I felt no particular urge to see It's not only Rock 'n' Roll, Baby!, an exhibition which reconsiders personalities of today's rock'n roll scene in the context of their work as visual artists. I don't like rock. But then i was in Brussels and had just read that the show was curated by Jérôme Sans, the co-founder and ex-co-director of what remains my favourite art center on earth, the Palais de Tokyo, and the current director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. He also happens to have his own rock band, Liquid Architecture.

Image La Libre Belgique

It's not only Rock 'n' Roll, Baby!, or 'how the voice of rock emerged in the visual arts', is crammed with big names (so i was told but i make a point of not knowing anything about rock, i don't like it, did i mention that already?): Patti Smith, Brian Eno, Chicks on Speed, Fischerspooner, Devendra Banhart, Pete Doherty (i know that one, he used to date Kate Moss)... There's some 20 of them brought together under the same roof, not to give a concert, but to showcase their installations, drawings, collages, paintings, sculptures or videos.

Kembra Pfahler, The Volutuous Horror of Karen Black, 2007 © Kristy Leibowitz

The good aspect of starting a visit with a grumpy attitude is that you can only have good surprises. I ended up liking the exhibition, despite the fact that part of the works on show correspond too much to the idea i had of what could be rock 'n' roll art, basically a bit of trash here and there, what looks like blood smudged over canvas, some provocative sexy installations that wouldn't impress your granny, etc. Don't expect to see portraits of Mick Jagger by Andy Warhol or the banana on the cover of a Velvet Underground LP in the gallery, you're in for a fresh and very contemporary treat.

Now the goodies:

Miss Kittin's graphic design-powered paintings.

Miss Kittin, bored in madchester, All drawings by Miss Kittin (Caroline Hervé), © 2002, Miss Kittin

Bent Van Looy, lead singer of Das Pop's dark acrylics. Apparently Brian Eno told the artist: 'Your paintings are the only other stuff I like'. Who am i to call into question his taste?

Bent Van Looy (Das Pop), Untitled, 2006 © Philippe de Gobert

Riceboy Sleeps:

Riceboy Sleeps, Indian Summer

The gem of the exhibition is it's catalog (available at actar and on amazon USA and UK), conceived as a 'half-book, half-rock magazine'. Grrrrrreat graphic design, interviews, essays, loads of photos. Gorgeous.

Some videos and photo galleries.

It's not only rock'n'roll baby ! runs at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Bozar), Brussels, through September 14, 2008.

Another project developed last month during Vision Play, one of the Interactivos? workshops organized by Medialab Prado in Madrid. This time i asked Horacio González and Paola Guimerans to tell us something about biophionitos, a project they developed together with Igor González and other collaborators.

Biophionitos generates artificial life using a system similar to the zoetrope, an early animation device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. Horacio González, Paola Guimerans and Igor González added to the concept a touch of Processing and a whiff of Arduino to develop an interface able to create a physical animation which runs in an old-style but interactive phenakistoscope (one of them reacts to your caresses, another one wakes up when you talk to it, etc).

This virtual pet created with the system is made of a limited series of simple polygons which the program has modified in order to give the drawing what looks like a biological life.

The artists also uploaded online a tutorial to do your own Biophionitos.

Note to spanish-speaking readers and in particular to the lovely people at TECAT (a great blog about media art i just discovered courtesy of Marcos, os lo recomiendo) who have kindly translated some of the Interactivos? posts in spanish: i pasted at the bottom of this post the original answers of Horacio and Paola. They wrote me in spanish and i translated their text in english.

Can you tell us what lies behind the name Biophionitos? What did you decide to call the project this way?

Paola
Well, this is a strange story. Horacio and i have been working together as a team for a few years under the name VHPlab. A few months ago, he came to spend some time in New York and we had the opportunity to travel together to San Francisco.

One our way back, in the plane, we started developing the project and thinking about the physical visualization of an auto-generative image. After much discussion, we managed to shape the idea and for various reasons, we agreed on the fact that the image should allude to a living being. We therefore decided that it would be an animal as it appears on our logotype.

The project matured conceptually and the time came to give it a name. At that moment, we knew that the prefix 'bio' had to be part of the name and we decided to use a game to complete the name.

Our objective was to invent a name that doesn't exist, just like when you are a kid and call something you don't know with a word you've invented. During the process we were reminded of Fiona, a very special child, the daughter of friends whom we had just met over that trip to San Francisco. Although it might sound surprising we also started thinking of the longest and strangest words of the Spanish language: Parangaricutirimicuaros. It is a word almost impossible to pronounce, it comes from a tongue twister, that Horacio and his sister used to mis-pronounce as Paranguanitos, when they were kids. We used a fragment of each word to build the name of the project; bio-phio-nitos.

Why did you choose to keep a "vintage" and early cinema look to the project? How important is the retro design for biophionitos?

Horacio
There is a side of the design which is retro and it is related to a series of ancient little games / toys that we had in mind while we were developing the project. One of them is the Cinexin. The idea to take some inspiration from a zoetrope was nevertheless related with a conceptual objective that we had set ourselves right from the start: we wanted to reflect on the form in which a generative animation should be presented.

Many artists who work with Processing have to face the issue of finding a way to pass from the digital world to the physical one, of overcoming the limit set by the screen. Our intention was to use a totally physical and very rudimentary interface to display an animation. We wanted the interface to highlight the simple principle that makes any animation work, while revealing what usually stays hidden: the trick.

An animation is nothing but a sequence of images very similar to each other. However, as this is usually imperceptible, the spectator sees them as something difficult to understand and magical, something that is beyond their reach.

Paola
In addition to the fact that the final design is retro and inspired by toys from previous decades, we also refer to the idea of the virtual pet and to the new digital toys. The idea of creating an interactive version of Biophionitos and the fact that spectators have the possibility to create their own virtual pet evoke the Tamagochi and the way users relate to them in order to keep them alive. We assigned sentiments to each boxes so that users would feel some kind of empathy when they activate the animation and would somehow feel the magic that those first inventions had.

What was the biggest challenge you met with when developing the project and how did you overcome it?

Paola
The projects has various dimensions and lectures. It was difficult to make them tangible, to have team members agree on their meanings and to establish a series of priorities that had to be met during the 15 days of the Madrid workshop.

The presentation to Interactivos meant that we had to clarify how the work would be distributed and the time necessary to fulfill each task. The team worked perfectly well. Horacio was in charge of developing the Processing application. Igor took care of the electronic, mechanical and Arduino side of the project. I was more active on the design and creative aspects of the work. But the help of the various collaborators was essential to enable us to complete the project on time.

On the other hand, Horacio couldn't come to Madrid during Interactivos. We had to work at a distance, discussing over skype or mobile phone.

Horacio
Working from a distance is always frustrating, there is not direct relationship between what you ask and what you get in exchange. You must invest much more time in communication. Some issues and decisions taken on the spot end up emerging in the course of a conversation, one of the side had taken that issue for granted while the other side had no idea about it. Everything happens with a delay and during the waiting time misunderstandings happen. Each time i made a modification i wanted to know how it would affect the final result inside the zoetrope. However, i couldn't see it until someone printed the new Biophionito, recorded it in a video that he or she had then to upload on Youtube. Very often, they would just call me and try to describe what could be seen in order to accelerate the process but trying to imagine in my head what they were explaining was tremendously difficult, almost hilarious.

I'm interested in the generative part of the work. How does it work exactly? Which kind of data do you feed the system? Why not drawing the little creatures yourself?

Horacio
It's the beta version of the program and it needs to be improved. We developed it over the course of the two weeks Interactivos workshop in Madrid. Each pet is made of a series of polygonal vertebrae; the first vertebra is the head of the animal and the rest constitutes its body. When the pet moves, the body follows the head in a decelerated way. Therefore, according to the direction and speed of the movement, the pet will stretch or shrink.

The idea is very simple, each vertebra is made of 2 segments. The first segment of each vertebra is attached to the previous vertebra and the second segment of each vertebra follows the first segment. As the answer of the second segment is not identical to the movement of the first segment, each vertebra will shrink or stretch according to the speed and direction that the previous vertebra has.

For the moment, when users create their pet, they can add vertebrae and shape it as they wish. It's a fairly rough way of drawing but for a first version it worked fairly well.

Our objective is to end up converting each of the points that compose the segments of the vertebrae in vertex of a unique Bézier curve. Doing so the drawing will be more detailed and free, its profile will then be curved and not polygonal.

The inclination, distance and the size of the various segments that form the pet condition the way each vertebra is going to stretch and shape. Although the process is always the same, each pet behave in its own way, because when they move each vertebra has a peculiar way to react. This modifies totally the way we perceive the movements of the pet.

Do you plan to develop the project any further?

Paola
We would love to see people make their own Biophionitos at home, using the D.I.Y. tutorial and that it could generate some online feedback about the results. Besides, after Sonarmatica, we were offered to give a few workshops about Biophionitos. It could be an interesting opportunity to enrich the project and hear about the perspective of the users.

Horacio
For future versions, we would like to have the program analyze the way users design. It would use several characteristics such as the number of vertebrae or their proportions and on that basis, alter the path of the pet or the way some vertebrae connect to each other. In any case, the movement of the pet is deeply influenced by the final interface. Each zoetrope can only contain16 different images, the animation must therefore be very simple and cyclic. Our objective is not to create a complex nor spectacular animation but to develop an easy to use and fun interface that will generate a pet which, by its functioning, reveals the mystery behind animation.

Thanks Paola and Horacio!

More biophionitos images.

Now for the spanish version

Can you tell us what lies behind the name Biophionitos? What did you decide to call the project this way?

Paola > Bueno es una historia curiosa. Horacio y yo llevamos trabajando en equipo desde hace varios años bajo el nombre de VHPlab (www.vhplab.net).Hace unos meses, el vino a pasar una temporada a NY y tuvimos la oportunidad de viajar juntos a San Francisco.

Durante el vuelo de vuelta, comenzamos a desarrollar el proyecto y a reflexionar sobre la visualización física de una imagen auto-generativa. Después muchas discusiones, logramos dotar de forma a la idea y por diferentes motivos, entendimos que la imagen debería hacer alusión a un ser vivo. Entonces, decidimos que fuera un animal, como el que aparece en nuestro logotipo.

El proyecto fue madurando conceptualmente y llegó el momento de buscar un nombre. En ese momento, teníamos claro que el prefijo "bio" debía formar parte del nombre, así que decidimos completar el resto de la palabra partir de un juego.

Nuestro objetivo era inventar un nombre que no existiera, como cuando eres un niño y denominas a algo que no conoces con una palabra inventada. Durante el proceso nos acordamos de Fiona una niña muy especial, hija de unos amigos que acabábamos de conocer durante nuestro viaje a San Francisco. Por raro que parezca también nos vino a la cabeza una de las palabras mas largas y raras que existen en castellano: Parangaricutirimicuaros. Se trata de una palabra imposible de pronunciar, proveniente de un trabalenguas, que Horacio y su hermana solían pronunciar erróneamente como Paranguanitos, cuando eran pequeños. Utilizamos un fragmento de cada palabra para construir el nombre del proyecto; bio-phio-nitos.

Why did you choose to keep a "vintage" and early cinema look to the project? How important is the retro design for biophionitos?

Horacio > Hay un aspecto del diseño que es retro y está relacionado con toda una serie de juguetes antiguos que tuvimos en mente cuando desarrollamos el proyecto, como el Cinexin (http://usuarios.lycos.es/los80/id64.htm). Sin embargo, la idea de inspirarnos en un zootropo estaba relacionada con un objetivo conceptual que nos planteamos desde el principio; queríamos reflexionar sobre la forma en que se presenta una animación auto-generativa.

Muchos artistas que trabajan con Processing se encuentran con el problema de cómo trascender del mundo digital al físico, de cómo superar la limitación que supone la pantalla. Nuestra intención era utilizar un soporte enteramente físico y muy rudimentario para mostrar una animación. Queríamos que el propio soporte pusiese en evidencia el sencillo principio que hace funcionar a cualquier animación, revelando aquello que normalmente queda oculto; el truco.

Una animación no es más que una secuencia de imágenes muy similares entre si. Sin embargo, como normalmente esto resulta imperceptible, el espectador las percibe como algo incomprensible y mágico, algo que está más allá de su alcance. Nosotros creemos que la tecnología debe ser abierta y además creemos que la tecnología no es abierta únicamente por el echo de ser open source. La tecnología debe ser accesible, comprensible, los usuarios deben poder hacer un uso consciente de la misma. En Biophionitos hemos intentado desarrollar una tecnología auto-explicativa, que se revele a sí misma, que en su desarrollo, recoja su historia y su funcionamiento.

Paola > Por otro lado, añadir que aunque el diseño final es retro y está inspirado en juguetes de hace décadas, también contemplamos como referencia de la idea de la mascota virtual y de los nuevos juguetes digitales. La idea de crear una versión interactiva de Biophionitos y el hecho que el espectador tuviera la posibilidad de crear su propia mascota virtual, nos recordó a los Tamagochi y a como el usuario se relaciona con ellos para mantenerlos vivos. Asignamos frases cargadas de sentimientos a cada una de las cajas para conseguir cierta empatía por parte del espectador en el momento de activar la animación y así transmitir de algún modo la magia que tenían estos primeros inventos.

What was the biggest challenge you met with when developing the project and how did you overcome it?

Paola > El proyecto tiene muchas dimensiones y lecturas diferentes. Resultó difícil darle forma, que todos los miembros del equipo lo entendiesen del mismo modo y establecer una serie de prioridades, para garantizar que se pudiese llevar a cabo durante los quince días del taller en Madrid.

Presentarlo a Interactivos requería tener muy claro el reparto de trabajo y los tiempos de desarrollo. El equipo funciono muy bien, porque que cada uno se hizo cargo de una parte clave del proyecto. Horacio se encargó del desarrollo de la aplicación en Processing. Igor de la parte mecánica y electrónica, de Arduino. Y yo, del diseño y la creatividad. En cualquier caso, la ayuda de los diferentes colaboradores fue determinante para poder terminar en tan poco tiempo.

Por otro lado, Horacio no pudo venir a Madrid durante Interactivos. Tuvimos que trabajar a distancia, manteniendo conversaciones a través de Skype o del movil.

Horacio > Trabajar de forma remota es siempre algo frustrante, porque no hay una relación directa entre lo que demandas y lo que recibes. Es necesario invertir mucho más tiempo en la comunicación. Siempre hay cuestiones y decisiones tomadas en el momento, que una de las dos partes del equipo presupone y la otra desconoce hasta que aparecen en una conversación. Todo sucede en diferido y durante los tiempos de espera suele haber malentendidos. Cada vez que yo hacia un cambio, estaba deseando conocer como afectaba al resultado final en el zootropo. Sin embargo, no podía verlo hasta que alguien imprimía el nuevo Biophionito, lo grababa en video y lo subía a Youtube. En muchos casos me llamaban y trataban de describir como se veía para acelerar el proceso, pero resultaba tremendamente difícil, casi cómico, tratar de hacerse a la idea.

i'm interested in the generative part of the work. How does it work exactly? Which kind of data do you feed the system? Why not drawing the little creatures yourself?

Horacio > Es una primera versión del programa, aun necesita muchas modificaciones porque se desarrolló a lo largo de las dos semanas que duró interactivos en Madrid. Cada mascota se compone de una serie de vértebras poligonales; la primera de las vértebras es la cabeza del animal y el resto componen su cuerpo. Cuando la mascota se mueve, el cuerpo sigue a la cabeza de forma decelerada. Así, en función de la dirección y velocidad del movimiento, la mascota va estirándose y encogiéndose.

La idea es muy simple cada vértebra está compuesta de dos segmentos. El primer segmento de cada vértebra está pegado a la vértebra anterior y el segundo segmento de cada vértebra sigue al primer segmento. Como la respuesta del segundo segmento no es idéntica al movimiento del primer segmento, cada vértebra se encoge o estira en función de la velocidad y dirección a la que se mueve la vértebra anterior.

De momento, cuando el usuario crea su mascota puede ir añadiendo vértebras y dándoles la forma que desee, es un sistema un poco rudimentario de dibujo pero para una primera versión ha funcionado bastante bien.

Con el tiempo, nuestra intención es convertir cada uno de los puntos que componen los segmentos de las vértebras en vértices de una única curva bezier. Así será posible hacer un dibujo mas detallado y libre obteniendo un perfil curvo y no poligonal.

La inclinación, la cercanía y el tamaño de los distintos segmentos que componen la mascota condicionan la forma en que cada vértebra se estira y encoge. Aunque el recorrido es siempre el mismo, ninguna mascota se comporta del mismo modo, porque al girar cada una de las vértebras tiene una forma particular de reaccionar. Esto modifica enteramente la forma que percibimos el movimiento de la mascota.

Do you plan to develop the project any further?

Paola > Nos gustaría que la gente empezase a hacer Biophionitos en su casa gracias al D.I.Y. y que esto generase cierta clase de feedback con los resultados a través de la web. Además, después de estar en Sonarmatica, ha surgido la oportunidad de impartir algunos workshops sobre Biophionitos. Puede ser una oportunidad interesante para enriquecer el proyecto y conocer la perspectiva de los usuarios.

Horacio > Queremos que el programa analice la forma que dibuja el usuario, en futuras versiones. Que utilice ciertas características como el número de vértebras o su proporción, para alterar el recorrido de la mascota o la forma en que unas vértebras se relacionan unas con otras. En cualquier caso el movimiento de la mascota está muy condicionado por el soporte final. Cada zootropo puede contener únicamente 16 imágenes diferentes, por lo que la animación debe ser muy sencilla y cíclica. Nuestro objetivo no es hacer una animación compleja ni espectacular, sino desarrollar una interfaz sencilla y divertida para crear una mascota que, en su funcionamiento, revele al usuario el misterio de la animación su naturaleza.

A tidbit from the recent This Happened in London, where Semitransparent Design from Japan, Matt Jones and Russell Davies, Simon Oliver and Brendan Walker gave some insights in the inner workings of their recent projects.

Brendan Walker as Thrill Engineer

Brendan calls himself a thrill researcher and engineer, and his design practice Aerial is "specialising in the creation of tailored emotional experience". This might sound a bit like standard lingo at first, but they actually mean it, since they're not looking at aesthetic pleasure from glitzy bathrooms or glossy interfaces, they're talking death-defying experiences, screams and cold sweat. This is an interesting subject for design since we are living in a time where often the emotional aspects of an object can be as important as the item itself, with people attributing cuteness to robots and such.

Originally trained as an aircraft engineer, he soon realized that there's more to flying than just getting from A to B. Especially fairground or theme park-rides often aim to produce the same feeling that you had when that jet you were on suddenly dropped a few hundred meters. Thrill Laboratories looked at the way roller coasters are created as scripted experiences: people usually undergo a series of feelings when on the ride, which often enough (think of the ones that pretend to be over and then comes the real drop) follow a narrative almost like in a film.

Airlife, Seatbelts from the Chromo11 project

To get a grip on the world of thrills, Walker teamed up with a criminologist from UCLA in Los Angeles to create the Taxonomy of Thrill and Thrilling Designs, two publications which try to formalize the aspects of the experience of being thrilled. And because this is proper research, they even created thrill-equations which include variables like euphoric value, valence polarity or the strong emotion coefficient.

Having that somewhat formalized, Thrill Labs and a gentleman named James Conran teamed up and applied for one of the British Wellcome Trust's grants to create a harness which can be stripped to people on rides and would capture their emotions. "The technology for recording extreme emotions is there, it's just a question of bolting together the right parts". So they did and successfully created a setup which allows to record audio, video and different vital signs like the heart rate of someone on a ride, as well as their current acceleration.

Mockup of Fairground: Thrill Laboratory at Dana Centre

After demoing this device, they were approached by London Science Museum's Dana Centre to create a three-week Fairground show which would include three "classic British fairground rides", the Miami Trip, the Ghost Train and the Booster to their venue in South Kensington. Each ride exploring a slightly different theme (pleasure, frisson and visceral delights), the main challenge was how to convey the subjects' experience on the rides in the yard to the audience inside the Centre. Dressed like Russian engineers in red overalls, Brendan and his colleagues from Shunt created a whole "carnival of experimentation" around the rides. The the images and data from individuals on the rides was streamed into the center (with wi-fi dropouts unintentionally but effectively adding to the drama) where there it was just displayed upstairs and interpreted by an expert downstairs.

Footage from Oblivion: Thrill Laboratory

Since then, there has been increasing interest in the research of thrill, with the Fairground performance being repeated at the iconic Oblivion ride at Alton Towers, which claims to be the world's first vertical drop roller coaster. There Brendan worked with a team of psychologists to survey 80 riders and collect their data into what became "a real monster of information". This eventually hints at the more serious side of thrills-there is a big market for developing technology and methodology of these extreme experiences. There has been little research so far in that area, especially in terms of design since most of these rides more or less stand upon 100 years of tacit knowledge and not rules and methodology.

A robo coaster

The ultimate goal, of course, would be designing a cybernetic ride with actual biofeedback from the individuals on it, always adapting the ride to their emotions and sensations. A little hint of that might be the internet-infamous robo coasters, some of which are already in use at Legoland California.

Airphoria: Terminal 2 at Shunt

And, for everyone who wants to have a controlled near-death experience of their own: Brendan and Thrill Laboratories will perform their Airphoria: Terminal 3, a.k.a. The Death Slide, this Friday (11th) evening at Shunt in London, which is located under the arches of London Bridge. Go scream!

Related story: Thrill Laboratory.

Back to the latest Interactivos? at Medialab Prado in Madrid. Subtitled Vision Play, this edition offered artists and other creative people the opportunity to create prototypes for exploring image technologies and mechanisms of perception, using open hardware and open code tools.

When it comes to exploring image technologies in a striking and poetical way, i'd say that Karolina Sobeka is certainly one of the most talented artists i've ever met. A couple of years ago, she developed the mesmerizing wildlife backseat projection which she showed in several countries. This time she was in Madrid to bring into being the Immodesty project.

Image courtesy of Emanuel from tagr.tv

This system is a prototype for a portable image recording system based on cheap, disposable multiple cameras positioned along a path. Controlled by a microcontroller, each camera can be assigned an individual time delay.

The aim of the project was to create an affordable platform which enable all kinds of temporal-spatial experimentation. Their first prototype for example, tried to re-conceive or visualize a spatial perception which expands the body's point of view in space. Check out the videos on the project website to get a clearer idea of what the project is about.

What was the inspiration the Immodesty project? How did you come up with that idea?

My background is in animation and video, and I've always been interested in making videos whose structure is manipulated at a very basic level, frame by frame, and that say something about our perception of time or space or point of view. These three elements are normally linked as the camera simulates our experience of visual perception. If we disassociate them, we can step outside this experience and maybe 'cheat' the laws of physics. There is something magical about seeing physical reality from a point of view that this reality precludes.

Screenshots from The Matrix (image the raw feed)

The kinds of videos I wanted to make would call for the multi-lens camera set-ups (which do exist -- and which were made famous by the bullet time effect from Matrix -- but are very out of financial reach for an independent artist). So when I had an idea for a video that would require a fast and long vertical movement of the camera, Interactivos? call came along for 'Vision Play' projects. During the workshop I wanted to create a reconfigurable recording system, which could be used to create many different kinds of content, a tool for artists to experiment with, as well as to demonstrate one kind of recording paired with one kind of display. Since I've been interested in the viewer's interaction with an image and in the bodily experience of space, I ended up going with recording moments in time from multiple points of view, and building narrative with them. The narrative would unfold as the viewer explored these moments by moving through space. The change in perspective gives the viewer new information about the scene she's watching. It is a similar experience as when you walk by an open door and only see a fragment of the scene at a time. Your movement reveals the space and the story. When you come back to the doorway the scene is different, the story has advanced. In the installation the viewer would be able to approach the story from either direction, and once she's seen the entire 'moment', a new one will be loaded that shows another moment in the same story.

I think this is a nice metaphor for the scope of our attention, always moving from detail to detail to sequence them together in a sense-making pattern.

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Image courtesy of Emanuel from tagr.tv

Immodesty seems to be very complex from the technology point of view. Which kind of challenge did you encounter while developing it and how did you overcome them? Did the difficulties make you modify any aspect of the project?

In a way the technology to make it possible existed already when Eadweard Muybridge was arranging his cameras sequentially along the path and triggering the shutters -- the complex part is turning it into a portable, modular system that's affordable and easy to experiment with. For a while the biggest challenge to creating a system like this was the expense of technology, but today the prices of cameras are dropping, it's conceivable to use lots of them for one project, and it is possible to imagine it as a tool for experimentation. The cameras are also getting smaller and lighter, which make it possible to make a portable rig and to manipulate and position the cameras more freely.

This project posed many challenges, for example designing and building a modular reconfigurable rig, that would at the same time provide the rigidity and near-perfect alignment for the cameras. We ended up creating a wooden module for each camera that could be angled independently in the horizontal plane and that still allowed the cameras to be tilted and adjusted by hand. Most challenges were overcome after a lot of head-scratching thanks to the great help of the awesome collaborators and instructors at the workshop. One problem however that we couldn't go around was the inconsistency in the time delay between the triggering of the shutter and the camera capturing an image, which made impossible the precision necessary for achieving some nice time effects. For the next version of the project I'm planning to use different cameras, hopefully solving this problem. This time we used the Dakota disposable digital cameras, the least expensive option, and which I liked because of utilizing the hack developed for these cameras when they came out, though it might have proved to be more of a trouble than benefit.

Image courtesy of Emanuel from tagr.tv

Creating the interactive display also posed some challenges. We had barely any time to put the installation together and could barely give enough consideration to the spatial arrangement, and to making sure that the size of the image and change in the projection felt correct in relationship to the viewer's movement.

The project plays with spatio- temporal situations. Can you describe the kind of experimentation the multi camera system can give life to? Did any application emerge over the course of the development that you had not thought about before?

I think it would be interesting to record things impossible to experience physically: extremely slowed-down time flow while the movement in space is fast, or camera movement in the 'frozen instant' combined with a display in a 'augmented reality' system. For example I would like to create a spherical rig to record spherical video (the cameras would all be triggered at the same time and the images stitched into a large spherical map) that could be explored in a custom interactive display. It could be used for exploring movement and perception not possible through our physical bodies: for example my initial idea to create the vertical camera movement, in a video shot from a point of view of someone who is jumping higher and higher, way beyond human capabilities. I can also imagine it being used as a 'wearable' recording system, lightweight enough that it could be carried around while recording.

Many people brought many different ideas to this project -- from an architectural point of view it could be used to create 'virtual spaces' or 'expanded screen'. Someone working with stereo imagery, like Alvaro, would be interested in creating stereo videos using parallel camera paths. It could serve as a kind of a 'total view' mirror.
Several ideas came up also for using it interactively and hopefully we'll be making some of them real soon!

Do you plan to develop the project any further?

Yes, definitely. What we developed at Interactivos? was a very imperfect prototype, which demonstrated only one simple application. There is definitely plenty of room for improvement and for taking it into many different directions. I'm planning to use different cameras that will allow more flexibility: automatic download or even real time image capture, perhaps video recording capability, etc. Hopefully we'll be able to bring to life some of the ideas that came up during Interactivos? and I'll be able to create more videos and installations.

I'm definitely open to any ideas people might have for using it, and once we have our second prototype that's a little more stable it would be great to make it available for different kinds of projects.

Thanks Karolina!

Another season, another exhibition worth taking the train to Florence for at Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina.

Marnix de Nijs' latest installation, Exploded Views - Remapping Firenze, spectacularly recreates a visual and dynamic body experience of the city. Minus the added visual layer of the hordes of tourists who walk through its cobbled streets every day.

See for yourself:

Two industrial treadmills in front of a huge screen display renderings of a deserted Florence. The 3D images are put into motion by the physical effort made by the viewer(s)/runner(s)/performer(s). The speed of his or her movements directly guides the intensity of the aesthetic experience. Sensors placed in the handle bar detect movements, and allow the viewer to determine which direction should be followed and what will be the intensity of the images traversed.

Exploded Views - Remapping Firenze

That might sound a bit like de Nijs' famous installation Run, Motherfucker Run.

There are some similarities of course. There's the irresistible element of risk. Don't be fooled by the cushion which gently inflates behind you as you run.... Runners don't have much more control on the probability of their fall as they have on its location (i did witness some "lateral falls" but they were totally benign.) I actually wonder what would happen with this installation in "risk-management" crazy Britain. But that's another story.

Just like in RMR, the runners meets with the emptiness of the city, with an almost total absence of any human imprint on the spaces. In Remapping Firenze however, the human presence is crawling back into the city through a store of sounds registered in the city by audio designer Boris Debackere.

Run Mother Fucker Run

The runner can only hear the field recordings when navigating slowly through the geometry of the streets and buildings. When they accelerate, contact with human voices and noises is lost. Which touches upon one of the most impressive characteristics of Remapping Firenze: running and slowing down/stopping on the treadmill provides the public with a totally different perspective.While you adopt a gentle walking pace, the city looks real and recognizable in all its touristic cliches and beauty but once you run, you enter a new dimension, the one of modernization and globalization which Florence, just like any other city, has to live up to, no matter how fascinating the history lurking behind its thick walls can be.

RMR shows a modern city. It was in fact Rotterdam but unless you intimately know Rotterdam there was no hint of the actual location. It could have been anywhere. As its name attests, Remapping Firenze is deeply grounded in its location.

Exploded Views - Remapping Firenze

The images on the screen are part film, part computer graphics re-creation. They were created using a brand new scanning software, developed both at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and at the University of Washington. The system generates a kind of extremely detailed 3D. Its functioning is very different from the usual procedure to generate 3D images. This one works with image recognition. When a peculiar spots in the picture is recognized in different pictures, it become the reference point of the 3d meshes.

Marnix de Nijs, Rendering Exploded Views Remapping Firenze, 2008

Exploded Views - Remapping Florence was made especially for the CCCS. It's the first of a series of works by leading international artists who have been invited to Florence to create site-specific works that reflect the diverse realities of this city'. Catch it while you can. The exhibitionis open until June 30 at Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina in Palazzo Strozzi, Florence.

The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, by Steven Jacobs (available on Amazon USA and UK.)

010 publishers write: In the films of Alfred Hitchcock, architecture plays an important role. Having worked as a set designer in the early 1920s, Hitchcock remained intensely concerned with the art direction of his films. In addition, the 'master of suspense' made some remarkable single-set films, such as Rope and Rear Window, that explicitly deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen. Spaces of confinement also turn up in the 'Gothic plot' of films in which the house is presented as an uncanny labyrinth and a trap. Furthermore, it became a Hitchcock hallmark to use famous monuments as the location for a climactic scene. Last but not least, Hitchcock used architectural motifs such as stairs and windows, which are closely connected to Hitchcockian narrative structures (suspense) or typical Hitchcock themes (voyeurism). Apart from dealing with these issues extensively, Steven Jacobs discusses at length a series of domestic buildings with the help of a number of reconstructed floor plans especially made for this publication.

1966 "Torn Curtain," Director Alfred Hitchcock. 1966 Universal. - Image MPTV.net

This is one dangerous book for people like me who don't need an excuse to jump in the sofa and watch a Hitchcock movie instead of staying in front of the computer to work. Still, no matter how many books have been written about the "Master of Suspense" i never felt compelled to read any. Until this one.

Author Steven Jacobs claimed that he had written a monograph about an non-existing architect which make more sense than one might think at first sight. After all, movie directors and production designers have been known for using film sets as an intermediary to reflect on the city of the future. Having designed more models than built houses didn't prevent architectural studio Archigram to be one of the most influential and iconic architectural studios ever. Hitchcock didn't advance the slightest step in that direction. His art did not explore possible or futuristic architecture but remained grounded in what was available at the time of films, with a marked preference for old-style furniture and bourgeois mansions (think Victorian or his own house near Guildford.)

Lobby Card from Vertigo (1963 reissue). Image tcmdb

The Wrong House (a title referring to the 1956 movie The Wrong Man) is roughly made of two parts.

The first part of the book, the theoretical one, is by far the most fascinating. It explains in details how Hitchcock regarded set design as crucial element of the drama, used both domestic elements and touristic sites as protagonists in the story but also extended the architectural language to camera movements and positions, editing and other cinematographic practices.

1954, Rear Window

Most of the settings for his movies were mounted in studio, where Hitchcock had total control over the shooting conditions. The most bourgeois house was often represented as a space of oppression, danger and a provider of the uncanny. The interior is stuffed and closed, keys give the viewers access to the murder room, and each step on a stair advances the denouement as much as it delays it. Other buildings, even the public ones, are not necessarily safer, perversion lurks behind motel doors, museums are made for mysterious encounters.

1948 James Stewart, Alfred Hitchcock, and Cast on the set of "Rope." 1948 Warner - Image MPTV.net

In location shootings, the film director had a field day toying with crowds and playing with urban icons. The former gave him some great opportunities to insert his famous cameos. The later included the Golden Gate Bridge, the British Museum, the UN Headquarters, Mount Rushmore which are so intimately connected to the films shot there that it can be said that Hitchcock tailed tourism as much as it stimulated it.

Still from Vertigo, 1958

1959, North by Northwest (via filmposters)

The second part of the book, made of case studies that dissect meticulously the architecture and internal design of 26 houses from 22 different films, is a bit overwhelming. When Jacobs hasn't been able to trace drawings of sets built in the studio, he reconstructed the floor plans of these houses, mostly on the basis of what he saw in the films. Each movie is investigated from an architectural point of view. That's how The Balestrero House in The Wrong Man is analyzed under the perspective of Kitchen sink claustrohpobia, Bates house and motel are defined as schizoid, Sebastian house in Notorious is a place for Nazi hominess and that's how Rebecca discovers that Manderley is in fact Bluebeard's Castle.

Plan of the ground floor of Manderley in the film Rebecca

I wouldn't say that The Wrong House is an architecture book. As i am much more interested in architecture than cinema i was surprised to see how metaphorically the term "architecture" was used along its pages. But then i also like to be surprised once in a while....