New Media Initiatives

It’s Monday morning, and like many of you I’m sitting down to my computer for the day. I’ll check my email (office and GMail), see what’s new in the blogosphere (Google Reader), maybe catch up on the world a bit (Google News), and finally start my day of programming. (searching Google to see if anyone’s already written the code I’m working on ;)

You may notice a trend: Google. What would my world be like without Google? It’s an interesting thought experiment.

… except yesterday morning, it was a reality. Details are still sketchy (it may have just been Comcast?) but for an hour Sunday morning, I couldn’t reach a single Google domain. No GMail, no RSS, no search. And, in a creepy side effect I hadn’t anticipated, MANY sites were either slow, broken, or eternally loading as my browser tried in vain to pull the Google Analytics or Adsense code for the page. In short, the Internet was Broken.

It was amazing to watch myself try to remember how to search without Google. Maybe… Yahoo? No, I’ll try Ask.com. Turns out the results are terrible, at least for programming-related searches. A friend called looking for directions to a farmers’ market, and it took me a bit to remember the world beyond Google Maps. Doesn’t… Microsoft do maps? Hmm, who else… If only I could search!!

Twitter was still up, and via TwitScoop.com I could see a big spike in Google-related tweets, but I have yet to see any official word on this. Clearly big companies have downtime (Amazon was down for a few hours recently), but still… It may be time to rethink my utter dependency on “The Google”.

Last night was the big SubZero street festival portion of Zero1. South First Street was closed for about four blocks in the SoFA district of San Jose, and many artists showing off their contraptions and work had set up. I took a walk down the street several times and captured some of the work.

Graffiti Research Lab was visibly present, both with some of their work on display on the street and in the Anno Domani gallery, with a show called “The U.S. Department of Homeland Graffiti Liquidation Sale”. Some of the work was a spoof on the LED sign scare in Boston a year ago, in which GRL was quickly and wrongly implicated. So nice to see Osama Bin Laden and George W Bush giving each other the finger in LED style.

Inside the gallery DJ Spooky (aka Paul D Miller) gave a talk about his new book and remix culture. He manages to connect the dots between many the history of the remix and how embedded it has become into our culture. I didn’t stick around to buy the book, though I plan to soon, because I was headed down to MACLA for a performance of Flock.

Upon entering the performance space for Flock, you’re given a black hat with a glowing white orb on the top and told to walk up to the stage. Just above the stage, there is a projection visualizing all the orbs on-screen, and with enough distinguishing movement, you can figure out which dot represents your orb. After a bit of play, the real performance begins. Four musicians playing saxophones eventually made the way on stage, each outfitted with an iPaq connected to a WiFi network, transmitting an ever-changing score of what they should be playing. Three dancers with white orbs eventually emerged, and began moving around the stage area. Their orbs combined with the movement of the musician’s orbs changed the score dynamically. Over the course of the show the method of generating music changed, from a simple cross-screen wipe, to something akin to radar, and also a connect-the-dots style graph. The audience was pulled in one at a time by the dancers through the performance as well, and were instructed to move around and generate the sound. At one point a conga line formed, and at another several people grabbed hands and began circling one of the musicians, overloading him with notes to play. In this way, the social interaction people engaged in to generate the music was more interesting than the music itself.

There were also low-rider art bikes on display. The display was no Minneapolis Art Car Parade, but still fun to see the weird things people do to their cars. The bikes in particular looked very slick. I’m afraid if I had a bike that nice, I’d never ride it.

Another performance on the street that always had a crowed was Drone Machines, operated by “Author & Punisher” Tristan Shone, consisting of several very industrial looking contraptions that as the description notes, “require significant physical interaction from the performer” to operate:

Minneapolis Art on Wheels has also been around the festival, but they were out in force last night at SubZero, at several different locations down First street and side streets. They even had one of MAW’s bikes rigged up with GRL’s L.A.S.E.R. Tag system and a crowd gathered around watching and waiting to tag. Everyone had a good laugh when a squad car drove by with an officer glared out the window at us.

I missed the first day of Zero1 due to an flight scheduling snafu that was totally my fault. From the reports I’ve read and the people I’ve talked with, it sounds like I missed out on some cool stuff. That said, I did make it to San Jose early yesterday morning and visited a few of the exhibitions. Rhizome already has some great coverage so I am not going to duplicate their thoughts.

Having not read much before visiting, I was expecting the exhibition to be very much in the realm of new media and digital technology as the primary focus. The show straddles the fence between technology as a driving factor in the creation of work, vs digital technology as the being only an enabling factor in much of the work. Its a good balance that seems to accurately represent the way many new media artists think; they dabble in many forms.

I would best describe Tantalum Memorial by Harwood, Richard Wright, Matsuko Yokokoji as a monument to retro computing, but it’s meaning makes it more solemn and morbid. It consists of several strowger switches, which a computer dials into and plays back recorded messages from London’s Congolese community’s circulating conversations. Strowger switches were the mechanical devices invented by Almon Strowger to replace human telephone operators. Strowger switches use Tantalum, as do many modern day electronics, including cell phones. Tantalum is mined in Congo, and is the source of considerable strife there, causing the deaths of many thousands in wars relatively underreported in western media. You can listen to the recording on a set of headphones. The sound of the switches echos through the gallery as if counting the rising death toll.

Global warming and climate change are themes that loom large in this exhibit and Zero1 in general. Rising North by Jane Marsching and the two other works by her address global warming more directly than perhaps any other work in the festival I’ve seen so far. The work consists of a almost sci-fi video showing the sea levels around the world rising, the mega-cities of the world shrinking and eventually being encased in some sort of biosphere and floatation device. The encased cities then move and converge at the north and south polls, the places on earth that will remain suitable for human habitation when much of the temperate zones become too warm. Watching the work, I can’t help but be both fascinated by the idea of moving entire land-masses and horrified that rising sea levels and temperatures is a future we are destined to see.

Ways to Wave is a virtual and physical sculpture; it exists both in the gallery and in a different form in Second Life. Participants in the gallery move the petals of the flower-like interface in the gallery, which effects a scene in Second Life projected on the screen just behind the sculpture. The movement of the petals also impacts a changing audio composition. There is supposed to be a way to visit the sculpture in Second Life, but I haven’t attempted that. It is an interesting way to bridge the physical and the virtual, and I’m always a big fan of work that encourages you to interact with it.

If/Then is Piotr Szyhalski’s contribution to the exhibition and the festival. Installed in the gallery and in changing locations around the festival are dispensers that drop leaflets designed by Szyhalski. The leaflets reference leaflets distributed by the US Military’s Psyops department in the Iraq and Afghanistan War. Visitors are encouraged to take some leaflets of leaflets that drop onto the gallery floor. The set of leaflets I received have the text “ Honor will never be regained, no matter what the cost”, printed in both arabic and english on the back, with pictures of Saddam Hussein and Thomas Jefferson on the front. The dual meanings of this are disturbing if unavoidable; Saddam Hussein will be remembered by many as a disgraced dictator, and the US has lost much of it’s honor and credibility in the world because of the war our government started in Iraq.

I’ve got a few more posts in store about the festival, so stay tuned.

I’ve just made a minor tweak to My Yard Our Message. You can now download the full resolution jpeg file for each sign as well as embed the signs into another page or blog, just like I am doing here.

All the signs for My Yard Our Message must be licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike License to be submitted to the project, so we are obligated to make the files available to all. They always were, but not easily accessible. Now we’ve got a link right there under each sign for the file.

For the embed, I’m using an iframe which is certainly the easiest method to getting a nicely formatted widget on the page, because it avoids any CSS inheritance problems that a Javascript and document.write solution might have. The downside is that it is not always compatible with every blogging or HTML authoring solution out there, due to the way some have a tendency to filter HTML. Regardless, it is good enough to satisfy most user’s needs.

University of Minnesota professor Ali Momeni and his students are on their way to San Jose’s Zero1 Festival later this week with their mobile projection units. The mobile projection units are GRL-inspired work bikes equipped with a computer, projector, generator and all other necessary gear for outdoor projection mayhem, which will be used during The UnConvention. The group has set up a new blog, Minneapolis Art on Wheels, to document the exploits of the trip. They’ve loaded up the bikes into a cargo van and are caravanning across the western United States.

Before he left, Momeni told me he was curious to see if they could project onto the face of Mt. Rushmore. I’m not sure if they’ll pull it off, but the latest updates from the Badlands are pretty close; pure projection geek porn.

I’m heading out to Zero1 later this week and will be blogging about the festival and hope to meet up with Momeni and his students for some fun in San Jose.