In his book “The Imaginary Museum” (1965), André Malraux asserted that in the reproductions of artworks published in books and exhibition catalogues we can find more significant artworks that could be seen in the largest museum of the world. Internet has exponentially expanded Malraux’s Imaginary Museum and provided us with unprecedented access to a myriad of artworks. In digital art, the complexity or ephemerality of many artworks makes it difficult to see them in an exhibition and therefore it is the video documentation created by the artists themselves that allows us to discover their works. Two selections of documentation videos present an overview of the many faces of digital art today.
Curator: Pau Waelder
Digital Life
The impact of digital technologies in our everyday life cannot be avoided anymore. This selection of videos showcases a series of digital artworks and projects that explore such impact and, in some cases, suggest ways of subverting it or looking at it with a sense of humor.
Koh-i-N∞r
Carlo Zanni
The geometric elements dancing on the screen in Koh-iN∞r (mountain of light) are actually the screens of some portable electronic devices of the artist, individually shot in a dark room and then edited to compose a choreography. The video, with a “dance” and hypnotic feeling, unveils itself with the appearance of two people from two very distant generations and it becomes a metaphor of the life cycle where the bright screens -the mountain of light- are the middle generation, a temporal and temporary keystone. The music of the video is an unreleased track by Moby. – www.zanni.org
The Rhythm of Sao Paulo
Mar Canet, Varvara Guljajeva
Produced for SP_Urban Digital Festival, this installation occupies the media facade of the FIESP building in Sao Paulo, which turns into a large metronome that sets the pace of the activity of the Paulistas in several social networks. The data obtained in real-time from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Foursquare determines the movement of the metronome.– www.varvarag.info
The Cathedral and the Convenience
Evan Roth
In this video, the artist carries out an intervention that replaces the sound of the bells of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, prompting a reflection about the sounds that dominate our daily life in the city. Courtesy of XPO Gallery, Paris.– www.evan-roth.com
We AR in MoMA
Sander Veenhof
Veenhof and Mark Skwarek invited a number of artists to produce artworks for the Layar augmented reality platform. These works were geolocated on different floors of MoMA in New York, without asking permission to the museum. On October 9, 2010, the “infiltrated” artworks could be seen on a tablet or smartphone in the same spaces that host the artworks from the collection of MoMA.– www.sndrv.nl
See You
Thierry Fournier
Placed in a street, a video screen displays exactly what can be seen behind it, as if it was a window – except that the video is displayed with a constant 24h delay. A coexistence of two temporalities into the same perspective creates a “temporal depth” and an impossible closed circuit for onlookers. Alternately actors and ghosts of the same scene, those who pass in the image and those who observe them coexist without ever communicating, unless they come back at the same place exactly 24h later.–www.thierryfournier.net
AR Magic System
Clara Boj y Diego Díaz
An interactive installation that exchanges the faces of onlookers, in the manner of a magic mirror. This work invites viewers to reflect on their own identity through a playful experience. – lalalab.org
Colmena
Martina Höfflin, Pascal Glissmann
About 100 analog creatures in hand-crocheted nests out of wire settled in trees of the mediterranean park up on the hills of Palma. As soon as the sun rises they start moving and cheeping, depending on how the sun falls into their solar cells. Visitors of the park are invited to discover, observe and wonder about these uncommon habitants which live autarkic in the trees. Through chaotic and unpredictable sounds and movements the creatures seem alive and fit perfectly into the surrounding natural environment. The installation shows parallels to Miro‘s work in using a geometrical form which on the same time appears very organic. – www.electronic-life-forms.com
Delicate Boundaries
Chris Sugrue
As digital technologies have become embedded in everyday life, the line between the virtual and real is increasingly blurred. Delicate Boundaries playfully explores our expectations and understanding of interfaces and interactivity.– csugrue.com
Between The Lines (Protograph)
Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau
“Between the Lines (Protograph)” is an interactive art installation developed by media artists Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer in 2014 for the introduction of the new “Nautilus” pen by Hermès. In this interactive installation users can handwrite any text or drawing on a piece of paper on the pedestal of the installation. These writings or drawings soon transform into living virtual beings. Courtesy of Galerie Charlot, Paris – www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent/
Vividness
Abelardo Gil-Fournier
This is an installation where a light mechanism renders an arrangement of dried flowers into an illusory regime of artificial vitality through the real-time manipulation of colors. By means of a digital projector, colors are sent to the dried leaves and flower in a way that the resulting image shows no colors at all.– abelardogfournier.org
memememe#selfie
Thiago Hersan, Radamés Ajna
What is the sound of a one-sided conversation? memememe#selfie is a sculpture that explores the possibility of establishing a dialogue between machines, in the context of our contemporary preoccupation with trending, liking, following, and other forms of communication.– www.thiagohersan.com | www.radames.in
Face to Facebook
Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico
The artists stole 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software, and then posted them on a custom-made dating website, sorted by their facial expressions characteristics. The project caused controversy and was spread on the media, forcing a reflection on the current state of privacy on the Internet.– www.paolocirio.net
I Like You (on Facebok)
Thiago Hersan
iLikeYou (on facebook) is a web app designed to help us quantify our feelings towards each other. It goes through facebook data and tries to like every post, picture and comment published by, or tagged with, a chosen friend.– www.thiagohersan.com
Text Trends
Martin John Callanan
Text Trends deals with the spectacularization of information. Using Google data it explores the vast search data of its users. The animation takes the content generated by search queries and reduces this process to its essential elements: search terms vs. frequency searched for over time, presented in the form of a line graph.– greyisgood.eu
Stock
Moisés Mañas
STOCK shows the physical representation of stock values in certain specific companies represented by raincoats that move according to positive changes of values in their stocks.– www.hibye.org
Facebox
Volker Morawe, Tilman Reiff
facebox is the world’s smallest social network. It is an artifact to rehabilitate social network geeks, an ironic statement to the massive increased social network madness. By stucking your head into one of this old computer monitors you will dive into this real world network. Find a friend and talk to him in a intimate face to face situation. facebox provides everything a former social network addicted persons needs to reactivate his social skills which are necessary to have an intense human to human conversation. – fursr.com
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
Gordan Savicic, moddr_
Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego.– suicidemachine.org
Hybrid Playground
Clara Boj y Diego Díaz
Hybrid Playground transforms kids playgrounds into interactive game scenarios. A network of wireless sensors transforms the playground game elements into physical interfaces to control videogames that are shown in mobile devices (pda). Hybrid Playground combines physical and digital interaction to create open air game experiences by mising digital game strategies with street game dynamics, verbal and corporal comunication and team playing.– www.lalalab.org
OIS – One-way Interaction Sculpture
Volker Morawe, Tilman Reiff
OIS consists of a real 60W light bulb and a real light switch as well as their virtual representation on the AOYS website. The real switch and the virtual switch are both working as an undirectional toggle switch: You can only switch it ON in the virtual world via the webinterface and you can only switch it OFF in the real world with a switch which is mounted next to the real light bulb. Thus, only those who are online can switch the lightbulb ON and only those who are on location can switch it OFF again.– fursr.com
Around: a word of network
Moisés Mañas
“Around a word of network” it is an art installation connected to Twitter. The software controlling the installation selects the term “around” from the thousands of tweets in real time. An hanging lamp swings with varying speed according to the number of tweets at any particular time. – www.hibye.org
Departure of All
Martin John Callanan
A flight departure board for all passenger departures from airports around the world, as they happen.– greyisgood.eu
Makers
In our technology-driven society, DIY culture also applies to creating and modifying digital devices. Maker culture also implies a critical stance towards technology: reverse-engineering a device means not being just a consumer, but also a creator. Numerous artists modify existing technologies or create new devices in order to express their ideas about the role that these machines, as well as the service providers on the web, play in our daily life.
How to build a fake Google Street View Car
Aram Bartholl, F.A.T. Lab
The Free Art & Technology Lab was nominated for the Transmediale Award 2010. During its presence at the festival F.A.T. members produced a series of Google critical projects on- and off-line. The public intervention with a fake Google Streetview car became the most distinctive piece of the series and evoked numerous reactions in the city and online.– datenform.de
Graffitti Analysis: sculpture
Evan Roth
A sculpture created algorithmically by motion capturing the writing of CAP from the 1983 documentary Style Wars.– www.evan-roth.com
Battling Pavillions
Sander Veenhof
Veenhof and Manifest.AR group geolocated several “virtual pavillions” in the Giardini and various areas of the Venice Biennale in 2011. Through a smartphone and the Layar app, visitors could see the pavilions at the sites of the official exhibitions of the Biennale. This “unauthorized infiltration” could be countered by deleting the pavilions on any mobile device.– www.sndrv.nl
SMSlingshot
VR Urban
A slingshot equipped with a keyboard allows the user to write a short message and throw it against a wall, where it appears as a virtual graffiti. VR/Urban have taken this playful form of urban art to various cities, including Cairo, shortly after Egypt’s revolution.– www.vrurban.org
Google Error
Marco Cadioli
Google Error is the last of a series of Google Earth variations where the virtual globe is transformed in something else. Far from his original goal of 3d World representation, Google Earth is turned in a playground where experimenting with images overlaid on the surface of the earth, errors and quotations. Taking advantage of a program error in rendering surfaces in this case it becomes a machine to generate Optical Art.– www.marcocadioli.com
Wishing Wall
Mar Canet, Varvara Guljajeva
This is a piece that looks at reimagining how we share our innermost wishes with the world. What if you could say your wish out loud and have it magically released into the world for people to see? In this piece spoken words are transformed into a butterflies, that are diverse in form and colour as they represent the sentiment of the words. The gallery visitors are invited to interact with the butterflies and discover released wishes. – www.mcanet.info
White Glove Tracking
Evan Roth
On May 4th, 2007, Internet users were asked to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. The resulting data was released freely as an input into any digital system, resulting in a series of video based visualizations. Collaborator: Ben Engebreth – www.evan-roth.com
Naked on Pluto
Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk
Naked on Pluto is a Multiplayer Text Adventure on Facebook. When you enter the game, you find yourself on Pluto, in a city under the rule of Elastic Versailles revision 14 (EVr14), an Artificial Intelligence functioning as an entertainment colony. The game explores the limits and nature of social networks from within, slowly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerated by the companies that own them, carefully documenting this process as we go.– www.pawfal.org/dave | su.kuri.mu | pi.kuri.mu
Facebots (Bots of Trust)
Abelardo Gil-Fournier
Bots of trust (aka Facebots) is an installation that consists of a grid of devices similar to points of sale terminals. Each bot downloads a list of “Recommended items” from a popular e-commerce platform. The list is then codified into an image, where human-like faces are detected. Faces are printed, together with the articles they come from, mimicking how customers are gradually being codified inside the databases of algorithm-driven online stores.– abelardogfournier.org
Remap Berlin
Marco Cadioli
From the virtual Berlin to Google maps: “Remap Berlin” spreads a thin geographical virus in Google Earth and deals with different levels of reality. The project introduces a series of b&w photographs shot in Twinity, a mirror world that reproduces a realistic 3D replica of Berlin.– www.marcocadioli.com
Dead Drops
Aram Bartholl
‘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.– datenform.de
The EyeWriter
Tempt1, Evan Roth, Chris Sugrue, Zach Lieberman,Theo Watson, James Powderly
The EyeWriter project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies. It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.– www.evan-roth.com
Loophole 4 All
Paolo Cirio
This artwork unveiled over 200000 Caymans Islands companies and it reversed global finance machination for creative agendas. The website Loophole4All.com promoted the sale of real identities of anonymous Cayman companies at low cost to democratize the privileges of offshore businesses by forging Certificates of Incorporation documents for each company, all issued with the artist’s real name and signature. This performance generated international media attention, engaged an active audience and drew outrage from authorities on the Cayman Islands, international law and accounting firms, PayPal and real owners of the companies.– www.paolocirio.net
