Website: http://www.pauwaelder.com
Website: http://www.pauwaelder.com
Monochromeye
Occular Witness is an artistic research-project that springs from Arijana Kajfes examinations of what light really is and what it consist of. The project attempts to stake out the limits of human vision and examines how information is malleable and how meaning is formed through image in a time when information is abundant and our culture is saturated with layers of processed imagery.

The installation i saw during ars electronica was meant to look like a �laboratory� with several stations that each examines diverse processes of light and the eye�s perception of light.
One of the pieces of Occular Witness is Monochromeye a kind of hat that covers your scalp and eyes and reduces vision to basic monochromatic color readings of the environment. You have to wear a fingerholder fitted with one red, green and blue lightsensor that measures light as you point your finger at something. It feeds back the color information to two tricolored (RGB) light diodes that emit two beams of light straight into your eyes.

When i tried it on, nothing happened as long as i stayed in the gallery, but going out of it, passing under the stairs and reaching the outside made the experience much more enjoyable. Nothing spectacular, but having my mode of recognition reduced down to only three kinds of light was incredibly soothing and playful, although i should have tested it during a much longer period of time to really appreciate its effects. And of course i really like the alien coolness it gave me.
Arijana Kajfes conducted the project at the Smart Studio, Interactive Institute.
Images on flickr.
PainStation Generations

To celebrate the five year anniversary we have set up two versions of the PainStation at this year�s GamesConvention in Leipzig:
PainStation 1.0
For the first time in 3 years the very first model has been excavated from the transportation case and is now playable at the pong.mythos exhibition. The crappy looks, the biting whip and the awful slowdowns of the software give this machine a unique retro touch!
PainStation 2.5
If you prefer the high tech treatment with varying pain levels, blinding flashlights and a lot more gameplay variety, stick to our professionally build workhorse. On display is model 4/5, codename �Vaterland�.

More photos from the exhibition can be found here.
Photos of pong.mythos @ GC and other locations.
Update: I just got a call from Andreas Lange asking for replacement whips for PS2.5. The first set is already used up � more than 36 000 people visited the show yesterday!
pong.mythos @ GamesConvention

The great exhibition pong.mythos by Andreas Lange from the Computerspielemuseum Berlin will have it�s second showing in Leipzig at the GamesConvention � europe�s biggest gaming expo. The exhibition will be shown in extended form with 25+ installations in one of the 4 main halls of the trade show. If you missed pong.mythos in Stuttgart, this is you chance!
Lots of pictures and press clippings can be found here: http://st.blinkenarea.org/pong.mythos/
Television Texts - Jenny Holzer

TV Texts (2000, 1.2 MB, 36 sec.)
“Jenny Holzer - ‘TV Texts’ represent ambivalent messages dynamically
directed at a vanishing point which lies beyond the viewer�s retina.
The messages are placed within brackets of white noise.”
from ZKM Videosammlung.
Review of Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins
I read Henry Jenkins's new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide this weekend. The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest. Jenkins is a multifaceted media scholar, a critic of vaudeville, fan fiction, comics, film, games, and more. He is also the founder of the Education Arcade, an MIT group interested in the intersection of videogames and learning. And so, even though the book addresses games as a minority subject, I offer this review to alert our readers to Jenkins's current thinking. In a future post, I will attempt to address what convergence might mean for videogames with an agenda.
Extimacy. Art, intimacy and technology
ART, INTIMACY AND TECHNOLOGY
Participating artists: Gazira Babeli, Clara Boj, Martin John Callanan, Grégory Chatonsky, Diego Díaz, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Laurent Mignonneau, Paul Sermon, Christa Sommerer, Carlo Zanni.
Curator: Pau Waelder
Inside the immense flow of data exchange, the new technologies have facilitated an interdependency between the spheres of what is private and what is public, between interior and exterior, leading us to reveal, in an increasingly natural manner, our experiences, thoughts and feelings, enlarging the circle of intimacy to the point of sharing our inner life with the invisible, abstract audience of Internet users. Things personal become collective, things belonging to others become our own and intimacy is no longer something that is preserved and kept in our innermost circles, but something that is projected in all directions in an eccentric movement. Thus intimacy turns into extimacy, to use the term created by Jacques Lacan to define the existence, within the most intimate sphere of the I, of a “foreign body”, that which is external to the individual and with which one identifies.
We need to share our intimacy because what we are is defined both by our subjectivity and by what surrounds us. In the realm of digital art, several artists have worked with the new parameters of subject, body, interpersonal relationship and intimacy introduced by the new technologies. Their works enable us to initiate a reflection on the ways in which the mobile phone, e-mails, chats, social networks and instant messaging systems modify, increase or condition our communication with others. They also allow us to consider where the boundaries of our personal space lie, where our “I” ends and that of others begins.
“Extimacy. Art, intimacy and technology” is a group digital art exhibition which puts forward a proposal that spectators reflect on these concepts through the presentation of works by recognised artists from the international scene. Interactive installations, mainly, that involve spectators in what is active participation with the work, which never ceases to be a piece with its own identity, the fruit of the firm artistic background of creators who combine art and technology in their work. In an era in which the user adopts an active role in the diffusion and manipulation of information on the global network (known as web 2.0), in art, too, a change in roles between spectator and work is taking place, with interactive art as the best expression of this new paradigm. The works of some great names from this sphere, such as Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer or Paul Sermon, for instance, are combined with the creations of promising artists like Gazira Babeli, Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, Gregory Chatonsky, Carlo Zanni or Martin John Callanan. All of them exhibit the multiple facets a concept as complex and at the same time as simple as extimacy can present, from different angles and with diverse intentions.
Extimacy. Art, intimacy and technology
facilitated an interdependency between the spheres of what is private
and what is public, between interior and exterior, leading us to reveal,
in an increasingly natural manner, our experiences, thoughts and
feelings, enlarging the circle of intimacy to the point of sharing our
inner life with the invisible, abstract audience of Internet users.
Things personal become collective, things belonging to others become our
own and intimacy is no longer something that is preserved and kept in
our innermost circles, but something that is projected in all directions
in an eccentric movement. Thus intimacy turns into extimacy, to use the
term created by Jacques Lacan to define the existence, within the most
intimate sphere of the I, of a “foreign body”, that which is external to
the individual and with which one identifies.
“Extimacy. Art, intimacy and technology” is a group digital art
exhibition which puts forward a proposal that spectators reflect on
these concepts through the presentation of works by recognised artists
from the international scene. Interactive installations, mainly, that
involve spectators in what is active participation with the work, which
never ceases to be a piece with its own identity, the fruit of the firm
artistic background of creators who combine art and technology in their
work. In an era in which the user adopts an active role in the diffusion
and manipulation of information on web
2.0, in art, too, a change in roles between spectator and work is
taking place, with interactive art as the best expression of this new
paradigm. The works of some great names from this sphere, such as
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer or Paul
Sermon, for instance, are combined with the creations of promising
artists like Gazira Babeli, Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, Gregory Chatonsky,
Carlo Zanni or Martin John Callanan. All of them exhibit the multiple
facets a concept as complex and at the same time as simple as extimacy
can present, from different angles and with diverse intentions.
Metalandscapes at the Pilar i Joan Miro Foundation
Fundacio Pilar i Joan Miro a Mallorca (Spain)
October 5th, 2007 - January 6th, 2008
Participating artists: Mauro Ceolin, Adam Chapman, Joan Fontcuberta, Thorsten Knaub, Scott Snibbe and Carlo Zanni.
Curator: Pau Waelder
http://www.metapaisatges.com
http://www.metapaisajes.com
The landscape is not just the natural environment or its representation. It is in itself a cultural construct, subject to the codes and beliefs of those who have configured it, be it physically (determining its shape by the arrangement of gardens, plantations, roads, bridges and constructions) or as an image (choosing the point of view and the elements that will be included). The representation of landscape, in painting, photography or other media, is thus not just the plain reproduction of the environment. It becomes a selected vision, a whole Weltanschauung summarized in one image.
Landscape painting brought the concept of mimesis to its extreme by pretending to be a real window at which the viewer can stare. But also, as an abstraction of reality, it incorporates several codes of the cultural environment in which it has been created: landscape can also mean social status, ownership or identity of a particular territory. It is also the result of the encounter of culture and natural environment, and thus depending on how the relation between these two elements evolves, the representation of landscape will change. Mankind has been afraid of nature, has then tried to understand it, label it, domesticate it, later on despise it and finally, on the fringe of extinction, recuperate it with a rather unrealistic nostalgia. All of these transformations are reflected in the representations of landscape that have been made during the last centuries.
Today, globalization offers us a repeated landscape all over the world: the horizon of a vast city or a never ending freeway flanked by signs displaying always the same advertisements. Landscape thus acquires a new signification. The so-called “urban landscape” finds its own sense and form; the natural landscape turns into either a fiction or a denunciation; the virtual landscape, finally, appears in the screen of the computer to offer us a new space at which we will stare. In any of its forms, the landscape is necessary to us because it represents our environment, and as it is embedded with our own cultural codes, it gives us an image of our place in the world.
metalandscapes proposes a revision of the concept of landscape from the perspective of digital art. Digital art incorporates the codes and themes of our contemporary society, which is dominated by technological processes and scientific research, and thus can bring a suggestive approach to the model of world view that is the representation of landscape. Due to the processes they generate and the forms they create, the artworks presented in this exhibition are, more than landscapes, metalandscapes. By using the greek prefix that means “beyond”, I designate these pieces as “landscapes after landscape”, which create an abstraction that is both a landscape and an analysis (or critique) of landscape.
Prix Ars Electronica 2007
Hybrid Art focuses on hybrid and transdisciplinary projects. The essential element is the blending and interweaving of different media and genres into new forms of artistic expression. For many artists, it‚s become a matter of course to transgress boundaries: they conduct research, pursue an active commitment to social and political causes, or engage with pop culture, and it‚s now time to formally acknowledge this development. Hybrid Art is designed to expand the scope of the Prix Ars Electronica categories of long standing and thus to create latitude for #3new and unexpected forms of creativity.
Media.Art.Research, in turn, focuses on scholarly work in art history and media studies. This year's theme is net-based artforms. The prizewinning work will be honored with a cash award to be used for a specified purpose from Linz's Ludwig Boltzmann Institute. This category is meant to formally acknowledge the theoretical research currently being done on media art, which has developed into a thematically wide-ranging discipline in its own right over the last two decades. The great diversity and current relevance of the work being done by media artists call for a process of scholarly reflection designed to historically contextualize this art, to mediate encounters with it by today‚s audiences and to preserve it for the future. The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research http://media.lbg.ac.at/en/index.php was established by the Ludwig Boltzmann Society in 2005. It will pursue its mission for seven years under the aegis of the Ars Electronica Center, the Linz Art University and the Lentos Museum of Art. On the basis of the extensive holdings of the Ars Electronica Archive, the institute is doing scholarly work in the fields of media art and media theory.
Golden Nicas
A Golden Nica is presented to the winner in each of the following categories: Computer Animation / Film / VFX, Digital Musics, Hybrid Art, Interactive Art, Digital Communities and u19 ˆ freestyle computing. Ars Electronica also awards [the next idea] Art & Technology Grant and the Media.Art.Research Prize.
COMPUTER ANIMATION / FILM / VFX
Codehunters / Ben Hibon (UK) / BLINK PRODUCTIONS
Ben Hibon‚s Codehunters is an action-packed, apocalyptic work of animation. It‚s set in the distant future in the slums of Lhek, a Far Eastern city that‚s being plunged into chaos. Here, might makes right since the evil Khaan eliminated Krai, his last adversary, and installed his reign of terror. But resistance rears its head again with the emergence of Shen, Lawan, Zom and Nhi. They‚re the Codehunters and their aim is to triumph though all who‚ve gone before them have failed. In a final, decisive battle, their mission is to free the land and its inhabitants from Khaan‚s stranglehold and to help Krai regain power and reestablish just rule ...
DIGITAL MUSICS
Reverse Simulation Music / Masahiro Miwa (JP) / IAMAS
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~mmiwa/
Mashiro Miwa‚s Reverse Simulation Music is based on composition structures developed by computer and then played by musicians, performers or mechanical devices. Depending on the concrete movements and actions of the performers as they go about this, prescribed rules and calculations are acoustically reproduced in a particular or a random (improvised) order. In contrast to traditional compositions, „Reverse Simulation Music‰ is not an effort to intonate and acoustically recreate natural phenomena; it rather does just the opposite: transform „artificial,‰ computer-developed rules and structures into natural phenomena.
HYBRID ART
SymbioticA (AU)
www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au
SymbioticA is a prototypical laboratory that combines artistic approaches and scientific methods, and makes them mutually accessible. Neurosciences, molecular biology, anatomy physics, anthropology and ethics˜SymbioticA interweaves a wide variety of scholarly disciplines with artistic issues and especially problematic areas having to do with the life sciences. This interdisciplinary research process ultimately delivers commentary and evaluation on scientific methods.
INTERACTIVE ART
Park View Hotel / Ashok Sukumaran (IN)
http://0ut.in/parkviewhotel
Ashok Sukumaran‚s Park View Hotel opens up a dialog between human beings and architecture. The setting is the Cesar Chavez Plaza and the adjacent Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. A specially constructed telescopic sight makes it possible to focus in on and „mark" individual windows of the hotel building as well as street lamps on the plaza below. Variously colored light impulses follow the „route‰ thus established, jumping from window to window and across the street to the street lamps on the plaza. Human being, park and hotel building communicate with one another ...
DIGITAL COMMUNITIES
Overmundo (BR)
www.overmundo.com.br
Overmundo was developed by Hermano Vianna, Alexandre Youssef, Ronaldo Lemos and Jose Marcelo Zacchi and is both a community as well as a software tool. The Web 2.0 platform focuses on Brazilian cultures in all their diversity and complexity. Texts, images, videos and pieces of music reflect the age groups, genders, ethnic groups, regions and languages of Brazilian society/societies. Overmundo is an open and transparent online discussion forum that bridges geographical and social barriers. It conveys culturally and sociopolitically relevant discussions and scenes from large urban centers to rural regions and, conversely, gives citydwellers a feel for the way people in the countryside see things.
u19 ˆ FREESTYLE COMPUTING
VoIP-Wiki / Daniel Robinig, Manuel Salzmann, Matthaus Spindelbock
http://projects.htl-klu.at/Projekt_0607/pr5dhi09/Internet/index.html
VoIP-Wiki is a voice-over IP system that can be used for a variety of different purposes. For instance, it makes it possible to acoustically access information in a wiki system like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. The voice connection is made either via voice-over IP, cell phone or landline. The project was realized in cooperation with the Carinthian Association of the Blind. Its many potential applications promise to substantially improve the quality of life of people who are blind or have impaired vision.
[THE NEXT IDEA] ART AND TECHNOLOGY GRANT
SUN_D / Jonas Burki (CH) / FHNW / University of Art and Design / HyperWerk Institute
www.sun-d.ch
With the development of SUN_D, Jonas Burki has come up with a concept for an image projection system with great promise for the future. It‚s based on the mechanical manipulation of the light and shadow from an existing light source. SUN_D gets along without screens and energy-squandering beamer methods; it only takes advantage of already available light sources˜in public spaces, sunlight, for instance. SUN_D links together information and art in an innovative, sensory way that arouses observers‚ natural curiosity and thus gets their attention. Simple mechanisms make it possible to perceive the process of origination of the projected information. Unobtrusively yet effectively, the messages depicted through the use of SUN_D set themselves apart from the deluge of information with which we are constantly being flooded.
MEDIA.ART.RESEARCH AWARD
Exe.cut[up]able statements - Poetische Kalkule und Phantasmen des selbst-ausfuhrenden Texts / Florian Cramer (NL/DE)
Florian Cramer‚s dissertation Exe.cut[up]able statements - Poetische Kalkule und Phantasmen des selbstausfuhrenden Texts investigates literature˜older works as well as contemporary ones˜that are based on calculation and algorithms. This text analyses cabbalistic combinations of utterances, word permutations, aleatory (combinational), stochastic (random) and recursive (running in reverse) texts, computer-generated literature as well as the poetics of programming languages and encoding systems. In going about this, calculations and algorithms are regarded as dimensions of language and literature like graphics and phonetics are perceived as dimensions of visual and acoustic compositions. A general characteristic of algorithmic literature is that calculations and algorithms cannot be separated from the text (and its meaning); rather, they possess their own poetics, which is why the text is „self-executing.‰ Its meaning (semantics) thus refers to the encoding system on which it is based and vice versa. Exe.cut[up]able contains a brief account of the history of this literary genre and also analyses two concrete texts: „Quirinus Kuhlmann‚s 17th-century permutational sonnet XLI„ and „Vom Wechsel menschlicher Sachen and mez' _Viro.Logic Condition][ing][ 1.1_‰ by Libeskus.
Ars Electronica Center's new venue officially opened
Three Floors of the Future in Downtown Linz
www.aec.at/center
While the Ars Electronica Center’s brand new facility is going up on the north bank of the Danube, the Museum of the Future will be doing a guest shot in downtown Linz until the end of 2008. The temporary quarters feature three floors and approximately 1,500 m2 of space for more than 50 installations-an interactive shows that illustrates how humans and computers can communicate with each other without the use of a mouse or keyboard. The new forms of interaction between the real world and digital domains that take place when a user brings his/her body, voice and sense of touch into play show tremendous promise for the future. Two new focal-point themes round out the offerings: “Everything in Motion” focuses on how animated films and cartoons are made, and “Adapted from Nature” looks at natural processes that have served as models for technological developments and solutions to technical problems.
“Everything in Motion” - From Image to Animation
16 images/second is what it takes to give the human eye the illusion of fluid motion in moving pictures. “Everything in Motion” shows how it’s done and gives museum visitors the chance to create-frame by frame-their own animated works.
“Adapted from Nature”
Bionics is a young branch of science that develops solutions to technical problems by designing systems modeled after living organisms and natural processes that have emerged over the course of evolution. “Adapted from Nature” documents how this works and shows what innovative and surprising application possibilities bionics has yielded.
URL: www.aec.at/press