Alessandro Ludovico is a media critic and editor in chief of the highly respected Neural magazine from 1993, (Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica 2004). He is the author of several essays on digital culture, he co-edited 'Mag.Net Reader' (1 and 2). He's one of the founding contributors of the Nettime community, one of the founders of the Mag.Net (Electronic Cultural Publishers)' organization and he teaches 'Computer Art' and 'Interface Aesthetics' at the Academy of Art in Carrara.

I think that's more than enough for a sole man.

Not for him apparently. Not only does he wear great t-shirts*, he also collaborates with UBERMORGEN and Paolo Cirio on artistic projects which have toured the world: GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself (Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica 2005, Rhizome Commission 2005, nomination Prix Transmediale 2006) and Amazon Noir (1st prize Stuttgarter Filmwinter 2007, Honorary Mention Share Prize 2007).

When I met him several years ago, i also realized that i had no chance of ever winning the contest for the "Nicest person in the new media art world." Sigh!

How did Neural start?

After being a passionate mail artist and zine fan in late eighties, in 1991 I started working as a graphic designer for Minus Habens Records (an underground electronic music label based in Bari, Italy). After a few months I was in charge to curate a special product: an early slim printed guide to virtual reality (the Virtual Reality Handbook), made out of theoretical text and resources, coming with an inspired music CD. It was sold out in less than a year, so I proposed to Ivan Iusco (the label owner) to found a magazine focusing on new technologies' cultural implications.

We worked hard on it so the first Neural issue was printed in November 1993. Topics ranged from cyberpunk to electronic music, computer art and BBS networks (the popular Internet ancestors), and even if it was almost naive compared to the current magazine it reflected the thrill of investigating a new world of personal communication and content sharing possibilities. In 1995 I continued to experiment with publishing with another hybrid printed/music product. It was called Internet Underground Guide, a guide to the most obscure parts of the rising global network, with a music compilation assembled only via the electronic mail medium (perhaps the first music compilation made on the net). In the same year I was invited to the Venice Bienniale symposium called >net.time<, where, in the end, the homonymous mailing list [http://www.nettime.org] was founded. During the three days of symposium there was such an intensive exchange of ideas and perspectives that a real international network of active persons involved with art, technology and politics was established. The various related international events (Next Five Minutes, 1996, The Beauty and the East, 1997, Net.Congestion 2000, the Italian Hackmeetings 1998-today, just to name a few) that followed were really precious to expand my personal network of friends, artists, hacktivists and theoreticians, reporting some of the most interesting concepts on the printed pages of Neural.

The magazine was developed on challenging ideas, trying to give them a proper visual frame. I cared a lot about design and how it could have expressed electronic culture in a sort of printed 'interface'. So, for example, the page numbering was strictly in binary numbers, just zero and ones, even if the printer started to complain loudly about that because this was driving him crazy. And from the beginning another 'sensorial experience' was placed on the centerfold, reprinting optical artworks and theories in various forms, giving readers an aesthetic mind trip while reading. In issue 18 this habit was definitively interrupted, publishing a disrupting hacktivist fake. It consisted of fake stickers, created by the Italian hacker laboratories' network, sarcastically simulating the mandatory real ones sticked on any book or compact disc sold in Italy, on behalf of the local 'copyright protection society' (called SIAE). On the one published it was printed 'suggested duplication on any media'. In 1998 we restyled the layout and restructured the contents, defining three sections. They still are: hacktivism, activism made through a conceptual/technically media hack, electronic music, investigating how technology is involved in music production and consumption, and media art, with a peculiar attention to the networked and conceptual use of technology in art. In 2000 I used a substantial part of music Neural content for the book Suoni Futuri Digitali (Future Digital Sounds), an in-depth research, chronicling the history of the innovations that have drastically changed how we produce and experience sounds. In 2003 (while maintaining the Italian edition) I started the Neural English edition, printed in 4000 copies. Actually it is distributed worldwide with subscribers from literally all over the world, and most of them are curators, artists, critics, students, professors and libraries. Neural.it website went online in may 1997, a decade ago, and it was updated every two weeks. Starting from November 2000, it is daily updated and from 2004 it's in English (and of course still in Italian too).


Image courtesy of Alessandro Ludovico

Have you seen the readership of Neural evolve over time?

Definitively. In the last 15 years readers mostly followed the fast and furious changes of printed publishing literally disrupted by the online medium advent and the pervasive digital influence in printing production. When we started we had 'letters to the editor' (a sort of ancient blog's comments) and the most compelling sources were found in bookstores and obscure mail orders.

It's not a question of being shaped by a (niche) market, but to mediate the editorial interests with what's really interesting for the readers, keeping an eye to: language evolution, new technical 'default' (what's not meant to be explained) and new area of interests. It's sad in the last decade that many interesting independent magazines were not able to catch up this fast evolution and had to close. My cultural strategy to survive is to seriously value the readers' feedback. And I'm not really talking about compliments. I receive some, but they are mostly important for the morale. Critics are vital, instead, to understand what is the next thing to modify, change, implement or delete. It's not a democratic process because in the end I take the final decision, but it's a collective help I receive without soliciting. So the magazine's editorial line is changed (even slightly) every printed issue, and the same happens to the website.


Cover of the latest issue of Neural

Neural is still everyone's favorite even if today several blogs/online magazines, etc. are trying to get a place on your turf. How do you maintain the "cult" status that neural has?

Frankly, I never bored of being 'cult' that means that if Neural is 'cult' that's only by accident. Some people even told me that they think of Neural as a work of art. I don't know whether it really is or not, but actually the website even won an Honorary Mention in Prix Ars Electronica 2004, in the Net.Vision category, and even if I'm a bit critical about prizes, I was honored (anyway in the end I think that my real prize are the tens of thousands of incoming links).

Truth is: I simply use instinct, experience and outer feedback in running the magazine. Sometimes I think of Neural as an info-gallery, the best info-gallery I'd want to read. If you want, it'd be defined as my personal narrative of the digital culture evolution, formed by important chunks of information condensed in a limited space. Concerning the 'turf', I always thought that the more cultural efforts (including blogs and magazines) are made to discuss (and then implicitly promote) digital culture the more we'll get out of the actual ghetto. Nevertheless as John Perry Barlow once said "You can't steal what's inside my mind." And this is true for every intellectual product (so also for blogs/magazines). People are interested not just in one, but in different good products and not really in clones (unless you enter the mass commercial market). Furthermore experience still counts a lot: no matter what's the work I always admire persons really experienced in one specific field. In the end I definitively think that Neural is a huge effort made over time with tons of passion and some discipline. One of the main characteristics of digital culture is spreading fast powerful ideas. A good technical hack, as an innovative use of sound, or an original concept shown in a proper digital artwork, are meaningful signals. These signals are ideas, which have to be shared among the worldwide interested community, for a participative development. The aim of Neural is to vehiculate meaningful ideas within local and international networks. This is my primary purpose.

I know how hard and time-consuming it can be to write an online magazine, how do you manage to maintain an online presence and publish the paper magazine regularly? please, tell us you live alone in a grotta and workers in developing countries are writing most of the content for you.

Apart from kidding, I know it's almost insane. Especially because I'm still obsessed in caring about each step of production, to achieve the best content quality I can afford. But again passion and the inestimable support I receive are continuously motivating me to go on and improve. It's a question of never stop to optimize processes and time management, also improving the gained experience. I'm still chaotic, as you might guess, but I'm definitively committed to continue and to make the project the better and the more sustainable I can. Now Aurelio Cianciotta is the music co-editor and we weekly deal with stuff from almost a decade. Paolo Cirio is the online platform guru, so also the person who made possible the Movable Type-based website (after years of cut and paste routines in html), while Roberto Orsini helps me so much with translations. Among the contributors, Valentina Culatti is the most generous in donating her time to Neural, but also skilled writings come regularly from Vito Campanelli, and Tony Canonico. They are all Italians, but this is only a coincidence and I'm also looking for skilled voluntary contributors from abroad. Going back on how to produce paper and online content, I'm developing a workshop, with Simon Worthington (co-founder of Mute magazine), to share our long experience with other independent publishers. I was a zine fan in the late eighties, so I still think that independent publishing should exploit every digital technology to enrich the freedom of expression many possibilities.

In the beautiful text "Paper and Pixel, the mutation of publishing" that you have written for The Mag.net reader, you talk about the changing role of the printed page. Can you explain us the reason why you keep on printing the magazine instead of relying only on a pixel version of it?

I think that paper is not supposed to die anytime soon. For that text I researched how the 'death of paper' was announced more than once in the past, after some major 'new' media announcement (radio, pc, the net ...). But it simply never happened. Actually, paper is the most stable medium in a crowded mediascape of 'unstable media'. Once produced it doesn't need electricity to be enjoyed and it is mobile as our life is more and more going to be. But, as I said above, we have to face that paper today means luxury. It means having time to enjoy reading in a comfortable way. Interesting paper content is not inducing banal 'flipping pages' habits. It's enticing in spending time on it, without burning your eyes in front of a screen light more or less instinctively clicking somewhere, and having the chance to simply interrupt the reading whenever you want and pick it up again in an arbitrary moment. And especially for specific niche and artistic data, the stability and feel of paper is still unbeatable (it's what I've tried to define as 'the persistence of paper' in an essay published on the Magnet Reader 2). These processes are even more interesting when the content is related to digital culture, because the medium becomes also the place where it itself is discussed. With some of these premises I was invited to join eleven independent editors at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía in Seville (Spain) in 2002, for a series of seminars and lessons entitled Post-Media Publishing, print-publishing and networks for electronic culture, coordinated by Andreas Broeckmann. It was a unique opportunity to join efforts with other editors and create an informal network of collaboration. So we founded Mag.Net (Magazine Network), Electronic Cultural Publishers. Our motto is "collaboration is better than competition" and we collaborate commissioning contents each other, sharing the knowledge on specific topics (like the online paying platforms, or the print-on-demand technologies), and working jointly on some projects, not necessarily all at the same time. The most tangible effort has been the Mag.Net reader, a book about the digital/printed content relationships, freely downloadable from the Mag.Net website or purchasable as a physical paper book through a print on demand platform. Actually the most active Mag.net members are Mute [UK], Springerin [AT], Zehar [SP], 3/4 Revue [SK] and Neural. Among the latest Mag. Net initiatives were a conference that took place in January 2007 at the Amsterdam's De Balie theatre called 'Offline ? Online Publishing: The Love for Print in an Age of Electronic Media', the Mag.Net Reader 2 that I edited with Nat Muller, and that was launched during the last DEAF (Dutch Electronic Art Festival) in Rotterdam, in April, and the Paper and Pixel week of panels and presentations I curated with Nat again for the Documenta 12 Magazine project in Kassel. Neural was part of this project (involving more than 90 independent art magazines form all over the world], and I was advising them for the online part. Finally in the last September I was invited by ANAT to give some workshops about the history of independent publishing, differences and similarities between online and offline media and how the open source culture can be applied to publishing. I'm editing with Nat the 3rd Mag.net Reader that will be published in 2008.

Amazon Noir

How do you explain that most "traditional" art magazines are still snubbing new media art?

In (new) media art the fetish physical component, i.e. the marketable object, is often missed. The infinite reproduction of the work of art is a process yet to be digested even by the contemporary art world. So traditional art magazines that are basically funded by the art market, are relegating it as a marginal and (sort of) exotic phenomenon for its economical scale. And we'd also consider the technical side. Dealing with hardware and software, media art aesthetics and narrative could be mind-boggling for curators and institution directors (often in their sixties or even older). Finally we should consider that video art was recognized by the art world only after twenty years from its early stage, because it suffered from similar problems.

I think it doesn't, and it endlessly breaks up an ethereal and problematic identity. William Gibson said once in late eighties "there was science slash humanism. Let's start to talk about the slash". I choose not to be obsessed by the most traditional art market, placing Neural on the opposite of new media art "snubbers". So I'm still focusing a substantial part of my personal research on the edges of the so-called 'new media art', on topics like spam, viruses, peer-to-peer networks (the last two developed thanks to the support of Franziska Nori) and how the 'perfect' marketing strategies of online giants can be 'hacked'. My humble opinion is that they are all possible testbed of future standard communication protocols, and so media potentially used for propaganda and mass marketing.

How would you describe the situation in Italy for computer and technology based art? Can you recommend some Italian artists who should get more attention outside of the country?

Unfortunately, Italy is not the ideal country to develop digital art projects. We have too much ancient and classical art heritage to hope for serious institutional support in contemporary art (and even less to digital based art). Nevertheless, there are persons with which I share some of my working paths. For example the 'Scuola di Nuove Tecnologie dell'Arte' (School of New Technologies in Art, part of the Carrara's Academy of Art) directed by Tommaso Tozzi is one of the national points of reference. I totally share his passion on the subject (for example he's developing an important collective and shared WikiArtPedia project on the Networked Arts history), and I was very happy to join the school actually teaching 'Computer Art' and 'Aesthetic of Interfaces' courses. But there are many different small initiatives around, and recently it seems even trendy to claim a Saturday night vjing in a small club as an 'electronic art and music festival'. My favorite festivals are Interferenze and PEAM in the center-south and Share in the north. In this field my personal experience goes back to 1996 when I was actively supporting the group that made one of the first 'new media art' exhibitions with Italian artists called Virtual Light (Aurelio Cianciotta was then one of the curators). It definitively was a success, but the curators had already spent two years to convince the municipality to fund the effort. My first reference in early nineties was Decoder, an underground magazine that introduced the concept of cyberpunk as a political movement, including art expressions at large. Actually the mailing list AHA - Activism, Hacktivism, Artivism, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli is the most popular electronic forum on electronic art in Italy. Generally speaking, anyway, there are Italian digital art productions more aesthetically oriented (Limiteazero, 80/81, Luigi Pagliarini, Chiara Passa, just to name a few well known, but there'd be way too many to cite), and the one with a specific political background. Among the latter, the Luther Blisset initiative (that I consider one of the most important cultural event in the nineties) influenced subsequent groups and initiatives as the 0100101110101101.ORG, epidemiC, Serpica Naro and many others, and on the same wavelength there are Molleindustria, Candida TV and the whole Telestreet movement with the New Global Vision archive, Dyne.org free software house, Sexyshock, my colleague Paolo Cirio, again only to name a few. Finally, even if it's not recognized as 'art', I think that the Hackmeetings are really a performative collective 'art' event. It's a hacker meeting completely self-organized through a mailing list taking decision on every aspect of the meeting with an anarchic playful spirit and gathering nonetheless a few thousands hackers in a different place every year from a decade, sharing knowledge and establishing/reinforcing human relationships and political awareness. I attended all of them from the beginning (except the last three), because of the incredible atmosphere and the deep social exchanges that I had there. But to answer your last question I think that Luca Bertini has not yet gained some (well deserved) attention, and it's a real pity because I think he's one of the most inventive and controversial Italian media artists. Finally in spring 2008 I'll start the 'Neural Archive' project, creating an online database of bibliographical references to all the physical stuff I have in my personal archive (books, dvds, cd-roms, ephemerals), to create a free online resource for researchers.


Image courtesy of Alessandro Ludovico

Together with UBERMORGEN and Paolo Cirio you have realized Google Will Eat Itself, an artistic project that aims to buy out Google with funds generated from Google Adsense. How did google react to GWEI?

Well, the official reaction of Google was a 'cease and desist' letter of their German branch. But it was very different from the other 'cease and desist' letters I've seen, it was a sort of confidential letter, not the usual cold lawyer-lexicon style one. But nevertheless even more frightening. It basically said, "ok, we understand it's art, but you have to stop it now". It matches what I think is their status of 'funny dictator', as I've tried to define it. In fact there were so many mysteries and strange facts during the project that I and Hans Bernhard did a whole lecture/performance on that at the v2's TANGENT_CONSPIRACY night, in December 2006 (video). Furthermore Google Italy, indeed, terminated the Neural.it AdSense account without any explanation. I think that was quite stupid because Neural.it has never been part of GWEI (this was clear from the beginning to all of us). But Goggle Italy was too blind minded to understand that, so just after being invited to a public debate with me and Paolo, they simply refused to come and terminated the Neural account because of 'fraudulent clicks' that never happened there. But you'd take in count that they grant the AdSense money so they can anytime decide to terminate your account without any real proof. That's also part of what I defined as their 'porcelain interface'. GWEI was for me one of the most fascinating experience I had: it was (unexpectedly for me) incredibly successful and it let me experience for the first time the artistic dimension inside a very skilled team, so sharing with Hans, Liz and Paolo all the (good and bad) moments. I'm really grateful to them.

Let's talk about Amazon Noir. What are the latest developments? Has Amazon reacted to the project?

Amazon noir is still going on with its most visible outcome: the stolen book files. We're still re-embodying them in different forms. We developed an installation that physically (and very symbolically) embodies the project. It consists of two overhead projectors displaying the logo and the diagram of our software internal mechanisms, and an incubator with one of the stolen book inside, reprinted digitally. Symbolically we chose the American counterculture classic from the seventies 'Steal This Book' by Abbie Hoffman. We in a way re-embodied the book (obtaining cover and complete textual content from Amazon) in its mutated physical form. But we also placed a warning near the incubator. It stated: "The book inside the incubator is the physical embodiment of a complex Amazon.com hacking action. It has been obtained exploiting Amazon 'Search Inside The Book' tool. Take care because it's an illegitimate and premature son born from the relationship between Amazon and Copyright. It's illegitimate because it's an unauthorized print of a copyright-protected book. And it's premature because the gestation of this relationship's outcome is far for being mature." That was why I thought that we 'stole the invisible' [http://amazon-noir.com/thieves.html]. It's an installation showing a net art piece without any IT or internet connection. Actually, various people tried to steal the book opening the incubator, claiming that they simply do what is written on the cover (we personally kindly asked some of them to put the book back, and one of them actually succeeded in stealing it during the Shift festival opening in Basel and we had to find out how to replace it quickly). This is also a proof that, ironically enough, it was also very 'interactive'.

About the Amazon reaction, they reverse-engineers the software, making the robot useless. We, indeed, spread all the books we downloaded through peer-to-peer networks (bittorrent, gnutella, fast track, emule, etc.).

Amazon Noir installation at the Share Festival in Turin, March 2007

The installation was exhibited in various museums and festivals in different countries and it has been actually nominated for the upcoming Tansmediale Award 2008. I've tried to conceptually develop a whole theoretical concept about the big online corporations marketing strategies and their potential hacking in an essay entitled "The (online) economy of desire". It'll be online soon.

Thanks Alessandro!

Related interview: Interview with UBERMORGEN.
Related story: How to survive the paper industry.

*here's the way to spam-clothing bliss.

This month Shanghai is hosting a huge eArts (read digital arts) Festival. The organizers teamed up with Fabrica, the Centre Pompidou, MIT, Ars Electronica and ZKM.

Andy Cameron, director of Fabrica Interactive, just informed me that Fabrica is keeping a video diary of the event.

Click To Play

There's already some good content such as an interview of Andy with Gerfried Stocker of ars electronica about the background to the Shanghai interest in media arts, the meeting of communism culture with Creative Commons, some trends in digital arts in China, etc. There's also a peak inside the ars electronica pavilion which i recommend if you haven't been to ars this year, they seem to have selected (mostly) the pieces i didn't like and won't therefore blog about.

The festival runs until November 11th.

Related entries: Reports from Fabrica - Gli Occhi Aperti in Milan.

Slowly coming back to the ars electronica postings with some notes from a talk by Zbigniew Oksiuta, one of the prize winners of the new Hybrid Art category and someone i was really looking forward to hearing. The Polish architect, artist, and researcher is now based in Germany where he works in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute and the University of Cologne. Oksiuta is probably one of the most interesting figures in the world of architecture, biology and biochemistry and he was as passionate and smart as i had imagined.

Oksiuta has been working for ten years on the possibility to create a new breed of biological habitat which would organically and dynamically adapt to conditions such as the absence of gravity that one might have to face both in the biosphere and in space. While architecture evokes ideas of stability and immobility, he envisions the possibility of making it living and unstable. Vegetable matter could become a live habitat, an isolated spatial entity that takes up, transforms, and synthesizes matter and energy from its surroundings by biological means.

The construction materials he works with are algae and gelatin. With traditional architecture, one has to assemble forms engineered by machines and this creates a big structure. In Oksiuta's system everything would grow at once, like biological systems. The dynamic systems would react to the external environment, communicate information and transfer energy through liquid medium.

Mesogloea 2003. Inflation of the hollows in a polymer lump floating under water

One of the challenges he encountered while working with liquid materials to grow his bio structures was the evaporation of water that's one of the reasons why he resorted to building them under the water, using neutral buoyancy (isopycnic systems). Besides the water process gives an idea of what it is like to built spacial forms for weightless conditions.

The next step is breeding the structures in petri dishes. Not plastic petri dish but membranes which work both as barriers that protects and separates from the outside and as part of the structure itself.

Spatium Gelatium 280807

His Biological Habitat: Breeding Spaces Technology, Made in Space project was exhibited at the OK Centrum, Linz. The system would use DNA as cosmic universal code: strands of DNA embedded in bioreactors are to develop autonomously into new forms of life in the biosphere and in outer space.

Both the environment and physical laws determine forms of life to the extent that their “experience� over the course of evolution is implemented in the strands of DNA. In the embryonic state, however, life emancipates itself from these guidelines and prescriptions. This is what the biological habitat uses; it provides a biotope that is not determined by gravitation and physical laws on Earth but rather by conditions in outer space. Therefore, biological forms of life also develop differently here and —similar to life on Earth— reproduce themselves over the course of an evolutionary process.

Two first images: Wojtek Kozak.

The Golden Nica in the brand new Hybrid Art category went to a whole structure not just a work: SymbioticA.

The birth of the category was motivated by the fact that people attending the festival were sometimes wondering where was the interaction of some pieces shown under the Interactive Art label, a clearer set of criteria was needed which would of course disqualify some interesting art pieces. The creation of the new category was thus the most obvious solution.

Jens Hauser, art curator, writer, and member of the jury gave an insightful introduction to the category. It was one of those "Focus or take notes" talk. So i dropped my pen but here´s a few points:

The results of a search of the word "hybrid" on google demonstrates that the biological origins of the term are increasingly used metaphorically and replaced by cultural examples of hybridity (cars, clothing, etc.) He pointed and discussed Brian Stross´ essay The Hybrid Metaphor From Biology to Culture.

Hybrid Art received 470 entries for its first year of existence. The category is dedicated specifically to today’s hybrid and transdisciplinary projects and approaches to media art, focusing on the process of fusing different media and genres into new forms of artistic expression as well as the act of transcending the boundaries between art and research, art and social/political activism, art and pop culture.

Since its foundation in 2000, SymbioticA has enabled dozens of artists to engage in and comment on "wet technologies" while complying strictly with scientific requirements. The collaborative structure produces new cultural experiments in the field of neurosciences, molecular biology, anatomy physics, anthropology and ethics.

Symbiotica offers undergraduate courses, postgrad programme, hosts individual short and long term research projects, workshops, "Friday Meetings. Symbiotica is also a founding partner of BEAP and pursues the research of Tissue Culture & Art Project.

Some of the projects developed with the help of SymbioticA include: a dress made of fungi by by Donna Franklin (image on the left); BioKino, the Living Screen; collaborations with Adam Zaretsky, the Critical Art Ensemble, etc.

Dr. Stuart Bunt, scientific director of SymbioticA, and Oron Catts explained how SymbioticA started as an artist in residence project and grew into a more stable structure as they were gaining recognition all over the world. They applied for more grants and had other artists come over to work with them.

Interestingly, Ionat Zurr explained that they applied both to the art school and to the science school. The art community didn't accept them, it was the science school which gave them support.

What makes their work appealing for the science world is that artists get more freedom to explore.

SymbioticA is very far off the radar, it is located in Perth, "the most isolated big city in the world", which apparently provides the artists with more freedom.

Part of the exhibition: Nigel Helyer´s Host, in which an audience of several crickets attend a lecture concerning the sex life of insects

For the ars electronica exhibition, SymbioticA brought some artists with them (more info about these works will follow). The form of display used doesn´t go very well with the rest of the usually very "please touch and have fun" ars electronica exhibition. For example, one project was hidden behind the heavy door of an incubator. Occasionally the door would be open and visitors who happen to wander around could have a peek, this aims to be a reference to the occasional opening up of the scientific world.

One of SymbioticA´s aims is to bring scientific discussions out of the laboratories and bring the debate out in public rahter than wait for tabloids to give their own take on it.

Catts also insisted on the fact that although many the works developed within their structure might seem to be subversive, all of them comply fully with the rules and requirement of science. That makes their approach more powerful and gives them more freedom to work and exhibit without the fear of being censored for some procedural reason.

rebel.tv has a video of Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts during the gala ceremony. Images from SymbioticA´s exhibition at ars.

Yeah! The return of the ars electronica posts. To be honest with you, this is going to be a messy time on wmmna. There are still tons of stories to write about Conflux, my little trips to Chelsea, to Beijing and there are a few more reports in store.

Right, here's the notes i took during the talk given by Bernie Lubell as a winner of the Interactive Art category.

Erkki Huhtamo, member of the jury this year, introduced the forum by explaining how people had been complaining that the interactive component of the winning works had not always been obvious over the past few years. With the creation of the Hybrid category, the focus of the Interactive Art one is now on the role of human interacting with systems and networks.

There's no electronics involved in Lubell`s installation, just wood and pneumatic components. Yet, the work charmed the whole ars electronica crowd (well, apart i guess from the usual bunch of Mr. Grumpies). It is interactivity without any pretension, just poetry and playfulness.

For Lubell, the winning work Conservation of Intimacy is all about having people physically involved, the body is part of the installation. The installation is just a stage where visitors are invited to perform their own play. The movements of a couple jumping and twisting on a wooden bench are transferred via air pressure to balls located in the adjacent room. It is made as a fully cooperative work, in fact, the bench/balls part works better when there are two people side by side on the bench.

At the same time, their movements are transferred from the drawing stylus mounted high on the wall opposite the bench onto a roll of paper that is, in turn, unspooled by a third person riding a stationary bike. There is a feedback loop between what everyone is doing and the record of it.

The installation was inspired by the physiological experiments Etienne Jules Marey conducted in the 19th century and is meant to expand Marey´s work into the field of intimacy.

Marey is famous for his research on chronophotography. But before experimenting with photography, Marey was building all sorts of pneumatic systems to better understand and measure precisely body movements, from heart beats to the way a bird flies. For example, one of these systems measured the way lips were moving during speech and his research was fundamental for the field of medical imagery.

He was successful in selling a portable instrument called Sphygmographe to measure the pulse. He hooked up horses with pneumatic sensors to study how they run (a work which inspired Muybridge and had him prove that prove that Marey was right when he wrote that a galloping horse for a brief moment had all four hooves off the ground) or construct sophisticated apparatus that he attached to the wings of birds to measure their precise movements while they are flying.

Marey’s Sphygmograph

“Conservation of Intimacy� received an award for the way it combines artistic, scientific, technological and cultural aspects, and shows that interaction functions best when each individual protagonist takes the actions of the others into account: Intimacy as the essential component of social interaction.

The exhibition at the OK Centrum also showed another of Lubell´s works which i liked a lot. Cheek to Cheek allows you to dance with youself, well... "cheek to cheek". You done a strange wooden helmet, sit on a stool and have to move about so that bladders beneath the seat transmit air to bladders pressed against your cheeks.

During his talk, he highlighted some of his installations. The most surprising one ...and the Synapse Sweetly Singing have visitors crank themselves inside a coffin than use a network of tin-can telephones to communicate with other visitors in the gallery.

That guy rocks. He reminded me of Theo Jansen, an artist quietly doing his own thing without wondering whether it is cool, innovative, whether it fits in the art system or not.

My pics.
Source of Marey images.

Beautiful things at Tesla (which will be shut down after this fall since Berlin has recently decided to kill its funding) last night –

Julien Maire's Digit, which was also awarded at this year's Ars Electronica is "a performance that is also conceived to be presented as a piece of living Art. A writer sits at a table writing a text. Simply by sliding his finger over a blank piece of paper, printed text appears under his finger. The spectators can come very close to the 'writer' and read the text following the movement of the finger. The writer remains absorbed in his task." The effect is quite spectacular since the actual mechanism is invisible. He doesn't give away how it works if you ask him and neither should we.

Digit

Maire says that "Digit enlarges the concept of projection and the concept of a project that operates in interstices between literature and moving image as well as referring to the surrealistic tradition of cutting and rearranging text: "Digit" is a kind of Soft machine. In opposition to other types of writing where machine interferes, the human movement is free and can print in any direction. The performance interfaces the human process between the thought and printed word."

"Thinking Machine", as opposed to his famous Talking Machine, is artist Martin Riches' (zero homepage but read an essay on him here) answer to Masahiro Miwa's proposal to him: "How about a thinking machine = computer? ... my dream is to build a very special or unique 'gate' ... a ''pseudo-random number generator with a simple and elegant algorithm and a long repetition". Miwa (awesome homepage), who won the Digital Music award at Ars with his Reverse Simulation Music – music that borrows from algorithms and gears to create patterns according to which the sounds are performed – suggested the following: newn = (6 - newn + previousn) mod 3.

Thinking Machine

Martin Riches' realisation took him 1200 hours to accomplish. "6 large steel balls (4 cm diameter, 250g.) are first loaded by hand into a rotating storage wheel (or shift register), and then its driving motor is started. On leaving the wheel, the balls run down a gentle, 2-meter-long gradient and, on their way, operate various mechanical gates, which pre-determine the course of the following ball, according to the algorithm. Depending on the path taken, they then play one of three percussion instruments: a tubular bell, an instrument similar to a vibro-slap, or an instrument similar to a temple block. They then return to the storage wheel to await their next turn."

Amazingly, the music that the machine creates is instantly recognizable as coming from the same composer as the utterly hypnotic "Bolero by Muramatsu Gear Engine" which the Brucker orchestra was performing in Linz.

Further niceness included Ignaz Schick's "ghosts/vibrations", 24 speakers "linked to one another with nylon ropes, which are adorned with various small, sounding objects" and a big performance including Christopher Bauder's electric moOns.

More photos to be found here.