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.

As part of Sonarama's celebration of "the year of japan," Toshio Iwai had been invited to make a performance of the Nintendo musical game electroplankton and of the sound + light musical instrument Tenori-On.

I don't need much to be convinced that the man is a genius. He could come on the stage and do absolutely nothing else that dance the flamenco and i would still clap my hands enthousiastically. People with more common sense than me were nevertheless mesmerized by his show. And i've got good news for you if you were not in Barcelona. Toshio Iwai will make another performance in Manchester as part of the Futuresonic festival at Academy 2, on Friday 21st July. I won't miss that, can't think of a better way to celebrate Belgium's National Day ;-)

The point wasn't to make wonderful music that you could listen to with your eyes closed but to show the possibilities of the instruments he developed. There were three of them on stage:

Iwai, Yu Nishibori, in charge of the Tenori-on project at YAMAHA were both playing Tenori-on and electroplankton, and Naoaki Kojima was playing Sound-Lens.

Sound-Lens, created by Iwai in 2001, is a mobile type art piece which converts light into sound. First realised as an installation piece, Sound-Lens was used at Sonar as a musical instrument. For the installation version, the participant is given a SOUND-LENS receiver and headset. They can then walk around the exhibit in search of light sources which are fixed on the walls and ceilings. When the receiver lens is held up against the lights, sounds which are hidden in the lights can be heard through the headset. Furthermore, each participant can enjoy the transformation of sounds interactively by moving the SOUND-LENS receiver around, adjusting its distance or angle in relation to the light sources.

For the Sonarama performance, 25 blue-green LEDs were place in a matrix on a stand in the center of the stage. LED's lights are designed to play a musical scale, so Naoaki Kojima was playing Sound-Lens like a musical instrument by moving the lens vertically or horizontally.

More about the performance: Luca Barbeni reviewed it on teknemedia (in italian), I put some images on flickr and i just read at Chris' place that the Tenori-on has now a weblog.

The Sonar festival isn't just music, clubbing and dancing. There were also tons of wmmna-esque works to eyeball at the SonarMática exhibition. Curated by Drew Hemment, José Luis de Vicente, Óscar Abril Ascaso and Advanced Music, the show, called Always On, is the third episode of a series of SonarMatica that focuses on the representation of territory.

The first year of SonarMatica, 2004, had been dedicated to Micronations, last year was called Randonnée and gave a glance through 21st century landscaping, from new figurativism to augmented reality to virtual architecture and datascapes.

This year the exhibition revolved around mobile culture and location projects.

During his talk at the Santa Monica Art Centre on Friday, Jose Luis de Vicente explained the origin of the title Always On. Oscar Abril Ascaso proposed the term "On" because it means "on, activated, switched on" but in catalan it also means "where." On suggests thus both an idea of place and an idea of activity.

rnd#06 underworld

De Vicente added that the idea of urban territory nowadays encompasses also a very crucial, ubiquous yet intangible element: connectivity. He mentionned several books: Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby and Me++, by William Mitchell and showed the always fascinating work of Richard Fenwick: rnd#06 underworld, a short video that shows a day in any given city: the network of communications and of broadcasts are super-imposed over the city like a veil.

In the past the walls of the city were its more important element, they were a symbol of its cultural and political power. The most powerful element of a city today is its fluid spaces, made of transports (the map of London metro is much more emblematic of the city than any other), electromagnetic waves, radio communications, mobile phone communications, etc. Some cities today define themselves by their tv or radio tower and no longer by their cathedral (cf. Berlin or Shanghai.) The transition from the cathedral to the antenna can sometimes take a very ironic form: the support pole for the golden angel weathervane on Guildford Cathedral in the UK is actually a mobile mast and supports several antennas.

The first ideas of fluid space emerged in the '60s with Superstudio's works and Archigram's Plug-In City.

The topography of networks doesn't coincide with the physical topography (cf. Graz' mobile phone landscape.)

Now back to the exhibition itself, it focusses thus on locative media and the technological and cultural works based on establishing a relationship between information and location.

Some projects were for the first time taking Sonar participants to the streets: i already mentionned Blast Theory's Day of the Figurines (after three days of constant texting i'm now very poor in phone credit but also missing my figurine, what's happening to her? wil i be able to get the same in September when Blast Theory will propose the full-fledge version of the game in Berlin?). Other outdoor projects:

- Akitsugu Maebayashi's fascinating Sonic Interface. Equipped with a computer in a backpack and headphones, you follow a guide through the city streets, shopping malls, or the underground. The sound you perceive through the headphones reflects the actula urban soundscape but with some suprises: the noises either come in mosaic or they are amplified or repeated. The subject, perceiving a shift between sight and sound finds himself in a new universe and, liberated from unified perception.

Sonic Interface and Life: A User's Manual

- Michelle Teran's Life: A User's Manual uses a very common tech device to "hack�? into surveillance cameras and see, what they see, on his/her own screen. As an art performance. Every day at 9 p.m, Michelle Teran was inviting people to follow her on a "sourveillance hacking" tour in Barcelona.

- Counts Media's famous Yellow Arrow;
- and Geocaching, an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which participants use a GPS receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called "geocaches" or "caches") anywhere in the world.

Inside the exhibtion:

- Antoni Abad's beautiful project that allow people with disabilities, prostitutes, gypsies and taxi drivers to broadcast from mobile phones;

zexe.net and TTSM

- Alejandro Duque's TTSM (Typewriter Tracklog Sewing Machine), by Alejandro Duque, uses a GPS device to track and save the data of a journey without destination. Artist's links: [k.0]_lab, s.o.u.p.

- Jeremy Wood - "GPS Drawing"- Meridians;

- Jens Brand's gPod / G-Player;

- a Zapped! kit by Preemptive Media. They were even showing a cockroach with rfid tag on the back. Last year, Preemptive Media had attached reprogrammed RFID tags to the roaches that, if placed in a Wal-Mart store, will taint its RFID database. The group distributed the roaches at the show's opening, sending them home with gallerygoers in Styrofoam coffee containers.

- Proboscis (UK), Urban Tapestries / Social Tapestries;

Bio Mapping

- Christian Nold's Bio Mapping which is one of my favourite projects ever! People are sent in the streets with a Bio Mapping tool to record their Galvanic Skin Response, a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. Using Google Earth, Bio Mapping indicates by the height of each track point the individuals' physiological arousal at that geographic location.

- Mark Shepard's Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit;

- Socialfiction's .walk that raises regimentation to an art form by giving instructions for a walk through a city. These instructions correspond to an algorithm and can be traced back to a simple computer programme;

- The Interpretive Engine for Various Places on Earth, by Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman, is a location-based narrative that relies on Wi-Fi to tell a story specific to user location.

I really enjoyed Always On, the great mix of outdoor and indoor projects, the calm of the exhibition space just below Sonar By Day frenzy, and the focus on a particular theme was so clear that it put the individual projects into a broader perspective. I guess i need to see more shows like that, i'm so used to festivals that showcase the "latest" and the "coolest" or to new media art exhibitions with a very vague theme.

Jens Brand's G-Player (Global player) works like a CD-player. But instead of playing CDs, it plays the globe. The device knows the postion of more than a thousand satellites and enables you, by the use if a virtual 3D planetary model, to listen to an imaginary trace of a selected flying object.

SonaMatica was showing the portable version of the G-Player which is unsurprisingly called g-Pod. Select one satellite on the menu (400 satellite orbits are available) and the device will analyse in real time the topographical profile of the region that satellite is flying over at the moment. gPod/G-Player will then translate this data into sound. Oceans have no sound, flat topographies produce high frequencies and mountains regions low ones.

If you have an old i-pod that you want to get rid of, Brand might modify it for you with their "satnav" application.

More images.

Drew Hemment created the Futuresonic International Festival in 1995. As AHRC Research Fellow at University of Salford, he developed Loca, a collaborative arts-based project on mobile media and surveillance. He is also a founder member of PLAN - The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network.

Together with José Luis de Vicente and Óscar Abril Ascaso, Drew Hemment curated the SonarMatica exhibition at Sonar this year.

Always On, Always Everywhere

Drew started by telling that, two years ago, he visited the Baja Beach Club, a club that represented the "cutting-edge of locative media." The Barcelona's club was the first in the world to use an RFID implant in place of VIP cards. Punters were invited to have the VIP VeriChip (the same kind of chip injected under the skin of pets) injected under their skin. Just by having your arm scanned, you can be recognised as a VIP, skip the queues at the door and pay for your drinks at the end of the night. That was the theory. When Hemment visited the club he found out that the whole story was more of a publicity stunt. Computers were not set up. It looked like a scam. VeriChip has often been associated with rather spectacular and somewhat dubious ideas such as the proposals to have migrants chipped or to tag the bodies of the victims of the hurricane Katrina.

Drew Hemment managed to interview Conrad Chase, the owner of the club (who later became a star of the Gran Hermano, the Spanish version of Big Brother.) The interview is online (i'm still wondering how he managed not to laugh during the interview). Conrad explains that the injection makes people very unique and positions them as trendsetters: "everyone has piercings and tattoos, not very many people have the VIP chip." Read also the whole story of Drew's visit at the club: Last night an Arphid saved my life.

VIP Chip system in action and Conrad Chase + a friend

In some ways, the Baja Beach Club rfid experiment is the cutting edge of Locative Media: it is not happening in a gallery or a consumer electronics fair but in a night club.

According to Drew Hemment, we've arrived at a crucial moment. Locative Media technologies are now breaking out of the hacker gulag. In 2003, the technologies were mostly in the hands of programmers and artists. Some social and art project that were still conceptual a few years ago are now coming into the mainstream. Now the situation is evolving. He gave two examples from the UK: mobile phone operator O2 is now offering Streetmap. What was being discussed and done in small workshop (e.g. PLAN) is now developed on large scale and polished by a major mobile phone operator. The other example is satellite navigation: it was the must have item last christmas. Google Earth is now a concept that most people grasp.

It's important to be able to engage in this and we shouldn't leave the whole development in the sole hands of the people who want to make money out of these technologies.

Hemment then gave the example of a group of German activists: FoeBuD. A MIT study has revealed that the Germans were the most naturally resistant to the massive implementation of RFID.

FoeBuD recently took the industry wrong-footed. The supermarket chain Metro set up the Future Store in Rheinberg to showcase how new technologies can re-shape the "shopping experience." They were offering shoppers cards that looked like normal loyalty cards but contained RFID chips. Without telling the customers about the presence of the chip. FoeBuD found out about it and wrote the supermarket chain who stepped back and added on the card a mention of the presence of the chip inside the card. FoeBuD had taken picture of the card before and after and issued a press release asking if customers could really trust a company that had lied to them. In Germany, there's thus a more mature debate that doesn't exist in other countries.

How can we respond to the technology? By showing different uses of it, by learning its limits and pushing them, by adding to the debate, etc. Being afraid of a technology is probably as bad as not knowing about it. We should try to embed social values into the RFID technology. The technology is still young, which leaves us with a small window of opportunities to get on, influence and propose alternative uses that were not foreseen right from the start. An example of something similar: Acid House: old technology used for something else. If we wait too long, some possibilites will be closed, others will be lost.

During Futuresonic, an international conference will explore the implications of RFID on July 21-22 in Manchester UK.

Images from the Barcelona club courtesy of Drew Hemment.

Well... when i write Blast Theory, i mean one of its members: Matt Adams (i took some extremely loosy pictures of him during his talk, so the portrait of him was stolen on The Age.)

Matt Adams started by giving a brief history of Blast Theory then explained with more details their latest work: The Day of the Figurines.

In the beginning, Blast Theory was particularly interested in British clubbing culture, they were trying to make out art in clubs in the early '90s. Clubbing at the time wasn't a branded activity like it is now (clubs selling their t-shirts and other "merchandising".) Matt background is in theater and he was interested in how people were staging themselves in clubs. In clubs you have a certain control: you can decide to be and stay a spectator or to be the center of attention, to become part of the show. Clubbing were a very fluid space. THe other main interested was: how do you find and build an audience? how does it form? Visual art is usually shown in galleries, galleries have their audience. Artist have a very personal dialogue with their work and get their audience via the gallery. So matt wanted to find other ways to find new audience.

This reflected also a political interest influenced by the Russian constructivism of the '20s and also by the radical forms of theatre that emerged in the 60s and 70s.

Matt wanted to see how culture could have a transformative role and to make art works which are not narrative. Stories have limits. None of us lives a linear life, our life is more fragmented. Looking for works which would be non-narratives while being also accessible for a broad public, he found out that there was already something out there that had these two qualities: Games!

Games are entertainable, readily understandable, interactive and non-narrative.

In the meantime, he had lost interest in clubs which had lost their fluidity.

Can You See Me Now?

Blast Theory's first attempt to use the street and mobile phones was Can You See Me Now?, commissioned in 2001 by the Art Council of England and the BBC. Why using mobile phones? in 1998-1999, the use of mobile phones was rising, they were becoming ubiquitous and thus became a new transformative technology. Internet is not as transformative as mobile phones. A small number of people have internet at home in some countries. Mobile phone is accessible, there's a very low barrier of entry (unlike the walkman which was a status symbol when it was launched). A study in the UK showed that the proportion of homeless people who own a mobile phone is higher than the proportion of people who have a home and a mobile phone. The mobile phone is also the first thing that immigrant buy when they arrive in the UK. The device is unusually well disiminated in our culture.

In 2000 and 2001, location and 3G were coming with all kinds of promises. Blast THeory wanted to come up with uses of these technologies which were not revolving around commerce and marketing (find the nearest McDonald's, etc.)

As Sadie Plant said "The mobile phone has privatized the phone book." It's an act of trust and reciprocity to give your phone number. In 2001, Blast Theory was thus looking for ways to address these factors. Matt Adams said the Can You see me now was rather primitive, it's a chase game in which online players and players in the streets compete against one another. Why such a simple format? Two reasons: the technical challenges were big and it was necessary to make players easily understand what was going on.

The game was developed in collaboration with the researchers of the Mixed Reality Lab in Nottingham.

People found the game very adrenaline-charged, even if they were only playing online. The walkie-talkie audio element made the game very compelling: listening to the player in the street struggling with traffic, snow, breathing heavier because he or she was running up a hill, etc. The audio element made the players feel intimately connected.

Uncle Roy All Around You

Blast Theory had some frustrations about the game: it was a short and specific experience, not intellectually engaging over a long period of time. The group wanted to extend this kind of experience, so they came up with Uncle Roy All Around You. The players are not competing anymore but collaborating to search the city for Uncle Roy. 20 players online and 12 players swapping information. Uncle Roy is always one step ahead and players never find him. They will finally get to his office but will have left already when they arrive there. Blast Theory ask people: if someone you don't know asks for your support, will you offer your help? They took the phone numbers of the people who said "yes" and gave each number to another person, saying that during one year that particular person would be there in case of need. Blast Theory was interested to see what kind of community they would be able to build like that. Two or three years ago people were not sure that it was safe to shop online, there's also still questions about trusting people on the net and in chatrooms. Matt Adams gave the example of suicide chatrooms. He commented in particular the famous example of Japanese chatrooms where depressed people get in touch with each other and arrange to meet and commit suicide together. Paradox: online space is accused of being hooribly corrupted, sick and twisted example of the worst internet can offer. On the other hand, many people around the world feel depressed and find confort in discussing with other people who feel the same and won't jude them.

Back to the mobile phone numbers swapped for Blast Theory's experiment: some people did meet as a result, other never used the number but kept it and felt a connection with the stranger out there who had agreed to be there in case they needed to talk to someone.

There was a frustration with Uncle Roy: developing works on phones is extremely difficult: mobile phones are hostile to people working on then and phone operator do not want you to mess around with the devices either. So for Uncle Roy, Blast Theroy was lending the phones. As they only had a small number of phones, the performace was always on a small scale.

Besides it's difficult to develop something new for every mobile phone that exists. You must make 32 types of the same ringtone to cover the different handsets. So for the Day of the Figurines, Blast theory had to use something that all mobile phones had in common: either the voice or the SMS. They chose the SMS.

The Day of the Figurines

Last July they tested the Day of the Figurines in London, at the Laban Center. They improved the game for Barcelona. The next Day of the Figurines performance will be in Berlin in September and it will last 24 days (only 3 days at Sonar.)

Blast Theory's concern is to let people play whenever they want to. They want to look at the culture of SMS: they can be either annoying or a welcome intrusion. FOr the new project, they wanted to keep the balance right. The goal is to have players regard the figurine as part of their life. Another concern was to make it simple, to let any kid break into the game and have fun with it. There's no more rule than necessary. For example, one of the players had decided that his figurine had stolen a BMW.