Double Cell

Double Cell "Bob meets Barbara" - Juha Huuskonen

I'm not sure what the title means, but its a game where all you have to do is move your mouse around in circles in a square. Two "cells" inch closer to each other. Once they get really close you have to circle your mouse faster and faster or they will repel. Once they contact each other, POOF! They multiply into 4 pairs that you have to work with so the game gets harder and harder.

What's great about this game is how simple yet enjoyable it is. Once I figured out what I was supposed to do, I got really into it. I was talking to my computer screen trying to get the cells to come together. It made me laugh.

Industrious Clock

Industrious Clock - Yugo Nakamura

In keeping with the clock theme... I found another digital clock online. This one is a little more stimulating than the subtle Circle Clock. Its hectic motions remind us of how quickly time passes. Each moment has a name, but it ticks by so fast we don't even notice. Each moment comes and then is erased.

Circle Clock

Circle Clock - Hahakid


I found this clock online with a little explanation at the bottom.

The artist said that as a child, they always wondered what the inner workings of machines like clocks looked like. Here, I'll quote them:

"When I was younger I always wondered what machines really looked like inside, so I ended up opening up a lot of them, usually they were mine but that didn't make my parents that much happier about it when they weren't put back together. It was a dissapointing experience though, the internals never lived up to my expectations. This is the first of what I hope will be several virtual machines. "

I really identified with this statement because I had always wondered how electronics, cassette tapes, CDs, etc work. It seems like magic to a person who hasn't been educated about physics and electronics. If you opened up a clock, it probably still wouldn't make sense how the clock works. So, this person did the work of an artist which is to come up with their own explanation of how the thing works.

Peeps

The Washington Post has an annual Peeps diorama contest. In the Style section of the April 12 edition there is a two page spread showing several of the more notable entries. Everyone loves Peeps, and a lot of people love art. It's the perfect combination. Entries included the "Miracle on the Hudson" and "Octomom" themed dioramas. The entries in the competition reflect current events, the things that are on people's minds right now. The detail is really amazing and the Peeps will make you giggle. It's art that reminds you of the joy in the simple things in life. It proves you don't have to be Monet to make something memorable.

Obzok

Singlecell.org is a website that hosts a collection of digital creations by various artists. I stumbled upon Golan Levin's 2001 creation while clicking around looking for material to cover in my blogs. The website now is linked to its new version, Double Cell.

This creation, Obzok, responds to the movements and clicks of your mouse. It changes color each time you refresh it. It's a cute funny little thing that offers a neat distraction and elicits a few giggles.

Quark

Quark, by Mark Napier is an interactive program that can be found on The Alternative Art Museum website. You can watch a unique piece created before your eyes. A black screen will come up and you can click anywhere in that screen, setting off an infinite series of lines and waves of color that represent the fundamental particle, the quark. Quarks are composed of three electrical charges, each represented by either red, green, or blue which together are said to make up white light. Computers also use these three fundamental colors to make up the myriad of colors constantly shown on your screen. This is called RGB. This project ties the concept of the quark into the RGB color model to create each picture. The result is a vivid series of colors complexly wound around each other. I highly recommend trying it out.

Eclipse

Created by EcoArtTech, a digital environmental art platform, Eclipse represents air quality in national parks from data obtained from nearby cities. In a process known as data-scraping, Eclipse searches for images tagged with the park's name from an image sharing database and then pulls real-time AQI (Air Quality Index) data from airnow.gov for the designated region. Eclipse then corrupts the photograph based on the levels of particulate matter observed by the website. The more air pollution, the more corrupt the new image will be.

This is the kind of New Media art that captures my attention the most. I love learning about anything to do with the environment and raising awareness to protect it. I am also fascinated by how artists can hijack data to make a statement about our high-tech lives. This is a perfect fusion of the two concepts.

infobreath

Christopher Robbins used Carnivore for his project titled infobreath. The idea is that we live in a world where the air around us is abound with bits of information floating around through the wireless networks computers have created. These pieces of information are likened to carbon dioxide and oxygen, elements vital to the lives of plants and humans. When the cyber flower is breathed on, it picks up wireless signals that are in the area nearby it. A microcontroller that links the flower to a computer formats the signals and sends them to the computer, which projects them into the air where the observer is breathing on the flower. The signals are turned into letters and numbers that the observer can recognize. The plant searches specifically for information that one person is sending to another, making it look like there is communication between the plant and the observer.

To me, this project exemplifies another definition of art. It is taking something we can not see and turning it into something that we can visualize. We can also visualize the bits of information, the different symbols, as the elements that make up the air we breathe. Natural air contains a mixture of gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. Today, we could think of our air as also containing data provided by wireless networks.

"Carnivore Is Sorry"

-It's Mark Daggett's "apologetic snooping program." The wikipedia page lists Radical Software Group which I mentioned in the earlier blog about "PoliceState."

"Carnivore Is Sorry" is another client of Radical Software Group's snooping program named Carnivore. Daggett's program finds people that the network has been spying on and sends them an email that has a compilation of images from websites they've viewed. However, a feedback loop blurs all the images together.

This is a program that takes seemingly meaningless data and turns it into a digital masterpiece that looks like abstract art. It has a lot of meaning in it. If only we could figure out what those images are and where they came from...

Radical Software Group's "CarnivorePE" - "PoliceState"

The federal government has a history of tapping into its citizens' personal lives, especially their travels through the world wide web. RSG developed a software program similar to what the government uses to track people's actions. However, this program, named CarnivorePE doesn't track identities, just general Internet traffic. Various artists, called clients utilize the program to create technologically based works of art. The one that grabbed my attention was PoliceState by Jonah Brucker-Cohan. In this piece, the artist uses CarnivorePE to track Internet searches containing key words such as bomb, and plane crash that one might envision the government tracking to keep tabs on "terrorists." These key words activate 20 toy remote controlled police cars that respond to each term after it has been translate to its respective police ten-code. The ten-codes trigger a sequence in the police cars causing them to move around a certain way, spinning, going in reverse, etc. They are all tuned to the same frequency so that they move together. In the background, sirens go-off and a police officer's voice can be heard giving the message over a speaker.

The artist's vision was to reverse the concept of police response to make the toy cars dependent upon the terms that we as a nation have come to be so paranoid about. To me, it shows how we have become enslaved to our paranoia about the "war on terror." The authorities are actively searching for evidence of terror, and when they find it, they must act. The dance of the police cars is quite comical and makes a satire of the government's surveillance.

Here is the link for the PoliceState project

Torolab's "The Region of the Transborder Trousers"

Using GPS units attached to the clothing of five subjects, Torolab documented the travel of the individuals around Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California over a period of five days. The GPS plots and fuel consumption data from the subjects' cars was displayed digitally on a large grid representing a topographical map of the area. All the data of the movements are displayed in an eight minute loop.

This project has several interesting implications. First, one can visually see the daily movement of several average individuals. To me, it represents our "on the go" lifestyles. The area that was chosen for this project is a border crossing hot spot, representing the very politically charged issue of immigration in North America. Finally, it is also a statement of how practical technology can be used to make a stunning artistic presentation.

The presentation itself was very eye catching. The colors and intricacies grabbed my attention, and the concept behind the project reinforced my curiosity. One of my concepts of art is that it is something that conveys a message, which this clearly does. Its peculiarity, being a large square grid full of lights, colors, and movements, is also visually appealing.