Two open calls for residencies, more details here. Apply now!
Tue - Sat, 12 - 6PM / 212.937.6580 / 540 W 21st St. New York, NY 10011
Timewarp is an experimental documentary film about the perception of time and its translation into images in our memory. The film translates interviews with Manuel de Landa, Bruce Sterling, John Perry Barlow, and others into graphic renderings questioning the nature of time and its many representations.
Alvin Sonic Incubator
The Alvin Sonic Incubator is a sound sculpture, composed of Plexiglas, speakers, audio electronics, wire, and metal filings. It is a crude neural network in which 8 sound sources build electrical connections to each other, creating a soundscape that evolves independent of human manipulation or computer control.
Viewers encounter the machine in its latent state, with no audible sound. Lights blink peacefully in sync with 8 subsonic pulses, lighting the room. The speaker cones rise and fall as if breathing. Metal filings grow into dynamic and changing magnetic forms once sound is added to the system. To start the process, a simple switch labeled: Procreate (learn) and Die (forget) can be flipped. A beginning tone is then added to the system. This tone will jostle metal filings, which grow to form electrical connections, producing audible sound elsewhere in the system. The sound will continue to grow until the environment within the sonic incubator is depleted of metal filings. Phasing patterns produce a music of overtones that change as a viewer moves throughout the room. At any time, the process can be aborted by flipping the switch back to Die (Forget).
A9 Weekend In this new piece, Holmberg references the concepts behind his most recent work, Weekend,which was visually rooted in Jean-Luc Godard’s similarly titled film. Holmberg's Weekend re-contextualized Godard’s scene of a post-apocalyptic traffic jam by isolating and splicing together individual frames from the film to create one image which scrolls across the screen via slow pacing to match the original camerawork. Holmberg’s A9 Weekend uses street-level photographs found through Amazon’s A9.com map service to visualize Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, from both sides of the street. The images are composited into one image for each side of the street, running at the same pace as Godard’s Weekend using a tweening process. The audio from Godard’s famous tracking shot is juxtaposed onto the A9 tracking shots, and the contrived videos of both sides of Sunset Blvd are screened on inward facing monitors which are spaced 10 feet apart, creating an illusion of space.
Accessible Happiness
Accessible Happiness (AH) is a prototype under development. It started as one artist's personal point of view on blogs, specifically video blogs. AH is an online/offline installation where users can participate in the current 'flow' of some pleasant emotional states (happiness). Although the initial moods/files are uploaded by an author, AH allows the user to add material via the site's A/V editors. Individual expressions are layered together, as holistic and direct means for continuously examining the possibilities of combining the imagery and the audio. AH decomposes, collapses, melts and dissolves files, accentuating and diminishing their impact. The piece creates often surprising narrative threads. AH doesn’t respond to any fixed boundaries, but could be described as an A/V book, one sequence in VJing, an eclectic mix of print and new media styles, an ever-changing digital painting and/or an immediate and fluid browser/less net piece.
The artist will demonstrate the numerous methods for processing and displaying the files via a local version ofAH. She will illustrate for the audience the main principle of the piece when completed: all graphical (visuals, texts) uploaded files will be displayed in previously designed shapes (no grids, no rectangulars), with custom commands (dynamic dragging, resizing, transparency, context menu, etc.). When finished, AH will be located at http://www.kalogera.net/addiction/ah/flash
Second Song: Live at Red Square
Alighiero Boetti inserted an “e” between his first and last name dividing his subject into two autonomous identities: Alighiero and (e) Boetti. His Twins, 1968 (a photomontage of the artist alongside a life-size copy of himself) signified an ironic gesture of authorial nominalism, a doubling of signatures, a destabilization of authorship and style. One becomes two; a twinning leads to an imaginary collaboration. In a world that operates within a system of regulated information (demographics, boundaries, history, language, etc.), this nameplay provides an insightful commentary on authenticity in an age of endless reproduction.
Lam is interested in a hypothetical collision of the biographies of John Lennon and Vladimir Lenin, where the latter will narrate the life of the former, and vice versa. Using biographical data, archival footage, and their writings as readymade, the project simulates a dialectical exchange (October Revolution meets the Beatles and the Anti-war Movement). The project deals with the possibility of reinvigorating a leftist political imaginary and the promise of a collective utopia.
For Eyebeam Circuit, Lam will exhibit a prototype of the second installment to his Lenin/Lennon series, entitled Second Song: Live at Red Square. Mixing concert footage of Paul McCartney’s In Red Square 2005, with footage shot of the Red Square Building on East Houston, New York City, the video installation borrows from the mechanics of the body switch movies in the 70s and 80s.
Scrambling the phrase “Live/live at Red Square” and conflating a “concert for the free” with free-market real estate, the work traces the flow of information within a globalized mediascape, addressing the discourse of mourning, displacement and remakes.
In addition to being a homage to John Lennon and Vladimir Lenin, Second Song is inspired by the writings of Annette Michelson, Three Songs for Lenin, by Dziga Vertov, and the work of Jia Zhangke.
Ghost Jockey is a computer program that continually generates mashup audio and video. The program repeatedly swaps audio samples from a library, layers and aligns them by tempo and key, and makes decisions on volume levels. The visuals are created by running a Google image search on the name and artist of each sample, cycling through the results, and adjusting the brightness with the volume of each sample track; the result is multi-track layered images that pulse with the music.
Culled from the artist’s music collection, most samples are intended to be recognizable; many of the visual results are also identifiable or even iconic (album covers, portraits, etc). The chaos of the web, however, still yields unrelated and often amusing results. This flood of historical information raises an inquiry into contemporary popular music’s heavy reliance on nostalgia, as a distraction from tedious structures or aesthetics. The result is entrancing, yet the relative each with which a computer subsumes the role of DJ and VJ comments upon the lack of originality required to create a directionless or non-hierarchical collage.
Tactical Gizmology is a subcategory of Tactical Media. Beatriz da Costa and Critical Art Ensemble have facilitated a series of workshops in which interested participants could obtain basic knowledge in low- tech consumer electronics and use a series of different "gizmos" in political micro interventions. The aim of Tactical Gizmology is to introduce the use of electronic hardware and consumer products into the often software and print media dominated tool-kit of the Tactical Media practitioner.
Interactive Digital Cinema Project
Immersive Interactive Multisensory Cinema Capture and Playback system studies novel aesthetic, expressive and narrative possibilities enabled by creative misuses of hardware and software technologies and computer vision methods. The project utilizes appropriated, hacked and modified hardware, microcontrollers, multiple 3d and video softwares using a custom workflow, and a minimalist viewing furniture based on a customized version of finnish industrial designer Esa Vesmanen's lounger design.
Core system components are: A) A 17 1920x1080 progressive HD cam 3D capture rig, B) Software based capture workflow consisting of 3D surface reconstruction/image based rendering, batch processing, 3D file formatting and importing to Unity3D Pro realtime game engine, C) A custom selfbuilt 1920x1080 progressive LED backlit stereoscopic 3D DLP front projector built from hijacked Samsung/Texas Instruments components, D) A custom lounger chair modified together with designer Esa Vesmanen based on his lounger chair designs (www.puredesign.fi). The chair consists of a selfmade USB scent stick engine microcontroller board, scent designs by artist Hilda Kozari, Clark Synthesis Platinum transducer, novel phase accurate speakers for speaker based crosstalk cancelled binaural 3D audio. User Interaction is tracked in a subtle manner based on tracking of the viewer's head in 6 degrees of freedom (X, Y, Z, pitch, yaw, roll) by an OpenCV computer vision routine, connected to Unity3D game engine.
Projector front panel:
17 cam hd capture rig:
USB scent engine microcontroller board:
Lounger prototype by Esa Vesmanen of Puredesign:
Collaboration Partners: Marko Tandefelt: overall concept, 3D scanning rig, scent engine microcontroller, interaction development; Donnie Bugden: game interaction programming; designer Esa Vesmanen of Puredesign: lounger industrial design; artist Hilda Kozari: scent design; Antti Louhivaara, designer of Aurelia speakers: speaker design
Special thank yous to: Daniel Lélis Baggio of visualblaster.com for his generosity of spirit and brilliant OpenCV/Unity3d 6 dof head tracking code examples
USB scent sticks kindly provided by Aroma USB/Debreu Ltd.
Unity3D Pro game engine kindly provided by Unity3D
DXG 595 video cameras, related custom firmware kindly provided by DXG USA
Initial stages of the project have been supported by Greta and William Lehtinen Foundation and AVEK The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture Vieteri grant (Spring grant)
Each day for a year, starting on September 1, 2007, Superfund365 visited one toxic site in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We began the journey in the New York City area and worked our way across the country, ending the year in Hawaii.
Today the archive consists of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund's National Priorities List (NPL). Along the way, we wrote an email update with highlights and conducted video interviews.
Superfund365 was conceived, designed and produced by Brooke Singer. The programming and Flash guru behind the project was John Kuiphoff. Kurt Olmstead provided business analysis and additional programming. Emily Gallagher assisted with project research and EPA relations. Camera and sound work by Andrew Rueland.
Superfund365 is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding provided by New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
Special thanks to Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green of Turbulence and Lois Marie Gibbs of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice.
Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut
1966-72, 1992, 2:59 min, color, sound
Part of a collection of restored early works by Nam June Paik, the haunting Beatles Electronique reveals Paik's engagement with manipulation of pop icons and electronic images. Snippets of footage from A Hard Day's Night are countered with Paik's early electronic processing.
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