PRISM:The Beacon Frame

[video src=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODQbbJPTpDY]Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev's Prism: The Beacon Frame, is a series of installations inspired by the formerly secret Prism program that uses similar techniques of wireless device localization and mapping, cell-tower hijacking and wireless packet inspection known to be in deployed by state sanctioned surveillance agencies such as the GCHQ(UK) and NSA(USA). It debuted at Transmediale in Berlin in 2014 and was taken down by the venue for allegedly violating German privacy laws.

Banksy: One Nation, Under CCTV

One Nation Under CCTV is a graffiti artwork criticizing the use of surveillance by the government. It was created in 2007 and was located on Newman Street in London. It was created by London-based guerilla artist Banksy [1], whose identity remains unknown by the public in 2019. He is known for his satirical, dark, yet political grafitti artwork that he places throughout the world without notice. Banky's work suggests that we are controlled by surveillance and that everything that we do is watched or listened by somebody. Overtime, his artworks are often taken down by the government or destroyed by unknown sources.

“Hope and Change” “Freedom”

jk29.jpg

In Josh Kline's Hope and Change (2015), a white boxed light illuminates the edges of a flat screen TV. In the video, an actor played the role of Barack Obama and Kline used a "facial substitution software" to reconstruct his face to look like the former president. The video is of the president's “inaugural speech” back in 2009 but with thought-provoking variations that were “written by the artist and one of the speechwriters” for Obama. We know it is just an animation – an avatar – but the duality it creates make us aware of the tension between the real and the virtual.

Jaywalking

Artist Dries Depoorter’Jaywalking_01_Bollman.pngs Jaywalking is an interactive installation that displays live surveillance footage of streets in various countries. Surveillance webcams capture footage of crosswalks and identify jaywalkers. From the monitor, visitors are given a choice as to whether or not they want to press a button that emails screenshots to local police stations. The work thus presents audiences with a moral dilemma. The ensuing interactions convey a complete disconnect between the surveilled and the installation viewer in charge of their fate.

Nobody Likes Me

Screen-Shot-2017-05-23-at-6.37.48-PM.pngA Vancouver based artist who goes by the alias of iHeart, has gotten a lot of attention after Banksy, a famous street and graffiti artist, reposted his work on social media.  The work in mention depicts a boy who is obviously distraught and weeping uncontrollably.  However, what makes this work so interesting as well as places the work into the category of both culture jamming as well as post-internet art, is the little bits of aerosol paint that depicts the instagram logos that indicate the amount of likes, comments that a user has.

Nests

[video src=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCB9BE5H6B4] Surveillance by governments, corporations, and even other institutions is becoming an epidemic around the world. Prague-based artist Jakub Geltner flips the viewpoint of standard surveillance equipment. Nest positions surveillance equipment such as video cameras and satellite dishes in congested flocks. Located at beaches, elementary schools, buildings, and bridges, amalgamations of up to twenty or so devices are placed within extremely close proximity to each other, pointing every direction. The installations suggest the spreading of an infection or rash, reminding us that in a sense, we are never out of the line of sight; we continually are being watched even when we do not notice.

Under

Martina-Amarti.jpg?itok=MA0uBTNz&timestaMartina Amati is a London-based artist and filmmaker that has worked with water as one of her main subjects. She developed the installation film “Under” with Kevin Fong, a scientist and a physiology professor at University College London.(1) She has various shots of people floating in water. She uses low frequency echoing sounds to create stability in the background and also to help enhance the spatial temporal depth of the film.(2) Amati uses the varying tones of blue to evoke a sense of calmness that amalgamates with both the ambient and manufactured sounds to reflect off each other a more profound sensation of surreal peace.

Seattle Crime Cams

[video src=https://vimeo.com/158497068 height: 200 align:right] Dries Depoorter's Seattle Crime Cams streams surveillance videos in real-time to the gallery installation. The artist tapped into Seattle's surveillance systems by finding the feed of the footage buried in code. This offered him access to a continuous stream of video captured by the city's numerous surveillance cameras. “I found it pretty strange, that the police were sharing all this data to the general public,” he claims. “I had to show what you could do with this… You see just how much surveillance there really is.”

Floribots

139758.jpgFloribots, a massive art piece created by Geoffrey Drake-Brockman in 2005, is essentially an array of 128 simple folding paper flowers that are mechanically controlled. Each large flower extends out of a rigid base, and is capable of mechanically "blooming" and extending higher. Operating under a collective "hive-mind," they are capable of reacting to movement stimulus and even has an array of different "moods" they can display through dynamic movement.

One Beat One Tree

[video src=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie80LvSpIpk align:right height:220]One Beat One Tree by Belgian artist  Naziha Mestaoui, displays a world of innovation and technology, and its ability to simulate the spectacle of life as well as growth, in an interactive and heartfelt simulation.  The installation consists of a projection of digital forests on cityscapes, bringing the technology as well as the nature into a perceived symbiotic relationship.  However, the real magic of this piece comes with the interactive capabilities of this virtual environment, in which the participants are given a heartbeat sensor that syncs with their phones[1], where with each beat, the virtual trees seem to sprout and continue to grow in the virtual space.

Sharing Faces

[video src=https://vimeo.com/96549043]Sometimes political and socio-economic issues can act as a veil, automating a blurring or skewing of how people may perceive one another.  Many people are taught to hate or disagree with entire populations of others because of past or ongoing sociopolitical issues.  Furthermore, this thought process produces stigmas and generalizations that will continue to deepen and push the cultures and people apart, until someone tries to reevaluate the situation.  Digital artist Kyle McDonald took this task into his own hands and created an art installation that utilizes high tech surveillance cameras and specially coded software to bring together people from Japan and South Korea to help mend the rocky history between the two countries.  

In Order to Control

[video src=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnq4rvPT4Qc&feature=youtu.be]“What is it to be free? Are you free at all? These are just some of the questions asked to the participants in the interactive installation created by Nota Bene, an Istanbul-based creative studio.  The artwork In Order to Control features a continuous loop of digital text sprawled across the floor, littered with moral and ethical questions such as, “Everything that’s legal is not always fair,” and “Everything that’s fair is not always legal.”[2]  As spectators step over the sea of Nota Bene’s ethos, their silhouette on the wall takes to life and is transposed with the scrolling typography.

I Promise to Love You

I Promise to Love You by Tracey Emin is a series of neon artworks, comprised of six written love messages animated on fifteen billboards in Times Square in February 2013.,  The glowing words slowly spell themselves out, as if being written by a ghost or an invisible presence, demonstrating the power of love.

LOVE

Love is Alexander Milov's debut art piece for the Burning Man Festival. The sculpture calls into question how one is to truly"discover one's genuine self in a media-saturated world." Not only does the sculpture itself send a message to its audience, but the material that is used to create the sculpture is also part of the message as well.The outer figures represent the independence and solitude of adulthood. The rebar cages from which they are fashioned represents how society traps our inner selves. By contrast, the children trapped inside suggested the possibility of connection and illumination.

Aporia

640x516x2.jpg?auth=1ed24f8a11f133b7e5c46Aporia is a collection of installations by South Korean artist Lee Jung. Each of the installations consist of a sentence or phrase spelled out in neon against an empty, natural background. The word "aporia" comes from a Greek word meaning "dead end street" and the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: "An irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory." The name of the piece combined with the specific matter phrases suggests the artist's complex, if not conflicted, thoughts about the concept of love.

We Are All Made of Light

[video src=https://vimeo.com/313413541 height:200 align: left]We Are All Made Of Light is an immersive art exhibition which exemplifies the interconnectedness that we share with our fellow humans and the universe itself. The releasing of the installation coincided with Seattle’s BOREALIS: a festival of light, debuting in October, 2018 in South Lake Union and across Seattle. The work was created by the Seattle-based artist Maja Petrić who set out to demonstrate the thought that we are all just individuals in vast and expansive universe, yet we all share some form of expanded consciousness.

External Cybernetics

[video src=[video src=https://youtu.be/I0lAcvfc5uU]] Geoffrey Drake-Brockman is an Australian artist who explores a concept known as external cybernetics in which all of his installations require human interaction in order to function. Geoffrey's work in a sense pays homage to the work of Groupe de recherche d'art visual or GRAV from the 1960s. However, Drake-Brockman's approach to external cybernetics gives a deeper, more in-depth look into the behavior of the spectator/participant. He utilizes interactivity to create a world in which the artist is the spectator and the spectator is the artist encouraging creativity in the purest form. 

Floribots

[video src=https://youtu.be/xUjPu0Jif-U] Floribots is a 128 robot origami flower interactive installation. It functions with “hive mind” characteristics by sensing the audience’s movement and adapting its behavior accordingly. The artist, Geoffrey Drake-Brockman programmed Floribots to simulate behaviors that are “both of an individual and a colony.” The technology of Floribots makes use of both software and electronics, allowing humans and machine to play creatively together. The artist installed sensors to detect the audience and in response the Floribots dance in waves creating a fun, interactive charged environment. 

Creative Adversarial Network

figure5_2-720x375.jpgA computer program called (CAN) Creative Adversarial Network has been making creative works that are being compared with art made by human artists, and it is learning how to continue to improve its works by having people judge them and learning to judge them itself. If a computer can make art on its own will humans artists become obsolete?

Reusable Universes

Artist Shih Chieh Huang really takes on the saying of one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, producing some incredible cybernetic structures and sculptures.  These sculptures utilize various pieces of plastics, fans, electronics, and circuit building that mimic organic life of deep sea organism.  The plastic deep sea animals glow with brilliant lighting, pneumatics, and […]

Eyeborg (Neil Harbisson’s Cyborg Antenna)

Neil_Harbisson_cyborgist.jpgNeil Harbisson is a cyborg artist based in New York City. He is described as a cyborg artist because his artwork his artwork is concerned with the concept of cyborgism but also because he himself is technically a cyborg. He has an antenna implant, which he calls "the Eyeborg." This device is implanted in his skull and was designed to extend the limitations of human color perception. Although he was born completely color blind, he can can now even see infrared and ultraviolet colors that are invisible to humans.

Biometric Mirror

[video src=https://youtu.be/Qzs6M0XFyaI height:220 align:left] Lucy McRae's Biometric Mirror is an interactive art installation. Viewers are invited to casually glance into one of the installation’s mirrors, which then runs artificial intelligence software to analyze and “perfect” the patron’s physical facial features. Physical attributes of the face including age, gender, and race are quantified and modified through use of an algorithm to produce a Marquardt Mask, or a more “physically perfect” version of ones face.The participant is therefore shown, face-to-face a simulated version of themselves, a doppelganger that is supposedly better, but eerily "off."

Doubt

[video src=https://vimeo.com/161752738]In Doubt, artist Carsten Höller challenges our perceptions of reality through coded sequences of light and spatio-temporal illusions. His goal was to blur the lines between spectator and performer within a work of art, while instilling a deep feeling of doubt inside us. The installation begins as a single hallway of light, which subsequently divides itself into two paths, each of which is individually illuminated by either yellow or green lights. Once a spectator chooses a path, they are presented with a multi-level maze of sorts, which combines different sequences of light projection with moments of darkness to challenge our perceptual framework.

Likeness

[video src=https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=99&v=wVYJ8EwL7WA height:195 align:right] Adam Ferriss’s art installation from June 2018, Likeness, takes one person’s face and transforms it into another. It “reimagines face-filtering and remolds people’s appearances in real time.” Likeness, curated by Alex Czetwertynski, another digital artist and curator, was produced for Google IO 2018 in the Museum of Developer Art and commissioned by UCLA Conditional Studio. Ferriss began his installation by presenting the computer two sets of images: generic photographs of people, and what Ferriss calls “label maps” that “identify and highlight the different facial features, like eyes, eyebrows, jawline, mouth, and nose, present in the photographs." 

All Things Fall

[video src=https://vimeo.com/125791075 height:200 align: right ]All Things Fall by Mat Collishaw and Sebastian Burton was first presented in 2014 during a solo exhibition titled “Black Mirror” at Galleria Borghese held in Rome [3]. The piece is powered by an electric motor and lit by numerous led lights placed all around the figurines which flash in repetition creating the illusion of motion. The zoetrope was originally designed in three dimensions. Each model figure was 3D printed at Sicnova 3D, a Spanish company specializing in 3D printing. The material used is not your average plastic found in most conventional 3D printers. Each of the figures are made from an ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) material, which is a specialized hard plastic used for the prototype printer that created all of the individual components of the piece.

Force of Nature

tumblr_nock79w2XF1qav3uso2_r1_540.gif?zoIn April 2015, Nike released its revolutionary kinetic digital art project, Force of Nature, for the Nike Innovation Summit at Truman Brewery in London. The work was created in collaboration with Field, a London-based design studio. By stepping onto a treadmill and beginning to create movement, the participating runner is presented with a fluctuating shower of stunning, multicolored sparks, similar to an energy “mirror” of themselves, created by the movement put forth by him or her on the treadmill. The flux of lights is meant to imitate the runner’s motion and turn the human body into a digital art piece. [1]. The work recalls earlier artworks, including Nancy Paterson's Bicycle TV (1989) and Jeffery Shaw's Legible City (1989-91), both of which used a bicycle as the interface by which the user's activity generates an animated video environment.

Song of the Phenomena

[video src=https://youtu.be/pcvVotT2XQo] Chris Henschke is an Australian digital artist who studies scientific concepts like physics, sound and light, and other phenomena. He and Mark Boland, an Australian Synchrotron physicist, collaborated on an exhibit called "Song of the Phenomena", which was displayed in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Gallery in 2016. "Song of the Phenomena" includes a machine that is activated by the atomic radiating particles emitting from decomposing fruit and converted into sound. The machine was once used to calibrate radiation oncology treatments.

CAPSID

[video src=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8IhFWiri5o]London-based artist John Walter spent three years studying with Greg Towers at UCL to better understand the interactions between a virus and its host, specifically HIV-1 and the effect of AIDS on the human body's immune system. His meticulous research is shown in his new multimedia project CAPSID, featuring a short film titled A Virus Walks Into a Bar, which pulls the "bar" motif of British soap operas to present an analogous tale of how HIV enters human cells and destroys them from within. Through this film – as well as paintings and installations – Walter's work not only uncovers new ways of expressing how HIV behaves, but presents his findings in a way that the non-scientifically-inclined can understand.

Digital Instru-Mentation: Red Forest and Emblems of Ascension

Campbell%20Red%20Forest%202015%20detail.Digital art, as in the work of Robert Campbell (Red Forest, detail) and NoiseFold is achieving the plasticity of clay, paint on canvas, or even analog electronics. Several Currents 2015 participants have developed, or cobbled together, computer based tools which provide the robustness needed to dig in, explore, and experiment with contemporary new media materials and techniques. It's much like the shift from the brush of a Mannerist painter to the sponge of a Max Ernst frottage.Progress in the flexibility and robustness of digital instruments allow them to be treated as plastic media which may lead to fully collaborative human/machine systems. We can start to imagine an actual collaboration between humans and machines where, rather than participating in a one-way struggle, each contribute what they do best in a two-way dialog. And once these collaborative systems are established, their collective behavior will become more interesting than any particular 'finished work'.

The Island of Pal

Anne-Farrell_The-Island-of-Pal-copy-940xLittle red skiffs float on undulating waters along with armchairs, fully made beds, and spiraling severed horses' heads in the throbbing air. Three toy horses are posed on synthetic turf in a theatrically raked trapezoidal corral bordered by tiny rope footlights. No bridles or saddles are ever in view; these are wild horses temporarily and ever-so-lightly penned in by a white picket fence. Enclosed inside the skewed geometry and oblique angles the equine visitors—a palomino named Pal, a buckskin called Bonnie, and her sometimes partner, the black-coated Clyde—are here to entice playmates. Inside a bricolage gilt frame a ten-minute video containing all of these disparate constituents (and new characters too) offers a dream narrative of these fantastical beings, delighting in an idyll of grasslands and wildflowers.

Two Women

stacks-image-34fddf8.jpgTwo women: one is young, angelic, billowing and dream like; the other alternates between the fetal position and the floating corpse pose. Side by side, the wood framed vessels into which the the images are projected and submerged in water, read as both boat and coffin. Like flowers dropped from the installation’s peeling wallpaper or the Chinese screens described by the narrator as she recounts a dream that turns into a nightmare, the water is the source of life of death. In Two Women, the gasping for air is visceral as the older woman contorts her body and I, the witness, listen to her story in Korean, read it in English and hear the stylus punctuate it into fabric as Morse code, the universal language associated with distress.

Mypocket

burak-arikan-mypocket-exhibition-neubergMYPOCKET by Burak Arikan traces simultaneously a personal history of expenditures and universal financial forecast. The artist has meticulously retained physical and virtual evidence of all his expenditures, creating a database visualization of their passage and custom software algorithm of their probability of recurrence. The Transactions Feed archives all of his economic interactions (thereby making all his personal financial records public), and posts their percentaged predictions.

Wave UFO

[video src= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8QbcyKwWNo align: left height: 200] Combining her love of sci-fi and her penchant for installations, artist Mariko Mori created a unique, encapsulating experience that literally transports the viewers to another world in Wave UFO. Mariko's goal is to make the audience experience what it would be like to go to another planet. Inside of the pod, visitors are given "a set of electrodes that gather brainwave data" [1] that feed to a video monitor inside of the pod. This is played alongside a second video screen, and those two coupled together represent both sides of the brain's psychology and functions. Viewers recline in padded seats placed around the pod, in which they watch the two screens. After the seven minutes of footage end, visitors disembark via the staircase.

Allvision

AllVision01.jpgExploring the medium since the late 1960’s, Steina and Woody Vasulka’s inventive exploration of the new technology coined them as the pioneers of the video arts. The artistic married pair found their inspiration with experimentation of the technology of the moment and social issues of their time. In 1976 Steina (who only goes by her first name) brought her work Allvision to life, born from her research of perception. The installment bears two cameras facing each other on a horizontally rotating axis, in the middle stands a mirrored sphere.  The two cameras, on a turntable, slowly orbit the mirrored sphere. Each camera visualizes one half of the reflected space, making the whole space observable as both cameras’ visual were transmitted to four monitors. [1]

The Event of a Thread

Ann Hamilton's 2012 piece, "The Event of a Thread," was a massive art installation that spans the entirety of the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The work was meant to respond and interact with the space's architecture and internal structures, as well as to be interactive with the audience. The space was divided, […]

NomadicMILK

[video src= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdSdGKvCvpA]Esther Polak’s art project NomadicMILK, 2009, shadows two different aspects of the dairy economy in Nigeria. Polak spent the early months of 2009 in the deserts of Nigeria following both the paths of those in charge of the production of the milk, the cow herder, and those in charge of the distribution of the milk, a truck driver. Through visual and GPS recording of both subjects, Polak’s NomadicMILK persuades the observer to redefine new relationships between the environment and technology. Polak introduced a GPS robot to the nomadic cow herders of Nigeria during her data collection. Polak remarked that she was fixated “on how people see their own tracks and how they react with that. When people see their own track, they see part of their life, part of their identity.”

The Tunnel under the Atlantic

[video src=http://youtu.be/gQ2Ti6nB9mg align: right height: 220] The Tunnel under the Atlantic, by Maurice Benayoun is an interesting stimulatory system that connects visitors of the Pompidou Centre in Paris to the visitors of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal through a simulated “digging” through skewed virtual medium.  By using televirtuality, people in each museum can dig to meet each other, and then interact with each other in this virtual channel.  They are brought together through communication as they survey their virtual surroundings that reveal geological strata as iconographic strata, bringing both shape and recognizable textures.

A Sound Garden

[video src=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aGUPZc53cQ height: 180 align: right] A Sound Garden, by Douglas Hollis, is an "aeolean" sound sculpture comprised of 12 tower-like structures. An aeolean instrument is one that wind-driven, a reference to Aeolus, the Greek god of wind. The structures contain pipes that generate a wide variety of sounds, depending on wind speed and direction [2]. As this area is subject to frequent winds of varying intensity, A Sound Garden the visitor will almost always hear it in action and may be treated to a dynamic wind-driven concert as the sounds respond to changes in the winds. A Sound Garden is also notable as the inspiration for the eponymous Seattle grunge band, Soundgarden.

Sound Bites City

Sound%20Bites%20City%202.jpgSound Bites City is a collection of sound art from 19 sound artists from around the world at the RMIT University in Australia.  Exhibited at the RMIT University Gallery, the sound art is played through speakers that are scattered around a round physical structure that culminates with a raised, faux, grassy knoll.  This space is called the Torus.   RMIT University describes the Torus as “an exciting circular structure that has been specially designed by architects, engineers and sound designers based in RMIT’s SIAL unit to provide the best way to exhibit sound.”

Times Square

Amidst the busy crowds and bustling traffic, people walking in New York Times Square can easily become lost in the various sounds. But if someone truly and intently listens, he or she can hear the unique art of sound sculptor Max Neuhaus, who specializes in sound technology works, including "Sound Figure" that he made in […]