Create a font from your own handwriting

At fontcapture.com

PERSONAS - How does the Internet see you?

http://personas.media.mit.edu/

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Invincible Cities by Camilo José Vergara

Re-posted here form Flavorpill Daily Dose:

"Mapping the shifting landscape of urban America
An interactive website created by sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara, Invincible Cities presents "A Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto."

Vergara travels through time. Invincible Cities captures more than three decades of changing streetscapes in Harlem, NY, Richmond, CA, and Camden, NJ. Trace shifting communities via photographs shot from the same vantage point throughout recent history.

The site encompasses multiple journeys. By incorporating ingenious mapping software and thematic tags, Invincible Cities makes it possible to explore many facets of each urban area. Categories include religion, vegetation, people, and junkyards, along with panoramas, artifacts, and census information.

Its interactive potential is just emerging. The ability to post comments beneath each image allows both current and former residents to discuss their neighborhoods. However, the project's future lies in its utility as a tool to inspire community-centered revitalization."

Read a profile on the Richmond project

The 4th Radiator festival. Going Underground - Surveillance and Sousveillance.

A very interesting exhibition regarding the city serveillance systems and its counterpart 'sousveillance' (Sousveillance - the counterpart to surveillance, where the ‘observed’ turns around, to face and watch the ‘observer’, recording the observers actions and movements.) of the 4th Radiator festival.
Read a review on Furtherfield

Microcodes by Pall Thayer

Microcodes are very small code-based artworks. Each one is a fully contained work of art. The conceptual meaning of each piece is revealed through a combination of the title, the code and the results of running them on a computer. As works of art these are the creative work of Pall Thayer. As programs they may be copied, distributed, modified and used under the terms of the GNU General Public License v.3 or (at your option) any later version. GPL v.3. If you're interested in running any of these but don't know how, see a brief HowTo. Also, see Rob Myer's review of Microcodes.

Processing

http://processing.org/
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students.

120 Feet of Video Art: Final Exams at NYU's Big Screens Class
Dan Shiffman isn't like most professors. Instead of Scantron sheets and bluebooks, Shiffman prefers to give his final exams on a 120-foot video wall that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays linked end-to-end.
Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen (a few others use openFrameworks, another visual language) has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

view more here



Shiffman is the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor.That hasn’t really been an option thus far in Processing, unless you were to go the hardware multiple-monitor route. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

Read more here

Voice Drawing by zefrank

http://www.zefrank.com/
A very nice voice drawing by zefrank here

Visit also zefrank's blog and site for many interactive and participating toys

Messa di Voce (2003: Golan Levin, Zachary Lieberman, Jaap Blonk, and Joan La Barbara) augments the speech, shouts and songs produced by a pair of virtuoso vocalists with real-time interactive visualizations. The project touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated, playful, and virtuosic audiovisual narrative.



One very nice stop motion animation re-posted here from zefrank's blog
Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie



Her Morning Elegance
Directed by Oren Lavie, Yuval and Merav Nathan
Featuring Shir Shomron
Photography by Eyal Landesman
Color Todd Iorio / Resolution

Oren Lavie is a songwriter of curly brown hair, whisperish voice, green eyes and suspiciously cold feet. He was born in 1976, two minutes behind schedule, and has been trying to catch up ever since.

eva and franco mattes have a new show in Mumbai, India, opening Saturday the 3rd, it's called "Traveling by telephone".

http://www.galeriems.com
http://www.timeoutmumbai.net/art/arts_preview_details.asp?code=74
Eva and Franco Mattes are known as the Bonnie and Clyde of contemporary art.

Interviewing artists Eva and Franco Mattes is confusing because Eva and Franco are not really real. “Once we were watching a Fassbinder movie and a journalist called,” the artist who uses the name Franco recalled in an email interview with Time Out Mumbai from Italy. “He wanted a name to write on the paper. We said we didn’t want any names, he insisted so Eva looked at the TV screen and there was the actress Eva Mattes, so she promptly said ‘OK, you won, my name is Eva Mattes’.” The name Franco was picked because it means honest in Italian. There are, however, some things about them that have been confirmed. They are the website 0100101110101101.org. They have watched and loved Sholay (“Sholay was like Sergio Leone on drugs!” they said). This fortnight, they will make their Indian debut at Galerie Mirchandani+ Steinruecke.

Eva and Franco Mattes are recognised as pioneers in the field of net art, which involves scrambling or copying internet codes. For Life Sharing (2000), they submitted themselves to a year of satellite surveillance during which their every move was monitored. In 2003, they courted media attention with an elaborate prank titled Nikeground. Nikeground circulated the rumour that Nike was going to buy and rename the town square Karlsplatz in Vienna which would be renamed Nikeplatz. The point was to trick an entire city and to a large extent, they succeeded. However, the protests they had expected against the privatisation of public spaces didn’t materialise. In 2006, the duo decided to make art out of and in Second Life, a virtual world where members, known as Residents, interact with each other using online personae, known as avatars. Second Life avatars are three-dimensional and animated, hovering between realistic, robotic and cartoonish. “We have always experimented with drugs, especially LSD,” said Franco. “We like being totally spaced out and see the world from a different perspective. Second Life reminded me a bit of that feeling, like being in Blade Runner or in Neuromancer.”

In 2006, Ars Virtua, a gallery in Second Life, hosted an exhibition by Franco and Eva Mattes at which they showed portraits of characters in Second Life. The same show, with the avatars were printed on canvas, was also taken to more conventional gallery spaces across Europe and in New York. The age-old European tradition of portraiture met the pop-art sensibility of Andy Warhol, held up a mirror to ideas of beauty and explored how identity is constructed in contemporary society. In Second Life, “masks are not there to hide your real identity”, explained Franco. “On the contrary they are there to show who you really are, since you can ignore social restrictions. Since we’ve been living fake identities all of our lives, it’s obvious that we are attracted by a world of avatars.”

The tension between the real and the virtual also inspired the Synthetic Performances series in which Franco and Eva recreated a number of famous performance art projects in Second Life. They picked “the most weird performances; maybe for all the sex and pain involved, which is completely absent, or, well, ‘abstract’ in a [video] game”, said Franco, who hates performance art as a genre and can’t see the point of it. In Mumbai, they will show the re-enactments of Chris Burden’s “Shoot”, Marina Abramovic’s “Seven Easy Pieces” and Gilbert & George’s “The Singing Sculpture” on large screens. The synthetic world of Second Life robs performance art of its central characteristic: spontaneity. Everything is mediated through avatars and feels oddly abstracted. The jerky, movements of the avatars further underscore the artificiality of the performances.

A number of Eva and Franco’s projects have been about art. Between 1998 and 2000, the duo created the fictional artist Darko Maver, by setting up a website and posting pictures of his art works, which recreated scenes of murder and violence using mannequins (in reality, they were pictures of real crime scenes that were freely available online). They convinced many of the existence of this Serbian artist, only to eventually kill him. In 2001, they scrambled the code of the website of Korean Web Art festival so that the works of artists were exchanged. “I’m afraid I have a love-hate relation with art,” said Franco. “I love it so much that I’m afraid to find out it may well be all bullshit, like a religious guy who after a whole life lived piously finds out before dying that god does not exist.”

The duo’s newest works, some of which will be shown in Mumbai, are photos “shot inside” a game called Half-Life. It’s been one of their tougher challenges. “Every shot was taken while killing aliens, struggling with radioactive traps or while escaping helicopters,” said Franco. “Sometimes I had to go through the whole scheme over and over for hours, because every time I was trying to stand still and make the photo, some goddamn alien was trying to eat my brain.”

HOW STUFF IS MADE by Natalie Jeremijenko

https://wikis.nyu.edu/xdesign/menupage.html
HowStuffisMade (HSIM) is a visual encyclopedia that documents manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental impacts involved in the production of contemporary products. Entries are summative photo essays produced by students who are guided by faculty responsible for ensuring appropriate citations and standards of evidence. Students engage the cooperation of manufacturers when possible. As an independent, academic, wiki-based publication, HSIM reconsiders engineering and design education as fundamentally connected to the social and political constraints, organizational innovations and global context that inform manufacturing decisions.
more projects here: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign

Female Icons by De Geuzen

Female Icons is a multifaceted project by the artist group known as De Geuzen.
On the project's website, each icon added to the site has her portrait added to the grid of oval images in the background of the page. When you click on an icon, you are taken to that page for that woman. There, the picture has a set of tags associated with it, and as you mouse-over the icon you have chosen, you can click on any of the tags, and see all the icons associated with that characteristic (i.e., 'writing' or 'radical'). There is a tag cloud on the project homepage, showing 'strength' as the most popular trait as of mid-September. If instead of clicking a tag you click directly on the icon, you are redirected to a Google image search of that person. The aesthetic of this project's archive reinforces the idea that an icon or representation is in itself a way of seeing. Seeing the symmetrical grid of images almost evoke a sense of uniformity - they are all of the same size but with radically different contents. De Geuzen does not shy away from the way in which we form collections and stories in the present in an attempt to understand the continuity of what it means to be female through acts of collection, homogenization, discussion, and disambiguation. This provides us with a collective means for seeing the female throughout history, and the resulting collection of hyperlinked media provides a way to draw comparisons and inferences that aren't always as available when we study a singular biography.
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=324
http://www.geuzen.org/female_icons/
http://www.geuzen.org/
more projects by Geuzen:
Wearable Resistance: http://geuzen.org/resistance/index.html

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

PRESENTS: http://www.yhchang.com/

#***one of the most beautiful, strange, conceptual net art sites***#!

thanks to: http://www.visualcorrespondents.com/

The Institute of Network Cultures

The Institute of Network Cultures is a media research centre that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink, following his appointment as professor within the Institute of Interactive Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam).
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/

Piano Migration V

http://www.interact.com.pt/pt/ed15/laboratorio/pianomigrationv

Nigel Johnson's "VOX"

Nigel Johnson's website http://imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/njohnson/

"Vox"
http://imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/njohnson/content/proposals/vox/vox_bin/VOX~1.HTM

"Gvision"
http://imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/njohnson/content/proposals/proposals.html

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, ShuddhabrataSengupta) is a collective of media practitioners based in New Delhi thatworks in art practice, new media, filmmaking, photography, media theory& research, writing, criticism and curation. Raqs are currentlyco-curators of the MANIFESTA 7 in South Tyrol/Trentino.
The origins of Raqs Media Collective’s practice lies in documentaryfilmmaking, and though they have traversed a long distance from theempiricist imperative of mainstream documentary making, documentsthemselves, and other forms that gesture to the notionally real,continue to intrigue them.Raqs are interested in documents because of the rhetorical spaces thatcan be prised open while handling documents. These include the elaboratedisguises and ruses that the rhetoric of documents sometimes carry withand within itself.
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.manifesta7.it

STEVE KURTZ : ARTIST CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE

ARTIST CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE

Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal
Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal

Buffalo, NY—Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government’s entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as “insufficient on its face.” This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as “fact”) were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara’s ruling and will not seek any new charges against Kurtz.

For over a decade, cultural institutions worldwide have hosted Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble’s educational art projects, which use common science materials to examine issues surrounding the new biotechnologies. In 2004 the Department of Justice alleged that Dr. Kurtz had schemed with colleague Dr. Robert Ferrell of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to illegally acquire two harmless bacteria cultures for use in one of those projects. The Justice Department further alleged that the transfer of the material from Ferrell to Kurtz broke a material transfer agreement, thus constituting mail fraud.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five years to twenty years in prison.

Dr. Kurtz has been fighting the charges ever since. In October 2007, Dr. Ferrell pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor charge after recurring bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered since his indictment prevented him from continuing the struggle.

KURTZ SUMS UP END OF FOUR-YEAR NIGHTMARE
Finally vindicated after four years of struggle, Kurtz, asked for a statement, responded stoically: “I don’t have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?”

Said Kurtz’s attorney, Paul Cambria, “I am glad an innocent man has been vindicated. Steve Kurtz stared in the face of the federal government and a twenty-year prison term and never flinched, because he believes in his work and his actions were those of a completely innocent man. Clients like him are a blessing, and although I have had many important victories, this one stands at the top of the list.”
As coordinator of the CAE Defense Fund, a group organized to support Kurtz from the beginning of the case, Lucia Sommer sees the end of the prosecution as bittersweet, and like Kurtz, is thoughtful about the broader significance of the case: “This ruling is the best possible ending to a horrible ordeal—but we are mindful of numerous cases still pending, and the grave injustices perpetrated by the Bush administration following 9/11. This case was part of a larger picture, in which law enforcement was given expanded powers. In this instance, the Bush administration was unsuccessful in its attempt to erode Americans’ constitutional rights.”

Referring to the international outcry the case provoked, involving fundraisers and protests held on four continents, Sommer said, “ The government has unlimited resources to bring and prosecute these kinds of charges, but the accused often don’t have any resources to defend themselves. This victory could never have happened without the activism of thousands of people. Supporters protested, vocally opposed the prosecution, and refused to let it go on in silence. And without their efforts at fundraising, Kurtz and Ferrell would not have been able to defend themselves from these false accusations.”

Sommer added that the next step for the defense will be to get back all of the materials taken by the FBI during its 2004 raid on the Kurtz home, including several completed art projects, as well as Dr. Kurtz’s lab equipment, computers, books, manuscripts, notes, research materials, and personal belongings. The four confiscated art projects are the subject of an exhibition entitled SEIZED on view at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, through July 18:http://www.hallwalls.org/visual_shows/2008/show_seized.html.

BACKGROUND TO THE CASE
The case originated in May 2004, when Kurtz’s wife Hope died of heart failure as the couple was preparing a project about genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Police who responded to Steve Kurtz’s 911 call deemed the Kurtzes’ art materials suspicious and alerted the FBI. Kurtz explained that the materials (legally and easily obtained basic life science equipment and two harmless bacteria samples) had already been displayed at museums throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the public. However, the following day, Kurtz was illegally detained for 22 hours on suspicion of bioterrorism, as dozens of agents from the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, Department of Defense, ATF, and numerous other law enforcement agencies raided his home, seizing his personal and professional belongings. After a federal grand jury refused to charge Kurtz with bioterrorism, Kurtz and Ferrell were indicted on two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud concerning the acquisition of $256 of harmless bacteria for one of Critical Art Ensemble’s educational art projects. (Critical Art Ensemble is the recipient of numerous awards for its projects, including the prestigious 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, in recognition of twenty years of distinguished work: http://www.creative-capital.org/index2.html.)

The Department of Justice brought the charges in spite of the fact that the alleged “victims of fraud”—American Type Culture Collection and the University of Pittsburgh—never filed any charges or complained of any wrongdoing, and the fact that in bringing the charges the Department of Justice was acting completely outside its own Prosecution Policy Relating to Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud (http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/43mcrm.htm).

For more information and extensive documentation, including the Judge’s dismissal, please visit:http://caedefensefund.org***

wordle

http://wordle.net/
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Create your own http://wordle.net/create

Liberate Your Avatar

http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/paulsermon/liberate/
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid823425610?bclid=1201016440&bctid=1398215641
An interactive public video art installation incorporating Second Life users in a real life environment. Located on All Saints Gardens, Oxford Road, Manchester, for the Urban Screens Festival, October 12th 2007 from 5pm to 6pm.
The merged realities of ‘All Saints Gardens’ on Oxford Road, and its online three-dimensional counterpart in ‘Second Life’ will, for the first time, allow ‘first life’ visitors and ‘second life’ avatars to coexist and share the same park bench in a live interactive public video installation. Entering into this feedback loop through a portal between these two parallel worlds this event exposes the identity paradox in Second Life. ‘Liberate your Avatar’ examines this new crisis and reflects the history of ‘All Saints Gardens’, relocating Emmeline Pankhurst as an avatar within ‘Second Life’ where she remains locked to the railings of ‘All Saints Gardens’.

Victims’ Symptom

commissioned by LabforCulture and curated by *Ana Peraica* (Croatia/The Netherlands)
<http://victims.labforculture.org/>.
Is the cultural production of victims preventing us from seeing the actual victims? Why does the mass media prefer to talk in terms of numbers? Are we losing our capacity for empathy? These are just some of the questions explored in the Victims’ Symptom project through critical texts, commissioned artworks, interviews and reflections by the curator and a number of renowned theorists and artists.

antisocial notworking

'antisocial notworking' is a repository of projects that explore the pseudo-agency of online social platforms. It takes a number of recent software projects as its inspiration to reflect upon the fashion for 'participation' with the arts sector and culture in general. The concern is how the Internet is increasingly charactised as a 'platform' (or collective machine) for 'social' uses, but to question what is meant by the term social in such descriptions. Although social networking platforms rely on user-generated content, what is the nature of this participation? What alternatives (or antitheses) can be identified?
http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/antisocial/
By 'anti-social', I do not mean (to be) unfriendly but to highlight that social networking platforms are already anti-social in as much as they display contradictory tendencies (both connecting and disconnecting socialities). In this way, and undoubtedly part of a backlash to the popularity of social networking in general, I am not referring to 'antisocial web' sites such as Hatebook that enable you to create a list of people that you don't want to be friends with (as opposed to Facebook that allows you to collect friends).
http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/projects/2008/antisocial/notes.php
To submit a project, go to:
http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/projects/2008/antisocial/form.php
The projects and other online resources are available as part of the subdomain 'project.arnolfini' - an online experimental production and management system:
http://project.arnolfini.org.uk