Fantastic Smartphones, alternative accessories, interactive installations and machine performances highlight the excesses relating to our use of these devices. By imagining innovative ways of interacting with our smartphones or by delegating our repetitive actions to machines, this exhibition takes a critical look at a society that has become addicted to an object that seems to have become indispensable : the “smart” phone.

Our homes are increasingly populated by connected objects. Bulbs, thermostats, TVs, voice assistants and many other devices all try to make our life easier, but in exchange, they constantly collect and share information about us, with their makers and with other companies. And as these devices become part of our home life routines, it’s hard…

Created by Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen, Alias is a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customisation and privacy.

Created by Giulio Barresi at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), Connected Tools is a series of objects that explore alternative rituals that could lead to a more reasonable consumption of mobile technologies.

Created by Automato, ‘Objective Realities’ is an installation and performance that explores the idea of how does it feel to be an object in a smart home. It includes a series of VR experiences that change the perspective from a human point of view to the one of an object, inviting users to see and act in a virtual smart home with the capabilities and limitations of a specific object and listen to the invisible chatter that happens between networked things and the home.

Ideated during a five days workshop held by Covestro in cooperation with the architecture faculty of the FH Münster MSA, InFoam Printing is a novel production process to alter the properties of flexible foam by giving it a skeleton which is able to distribute forces differently and create new kinetic effects.

Created by Lauren McCarthy, “LAUREN” is an online experiment where she attempts to become a human version of Amazon Alexa, a smart home intelligence for people in their own homes. The project will take place as an online three day performance that begins with an installation of a series of custom designed networked smart devices in peoples’ homes.

Showcasing three film collaborations by Liam Young and Tim Maughan, “New Romance: Love Stories from the Machine City” is an exhibition currently showing at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery (Columbia GSAPP) about finding respite and cultivating resistance in the smart city.

Created by Simone Rebaudengo & Matthieu Cherubini, Ethical Things is a project that explores the effects of autonomous systems of the future, speculating what happens to the mundane and insignificant objects we rely on every day.

Developed at the Ars Electronica Futurelab, Spaxels (a portmanteau word from space pixels) are LED-equipped quadcopters. They make up a drone swarm that can “draw” three-dimensional figures in midair.

Resinance explores the potential use of smart materials in an architectural context influenced by the behaviour of simple organic life forms.

Sorry, this is Members Only content. Please Log-in. Join us today by becoming a Member. • Archive: Access thousands of projects, scores of essays, interviews and reviews.• Publish: Post your projects, events, announcements.• Discuss: Join our Discord for events, open calls and even more projects.• Education: Tutorials (beginners and advanced) with code examples and downloads.•…

Sorry, this is Members Only content. Please Log-in. Join us today by becoming a Member. • Archive: Access thousands of projects, scores of essays, interviews and reviews.• Publish: Post your projects, events, announcements.• Discuss: Join our Discord for events, open calls and even more projects.• Education: Tutorials (beginners and advanced) with code examples and downloads.•…

Sorry, this is Members Only content. Please Log-in. Join us today by becoming a Member. • Archive: Access thousands of projects, scores of essays, interviews and reviews.• Publish: Post your projects, events, announcements.• Discuss: Join our Discord for events, open calls and even more projects.• Education: Tutorials (beginners and advanced) with code examples and downloads.•…

‘A Drop of Light’ is an interactive new-media art research project aimed at developing a computer-generated holographic spot as a responsive techno-hypermedium with which the performer interacts and her techno-perception is embodied, expressed, and analyzed.

Web is a fully on-chain generative cross-linked network of 1000 webpages on Ethereum mainnet. All pages and the links between them are generated and form a deterministic universe.

KRILLER is an eternally looping, seven day, globally synced audio-visual broadcast of synth soaked ambient software (online) experience. The weeklong broadcast is divided into 6300 software art ‘cassettes’, each bound to a specific moment of time during the week, minted by its fabricator, and seamlessly fusing with its predecessor and successor to form audiovisual duets and mashups.

SMOG SEASON is a workpiece that pulled PM 2.5 data to satirically compare the bad effect of cigarette smoke on the human body with current Bangkok air pollution by expressing through pictures and warnings of a cigarette label.

Altar-3000′ is a project and a device that explores the notion of an AI prophet, a automated totem of customised belief. The home altar connects to the internet to retrieve latest betting headlines from PredictIt, humanity’s financial positions on the near future IRL.

The path to today’s dance-tech, review the projects by YCAM, and speculate the next steps of dance-tech through a conversation with Richi Owaki, an artist and researcher at YCAM.

The Lost Passage is an interactive experience for the web that creates a new digital home for an extinct species called passenger pigeon. It’s a digitally crafted world of a swarm of artificial pigeons, which seem to be inhabiting a sublime yet destitute memory of a lost landscape.

Created by panGenerator, “Icons” is an exhibition exploring our shared cultural “imaginarium” of digital gestures, symbols, and artefacts, dragging them out onto a physical space, enabling audiences a direct, tactile confrontation and – also literally – a different visual perspective.

Created by Ksawery Komputery, the work is comprised of is a video and the promotional website for Sai Ga, taking on the graphic theme and having a close look at pixels.

An exploratory project into networks’ ability to guide movement through physical space – the name concatenates three popular digital services which perform acts of choreography on a mass scale.

In November 2019, CAN joined the biannual ECAL Research Day to find out how methodologies borrowed from science and engineering can strengthen creative practice—and drive the conversation.

This tutorial introduces you to FLIPDIGITS PLAYER, an algorithm sequencer and a collection of demo animations for a flipdigits display, coded in Processing.

SFPC tutor Celine Wong Katzman reflects on yet another successful session at the artist run school in New York.

As per tradition each year, December is when we look back at the amazing work published on CAN. From ingenious machines and installations to mesmerising experiences that leverage new mediums for artistic inquiry – we added scores of projects to CAN’s archive in 2019. Here are some highlights.

CAN will join (and report from) the ECAL Research Day, an eclectic symposium where artists, designers, and scholars will discuss the entanglement of technology and research.

HOLO curates a series of critical conversations and hands-on exercises as part of the 20th Edition of MUTEK Monreal, Aug 20-25.