Originally from Code & form by marius watz reBlogged by michael on Mar 24, 2008, 9:36AM

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

Originally from Interactive Architecture dot Org by Ruairi reBlogged by michael on Mar 23, 2008, 12:59PM

a new Google Visualization API, based on the powerful visualization techniques from GapMinder. the API is "designed to make it easier for a wide audience to make use of advanced visualization technology, & do so in a way that makes it quick and easy to integrate with new visualizations."

next to the classical methods, the amount of new visualization techniques is quite impressive & include motion charts (a la Gapminder), flashy 3D funnels, pyramids, pie & donuts, time series charts (a la Google Finance), data gauges, geographical heat maps & Gantt charts.

this launch is simultaneous with a recent announcement (googledocs.google.com) from the Google Docs team, who have added support for gadgets & the Visualization API in spreadsheets. this includes a set of gadgets created by Google & several other companies, including some that add pivoting, grouping, & other new visual functionalities.

will this shape the future of data visualization online? if so, how?

[link: code.google.com (visualization API) & code.google.com (visualization gallery) & google-pivot-tables.blogspot.com (Panorama software blog)|via google-code-updates.blogspot.com & arstechnica.com|thnkx Juan Pablo & Ali]

see also iGoogle gadgets & Google chart API.

Originally from information aesthetics reBlogged by michael on Mar 20, 2008, 3:33AM

Want — by MTAA and RSG — is a multiple channel algorithmic video installation that will premier at “Live” on April 3, 2008 at the Beall Center for Art & Technology.

People want what they want NOW. Instinct tells us to get as much as we can as fast as we can – and the Internet obliges. Instant gratification meets infinite opportunity – be it information, commerce, employment, acceptance or love. And yet the majority of bandwidth is dedicated to base human behavior, i.e. celebrity gossip and pornography.

Nobody needs poorly Photoshopped pictures of naked Britney Spears – but hey! If they’re out there, why not look? The Internet gives our less-seemly desires space to grow, allowing us to anonymously indulge curiosities, perversions and fetishes that most would never pursue in a public space. And yet “virtual reality” has ceased to exist. What we think of as the “real world” now encompasses the Internet. We download movie clips and call our co-workers to watch. We shop online and have goods delivered to our home. We meet through matchmaking web sites. No more virtual vs. real. It’s all real now.

Want explores the current climate of society over-stimulated by the bombardment of technological instant gratification, and the very definite, yet-to-be-revealed implications and issues of accountability and responsibility surrounding virtuality. Here, the Internet’s underbelly is exposed; pushing the quiet, anonymous behavior that flourishes in cyberspace into public space, forcing us to reevaluate this behavior if it were to take place in the physical community.

The life-sized six-screen video display uses custom software to monitor real time Internet searches. When the software finds a programmed keyword, it triggers a video clip of one of several actors/avatars who translates the virtual request to reality.

A soccer mom says, “I want French.”
A rocker dude says, “I want Star Trek Enterprise.”
A nondescript middle-aged guy says, “I want Little Girl.”
A girl says, “I want Forever.”

The six video screens are triggered almost concurrently, causing the voiced requests to overlap. The result is an audio-visual cacophony of desire; an online echo chamber of warped reality.

Want @ Beall Apr 3, ‘08 from T.Whid on Vimeo.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by michael on Mar 18, 2008, 4:06PM

Originally from panopticist by hearst reBlogged by michael on Mar 19, 2008, 10:04AM

Originally from panopticist by hearst reBlogged by michael on Feb 20, 2008, 2:51PM

a chart mapping about 1,300 colors & the according (English) names that people gave for them. each name is printed in its own color & positioned on a color wheel. there seem to appear distinct regions for different names, while there are also rich sets of modifiers (”light”, “dark”, “sea”), multi-word names (”army green”), & fun obscure ones (”cerulean”).

[link: doloreslabs.com & berkeley.edu (world color survey)|via boingboing.net]

see also hand drawn sheep market collection.

Originally from information aesthetics reBlogged by michael on Mar 17, 2008, 6:18PM

an impressive 3D navigable representation of the services that use our electromagnetic radiospectrum, ranging from 10Khz "radio navigation" to 100Ghz "inter-satellite communication".

the "services" view shows the range of applications (e.g. mobile, satellite, broadcasting) sorted by electromagnetic frequency, while the "projects" view documents different art works that have been based on specific spectrum zones (with accompanying descriptions & videos).

[link: spectrumatlas.org & vimeo.com|thnkx Tom]

Originally from information aesthetics reBlogged by michael on Mar 17, 2008, 6:55PM

Professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, Richard Sennett, talks about his new book, The Craftsman. The book is the first in a trilogy about how we relate to people, objects, and the world around us when we make stuff.

Listen to the full interview here.

...

Originally from core77.com's design blog reBlogged by michael on Mar 17, 2008, 5:25AM

For the upcoming update to its popular Melodyne audio-processing plugin, the German company Celemony has done the impossible: It has developed technology that can analyze polyphonic audio and break it up into individual notes, which can then be pitch-shifted, time-shifted, and otherwise mucked with. What this means is that the audio of anything from a guitar chord to a full symphony orchestra can be twisted into an entirely new piece of music. It’s long been possible to pitch-shift monophonic audio, such as a singer’s voice, or to pitch-shift an entire music track. What has never been possible before—and this is truly revolutionary, in a way that will eventually have a major impact on the music you listen to, whether you ultimately know it or not—is the ability to break apart complex, polyphonic audio into its constituent parts and rebuild it into something else.

To name just one application of this technology (and I’m sure someone will do exactly this): You could take the vocals-only version of the Beatles’ “Because” from Anthology 3 and completely reharmonize it into a new piece of music (even on the fly, with a MIDI keyboard), and it would still sound very much like John Lennon and the Beatles.

Celemony’s (slightly cheesy) promotional video explains everything:

Originally from panopticist by hearst reBlogged by michael on Mar 16, 2008, 4:30PM

March 16, 2008

This is my talk from yesterday in Helsinki at Pixelache University. There are pix here

Could the biosphere be saved by six glass lamps, six speakers, 36 ultra bright leds, six diy mono amplifiers, a diy arduino-based six channel led dimmer, a six channel soundcard, a midi controller, a midi interface,one computer, and a max-msp application ?

It all depends on how radical and open-minded we are prepared to be in the search for alternatives to physical travel.

Traveling without moving has become an economic and environmental imperative. Matter is more expensive than energy; energy is more expensive than information; it is cheaper to move information, than people or things. So what is to stop us moving less, and and tele-communicating more?

Telecommunications companies have invested heavily for years in telepresence systems with the aim of reproducing as closely as possible the sensation of 'being there'. Hewlett Packard describe their system, Halo as "the ultimate collaborative environment... a telepresence solution that brings meeting attendees from around the globe into an environment that feels as if they are in the same room".

The entertainment industry has also been busy - motivated by the fact that people will pay theme park operators a dollar a minute to experience sophisticated simulations. The small-screen computer games industry is already bigger than Hollywood; social website proprietors are also keen to add functionality; so big money is at stake.

Presence researchers are testing myriad ways for us to interact with virtual worlds in this 'fakespace' race: Computerized clothing that recognizes physical gestures; accelerometers that track movements of the body; sensors that track eye movements (first developed by shop designers); joysticks that allow interaction with 3-D magic wands; feedback systems that measure force, pressure, or vibration; remote operation systems that translate human movements into the control of machinery.

With so-called haptic interface devices, you feel the motion, shape, resistance, and surface texture of simulated objects.Telerobotic manipulators, that incorporate actuation, sensor, and control technologies, permit us to achieve dexterous manipulation of virtual objects.

Sound is also being designed for "acoustigraphic" environments in which 3-D sound is combined with stereoscopic vision to help you hear the sounds of traffic in the distance and wind rustling the leaves of nearby trees. A Displaced Temperature Sensing System enables you to feel the temperature of a remote location - real or unreal - as if you were there.

Down the line, technology developers that tiny micro-lasers will scan pictures directly onto the retina of the eye - an effect already experienced by military pilots. A company called Cyberware has developed 3d whole-body scanners which create representations of people - avatars - that can act for corporeal people in "inhabited information spaces". The business plan is that you'll be scanned in AvatarBooths - as happens now with passport photographs in railway stations. Having digitised your body, you'll send it out into cyberspace where it will meet and hang out with other avatars. (The project was was nicknamed Immortality R Us by fellow researchers).

Other developers dream of scaling up such effects to create virtual electronic crowds. A project in Europe called eRENA focussed on information spaces inhabited jointly by audience members, performers, and artists: they would explore, interact, communicate with one another and participate in staged events.

Remote sensing may also be used to create immersive representations of otherwise inaccessible places. Real-time sonar and acoustic tomography data could become a display of undersea terrain and objects. An acoustigraphics library would stream the noises made by fish into the mix.

BEING THERE - - - NOT

Evelina Domnitch (who is here at Pixelache) and Dmitry Gelfand directly convert sound into lightwaves by employing a phenomenon called sonoluminescence. They create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices.

The problem with these intriguing ideas is that it would never occur to telcos to develp them. Despite five decades of effort, the promise of virtual presence ushered in by the of the videophone, which was launched with much kerfuffle by IBM at the 1964 New York World's Fair, has not been met. Huge investments in virtual environments, mobile communication and biosensors have delivered modest results at best. Tele-presence communication has not matured as an experience, nor as a market.

Even its advocates remain unimpressed: The head of videoconferencing of a large British TelCo told me that he and his colleagues avoided used their own system if they possibly could.

A reality check for technology optimists: whilst high bandwidth videoconferencing has strugggled, simpler forms of remote communication have boomed - POTS they call it in the telecoms trade, or "Plain Old Telephone Service". Two billion people now have handsets because they want POTS - not because they want virtualty. The lowest bandwidth communication, texting, enjoys the highest volume by far.

TelCos are needlessly obsessed with Being There-ness in a literal sense. As MediaLab rsearcher Skip Ishii points out, the human eye has something like 40 million receptors in it. Many millions more receptors are to be found in our ears, up out noses, in our skin and on our tongues. (There are dense clusters of receptors elsewhere on the body, too - but this is a family readership, so I will not dwell on those).

Even if you could capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitise them, and send them down a wire - you'd still never get near the sensation of Being There. Why? We'd just know, that's why. Our minds and our bodies are one intelligence.

Subliminal perception, perception that occurs without conscious awareness, is not an anomaly, but the norm. As Tor Norretranders has explained, most of what we perceive in the world comes not from conscious observation but from a continuous process of unconscious scanning. During any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information that our senses pass on to our brains. The conscious part of us receives much less information than the unconscious part of us.

This is why technology simply cannot and will not recreate what it is like to be in a meeting with people somewhere else. People, who have bodies, cannot inhabit virtual space. Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor, puts it more poetically: "Tele-hugs won't do it."

The fact that we inhabit bodies, and not networks, frustrates games designers. They complain about the "uncanny valley" dilemma. Game designers once hoped that crisper 3-D graphics and faster response-times would deliver a more realistic experience. In the event, higher bandwidth and faster speeds does nothing to increase our sense of an environment being 'real'.

The uncanny valley effect was explained by a robotics engineer, Masahiro Mori, to explain why almost-human-looking robots scare people more than mechanical-looking robots. The uncanny valley of Mori’s thesis is the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting.

Cognitive pyschologist Andy Clarke, author of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again adds that the biological brain is populated by a vast number of what he calls hidden 'zombie processes.' These underpin the skills and capacities in which successful behaviour depends.

"Being embodied is our nature as earth-born creatures” says the English philosopher, John Gray. But our infantile enchantment with digital communication blinds us to this fact. Our tendency to undervalue embodied knowledge is one of the root causes of the sustainability crisis.

OUT OF THE SILOS

Telepresence sucks. It's an insult that telcos should expect us to meet in hideous sterile rooms in front of huge screens.

But sustainabiity demands that we compromise; the biosphere cannot support the perpetually growing movement of goods and bodies around the world. We have to make the best we can of mediated presence.

So we have to keep on trying. But there are more interesting tasks for design than the use of brute bandwidth to achieve 'Being There' verisimilitude. The communication quality of cyberspace can be enhanced by artful and indirect means.

A first task is to escape from our disciplinary silos. Engineers try to coax more bandwidth out of pipes. Psychologists study communication behaviours. Philosophers talk about embodiment. Artists make beautiful interfaces. But they barely know that each other exists - let alone pool their knowledge and resources.

Some designers have tried out a more poetic and multi-dimensional approach. Twelve years back, in The Poetics of Telepresence, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby looked at the potential of fusing physical and telematic space. They asked, why should videoconferencing always be face to face? why limit contact to speech, or sight? They proceeded to use radio to trigger heat devices remotely, and proposed other techniques to evoke, and not just replicate, the shared experience of the remote body.

Half a decade ago in Italy, design researchers in a project called Faraway also looked at long distance communication between loved ones who are physically distant, but emotionally close. The team explored what happens when gesture, expressions, heartbeat, breathing, alpha- and beta-rythm informnation are incorporated into long-distance communication. The idea was to increase the sense of presence of a loved person over distance - but indirectly.

Replicating heartbeats is not the only way to go. Seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin marveled at the capacity of the aura of an original art work to spur our imaginative engagement wth a situation. Or think how much the religions achieve with the use of icons as aids to devotion; if lumps of bronze help millons of people commune with a deity, surely we can enhance telepresence using other kinds of objects.

Think of photographs. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about kissing the picture of one's beloved. "When we kiss a photograph, we do not expect to conjour up a spectacular manifestation of the person in the picture represents - but the action is nonetheless satisfying".

Evolutionary psychologists believe that magical ways of thinking may be hardwired into us, and cite as evidence the human capacity to invest inanimate objects with meaning...souvenirs, heirlooms, chldhood toys, objets d'art, dolls, totems, talsmans, and charms.

It's probably a matter of timing. Here we are at Pixelache, and the world needs artful telepresence more urgently than before. Can we please get on with it? Now!

Posted by John Thackara at March 16, 2008 05:22 AM

This time around we chose to cover the Whitney Biennial with help from the museum's exhibition designer, Mark Steigelman. Last week's video on Olaf Breuning included a glimpse of his Biennial installation at the Park Avenue Armory (an off-site component that's new this year) and this episode is a select survey of the works by the 50-odd artists showing at the Whitney. Mark explains the challenges of laying out such a monumental exhibit, shows us a few of his prized sight-lines and points out architectural features unique to the Marcel Breuer-designed building.

Also on Cool Hunting: Whitney Biennial 2006

Originally from Cool Hunting by Ami Kealoha reBlogged by michael on Mar 15, 2008, 3:10PM

Originally from Wired: Beyond the Beyond by Bruce Sterling reBlogged by michael

Back in New York for a few days and walking around Chelsea with a long list of shows to visit (as usual ArCal has helped me select them.)

On Friday i fell in love with the work of Marcel Dzama at the Gallery David Zwirner.

Fist Born 2007

Even the Ghost of the Past, Dzama's fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, includes drawings, collages, costumes, installations, dioramas, and a film. They evoke fairy tales but with an added streak of terrorism, jazz-era nostalgia, sexual perversion and cruelty.

La Verdad está Muerta Room Full of Liars, 2007

Inspired by the religious shrines he found in Mexico and the work of Joseph Cornell, the Canadian artist has created a series of five dioramas. Recessed into the wall, they recall a child's puppet theatre or the didactic displays found in natural history museums.

On the Banks of the Red River, 2008

Nearly 300 ceramic sculptures were used to compose the biggest diorama in the show. On the banks of the red river recreates the apocalyptic cover image of his 2005 exhibition catalogue, The Course of Human History Personified. Dozens of haughty aristocratic hunters, guns in hand, are massacring forest animals. The lovely fawn lays with its tongue out, the bird had its head severed from the body, the fate of the little dead frog leaves the hunters indifferent, bats and flowers are flying, etc. Great care has been taken to make the corpse as cute as possible. The cuteness of the animal kingdom turn into perversion with the Infidels diorama where adorable little bats flap their wings above a dead bear.

Infidels, 2008

Dzama also created an installation that pays homage to and almost demystifies Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés, 1946-66. Like Duchamp, Dzama has created an intricate tableau only visible to viewers through a peephole. The artist imagines what could have provoked Duchamp's scene of a nude splayed in the woods. Dzama's interpretation proposes a wily fox is to blame, knocking-out both the nude and her lover with a slingshot.

Even the Ghost of the Past, 2008

In a room at the back of the gallery, the silent film The Lotus Eaters recalls a time when black-and-white mute movies were accompanied by live pianists. The title suggests Homer's mythical race whose favored food induced a dreamy and contented forgetfulness.

Lotus Eaters, 2005

Using a combination of 8mm and 16mm film, Dzama also incorporates footage shot by a Fisher-Price PixelVision camcorder - his childhood camera. Embodying the unique combination of homespun aesthetic and referential complexity that characterizes Dzama's production, the film makes vivid not only the characters who occupy the artist's imagination, but also the essential nature of the creative process.

Untitled (Page 8 of 13), 2007

In Dzama's drawings and collages, distinct characters take center stage against a blank background, most notably the masked and armed "terrorist." The character is repeated amongst cowboys, archers, and femmes fatales. What the artist really meant to evoke is up to everyone's imagination. It's hard not to think of the climate of paranoia at the forefront of American politics.

Weep our sad bosoms empty, 2007

More images. And i took some photos.

On view at David Zwirner gallery, through April 19, 2008.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

Stephen Vitiello creates sound installations that often feature pristine recordings of natural environments and phenomena – the Amazon rain forest or flapping moth wings for example– sonically magnified to expose their internal detail and beauty. His installation work also focuses heavily on the use and implications of space as a compositional parameter. Vitiello has released several CDs and his work has been performed at The Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Kitchen, NYC. His work was also featured in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He is currently Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

On September 21, 2007, Vitiello visited the University of Virginia. We sat and discussed his work for an hour in the university’s Jefferson Rotunda. The recording and transcript of that interview is presented below.

A Note To Listeners and Readers: The following transcript covers the first half the interview. In two weeks, we will provide the remaining transcript for this interview.

Listen to the full interview. Approximately 52 minutes.

Peter Traub: Welcome Stephen Vitiello. This is an interview that we’re doing for the Networked_Music_Review blog. To start us out, could you tell us a little bit about your musical background and where your interest in electronic music came from?

Stephen Vitiello: My background, it really went from being in punk rock bands and rock bands and sorta noise rock to kinda gravitating toward sound track and starting to collaborate with visual artists in the late 80s and being exposed to other ways of making things, other processes, and realizing that I didn’t have to play guitar straight pick down, and that there were other ways to approach a guitar. Through that being introduced to someone like Fred Frith and then from Fred Frith understanding John Cage - different ways of manipulating instruments and the prepared guitar then exposing me to the prepared piano. A lot of what happened was, as I would collaborate with different artists I would really start to try to think ‘what’s a kind of process that would work with their process?’ Different people work so differently and their colors are different or their thought is different, and so just through that I really learned more about experimental music than I did, rather than coming at it from a point of studying classical art or experimental music, it was really that exposure to image making that taught me about sound making. Eventually I went through about ten, twelve years of doing that and got to a point where I felt really luck to have done all I had done, but felt that I was tired being the support team and that it was time ideally I would make a CD that was my own music, or something that started as a CD without being a CD of soundtracks for example, which lead to the World Trade Center residency and a four night event in Cologne called per->Son with Frances-Marie Uitti, Pauline Oliveros and Scanner, and then also being put into a world of improvising and collaborating with sound makers rather than visual art makers. From that I’ve just moved step by step but more and more in a solo career and more and more invested in site so that I tend to think less about making music than I do about making installations, even if a musical installation is present in the sound.

Peter: In ’site’ you mean as in place, location?

Stephen: Yeah, exactly, yeah this place that we’re sitting in is so overwhelming it’s hard to imagine just making something here that would not be a dialog with the space. I think too that a lot of what happened is that I learned to create these participating dialogs with visual artists and somehow that moved into being a dialog with spaces rather than people.

Peter: When did that happen, because actually my next question was, when did you start making sound installations and what got you moving in that direction?

Stephen: In 1998 there was this series of concerts in Cologne called per->Son, and what was incredible about them was that they were in a church, but it was a church rigged with a 64 channel sound system. It was amazing. Andres Bosshard is a Swiss sound artist who also creates these structures that other people perform in. That was the first time I was really in a space where they’re performing to space, both the acoustics but also this incredible electronic possibility, and I remember really really distinctly that I tried to study the people who I was going to be working with. I had heard Pauline Oliveros on NPR and thought ‘oh, I guess this is interesting’, and when I walked in and she was sound checking and moving her sound through that space and the way that she listens to space, I got chills and thought ‘what have I been missing?

Peter: Was this an old Gothic cathedral?

Stephen: No, it’s fairly modern.

Peter: I guess what I meant was, why does this cathedral have a 64 channel sound system?

Stephen: Well, it was right near the media academy. The media academy, the KHM, made the arrangement to have this performance at the church, and then they brought in the speaker system just for the event. I think with someone like Pauline, she would’ve been doing something similar if it was a purely acoustic thing in the way that she would listen to the church, but in this case, we were really working with somebody who you could say, ‘ok, start with this bird sound, and I would love for it to spiral and then start moving really fast and then zip and disappear and then explode into all the speakers’. He had each speaker connected to a fader on the mixing board and he was performing the mixing board and that definitely made me more aware of space.

And then the following year being invited to do this residency at the World Trade Center where I had six months. That was my transition from being a musician to being a sound artist and being really given the opportunity to experience the sound of the building and the sound of my studio and both technologically finding ways to do it, and also just tuning myself to listening to the place. A lot of what I did was, I was kind of ripping off - I had read an article about Maryanne Amacher, and how she had this residency in the New England Fisheries and she had microphones mounted out to the water that always ran to a feed to her mixing board so that whatever she was working on she had this environment - so I though ‘ok, i’ll do that but I’ll do it with the World Trade Center’. Really what I found was that the sound of the building was the best sound - there was nothing I could do to add to it that was better than the sound itself. Also career-wise at the end of the residency there was an open studio where all the different studios in the World Trade Center - there were about sixteen artists - were opened and about a thousand people came through in two days. That was the point where I started to get invited to make installations and to be in exhibitions. Also, that show the year before in Cologne was the first time I was invited - Jack De Kuiper approached me, he had this label JDK. That was the first time I was invited to do a CD that was my own rather than a CD of compiled soundtracks. Those two years gave me incredible opportunities and encounters and kind of a chance to learn through these opportunities.

Contact microphones on the windows of the World Trade Center.

Peter: In terms of the World Trade Center piece, obviously there’s this aspect about it because a very horrible event suddenly brought new resonance to the piece afterward. Did people come and discover it again? How did that affect the work to you. I mean, it sort of cast an entirely different light on it, one that was obviously unexpected at the time that you were making it such that people will always view it in this way now.

Stephen: It’s been a big part of my career. Nam June Paik said I had a karmic debt to the World Trade Center, which is the last thing I wanted to hear. After I did it, it wasn’t such a well-known thing, but just some people came to know me through it. But the way that I represented myself up until September 10th, 2001 was always in relation to that residency. That night of September 10th I gave a talk at Brooklyn College and talked about listening and my sense of vulnerability through listening to the building and how hearing made me feel the distance and height of the building much more than seeing. Then the next day when that happened it just seemed minor and so irrelevant compared to people’s life and death, and my own vulnerability seemed kind of silly compared to that. But then I did start to get these calls and these interests in making it public, and there was a publicist who wanted to include it in his public interest stories and I just didn’t return phone calls. I was living really close to the World Trade Center with my wife and daughter, and so I thought, I don’t want to imply that I had something to do with that. Then there was a night at The Kitchen where artists who had been part of the residency presented their works and talked about their experiences about three weeks later. I talked about how I felt like I should shelve the project, but I felt very fortunate to have done it. But the response was across the board that I can’t do that. I had to find a way to share it in a way that didn’t exploit the situation but gave people the opportunity to hear something that they’ll never hear again. So I did my best. There was a Peabody Award-winning program that was incredible, called A Sonic Memorial, and they interviewed me and included some of the sounds. Then I made a piece out of it that was at the sound gallery Diapason, and then it was at the Whitney Museum. But I tried to keep it outside of things that were about the destruction where even the sonic memorial was about the memory of the building rather than about more images of the towers falling. So I guess the quick answer is that it is something that has weighed upon me and something that I feel sort of happy to have captured but I try to keep in perspective that it’s my experience in relation to something that is far more horrific.

Peter: To change gears a little bit, we talked about this a few minutes ago [prior to the interview], you have this new installation “Smallest of Wings”. Could you tell us a little bit about it?

Stephen: It’s actually a piece I did in 2005 at the gallery that I work with in New York called The Project. It used hummingbird wings that I accidentally captured in the Amazon and moth wings that were recorded. There’s a really interesting artist named Joseph Scheer who does these scans, these very very high definition scans, of moths that he captures in upstate New York with his colleague Mark Klingensmith. There was an NPR piece about the work, and they had done some really nice low frequency recordings of moth wings to go with the radio piece, and I asked if I could use them and they said sure. Somehow in the gallery it was a small piece and it sounded good, and then when United Technologies Corporation and Creative Time approached me about doing that piece in a large environment, I went back and listened to it and I thought ‘god, this sounds terrible’. The moths sound kind of flatulent. The idea of the piece was something that I loved and I wanted to go back to, so I gathered a lot more recordings and went back to the moth recordings and found I had used two minutes out of thirty minutes, and I found other elements that I liked.

I was asked to do it in Broadgate Arena, which is an ice skating rink in London, which off-season is used for all sorts of public events and high end rentals. So I worked with a man named Alban Bassuet from Arup Acoustics, and worked with him to recompose the sounds for a much more intensely spatialized space. It was 18 discreet channels plus four subwoofers. I asked for grass and they gave me grass and I asked for this sorta large structure and they ended up renting part of a geodesic dome, but we’re gonna recreate it in New York and build a new structure for it. It was about giving it this intensified experience of these birding wings and moth wings and a kind of magical explosion of these very minute elements. What I found in London especially that I really enjoyed was the fact that putting it in a public arena and using natural sounds that are kind of familiar to people, even if not on that scale, it allowed for it to be enjoyed by a diverse public that might not have been so if I had done one of my more electronic pieces that some people knew or said ‘Stephen Vitiello does this kind of work and we’re here to listen to this kind of work’. Some people saw it as a nature show. They approached it from all different backgrounds, and the piece wasn’t didactic enough to tell them ‘you can’t appreciate it if you just want to hear this as National Geographic’ or ‘you can appreciate it if you want to consider this as sound art with a history based in this and this and this’. It was wonderful to do it. It was by far the largest project I’ve ever done, and it was only up for four-and-a-half days. But it was on 24 hours a day so that you did have people through the night and the day. It’s a place that gets such an incredible movement of public. The corporate sponsor knew that it was a very high-visibility site, so potentially 500,000 people go through there in a week. What portion of the those people stopped, lay down, sat, listened was hard to know, but what was interesting was that during the week the crowd got larger each day. Some of the people I saw day to day who worked in the area would sort of skeptically look at it, and on the second day they would skeptically stick their head in, and by the end they were laying on the grass drinking beer and having a good time. I had sort of seduced a certain public into something that might have felt alien but I was able to kind of cross that threshold.

“Smallest of Wings’” at London’s Broadgate Arena.

Peter: What was your approach to the sounds in the piece? How much did you treat them electronically, if at all?

Stephen: I manipulated them in time and in structure, but I didn’t manipulate them heavily - everything is rooted in the sound that it was but it might be intensified. So there was a bird that was kind of going [knocks several times on the table] on the birdfeeder and I used that and I would put that in spaces but I didn’t slow it down and didn’t speed it up. Just by isolating it and maybe playing with EQ a bit, that just became sort of a space structure that happened every once in a while. The biggest sound that happens continuously is this ’ssshhhhewp’.

There’s two sections - the first section is loosely called ‘America’, the second section is loosely called ‘Amazon’, and most of the sounds in the first section came from upstate New York and were very much edited as a multichannel thing where they were really placed ‘this over here, this over here, this over here’. Then when it moves into ‘Amazon’, it was such a dense - the recording was a stereo recording - but there was so much information going on in that recording that primarily what we did was just spatialize that stereo recording over the 18 channels. It was definitely two ways of working where one was more compositional in terms of organization of sound, and the other was more spatial and compositional in just terms of what’s the beginning and what’s the end, but also how it’s treated over the space. Being in the Amazon was the densest sound I’ve ever been in. It’s the only place I’ve ever been in where you don’t hear man-made machines except twice in the week when a little Cessna plane came in. But it’s just between the cicadas and the birds and the Yanomami people that I was with, although they walked more quietly than you can imagine. When certain things were going on there were probably 125 tracks of information in terms of what you were hearing just through a stereo microphone and a DAT recorder.

Excerpt from “Smallest of Wings”.

Peter: Just an incredible stratification frequency-wise? Like everything sort of occupies its own space?

Stephen: Yeah, it does really - and differently during the day, because if you put a graph on it, there’s a peak in cicadas in the late afternoon, but in the morning when the howler monkeys wake up and the bats fly home there’s a very classical, interesting shape that you can treat over the 24 hours. So I’ve tried to take segments of that whole 24 hour cycle and put them into about a 46 minute composition. Then I also did binaural recordings that were more just discovery-based, just a real-time 15 minute walk-through from one place to another.

Peter: I guess that brings me to the next question: you talk about the Amazon and upstate New York and these are obviously very specific sound environments, and my impression of your work to-date is that you take a lot of these sounds and then you put them into a gallery space, and I’m wondering, how do you think about site in your work? Do you consider your gallery pieces site-specific? Are their varying levels of portability in the work, and how does the site of the gallery where these installations end up relate to the environments from where the sounds come? There seems to be sort of an inherent tension there that you obviously are aware of, and do you consider yourself playing with that?

Stephen: I definitely try to play with it. I don’t know what portion of the pieces live in galleries versus museums or public spaces or non-traditional spaces, but it’s definitely true that the least exciting is to be given the white box gallery. And yet the gallery I work with and it’s the gallery I love - it’s in Manhattan on 57th street - it used to be in Harlem in a house that had really odd sound corners that I could play with and now they’re in an absolutely standard white box. So I absolutely try to… there’s works that are site-specific that are meant to be heard within the site or within the area, and then there are these questions about how do you transfer them or how do you carry them? I also try to treat the site of where they’ll be re-presented, whether it’s a white box gallery or a corridor of a museum or something, as another level of site-specificity, in terms of the quality and placement of sounds, in terms of the access points for the audience. Sometimes I really want you to be aware of where the sounds came from, sometimes I don’t.

I had this crazy thing happen, I had this piece in Paris at a museum - I was co-existing with another artist - and it was using solar-cells to amplify light frequencies and then a microphone outside running through a Max patch that would come in at random bursts, and there was just a two sentence description of the process on the wall, and the assistant to the other artist in a fury ripped it down and said ‘this is not how art should be represented’, and I thought ‘maybe your art’, but I kind of felt like, there are times you want people to understand, and if I’m using solar cells that transfer light frequencies into audio, I think it might be interesting for people to understand that’s a source of sound as they move through the space - and that their shadow is changing the sound. It’s not that I want it to be a science experiment or just an experiment with technology, but hopefully a piece that explores a technology. I guess I re-conceive that with every different opportunity. And even CDs, being on compilations, I tend to kind of think in site-specific projects. You get all these requests to be on compilations that have these very specific themes, and someone writes ‘we’re doing a CD about the death of Maurice Blanchot’ - well if I’m gonna have to think about Maurice Blanchot and invest myself in his writing, that’s very different than if someone says ‘we’re gonna a do a piece re-conceiving of a Stockhausen composition’. So just to really treat every situation as new and fresh as possible and try to find my point that I might connect to a listener.

Peter: Going back to the environmental recordings, what drew you toward eco-acoustics and environmental sound - it’s kind of a far way to come from playing guitar…

Stephen: But I have to say there’s a large population of people who follow that path for some reason - and it’s time and it’s technologies available, but going from guitar to prepared guitar to environment - something maybe the resonance of the guitar cavity breaking out. I feel like I stumbled upon it - the recordings I did at the World Trade Center were kind of field recording, although I didn’t think of it at the time, using contact microphones outside the building and hearing the building through the building. Then that led to being in this exhibition at the Cartier Foundation where I was doing the piece with the solar cells, and then they said to me ‘we really like working with you, the next show is sending five different artists separately into the Amazon to work with the Yanomami’, and I was suddenly going ‘wow, that’s interesting’, but I suggested that they either take David Toop or Chris Watson - David Toop being a writer but also a composer having worked with the Yanomami in the 70s, and Chris Watson being this brilliant master of environmental and field recordings. But they said ‘we like you and we know you already and it’s gotta go quick’. I immediately had to start learning about the technologies, and in some ways I got it incredibly wrong. I ended up calling Royer Microphones, who make these beautiful ribbon microphones and they told me that it would be fine to take a stereo ribbon mic out into the Amazon, and so I did that but when I came back and I called them, I talked to somebody else who said ‘that’s the most insane thing possible - you don’t want wind or breath or anything to hit the ribbon’ - and I thought ‘hmmm, that’s weird, but it worked’.

A radio piece on NPR’s ‘The Savvy Traveler’ about Vitiello’s Yanomami recordings. Produced by Michael Raphael.

I think that experience had a great effect on me as a new way of composing and listening through technology. It was the first time I really thought outside of a city. I had always been such a New York person and in kind of urban, dense noise – that it was a different rural dense, if you can even call it rural – Amazon-dense noise. From there I just started investigating, listening more, getting some more of the so-called useful field recording gear. Then when I moved from New York to Virginia, I started this whole long three year project that really began with listening to the sound in my back yard, and this crazy thing with having 12 hunting beagles on one side of the yard and three pit bulls on the other, and fireworks and gunshots…

Peter: These are your dogs, or a neighbors?

Stephen: No, a neighbor’s. It was at first just thinking ‘God, what am I doing here’, and then thinking ‘boy, this is a really curious intersection of noise and city noise and forest noise - or country noise - and suburban noise and hillbillies and rednecks and art people and hunting people. From there I got a grant from Creative Capital that allowed me to buy this beautiful Schoeps Microphone, which sort of really upped the quality of my portable rig and encouraged me to go through the state and do field recordings. The more I’ve done that the more I’ve moved away from playing bass and guitar and the things that I used to do, or even using a sampler in terms of a keyboard-based way, to just other ways of manipulating either sounds in real-time or just capturing other environments.

Transcript to be continued on March 29…

Originally from Networked Music Review by peter reBlogged by michael on Mar 16, 2008, 8:01AM

Victoria Reynolds takes the metaphor ‘meat curtains’ to a new level with her unnervingly photo-realistic portraits of flesh fresh from the butcher shop. Some have a cheeky yonic quality, while others are grotesquely beautiful. (more…)

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Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by Gerry Mak reBlogged by michael on Mar 3, 2008, 5:41PM

On Saturday, i visited the Biennale de la Photo de Liège. Now you might never have heard of Liège. Good for you! That's where i grew up and i must say that apart from the sticky Sirop de Liège (which i've never really liked but was nevertheless almost forced to eat), a fantastic programme at a couple of independent movie theatres, and Georges Simenon, there is nothing exciting nor even remotely nostalgic i'm ready to say about that city. Pass your way, dear tourist... Unless you happen to be stuck there before March 30.

ANOUK KRUITHOF, no title, from the series « We are the blue people », 2007

The concept of Territories is the centre of Liège's 6th International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts. This theme is explored through different aspects: "Mental Territory", "Political Territory", "Mutating Territory" or the relationship between "Territory and Identities".

Brigitte Grignet, Nablus, West Bank, June 2005, from the series Palestine, Unfortunately It Was Paradise

The selection is really good but the curators didn't take any risk. I mean you can't go wrong with the likes of Edward Burtynsky, Xavier Delory and Patrick Messina, can you? Several aspects of this biennale looked a bit like a re-load of several exhibitions on the same topic i've seen over the past couple of years (namely BAC! Living in Babylon in Barcelona and Spectacular City in Rotterdam) but, hey, i enjoyed the biennale a lot so i'm going to stop spitting in the soup now. As I applauded some chapters of the biennale much better than others, i'll exercise my right to be a subjective blogger and focus only on what grabbed my interest.

View of the Ancienne Eglise Saint-Antoine

Political Territory

My first stop was at the luminous Ancienne Eglise Saint-Antoine, an ex-church recently restaured with a very profuse helping of white paint. Wars and fights have marked the history of nations but also left stigmas on the landscapes and in the hearts of people. While some of the artists presented in the Political Territory exhibition turned their lens towards the geographical borderline - seen here as either a real or a symbolic delimitation, other photographers reflect on the human and social consequences which inevitably tailgate these geopolitical challenges.

A fascinating place was dedicated to migrants, "unrooted" or displaced persons, all those who move to another land following their own will or obligation and had to somehow adjust and rebuild a new community and identity.

Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya, from the series «East of a New Eden», 2001-2002

Today, long after the fall of the iron curtain, new reinforcement measures are being put into place. The buffer zone that was formerly made up of the 'sister countries' of the URSS, is slowly becoming the European Union's buffer zone against illegal immigration and illegal traffic.

Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya, N 43° 44' 32 3'' - E 28° 34' 43 9'', from the
series «East of a New Eden», 2001-2002

In 2002, just before some of the Eastern countries would join the European Union Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya took a GPS and travelled along the length of Europe's new frontier, from the Adriatic to the Baltic to give a snapshop of the state of a border separating the European Union from countries of the ex-Soviet Union.

Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya, N 55° 05' 33 3'' - E 21° 53' 49 6'', from the
series «East of a New Eden», 2001-2002 (c-print 100x100cm)

East of a New Eden raises a series of questions: What is happening today in a zone where people, who have been accustomed to the standards of the Ancient Regime, are suddenly expected to follow the rules of the European Union? Will the iron curtain be replaced by a high tech surveillance barrier?

Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya, from the series «East of a New Eden», 2001-2002

Rip Hopkins traveled to Uzbekistan, a country very few people could locate on a map but also an artificial country as it was peopled "forcibly" by outcasts from various counties of the former Soviet Union. The Displaced ("From Home and Away") photos are accompanied by a short text which tells the story of one of these Uzbeks who might or might not feel that they really belong there.

Rip Hopkins, from the series Déplacés, 2002

Leonid Svertchkov in Tashkent's Geology and Biophysical Institute's conference room. He is 42 years old. He is Ukrainian and works at the Science Institute as an archeologist specialised in Zoroastrian sites in the south of Uzbekistan bordering with Afghanistan. Leonid was born in East Germany and came to work in Uzbekistan in 1982. He will not leave to join his wife and two sons living in Athens, Greece. 30/07/02

Rip Hopkins, from the series Déplacés, 2002

Lena Olegovna in the shop Les cadeaux de la Dame Nature in the city centre of Tachkent. Lola Karimova, the elder daughter of President Karimov, owns this shop. Lena is 24. She is an english, russian and ouzbek interpret. Her mother is Tatar and her father is half Russian and half Ouzbek. She want to go to Norway. 03/08/02

With Linewatch - Pasaje en la frontera, Laetitia Tura documents the border areas between the United States and Mexico and in particular the police control systems erected across the accidents of the landscape.

Laetitia Tura, Lumière inquisitrice 7, Colonie Libertad, Tijuana, Mexique, 2005

Jérôme Brézillon's series Souverains, Indiens des Plaines is a breathtakingly beautiful and thought-provoking series about the fate of Indian Americans. In 1868 the Treaty of Fort Laramie set the frontiers of the land assigned to the Yanktonai Sioux, Santee Sioux, and Arapaho and stipulates that the land is theirs to use as they deem fit. History showed that their territory was not always respected.

Jérôme Brézillon, Souverains, Indiens des Plaines

In the Souverains (Sovereigns) series Brézillon juxtaposes a portrait of a Sioux Lakotas with a landscape of Indian reservations. An identity relationship is instantly created. History, myth and ancestry ensure that the intimacy cannot vanish so easily nor be reduced to folklore.

Mutating Territory

View of the Musée de l'Art wallon

The exhibition Mutating Territory, at the greyer than grey Musée de l'Art wallon, explores how men appropriate a territory and shape it according to their own requirements.

But doesn't this new territory in turn also shape a new humanity?

Joël Tettamanti toured the globe to document the way mankind takes root in the landscape.

Joël Tettamanti, Qaqortoq_1781

Joel Tettamanti, from the series Maloting, Lesotho, 2004

Edward Burtynsky collects evidences of man's boundless disregard for the planet: oilfields, polluted ship-breaking beaches, recycling yards, quarries, industrial refineries, etc. He takes images of the colonized landscape but he also enters factories to take sublime shots of intricate industrial constructions or chain workers in the process of loosing any personality.

E. Burtynsky, Oil Refineries No. 14, Saint John, New Brunswick 1999

E. Burtynsky, Manufacturing 16, Bird Mobile, Ningbo Province, China 2005

Xavier Delory didn't have to take any plane to dedicate his attention to the houses "clé sur porte" (key in the door), they are all over Belgium and many other European cities. Manipulating the images to remove any trace of door and window, he leaves us with a soul-less canvas which has no qualm about being in total disharmony with the environment.

Xavier Delory, from the series Habitat

Mental Territory

I'm going to pretend i haven't visited Territory and Identities and go directly to Mental Territory at the MAMAC. The territory this time is the one of human intimacy, the internal territory mapped by our choices, family, loneliness, etc. Although i tried as hard as i could there was little attention left for anything else than her pictures the moment i saw Marrie Bot's Geliefden. Timeles Love. The series shows elderly having some very intimate moments. Hard not to let your jaw drop and ask your companion "How can they?" "You'll find me so awful when i'm seventy, we will just hold hands and that's it right?" Hard to also not to think that these couples are incredibly lucky to still love each other so much after decades of marriage.

Marrie Bot, Liesbeth (76) and Cor (70), Geliefden-Timeless Love, 2004

Territoires, the 6th Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts is on view at several venues in Liège until March 30.

Mathias Nouel, Iris, 2004

Patrick Messina, from the series «Ma petite Amérique», Courtesy of Label Expositions, Paris

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

Originally from Seth's Blog by Seth Godin reBlogged by michael

When Users “Do” the Ubicomp is the great sounding title of an article by Finnish researcher Antti Oulasvirta in the March-April issue of Interactions Magazine. Abstract: Computers have become ubiquitous, but in a different way than envisioned in the 1990s. To master the present-day ubicomp-a multi-layered agglomeration of connections and data, distributed physically and digitally, and operating under no recognizable guiding principles-the user must exhibit foresight, cunning and perseverance. Preoccupation with Weiserian visions of ubicomp may have diverted research toward problems that do not meet the day-to-day needs of developers. The article builds on the work done by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish, and in particular their article Yesterday’s Tomorrows. Like them, Oulasvirta argues that there are two ubicomps: the idealised one presented at conferences and the “real ubicomp”, described as “a massive noncentralized agglomeration of the devices, connectivity and electricity means, applications, services, and interfaces, as well as material objects such as cables and meeting rooms and support surfaces that have emerged almost anarchistically, without a recognized set of guiding principles.”. This infrastructure is therefore “not homogenous or seamless, but fragmented into several techniques that the user has to study and use.” He then takes his analysis a step further and actually shows “the many ways in which it is the users who have to ‘do’ ubicomp; that is, actively create the resources for using an application in a heterogeneous, multicomputer environment.” Oulasvirta concludes with “a laundry list of approaches to improving ubicomp infrastructures:” 1) minimizing overheads that create temporal seams between activities; 2) making remote but important resources, such as connectivity or cables, better transparent locally and digitally; 3) propagating metadata on migration of data from device to device; 4) supporting ad hoc uses of proximate devices’ resources like projectors, keyboards, and displays; 5) triggering digital events like synchronization of predetermined documents with physical gestures; and 6) supporting appropriation of material properties for support surfaces“ To read the entire article, you need an ACM Digital Library subscription.

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia reBlogged by michael on Mar 14, 2008, 4:15AM

Last Call to Join the Tactical Media Club Alexandria :: DEADLINE: March 18, 2008 :: Cleotronica 08 Project # 6: Tactical Media Club - A Participatory Club for Tactical Media moderated by Joanne Richardson (RO) and Francesca Bria (IT) :: CLUB MEETINGS: March 20-22, 2008.

Lecture 1: Tactical Media: Past, Present, and Future by Joanne Richardson, March 21, 7 pm :: Lecture 2: Social Media, Shared Culture, and the Hacker Movement in Italy by Francesca Bria, March 23, 7 pm :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Flat 6, Azarita, Alexandria, Egypt.

Tactical media is a concept and set of practices that emerged around the Next Five Minutes festivals in Amsterdam from 1993 to 2003. What is common to these practices is the artistic use of media technologies to subvert power. As part of the Cleotronica 2008 festival Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) will set up a transient club for ‘Tactical Media’ inside its space. The club seeks to collectively explore ‘Tactical Media’ practices in the different contexts of Europe and Egypt, and conduct brainstorming sessions that investigate the possibility of new intersections between art, media, activism, and theory. Artists, activists, and collectives are invited to be members of the club and participate in its discussion and debate group meetings that will be moderated by Joanne Richardson (Romania) and Francesca Bria (Italy).

To become a member and participate in the club’s sessions please send us a brief paragraph about yourself and your interests or your collective in English or Arabic to acafspace [at] gmail.com and office [at] acafspace.org , please include your complete contact info and write “club” in the subject box. The meetings will be carried out on the 20, 21, and 22 of March. In addition to the club meetings Joanne Richardson will be delivering a public lecture on the past, present and future of Tactical Media at ACAF on Friday 21 March, while Francesca Bria will talk about social media, shared culture and the hacker movement in Italy on Sunday 23 March, both lectures will feature live Arabic translation and start at 7 pm.

Joanne Richardson was born in Bucharest, grew up in New York, currently living between Cluj, Romania and Berlin. Founder of D Media in Romania, an NGO for the production and dissemination of art and digital culture. Editor of Subsol webzine, and author of essays on social movements, postcommunism, immaterial labor, copyleft, tactical media, the history of the avant-gardes, and experimental film & video in Eastern Europe. Recent videos on nationalism, delocalization, migration, activism, precarity and borders.

Francesca Bria is a Film Maker, journalist and Independent Network Activist. Born and currently living in Rome . She teaches digital media and video journalism in Rome and she is active as a free lance video journalist. She is counsultant and expert on access to knowledge policy for the Region of Lazio and the European Commission. She has been coordinating an international cooperation project between Italy and Brazil on Digital Culture and she’s currently coordinating a cooperation project on free software in Venezuela. She is the author of different video documentaries and short experimental films on digital media technology, free knowledge, politics, precarity, migration and social justice. She’s active in different networking and grassroot projects for the promotion of shared culture and free technology.

The Cleotronica 08 program receives generous support from the Kingdom of the Netherlands Embassy in Cairo and the Goethe Institute Egypt // Extra Special thanks to Mohamed A. Fahmy AKA ganzeer.com for the Tactical Media Club identity. Tactical Media Club Alexandria is also part of 1001 Actions for Dialogue.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by michael on Mar 14, 2008, 10:40AM

DRAIN - CALL FOR ENTRIES: In 1955, Guy Debord described psychogeography as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Debord’s psychogeographical map The Naked City (1957) challenged traditional ideas of mapping relating to scale, location, and fixity, and drew on the work of urban social geographer Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe’s concept of the city as a conglomeration of distinct quarters, each with its own special function, class divisions, and “physiognomy,” which linked the idea of the urban plan to the body. An important strategy of the pyschogeographical was the dérive, “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences”.

The ‘psychogeographical’ has had a pervasive if somewhat amorphous role in contemporary art and culture. As a creative, social and political tactic, wandering through psychogeographic spaces is pertinent to a diverse range of practices including the use of GPS systems, Internet art, photography as well as sound and performance art.

This issue of Drain attempts to gather a series of essays, artworks and creative writings that reflect on the current state of psychogeography. How have contemporary artists, writers and thinkers interpreted, or been influenced by, the legacy of psychogeography?

Abstract deadline: April 1, 2008
Submission deadline: June 1, 2008
Launch: August 1, 2008

Please send written submissions to: Celina Jeffery and Frederick Gross.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by michael on Mar 14, 2008, 3:52PM

Soundpockets is a series of intimate sound interventions in public spaces. By using FM radiowaves, soundbeams and miniature speakers to create local pockets of sound, the different projects create private listening rooms, change the soundtracks of locations, and/or displace time and space.

Soundpocket 1 — created for Urban Interface, Oslo (2007) — was installed in a narrow passageway connecting two parts of the city. The soundbeam, which can be as narrow as 50 cm in diameter, was mounted on a pan/tilt head which made it possible to place the sounds very precisely in the passageway. By bouncing the sound off surfaces, it seemed as if the sound could be coming from a window, door, elevator, or a poster on the wall. Most of the sounds seemed to belong to the site; others were slightly out of place, like the sound of a chandelier blowing in the wind.

I wanted it to be slight distortions to the regular soundscape of the passageway, and was pleased to see that the people who used this passageway regularly were noticing these disturbances. This could be described using the first of Barthes´ three listening modes: hearing involves “evaluation of the spatio-temporal situation“ and thus, it is linked to a “notion of territory“. It places the listener on alert when new sounds which don’t “fit in” are heard. By adding an extra layer of sound if also made people focus on the sounds which were already there.

For Soundpocket 2, HC Gilje set up an Internet radio station (using Nicecast), and played sounds from his library of field recordings. He found three locations in Oslo to serve as local radio stations. They were connected to visible cues: a huge oak tree, a small sculpture, and a small pond in the roundabout. The range of the local stations more or less corresponded to these visual cues: if you saw them you would be able to pick up the signal. Gilje used AAREFF FM transmitters placed with the three hosts, who allowed him to pick up their Internet radio streams. The result was three very local radio stations sending out a continuous soundtrack from other places, so somehow these recorded locations came in dialogue with the physical locations of the radio stations. The listening involved active participation from the public as you would need to tune in on your own radio to pick up the broadcast.

HC Gilje works with realtime environments, installations, live performance, set design and singlechannel video. Gilje has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues,theatre and cinema venues, galleries, festivals and through several international dvd releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave. He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of kreutzerkompani. In october 2006 Gilje started a 3 year position as a research fellow at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, exploring how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces. He blogs at Conversations with Spaces.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo reBlogged by michael on Mar 14, 2008, 3:23PM

New York has long been home to generations of experimental filmmakers and video artists. This community has embraced and fostered artists working in newer media, if not because of formal similarities, then through affinities with the effort to continue expanding the means by which artists can express themselves. The city (and its next-door neighbor, Brooklyn) has been home to countless experimental cinemas, festivals, underground venues, and similar efforts, but the ever-shifting market has edged-out many once-thriving platforms. On March 25, a new space will open in Brooklyn's Sunset Park area, called Light Industry. Founded by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, two active participants in the film and new media communities, the organization is inspired by New York's history and strives to support a range of artists and practices revolving around film, electronic art, and performance. Their goal is "to explore new models for the presentation of time-based media and foster a complex dialogue amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city." On March 25, they will open their doors for the first of what promises to be many compelling events. (Check the upcoming roster of stellar artists & curators lined-up to organize unique programs.) In an inaugural screening curated by Light Industry's founders, entitled "The Blazing World," Keewatin Dewdney, Michael Gitlin, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Kurt Kren, Jenny Perlin, and Michael Robinson will present "films that ponder the vicissitudes of utopian scheming and the search for new ground." The following week, on April Fool's Day, Brian Frye and Bradley Eros of the collective screening project Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema have cooked-up a recipe for folly with a long list of important shorts inspired by the art of prankery. Good times seems guaranteed, so if you have the chance, please welcome Light Industry to the community. - Marisa Olson

http://www.lightindustry.org/

Originally from Rhizome News reBlogged by michael on Mar 9, 2008, 10:00PM

As artists we are consistently working to push the boundaries of what we believe is possible without regard to how we might do it. We are the forever dreamers, the magic seekers, and the alchemists of spirit. Theo Jansen is a kinetic sculptor based in Holland. He is a wind sculptor who has created animals that move with the wind and that inhabit their own beaches near his home. He even has a webcam set up inside his studio so the ultimate peeper can watch him tinker away with his wind driven animals as he utters ‘It’s aliiive!” [see more of Theo Jansen’s work]

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Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by Jenn Porreca reBlogged by michael on Mar 7, 2008, 11:37AM

What's experimental in a Flat World?
A fragrance by Zaha Hadid. Jewelry for Tiffany's by Frank Gehry. Self-help books for hipsters by Karim Rashid. Signature designers had arrived in the luxury market long ago and by now it's ordinary. Radical or poetic form, once considered experimental, is the not-so-secret weapon of modern brand building. Where design once served industry, now industry often serves design. Here Design meets Art meets Fashion meets the Devil-wears-Prada Catch-22 of a culture industry starving for new icons and rocket-fueled by a viral Web. If the world is flat as Tom Friedman claimed, then so is design--stripped of the hierarchies that used to distinguish high and low, design and art, theoretical and applied. Has this newfound freedom produced wild experimental design thinking? Not enough. Instead, design's intellectual edge has been mostly employed by the vanities of a fashion system. Someday we may recall this period as design's fashion phase. Is it finally time to revive experimental design thinking from this fashion hangover?

It's not that fashion is bad, or unimportant. Design's marriage to Fashion was fated and permanent so that beauty and design storytelling are here to stay. It's just that it's not so experimental any more. The honeymoon is over. It's as if Memphis never died, and instead is continually reincarnated in an aesthetic economy endlessly hungry for new styles, with plenty of colorful characters ready to exploit new aesthetic markets. Outside this fashion system there are plenty of juicy design issues that deserve experimental exploration in search of new modern meanings. Experimental design is the way that design comes to know itself better and to advance its potentials. It's the way the field of design moves forward. Design has absorbed fashion. Uncharted waters await.

...

Originally from core77.com's design blog reBlogged by michael on Mar 6, 2008, 2:15PM

Do androids dream of electric sheep? It's a question that rang through my brain while visiting "Design and the Elastic Mind" at the Museum of Modern Art, a show where science and science fiction share the stage.

The science on display is fascinating--genetic engineering, nanotechnology, biomimicry--but it's the science fiction that makes the show particularly compelling. This is not a typical science museum exhibition transplanted into a MoMA gallery. Curator Paola Antonelli altogether avoids the often dry repackaging of scientific material for a general audience. Instead, she's filled the upper floor with projections about possible futures and explorations of poetic technology. Like so much good science fiction, here science is the stage set for playing out the tangle of human relationships and emotional ambiguities that unfold when the technology that connects us begins to infringe upon or even claim our affection.

The prince and princess of this techmo trend are Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who together have helped build the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art into a provocative program where design is a critical probe that explores our evolving relationships with technology. Their "Technological Dreams Series" featured in the show is a set of four robots that, well, look nothing like robots. One is a chunk of oak shaped more like a table leg or a hockey stick. Dunne and Raby call it a sentinel, a slow-processing retinal scanner that requires the user to cradle it and stare longingly into its eyes. Though the robots sit unimpressively in the gallery under glass, it's the imagery on the wall that's most charged: a kind of Freudian-Droidian scene where the sentinel is embraced by a woman who unmistakably evokes Rachael, the replicant android played by Sean Young in Blade Runner.

Shows curated by Antonelli can leave the viewer disoriented and spent, overwhelmed by schools of objects, an octopus of themes and murky environments. This exhibition poses a challenge to anyone trying to neatly summarize the over 200 objects on view. I'm not even sure it's possible to reconcile a space telescope designed using the principles of origami with sperm mutated into typographic forms, and I'm not going to try except to acknowledge that each is scientific in it's own way. But one of the things I truly appreciate about Antonelli's shows are the way currents and countercurrents pull me through the show, and in the occasional calm, objects from different rooms and different disciplines swirl around a common set of questions.

...

Originally from core77.com's design blog reBlogged by michael on Mar 6, 2008, 2:33PM

Kim Cascone received his formal training in electronic music at the Berklee College of Music in the early 1970’s, and in 1976 continued his studies with Dana McCurdy at the New School in New York City. In the 1980’s, after moving to San Francisco and gaining experience as an audio technician, Cascone worked with David Lynch as Assistant Music Editor on both Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart. He has worked for Thomas Dolby’s company Headspace and as Director of Content for Staccato Systems. Since 1980, Kim has released more than 15 albums of electronic music and has worked / performed with Keith Rehberg, Oval, Scanner, Carsten Nicolai, Doug Aitken, and David Toop among others. Cascone was one of the co-founders of the microsound list and writes for Computer Music Journal and Artbyte Magazine.

CTHEORY: You have mentioned before that the problem with some realtime performances of laptops is that the result(s) can be easily dismissed by the listening public as “spacebar music”. Do you feel that performing your own compositions from your laptop is a sufficient way to engage a concert audience?” Continue reading The Microsound Scene - An Interview with Kim Cascone by Jeremy Turner, CTheory, 2001.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo reBlogged by michael on Feb 29, 2008, 3:24PM

Yaniv Steiner has been running a class at the Visual and Multimedia Design graduate programme from the University of Architecture in Venice a few weeks ago. Its approach was slightly different from classical physical computing classes, starting with the name of the class: Usable Witchery. Students learned magic tricks with coins and cards, and then built up some Animatronics elements trying to humanize machine and robots to look and feel more like humans.

I'm just going to give a summary of the course as i feel its spirit might be relevant to the interests of many readers. But i'll keep it short as i've decided a while ago not to cover anything i haven't had the opportunity to see nor experience myself. Rules are supposed to have exceptions, right?

Usable Witchery investigated how products could be less a result of technical thinking, and become more "humanized", natural and intuitive. As Yaniv told me recently: "I will trade many functional elements to magical and slightly more poetical element in any of my devices. I hope the student will apply it one day as they go and work for IDEO and Nintendo J."

Image by Yaniv Steiner

He explains with further details this association between magic and interaction design in a list of reasons why advanced technology can be compared to magic. According to him, interfaces are actually doing the same to some extent. His text illustrates the point by giving examples of interaction procedures, viewed from this frame of reference: calculators displaying, without revealing how, the correct series of digits, mountains of information "leaping" invisibly in the air, "hold" switches, etc.

But still... Harry Pottering design students?

"Regarding the animatronics part, I feel it is dealing with humanization of machines in relation to Physical-Computing," he goes on. "We all saw the blinking LED - Blink; and how motors can move robotic limbs with the grace of "Marvin the paranoid android". We conducted experiments with ways to humanize these artifacts, making them closer to the way we, humans, interact and communicate with the world around us. And thus giving a small humanized illusion."

Image by Synodic Month

Tons of images from Usable Witchery.

Related entries: Yaniv Steiner's talk on rapid prototyping process and Opensourcery (where Zach Lieberman learns a few tricks from Mago Julián.)

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

They say rooting out insurgents is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If that's true, this tank is in trouble.

(By German artist Hans Hemmert.)

via like cool

...

Originally from core77.com's design blog reBlogged by michael on Feb 29, 2008, 9:56AM

Cao Fei: RMB City :: February 29 - April 5, 2008 :: Opening: February 29; 6-8 pm :: Lombard-Freid Projects, 531 West 26th Street, 2nd floor, New York NY

“Is this your city?” asked the young man. “It’s yours.” The angel answered.

RMB City has been created by Cao Fei’s avatar China Tracy as an experimental utopian world for the 3D online virtual community of Second Life. Institutions and investors have been invited to buy buildings in RMB City and program events and activities within them where other Second Life users can participate. Thousands of young people in Asia and around the world are embracing Second Life as a “parallel universe” on the Internet.

RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China’s current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country’s future.

Lombard-Freid is providing China Tracy, as Chief Developer, with retail space for a New York RMB City leasing office and showroom. The public is invited to view an RMB City model, promotional videos, detailed RMB City photographs and go online via laptops providing real time links to RMB City under construction in Second Life.

The pure white RMB City Model proposes an ideal futuristic city in three dimensions for viewers outside of Second Life. China Tracy’s RMB City video projected onto a reflection pool showcases the myriad details of the metropolis – exposing layers of urban activity and the dense beauty of its architecture.

Also on view i.Mirror, Cao Fei’s quasi-documentary of China Tracy’s adventures in Second Life over a 6 month period premiered at the last Venice Biennale. i-Mirror the 3-part machinima of her Second Life experience inspired Cao Fei aka China Tracy to build RMB City.

Cao Fei’s recent exhibitions include: Brave New Worlds at the Walker Art Center, and Laughing In A Foreign Language at The Hayward Gallery, London. The 10th International Istanbul Biennial, the 52nd International Venice Biennale, the Lyon Biennial, China Power Station: Part 1, at the Serpentine Gallery, and China Power Station: Part II, at Astrup Fearley Museum of Modern Art. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo retrospective at Le Plateau, Paris.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2008, 3:08PM

voiceoverhead - A project by Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal featuring Casper Cordes, Harun Farocki, William Furlong, Sharon Hayes :: until March 1, 2008 :: February 29, 2008: An evening of live-performances - Casper Cordes & Ellen Ugelvik; Discoteca Flaming Star; Will Holder; Guy-Marc Hinant - subrosa; Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal :: SMART Project Space, Arie Biemondstraat 105-113, Amsterdam.

In their collaborative practice Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal deal with audio-acoustics and storage media used for acoustic material. Their core interests are audio-recordings, particularly of language, spoken word and speech, original footage taken from radio-broadcastings or other archives. Their work found its multiple form in the project voiceoverhead which is rooted in a record collection of approximately 350 records, including footage documenting political speeches and language orientated radio-programs. The records aurally cover historical events and were originally designed to function as “documentations of the real”. This notion of the ‘documentary’ has been questioned throughout the history of the medium itself and developed as one of the inherent debates around the emerging modes of reproduction in the late 19th century - the phonograph, film and photography. Starting with the early Lumière-movie ‘Workers Leaving the Factory,’ this discussion emerges. Harun Farocki has shown, in his 1995 video-essay on the Lumière-sequence, the complexity of a playful representational conspiracy between the audience / viewer, the document / documentarian and the documented beginning at the birth of the genre itself. This act of conspiracy takes place when any document from the archive is brought back to the public sphere as a kind of reenactment of a communicative and rhetorical figure.

Lengerer & Gal developed the idea voiceoverhead in order to locate the record collection and their artistic practice within a broader context and to include the work of other artists, filmmakers and musicians working with archived language materials in multiple ways and diverging modes. So too do divisions exist in the cultural field: such as electronic music that is entrenched in elements of language and radio-sounds and there is a sub-genre of visual artists, filmmakers and documentarians who also focus their work in this area. Both fields are conceptually and practically applying different approaches to the given speech material: differences in working and presentation methods, as well as differences in distribution and public reception. voiceoverhead presents, confronts and merges the approaches applied in these diverse cultural productions in the exhibition and in an evening of sound performances, taking place on Friday 29 February.

voiceoverhead is a co-production with the Jan van Eyck Academy.

http://www.smartprojectspace.net/

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2008, 1:20PM

Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What’s up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. Twitter is social software that asks a simple question: What are you doing?

Botanicalls is a system that was developed to allow plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics. Call 212.202.8348 to hear more about each of the plants. What you need >>.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2008, 12:58PM

Situation Room, a project / prototype conceptualized and proposed / produced by hackitectura.net, is on view until March 17 at LABoral, an new exhibition, training and production centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries located in Gijon, Spain.

Situation rooms are places used in times of crisis to assess and monitor data for decision taking. These rooms are equipped with monitors and data boards to control everything from the Strait of Gibraltar to the nuclear fission processes in a nuclear power station or the life sustaining mechanisms on board the International Space Station. If i tell you that they are also called "control room" then all kinds of images from war, space and spies movies might come to your mind.

British Destroyer On-Board Glass Polar Plotting Board (via)

With the arrival of the Internet, a more open access to data collection and display technologies has enabled several experiences of Situation Rooms in civil society, with temporary media-labs mainly influenced by cybernetic ideas and free software.

Taking Asturias as a case study, Situation Room invites the public to participate in an open experiment-simulation of a situation room. The second goal of the project is to facilitate the production of common knowledge among artists, geographers, architects, biologists, economists, computer specialists, critics and the public, about the issues put forward.

I found the project so interesting that i asked the coordinator of the project, Pablo de Soto, if he had a few moments to answer my questions. In the meantime i realized that Pablo is a member of hackitectura.net, an activist group of architects, hackers and programmers, whose work i had been admiring for a couple of years. At the core of hackitectura.net are Sergio Moreno and José Pérez de Lama and Pablo. Their collaborative network undertakes practical and theoretical research into the emerging territories of information and communication technologies, new social networks and the traditional physical space.

Answers by both José Pérez de Lama aka Osfa and Pablo from hackitectura:

Situation Room. Image LABoral/Cárdenas

I actually discovered your work a few years ago at the festival Mal au Pixel in Paris where you gave a talk about Hackitectura. How does Situation Room builds upon the experience and projects Hackitectura.net have been developing since its creation? How does the project complete (or differs from) your previous works?

The project Situation Room is the distillation of the experiences made by hackitectura.net since 2003 in the design and implementation of several temporary media-labs: "Pure Data Beta Rave" in the abandoned AVE station in Seville, "Okupa Futura: Ciudad Disidente" in the Centro Cívico Federica Montseny in Corvera de Asturias and "La Multitud conectada", a media-lab with satellite connection in La Rábida Huelva (2003), Fadaiat: freedom of movement / freedom of communication in both borders of the Strait of Gibraltar (2004 and 2005).

The Multitud Conectada ("Connected Multitude") was a prototype for a networked public space, produced for a network of activists, artists and technicians. Using technologies such as the bi-directional satellite connection, the wifi (in its infancy at the time) or the streaming with free software, -with real time connections to México, Bogotá or France-, we created a space which was both local and global, digital and analog.

Dave Tarifa Psand pointing grid antenna to Tangier. No GPS device was used. Picture: osfa

In Fadaiat, which we developed in the framework of the Indymedia Estrecho network (an independent production platform and a bi-political production to which hackitectura actively participated), we developed the same concept but focused on the production of a cyborg geography (conception of spaces, social networks and electronic flux), which was located in a geopolitical node as peculiar and antagonistic as the frontier that separates Europe and Africa in the Gibraltar Strait. In Fadaiat, which held editions in 2004 and 2005, we had a distributed medialab, part of it was located in the Castillo de Tarifa (Spain) and the other in the Marshan, in Tánger (Morocco), linked between each other by wifi connection. Besides, this connection, set up by a network of technicians and activists from both parts of the Strait, was the first wifi connection ever made between the two continents, at least the first one managed by hackers and activists. We like to highlight how the link crossed a densely controlled and militarized space, a space with which we were trying to communicate in some way or another.

Planning of the wifi link, as sent to ITU Morocco for permission. Image:osfa

The SIVE (Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior / Integrated System of External Surveillance), which had started to take ground in the area since 2002, constitutes the first attempt to fortify the frontier with electronic tools, and Fadaiat was conceived as a kind of critical mirror to it.

Media-lab Tangier. Daytime, fixing the link with Tarifa. Picture: hd_(((i))) bcn

More specifically Situation Room is the continuation of the temporary laboratory that hackitectura.net designed and implemented in Geografías Emergentes ("Emerging Geographies", 2007), which took place near the nuclear power plant of Valdecaballeros, located in a Spanish region called Siberia Extremeña. Because of the social opposition, the power plant was put to a stop 25 years ago, before it even started functioning and since then it is abandoned, dominating a severe landscape made of steppes, like a post-nuclear ruin.

Valdecaballeros nuclear power plant (image)

Taking the challenge of the regional government which called for a development based on knowledge (we are talking about the first region in the world who chose to work with free software at an institutional level) and sustainability, we decided to simulate a takeover of the nuclear plant as a participatory lab in order to initiate a reflexion and come up with proposals regarding the re-use of the power plant in another economical and production context and from other subjects. The laboratory was located in the middle of the field, surrounded by sheep, but it was connected to the internet by a satellite antenna and equipped with computers and screening systems. A geodesic dome acted both as a shelter and as a screen for projections. Made of white textile, it worked from the inside as an immersive interface and from the exterior like a magic lantern in the middle of the night.

Geografías Emergentes, Geolab

The various events that took place in the lab (presentations, debates, workshops, performances) were broadcast live on the net and we also had remote participants via streaming.

An important element of Geografías Emergentes was the participation of young people from the area (a competition selected 10 projects to be implemented in the lab) but also of children and adults from Valdecaballeros who participated to workshop and festive events.

Situation Room, an attempt to combine the ideas of a media lab and media room, with practices of data-visualization, cartography and free streaming, aims to present previous experiences in a more artistic and institutional context.

Situation Room. Image Marcos Morilla. Courtesy of LABoral

Which kind of data are you going to monitor during these two months spent in Asturias?

We understand the Situation Room at LABoral, more as a simulation than an actual device to scientifically mine and process data. The main information that we have been showing and discussing at least in the first part of the project, has been the presentation of the concept itself, its origins and proliferating use by command and control powers, and the potentials to hack situation rooms in order to make them perform with other goals.

Situation rooms are on the one hand, devices connected to complex contexts, where processes are non-linear. In order to take decisions and act in these situations, the different agencies (military staff, governments, business, police...) need to continuously monitor reality and establish a permanent feedback loop between it and their actions.

The processing of sets of data extracted from complex systems needs new ways of processing and evaluation, which have to do with cartography and data visualization. On the other hand, situation rooms are only meaningful if we understand them as embedded in networks, which comprise at least two main areas, a sensors area (that captures data) and an actuators area, which allows for strategies and decisions to be performed.

Our ideas where to use Situation Room as a space and time to discuss these issues, and particularly the possibility of turning them into a "multitudinar" device, that is the possibility to use them to empower the action of social networks, rather than central powers. How could situation rooms enhance distributed control. How could they be used to generate socially useful knowledge and to increase coordination between social movements.

"Financial core," Bureau d'études, World Monitoring Atlas (via)

One of the questions that we made ourselves is, then, what kind of data would such a situation room be interested in. In order to advance in this direction, we held a workshop with Bureau d'Etudes, the French team famous for their cartographies of capitalism, power and production. It seems somehow that before or beyond quantifying data, a situation room of this sort should produce different images of the system, that would enable other desires and goals. In this workshop we started studying different critical mapping projects, and after that participants - focusing on Asturias, the region where the workshop was happening -, made a list of possible mapping subjects (worked out of the ideas of nodal points, threats and opportunities). This allowed us to produce a preliminary map of the region, somehow a strategic map, that should guide future data mining - and could as well work as a communication and coordination tool.

Installation Cibersyn operations room (image)

The second workshop dealt with a project which we feel very closely connected to ours, which is Cybersyn. Cybersyn was a network developed in Chile between 1970 and 1973 under the socialist government of Salvador Allende (Cybersyn was presented in Transmediale, right after Situation Room). A very young team of Chilean techs collaborated with British cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer to develop a Chile-wide system to coordinate nationalized industries. The aim of the project, however, wasn't to control factories and workers, but to regulate the network as a living organism, where autonomy of the different cells was compatible with the overall functioning of the organism. Of course, the right wing coup d'etat didn't allow the project to be completed, but its promises are still of great appeal. One of the interests of this workshop was to realize the social potential of the concept - which astonishingly was designed almost simultaneously to Arpanet itself (1969). Rather than being afraid of control and technologies in general, we think that research and creativity should be applied to the social appropriation of them; we even think that the source of technological creativity, as Cybersyn shows, lies rather on social cooperation, and that is only later captured by the military or capitalism.

Situation Room. Image Julio Calvo. Courtesy of LABoral

Situation Room is a complex project which includes a series of workshops, a laboratory and the installation itself. What is the aim of the project? What do you hope to explore and learn with it?

We think one of our aims was to advance in the design of situation room that could be actually used in the context of social movements, for special events or for daily research, strategic planning and organizing. Somehow we understand that it should be rather a multiplicity interconnected of situation rooms, embedded in networks of "biopolitical labs" such as social centers and independent media and research groups. As we wrote in the presentation for the project, somehow anyone equipped with tv, Internet, mobile phone and computer, has a personal situation room at home, but we would like to go on researching how the combination of hacktivists medialabs, artists media rooms, multimedia communication, participatory cartography and emergent free software data mining and visualization technologies, could empower social action.

Situation Room, graphic from the first proposal

The presentation of the projects says that the public will be able to participate. How exactly can they get involved in the project?

In the first part of the event, we organized the two already mentioned workshops that were open to the public, and students in particular.

There was a small but intense participation, composed by artists, architects, techies and activists. In the opening sessions we had remote participants, from Barcelona and Malaga, whose images occupied one of the walls of the room. The sessions were streamed through GISS (a global free software network) making them available to anyone connected.

One of the results of the workshops was an interactive cartography of Asturias, based on meipimatic (a wikimapping platform developed by some Madrid friends). In the next weeks, meetings will be held with different local collectives, that are knowledgeable on particular issues such as ecology, labor, urbanism, etc, that we expect to join the mapping team. This groups will be invited as well to set up their temporary offices in the lab and use its resources.

Open tactical cartography of Asturias

The general public is also invited to contribute to the map.

Another way of rather automated participation is through rss feed. Feeds form relevant media, especially independent, are processed and permanently projected in several of the large screens in the lab, presenting a panorama of current issues in Asturias.

Eventually, there will be several workshops with children. Activities will include access to data bases, introduction to data visualization technologies and creation of data bases and maps to be visualized in the Situation Room. Children's contributions would be incorporated as well to the Asturias meipimatic.

Thanks Pablo and osfa!

Situation Room. Image Marcos Morilla. Courtesy of LABoral

Situation Room is the winner of the first convocation of the LABjoven Experimenta Contest at LABoral in Gijon, Spain.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

The talk i was looking forward to listen to during the Transmediale conference last week was Trevor Paglen's who was part of Session 4: Techno-Historical Collusions: The Making Of A Trojan Horse.

(Previously, in the same session: Eva Horn's talk at Transmediale)

Paglen works at the border of art and research and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. His artistic work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and other more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. He has published two books (Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (Amazon USA and UK) which documents the use by the CIA of modified commercial aircraft for extraordinary rendition; and I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Amazon USA and UK) about the secret world of military imagery and jargon revealed by patches from classified projects) and is currently preparing the third one (Blank Spots on a Map, 2008/09).

One day Paglen arrived at his office to find man standing in front of his door, looking with intensity at a picture hung outside of the office. At some point, the man tried to pick out the image out of its frame. Paglen intervenes and asks him what he think he's doing. The guy then asks him "Do you know what that place is?" Starts a dialog where the man reveals that he used to be a pilot. He and his companions at the army were instructed that there were places in the desert where they would not be able to fire at all, where they could not land under any circumstance. One of these places was just called "The Box". But one of the pilots ran out of gas and has no choice but land on "The Box." A week later, the guy comes back. He wouldn't say anything. "That place belongs to the Black World." The black World, as military insiders call it, is the world of classified programs, projects, and places, whose outlines, even existence, are deeply-held secrets.

Tail Numbers/Gold Coast Terminal, Las Vegas, NV/Distance ~1 mile/5:27 pm

Paglen then showed us pages from the Department of Defense Budget Fiscal Year 2008. The document is publicly available but presents some puzzling numbers. For example, a whopping $ 12.3 million is allocated to toilets which, the document states, must provide soldiers with equipment 2 enhance their efficiency and efficacy."

Paglen showed more images from a documents of classified strategic RDT&E programs. Some projects with mysterious names such as "Pilot Fish", "Retract Juniper," "Chalk Coral", etc. receive huge budget but, unlike the toilets do not present any justification. Sometimes the sum allocated to a project does not appear at all, leaving blank spots in the budget. The National Security Agency has mostly blanks in its budget.

Code Names: Classified Military Programs Active Between 2001 and 2007

One of Paglen's work inspired by the military budget is Code Names is a list of words, phrases, and terms that designate active military programs whose existence or purpose is classified.

So what happens with these "Selected Sites Associated with Classified Military Activity"? Money doesn't disappear like that. Paglen calls them the "Black Dollars". A number of places where these figures congeal are located in the South West of the country, more precisely in the desert. That area has a long history of being an unexplored region. In World War II, these places became useful to hide secret bases where airplanes were tested. Also the Manhattan Project in 1945.

Manhattan Project, "Jumbo" atomic device being positioned for "Trinity" test at Alamogordo, New Mexico (souce)

This Black World started to get more importance in the '80s. The Black Budget became then a big part of the defense budget with President Reagan, a man fascinated by secret weapons.

Paglen showed more documents to prove his point.

The next issue he tackled was "How do we study something that doesn't exist? Something that must stay hidden?"

Paglen turned to geography to make emerge a negative image of these black spots on maps. That's where he compares his work to the one of an astronomer because he deals with dark matters, with phenomena which are detectable only through the influence they exercise on the visible world.

Open Hangar/Cactus Flats, NV/Distance ~18 miles/10:04 am

He uses similar instruments as astronomers' to create his Limit Telephotography series.

Many of the military bases and installations hidden deep in deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land are so remote that a civilian might be able to see them with an unaided eye. In order to visually document these places, Paglen uses high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent. Because of the distance and the heat coming off the desert, these images have peculiar aesthetical qualities that sometimes evoke impressionists paintings rather than photography.

Limit-telephotography resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth.

Flight Tracking
CIA sets up civilian front companies to hide these "black" operations, making it look like a normal business. But even front companies must produce flight logs, registration papers, and other legal documents. And most of them publicly available. That's the kind of data you check to know if a plane will land on time for example. Now how do you find front companies? Documents such as the Civil Aircraft Landing Permits lists the planes which are allowed to land on military landfills. These are companies you have never heard of. You can get a list of the planes these airlines own and from there track information about where they land and from where they fly.

Terminal Air

Terminal Air, a visualization system that Trevor Paglen developed together with the Institute for Applied Autonomy tracks the CIA aircrafts. You can register and get an email message when a CIA plane is coming to your city.

These companies leave other traces. They must have addresses. One of them lead Paglen to a law office which is weird for an aviation company. No one would answer his questions. Then there are signatures at the bottom of documents belonging to the companies. He deciphered the names and found individuals which, unlike the rest of us, leave no electronic trace: they have no credit history, no driver license, etc. They all have a single address which is a PO Box in Virginia. Paglen went there and discovered that the PO Box was used by hundreds and hundreds of names. It's a long collection of ghosts, of fictional characters. Which makes sense as these people are in the business of making other people disappear.

Signature of a non-existing airline company member (image source)

Paglen also practices some Amateur Anthropology.

These people involved in secret activities have colleagues which are the only persons with whom they are allowed to talk about their jobs. They organize reunions and form bonds. They also give awards to each other but they can't exactly say what this award is for. So someone would get an award for his or her "significant contribution in a remote location."

One of Paglen's slides showing the cryptic information of someone involved in one of the secret programs he's investigating

Paglen is also into Amateur geo-spacial intelligence. He and his collaborators make maps of the world based on those flights.

He then reminded us of the case of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen who was abducted, flown to Afghanistan, interrogated and tortured by the CIA for several months in one of those Black Sites and then released without charge. The extrajudicial detention was apparently due to a mis-spelling of El-Masri's name. When the CIA realized El-Masri was the wrong guy, they threw him on another plane and freed him in Albania.

Aerial view of Salt Pit (image)

It is believed that the jail were he was detained was a secret CIA detention center outside Kabul called the Salt Pit. For five months, El-Masri says, he was locked in a solitary cell in the Salt Pit and interrogated by Arabic-speaking inquisitors who asked him repeatedly if he was involved with the Sept. 11 hijackers, if he'd journeyed to Jalalabad on a false passport, if he hung out with Islamic extremists living in Germany (via).

Symbology.

NOYFB. Fabric patch, Edition of 50, 2006

Military have all sorts of patches, icons and insignia. They reveal anything that they do or are. These markers of identity and program heraldry begin to create a peculiar symbolic regime when they depict one's affiliation with what defense-industry insiders call the "black world".

The symbols and insignia shown in Paglen's Symbology series provide a glimpse into how contemporary military units answer questions that have historically been the purview of mystery cults, secret societies, religions, and mystics: How does one represent that which, by definition, must not be represented?

Both the icons and words used on the patches are weird. "Alone and on the Prowl", sometimes with inside jokes "Gustatus Similis Pullus" (Tastes Like Chicken); "Doing God's works with other people's money," NOYFB (None of Your Fucking Business), etc.

You can see some of these patches until February at the Transmediale exhibition which runs until February 24 at the House of World Cultures in Berlin.

Related: Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy; Tracking the Torture Taxis; The Captives.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

Just back from London where i visited the Work in Progress show at the Royal College of Art (you've got until Thursday 7 February to visit it). I'll come back with more details later but here's an appetizer from the department of Design Interactions.

Revital Cohen got interested in Life support machines and the way the technologies involved in keeping patients alive in intensive care enter and merge with the body. By doing so they redefine its material and functional properties. As the human anatomy gains technological capabilities, where does the body end and the machine begin?

The Telepresence Frame is a domestic object which utilizes the fact that one's bodily functions are digitalized in order to create a new form of telepresence. Your family would have the frame at home as a presence that keeps them constantly aware of your physical state while you're being kept alive at the hospital.

The Human Black Box records and stores this information, keeping a record of your very last moments. Once you die, the frame plays your life data back. In loop.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

Power Of Display 44: Exhibiting On The Internet - Dialogue with Franz Thalmair / Carlos Katastrofsky, Sakrowski moderated by: Nora Sternfeld (in German) :: February 7, 2008; 7 pm, Brick 5 :: Fonfhausgasse 5, A-1150 Vienna.

Initiated by Schnittpunkt exhibition theory & practice, the lecture series “power of display” seeks to stimulate reflection on current exhibition practices and to test experimental exhibition forms. The upcoming issue of the event in co-production with basis wien - Kunst, Information und Archiv deals with curatorial methods on the Internet. A virtual tour through exemplary projects is the starting point for a discussion about question of display and modes of exhibiting New Media and Internet-based Art.

schnittpunkt. exhibition theory & practice aims at producing a critically reflective exhibition and museum viewers/public. Beginning with theoretically well-founded exhibition and museum analyses, schnittpunkt wishes to stimulate reflection on current exhibition practice and to test experimental exhibition forms. We intend to bring about a general awareness of how interpretation and operation patterns of institutions are determined by cultural and social conditions.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by michael on Feb 4, 2008, 9:46AM

The New York Times just did a photo feature on shopdropping, a form of 'culture jamming' where artists covertly leave their work amid the products on the shelves of stores. The practice has been mostly limited to grocery-store goods, but it'll be interesting to see where this leads. [see also Paleo Future, a real sign of the times]

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Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by Gerry Mak reBlogged by michael on Jan 18, 2008, 11:33AM

Originally from This Blog Sits at the by Grant McCracken reBlogged by michael on Jan 18, 2008, 5:06PM

In the newest issue of Interactions magazine, Steve Portigal laments the use of personas. His point essentially is that personas “invite misuse” and therefore they should be avoided. Peter has responded, pointing out that Steve has thrown a baby or two out with the bath water by conflating personas with poorly conceived personas. To some degree it becomes a war of analogies, with Steve saying personas are like guns (i.e. inviting misuse and dire consequences) and Peter saying they are like movies (i.e. just because most are bad doesn’t mean that we should dismiss the activity of movie-making).

But neither of them addresses the underlying issue that is at the heart of all this fear and loathing, use and misuse. The power and danger of personas is their realism. Good personas use this realism to drive authentic understanding deep into the heart of an organization. As humans, we are highly attuned to observing, interpreting, and relating to other people. Good personas take advantage of this tendency and focus it on “people” that are highly relevant to a design, business, or engineering task. I have seen this have profound positive effects on organizations.

The issue is that personas are not real. They are realistic but, in the end, fictional. Knowing Steve, I can say that he is very uncomfortable with that element of fiction because of how it can affect the people creating and using personas. When handled poorly, organizations can begin (or continue) to talk about real people as characters or stereotypes. And that, as he would probably say, “freaks him out.” As it should. We all hate to see organizations misunderstanding the people they are trying to serve.

But does this potential really outweigh the benefits? In my experience, personas have always improved an organizations understanding of their customers because, if nothing else, they become a tangible and explicit artifact for focusing and catalyzing discussion about customers. While this may not always be inspiring, it moves things forward. Incremental change is better than no change at all.

Of course, Steve’s essay also raises an important question, what is the alternative to personas? (Peter makes this same point.) If we agree that qualitative, contextual, and in-depth research is important and necessary, how do we capture and communicate the things we learn in the field beyond giving people a mountain of raw video and audio to go through for themselves? (Assuming that video and audio actually substitutes for being in the field…). Steve says that we should “tell stories.” But every story told is an approximation. Details are left out or reordered to support a larger theme or message. This is true in journalism as much as in romance or sci-fi. In the same way, some level of fiction is necessary when it comes to personas. Personas are meant to represent archetypical customers or users of a product or service. Representing archetypes requires a certain level of aggregation and synthesis.

In my whole career, I have seen few things that inspire strong reactions like personas. Enthusiasm & excitement as well as fear and loathing. So, I can’t fault Steve for his strong reaction. Personas blur the line between truth and fiction, which can be disconcerting. But this all highlights the fact that personas are more a medium of communication than a tool. So, Steve’s gun analogy isn’t really appropriate. Peter’s movie analogy is better. Or consider painting, which actually had/has a movement called Realism. I think it’s a mistake to throw out the idea of painting or of Realism just because someone’s first attempt looks more like a toddler’s scrawl than a Rembrandt.

P.S. Congrats to Steve for such a provocative first column!

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Originally from Adaptive Path by Todd Wilkens reBlogged by michael on Jan 18, 2008, 3:41PM

Mark Richards has captured the beauty of computer equipment in his photography series, Core Memory.

via coudal

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Originally from core77.com's design blog reBlogged by michael on Jan 14, 2008, 11:39AM

Steve Portigal is going after the hypocritical use of personas (”the Big Lie”) in the article he wrote for Interactions Magazine: “Personas are misused to maintain a “safe” distance from the people we design for, manifesting contempt over understanding, and creating the facade of user-centeredness while merely reinforcing who we want to be designing for and selling to.” You can request a copy of the article by contacting Steve at steve at portigal dot com and telling him your name, title and organisation.

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia reBlogged by michael on Jan 14, 2008, 1:55PM

Whilst Google uses satellite imagery, photographs and map overlays to create their mapping systems, China's Edushi uses intricate (and quite incredible) computer-based drawings to create their city maps. Edushi will 'virtually represent' many Chinese cities – a part of Hong Kong is shown above (and that's the city-demo you can use on their site). Each proposed city map will be complete with virtual community, game-like emulation advertisements and directory features. Try not to spend quite a bit of time here exploring and marvelling at the remarkable (and zoom-able) bird's-eye views of Hong Kong.

It's interesting to draw parallels with the pixel-illustrations of eBoy, but thus far, Edushi doesn't feature giant destructive robots and scantily-clad women riding missiles. Via PSFK.

Originally from One Plus One Equals Three by Andrew Haig reBlogged by michael on Dec 12, 2007, 9:22PM

Transitory Homes - "About invisible cities, or how to be alone, when accompanied."

This came in the mail, it looked good, they have no website. Maybe you need another reason to visit Brazil? Jetsetters check it out! Excellent work around the theme of homeless life - in a museum by Oscar Niemeyer! Runs through February 11th.

Curated by Nicola Goretti, info ( a t ) grupoag.net

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Originally from core77.com's design blog reBlogged by michael on Jan 4, 2008, 2:09PM

[Image: Castle Rushen, Castletown, Isle of Man, via Old UK Photos].

I was poking around for images this morning and I somehow ended up at a site called Old UK Photos. They collect old, public domain photographs of the UK (rather cheekily including Ireland) – but some of the photos are so extraordinarily beautiful, and so hard to believe that they really are photographs, that I felt like re-posting a few here.

[Image: Wiltshire, Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge, via Old UK Photos].

The fact that I've also been to many of these places adds a weird layer of delayed misrecognition to many of the scenes, as if stumbling upon landscapes from trips I forgot I'd taken (which is almost accurate).
The old pier in Bangor. One of the Peak District caves. Edinburgh castle.
And, of course, Stonehenge, pictured above from those years in which it hadn't yet been fenced off.

[Image: Caerlaverock Castle, Dumfriesshire; Peel Cathedral, Isle of Man; castle in Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire; castle in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire; Peel Castle, Isle of Man; and Ballower Mount, Ramsey, Isle of Man; all via Old UK Photos].

I don't have all that much to say about these, in fact, other than to point out that they seem to instill something between nostalgia (for myself, an Anglo-American) and a wistful need to travel through non-automobile-based landscapes – and perhaps even a somewhat Gothicized sense of fictive possibilities, like something out of BLDGBLOG's recent interview with novelist Patrick McGrath.
That said, then, here are some photos, with crumbling castles on distant hills and even mysterious pieces of old machinery.

[Images: Castle at Bolsover, Derbyshire; castle in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire; bridge in Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire; the Wheel at Laxey, Isle of Man; Devil's Bridge, Aberystwyth; Templand Bridge, Cumnock, Ayrshire; The Blackrock in Cromford, Derbyshire; entrance to a cave outside Castleton, Derbyshire; all via Old UK Photos].

Some of the coastal photographs – of bays, inlets, coves, rock arches, and cliffs – seem to imply a labyrinthine island geography so complicated and ornate in its expanse, and so remote, that people still must be discovering new places there today... But then, of course, that describes the British Isles. Unless you spend all your time in Leicester Square.

[Images: Castle in Llanstephan, Carmarthenshire; Petite Bot, Guernsey, Channel Islands; La Coupee, Sark, Channel Islands; Dixcart Bay, Sark; Sugarloaf Rock at Port St. Mary, Isle of Man; the coast at the Gouffre, Petite Bot, and the harbor at La Moye Point (3 images), Guernsey; via Old UK Photos].

Actually, I'm reminded of something I read a few years ago in a book called The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin – which is that a particular stretch of British coastline, near Lyme Regis, is full of fossils.
The book opens with the story of Mary Anning, an amateur "fossilist" – she made an income selling bits of backbones and fragments of mastodons, jigsaw puzzle-like pieces of species that no longer exist – who stumbled upon, if I remember correctly, the body of an ichthyosaur – but only because there had been a landslide. Without that tidally inspired collapse of a nearby cliff, Anning perhaps would never have found her fossil; it would have remained buried in the cliffside for years – decades, centuries – to come.

Although she had an eye for fossils, she could not find them until they had been exposed by weathering – an achingly slow process. But when wind and rain and frost and sun had done their work, she would find them, peeking through the surface. Others were buried so deeply in the cliffs that it would be aeons before they were ever discovered.

The idea that the fossils of as yet undiscovered creatures still lie buried somewhere in the cliffs of Dorset is almost overwhelmingly interesting.
In any case, the bottom two images are from Bangor, Wales, where my brother and I once stayed in a youth hostel and ate soup. We hiked outside of town one afternoon and we looked up at a tree covered in drooping sleeves of loose vegetation, then we fell asleep on a hillside in some farmyard nearby, jumping over a fence and lying down amidst lichen-covered rocks and small bushes.
In fact, I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I was reading The Lord of the Rings and so the whole experience was tinged with an air of the mythic.

[Images: Garth's Pier in Bangor, Caernarfonshire, and a view of Bangor from Anglesey, via Old UK Photos].

Anywho, the old lighthouse at Corbiere, on the Channel Island of Jersey, makes a nice painterly silhouette in this next photo.

[Image: The lighthouse at Corbiere, Jersey, Channel Islands, via Old UK Photos].

And the old paths still whirl and turn through hills, leading somewhere, going everywhere.

[Image: Moulin Huet, Guernsey, Channel Islands, via Old UK Photos].

All of these images, plus a few more, are also saved in a Flickr set I put together this afternoon.

(The title of this post paraphrases a line from William Blake's poem Milton. Meanwhile, it may not be entirely related to the images in this post, but I do recommend giving at least a quick read to BLDGBLOG's interview with Patrick McGrath for some thoughts on the literary impact of these – or similar – landscapes).

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh reBlogged by michael on Dec 23, 2007, 12:29PM

Video

Here’s one of Augmented Architecture’s prototypes that I saw at the ACADIA07 earlier this year. “Life Spectulatrix” is an evolutionary physical skin based on digital environmental feedback retrieved through the webspace. Architect Nancy Diniz describes how it becomes a “universally situated living piece” through its own evolutionary behaviour in relation to global environmental information as well as local interaction.

“Augemented Architectures” is : Nancy Diniz, a licensed architect and a PhD candidate at the Bartlett and a tutor at the Department of Architecture at ISCTE in Lisbon and Cesar Branco, a computer science engineer working for VSNL as a Solutions Architect based in London, UK.

Originally from Interactive Architecture dot Org by Ruairi reBlogged by michael on Dec 17, 2007, 4:39PM

[Image: The Kaiser Shipyard's General Warehouse, photographed by Jon Haeber; more images here. View larger!].

This perforated monolith – all 158,000 square feet of it – stands on the waterfront in Richmond, California, north of Berkeley, part of the Henry J. Kaiser shipyards. It was photographed here by Jon Haeber.
I emailed Haeber a few weeks ago to find out more about the structure – and the building has a fairly interesting backstory.
For starters, its architect is apparently unknown, although it is rumored to have been designed by John B. Anthony. Anthony, Haeber explained, "did work for WWII ship baron Henry J. Kaiser in the same period that the warehouse was constructed, so it would be reasonable to assume that he played an integral role in the design, especially considering its similarities with his other designs." For instance, Anthony also built the quasi-futurist Art Moderne Joseph W. Harris House in Berkeley.
This "massive square concrete building," we read elsewhere, though the building is very clearly not a square, was "the general warehouse, from which ships received their finishing touches – blankets, mops, brooms and all the other individual pieces of furnishings and equipment needed to completely fit out a self-contained floating vessel." The warehouse even appears on a t-shirt.
Now, however, the buildings just sits out in the rain, doing nothing, storing air.

[Image: The warehouse at night, photographed by Jon Haeber; view original].

Haeber, meanwhile, "[has] not been in inside, and I do not know anyone who has. It is currently owned by a storage company, and they seem to be very protective of the site. I don't believe official access is possible," he continues, "and it's relatively sealed."
In any case, if you enjoy urban ruins, military history, or just interesting photography, be sure to check out Haeber's other images of the site, including his own exploratory tour through "the below-ground galleys that adjoin the five shipways, where water was pumped out on a massive scale and the iconic 'Rosie the Riveters' welded and assembled hundreds of U.S. warships."
Indeed, these drydocks "produced the most ships in the shortest time in history," and you can read more about their wartime history courtesy of the National Park Service or Rosie the Riveter.

(Thanks, Jon!)

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh reBlogged by michael on Dec 16, 2007, 1:29PM