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)

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.

“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).

PHOTO: MIKAEL OLSSON

“The first solo UK show by the Swedish artist Peter Geschwind will fully utilize the scale and industrial aesthetic of The Exchange.

Automatic was originally presented at Fargfabriken, Stockholm in 2006, but has been dramatically reworked for Penzance.” - from Newlyn Art Gallery.

I hooked up some motion sensors to automate a shadow-play for the exhibition at the Newlyn Art Gallery, a small task, but it was never the less a fun little project. I really like Peter Geschwinds work and I got to try out some new stuff with POCO C++ which is now part of cppGlue.

The exhibition opens on April 19th an will be on display until June 28th.

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds. - Theo Jansen

Space Camping by Ebba Matz, Physical Interaction Lab and Philippe Boix-Vives is a geodesic dome whose inside surface alternates between kaleidoscopic reflections and back-projected animations. The dome is partially inspired by the Pepsi Pavilion created by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) for the Expo ‘70 in Osaka, and Buckmister Füller who developed the geodesic dome. E.A.T and Buckminister Füller are two great sources of inspiration to me and I find it beautiful how much from them that can be related to in this work and the context it was created in.

Geodesic domes are the only man made structures that become stronger the larger they are, in fact it is theoretically possible to construct geodesic domes large enough to cover cities, planets and stars. This is achieved by tensegrity, “when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other”. Tensegrity is not only an interesting concept, it is also an interesting example of how the pursuit of art can create synergy effects* that contribute to the sciences. The term was coined by Buckmister Füller for artist Kennet Snelson who successfully explored and demonstrated the concept in his sculptures. Füller later used tensegrity to develop the geodesic dome and today tensegrity has found applications in a wide variety of ares from architecture to robotics.

I was not involved much in the construction of the dome but I participated in the brainstorming sessions around Man Machine 2, the exhibition which it was created for. A lot of ideas that were discussed didn’t make it into the finished pieces, which isn’t strange considering that the exhibition was conceived and constructed in two and a half months. One such idea was to create an open interface for the dome and let visitors program it with their own content. Interestingly I just discovered that Billy Klüver, co-founder of E.A.T, had similar ideas for the Pepsi Pavilion. Some 27 years earlier he wanted the pavilion to be a “laboratory environment, encouraging ‹live programming› that offered opportunity for experimentation, rather than resort to fixed or ‹dead programming›” (Media Art Net).

Space Camping is part of the Man Machine 2 exhibition which is on display at The National Museum of Science & Technology in Stockholm, Sweden from December 8th 2007 to April 27th 2008.

* Synergy is another term popularized by Bückmister Fuller.

All art is experimental, or it isn’t art. - Gene Youngblood

PHOTO: HARTMUT STOCKTER

Last weekend I went to the Super Market art fair and discovered the wonderful and witty inventions of Hartmut Stockter.

Hartmut Stockter is among other things the inventor of The Sloth-machine, a convenient vehicle for moving through dense European primeval forests, The Eavesdrop-leaves-machine which “raises the question whether listening to the wind in the trees is perhaps most conveniently done outside” and The Beehive-Hat which “invites to rest in the grass, in the shadow of its broad rim, and to listen to the humming of the bees”.

Stockters project documentary can be updated or printed in its entirety from his website, there are even instructions on how to bind it properly. Those who are too lazy to bind it themselves will be able to buy it at his upcoming solo show at DUNK! in Copenhagen, March 13th - April 24th 2008.

While great art makes you wonder, great design makes things clear. - John Maeda (The Laws of Simplicity, 2006)

“Even in the perfect darkness there is always some kind of light.” (Färgfabriken)

The Gauntlet is an experience that to a high degree is influenced by the viewers knowledge about John Duncans previous works and the exhibition itself. You could argue that the exhibition will have a higher impact the less you know about The Gauntlet and the more you know about the artist.

Duncan is probably most famous for Scare (1976), a “performance” in which he approached the houses of people he knew well and, dressed in a full-head mask carrying a gun loaded with blanks, shot them point-blank in the face and took off.

Scare is certainly a controversial work but Blind Date (1980), which involves the sound recording of Duncan having sexual intercourse with a dead body in Mexico and his subsequent sterilization, is (for most people) even more upsetting and morally objectionable. In his comments to Blind Date Duncan says that he wanted it “to render any further self-torture of this kind, especially psychic self-torture, unnecessary for anyone to perform as a creative act.” (from Neon Gallery). The question is weather he really would have had to perform the act to achieve this objective. Would it not be enough to maintain the illusion that he did?

My friend took the opportunity to approach Duncan at the exhibition opening and confront him about Blind Date. Unfortunately Duncan avoided the subject and quickly excused himself. In his comments to Blind Date Duncan also says that “Since Blind Date, all forms of my work are created to raise questions”. He does obviously not intend to give all the answers…

The Gauntlet is exhibited at Färgfabriken from 2008-02-02 to 2008-03-02

The Dream World and Metabolism of the Organism is a landscape of bodies that together form an organism. Visitors connect to, become part of and give life to the organism by breathing into an “umbilical cord” that extends out of its main body. The organism responds to the air it receives by shifting in color, emitting sounds and growing in size until it eventually rewards the visitor by opening up a window to its dream world.

The installation is part of the Man Machine 2 exhibition whose theme is how the human mind and body “have interplayed with the machine historically and how man and machine will interact in the future”.

“There are a lot of primitive emotional stuff going on in the mouth, old animal behaviour… if you play for a couple of minutes, you might feel a little dizzy and disconnected from the world outside, maybe a little less human…”
- Matti Kallioinen

“The work can be interpreted literary: we need oxygen, interaction and engagement to survive”.
- Rikard Ekholm, SvD Konst

Construction and Behavior

“It is obvious that the technology gives us possibilities to create illusions, especially if the technology is hidden so what appears are just the effects. The technology is always there even if not seen. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it just plays a game with us and sometimes it makes the impossible possible”.
- Björn Norberg, Curator Man Machine II

The Dream World and Metabolism of the Organism consists of nine inflatable bodies (five spheres and four cones) constructed of non flammable synthetic fabric. The designs for the bodies and the costumes for the characters in the video projection were drawn by hand and translated to 3D-models from which patterns were generated and printed. The bodies are connected by flexible ventilation tubes to four ventilation fans. Three of the fans assure that the installation can be inflated within seconds when a visitor blows in the “umbilical cord”; a thin tube connected to the large center sphere. The fourth fan deflates the center sphere when the visitor ceases to blow.

The airflow in the umbilical cord is measured by a microelectromechanical air velocity sensor and determines the speed at which the bodies are inflated. The soundscape that surround the installation, the color of the bodies and the frequency of the color shifts depends on the growth of the installation (which is is measured by ultrasonic range finders) and the airflow in the umbilical cord. The bodies are illuminated from their insides by green and red lamps and a video projection with accompanying sound fades in and out on the center sphere as it is inflated and deflated.

When no one is interacting with the installation it emits ambient sounds and slowly shifts color while occasionally inflating itself slightly. A spotlight illuminates the umbilical cord so as to invite people to grab it and start interacting with the installation.

Sensors, fans, lights, video and sound are all monitored and controlled through an Arduino microcontroller and a DMX USB Pro device connected to a Mac Mini computer running software written in C++ with openFrameworks. All technology is hidden from sight within the bodies, in the roof or behind the surrounding walls. The installation logs interaction and sensor statistics that can be monitored from a remote location.

The Dream World and Metabolism of the Organism is a collaboration between Matti Kallioinen (Artist), Erik Sjödin (Engineer) and David Kjelkerud (Engineer, from Physical Interaction Lab) for the Man Machine 2 exhibition which is produced by The Interactive Institute for The National Museum of Science & Technology. The exhibition is on display at The National Museum of Science & Technology in Stockholm, Sweden from December 8th 2007 to April 27th 2008.