For Natalie Loveless‘ 4th performance-based wall-drawing installation–Co-Operation–she is fasting and isolating herself in the Bromfield Art Gallery. During this time her contact with the outside world will be mediated through instant messaging technologies. You are invited to communicate with her from December 28th – January 1st, between 5 am and 12 am (EST), through either Yahoo or MSN (handle:bromfield_co_operation).

Please share your stories of mourning, memory or memorials; these will be used to generate this installation. Your communications will be encoded across the gallery walls through a silverpoint graphing system based upon the spatial organization of our primary mediating mediating technology: the computer keyboard.

Hmmm… sounds interesting. A collection of memories and a wall diagram? I wonder what the finished product will look like.

I really like wall diagrams. Here’s an example:

A wall drawing is a set of instructions (a text description and optional diagram) outlining a visual structure to be executed on a wall. For example, the program for Wall Drawing #69 from 1971 reads:

Lines not long, not strait, not touching, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall.

Howard Rheingold points to an interesting article that examines everyday life in today’s ‘internet enabled’ age. The article starts out with an example of how our concept of time has been altered by the tools that provide ‘instant access’ to family and friends.

“Three days? It’s like eternity!” she explained.

For a generation accustomed to near-instantaneous keeping in touch — primarily via instant messaging, cell phones and e-mail — Rainie’s complaint doesn’t seem so far-fetched, especially since she and her generational peers are perfectly comfortable roaming in a social sphere where real face-to-face encounters take a backseat to cyber contact.

I don’t know about you but the idea of Time being malleable just, well, kinda freaks me out. It’s not a new idea though, in fact it seems like it’s been the subject of a lot of study. Most of that study focuses on the historical evolution of time but in light of the exponential rate of technological development we are now able to notice the evolution in our own lifetime. Fabio Sergio started questioning the connection between time and technology more than a year ago saying:

Mobile connected devices have already started changing the way we collectively relate to the passing of seconds, freeing us from rigidly planned arrangements and allowing us to rely on connectivity to constantly re-schedule our daily activities, but that said, what are the long-term implications of this trend? I am not talking about projects such as IDII’s Fluid Time, which focus on ways to solve problems already associated with some of these changes, I am talking about our culture’s very model of time. During the past week I spent a few hours rummaging through my college books, and dug out Sandra Bonfiglioli’s excellent “L’Architettura del Tempo” (The Architecture of Time). The book is a fascinating, in-depth analysis of how the philo-socio-economical concept of time has evolved in the western world, from the natural light /darkness cycles of early agricultural villages, to the discrete time of the church bells of medieval cities, to the split-second precision of the clock of industrial urban settings.

And a lot has changed in the year since Fabio made those comments…

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Originally uploaded by alienai.

Message in a bottle

Originally uploaded by Coffee Break.

Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I’m not alone at being alone
Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home

I’ll send an s.o.s. to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle…

(c) Sting

the present lies in the shadow of the future
providing relief from the sun and the heat of time

In the installation user encounters his own image in a real-time projection. His reflection is being attacked by a computer generated character. The digital character is a kinetic monster, which tries to overlap users reflections in the projection and take it under it´s own control. When user moves and tries to avoid the visual invasion, he is engaged in a struggle to keep his own appearance in the projection. If the visual invasion is succesfull, the scramble suit takes control of the user´s image sucking and transforming it as part of itself.

The installation deals with the vulnerability of our self-representation, which can be shattered in an instant by an outside force. The installation encourages people to fight for their own image and protect it from the cloning effect scramble suit does.

For this issue, we interviewed George Lipstiz, a professor of Ethnic Studies. It is proper to say he has been a great point of inspiration for me as well as for Evil Monito. It was the teachings of Communication theory that inculcated a deep want for me to create a conduit where people from all walks of life could share and learn. Hence having George Lipsitz as our cover story is much more than I could ask for. We hope you appreciate his deep insights on popular culture and social dynamics.

Go check it out

Brian Knep’s Healing Series is really cool. The pieces tries to illustrate the changes that happen when things or people interface with each other. The contact causes changes in all participants, and so has a destructive quality, but change forces growth too, and so has a regenerative quality.

The series is currently made up of three separate but similar interactive floor pieces. They are dynamic and change in response to visitors. When a piece encounters a foreign body, such as a gallery visitor, the pattern on it pulls away, creating a wound. When the foreign body leaves, the pattern heals itself and the wound closes, but each piece heals itself in a different way.

Via Networked_Performance

Kinda reminds me of the Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

I saw this really cool film called Keeping it Real a few months ago.

This offbeat documentary, philosophical in scope but funny and down-to-earth, investigates why an increasing number of people in our modern, highly developed societies, are eagerly seeking “authentic,” real-life experiences.

Viewpoint Productions sums it up better saying:

Why is it so difficult to find authentic experiences these days? Director Sunny Bergman goes looking for originality in western society, a society that would appear to be dominated by packaged experiences, products of the experience economy. We see how Bergman and others search for authenticity but do not always manage to find it. The concept of authenticity is hard to grasp, let alone the demand for it.

‘The concept of authenticity is hard to grasp, let alone the demand for it’ is what Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life sets out to investigate. I’ve just finished chapter one so i cant really say much about the book (although so far it’s promising) but film was really spot on.

So much of our daily lives is mediated by the media but we tend to forget the media is subjective. It might just be a simple innocent matter of a reporter’s point of view altering how a news story is reported. It could even be media subject to active censorship and manipulation *cough* Dubya *cough*

The internet changes things. But is this new decentralized media going to keep it real? Are we just trading life mediated by the media for life mediate by software? Well, the beauty of the internet is that you get to make your own tools so it’s up to us to answer that question.

Oh, that brings me to the point I was out to make! What’s so socal about social software? What so social about sitting in a room all by yourself chatting to someone one the other side of the world? The first generation of social sites were really crap. The current generation are promising. del.icio.us, flickr and audioscrobbler actually provide some sort of tangible value. The only problem is that you’re still stuck in a room, by yourself. flickr is the first one to break out of that mould with it’s ability to exploit cameraphones.

That’s just the start, Mogi, a location based online multiplayer experiene set in Tokyo, and other location based technolgies like it, provide a glimpse at where technology is headed. And this, for me at least, is technolgy keeping it real. It’s technology firmly rooted in physical space and complete with real social interaction.

Archinet conducted an interview with Spacekraftlab, an interesting architecture firm with fascinating ideas around the intersection of physical and electronic space.

Paul Petrunia:
What does sonic intervention mean and how does sound influence the way you are working?

Spacekraftlab:
Sonic intervention is a larger topic we have been developing on for a while. It is a theoretical investigation in sound as a three dimensional tool. We first had this idea when we visited the ?cite sonar? exhibition in Paris which dealt with the idea of an acoustic identity of a city. We started to collaborate with a programmer and developed a specialized software that analyzes different characteristics of a sound and translates this analysis into a three dimensional medium. Some of these ideas were implemented for the Museums Quartier Project where we used the sonogram of a voice recording as a form generator and conceptual framework for the project.

This sounds a lot like the Instant City installation, which also investigates the relationship between the physical shape of a city, albeit on a much smaller scale, and sound. And sound, particularly the sound of the city, is just encoded information, like the sound of traffic informing you about a peak hour for example.

Paul Petrunia:
Many of your projects are museums spaces. What makes a museum space an interesting program for you ? Has there been a change in the way we perceive art?

Spacekraftlab:
The turning point really is the way in which we consume information today versus lets say 20 years ago. That has very much changed our perception and reception of many things including art. The contemporary museum can no longer only be an exhibition space by itself, but needs to feed the growing appetite for information if it wants to be able to compete with the information highways surrounding it. A contemporary museum as we envision it is an information hybrid moving beyond the sole functionality of being a representative exhibition shelter that makes it an interesting program for us.

With the internet already shaping the way we communicate, shaping our relationships, can we expect to see it shaping our physical surroundings too? Buildings shaped by the kind of information the store? Cities shaped by the way information flows through it?