On the 10th and 11th of April I will be teaching a workshop on openFrameworks (OF) at CIANT together with Arturo Castro, one of the lead developers of OF.

The workshop is free, so if you are in the area please feel free to register.

The details of the event are here.

I wrote an article on liminal immersion in the 16th issue of on-line art and technology journal Vague Terrain.

Guest edited by Joshua Noble the theme is Architecture/Action. It also features articles by or interview with Golan Levin, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Joshua Noble, Marilena Skavara, and Mark Shepard.

It’s a summary of my thoughts on the threshold of immersion in interaction installations. Check it out here.

I’ve been pretty slow as usual to document my projects from last year, but here’s a video of the Frame Seductions project with the technical back-end improved and using some new technology. It’s not terribly glamorous as it was shot in my apartment in Toulouse, but it should give you a feeling for the smoothness and intuitive feel of the interaction. Above is a picture from the orginal installation that was exhibited in Lima, Peru. Unfortunately the video we recorded somehow got corrupted – I’m not sure if this was due to the x-ray machines at the airports I passed through or just the scorching heat in the south of France last summer…but basically I was only able to extract a few decent frames from the HDV tapes I had from the event.

Here is the video of the updated installation:

On the 22nd of September I ran an openFrameworks workshop together with Arturo Castro. It was part of the Tweak festival in Limerick Ireland. Huge thanks to Nora O’ Murchu for organising this! Here’s the text of the event from the Tweak website:

openFrameworks is a new open source, cross platform, C++ library to make programming for students accessible and easy. In it, the developers wrap several different libraries like opengl for graphics, quicktime for movie playing and capturing, and free type for font rendering into a convenient package creating a simple, intuitive framework for creating projects using C++.

This workshop is led by one of the founders of OpenFrameWorks: Arturo Castro. Along with Pierre Proske, he will concentrate on computer vision and facial expression. Castro & Proske will offer a mixture of practical advice related to the world of computer graphics and computer vision with a focus on general computer vision concepts and then move onto facial expression recognition with OF.

This is the first time a workshop on the topic of OpenFrameWorks will be held in Ireland, offering an exclusive opportunity for Irish students to engage directly with one of the founders of the open source platform.

I recently completed an installation with designer Clarissa Keck that used analogue photography to document identical, private spaces such as government housing flats and community garden plots in London. We visualised these by building an emergent “city” that showed the micro spaces described in the photos growing out of a larger, macro structure. Currently exhibiting at the Candid Arts Gallery in London.

More details on the project can be found here:
http://clarissakeck.com/?page_id=142
…and a video here:

With some friends I went to the 2009 OFFF festival this year which was located at Oeiras just outside of Lisbon. Admittedly the trip was something of an excuse to experience Portugal for the first time, and in this department I certainly wasn’t let down….cheap food and drink, charming sunburnt cobblestone streets and a general festive atmosphere.

At the festival I had the pleasure of bumping into some people I know…such as Martin Kaltenbrunner, Andre Goncalves, Memo Atken and Joshua Noble.

In addition, as a result of having an image (the one above) published in the 2009 OFFF Catalogue, I was contacted by an on-line digital gallery called digitalbloom who were interested in my pollen images from the Abstract Microecologies series. So I obliged, and now you can purchase some of them here.

Currently I’m artist of the week at digitalbloom, although that’s certainly due to the fact that I’ve just signed up. The prints are part of a new series I’ve done, so check them out…

One of the projects I’ve been thinking about and researching for some time has been selected for the 2009 Lima edition of the fantastic Interactivos workshop/exhibition series. I will be spending two intensive weeks in Lima, Peru in mid-April working on developing the concept of peering outside the borders of a video frame. The idea is to break out of the convention of the video frame as a fixed window using techniques from virtual reality, Genre painting, screen based immersion and  optical illusion. The result will hopefully be a captivating but cheeky interactive installation.

This event is produced by the wonderful Medialab-Prado group.

I’ll be heading there with my lovely Linz compatriots Carles Gutierrez and Ricardo Nascimento.

After the workshop I’ll be leaving the Ars Electronica Futurelab to take time out to focus on my own projects. My base of operations will be mostly Toulouse, France.

I’ve been collaborating lately with austrian artist/designer Clarissa Keck who lives in London on a project employing both photography and generative graphics to investigate ideas of public/private,  macro/micro and the city as a rhizomic structure. It’s still in the conceptual and prototype stage, but I’ve massaged some algorithms using Processing to come up with some visualisations.

This here is not at all what the installation will finally look like and doesn’t include Clarissa’s photography but is rather a sketch of some of the code I’ve been playing around with. It may take a little time to load so please be patient.

To date Clarissa has been taking photographs of rooms inside identical appartments to compare the micro-lives of people residing in anonymous characterless architecture and space.

Early in december I was selected to be one of 20 artist groups to work on the 80 + 1 project for the Ars Electronica and Linz 09 festivities. The project I am being commissioned to create is called Grand Mutual Smiles. It is a two-way interactive installation that communicates between two parties through the transmission of images of smiling faces. Progressively captured pictures of smiling people are displayed on video screens at each installation site. The motivation is to encourage users to communicate across the internet in a non-verbal and humoristic way, by smiling. Both Linz in Austria and Thimphu in Bhutan will therefore be connected by real-time updating “smile” boards.

There are lots of logistic involved to get such a project of the ground, but I hope it all goes to plan as I’m very much interested to see how people react to the challenge of smiling for a machine…and seeing the undoubtedly hilarious results. The project should go live some time in early June 2009.