public art as a wireless network

from Maria Stukhoff's blog

my >blubox< artwork is piloting an example of the above mentioned terms and practises and sits amongst 4 other case studies of artists using mobile and wireless media devices. >blubox< which is a systems-based art project, enables the public to network together via bluetooth to play with various designed mobile applications in a coordinated city environment.

The first blubox project developments test led us to network between four mobile phones and a laptop user. Working through Bluetooth, we communicated and exchanged music mp3’s, text and images with each other. The system worked within an approx. 25-meter radius around corners and through walls within the studio building… Not bad for our first go! We also connected a large format LED screen...

ONTECA, who are leading the design research and programming part of blubox applications are now concentrating on developing our first bluetooth enabled multiplayer JAVA game. For more on ONTECA go to: http://www.onteca.com/

Blow Out

*

Invited to an exhibition of work by architects and artists, “Idea as Model,” Gordon Matta-Clark elected to show not a new vision of architecture or planned proposal, but the current state of some architects’ model buildings: he displayed photographs of buildings in the South Bronx whose windows has been broken out by its residents. Gordon Matta-Clark's first attempt was a small-scale cutting for one of its seminar rooms - a windowless box of sheetrock.

He changed his plans the day before the opening.

On the night before the opening, Matta-Clark appeared with a BB gun borrowed from Dennis Oppenheim and asked MacNair for permission to shoot out a couple of the windows of the Institute instead. The windows were already cracked, he reasoned, and he would use their empty casement as a frame for photographs of housing projects taken in South Bronx.

However he went on to shoot out every single window.

A shocked Peter Eisenman compared the act to the Crystal Night in 1938 in Germany, and Gordon Matta-Clark had to leave. His work was removed from exhibition and the windows quickly replaced in time for the reception.

* photo taken from Gordon Matta-Clark / ed. by Corrinne Diserens. Essays by Judith Russi Kirshner, London : Phaidon, 2003

Palast der Republik

click here to read about the campaign to stop the demolition of the building

Understanding Meta-Media

rethinking mapping
from Article by Lev Manovitch
If we want to describe what new media does to old media with a single term, 'mapping' is a good candidate. Software allows us to remap old media objects into new structures -- turning media into 'meta-media."

In contrast to media, meta-media acquires three new properties. First, with software, data can be translated into another domain -- time into 2D space, 2D image into 3D space, sound into 2D image, and so on. (More complex and unusual mappings are also possible -- and the search for new mappings allows us to access old media objects in new ways congruent with information interfaces we use in our everyday life represents one of the most fruitful research directions in new media art.) Second, media objects can be manipulated using GUI (Graphical User Interface) techniques such as: move, transform, zoom, multiple views, filter, summarize. And third, media objects can now be 'processed' using standard techniques of computerized data processing; search, sort, replace, etc.