Sun Boxes, by Craig Colorusso, are an environment to enter and exit at will. It’s comprised of twenty speakers operating independently, each powered by the sun via solar panels. There is a different loop set to play a guitar note in each box continuously. These guitar notes collectively make a Bb chord. Because the loops are different in length, once the piece begins they continually overlap and the piece slowly evolves over time. The sounds of Sun Boxes have been described as both soothing and energizing. A unique combination of adjectives often used to describe yoga, or meditation. When experiencing the piece, Sun Boxes allows the participant to slow down, and notice the subtleties of the composition unfold. With the abundance of technology and hustle of this culture it is a much needed concept to not only be allowed, but also encouraged to slow down.

http://www.sun-boxes.com
http://muudmusic.blogspot.com

Fragments of RGB is an interactive Installation experimenting with illusion and perception. The classic LED screen as a medium was simulated and disintegrated by the creation of a pixel-like LED optic with the ability to change and transform with the viewer’s movement and, hence, his perspective and point of view. By Onformative Studio.

http://www.onformative.com

Are We There Yet? is a new media art installation in the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum by Bay Area artists Ken Goldberg and Gil Gershoni that celebrates inquisitive impulse. An immersive sound environment, the installation poses questions from a variety of sources including the Talmud, literature, and popular culture. Questions vary based on visitors’ movement through the space.
Each visit is a unique mix of playfulness, poetry, and spiritual journey. A companion website, are-we-there-yet.org, presents live streams of videos and tweets, allowing visitors to suggest questions for the exhibition and to playfully explore the suggestions of others.
You can also download the iPod/iPad app, follow on Twitter @doyouloveme, or like Are We There Yet? on Facebook. Are We There Yet? encourages visitors to reflect on the rich history and future of curiosity.

http://are-we-there-yet.org

“CCTV chandelier – Virtual Doppelganger Simulator”, by Hwang Kim, is an interactive installation that can reflect viewer’s Virtual Doppelganger. You can look objectively into your self in a third person’s point of view. This machine have around 30 CCTVs surrounding and hanging near viewer’s face and engineering viewer’s experience to show there Virtual Doppelganger in the connected TVs. This wearable visual system then allows the participant to see his/her own body or the surrounding environment from a third person’s perspective. Therefore, you yourself, viewer and visitor is displayed as an object in the gallery.

http://www.hwangkim.com

Recently, with the improvement of camera capabilities and related tracking systems, game input systems such as Nintendo Wii controllers or Microsoft Kinect games are incorporating more body positions and movements. Kiss Controller is an experimental project that allows users to control a bowling game by moving their tongues while kissing. Unlike existing game input devices, Kiss Controller seeks to generate the emotional experience of a kinetic act while users play the game rather than control games with their body.

http://vimeo.com/20119651

Happy Things is another “speed project” by Theo Watson and Kyle McDonald. The software captures positive human reactions to the Internet, analyzing your face through the computer’s webcam when you are browsing. Every time you smile, it posts your screenshot online, along with the web page that you found amusing.

http://kylemcdonald.net/happythings

114.psd Type, by Emilio Gomariz:

“114.psd Type is a simple typography which I designed once again thanks to Mac OS X (maybe it reminds to Folder Type, also created with Mac OS X). The idea for this type came in when seeing that this operative system memorizes the position of any file or window when you minimize and maximize it. So I created 114 photoshop files (I only used six colors, I played with all possibilites in RGB with the numbers 0 and 255, excepted 0,0,0 and 255,255,255). Then I placed and ordered the files in the right position before minimizing them on the dock. And finally I captured the screen maximizing every file.”

“Michael Jackson 4 Ways“, by Chris Howlett, is one of a series of video art works which are designed to activate an immersive space from which to critically and creatively consider how reality and simulated environments both construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of subjectivity and identity.
The video work explores these new phenomenons through Sims 3, which is a strategic life simulation video game where players construct and control their Sims in various social activities and form relationships in a manner similar to real life. Sims 3 does not have a defined final goal and its gameplay is open-ended. Michael Jackson was a person who cut across international racial and gender divisions with his music and lyrics, but whose personal life created intense contradictions between his private life and his role as a musician.
As the copies of the Michael Jackson Sims play out their animated roles in Paris Hilton’s house, the accompanying audio tracks expose the political and moral debates surrounding accusations of paedophilia. “Michael Jackson 4 Ways” questions the slippery position the viewer inhabits, to make informed, truth based decisions over these personal and moral online statements. Where does one locate one’s moral and ethical decisions based on the artists aesthetics?

http://www.chrishowlett.com.au
http://vimeo.com/user1098496

For a limited time in February 2011, KWMC (Knowle West Media Centre), in Bristol, UK, hosted an immersive video installation, which questioned how proximity and distance can affect the way we perceive and interact with other people.
“Who Are You?” has been developed by KWMC’s resident artist Patrycja Cudak. At the opening of the installation, the viewer is asked to choose a character they would like to hear from. As the viewer crosses the installation space and approaches the screen on which the character is projected, the character’s behaviour, dialogue and body language will change. Each viewer will hear a personalised narrative and develop an individual relationship with their character, as a result of the unique movements they make within the installation space.
Patrycja said: “[in] building ‘Who Are You?’, I was especially interested in what happens to us when we make a close relationship with someone and suddenly discover that this person performs some unhealthy habits when no one can see. How do these people create their outer image? How does their performance change when we get closer to them? Can we ever know the truth about a person?”

http://www.kwmc.org.uk

LPM – Live Performers Meeting is considered the most important international meeting of live video performers, visual artists and VJs, focused on live video performances.
LPM is conceived to be a place for dialogue, comparison and exchange of information and ideas among artists coming from all over the world and it aims to promote and support the intercultural dialogue and the transnational mobility of artists expert in live video field. LPM encourage the research, the experimentation, the encounter among different forms of artistic expression, the interaction-fusion among the manifolds techniques, digital and analogic technologies, software and hardware.

The ninth edition of LPM – Live Performers Meeting – kicks off on 19th May 2011 in Rome, Italy and will take place at the recently renewed Cinema Aquila, a multi-purpose cultural space dedicated to cinema and visual arts. Venue consists of three floors and includes 3 cinema halls set up with the highest technological standards, foyer and other spaces dedicated to the social interaction we love to promote at LPM.

The CALL FOR ENTRIES is now open, send your proposal!
Ready to participate? The LPM registration form LPM is on-line.
http://www.liveperformersmeeting.net/2011/en/participate/

Face to Facebook is the latest project by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, the third work in a series that began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir. These works share a lot in terms of both methodologies and strategies. They all use custom programmed software  in order to exploit (not without fun) three of the biggest online corporations (Google, Amazon and Facebook), exploiting conceptual hacks that generate unexpected holes in their well oiled marketing and economic system. Face to Facebook is currently on view as an installation at Transmediale Festival in Berlin.

This is how the authors explain this new, provocative net artwork:

“Stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software and then posting them on a custom-made dating website, sorted by their facial expression characteristics.
In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook’s exclusive property we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures).Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of  thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering  expressions. After a few weeks we had to face the evidence. All that people wanted was to attract new people, have more  relationships, to express and receive love through their digital traits. But they were trapped by Facebook  owning their data and restricting their actions with primitive privacy rules. They wanted more than just their restricted circles of “friends” and they wanted it quickly and easily.
Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules. So we established a new website (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data.
Now they are there, in full effect, free to keep in touch with a whole world of men and women and anything in between. And we accomplished our mission: the final piece of the free relationships interface is now running.”

http://face-to-facebook.net
http://lovely-faces.com
http://www.transmediale.de

The Ghost Town project was started the day Google Street View launched in Germany, in late 2010, by Arne Huebner, Daniel Stäbler, Chris Heller and Theo Seeman. Germany blocked Street view for a very long time, and when it was finally allowed, most of the buildings were blurred to protect the inhabitants privacy. Shocked by the look of their home town, Stuttgart – “a town filled with shower cubicles”, Seeman says – they decided to start an online project that poses the question about the sense/nonsense of this privacy mania:

“It started the day Google Street View was launched in Germany and is aimed to put focus on blurred real estates in Stuttgart to contribute to the controversially discussed question of privacy in a Google age. We started at Killesberg, where a quite high amount of blurred houses is located and interestingly the bold and the beautiful live. Step by step every blurred house of Street View in Stuttgart should be built as 3D model and put back in a Google Earth KMZ file, while their shapes are not original but geared to their blur layers. ”

Ghost Town is a project built at Merz Akademie during Attention Design workshop with Manuel Bürger in 2010.

http://nm.merz-akademie.de/ghosttown

New York director Annie Dorsen takes the famous television debate between the philosopher Michel Foucault and linguist and activist Noam Chomsky from the Seventies as inspiration and material for a dialogue between two specially developed chatbots: every evening, these computer programs designed to mimic human conversations perform a new – as it were, improvised – live text.
Hello Hi There is a performance without people – a literal expression of post-humanism, and simultaneously an examination of what it means to be human. The piece goes inside the question of human nature and intelligence, both the organic and the artificial.

http://www.ps122.org/performances/hello_hi_there.html

Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch, by Ben Baker-Smith, is a stream-of-conciousness representation of this overwhelming flood of media, its fractured and degraded sounds and images reflecting how little we as an audience are able to retain from this daily barrage.
Infinite Glitch is an automated system that generates an ever-changing audio/video stream from the constantly increasing mass of media files freely available on the web. Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of popular media hosting sites, torn apart, and recombined using collage and glitch techniques to create an organic, chaotic flood of sensory input.

http://infiniteglitch.com
http://bitsynthesis.com

Topologies, by Quayola, is an instalment of the Strata Series. Differently from the previous Strata pieces, Topologies does not describe a process of transformation, rather it focuses into the observation of objects that are already fully transformed. The subjects of these new pieces are two iconic paintings from the Prado Museum’s collection: “Las Meninas” of Velazquez and “L’ Immacolata Concezione” of Tiepolo. Following the rules behind their visual composition and colours, the two masterpieces have been transformed into digital fabrications through the use of custom software. Topologies consist in the exploration of the digital objects created by this transformation process. The outcome is not a narrative film but rather separate objects of contemplation… Literally “digital paintings”. Commissioned by onedotzero for the BFI Gallery, London.

http://www.quayola.com/index.php?/topologies

Drowning NYC, the new Recombinant Fiction piece by Paolo Cirio.
This is an attempt to weave a fictional story into the daily reality of the residents of Lower East Side Waterfront in Manhattan. They found themselves surrounded by an over-layering of mediated narrative information. Drowning NYC is a cross-media story; an experimental pilot that is told by actors and through narrative devices that are staged over the Internet and in the public spaces of a few chosen New York City neighborhoods. The genre and the art type are theorized by the artist as being “Recombinant Fiction”, a political and pervasive form of cross-media fiction.
This project proposes new pedagogical instruments, innovative activist strategies, elaborate media experiments, cutting-edge forms of theatre and cinema, questions about reality perception/construction and, above all, a new form of conceptual art.

http://www.drowning-nyc.net

Capacities is an installation by Stanza. This artwork gathers data from the city (environment) this is then made virtual and then this virtual city is represented as this electronic city. A manipulation of data, that ‘powers’ all the ‘events’ ‘actions’ and ‘processes’ in the installation.The changing data creates; all the changes one experiences in the space. The moving objects, fans, changing lights, motors, noises, that you encounter in the gallery are all responding to changes in temperature, light, pressure, noise, and the sound of the environment and the city outside.

The whole gallery space becomes one large artwork made from real time city information and data. The aesthetic and feel of the space looks like an electronic city. The city is made of units, grids, repetition , building blocks. In the gallery city called ‘Capacities’ the leads, the wires,and cables are incorporated into the artwork to look like a city map.’ Capacities’ looks “designed” like a piece of urban design, a city surveyed and controlled. The whole space becomes a map to wander through.

http://www.stanza.co.uk/capacities

Google is the main hub of an emerging data-driven world. It is a beast with many faces, impossible to grasp all at once and growing new limbs every day. It is also the name of many contradictions: a centralized traffic control in the (supposedly) horizontal and distributed Internet; a supporter of data openness and accessibility that relies on secret algorithms; and a ranking technology that is based on finding out popularity while it simultaneously determines it. “Google Variations” is a series of approximations of some of these diverse aspects of Google. It is a collection of formal and conceptual micro-experiments, a fly-eyed view of an entity so pervasive that it tends to be invisible while it radically changes our lives. “Google Variations” employs multiple strategies to de-naturalize our relationship with the brand, the corporation and the technology.
“Google Variations“, by Leonardo Solaas, is a 2010 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

http://turbulence.org/Works/google

Project GuitARS brings the rock out of your living-room! It is a game played with a guitar-shaped usb controller on a 5100m² LED facade. The player has to hit the buttons and stroke on the controller at the right time, depending on the falling blocks on the building.
The game was developed during the course “interface technologies” with Robert Praxmarer at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences. Project GuitARS was written in Java, the controller input is piped via xpadder. A note-recording tool was written in C++.

http://artcore.mediacube.at

One Hundred and Eight, by Nils Völker is an interactive wall-mounted Installation mainly made out of ordinary garbage bags. Controlled by a microcontroller each of them is selectively inflated and deflated in turn by two cooling fans.
Although each plastic bag is mounted stationary the sequences of inflation and deflation create the impression of lively and moving creatures which waft slowly around like a shoal. But as soon a viewer comes close it instantly reacts by drawing back and tentatively following the movements of the observer. As long as he remains in a certain area in front of the installation it dynamically reacts to the viewers motion. As soon it does no longer detect someone close it reorganizes itself after a while and gently restarts wobbling around.

http://nilsvoelker.com