Davide Tidoni‘s itinerate project, A Balloon for… brings to life the sound responses of specific spaces. By bursting balloons, the project discovers unique acoustic sites and invites people to explore space through listening. The video below is a version of A Balloon for Linz.

(thanks to Davide Tidoni)

With Continuization Loop, a single 35mm film loop is pulled up and down over more than 150 guide wheels creating a wall of film. The frames of this piece of film are either black or transparent.
When the loop travels through the mechanism, the image of video static appears.

While film as a medium normally makes images appear through projection in combination with
the transport of celluloid through a projector, this Wim Janssen work omits the projection and
makes the image appear by means of transport alone.

The installation combines and imitates visual elements from three generations of visual media:
the material aspect of film, the empty signal of video and the binary logic of digital.
At the same time, the most important attributes of these media are absent:
there is no construction of an illusory film-space, there is no real video image and
there are no computers involved. The first video is from the artist.
The second is from me. Both are silent.

(thanks to Wim Janssen)

Ocean of Light: Surface is a responsive virtual eco-system from Squidsoup that occupies a physical space. It uses a room-sized 3D grid of individually addressable points of light to simulate movement in this physical space. The space is dominated by a surface which is a boundary between two fluid virtual materials. The materials are affected by sound. Nearby noises create waves that ripple across the surface. The surface is unstable. The turbulence caused by noise also triggers luminous blasts.
Two videos follow. The second one I decided to shoot from underneath the installation.

For the installation Earth 2010, Finnbogi Pétursson creates an interference wave measuring 7.8Hz in a pool of water. The tone, which can be heard and physically detected, is visible on the surface of the water in the form of waves. The frequency of 7.8 hertz corresponds to the physical phenomenon known as the Schumann Resonance, which is the frequency of the Earth’s electromagnetic field. For Pétursson, this frequency represents the primal pulse of our planet. The first video is Pétursson’s own professional video. The second is my fuzzy hand-held that zooms in on the reflected wave patterns.

(thanks to Finnbogi Pétursson)

If you’re indoors, even in a tight little apartment, and you have some natural light streaming through your windows, you can grow your own tasty, healthy food by setting up what Britta Riley calls “windowfarms” – vertically growing hydroponic farms that will grow right in your window and won’t use soil that might take up precious living space. It’s a wonderfully compact system that produces healthy food without making a major carbon footprint.

(thanks to Britta Riley)

Computer software analyzes the 12 heartbeats of the members of The Heart Chamber Orchestra in real time with various algorithms turning the data into a living musical score. While the musicians are playing, their heartbeats influence and change the composition and vice versa. Computer graphics are also generated from the same heart data that add a narrative and visual layer to the performance, providing the audience with a multi-layered lateral experience. The heartbeats of the musicians and their relation to each other become audible and visible in a transformative way.

(thanks to The Heart Chamber Orchestra)

When you’re inside the Fablab of the Ars Electronica Center, you can see, through a glass wall, the Biolab next door where gene technology is demonstrated using synthetically cloned plants. A 3D printer that is used to produce replications through digital fabrication sits conveniently located nearby. Laterally connecting these two areas, we have the folding of proteins in nature meeting the folding of paper and synthetic fabrics in a field of research known as Oribotics. Working in the Futurelab, Matthew Gardiner has furthered his interest in an area where robotics, nature and origami intersect by creating interactive cyber-flowers called “oribots” that are made of a polyester fabric and contain proximity sensors that not only respond to, say, the presence of your hand, but are also networked to each other causing even small interactions to spread sympathetically amongst the other oribots. A blossom opens, causing 1,050 folds to actuate while electro-reflexes do the same to over 50,000 folds across the installation.

 

 (thanks to Matthew Gardiner)

 

One of the delights of the Ars Electronica Festival is attending the various forums where the winners talk about their inspirations for works past, present and future. Here, you’ll get to see what goes on during one of these forums. This year was the first to include the category of “sound art” – a category which joins up with “digital musics” – in order to encourage those that work in this area to submit works for consideration.The forum for this year’s winners was moderated by the excellent sound artist Christina Kubisch who gave a short introduction – speaking a little about the jury process – then introduced this year’s winners, Michel & André Décosterd, Ryoichi Kurokawa, and Martin Bédard, followed by a closing statement. Our first-time meeting was the day before during one of her “electrical walk” tours (of which I’ll speak more of in a later posting) in which we chatted about the influence of Alvin Lucier. It seemed like the perfect setting for me to remind her of John Cage’s 98th birthday that day as well. A longer than usual video for this website, but you’ll be able to not only hear the artists talk about influences and ways of working, but you’ll be introduced to some of their other works that have been featured in other exhibitions.