bridell.com

Stockholm has been blessed with its own openFrameworks Knitting Circle. If you’re wondering why I’m talking about a knitting circle at at new media blog, it’s because this is not really a knitting circle. The craft here is hacking, not knitting. The material is code and electronics, not textiles, and the tool is primarily openFrameworks, the C-based framwork for new media artists and other… well, creative engineers.

The first oF Syjunta is at Doberman in Münchenbryggeriet, Oct 30 2008.

>> openFrameworks for the tool (and openframeworks.cc/download for the download)

>> oF Syjunta for the event

A while back something happened with bridell.com, and loading a page - any page -  suddenly took ages. I couldn’t really find the strength and time to fix it (especially since loading the administration pages was just as slow…) and that’s why I haven’t been updating the site. Now at least it looks like the speed is as it used to be, but on the other hands some stuff is not working at all now.

So, the site is back, but crippled. I hope to fix it. So stay tuned.

I’ve been working on the Fringe.nu site for a while, transforming the old site into a Wordpress-driven site. Tonight we flicked the switch and put it online. Go and have a look (and tell me if you find stuff that’s broken…). It’s at http://fringe.nu, just like before.

The good people of Dånk! are organizing the first Dorkbot Gothenburg event. It starts in about 30 minutes, so chances are that if you’re reading about it here it’s too late. All I know is that Japanese artist Kanta Horio will be there.

If you are not familiar with Dorkbot, I think the tagline “people doing strange things with electricity” really says it all. It’s great to see that it’s now running in Gothenburg too. Dorkbot STHLM has not been very busy lately, but fortunately we have Fringe… where, as it happens, Kanta Horio will also show up, as well as Alex Berman (aka Nim) from Dånk!

Out there:

• Dånk! [daonk.org]
• Dorkbot [dorkbot.org]
• Fringe [fringe.nu]
• Kanta Horio [media.t-kougei.ac.jp/~horio/]
• Alex Berman / Nim [timebend.net] [myspace.com/niminalism] [nimations.com]

A tool for exploring extrasensory perception

Interactive installation by Ulrika Sparre (2007). Produced at the Interactive Institute with Sparre as Artist in Residence. Programming and interface design by Fredrik Bridell.

Mental Radio contains an archive of drawings. The viewer is invited to try to guess the current drawing, hidden from view, and try to make a similar drawing.

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I just spent a while looking for a way to install the current (2.5) release of the WordPress blog on the web host web10.se. I failed. However, I did manage to install Wordpress 2.3. If you want to know how I did it, read on.

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Autonomous installation by Tim Horntrich and Jens Wunderling.

The piece self.detach - decomposing identities continuously scans whatever is being posted to Flickr. Images that are understood as being self-portraits (pictures tagged as “me”, “moi”, etc) will be extracted. They are then shredded into RGB pixels, which in turn are translated to physical colored grains that fall out of the machine.

Visually it first makes me think of Felix Gonzales-Torres’ famous Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) from 1991 - a huge pile of colored candy, weighing 175 lbs (80 kg) like Gonzales-Torres’s partner Ross before he started losing weight. I guess Horntrich and Wunderling are not aiming for quite that level of serious contemplation, but still, perhaps it is more than a jab at postmodern deconstructionism. At the project website the talk about the Buddhist practice of laying mandalas with colored sand, ephemeral paintings that are just brushed away into candy-colored piles of sand after they are done. With that in mind this piece does become a rather beautiful image for thinking about the futility of posting images of yourself at Flickr. “Look, this is me”. So?

Structured tagging: autonomous, installation, mixed reality

Further reading:

• selfdetach.net project website
• Tim Horntrich (udk.rgbdeluxe.de)
• Jens Wunderling (sport4minus.de)

Just so you know, there will be a new edition of Electrohype in Malmö, Sweden, this fall (2008). The call for entries is out on the electrohype website, electrohype.org

Interactive mixed reality game by Animaatiokone Industries.

Kick Ass Kung-Fu is a mixed reality fighting game. You perform your real martial-arts type moves in front of a camera. On screen you see both yourself and your virtual opponents. Fight!

I’m particularly impressed by the way they managed to mix physical motion with game-like physics on screen (super high jumps, super fast moves, etc). It’s also really liberating to do this sort of gaming without having to strap on any type of sensors, glasses or other gadgets, and at the same time allow you to use any physical object as a weapon. There are some videos on the site below showing all the nifty features.

Further reading:

• kickasskungfu.net

Autonomous installation by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Listening Post is a piece that listens to a number of online chat forums in real time. It extracts lines (those that contain the words “I am…”) and then displays these at the small displays, and reads the lines out using text-to-speech software.

While this sounds simple enough, it really is very nicely done. You should have a look at the page below and watch the videos to get the idea. This piece won the Ars Electronica Golden Nica for interactive art in 2004.

Further Reading:

• Listening Post (with videos) at Earstudio.com (Ben Rubin’s site)
• Mark Hansen homepage

Structured tagging: autonomous, installation