingly set up.
we are all confronted with the situation, that nations restrict the civil rights, homeland security and common mistrust. is there a real threat, or do nations only use this scenery to fundament their status quo? you decide..
… Repetitation. The swiss pavillon shows a hybrid between classical paintings and video art. On a huge wall, rotated app. 45 degrees towards the spectator, i see surrealistic paintings of faceless, naked women eating chickenwings, while overlayed by 3d renderings. I can definitely state the fact, that yves is a better painter than 3d modeller. But who cares
homo technologicous
Originally uploaded by tagr_tv
he wont tell me his name. all i found out was, that he is ‘homo technologicous’. walking giardini with some wireless equipment, cellular, gps, tablet pc and whatnot, he was a real eyecatcher. wished to meet him again, but we got this speech barrier since he only spoke italian. i WILL learn this language until biennale09. if the world still exists then..
Ruben ramos balsa, bowling
two tables, two monitors. Stereo sound that somehow interacts with a tube that does bubbles into a glass of water. weired, melodic sound, from a piano that is used in a cageous style. This is the first stop of our journey through giardini: the spanish pavillon
Ruben ramos balsa. Spain
here you see the installation from a different perspective. thru a tube, air is being pumped into the glass where it bubbles. on the video screen on the right, a boy blows into the other end of the tube. blowing halt..
this is another installation of ruben balsa. one the one side a camera attached to a glass. the other is a beamer, where the cam sends its picture to. if you blow on the surface of the water, the picture on the beamer shows some nice patterns. ruben really seems to be quite into ehrm blowing..
sorrowful we had to accept that we could not make it to the makeart festival, but we could still do our web 2.0 job and asked some people on flickr to join the makeart07 flickr group. it looks like there were not too many photographers at the festival who uploaded their stuff to flickr – but the ones who did are great. please enjoy some great pictures from portier, thanks to manuel braun (www.decept.org) and flickr user yesyesnono for sharing their photos!
Krems, known as a kind of conservative city in lower austria is the mainspot of the annual contemporary music & art festival “donaufestival“. Tomas Zierhofer-Kin and his team are bringing international high quality program to krems. read his statement. Apart from international contemporary musicprogram, which is the mainpart of the festival, it shows new pulsing mediaart and performances. This years theme was “unprotected games” and a not to be missed work in this context is of course the painstation
another immersive installation in the lounge was “pause” from
Lynn Pook & Julien Clauss
u lay down in a hammok, get earplugs, get connected with contactspeakers, close your eyes & disconnect normal perception.
relax & go deeply inside. its like lying in a samadhi-tank.
you can hear your heart beat … poch poch ! but is it really your heart beating ?
… your bones making sounds – or just your mind experiencing inner visions ?
noise & resonance…in your bones and in your body !
the sound u experience is a composed piece of 18 min.
also they found H.A.P.P.Y – the infomonster in the danube. a huge fluffy something is sitting in the lounge, next to a terminal, where u could ask this monster – and it had an answer for any question.
why didn´t u stay in danube ?
a new breathtaking, freaky work at las palmas is the knife.hand.chop.bot by 5VOLTCORE
5VOLTCORE… the guys with the nasty robots… their work shockbot “corejulio” won at transmediale05 and since that travels all the relevant media art festivals and exhibitions. The knife.hand.chop.bot is their new work, first time presented at DEAF07.
Do you have the guts to put your hand inside a robot, who does the knife hand game ? interact and die ? or just cry ?
adrenaline guaranteed !
description by 5voltcore :
5VOLTCORE is about to build a self-fulfilling cybernetic system, that plays with the senses and perceptions of the User and the sensors and the processes of the Machine.
The Robot is equipped with a knife that the Machine uses to s(t)imulate the test of courage – a kind of game known as “Mumblety-Peg”. The User puts his/her hand into the Machine and starts the knife game at the push of a button. The knife starts to hit the space between the fingers, first slowly then continually getting faster. The Machine knows where to chop by receiving signals of a sensor that guides the knife to the place between the fingers.
Electric contacts are mounted on the support block of the Machine, where the hand is situated. These contacts are activated as soon as the first “nervous sweat” appears that turns the skin into a conductor. Subsequently the computer becomes disturbed by the electric current that is now transmitted via the skin.
This has two effects: on the one hand, sounds are generated by the closure of the contacts (circuit bending) that can either be interpreted as warning or act as an additional source of stress. On the other hand, they can have an effect on the position of the knife which is controlled by the computer and thereby hurt the potential perpetrator of the disturbance.
Essential to the set-up is the the feedback loop i.e. the circularity between computer, robot and User. It instantiates the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy:
The human is right by assuming that the Machine can fail. The Machine can fail because the human assumes.
This puts the courage or mettle of the User to the test. In case the User can’t keep their trust in the Machine and start to sweat, this “embodied rationality” causes fear and sweat that pertubates the function of Machine.
The work is about the a fascinating paradox that results from this close relationship between humans and artifacts. A fascination that tries to run a risk and avoid it at the same time.
Therefore we like games that, by playing them, put their rules to the test.
SE/30 (Code31) is an installation of 20, almost 20 year old Macintosh SE-computers. The installation is based on the principle of cellular automata, every SE/30 is a cel that adapts to its environment and forms collaborative patterns. The sound is modulated and the images are plotted by the status of each computer that generates the sound and images. In the realm of General Midi and Quicktime Musical Instruments the aesthetics of failure are a necesity. Digital artefacts distort mobile phone-like timbres to abstract structures…
experiments in galvanism (by Garnet Hertz) A miniature webserver is implanted in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container. Through an ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani’s original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal.
Surrounded (Yang Zhenzhong) is a circular installation of 8 synchronized videos. It explores the contemporary preoccupation with questions of identity and perception, and the ability of images to turn apathy into anticipation, and ordinariness into desirability.
Ubermorgen.com in cooperation with Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico are digitaly stealing books from amazon.
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