"There is nothing in a Caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a Butterfy"

by R. Buckminster Fuller

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index
http://challenge.bfi.org/ideaindex

The Whitney's Buckminster Fuller: Starting with Universe
http://www.whitney.org/www/buckminster_fuller/about.jsp

Urban Life Intervensions

Watch the Guerilla London 2007 set of 6 videos.
More here.

CVM - Center for Visual Music

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Library.html
http://www.si21.com/interakt/

Craig Baldwin

is a filmmaker and curator whose interests lie in archival retrieval and recombinatory forms of cinema, performance, and installation. He is the recipient of several grants, including those from the Rockefeller Foundation, Alpert Award, Creative Capital, Phelan, AFI, FAF, and California Arts Council. Over the last two decades, his productions have been shown and awarded at numerous international festivals, museums, and institutes of contemporary art, often in conjunction with panels, juries, and workshops on collage and cultural activism. His own weekly screening project, Other Cinema, has continued to premiere experimental, essay, and documentary works for over a quarter century, recently expanding into DVD publishing.
http://www.othercinema.com/cbfilmography.html
http://www.othercinema.com/

Synthazards

Synthazards are synthetic fabrications of natural hazards which forms are generated by various algorithms and machines. They are manufactured by using different rapid prototyping techniques, laser cutouts, and cnc. The following natural hazards are prototyped: earthquake, drought, whirlpool, lightning, volcano, tsunami, tornado and lava. The objects are focusing on formal aspects of these phenomena. What is apparent in fabrications is a unique synthetic form, which is given by algorithms and inscribed in the language of prototyping machines.
http://www.syntfarm.org/projects/synthazards/
by http://syntfarm.org/
syntfarm (Germany/Serbia/Singapore) is founded by Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic in April 2007 in the very clean city of Singapore. The group focuses on the preservation of expressions and structures that are found in various dynamic (eco)systems.

http://www.ktonycia.com/

http://www.improvisa.es/

Edu-Factory

Conflicts and Transformations of the University
http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/

Bonnie Prince Billy - Workhorse

directed by Harmony Korine

Leonard Shlain

Dr. Shlain is a best-selling author of three books, Art and Physics: The Parallel Visions of Space, Time and Light, Alphabet Vs. The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image and Sex, Time & Power: How Woman’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution. A favorite among artists, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and educators, he has lectured at such venues as Harvard, The New York Museum of Modern Art, Cern, Los Alamos, The Phillips Collection, Florence Academy of Art and the European Council of Ministers. His fourth book about Leonardo Da Vinci “Leonardo’s Brain: The Right - Left Roots of Creativity” is nearly completed and in typical Leonard Shlain fashion he is determined to finish it, however he will be canceling his currently scheduled speaking engagements.
http://leonardshlainsbrain.com/site/

"The Puppet" by Ibrahim Al-Koni,

Ibrahim Al-Koni, scion of a Libyan Tuareg family, is regarded as the great writer of the Sahara. In his new novel "The Puppet" Al-Koni perceptively depicts the way in which the modern world intrudes into the Tuaregs' traditional society.
A fundamental examination of the phenomenon of emergent capitalism: Al-Koni's Die Puppe ("The Puppet", not yet available in English translation)
A presentation of the novel by Kersten Knipp

Lipotechnica

Lipotechnica is an international, integrated energy company based in Estonia.
It aims to manufacture, use and market clean burning fat. Lipotechnica is a proud producer of groundbreaking cost and enivronmental friendly Biofuel.
If all goes as planned for the company Lipotechnica and their development, a part of the city's vehicles get their fuel from a greasy, yellowish liquid distilled from the remnants of liposuction.
The research team at Lipotechnica has developed groundbreaking techniques of efficiently and economically production of a biofuel based on leftover products from liposuction. Making use of human medical waste products Lipotechnica is picking up the race with companies like ConocoPhillips making use of poultry fat - only their product line will have a nonviolent and high ecological profile.

http://www.lipotechnica.com/

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

Laurie Simmons's film 'The Music of Regret,'

ACT2:'Excellent Moon'


Cafe Song


from 'The Music of Regret,' by Laurie Simmons, featuring Adam Guettel as The Dummy // music M. Rohatyn, lyrics L. Simmons.

'The Music of Regret' is a mini-musical in three acts. The film is inspired by three distinct periods of Laurie Simmon’s photographic work. Vintage childcraft puppets, ventriloquist dummies and walking objects enact three tales of ambition, disappointment, love and regret. more

Read lyrics of the songs here

'The Music of Regret''s acts I and III also staged and performed live as part of PERFORMA05



Many more wonderful photographs and artworks at the artist's website

You can read also an interview here

Technologically Expanded Dance

http://tercius.wordpress.com/

A new book accompanied by DVD "TeDance - Perspectives on Technologically Expanded Dance" has been published by Daniel Tércio.

"When preparing this paper, I have started attempting to identify a Portuguese accent. In order to do so, I have chronologically listed dance pieces exhibited in Portugal by Portuguese, or Portugal-based, choreographers, where intersections with new technologies were portrayed. Soon I was to face a curious dilemma: how would one distinguish ‘new technologies’? And above all, how would one identify those artworks where the authors take up technology not only as devices or resources but as dramaturgically purposeful?"
“Dance and Technology with Portuguese accent at the crossroads” excerpt, by Daniel Tércio.

In Tedance. Perspectives on Technologically Expanded Dance. Lisbon, FMH, 2009. 249 pp. Paper plus a DVD. ISBN: 987-972-735-160-2

Sonom

Suicide
Instalation. Starting from free rights footage from clinical re-education to suicides at 30´s at USA
http://www.sonom.org/



[ Ether ] from Sonom on Vimeo

Agua [ Element ]

Agua [ Element ] from Sonom on Vimeo.

"Monolit" a fresh one

[ Monolit ] from Sonom on Vimeo.

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.

CAPITALISM HITS THE FAN

english//38,54 Min//04.12.2008
- A Marxian View - Professor Rick Wolff, Department of Economics, UMass Amherst, October 7, 2008

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

http://kanalb.org/clip.php?clipId=2188&Vlang=eng

Jennifer Steinkamp

A visual artist who crafts computer-animated projections for site-specific spaces, Jennifer Steinkamp uses her work to explore new means of producing and experiencing art. Employing virtual-reality software like a painter wields a brush, Steinkamp constructs lifelike installations of nature in motion, derived entirely from code.

The artwork is interactive. Steinkamp builds her pieces in relation to their site's architecture, and sets the projectors at a low level so the viewer's shadow disrupts the imagery, provoking a playful point of immersion.
http://jsteinkamp.com/



Loom consisted of two overlapping video projections; one contained a horizontal pattern, while the other vertical. When combined, the two created a weave. Because there were two projections at angles, the viewer created two shadows that disrupted the projection; one shadow revealed the vertical lines while the other was filled with horizontal lines. The image formed a cube that matched the perspective of the space, which was a deep tunnel. The lines warped with a water like pattern.

The T-Mobile Dance

SocioPatterns.org

SocioPatterns.org aims to shed light on patterns in social dynamics and coordinated human activity. We do so by reporting on experiments, data analyses and visualisations designed and conducted by ourselves as well as carried out by other groups.

SocioPatterns.org focuses on exposing patterns. We are specifically interested in experiments that gather data, and visualizations that present the data in novel and insightful ways.

dance-techLIVE

http://www.dance-tech.net/page/dancetechlive-beta

Watch 50 Categorized Dance Animation Videos

Here you will find categorized links to more than 50 posts on Great Dance that include videos of many different types of dance and movement animations such as 2D and 3D, stop-motion, visual effects, interactive performances and installations, computer games, machinima, live action and CG, motion graphics, visualizations, pre-cinema and many other types.

The OpenEnded Group

http://www.openendedgroup.com/
The OpenEnded Group is three digital artists — Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser — who create works for stage, screen, gallery, page, and public space.
Kaiser and Eshkar have collaborated on numerous projects since the mid-1990s. Interested from the start in creating a new kind of 3D space that did not aspire to photorealism, we thought instead about drawing. Soon we formulated the notions of drawing as performance and hand-drawn space, which we then applied to motion-captured performance in a series of collaborations with choreographers. Of these, perhaps the best known are BIPED, with Merce Cunningham, and Ghostcatching, with Bill T. Jones.
Watch videos like 'Verge (Complete)' (Verge uses volumetric light to explore the idea of “blind 3D” in which black zones of the image may be read as voids or as dark solids) and clips 'Movement Principles' of Robert Wilson's instructions on how to move your body on stage

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.”

"Theater Of War" by John Walter

John Walter labels his film Theater Of War “a documentary about art and politics,” which is the kind of blatant provocation meant to pay homage to the film’s ostensible subject, Bertolt Brecht. In 2006, Walter was allowed to film the rehearsals for George C. Wolfe’s Central Park production of Brecht’s anti-war play Mother Courage And Her Children, starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Austin Pendleton, with a Tony Kushner translation and songs by Jeanine Tesori. Walter was also granted extended time with Streep, who allowed a rare and reluctant glimpse at her process in deference to Brecht, an artist who favored exposing his own artifice. Walter intersperses his coverage of the Mother Courage production with biographical sketches and analysis of Brecht—much of it provided by post-modern novelist Jay Cantor. At one point, Walter shoots some stock footage of Cantor working at his computer, then cuts to a shot of what Cantor is writing: a few idle lines about how much he hates pretending to work for the sake of a movie.

Though Theater Of War is informative—both about Brecht and about the effort it takes to mount a big New York production—Walter overreaches in trying to connect Brecht’s anti-war sentiment with contemporary protest movements, and doesn’t do more than dabble with the themes of truth and representation in documentary filmmaking. There’s an interesting section about how in Brecht’s 1947 appearance before HUAC, he used his own theatrical techniques to throw Congress off the scent of his Marxist leanings; for the most part though, Walter is unable to make the intersection between art and politics in Brecht’s work really come to life. The problem is built into the documentary’s design. While Theater Of War contains a few direct, empathetic moments—like Kushner describing how Mother Courage changed his life when he read it in college, or Streep explaining that she sees her role in theatrical revivals to be “the voice of dead people”—Walter would rather we care about the ideas this film raises, not the people we meet. Which is very Brechtian, to be sure, but not always so engaging
http://www.avclub.com/content/cinema/theater_of_war?utm_source=imdb_rss_1
http://filmmakermagazine.com/directorinterviews/2008/12/john-walter-theater-of-war.php

Brain Power Video - CBS News

Watch CBS Videos Online

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality Page
http://www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar/index.html
This page is a resource for Augmented Reality information. You will find an introduction to augmented reality and links to some augmented reality work on the web.

Levelhead
http://selectparks.net/
http://julianoliver.com/levelhead
http://selectparks.net/~julian/levelhead/install.html
levelHead is known to build on Ubuntu 7.10/7.04 and Debian Etch systems against the following external dependencies. It's adviseable you adhere to these versions if you want to avoid going spontaneously mad:
· cal3d 0.11 https://gna.org/projects/cal3d/
· osgcal 0.1.44 http://download.gna.org/underware/
· openscenegraph 1.2 http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg/wiki/Downloads/PreviousReleases
· gstreamer (any) http://www.gstreamer.net/
· bakefile (any) http://www.bakefile.org/
· ARToolkit 2.72.1 http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/download/
· ARToolkitPlus 2.1.1 http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/handheld_ar/artoolkitplus.php Optional:
· linux-uvc revision 228 http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/
· libwebcam revision 22 http://www.quickcamteam.net/software/libwebcam

HIT Lab
The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ) is developing and commercializing technology that improves human computer interaction and by doing so unlocks the power of human intelligence.The HIT Lab NZ conducts research with new emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality, Next Generation Video Conferencing, Immersive Visualization and Perceptual User Interfaces. Interaction Design techniques are used to adapt these technologies to the needs of end users and solve real world problems.

ARToolKit from HIT Lab NZ http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/
Development for the ARToolKit library (originally design by Hirokazu Kato and Mark Billinghurst). It's a low-level AR Library for the tracking and the visual integration of real and virtual content. Widely used internationally by the community (GPL Licence), the software is now available commercially from ARToolWorks.

OSGART From HIT Lab NZ http://www.artoolworks.com/community/osgart/index.html
OSGART is a library that simplifies the development of Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality applications by combining the well-known ARToolKit tracking library with OpenSceneGraph. But rather than acting just as a simple nodekit, the library offers 3 main functionalities: high level integration of video input (video object, shaders), spatial registration (marker-based, multiple trackers), and photometric registration (occlusion, shadow).
With OSGART, users gain the benefit of all the features of OpenSceneGraph (high quality renderer, multiple file type loaders, community nodekits like osgAL, etc.) directly in their augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) or mediated reality applications. As with the standard ARToolKit, the user can thus develop and prototype interactive applications that can use tangible interaction (in C++, Python, Lua, Ruby etc.).

AR-media™ Plugin v1.0 for Google SkecthUp™
With ARplug-in, Google Sketch-Up users are allowed to visualize their 3D models directly in the real physical space which sorrounds them. In a very precise sense, through ARplug-in, Sketch-Up 3D models can be visualized out of the digital workspace directly on users' desktop, by connecting a simple webcam and by printing a suitable code. The Plug-in provides users with an advanced visualization functionality which serves two main purposes:
Study and analize scaled virtual prototypes in real environments
Communicate 3D projects immersively and astonishingly
All you need to make ARplug-in work is a personal computer, a webcam and a printed code attached to the software. For optimal functioning, a Dual-core PC with a standard graphic card for 3D videogames are recommended. The price of a one seat License amounts to 99 eur.

Augmented reality on your desktop, thanks to Sketchup



Augmented Reality is a new technology that is starting to spread. Basically, it consists on mixing 3D model with live footage in real time. This concept has been applied to futuristic interfaces, and it can be very helpful for architects as it allows you to take 3D Models a step further, placed on the real world and show it to your clients.
Thanks to the AR-media Plugin for Sketchup, you can start playing with Augmented Reality. This plugin allows you to place the 3D Model over live video from your webcam, and move it around as you can see on the above video. The plugin calculates the planes on the live footage thanks to a sheet you need to print out, which allows the software to calculate the distance and inclination.

Video Art by Michael Szpakowski and Doron Golan

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Projecting Performance

Interrelationships between performance and technology, dancer and operator

Projecting Performance is a collaboration between performance academics from the School of Performance & Cultural Industries and digital technologists from KMA Creative Technology Ltd. This AHRC-funded project focuses on the choreographic and scenographic exchange between dancers and projected digital images within a theatrical context. It questions processes of performance and perceived boundaries between performers and technologists, and instead it promotes dialogues in an iterative cycle of creative development.....more information
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/paci/projectingperformance/home.html

On Scenography

http://www.sceno.org/
http://www.scenofest.org/index.html