Category: Digital and Interactive Art

Celebrating the Olympics with sound art. Athens Olympics Inspire Artist’s Computer-Based Sculptures is a fawning and rather silly article from the Associated Press about a Greek sculptress who has created, in celebration of the Olympics, art based on digitally visualized sounds. (See SonArt Olympics for the web site on the travelling exhibit.) Whatever your opinion of the art, there is a strange confusion to the layers of representation – sculpture that draws on graphical representations of digitized (sampled and quantized) words connected to Greek and Olympic themes!!!!
Continue reading Silly Sound Sculpture

Fotolog.net allows people to create one-picture-a-day blogs. Simple interface that works for diary-like image. Amazing international crowd of fotologgers (largest group from Brazil) – most are just posting pictures of themselves and friends, on which other comment, but some are beautiful. Much more interesting than lulu.com.
Continue reading Fotolog.net: Photography Blogs

Gallery is a freeware web photo album package that allows you to manage your digital pictures. It seems well supported – has skins, does image downsizing, supports captions and so on. (This is courtesy of Ross Scaife.) Do you know of any others?

In Look, See: July 04, 2004 – July 10, 2004 Archives, Chris Ashley was amused by my entry and attempted experiment. He notes that for him these works need to be understood in context,

My drawings, though, don’t stand alone. They exist within a context; anyone who has followed these for awhile will have a sense that:
1. the drawings have or respond to a subject, and are somewhat representational, but not always of tangible things;
2. the drawings also derive their meaning from the fact that they exist within a weblog where I have a daily deadline, one drawing (typically) is exhibited each day, and the weblog serves as a gallery and an archive, all public;
3. meaning is also inherent in the fact that the drawings (almost always) are in series, so that drawings are part of a body; and
4. I am really working up against the edge of the limitations of HTML tables, a very simple medium, so that even though I use the grid everday I am working against making an image that is just a set of blocks;
5. I use color like a painter, which is my background- I mix, tint, shade, and use it for structure, space, and composition.

While his works don’t stand alone, and that makes the site more than just a collection of HTML art, does that mean that the technique can’t be repurposed and used in other contexts? How tied is a technique to its original context? Does one have to follow the blog to appreciate a particular work? These parallel the questions we have in literary theory around the authority of the author and their control over their work. The web (and blogging) makes it that much easier for fragments to be taken out of context. I would go further and say that you can’t count on context on the web. I certainly missed the importance to Chris of the sequential evolution of his work working my way backward from the entry point.
Continue reading HTML Art Context

c-level is an artists (and others) cooperative in LA that hosts projects like Endgames: Waco Resurrection. waco resurrection is a computer game and performance that explores the siege at Waco, Texas. I haven’t experienced it, but from the images and QT video it looks like a powerful example of gaming in an art/provocation context. Comments from those who have seen it appreciated!
Continue reading C-Level: Waco Resurrection

sally mckay suggested this artist’s blog, Look, See. What I like about Look, See (among other things) are the html art – simple works written with tables with coloured cells. (See his discussion of these at Visual Problems and Solutions.
Continue reading Chris Ashley: Look, See

July 1st was Canada Day and we went to a Military Tattoo at Dundurn Castle here in Hamilton, Ontario. Tattoos are left over from the Empire – marching bagpipe bands and highland dancers. It was, after all, the colonies like Canada that benefited most from the British Empire. Tattoos and jubilees are a passing type of performance, enjoy them while they last.
Click here to see a selection of pictures.

Eddo Stern at AGO – N. Post June 19/04 is an article on the show currently on at the Art Gallery of Ontario on recent work by Eddo Stern. Stern’s work, like Fort Paladin: America’s Army, 2003, combines modified computers and projections from computer games. Fort Paladin has a castle built around a screen and tower system unit. There is a keyboard with actuators controlled by another computer typing away beneath the screen (or castle gateway) showing a violent first person shooter (is the game projected controlled by the keyboard?) To quote from the pamphlet in the exhibit room,

Keywords: Tolkien, Christ, Your Empire and Your Desktop
Fort Paladin is a medieval computer castle automaton trained to kill and master the US Army’s inforamous recruitment/training game, America’s Army, using electro-mechanics and a custom-written expert system.

Continue reading Eddo Stern at the AGO

Having just been unfair about Manovich I should mention that his web site, Lev Manovich has a great little archive of images from the book The Language of New Media (follow “Visuals for the Book” link). He also makes his essays available under a creative commons license – neat.

Lisbeth Klastrup:†Paradigms of interaction: conceptions and misconceptions of the field today is an good overview of the literature on interactivity.

I found the link for this from a blog by Jason Rhody at the University of Maryland who has a category archive on the interactive.