Múm - "They Made the Frogs Smoke..."

Múm (myspace link) is an Icelandic band of the deliciously deviant experimenting sort, arty artists all punked up with somewhere to go. The band is carried by the UK label Fat Cat Records, There is a duo, Gunnar and Örvar, at the helm of a foolish ship of seven band members. "They Made the Frogs Explode Till They Blew Up" (YouTube) is a found-footage reportage of old times and bygone eras as seen through the filter of creative sound artists. Sound sampling is derived from film cut-ups from home 16mm films, east european documentaries and old cartoons. Fat Cat Records seems to have a fabulous collection of idiosyncratic Icelandic artists, including the more well-known Sigur Rós, who has also tours and collaborates with Múm.

The animation, which is primarily why this posting is here, is created by the Icelandic artist Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, who also did an animation for the Múm single 'go go smear the poison ivy.' The rough, intuitive and self-taught look of the animation also uses the found-footage collage of 1950's childhood, referencing the "picture-perfect" illustrations of children and animals. The blood-and-guts ripping to pieces of these little homilies to f*%$d up childhood move in the direction of the recently revived interest in psychotic outsider artist Henry Darger.

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The Shift of Time

The web has a collection of time-lapse videos of the silly and boring, disgusting detail (rotting pigs, ) as well as exquisitely animated beauty. Time Lapse means that a single frame or image is taken over an extended period of a repeated interval, for instance one frame every 2 minutes. Later, these are put together in a movie format, and you have a sped up version of the event that has unfolded. If you have ever seen the movie Koyaanisqatsi, you've seen time-lapse on a larger production scale. This process brings a level of existence into comprehensible form- changes and shifts that would be imperceptible to us become revealed.

The most remarkable online timelapse movie that I came across was created by (who I believe is) Nick Fankhauser in Switzerland.
One that is quite beautiful is the recording of an entire year. He recorded large format stills, and then animated a pan across this edited movie, creating a gestural movement "within" the scene.

A more complex put together for something like this would be to use a motion control unit to guide the movement of the camera mounted on a control system. This allows a motor-driven single frame rotational / transverse adjustments on XYZ coordinates, making it possible to create time-lapsed camera movement as well for as animating the timed changes of landscapes.

A little side note is that the animation filmmaker John Whitney is responsible for designing the original motion control unit using old aircraft machinery.

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Giving Your Art a Second Life

If you haven't heard, visited, or participated already, the world of Art is moving into a hot new location: Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world online, one that boasts a community membership of approximately 7 million. It didn't take long for creative people of all walks to realize that this alternative community was a way to exchange ideas and to present one's own unique representations to those millions of others. These "others" are actual people that live and work all across the world. Of course, capitalism and commodity were an instant addition to this, and some of those others are not just random viewers, but actual consumers and purchasers of art. Art galleries and museums are present, and th works of art that are represented are sometimes only virtual, but are also sometimes real. Representations of the "real," which you can purchase and have mailed to you, the Real you at your Real home.

Helen Stoilas reports in The Art Newspaper, an online journal, in her article "Art makes a scene on Second Life," that the Dutch team of Roy Irwin and Karen Zohari have created a popular gallery called the Art Tower. Their gallery receives approximately 200 visitors a day, viewing the scheduled series of exhibitions. Irwin an Zohari in return receive a 30% commission on the gallery sales. That's real money, real art changing hands, in a virtual gallery space. In this image of an event at Art Tower in SL, you see the SL visitrs with their name identities floating above their heads. You find people dressing for the occasion, and even adopting the disaffected poseur attitudes that frequent the gallery scenes.


© http://irwinandzohari.wordpress.com

But as the saying goes: just because you can doesn't mean you should. Those that can gain access, and have always considered themselves "somewhat artistic," will populate the SL landscape with a tremendous amount of awful, awful art.
And how does one find the quality art and exhibitions? A good place to start might be the online review journal SLART. You'll find reviews on shows, artists, galleries and the like.
Second Life Art News is a blogspot that has something to say about various art related events, and covers everything from art exhibitions to performance art.

© SLART

So who will supply the artists that know the virtual business of art? Art schools are on the bandwagon, of course. The Art Institute has developed an online education system, and has extended it into the virtual life of SL. Animation Magazine reports that AI opened a student campus in Second Life, virtual social community created by San-Francisco-based Linden Lab...Online students and faculty can interact with one another by controlling their avatars via keyboard and mouse. The course will be primarily asynchronous and will involve both constructivism (learning by doing) and simulation-based learning.

What about artists that have achieved a certain level of distinction in the Real World and would like to make a go of it online? If you have The Australian Arts Council "Inter-Arts" has created a 20k grant for artists to create collaborative art work in SL, saying:

The aim of the residency is to offer Australian artists and writers the opportunity to creatively
and critically explore new interactive, virtual platforms.

The residency allows for a collaborative team of up to three people (including a writer, musician/sound
artist and digital visual media practitioner) to develop inter-disciplinary artwork in Second Life.

So what are you waiting for? Go make some Art.

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Boston topics: Upgrade!Boston

Check out Upgrade! Boston's site and see their summer schedule. They are going to be at alternative locations this summer, and then will be hosted on the MassArt campus, courtesy of the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIMS.)

-=-= July 19.07 =-=-

Maura Jasper is a conceptual multimedia artist
whose work investigates how pop cultures and histories shape and
inform identity. Currently she is a resident in the Artist in Research Program at the Berwick Research Institute and a graduate student at Massachusetts College of Art's Studio for Interrelated Media.

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Toxic Homefronts

Do you know what the toxic map looks like for your neighborhood, town or city? I do, unfortunately. You can find out too, if you're brave. Go visit the Environmental Protection Agency's EnviroMapper. Type in your zipcode and see where local companies have been targeted for hazardous waste disposal, waste emissions, air emissions, toxis releases. You can follow up the information if you follow the chart links that are listed on the right, and find out WHO the polluters are and WHAT they are recorded as dumping into your air, water and air. If you're looking to buy a house in a new area, this would be a super handy check system. Nothing like moving your family into a toxic waste dump, eh?

Do Androids Dream?

The Electric Sheep Screen-Saver

re-blog :: [networked_performance] > [via smartmobs]

A Collective "Android Dream"

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

Bacterial Orchestra

Evolutionary musical organism

re-blog :: | We-Make-Money-Not-Art |

Bacterial Orchestra is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism made of audio cells. Every cell -consisting of microphone and a loudspeaker- listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells. Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole.Every cell is born with a unique set of characteristics (its DNA) that control the way it will react to sound. If it’s not fit enough, the cell dies and is reborn with a new DNA (you can also adopt a cell, btw.)

The result is a musical organism adapting to its environment, evolving with neighbouring cells and spectators and becoming musically smarter and smarter.

The piece was developed by Olle Cornéer, Christian Hörgren and Martin Lübcke. I asked Olle a couple of questions about the Bacterial Orchestra:

What motivated you to make this installation?

We are really interested in systems that are self-organizing and has it's own life. You never know what would will be created in the end. The only thing you could do is to give birth to the creation. Then wait. I have been interested in sound installations for a while now, but I often think that they're more "sound" than "music". This is musical organism. It might sound a bit random, but it creates music. All sounds from the Bacterial Orchestra are played in interaction with the other cells and with sounds in the room. It's music.

Any plan to show the installation at other venues or to keep on improving it?

Yes, we have just showed it one time. First we are interested in showing it in another environment - since it will react competely different. We're also interested in making it larger. Today it's built around 16 cells, but the idea is to add a few cells every time we show it. It can easily be scaled - since the cells only are communicating through (analog) audio. We hope to one day be able to show it when it's built of hundreds of cells. That's what I call a pendemic!

The work sounds kind of "human", did you develop some sort of affection for it?

Yes, actually we did. It really didn't react the way we wanted it to, which was really interesting. For example it started to scream - from self oscillation in the room. This is not supposed to be possible, since the cells don't listen and play sounds at the same time. Feedback is impossible. And still sometimes there would be strange noises, similar to a musical feedback. At that times all the other cells picked up the uncontrolled sound and the whole installation was screaming. At points when we were in other parts of the building, me and Martin would react to the screaming sounds down in the basement, where the installation was showed. I think you could compare it to a father or mother reacting to a crying baby in the room next door. You think you hear it, but it's not there all the time... It comes from your concern.

Thanks Olle!

Current TV

Current TV is both a cable broadcast and website destination, designed to be a portal for providing media made by and for the people. However, their target audience is clear: a hip, young generation. But stay with me- I believe there's a reason. And a head's up, I love Al.

Current TV launched on Aug 1, 2005 with Al Gore as the Chairman and longtime Democratic business partner, Joel Hyatt, sharing the reins. Gore made the purchase of Newsworld International, a cable news channel, programmed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which airs news programming from around the world. On August 1, Gore and Hyatt relaunched the network as Current TV, a young adult-programmed news service, with headquarters in San Francisco, a studio in Los Angeles, and an ad sales office in New York.

Al Gore is using this broadcasting company to bring a sense of empowerment and action to those that want to use those abilities now. He is not Rupert Murdoch, buying up a group of teenage voices so he can conduct market analysis on them for pitching products and selling their user data. So, what better way to encourage a generation of people to become proactive, to take the world's future into their own hands? Even if Al Gore really didn't create the Internet, he is using his own power and privilege as a way to encourage positive power and participation in a real and effective way. The concept of journalism and documenting of information is changing because the power of who controls the information is changing. The dissemination of that information has changed, and continues to change.

There is so much home-style generated media out there these days, such as the media on YouTube, what's the difference? There is an equal amount of dumb time-filler and "done for laughs," but there are also interesting and thoughtful moments that include material that you won't see on any regular tv news show. An example is a work documenting the torture technique of water-boarding, done by one their staff journalists. Current TV has a focus on news items, and provides a collection of full-time staff journalists that function at the core of the group, producing segments that are the main facet of the media that is broadcast and made available online. They also serve as a review committee for submitted viewer-created media, called "VC2 Pod" media. Pods are short videos that tell a story, profile a character and/or share an idea. There is a handful of terminology so you feel like you're part of a movement, so you'd better check out there "how to" section if you really need to know.

The Current TV website serves as a virtual production studio where people upload video, and the online community votes for what to put up for broadcast. It is an essential companion aspect to the broadcast facet of this organization. Good news travels fast, as the site users are savvy with sharing information and building a buzz.

Will it last? Is it any good? Viewers and users are obviously the best judges. My opinion as an educated filmmaker will of course be more judgmental than those of younger, untrained teenage ones. But why not make sure that they are being exposed to news and world issues in a way that is appealing and dynamic for them? Get them started now, and they will be the ones to work hard for us all later on, because they've been practicing using their voices, talking, viewing, thinking and doing. At least that's what I think Al Gore's master plan entails. And I think he's right.

info gathered from | Wikipedia| Current TV | Wired.com | BBC |

MIT Sketch

This project is under the development of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Prof. Randall Davis, and appears online through the MIT iCampus website. But an even more fun way to see what this project can do, visit the YouTube website and see a video demonstration. According to these researchers, "The old computer interface of type, point and click will be replaced by sketch, gesture and talk..." (cnn.com article, by Nick Easen)

The sketching tools are a PC-based computer system that takes sketches of basic objects made on a computer drawing tablet and runs them thru code, applying physics-based information to the objects that make up the sketch. Gravity and momentum kick in and balls roll and fall and bounce, springs sproing, carts bump and wheelie.... it's magic.

Now You Know, and She knows, and They know...

Here at Instructables.com are the MacGyvers and their associates, ego-busting and attitude flexing commentators, idea negotiators, and a very enthusiastic DIY community with the desire to know how to put together and take apart just about anything. And sometimes they'll tell you why they did it, too. There are the answers to those things you really wanted to find out about, and those that you didn't know you needed to know, until you saw that tantalizing headline "Duct Tape Body Building" and "ShockWave Air Cannon."

This community-edited online site is an odd encycolopoaedia of knowledge, and it is lighthearted in many respects, but also supplies a serious resource for real and practical information. The subjects are not those that you will find in a conservative "do-it-yourself" primer. Instead, they fall on the side of the "whacked out experiments" to making simple home-made variations of otherwise expensive gear, and to a real category, the Painfully Stupid.

They have two main sections. One is the Instructables for "grown-ups," which contains many categories and groupings of DIY info. This was begun by; and there is HowToons for kids. Saul Griffith and various MIT collaborators began years ago with variations of these kinds of community-building/sharing projects, which have branched off into other functioning entities. Squid Labs is the post-MIT collective of many of these people, being a practical engineering and design group that supports this online presence.