Virgin Media has commissioned UVA to ‘explore the themes of communication and modernity’ as part of their 10th year celebrations of broadband. As a concept, UVA explored the material of optical fibre and stripped back – it is essentially a beam of light.
The response to the brief is a series of installations set across six rooms and four floors of a raw industrial space behind the OXO tower in London.
As you enter the space, you are posed a question. You speak your answer into a microphone and your voice is amplified and distorted as it is played back to you. Slightly amused and curious, you climb the stairs into the darkness.
As your eyes adjust, flashes of red laser light race round the edges of the room to create hard edged forms. It’s an impressive visual mixed with sporadic snippets of voices, and you quickly pass to see the same effect in a smaller room outlining a TV, table and a sofa.
The next room appears to have a long reflective channel down the middle, maybe 10 metres long. Red, green and blue lasers at either end are mixed together to form white light and then this light is reflected and scattered back down the length of the installation. All the time snatches of voices (which you now realise are the responses to the earlier question) are syncopated into a heavy bass track and perfectly matched in time with the laser sequences.
It’s mesmerising, thrilling and the sense of the world of conversation passing through light is beautifully represented. My photos do not do this justice in any way.
The next room appears to have a ‘smiley’ face and the concept wasn’t apparent.
The last room is in the loft of the building is a sequence where lasers from different parts of the room converge on single points as they move. Snippets of news and other sounds are mixed together and this piece (although very beautiful) felt more of a showcase for effects than the strong narrative that was represented earlier in the show.
Overall a stunning achievement – technically and in terms of drama and narrative.
The behind the scenes videos are a lovely touch into the revealing processes involved in creating this type of work.
Spotted on the Barbican website – This looks like a very interesting use of a dead space in East London -
As part of Radical Nature, the experimental and socially engaged architectural collective EXYZT has created a dynamic satellite project, The Dalston Mill.
Inspired by an overgrown wasteland, EXYZT have been working closely with various local communities to turn a disused site in Dalston into a vibrant rural retreat for the people of the area and beyond. Literally occupying an abandoned garden, the project offers an exciting programme of events, screening and summer feasts.
‘The Physical Internet’ as a buzz phrase has been thrown about a fair bit recently and only really recently have I seen things start to get interesting. I really like the idea of making the internet tangible and a flipside to this is taking a real world interaction and broadcasting this onto the net. A few things have made this much more attainable ->
1) Twitter and other systems have opened up to let other systems interact through them via an API to send/retrieve data.
2) Electronics such as arduino or ioBridge have made the geeky electronics bit much easier.
3) Programming interfaces such as Processing or Openframeworks have made the geeky programming bit much easier.
Here is a little recap of some interesting/useful/useless/fun interfaces.
An ordinary office chair – you let out a little bottom burp and a twitter status gets updated. I kid you not. It actually uses a methane gas sensor and some amazing hacking skills to work.
Fed up with waiting around for your toast to be done – well now your toaster tweets when that bready goodness is ready. Poke London did a much higher tech version of this recently – Baker Tweet.
A baby growing and moving inside a mothers womb is a special experience that the father doesn’t have to miss out on – A sensor is hidden inside a rather stylish garment which is wrapped round the waist of the mother and every ‘kick’ by the baby is broadcast to twitter.
Want to know if aliens are invading the earth? Take one fire alarm – The New York Times API and a bit of hacking and you have your very own aliens detector. The system works by monitoring the New York Times and if 50% of the articles are about aliens then 85db of screeching alarm will alert you to the fact – totally ridiculous but genius all the same.
Putting an RFID on a cat flap is a great way to keep naughty neighbourhood cats from eating their way into your house as the flap only opens if your cat is at the door – but who not hook this upto a twitter feed so you can track the comings and goings of your feline friends.
I actually would love to extend this to put a GPS or RFID on a cat and track where it goes to on its prowl – I bet this would be surprising how far they go.
For five nights this week, visitors to Trafalgar Square will be treated to spectacular illuminations covering the front of the National Gallery.
25 February – 1 March, 6–10pm
Picasso exhibition
You can also see real masterpieces by Picasso at the Gallery. The illuminations celebrate the opening of the National Gallery’s must-see exhibition ‘Picasso: Challenging the Past‘.
Interactive installation work is really becoming really interesting of late as more brands commision work and more design studios are born out of the frustration of working in one medium – really blurring the lines between art/architecture/design/interaction. A great way to introduce yourself to this world is with the upcoming Kinetica Art Fair.
Kinetica Art Fair is developed by Kinetica Museum in partnership with P3 and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.
More than 25 galleries and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art are taking part with over 150 exhibiting artists. The Fair will be like no other with living, moving, speaking and performing art.
The Fair provides unparalleled opportunities for the public and collectors alike to view and buy work from this thriving international movement and to participate in the programme of talks, workshops and performances.
It’s on from friday 27th -> monday 2nd in London town and the lineup of speakers and performances looks great.
It is an interactive installation in our office window where your face gets motion tracked in realtime onto one of 12 slightly bizarre xmas characters. The website then lets you find your face and create a personal christmas card around it.
The face tracking system was written by Joel Gethin Lewis (ex UVA) and written in open frameworks. The behind the scenes system is actually very funny to watch as you see peoples reactions to the window. Overall it is a very simple system which I’m really proud to have helped bring together. Come on down and have a go.
For three evenings in October, a new interactive smoky communication will be underway in central London – one that combines a very modern medium with a 5,000-year-old one. In Memory Cloud, visitors can text any message they like to the artists’ creation, and that phone message will be made into light-and-air smoke signals and huge in Trafalgar Square. This new exploration of personal expression in public spaces is from Minimaforms, founded in 2002 by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos as an experimental architecture and design practice that explores projects that provoke and facilitate new means of communication.
