Are you at dOCUMENTA (13) and desperately waiting for one of the iPods to experience the new, beautiful and site specific Janet Cardiff piece? Instead of queuing in line I recommend to take the tour with your own phone while playing this Youtube docu clip of the piece below. It’s super fun and adds and extra layer of confusion to the piece! :)

Janet Cardiff and George BuresMiller – Documenta13, Kassel
‘Alter Bahnhof Video Walk’ 2012

DeadDropDog

Site specific intervention
Material: Dog & Flashdrive
Dimensions: 25x60x65 cm
Aram Bartholl 2012

for K67_Urban Router by Kuc & Jan (opening tonight! August 2, Berlin)

If you hang out at K67_Urban Router try to spot Ray and play with him. If you are nice and he likes you take a look at the files he has on him. It s recommended you have a Leckerli or extension wire at your hands! :) Based on DeadDrops

sPEED pROJECT 20 min

first released on http://fffff.at/deaddropdog/

While I do tend to like foreign films and independent films most, I have always had a soft spot for action films, even the gratuitously violent ones. No matter how fantastical or b-class it might be, I find myself jumping in my seat, cringing, cheering for the good guy and on occasion covering my mouth in disbelief. I am a sucker for this stuff, no doubt. When I designed Hit Me! I was looking for inspiration — anything — with the idea in mind that I wanted to create a game that was intense and exciting — not just to play but also to watch. I went through my mental rolodex of action film memories, and stopped at Jean Claude Van Damme’s Lionheart. I studied games such as Twister, Sumo and Fencing for inspiration too, but at the end the fight scenes from Lionheart had a big influence on the game. The circle of spectators, the performance, the spectacle of the 2 fighters fighting a bare fisted, no holds barred fight, and the raw, spontaneous setting of the abandoned parking lot where the fights took place — It had it all. These were elements that I wanted to incorporate into the look and feel of Hit Me! Here is an example: Movies are wonderful inspirations especially for games played in the physical world, because they contain scenarios that connect space, story and characters. Also because it uses a visual language that has been understood by viewers. The latter is actually an useful tool. For example, think of all the nail biting scenarios in all of the action films you have seen over the years — there are certainly patterns we can identify — not just in story but also with the characters and the environment that is involved. These patterns can be used and recreated in the game in order to evoke the same feelings in the player and also the spectators. So I am so excited by Jean-Claude Van Jam, because it highlights the potential of using films as inspiration for games. I can’t wait to see what parts of the films the jammers will use in their games. I hope there will be physical games too! Jean-Claude Van Jam — August 17-19, 2012 7PM Eyebeam Art & Technology Center (540 W 21st Street, NYC) Sign up at http://jeanclaudevanjam.com/

I am very happy to report that I am featured in this week’s science magazine! The magazine isn’t freely available online but I am posting just the little section on me here in case anyone is interested in reading it!

Facing the Genetic Future

Sitting in a therapist’s office, New York City artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg discovered a hair

lodged in a crack in the glass covering a painting on the wall. “I stared at it for an hour,”

she says. “I couldn’t stop wondering who it belonged to, and what I could find out about

that person.”

After reading a story in Science about the new field of forensic DNA phenotyping

(18 February 2011, p. 838), Dewey-Hagborg decided to turn her fascination into an art

project. She collected 11 hairs left around the city by strangers and learned how to test their

DNA at a genetics lab. Now, she’s printing three dimensional masks, or approximations, of those

people’s faces, which will be on display—along with her own—in a January exhibition called Stranger

Visions. The masks reflect eye color, geographical roots, sex, and other traits, but not exact facial

features because forensic phenotyping can’t fill in all the details. But it might one day, and with ever

cheaper sequencing, an era of “genetic surveillance” is looming, says Dewey-Hagborg. “As a society, we

need to have a discussion about that.”