Everything I Do is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes Any Difference is a playable level for Half Life 2 and a performance conceived as a direct response to an installation of his friend Pat Rios.

Rios had filled a Chicago gallery with objects and furniture that suggested his mantra that ‘everything he does is art.’ Chris Reilly replicated the gallery space and its art pieces in a 3D first person shooter game environment by manipulating its architecture. During the performance, Reilly manipulated the character to “interact�? with the space. Shooting up the room, blowing up Pat Rios' installation, and graffitiing “CHRIS�? on the wall with a machine gun. Reilly was not only paying homage to male adolescents impulses within gaming environments, but also reacting to Rios’ artistic vision.

"After all, if everything you do is art, that's kind of like saying nothing you do is art; everything's on the same level," explained Reilly. "That condition goes along well with a video game, where everything is basically without consequence. If you die, just start over and everything's back to the way it was."

In a second version of the work, Everything I Do is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes Any Difference, Part II Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gallery, the 3 floors of an art gallery had been modeled, along with some of the artworks from the show.

The Ai systems of the modified Source engine was unleashing attacks of monsters, aliens, robots and zombies (all of them characters from the original game) on unwitting virtual gallery attendants. Health points and extra ammo could be earned by machine-gunning the artwork. Players/performers were also given a vast arsenal of military-grade guns for "expressive destruction" of the gallery walls. They could also pick up cans of spray paint to create their own art works.

The performance reminded me of Ars Doom that Orhan Kipcak and Reinhard Urban developed for the 1995 edition of Ars Electronica as a satire on the art business.

Using the Doom engine the artists reproduced in 3D the exhibition space. Equipped with their tools—Georg Baselitz' thumbs, Nam June Paik’s remote control or Arnulf Rainer’s paint brush— the visitor (at the exhibition center or online anywhere in the world) could destroy works of art, other artists and art critics. The favourite victim of players was said to have been exhibition director Peter Weibel.

The work is also said to be the first attempt by an artist to use a computer game as an artistic medium. Other similar game mods followed such as Museum Meltdown (image on the right), by Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup, another first person shooter game mod that allowed museum visitors to wander around a virtual version of the exhibition space killing people and blowing up masterpieces.

Julian also points to Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt's Container.

Via the always excellent Videoludica.
Check also Maia Engeli's list of Art Game Mods of a Shooter Game; exibart's story on videogames vs musei (english version), inspired by this page from Media Art Net.
Front's "Representation of Things" that uses computer game as a design tool.

Is the Internet becoming an entity? If the answer is positive, what are the characteristics of this being?, wonders Fang-Yu Lin.

Inspired by the Turing Test, he designed From The Great Beyond, a typerwriter that has (seemingly) a life of its own.

By typing on the keyboard of the custom robotic typewriter, you are able to "chat" with the Internet while the background application searches online resources for response. There's not screen, the typewriter automatically prints out the resulting text or ASCII art on a paper roll for you to view or keep. Be it whimsical, intelligent or simply irrelevant, the typed words of the Internet reveal a fragment of truth regarding itself.

The existence of an invisible entity is suggested by the noise of the typing and flowing responses spit out from the typewriter.

Video.

Via exibart.

More typewriter: TTSM (Typewriter Tracklog Sewing Machine), by Alejandro Duque, uses a GPS device to track and save the data of a journey without destination; 22POP is a typewriter that sends typed letters as emails to your destinary; Life Writer turns the letters typed into artificial life creatures that appear to float on the paper of the machine.
Also: The Universal Digest Machine features a web spider that crawls the net, digesting web pages, outputting a brief analysis of their contents and printing it on a receipt.

Electricity flowing around the body. What an uncomfortable thought, writes Hannah Perner-Wilson. Yet she designed the Clothing that arranges the Body collection. The first prototype is a jacket that connects the flow of electricity between electrical gadgets scattered in five hidden pockets around the body.

CAB visualizes our dependency on mobile technology. We carry in our pockets and handbags all kinds of gadgets; we are systems of sorts - a set of draws, a storage box, a showcase for our collections of digital data plus their extension with the outside world. Both the garment's apearance and use play with this fact that we spend every day within close proximity of electronic devices, within the flow of electricity around our bodies.

The pockets connect their content with the outside via the flow of electricity. Instead of regular plugs and plugholes the electrical current flows through material magnetic fastenings.

Seen at Tangible, audible, playable, wearable interface cultures, ars electronica 2006.

Another piece i saw at ars electronica (looks like a loooong time ago now) is Tartarus. It is a real time 3D simulation in which you interact with a virtual character. You have to touch the screen with your finger to guide the little man through dark rooms and dilapidated staircases. Like Sisyphus, the character is destined to carry his burden over and over again. It's not a giant rock as in the Greek mythology tale but something slightly ridiculous: a wooden chair.

As the viewer guides the character, the perpetual replication of his environment is discovered. Iterations of the chair begin to accumulate, eventually building to an impasse. At this critical point, the obstacles fade and the cycle repeats.

It took me some time to understand what was happening. You touch the screen and the eyes of the man will follow the place you touched, then he'll grab the chair and carry it along the corridor. Facial expressions respond to the location and prompting of the viewer’s position in the scene. The virtual camera is programmed to follow the character and navigate within the confines of the architectural space. Over two dozen animation sequences are randomly accesses and blended to control the character in response to the viewer’s interaction and to the geometry of the environment.

A work by Alan Price, Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, Ohio State University.

Is it possible to feel the temperature of a virtual object? Thermoesthesia, which i saw at the ars electronica center, is a table that lets visitors feel the different temperatures of a wide array of graphics (from snow flakes to heat waves) through the sense of touch.

The surface of the monitor screen displaying the images is warmed and cooled by 80 Peltier modules. A PC controls the electrical circuits feeding current to the modules. The thermographic displays can read out temperatures ranging from 5° to 45° Celsius.

A photosensoric touch-pad system registers the position of the user’s hand via infrared light diodes and thus enables the visitor to interact with the thermographic images.
Concept by Kumiko Kushiyama.

You can get a rough idea of what it looks like (but not what it "feels" like of course) with the video of Thermoesthesia, found on digg.

Thermoesthesia
My images on flickr.

One of the works that received an honorary mention at the prix ars electronica in the Net Vision category is Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project, a collection of photographs with a web based companion that tracks Hasan M. Elahi and his movements in real-time, from the last meal he ate to the last public urinal he visited.

Between June and November 2002, Elahi had been the subject of an investigation by the FBI as a possible terrorist suspect. He was at a residency overseas while this was initiated. Upon returning home, the artist spent 6 months frequently meeting with FBI agents who wanted to know every detail of everything, explains Elahi: What was I doing there? Who was I speaking with? What did I see? Where did I sleep? And even down to what I ate and drank. I was eventually cleared and to the relief of my friends, family and co-workers, I am officially no longer considered a terrorist – after a 3 hour long polygraph exam which was repeated 9 times.

Tracking Transience uses modern technoloies to document every aspect of his life. Inspired by the “prison ankle bracelet�?, he chose to wear a device far more invasive of his privacy in terms of access to the detail of information available.

The device uploads images tagged with exact GPS coordinates of where the image was shot to a server which then sends the GPS tag to the United States Geological Survey which returns an aerial surveillance image of the artist's exact location. The server compiles this map with the uploaded images and small thumbnails of the previously used images into the web based file which is then accessed online by anyone.

Three other networked performances but of shorter duration:

In August 2004, Paula Roush --author of the Arphid Recordings performances in London-- got herself electronically tagged. She created a semi fictional alter-ego Marion Manesta Forrester, who was electronically tagged and given a period of three days to earn her citizenship to Bowville, a fictional urban cityscape whose inhabitants were invited to follow her movements and vote for or against the protagonist.

Roush chose the name Marion Manesta Forrester, as a partial homage to the suffragettes- the first women to undergo and rebel against photographic surveillance, the work is also a partial reaction to the announcement of electronic tagging for asylum seekers in the UK, and a reference to Lars Von Triers' Dogville.

In 2002, the two members of 0100101110101101.ORG wore a GPS transmitter that, exchanging data with satellites, was constantly transmitting to their website their exact position on the urban environment. The VOPOS project was trying to underline how vast amounts of personal information are moving into corporate hands.

0100101110101101.ORG also put his own telephone under control for a month, so that all Internet users had real-time access to any phone conversation trough the website.

For the Liverpool Art Biennal in 2004, Jill Magid worked with the operators of the city's CCTV network to teach them the techniques of professional filmmakers.

Throughout this one-month performance, called Evidence Locker, Magid wore a red trench coat and boots, ensuring she could be easily spotted throughout the city. She called the police on duty with details of where she was and asked them to film her in particular poses and even guide her through the city with her eyes closed - all using the public surveilance cameras.

All around Magid, the most innocent passers-by were transformed by the camera's behaviour into potential bag-snatchers, rapists and serial killers.