A collection of press images on Flickr
Ars Electronica: Milchkühe auf den Brucknerhausbühnen, OÖ Nachrichten
Oma und der Weltschmerz, Neues Volksblatt
Ars Electronica: Kühe musizieren, Steine erzählen Geschichten, Vorarlberg Online
We are proud to announce our annual Interface Culture exhibition at the Ars Electronica Festival. During the following days we will present the various artworks that have been contributed by members of our master program.
Art and usefulness, a complicated liaison. This exhibition shows a critical reflection towards media culture and its constantly changing framework, where the role of art as a transformer and enabler of new creative solutions can be put into question. It is especially the freedom of art to create and realize initially useless ideas, which eventually yields radically new approaches in interaction design by thinking out of the box. While design and technology will usefully improve our everyday relation to machines, only artistic research is capable of producing previously unexpected results. Therefore our artworks and installations are driven by the forces of unuselessness, the useful useless.
We want to cultivate the borderline between artworks, interaction prototypes and an open approach towards art and functionality claims. The young generation of media artists and creators is aware of its roots in art and design and especially of interactive art and its connection to participation and performance art and their places in art history.
This video showreel provides a walkthrough through the “Playful Interface Cultures” exhibition at the Ars Electronica Festival 2010. The works shown were created within the Master and Ph.D. program at the Interface Culture Lab, University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz.
Newsleak by Tim Devine, Jayme Cochrane, Shervin Afshar
Rambler by Ricardo Nascimento, Tiago Martins
Lovely Machine by Anika Hirt
Augmented Photography by Varvara Guljajeva
Mohr SMS by Hugo Camargo, Veronika Pauser
Urban Mood by Mahir Yavuz
Endotastic Voyage by Reinhard Gupfinger
Der Beweis by David Brunntaler, Henning Schulze, Shervin Afshar
Pizzabox by Henning Schulze
Nica Freeware by Mar Canet, Julian Stadon
Human Allergy by Hugo Martinez-Tormo
Glovatron by Vesela Mihaylova, Myrssini Antoniou, Sotiris Katsimpas
Artificial Stupidity by Bager Akbay, Ana Cigon
Nanocup by Hugo Martinez-Tormo
Shopping in One Minute by Varvara Guljajeva, Mar Canet
Playfulness by Mar Canet, Jayme Cochrane, Travis Kirton
Mexican Standoff by Onur Sönmez, Tim Devine
The exhibition design has been based on traditional Austrian tobacco brands in reference to the historic venue of the former tobacco factory built by the German designer and architect Peter Behrens.
Binge drinking may result in serious health risks. Abrupt seriousness, the belief that it is ok to call your ex at 5 am in the morning or forgetting your national anthem are just a few of the possible negative effects. In order to give you additional time to think about the consequences of the action you’re about to take, our apparatus slows down the process of giving you your desired shot.
After all we don’t want to get you drunk.
We just want you to loosen up.
The incredible SlowShot Apparatus was presented at this years Roboexotica in Vienna. Roboexotica is a festival for cocktail robotics which 2010 took place for the 12th time.
The idea behind this apparatus was born during this years Robotics Workshop. Nearly every part of it, was done and redone countless times until everything functioned the way it was supposed to.
Constructed as a Rube Goldberg machine, it was designed to do a very simple task (serving a shot) in a complicated way (the iron ball rolls down the track and at the end turning the lever and thus serving the shot) – therefore the name SlowShot. It turned out that the machine was one of the fastest, if not the fastest one at this years exhibition.
SlowShot even won the ACRA (Annual Cocktail Robot Awards v12.0) in the category “most wasted alcohol”. Wether this was due to a design flaw or due to the fact that the people who used the machine were maybe already slightly intoxicated from the surrounding machines will remain an unanswered question.
http://slowshot.i-am-alive.at – project page
http://vimeo.com/album/1490536 – vimeo album for the project
http://www.roboexotica.org – roboexotica festival page
And oh, what vistas of woe and decline, what fretful hauntings of threatening ghosts and phantoms. The central processor chip can fail. The operating system can fail. The language that supports the operating system may be discontinued and no longer supported. Unlike paper, which degrades rather gracefully, computers have sudden, catastrophic failures [1].
On September 2nd of this year, expectations were at a peak for the Playful Interface Cultures exhibition opening. I myself was uncommonly tranquil. After a few years of exhibiting during the Ars Electronica Festival one inevitably comes to realize that there is an inherent praxis to all this process of getting your work ready for being shown – and also to keep it running afterwards – and nervousness is an undeniable part of it. But Rambler had been ready, tested and running for some months then. Furthermore, it had been tested once again a mere two days before the opening. I was tranquil – as much as I can ever be, at least.
The Robotics Workshop organized in collaboration with Time’s Up took place in April/May and was investigating the many possibilities for motion, control and machines. With a core theme of kinetic energy, the workshop encouraged a broad an experimental approach to the building of devices, systems and experiments.
Energy is on everyone’s lips, from conservation to clean, from personal to mystical. This year’s Robotics Workshop deals with many forms of energy, the senseful and senseless conversion of one form into another, the confrontation of matter with motion, mass with energy, intent with randomness. Through the frustrations of intended movement, perturbations arise and new cycles of energy emerge. Bottle boats bashing against the wind, a reduced machine of unnecessary complexity, scholarly analyses of movement and control, the Zen of shaking; the workshop produces unusual and strange machines with the oddity of energy expended.
Out of 1700 applications Andreas Weixler’s work for Pi got selected for presentation at the ICMC – International Computer Music Conference.The ICMC is one of the most important conference concerning computer music and is held every year in different country, this year it was held in New York City and Stony Brook from 1. – 5. June 2010.
For Pi is an electro-acoustic multichannel composition composed at the TU-Studio Berlin. At ICMC it was selected for the dance concert, which was performed by two brilliant dancers Laurie Berg and Siri Peterson. The joy was on both sides, the dancers really liked the new experience of contemporary music and also the audience was pleased with the artistic interpretation.
Beside the interesting concerts, videos and performances, the paper presentations were on a high level. Also several studio reports have been particularly interesting: Music Research Centre, Department of Music, University Of York IRCAM: Coordinating Musical Research At IRCAM, Music Technology At Penn State University Forums, University of Oslo – Lab Report Georgia Southern University, Studio Report The Brooklyn College Center For Computer Music, City University Of New York.
Se-Lien Chuang´s pieces also got selected for video installation. die Wege entstehen im Gehenis based on recording of Japanese cicadas “Semi”. The audio was processed and composed and SARC Sonic Arts Research Center in Belfast, the Video in our Atelier Avant Austria, the premier was in the DeepSpace of the Ars Electronica Center last year.
It was very inspiring meeting professionals, like composer João Pedro Oliveira, kinetic sculptor Gary di Benedetto among others. Daria Semegen, associate professor of composition, director of the Electronic Music Studio, Stony Brook University, showed an original 70´s electronic studio with a still working Buchla synthesizer!
Our second games workshop by Mika Satomi which took place from May 31st until June 2nd, introduced interaction design and physical interface design topics through hands-on projects. Students were asked to plan a game inspired by words, describing physical actions, and develop original physical interfaces for their planned games.
Four groups were formed during the workshop to work together, where each picked 3 action keywords and started their game concept using these key words. Conductive fabrics, threads and some hand crafting techniques were introduced to support the realization of the planned interface. Participants are challenged to create a game strategy and interface, as well as to learn basic electronics, programming and handcrafting skills.
The Interface Culture faculty is well represented at the Play Admont exhibition, which will be shown from June 3rd until November 7th at the Styrian monastery as part of the Regionale10 festival for contemporary art. In addition to the Lifewriter by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau and the Reactable by Martin Kaltenbrunner et.al., Play Admont provides an international selection of contemporary interactive art.
Active participation enables the visitor to enter into a dialogue with an extended, socially-anchored sculptural milieu and gain admittance to a user-orientated environment that provides for a wide diversity of different transactions and forms of expression thanks to the incorporation of digital technologies. Choreographic objects, location-specific acoustic installations, situationally related spatial installations, interactive machines, performance activity participation, ephemeral experimental designs and developing archives assimilate visitors into the creative artistic process itself – it is only through the complementary elements of interaction and participation that the exhibits reveal their full potential.
In the context of the Erasmus teaching exchange program Varvara Guljajeva, was leading a workshop at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn from 17th to 21st of May. The 5-day class was a combination of theory and practice, and meant to achieve basic interactive results with little or no previous technical knowledge. During the first two days a group of seven students was introduced to interactive art and encouraged to discuss the role of interaction in general. Then the participants were given a classical interactive art work, which they had to break down according to the introduced interaction models. The following step was a hardware and software introduction, where various sensors, the Arduino micro controller and its development environment, as well as the Processing language were presented. Students had to complete several exercises in order to gather understanding about the logic of sensors, micro controllers, and their interface to a computer. After these initial exercises the participants proposed their own project ideas and developed the according interaction scenarios.