bridell.com

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)

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

Autonomous LED installation by Jim Campbell.

This low-resolution LED matrix display (32 x 24 pixels, all red) show a video of a person running and falling.

This is a piece from Campbell’s “ambiguous icon” series of LED works.

Further reading

• jimcampbell.tv

Autonomous robotic installation by Frank Fietzek and Uli Winters.

On two white pedestals we see two characters, a cat and a frog. They both look like some sort of odd low-tech cyborg versions of stuffed animals. When you walk closer you hear they are having a very serious discussion about language philosophy, quoting Kant and Wittgenstein and so on. From time to time they will lose their temper and resort to slapping each other.

I saw this piece during Ars Electronica 2005 and for some reason this is one of the pieces I really remember - more than some of the award winners.

Structured tagging: autonomous, kinetic, robotic, installation

See also:

• Watchendiskurs, from Frank Fietzek

Dynamic installation by Ola Pehrson

On the table we see a yucca plant in a pot, wired up with electronic sensors. The sensors are in fact biometric sensors that measure tiny electrical variations in the plant. These are interpreted by the computer, who uses it to buy or sell shares on the stock market. If the plant does well as an investor, it is rewarded with more light and water.

Further reading:

• www.olapehrson.com

Structured tagging:

• autonomous (it changes over time, but it’s not interactive as such)
• bio-art (it contains sensors that measure biological activity)
• installation (in a broad sense)

A paranoid web spider searching for the devil on the Internet.

Digital art piece produced at the Interactive Institute Smart Studio by Thomas Broomé, Fredrik Bridell and Olof Bendt. (2001)

Hellhunt contains a web spider, a computer program that goes to one web page, downloads all the images on the page and remembers all the links leading out from that page. It uses a corner detection algorithm to detect corners in images, and then tries to match those corners with the pattern of an inverted pentagram, a five-pointed star with two points on top, considered to be a symbol of evil. If it finds it, the image is saved along with a copy of the image with the pentagram filled in. In some versions the image is also printed out, and an e-mail is automatically sent to the owner of the page, saying that we have detected that they are posting satanic material on the web, and would they please be so kind as to remove it.

This piece (conceived by Thomas Broomé) was originally part of a larger exhibition called Lords of Legacy, shown at Art Node in Stockholm (2001). I did a lot of the programming (in Lingo, the curious programming language used in Macromedia Director).

Out there:
thomasbroome.com