The ‘Going Viral’ research project engaged by principal investigator and Fluxmedia founder Tagny Duff assisted by Antonia Hernandez explores the way contemporary developments in biological and medical sciences provides new ways of thinking about and theorising viruses in their biophysical, technical and socio-cultural manifestations.

The Microscopy Project developed by Brandon Ballengee, AlisonLoader and Tagny Duff combines microscopy and video animation to ‘explore the liminal space between living and undead.’ (http://www.fluxmediaresearch.com/#515798/Microscopy-project). Using an inverted tissue culture microscope and a video camera the project images stained frog specimens aiming to explore and develop techniques for experimental video, (re)animation and still imaging of organisms at the microscopic level.

Researchers associated with Fluxmedia in 2010-2011 include;

Fluxmedia founder Tagny Duff (Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies University of Concordia) and Artist and Researcher exploring and working with medical imaging, biological materials and laboratory cultures;

Artist and Biologist Brandon Ballangee, who combines a fascination with fish and amphibians with the techniques of commercial art photography – his work has concentrated on researching and documenting mutations in amphibian populations, this work includes an almost performative inclusion of the public in the artist’s surveys as a means of engaging public interest. Brandon is visiting scientist at Redpath Museum. McGill University and PhD Candidate of the University of Plymouth;

Filmmaker and animation specialist Alison Loader whose work has explored identity, race and cultural heritage and whose research interests include Stereoscopy, Animated Installation, and Anamorphis;

Antonio Hernanadez whose research has focussed on the intersection between pornography and domestic space motivated by a ‘personal quest for a new ecology of domestic space’;

Britt Wray a Biologist, Artist and Science Communicator whose research interests include ‘biotech criticism, synthetic biology, evolutionary ecology, conservation bio, biomedical ethics, radio broadcasting and documentary’. Britt is workshop coordinator at StudioXX a bilingual feminist digital art centre for technological exploration, creation and critique.

Claire Kenway who has a background in music and sound art and whose research focuses on the intersections between sound, space, experience, and emotion. Claire has performed internationally as a DJ for over a decade although now works with sound in installations.

Geneviève RUEST, is a Montréal based visual artist working with digital print media and installation with medical imageries. Her artistic research focuses on the ‘human body through its transformations and mutations from generation to generation.’ (http://www.genevieveruest.com/html/biography.html)

Interdisciplinary artist Kelly Andres who is ‘fascinated with ecologies and energies from those of cellular species such as plants and animals to those of electronic media such as radio waves and transmission devices’.

Interdisciplinary Artist Vanessa Rigaux whose practice encompasses performance rooted in theatre, live sculpture, contemporary dance, clowning, collaboration and improvisation. Vanessa is interested in the role of the clown and the absurd, dichotomies , nature, and the performer audience relationship.

Mapping Online Publics ‘addresses the problem of scale in online personal communications and the need for disciplinary renewal in media, cultural and communications studies’ (Burgess, 2010). The project is interested in ‘computer-assisted cultural analysis; tacking, mapping and analysing blogs. twitter, flickr, and youtube as ‘networked publics’’ (Burgess, 2010).

Mapping Online Publics is based on the notion that the development of social media sees the convergence of user generated or shared content, online social networks, and communication. The theoretical framework of the project is that personal communicative ecologies constitute public communication. This means that tracking levels of activity, topics of interest, changes over time, and relation to other media, allows the researchers to address questions regarding the formation of communities and network around issues, the dynamic of interaction between issues and networks, and the interplay between personal communication and the formation of ‘networked publics’. (Burgess 2010)

Although the Mapping Online Publics project is in its early stages the project has tested a variety of tools for a multimodal analysis of both blogs and twitter. The researchers use Gawk, Leximancer and Wordstat for textual analysis of posts, have engaged link analysis on blog networks, while using a tool developed inhouse, Twapperkeeper, for crawling and archiving tweets. Gephi the socalled ‘photoshop for graphs’ has been used successfully to demonstrate the potential for a time based visualisation of the ‘life’ of issues as the develop and subside in twitter using both the content of tweets and networks formed of hashtags and replies.

A recent presentation published online by Jean Burgess, and examples posted on the project’s blog show the potential for the rich visualisation of issues playing out in the blogosphere and on twitter during the Australia Federal 2010 election campaign.

The collection and representation of Australian biodiversity information online is currently handled by a range of services and institutions across disciplines and approaches. These include (for example); The Australian Virtual Herbarium, The Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums, the Australian Natural Resource Atlas, The Biomaps gateway to biodiversity information hled by Natural History Institutions, The Australian Plant Census, The Birdata Atlas of Australian Birds.

The Atlas of Living Australia aims to support, augment and extend the diverse range of existing collections that document Australian biodiversity making that data both extensible and interoperable. A significant part of the project is providing a system capable of aggregating, managing, and developing nomenclature and taxonomic information between across institutions and collections. This decentralised and collaborative approach to metadata will allow a more distributed approach to the work of collecting, identifying, and aggregating information related to biodiversity.

A dynamic approach to the nomenclature and taxonomy has two outcomes – it streamlines and economises the collection and digitisation of biodiversity information while allowing for its more effective re-use and extension across institutions and by the greater public. The Atlas is interested in supporting the work and activities of existing organisations and networks by building the potential for a more agile and participatory collection and digitisation of biodiversity information while at the same time providing for the dynamic aggregation and redistribution of that data in the interest of open and distributed research.

By aggregating biodiversity information the Atlas hopes to make existing work and activities of its various stakeholders available and interoperable with the information and research of the Australian Plant Phenomics Laboratory and the Australian Pacific Network for Global Change Research and ensuring this information is made open and accessible beyond the biodiversity research community – to, for example, the Australian Biosecurity Intelligence Network, the Integrated Marine Observing System, and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network.

The ALA was officially launched in July of 2010 and will become publicly accessible in late 2010.

Partners include the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), The Australian Museum, The Museum and Art Galleries of Northern Territory, Museum Victoria, The Queensland Museum, The South Australian Museum, The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, The Western Australian Museum, Southern Cross University, The University of Adelaide, The Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry, The Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water and the Arts (DEWHA), as well as the representative bodies concerned with the administration and management of biodiversity collections.

The project is funded by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Strategy and supported by the Super Science Initiative form the Education Investment Fund.

References:

Atlas of Living Australia Launch - Infrastructure for Biodiversity Research (Donald Hobern, 28 July 2010) – PDF (8.2MB)

Atlas of Living Australia Website – http://www.ala.org.au/ accessed Friday 8th Oct 2010.

Simon was the lead Artist involved in the Archimedia building project http://www.archimedia.org.uk tasked with facilitating the participatory development of a new home for the Knowle West Media Centre – A centre based in the Knowle West Area in Bristol – that aims to develop the creative, educational and social potential of people within a historically underprivileged area. The Archimedia project assured that the local youth were involved with every step of the development of the new centre.

A complete list of Simon’s project are available at simonpoulter.co.uk.

His most recent work includes an essay in a collection published by the Knowle West Media Centre called Collapsing the Gap. The collection explores ‘the increasingly complex relationship between culture and regeneration’ and Simon’s essay At Risk provides a critical analysis of the way public funding for ‘Creative Industries’ is skewed toward the development of landmark buildings and the importation of ‘culture’ or ‘creative industry’ into areas deemed as requiring regeneration.

Simon writes that;

‘The artistic work commissioned as a
part of a regeneration programme is an opportunity to
develop an encounter, not limited to a street bollard or
bauble. This encounter can offer both the artist and the
community the opportunity to expand their understanding
of the ‘whole scene’ and is a two way process.
When it stops being an encounter, and becomes an
imposition of the state or other agency, then it becomes
meaningless and unhelpful.’

Simon’s practice, consultancy, and advocacy might be best summarised as facilitating this ‘two-way process’ – as providing for an an encounter between community members (including the artists) in the service of developing, valuing, and extending local cultures rather than simply the imposition of funded cultural or creative industry as a means of cultural ‘regeneration’.

Delib see a potential for ‘apps to act as the interface between government and citizens, seeing government as a platform which is enabled and optimised by an ecosystem of innovative apps.’
(Delib.co.uk)

Delib espouse the notion of government as ‘platform’. They figure government should identify problems and challenge the public to come up with solutions. Under their model the government then uses a series of applications facilitating open and participatory engagement in the problem solving process. These applications facilitate the crowd sourcing of solutions, open policy consultation and development, and budget simulation apps that demonstrate the pressures of competing revenue demands while the gauging public preferences for future spending. These and other custom applications provide an interface between interest groups and the bureaucracy who formulate and deliver policy and programs.

Delib began with the production of political satire site for the 2001 UK elections called spin.co.uk. In 2002 they worked on the first UK e-voting pilots in partnership with BT and Accenture allowing people to vote in local elections using the internet and SMS. In 2007 they won the BBC’s innovation awards for their argument visualisation application called aMap http://www.amap.org.uk/. In 2008 they worked with NAPA and the Office of Management and Budget in Washington DC. In 2009 the Obama Administration used ‘Dialogue App’ to run their first Open-Gov crowd sourcing project.

The Delib team have also produced a ‘Open Gov the Movie’ a documentary about the first 12 months of the Obama administration’s Open Gov initiative.

So far the Delib Suite of Applications include:

Opinion Suite : An open sourced suite of applications for managing and publishing information about every public involvement exercise, build consultations, and increase participation.

Dialogue App: Policy and Idea Crowd sourcing and ‘Ideation’ tool.

Budget Simulator: A tool for simulating the revenue demands and priorities in the development of governmental budgets and for facilitating budget consultation.

Quick Consult: Tools for building and running consultations and surveys.

Citizen Space: A tool for managing , organising and publicising consultations in one system

aMap: A beautifully designed online argument mapping application.

Delib is a business of ‘Team Rubber’ a private Creative Industry Incubator.

Galloway describes her research as ‘driven by a desire to understand how objects, images and stories shape—and are shaped by—people’s personal relationships, social activities and cultural values.’

Galloway’s primary interest is in the adoption and development of pervasive, mobile and locative media technologies and the complex multilinear and ‘fed-back’ relation between our fears, expectations and presumptions and the affordances of emerging technologies.

In her paper in Aether : The Journal of Media Geography titled ‘Locating Media Futures in the Present : Or how to map emergent associations and expectations’ she moves toward a reading of Actor Network Theory that pushes beyond a ‘Sociology of Association’s and toward a more dynamic, affect-aware and speculative ‘Sociology of Expectations’ that acknowledges that ‘tomorrow’s expectations and today’s associations are bound up in rather complex ways’. She argues that this complex binding requires affect and expectation ‘be approached from two interconnected perspectives: one of technological ‘becoming’ and one of ‘hope’ for particular technological futures. (Galloway 2010 in Aether Spring 2010: 34)

Galloway’s current research centres on the New Zealand merino wool industry and the adoption of RFID technology for tracking cattle and sheep. Her research is concerned with the affordances and adoption of RFID technology for  identifying, accrediting, and tracking merino wool as it moves through the production cycle from the back of the sheep to the back of the consumer.

That research looks at the way governmental, industrial, consumer hopes and expectations become instrumental in the development and adoption of RFID technology on the farm and how this alters the relation of the consumer and product, government and industry, but also of farmer and animal. Where the ethical production of merino wool has become and important point of market capitalisation for the New Zealand wool industry Galloway explores the way the development and deployment of RFID might both, be facilitated, and facilitate new modes of association, and alternative narratives of ethical production and management.

This weekend I experienced two very different works of ‘media’ art united by the fact that writing about them will not only and undoubtedly fail to provide an adequate account but also perhaps undermine their value for the reader’s future experience.

You have been warned.

While I’m here interested in the first of these works, Duncan Speakman’s subtlemob piece As If It Were the Last Time, its relation to the second – James Turrell’s newest Skyspace installation at the National Gallery of Australia, is intriguing. Both are works of experience design. This is not experience design in the sense that we are now seeing as pervasive media tech finds it way into retail spaces and public institutions. This is experience design in the sense that both works are designed for a kind of quiet transformation of the way the viewer perceives the world and our place in it.

Quiet - is key here. Neither of these works are interested in mediation or expression. Even the term modulation seems to indicate a degree of intermediation that simply doesn’t apply. At the least the term ‘modulation’ comes close to the sense of a kind of phase shift in perception that provides for \a new synthesis between bodies and between bodies and their environment.

Turrell’s Skyspace installation is a large scale architectural work in the South Garden of the National Gallery of Australia. The work recalls spaces of contemplation or worship. The Skyspace architecture plays with the perception of space and of natural light. It makes the ‘fabric’ of perception tangible from the scale and frame of the body and its movements through to scale and frame of planet and universe and their movements. There is nothing to say as you leave Turrell’s Skyspace – no interpretation to share, no reading to offer, but something like a necessarily and refreshingly unspoken quietude.

Beyond Flash Mobs.

Speakman’s Subtlemob concept similarly modulates the scale and frame of perception in the service of realising a resonant intensity between bodies.

Subtlemob is based on the concept of flash mobbing. Flash mobbing is a mode of collective performance based on the potential for contemporary technology (mobile phones, internet) to organise a spontaneous collection of anonymous individuals to gather in a public space at a designated time and perform a particular act (normally inane or bizarre).

The invention of Flash mobbing is claimed by Bill Wasik in his excellent account published in Harper’s Bazaar in 2006 (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963). In that account Wasik describes the project as essentially self parodying the willingness of its participants to act in transgression of norms only within the unanimity of a group. For Wasik the Flash Mob was a performative critique of ‘hipster’ culture based on the production of an event that was its own sufficient reason.

The Flash Mob concept realised a number of variations and innovations. For the most part the increasing ubiquity of Flash mobs saw them become as mundane as they were inane. The most interesting of flash mobs became more determinedly performative – less based on the spontaneous experience of the mob and more on a deliberate and organised performance. In many cases the presence of as many video cameras recording proceedings as participants begged the question as to who the mob was performing – they appeared like an obstinant child acting-out in front of a mirror. This desire to record Flash Mob culminated in a series of performances the execution and filming of which is so elaborately staged

By 2006 the ubiquity of the iPod added another dimension to the potential of Flash Mobs allowing for ‘Silent Disco’s’ -where participants downloaded a playlist to be played on headphones as they gathered at a predetermined and network-shared (public) space and time. The ‘Silent Disco’ realises the potential of audio to produce a locative, augmented, and social media form without the need for anything but the simplest of consumer media technologies. Its also sees the flash mob move back away from the cynical critique of Wisak and from the pretense of performance. In the process, it hints at a less irony laden experience, an experience more concerned with the implication of a social intensity via the production of shared ‘spontaneous’ experience.

Speakman’s Subtlemob.

Speakman’s subtlemob ‘instance’ As if it Were the Last Time’ extends and capitalises on these later developments. The potential participant is alerted to an immanent subtlemob event by a Facebook group, Email list or via Twitter only days before the event is scheduled. The location of the event is posted the morning prior. For ‘As if it were the last time’ The participant is instructed to download one of two 30 minute audio files based on their birthdate. Each participant is to bring a partner each with their own mp3 player and set of headphones. The content of As if it Were the Last Time seemed heavily biased to a romantic couple- although this wasn’t mentioned explicitly. I’m glad I was their with my wife – rather than a friend – which would have been awkward. The participants amass in the designated space and play the file at the designated time.

Unlike the flash mob -the aim of subtlemob is to remain subtle throughout the event – to not draw undue attention yourself and to follow the instructions delivered in the audio file. Instructions prior to the event explicitly ask participants not to bring video cameras or recording devices. The aim is to be completely absorbed in the moment rather than to be performing for latter recollection or replay. The value of the subtlemob is in the experience itself not in the expressive performance of its participants. Experience of the work is rather akin to being immersed in a cinematic work that has come to life and absorbed the viewers as its protagonists.

As stated, the work consists of two audio files so that roughly half the participants are listening to each file (couples listen to the same file). The files are well produced from an audio perspective with beautifully edited and composed music and professional voice over and minimal (but very effective) additional sound design.

In Experience.

The content of the audio is elusive and ethereal – with snaps of instruction interspersed with near-narrative insights projected onto the people and the space you inhabit. Although these snaps of insight and reflection are very general they become more specific and contextual due to the fact that the actions of the other subtlemob participants fall roughly in sync and are interspersed with the unaware public as they too move through the space.

The content of As If It Were the Last Time isn’t tailored to the space as in an audio tour – its composed to compel your reflection on the space and your place within it, your relation to your partner, and to the other couples, and passers-by that inhabit the space. As participants lean on each other, or look at their reflections, or gaze up at the buildings, or as other people pass by, the narrator will ask you to reflect on what they are thinking and feeling, what possible past, or potential future they each embody in that instance.

The resulting experience is transcendent and dreamlike. I am not usually well-disposed to public performance but in this case it rarely felt like I was performing. I never felt self-conscious during the piece but rather deeply engaged by the work and by the interaction it encouraged with my partner and the space. Like Turrell’s Skypasce installation As If It Were the Last Time never becomes about the content itself, there is no story to take away form the experience other than those that you bring to the space and are invoked by the work. There is no message, only the intense modulation of the relation between bodies and between body and space.

Sydney’s subtlemob was on a friday evening at 6pm in the middle of Martin Place (the middle of post-colonial Sydney). There were 35 couples participating. There is much to be said about the concept of the subtlemob and Speakman’s execution of the concept in the form of As if It Were The Last Time. None of that discussion is really about the experience of the work – beyond the fact that it demonstrates a entirely new form of media art and experience in the use of audio as the basis for truly creative, social, and technically unencumbered augmented reality.

Beyond that -you really needed to be there.

The subtlemob project and the development of As If It Were the Last Time is a project supported by the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol (Who have also supported the amazing Anti-VJ).

Urblove is both a service for the production and staging of location based mobile games and an online community where these games are distirbuted. Urblove provides for users to create their own games and to share their experience in playing them. The project hopes to encourage a sense of urban exploration in the service of creating a more integrated tolerant urban environment.

The project is being developed in collaboration with researchers Pers-Anders Hillgren and Per Linde (Interaction Design) and Karin Brook (Cultural Geography). The project is also developed in cooperation with wireless provider WIP and two community youth organisations RGRA and Tosabidarna. RGRA is a group interested in engaging youth in issues of national and global importance while Tosabidarna is a group supporting female Skaters.

While the project is in the early stages of development it is particularly interesting for its mix of start-up, community support, corporate cooperation, and institutional support.

The centre is founded on the now familiar notion that new media industry has certain characteristics distinguishing it from traditional industry. They argue that ‘technological development is faster and that work within new media industries is based much more heavily on experimentation.

Rather than simply noting, critiquing, or analysing this shift the MEDEA Initiative recognises the implications for research itself. Because digital media is relatively cheap and development fast it is argued that ‘rather than doing careful studies over longer periods of time before acting, it is more efficient to simply experiment.’

The centre is built on the concept of co-production which sees academic researchers working with actors outside of the university including from the corporate sector, community, government, NGOs, and individuals in the development of ‘new forms of knowledge and new innovation models within the field of new media’.

This commitment to experimentation as a mode of research and research-as-doing, coupled with a philosophy of open-innovation, offers an almost improvisational research dynamic. This dynamic promises a moves beyond the notion of overtly determined and instrumental private/public partnerships or the need to farm and protect the value of institutional and corporate IP. The  Centre’s approach to research, design and development promises the support of an open collaboration between community, institutional and corporate actors.

The MEDEA Collaborative Media Institute is located a Malmo University where a large studio space offers the chance for academic researchers, external partners, artists-in-residence and ‘entrepeneurs-in -residence to engage with and develop experiments, workshops, events and creative work in general.

MEDEA is funded as one the KK (Knowledge)-environments funded by the Knowledge Foundation to develop networks of collaboration between Universities and External Partners and programs designed to create opportunities for collaboration between a variety of actors in the service of encouraging innovation.

MEDEA has been a central partner in the establishment of the Media Evolution ‘network hub’ which develops and implements opportunities for interactions between different media industries and skill sets in the service of encouraging innovative approaches and experiments in new media, as well as encouraging the development of business models capable of harnessing the potential of new and networked media.

The MEDEA group funds a series of innovation projects provocatively called ‘do-tanks’ (creating an intriguing parallel to the ‘think-tank’. Projects funded/supported in the last series of grants include;

Dodream – an engine for sketching, sharing, and developing ideas into new and concrete projects.
Parapolis – a project that uses augmented reality technology to allow the public to view, comment on, and reconfigure plans for development in shared or public spaces.
Urblove – a project aimed at developing the tools and strategies for combining urban exploration, gaming and user created content. Urblove is a service for developing location based mobile games in urban environments as well as supporting a community that develops their own games and share their experience of them. (http://www.ozma.se/2010/05/06/urblove/)
Liverse – an application that allows concertgoers to interact with the musicians and for bands to share additional content via ‘mobile tags’ (QR Codes). (trendmaze.com)
The Magpie Nest – a Facebook based application that supports small teams of eight participants in reflecting and analysing corporate stories and dilemmas in the interests of enhancing the transmission and transference of tacit knowledge within corporations.
Din Nature – an interactive museum exhibition that morphs according to a user/clients attitudes to the concept of nature.
It’s my experience – a Web Based Editor allowing users to create location based games and experiences for mobile phone with a focus on the potential they provide for contextualised and informal learning.

The MEDEA centre also supports a research program and a series of in-house projects. The center is directed by Bo Reimer.

Media Evoution is funded by the Region Skane, Malmo City Council, and the EU Structural Funds, Region Blekinge, City of Helsingborg and Malmo University. That funding provides for the support of a number of projects including;

- Cross Media Talent – a project aimed at developing individuals who can move freely between areas of media industry, practice and modes of production.
-A project aimed at encouraging dialogue and cooperation between the film and computer game industries in the hope of inspiring new products, new stories, new processes and business models.
-The Nordic Game Conference and related activities
-The Living Lab Kvarteret run by MEDEA, Malmo University- a new media innovation lab/incubator aimed at establishing networks platforms and infrastructure.
- A research and development project at Malmo University looking at the way local media actors access and make use of available research and development.
- Minc Incubator: a business incubator and development network.
- A number of infrastructure projects supporting new media innovation.

Myoo Create is being ‘incubated’ by Adventure Ecology – notable because it is the company behind the ‘Plastiki Expedition’. Platiki is a sailing vessel built from completely recycled materials – predominantly repurposed PET bottles – and sailed from San Francisco to Sydney to raise awareness of the plastic waste in our oceans. That expedition was the latest of many projects led by adventurer and environmental campaigner David de Rothschild who is the head of Adventure Ecology and the youngest heir to Rothschild banking family.

The Adventure Ecology website lists Myoo Create as a shift in direction. They cite the ‘philosophy they live by’ as the ‘Equation of Curiosity ; recognising that nothing’s really more powerful, inspiring and game changing than acting upon dreams, undertaking adventures and telling compelling stories in order to raise awareness of environmental and social issues while driving innovative, real world solutions’. Myoo Create however marks a shift from attempts to raise awareness of environmental issues via the production and staging of expedition events that aimed at catching the attention of the mass media to the now familiar web2.0. What is perhaps less mundane in this rather late ‘2.0 manoeuvre’ is the recognition that Adventure Ecology always hoped to inspire and contribute to a ‘Planet 2.0’ way of living but that at ‘the heart of any movement is a committed community of change-makers driving each other forward’. There is an interesting although confounding mix of venture capital, social capital, and social media rhetoric being employed on this still fresh venture. Underneath all that is an interesting acknowledgement that their is a great deal of ‘social capital’ available to projects that garner popular but not necessarily industrial support.

Feelix Growing is a large EU funded project that involves a consortium of institutions and corporations. These include; the Adapative Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire, The Emotion Centre at the French National Centre of Scientific Reserach, The Neurocybernetics team at the Equipes de Traitement de Images et du Signal and attached to the Cergy Pontoise University, The Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, The Centre for the Study of Emotion at the University of Plymouth, The Image, Video and Intelligent Multimedia Systems Lab (IVML) of the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems at the National Technical University of Athens, Entertainment Robotics – a spin off of the Adaptronics Group, and Aldebaran Robotics.

This network provides for an interdisciplinary approach to research in adaptive robotic systems that includes proficiencies across neural networks, ethology, psychology and psychopathology, linguistics and facial coding systems, adaptive control architectures, neuroscience, epigenetic robotics, and commercial and consumer robotics to name but a few.

The Project is led by the University of Hertfordshire Team with Lola Canamero operating as the project coordinator.

Feelix Growing is based on the assumption that robots functioning in interaction with humans beings in areas such as care-giving, patient monitoring, entertainment, or serving as companions, must be capable of ‘adapting to incompletely known and changing environments’ and of personal and personable interactions with their human users and partners’.

The project assumes that this end requires robots that can develop according to their social situation – or rather that the utility of robots in human environments will depend on social integration as an effective, agile, and adapatable mode of development within dynamic environments. In this sense the project represents an interesting vector in robotics – away from the emulation/simulation or reverse engineering of what are perceived to be human like qualities – and toward the engineering of an adaptable social assemblage that includes both robot and human/animal/organism.

The project has worked with commercial developers including the Aldebaran Robotics Corporation and their humanoid robot Nao to test the effect of simulating emotional response and reaction of robots. They have tested the social effects of introducing a emotionally responsive robost to the play environments of both human children and young chimpanzees. The focus on these projects is on the integration of the robot as a component within a wider social assemblage.

Luciana was first introduced to EEG after studying with the cybernetic art pioneer Roy Ascott in the late 90′s.  The artist is using the relatively simple 3 contact ‘consumer ‘ grade array  produced and marketted by the artist’s company IBVA. Medical grade EEGS array use in excess of 16+ contacts and this provides sufficient localisation to  provide a topology of brain activity while limiting the noise inherent to the EEG method. Haill presented work at Future of Sound festival in 2008 and is the head of ‘Augmented States of Consciousness’ at the Institute for Unnecessary Research.

The two projects listed on the Institute include; the ‘Audio Index’ system  and the  Inclusive Train Information Terminal. The ‘AudioIndex’ is-a system that allows visually impaired library patrons and librarians to navigate the audio book shelves of a library. Touching the spine of a book provides audio feedback – a project supported by the European Union and is run by public libraries in the Umea region. The Inclusive Train Information Terminal is an accesible information kiosk – the completed and tested design will be rolled out to all Swedish railway stations in 2010.

Malin Grummas a student in the MA program for Advanced Product Design at the Institute was awarded gold at the International Design Excellence Awards for her ‘Clean Air System’ – an intelligent light weight intelligent air filter system for use by firefighters or other professionals working in a a compromised environment.

Rosling is Professor of International Health in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Karolinska Institute – the highest ranked university in Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy in Europe – and eighth in the world. He has been a health adviser for the World Health Organisation and UNICEF and was involved with the starting a division of Medecins Sans Frontieres in Sweden. He served for three years as a District Medical Officer in the Mozambique.

Roslings most recent TED presentation used the Gapminder software to provide a stark demonstration of the link between population growth and improved infant mortality rates and standards of living. The graphic generated by the software shows the dynamic by which population growth subsides as infant mortality improves – a somewhat counter intuitive argument and suggested model for sustainable development. While the Trendalyzer visualisation is a key element in Rosling’s presentation the bulk of his time on stage is spent demonstrating the complex of affects of health and wealth on population using plastic Ikea tubs to represent population in first, developing and third worlds and a pair of thongs, a model bike, car, and airplane signifying standards of living. This is a man completely in command of the statistics and an extraordinary communicator – to some extent the Gapminder/Trendalzyer software is a manifestation of that command rather than its simple instrument. There is perhaps a lesson for developers and designer here as we move into an era of we development that focuses on the production, exploration, and manipulation/visualisation/mediation of large datasets.

His work as co-manager (with Kaj Grønbæk) of the Interactive Spaces research centre involves; The design and implementation of IT systems that are designed with a specific focus on ensuring the seamless integration of information architectures and the physical environment (Info Gallery, Echoes of the City, Wisdom Wells), The potential presented by pervasive computing for new forms of sporting interaction and extension (iSport) and The potential for context aware computing presented by pervasive computers ubiquitous networking and mobile sensor, capture and positioning technologies (Urban Web).

Peter’s research publications are concerned with the both theoretical and pragmatic exploration of new approaches to interaction design and have, for example explored the innovative concepts of ‘Collective Interaction’ (with M.G. Petersen Designing for Collective Interaction in Randall, D. (ed) From CSCW to Web 2.0 European Developments in Collaborative Design, Springer Verlag -in Press.) and ‘Frame Shifting’ (with Thomas Markussen, Mapping Cultural Frame Shifting in INteraction Design with Blending Theory 2008 -www.ijdesgn.org). Peter is the Conference Chair (with Olav W. Bertelsen) of the DIS2010 conference. He sits on the board of the Nordic Design Research Network Nordes.org.

Under the Cutural Heritage focus of the centre the DUL has worked with Moesgård Museum to produce an interactive display allowing visitors to create and record their own rune stone designs. Under the Digital Art focus the centre has curated an exhibition of work exploring Surveillance in contemporary networked and pervasive media cultures. Under the Digital Art fous the centre has also employed the ‘Talkaoke’ format developed by the British Artist collective ‘The People Speak’ to explore the potential for digital/networked art to open spaces of public dialogue and exchange and as a commercial and cultural ‘facilitation’ engine. The Talkaoke format involves a donut shaped ‘news desk’ in which a central interviewer host a ‘talk show’ with the participants seated around the table discuss a particular user -led issue. The format of the table encourages and open and intimates engagement which is then recorded and presented on screen on site and online. In the same vein and in collaboration with ‘The People Speak’ once again the DUL directed a game show  ’The Pledge Pyramid’ that encouraged people to discuss options  and to vote for an idea for combatting the effects of climate change – participants were required to donate ‘hard cash’ and the collected funds were awarded to the ‘winning’ option. The project Atmosphere Co2 involved the translation of Co2 levels to sound and light in the form of 3 sculptures positioned in public spaces- exploring the effects of making the non-sensuous qualities of the environment sensible. The data from the sculptures’ sensors was captured to pachube.com. Pachube.com is a site that acts a an open repository/collection point for environmental and other forms of realtime sensor creating a real time source of CO2 information beyond the immediate and the sensible.

The centre also publishes extensively on management training, management and business communication, and participatory design, and the analysis of public and management discourse.

The Video and accompanying website and mobile app  is an impressive collaborative effort involving 33 listed collaborators many of whom are commercial motion designers or motion design firms, web developers, and interest groups. The narrative of the film is framed by the failure of the 2009 CopenhagenSummit on Climate Change to finalise an international agreement on the reduction of Carbon Pollution. The film claims that an effective ‘War on Climate Change’ must be also ‘War on Consumerism’ – a war our governments are unwilling and perhaps unable to fight. The film then proceeds to argue that we require a return to the form of Swarm Intelligence that was characterised by the counter-cultural movements of the 60′s that were undermined by their (superficial) reduction to a marketable ‘individualism’. The internet and specifically Web2.0 and Open Source development are figured as providing and demonstrating the potential for a return to the true and marginalised potential of 60′s collectivism. This new found potential will provide the potential for open source solutions to Climate Change.

Six short ‘essays’ accompany each of the films in order to develop its themes and to provide a basis for ongoing discussion. They provide some more detailed insight into the claims made by the film. More importantly they detail the specific qualities and models of web2.0 and Open Source development figured as being the basis for this new counter-cultural efficacy. The film and accompanying essay argues for a three tier architecture for harnessing and motivating a ‘swarm’ intelligence to act on Climate Change. The first of these tiers is an open source, collaboratively developed, Green Knowledge Base – an engine with which to share both simple and complex solutions and contributions to reducing CO2 emissions and approaching sustainability more generally. The model for this tier is the Wiki. The second tier is rather less detailed and appears to be a collaborative engine along the lines of a version control system  - where I ideas could be shared, fleshed out, developed, and implemented in a collaborative environment. The model for the second tier is, rather predictably, Linux. The third tier is a socially driven engine of promotion, networking and information, to quote; ‘This is where green activism 2.0 is expressing itself’. Somewhat disturbingly/tellingly the relevant model here is described as Facebook meets Indymedia.

The film project is divided into the six chapters mentioned above. The release of the film was staggered to promote discussion of each section of the film while the film was still in production. It is clear from the COTW website, however, that this was a social media promotion strategy designed to give consumers a sense of ownership over the film and its ideas and in the service of developing an ‘environmental brand in itself’.

Amongst the mostly UK based designers and producers listed as collaborators the film also lists the Betterment Bureau- a team of likeminded media producers and designers working to ‘make the world a better place through design’, and Ladyverd.com an online magazine ‘that was created to promote inspiring information for organizations and individuals committed in the war against climate change who want to fight for a better world.’

The projects supported by the Pervasive Media Studio are diverse in both their mode of practice and their projected outcomes. A long terms partnership between HPlabs and the University of Western England was concerned with the development of software allowing for the production, distribution and consumption of ‘mScapes’ or mediascapes – They were also central in the development of an ongoing conference series exploring and demonstrating the potential of mScapes. An m(edia)Scape is essentially a mixedmedia production that uses GPS to both record and playback audio, video, or augmented reality style graphics (mapped images on a smart phones camera/video input – dependent on position) as the basis for a particular ‘text’. Most of these mScape were audio centric allowing for recorded audio to trigger as a user moved through a space. In more recent times the ubiquity of phones with gyroscopes, GPS and compass, has allowed for the real time overlay of graphics on a video image- allowing a user to view an augmented reality through the phones camera. The latter development has seen AntiVJ – one of the Pervasive Media Studio’s residents – working with the HPlabs and the University of Western England on the potential for/feasibility of identifying and tracking a plane in 3 dimensions. The facility for mapping and tracking a plane in 3D space supports the mScape project by allowing the augmented/imposed image to move beyond ‘simple’ two dimensional infomatic style augmentation and toward the potential for ‘architectural’ augmentation in 3 dimensions.

The mScpae project has largely fed into the launch of Calvium – a ‘startup’ aiming at the commercialisation and continuing development of the mScape production and playback tools.

The facility for automatically mapping and tracking a plane in 3 Dimensions also serves the project being developed by Anti-VJ as part of their PM Studio Residency. That project involves the development of a ‘Mapping’ Suite of Applications based on the demonstrated potential for projecting a ‘keyed’ image onto a 3-Dimensional object providing for seamless projected live augmentations of architectural space. At present  AntiVJ projects depend on laborious keying of an image or video to a necessarily static surface or plane. Automated identification and tracking of planes would allow for the mapping of projections to dynamic/mobile surfaces effectively allowing a new form of augmented reality (augmented virtuality??). This potential is further extended by another of AntiVJ’s projects stereoscopic projection – the idea here is that keyed projections on a tracked plane in 3 dimensional space would allow for 3D ‘holographic’ projections.

The PM Studio has also supported research into the use of POV cameras in theatre productions. The ‘Extended Theatre Experience’ has explored the potential for attaching cameras to actors and to objects/props provides for a better or extended experience of recorded theatre although increasingly this has led to the development of new modes of mediated performance.

The SubtleMobs project developed by Duncan Speakman as a residence of the PM Studio is a variation and development of the rather tired/dated concept of Flash Mobs – The SubtleMob projects move away from the simple realisation of a social spectacle that became the standard for flashmobs to explore the more interesting performative affordances of that practice. In the simplest terms this has meant ensuring that the ‘mob’ maintains the form of subtlety that ensures the experience of the ‘mob’ – both between members and for the unsuspecting public – retains its submersion-in and subversion-of the everyday. SubtleMobs participants are told not to bring cameras or other recording devices that might subvert the grounded subtlety of the ‘performance’. The participants of one SubtleMob were instructed to download two sets of recorded instructions to an mp3 player. The recorded instructions were to be played only at the site of the SubtleMob performance and carried out with a partner listening to the alternative/paired recording. The ensuing performance emerges between partners, between couples, between the mob and the public – a kind of purely emergent performative practice.

Their are a number of other  interesting projects and collaborations supported by the PM Studio. The Street Art Dealer project is a collaboration between C6.org and Steal From Work – both groups concerned with public and street art and its marginalisation by market driven art practices and cultures. The project use QR codes (the form of barcoding that allows for embedding and collection of metadata via mobile phone cameras) to allow street artists to sign their work and for ‘consumers’ to then locate work identified by artist (or any other applied taxonomy) – it is suggested that this could lead to a form of commercialisation supporting the work of street artists (perhaps via commissions).

The PM Studio also supports; a CyberTherapy project (collaboration between HMC Interactive, Drake Music, and bibic) looking at the development of simple software that provides synaesthetic feedback (voice to visual feedback) as a form of Therapy for autistic children, a project enabling simple browser based recording and sharing of audio between schools students (Audio Enable), a number of augmented reality and cross media narrative projects, development of the IndieMobile social media campaign engine (Complaint Generator) in collaboration with Indie Mobile (an UX agency).

The PM Studio is supported by The University of Western England and their Digital Cultures Research Centre, Hewlett Packard Labs, and the Southwest Regional Development Agency and is part of Watershed @ Bristol.

Much of AntiVJ’s work is positioned against the status quo of club based VJing – in that the works tend to explore a unified theme, question, or project that is driven by the context in which it is performed or presented – one of AntiVS’s artists, Olivier Ratsi describes one of his modes of production as ‘live painting’ and to a certain degree this term describes the type of work AntiVJ do in a more general sense as well – dynamic time based projections that transfigure the site of their projection. AntiVJ consists of artists Simon Geilfus, Yannick Jacquet, Joanie Lemercier, and Olivier Ratsi, Romain Tardy with music by Thomas Vaquie.

The work of AntiVJ has mostly involved large scale intricately mapped projections onto the surface of the built environment. Some of the work extends to or from the club environment but it real power lies in both extrapolating, deconstructing, and playing with the perception of the surface and volume of architecture via the play of projected light (Desherence, Songdo). More recent work has included  large scale stereoscopic work with the electro outfit Principles of Geometry – a 50 minute exploration of a starry 3D space and work with Mexican composer and producer Murcof – confounding projections that seem to hang and move through mid space at will.

AntiVJ’s work displays a unique aesthetic and a previously unseen degree of  precision in terms of projection onto large scale, multi-faced/multidimensional, objects. The mapping is apparently achieved via software developed in house that AntiVJ intend to eventually release publicly.

See the cross referenced projects for more on the Mapping Controversies projects and network.

These courses and their output along with the collection of resources that support those course represent the first ‘workpackage’ of the MACOSPOL (Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics) project. The student work represents a testbed for the collected resources and the communication and development of the ‘Mapping Controversies’ methodology for a public ‘governmental’ stakeholders.

The project/network is divided into 8 ‘work packages’ and provides a useful model for how to run large scale project/networks across dispersed institutions. Each work package bar the final meta-administrative package has substantial individual outcomes all of which contribute toward the goal of realising a well developed and tested research methodology, toolset, aggregation, and implementation/extension strategy for the mapping/visualisation and finally, the collaborative mediation, of issues of policy debate/contest.

Bruno Latour is listed as the ‘Scientific Coordinator’ and an Actor Network Theory methodology characterises the project. Here however ANT folds into the concerted development of a strategic approach and governmental technology, the tools to manage that approach, and the communication of that approach to different levels of researcher/antagonist.

As the leader of the team working on Work Package 1 Latour working with Sciences Po (Paris), and a number of parties from MIT have established a web site and called Mapping Controversies (http://www.demoscience.org/)  that collects and directs the implementation of resources to the execution of controversy mapping and has developed a set of courses and course materials that allows Science and Technology students to engage in the research and mapping of controversies in science and technology. Many of the projects developed by students at MIT, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), and Sciences Po (France), Manchester University, Oxford University (UK), Ecoles de Mines (france) move well beyond the mapping of purely scientific issues (http://medialab.sciences-po.fr/controversies/) and demonstrate the potential of the approach as a generalised strategy of networked issue collaboration/navigation/mediation/governance. The level and presentation of research performed at an undergraduate level via the apporach is particularly impressive and perhaps indicates the potential for a community level implementation of the MACOSPOL approach.

The Mapping Controversies website also collects a wide range of resources for both the investigation/research of controversy, the collection of data, and the presentation of that data. These include a vast set of visualisation softwares designed for the analysis and representation of dynamic social networks. Many of these technologies are simple and accesible (wordle.net) and the despite the project’s pretence to ‘build one platform’ its clear the methodology itdelf is the primary and directive ‘codebase’ – The project presently aggregates and augments  systems and softwares in the service of this methodology. The most successful of the student visualisations tend to be quite technical implementations or iterations of the NetVis Module (http://www.netvis.org/), although the project also directs students/researchers the promising Prefuse -Java/Flash toolkit as well (http://prefuse.org/).

The courses deployed as part of the project empower the students involved to work through the mapping of controversy from the identification and documentation of the Actors and Propositions involved, through to the mapping/visualisation of the networks they describe, and finally, an analysis of potential outcomes implied by the process and their communication online. The initial workpackage  project tests, supports, and illustrates the development and application of both the MACOSPOL methodology and a collection of mostly open access technologies as they are deployed by relatively low level (undergraduate) researchers across a wide range of institutions and cultural contexts.

The other work packages move toward the collection, aggregation, development of technologies in the hope of consolidating the approach demonstrated by work package 1. They involve; The development of visualisation technologies at Ludwig Maximillian University and the University of Oslo (“Risk Cartography: Visualisation of Argumentative Landscapes” http://www.risk-cartography.org/en_index.html), The development of a compatible set of tools tested/proven as effective in WP1 toward their integration as a platform (Govcom.org, University of Amsterdam) and finally The testing of the platform in the government/policy arena.

It is this final element that illustrates the expansive aims and potential for the project. The project’s synopsis gestures toward the aim of developing/demonstrating the project as the ‘elementary building block of a ‘quasi-parliament’ allowing a multitude of stakeholders, interests and other actors – including the public- to effectively navigate a particular issue. The project aims to develop the methodological and technological ground for a ‘technical’ or networked governance – to develop the ‘democratic equipment’ required for such a governance.

While there are any number of government and institutional initiatives concerned with the development of Gov2.0 MACOSPOL is perhaps the first large scale project looking at the way new methodologies and literacies will be central in the realisation of a more networked and distributed governance capable of routing around the need for Big Government as a principle technology for negotiating interests and navigating particular issues.

The centre includes five research groups – Scientific Visualisation, Information and Geo Visualisation, Computer Graphics and VR, Structural and Civil Engineering and Visual Learning and Communication.

It should also be note that the Centre for Medical Image Science and Visualisation is based at the university teaching hospital and works closely with both VITA and the Norrköping Visualisation Centre.

Research projects include but are not limited to: Volumetric visualisation of large datasets, Data visualisation and Augmented Reality, Haptic Interaction with Deformable Objects, Visual Analytics, Photorealistic computer graphics for virtual and augmented reality, Town Planning, Civil and Structural Design, Learning through Scientific Visualisation.

The Centre for Visual Information Technology and Applications, along with the Centre for Medical Image Science and Visualisation worked in collaboration with the Interactive Institute on The Virtual Autopsy Table project.

The volumetric representation of data appears to have been drawn from the expertise of the Centre for Medical Image Science at Linköpings university . The interaction/installation/industrial design concept and production appears to be drawn from the expertise of the SII. These two elements of the project come together under the banner of the intriguing Visualisation Centre in Norrköping which includes presentations on Swedish innovation in visualisation, educational workshops, a cinema, and a dome projection system as well as providing an umbrella (in terms of funding and research) for visualisation projects. The Centre is closely associated with the  Visualisation Information Technology and Applications centre at inköpings university who is also involved in the development of the project.

The Thinkbox collective is based in and around Windsor, Ontario – across the river and border from Detroit – with all of its attendent musical history. The Detroit  based www.metrotimes.com predictably places Thinkbox in the context of Techno’s genesis, development and bifurcation as moving the techno/electronic aesthetic betond the club dance floors to the gallery and museum space.

Given the timing however (2003-2008) it would seem more likely that Thinkbox were rather more influenced by the increasingly ubiquity of (largely eurpoean) post glitch ambient electronica of the form popularised by the likes of Christopher Fennesz or the ‘Artic Ambience’ of Biosphere. That claim appears reinforced by the individual releases of Christopher Bissonnette one of the founding members of the collective.A sound and graphic designer, Bissonnette use of the guitar and field recordings recalls both Fennesz and perhaps Oren Ambarchi and fellow Canadian (Vancouver) Loscil. Other members of the collective include Mark Laliberte (http://www.marklaliberte.com/index2.html) - an independent curator , ‘project-based’ artist and experimental poet – who also performs ambient soundscape/design work – his Pillow Scenes Soundworks marked the first and only CD release for the collective. Mark has been heavily involved with the Zine culture and currently produces the design/pictorial magazine Carousel (http://www.carouselmagazine.ca/) while exhibiting a wide range of intermedia and installation works that are united by the kind of countercultural cool that belies their zine-culture influences. Chris McNamara is a Windsor based video artist who teaches new media at the University of Michigan. Chris also works with collaborator Dermot Wilson under the name Machydem Inc. – mostly producing film and digital video projects.  Steve Roy, Rob Theakston – an  electronic music producer working a similar vein to that of Bissonette -with a slightly more dissonant edge- and Bill van Loo –  an electronic music producer who also works with guitar to produce live ambient electronica (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGgsCV7gh88).

Daniel Woo is  also associated with the iCinema project at UNSW a large scale hemispherical ‘cave’ style immersive environment although his work tends to focus of speech and natural languages and interface design and usability research.

Woo was central in establishing a HCI education at UNSW and is considered a leader in the field of HCI education and research. He has published widely on interface design, formal usability testing, speech synthesis and interface, spatial audio interfaces amongst other research interests.

Aaron’s work has often included the conceptualisation and visual design of installations, interactives, web applications, multi-screen displays as well as the subsequent coordination required to see the often multidisciplinary nature of cross-media projects realised with a consistency of visual and interactive design.

Helyer’s work is what his website describes as ‘actively interdisciplinary’- linking creative expression, scientific research and technical development. More specifically Helyer’s work is characterised by an interest in the potential for technical architectures to reveal otherwise unseen or marginalised dynamics that span and interweave the development of culture, environment, history and technology .

Installation is the most common vehicle for Helyer’s work which tends to employ elements of computer and mechanical interaction as the basis for an establishing and exploring the visceral relation between body and ecology that it potentialises.

Helyer’s most recent work has developed out of a collaboration with the Satellite Navigation and Positioning Group and Human Computer Interaction Lab of the University of New South Wales (Most notably with Daniel Woo and  Michael Lake of UNSW). That work is based on the Audio Nomad system that provides for the mapping of geo-tagged media and geospatial information in a interactive system that immerses the user in a sonified representation of the environment. That representation juxtaposes sonified meteorological and environmental data with recorded histories, cultural fragments, field recordings (both visual and sonic) making the relations between these ‘readings’ visceral. The user traverses this sonic topology  produced via an immersive multiscreen and surround sound system and the unique Audio Nomad interface  to explore the transitions and relations between the human, biological, and environmental systems.

The Audio Nomad system is the result of a project Helyer began in 1999 and which continued until 2001 called Sonic Landscapes and which employed the spatial audio systems developed by Lake Technology and the GPS systems developed by the SNAP lab of the University of New South Wales (and in collaboration with both Lake and UNSW). That project allowed for a fictive but nonetheless visceral 3D immersive soundscape to be accurately positioned and explored on/in a physical terrain. The subject and site for that work was the St Stephen’s Graveyard in Newtown, Sydney – a site rich with the kind of lost/invisible histories, that along with the invisible or marginalised dynamics of our ecology, constitute the other principle interest in Helyer’s work.

Two other interwoven streams are apparent in traversing Helyer’s catalogue. The first is an interest in oral and sonic histories that is expressed in the Wireless House (2009) and  GhosTrain (2008) projects both of which work on resounding the forgotten histories that are expressed in the sonic markers of a superceded or evicted heavy industry that once constituted Sydney’s inner city life or the oral histories that recount the human cultures to which it gave rise.

The other stream of Helyer’s catalogue is the design of mechanical and dynamic sculptures that harness wind or other environmental (or differential forces-electromagnetic force for example) forces as a means of modal ‘transduction’ – of converting wind to dynamic form (Zephyr 2010), or electromagnetic potential into sound (Swarm 2005), audio to tactile vibration (Adrift-2009, Transformer 2005), kinaesthetic potential into sound and form (Spinner 2005).

Helyer’s work is extensively and generously documented on the Artist’s web site (http://www.sonicobjects.com/) and farexceeds this rather cursory account of his contribution to media art both nationally in Australia and and internationally – The rise of ubiquitous computing and cheap portable, and embeddable, systems of playback has seen sound art move to the forefront of media and interactive art – Helyer has become a central protagonist in this ongoing exploration.

Run Silent, Run Deep is the 2008 Singapore Iteration of the series and involved a mapping of the Marine environment of Singapore harbour onto an immersive and interactive sonic topology that the user can explore via a projected visual interface.

The Audio Nomad project involves the representation of geo-tagged, recorded, media including images, video, sound, juxtaposed with the sonification of geo-spatial information. This reconstitution of this collected data in a sonic topology allows a user to navigate a soundscape in which recorded histories, unseen ecological dynamics, and visceral field recordings are evocatively juxtaposed to reveal otherwise forgotten, marginalised, or assumed networks of relation.

Adrift is amongst the simplest and most linear of Helyer’s works but nonetheless manages to make visceral the complex of relations that characterise and constitute the interactions of human/marine culture.

Eco Located began with a  maiden collaborative residency aboard the MARIN (Media Art Research Interdiciplinary Network) catamaran.

The project took water quality and meteorological readings, geotagged information, made field recordings, and recorded interviews with scientists and the community in and around Belfast Port and during their voyage across the North Sea- concentrating on the ‘Littoral cultures’ – the cultures that develop at the transition or boundaries of (in this case) land and sea.

The information gathered becomes the basis for an immersive surround sound installation that uses the Audio Nomad system to allow a user to enter and navigate an abstract soundscape – a kind of sonic topology constituted of and juxtaposing (sonifying) the information and media recorded during the vessel’s progress across the North Sea.

The Eco-Located project continues a common theme in Helyer’s work that explores the potential for audio to make audible that which be forgotten or unseen – this extends beyond the post modern desire to reveal an underlying or marginalised structure and  to explore the way we might use audio in both new and old technology to realise new networks of relation and remembering between individuals, the communities of which they are part,their ecology, and their histories.

Jon’s solo work is mostly concerned with installation and performance sound projects. He has explored the potential interaction between old and emerging audio technology -most notably between the theremin and the sampler (Sheet and Spiral 1997).Sonic Constructions (2004-2008) is a series of live VJ style performance where projected ink blots (and runs) provide a live data feed that generates an accompanying soundscape via Max/MSP/Jitter. His Sounding the Winds project uses a sensor laden kite to provide a live feed of data via bluetooth to produce a soundscape below (Presented at Electrofringe Newcastle NSW 2005)

Martyn Coutts is a Melbourne based ‘live art’ artist – an art practice defined only by the fact that it tends to fall between the categories and discourse of established art practice and the institutional discourses into which they play – live art is difficult to contain or position in terms of intended audience or defined outcome.

Martyn has worked with, and helped to cultivate, a network of artists. He is,involved with an number of projects that experiment with funding and collaborative models for live and marginalised art practice. These projects include the Live Art List (a blog) and Field Theory (a collaborative funding/support model and collaboration -with performative elements).

In the context of this Dynamic Media Network he is notable for his collaborations with Kate Richards on the Wayfarer projects. He was the recipient of the Green Room award for his work on James Saunders’ The Harry Harlow Project (2009) and has experimented with the use of digital and relay video in choreographed performance works Inside (2004) and Bunker (2006). His work with the ‘live art’ collaboration Deadpan (with Willoh Weiland)  and puppetry/new media collaboration Blood Policy (initially with Sam Routledge) are characteristically difficult to place – although he use of media and a mechanism as a mode for generative engagement of an audience or subject marks an intriguing juxtaposition to the bulk of media and new media art documented here.

It’s tempting to package the form of practice that Martyn is engaged with as related to performance art – a form his work occasionally skirts around and engages. Despite the use of performance as a central mechanism in his work its not clear that expression in any sense of the word is key. The diversity of practices that Martyn is involved recall forms of structured improvisation – perhaps more of the musical or dance variety than theatrical in that the process and the object are inseparable and in constant recursion – the performance is exploratory rather than expressive. There are also echoes of a kind of urban and reflective anthropology (particularly with Deadpan) except that the form of the investigation itself implies a kind of open compositional and playful intent.

While its difficult to characterise Kate’s work as the expression of an overarching concern, most of her works explore the potential for frameworks of action and interaction to emerge out of, and then feed into the dynamism of complex systems. New and interactive media becomes a vehicle for exploring, invoking, disorientating, the generative and or affective potential of these frameworks and the social and subjective states they imply.

Sub_scape is a series of projects by Australian artists Kate Richards and Sarah Waterson that explores the potential of (and for) noisy intersections between datasets, archives and maps to produce emergent and deeply reflective topologies that upend the desire they express for a controlled and instrumental ‘sense making’. In the original 2004  iteration produced for ISEA Baltic (held on a Baltic ferry) sub_scape took the form of a submarine periscope that allowed the user to explore a datascape synthesised from environmental datasets from the Australian Desert and the Baltic Sea. The aim of the work was to explore the isomorphic characteristics and relations between these two widely differing landscapes as similarly affecting/reflecting deeply inscribed  metaphysical, aesthetics, and political intensities. The second iteration of Sub_scape. sub_scapePROOF (2006) used the same periscope interface used in the previous iteration to synthesise a landscape of political and rhetorical sensemaking to explore the relations between truth, discourse and affect. The third and final interation of sub_scape, subscapeCYCLE, used a recumbant cycle as the interface for navigating a virtual landscape terraformed in real-time by data mapping ‘contemporary, technological, economic and cultural ills – some pre-cached some streaming in real-time from the web.’ In this iteration of the project the user navigates a landscape deformed (and deforming) by manifestation of human folly, idealism and agency. The user’s interaction actually reforms this twisted topology so that the input of energy, the user’s very attention, becomes the basis for a sustainable ecology.

Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters  marks the denial of authorial sense making in the age of networked and participatory media, begging questions as to the function of universality in the realisation of shared spaces of generative interaction. The work might also be read as challenging/exploring the perceived continuities, between new and legacy media systems, and exploring the celebration of the multiple at the preference to the ‘universal’.

According to the description of the artists web page (http://katerichards.net/art/eclipse/) the work explores the universe as a generative system informed by a ‘creative intelligence, ordering principles, patterns, significance and aesthetics’.

The work explores questions regarding our aesthetic relation to the universe and the recurrent generativity it describes between astronomical and scientific visualisation and schematisation, cosmology and folk sciences.

The work is also notable for the way Richards is live documenting the process of the works development on an open wiki. If the work explores the universe as both ‘process and object’ then the work is also a recursive function and modulation of that systemic generativity. (http://darkenergy.wikispaces.com/)

Bystander is a multichannel interactive video, sound and interactive installation by Australian artists Kate Richards and Ross Gibson. Bystander is one of the Life After Wartime suite which includes works; Crime Scene, LAW Live, Darkness Loiters, and the LAW CD-ROM. Bystander is the final work of the suite all of which is based on an unsorted and poorly documented archive of post-war crime scene and police photographs. Richards and Gibson have used these evocative images as the basis for a fictional narrative . That narrative  unfolds according to the participants movement within the installation space and their interaction. A ‘kinaesthetic particle animation’ responds, reflects and feeds back on the relation between body and archive. The development of the narrative is keyed to the quality of movements of bodies in the space. A still and attentive participant unlocks a deeper and more focussed narrative unfolding while the hyperactive participant realise a more fragmented and playful experience.

The work establishes a complex play between a societal perception and response to a diffuse, arbitrary, and perhaps ambient criminality and violence and the more complex and highly contextual set of relations that have produced such an archive. In the process Bystander posits intriguing questions about the nature of the archive, narrative, technology (perhaps including the former two but extending to the institution, interaction, photography), and affect.

In ‘Prediction Pieces’ (1981-1991) Jones she explored ‘the way humans arrange the idea of the future within their minds’

The Darwin Translations (1994-99) explores Darwin’s theory of sexual selection across the animal and human and its relation to notions of sexual play.

Deep Water/Aqua Profunda (2001) is a video and sound installation exploring the nature of sexual intimacy (for the Venice Biennale).

The Avoca Project is a sprawling project that explores themes of immigration, subsistance, climate change, and community in the Victorian country town of Avoca.

The project is multilayered game employing the ‘This is not a game ‘ gambit to evoke a rich immersive game space that allowed the national broadcaster to develop a new intimate relationship with its viewers -’reaching audiences that have left the Sofa for the Keyboard’. The Truth About Marika was based on a traditional TV Drama. Before the premier of the television show a women made the public claim that SVT has stolen the story of her missing friend for the Drama Series and was part of a cover up. Her blog became the online section of the game space as viewers/participants looked for collected and shared clues to the missing girls story which were planted in the Drama Series and in Virtual and Actual worlds – the third plane of the game space. Talk Shows were staged including the shows producers, their accuser, and other protagonists.  Printed QR codes were posted in locations for discovery via mobiles. Geospatial information was gleaned via google mappings of clues.

The project might be seen as model for creating television media, broadcast media, and perhaps narrative media more  generally that is event driven and therefore makes good use of the relative difference that broadcast media displays in relation to network based content delivery platforms.

This might be related to the more simple and serendipitous rise of twitter as a backchannel for television. The real-time qualities of twitter and broadcast media appear particularly well aligned -each adding another dimension to the other.

The project is has so far included projects such as a water conservation systems, and a heightening of the ‘foreignness’ of the house as it becomes increasingly sustainable. Artworks are proposed that become indicators to measure and  increase awareness of the developing sustainability of the house – the aim is to build a house that signals its own use in ‘ magical’ as well as useful ways.

He is currently working with the Game Studio @ SICS and is the principal developer of the commercialised pervasive gaming platform ‘The Creator’. He was also involved with the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming.The ‘game creator’ project developed as part of that project is the original  implementation of ‘the Creator’.

The most notable outcome of the project is perhaps ‘The Game Creator’ development and control platform for pervasive gaming which then became ‘the Creator’. That package was used by SVT and mixed media production company The Company P to produce the Truth About Marika – a participative narrative based on a multiplatform multilayered game space including a television drama, web based media, physical and virtual worlds. The game provided for large scale collaboration and interaction by the public. The Project also developed pervasive game models for mobile phones in conjunction with Nokia and a wide range of other models for pervasive, ambient, locative, ubiquitous gaming and interaction.

Her website tells us Senator Lundy has participated in every Senate enquiry relation to telecommunications and Information Technology over the last fourteen years and that she has spearheaded the governments Gov2.0 initiatives.

What the web site doesn’t tell us is that, unlike many federal politicians with responsibilities in the area of network governance, Senator Lundy is a well respected ‘geek’ – She has been known to quote William Gibson on the fly and has been an active participant in the local and international conference and workshops concerning Gov2.0. She has been a staunch, consistent, and informed advocate for an open, transparent, accesible and networked government.

The paper is notable for its detailing of three policy premises or principles that Senator Lundy deems as essential for a move toward Gov2.0 and an ‘open government.

The first principle is ‘Citizen centric services’ – which she defines as a focus on improving or perhaps duplexing the interface between citizens and government. This was a critical recommendation of the governments Gov2.0 Taskforce which started to look beyond a service paradigm in governance toward thinking governance itself as interface between dtatasets, communities, neighbours, service providers.

The second Pillar is an Open and Transparent Government –  Senator Lundy argues that access to information and a willingness to harness the ‘wisdom of the crowd’. While not discussed here the Gov2.0 taskforce used wordpress with digress.it commenting plug-in and wiki’s to allows discussion documents to serve actual discussion with a wider group of stakeholders than would otherwise have been possible or likely.

The Third Pillar is described as ‘Innovation Facilitation’ by which the senator espouses the provision of open access to datasets that are structured and published according to open standards and made available through open formats and API’s. The emphasis here is less on industrial innovation that enabling access to, exploration of, and open use of governmental information in a way that might all the idea of government as interface rather than service to prosper.

The paper goes on to outline some technical requirements necessary to achieve these aims – most notable of these is perhaps a call stop ‘ reinventing the wheel’ – a novel idea suggesting a move away from ‘turn key’ service provision to an enabled public governance.

The paper also announces the work of the Office of Spatial Data Management in opening datasets.

Full paper can be found here

Of his many projects his recent work with telephony systems go some way to documenting the principle concerns of his work. Harwwod has developed a system, the Telephone Trottoire, with which members of the refugee Congolese community in the UK and in the Congo could connect randomly over the telephone in order to share stories and news and choose whether or not to pass that on to another caller. This system routed around the easily traceable nature of mobile telephony and provided a kind of viral mode of  unattributable information exchange and communication. In an interview with Rhizome (http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2297) Harwood is at pains to convey the fact that not particular concerned with anything but the utility of the system to the community itself – When the project required funding it was developed as an art project that put the telephone switches upon which the system was based on display – a kind of memorial (The Tantalum Memorial) to a lost age of analog anonymity and communality and a powerful metaphor for the way Tantalum the metal derived from the precious mineral Coltan and central to the function of mobile phones has driven the Congolese apart.

Harwood is responsible for the MediaShed (mediashed.org.uk) a public access media production lab of which the Mongrel artists work. Together with Eyebeam a like institution based in the US Mediashed has produced  Gearbox – a collaborative database for low budget and DIY film and video making techniques.

cite: http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2297

Some projects with which the lab is associated include:

Nexttext : nexttext.net – A project (based in Processing-Java) that allows the breakdown of text into unit hierarchies (phrases, words, letters) and to apply dynamic behaviours and interactions to those hierarchies.

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace Project: http://www.abtec.org/

Mr Softie: A typographic text editor, for working with the nexttext framework.

The Korsakow non-linear video system has been central to the groups work – Originally designed by New Media artist Florian Thalhofer – the system was further developed in conjunction with CINER-G. Matt Soar is the principle investigator on this project is a major contributor to a growing community of users.

A story from the Concordia University Joural regarding the work of the Research Group, its relation to the Korsokow project, and its use in teaching non-linear video can be found here.

Examples show a CNC Lathe/Router and an XY Plotter. This is  rather more community driven attempt at low level Open Source Hardware design that is nonetheless capable of sophisticated outcomes.

Jonathan Duckworth is an interactive designer/artist based in Melbourne. He is part of the design company ZedBuffer, which occupies an interesting niche between interactive design and art.The objects and installations that he designs are embodied, aesthetic, interactive and functional. Some examples of his work include: ‘The ‘Embracelet’, a prototype  hand bracelet designed to develop and increase hand grip strength for patients recovering from Traumatic Brain Injury (ABI); and ‘Elements’, pictured above.

This latter work is one of his most interesting because he worked with Peter Wilson in Health Sciences at RMIT University, Melbourne. Elements is an interactive tabletop that they both produced in trial with patients suffering from ABI. It provides aesthetic visual, aural and tactile feedback to users, almost dynamically ‘rewarding’ them for skill, progress and level of movement in their upper limbs.

Jonathan’s work now seems to be moving toward the burgeoning field of art and health (See this interview here for his thoughts about working in this area). Interestingly, his background in the late 1990s was in virtual reality design, especially exploring the social interactions of people in VR spaces. He makes the comment in the above interview that: ‘‘I am interested in taking the virtual back into the physical.”. Something that carries over from his previous work in VR design, is to create interactive interfaces such as the tabletop and hand bracelet that leave the participant feeling physically unencumbered by the technology.

STARS  is a web app that brings together a number of ‘semantic web’ tools and interesting audio visual datasets in order to benchtest the potential for developing an open ended space for annotating audio visual material. That said the assets STARs is capable of working with extend well beyond the audio visual.

While STARS seems particularly well suited and uniquely capable for the collaborative annotation of rich media – the possibilites it presents extend well beyond this single facility. The real value of STARS lies in the model it presents for collaboratively mapping and actively developing a dynamic space of richly connected and widely varied assets – rich media, institutions, people, concepts, projects, events, text, taxonomies and folksonomies (annotations).

STARS allows a user to search any of the prescribed datasets via keyword or specified filter. It returns results identified by a neat icon key that identifies them by those varied asset types. The search provides a brief description, an option to reveal an detail description and semantic components, and an option to open a ‘mapping’ of the item.

Opening the map reveals a visualisation of the items semantic connections in a number of varied diagrams (linear, cubic, distrubuted). In each case the map provides an interesting description of the relation between associated asset types. The most obvious example might be a map centered on an institution that has a number of people attached – has links to other institutions through projects –  etc. These maps all open onto semantic descriptions which can be further annotated. I imagine these maps getting much more interesting when video annotations start mapping memes or technical qualities throughout a dataset. The great thing about STARs is that it has kept the annotations, assets and so on on the same level as assets of the order of institution and people. A completely flat ontology like this is incredibly powerful – infinitely generative – because it refrains from prescribing a hierarchy or limit the way things, bodies, concepts, assemblages potentially interact – In fact these very interactions become assets in the database – no longer ‘meta’ – they’ve become differential.

For instance with a system like this it becomes plausible that you might  realise oblique connections between otherwise disparate researchers via the way their varied taxonomies are applied in a set of like media annotations.

Karen Casey is an interdisciplinary artist working across a broad spectrum of the visual arts. Starting out as a painter and printmaker Casey was among a vanguard group of urban Aboriginal artists exhibiting widely in Australia and overseas from the late 1980’s. Since those early years her practice has diversified and expanded to incorporate a range of both traditional and digital media processes.
While her works have taken numerous forms Casey’s thematic interests have focused steadily on the interplay between mind and matter, the physical and the spiritual, referencing both ancient and contemporary modes of thought as she questions and challenges perceived notions of reality, time and space and our collective world view.
Known for her signature light works and earth-encrusted surfaces Casey’s art resonates with a vibrant intensity that elicits intimate engagement, drawing on an indigenous perspective of connection to land.

About TEKS – TEKS, Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre is a non-profit organization founded in Trondheim in 2002.  TEKS is a resource and competence centre that has as a goal to realize productions of techno related art projects within all art disciplines.
TEKS initiates and organizes artistic productions and projects, works with promotion and education through courses and workshops, and acts as organizer or co organizer of various cultural initiatives.
TEKS organizes “Trondheim Matchmaking,” an annual international festival for arts and technology. The festival is an arena for presentations of innovative ideas and artistic projects – a place where competence and resources are maintained and developed.
TEKS is in 2009 funded by the Norwegian government, the Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs and the City of Trondheim.
TEKS is a member of PNEK, Production Network for Electronic Arts.

Wayfarer V1 was a sell-out live event in 2007 at Sydney’s Performance Space – its a live computer game with actors as avatars. ‘Wayfarer v1’ utilised a custom-designed hardware-software system. The players streamed video, audio, bluetooth and RFID from body-mounted Vaio micro computers, to the Wayfarer software which displayed the players’ clock-times, site location, loot and camera point of view.

Urban Agents is the 2nd Wayfarer project – a fortnight long social media event taking place on the streets of Melbourne in late 2009, open to anyone who registers to play. Citizens, agents, advocates and moderators play together to create a smorgasbord of video interventions. Urban Agents tempts you to make sense of your city, to question, report back and to re-invigorate and re-interpret the urban spaces you call home. Wayfarer engages citizens experientially in an event that animates both the real world and online communities.

Virtual Knowledge Studio – The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (KNAW) supports researchers in the humanities and social sciences in the Netherlands in the creation of new scholarly practices and in their reflection on e-research in relation to their fields.

A core feature of the Virtual Knowledge Studio is the integration of design and analysis in a close cooperation between social scientists, humanities researchers, information technology experts and information scientists. This integrated approach provides insight in the way e-research can contribute to new research questions and methods.

The VKS collaborates with the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Erasmus Studio KNAW (in short: Erasmus Studio) based in Rotterdam and with Maastricht University in the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio KNAW based in Maastricht.

Global Minds Project – Global Mind Project is a unique creative venture combining new media art, neuroscience and computer technology. The project was conceived by Karen Casey and undertaken in partnership with software designer Harry Sokol. Together they have developed a means of generating real time video art from brainwaves.
The Melbourne launch of the Global Mind project represents the first stage of an online artistic forum that will creatively engage people through public interaction and collaboration.

A good primer on Hyperdub’s rise and the project more generally can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/22/hyperdub-steve-goodman

To cite that article directly on Hyperdub’s post Burial era;

‘The new Hyperdub sound is all about synthesisers…”It’s like hearing circuitry crying,” Goodman has said of this recent output, and for new signings Darkstar this idea of computer love is a real fascination.’

There is an obvious ‘mutation’ here form a music born of hedonistic abandon in a sea techno-cultural detritus to a more positively generative techno-synthesis.

Hellyer’s Wireless House project aims to reclaim, or rather ‘resound’ the structure. In the process the Wireless House project reclaims the potential for sound to produce a communal space within the park as public space. There is an intriguing differential evoked here  between the communal and the public.

The installation reacts to people who approach the structure calling on a substantial archive of audio, in part contributed by the National Sound and Music Archives and supplemented by an open call for local citizens to record their own recollections of Glebe’s past. This audio recollections are played back at a level that invites engagement without disturbing the park.

In an interesting twist the Wireless House becomes more than simply a memorial to a media passed. Equipped with an Unwired wireless internet node the site also becomes Sydney’s first (official) free outdoor hotspot. The wireless of today and the forms of sociality, communality, interaction into which it folds begs comparison to yesterdays community gathered around the radio transmitter.

The Wireless House project is supported by the City of Sydney Council and Unwired.

Some of here projects include:

Zoomorph (in development): Plugin filters for Imaging Software and Smartphones – simulating How Animals See. (launch 2011).

Evidence (Days Following: Difference) – A honest attempt to capture a ghost using simple image filtering. Actually about the space/time in between the sample/digit/perception.

Rosten (the Voice): Visualisation of people’s activities who visit the site in question. As with ‘Evidence’ this is concerned with the space/time inbetween people, event, that constitute the web. Commissioned by the Swedish National Public Art Council .

Professor Suchman runs courses at Lancaster on Virtual Cultures and a graduate course on the Antropology of Cybercultures – she also teachers in Gender studies and feminist theory.

Her work at Xerox ‘combined ethnographic studies of work and technologies-in-use with the in-situ development of new prototype information systems’.

Professor Suchmann has written two books on the human-machine nexus. The first based on her Dissertation, Plan and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication (1987) and the second a reprise or sequel of the first Human-Machine Reconfigurations: plans and Situated Actions 2nd Edition (2007).

The ACVA’s first exhibition ‘Babelswarm‘ (2008 Nash, Dodds, Clemens), won the Australia Councils inaugural Second Life Artists in Residence aware. (See the project post for more detail on Babel Swarm.)

In 2010 the ACVA will launch ACVALab – an attempt to provide an incubator for emerging practices and practitioner while providing a collective interface for educators, curators and artists to extend and explore the development of virtual art. ACVALab started with a call for artist participants based on the central question; ‘What could a virtual art lab be if it was imagined by artists for artist?’

ACVA also plans to launch a critical journal.

ACVA Labs lists an impressive list of collaborators on the site including;

Coordinators:

Christopher Dodds – Artist and Produce founder of Icon.Inc.

Greg More – Director OOM Creative.

Adam Nash – Artist working in Digital Environments – SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Venic Biennale

Faciltators;

Dr Melinda Rackham – Adjunct Professor RMIT. Founder of – empyre – list/fourm.

Kate Richards – Artist and Lecturer in Convergent Media at UWS.

Guest Presenters:

Dr Justin Clemems: Artist, Lacanian Scholar.

Fee Plumley: ‘Techno Evangelist’ and owner of creative agency ‘the phone book limited‘ – Digital Program manager for the Australia Council for the Arts

Dr Troy Innocent: Senior Lecturer – Department Multimedia and Digital Arts, Monash University Melbourne.

Gillian Raymond:  Online Manager for the National Portrait Gallery (Canberra)

The ACVA and ACVALab projects are funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Users own all the data they collect and they can access this data through smart phones (e.g. iPhone) for future use. Users might want to share their data with friends and social networks to improve bike routes or meet up on the fly. They can also share their data anonymously with their city to create a finely grained database of environmental conditions that can be used to help improve traffic flow, air quality and the like.

Prototypes developed by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab for the Kobenhavns Kommune were launched at the COP15 United Nations Climate Conference. Technical partners were Ducati Energia and Progical Solutions LLC. The project was funded by the Danish Ministry for the Environment.

The project was a partnership between the Arts Council England and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology).

OCEAN aims to facilitate collaborative research by design with a focus of improving the human environment. It has produced work ranging from exhibitions of Performance-oriented Design to publications on 3D Audio and Sound-Art. Its diverse group of members hail from a range of countries from Italy to Israel and Australia to the United States, but are based mainly in Oslo, London, Sydney and Istanbul.

In February 2006, one of Gapminder’s founders Hans Rosling gave a TED talk that demonstrated the most effective aspect of Gapminder’s data visualisation, that is, how data changes over time. In a graph that displayed UN statistics of the number of children per family juxtaposed with life expectancy for a number of countries, Rosling takes us through the changes from 1962 to 2003 like a sportscaster calling a horse race as countries represented by animated, colour-coded dots that grow and shrink as they move across the axes.

The Gapminder site offers both static and dynamic materials in the form of PDFs and clickable flash presentations/applications, but the main draw is Gapminder World, where you can create your own animated data-visualisation by investigating whichever countries and using whatever parameters that interest you.

He developed and administers runme.org, an online repository for software art, which has given rise to works like dot_matrix_synth, where a dot matrix printer is reprogrammed to play music while it prints its own notations in patterns as it is performed. He forms part of slub, a trio of coders who develop their own software for the creation and performance of process-based improvisations and live generative music. In the same vein, he is also a member of TOPLAP, a group of highly improvisatory programmers who write software while it is being executed to generate music and live visuals during a performance.

Yee-King has many years as a composer and producer of electronic music behind him, and continues to perform and release records. An expert user and teacher of SuperCollider (a programming language for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition), he also contributes to the Linux open source community.

In 2005 he started Generator.x as a curatorial platform for generative art and design which has since resulted in a conference, a blog, a travelling exhibition and concert tour. Watz practices out of New York City and Oslo, where he is a lecturer at the Oslo School of Architecture and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

He is the founder of Transmute, the interdisciplinary collective behind Intimate Transactions, an interactive installation that has been exhibited all over the world, where two people in geographically separate spaces inhabit and interact in a shared virtual space.

She has performed audio/visual work with artists like Chris Caines, Shannon O’Neill and Ben Byrne. She has curated collaborative performance events like Semaphore and is also Co-Director of the Firstdraft Gallery.

In many of her pieces a live physical presence central to the work, where the audience’s movement and interaction with the installation directly affects the space. In Potential Energy, where a line of sensors on the wall set into movement the line of chains opposite, the audience functions as triggers. In The Real Thing, a large-scale kaleidoscope where the viewer’s body not only triggers the installation but becomes the content for it, the work literally cannot function without the presence of an audience, as it is their body that is captured as an image, processed and projected as the kaleidoscopic content shifts and changes with the person’s movement.

She has collaborated with performers, writers, video artists and sound artists like Talia Linz, Eva Mueller, Young-Ah Noh, Matthias Erian, Muse Me and Nick Mariette, and participated in residencies ranging from CarriageWorks in Sydney to the Transmediale: Digital Culture Festival in Berlin.

The pair represented Australia at the 2008 Beijing Architecture Biennale.

TechLab’s artist-in-residence program is designed to give artists the time, space and technology they need to realise their digital art projects. It is also intended to be a space of interaction, a place where the public is able to witness the process of creating computer-based art. It is also designed as an engine for innovation with artists being asked to advise on future exhibitions and programs.

“intends to create a sonic space that can support innovation in new electronic music and digital art. This is a world of constant evolution and incessant refinement – the “MU” in MUTEK refers consciously to the notion of “mutation”.

The not-for-profit organization achieves this through a variety of initiatives including the festival itself but also a record label, tours, international events and showcases in Montreal.

Smith blogs at serialconsign.com, he edits and co-curates Vague Terrain and is a contributor to Rhizome.

Syneme‘s aim is to explore artistic practices that are enabled and enriched by networked digital technologies (particularily those that allow real-time engagment between participants) and to ask ” how can we use the network itself as an artistic instrument – not merely a distribution channel.”

To explore such questions Syneme has focused on the development of Artsmesh, a platform that makes expressive telepresence on high-speed research networks possible.

Kenneth Fields is the group’s director.

The creators state that the objectives of ec(h)o are:

to develop a “next generation” interface that augments an existing physical environment with a virtual audio environment, and enables people to interact with the system without directly using a computer device; to develop an interaction model based on a semantic web approach to networked digital object repositories in order to create adaptive responses; and to demonstrate that enabling end-users access to digital object repositories engenders a participatory model for interaction and communication.

Soundscapes are generated based on the users position in the gallery and audio objects can also be triggered based upon his or her past visits and expressed interests. Customisation is possible as each user generates a “knowledge tree” or “a map of relationships” based on their interaction with the artifacts. Taken together these many maps create a “collective intelligence”. Their design is influenced by the philosophy of Pierre Lévy.

Innovation and its relationship with experimentation and artists are particular interests.

Their website states

Artists are innovators, if a new piece of technology or a new medium, becomes available; artists want to try it, to experiment with it, to push the boundaries. Some artists take on the role of a scientist in almost a performative way and some scientists equally take on the role of artist. Attitudes to science, medicine and art have changed over the last five hundred years, in that whilst Science has become more formalized, Art has become increasingly less so. By stepping outside the testable hypothesis artists are free to go off at tangents, to get bogged down in aesthetics and be mavericks.

His books include Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing Associative Engines, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, and Natural Born Cyborgs.

Build Your Own Being utilised the company’s expertise to create an interactive performanceat the Studio at the Sydney Opera House, the Melbourne Arts House and the Canberra Street Theatre in 2007. Data about the audience’s creation and participation is available on the website for use by researchers and media.

Pesce’s most recent research focuses on sharing

CipherCities was developed by researchers at the Queensland University of Technology and launched in late 2008. The project uses the web in tandem with mobile phone technologies such as SMS and phone cameras to to build interactive mobile adventures intent on connecting people with their environments and each other. The website is a repository for games, artifacts collected by users (eg. photos) and social connection. Creators say that “at its most basic, a game consists of a sequence of messages sent and received between you and CipherCities.”

Founded in 1998, the Interactive Institute is comprised of multiple research studios/groups located across the country and each node has its own area of specialisation that contributes to their focus on exploring the intersections between technology, art and design. Their innovative research uses collaborative models to explore digital technologies and their research output includes academic publications, exhibitions, start-up companies and popular books.

Packet Garden is a private virtual world generated by capturing information about how you use the internet. The open source software was created by the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist Julian Oliver. The software was commissioned by the Bristol-based contemporary arts centre, Arnolfini.

The software creates a landscape and grows virtual plants based on the servers you visit and the amount and kind of data you send and recieve. The information you harvest is entirely private and it is suggested that “you can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.”

Between 2005 and 2008 they developed and coordinated The Migrant Project, a collaboration between 40 Sydney-based artists that included performances and the creation of serveral multimedia projects.

CuriousWorks’ second project, All Around You, is, according to their website, “a system for using digital media in a simple, positive, lasting manner in marginalised communities. Currently the system is being developed through 3 year partnerships in two regions: Western Sydney (urban) and the Pilbara, Western Australia (remote).” A resource kit and training program is being developed and will be available to other interested groups and communities in 2010.

The project developed interface techniques and applications to support research into outdoor augmented reality.

Augmented reality (AR) is the registration of projected computer-generated images over a user’s view of the physical world. With this extra information presented to the user, the physical world can be enhanced or augmented beyond the user’s normal experience. The addition of information that is spatially located relative to the user can help to improve their understanding of it. The images and videos on this web site are demonstrations of what a person experiences when they use our equipment.

The project was developed as Piekarski’s PhD thesis, under the supervision of Dr Bruce Thomas, at the Wearable Computer Lab.

OpenAustralia.org utilises Hansard, the name given to the public record of parliamentary proceedings, and networks these documents in such a way that they are made more accessible, easier to find and simpler to use in a networked environment. Registered users are able to comment upon debates and documents, thereby making it easier for Australian citizens to insert their views via annotation of the public record. Cross referencing also makes it easier to find out about your MPs participation and effectiveness in parliamentary debate.

The site was inspired by the UK project http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

The experimental research/practice focuses on generative design processes that address contemporary social and cultural agendas. Included in their collaborative work was an entry in Abundant, the 11th architectural biennale in Venice.

All principles are distinguished graduates of RMIT’s Bachelor of Architecture and are currently PhD candidates at the university’s Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory.

Kokkugia’s wiki collects open source scripts and collaborative tools for teaching and research.

Podborsek and Snooks both hold Bachelor of Architecture degrees from RMIT.

The ART Mobile Lab, for instance, is known for its work on locative media in wilderness areas, while the Collaboration and Visualization Lab is known for its hybrid research practice and is dedicated to “the design of new technologies, applications, and experiences for cultural interfacing. That is, interfaces that encourage shifts in the perception of the self and the everyday lived world through collaborative experiences in spaces where we play, work, and learn.”

As the user goes about their day, the bio sensors capture real-time information on their physical states, including pulse, movement, skin temperature and galvanic skin response. At the end of the day, when the user syncs the collection devices to the tablet, the software interprets the bio data and represents the user’s emotional and physical states as colourful body shapes in positions ranging from fully reclined to upright. The colour of the shapes represent emotional states, with blue for the calm/rested end of the scale, red for the other aroused/agitated extreme, and gradations of purple for the states in between. Whether the shapes are more horizontal or vertical indicates that the user is moving around a lot or a little, respectively. Text messages that the user has received throughout the day, and photos they have taken are also uploaded to the diary from their mobile phone. All this bio and social data is then overlaid on a timeline of the user’s day.

The user can then navigate their diary by scrolling through this timeline and looking at sections of their day and the data associated with it. Photos they have taken are displayed in stacks according to their timestamp, and circular symbols that represent text messages received can be clicked on to reveal their contents. The user also has the ability to write or draw on these sections – perhaps notes on where they were, who they were talking to – adding another layer of narrative.

High-res screen captures can be viewed here and there is a video with more information on how to use the system here.

Affective Diary was developed in the Interaction Lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in cooperation with Microsoft Research. Participants in the project are: Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Anna Ståhl, Petra Sundström and Jarmo Laaksolathi, SICS, Marco Combetto, Alex Taylor and Richard Harper.

Interactive Media Facades (Rob Saunders, Martin Tomitsch, Design Lab)

The Design Lab is a centre for research and creative practice in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. It aims to “foster design as a means of knowledge production in its own right.” The centre’s research staff and postgraduate students come from a range of disciplines including interaction design, electronic arts, computer science and social science.

His research blog  infosthetics.com collects data visualizations and similar projects related to his interest in Information Aesthetics. It takes it’s name from Lev Manovich’s definition of information aesthetics.

See http://web.arch.usyd.edu.au/~petra/ for links to recent projects and publications including her collaborative work Impossible Geographies.

His research interests include the “biopolitics of network culture, neomaterialist cultural theory, transdisciplinary discourses and practices of knowledge, media anomalies, research/creative practice collaboration.” (ARC Digital)

Research projects include Spam Cultures, a project that “aims to develop tools and concepts for a critical understanding of the accidents of digital culture, and address the media anomalies of current digital culture” and to address the “biopolitics of networked culture”. (ARC Digital, Research @ the Centre) He addressed similar themes in his book Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Peter Lang, 2007) and in a volume he co-edited The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Hampton Press, Alternative Communications Series, 2009).

In collaboration with Milla Tiainen, Parikka is creating a conceptual laboratory devoted to Neomaterialist Cultural Analysis. This research will investigate transformations in cultural studies through a series of publications, events and seminars that will engage with trends in media and cultural theory. Forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in 2010 as part of their Posthumanities-series is Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals, Technology and Cultural Theory.

Originally from the USA, fields received a Ph.D. in Media Arts from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000 before moving to Beijing to assist with the establishment and development of media arts programs and curriculum in some of the country’s top institutions including China’s Central Conservatory of Music and Peking University.

An advocate for research-creation, Field’s own domain of practice lies within the area of telematic arts, specifically digital music, while focusing theoretically on issues related to ontology and the technology of inquiry. As well as write and perform his own electroacoustic compositions, Fields has been involved in several sound installations and networked performances internationally, has developed collaborative online work environments for students, and has published widely. He is also co-organiser of the Musicacoustica Festival, Beijing.

Perceiving the Internet to be more than a conduit of communication, but also a medium for artistic creation, performance, exploration and experimentation, at the University of Calgary Fields focuses on building high-speed networks that facilitate live, real-time interaction between participants operating within various media (be they musical, visual, physical, etc), thus establishing dynamic collaborative environments that are not tied to one location, but exist in multiple places at once.

ThoughtMesh was conceived as an effort to overstep the limitations associated with academia’s currency of the peer-reviewed print journal, which can be viewed as an isolating and outdated medium for distribution of intellectual discourse in our increasingly networked environment. Operating via a tag-based navigation system, ThoughtMesh allows users to instantly locate excerpts within essays that deal specifically with the subject matter they are wishing to research. For example, within an essay dealing with a wider topic within new media, a researcher may select the tag ‘interactivity’ to be presented with direct excerpts from the essay that deal with this subject matter. Beyond this, users may also view from a list of sections of other essays throughout the mesh that also share this tag.

ThoughtMesh presents itself as an avenue for scholars to tap into and participate in flows of information Twittering and Flickring across the world. It is also an ideal way for academics specializing in digital culture to situate their discourse within the culture itself. ThoughtMesh’s system of fluid distribution bears benefits when compared to single repository databases in that it interconnects essays and authors beyond their affiliations with single institutions or isolated networks and websites. Users are given the option of submitting their work directly into ThoughtMesh’s database, or simply tagging essays as they are published on a remote website.

This essay by John Ippolito outlines the intended aims and outcomes of the ThoughtMesh project.

Given the simplicity via which the service facilitates a bridging of physical and virtual worlds, Pachube has been employed by users in a number of versatile practical and social scenarios world wide, indicating that its potential is virtually endless. Examples range from consumers who connect their home electricity meter to their iPhone in order to calculate their carbon footprint in real-time, or property developers who connect together several buildings to allocate resources and monitor energy consumption, to interaction, graphics, wearables and games designers who wish to infuse their creations with the intelligence of being able to network and foster communities of people who enter/view/wear/play them.

The development and maintenance of Pachube is currently a main focus of British interactive design/architecture centre Haque Design + Research.

Based in the UK, Haque Design + Research is a centre specializing in the design and research of interactive architecture systems. Headed by Usman Haque, the centre houses the collaborative projects of a collective of designers and architects including Ali Hasegawa, Barbara Jasinowicz, Chris Leung and Susan Haque. The team’s innovation is based on the assumption that architecture is no longer to be considered something static and immutable; it is instead imagined as dynamic, responsive and conversant.

As an architect, Husman Haque’s stated focus has been to consider what he’s called the ‘software’ of space (ie. sounds, smell, light, temperature, electromagnetic fields, social relationships etc) as opposed to the ‘hardware’ (ie. floors, walls, roof etc) – the domain of traditional architecture. His personal work has involved the creation of responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass participation performances, all of which have displayed a celebrated skill for the design of physical space and the software and systems that may bring them to life. His work has been recognized and supported via several prestigious international grants and residencies.

Projects completed by Haque Design + Research transverse the aesthetic and the social. Examples include ‘Reconfigurable House’, an environment constructed from thousands of low-tech components that can be “reconfigured” by its occupants, allowing them to determine the systems that run inside it; and ‘Haunt’, a collaboration in non-visual architecture that uses humidity, temperatures and electromagnetic and sonic frequencies to imbue an environment with a simulated feeling of ‘haunted-ness’.

Pachube is currently a main focus for Haque Design + Research.

As outlined in a measured statement of purpose, prepared by the journal’s editorial collective (including SenseLab mainstays Erin Manning and Brian Massumi), the overriding goal for Inflexions is to promote experimental practices that combine research and practice in such a way as to foster symbiotic links between philosophical enquiry, technological innovation, artistic production, and social and political engagement. Through exploring and connecting these terrains, authors contributing to Inflexions are led to question how their efforts may renew and recast relations between the concrete and the abstract, perception and conception, or the body and technology. As such, topics of interest include inter/trans/non disciplinarity, emergence of new modes of collaboration, micropolitics and the life and death of institutions, the ethics of aesthetics, and subjectivity and collectivity in cultural production.

Significantly, Inflexions is divided into a dual-layer schema guided by the titles Node and Tangents – roughly conceived of as the ‘articles’ and ‘practice’ sections, respectively. Node is comprised of a selection of contributing authors’ articles that are conceptually linked to a specifically titled problematic or theme being addressed in the current issue that sensibly relates to the journal’s overriding goals (eg. title of issue no. 1 “How is Reasearch-Creation”; no. 2 “Rhythmic Nexus: the Felt Togetherness of Movement and Thought”). As authors are encouraged to approach their subject matter via creative or experimental methods, the content of Node ranges from scholarly prose to poetry, ficto-theory, multimedia formats and beyond. In taking advantage of the online format, articles may, for example, present texts and artworks together in such a way as to facilitate their interaction and response with each other within the virtual space of the article – see The Stroboscopic Trilogy by Antonin de Bemels with accompanying text by Stamatia Portanova.

Tangents demonstrates the results or bi-products of artists’ and academics’ individual contributions to the theory and practice of research-creation. While the entries in Tangents strike off in directions of their own and resonate across their own divergences, grouping them together in Inflexions allows for the suggestion of connections between each other, as well as questions being posed in the issue’s Node. Tangents often includes actual artworks made available via any web-presentable medium or media mix; beyond this differing ephemera, writing in various genres, art or political reportage, and reviews or reassessments of old but relevant material are also presented.

The advisory board of Inflexions includes members of a far-reaching, international network of scholars.

Pactac Video

A short animated video sums sum up the planning approach and philosophy.

Courchesne earned a BA in Communication Design from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974) and a MA of Science in Visual Studies from MIT (1984). In the early 1980s he helped pioneer the field of interactive video when he co-authored Elastic Movies (1984) with Ellen Sebring, Benjamin Bergery, Bill Seaman et al. Throughout recent decades he has continued to produce several interactive installations that combine light, photography, design, sound, film and video.

Courshesne’s installations characteristically encourage participants to enter into an immersion of images and sounds that is triggered and guided by use of their own voice and physical movement; the works attempt to remove all spatial reference to plunge the viewer into an interactive, virtual world within which they are able to transverse landscapes and communicate with real or fictional people. Courchesne’s ongoing interest in socialisation has grown more pronounced from each work to the next as his installations have themselves become more increasingly complex and advanced in their development and presentation mode. In Where Are You? (2005) visitors are invited to operate a joystick to control their flight through a world of several dimensions that are defined by an X,Y and Z scale – the higher the visitor travels to the ‘+’ end of each axis, the more detailed the world they experience is. Here existence is paramount, for the work is dependent upon the visitor’s whims and choices to define itself and reach its full potential.

Courchesne is based in Montreal where he is professor of information design at Université de Montréal. Courchesne is also a founding member of the Society for Arts and Technology.

ABC approaches (ICT) development from an ‘activity’ rather than ‘utility’ based perspective. This means moving away from the assumptions of a desktop paradigm and associated layer(s) of abstraction. We have gotten very used to this way of working (spatial information metaphors) but when documents and activities becomes more mobile – more likely to move between applications, instances of applications, platforms, mediums, between users, and finally between utilities (that require differing ‘perspectives’ on those documents or applications) the desktop paradigm becomes more cumbersome. In fact many of the older spatial metaphors with which we originally structured the developing information space (of the network, the personal computer) are in the process of being fundamentally undermined by meta-data systems that provide for more recombinant mobility – a single organ (file, routine) can be central to more than one organism in the datascape – a document is not so much some ‘thing’ to be finally categorized, to be given a final context,  as it is a zone of ‘torsional coalescence’ capable of dynamically generating ‘context’ according the potential interactions and/or requirements of particular bodies or the concret spaces that those body’s inhabit. A concrete example here is the way ‘tags’ or ‘meta-tagging’ systems upset the extended and hierarchical ‘Folders’ metaphor. Tagging and the Folksonomies are both exemplars and evidence-of the usefulness and problems that occur as we move to a less spatially coherent or grounded taxonomy.

While the Activity Based Computing project doesn’t voice its aims in such theoretical terms these issues nonetheless underwrite the project; How do we facilitate the mobility of data in concrete space – how do we lend the molecular mobility of data a concrete/useful molar coherence? The CfPH’s approach is grounded in the concrete and time-critical environment of the hospital ward where effective collaboration saves time and pervasive computing might equate to a more pervasive distribution of skill/talent or simply put, better resource management.

Computing in health care evolves iteratively according to the identification of a need. This tends to leads over time to a complex perhaps disjunctive informations space – an information space always out of phase with itself. Pervasive computing in a Healthcare environment manifests within a diverse group of platforms, operating systems, devices, and knowledges will inevitable permeate each space. A hospital also provides the an architecture in which the mobility of data is critical and its coherent distribution essential given the mobility of bodies that inhabit that space. In a hospital the concrete is the only constant, everything else is fluid; patients, nurses, doctors, managers, services – information must also be coherently fluid. In fact in Healthcare the mobility of information should provide the relational glue on which the coherence of medical service is based.

Based in Montreal, Quebec the Foundation funds a variety of projects by artists and researchers from around the world including art projects and investigative residencies that explore the nexus between art, science and technology. Recent projects included Ælab’s DATA (2004) , a collaboration that explored the representation of the micro and nanometric imagery with the Lennox Lab in the Department of Chemistry at McGill University; and Judith Barry’s 3-D video work Not reconciled: Cairo Stories (2006).

Central to the foundation’s investigation of the aesthetics of our technological environment is the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D), a media collection devoted to trends and practices in electronic and media arts from the sixties to the present day. The growing collection is an invaluable resource for researchers interested in the history of new media and theory surrounding its documentation. The collection’s web site is an integral part of the Centre’s strategy: In Digital Preservation: Recording the Recoding – The Documentary Strategy, CR+D’s Director Alain Depocas writes “To make accessible – and to access – is to preserve.”

Since 2002, CR + D has funded innovative residencies for curators, artists and researchers interested in engaging with the media collection and investigating the special challenges inherent in preserving and documenting new media. Recent residents have included Australian-based curator Lizzie Muller, Variable Media Network curators Caitlin Jones and Paul Kuranko and, in conjunction with OBORO’s MediaLab , Uraguayan artist Juliana Rosales.

Erin Manning is an artist and philosopher who currently holds office as assistant professor of film studies and studio art at Concordia University, Canada. Her multidisciplinary activity encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, textiles and writing.

Manning is founder and director of The SenseLab, a laboratory and international network that explores intersections between art practice and philosophy in relation to the sensing body in movement.

As well as serve as a member of the editorial board for the journal Inflexions, Manning is also the author of several books on ephemerality and movement. Her most recent publication Relationscapes (2009) is the latest to be printed in a series titled Technologies of Lived Abstraction, which is co-edited for MIT Press by herself and Brian Massumi.

To view Relationscapes at MIT Press, please click here.

Located in Montreal, Canada, the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) is a multidisciplinary centre dedicated to research, creation, production, presentation, education and conservation in the field of digital culture. The centre operates as a forum where practitioners who work with digital technologies may congregate and collaborate across an array of artistic and scientific disciplines. The centre is situated prominently within an international network of industry and educational institutional partners who share similar and complementary objectives.

Since 1996 the SAT has established a number of programs that facilitate access to human and technical resources with the aim of encouraging reflection on issues related to the use of technology. SAT[Art&D] supports IT projects in IP network environments by providing a studio for research, production and commission of artwork that is utilized as a workspace by artists participating in SAT’s artist in residence calendar. [Espace]SAT is a presentation space that is used to house live electronic music and video events conceived and performed by international artists. Between such larger events SAT[Mix Sessions] serves to promote and develop local audiovisual creativity by gathering Montreal’s VJ and DJ/sound artist communities for jam session meetings. SAT also provides education through [TransForm], which offers courses on production of interactive projects, video art, audiovisual creation in real time and VJing, teaching students to operate software such as Arduino, Max/MSP and Modul8.

SAT is an affiliate of The SenseLab, a research-creation laboratory that houses the collaborations of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi.

Established by Erin Manning in 2004, the SenseLab is an international network of artists, theorists, researchers, dancers and writers who work together to explore the active passage between research and creation, promoting theoretical and artistic exploration of the sensing body in motion. The SenseLab is physically based in Montreal with space at the Society for Art and Technology . Part of the research agenda of SenseLab is to understand moving bodies and bodies in motion as relational bodies– “the senses are not seen as pregiven biological apparatuses, but as veritable technologies of life that continuously reinvent what the body is and can do, through its interactions with its designed environment and the technical objects populating it.”

The SenseLab interconnects a range of initiatives that each involves the collaborative participation of various members of its network. Bodies-Bits is a bi-monthly speaker series that provides a platform for international presenters to reveal insights into their research-creation works in progress. A series of thematically focused annual events with the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction aim to explore various modes of participation that view thought as a laboratory for creative practice and creative practice as a platform for thought. The 2009 event titled Society of Molecules connected ‘molcules’ of three to ten people as each simultaneously set up and executed a single aesthetico-political action within and between individual locations in eighteen different cities worldwide.

An interdisciplinary book series conceived by Manning and Brian Massumi and spawned from concepts examined during these annual events (also sharing the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction) is published by MIT Press. The SenseLab also publishes Inflexions, an open-access online journal aiming to promote experimental practices that combine research and creation in such a way as to foster symbiotic links between philosophical inquiry, technological innovation, artistic production, and social and political engagement.

NRPA was founded in 1981 with the purpose of supporting and developing radio art, a cultural movement encompassing experimental sound-based practices conceived to operate within the specific parameters associated with broadcast radio. The organization was considered to lie at the international forefront of radio art distribution between 1987 and 1998, during which over 300 works for public radio were commissioned and disseminated via the weekly program series New American Radio.

Taking heed of significant cultural shifts resulting from the expansion and proliferation of wireless and digital modes of communication, the NRPA extended its mandate in 1996 to support the then burgeoning practice of net art by launching Turbulence. The project and its associated website currently remains dedicated to commissioning and exhibiting the work of artists who either use existing applications and technologies or develop new ones to create innovative, hybrid or networked art forms that use the Internet as a primary medium. The organisation’s key channels for facilitating the creation and reception of new works are its Artists’ Studios, Guest Curator, Spotlight and Events programs. Importantly, the Turbulence website houses an online archive of over 160 projects commissioned by the body throughout its 13 year life.

Other NRPA supported projects affiliated with Turbulence include the Networked_Performance research blog (2004 -), a valuable resource that chronicles the wide range of issues and perspectives linked with various network-enabled practices, and the Networked_Music_Review blog (2007 -), which accommodates the present legacy of New American Radio by gathering data on projects, performances, composers, musicians and software tools related with emerging networked musical explorations made possible by computers, the Internet and mobile technologies.

Edmonds is currently Professor of Computation and Creative Media in the Faculty of IT at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios (CCS). The origins of CCS derived from his unique research, which spawned a conference series under the similar title of Creativity and Cognitions. A regular headliner from 1993 onwards on the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCHI calendar, concepts explored in these meetings developed into an artist-in-residency program (COSTART) at Loughborough University (UK) from 1996 before CCS was established in its present location at UTS in 2003.

Toni Robertson established the Interaction Design and Work Practice Lab at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 2002. Robertson’s interest in technology design was born out of her earlier career as an artist, printmaker and graphic designer. Today her research interests include understanding how actual work practices can be developed and then used to design information systems that appropriately service their situation of use, and exploring how different metaphors for human cognition and work can affect the design of technology.

Robertson is presently chief investigator in an Australian Research Council funded project that is seeking to establish an empirical framework for designing usable and useful wireless mobile computing applications. Based on the premise that the technological challenges presented in the development of mobile computing devices have overshadowed attention to issues of use and usability that ultimately determine technologies’ success in real environments, the project aims to shape the findings of its ethnographic studies into a reliable conceptual framework that will increase the successful utilization of mobile technology by Australian industries.

Under Robertson’s directorship the Interaction Design and Work Practice Lab is currently committed to two other main projects. The Bystander Field aims to stimulate unprecedented understanding of narrative and affective patterns in our past through investigating new systems for interactive and immersive display of contentious stories found in imagery from heritage collections.  Understanding Quality of Experience in Experience Enrich (Next Generation) aims to provide an approximation of what the phrase ‘quality of experience’ could imply for future networked environments, and how its criteria could be utilised to assist with the beneficial design of network related technology, as well facilitate a decrease of the risks in developing inappropriate products and services.

The Centre for Pervasive Computing is committed to bolstering this rapidly unfolding reality by contributing to the development of new concepts, technologies, products and services based on a broad spectrum of available media and resources. Beyond harnessing and understanding these technologies, the centre facilitates innovative interaction between universities and companies to assist with the implementation of new business models based on pervasive computing, as well as providing a strong future basis for educating IT specialists.

The size and scope of the centre positions it as a world leader in the development of next generation computing environments. Housed within the centre are a number of departments that cut across research areas and involve several traditional research traditions, attesting to the widespread implications pervasive computing bares for several aspects and levels of society.

Research pursuits range from exploring the effects of sound in its functional and emotional roles in day-to-day life, to addressing the impact of 3D visualization and interaction technologies in areas of life and industry as diverse as architecture, city planning, industrial design, medicine and the arts. Current joint research projects involving both companies and universities aim to examine and develop new information technologies for workplaces and the manufacturing sector; others seek to provide new ways to deliver services and dynamic content to mobile computing users.

]]> http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/institutions/interaction-design-and-work-practice-laboratory/feed 0 -33.883785 151.201025-33.883785151.201025 http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/institutions/australasian-cooperative-research-centre-for-interaction-design http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/institutions/australasian-cooperative-research-centre-for-interaction-design#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:00:24 +0000 timmaybury http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/?p=201

The Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID) is a leading innovator within the realm of experience design. In developing new platforms for human interaction via communication technologies and new media, ACID is committed to helping people participate in an increasingly digital world. The centre houses a multi-disciplinary team of ethnographers, designers, computer scientists and software developers who utilize their expertise to provide solutions for clients who wish to use technology to get closer to their users or customers.

The strength of the centre’s research derives from its extensive investigation into new ways to facilitate collaboration and develop social capital in various communities via technological intervention. In creating versatile digital media content, ACID aims to develop methods and tools that emphasise automation, generation and adaptation, thus enhancing creative potential for individual users.

ACID’s unique propriety research methodology follows a process that begins with careful determination and understanding of case-specific human interaction needs, followed by the formulation of initial designs for an appropriate digital interface. Each project’s prototype subsequently undergoes extensive testing and evaluation before a solution is obtained, carried out with the aid of genuine subjects in living laboratories.

Since 2007 ACID has provided technology-based resolutions to human problems in a number of real-world contexts. The broad spectrum of the centre’s research encompasses services to education, tourism, local government, electronic entertainment, indigenous communities, artistic practitioners and telecommunication networks.

Anna Munster
School of Art History and Art EducationCollege of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales
P.O Box 259Paddington
NSW 2026
Australia
A.Munster@unsw.edu.au
www.dynamicmedianetwork.org
+61293850741

Selected Publications, 2000-8

Books
Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, 2006 Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England
Book Chapters
‘Welcome to Google Earth’ forthcoming 2008, Critical Digital Studies Reader A and M Kroker eds, University of Toronto Press: Toronto,
‘Outage, Seepage, Blockage: art and cultural praxis in the network’ forthcoming 2008, Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice, D. Butt, J. Bywater and N. Paul eds, Cambridge Scholars Press, Cambridge, UK, 78–92
‘Bioaesthetics as Bioethics’ 2008, Art of the Biotech Age, M. Pandolowski ed, Experimental Art Foundation/IMA Books, Adelaide and Brisbane, Australia,14–21.
‘Media Art Zones – But Where’s the Media?’ 2006, Zones of Contact: A Critical Reader, N. Bullock and R. Keehan eds, Sydney: Artspace Visual Arts Centre 55–60
‘Digitality – approximate aesthetics’, 2004, Life in the Wires: The CTheory Reader, A. and M.L Kroker eds, Victoria Canada: New World Perspectives/CTheory Books, (15pp) 415–29
‘Returns of the Diminishing Body’, Future Bodies. Visualisierung von Körper in Science und Fiction, 2002, ML. Angerer, K. Peters and Z. Sofoulis eds, Vienna: Springer Verlag, (21pp) 143–60
‘Net Affects: responding to Shock on Internet Time’, 2001, Fibreculture: Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, H. Brown and G. Lovink, et. al. eds, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, (8pp) 9–17

Selected Shows and Work, 2000–8
2007 ‘Struck’, (with Michele Barker) 3-channel DVD installation, Level 2 Contemporary Art Projects, Art Gallery of New South Wales, February 7 – March 22
July 30–September 3, 2007, Kickarts Contemporary Arts Centre, Cairns Queensland
May 17–June 4,
‘Remapped Realities’, March 17–April 30, group show, Eyebeam Gallery, New York.
2006 ‘Struck’ (with Michele Barker) winner National Digital Art Awards, “The Harries”,dynamic category, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, May 17–June 4
December 17 –30, 2006, International Digital Art Exhibition, Beijing Film Academy, Beijing, China
‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’, invited audiovisual remix performance with Andrew Murphie, 13th Intersociety for the Electronic Arts (ISEA2006), San Jose, USA, August 13
2005 ‘The Two of Us’, (with Michele Barker) two channel video and photomedia installation, The Butterfly Effect, group show, Sydney Festival, Australian Museum, January 6-February 28
2002 ‘wunderkammer’, interactive installation Aller Anfang (The Very Beginning), group show, Austrian Museum of Ethnology, Vienna, Austria, April – October
2001 ‘wundernet’, online artwork funded by the Australian Film Commission, http://wundernet.cofa.unsw.edu.au

3 Samples of writing
1. A Pdf file of the article ‘Net Affects: responding to shock on Internet time’,2001, Fibreculture: Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, H. Brown and G. Lovink, et. al. eds, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 9–17
This can be downloaded at http://staff.cofa.unsw.edu.au/~annamunster/people/

This is an article that was published as a print piece in an anthology as its final version. However, the process of writing it took place on the online listserv ‘fibreculture’ during 2001. Regular posters posted and then the list community ‘reviewed’ and provided extensive feedback for development of the pieces into articles. It was an early example of real peer assessment of research writing in practice. The articles were then typeset and a reader was independently published. I have included the Acknowledgements section to give some idea of how the process took place.

For the next two samples please click on title of posts below

2. A post on my research blog
The Image in the Network. This piece has two comments from fellow research bloggers but also solicited a longer response by one of my fellow research bloggers Andrew Murphie
at Networks, Aesthetics and Aesthesia

3. A post on my research blog
Data Nonvisualisation which forms the background for the proposal for this piece for Networked_art.

Proposal for Networked_Art
Data undermining: the work of networked art in an age of imperceptibility

Abstract
The large quantities of data now being generated via networked communications are also being managed, regulated and interpreted into patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The management of data is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions such as Google or the US military. Even when data flows ‘freely’ through the net, the operations of search engines, databases, digest and feeds such as RSSs increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible. Techniques such as aggregation smooth out the differentials of data’s constitution and present us instead with a flattened landscape of information. The sources, processes and contexts, which make information meaningful, are rendered imperceptible.

How have networked artistic practices responded to this emerging terrain of the imperceptible conditions for the generation of data? This ‘chapter’ will examine the work of online and offline networked art practices that seek to undermine the broader flow of data toward a general cultural state of imperceptibility. These artists render visible the real technical and social relations that comprise the production of data in networked culture. I hope to collaboratively think through these projects, zigzagging collectively through a mesh of artistic practice that makes the automatisms and aggregation of data palpably perceptible. A number of projects will be suggested for exploration: Antidatamining by the collective rybn.org; Antonio Muntadas’ ‘On Translation: Social Networks’; Eduardo Navas’ ‘Trace blog’; ShiftSpace. It is hoped that new projects will also come to light through networked participation.

Keywords: datamining; data visualisation;networked data management;imperceptibility; Web 2.0; networked art

1000 Word Proposal
The more data multiplies both quantitatively and qualitatively, the more it requires more than just visualisation. It also needs to be managed, regulated and interpreted into patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The labour of extracting pattern and order from data is rarely visualised for screen display in everyday life. The management of data is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions. Even when data flows do not become private or hidden property, their remixing and recombination in, for example, the web through the operations of search engines, databases, digest and feeds such as RSSs increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible.

These mounting reserves of data about data, t
he software used to extract and analyse these and the social and cultural techniques accompanying this increasing trend results in a generalised data nonvisualisation. Whereas data visualisation characterised previous decades of digital culture in terms of tendencies in software development and the importance of the digital image, the invisibility of the processes involved in the manipulation of data is now ascendant. This is not to say that these techniques for aggregating and deciphering data do not use visualisation techniques. In the area of datamining particularly, visual environments can be modelled to make sense of patterns detected in sets of information. What is not visualised are the parameters, relations and arrangements that are used to organise and make sense of data.

The first phase of web development and design from 1995 to 2001 (Web 1.0) required designers and artists to be versed in at least a basic level of the then broadly used scripting language for displaying information online – HTML. In other words, during this early phase of web design there were no pre-packaged methods for formatting the way a web page was displayed. All graphic and stylistic elements had to be laid out in HTML scripting that ‘told’ the web browser how to format the page for online display. For a relatively short period, both artists and designers had a measure of access to the ‘source code’ of the web and this resulted in a lot of play with HTML aesthetics. From the mid-1990s, the artistic duo of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, known as ‘jodi.org’, became infamous for their collapse of the visual levels of web display into the underlying HTML level of source code.

Jodi.org furnish us with an aesthetic example that resists the contemporary cultural trend toward data nonvisualisation. Rather than using the graphic interface to obscure the underlying operations of computation, jodi.org’s work insists on using visual elements to foreground the complex historical, social and economic factors that lie embedded within contemporary ‘user-friendly’ interfaces. Nevertheless, web design and use has now moved toward less visible engagement – certainly for the everyday user – with the underlying architecture and flow of data through its various nodes and mechanisms.

Web 2.0 is a phrase used to denote the many changes that have taken place in the online environment after online cultures, commerce and everyday users regrouped in the post- dot.com context. At the core of the concept of Web 2.0 is the understanding of the network as an expanded field of interaction, interrelation and semantic generation between users, online infrastructure and software. (See O’Reilly, 2005). Aggregators are a common feature of the information landscape of Web 2.0 as they are: a) automated forms of operations previously carried out by human labour in the Web 1.0 environment; b) methods for dealing with the explosion of online information that followed the growth of blogs from around 2002 onward; and c) able to easily link and function in relation to the straight-to-web publishing environment that has become the mainstay of contemporary online transaction. Hence they provide a veneer of immediacy.

Users deploying such aggregators are usually not aware what the parameters are for extracting and determining pattern. The processes of making data meaningful in particular ways are never visualised or made explicit. Automatic aggregation tends to perform operations that reduce the relations between data to commonalities rather than differences. This may be of crucial importance in the aggregation of news data where conflicting rather than similar perspectives about an item actually comprise the information about it. But techniques such as aggregation smooth out these differentials and present us instead with a flattened landscape of information. The sources, processes and contexts, which make information meaningful, are rendered imperceptible.

How have networked artistic practices responded to this emerging terrain of the imperceptible conditions for the generation of data? This ‘chapter’ will examine the work of a series of online and offline networked art practices that seek to undermine the broader flow of data toward a general cultural state of imperceptibility. These artists render visible the real technical and social relations that comprise the production of data in networked culture. I hope to collaboratively think through these projects, zigzagging collectively through a mesh of artistic practice that makes the automatisms and aggregation of data palpably perceptible. A number of projects will be suggested for exploration: Antidatamining; Trace blog; On Translation: Social Networks; ShiftSpace. It is hoped that new projects will also come to light through networked contributions.

Some of this artistic practice verges on the social-political space of web knowledge generation. Yet it is precisely the question of the aesthetic that is put into play by the common approach of dataundermining the nonvisualised image terrain of contemporary information that these artists and collectives pursue. What these projects demand is a socio-aesthetic domain for data in which users, techniques and flows are not appropriated by a mindless automatism and in which the labour and work of all elements is not rendered imperceptible and, inevitably, irretrievable.

The Digital Artists Handbook is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies.

When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free/Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating.

download the Digital Artists Handbook pdf.

An artist-led group that utilizes networked media to create, explore, nurture and promote the art that happens when connections are made and knowledge is shared – across the boundaries of established art-world institutions and their markets, grass-roots artistic and activist projects and communities of socially-engaged software developers. This is a spectrum that engages from the maverick media-art-makers and small collectives of cross-specialist practitioners, to projects that critique and change dominant hierarchical structures as part of their art process.

Furtherfield

Whilst developing an online studio of work at devoid, together with commercial projects and interactive design and programming for arts organisations, he works extensively with Furtherfield, an London/net based artists collective, using the internet and networked technology as a focal point for creative discourse, events and production. Projects including Visitors Studio and FurtherStudio (an online artists residency programming) and ‘Skin/Strip Online’ (a collaboration between Furtherfield and Completely Naked, commissioned by BBC Shooting Live Artists 2003).

Neil also teaches and held the position of Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media at Bath Spa University (Graphic & Screen Design) from 2000 to 2008.

Visit his website www.devoid.co.uk

Dorkbot is a worldwide movement characterised by regular open community meetings under the principles of open access, hacking, experimentation, making, community art practice, and collaboration. The Sydney chapter tends to be led by (but not limited to) art practitioners and characterised by an interests in installation, sound and projection experiments.

Cited from the Dorkbot Sydney website, Dorkbot aims:

‘To bring people together from different fields who are interested in doing strange things with electricity; be you artist, engineer, musician, electrician, software developer, hermit, whatever. Regular meetings pose as an opportunity for public discussion, peer review and exploration of ideas, experiments and finished works and also to solidify and invite growth, encouragement and collaboration in a community of curious people.’ Dorkbot Sydney is generally held the last TUESDAY of the month.. Dorkbot Sydney is a non-profit organization and so it is free to come and be a member of the audience or make a presentation although we welcome donations to help with the basic costs of running the event. ]]> http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/events/dorkbot-sydney/feed 0 -33.890418 151.2091862-33.890418151.2091862 http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/people/ross-gibson http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/people/ross-gibson#comments Fri, 28 Nov 2008 04:13:06 +0000 Xavier http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/?p=193 Ross Gibson is a teacher and writer who also makes films and multimedia systems. He has curated several acclaimed exhibitions. Ross devises artistic content, architectural design and ICT systems for museums, public spaces and large dynamic databases. Examples include the Museum of Sydney where he was senior consultant producer between 1993 and 1996, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where Gibson was Creative Director during its estabishment phase between 1999 and early 2002. He was Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at UTS and now is now Professor of Contemporary Art at the the Sydney College of the Arts ,University of Sydney.

Massumi is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard‘s The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali‘s Noise and Deleuze and Guattari‘s A Thousand Plateaus.

Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with the Society for Art and Technology. They also co-edit a book series at MIT Press entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction and are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation.

The first, and perhaps most known, concept I worked with, we named social navigation. Bascially, social navigation makes other’s social trails through information spaces visible. This helps users find their way in large information spaces as we typically rely on the judgement of others. After working with the concept of social navigation for a while, some of the colleagues I was working with at the time, figured that we could move this concept out into mobile contexts. Thus, we built a range of social mobile services . This in turn, made us discover the problematic nature of seamlessness, a concept often promoted by the telecom-industry. Instead of seamlessness, we have therefore been working with seamfulness. A seamful design is one where the seams in the network coverage, positioning system, or between different media in a space are not hidden but instead used as a resource in the design, shown to the users so that they can make sense of them, appropriate them and have fun with them.

After working with social navigation for many years, I became really interested in affective computing after listening to Rosalind Picard in 1998. But my take on affective computing is somewhat different from Roz’ direction of research. Together with the affective presence group I have been exploring an alternative view on how affect can be integrated into interaction with end users. Our take is that of affective interaction. In particular, with my research group we have been exploring the idea of involving users both physically and cognitively in what we name an affective loop.

All these “interaction concepts” that I have been working with throughout my research career all belong to the same theoretical foundation: that of embodied interaction (as discussed by Paul Dourish). But instead of being grand theories of life, universe and everything, our aim is to make these concepts carry the grand theory into usable design concepts that anyone can pick up and make use of in their design practice.”

Since the start in 1998, their work has been characterized by not only conducting traditional academic research but also exploring the borders between art, design and technology, industry and academy, etc. The institute has about 60 employees organized in a number of research studios/groups located in Kista/Stockholm, Piteå, Eskilstuna, Norrköping, Växjö and Göteborg. Each research group has its own focus area that relates to the overall focus of combining technology with art and design.

The Interactive Institute has a number of research groups within it such as Digital Cultural Heritage Centre which looks at issues such as cultural knowledge transfer in new media and technologies, The Design Research Centre which seems concerned with developing big-picture research strategies, Sound Studio and SoundSpace groups working in interactive sound design, NVISION working with visualisation techniques and Mobility Studio which looks at, well, developments in the use of mobile technologies.

The Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University has a research focus that spans from social and entertainment and work aspects of mobile technologies, affective engagement and ubiquitous computing. Set up as a 10 year funding project by VINNOVA – (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), which is a State authority that aims to ‘promote growth and prosperity throughout Sweden’ through funding ‘innovations linked to research and development’. The Centre names the Interactive Insitute and the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science as collaborative partners, and also list a number of industry partners including Sony Ericsson, Microsoft Research and Stockholm Innovation and Growth. The centre lists around 20 PhD students and Professorial staff on its list of researchers and lsome of the more interesting research projects include:

Mobile Eco-System

The future mobile eco-system – who pays for what? And what does it feel like? A future mobile service eco-system where we explore alternative universes for infrastructure, business models and the industry’s new role.

Embodied Affective Interaction

Interact emotionally with your whole body. New mobile and ubiquitous services in areas such as pervasive games, social, emotional and bodily communication and new mobile media.

There is also an interesting list of seminars on topics such as the following:
Beyond representations: Towards an action-centric perspective on tangible interaction

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

Affective Loops : research agenda for bodily persuasion through a design approach we name affective loops is outlined. Affective loop experiences draw upon physical, emotional interactions between user and system.

Whilst this begins to appear quite the complex web of tangled connections, it seems that one common link and hence potentially a good interview subject might be Professor Kristina Hook . She is Professor at Mobile Life, as well as Lab Manager at Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at the Dept of Computer and Systems Science (a joint venture between Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Kristina Hook lists research projects in embodied interaction and ‘affective computing’ among her interests. Particularly notable is the research project which has involved Microsoft Research called Affective Diary, which investigates techniques data-mapping diary of galvanic skin response via mobile technologies, and seems to have spawned collaborative projects such as a sound design project which looks at sonification techniques using the data sets generated by Affective Diary.

Youtube video on Affective Diary with Kristina Hook

With a background in interaction design, focused on algorithm controlled animation, sensor driven interactive installations, web applications, broadcast applications and digital design, shiftcontrol applies a united process of design and development to its clients and users.
In 2008 Simon Løvind joined as associate partner, bringing experience from media-art, academia and game developement.

shiftcontrol has already taken on projects for Carlsberg, ZDF, Al Aan, BBC, Danish TV2, PRADA, OMA, AMO, Kontrapunkt and VW.

shiftcontrol works tightly with the team behind Unity – our preferred platform for exploring next generation interactive media, and Markus Schaefer/Hosoya Schaefer Architects – our preferred partner for exploring next generation concepts.

Sher Doruff was head of the Research Dissemination Programma at Waag Society until September 2007. This programme investigated creative processes and research methodologies of projects within Waag Society. It aims to distribute analyses of these processes to a wider public in a variety of ways.

Sher received her PhD in 2006 from University of the Arts London/Central Saint Martins/Smartlab. Her research  focused on situating translocal performance practice enabled by KeyWorx in a conceptual frame that references the affective intensities of diagrams, biograms and polyrhythms.

Berger is trained as an engineer for communication engineering and electronics.
He has a master degree in philosophy with an interdisciplinary subject
combination of mechatronic and philosophy. The master thesis was written about
Epistemolpgical Questions Towards Telerobotics with Prof. Herbert Hrachovec from the University of Vienna/Austria.

From 1996-1999 Berger was working at the Ars Electronica Center, Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ars Electronica Festival in Linz/Austria. In the Ars Electronica Center he was technically responsible for the implementation of the visitor guidance system and the telerobotic art installation TELEGARDEN. In the Ars Electronica Futurelab he was project manager and developer for the telerobotic art installation TELEZONE. 1998 and 1999 he was technical director of the Ars Electronica Festival.

http://www.aec.at

From 1999-2002 Berger was working for the Vienna/Austria based it-company Ideal Communications as a researcher and knowledge manager. His responsibilities included research on the fringes of it-business (science, art, design), employee education and training as well as organizing and assisting the restructuring of the company during and after phases of extensive growth.

Since 2003 Berger gave workshops about physical computing, interaction design and related subjects at various universities, labs and educational institution throughout Europe.

2004 and 2005 he was developing and directing the MAKING SENSE project at the Oslo/Norway based media lab Atelier Nord. MAKING SENSE was a research and education program about physical computing for artists and designers. It included the direction of workshops, the build-up of a physical computing lab and technical and artistic consulting for artists.

http://anart.no/projects/making-sense/

2006 Berger was artistic director and curator for the INTERFACE & SOCIETY project at theOslo/Norway based media lab Atelier Nord. INTERFACE & SOCIETY investigated artistic practices and strategies which deal with the transformation of our everyday life through electronic interfaces. This one year project consisted of workshops, the production of artworks, a conference and an exhibition.

http://anart.no/projects/interface-and-society/

2007 Berger was appointed Chief Curator at LABoral Center for Art and Creative Industries in Gijon/Spain.

http://www.laboralcentrodearte.es/

Since the mid nineties Berger works as an artist. He is interested in information processes and
feedback structures which he investigates with installations, situations, performances and various
interfaces. His work is shown internationally in media-festivals, exhibitions and galleries.
Together with the sound artist PURE he founded the audio visual impro duo TERMINALBEACH (2002).
He received a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction together with the Telezone-Group for the
project TELEZONE (2000), the Intermedium2 Award, Bawarian Broadcasting Station / ZKM together
with the group 92v2.0 for A SOPHISTICATED SOIREE (2002) and a Honorary Mention from VIDA 5.0 Art
and Artificial Life international Competition together with Laura Beloff for the installation
SPINNE (2002).

Operating nationally and globally for two decades, ANAT has been delivering initiatives which enable connection, collaboration, research and development, fostering enterprise, sustainability, dialogue and exchange across art, culture, science and technology.

By creating opportunities for enrichment & inspiration, ANAT supports emerging and established artists in the fields of media and hybrid arts, networked and distributed practices, sound and performance to develop new concepts and work. The majority of Australia’s prominent media artists, curators and producers have benefited from ANAT’s innovative programs.

ANAT collaborates with science, industry and arts partners within Australia and overseas to initiate opportunities including immersive residencies, databases and emerging technology labs. ANAT also provides quick response competitive grants to assist Australian practitioners to take up professional development opportunities worldwide.

Watz discovered the computer at age 11 and immediately found his direction in life. At age 20 he defected from Computer Science studies to do graphics for raves, using his programming to create organic shapes in 2D and 3D. In parallel to creating his own work, Watz worked as a graphic designer for many years, probing the limits of design. In the years 2000-2002 he ran the studio Products of Play with Erik Johan Worsøe Eriksen before deciding to focus on his art practice.

In 2005 Watz started Generator.x, a platform for generative art and design which so far has resulted in a conference, a blog, a travelling exhibition and concert tour. The Generator.x conference took place at Atelier Nord in Oslo September 2005, while the Generator.x exhibition premiered at the Norwegian National Museum. The exhibition is currently touring until 2007. A concert tour of Norway with generative sound and visuals took place in April 2006, organized by the National Touring Concerts.

In 2005 Watz received an honorary mention for his project Universal Digest Machine. He had previously received a mention for Sense:less (Pendry / Mork / Stenslie / Watz) in 1996. In 2003 he premiered the public art commission Drawing Machine 1-12, a work that was shown for two years on the home page of the Norwegian Government and Ministries of State. In recent years he has created several animated works for projection on building facades such as Neon Organic, which is currently being projected on the Vattenfall headquarters in Berlin.

Watz currently lives in Berlin. His tools of choice are Java, Processing, VVVV and Flash. He continues to edit the Generator.x blog and prepare future Generator.x events, as well as teach workshops in computational design and generative art.

Marius Watz can be contacted at marius@unlekker.net

Joyce Hinterding’s Recent individual exhibitions include:  AV festival, Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, England, (2008) Biennale of Sydney, (the world may be) fantastic, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2002), Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Converge: where art and science meet (2002); 7 Istanbul Biennial, Yerebetan Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey, (2001), Joyce’s live solo sound performances include, The NowNow festival (2008) Sound and Electricity, The Performance Space (2006), Audiotheque, The night air, ABC radio national (2005).

David Haines and Joyce Hinterding live and work in the Blue Mountains, NSW Australia and work both collaboratively and independently.

Their collaborative work has produced large scale immersive video and sound works that explore the tension between the fictive and the phenomenal. This work incorporates Joyce’s investigations into energetic forces and David’s concern with the intersection of hallucination and landscape.

Most recently they have exhibited their collaborative work in the exhibitions ; Turn and Widen, The 5th Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul Korea (2008), Superlight, The 2nd Biennial 01SJ Art on the edge, San Jose Museum Art, California, USA, (2008), Waves – The Art of the Electromagnetic Society, PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, Germany, (2008), (in)visible sounds, Montevideo, The Dutch Institute for Time based Art, Netherlands (2007), V2 Zone, Act interact, The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (2007). ReSearch, The Sendai MediaTech in Sendai, Japan (2006). Under the Radar, FACT, (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) Liverpool England (2006), Waves (Electromagnetic Waves as medium for Art), Riga, Latvia (2006), The 26th Biennale de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2004); Liquid sea, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003); Space odyssey: sensation and immersion, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2002-01.

David Haines and Joyce Hinterding live and work in the Blue Mountains, NSW Australia and work both collaboratively and independently.

Their collaborative work has produced large scale immersive video and sound works that explore the tension between the fictive and the phenomenal. This work incorporates Joyce’s investigations into energetic forces and David’s concern with the intersection of hallucination and landscape.

Most recently they have exhibited their collaborative work in the exhibitions ; Turn and Widen, The 5th Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul Korea (2008), Superlight, The 2nd Biennial 01SJ Art on the edge, San Jose Museum Art, California, USA, (2008), Waves – The Art of the Electromagnetic Society, PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, Germany, (2008), (in)visible sounds, Montevideo, The Dutch Institute for Time based Art, Netherlands (2007), V2 Zone, Act interact, The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (2007). ReSearch, The Sendai MediaTech in Sendai, Japan (2006). Under the Radar, FACT, (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) Liverpool England (2006), Waves (Electromagnetic Waves as medium for Art), Riga, Latvia (2006), The 26th Biennale de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2004); Liquid sea, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003); Space odyssey: sensation and immersion, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2002-01.

David Haines Recent individual exhibitions include:  AV festival, Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, England, (2008) Biennale of Sydney, (the world may be) fantastic, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2002), Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Converge: where art and science meet (2002); 7 Istanbul Biennial, Yerebetan Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey, (2001), Joyce’s live solo sound performances include, The NowNow festival (2008) Sound and Electricity, The Performance Space (2006), Audiotheque, The night air, ABC radio national (2005).

Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and completed a Ph.D. in theater+computer-generated sound at Stanford University in 1997.He was awarded the Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt “Bundeskanzler” grants for research/work in Germany between 1993-1995 where he collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe at the Ballett Frankfurt( Eidos:Telos, 1995, Sleepers Guts, 1997).

In 1997, he co-founded the art+research organization Sponge, an interdisciplinary association of artists and researchers who are exploring the nexus of investigative art, speculative design and techno-scientific research. His work with Sponge has toured internationally to festivals and exhibitions such as Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH 2000, Mediaterra-Athens, the Exploratorium, Mediaterra-Athens, the Exploratorium, Banff Center and V2 Rotterdam and has received recent grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the LEF Foundation.

The global political climate is rapidly changing, shaped by phenomena such as globalism, terrorism and violence, migration, displacement and postcoloniality. Researchers at the CCAP are investigating cultural responses to each of these issues, identifying in particular the new forms of visual art emerging in this global context. The CCAP encourages research in both the theory and practice of art, and it runs a program of exhibitions, conferences and publications addressing diverse forms of political and social engagement.

The Centre facilitates the formation of research clusters, comprising staff and postgraduate students, and of national and international networks that bring together those working at the cutting edge of art and politics. The CCAP has links with a number of international institutions and its members are currently working on collaborative research projects with scholars in South Africa, China, Germany and the Netherlands.

ACMI at Federation Square

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) celebrates, champions and explores the moving image in all its forms – film, television, games, new media and art.

Through a diverse and engaging annual calendar of award winning major exhibitions, film programs, live events, creative workshops, education programs, community activities and lending services, ACMI brings the best of moving image culture from across the globe to Australian audiences.

Visitors to ACMI can explore all about the moving image, engage with the industry and get hands-on by making their own moving image stories. In presenting these programs, ACMI celebrates the convergence of art and technology and broadly fosters innovation in Australia’s dynamic screen industries – from animation to games.

The Interactive Insitute outside Stockholm, Sweden is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Originally set up by Sweden’s Foundation for Strategic Research in 1998, it is now owned and co-funded by the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science group which also includes the Viktoria Institute and Santa Anna, and is in turn owned by the government body Swedish ICT Research.

The Interactive Institute has a number of research groups within it such as Digital Cultural Heritage Centre which looks at issues such as cultural knowledge transfer in new media and technologies, The Design Research Centre which seems concerned with developing big-picture research strategies, Sound Studio and SoundSpace groups working in interactive sound design, NVISION working with visualisation techniques and Mobility Studio which looks at, well, developments in the use of mobile technologies.

The Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University has a research focus that spans from social and entertainment and work aspects of mobile technologies, affective engagement and ubiquitous computing. Set up as a 10 year funding project by VINNOVA – (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), which is a State authority that aims to ‘promote growth and prosperity throughout Sweden’ through funding ‘innovations linked to research and development’. The Centre names the Interactive Insitute and the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science as collaborative partners, and also list a number of industry partners including Sony Ericsson, Microsoft Research and Stockholm Innovation and Growth. The centre lists around 20 PhD students and Professorial staff on its list of researchers and lsome of the more interesting research projects include:

Mobile Eco-System

The future mobile eco-system – who pays for what? And what does it feel like? A future mobile service eco-system where we explore alternative universes for infrastructure, business models and the industry’s new role.

Embodied Affective Interaction

Interact emotionally with your whole body. New mobile and ubiquitous services in areas such as pervasive games, social, emotional and bodily communication and new mobile media.

There is also an interesting list of seminars on topics such as the following:
Beyond representations: Towards an action-centric perspective on tangible interaction

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

Affective Loops : research agenda for bodily persuasion through a design approach we name affective loops is outlined. Affective loop experiences draw upon physical, emotional interactions between user and system.

Whilst this begins to appear quite the complex web of tangled connections, it seems that one common link and hence potentially a good interview subject might be Professor Kristina Hook . She is Professor at Mobile Life, as well as Lab Manager at Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at the Dept of Computer and Systems Science (a joint venture between Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Kristina Hook lists research projects in embodied interaction and ‘affective computing’ among her interests. Particularly notable is the research project which has involved Microsoft Research called Affective Diary, which investigates techniques data-mapping diary of galvanic skin response via mobile technologies, and seems to have spawned collaborative projects such as a sound design project which looks at sonification techniques using the data sets generated by Affective Diary.

Youtube video on Affective Diary with Kristina Hook Purchase Lortab

Cymatics, the study of ‘wave phenomena’, or sound vibrations and their harmonically resonant properties in matter is an area of scientific research which has enjoyed a few brief and spasmodic periods of interest, but often with quasi-scientific and quasi-mystical and spiritual leanings. Whether or not one wants to pursue the relationship of wave phenomena to crop circles, cosmic music, theology and spirituality healing powers, etc etc, the fact remains that cymatics presents a very concrete example of the inextricably material and embodied relationship between the sonic and the visual, between audio and video and the ability of sound to affect and even form physical structures. For this reason it is a very interesting phenomena / research area from the point of view of cross-signal processing, synaethesia and data-visualisation techniques in art and new media. Indeed Robin Fox’s Oscilloscope works and Carsten Nicolai’s audiovisual works with milk employ this very technique of emergent harmonic patterns formed in matter by excitation by sonic vibration.

Cymatics, the study of wave phenomena, is a science pioneered by Swiss medical doctor and natural scientist, Hans Jenny (1904-1972). For 14 years he conducted experiments animating inert powders, pastes, and liquids into life-like, flowing forms, which mirrored patterns found throughout nature, art and architecture. What’s more, all of these patterns were created using simple sine wave vibrations (pure tones) within the audible range. So what you see is a physical representation of vibration, or how sound manifests into form through the medium of various materials. (cymaticsource.com)

Also interesting from a research point of view is this article published in 1982 which sets out to explore the dynamic relationships between sound waves, matter, visual patterns of cymatics in terms of their potential for audiovisual ‘interactive and new media’ environments:

“One of my guiding principles is to create a total sonic and visual music based on archetypal dynamic structures that transcend the cultural deformations of perception. Archetypal dynamic structures result from timeless natural processes that involve the patterns, relationship, interaction and transformations of energy. One such example is the solar system as we refer to it in the planetary, international, social and atomic contexts. Magnetic polarity is another example of a natural energy field. Another is the structure of weather patterns, a model which I have used for the composition of a number of my own interactive environments.

I am sensing on the horizon a truly new field of composition, a field being fostered by the emerging instruments of the electronic arts of sound and light – computers, synthesizers, laser graphics systems, holography and videographics systems. This new field of composition is based on creating totally integrated, nontrivial sound/light compositions from a complex multidimensionally organised wave set – a wave set that will simultaneously speak to the ear and signal to the eye with the life force.”

Cymatic Music: Towards a Metatheory of Harmonic Phenomena: My Interactive Compositions and Environments
# Ronald A. Pellegrino
# Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 120-123

Looking into the author’s history of work, one might have expected his work to have moved further into more current ‘new media’ practices, but there seems to be a recurring theme of limited scope with the study of Cymatics. It appears to be mostly unable to escape the novel other than by way of reference to the mystical – perhaps the relationship between the frequencies and the patterns thus formed are too directly correlative, perhaps surprisingly not dynamic enough in their ability to connect with, and generate new, fields of potential? Perhaps they are too easily captured by a popular cultural pockets of desire for a contemporary quasi-scientific mysticism? I wonder why though, surely there is more to be done here with the relationship between energy waves, sonic and visual patterns and the physicality of matter and bodies themselves?

Users can upload and download a variety of raw and processed, unmixed and remixed audio, video, images and text all under various incarnations of Creative Commons. The site is divided into user accounts or profiles which have information and background about the user (much like existing social media sites) and where they upload their work, name, categorise, genrify (well ‘genrification’ is a word) and tag it for perusal by site member and non-members, but also importantly to act as source material for further downloading and reworking and remixing by other members. There are also ‘projects’ which are works in progress at any one time which on site members can collaborate and also the capacity to search members by skills and interest areas for collaboration and networking etc.

There are certainly many interesting questions raised here in the production of open-source new media content and related aesthetic concerns and the ways that these might intesect with a national-scale broadcast media network, and the various kinds of feedback (social, technical, cultural) within the network ecologies that may emerge from or be drawn into this.

Another question to investigate would be how might the relationship between the metadata such as tags, genres, geolocation etc and the actual AV/text content on the site be used in other innovative and interesting and dynamic ways?

There are some interesting people on the project who might be worth talking to:

The Pool Team

Editorial:

Executive producer: Sherre DeLys

“Sherre DeLys has developed playful dialogues with some of her favourite writers and musicians to create radio art which displays an intense regard for listeners’ own imaginative involvement. She has collaborated with sculptor Joan Grounds for more than a decade– their sound sculptures enter into a call-and-response with the botanical environments they inhabit.”

Producers:

John Jacobs – John is an ABC broadcaster, social media activist, electronic and mechanical inventor, bike rider, vegan cook, performer, promoter, composer, and enthusiastic life hacker. He is a founding member of the Indymedia movement and also part of the team that devised and produces Radio National’s weekly remix program, The Night Air.

Gretchen Miller – Gretchen Miller is a writer, radio producer, composer and maker of audio arts. She works at ABC Radio National. Her work has been broadcast in Germany and France and reworked for live performance at the Studio, Sydney Opera House. She has a passion for travelling into the Australian inland, camping rough and collecting sounds from the natural world, tales that float across the landscape.

Pool education consortium:

Ross Gibson, Norie Neumark, Shannon O’Neill, and Darrall Thompson from University of Technology, Sydney; Marius Foley from RMIT; Brogan Bunt and Terumi Narushima from University of Wollongong; Tom Ellard from UNSW College of Fine Arts.

Also: the Production Manager is a person called Peter Jackson – ?

The concept of ‘wildcrafting’ of consumer goods in the work of UK artsits Kate Ruch and Kayle Brandon explores the relationship between information access and the production of commodities, art and social networks as an inter-related set of sustainable or unsustainable processes. An emergent, and potentially sustainable network ecology of relations is realised in and through the process of production.

Mark Garret, of UK network/arts organisation Furtherfield describes the work of Kate Rich & Kayle Brandon who produce an ‘open-source’ cola drink and ‘trade’ it through a ‘social media’ distribution network ‘Feral Trade’ that focuses on non-commercial sustainable network ecologies for material goods – (description from Thing.net blog): ‘cube-cola’

“With a hackivist consciousness or attitude, they are exploring the creation of their own version(s) of Coca-Cola. Both are bar managers at the CubeCinema (Bristol UK), and have actively steered away from selling the ‘real -thing’, due to their feelings about the environmental practises of the multi-national company Coca-Cola. “We’d tried Pepsi and Virgin Cola and various others too,” says Brandon, “but they weren’t really a positive alternative. They were acceptable, but they weren’t Coke. And people really want Coke / We are wildcrafting our own cola from an on-line, open source recipe. A process developed through home-lab experimentation, merging domestic and scientific methadology.”

and from Feral Trade website:

“Feral Trade is a public experiment trading goods over social networks. The use of the word ‘feral’ describes a process which is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). The passage of goods can open up wormholes between diverse social settings, routes along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel. / Products are chosen for their portability, shelf-life and capacity for sociability: feral trade goods in current circulation include the coffee from El Salvador plus grappa from Croatia, mountain-grown antidepressants from Bulgaria and fresh sweets from the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

An ‘open-source’ recipe for cola which evokes the principles of hactivism and DIY culture and looks at the role of the prosumer in terms of consumer goods and their relationship to social media networks. By ‘wild-crafting’ their own cola from an online ‘open-source’ recipe, the work presents an analogy between the forms of access and control of ‘data’ that relate equally to both ‘secret recipes’ and ‘software code’ within network ecologies. The work comments on the networks of global capital, consumer goods, marketing, and intellectual property, but also the inevitable laments over a homogenised, mass-produced culture of which Coke is emblematic. The open-source cola project and moreover Feral Trade itself is interesting because they seems to offer both critique of the unsustainable ecologies of global networks of capital / consumer culture as well as a tangible and ‘practical alternative’. Where related practices such as the ‘open-source hardware’ movement in audiovisual culture seek to un-black-box AV technologies and re-mediate them as ‘social media’ (post on this coming soon!) the wildcrafting experiements are notable for their reorientation of the role of the ‘prosumer’ away from ‘hi-tech’ social, cultural and information networks and towards the production of sustainable social network ecologies through the most everyday and material of ‘consumables’ – food and drink.

The Feral Trade / wildcrafted cola experiment might also draw attention to other aspects of ‘network ecologies’ – that of the incredibly complex ecology of relations that on the one hand ‘produce’ the Coca-Cola and on the other position it where it is accessible: psychologically, economically and physically. Rather than a ‘black-boxed’ consumer product, ‘Coke’ is decomposed into an networked collection of elements and flows; precariously structured, yet fiercely guarded data flows within a global network ecology of physical, economic, cultural and informational relations. It brings to mind the network of relations that incorporates a phenomenal flow of energy both material (aluminium production, ingredients, brewing costs, shipping costs etc) as well ‘immaterial’ (marketing, logistics, intellectual property and trademark issues, and the general market-domination of the psychological cola landscape). The ‘unsustainablilty’ of this kind of network ecology in both physical resources as well as its impersonality or asociality is rendered starkly ‘material’ in the practical solution of open-source recipe and the use of a social media / local area / community network for the distribution of cola. The emphasis on the production of sociality in and through the process prosumer craftmaking is made tangible in its drinkable, consumable materiality and raises interesting questions about the sustainability of network ecologies and the flows and stoppages of global and local consumerism and marketing, labour and information access and control.

Furtherfield article : ‘Feral Trade Coffee: A New Media For Social Networks’ http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=142

Thing.net blog post : http://post.thing.net/node/1142

Guardian article : http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/jul/28/foodanddrink.shopping

Feral Trade Website : http://www.feraltrade.org/cgi-bin/courier/courier.pl

Cube Cola website : http://sparror.cubecinema.com/cube/cola/

‘Foam‘ is an trans-national online collaborative research network or ‘distributed laboratory’ that focuses on transdisciplinary research, creative collabortion and the fostering of a diverse and loosely structured community of artists, academics, theorists, designers spanning Amsterdam, Brussels and Singapore. I came across the site whilst researching the work of media artist and researcher Christopher Salter, who is a member / affiliate. Their research and production interests are stated as ‘experimental situations, responsive environments, active materials, generative media, culinary performances and other forms of participatory culture’. Additionally the website states their activities as including the organisation and hosting of workshops and public events as well as the production of co-authored publications, on-line and on-site libraries and archives. The website also includes a forum and an events calender that links to various external events and online resources.

From the website:

[foam] is committed to growing inclusive, resilient and abundant worlds. We do this by providing a context and a structure to research, design and reflect on transdisciplinary creative practices. By seeking out and connecting people in the interstitial spaces between professional and cultural boundaries, we are smoothing the way for a community of ‘generalists’. This diverse community enables its members to tackle complex challenges, in the cultural, as well as technological environments. While facilitating multi-stakeholder workshops, or mixing digital and physical realities, [foam] steers the creative practices towards ethically and environmentally sustainable practices. Our motto, ‘grow your own worlds’ alludes to our mission; to move from wasteful consumption and mindless dependence to responsible participation in all aspects of our lives.

The site appears to be a reasonably good reference for Dynamic Media given their stated aims and approach of facillitating a collaborative research community coupled with the publication of an online database resource. Perhaps most notable is their novel approach to the problems of data architecture and taxonomy (of which we are increasingly aware!): what they call the the ‘Libarynth‘:

“The ever-growing Libarynth is exactly what its name implies – a hybrid between a library and a labyrinth, a maze of pages in various stages of completion. FoAM’s collaborators and friends use the Libarynth as their research diary, sketch-book, or activity log. Some pages are valuable references, on a variety of topics; from visual programming, to inflatables and even vegetarian-friendly restaurants around the world. Others are fully-fledged research reports, or concept documents.”

However there is perhaps too little emphasis on the taxonomy / tagging systems or generally towards producing a dynamism with respect to the data available on the site, particularly from a usability perspective – much of the data seems at least partially obscured by the architecture of the site itself. Ths reiterates the importance of techniques of data visualisation and other approaches in dealing with the complex networks of loose, ongoing and emergent connections between data, various kinds of bodies and organisations. There is a real elusiveness to the solution of simple and elegant design for dealing with a complex and chaotic network of heterogenous structures and forms of data.

Cymatics pattern

Cymatics, the study of ‘wave phenomena’, or sound vibrations and their harmonically resonant properties in matter is an area of scientific research which has enjoyed a few brief and spasmodic periods of interest, but often with quasi-scientific and quasi-mystical and spiritual leanings. Whether or not one wants to pursue the relationship of wave phenomena to crop circles, cosmic music, theology and spirituality healing powers, etc etc, the fact remains that cymatics presents a very concrete example of the inextricably material and embodied relationship between the sonic and the visual, between audio and video and the ability of sound to affect and even form physical structures. For this reason it is a very interesting phenomena / research area from the point of view of cross-signal processing, synaethesia and data-visualisation techniques in art and new media. Indeed Robin Fox’s Oscilloscope works and Carsten Nicolai’s audiovisual works with milk employ this very technique of emergent harmonic patterns formed in matter by excitation by sonic vibration.

Cymatics, the study of wave phenomena, is a science pioneered by Swiss medical doctor and natural scientist, Hans Jenny (1904-1972). For 14 years he conducted experiments animating inert powders, pastes, and liquids into life-like, flowing forms, which mirrored patterns found throughout nature, art and architecture. What’s more, all of these patterns were created using simple sine wave vibrations (pure tones) within the audible range. So what you see is a physical representation of vibration, or how sound manifests into form through the medium of various materials. (cymaticsource.com)

Also interesting from a research point of view is this article published in 1982 which sets out to explore the dynamic relationships between sound waves, matter, visual patterns of cymatics in terms of their potential for audiovisual ‘interactive and new media’ environments:

“One of my guiding principles is to create a total sonic and visual music based on archetypal dynamic structures that transcend the cultural deformations of perception. Archetypal dynamic structures result from timeless natural processes that involve the patterns, relationship, interaction and transformations of energy. One such example is the solar system as we refer to it in the planetary, international, social and atomic contexts. Magnetic polarity is another example of a natural energy field. Another is the structure of weather patterns, a model which I have used for the composition of a number of my own interactive environments.

I am sensing on the horizon a truly new field of composition, a field being fostered by the emerging instruments of the electronic arts of sound and light – computers, synthesizers, laser graphics systems, holography and videographics systems. This new field of composition is based on creating totally integrated, nontrivial sound/light compositions from a complex multidimensionally organised wave set – a wave set that will simultaneously speak to the ear and signal to the eye with the life force.”

Cymatic Music: Towards a Metatheory of Harmonic Phenomena: My Interactive Compositions and Environments
# Ronald A. Pellegrino
# Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 120-123

Users can upload and download a variety of raw and processed, unmixed and remixed audio, video, images and text all under various incarnations of Creative Commons. The site is divided into user accounts or profiles which have information and background about the user (much like existing social media sites) and where they upload their work, name, categorise, genrify (well ‘genrification’ is a word) and tag it for perusal by site member and non-members, but also importantly to act as source material for further downloading and reworking and remixing by other members. There are also ‘projects’ which are works in progress at any one time which on site members can collaborate and also the capacity to search members by skills and interest areas for collaboration and networking etc.

There are certainly many interesting questions raised here in the production of open-source new media content and related aesthetic concerns and the ways that these might intesect with a national-scale broadcast media network, and the various kinds of feedback (social, technical, cultural) within the network ecologies that may emerge from or be drawn into this.

Another question to investigate would be how might the relationship between the metadata such as tags, genres, geolocation etc and the actual AV/text content on the site be used in other innovative and interesting and dynamic ways?

There are some interesting people on the project who might be worth talking to:

The Pool Team

Editorial:

Executive producer: Sherre DeLys

“Sherre DeLys has developed playful dialogues with some of her favourite writers and musicians to create radio art which displays an intense regard for listeners’ own imaginative involvement. She has collaborated with sculptor Joan Grounds for more than a decade– their sound sculptures enter into a call-and-response with the botanical environments they inhabit.”

Producers:

John Jacobs – John is an ABC broadcaster, social media activist, electronic and mechanical inventor, bike rider, vegan cook, performer, promoter, composer, and enthusiastic life hacker. He is a founding member of the Indymedia movement and also part of the team that devised and produces Radio National’s weekly remix program, The Night Air.

Gretchen Miller – Gretchen Miller is a writer, radio producer, composer and maker of audio arts. She works at ABC Radio National. Her work has been broadcast in Germany and France and reworked for live performance at the Studio, Sydney Opera House. She has a passion for travelling into the Australian inland, camping rough and collecting sounds from the natural world, tales that float across the landscape.

Pool education consortium:

Ross Gibson, Norie Neumark, Shannon O’Neill, and Darrall Thompson from University of Technology, Sydney; Marius Foley from RMIT; Brogan Bunt and Terumi Narushima from University of Wollongong; Tom Ellard from UNSW College of Fine Arts.

Also: the Production Manager is a person called Peter Jackson – ?

The concept of ‘wildcrafting’ of consumer goods in the work of UK artsits Kate Ruch and Kayle Brandon explores the relationship between information access and the production of commodities, art and social networks as an inter-related set of sustainable or unsustainable processes. An emergent, and potentially sustainable network ecology of relations is realised in and through the process of production.

Mark Garret, of UK network/arts organisation Furtherfield describes the work of Kate Rich & Kayle Brandon who produce an ‘open-source’ cola drink and ‘trade’ it through a ‘social media’ distribution network ‘Feral Trade’ that focuses on non-commercial sustainable network ecologies for material goods – (description from Thing.net blog): ‘cube-cola’

“With a hackivist consciousness or attitude, they are exploring the creation of their own version(s) of Coca-Cola. Both are bar managers at the CubeCinema (Bristol UK), and have actively steered away from selling the ‘real -thing’, due to their feelings about the environmental practises of the multi-national company Coca-Cola. “We’d tried Pepsi and Virgin Cola and various others too,” says Brandon, “but they weren’t really a positive alternative. They were acceptable, but they weren’t Coke. And people really want Coke / We are wildcrafting our own cola from an on-line, open source recipe. A process developed through home-lab experimentation, merging domestic and scientific methadology.”

and from Feral Trade website:

“Feral Trade is a public experiment trading goods over social networks. The use of the word ‘feral’ describes a process which is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). The passage of goods can open up wormholes between diverse social settings, routes along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel. / Products are chosen for their portability, shelf-life and capacity for sociability: feral trade goods in current circulation include the coffee from El Salvador plus grappa from Croatia, mountain-grown antidepressants from Bulgaria and fresh sweets from the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

An ‘open-source’ recipe for cola which evokes the principles of hactivism and DIY culture and looks at the role of the prosumer in terms of consumer goods and their relationship to social media networks. By ‘wild-crafting’ their own cola from an online ‘open-source’ recipe, the work presents an analogy between the forms of access and control of ‘data’ that relate equally to both ‘secret recipes’ and ‘software code’ within network ecologies. The work comments on the networks of global capital, consumer goods, marketing, and intellectual property, but also the inevitable laments over a homogenised, mass-produced culture of which Coke is emblematic. The open-source cola project and moreover Feral Trade itself is interesting because they seems to offer both critique of the unsustainable ecologies of global networks of capital / consumer culture as well as a tangible and ‘practical alternative’. Where related practices such as the ‘open-source hardware’ movement in audiovisual culture seek to un-black-box AV technologies and re-mediate them as ‘social media’ (post on this coming soon!) the wildcrafting experiements are notable for their reorientation of the role of the ‘prosumer’ away from ‘hi-tech’ social, cultural and information networks and towards the production of sustainable social network ecologies through the most everyday and material of ‘consumables’ – food and drink.

The Feral Trade / wildcrafted cola experiment might also draw attention to other aspects of ‘network ecologies’ – that of the incredibly complex ecology of relations that on the one hand ‘produce’ the Coca-Cola and on the other position it where it is accessible: psychologically, economically and physically. Rather than a ‘black-boxed’ consumer product, ‘Coke’ is decomposed into an networked collection of elements and flows; precariously structured, yet fiercely guarded data flows within a global network ecology of physical, economic, cultural and informational relations. It brings to mind the network of relations that incorporates a phenomenal flow of energy both material (aluminium production, ingredients, brewing costs, shipping costs etc) as well ‘immaterial’ (marketing, logistics, intellectual property and trademark issues, and the general market-domination of the psychological cola landscape). The ‘unsustainablilty’ of this kind of network ecology in both physical resources as well as its impersonality or asociality is rendered starkly ‘material’ in the practical solution of open-source recipe and the use of a social media / local area / community network for the distribution of cola. The emphasis on the production of sociality in and through the process prosumer craftmaking is made tangible in its drinkable, consumable materiality and raises interesting questions about the sustainability of network ecologies and the flows and stoppages of global and local consumerism and marketing, labour and information access and control.

Furtherfield article : ‘Feral Trade Coffee: A New Media For Social Networks’ http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=142

Thing.net blog post : http://post.thing.net/node/1142

Guardian article : http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/jul/28/foodanddrink.shopping

Feral Trade Website : http://www.feraltrade.org/cgi-bin/courier/courier.pl

Cube Cola website : http://sparror.cubecinema.com/cube/cola/

Screenshot from ‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’ VJ and networked remix project. Performed at International Symposium for Electronic Arts and ZeroOne, San Jose, USA, August 12 2006.

Dynamic Media: Innovative Social and Artistic Development in New Media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990 is an international, ARC funded project that provides information for Australians to more extensively implement dynamic media within a social context. Based at the Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, the project is a collaboration between Anna Munster (CoFA/CCAP), Andrew Murphie (Media, Film & Theatre, UNSW), Brian Massumi (University of Montreal) and Adrian MacKenzie (Lancaster University).The project focuses on the international strategies for social use of dynamic media, and will form the basis of an online database that will profile and be accessible to Australian artists, arts organisations, new media researchers and social innovators. This study highlights the innovation of Australian artists and researchers in the development of dynamic media and positions these internationally.

Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics, College of Fine Arts, UNSW

Adam (http://www.xs4all.nl/~adam) is a New Zealander based in Amsterdam. His career has been through many stages including managing radio stations in New Zealand, IT management at XS4ALL (.nl), tactical media (Radio21, HelpB92), and for the last 4 years he has been a professional new media artist.

Adam is now solely focused on managing the development of FLOSS Manuals (http://www.flossmanuals.net). FLOSS Manuals aim is to document the world of free software. The documentation is created by the FLOSS Manuals community and is licensed under the GPL (http://www.flossmanuals.net/license).

However, the more that data multiplies both quantitatively and qualitatively, the more it requires more than just visualisation. It also needs to be managed, regulated and interpreted into meaningful patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The work and outcomes of extracting pattern and order from data are rarely visualised for screen display in daily life. Indeed this management and interpretation of data flows is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are more frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions. Even when data flows do not become private or hidden property, their remixing and recombination in, for example, the web through the operations of search engines, databases, digest and feeds such as RSSs (Really Simple Syndication) increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible.

I will here refer to these mounting reserves of data about data, the software used to extract and analyse these and the social and cultural techniques accompanying this increasing trend as processes of data nonvisualisation in digital culture. By looking in some more detail at two areas in which data nonvisualisation processes dominate – Web 2.0 and data mining – we can begin to see how this marks an increasing trend in the way digital culture is organising data. At the same time, these newer less visible processes of aggregating and regulating data begin to reorganise contemporary digital culture. Whereas data visualisation characterised previous decades of digital culture in terms of tendencies in software development and the importance of digital imagery in both the arts and sciences, the invisibility of the processes involved in the manipulation of data is now ascendant.

This is not to say that these techniques for aggregating and deciphering data do not use visualisation techniques. In the area of data mining particularly, visual environments can be modelled to make sense of patterns detected in sets of information. What is invisible or rather not visualised are the parameters, relations and arrangements that are used to organise, interpret and hence make sense of the data. Additionally, the visualisation of data patterns has taken on a particular aesthetic – that of the vector/line. Examples of this can be found in abundance throughout the contemporary aesthetics of digital culture as social networks, relations between documents, corporate organisational relationships and even complex ideas are visually rendered as connections between lines and nodes. This visual style represents a type of thinning out of the visual plane of the image in contemporary culture – an attempt to streamline only the essential information-based elements of the image and eliminate ‘noise’ from the image scape. We might also think about the growing dominance of these minimal line images as a tendency toward reduced visuality within data visualisation.

An important cultural response to the proliferation of visualised data throughout the 1990s and early 2000s came from artists who re-worked scientific and medical images. The presumption that data imaging was a neutral or accurate portrayal of scientific facts has been variously investigated in the work of Aziz and Cucher, Justine Cooper, Michele Barker, Catherine Richards and others. But if we now increasingly occupy an aesthetic and social space in which the processes of making and organising data are largely invisible, what would be an appropriate aesthetic response to this trend? It may be the case that online and software artists will need to consider future artistic practices that are not visually based in order to respond to these processes of data nonvisualisation.

The ‘blackbox’ of data processing
Katherine Hayles has suggested that the use of computers for visualisation purposes has radically altered not only the ways in which mathematical operations are performed but contributes toward a new kind of knowledge that is visually intuitive:

…with computers, a new style of mathematics is possible. The operator does
not need to know in advance how a mathematical function will behave when it is iterated. Rather, she can set the initial values and watch its behaviour as iteration proceeds and phase space projections are displayed on a computer screen…The resulting dynamic interaction of operator, computer display and mathematical functions is remarkably effective in developing a new kind of intuition (Hayles, 1990: 163)

Sherry Turkle’s early analysis of the shift to online explorations of identity through chat and text-based virtual worlds indicated that interaction with digital machines became more ubiquitous the less people knew about the technical operations of those machines (Turkle, 1995). She compared the 1984 release of the MacIntosh operating system and its relatively easy yet opaque ‘desktop’ interface with a previous generation of ‘nerds’ and programmers who had interacted with computers using text-based commands (Turkle, 1995: 34). The command-line interface for a previous generation of computer-human interaction encouraged its human users to tinker with the underlying code of the interface in order to simply get the machine to work. In a sense, then, the operation and performance of computational systems had been more visible – although to a smaller and more elite group of people – if more cumbersome to operate.

There have been many debates about how graphics function in interface design, especially at the level of the Graphic User Interface (GUI). Some designers suggest that graphic representation of computational processes – the desktop as a representation of the computer’s operating system, for example – can confuse and obsfucate interaction with the computer (Norman, 1990: 216). Others have emphasised the importance of the GUI in communicating to users the complex tasks and functions that data undergoes in computation (Marcus, 1995: 425). But the use of graphics to represent both data and the processes performed upon data now definitively guides everyday interaction with computers.

By the late 1980s – and certainly by the introduction of GUIs for the web in 1994 – we were already less overtly aware of the inner processing of data and its pathways through the underlying architecture of digital machines. Computers had become the exemplary black box machine – you put something in and you get something out – and most users never really understood what happens in the middle. By the late 1990s, data visualisation, especially the animation of changes to data over time, was likewise being applauded by interface designers as a technique for making computation more human-centred:

New ways of representing data, especially changing data, allow users to gain new insights into the behaviour of the systems they are trying to understand and make the computer an invaluable tool for understanding and discovery as well as for interpretation and mundane calculation (Dix et. al., 1998: 598)

During the period of the rise of computer graphics, important areas of social and economic life such as financial markets and entire disciplines such as the life sciences, geographical systems and meteorology were adopting and developing various kinds of data visualisation. In the development of these applications, data visualisation followed two main directions: the digital visualisation of information held previously in analogue form such as printed maps or of numerical data such as statistics about climate; and the creation of information spaces as visual spaces. Geographical Information Systems (GISs) – an example of the first direction – began their life in the 1960s with the development of the Canadian Geographic Information Systems by Roger Tomlinson for the Canadian government’s Department of Energy, Mines and Resources in 1963. The digitisation and visualisation of geographic data has allowed query, analysis and editing of data using visual means and within a visual environment. During the 1980s and 1990s, GISs were standardised across a smaller number of computer operating systems and were being accessed across the internet. This greatly increased the ease and amount of user interaction. There are now a number of online applications that allow public access to certain kinds of GISs – map locators such as MapBlast and the virtual globe environment of Google Earth.

The second direction – the rendering of ‘pure’ information spaces – includes a multitude of projects for mapping cyberspace in which complex and invisible information flows and intersections such as website traffic are visualised (See Dodge and Kitchen, 2000). An example of this kind of data visualisation can also be found in the interactive three-dimensional real time rendering of the New Stock Exchange trading floor completed by the architectural design firm Asymptote in 1999. Traders in the exchange use this virtual information environment to, for example, visually track stock performance by individual companies and graphically detect the effect of incidents on performance. Asymptote’s Lise Ann Couture and Hani Rashid state that the complexity of data interrelations in stock markets was precisely the rationale presented by the New York Stock exchange for commissioning the spatial visualisation of its information (Asymptote, 2006).

The fascinating paradox of all these trends toward the visualisation of data – the screen interface of the desktop computer, the dominance of GUIs in web browser design and the construction of entire information spaces as both two- and three-dimensional image-scapes – is that the structures, operations and circuits through which data move become increasingly invisible. It is often the case that during initial periods of a digital medium’s or set of technologies’ development a period of greater accessibility to these underlying structures and processes occurs. This period of experimentation, in which technical and design protocols are less established, is often also characterised by artistic and cultural exploration of the medium/technology.

The first phase of web development and design from 1995 to 2001 (sometimes referred to as Web 1.0) required designers and artists to be versed in at least a basic level of the then broadly used scripting language for displaying information online – hypertext mark-up language (HTML). In other words, during this early phase of web design there were no pre-packaged methods for formatting the way a web page was displayed. All graphic and stylistic elements had to be laid out in HTML scripting that ‘told’ the web browser how to format the page for online display. For a relatively short period, both artists and designers had a measure of access to the ‘source code’ of the web and this resulted in a lot of play with HTML aesthetics. From the mid-1990s, the artistic duo of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, known as ‘jodi.org’, became infamous for their collapse of the visual levels of web display into the underlying HTML level of source code. Their early piece ‘http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/’ used the visual potential of HTML (using the actual ‘language’ to create a diagram of a hydrogen bomb) rather than HTML’s functionality as a piece of executing computer code (see Lunefeld, 2001: get page number). This very simple act of using the web’s language to sketch out an image of the hydrogen bomb was jodi.org’s reminder to us of the military origins of digital computing and indeed of the internet.

In fact, jodi.org furnish us with an aesthetic example that resists the broader cultural trend toward data nonvisualisation. Rather than using the graphic interface to obscure the underlying operations of computation, jodi.org’s work insists on using visual elements to foreground the complex historical, social and economic factors that are embedded within contemporary ‘user-friendly’ interfaces. Nevertheless, web design has now moved toward less visible engagement – certainly for the everyday user – with the underlying architecture, data structures and flow of data through its various nodes and mechanisms. This is so much the case that many people are unable to clearly distinguish between the web and the net or have no sense, for example, of how different search engines operate to retrieve and display their end results. In the next section, I want to briefly examine some of the information mechanisms within the Web 2.0 environment that contribute to this increasing trend toward data nonvisualisation.

Data as pattern, automation and aggregation
After the infamous dot.com crash, the web environment dramatically changed. One of the key criticisms of earlier web interaction and transaction had been that pre-existing commerce, institutions and communications were simply relocated into the domain of cyberspace. Models and modes of interaction suited to and developing out of the web environment has not really emerged in its early phases of growth.

Web 2.0 is a phrase used to denote the many changes that have taken place in the online environment after online cultures, commerce and everyday users regrouped in the post- dot.com context. It marks a ‘new’ generation of services and relationships that are internet-based and indeed can only develop in the online context. At the core of the concept of Web 2.0 is the understanding of the network as an expanded field of interaction, interrelation and semantic generation between users, online technical infrastructure and software. (See O’Reilly, 2005).

Newsblaster is an automatic news weblogger developed by the Natural Language Processing Group at Columbia University, New York, USA. The project began in 2002 and is a good example of a Web 2.0 tool. Newsblaster ‘reads’ a range of news items (from approximately 14 different sources) and, using artificial intelligence techniques, produces summaries of these stories. The tool is an example of an ‘aggregator’ – software that draws together and re-presents data in a digested and reduced form. Aggregators are a common feature of the information landscape of Web 2.0 as they are: a) automated forms of operations – such as producing digests of information – previously carried out by human labour in the Web 1.0 environment; b) methods for dealing with the explosion of online information that followed, the growth of blogs from around 2002 onward; and c) able to easily link and function in relation to the straight-to-web publishing environment that has become the mainstay of contemporary online transaction.

But Newsblaster is also an example of data mining techniques – automatically extracting embedded patterns and invisible connections – to produce news digests based on keyword and common phrase relationships in the stories that it culls from online searches. It represents a textual instance of the aesthetic of making visible the invisible connectivity of data. However, what remain invisible in Newsblaster’s automated, aggregate functionality are two key aspects. First, users deploying such aggregators are not aware what the parameters are for extracting and determining pattern and hence the processes of making data meaningful in particular ways are never visualised or made explicit. Automatic aggregation tends to perform operations that reduce the relations between data to commonalities rather than differences. This may be of crucial importance in the aggregation of news data where conflicting rather than similar perspectives about an item actually comprise the information about it. In reviewing the ‘newsworthiness’ of Newsblaster New York Times journalist Susan Reed notes that:

in summarizing reports about President Bush’s plan for greater scrutiny of corporations, Newsblaster did not include criticism that the plan failed to call for increased financing for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would carry out the effort. (Reed, 2002)

Aggregation therefore rests upon and contributes to the ‘image’ of networked information based upon similarity and close proximity as determinants of interconnectivity. It shares this propensity with other Web 2.0 tools and environments such as Friendster, which function by creating clusters of connections (friend and/or semantic networks) between closely proximate linked data and/or users.

Second, the historical, cultural and institutional contexts in which a tool such as Newsblaster operates are not so apparent in its every day use. The Newsblaster project was funded by the US government’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Although the project had been in development from 1998, nonetheless NSF and DARPA funding to a range of data mining projects increased in the heightened emphasis upon security and intelligence in the post-9/11 context. Newsblaster was funded due to a perceived need by US intelligence analysts wanting to explore the potential of data mining for homeland security applications. According to the NSF, data mining large sets of information from television broadcasts and web pages may uncover underlying invisible relations between events and increase the predictive capacities of intelligence agencies (NSF Press Release, 2002). What is important here is not the specific development of Newsblaster but rather the boost to the Web 2.0 environment afforded by US military funding. Coincidentally or not both the dot.com crash and 9/11 occurred in 2001 and it is after this period that the rise of Web 2.0 occurs. What, then, are the less visible forces at work driving the imaging and understanding of data as pattern and deep connectivity?

It comes as no surprise that the search for the invisible patterns and organization of data should be driven by military requirements. Data mining is an operation that can only take place in a context where vast quantities of data are produced and circulate and where much of this data is in fact meaningless or rather redundant. The automated mining of data sets for underlying pattern supposedly sifts through redundant information and extracts only relevant information. But it is precisely redundant information – or rather the potential for redundancy – that is at the heart of the original military diagram for networked connectivity. Paul Baran, an engineer working for the American nonprofit research agency RAND, wrote a memorandum in 1964 that became the basis of the thinking and imaging of networked communications (Rand, 1964). Sponsored by the US Air Force, the memorandum details a plan for a digital communications system that could survive the event of an attack on any of its parts. It is often remarked that the distributed and mesh-like character of the diagrams Baran used to illustrate how this system would function serve as an abstraction of advanced internet connectivity. However, more fundamental to Baran’s system is the ratio of its redundancy of links and nodes to actual links and nodes needed for communication of data (Baran, 1964: 8–9). By building in a degree of redundant links and nodes, Baran sought to allow switching of information packets to alternative communications routes in the case of either systemic failure or enemy attacks carried out upon the system.

Although it is now the case that the contemporary internet has outgrown its original military origins, redundancy of information is perhaps the most characteristic attribute of contemporary online communications. Everyone has experienced this phenomenon in the fruitless searches conducted for an item that lead nowhere or in being the recipient of bulk or spam email. And it is precisely this prolific redundancy of data – built into the original thinking and imaging of distributed communications – that today motivates the activity of data mining; that is, producing invisible pattern from the overwhelming chaos of too much information. It is as if we have come full circle in the 40 or so years since the inception of networked thinking to the point where what was conceived as a line of protection for the US military – the production of redundant connections, links and flows of information – now sustains the intelligence arms of this same institution. Perhaps the future of networks lies not so much with their visualisation but with what lies beneath them – the institutional and intellectual cultures of their past. In order to understand the increasing trend toward the nonvisualisation of the processing and manipulation of data, then, we also need to understand the institutional, intellectual and cultural histories of data’s flows.

Recommended Readings:
Baran, Paul (1964) “On Distributed Communications: Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks”, Memorandum RM-3420-PR, Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation

Dodge, Martin and Kitchen, Rob (2000) Mapping Cyberspace, London: Routledge

Hayles, N. Katherine, (1990) Chaos Bound, Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Lunenfeld, P. (2000) Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

O’Reilly, Tim (2005) “What Is Web 2.0:
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”, O’Reilly weblog, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?CMP=&ATT=2432

References
Asymptote website (2006) ‘NYSE 3D Trading Floor’, http://www.asymptote.net

Dix, Alan, Finlay Janet, Abowd, Gregory and Beale, Russell (1998), Human-Computer Interaction (Second Edition), London: Prentice-Hall Europe.

Dodge, Martin and Kitchen, Rob (2000) Mapping Cyberspace, London: Routledge

Hayles, N. Katherine, (1990) Chaos Bound, Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Lunenfeld, Peter (2000) Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

Marcus, Aaron (1995) ’Principles of Effective Visual Communication for Graphical User Interface Design’, Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000 (Second Edition), Ronald M. Baecker, Jonathan Grudin, William Buxton, Saul Greenberg eds, San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann missing page numbers

National Science Foundation Press Release 02-64-1 (2002) ‘NSF, Intelligence Community to Cooperate on “Data Mining” Research’, July 30, http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/pr0264.htm

Norman, Donald A. (1990 ) ‘Why Interfaces Don’t Work’, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, ed. Brenda Laurel, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 209–19.

O’Reilly, Tim (2005) “What Is Web 2.0:
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”, O’Reilly Blog, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?CMP=&ATT=2432

Reed, Susen E. (2002) “A News Cocktail Mixed by a Software Genie”, New York Times Electronic Edition, March 28,

http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9C04E5DF113BF93BA15750C0A9649C8B63

Turkle, Sherry (1997) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,
London: Phoenix

The two installations that form the topology of this other space – Memory and Urban Fiction – both depend on maintaining a relation to physical, encountered and imagined spaces outside the refuge of gallery walls. Memory is a restaging of an installation that Gemeinboeck exhibited previously in Singapore, the US and UK. This was its Australian premiere – this alone attesting to the lag we still experience in curating and facilitating access for audiences here to experimental new media arts. Memory captures audience members’ images as we pass into its net of ‘Mission Impossible’ style laser beams. These ethereal bounding mechanisms trigger image captures, which end up both spread across the work’s fractured and layered screens and deposited in a databank. We join up with the ghosts’ of audiences long past and become slot’s in the computer’s memory bank to be accessed according to its algorithmic and rhythmic processing. That space of computational processing – utterly impossible for human memory to inhabit – nonetheless returns on the installation’s screens. For we find our own real time gallery movements conjoined with the traces of previous visitors and with traces of movements we might have made in the gallery only five minutes before.

We expect a mirror, conversation or cause and effect response as we interact with Memory. We are met instead with distribution, fragmentation and tracing of the relations between image/trace, computer/embodied human and processing/thinking. What is delightful and pleasurable about Memory is that these are impossible spaces to navigate, if by navigation we mean to steer or move in a purposeful manner toward obtaining a goal. But this impossibility makes the interaction all the more enjoyable, provoking us to experiment with the relations between virtual and actual space and action. We are also tiptoeing through another impossibility in Memory – time. Although digital media have long been flaunted as ‘nonlinear’, much of our experience of them tends to really be multilinear. We branch through options in an interactive story; we go forwards, backwards, even sideways but advance through levels in gaming. Memory, however, gives us no such pathways: our and visitors’ images from the installation’s past are entangled in a visual dynamic and as the software’s dynamically processes its present and prior captures. There are gaps and syntheses between the present and past here and the installation’s future only materialises from this interplay.. Memory is one of those rare interactive experiences where we momentarily perceive the impossible temporality of the nonlinear.

A fracturing aesthetic and experimentation with dynamic human-machine interaction connect the installations Memory and Urban Fiction, within the gallery. What threads together the two works visually is the distribution and layering of screen spaces. Rather than just a convenient wall to absorb projection, Gemeinboeck treats screens viscerally. They are the fabric and fabrication place of digital production, to be ripped, stitched, piled upon and scattered. In Urban Fiction three screens are stretched in mid-air, catching their projections but also letting the edges of the moving image spill out onto the floor. Everything is beautifully positioned and executed but simultaneously unshackled.

But what are we actually looking at? Pulsations become patterns; dots march imperceptibly across the screen space; deforming lines and grids slowly unravel. This feels like a fragment from a map of planet ‘Information’ or the twisted, skeletal wire-frame of 3D-generated space or computer code run through a visualiser of the imagination. If Urban Fiction is a map, then it is not of familiar territory and it defies all formal cartographic conventions. And yet, the barely moving images are all generated through engagement with the surrounding geography of Darlington. Participants use customised mobile phones to walk in the vicinity of the gallery. The installation also logs signals from unwitting mobiles on the same network within specified parameters surrounding the gallery. These signals aggregate via custom software into forces and tensions that interfere, are sutured into and deform the images.

As we stand in the gallery, we begin to realise we are watching the formation of vast movement-patterns beyond singular instances of navigation through urban space. We keep time instead with collective city rhythms beyond immediate visibility. Indeed we see more than we would when looking at a map or image of the city. For here the surrounding buildings block, refract and lose network signal and these processes affect the absorption of signal into the data capture process. An image scape emerges of the urban landscape we think we know but to which many histories, forces and traces also belong. What emerges is not cartographic but topological – the nonphysical yet ever-present ground of shifting relations between people, between people, buildings and urban cultures, buildings and signals, signals and signs, all contributing to contemporary urbanity.

Petra Gemeinboeck is one of those rare new media artists whose work is equally aesthetic and intellectual. The sensation of inhabiting her impossible geographies is visceral but also a jolt that provokes thought: the thought of inhabiting the impossible. Like that of Jorge Louis Borges’ writing fragment The Garden of Forking Paths, Gemeinboeck’s ‘impossible’ is actually a space and time of infinite possibilities.