oF Syjunta is like a knitting circle, but instead of knitting we’re coding. We meet up, hack a bit on our stuff, chat, have a coffee, exchange ideas, tricks and code.

We want it to be an open place for anybody who use openFrameworks and wants to meet other people doing the same in Stockholm. You can come when you like and leave when you’re tired, there are no talks or lectures planned, but it’s totally ok to demo you latest work or hack.

We hope to have an OF Syjunta once or twice monthly starting on Thursday October 30th. We’ll be in Münchenbryggeriet, at Doberman (map) and we’ll be there from 18.00 to 22.00. It doesn’t matter if you’re up for some coding, or just have time to say hi, swing by!

The syjunta is arranged by Collective Experiments, more information will be posted at the oF Syjunta blog.

During this years Ars Electronica festival the Lentos Museum in Linz exhibited Ecology of Techno Mind, a retrospective from the Kapelica gallery in Ljublijana, Slovenia.

The Kapelica gallery dedicate “special attention to projects that topicalize the reverse engineering of nature with their direct application of technologies and biotechnology on the human body”. I’m not a body art connoisseur or practitioner. I am however very interested in the reverse engineering of nature. And whether or not I like body art I admire the galleries idealism. According to the galleries curator, Jurij Krpan, the role of the gallery is to unite people who have something to say and, though it may sound a bit 80’s, enter debate and change society. Over the years Kapelica have had over 150 exhibitions. I got a sense that they at the very least has succeeded in creating debate in Slovenia. Here are three of my favorite pieces from the exhibition…

Junior’s Return

I find Philip Ross’s work very inspiring and interesting. In particular Junior’s Return since it connects to my current work and research on living systems. In Junior’s Return plants are grown in networked hydroponic systems. “The system keeps its enclosed plant in a dwarf state by supplying only enough resources to survive but not thrive. I kept a broccoli seedling alive for almost three years using this technique” says Ross. Junior’s Return shows that crops can be sustained in artificial environments. “However, they have long since ceased being the subject of farming or gardening. They are increasingly becoming the subject of science and technology.”

Robot Rabbit

Robot Rabbit by Paul Granjon says “robot, rabit” with a rate of one word every second. A counter is incremented with each word and the (real) grass is automatically watered by a pump when the soil dries. The installation “questions and comments on the effects of exposure to an exponentially growing and more capable technological environment. Robot Rabbit is an automatic installation that opposes the inflexible rhythm of the machine to the biological growth of the live grass”. Admittedly I didn’t get this deeper meaning at first. Until I read about the piece I thought the point was that the rabbit sounded like a frog. Anyway, I love Granjons humor and can really recommend his book Hand-made Machines.

Eat a Bit

Eat a Bit introduces the first utensils of Digital Kitchen. Digital Kitchen will allow processing of “eat a bit” recipes and using open source software and 2D/3D printing technology it will allow production of edible objects. The actual printing equipment didn’t make it to Ars. I haven’t been able to find anything about the project on the web so I’m not sure if it even exists, but the concept intrigues me…

An artwork is something that creates a gap in the meaning, that is attractive for the viewer to fill themselves. The subject succeeds when people are questioned by it, they have to construct the meaning, they have to participate in the creation of the sense of the work. - Michel De Broin (VoCA)

Living systems are inhabited by organisms with complex forms of communication and information processing. Suitcase Science is an attempt to package these systems and tap into them in order to form new alliances between nature and technology.

Suitcase Science represents a turn from the Modernism’s use of technology to control nature to a postmodern use of nature to enliven technology. By approaching living systems as technology Suitcase Science challenges traditional views of nature and suggests that new relationships to nature can be formed.

More concretely the Suitcase Science project investigates how living systems can be sustained in portable controlled ecological life support systems (CELSS) and how system parameters like environmental conditions, volatile organic compounds and electrophysiological activity can be intercepted and interpreted.

Suitcase Science is a project sprung out of the recently started Strange Eden Lab at the Interactive Institutes Art and Technology Program, it was most recently shown at New Media Meeting 3. Suitcase Science is a work in progress, more information will be available at SuitcaseScience.net as the project develops.

Suitcase Science is a collaboration between Erik Sjödin and Michel Bussien.

We humans are full of experiences and feelings that do not, or not completely, allow themselves to be converted into language. In order to understand them, we have art. - Arjen Mulder (Interact or Die, 2007)

Fringe has put together a workshop and an (almost) all inclusive weekend package from Stockholm to New Media Meeting in Norrköping (19th to 20th of September). It’s not too late to join Fringe and sign up for the package or the workshop yet (you don’t have to sign up for both). Drop a mail to Tina Finnäs if you’re interested. The package is at least half the price of what you’d pay if you’d pay for everything separately, and it’s more fun than traveling alone…

NEW MEDIA MEETING
In only two years NMM has become one of the most important media festivals in the Nordic Region – attracting an impressive line-up of renowned and upcoming international artists on the media art and electronic music scene.

This year NMM has invited around 50 international artists, hackers, DJs, VJs, researchers, media-activists, designers, movie producers, etc. from more than ten countries. Young and old, beginners and world-renowned. During one weekend concerts, installations, performances, workshops, lectures and seminars will be crammed under the same roof.

FRINGE NMM PACKAGE
- Buss-trip, Sthlm-Norrköping-Sthlm.
- Two nights of accommodation, 19th-21st, at the Hostel Above in shared or single rooms
- Entrance to the both days of the NMM.

Price: 600 SEK.

FRINGE WORKSHOP @ NMM
A one-day Introduction workshop in circuit bending with Olof Bendt and Magnus Gyllenswärd from Ergonomidesign in Stockholm.

Price: 300 SEK (includes all the required equipment for the workshop).

Contact Tina Finnäs for more information about the workshop and the NMM package.

OF lab construction - day 2 from openFrameworks Lab on Vimeo.

I’ll be at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria September 4 - 8. In between the tremendous amount of art and technology sightseeing I plan to do with the Interactive Institute, I’ll be dropping by the OF Lab to finalize the Arduino class in cppGlue.

“The OF lab will focus on creating new works that come directly out of suggestions from the festival audience members, and over the course of the event, create a feedback loop between suggestions, experimentation, making projects, exhibiting the results and most importantly, exposing the process”.

PHOTO: xCLINIC

Yesterday I attended a very inspiring talk on art and resilience with Natalie Jeremijenko and Sverker Sörlin. The talk began with a presentation of Natalie’s new project: The Environmental Health Clinic, and ended with a discussion between Sverker and Natalie.

The Environmental Health Clinic is a response to the issue of resilience and an attempt to patch natural systems that have crashed in urban environments. The clinic recognizes that in the process of making environmental work newsworthy issues have not been made local enough. Consequentially people are left wondering why nothing is happening in their neighborhood and what the hell they should do.

To address the situation people, wittingly called impatients, can come to the environmental health clinic with their concerns. The clinic analyzes the problem and issues a prescription that helps the impatients cure their concerns.

One such prescription is noPark.

“NoPark returns “no parking zones” … to low growth mosses and grasses … These microparks continue to provide emergency parking space for fire trucks and exasperated Fresh-direct delivery persons. But the other 99.9% of the time they now do something more … For all the same rationales that apply to green roofs, greening the no-standing zones is a good thing”.
- noPark

A decade ago a project like noPark would probably be done as an underground action, but according to Natalie the era of guerilla interventions is over. Artists (like Steve Kurz) now face getting arrested on terrorist charges for their actions and few are willing to take such risks. Instead the environmental health clinic seek to achieve results in a collaborative and orderly fashion. For example impatients get to buy shares in the noPark lots. The shares pay for legal installation of the lots but they also provide a sense of ownership that secures their long term survival.

Other projects that Natalie presented included birds, frogs, bats, and urban space stations. All very interesting but I’m going to fast forward to the discussion between Natalie and Sverker that followed her presentation.

Natalie and Sverker frequently returned to the conflict between traditional environmentalism and new forms of social-ecological interaction. While traditional environmentalist believe in “do not touch, do not interfere”. Natalie believes that the best way for us to cohabit with non humans in urban contexts is by actively interacting with nature. Sverker is on the same track. According to him we are starting to realize that “using is not equal to loosing”. Urban ecological diversity is not preserved by stepping aside but by intervening and we should use new technology to build new ecosystem services. Parks are excellent examples of this, they exist because they are used by people. According to Sverker there is a park in Stockholm (I forgot which) where there are sixty organizations who depend on the park for their activities. Their various interests provide for the parks diversity.

After many turns the discussion eventually drifted over to whether or not basing art on science is important. According to Natalie science with its high standard and structures of accountability is a social representation that we trust. The problem with science is that the public can’t to participate in discussions with scientists on equal terms. Cultural workers on the other hand are wide open for criticism from anyone and art can therefore function as a communicative device for science. In other words science gives art credibility and art communicates science.

After about one and a half hour Sverker rounded of by asking Natalie how far we can go in our efforts to redesign social and ecological interaction.

S: Can we have bears on Manhattan?

N: Bears are interesting in the way they challenge domesticity. There are Black Bears in New Jersey. Can we design technologies that enable urban bears? - Yes.

The talk was arranged by Mejan Labs as part of Changing Matters - The Resilience Art Exhibition at The Swedish Museum of Natural History. The exhibition closes September 7th 2008.

Designing Interactions is a collection of interviews with people who have invented and designed things that we interact with on a daily basis, from the desktop metaphor and the computer mouse to Google and the iPod. The decades worth of experience that can be distilled from this book make it a must read for interaction designers, but anyone who design for others are bound to get something out of it.

I recently found some notes I made on the DVD and though it’s been a while since I read it, I figure that now would be as good time as any to blog it. Designing Interactions will stay topical for many years to come…

As my DVD-notes illustrate Designing Interactions is so full of usefulness that it’s easy to make it sound boring. But Designing Interactions is about the people behind innovations and their stories are inspiring and engaging throughout the book. To spice it up even more ground-breakingly useful innovations are mixed with less “serious” (but arguably equally important) projects like the Nipple Chair and Meat Eating Products. And it’s richly illustrated…

Besides from the interviews Designing Interaction also comes with an excellent introduction to interaction design and a lot of interaction design philosophy by and from Bill Moggridge (the author).

Notes on some of the DVD interviews:
Bill Atkinson - the importance of user testing, Paul Bradley - prototyping, Cordell Ratzlaf - putting concepts before technology, Stu Card - how researchers can provide constrains for designers, David Liddle - the three phases of adoption, Mat Hunter - user motivation, Paul Mercer - putting development times in perspective, Terry Winograd - three interaction metaphors.

“Like There Was No Tomorrow visualizes life and eternity, a dawn when everything is born and dusk when the sun sets. Finnäs wants to remind us that this is a fragile beauty. The earth is a resource we borrow but also rapidly consume”. - From the Visual Voltage Catalog.

Like There Was No Tomorrow is an installation produced by artist Tina Finnäs and the Interactive Institute for Visual Voltage, a traveling exhibition commissioned by the Swedish Institute. The exhibition “communicates an understanding of energy in a broader sense that aims to increase the interest in energy consumption and environmental questions”.

The artificial plants, the grinding mechanical noise they make as they grow and the light that changes as the installation cycles from dusk to dawn accompanied by Lou Reed’s Perfect Day call for an immediate emotional response. Beyond the visceral Like There Was No Tomorrow deals with the dark side of energy consumption; rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

A meter in the installation measures the carbon dioxide (CO2) level in the exhibition space and causes artificial plants in the installation to grow as the level rises. The CO2 level is directly related to the presence of humans as well as traffic and industrial activity in the area. Real plants may just like the artificial plants in the installation prosper from increased CO2 levels but ironically, though they may produce more flowers, seeds and fruits, their nutrition value will decrease and we will have to eat more to get the same nutritional benefits. [1]

An internal “carbon dioxide clock”, similar to the one at co2clock.org but based on historical data and trends*, is used as a seed for random movements among the plants. If values from the clock were to be plotted over time they would form a steadily rising curve that begins where the Keeling curve ends today.

“The [Keeling] curve has become one of the iconic images of science, rivaling the double helix or Darwin’s sketches of finches. Society might first come to know that its efforts are paying off when measurements taken at Mauna Loa and its companion stations reveal that the Keeling Curve is no longer rising, but at last, is sinking”. [2]

Finally a small display in the installation shows a year corresponding to the year when the global atmospheric CO2 value will be the same as that measured by the installation, assuming that CO2 emissions continue to rise as they have lately. In other words assuming that we carry on like there was no tomorrow, ignoring the entire climate issue and continue to consume new sources of coal, oil, and natural gas**.

Like There Was No Tomorrow and the Visual Voltage exhibition will be shown in various locations throughout Asia, Europe, USA and South America during 2008 to 2011.

Made with:
openFrameworks, Arduino, DMX LED Lights, Linear Actuators, CO2 Meter.

Project Team:
Tina Finnäs, Erik Sjödin, Henrik Berggren and Rouzbeh Delavari / Physical Interaction Lab, Johan Strandahl and Kladji Shoushi. Sponsored by ELFA and SenseAir.

* The CO2 clock and the year calculations are based on the assumption that the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 observed over the last five years (starting at 2007) continues at 2.0 ppm (part per million) per year, and a seasonal cycle with an amplitude of 2.5 ppm. The display shows a year in the future as long as the measured CO2 level is greater than the current global atmospheric level (385 ppm at the time of writing). The year can potentially rise to 2815 which corresponds to a CO2 level of 2000 ppm. [3, 4, 5]

“The next hundred years … depends on how successful we are (or not) in decreasing emissions. This plot shows emissions under “business as usual”, under the ASSUMPTION that we are not successful stopping emissions and ignore, for whatever set of reasons, the entire climate issue. A further assumption is that in that scenario the total amount burned will be twice what is now considered to be the global reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, namely two times ~1000 billion metric ton Carbon … For comparison, cumulative global combustion from 1850-today has been about 340 billion ton C. Notice that in this projection, which also ASSUMES an initial growth of the rate of burning of 3% per year (observed during the last five years), we will reach the maximum rate of consumption in ~2050, when we will have burned half of the total resource. Presumably, after that point it gets progressively harder (expensive) to pull stuff out of the ground, as the history of oil extraction in the U.S. appears to demonstrate”. [Pieter Tans]

Parasitic Video Network is an installation, intervention and participatory event developed by Michelle Teran at the Interactive Institutes Art and Technology Program during Spring 2008.

The project includes a portable device that captures and records live feeds from surveillance cameras and augments them with a sound scape that is generated by the visitors movement through the architectural space. Me and Yoshi Akai worked together with Michelle on the construction of this instrument; engineering an Arduino based audio player, analyzer and mixer and integrating it with a digital video recorder and wireless receiver in a beautifully crafted leather case.

“Every place tells a story whose sum is composed of its parts. Like a game board, every piece stands on its own, but is part of an intricate jigsaw puzzle. ‘Parasitic Video Network’ is a live wireless video network, part intervention, part installation, part participatory event transforming the architectural space into a media space, somewhere between a live film set and gaming environment. Like pieces of a puzzle, each camera focuses on different areas of the building, capturing the different boundaries, thresholds, circulation points as well as the strange objects that populate the building. These different views, which are transmitting wirelessly, are intercepted and monitored by the visitor by carrying a special device that capture and record these live feeds. The culmination of these different views forms a narrative of the building and how we move through it”. - Michelle Teran

Parasitic Video Network was recently shown at Escalators / Theater der Welt (June/July 2008, Germany) and is currently scheduled to be presented at Mois Multi 9 (September 2008, Canada) and Centre Art Girona (October 2008, Spain).

Tomorrow, Saturday, May 31st, from 13.00-20.00 Michelle Teran, will preview the Parasitic Video Network she has produced during her artist in residency at The Interactive Institutes Art and Technology program.

The Parasitic Network includes twenty surveillance cameras and a special instrument that visitors can use to capture and record live feeds from the cameras with. Besides from capturing and recording live feeds the instrument automatically mixes different sound sources as visitors move through the space, a functionality I’ve been working on together with Yoshi Akai and Michelle.

When:
Saturday, May 31st, from 13.00-20.00

Where:
Interactive Institute, Electrum, Kista.
Kistagången 16/Isafjordsgatan 22
6th floor, elevator B

Making a robot from scratch in three days with hardly any previous knowledge of programming or electronics is quite a challenge, but the participants at CRACs the Art of Robotics workshop proved that it is possible.

We were all too busy working to gather any decent documentation of the results, but some of the material that we used during the workshop is available here. ..

Creative Room for Art and Computing (CRAC) arranges an open lecture on robotics.

Maj 16 10.00 STUDIO 3 KULTURHUSET, STOCKHOLM

10.15 Björn Norberg, MejanLabs, talks about the intersections of art and technology within Mejan Labs.

10.45 dr Chandana Paul gives an overview to Robotics and
Artificial Intelligence as well as examples of robotics within arts.

The lecture is part of the ‘the Art of Robotics’ workshop.
See www.crac.org for more information.

I totally missed this but tinker.it in London had an Arduino + Flash workshop some weeks ago where they used as3Glue.

Besides from being used by tinker.it, as3Glue has been used to teach physical computing and prototyping at Stanford and at least one commercial project (the Spelar roll exhibition by Doberman). So far I’ve had around one thousand downloads of the code, and since I’ve received no bug reports since the last update it looks like it is working pretty well. Glue is the first library I’ve released as open source so I’m really happy about this…