Image: Mitchell Joachim, Terreform ONE, Green Brain:A Smart Park for a New City, 2006
August 20 (opening reception 6-8pm) - October 22, 2010
Artists: Mark Amerika, Rachel Armstrong/Michael Simon Toon, Marc Barasch, Ed Bilous, etoy, Mitchell Joachim, Eduardo Kac, StudioIMC-Tunick/Elston/Schiller, Jack Toolin/C5, Marina Zurkow, Google UK, Clean Energy 2030, Andrew Senior, Cordero/Senior/Weston
EXHIBITION AND ARTIST TALKS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, 5:30 - 7:30pm Thursday, September 23: James Tunick, Jack Toolin Friday, October 1: Rachel Armstrong, Mitchell Joachim Thursday, October 21: Eduardo Kac, Marina Zurkow, Andrew Senior/Sandra Cordero
RSVP REQUIRED: rsvp@chelseaartmuseum.org
LOCATION: Google, Inc. 75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd floor, NYC
Support for Digital Art @Google provided by the Google, Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation
New York, NY - Google and The Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum (CAM) in New York launched an exhibition program, Digital Art @Google NYC, in June to engage Googlers with the art world and promote creativity with digital technology. The exhibitions and artist talks, which take place at Google, Inc, are open to guests at times indicated below.
We Write This To You From The Distant Future, opening August 20, is a multi-media exhibition of work by visionary creators in the arts and sciences that focuses on a future world imagined and possible to build. Included in the exhibition are Mark Amerika, Rachel Armstrong/Michael Simon Toon, Marc Barasch, Ed Bilous, etoy, Mitchell Joachim, Eduardo Kac, StudioIMC-Tunick/Elston/Schiller, Jack Toolin/C5, Marina Zurkow, Google UK, Clean Energy 2030, Andrew Senior, Cordero/Senior/Weston.
The exhibition title is a line spoken by the narrator in Immobilité. a feature length art film shot with a mobile phone video camera by Mark Amerika, with music score by Chad Mossholder. Immobilité evokes questions - how will a technologically advanced world effect what it is to be human and what is the world with advanced technology to become?
Digital Art @Google NYC is curated by Nina Colosi, Curator of The Project Room for New Media at CAM and founder of its public art program, Streaming Museum, which presents exhibitions in cyberspace and public spaces on 7 continents. The programs were inspired by pioneer video artist Nam June Paik who in the 1970s envisioned the Internet, predicting an “information superhighway” as an open and free medium for imagination and exchange of cultures.
According to Colosi, “A natural synergy exists with Google in this partnership. The Project Room’s program showcases artworks and educational programs, which incorporate technology and the Internet in the creative process.”
Digital Art @Google emphasizes the correlation of Google’s mission in organizing the world’s information and making it accessible, with the ability of artists to reflect and synthesize information in the creation of artwork that expresses the contemporary world. The exhibitions and speaker programs will inspire, entertain, and help envision the world in new ways.
The exhibition program was initiated at Google by Josh Mittleman, User Interface Software Engineer, and supported by the Google Community Affairs committee at Google New York City. Mittleman described the motivation of the exhibit, “Art is one of many tools that can help to organize and make sense of the world’s information. Digital Art @Google NYC is the first step toward introducing the digital arts community to Google, and to starting a conversation that will lead to a rich, ongoing collaboration.”
The first Digital Art @Google exhibition, “Data Poetics”, opened June 11 with works by well-known international digital artists, Scott Draves, R. Luke DuBois, Aaron Koblin, Mark Napier, W. Bradford Paley, Lincoln Schatz, John F. Simon, Jr., Thomson and Craighead, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas. The exhibition and artist talks, were open to the public on July 29, August 5 and 12.
The opening reception for We Write This To You From The Distant Future will be held on Friday, August 20, 2010 from 6-8 PM. Visitors may attend the opening, view the exhibition, and participate in the artist speaker program taking place at Google, Inc., 75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd floor, by sending an email to RSVP@chelseaartmuseum.org.
ARTISTS FEATURED
Mark Amerika, Immobilité, 2009
4 remixes from 75 min. feature film, duration: 12:00” (loop), stereo sound
Mark Amerika, b.1960, Miami. Lives and works in Boulder, CO and Kailua, HI.
Mark Amerika is an interdisciplinary media artist whose works have been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME.
Amerika is internationally renown as a “remix artist” who not only reconfigures existing cultural content into new forms of art, but also mashes up the mainstream media forms and genres that most commercial artists work in. For example, his body of remix artworks includes published cult novels, pioneering works of Internet art, large scale video projections in public spaces, live VJ performance, and most recently, a series of feature-length “films” shot with different image capturing devices in various locations throughout the world.
Immobilité Remixes are four video remixes of images, sounds, and texts from the original 75-minute feature-length film Immobilité produced and directed by the artist Mark Amerika. The work was shot entirely on mobile phone and traces the story of three abstract figures passing through an imaginary video landscape.
The fragmented mobile phone images are captured and edited in an amateurish or DIY [do-it-yourself] fashion similar to the evolving forms of video distributed in social media environments such as YouTube. By creating this low-tech version of filmic narrative where the aesthetic style is influenced by the rich history of more sophisticated forms of European auteur cinema, Amerika both asks and answers the question “What is the future of cinema?” while simultaneously challenging the status and viability of contemporary artworks in an increasingly networked field of distribution.
Mitchell Joachim / Co-Founder, Terreform One
Mobility: Jetpack Packing, 2010; Blimp Bumper Bus, 2008
Habitat: Fab Tree Hab Village, 2009
Urbanity: Rapid Re(f)use, 2008; Green Brain Micro Climate Towers, 2006
Jetpack Packing project involves the feasibility of jet-packs that move in flocks - Facebook in the air. Fab Tree Hab Village, 100% living habitat prefabricated with computer numeric controlled (CNC) reusable scaffolds to graft trees into shape. SOFT Blimp Bumper Bus increases traffic efficiency by almost 30 percent. Rapid Re(f)use seamlessly engages the topic of real-time “Google-like” cities where rapid prototype technology is used to make waste into architecture on the fly. Nothing is thrown away, instead, waste is tagged, cataloged and instantly up-cycled into an architectural matrix. Green Brain Micro Climate Towers is a park that is a harmonized environment which balances its own energy, waste, air quality, water, and economy.
Mitchell Joachim, b.1972, New Jersey, USA. Lives and works in Brooklyn.
Dr. Joachim is a leader in ecological design and urbanism. He co-founded Terreform ONE and Terrefuge with Maria Aiolova. Mitchell earned a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, M.Arch. Columbia University, and BPS SUNY at Buffalo with Honors. He is an Associate Professor at NYU and previously was the Frank Gehry Chair at University of Toronto. Earlier, he was faculty at Columbia, Syracuse, Washington, and Parsons. Mitchell was formerly an architect at Gehry Partners, and Pei Cobb Freed. He has been awarded fellowships at TED2010, Moshe Safdie Assoc., and Martin Society for Sustainability at MIT. He won the History Channel and Infiniti Excellence Award for City of the Future, and Time Magazine Best Invention of 2007, Compacted Car w/ MIT Smart Cities. His project, Fab Tree Hab, has been exhibited at MoMA and widely published. He was chosen by Wired magazine for “The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To”. Rolling Stone magazine honored Mitchell in “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”. In 2009 he was interviewed on the Colbert Report. Popular Science magazine has featured his work as a visionary for “The Future of the Environment” in 2010.
Marina Zurkow, Slurb, 2009
Duration: 17'42” (loop) Color, animation and stereo sound Format: Blu-Ray disc, Mac Mini Dimensions variable; (dimensions in pixels): 1920 x 1080 Music by Lem Jay Ignacio Additional animation: Jen Kelly Commissioned by the City of Tampa, for Lights on Tampa 2009
The animated, carnivalesque tailgate party of Slurb loops and stutters like a vinyl record stuck in a groove. Slurb – a word that collapses “slum” and “suburb” – encapsulates a dreamy ode to the rise of slime, a watery future in which jellyfish have dominion.
Facts of the ocean’s radical changes in acidity and oxygen levels form the backbone of the animation; overfishing, dumping, and the heating of ocean currents have already triggered reversions toward a primordial sea. Slurb’s surface is inspired by fictions, like J.G. Ballard’s prescient 1962 novel Drowned World, in which inhabitants of a flooded world feel the tug of the sun, and dream of a return to their amniotic past. And yet nothing is fiction (although everything is hybrid): all the source material for the piece is taken from YouTube, nature footage sites, and Google searches.
Courtesy: Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
Marina Zurkow (b.1962, New York. Lives and works in New York) is a video and media artist whose works have taken the form of multi-channel videos, customized multi-screen computer pieces, performative and interactive works. Her recent animated psychological narratives address humans and their relationships to animals, plants and the weather. Slyly candy-colored, these animated “paintings” pose questions intended to disrupt the mediating languages with which we imagine these very relationships.
Since 2000, Zurkow has exhibited at The Sundance Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The Seoul Media City Biennial, Ars Electronica, Creative Time, The Kitchen, The Walker Art Center, The National Museum for Women in the Arts, and Eyebeam, and other venues. She has been a NYFA Fellow, a Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and a Creative Capital grantee. Zurkow is on faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York.
TUNICK/ELSTON/SCHILLER City of the Future
The City of the Future is about future cities and the emergence of the Outernet. Originally created for an exhibition at Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, the work has been expanded for this exhibition. It imagines the Outernet as an urban communication medium that uses digital art and interactive media in public spaces to invite community participation. The work is powered by software developed at StudioIMC, an Outernet technology company in New York that represents an international team of programmers and artists. The City of the Future envisions urban spaces filled with art and technology that inspire creativity, offer open access to information, and foster a sense of community. The work explores concepts like: big screens and media architecture as community bulletins where people can discuss local issues; mobile phones as digital paintbrushes and building facades as open canvases; social games as new collective experiences; and light sculptures connected to the smart grid as data displays showing local energy consumption, pollution, and recycling habits. The City of the Future sees future cities as immersive information spaces where people can navigate a galaxy of information, friends, videos, and music that exist within our clothing, our phones, and in public spaces.
The City of the Future is comprised of two video screens and an interactive screen. One video describes the work with imagery by StudioIMC artists and narration by James Tunick. The 2nd video shows Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, and Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC speaking on a panel at Google about the smart grid and networked technologies that will shape energy and communication in future cities. The interactive screen depicts future cities as vast data spaces with 1000s of user generated Flickr images, YouTube videos, and Twitter posts pulled live from the Web. Using IMCmobile, a mobile social platform, viewers can connect to the screen from their phone and respond to the question: “What do you want to see in the cities of the future?” Using IMCtv, a software platform for big screens, viewers can wave their hands to make music and fly through a 3D city of YouTube videos. The city of YouTube videos is generated by a 3D visualization platform and visual search engine called IMCspace.
James Tunick is an artist focused on the intersection of creativity and technology in public spaces, an entrepreneur, and software developer. He lives and works in New York City. Tunick founded StudioIMC (theimclab.com), an Outernet technology company that represents an international team of programmers and digital artists. His work has been featured at Ars Electronica Center and the USF Contemporary Art Museum, and he has curated StudioIMC art shows at the Paley Center for Media and Chelsea Art Museum. He has two patents pending on software that allows large audience participation with games, ads, and digital art on billboards and video screens in Times Square, MLB stadiums, Live Nation concerts, and in lobbies at the IAC Building and the Time Warner Center. He is also creator of IMCtv and IMCmobile, software platforms that power the first network of interactive movie screens in cities across the U.S.. Tunick co-founded Mapcidy, a social platform that uses Google Earth, and Web5design, a Web development firm. His clients have included Nokia, Verizon, Sprint, Toyota, Adidas, Clear Channel, US Army, MoMA PS1, Heineken, and the NRDC. His work has been featured in RollingStone Magazine, the Museum of Modern Art, the NY Times, LA Times, NY1 News, The Discovery Channel, and several books. Tunick received his BA from Yale University and his Masters from NYU Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).
Carrie Elston is an artist who currently lives and works in New York. She graduated Yale in ‘03 and is currently in the MFA program at Hunter College. She has exhibited around the country. Elston is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Mapcidy, a social platform where users and writers can publish local content about New York to personalized maps powered by Google Earth. Her work Park of the Future won the Grand Intervention Design Competition in Los Angeles. Elston is also on the steering committee of NRDC’s New York Council, a Young Patron of the Lincoln Center Theater, a member of the Flea Theater.
Josh Schiller is an artist and lawyer works in New York. BA Yale, JD Columbia University, works at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. He also works with StudioIMC on intellectual property strategy and technology patents for software for billboards and mobile phones. His collaboration Park of the Future won the Grand Intervention Design Competition in LA and was featured in the L.A. Times.
Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman of the Board and CEO, Clean Energy 2030 video conversation
Google’s proposal for reducing u.s. dependence on fossil fuels “Solving every problem at once”
Eric Schmidt, Frances Beinecke, NRDC President, Ralph Cavanagh, Co-Director, NRDC’s Energy Program, and Dan Reicher, Director, Climate Change and Energy Initiatives at Google, in conversation at Google, NY about the Big Three: economy, energy and the environment. “Is there a way,” Schmidt posited, “to solve every known problem at once? … I’ve learned something here: do the right thing and you can solve multiple problems. Let’s go through the list: energy prices are too high, energy security, how many wars are being fought over oil now and in the future, what about job creation, especially in the rural areas? What about building businesses that are exportable outside of the United States to create wealth for Americans … oh and yeah, why don’t we solve the climate problem at the same time.” Ralph Cavanagh, Co-Director, NRDC’s Energy Program joked about “How can we make energy efficiency as cool as Google?
Eric Schmidt, b. 1955, Washington, D.C.. Lives and works in California. Since joining Google in 2001, Eric Schmidt has helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley startup to a global enterprise. Under his leadership, Google has dramatically scaled its infrastructure and broadened its offerings while maintaining a culture of strong innovation. His background uniquely prepares him to lead Google’s efforts toward technological solutions that focus on users. With founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and the rest of the executive team, Eric oversees the company’s technical and business strategy.
Prior to joining Google, Eric was the Chairman and CEO of Novell and Chief Technology Officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he led the development of Java, Sun’s platform-independent programming technology. Earlier in his career, Eric was a member of the research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and held positions at Bell Laboratories and Zilog. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University as well as a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Eric is a member of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a fellow in 2007. Eric also chairs the board of the New America Foundation.
JACK TOOLIN/C5, PERFECT VIEW, 2002 - 2007
Perfect View considers our perception of landscape in light of growing technological mediation brought about by digital technologies. GPS, satellite imaging, computer graphics, etc. allow us to preview, to navigate, to represent, and to conceptualize our experience of landscape in complex ways. How does this mediation affect the phenomenological experience of the natural environment? In what ways do these technologies enhance the experience of nature? Does their use somehow interfere with this experience? Are some forms of perception privileged over others due to their use?
For Perfect View, geocaching enthusiasts across the U.S. were asked to recommend ‘sublime’ locations. The latitude and longitude coordinates retrieved from this collective intelligence became the waypoints (guide points) for a thirty-three state, thirteen thousand mile motorcycle expedition and the subject matter of this project. The exhibited pieces are triptychs that juxtapose three different ways of viewing the sites’ topographies. These include photographic documentation, satellite aerial imagery of the location (the blue dots show the precise point of documentation), and 3-D computer graphic imagery of the topography using USGS topological data as a source. The work plays on the parallels between technological and philosophical developments during the Enlightenment and our current period of high-tech innovation. It also plays on our extraordinary ability to represent nature while the qualities of sublimity remain elusive.
Perfect View is part of the Landscape Initiative suite by the art group C5 (1997–2007). The other projects include Analogous Landscape, Other Path, and the C5 Media Player. The projects apply navigating and mapping technologies (as well as data mining techniques in some cases) as a basis for what will ultimately be a hybrid between technological and phenomenological experiences of landscape. Documentation of all projects can be seen at c5corp.com, and jacktoolin.net.
Jack Toolin lives and works in New York. His artwork spans new media. He been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002 Whitney Biennial); San Francisco Camerawork; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Foxy Production, New York City. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and an adjunct professor at the Polytechnic Institute at NYU.
Eduardo Kac, Lagoglyphs, 2009
Lagoglyphs is part of a series of artworks in different media in which he references and expands upon his controversial genetically altered Alba the GFP Bunny 2000. The real-time animations, continuously flowing and reconfiguring themselves, place emphasis on the generative mutability of writing and the encoded nature of life.
Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”) is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web ’80s, emerged in the early ’90s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience (Uirapuru) to the cultural impact of biotechnology (Genesis); from the changing condition of memory in the digital age (Time Capsule) to distributed collective agency (Teleporting an Unknown State); from the problematic notion of the “exotic” (Rara Avis) to the creation of life and evolution (GFP Bunny). At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac opened a new direction for contemporary art with his “transgenic art”–first with a groundbreaking transgenic work entitled Genesis (1999), which included an “artist’s gene” he invented, and then with his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000).
Lagoglyphs
From his first experiments online in 1985 to his current convergence of the digital and the biological, Kac has always investigated the philosophical and political dimensions of communication processes. Equally concerned with the aesthetic and the social aspects of verbal and non-verbal interaction, Kac examines linguistic systems, dialogic exchanges, and interspecies communication. Kac’s pieces, which often link virtual and physical spaces, propose alternative ways of understanding the role of communication phenomena in creating shared realities. Kac merges multiple media and biological processes to create hybrids from the conventional operations of existing communications systems. He first employed telerobotics in 1986 motivated by a desire to convert electronic space from a medium of representation to a medium for remote agency. He creates pieces in which actions carried out by Internet participants have direct physical manifestation in a remote gallery space. Often relying on the indefinite suspension of closure and the intervention of the participant, his work encourages dialogical interaction and confronts complex issues concerning identity, agency, responsibility, and the very possibility of communication.
Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally, featured in major international contemporary art publications and media, has received many awards, including the prestigious Golden Nica Award of Ars Electronica. He lectures and publishes worldwide. His work is documented on the Web in eight languages. ekac.org
Dr. Rachel Armstrong, Protocells, 2008 - ongoing
Michael Simon Toon, editing sound and post-production
A ‘living’ programmable technology with vast potential that includes removing environmental poisons, and growing a limestone reef under Venice
Armstrong believes in a future where the way to heal an environment is to make a building. This means that the processes and materials used in the construction of architecture, will share some of the properties of natural systems. In the practice of the built environment, the current approach to climate change is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by, using recycled materials, making our technologies more efficient and finding alternative energy sources such as, fitting solar panels to our rooftops.
Today, architects strive to create the ultimate zero carbon buildings, in other words, architecture that produces no net carbon dioxide emissions when it is being used. This goal is not ambitious enough. A zero carbon building such as the Green Lighthouse in Copenhagen does not reverse the causes of climate change by for example, by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and nor does it challenge the fundamental way in which buildings are constructed. it may be possible to grow architecture using a technology called the protocell, which is a ‘living’ chemically programmable agent based on the chemistry of oil and water. For example, it may be possible to grow an artificial reef under the foundations of Venice as an alternative way of reclaiming the history city.
With these concepts a protocell system has been engineered to create solid material showing that it is possible to create carbonate, a solid form of carbon dioxide. Therefore it is useful in an architectural context to create limestone coats or skins on the surfaces of buildings so that they become a source of carbon dioxide removal and fixation as well as provide a new kind of building material that can grow on the outside of our homes. Protocells are paving the way for solar chemistries to capture carbon dioxide and turn it into small organic molecules such as fuels. All of the research in the laboratory to date indicates that this is possible.
Dr. Rachel Armstrong lives and works in United Kingdom. Armstrong is an interdisciplinary practitioner with a background in medicine, a Teaching Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London, and a science fiction author. She is currently collaborating with international scientists and architects to explore cutting-edge, sustainable technologies by developing ‘metabolic materials’ in an experimental setting.
Ed Bilous, Night of the Dark Moon, 2005
Music that underscores the artwork
Based loosely on the myth of Orpheus, Night of the Dark Moon is the story of two lovers on a journey through the Underworld. They are lured away from each other by the shadows of people looking for love that has been lost. Orpheus, child of the muse Calliope and “father of songs” guides the lovers back from the darkness of the Underworld with a soulful song sung by a luminous figure. This is her song. Night of the Dark Moon was the second of four works commissioned by Alison Chase and Pilobolus Dance Theater. As with other collaborations between Chase and myself, Dark Moon marries music, movement and light to evoke a dream-like world in which human bodies and voices drift between different states of awareness. In this production, the vocalist cues a chorus of distant voices and controls their dynamics with electronic sensors. Similarly, a dancer’s movement affects the color and luminosity of the video and projection design. All the programming for Night of the Dark Moon was done at the new Music Technology Center at Juilliard.
Ed Bilous (b. 1957. Lives and works in New York) has had a diverse musical career that includes works for film, stage, dance and multimedia. His recent compositions include Lucid Dreams for the American Composers Orchestra, Night of the Dark Moon for Pilobolus Dance Theater, Benedictus for Triple Chorus and Percussion”, for the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, Portraits of Grief - A Tribute to the Victims of the September 11th Tragedy commissioned by New York Times Television, and Chaconne for Nine Souls from the Academy Award nominated film Scottsboro. His film credits include Scottsboro, Naked Man, by Academy Award Winning screenwriter Ethan Coen, Mixing Nia and Just One Time. Edward Bilous has been on the faculty of the Juilliard School since 1984. He is the Chairman of the Literature and Materials of Music Department, Founding Director of the Juilliard Music Technology Center and the Juilliard Electric Ensemble and Co-Founder/Artistic Director of Beyond The Machine, A Festival of Electro-acoustic and Multimedia Art. Edward Bilous is a nationally recognized leader in the field of arts education and has conducted master classes and seminars around the US and around the world.
Marc Barasch, Green World Campaign
Green World Campaign: Mission to Earth will use interactive geolocational maps to catalyze global treeplanting. Audiences will be able to use cellphone shortcode to fund trees on degraded land in the developing world, with the areas geotagged on dynamic, large-screen media displays with game-like functionalities and user-generated content. Mission to Earth installations will inhabit the built environment, akin to Metronome in New York’s Union Square, Times Square’s National Debt Clock, or World Clock in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. A key difference: new media technologies empower the public as change-agents rather than mere witnesses, creating positive feedback loops, conferring a sense of collective efficacy to regenerate a green world. Public discourse is stimulated, global awareness infuses social space, action is potentiated. The project will look to Google Earth Observation (GEO), the satellite imagery-processing engine in the “Google cloud” which analyzes deforestation with mind-boggling speed (only here, the focus is on reforestation). It will also have a Web presence. The art and technology developed by the project consortium–media artists, digital technologists, and curators in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Stockholm, and Yekaterinburg, Russia—will be deployed at concerts, sporting events, conferences, museums, etc. in a multiyear campaign to re-green the planet with billions of trees.
Marc Barasch (b. 1949. lives in Boulder, works in L.A., New York, London.) He is the founder-director of the nonprofit Green World Campaign, which plants trees in developing world countries. The GWC is a global collaboratory for what he calls “regenerative ecology.“ It also creates public interfaces with traditional and new media. Barasch’s Emmy Award-winning environmental call to action, One Child, One Voice, was broadcast to 160 countries over the CNN world network. He was a founding producer of the NPR show “E-Town,” heard in over 200 markets. Educated at Yale, he was one of the founding faculty in the psychology department at Naropa University. He is the author of several bestselling books, recently Field Notes on the Compassionate Life (2005). He has presented at Art Center College of Design’s Big Picture, Oxford’s Visions of Humanity, L.A.’s Mindshare, University of California’s Mind/SuperMind series, et. al.
Cordero/Senior/Weston, Refugium 1 & 2, 2010
Oil & digital projection. each 18” x 24"
Refugium 1 & 2 depicts future refugia, relict populations of flora and fauna descended from the species we know today, isolated in ecosystems of hyper-evolved life forms on the earth of the future, observed surviving in pockets beneath the shimmering, shifting atmosphere. The works are conceived as an exploration of the future of painting, presenting paintings enhanced by dynamically structured illumination in a hybrid of these two media.
Biographies
Sandra Cordero lives and works in New York. She studied animation and painting at New York University and Hunter College. Her work has been shown at the Queens Museum of Art and at film festivals across the country. She is a member of the Sperm Whale collective, which creates interactive installations and visuals at events throughout the Northeast.
Andrew Senior is a British artist working in New York, in sculpture and electronic art. He has exhibited internationally, including an honorable mention in the Prix Vida 8.0, Blind Art foundation prize (UK) and Madrid Abierto 2008. He studied art at SUNY Purchase and at the Art Students League of New York. He has co-chaired the ACM Multimedia Conference Art Track (2005) and continues to serve as a program committee member. He has curated exhibitions in New York and Singapore (co-curator) and published several articles about electronic art. Andrew Senior’s art is informed by his technical research in human-computer interaction, multimedia and computer vision, for which he holds several patents and has published extensively. He currently works on speech recognition in the Research group at Google, New York.
Jason Weston is a digital artist living in New York. He has been fascinated by computer science and particularly computer art all his life. He has worked in the computer games industry, and is a VJ and author of VJ software. He works as a Senior Research Scientist at Google Inc., focused on machine learning for image understanding and other vision applications.
Andrew Senior Couch Potato Farm, 2005-2010
Couch Potato Farm shows an ecosystem that watches television. The work hypothesizes virtual life forms that have sprung up to live off the electromagnetic energy being transmitted all around us. This installation is an exploration of a heterogeneous virtual ecosystem that lives off television signals, with two kinds of virtual life form - a cellular automaton (the “potato field”), and mobile creatures that roam the field, interacting and evolving characteristics through a genetic algorithm. Their presence is observed through the effects that they have on our television signals- draining it of colour, blurring it and displaying television from the past.
The installation simulates the complex behaviors in the ecosystem (photosynthesis, seeding, grazing, hunting, mating). The monitor shows the resulting television signal. Couch Potato Farm was awarded a special mention in the Vida 8.0 international prize for art and artificial life.
etoy, Mission Eternity, 2005-2016
All cultures need to dispose of the dead and share the loss of friends and family connected with the challenge of remembering and forgetting. MISSION ETERNITY (M∞) is a digital cultof the dead for the information society. The art group etoy stores the data of a few M∞ PILOTS forever with the help of thousands of M∞ ANGELS who download and run a program on their computer. PILOTS cross the ultimate boundary to investigate afterlife, the most virtual of all worlds. On May 26, 2007, etoy transferred the mortal remains of Timothy Leary into the multiuser SARCOPHAGUS. A key figure of the information society, Leary experimented with the expansion of the human mind with the drug LSD and designed his own death in 1996 as a last trip.
The M∞ SARCOPHAGUS is a modified 20 foot cargo container outfitted with 17'000 lights reflecting the info sphere of human beings who passed away: visual information, the voices of the dead, statistics and ascii text collected from governmental databases, family albums, and online sources explore the artistic portrait for information society (ARCANUM CAPSULE). The sarcophagus is a bridge that connects human memory and electric impulses with the mortal remains of M∞ PILOTS. The TERMINUS, a plug-shaped repository, stores the ashes of a M∞ PILOT after cremation. All other PILOTS are alive today and will enter the SARCOPHAGUS when they die. The interactive and networked sculpture links the community of the living and the dead. It travels geo-space like internet particles (TCP/IP packages) travel our global media reality. With this ultra long term project etoy challenges the way human civilization deals with memory (conservation/loss), time (future/present/past) and death.
etoy goes where traditional artists, companies and individuals cannot afford or risk to go. Founded in 1994, etoy.CORPORATION transforms the concept of artistic production and appearance in a world dominated by ambivalent parameters: mass production and consumption of information and goods, global transportation, branding, maximization of profits, growing complexity, technological penetration of life and virtualization. While most successful artists, dealers and collectors depend on a game they tend to deny, superficially criticize or cynically celebrate, etoy does not play down the nature of art business or hide commerce behind radical chic. By registering, branding and protecting its identity as an abstract trade mark and by sharing its intangible value (pure art) in the form of stock, etoy puts the tools, vehicles and strategies of capitalism into the center of interest: 640'000 etoy.SHARES = 100% ofetoy.CORPORATION = 100% of commercially available etoy.ART. More than 200 etoy.INVESTORS own, feed, control and protect the legendary corporate sculpture to scan and expand the boundaries of contemporary art.
25 etoy.AGENTS work on the etoy.OEUVRE. The digital hijack, TOYWAR, etoy.SHARE, etoy.TANKS or the MISSION ETERNITY SARCOPHAGUS became art history but can not be purchased or collected in the traditional way. The work is available to the public online and widely discussed in art publications from MIT Press, Tate Publishing, Dumont, Gestalten Verlag, JRP Ringier or Birkhaeuser. etoy.SHOWS since 1996: Palais de Tokyo Paris, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, ICC Tokyo, Helmhaus Zurich, Art en plein air Môtiers, ARCO, Madrid Abierto, BigTorino, Fondazione Pistoletto Biella, Ars Electronica Linz, Secession Vienna, Museum of Modern Art San Francisco, Art Museum San Jose, Postmasters New York, Armory Center for the Arts Pasadena and more.
Google UK, Translate for Animals, 2010 Watch the video here
Making the world’s information universally accessible is a key goal for Google. Language is one of our biggest challenges so we have targeted our efforts on removing language barriers between the species. We are excited to introduce Translate for Animals, an Android application which we hope will allow us to better understand our animal friends. We’ve always been a pet-friendly company at Google, and we hope that Translate for Animals encourages greater interaction and understanding between animal and human.
Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognises and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. To develop Translate for Animals, we worked closely with many of the world’s top language synthesis teams, and with leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics, including senior fellows at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The Creators Tom Uglow, who runs the Creative Lab in Europe, reports:
We were lucky enough to work on this (our first Google April Fool) with Sara Rowghani and Reto Meier (who actually built the app). The video was shot by Glue in conjunction with the in-house team (scripting and editing). The scripts, translations, designs, and copy were created in-house over a few weeks. The video had over a million views and over 50k app downloads.
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