An artist with a background in DJ-ing, electronic music, and visuals for clubs in Japan and now all over the world, Daito Manabe tends to make virtual things real, rather than vice versa. One of the things that I find most compelling in the work of Daito is the materiality, the viscerality of the means of transmitting his bits. As Mitchell Whitelaw points out we can aestheticize transmateriality, that is, the coolness of the not-there, of the purely momentary electric buzz, but there’s no getting around the fundamental essence of a physical entry point. For me to be aware, I must engage my body and the material of the world that lies right beyond it.

What’s so refreshing about Daitos work, particularly in contrast to many North American computational artists, is his willingness to engage the body as a canvas, as a site of action, rather than the engine of action. He might be one of the most interesting post-screen artists working today quite simple because of the canvas on which he’s chosen to work and the playfulness with which he approaches the body as a canvas. You can’t help but notice how for a time computational art seemed to focus on the digitalization and augmentation of space and physical properties. With a rash of compelling works that focus on the rematerialization of digital space, the reverse seems to be gaining momentum. Just as we were all once surprised by the digital mimicking the analog, familiar digital tropes now surprise when revealed in analogue form: real, actuated, physical stuff, moving around.

A projection is not just a projection onto a blank screen, instead, he paints the wall with phosphorescent paint and illuminates it with a laser to paint a transient image. To write a sentence or draw a hand, he arms a robotic arm with an automatic BB gun and shoots it through a sheet of paper.

It’s an interesting thing about the aesthetics of these surfaces: they’re really about not using the traditional screen even though I’m only aware of them because they are on a traditional screen. Without Youtube, I wouldn’t even know the name Daito Manabe, and in all likelihood neither would you. But his videos that he puts up are more than just documentation, more than a simple process video to demonstrate technical considerations, background, the specifics of a set-up, nor are they the slick depth-of-field heavy mini-advertisements of so many design agencies. There’s very little hidden magic or un-necessary polish in both his performances and his videos. An electrode to the face is rather difficult to miss, its effects are unmistakable, and that’s part of the point: if you’re at all empathetic, you can feel it too, even from the audience or from half a globe away in front of your computer.

There’s another un-mistakable reference floating around in Daitos work: the club. One could imagine a dance floor as a fluid particle simulation: forces inspire bodies, particles influence one another, density and energy increase and decrease in patterns. It’s the perfect territory for a computational artist. A crowd of women with miniaturized versions of club light displays walking around Tokyo looks like a club. The synchronized bodies of Particles At YCAM resemble nothing so much as either choreographed dancers or generated flocking fireflies. The music is absent but its pattern can almost be heard, synaesthetically. What’s interesting is that these objects could very well be virtual, but they simply aren’t. Their movement could be played out in a purely virtual plane, but it isn’t, and that’s what makes them so more interesting. What’s a wave without a medium? What’s a beat in a club without people to listen? His history of working as a DJ and VJ makes perfect sense: in few places is computational technology as visceral, as embodied, as in making music.

“from hardware hacking to modular LEDs and custom software, they participate in what might be called “expanded computing”, using the malleability of digital media to reactivate its presence – and thus our presence, too – in the world of things.” – Mitchell Whitelaw

In his excellent essay “After the Screen” Mitchell Whitelaw talks to as post-screen imaging: making images on things that remind us that they’re in a single place and that, despite our illusions to the contrary, in a material sense, we are too. In Daitos bodily works and his physical works the pixels are not simply pixels, they are automata that speak to one another. His physical pixels swarm and synchronize, his human computer interfaces play their people; as in Stelarc, though perhaps in a less frightening way, the machine drives the human. Much of the early cybernetic performance art emphasized the strangeness of a human and machine co-creating a being. It was scary and weird. The lightness of Daitos work comes from his playfulness. I always get the sense that it isn’t so much that cyborgs are weird, just that his cyborgs are a little weird. When he uses the face as a solenoid of sorts, an actuated surface, it’s very similar to things that architects and material engineers design for and dream of. Just made ever-so-slightly weird. Another word might be “quirky”. But that minimizes what I think is the importance and the curiosity of the things that Daito makes. More than anything else, his work reminds us that the promise of hyper-surfaces and hyper-actuated technological skins, is at the moment only delivered by us and our bodies with all the strange, funny, and sometimes uncomfortable corollaries that implies.

Childhood Ghosts is an interactive animation created by Eric John Olson using openFrameworks with a series of hand drawn frames of a child. The installation allows visitors to engage digital character via a set of predefined tracked movements, a sort of discovery to make the character react and come alive.

The music sampled in this video is by Kim Hiorthøy.

Originally from Tacoma, Washington, Eric John Olson is an artist and engineer. After graduating Seattle University in Computer Science and attending Columbia University for Human Computer Interaction, he worked on a number of large interactive art installations in New York City. His personal work often mirrors his life-long relationship with technology and science and its conflict with art and nature. It is this tension between the logical and emotional and between literal and figurative that animates his art.

For more projects by Eric Olson, see ericdidit.com

See also Boo! [Processing]

Created by Keyvane Alinaghi, Simon Lebon and Damien Marchal, Boo! is an interactive installation created using Processing and Pure Data that allows viewers to interact with zombies in the projected scene.

The unusual component of this scene is the strange behavior of the zombies. When the viewer hides his face or turns his back to the image, the zombie who had been facing him takes a few akward steps forward. When the viewer looks again at the zombie, the latter stops dead in his tracks. It is as if a mere glance from the viewer—whether expressing curiosity, disgust, or fascination—were enough to awaken a feeling of shyness or shame in the breast of the blood-thirsty creatures. The esthetics of the installation are those of currently produced video games. The script, however, runs counter to the rules of the genre, providing an unusually negative ending. The zombies end up devouring their victim whenever there are no viewers or when the viewer, horrified, hides his face in his hands, peeping at the screen through his fingers instead of looking at it directly. Once the zombies have finished their meal, the frame of the scene expands, revealing a new victim. The only changing aspect of the action is the time it takes to eat the victim, which depends on the attitude of the spectators.

Technical Direction and Art Direction : Keyvane Alinaghi
3D Infography : Simon Lebon (Meconopsys)
Software development : Damien Marchal

With support from EnsadLab, as part of the school’s research program on relational set-ups. Additional support from the French National Research Agency, as part of the research program Praticables – Dispositifs artistiques: les mises en œuvre du spectateur, and from the Maison européenne des sciences de l’homme et de la société (MESHS), Lille.

Project Page

(Thanks Emilio)

Almost two years after its initial release for Mac OSX and Windows, Tale of Tales have ported their title The Graveyard to Apple’s iPhone platform. As of now, The Graveyard can be purchased in the App Store for $1.99. As with the PC release, a Lite version is available for free.

Finalist in the category of innovation in the last year’s The 12th Annual Independent Game Festival, The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michal Samyn (Tale of Tales). In The Graveyard you play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game, an experiment with realtime poetry, storytelling without words. The Graveyard is an emotional journey of empathy.

“The Graveyard offers a player the opportunity to imagine themselves in a certain situation,” explain creators Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. “It’s not a game in the sense that there is a way to win or lose or a puzzle to solve, or even a story to uncover. But the interaction does immerse you in a virtual world filled with narrative, an equally powerful feature of the medium of videogames. The iPhone version of The Graveyard is the same as the PC version. Only a few elements have been removed or simplified to allow it to run on the iPhone hardware. But the fact that you hold the game in your hand and touch it with your finger, adds to the sensation of fragility and preciousness.”

Without revealing too much, you really must try the game for yourself.  The free download version is similar to paid ($1.99) but does not include the possibility of death. The full version of the game is exactly the same as the trial, except, every time you play she may die.

The game was originally built using the Unity game engine and considering easy portability it’s great to see Graveyard now also available for the iPhone.

Auriea was kind enough to share 5 promocodes with us to give away to you, our readers. If you would like one, please leave a comment below and we’ll pick 5 best comments later today.

Tale of Tales BVBA is a games development studio, founded by Auriea Harvey and Michal Samyn in Belgium in 2002. The purpose of Tale of Tales is to create elegant and emotionally rich interactive entertainment. We explicitly want to cater to people who are not enchanted by most contemporary computer games, or who wouldn’t mind more variety in their gameplay experiences. For this purpose, all of our products feature innovative forms of interaction, engaging poetic narratives and simple controls. more

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $1.99
Developer: Tale of Tales

Devil’s Tuning Fork is an exploration game viewed from a first-person perspective, where you play as a child trapped in an alternate reality after catching a strange illness and falling into a coma. The unknown world is a dark one and has no illumination, but a tuning fork that you find at the start of your adventure can be used to feel your way around the maze of rooms and platforms.

Watch the clip below for what may seem a scary little adventure. Available as a free Windows download, 42.8MB.

See also this flickr set for more wonderful images.

(via @differentcloth + IndieGames.com)

Finalist in the category of innovation at this year’s The 12th Annual Independent Game Festival, The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn (Tale of Tales). In The Graveyard you play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game, an experiment with realtime poetry, storytelling without words. The Graveyard is an emotional journey of empathy.

Here is a little extract from the Tales-of-Tales website on the development of the game and ideas behind it:

When we talk about “story” with respect to our games, we don’t mean linear plot-based narrative constructions. When we say story, we refer to the meanings of the game, the content, its theme. We believe that expression in any mature art form is driven by this content, by the story. In computer games, however, the reverse is often true: stories are chosen because they mesh well with a certain game structure or mechanic. Since games are about winning, they tend to feature stories about heroism and good versus evil. And even those stories are forced to fit the tight corset of game rules. read more..

Without revealing too much, you really must try the game for yourself.  The free download version is similar to paid ($5) but does not include the possibility of death. The full version of the game is exactly the same as the trial, except, every time you play she may die.

The game has been built using Unity game engine and considering easy portability to the iPhone the platform provides, we may expect to see The Graveyard on the iPhone sometime soon. For the time being, you can play the game on both Mac and Windows platforms.

The Graveyard

+ read also The Graveyard Post Mortem – Development and Theory

System Recomendations:
Mac OSX, Intel or PPC processor, with Radeon or GeForce video card (G5, iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro)
Windows PC, XP or Vista with Radeon or GeForce video card (no integrated graphics)

Tale of Tales BVBA is a games development studio, founded by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn in Belgium in 2002. The purpose of Tale of Tales is to create elegant and emotionally rich interactive entertainment. We explicitly want to cater to people who are not enchanted by most contemporary computer games, or who wouldn’t mind more variety in their gameplay experiences. For this purpose, all of our products feature innovative forms of interaction, engaging poetic narratives and simple controls. more