Nova is one of the three artists who presented their work at SXSW in a panel called
I really liked Nova’s live comic book – The Ideogenetic Machine
The narrative of the book is based on current news and events, to which participants respond by acting and filling speech bubbles. The installation is algorithmically generated. The software keeps producing new images allowing an infinite number of unique stories to take place.
Jon Cohrs tackles social and political issues in his art. He’s interested in the relationship between culture and nature.
The Spice Trade Exhibition investigates the disconnection between contemporary food and its origins, challenging our perception of what is “natural” and “artificial” in relation to food.
Jon travelled with a friend in a canoe and camped along the Meadowlands of Northern New Jersey, a landscape hosting the highest percentage of artificial flavouring factories in the world. They’d set up a tent between the river and the smoky factories and fall asleep with the smell of chocolate in the air.
Alviso’s Medicinal All Sault is a site-specific project that raises awareness on the pharmaceuticals in the San Francisco Bay. Jon talked about the wastewater treatment plants that filter out most toxic contaminants, but not the pharmaceuticals that many of us flush down our toilets ( anything from antibiotics to antidepressants that are not completely absorbed by our bodies). He got to harvest these substances in the Bay and created ALL SALT – a new product he then advertised and sold online and ironically at organic street fairs.
OMG I’m on.TV challenges the content imposed by media conglomerates and refers to June 12th 2009 when American television changed from analog to digital. OMG TV is a pirate TV station - an analog VHF transmitter that broadcasts video content pre-programmed from the web sources.
The project went live for 45 days giving the chance to anyone with limited tech experience to remix videos and broadcast them.
Just like in Nova Jiang’s live comic book, this project works like a platform where infinite random narratives can happen.
It’s interesting how this project changed the role of television as a medium by transforming it into a live screensaver that broadcasts interconnected bits of stories.
And last but not least we have Kaho Abe who approaches art in a very playful way. She uses technology to build games that bring people together in the real world. Hit Me is a game where 2 players with cameras on their heads have to take snaps of the opponent by hitting a button on the their head. The game tests speed, agility and the ability to take good snapshots.
by David Womack, Creative Dir, Interaction DesignR/GA
Every story follows a plot triangle where you have: tension and time building up the climax. The climax in digital experiences is the buy button or the next level in the game.
The most important aspect of the story is the complication, which is generated by conflict.
How do you get teenagers in USA interested in engineering? You create conflict. Somebody had the idea to make robots fighting which changed everything. Robots were introduced in middle school, kids loved playing with them and became 4 times more likely to study engineering.
In the early ages, technology was a story in itself.
1995 - Amazon: nobody else was selling stuff online.
You would go to amazon.com to see if you wanted what they had. Now the amazing thing about Amazon is the stories around obscure products like the 45 gallons passion water based lubricant. People create whole identities around these products – loving them and hating them is better then just loving them.
“More emotions are better then less”.
Successful products add layers of complexity over and over again: Foursquare started with location sharing, then they added complexity. How do you feel about this place/ are you the one who loves this place the most, and now: what are people in different areas feeling about the elections?
Digital media transforms the observer into the author of the story. Products that build platforms for stories are the ones that will survive. Example: Jonathan Harris’ latest project – Cow Bird – a project devoted to collecting stories, where you can search by topics, people or location and find connections between stories.
This panel featured Kate de Rivero, Comms Manager at WAHA international, Ivan Gayton, head of Mission at Doctors without Borders, and Pablo Maygrundter software engineer at Google.
In Africa there are a lot of problems with keeping medical records, landlines don’t work but the new rise of mobile technology – 640 million phone users from a population of 1 billion. So we have a lot of new applications and services helping remote communities to stay connected. The challenge is to come up with digital solutions that don’t rely on internet connection.
ICow in Kenia used text messages to help farmers to manage their stock.
Mpesa is an mobile banking service that allows people to do bank transfers via text messages.
Ivan Gayton from Doctors without Borders worked with Google to map the spread of cholera in Haiti. Sharing real time data during a natural disaster is not easy. They couldn’t rely on the internet in Haiti, so they had to use old technology like GPS Garmin units from Best Buy, pool chlorine sheets and spreadsheets to source what was happening on the ground at the time.
This method allowed low skilled locals to jump on their bikes and gather the data, and then fill in the spreadsheets. This data was then combined with the health centers in Haiti and all the water systems on Google maps. Now they could monitor the spread quicker than ever.
Mapping the spread of cholera helped everyone understand how to react to the disaster: it helped the doctors to treat more than 100 thousand people, and it also helped UNICEF and the water authority to take necessary measures much quicker.
Lately we've been thinking about virtual avatars and AI. What happens to your online self when you die? Could it have learnt enough about you during your lifetime to live on as you? Could an avatar be a big help in consuming the web? If an AI bot that had your taste characteristics was set free on the net, could it save you time by collating stuf for you, or doing chores etc?
We thought we were being very original here, but it seems we're not the first. this is an Australian life insurance ad.
This guy is called Bruce Duncan and he runs a thing called the Terasem Movement Foundation LifeNaut Project. They created the concept of "mindfiles", files that contain data from your life gained from data. They are mentioned in the above video, but had no idea it existed.
The life insurance ad talks about Social Network data. LifeNaut uses digital data, but not social network data yet as far as I know. So it seems to still be a young enough field to make an impact, it seems likely that social network data would be a very rich seem of information if you wanted to re-create someones personality. Anyway I spoke to Bruce and he's a really nice guy, maybe we'll collaborate.
He bought along a robot likeness of a colleague called Bina48. Her personality was based on the Mindfile of the real Bina, whilst the conversation interface was made using separate language parser. About half the session was a question and answer session with Bina48 herself, which had varying success. It was actually pretty funny and occasionally profound.
Something interesting highlighted by an audience member was that everyone seemed to be asking really profound questions about the nature of existence, although I suppose that's to be expected from your first conversation with a robot.
Being in a room at a big conference talking to a robot head felt really exciting, like we were witnessing the first alien contact or something.
When Julius von Bismark was a kid, he probably never "just put his fingers on his nose" but instead was creating real time sculptures using experimental materials to share with the classroom community. He probably never drew just a stick man but the human simple structure for future mapping interactions.
Julius von Bismark is an interactive Artist and this week at the age of 28 received a desk at Cern, in Geneva, Switzerland. Julius von Bismark is a genius but, just like every genius is paranoid: he is afraid that his inventions can end up in wrong hands. The spy? The communist? The fascists? The terrorists? The Martians? The Others? No! The Advertising. Really? Yes. In 2008 he won the Ars Electronica Grand Prix Award with the Image Fulgurator: a real world hack of other’s people photos. The camera is synchronized with other people’s flashes and projects an image to the pointed pictures. The other users will discover the hidden message later on their cameras. In this video Julius shows the potentials of the Image Fulgurator projecting a white dove on Mao Zedong's portrait. Scary, powerful.
I am sure everyone who ended up on this blog, especially these days, has a high sense of responsibility and knows the difference between creating a new concept and stealing Julius idea.
Mr Von Bismark, keep creating and inspiring all of us with this amazing stuff. And never shave your beard.
