10 days ago, i was in Ghent for the festival The Game is Up! at the Vooruit. Artists who study the relationship between art and consumerism were invited to perform, and present their work to explore this year's theme: Art for Sale.

Vending machines, installed all around Vooruit magnificent 1913 building, were packed with surprise objects made by the artists who participated to the exhibition: t-shirts, 5 euro banknotes inside blank envelopes, badges, crazy eyeglasses to see what is happening behind your back, etc.

Eva De Groote had invited me to moderate a couple of Fricties Salons. That's how i finally got to have dinner with one of my heroes, Heath Bunting, saw a performance of Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping, had drinks and a lot of laughs with the smart and hilarious Christophe Bruno and the guy who resuscitated net.art Carlos Katastrofky. Definitely one of the most exciting events of this year for me (so far). Bliss-a-lujah!

Photo indymedia

On Saturday March 8, i was walking on a cloud telling myself what a lucky person i was to present a FrictiesSalon with the masked and magnificent guys of the Billboard Liberation Front.

Not that it has been a piece of cake. How do you introduce people who should not be introduced? Who have to keep their identity secret in order to be able to keep on doing their own activities? All i could find in the press were stories about the CIA or Mafia like secrecy that surrounds them and implies that "Spouses and friends do not know that the members are in the organization."

"Improving outdoor advertising since 1977" is the catchphrase of the Billboard Liberation Front. The idea is simple: by making small adjustments to billboards, the BLF creates ironic and often highly critical street marketing campaigns. By changing just a few or sometimes only one letters, they turn upside down the clean and seemingly well-controlled facade of an entire company.

Photo by Gina Gayle for the SF gate

BLF has several sets of presentations. They could have gone for the "terrorist" version but given the theme of the festival, they chose the "corporate" one.

First, we were given a tour of the Fundamentals of the organization, its clients and the opportunities.

They started their actions 30 years ago. At the time, there was no internet, no mobile phone, no blogs, etc. It was also a time when advertisement communication just went one way. Consumers received it and didn't have anyway to hit back through blogs or forums. There has been dozens of members over the years, some have gone, others have arrived more recently.

Client portfolio

In 77 a "bunch of freaks" in San Francisco called the San Francisco Suicide Club had vowed to live each day like it was the last one. 27 of them (including ten members wearing gorilla suits) were blindfolded and taken up to a roof. They were faced with two Max Factor billboard and some paint. Unfortunately they were a bit drunk, a bit conspicuous because of the gorilla suits and they started arguing about what should be done with the billboard. Some neighbour called the police and SF Suicide Club learned the message the hard way: be prepared, don't get drunk, don't wear stupid suits.

1980. Marlbore instead of Marlboro. It was the first time that the prank was interpreted as a real message from the tobacco company while in fact BLF wanted to comment on the lack of originality of the billboard.

1989. Kant, probably done by a student intern. "Actually it was probably a European intern as no one in the U.S. has ever heard of Kant."

1994. an ad for the the Hillsdale Mall. Very straighforward operation, all they had to do was turn a couple of lights off and just keep the central letters: LSD.

Only a few months after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, one of the most devastating man-made environmental disasters ever to occur at sea which occured in Alaska in 1989, the BLF turned HITS HAPPEN -- NEW X-100 into SHIT HAPPENS -- NEW EXXON

Then they became more ambitious:

1997. Alteration of a Levi's billboard overlooking a major highway. BLF issued a press release in which they introduced Charles Manson, a figure who didn't need any introduction, as the new corporate spokesman of the jeans' company. This historic collaboration between two of most potent iconic forces of the 1960's taps into a frothy zeitgeist of manipulative nostalgia.

1996. Am I dead yet? Technically more elaborate as they had to sub-contract an electrician and a neon guy.

1989. The "Think Different" campaign of Apple became "Think desillusioned". The company had appropriated the image of famous dead guys or exiled ones like the Dalai Lama. Bulletins are the biggest and the most expensive.

The clients this time were technology companies, with a sector focus on the "dot-coms". Large-format warning labels were added to the billboards, in the style of a standard computer error message, bearing the bold copy: "FATAL ERROR - Invalid Stock Value Abort/Retry/Fail".
Ironically the stock market crashed right after this action.

A billboard manipulation can take from a few hours to a few weeks for the most ambitious actions.

Even before the improvement action takes place there is a careful preparation. The area surrounding the billboard is mapped, looking for the best ways of quick escape, ideal positions for ground crews, etc.

BLF has to go more and more tech-savvy, just like the industry does. Today you get talking billboards, talks of billboards in space, billboards activated by motion sensors, etc.

In 2005, they collaborated with artist Ron English for their first animatronic billboard alteration. The background is an original 12' x 22' painting by English. At the foreground the animatronic of Ronald McDonald feeding a fat kid his daily dose of Big Macs. The improvement took place in broad day light at a busy cross road in San Francisco while 15 persons where on the ground, dressed up like McDonald and acting crazy.

Some of the key rules of their billboard improvement actions:

- Make alterations that will make people smile not something that will make them angry,
- Less is more. The best improvements are those that require only to alter a single letter to change the whole meaning of the campaign.
- Expose what is hidden. Some advertisers are too shy about what they really mean, BLF will help them make their message clearer. Case in point: the 2005 improvement of Johnny Walker where "Drink responsibly" became "Drink yourself blind".

- Send the press some media releases to better disseminate the action. A modified billboard might remain only one hour in the street before it is removed but its traces remain forever online.
- Document your action with some Before and After images.
- A careful planning is essential: Don't get caught, don't get hurt. The larger the billboard, the higher you'll fall.
- Minimize property damage and respect the sign men. BLF make modification which are easy to remove and always leave some beer or liquor for the men who have to come and clean their "improvements."
- You don't have to be in San Francisco to make and see billboard improvements. Make yours with the help of BLF's The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement guide (PDF).

And just like Rev. Billy did in a local shopping center, BLF made their own billboard improvement in the streets of Ghent.

More images of their actions.

It took me ages to come up with the second part of Urban Interface Berlin. The event ended a few days ago but i thought it would be worth waiting for some proper documentation of Exposure as the images i took of the installation are -to say the least- pathetic.

Exposure monochromatic posters looked like the covers of mainstream magazines, the bars closing a prison cell or thumb prints. Installed along a segment of a passageway, they could only be enjoyed at night.

When a pedestrian passed by the poster, a distance sensor, connected to a tele-objective camera, activates the flash of the camera, casting the person’s shadow momentarily on the poster. The poster's graphics being printed with fluorescent ink, shadows are captured and become an integrated element of the poster that gradually fades away. Simple, immediate and effective.

As Jussi Ängeslevä and Richard The explain, the technology is used by science museums around the world, and artists such as Random-International. The artists/designers combined the simple technological principle with traditional poster design, where static graphics are augmented with the viewer's silhouette to create playful situations and weave micro narratives for the unsuspecting public as they navigate through the dark alleys.

The work comments on the effects social softwares have on us. The online self-presentation being an idealisation of the reality, and only existing through the aid of the service providers. By reminding the traces and constraints the license terms levy upon us, Exposure brings the online discourse to physical space in the form of a poster series. The work is also a comment on the omnipresent cameraphone, a "little brother" who is relentlessly prying on the unexpected moment of embarrasment or shock. Exposure's motion sensing flash lights relate to this "everyman paparazzi".

Related: SonarMatica has a fantastic line-up of projects playing with shadow this year.
Previously: Tool's Life, Bugs, errors, and weird behaviors, Takashi's Seasons, Biophilia, Streetclock, Shadow, Visceral Cinema: Chien , Reflective stencils, etc.

Eduardo Fernandes, Flávio Reis, Geandre Tomazzoni, Gustavo Godoy, Frederico Ming, Maurício Brandão, Olavo Ekman, Rodrigo Araújo and Sandro Akel are the members of Bijari, a Brazilian collective of artists/activists whose portfolio is one of the most impressive i've ever seen. They work for commercial corporations without loosing their soul, freshness and identity, they are also well-known for their VJ activities and somehow they even find some time to invade cities with their critical and witty interventions that comment on contemporary urban issues.

Bijari is 10 years old this year. How did it all start and how did you grow over the years? Were you planning to cover so many areas (artistic urban interventions, web design, graphic design, video installations, etc.) right from the start?

The art collective was born in 1997, when we began to meet for common interests, research, chats, parties. Since 2001, we think about art with regard to the city, architecture and urbanism issues (most of us are graduates of the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo). Through the extended field of art and the countless symbolical forms that it offers, we distinguish a very interesting way of developing considerations and criticisms about the metropolitan condition as well as about architecture, since we never have made architecture strictly speaking.

Diversity and elasticity always were our priorities, and we are constantly researching and linking diverse knowledge areas, in order to create more possibilities of transformation in our works as well as to extend the number of potential clients, something very inconstant in this market.

Bijari engages with many media and technologies. Does it mean that each member of the group has a specific role and its own competences? Or is each project always developed through a "total team" work?

Nowadays, we are an enterprise with nine partners, distributed over a horizontal structure in which we perform all productive and administrative functions. We participate and function as art directors on the commercial market (video, VJ, graphic design, web, scenery). At the same time, we have our own art project that gives us some independence as to the necessity of art-products commercialization (most of them aren’t "consumable" like a sculpture is, for instance, consumable at an art gallery). Thus, a lot of those works are more focused on the process than on the final products.

Among us, there are varied talents and, depending on the nature of the work and availability of each partner, we organize groups for each job. A job differs from other one and the group organizes itself according to this. Some works are made by all of us but other not.

Resistant Architecture was an artistic investigation of non official activities and architecture of excluded citizen in central Sao Paulo. Can you give us more details about these non official activities and architecture of excluded citizen. Which form do they take? What was the outcome of your artistic project?

The Arquitetura da (R)esistência project (there is there a play on words: resistance-existence) was conceived through a look on the non-official urban equipment and architecture of downtown São Paulo city. Analyzing clandestine and parallel inventions and constructions over and for the urban network, we have created devices that drive attention on the manifestations that we regarded as creative and resistant expressions in front of the restrictions of the official, controlling and standardizing city. Through them appear some design and desire for adaptation and resistance.

Their image expresses concepts of polyphony, multiplicity and organicity which are typical of Brazilian culture. Thus, we want to establish an inclusion of this present and non-official memory, allowing other looks stirring up reflections on this phenomenon and asserting the dissonant image that is typical of the real city.

Bijari also developed a very intriguing "Chicken Project". How exactly did the intervention use the volatile? How did people react to your action and what did the project reveal that you might not have
suspected?

Using a camera to register, we’ve inserted a chicken in a street refuge where hucksters and pedestrians fought against cars and buses. After that, we moved the chicken to the front of a famous shopping center in Faria Lima avenue. The chicken acted as a kind of thermometer that could reveal us differences among people that use the same space.

On the one hand, the chicken was the solution! Several people started to cluster and run after it. The gallinacean had become an object of fascination and provoked greed – an opportunity to take away, bring home and maybe eat! On the other hand, it was a problem! In another place, after the chicken had begun to move in front of the shopping center, pedestrians deviated, looked distrustful, somewhat astonished by its presence in the city. Some people deviated, other hesitated before crossing it. Little by little, we were surrounded: three keepers appeared after a watchman had reported the situation by radio. A minute after, there was a guard vehicle over the sidewalk. Some nervous men accosted us, demonstrating some fear because of the situation: there was a new element scratching and pecking at their ground.

We thought that we would have met with situations of resistance, or strangeness, but we never considered the presence of so many watchmen. This short story illustrates the approach of architecture Bijari is concerned about – the one that develops in spite of the ready space established by political wishes imposed from top to bottom. In fact, we understand architecture as a space under permanent construction, subject to participation and pressing inclusion.

Are there urban phenomena you see emerge whatever the country you are in due to gloablization trends? On the other hand, what are the urban characteristics of Sao Paulo (or Brazil) that are peculiar to the place?

The great metropolis is an excluding place. The perception change on the appropriation of space – and its consequent appropriation from those who live in it – is the goal of our work.

The constellation of global cities, where city chains influence and polarize other ones around it, configure homogeneous cities that acquire the same aspect, one becoming like the other. It’s impossible to recognize if we are in São Paulo or Hong Kong. Urban space becomes pasteurized, sterile. We loose local identity and design tramples the living body of the city. This trend is sold to us as the unique truth and the paradigm for progress and modernity.

By creating a resistance to the general movement of globalization, the city preserves its own characteristics and learns to say no to certain ready-made proposals for a new world. The city is a living body; architecture must be thought as the possibility of building a space that welcomes its manifestations and essential activities.

In the last four years, we conceived projects that question the functions of public place, revealing relations of power hidden in everyday settings. We did and do this by using artistic artifices that serve to crop and amplify some aspects of the city. In an inverted process of architecture that builds solid structures, we create almost ephemeral works that guide themselves by rupture of standards in each individual, allowing a reflection on the approached themes.

Bijari is also involved in a series of projects developed for the commercial corporate market. How do the purely artistic projects relate to "hired" ones? Do the commercial and the art works feed each other?

We produced commercial works for some enterprises. Working commercially allows us to get some financial income and, also, to support part of our artistic research with a certain level of independence.

We take advertising as a reference for us because of its brutal visual and communication power, although the sense used in our art projects are completely inverted. The knowledge as a tool in trade or advertising works helps us working formally better in the image construction.

Lastly, we use our knowledge in interventions, installations and urban performances for developing projects in Guerrilla Advertisement trend, non-standard media. In those works we try to convince clients to invest in pieces or happenings that privilege contents creation and new experiences that are not pure branding.

How do you feel about the advertising world finding inspiration in and using the tools and mechanisms of alternative culture as it is happening more and more in urban areas*?

I guess new media are appearing, people are more and more online, communication pulses and information flows are more opened, in several paths and from interlocutors different from official media.

There will always be moments in which market has devours art and uses it in order to create new products and esthetics that support themselves for generating behavior and consumption trends. This is a natural cycle, in which art also devours market and its esthetics, where all created things are transformed in new forms and purposes, acting as incentive and feeding artists’ reactions, their offsprings will in turn be devoured and absorbed by market and advertising.

It’s important that, among this, anything gets fixing and changing mind of the people to a more conscious present and active participation in this world. Our times are very dynamic; people must gain enough mobility to accompany its speed, and enough action that ensures that they don't become mere coadjuvant actors.

Any advice for young creatives who dream of setting up a group like yours?

It’s important to keep updated with what's going on in the world, references, researches, to be attentive to the senses and always present some critical sense imbued with pro-activity.

Working in group demands that we reconsider our egos, become tolerant, learn to listen, become very persevering and focus on long term goals.

How is the contemporary art scene in Sao Paulo? Could you name us a few artists who deserve to get more attention from the public?

Because we are a group of nine artists, it’s difficult to know on which each one is connected at this moment. But, generally, we have some common references and we can quote those in areas we act them.

Beginning from video universe, we admire works of video-makers as Michael Gondry (“Eternal Shine of a Mind without Remembrances� and videoclips for White-Strips and Chemical Brothers), Spike Jonze and Johan Soderberg (with his instigating charge sheet against global consumption “Surplus�).

From Brazil, we would quote the documentary-makers João Salles and Eduardo Coutinho that possess a very strong work associated to urban urgencies. Thinking on integration of video with multimedia, Joshua Davis and his crazy work developing systems for standards generation.

It’s to be remembered also the recently deceased Korean Nam June Paik, father of video-art and member of Fluxus group, that acted at 1960 and 70 decades proposing plays, actions, performances, concerts, demystifying art, bringing it closer to the dynamics of daily life. Mentioning a contemporaneous video-artist, the young Uruguayan Martin Sastre and his creative fantastic-realistic videos in which he performs as character of his paranoid stories (in one of them, he proposes that Lady Di isn’t dead and lives hidden in Uruguay).

Migrating to art works, more specifically those related to public space and possibilities of interaction non mediated nor controlled by conventional forms of communication (interest focus of our art nucleus), we can quote satirical aspects of work of English artist and graffiti-painter Bansky, the playful and new-tech of Graffiti Research Lab, the engagement and formal precision lend from mass-media expressed in Barbara Krueger and Jenny Holzer works, as well as social expression/liberation vehicles of the Polish Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Quoting some artists that work with this approach here in Brazil, we can mention works of Daniel Lima and Frente 3 de Fevereiro [February the 3rd Front], that mixes theater, music and art with an appeal for the black cause. The Integração-Sem-Posse [Integration-Without-Possession] project (on which we were involved), linked to social movements fighting for housing; Contra-Filé group searching short-circuits in media and solo works of Cildo Meireles, Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg, Rubens Mano, Marcelo Cidade and graffiti-painters Zezão and Orion, just quoting some of them...

In the VJ area, scene in which we many times act, we mention the japs of Glamoove (that have developed a powerful software for image mixing), improvisations on jingles by Eclectic Method (UK) and VJ Anyone (UK) with whom we are developing a project (see also w.roland.com/audiovisual).

Other generic references that have inspired us but aren’t directly related to our artistic making: Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his critic and acid look on contemporaneous metropolis, studies involving deleuzean concepts and psychoanalysis in the structuration of contemporaneous being by Suely Rolnik, the book Abusado [Bold] by Caco Barcellos on Rio de Janeiro city’s drug traffickers, the Canadian electronic music producer Richie Hawtin and the fanzine Sociedade Radioativa [Radioactive Society] drawn by cartoonist friends.

Thanks Flavio for having orchestrated the interview!

* cf. this article.

Andy Cameron is the Head of the Interactive Department at Fabrica, the Benetton research centre on communication located near Treviso, in an old villa wonderfully restored by Tadao Ando. Each year Fabrica invites young artists, photographers, designers, musicans, writers, interaction designers from all over the world to closely collaborate to "uncover the future." His role at Fabrica alone justifies an interview of Andy Cameron. But there's more to Cameron. He is also a founding member of the Hypermedia Reseach Centre at the University of Westminster in London. In 1994, he co-founded Antirom, a studio that investigated the nature of interactivity - how it operates as a language, what forms and figurations of rhetoric it makes available, and what novel structures of spectatorship it offers. The award-winning interactive agency worked for clients like Levi Strauss (more information about their Levi's kiosk and its interactive toys), but also as an arts collective, with productions and performances at, among others, Sonar in Barcelona and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. IN 1999, with two founding membes of Antirom, Andy Allenson and Joe Stephenson, he participated to the creation of studio Romandson Interactive Design in London.

Andy Cameron also edited one of the books which was most useful to me when i started investigating what interactive art and design could mean. The Art of Experimental Interaction Design is a great presentation of works by Ryota Kuwakubo, Antenna Design, Boutique Vizique, Ear Studio, ART+Com, Tmema, and other individuals or collectives whose works have left a mark on the interaction field.

I'd just advise that you browse through their website to get an idea of what they are doing at Fabrica. One of their latest projects i really liked was Home Entertainment at Colette in Paris, constructed out of industrial storage shelving and stacks of obsolete technologies from the 1980s – dial telephones, VHS tapes and old school ghetto blasters, recreated in perfect detail in flawless white ceramic. Like a place where old technologies go to die. Oh, yes! And please do waste some of your precious time on doodle.

In the center of all this obsolescence flickered an electronic screen, the only sign of life within the installation space, that showed a moving image sequence of hundreds and hundreds of ghostly faces, peering out of the window and trapped in a never ending video loop. These are the faces of passersby in the street who, by touching a sensor set into the window, have triggered a video camera to record a short sequence of themselves to add to the exhibition.

Home Entertainment at Colette in Paris

One of the goal of antirom which you founded in 1994 was to "explore interactivity and try to understand what made an interactive experience engaging." You admitted at the time that it was "a simple question but one that proved difficult to resolve." 12 years on, is the answer to that question any clearer?

It's one of those questions where the answer seems blindingly obvious from one perspective, and yet it's hard to work out what the answer actually means. The short version is that interactive experiences need to be playful to be successful - if you want people to use your stuff and keep using your stuff, make it playful. Play is the thing. Play is the basic drive behind interactivity - it's the big 'what if?' aspect that keeps a good interactive experience humming along.

So now everyone's talking about play. It reminds me of the 90s, how everybody used the word 'narrative' all the time - everything had to be narrative this and narrative that - but nobody really explained what it meant or why everything had to be narrative. Narrative is actually a very simple thing at one level - a format for telling stories - but it became this almost metaphysical quality, this magical, indispensable... something.

Now the buzz words are play, playfulness, ludic and so on. I find myself using these words all the time and hearing these words all the time and yet I'm not sure we really know what their implications are.

In one way play is like narrative - play is a simple, formal thing, a way of setting things up. It's a way of positioning your audience in front of something so they know how to deal with it. So too is narrative, even if the formal methods of narrative and play are pretty much the opposite of each other. They don't mix very well. They are like two sides of the same coin - play is a technique that helps people construct stories, and stories are a way for people to recount and give meaning to what happened when people played a particular game at a particular time together. But formally they are very very different and very hard to mix together.

I'm increasingly interested not so much in what play is, but in trying to work out what makes it good - what makes this toy, this game, this installation, better than others. Thinking of interaction design not in terms of novelty or innovation but rather looking at each piece critically, in terms of the values and meanings and pleasures it can offer us. Are there any great works of interactive art? Which are they? Why are they so good? These are the questions I'm interested in finding answers to at the moment.

Has the interaction design scene changed since you joined it?

It's changed and it hasn't changed. There's still the same crossover between commercial design and more experimental artistic design - people doing corporate websites in the morning and insane installations in the afternoon. I think this is a good thing and I hope it stays like this. You can read about this kind of crossover on your lovely website every day. There's lots of superficial, technological change, but I don't think this is as important as it seems. The fundamentals of good interaction design don't seem to change much.

People are more and more interested in connecting interaction design with everyday life, everyday play. I mean in not really starting with certain kinds of technology in mind, but starting with certain kinds of activity in mind. And finding that interaction design, or making up games, doesn't always need complex technology.

10x10 and Barcode Installation

How much has the reaction of the audience evolved over time? Are they used to interactivity now, is it more difficult to surprise and entertain them? Is their feedback different from place to place (more difficult to please in London than in Bologna for example?)

I haven't noticed it evolving. It used to be really hard to surprise and entertain people and it still is. That's not going to change.

There are some cultural differences but I guess they're kind of obvious. Ross Phillips, who used to work at Fabrica, and who now heads interactive at ShowStudio in London, made a wonderful project with me at Fabrica called Face - the installation lets people control a camera to record a few frames of themselves and add it to a kind of collaborative ever looping ever growing movie. It's really simple and very deep at the same time - a really rich piece of interaction design. We did it in a gallery in New York as well as Benetton store windows in Italy, Hong Kong and Istanbul. We did a version in Colette in Paris. Ross did the same thing in London - in Liberty's window just off Regent's Street - and London was the only place where women flashed their breasts for the camera. It's something to do with the way they booze it up in London. And the fact that English women never seem to feel the cold.

How do you think interaction design/art is to evolve over the next few years? Do you see new frontiers, new aspects to explore?

I think 'frontiers' is the wrong word. I think we have to get over the whole idea of exploring new territory and boldly going where no man has gone before... Maybe this is a personal thing, maybe I'm talking to myself here. The idea of being a pioneer is such a very compelling one. I remember at Antirom there was a real competitive energy around the idea of coming up with original stuff, being the first one to do this or that. I started thinking about all this seriously a few years ago when I met the great Myron Krueger at Ars Electronica. We talked about his work - (when you're with Myron you tend to talk about Myron and his work) - and I was completely knocked out by a) how important he is as an artist and b) how completely ignored he's been by the mainstream art world. Why isn't he in the permanent collection at the Tate, at MOMA? Why isn't he in the art history books? And what I think it comes down to is this relentless rhetoric of exploration, of discovery, of trailblazing and groundbreaking and being in the vanguard. When you look at someone like Myron Krueger and his life's work you get the feeling that he was so busy exploring new frontiers that he didn't really take the time to exploit the extraordinary interactive scenarios that he invented. You also get a sense of how easy it is for an unsympathetic critic to dismiss Myron's work as being that of a crank inventor rather than a serious artist. I suppose this is what the geek ghetto is for. I wrote about this last year in a piece called "Dinner with Myron Or: Rereading Artificial Reality 2: Reflections on Interface and Art"*.

None of which answers your question. What I'd like to see happen is for interaction designers and artists to let go of the relentless search for the new and try and make work which is as good as work in any other medium. I suppose what I'm saying is I'd like to see interactive art and design grow up a little.

You edited "The Art of Experimental Interaction Design" in 2004. I've always been surprised by the fact that you chose to put two words like "art" and "design" together. I thought that the art and the design worlds didn't like to be mixed together. Did i miss something?

My idea was to try and cram as many buzzwords into the title as possible so that as many people as possible would buy it. Of course it didn't work like that - artists were put off by the word design and designers were put of by the word art and everyone else was put off by the word interaction which apparently is so passé. I've never really felt that art and design are so far apart - this implies a romantic notion of what art is and especially what an artist is. But the real reason for the title was a cunning marketing ploy and I can tell you it failed miserably.

Which exhibition space do you regard as ideal for your installations? The window of a trendy shop in Paris or a new media art festival? How about a museum?

Does Benetton gives you carte blanche? Can your projects for fabrica be as experiemental as you want? Or are there any limits you should respect?

You know what - I'm grateful for any chance to put the work we do in Fabrica out in the world. I really don't see a shop window as less of an opportunity than a new media arts festival or a gallery or a museum. They're different audiences and they have different problems and different advantages. The web too - some of the more interesting work done at Fabrica in the last few years has been online - I'm thinking of Juan Ospina's Flipbook or Jon Harris' 10x10 or the Hatemap project by Harun Alikadic which aggregates extremist websites in a fun-to-use Flash interface. And we've just done benettonplay.com which is an experimental games site for Benetton, and which I am very proud of - check out Hansi Raber's doodle toy to see what I mean. Although Fabrica is wholly owned by Benetton, they really do have a very light touch when it comes to setting limits. Which is actually incredibly smart of them.

Fabrica invites young creatives from all over the world to join its research centre. They stay a year or two. What is the plus side and the down side of having people come and go so regularly? Don't you feel that a more long-term collaboration would be better sometimes?

The plus side is that we get a constant turnover of some of the best new talent, under 25 years old, from across the world. Yes, it can be frustrating to lose people after a year or two, but actually it's not so clear cut - people go out and get on with their creative careers and at the same time maintain a continuing relationship with Fabrica and what's going on there. Fabrica is situated in the countryside outside Treviso - far from the bustling creative centres of the world - so we work hard to build and maintain relationships with ex-fabricanti and with other artists and designers.

You told me about your respect for Nicolas Bourriaud, one of the few critics who understand the use of performative and interactive techniques. How much does his thinking influence the works developed at the interaction unit of fabrica?

Bourriaud doesn't influence what we do but the way we think about what we have done. I'm ashamed to say I wasn't aware of his work until a couple of years ago when Angela Vettese, the critic and curator and head of a contemporary art centre in Venice, the Fondazione Bevilacqua, gave a lecture on relational art at Fabrica. She didn't talk about interactive art or art that uses computers per se, but what she said had incredible relevance for the issues of spectatorship and authorship and language that have concerned me for a long time - since Antirom and before. She referred quite a lot to Bourriaud's 'Relational Aesthetics'. I read the book and found that here was a critical theory - and a body of work - that was struggling with precisely those questions which we were struggling with - how to deal with the fact that the artwork is not made by the artist but by the audience? What is the aesthetic? How do you know if it is any good? How to deal with banality? How to let go? It seems to me that the work of artists like Rikrit Tiravanija or Liam Gillick provides a real opportunity for interactive artists to think about what they are trying to do with technology, but from a different perspective. A perspective which has absolutely nothing to do with technology.

It was also a kind of validation, which I know sounds a bit pathetic, but there it is. Not of any particular piece of work - I've no idea if Bourriaud likes or even knows about interactive computer based art, or media art - but of an approach to making art and a way of thinking about what art can be. I've long been perplexed by the ghettoisation of interactive art and Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics seemed to me to offer a way out of the ghetto. It offers a critical approach to interactive art which doesn't rely on technical novelty but on broader questions of audience and agency.

We'll see. A new Fabrica group show, curated by Silvia Marini, Ann Poochareon and myself, called "I've been waiting for you" which explores the links between relational art and interactive art, is opening at the Triad gallery in Seoul in November this year. And we're showing several relational/interactive pieces at the Pompidou Centre in Paris as part of a major exhibition of Fabrica art and design this October.

Can you name us 3 interactive works you find particularly interesting? Why?

The Composition Station by Andy Allenson with Joe Stephenson, at the Science Museum in London. The piece is a table with 4 touch screens embedded into it - each screen has a musical grid which lets you compose a simple repeating pattern of notes. The key thing is you can change the number of notes in your grid and let it slip away from the other grids. So you get these really interesting patterns emerging from the combination of simple numbers - a 3 against a 4, a 7 and an 11 for example will give an unbelievably complex sequence. Andy Allenson was inspired by his experience of playing in a Balinese Gambelan orchestra - but the piece also seems to owe something to the music of Steve Reich. The Composition Station lets you explore something really fundamental about time, numbers and music - it's a glorious piece, rich and hypnotic and fascinating. You can get a taste of it on the Rom:One CD-Rom, (Mac OS 9 version only)
And you can see more pictures at http://www.pickledonion.com/cs/index.htm

Marie Sester's Access, made at Eyebeam in New York in 2003 and shown at Ars Electronica in the same year, is a piece for public spaces in which a robotic spotlight tracks a person as they walk across an area. It's funny and scary at the same time - it's got this deliciously double edged quality to it. As Sester comments in her notes about the piece "beware. Some individuals may not like the idea of being under surveillance. beware. Some individuals may love the attention." It's a great example of how interactive work can be meaningful without making a statement - the work is concerned with issues of surveillance, but it's not making a statement about surveillance, rather it's staging a mise en scene of surveillance and doing it in a way which manages to be playful and profound at the same time. Photos of Access and videos.

And finally I'd have to include Videoplace created by Myron Krueger right back in the 1970s. He came up with the supremely elegant idea of having the spectator stand in front of a screen and a camera and seeing the image of themselves projected back onto the screen in real time. The result is a literal embodiment of the audience within the artwork where the body itself becomes the interface to kind of self portrait. It's a basic blueprint for some of the best interactive art created in the last decades - I'm thinking of work by artists like Scott Snibbe, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and many others. Videoplace helped us to recognize what Krueger called "a new category of beauty" in the world - an aesthetic which is properly interactive - and for this I am truly grateful to him.

Thanks Andy.

Catch up with Andy’s Interaction Unit at the Fabrica: Les Yeux Ouverts show at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, it opens October 6 until November 6. They have another piece at Triad in Seoul opening November 15 2006.

Interactive Fabrica promo poster found at Ann's place. Pictures of Fabrica's installations courtesy of Andy Cameron.

*Cameron, Andy. "Dinner with Myron Or: Rereading Artificial Reality 2: Reflections on Interface and Art". In aRt&D: Research and Development in Art, ed. Joke Brouwer et al. V2_NAi Publishers, 2005. ISBN: 90-5662-423-7.

UPDATE: i couldn't resist. As soon as i saw the image that Ann had blogged of the ten Antirom guys, i knew i had to post it as well. Congrats to Mister Roope for the lovely Hawaii t-shirt.

Another great vintage ad about personal hygiene.

Via Billboardom < eatliver.

Also: Blow in her face.

Conflux, the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, will take place in Brooklyn, NYC, September 14-17.

At Conflux, participants turn NYc into a playground, a laboratory and a space for the development of new networks and communities. All events are free and open to the public. They include walks and tours, lectures, workshops, street games and tech-enabled expeditions, interactive performance, public art installations, movies, etc.

I've spotted a few interesting projects in the programme:

2.4GHz scape (image on the left), by Sawako Kato, will let audiences experience the realtime sonification of 2.4GHz signal (spectrum used for WiFi, microwave ovens, bluetooth, baby monitors, cordless game controllers etc.) around the place. People will also be invited to join the soundscape using their laptop or bluetooth devices such as the mobile phones to make the signal interference.

The Anti-Advertising Agency's Portable Sound Units are small sound-systems triggered only when pedestrians pass by them. They playback on-the-street interviews with the public about their opinions on outdoor advertising. Sara Dierck, Michael Dodge, and Steve Lambert from the AAA conducted hours of audio interviews about issues surrounding outdoor advertising with the public but also with selected individuals in the fields of advertising, conservation, and social criticism. They compiled and edited down the interviews into very short clips that raise questions about the role of advertising in culture. During Conflux, the units will be temporarily installed in various locations around the festival and area streets.

AAA Portable Sound Units

Also on the programme: Sue Huang's Street Cut-ups that uses text found on the street and remixes it to find surprising new meanings; Caroline Woolard will affix “seats� into the u-channel of the no parking and stop sign posts implanted in the sidewalk; Toby Lee and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga will invite you to freeze for 5 minutes; etc.

Another Glowlab production: The Drift Relay , a collaborative psychogeographic experience in the form of a 24 hour relay-style exploration of San Jose, will kick off next week at ISEA: Tuesday, August 08, 10am - Wednesday, August 09, 10am.