I might get what? 2 or 3 emails per day from people who ask me to write a story to promote their own event. I would love to help everyone but publishing every single call and event i hear about would be a full time job and i am not up for that one.

Besides, my readers know very well that they can find this sort of information on rhizome (who btw has a commission call for media art works running), networked_performance and various mailing lists. Wmmna is mostly about reports from exhibitions i've seen around which leaves no space to announcements. However, there are exceptions to this rule, wmmna is a personal blog and as such highly subjective, so once in a while (read every 6 months) i will blatantly favor organizations i like A LOT because i know each of them treat artists as well as they deserve. So here, dear readers, two calls for proposals which might give you the opportunity to get some fantastic holidays in Spain develop your own project in the best conditions you could dream of:

Situation Room. Image Julio Calvo. Courtesy of LABoral

- LABoral is launching two calls. One is for a curator in residence. Curators and researchers interested in media and visual arts, gaming, robotics, architecture, design, ecology, science, technology, interdisciplinary and emerging forms of art are invited to develop a research and production project at LABoral, Gijon, for two months during 2008. Deadline is May 30 and if i wasn't already so busy answering all those emails from people who ask me to promote their events i would be very tempted to submit my candidacy.

LABoral is also calling for proposals from artists to develop a research and production project at LABoral for two months during 2008. Same deadline: May 30, 2008.

Image Medialab Prado

- Meanwhile Medialab-Prado is also looking for the submission of projects to be carried out as part of the production-oriented Interactivos?'08: Vision Play workshop, which will take place from 30 May to 14 June 2008 in Madrid. The workshop aims to use open hardware and open code tools to create prototypes for exploring image technologies and mechanisms of perception.

The Interactivos? workshop will be lead by Álvaro Cassinelli and Simone Jones, with the participation of the research group Light, space and perception (Daniel Canogar, Julian Oliver and Pablo Valbuena.)

Deadline: 25th April.

Related: my previous posts about the Interactivos? workshops and about LABoral (i also wrote an article about them in Art Review a while ago.)

While i'm at it, i'll also mention (but i don't know them as well as Medialab Prado and LABoral) that NEW LIFE BERLIN is taking place in Berlin from June 1-15th, 2008 and artists are encouraged to apply for participation now.

The festival is organized by the wooloo and is open to international artists.

A few months ago, i started covering in details the projects developed at the Interactivos? workshop which took place at Medialab Prado in Madrid in June (btw they have a Visualizar workshop going on this week, with a Communication Applied Data Visualization Seminary on November 23 you might want to check out if you're in the neighbourhood). Well, i had kept another project in my closet for you.

Based on an augmented reality system, AR_Magic System allows users to exchange head with their neighbours. You stand in front of the computer screen, next to one or more persons and after a few seconds, your head appears on the shoulder of someone else and you get a new face yourself. I swapped head with Edgar Gonzalez while i was there and as i didn't like the look of myself with a beard, i'd rather show you a video of other experiments:

Video of AR_Magic System

Clara Boj and Diego Diaz work together since 2000. They have developed and exhibited their artistic and research projects all over the world. They have been artists in residence at the Mixed Reality Lab, National University of Singapore and did some research at the Interface Culture Lab at Linz University.

I've been following the work of Clara and Diego for a couple of years and because i was curious about their other projects, i decided to run a longer feature on their work.

You started working on Free Network Visible Network in 2004. The main objective of the project was to "ask for the free access to the net and at the same time to make actions in the urban landscape as a way to create new meanings in the public domain." When you look back at your ideas at the time, how do you feel? In particular about the free access issue(s)? What were the biggest challenges you encountered and were not expecting while working on the project?

At that time several situations happened in Spain that brought us to start the Free Network Visible Network project. Some city councils started to offer free wifi acces all over their territory and there were plans to extend this network to other places. But the Telecommunications Market Commision (CMT) denounced this situation as a kind of illegal competence for the phone companies. Even when in some cases those networks were only offering access to the services of a local Intranet, not to the Internet. All this kind of projects supported by the small cities administrations were brought to a stop, and only some voluntary groups continued creating wifi networks all over the Spanish territory. The same situation was happening in other places in Europe and USA.

We were really worried about the privatization of digital space, due the control that some economic powers make over one of the more basic rights of citizens, the free use of the public space. So mainly we started the Free Network Visible Network project to collaborate with those groups of free wifi networks users and somehow to spread the idea of public space as something more than streets and parks.

Now, once the project is technically finished and has been installed in several places we still think that actions need to be taken to somehow make use of the digital public space with freedom. The situation with the big communication companies and legal practices it hasn't changed much. Even is much more restrictive than before and in some places of Europe people have been fined for using their neighbours' open wifi network.

One of the biggest challenges for us, apart from the technical difficulties, it has been the relations with institutions when we were showing the project at museums or official art spaces. It is not always easy to convince people from institutions to create a open wifi network and keep it running after the exhibition is finished. The notion of private property is very strong even for something as invisible as waves.

Free Network Visible Network in Kyoto

What did the project teach you about the concept of public space?

Basically, this project not only represents the public space but it also allows people to experience it, in a hybrid dimension, as a combination of physical places and digital communication spaces. At present time we cannot talk anymore about public space without including all this non physical places that emerge when people talk, exchange information or play through digital networks. The combination of those territories, physical and digital, creates a new public sphere much more dynamic and changeable, rich in relationships and meanings. Free
Network Visible Network is a very useful tool to help understand those relations, and what is our situation, as users-citizens in this new domain.

You have used augmented reality technology in several of your projects, one of them is BE CAREFUL, FRAGILE. How was it like to present a high-tech art work in ARCO06, a "traditional" contemporary art fair? What did you try to convey with that particular artwork? How did the audience react to it?

This project had a great success among the ARCO visitors. At some point we were even asked to shut it down for a little bit because so many people were playing with it that they were collapsing the area.

It was our first time exhibiting at ARCO and we were really concerned about traditional art market and digital media collectionism. It is a very old issue and we ourselves were very interested about how the traditional art market system should be applied to interactive installations. Questions like producing pieces in series, technical needs and maintenance, etc were some of the questions we were discussing with the gallery owner and it was clear that digital media have specifications that need to be carefully addressed when selling a piece to a private or institutional collector. For us it doesn't make much sense to create a limited number series of a digital artwork when most of the time it can be contained in a cd and easily installed in any computer, even more when we are usually working with free software and our projects are registered under creative commons license. The
question was how to preserve the value of the uniqueness that traditional art market appreciate if anybody can download our source code from the web and make it themselves? It is traditional art market ready for this kind of situations?

So we did an interactive installation were a digital 3D modeled traditional vase was projected as it really was over a real pedestal. When visitors tried to touch it the vase fell down to the floor in a realistic way and finally was broken making a big noise. People were
very surprised when two pre-recorded persons (that were us) entered the scene bringing a new vase exactly identical and placed again over the real pedestal. This loop was repeated again and again each time people broke the vase. Somehow our piece exhibited at ARCO was a digital object and it could be infinitely reproduced.

It was really appreciated by the general audience and also by professionals and gallery owners. The audience was continuously playing with it, making the vase fall down again and again.

During the Interactivos? workshop in Madrid, you developed the very fun AR magic system. Can you explain us what made the work "magical'?

The magical aspect of this project is that it uses a very intuitive interaction for playing with the identity of the users. People just need to look at themselves in the video projection, that it acts like a mirror, and they will see their face interchanged with another person.

It is really amazing how people react when they look at themselves and see another face that is smiling or talking and they can not control the expression. It is as if somebody had supplanted your identity. For us it was a real surprise how people enjoyed this very simple idea and they played during long time and called their friends for see how it feels to be the other. During the time it was exhibited at MediaLab in Madrid and later at Sonar Festival in Barcelona, almost everybody who played with the piece took a picture of their transformed face. We found dozens of those pictures at flicker, which for us is a sign of how people enjoyed the experience.

One of the most magical aspects of this piece it how it plays with technological simplicity but with a really complex universe of meanings about identity.

Do you plan to develop that project any further?

Actually the project as it was developed during Interactivos? it is just a small part of the whole idea due the very limited time of the workshop and the difficulties we found with some technical aspects.

We would like to thanks Zachary Lieberman, Martín Nadal, Damien Stewart, Javier Lloret, Blanca Rego, Julio Lucio y Jordi Puig for their help programing the software which is written in C++ using the openFrameworks library.

Basically we wanted to create a complete set of magic tricks, based on one of the first tricks registered on the history of magic. In ancient Egypt a magician interchanged the head of chickens and ducks and made people believe it was really magic. We will continue working on the piece; adding new tricks were users can play magic in a very intuitive manner.

You mentioned that you want to establish a new media community in Valencia. Can you tell us more about that project? Which shape will it take? What are its objective and what do you hope to achieve?

Valencia is a very dynamic city that is growing really fast but the media art scene is really unstructured, not to say non-existing. There are very good artists, of course, but there is no place to meet each other nor is there any kind of network to meet and collaborate. We have been living in Valencia during the last 10 years but with extensive periods overseas. Recently we decided to come back and install ourselves for a long period of time. We just opened our studio, LALALAB, and we would like it to become a kind of meeting point for digital media artist where they can produce their work, or find collaborators.

LALALAB is not an institutional media center but the idea is to explore the connexions with other production center as MediaLab Prado in Madrid or Hangar in Barcelona to create this network and to dynamize the Valencia media art scene. In Lalalab there will be workshops and artist presentations and we have a good collection of production tools to help other artists develop their works at the same time that we continue with our personal production.

Thanks Clara and Diego!

On 28/11 Clara Boj and Diego Díaz will give a talk on Research art: nuevos modos de hacer en las prácticas artísticas contemporáneas at the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Mallorca.

opensourcery is what you get when you throw a master of bewitching installations and a "real" magician right into a workshop dedicated to magic and illusion.

The workshop was Interactivos?, it took place in June at the MediaLab Madrid. The illusionists are Zachary Lieberman and Mago Julián ("Julian the Magician" in english.)

opensourcery is a performance which marries camera based technology with old fashioned close magic to manipulate a live video image seamlessly and create new tricks. The custom developed software is completely open-source (thus the title) and designed as a starting point for imagining a new language of tricks and techniques for magical expression.

A few questions to Zack:

The coin follows the finger, then moves on its own + The magic eye reveals the chosen card

I suspect that it was the first time that you worked with a magician. How did the collaboration go? Did Mago Julián come with an idea asking for some technical help or did you develop the whole concept together? And did he teach you a few tricks you plan to use in your future work?

First of all the collaborate came out from the excellent advice of José Luis Vicente and Oscar Abril, two Sonar curators who noticed a similarity between how my performance Drawn works and how the magician Mago Julián uses an overhead camera to perform close magic.

It was the first time I've ever worked with a magician, and it was really surprising to see the differences in how we work and make work.
For example, magicians are very secretive about their techniques - it took a long time for Julián to warm up to showing me some of the "behind the scenes" while we were working together. I still have absolutely no idea how he does many of things he does live. In contrast, I was eager to demonstrate all of the techniques and hidden systems that make the projects I've worked on, like Drawn or Manual Input Sessions work.

Since we didn't have a lot of time to develop the project during interactivos, we started with Drawn, and he spent some time learning and performing with it. I also spent time examining his close magic performance, and learning about the kinds of things he might need in a performance. What was amazing is that his magic is so good, he really doesn't need any help with technology, so it was a very nice starting point. We started to identify needs - for example, to take a snapshot of an object and reveal / hide that snapshot when it is covered, so that his act can have a certain amount of freedom. I recoded a great deal of Drawn (in order to make a clean, open source project) and we spent a lot of time just playing with different effects and ideas.

An amazing thing that happened was that Mago Julián and Punkie (his wife and partner in the act) started completely hacking the software. They would take different bugs or problems and flip them into remarkable tricks. Every day I would come to the workshop and Julián would be like, "We have to show you this!" The last trick, for example, when Julián reveals the card through a magic eye was completely based on bugs in the rendering. I cringed the first time he showed me (as a programmer I hate to see those bugs) but the cringe quickly became a huge laugh.

Video (excerpt) of the performance at Sonar / SonarMática 2007:

How does opensourcery work technically?

It's software that is programmed in C++, using the openframeworks library, that takes a live video image and composites it with synthetic graphics and then reprojects the results to create something which is seamless and looks just like live video. The software is based on Drawn, and is completely open-source.

During the performance a second operator (in this case the Magician's wife) works backstage to control the software, but it could be programmed to work with wireless devices or switches.

Do you plan to go any further in the development of this piece?

Yes, one of the nice outcomes of the Sonar performances is that we have been invited to several Magic festivals. For me this is very exciting because while I typically work in new media festivals, I have never even been to magic festival, let alone performed in one. We are going to develop several new tricks and refine the current ones.

Additionally, we have made the software completely opensource, and we will be making in early fall a manual and tutorials available so that anyone who wants to perform these tricks (or develop new ones) should be able to. We look forward to other people participating or using the software. While a magician almost never reveals his tricks, we want to do the exact opposite.

Thanks Zack!

*Previous episodes: I Thought Some Daisies Might Cheer You Up, Delicate Boundaries, Palimpsesto and Augmented Sculpture v 1.0. Interview with Marcos García from MediaLab Madrid.

Project number 4* developed over the Interactivos? workshop at the MediaLab Madrid last month.

That one appealed to me a lot while i was visiting the workshop. All those daisies among just chips, broken bulbs, circuit boards, bits of cables and plastic!

I Thought Some Daisies Might Cheer You Up, by André Gonçalves, reacts to the displacement of the air that moves with us. Using people's movement in the space, the installation simulates unnatural forces, in a poetic sense.

The room is divided in two parts. In the first half a computer vision system tracks user's movement, direction and velocity; fans are activated via an Arduino board. If someone passes in a certain direction only the corresponding fan would be activated, the faster the movement, the faster the fans spin.

In the back room, there is a flower bed of daisies, leaving space for people to walk around it. In front of the flowers a camera captures video and sends it to the projector. The projection shows an image of the flower bed bending with people's motion.

What inspired the idea behind *"I thought some daisies might cheer you up"?

This installation have been in my mind for a couple years, at the time i was in residency at Experimental Intermedia Foundation in NY, so sometimes i liked to feel like a tourist and walkaround the city, that day i had in mind walking all the way down central park starting from Harlem, so at some point i climbed one hill and, without expecting it, i was facing the Jacqueline Kennedy Reservoir and i was instantly overwhelmed by that huge amount of water, it’s location and it’s surroundings, it instantly gave me the shivers! That state of conscience induced by the place itself made me enjoy the moment in a very emotional way. While holding that feeling i found myself watching the canes that grow on the shore, they were bending due to strong winds and they were making a really loud noise, i remember ignoring my skin senses and just imagined what if it wasn’t the wind that were bending the canes but, instead, sound itself. As if the sound was coming from somewhere else and when passing by those canes it was making them bend more or less accordingly to it’s amplitude, like if they were crouching, trying to hide from sound strength or performing choreographed movements with the sounds heard. After that i just wanted to explore how sound could be used as a movement inducer in order to recreate that experience and at the same time it triggered in me this idea of how to make a spectator believe in a not so natural behaviour when presented as a natural one.

The main difference between the finished work and the initial idea is the use of movement replacing sound, as if the air that we force to move when we move could have an effect on real objects, in a poetic sense it's a tremendous amplification of our mass dislocation air-flow movement, the air that moves along with us.

The other difference is the subject to control, instead of canes i knew i wanted a flower, but it had to be as fragile as poetic, i instantly remembered of daisies for being the most simple and beautifull wild flower, at the same time i remembered this line from the song “Daisies of the Galaxy�? by Eels, where Mr. E(?) was picking up daisies for a friend in need, taken out of the context i like to keep in open who i really wanted to cheer up, a loved one, interactivos?, myself...

What was the biggest challenge in developing the project?

Definetly everything related with the control of the natural factor involved. As funny as it may seem, in the beggining of the development, the biggest problem appeared to be finding the proper daisies, although it was spring time flower shops in town only had one or two specific kind which didn’t suit because they were too big and hard to bend with the wind forces applied, fortunatly i had a big help from Gema e Paola, my always so kind volunteer collaborators, so they took me outside Madrid to a green house where they had all sorts of flowers, plants, vases, and got that sorted out, but then i faced one of my most important concerns, how to keep it’s “reality-ness�?, the idea of controlling nature forces always seems very easy in sketches but, as in other of my experiences, the response is as surprising as it is not linear.

Because of that the biggest part of the time was spent in testing, testing, testing and testing it again, changing all the parameters that i could think of so to achieve the best settings for the the overall effect, also i had to look for fans that could bring the most to the installation, both in technical and aesthetic aspects, had to find the best position, the rotation speed, the hardware reaction factor, all this done with the time constraint flashing above, somewhere.

Do you plan to develop the idea any further?

Yes, this specific piece i would love to present it in a larger scale in a different setting where the installation, instead of two contiguous rooms, would be separated by a gallery window so that the first room would be the gallery sidewalk, reacting to the outside environment.

But what mostly interested me from the very start was having wind as an output of a whole system with the purpose of controlling a third element by a certain magical invisible force.

Work in progress

Since i left Madrid i have already made two new pieces using wind as a controller for physical events, both of them are exploring this in different directions but at the same time both are taking advantage of this poetic use of wind forces.
The first of them is a continuous levitation of a balloon, where one fan is faced up and a balloon located over it, the fan speed reacts to the sound amplitude of a chosen source so that the higher the volume the higher the balloon floats, i’ve been using it as a real-time video installation for my solo musical performances, but i’ve also been working on a bigger and standalone version...

The second is a collaboration with Pedro Boavida, a friend who’s also a musician, we were invited to play in this big one night event happening in Lisbon and we wanted to make something that could also work as an installation, after several days of brainstormings and experiments we ended up with this setup that consisted in five guitars, five fans, a sound mixer and some amplifiers, the guitars laid on the floor with the fans attached over the first fret blowing in the guitar’s body direction, both the wind and the fan vibration over the strings cause each guitar to resonate creating a soundscape based in the guitars tuning and the performance space resonant properties.

Both projects can be seen in my website in more detail.

Thanks André!

* Delicate Boundaries, Palimpsesto and Augmented Sculpture v 1.0.

See also Dandelion by Sennep, Sommerer & Mignonneau's Interactive Plant Growing.

Yo! Here's the third* project born from the Interactivos? workshop held at MediaLab Madrid last month.

Delicate Boundaries, a work by Chris Sugrue, uses human touch to dissolve the barrier of the computer screen. Using the body as a means of exchange, the system explores the subtle boundaries that exist between foreign systems and what it might mean to cross them. Lifelike digital animations swarm out of their virtual confinement onto the skin of a hand or arm when it makes contact with a computer screen creating an imaginative world where our bodies are a landscape for digital life to explore.
Video.

What was the biggest challenge in developing the project?

The greatest challenge was that the piece dealt very directly with the human body. It was important to create the illusion that these animated forms (which my Spanish colleagues have fondly named
bichitos) have an understanding of the structure of the arm or hand they are exploring and can respond to it in a believable manner.

Interactive works are often facing the challenge of unpredictable audiences and responses, but attempting to respond so specifically to something as versatile and subtle as hand and arm movements was pretty challenging. I also wanted to create the experience that these lifelike forms that are made entirely of projected light had a physical presence in the world. It was certainly a challenge to design a system that convinced people to try to hold them and feel they had perhaps some responsibility for them.

Do you plan to develop the idea any further?

Yes, absolutely. I think there is a lot of potential for development.

The next release of the installation will integrate audio feedback. I began working with several talented sounds designers during
Interactivos?, but did not have a chance to fully integrate it. I think an audio-visual synthesis will add to the sensory experience of the piece. On a more conceptual level, I plan to consider the idea that when two foreign systems or frontiers suddenly connect there is an inevitable change to both. So I am interested to find a subtle, but meaningful way to communicate that.

Looking further into the future, this project explores a lot of the concepts and questions I continue to research during my fellowship at Eyebeam. I am very interested in how digital artists deal with the human body. Although our bodies are so familiar and intimate I think they continue to be a source of mystery (at least to me) and it seems very human to try to use technology to explore and augment them. I also love work that wants to break free from the computer screen or other device, and I think a fascinating way to do this is to treat light as a living or physical force.

How does the system work technically?

The system design is not terribly complex. I use a digital projector mounted over the installation space for the projection onto the body.

A video camera and infrared illuminator are aligned with the projector to perform the vision tracking. The rest of the magic happens in the software which is written in C++ using the openFrameworks library. The program I developed (along with the help of several very talented collaborators) has three main components.

The first connects the various spaces of the installation (the video image from the camera, the projection space, and the computer screen). Understanding how these spaces connect physically was essential in creating a believable transference between the virtual and physical worlds. The next step was processing the live video to find different structural and motion information about the audience and how they are connected to both the screen and to each other. Finally, the fun part was designing the behaviors and interactions. I spent a fair amount of time finding the right marriage of form and physics to give the bugs some character and a sense of life. I have to credit Zachary Lieberman for all his help in programming the physics and motion in the piece.

Thanks Chris!

See also: Light bulb screen and Augmented Sculpture v 1.0.

Another work developed last month at MediaLab Madrid during Interactivos?, a workshop focusing on magic and illusion (see also Augmented Sculpture v 1.0.)

Palimpsesto (video) is a sculpture screen made of "dead" light bulbs. Moving spots of light are projected on its surface and as a visitor comes closer to the screen, the light dots gather and re-create the silhouette of the person. The dead light bulbs seem to come to life again. The presence of a public metaphorically gives back their lost splendor to the bulbs.

When i visited the workshop, i didn't get to see the installation working. Nevertheless, i found that the screen was really amazing (as was the amount of bulbs that had been broken in the process.) I recently asked Daniel Canogar, the creator of the project, to give us more details about it:

What was the biggest challenge in developing the project?

There were two basic challenges, and i can't quite pinpoint which was bigger. The first challenge was figuring a way of constructing a screen with dead light bulbs in an immaterial way,so that they would look like they were floating. During the installation, many light bulbs were broken, a whole string would come crashing down onto the floor, everyone would stop working and look at me, it was quite dramatic. Eventually I figured out how to do this and there were no further problems.

The second biggest challenge for me was coordinating with the programmer. It was hard to be patient while Jordi, my main programmer who was terrific, typed away for hours trying to get the effects that I was after. In the end he did a terrific job, and was worth the wait.

Do you plan to develop the idea any further?

I consider the piece at the Media Lab a prototype, which is going to be made much larger in the following months. The piece will be featured in a large new media show that is opening in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid June 2008, a show called "Maquinas y Almas" (Machines and Soul) curated by Montxo Algora. I plan to develop the piece more with MediaLAb, who have being absolutely amazing to work with. They have a real interest in research projects, and want to take my piece on to develop it more.

How does the system work technically?

When first encountering the sculptural screen made of dead light bulbs, the viewer sees these free-floating white particles flying about. The video projector casts these spots of light on the light bulbs, which makes them look like they magically give light again. When the viewer gets close to the screen, a web-cam hidden amongst the light-bulbs captures his/her silhouette and this information is processed by the Open Frames software and makes the free-floating light particles cluster together. The resulting light-blob loosely has the shape of the viewer's silhouette, and follows him/her as they move along. It is the viewer that brings new light to these dead light bulbs, brings forth the memory of these discarded artifacts.

Thanks Daniel!

Image Medialab interactivos.