Hacked NES cartridge by Cory Arcangel.

Arcangel used an original Super Mario cartridge and hacked it so that everything but the clouds was removed.

What I find especially interesting about this piece is that it pisses some many off, and sends them ranting down the “that’s not real art!” lane. I suppose Arcangel is (deliberately?) fueling this by saying pretentious stuff like “[---] what do these pixelated clouds represent? It represents the whole progression of humans, communication and technology. [---]”

Check the comments on the Guardian article and the other links below - it’s like seeing how people responded to Duchamp’s Fountain.

• Super Mario Clouds from Cory Arcangel
• Super Mario Clouds at medienkunstnetz.de
• Super Mario Clouds on YouTube
• Cory Arcangel in the Guardian
• The Meaning of Super Mario Clouds at Kotaku.com

video by Camille Laurelli, www.laurelli.blogspot.com

If you’re wondering whether this is even possible, all I have to say is that it’s not fake, it’s art.

Automaton by Jacques de Vaucanson

Vaucanson’s duck is one of several “automata” made by Jacques Vaucanson (1709-1782). The actual duck has been lost - reportedly lost in a fire while on tour in Russia - and few surviving photographs exist. The image I was most familiar with, a sketch that shows the inner workings of the Duck, seems to be just a guesswork.

Vaucanson demonstrated that the Duck could eat corn, digest them, and defecate, and hinted that he was going to show how the mechanism worked at some later time. He never did, and in fact it was later shown that the digestive system was fake - the corn went in one way, but the “excrement” that came out the other end was not the result of any process (chemical, mechanical, biological or otherwise) but simply a whitish substance that was loaded before the demonstration.

Fake or not, the Duck was a mechanical masterpiece (according to some sources containing over a thousand moving parts) and even more than that, an object to think with, a thing that sparked a discussion about what it means to be “alive”.

Further reading

• Page about Vaucanson from Lutèce Créations - there’s plenty more information about automata etc in their “virtual Museum”, at www.automates-boites-musique.com
• The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life - article by Jessica Riskin
• Digesting Duck on wikipedia
• article from Sara Roberts
• essay by Peter Schmidt, Swarthmore College
• Robot History from Designboom

Open Burble by Usman Haque (and others, see full credits here was a commissioned piece for the Singapore Biennale 2006, in which about 1000 latex balloons, equipped with LEDs and microcontrollers, are assembled to this huge shape that rises like a plume of smoke.

Video here:

Reference: straight from Usman Haque at www.haque.co.uk/openburble.php

Giant foam letters that float up in the sky.

At first, I’ll admit, I thought this was an art piece, but it seems it is actually a form of advertising created by a company called Flogos. The video on YouTube has been making the rounds - I spotted it on create digital motion but with very little info on about what it is. Apparently the video is from the IFA (Internationale Funkaufstellung ) Berlin, a consumer electronics fair. Create Digital Motion wrote about it under the heading “Printing in Floating Foam: 3D Printing, Into the Sky”, but as far as I can make out it’s not really 3D printing. The foam is basically a sort of soap-based foam inflated with lighter-than-air gases (helium, probably) and then extruded through a stencil.

Anyway, clever, and beautiful.

Also, this marks my return to blogging here after a long hiatus. The theme for October: Things that fly. Stay tuned.

Experimental music instruments by Luigi Russolo.

Russolo, an Italian futurist painter and composer, made these wonderful noise-making instruments 1913. There were 27 different versions, each named, and each making some sort of noise or sound; like that of machines, but turned into music. Inside each of the boxes was a rotating wheel. The wheel would cause a string to vibrate, and the vibrations would be transmitted to a membrane and create the sound coming out the speaker. The wheel would be set in motion either by simply turning a crank, or in some cases, electrically. A lever on top controlled the tension of the string, and so also the pitch of the sound.

This embrace of noise and machines are of course emblematic of the futurist movement. There is a manifest by Russolo, called The Art of Noise, where he goes on about how he wants to use noise to make music rather than just traditional instruments.  “This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered. ”

You could discuss the political implications of this - Italian, futurist, just before WW1:  but personally I just love the simplicity of the design of these boxes, and this great image with Russolo and his companion Ugo Piatti (with the impeccable bow tie). Noise artists everywhere clearly owe something to Luigi Russolo.

• The Art of Noise manifesto at Thereminvox.com
• Intonarumori at Thereminvox.com

If you are reading the full entry, there is a  paragraph of fake latin above. It was generated using my Lorem Ipsum Generator. You are welcome to grab and use the javascript here: loremipsum.js.

If you peek at the code of this post, the updatePage stuff is just for Wordpress, you don’t need that. To include the loremipsum.js on your own webpage, just copy the loremipsum.js to your server, link it in with <script src=”loremipsum.js”></script>, and then do<script>loremIpsumParagraph(100);</script>on the page. The number is the number of words you want in the paragraph. See the comments in the file for more details. It is designed to be simple to add more dictionaries to use your own languages. It has no grammar as such, it is just a random jumble of words.

Update: Note that you do need to close the script element separately, even if you only include a script. You have to do <script src=”whatever”></script>, trying to compress it to <script src=”whatever” /> will not work (on most browsers, at least). If you want to be well-behaved you should also include what sort of script you are running: <script type=”text/javascript” src=”loremipsum.js”></script> — any year now major browser will be supporting other languages.

Since you read this far, you might as well see a Swedish paragraph too. The Latin words are from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the (rather arcane) Swedish is from August Strindberg’s Röda Rummet.

This is another of those “scratch your own itch” things. I am not sure anybody else needs this, but I find it useful myself - it’s nice to have a tool like this to fill your templates with text when you are doing web development. Oh, and if you’re seeing the RSS feed this may or may not work as intended. Probably not.

Wallin built a model of a home, in the scale of rats. For five weeks they were living in the model, constantly monitored by video cameras. The video was streamed in real time and shown at the modern museum in Stockholm.

There is some more information and a video of the piece at Ilona Huss Wallins site.

Since release 0.06 (the current release) OpenFrameworks is built on top of Poco, a general-purpose class library for C++ that is really nifty - it’s almost like being back in a decent programming language. In Poco one of the fundamental classes is Poco::Util::Application - the base class for building applications. It is not used by OpenFrameworks, instead OpenFrameworks has their own ofBaseApp.

What I did was to combine the two into something that is both a Poco Application and an OpenFrameworks App.

If anybody want to use it, just grab it at http://bridell.com/files/PocoApp.003.zip and play away. This version should run out the box in OF 0.06 on Code::Blocks on Windows, but if you just copy the code over to an “EmptyExample” copy on your setup you shoule be good to go on other platforms as well, I think.

If you have linker problems, so did I, but things got better. See this thread on the OF forum. The trick seems to be the -liphlpapi linker option and sometimes shuffling the order in which the Poco libs are linked in. Hey, it’s C++.

Here’s my CSS color name to hex chart with css-style comments.

Polycranium Crisp is my own Wordpress theme that I use on this site.

The theme is using images from Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com randomly rotating in the top banner. I will probably add more images later on.

I haven’t released it on the Wordpress Themes site - I think it is still a bit sketchy - but if you want to grab a copy here it is: polycraniumcrisp01beta.zip

Polycranium Crisp by Fredrik Bridell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Sweden License.

Polycranium Techne is the Wordpress Theme I made for the Interactive Institute Art & Technology department, where I work. Technically it’s based on my own Polycranium Sleet theme, which is also the ancestor of the theme I am using for this blog: Polycranium Crisp. The visual design of Polycranium Techne was largely made by Lars Nordqvist.

It is still in development (as of today it is not even online yet), and I haven’t published the theme, but if you want it, you can have it. Just e-mail me and ask for it.

This kinetic scuplture consists of 714 balls (in, I believe, a 15 x 42 grid) that drop down on wires from the ceiling. During a 7-minute run they form various forms; at first just a random cloud, but soon the start forming outlines of cars.

There’s a video of the piece on YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

>> More info on ART+COM’s site

Light installation  (?) by Anthony McCall (1973)

A 16mm projector is projecting a movie on the wall. At first, the movie seems to be just a white point on a black background. Very slowly, it starts expanding, first to an arc, and after 30 minutes, a circle. The magic happens not on the screen (or wall), but in mid-air. Shown either in a naturally dusty area, or with the help of a haze machine, the line from the projector to the dot becomes a cone, visible in air.

Anthony McCall made this piece in 1973, well before the digital revolution, and it was made using 16mm film. In the Tate paper he discusses how 16mm film differs from digital media - both have their peculiarities; analog film has dust and scratches, digital is pixel-based (eloquently but obscure: “digital planes of light carry longitudinal striations which radiate from lens to wall”).

Below are two very readable articles about McCall and his work.

>> Anthony McCall talks about his “solid light” films. (Jeffrey Kastner, in ArtForum 2004, at findarticles.com)

>> Anthony McCall’s Line Describing A Cone (Tate Papers 2007)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Khronos Projector looks like a backprojected image on a wall. But the projection surface is very flexible, and you can push it in with your hands. When you do that, the parts of the image that you push in change appearance. Specifically, you shift parts of the video in time. You don’t just play, stop, rewind and fast forward the entire video, but different parts of the screen can be at different positions in the video — at  the same time.

If you view the video data as a spatio-temporal volume (with x, y coordinates making up the screen coordinates and the individual frames aligned along the z axis), a normal form of viewing is like showing the intersection with a plane sliding along the z axis. Khronos Projector allows you to shape that intersection from a plane to a curved surface.

There are (many) other pieces examining this form of slicing up video volumes, using traditional slit scan techniques or (more commonly these days) software to do it. Golan Levin has assembled a really impressive Informal Catalogue of Slit-scan Video Artworks and Research [http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/]

There’s a lot more about Khronos Projector at http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/alvaro/Khronos/

They have has been showing this piece with different videos and with slightly different setups, sometimes including live video. I think that is because it lands somewhere in between new media art and innovative interface design. Indeed, Cassinelli is both a researcher and an artist.

Here’s a thought:

Anything an artist does tends to be interpreted as art. Therefore, if an artists shows a piece like this but with different video material, this is likely to can be construed as a hint that the artist is working with the conceptual aspects of the piece, not the material ones. Consider the case of Joseph Kosuth, showing his “One and Three Chairs”, consisting of a chair, a photograph of the chair, and a text from a dictionary about what a chair is — using different chairs, photographs and texts in different shows. This is not because he couldn’t decide on a particular chair, but to highlight that the particular chair was not important. Similarly, anything an engineering-type guy does tends to be viewed as engineering. In this case, the “lack of content” is (I believe) more likely to be viewed as an example of how engineers don’t understand the conceptual aspects, but only work with “the interface”. OK, maybe that bit about the Kosuth piece is just confusing, because clearly that is a conceptual piece. Perhaps Damien Hirst placing various medium-sized animals in formaldehyde is a better example. With a little effort, the Khronos Projector can also be seen more as a conceptual piece, and that this is, perhaps, why they’ve shown it with different video “content” - not because they don’t care, but because the piece is not about that particular shot of a cityscape, or any of the other pieces, but about the more abstract idea of how time changes everything, or perhaps that time does not change things, only your perspective on it, yada yada.

On the other hand, I’m an engineering-type guy myself, and I too think feel that the Khronos Projector is primarily an interesting interface design - but perhaps a conceptual interface design? Anyway, my posting about art pieces here does not generally mean I think they are particulary “good art”, or even art that I like, just that I think they are pieces worth knowing about.

Speaking of Damien Hirst, I came across this beautiful Lego rendering of Hirst’s classic The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, made by the Little Artists aka John Cake and Darren Neave. (http://www.littleartist.co.uk/)

Two people put on these machines that let you swap your visual and auditory input with each other, so that you “can only see through the other person’s eyes”.

Photo: Kurokawa Mikio

>> artist’s home page

A statue of the Buddha is watching its own image on TV. Need I say more?

>> paikstudios.com

>> TV Buddha at medienkunstnetz

In his series of “illuminated averages”, artist Jim Campbell creates averages of video sequences. Of course (well, I assume)  he makes these using some sort of software, not by hand, but they also refer back to that point in time where artists - painters - started exploring the passage of time and capture it on a piece of canvas.

Giacomo Balla: Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)

Some of Campbell’s images are even titled “dynamisms”, reappropriating the term used by artists like Luigo Russolo and Giacomo Balla, at the beginning of the 20th century. In this particular piece, Campbell created an image of the average of the entire Hitchcock movie Psycho, something that can hardly be anything than a wink to Douglas Gordon’s classic video work 24 Hour Psycho which shows the entire Psycho in slow motion so that it lasts 24 hours.

In terms of new media works, this piece is something that I would, by definition - my own definition - not call new media art, since the piece is a still image, shown on a lightbox. I would typically say that new media art is art that incorporates new media in the piece itself, so that they are somehow dynamic, autonomous, responsive, ergodic or full-out interactive at the time you experience the piece. It is not enough to use “new media” in the production of a piece. Something you make in photoshop does not normally constitute new media art. I could go on to argue that you have to do a media-specific analysis, and focus on the piece, not the experience; if you talk about an interactive piece, the interactivity lies in the piece, not in the experience.

Maybe I need to rethink my definitions, because I really like pretty much everything Jim Campbell does, and I would definitely say he’s a new media artist, and I don’t see that these pieces are all that different from his other works.

All that from a piece of blur on a lightbox.

>> jimcampbell.tv

Project Blinkenlights was a public installations that turned the façade of a building into a low-resolution display, using lights inside the windows. Members of the general public could upload their own animations to the building, using a special piece of software rom the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). You could also play a version of Pong on the building, using mobile phones.

These days there are lots and lots of these “media façades” installed over the world that make the black and white, pixeled display of Blinkenlights look rather primitive, but it deserves it place in media art history. The original Blinkenlights, first installed 11 sep 2001 (sic!) in the Haus der Lehrers at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin, was one of the first - if not the first? - of this type of public installations. Also you should remember that this was not a permanent commercial project, but a temporary project created using DIY electronics in an empty office building. The people behind the original Blinkenlights also updated the project and shown it elsewhere, as in the Blinkenlights Arcade at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (2003) and Blinkenlights Stereoscope at Toronto’s City Hall (2008).

>> Blinkenlights.net

interactive game environment by Pierre Huyghe (1999)

Two people hold game controllers and play Pong using the lights in the ceiling as pixels.