It is not entirely unusual for a Canadian wildlife documentary to open with grainy footage of an animal being carefully approached by park officials, but any similarities between Bear 71 and nostalgic Canadian depictions of wildlife end about 15 seconds into the timeline. This interactive documentary opens with a young bear being sedated, hogtied, tagged with a GPS receiver and set free into the wilds of Banff National Park as narrator Mia Kirshner dryly explains that the tranquilizer used to facilitate the takedown was Telazol, developed “by the same people that make Zoloft and Viagra.” From this moment onwards our protagonist is ‘Bear 71′ and as she bounds back into her native habitat the point of view radically shifts to an abstract topographical map – an interface for exploring data and video collected documenting this subject’s movement and activities between 2001-09

Continue reading.... Bear 71 – Interactive Documentary [Flash, Review]

“The fireflies are leaving the city, looking for a new home. Let your touch guide them as they soar through the skies and dance among the trees” is the description of an experimental video game ‘Flight of the Fireflies’ by Jonathan Hise Kaldma that takes you on an atmospheric journey through places and emotions. The focus of the game is not on the challenge – but on the experience.�

Continue reading.... Flight of the Fireflies – “Atmospheric journey through places and emotions” [iPad, Games]

The City of Lille (FR) commissioned the Rotterdam studio of media artist, architect and 2009 Dutch Design Price winner Daan Roosegaarde to build Lotus Dome (2011-2012), an upcoming living aluminum foil structure that ‘blooms’ in response to touch and warmth. A “futuristic view on the Renaissance”, Lotus Dome merges elements of architecture and nature into an interactive experience. Or, as the artist often refers to his work, “techno-poetry” – boom

Continue reading.... Lotus Dome [Objects]

Puppet Parade is an interactive installation by Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson of Design I/O that allows children to use their arms to puppeteer larger than life creatures projected on the wall in front of them. This dual interactive setup allows children to perform alongside the puppets, blurring the line between the ‘audience’ and the puppeteers and creating an endlessly playful dialogue between the children in the space and the children puppeteering the creatures.

Continue reading.... Puppet Parade [openFrameworks]

Peter Kernel asked Andreas Gysin to build an interactive video for their upcoming album. The result, and although unfinished and missing some of the elements Andreas originally planned for, is a wonderful play of particles, typography, music and interaction.

Andreas writes on his blog:
It was fun to rewrite the particle engine I was working on and to test different behaviors and colorings. I tried to overcome the “organic” feel of force driven systems with grid snapping and other “smart” distribution rules. It was interesting to sync the sound to the animation. I also tried to sync videos with a constant framerate to the main system: it worked quite well but later I abandoned the whole idea of working with video feeds. The main idea was to visualize the word-lists in the song but I didn’t want to introduce a font directly into the scene so it was kind of obvious to form words with the particles… as in any dot-matrix display. Oh and the particles: simple (bitmap-cached) circles. I tried different shapes and always came back to a plain circle. But in a moment I tested with donut kind of shapes and the result was simple but interesting:

The only part where I had time to implement the sum of those shapes was in the beginning sequence.

For more information see ertdfgcvb.com/anthem-of-hearts

Peter Kernel: peterkernel.com

“Goethe Institut Barcelona” is the latest work by Sebastian Neitsch. The project consits in a simple audio-reactive installation in the entrance hall of the Goethe Institute in Barcelona. A microphone hanging from the ceiling picks up sound which gets transformed into projected wall graphics using VVVV with FFT.

Sebastian tells us about the process;

“To map the space I developed my own “drawingtool” which automatically defines spaces out of 4 Points and than makes Grides out of them with the correct perspective. This way I did not have to have the Space as 3D data but could just install the projectors and do about half an hour of klicking and the mapping was done.

After That I had a lot of points defining edges and grids. What I did was a simple FFT analysis which gave me a value for each incoming frequency (256 different values) -> now I multiplied or added those values to the positions or rgb-values of planes and points.

To make it a bit more unpredictable I created a timeline which consisted out of a counter that counted one value up every time a certain soundvalue was hit (lets say > than 3) This way the different stages depend on the history of the soundlandscape in the room. After that I added some random stuff – depending on that timeline and that was basicaly it. Every time the counter reached 2000 everything started again from the beginning with different randomized values.”

For more work, see sebastianneitsch.de

Previously:
Kinetic Chandelier SILKE [vvvv] by Sebastian Neitsch …
Maintenance, Repair and Operations AV [vvvv] at Ars Electronica …
Nemore [vvvv] – a sound garden of 36 bendable graphite poles | by …

Setup:
3 projectors (Benq,MX613ST)
1 standart gamingPC with nvidia gfx card
1 MatroxTripleHead2go for the Projectors
1 customized microphone including amplifier

Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises ELSIE

Usman Haque has, on several occasions, made the observation that there is an important difference between interactivity and responsiveness (see for example -pdf). A responsive system is a fundamentally linear  set of relations, a kind of reaction where the same thing happens every time a given action is performed. A normal light switch is responsive in this sense. A typical light switch doesn’t consider any other variables, or have any other behavioural options. Pressing the switch will either turn it off or on, in what is a linear causal relationship. A properly interactive system is very different in its logical structure, and is characterised instead by a relational and circular (or more complex network) causality. In a properly interactive system, a given action will produce different results, because it depends upon the context at that moment, the history of previous interactions, and the relational creativity of the system. To take the banal example of a light switch again: in an interactive system an input might turn on a light, but it could equally result in other behaviour. A properly interactive light might set itself at different levels according to other sensor inputs, or the light might not come on at all, and instead curtains or windows might be opened to allow in more light. It might even ask you if you are afraid of the dark, or if you need help. It might try to sell you a torch, or it might just remind you that you are wearing shades. The post-war maverick ecologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson used a different example to illustrate the same point. If you kick a stone, he said, then the trajectory of the stone is a simple mechanical affair, that can easily be calculated using Newton’s equations. If you kick a dog, then you do not know what is going to happen. It might bite you, or bark at you, or run away. A dog interacts with us. It has its own agency, and that is the important issue here.

One point to be made here then, is that many of the installations, systems and apps that we might broadly classify as interactive, are actually just responsive or reactive. There is nothing per se wrong with reactivity, and of course such responsive and reactive systems can in any case be ‘looped’ and networked to form components of more complex and properly interactive feedback systems. The important point rather, is that properly interactive systems are interesting, as they are able to stage a series of philosophical questions regarding the nature of agency and creativity – important questions that perhaps cannot be posed in any other way.

The way that circular causal systems which feature feedback and recursion act as minds was the broad research focus of the post war project of cybernetics, and has been the subject of a recently published book by Andrew Pickering, called The Cybernetic Brain – Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010). In this work, Pickering takes the reader through this fascinating period of experimental work at the boundary of art and science, which he describes as “some of the most striking and visionary work that I have come across in the history of science and engineering”.

Pickering focuses upon the most radical traditions within cybernetic research, which largely arose out of the work of a series of distinctly eccentric British researchers, who he describes – borrowing a phrase from philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – as performing a nomadic science. He notes that “unlike more familiar sciences such as physics, which remain tied to specific academic departments and scholarly modes of transmission, cybernetics is better seen as a form of life, a way of going on in the world…” Pickering considers many experiments that have come to take on a legendary status within the history of cybernetics, ranging from Ross Ashby’s Homeostat (a network of four machines composed of movable magnets with electric connections through water, which would exhibit a range of emergent self-organised behaviours), Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises ELSIE and ELMER (which would respond to each other’s  lights, or themselves in a mirror), to Stafford Beer’s remarkable Cybersyn project for Salvadore Allende’s government in Chile (an early form of the internet, which created the basis of a de-centralised socialist planned economy. For an information rich – though political analysis very poor – documentary, see here). Of particular interest to Pickering is the work of Gordon Pask, whose experimental installations and assemblages of various kinds captured in a uniquely distinct way, what Pickering describes as the “hylozoic wonder” of radical cybernetics – that is to say, under what conditions can we think of all matter as (at least capable of) being alive and thinking.

Gordon Pask was heavily influenced by the ideas of Gregory Bateson – in particular Bateson’s anthropological work with various Balinese tribes, and later with family therapy and schizophrenia. In this research Bateson showed how our very experience of being a ‘self’ is produced out, or emerges out of, our participation in a network or ecology of conversations with other actors in our environment: people, objects, rituals and so on. Bateson suggested that

“the total self-corrective unit which processes information, or as I say, ‘thinks’, ‘acts’ and ‘decides’, is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’.”

For Pask famously, the conversation became the paradigm for thinking about interactivity – much of which focused on the question of how do systems learn and teach, or as Bateson described it, what is deuterolearning: learning how to learn? Pask’s writings in this area can often be rather obscure, especially to the newcomers to the field, and Pickering provides an excellent introduction to these projects – including Musicolour, SAKI, Eucrates, CASTE, and the yet more experimental chemical computing projects – many of which were developed in association with architecture schools and in art settings. In all of these projects, Pickering reminds us, Pask is ultimately staging questions about who we are, and what we and our world might be; questions which the ‘ecology of mind’ of radical cybernetics can still help us with today. In this regard, I can’t put it any better than Usman Haque, who has stated that:

“It is not about designing aesthetic representations of environmental data, or improving online efficiency or making urban structures more spectacular. Nor is it about making another piece of high-tech lobby art that responds to flows of people moving through the space, which is just as representational, metaphor-encumbered and unchallenging as a polite watercolour landscape. It is about designing tools that people themselves may use to construct – in the widest sense of the word – their environments and as a result build their own sense of agency. It is about developing ways in which people themselves can become more engaged with, and ultimately responsible for, the spaces they inhabit.”

–

About the Author: Jon Goodbun is researcher interested in networks of architecture, process philosophy, radical cybernetics, urban political ecology, and the natural and cognitive sciences. He sometimes refer to himself as an metropolitan tektologist, for want of a better description. His work focuses on near and medium term future scenarios. He is currently printing his PhD, working on a book ‘Critical and Maverick Systems Thinkers’, and planning some kind of exhibition on ‘Ecological Aesthetics, Empathy and Extended Mind’.

http://www.rheomode.org.uk

Flutter is an interactive artwork by Dominic Harris, and produced by Cinimod Studio. Presented at this years Kinetica Art Fair, the installation explores the viewer’s encounter with a rabble of virtual butterflies.  Inspired by some ideas from the zoetrope and its later successor, the praxinoscope, by introducing interactive component it attempts to distance itself from the linear nature of the historical devices. As the viewer moves along the piece, the butterflies respond in various manners, directly interacting with the viewer. The object is 4.5m long, consisting of 88 monitors mounted as double-sided video fins protruding from a front surface mirror.

I asked Dominic about the technical component of the installation and how it was all achieved. Dominic writes:

All hardware and control is bespoke, developed for the Flutter artwork.  Each of the 88 screens is individually controlled from a PCB that holds 1 gigabyte of uncompressed full-resolution AVI animation.  Each of these is connected in series to a DMX data signal, where the DMX provides the frame number of the animation file to display update at 60 fps.   A single solid state computer runs the overall installation, taking the data feed from the two thermal tracking cameras and interpreting their outputs to determine the correct animation frame number for each screen.

To get more information on the project, see this project page on Cinimod Studio’s website. A new edition of Flutter is currently being prepared and will be launched as a limited edition later this year.

Dominic Harris is an interactive artist whose chosen palette of materials include lighting, interaction design, and electronics. Dominic’s artworks exhibit an on-going fascination between the marriage of evocative and beautiful concepts with the inventive adaptation of cutting-edge technologies. Dominic designs and fabricates his artworks at Cinimod Studio, a multi-disciplinary practice he founded in 2007.

onedotzero are seeking innovative short films, installations, interactive work and live audiovisual performances to showcase at the BFI Southbank, London, UK, 10-14 November 2010. The five-day festival is the first stop on onedotzero’s extensive worldwide network of events. It is a fantastic opportunity to get your work seen by a like-minded, connected and creative international community.

This year, as part of our annual international tour of festivals and events, the team will be running a brand new category entitled ‘code warriors’. They are looking for individuals and organizations that use code creatively in their production of short films, installation pieces or live audiovisual performances to submit their work, and the most imaginative examples will be chosen to be part of our events . For more information on how to submit, visit http://www.onedotzero.com/submissions

Extended deadline for receiving entries is 16th july 2010, 5pm.

Submit here

This years festival premieres at the BFI Southbank, London, UK, 10-14 November 2010 before touring internationally.

To keep track of all the events related to CAN, see our Event Calender or subscribe with iCal here.

Fun and engaging interactive installations by spta with Luis and Felix, two students based in Berlin. Inspired by Todd Vanderlin´s Mask Video, the duo started with a simple face-tracking application which progressed to animated masks, with each one with it´s own little story. The end result are wonderful interactive pieces that look like a lot of fun. Three fun videos embedded below, one the monstermaker and another project by spta: “Green Power – be a politician”.

It took us several months to transform human beings into wild, colourful, dancing and screaming monsters, but it finally worked! There are two kinds of monsters you can mutate into: the bad ones, edgy and snarling in red, orange and pink or the good ones, roundy and innocent in green, blue and yellow. If you pipe up, the monster opens it´s trap, too.

Have you ever seen politicians dancing in front of an interactive installation? YES WE DID! The party “BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN” celebrated their best vote in history – to the surprise of all, we created a funny installation with animated politician-masks that included green power and many clichés!

Made with openFrameworks and and a combination of ofxHairFinder and ofxContourFinder + thanks to openCV.

Green Power – Demo Video from spta on Vimeo.