Knowbotic Research with Peter Sandbichler

This piece of art by the artist group Knowbotic Research along with Peter Sandbichler, is know as Mindsof Concern::Breaking News was presented to the the public in 2002. It first appeared in a group exhibition in New York. This piece is created using port scanning software that looked for weaknesses in the Internet servers of selected non-governmental organizations as well as media activists. When the website was visited by visitors of the exhibition, a port scan was initiated. This was performed by a " colorful slot machine interface called the 'Public Domain Scanner' ". This scanner found weaknesses in the specific servers to attacks by hackers. What you see in the picture is similar to the type of feedback received from the port scan. Results are returned in the form of a newsticker with things popping up different ways without signifying which port each result was referring to. Different colors and fonts and font sizes are used.

Scanning the ports is a legal process but is often prohibited by the internet service providers because it helps hackers gain access where they should not be. Because of this, the scanners were taken offline after the exhibit. The idea behind the project was to expose the issues that NGO's deal with in securing their projects from constant hacks or attempts at hacking.

I liked this project because it brings out a serious issue into the public eye. While showing what comes back from the scan as art, the results are translated into a language that allows for different groups of people to understand the issue. I feel like this is what happens with a lot of art so digital art is no different.

Email Erosion

Email Erosion, by Etham Ham, is a sculpture piece. A block of styrofoam is carved out depending on the spam and email present on your computer. This project consisted of a steel frame with the block of styrofoam within it. A mobile sprayer, the Eroder, moves around within the frame to spray colored water on the styrofoam to sculpt it. This is a very simple idea but an interesting one at the same time.

With this project, anyone can email in and have their email and spam turned into art. Once it is completed, they will recieve a picture of their sculpture. This is very much an interactive project for all people. All you need is an email address to take part! Each person will have a unique sculpture based on the content on their computer. It is amazing how it seems to get easier and easier to get involved with projects like these and they get more and more personal at the same time.

I thought this was a cool project because this is the first one that I have seen of this kind, which is what grabbed my attention. I also liked how simple it is to be interactive with this project. All you need to do is email eroder@emailerosion.org and your art can be created.

Check out the Email Erosion website HERE.

BUST D0WN THE D00RS!

HERE you can find the link to the flash video.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries has created a number of different flash videos. The particular one that I was interested in, Bust Down The Doors!, was released in 2000.

Young-Hae Chang, a Korean artist, and Marc Voge, an American poet based in Seoul, were participants at a Net Art workshop in Brisbane, Australia. At the workshop they focused on Flash, a web animation tool that would take years to master. While there, they went over the first two topics of Flash which were making text appear on the screen and then setting it to music. After going to the workshop, Chang and Voge created Flash movies of fast moving text set to music under the name Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Bust Down The Doors! in 2000 was a Flash movie that told a story of a midnight raid on a house from different perspectives.

This video is different from others today because it sticks with the most basic of concepts from Flash. This artist and poet have made an art out of this style of Flash movies. Since the videos are all text, a lot can be taken from the font style and size. With the focus on the meaning of the words, the pace of the text and the music in the background, the viewer becomes a participant as is a characteristic of New Media Art.

I like this because it is different from the other New Art that I have found. In this case it isn't the direct participation that is required rather an indirect one as you watch the videos. Because this type of old school style to their videos is what thay do I wouod say to keep bringing new things to the table in the way of font usage as well as background music.

Vuk Cosic

Vuk Cosic, the man widely acknowledged for coining the term net.art, used a program and ASCII characters to create one of his best-known projects, ASCII History of Moving Images. Vuk Cosic used software to transform still frame images. He used ASCII characters, a set of numerical equivalents for typed letters and symbols that allow computer programs to talk to one another, to take the place of pixels in the image to create shadows and figures. After changing the still frames, Cosic quickly ran the images in succession to re-animate the original piece. Vuk was not the first to use these characters in art but this different way of recreating images goes with a long list of other ways Cosic has used to reproduced images.



The man who coined the term "net.art" has used the computer in an artistic way with this project. A few movies and television shows that he recreated in this way can be found HERE. These recreations have a futuristic look to them. It is cool that he used ASCII characters which were created in the 1960's to change classic videos in an artistic way.

I thought the videos and shows that Vuk Cosic chose to do were interesting because they spanned many genres from classic to pornography. With such a wide variety though, the art can be respected and enjoyed by a larger variation of people which is one idea behind New Media Art that brings people from all backgrounds together.

Umbrella.net

Created by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, Umbella.net look visually at mobile computer networks that connect spontaneously between mobile divices. This piece features white umbrellas with mobile devices attached to the shafts of the umbrellas. These umbrellas were operated by various people at various events. When participants would open the umbrella, the bobile device would attempt to establish a connection with other computer equipped umbrellas in the area. The color of the umbrella was created by LED lights in the umbrella to indicate the connection status, red signified that the mobile device was trying to establish a connection with the and blue means that a connection has been made. The umbrellas were chosen for aesthetic reasons and the creators "... believe these transitory networks can add surprise and beauty to our currently fixed communication channels."

This project embodies New Media art in how it involved a group of people to create the final product. This collaborative effort brought together people from all backgrounds, from architects to engineers, as well as designers and artists. As with many New Media projects that I have come across, the idea came up in a context other than an artistic one. Umbrella.net came up in an engineering context but had an artistic charm to it which allowed it to express an idea in a different way.

What caught my interest with this project was the want to find out more about the colored umbrellas. I think that to better relate to connecting to a network, Green LED lights would have been a better color for being connected to a network than the blue LED. On everything that I have ever seen, green means connected and red means that there is no connection. This change would have allowed a clearer understanding of the umbrellas and the mobile devices attached to them being connected with each other. I did like the dotted lines between the umbrellas to show that all the umbrellas were connected to one another because it was visually easy to understand.

This project was found on Mark Tribe website and the site can be found HERE.

This image was my original one turned in a week ago. The baby was intended to symbolize people in general that were being pushed to eat healthy. The fast food symbols were thoughts of those people and what they would rather have over healthy food, symbolized by the green baby food.



This above image is my second attempt based on the critique received from the first image. It seemed like people were having a tough time grasping how the baby knew about fast food in the first image. Instead of changing the baby to an adult or child I decided to change the "thoughts" of the baby. I thought popcorn suited the image better.

TOROLAB

A group called Torolab created this project in the early 21st century by using a series of GPS transmitters and specific Torolab-designed clothing to explore logistics of the daily life of Torolab members over a 5 day period. The members were all from the twin border cities of Tijuana and San Diego of which a map was included in the animation of the raoming lab members. The idea behind the project which they called, The Region of the Transborder Trousers, was to use GPS systems to accumulate data which would be entered into a computer and analyzed by a program which they had altered. From the data that was input, a piece of art was born. Along with the GPS data to show where people have been, there were different colored circles to represent the location of the Torolab members with the diameter of the circles to show the amount of fuel that remained in their tank. This successful design was presented as an installation at an art show in Madrid known as ARCO.

This project, though it was not meant to be used for this purpose, takes a look at one of the busiest borders in the world. By tracking only a handful of people in the Tijuana/San Diego area, one can get an idea of the amount of activity surrounding the border. By releasing this in Madrid where they may not know about the area, I feel like more can be pulled from the projection than by those who understand the area and may overlook the activity of the Torolab members in the region. The Spaniards will analyze the projection and may be able to compare the region to one that is around them. By releasing in other parts of the world, cultures are connected, compared and related in different ways than how they would be through looking at data points of similar circumstances. The installation feels much more personal that data.

I really like this piece because it is a different way of looking at people from a different region and where their like takes them. It give a personal account of their life which can be understood by all cultures, young and old. There are no barriers for understanding this installation. I feel like that is important with new media because much of it is shared between people of different backgrounds and cultures. Without barriers it is all for anyone, not just for those who received background or those that know a little about the region. Thought this was a great piece!!

This was found on the Mark Tribe Website HERE.

John Klima's - Glasbead

John Klima's online art, Glasbead, is an interactive 3-D interface that allows 20 people to make music collaboratively. The interface is a 3-D translucent blue orb with stems that look like pistils of a flower radiating from the center of the orb. There are two types of stems, bells and hammers, which can be moved around the orb with the mouse. The bell stems are for participants to compose music and upload the file to the stem. By moving the purple rings around the bell stems, one can control the pitch and volume of the music. The music file saved on the bell stem plays when the hammer stem comes in contact with, "strikes", the bell stem. The idea behind the Glasbead came from a Nobel Prize winning novel by Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game. In the novel Hesse talks of a futuristic game where "cultural values are played like notes on an organ..." and requires input from people based on their background and knowledge. Klima created a spin off of this idea when making this piece creating a futuristic musical instrument requiring collaboration from different people.

This online art form is a very interactive piece which embraces the idea of New Media Art. By allowing people to simultaneously create music by themselves or with the help of others online, it brings people from different backgrounds together for a cause and to create art. While this interface allows people to create music/art, it also allows the other people on the system to analyze it and try to understand it. You don't have to be a composer to be creative on this system and have your "voice" heard by a lot of people. Klima is trying to bring people together to combine their ideas and provoke the creation of art that would otherwise not likely occur.

This interface is meant for bringing people together but it is art in itself. The orb and the stems are aesthetically pleasing and very cool to look at and interact with whether you are making music or just spinning the orb and moving the stems. I enjoyed this piece because I feel it encompasses all that New Media Art is. The piece is art in itself but it goes further than just that to being an interactive program for all people to enjoy!

I found this on the Mark Tribe website which can be found HERE.

Amalgamatmosphere

A group named the Radical Software Group (RSG) created CarnivorePE (Personal Edition), a new version of Carnivore which a digital wiretapping software application used by the FBI in the 1990's to monitor the traffic flowing through the servers of internet service providers. This new version of Carnivore is similar to the original version in that itis able to see what is going on on the internet servers. The program does not spy on emails or chatrooms, as the original version did, but rather turns what it sees on the server into different forms of art. One abstract from CarnivorePE is Amalgamatmosphere. The information that is collected by CarnivorePE represents each active user on the network as a brightly colored circle. The color of the circle reflects a specific activity and the size of the circle is reflects increased activity.

This new version of Carnivore came as a response to the high-tech form of state surveillance used by the Government in the 1990's. Many of the clients of CarnivorePE emphasize the political implications of network surveillance. These pieces of art show how in depth Carnivore can get into other servers and ordinary civilian computers. In an artistic way, you can see the different applications that are seen by the program via the large number of different colors. I like how this program brings the secrets of the government out into the light where people can see what capabilities our government has. While it is somewhat comforting to know the abilities when they are being used against our enemies, these capabilities were and may be being used against everyday civilians.

I enjoyed this piece because it is taking a very complicated computer spying software and creates an art piece that is easy to understand. By making this so easy to understand, those of us that are not as computer savvy can understand how extensive the Carnivore software can look into the internet servers by simply analyzing the different colors and sizes of the circles. Great piece of art and very interesting!

A few pictures.

Remote Sonar Drawing Device

This is a link to the article on Rhizome:
http://rhizome.org/object.php?o=49127&m=1042811

This is a link to a video describing the project:
http://www.dwbowen.com/remote_sonarmovie.html

Remote Sonar Drawing Device

David Bowen, an artist who is involved in a variety of electronic works, designed a project which involves the interactions from people in Minnesota and Spain. In each of these places Mr. Bowen set up robotic devices to draw by the direction of people from the opposite location. The device is composed of a sensor and a robotic drawing arm. Via the internet, sensors are sent to the drawing arm in the other location. Because of this set up, drawings are created in Spain by the people in Minnesota and vice-versa. It was encouraged for the people of each location to partcipate in the drawings taking place on the other side of the globe.

This art project really shows hows connected the world is. It shows that connections between people are limitless. While this project is similar to facebook and twitter in how it connects people from all over the world, it goes a step further in creating physical actions in another location as if they were there. This idea is known as telepresence and is a fast growing idea. David is advancing the connections between people in places all over the world and this is only the beginning of the idea of telepresence.

I think the idea behind this project is brilliant in gaining insight on the different views and ideas of art in different locations of the world. With the increasing need and use of video chatting and video conferences, this idea is another step in making the process that much more personal. I wish the article went more into detail about the process of submitting signals through the internet. This would have provided for a better understanding of the designs that were being drawn. Overall though, I liked how technology was involved in the creation of art but still using the creative minds of the world to input the designs on the paper.

Cool Pic

Thought this was a pretty cool piece of art and thought it might make my page look more colorful. First post down many more to follow.