The Wifi Camera is a camera that takes “pictures” of spaces illuminated by wifi in much the same way that a traditional camera takes pictures of spaces illuminated by visible light. The camera reveals the electromagnetic space of our devices and the shadows that we create within such spaces, in particular our wifi networks which are increasingly found in our daily lives, in coffee shops, offices and homes throughout cities of the developed world.
With the camera we can take real time “photos” of wifi. These show how our physical structures are illuminated by this particular electromagnetic phenomenon and we are even able to see the shadows that our bodies cast within such “hertzian” spaces.
Wifi Camera is an ongoing research project initiated by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai Fischer with Usman Haque.

http://wificamera.propositions.org.uk

Hi everybody, I’m working on a curatorial project for the next edition of FotoGrafia Festival in Rome.
My focus is on the relationship between Photography and New Media (especially Web Culture). If you have submissions / suggestions send an e-mail to: valentina.tanni AT gmail.com. I’d love to receive proposals!

Valentina Tanni
Random Magazine’s founder
www.valentinatanni.com

The CodeOrgan analyses the “body” content of any web page and translates that content into music. The CodeOrgan uses a complex algorithm to define the key, synth style and drum pattern most appropriate to the page content.
Firstly, the CodeOrgan scans the page content and removes all characters not found in the musical scale (A to G), and then analyses the remaining characters to find the most commonly used “note”. If this is an even number the page is translated into the major pentatonic scale of that particular note, it becomes minor if there is an uneven number.
Secondly, the CodeOrgan defines which synthesizer to use. This is based upon the total number characters used on the webpage – there are currently 10 synthesizer effects and the one chosen is picked based upon the percentage of content.
Lastly, the CodeOrgan selects a drum loop based upon the ratio of characters on the page versus the number of characters that are actually musical notes – there are currently 10 different drum loops to pick from.

http://www.codeorgan.com

Zimoun focuses on creating installations and sound sculptures, usually in connection with mechanical features, movement and physically generated sounds. His creations are graceful, mechanically harmonized works of poetic playfulness – simple yet complex, the result of repetitions with slight irregularities caused by routine and coincidence.
Zimoun uses simple components. Through mutual interference and interaction these generate complex sound structures and movements. He often works with a great number of identical mechanical industrial elements, which he then manipulates and prepares for his creations. His interest lies in the artistic research of resonance, space, movement, simplicity, materials and generative systems. The result is an artificially generated yet seemingly organic behaviour of these installations and sound sculptures.

http://www.zimoun.ch

Notput, by Jürgen Graef and Jonas Heuer, is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting.
All basic clefs, note values and accidentals exist as single wood elements. Whole, half, quarter and eighth notes differ not only in their form, but also in their weight: Long note values are heavier than short ones.
The table has two modes: A standard mode, where you can place notes on the table in a playful and experimental way and explore the related music outcome. And an excercise mode, where excercises and tutorials sort by topic and difficulty have to be mastered.

http://www.jonasheuer.de/index.php/noteput/

All Over, by Samuel Bianchini, is an online artwork based on a series of images composed of typographic characters in the manner of ASCII art, that is using the display techniques of the first computers. In this case, however, the figures and letters composing the images are dynamic and keep changing: they are generated in real time following the rise and fall of stock market indexes around the world. The originally still images change according to the volume of financial transactions, which simultaneously feed and disrupt the photographs.

http://www.dispotheque.org/allover
http://www.jeudepaume.org

Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.
On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…

http://www.streetwithaview.com

Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) is a project by Gebhard Sengmüller, in collaboration with Jakob Edlbacher, Johannes Obermayr, Gerhard Proksch-Weilguni, Ludwig Ertl and Andreas Konecky.

“Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) is a new television format that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television (SSTV), an image transmission system used by Ham Radio amateurs. VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain television system and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system: Just as a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create various hues, VSSTV utilizes a plotter-like machine to fill the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT colors, turning them into pixels on the VSSTV “screen”. Large television images with a frame rate of one per day are the result, images that take the idea of slow scan to the extreme.”

http://www.gebseng.com/02_vsstv

Peter Nitsch just launched his new project: ASCIImeo, a web application that renders Vimeo’s videos in different textmodes.

“The player is an evolution of earlier video experiments I was doing in Alchemy. Still using Jari Komppa’s TextFX7 engine for the glyph conversion and AS3ANSI for the rendering, this version features improved speeds and a control UI including fullscreen mode.When this project was first conceived, I had considered using the Youtube API, but after reading through their TOS that idea quickly vanished (obstructing the video is a violation). Vimeo didn’t pose the same problem, and in retrospect, it was a wiser choice considering the greater quality and style of most of their videos.”

http://www.asciimeo.com
http://www.peternitsch.net

Every day the same dream, by Molleindustria, is a slightly existential riff on the theme of alienation and refusal of labor. The idea was to charge the cyclic nature of most video games with some kind of meaning (i.e. the “play again” is not a game over). Yes, there is an end state, you can “beat” the game.

http://www.molleindustria.org

The typical browsing experience is conducted through a single application window. This is indeed a useful, practical thing. Browser Pong instead exists between a collection of windows. During play the negative space between windows is transformed into a playing field—the abstracted tennis court of Pong. The idea of thinking inside or outside some “box” is of course a dead and beaten horse. Browser Pong attempts to think with the boxes. (Stewart Smith of Stewdio).

http://stewdio.org/pong

Remap Berlin, by Marco Cadioli aka Marco Manray, spreads a thin geographical virus in Google Earth and deals with different levels of reality. The project introduces a series of b&w photographs shot in Twinity, a mirror world that reproduces a realistic 3D replica of Berlin. The photos shot in Twinity, are then geo-localized in Google maps, re-mapped from virtual to real and positioned in the exact point where they have been shot in the mirror world. Once uploaded in the photo sharing community Panoramio, the pictures are mixed up with other ones shot in the same geographical point from real life users. Many of these pictures have been selected by Google and can now be found as “Popular photos in Google Earth”: his became a little geographical virus, parts of our memories of the real world. The photographs are cityscapes, shot by Marco Manray roaming around the still empty streets of Berlin in the beta version.

http://www.marcomanray.com/remap-berlin/

Stephanie Syjuco fabricated a selection of “sculptures” designed by anonymous users of Google SketchUp, a free 3-D modeling program: “Many–but not all–of the digital designs are created by non-artists who are just trying to figure out the software (”Something I made while I was bored”), but some are very earnestly made (”best sculpture ever!”) and all are lovely in their own way. Using their designs, I became the “unsolicited” fabricator of their work. The final sculptures are cleanly made from simple materials such as cardboard, plastic, Coroplast (a stiff, corrugated plastic material), paper, and tape.”

http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com

The Victoria and Albert Museum has commissioned the artist Karsten Schmidt to design a truly malleable, digital identity for the Decode exhibition by providing it as open source code. Anyone can recode Karsten’s work and create his own original artwork. The identity application is fully interactive and can be controlled via mouse, keyboard and a graphical user interface. A number of the recoded works submitted will be chosen by the V&A and CBS to appear on London Underground digital screens to promote the exhibition.

http://code.google.com/p/decode
http://postspectacular.com
http://www.vam.ac.uk/decode

JODI’s ongoing performance project, The Folksomy Project, takes YouTube as source material, with the artists utilizing custom software to select and manipulate user-generated videos from the popular website. Armed with a virtual “juke-box” of video clips, JODI focuses on YouTube users love-hate relationship with new technologies, from iPod love ballads to laptop smashing. As with much of JODI’s work, The Folksomy Project is a study in how online systems (dis)function.

http://g33con.com/
http://eyebeam.org/projects/the-folksomy-project

A Google Portrait is a drawing which contains the Google URL search string of the portrayed person in encoded form. Any camera smart phone is capable to decode the matrix-code with the help of barcode reader like software. The result points the mobile phone browser to a search on the portrayed person’s name at Google.
Google Portrait is a project by Aram Bartholl.

http://datenform.de/googleportraiteng.html

Tweeting Colors, by Brian Piana, is webpage comprised of vertical color bars created by special tweets from Twitter users. Anyone can view the piece, but a Twitter user in the public timeline can add bars by following the simple directions linked to from the bottom of the page. The newest bars appear from the left. The page auto-refreshes a few times a minute, so sit back and enjoy the Color Feed.

http://www.tweetingcolors.com

The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine, by Marc Owens, is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.
The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.

http://www.marcowens.co.uk

Xbox 360 Self Portraits, by Marque Cornblatt, are executed within various games available on the Xbox 360 game console. The artist’s avatar and all other elements were created using the “character creation” tools provided within each game. There was no use of hacking, programing, or other methods beyond the options provided within the game itself used to augment each piece. The inherent limitations of the game tools present a conceptual challenge to craft digital representations of the self which accurately reflect the nature of the artist’s personae, vs. the essentialized character presumed by the game’s designers.

www.marquecornblatt.com

Virtual data isn’t subject to decay like traditional media. Despite this, we can still lose personal data to disk failure, viruses, or accidental deletion. Unlike personal data however, data on the internet has a seemingly infinite shelf-life. Between search-engine caching, cloud-hosting, re-blogging, plagiarizing, and the way-back machine, the net collects and eternally stores vast amounts of information.
Temporary.cc, by by Zach Gage, schews this paradigm. For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.
Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.

http://www.temporary.cc