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?

Faith has put up a new, super tight, version of her website. This is her piece at Century City.

There’s a whole lot more of her work up at her site so go check it out!