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:

INTRODUCTION

While the Gross National Happiness (GNH) of Bhutan has been criticised for being naïve and an attempt to deflect attention from the material poverty of its people, there is no doubt that its citizens have benefited from the emphasis on well-being and the environment their king has instituted. The advent of television and Internet has nevertheless raised questions of the fragility of this so called “Last Shangri-La”. Part of the success of the King’s GNH is based on the preservation of traditional customs and culture which the spectre of materialism inherent in both on-line and broadcast media threatens to unravel.

The smile detection machine in Thimphu.

DESCRIPTION

Grand Mutual Smiles is an installation that explored networked mediated happiness through an international smile exchange.The project captured the smiles of people and transmitted them across the Internet to display them in the city of Linz in Austria and Thimphu in Bhutan. Using cameras equipped with smile detection technology, installations in both cities progressively captured pictures of smiling people, displaying them both locally and remotely. In both cities the pictures of smiling Bhutanese and smiling Austrians were projected on video screens. The motivation was to encourage people from the respective countries to communicate with each other across the Internet in a non-verbal and humoristic way, by smiling.

WEBSITE & PHOTOS

The project website can be found here: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/grand_mutual_smiles/. The website describes the project in more depth and contains a large selection of smiles capture by the installations in both Austria and Bhutan.

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

Here is a video of the opening of the Grand Mutual Smiles installation in Clocktower square, Thimphu, Bhutan, on the 17th June 2009.
The proceedings were opened by Her Royal Highness Ashi Chimi Yangzom Wangchuck.

This project is exhibited as a video depiction of several everyday scenes in the tradition of genre painting. Genre painting or photography depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. These depictions can be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Because of their familiar and frequently sentimental subject matter, genre paintings have often proven popular with the bourgeoisie, or middle class.

The Frame Seductions installation in Lima

The installation plays back panoramic video, of a width much larger than the screen frame itself. Movement generate from the gaze of watching people cause the focus of the frame to shift either to the left or to the right, exposing new material. The idea is to have a seemingly static looking picture from a distance, with the opportunity to peer into the sidelines of the image revealing dynamic ‘hidden’ scenes when closer to the screen. The ’side-lines’ also play sound, whereas the central image will be mostly silent. Video material for the screen was shot using actors, using multiple cameras to achieve a panoramic effect and then processed appropriately by custom software. Each video is looped seamlessly, periodically swapping out when off-screen to be replaced by new content.

A demonstration of the latest version of the software can viewed here.

More details here…and a video here.

The essence of this piece is a large monolithic dark wall that is represented both in the real and virtual worlds. It is a one-way portal to the virtual world through which people can whisper their thoughts, scream their frustrations and convey regret without the privilege of reply. It is a wailing wall through which to mourn the loss of our humanity to the virtual network.

CATERWAUL is an interactive sound installation that operates as a one way “portal” to Second Life via the Internet. A physical wall in operates as a totemic locus of grief. People approach it with intent to wail and mourn. The mourners grieve their lost loved ones who spend more time in virtual and on-line worlds than they do communicating in real life. The cacophony of the lamentation is recorded by hidden microphones in the wall, transmitted across the Internet and piped out of an “identical” wall in the virtual world Second Life (http://secondlife.com). A website displaying a simulation of the wall allows other people, on the threshold of “real” and “second” life, to vicariously eavesdrop the wailing.

Project webpage: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/caterwaul/

Smart Fridge Poetry Magnets are an extension of their predecessors that distinguish themselves from their analogue counterparts by being able to individually access large dictionaries of words, select words based on the content of neighbouring magnets and learn a basic sense of grammar through user interactions.

Each magnet has a lexicon of words and their associated parts of speech (POS), words defined in relation to their grammatical function. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and adverbs are all parts of speech.

Magnets learn through positive interactions what parts of speech are preferred neighbours. The desired outcome of this is to explore the possibility of an emergent abstract poetry, as well as a whimsical, playful approach to agent-based learning.

The flow of interaction is as follows:

- The user selects a magnet and places it on the fridge.
- The magnet communicates with its neighbours and finds out what POS they are.
- If the user leaves the magnet on the board, it learns that its left and right neighbours’ POS are valid with respect to its own POS.
- A magnet can have its current word changed by depressing a button on the magnet. The magnet then selects a new word through a probability distribution based on the history of its left and right neighbours.
- The user then selects the next magnet to place on the fridge. This can be placed to the left or right of any words already on the fridge.

Communication between magnets is effectuated through bi-directional infrared transmitter/receivers.

PROTOTYPE TECHNOLOGY

The hardware prototypes of the Smart Fridge Poetry Magnets each consist of the following:

* A microcontroller
* A 16-character LCD display
* Infrared based transmitter/receivers on each side of the display (to communicate with neighbouring magnets)
* An SD (SecureDigital) memory card interface which enables us to load different databases of words into each magnet
* A button to change the displayed word

Project web-page: http://digitalstar.net/projects/smartpoetrymagnets/

Rear view of the Crass robot

Project website: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/crass/

Inspired by a trip to Tokyo, Japan, the capital city of mobile technologies, I was struck by the ability of the mobile phone to enhance polygamous activity through non-verbal and thus unnoticeable phone text messaging.

True Blue Love is a networked real-time experience which is intended to run in public, social spaces. Possible scenarios would be to have it run concurrent with a cocktail party, book launch, workshop or other such gathering of a variety of people. Alternatively, designated zones could be established throughout the city, encouraging people to run the software in certain areas, increasing the chances of interaction between participants.

Each person is supplied with a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone running custom client software written in the Java programming language. Each participant selects from a predefined list of options
the characteristics of their ideal sexual mate from within the software. While the software is running, every time another phone comes within range, a “love” metric is calculated which is a representation of how close the incoming person matches the participant’s ideal mate. If the match is close, the phone will emit a raucous mating call that will be unique to that participant.

The concept behind the triggered mating calls is to attempt to undermine the silent technology of messaging and email with vocal communication that expresses the user’s desires through a public
broadcast, a broadcast that harks back to more primitive exchanges. The ridiculous sounds should function as social ice-breakers, and the unwilling couple may want to discuss what it is that they have in common that triggered the noise.

A fully functional prototype of True Blue Love was developed for dLux Media Arts and the Mobile Journeys exhibition in 2005 (http://dlux.org.au/mobilejourneys/pierreproske.html).

Project web-page: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/truebluelove/

The project is essentially an automated, algorithmic system for creating collages of images obtained through high resolution digital microscopy. Conversations with scientists, laboratory work, field trips and self-directed research resulted in some custom artistic software and an initial body of work. The ability of an algorithmic collage to assemble contrasting and diverse images and to produce an overarching narrative was useful in the portrayal of natural and cultural ecologies.

Through photographs taken using various camera-equipped microscopes from a laboratory in the Department of Archaeology and Natural History I created the visual source material for 2 pieces of software that I wrote during the residency period. These images were edited to isolate particular micro-organisms or fossils, most of which were pollen, and then fed into my customs programs and subsequently used to create large-scale abstract prints. The prints were created by organising the smaller image fragments using specific rules. A non-linear, never-ending computer animation of pollen and other microscopic fossils was also created.

The Abstract Microecologies project involved studying generative processes in the arts and the sciences, where generative refers to systems which generate ecologies of interrelated, distributed elements. Generative processes seem to be particularly good at creating morphologies and narratives from large quantities of data and this proved to be a useful tool to navigate the reference collections in the lab I worked in.

The residency blog: http://www.digitalstar.net/microecologies/

In human speech the basic acoustic unit is called a phoneme. The visual equivalent is called a “viseme”, a basic speech unit in the visual domain, in other words a facial expression that can be used to describe a particular sound. Using this analogy, I have written a piece of software which describes sound using basic visual units to represent recorded frequencies.

My inspiration for a basic visual unit came to me while staring at a wall where I had hung up three Japanese fabrics covered with repeating iconic motifs. Here was an already established set of visual patterns comprised of small repeating elements.

These textile motifs seem appropriate for use in a computer artwork as they are already tiled in a networked, matrix fashion and their morphology resembles miniaturized automata. Woven textiles form part of computing history, through Joseph Marie Jacquard’s automated patterned textile weaving machine in 1804 which led to punch cards in computing devices.