My Top Five:
1. Tod Machover's "Music Toys"
- bb_center.jpg (10.66 KiB) Viewed 24755 times
Beatbugs are hand-held percussive instruments which allow the creation, manipulation and sharing of rhythmic motives through a simple interface. When multiple Beatbugs are connected in a network, players can share and develop rhythmic patterns to form larger scale compositions. The players themselves choose between manipulating existing motives and entering their own material, in essence creating a dynamic and collaborative music that is truly more than the sum of its parts.
From his Website:
Is it Possible to see Sound?
Or touch sound? Or to have sound touch you so deeply that it can change your mind, your body, your life?
Tod Machover certainly thinks so, and his work over the past 30 years demonstrates an extraordinary range and diversity that enhances our definition of music itself and our conception of what it can achieve. Called "America's Most Wired Composer" by The Los Angeles Times, Machover is widely recognized as one of the most significant and innovative composers of his generation, and is also celebrated for inventing new technologies for music, including Hypersinstruments which he launched at the MIT Media Lab in 1986.
Whether it is creating genre-breaking compositions for the concert hall, "robotic" operas for worldwide stages, software that allows anyone to compose original music, or musical activities that can diagnose illness and restore health, Tod Machover's unique vision is shaping the future of music, while producing work after work that touch the hearts of audiences here and now
http://opera.media.mit.edu/ToySymphony/ ... smain.html
http://web.media.mit.edu/~tod/
2. Kinetic Sculpture
BMW Museum, Munich
Description
The Kinetic Sculpture is a metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding in art and design. 714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors and covering the area of six square meters, animate a seven minute long mechatronic narrative. In the beginning, moving chaotically, then evolving to several competing forms that eventually resolve to the finished object, the Kinetic Sculpture creates an artistic visualisation of the process of form-finding in different variations.
3. Through the Looking Glass
The world “through the looking glass” has been variously depicted
in fairy tales and science fiction. Yet in the real world, common sense
tells us that a mirror clearly and accurately reflects any object placed
before it. This idea underlies all of our interactions with mirrors in daily life.
“through the looking glass” defies such common sense. Here we use
a perfectly ordinary mirror (without any special treatment or manipulation)
and destroy the relationship between the actual object and its reflection.
When you stand before the mirror, you experience something strange. A screen
displaying an image is placed before the mirror, but the screen image and the
mirrored image do not match--you see a different world reflected in the mirror.
The “through the looking glass” world has become a reality.
Furthermore, this work enables you to separate yourself from your mirrored image
to experience an entirely new kind of interaction. In this work, there is a
square-shaped screen in front of the mirror. This screen is reflected within
the mirror to create a rectangular screen, in which you play air hockey with
your own reflection. A video puck travels back and forth through the looking glass,
and you hit the puck to compete with your mirrored image. You have to think fast
on your feet and control both sides of the game depending on the position and direction
of the puck. If you play aggressively and hit the puck hard, your opponent has to scramble
to return the puck. But you are also your own opponent--you simultaneously win and lose.
4. Spot the SPOTS
It's a Game; It's a Serious Work of Art; It's Insightful Commentary about Technology; and It's Soon to Be On Display in Downtown San Jose
July 28, 2006 - Where do art and science intersect? This subject of intense philosophical debate will soon have a concrete answer: between Cesar Chavez Plaza and the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose, California.
From August 7-13, Sun Labs' artist-in-residence, Ashok Sukumaran, will display his latest work, Park View Hotel. He has created a "line-of-sight network" distributed across almost an entire city block and parts of the Fairmont Hotel—a work that incorporates "Sun SPOT" (Small Programmable Object Technology) wireless sensor and transducer technology developed at Sun Labs. The display will be featured as part of ZeroOne San Jose, a "global festival of art on the edge" and the 13th Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) Symposium.
the work is accessed via two telescope-like interface devices situated at ground level in the park. As viewers aim the devices toward the architecture, an infra-red beam illuminates or "turns on" embedded elements along the viewer's line of sight. For example, lights turn on in rooms at the Fairmont, over 200 feet away. You can then activate these newly revealed "SPOTs," an action that leaks into other parts of the network. In all more than 40 Sun SPOT elements will be embedded into the finished artwork.
Park View Hotel is fundamentally interactive--the viewer and a network of hidden devices actually discover each other. As you detect their presence, they detects yours. And the characteristics of the network change in response to your looking at it, something we learn in both physics (Heisenberg) and in cinema's active "gaze."
"Things tend to disappear as they become pervasive," said Ashok. "This is true of familiar physical objects such as streetlights or a hotel; and in a broader sense it's true of technology. Electricity, for example, is so familiar it has disappeared. It is used so routinely that it is no longer noticed, and I look at this condition in other artworks. Today, network technology has become pervasive, and many networks all around us are similarly hidden."
So in the same way that Park View Hotel will help people look at a familiar hotel with new eyes, it will also reveal the network and explore its properties.
"I'm particularly interested in exploring the topology or modality of communication between public and private spaces," said Ashok. "In this case the viewer's actions are affecting the interior of a large building from the street. You are entering it and impacting it optically and electronically, and its properties are leaking back to you, coming to find you and affecting you. It's almost like a gaming environment in some ways: it creates a certain sense of excitement as you point a device at something, target something very precisely. But there's also a sense of transgression—a feeling that you're invading a private space. It questions the boundaries of ownership, permissions, and at one level property itself."
Mr. Sukumaran became the first Sun Microsystems - ZeroOne San Jose artist-in-residence in September, 2005. He is both an architect and media artist, with strong interests in the built environment, technology, and digital art. Based in India, Ashok earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in media art at UCLA in 2003. That year he was project director for NANO, an exhibition that blended multiple scientific disciplines to explore the intersection of digital art and nanoscale science at LACMALab, Los Angeles.
In general, Mr. Sukumaran's art deals with the complex interrelationships between embedded technology and human habitat, and explores new ways to provide insight into the evolution of technology and the way people interact with it. His projects have received many art and design honors, including the UNESCO Digital Arts first award for 2005, a first prize in the Samsung Art and Design Institute's competition 2002, a David Bermant Foundation award for media art in 2003, AMONG others (see some examples of his previous work at
http://users.dma.ucla.edu/~suku/).
From the perspective of Sun Labs, Ashok's art provides a unique and powerful new means of exploring the potential—and the potential impact—of the technologies its researchers are creating.
"I have been very fortunate to work closely with the people at Sun Labs," said Ashok. "There is often a perception that corporate culture is the antithesis of the practice of art, and in this case nothing could be further from the truth. The depth of technical and other knowledge I have found here and the broad expertise and perspective of Sun researchers has amazed me and will influence my work for a long time to come. I've enjoyed my experience here and learned a great deal."
5. BABY LOVE
(my favorite)
http://babylove.biz/index-en.html
http://babylove.biz/html/concept.html
Baby Love - concept
Baby Love situates human and its baby clones in a perpetual spin of fairground teacup ride. Tea and sympathy, love and ME-motion. Love songs, uploaded by the public and transmitted via 802.11 wireless network by the public are coded as ME-data in the cloned locker babies. Revolt against mirrored self, the clone babies reprocess the networked ME-data during the joy teacup ride. By taking a teacup ride with the babies, the ME-data are retrieved, played back, shuffled, and jumbled. A gentle ride turned fast spin, the data jams and jammed, we are left to sort out the ME with the babies in the storming teacups. The crash would eventually happen. Upon the carsh when the teacups bump into each other, the clone babies exchange ME data and broadcast the remix on the web.