dryfter: (Default)
I visited Experimental Playground today, at the Melbourne Arts Centre.
It was quite a nifty little exhibition of interactive art. As usual with these things, I felt that the artistic descriptions given were sometimes reaching a little far.. but nevertheless, the tech was cool :)

There was a projector system where you put your hands in the beam and flicked your fingers around.. on the projected screen coloured pieces of glass and bubbles would form and bounce off the sides and your hands, making musical noises as they did so.

There was a shadow-puppets system with a difference.. it scanned your silhouettes, and then modified them, adding beaks and fins and fur and hair and so forth to your hand-puppets.

There were (artificial) babies driving giant teacups who listened to MP3s; people could upload different MP3s which changed the way the babies drove.

There were "windows" into a virtual world, and the view changed as you panned or zoomed the window by physically moving it around, and by touching the screen you could effect things that were going on.

Those were some of my highlights, but there were quite a few more exhibits.

Oh, and I was amazed at the patience of the people who had put together a stop-motion-animated version of Pole Position (most popular computer game of 1983). (The performance is also available on Youtube here. See also Space Invaders.
That was non-interactive though.
dryfter: (spider)
The only thing more boring than performing this, would be *watching it*.. and they're planning on doing it for eight hours?

The performance A la recherche du temps perdu takes the code literally. We are reading the machine-code version of Marcel Proust's novel. During the eight hours of a working day the human performers are playing computer. From the analog to the digital and back again: The sequence of events of the performance is described in this manual. Starting from the ASCII-Version of Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu it is then re-coded into its underlying zeros and ones and then read by two performers alternately (one is reading the zeros, the other one the ones). The third person is CPU (the Central Processing Unit): She interprets the zeros and ones with the aid of an ASCII allocation table, cuts out the corresponding letter from the prepared sheets and turns it over to Display, who sticks it onto the wall panel. After eight hours of performance about 250 characters can be processed. During the act of reading, interpreting and presenting the work of art emerges, posing questions about the nature of the digital and the analogue, of work and art, time and beauty.
players:
False (Zero): James Smith
True (One): Valie Djordjevic
CPU: Karl Heinz Jeron
Display: Elvina Flower

http://khjeron.de/index.php?cSID=&cat_id=1826

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dryfter: (Default)
Toby "dryfter" Wintermute

December 2010

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