Interface Culture Student Works at Ars Electronica 2006
Text by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
(Spanish)
A year after its establishment, the Interface Culture masters program was already able to present works by its students at the 2005 Ars Electronica Festival. This exhibition included examples of interactive art, tangible interfaces, intuitive instruments for playing and composing music, acoustic and object-based interfaces, CAVE applications and interactive games.
Gerfried Stocker / Christine Schöpf
(español)
Simplicity—the pipedream of a society dominated by technical revolutions, global networks and inundations of information from mass media? The mantra of a new generation of user-centered information designers? Dogma of technophobic naysayers to progress? Or merely the—as yet unfulfilled—promise of IT companies? There has been hardly a concept of late that has been laid claim to in so many different quarters, and none that delivers such a trenchant reading of the vital signs of our times.
So then: just how are we to cope with the increasing degree of complexity in the reality we inhabit? How can we tap and utilize the potential of global communication and realtime-access to information and ideas, to people and markets in an efficient as well as responsible way? How can we develop flexible, adaptable systems, devices and programs that are responsive to our strengths and intuitive capabilities, to support our activities in complex contexts? Which options and features could we possibly do without? And which would we be only too glad to dispense with?
With the digital technologies, the issue of the frame, the border and the margin is being rewritten in a rather interesting way.
The importance of the borders may be observed particularly in the visual arts and literature. In the history of art, as an unfolding of a visual historicity, the theme has generated a series of questions and positions.
Several painters have pondered on the need of a frame, of a casing, of a temporal and spatial restriction which, according to them, would confine their work. Nevertheless, Degas affirmed: “the frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting’s expense.” (Keim, J. A., Le tableau et son cadre, 1962). And Manet also stated that “The frame is necessary” (…) “Without the frame the printing loses one hundred per cent.” (Antonin Proust, Edouard Manet – Souvenirs, 1913) 2.
Beginning in 1964, Vladimir Bonacic worked in the Croatian National Research Institute Ruder Boskovic in Zagreb, where he headed the Laboratory of Cybernetics from 1969 to 1973. He earned his Ph.D. in 1967 in the field of pattern recognition and hidden data structures. In 1968 he began his artistic career under the auspices of the international movement New Tendencies (NT), at the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Zagreb (GCAZ), which had pushed for his inclusion. [1] The movement had been presenting different aspects of lumino-kinetic and neo-constructivist art since 1961. [2] The statement of the Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro that computer art had replaced constructivist art [3] found its proof in Bonacic’s work. Looking back at the crisis of neo-constructivist art that NT faced in 1965, GCAZ curator Radoslav Putar wrote in 1970, “many followers of NT have tried to give their work the habits of the machine or else they have based their procedures on the use of mechanical or electric devices; they have all dreamt of the machines - and now the machines have arrived. And they have arrived from a direction which was somewhat unexpected, and accompanied by people who were neither painters nor sculptors.” [4] From the start, Bonacic had a critical view on the use of the computer in art for the simulation of reality. For example, regarding Michael Noll’s Mondrian-like drawing generated by a computer simulation, in 1969 he proposed that:
“The computer must not remain simply as a tool for the simulation of what exists in a new form. It should not be used to paint in the way Mondrian did or to compose music as Beethoven did. The computer gives us a new substance, it uncovers a new world before our eyes. In that world after so long a time scientists and artists will meet again on common ground stimulated by their common desire for knowledge”. [5]
Gordon Pask was unique in the intellectual landscape of the United Kingdom after World War II. He was one of the major figures in British cybernetics (along with Ashby, Beer, George, and Walter) and an active theatrical designer and producer. Pask was influential in various art-related fields including art installation, architecture and art theory. After fifteen years of cybernetic/cultural practice, he participated in the groundbreaking exhibition, Cybernetic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt in 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and appeared prominently in the catalog and texts associated with that exhibition.1 Among a select group of individuals, he introduced cybernetic concepts to the world of cultural practice. Yet, unlike artist/theorists Jack Burnham and Roy Ascott and engineer Billy Klüver, he was more than a conduit between the worlds of technology and the arts.
by Edward A. Shanken
Guest-editor
The following essays are based on papers from the panel discussion, “Media Art Histories: Times and Landscapes II” at REFRESH! First International Conference on Histories of Media Art, Science, and Technology, held at the Banff New Media Institute, September 28 – October 1, 2005. Although conference participant Tim Druckery noted that over the last decade he’d attended several “first conferences on the history of media art,” I know of no prior event that focused on art historical scholarship, so I consider REFRESH! a potentially significant turning-point. Many publications, including the ones presented here, will be generated from its panels and there are plans for REFRESH! redux in Berlin in 2007.
Bits, Parasites and the Media Ecology of Network Culture
Jussi Parikka
“Organisms are adapted to their environments, and it has appeared adequate to say of them that their organization represents the ‘environment’ in which they live […].”[1]
Humberto Maturana
Prologue: The Biology of Digital Culture
During the past few decades, biological creatures like viruses, worms, bugs and bacteria seem to have migrated from their natural habitats to ecologies of silicone and electricity. The media has also been eager to employ these figures of life and monstrosity in representing miniprograms, turning them into digital Godzillas and other mythical monsters. The anxiety these programs produce is largely due to their alleged status as near-living programs, as exemplified in this quote on the Internet worm of 1988:
“The program kept pounding at Berkeley’s electronic doors. Worse, when Lapsley tried to control the break-in attempts, he found that they came faster than he could kill them. And by this point, Berkeley machines being attacked were slowing down as the demonic intruder devoured more and more computer processing time. They were being overwhelmed. Computers started to crash or become catatonic. They would just sit there stalled, accepting no input. And even though the workstations were programmed to start running again automatically after crashing, as soon as they were up and running they were invaded again. The university was under attack by a computer virus”.[2]
BioKino
Tanja Visosevic
Guy Ben-Ary
Bruce Murphy
A kino-parlour of microscopic Bio-Freak Wonderment
(spanish)
The Living Screen is a primitive Bio-Kino toy, designed to travel the side show alleys of art. Peer thru the Bio-Projector and experience the astounding 1/2 millimetre projection, as it transforms with the living canvas. Take savage pleasure in how the screen made from blood Splatters the dead back to life.
Delight in primeval horror, as the Cellular Dentata lurches towards you for a bite. OR look awry, as the Monstrous Other, gazes back into your eye.
