Category: Digital and Interactive Art

Digital Art Museum

The “Digital Art Museum has an ambitious aim – to be the source for history on the digital arts. They have an interesting set of essay links and information about the early history of digital arts.

Digital Art Museum aims to become the world’s leading online resource for the history and practice of digital fine art.

It exhibits the work of leading Artists in this field since 1956. [DAM] is an on-line museum with a comprehensive exhibition of Digital Art supported by a wide range of background information including biographies, articles, a bibliography and interviews.

Keven Steele: Photo.menu

Steele Photo of TorontoKevin Steele’s Photo Menu page has a large collection of small photo essays by Steele. He has a nice clean touch – small numbers of images arranged on a white background using repetitions of different elements.

Steele is a designer who cofounded Mackerel an innovative early Toronto multimedia company that Cory Doctorow says,

“Together, they built the first iteration of a project that would go on to virtually create the market for multimedia in Canada. They laughed. They smoked. They blew a bunch of doobs.”

Previously I blogged his new site for Smackerel where he and David Goff have some great essays on early multimedia – see Mackarel Smackarel.

The Pool: Float Your Ideas

Pool ProcessThe Pool is a networked collaboration environment that presents a visualization of proposed projects distributed by approval and recognition. The idea is that people can propose ideas, approaches to ideas, release implementations of the approaches and then reviews. I guess that as ideas mature they will migrate from the lower left to upper rights. It only works on selected browsers.

This online environment is an experiment in sharing art, text, and code–not just sharing digital files themselves, but sharing the process of making them. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of studio art programs and collection management systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. (From “learn more” -> “purpose”)

Prize Budget for Boys

Prize Budget for Boys is an arts collective “convened in Toronto in 2001” that has been creating interactive arts games. Pac-Mondrian
, for example, is a Pac-Man like game where you eat through a Mondrian work to the tune of boogie woogie jazz. (See the New York Times article, Arts > Art & Design > Chomp if You Like Art” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/arts/design/27mond.html?ex=1261890000&en=bc65f21f79d37d0a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>Chomp if You Like Art by Sarah Boxer (Dec. 27, 2004.)
Calderoids combines Asteroids with Calder like mobiles.
Continue reading Prize Budget for Boys

Research/Creation: State of the Art

I am presenting on the 19th at the Ontario College of Art and Design on the SSHRC /Research/Creation Grants in Fine Arts with Craig McNaughton, the program officer. It should be an interesting discussion about the pragmatics of research/creation which is an emerging concept for the sort of hybrid research and art that many of us do.
In an earlier post on Research Creation I talked about what I think are the primary criteria. Also of interest are issues around Ethics and Art
Continue reading Research/Creation: State of the Art

Lemur Multitouch Control by JazzMutant

lemurimage.jpgJazzMutant
has developed a multitouch control panel called Lemur which is being distributed in the US by Cycling ’74 (who also are responsible for Max/MSP.)

Lemur is basically a touch screen that can be programmed to display a virtual instrument or control that will accept multipoint touch input. The programmed controller can then be used to control things using the appropriate interface. You can develop virtual instruments and so on. Could this be used to create interesting text environments? This is thanks to Matt Patey.