Ars Electronica: Milchkühe auf den Brucknerhausbühnen, OÖ Nachrichten

Oma und der Weltschmerz, Neues Volksblatt

Ars Electronica: Kühe musizieren, Steine erzählen Geschichten, Vorarlberg Online

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.

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 day of the opening came. The sneakers worked, they communicated between themselves and with the mobile app, the mobile app gathered data and posted it on Twitter. Or so it seemed until, upon close inspection, I found that the Twitter posts weren’t being updated.

It easily skipped my radar (or rather, my nerdar) that the Twitter API was going through some major changes. Alas, the official mail from Twitter came a couple of days too late, saying

Starting August 31, all applications will be required to use “OAuth” to access your Twitter account.

In layman’s terms, basically, Twitter didn’t only change the key to a door: they changed the whole entrance, door and doorframe and all, the type of lock, the type of key and whatever else I might manage to fit in the present analogy, had I the time and patience to do it. Naturally, this is understandable to one who is familiar with the workings of web-services and such. But it is also undeniably annoying to find out on opening day that the final stage on the whole flowchart of your work’s digital innards isn’t in a stage of flowing anymore (the mail I got from Twitter was delivered to my mail server on September 2nd at 10:53am).

Fortunately, some passionately furious googling led me to a solution – an easy-to-use Java ME library for the Twitter API [2]. In a few hours, the Java ME application was remade to accommodate the new code and Rambler was back.

No wonder that interactive installations are the nightmare of many a curator – and many an artist too. Going back to Sterling,

We imagined that our bed was a clean, abstract, mathematical, Euclidean, Platonic, computer-science, electronic kind of bed, but we were deceiving ourselves. The bed of digital culture is a very rumpled, dirty, makeshift, anarchic kind of bed. It smells of viruses and worms and is surrounded by vast, ever-growing heaps of our discarded trash. The sheets are owned by other people and they want us to rent the mattress by the hour. [1]

In the end, how ephemeral, how easily perishable is our New Media Art? And will there one day be a remunerated occupation with a job description such as “Media Art Restorer”? Glory to the jack-of-all-trades media artist, the one who not only devises, constructs, performs and promotes the work, but is also able to keep it up-to-date and running in this challenging landscape of throughput restrictions, shifting protocols and obsolescent formats.

Rambler was, in the end, a success. The ever-absent pair of obsessive-compulsive sneakers was awarded the title Best of Interface Cultures 2010, with a nifty material prize to boot. It will be exhibited at the Amber Festival 2010 in Istambul (Nov 4-14) and also at the 404 Festival 2010 in Taiwan (Nov 25 to Dec 8).

So take heed to the words of Bruce Sterling, which I have borrowed as mine. You are driven to produce Media/Interactive/Ludic works? Then know that your work is never truly done.

[1] Sterling, B. (2007). Media Paleontology. In: Kluitenberg, Eric (ed.) The Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

[2] Twitter API ME Wiki

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.

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!

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.

“Thumb Fu!” by Tim Devine and Vasela Mihaylova. One of the four projects that were developed during the workshop.

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.