Kunstautomat

Rudy Rucker

2009-06-20T23:46:00.007+02:00

I have always been very inspired by the non-fiction and "transrealist" publications by author Rudy Rucker. One of the essays in "Mind tools" have been republished in our new book "Re_action".
Rucker visited Copenhagen this week and I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with him in the "free town" of Christiania.

Yet another book release

2009-06-14T19:48:00.003+02:00

The Danish National Board of Heritage has published a book about using digital media in museums. Morten Søndergaard and I have a written an article for this publication (and the “Hørbar/Audiobar” is on the cover).

Book Release

2009-06-04T23:13:00.003+02:00

Today we released the book ” Re_Action: The Digital Archive Experience” (ISBN 978877379522). The book is edited by Morten Søndergaard and me. Contríbutions by Marianne Bech, Peter Weibel, Mark Weiser, Sebastian Campion, Astrid Lomholt, Thomas Markussen, Rudy Rucker, Carl Emil Carlsen, Lev Manovich, Clay Shirky, Kjell Y Petersen, Karin Sødergaard, HC Gilje, Lars Lundehave Hansen, Rasmus Holmboe, Morten Søndergaard and myself.

ARoS museum interview

2009-02-09T22:27:00.002+01:00

I'm showing a piece at the ARoS Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark. They interviewed me by mail and put it in the catalogue. But you can also download it from the ARoS website. (The printed version is in English/German/Danish, but the online version is Danish only)

Skyline of Shanghai

2008-12-09T13:52:00.002+01:00

This is China candy I brought back home from the Shanghain eArt 2008.

Vanished Artnode Website

2008-07-22T15:23:00.004+02:00

The website of the Artnode Foundation suddenly went offline. Our hosting provider would not host the site unless we used them as ISP. Finally they took down the site. Unluckily this happened at the Danish holiday season – when the Artnode member with the domain name code is away. We are currently moving the site to another provider and will switch the domain ASAP (but it might take a couple of weeks)

Souvenir do Brazil

2008-04-02T16:20:00.002+02:00

I brought home a tube of Acerola toothpaste from the FILE festival in Rio de Janeiro.

FILE Rio People

2008-03-24T11:30:00.001+01:00

I haven’t been posting anything lately. Sorry. I have been busy traveling and planning exhibitions for the fall.
But I went to the FILE festival in Rio de Janeiro. And I met a lot of nice people there: All the folks behind FILE – Fabiana, Paula and Ricardo. At the symposium I met Lars Lundehave Hansen (seems strange to travel 11.000 km to meet a guy that lives 115 km from my home). I also was lucky to meet David Jhave Johnston, who is making a film about God in his bathroom. And Myron Campbell who showed his beautiful and scary stories.

Using SRF02 ultrasound ranger in VB

2007-11-13T16:27:00.000+01:00

Lately I have been working with ultrasound rang finders. I’m using the very inexpensive Devantech SRF02 (approx 14 €). This ranger has an I2C interface ideal for microprocessors such as the Arduino or the BASIC Stamp. If you want to connect it directly to a PC you will need some sort of interface available on a standard computer. I´m using the Devantech USB-to-I2C board. This board is tiny, priced at approx. 27 € and can interface up to 16 ultrasound rangers. I’m working in VB.net (VS2005) and had to do some code-twisting to get it to work. You can download my srf02.vb module as a ZIP-file. Just add this module to your VS2005 project and call the function like this:
sonarping(comport As String, sf02_address As Byte)
The function returns the distance in centimeters as an integer. The default address of the SRF02 is &HE0.
Download the SRF02.vb module

YOU_ser exhibition at ZKM

2007-10-20T22:58:00.000+02:00

ZKM in Karlsruhe celebrated their 10 years anniversary tonight by opening the “YOU_ser” exhibition. I’m showing my Hørbar/Audiobar at this exhibition. The opening was great, lots of nice people. I totally lost my voice tonight (due to cold weather and speaking german).

TimeSquare video exhibition

2007-10-14T12:20:00.000+02:00

I spend a great night Friday. We opened the "TimeSquare" exhbition of videos shown in display windows around Solbjerg Square in Copenhagen (curated by yours truely). The four artist - Marius Watz, Lisa Strömbeck, Erik Olofsen and Junebum Park - spoke at the library and showed some of their other works.
(The image is from the video "In memory of all those who work without ever getting a reward II" by Lisa Strömbeck)

No Tokyo trash

2007-08-08T13:42:00.000+02:00

Having spent some days in Tokyo, I’m very surprised by the lack of trashcans.
It’s very hard to get rid of your accumulated garbage in this city. But the streets are very clean. It’s seems like everybody is taking care of their own trash – taking it with them home. Copenhagen seem very dirty in comparison, even thought there is an abundance of public trashcans. Perhaps the citizens of Copenhagen should take a greater responsibility of their environment.

Retro tech sale.

2007-06-25T21:04:00.001+02:00

DR – the Danish national radio – are moving from their old location to brand new buildings in the ”Ørestad” area. This Sunday they were selling a lot of old equipment. I would have bought one of their Studer tape decks if only I had room for it – they are all the size of a small car! Instead I bought a Lyrec RB04 – aka the Lyrec Fred. I have always thought the Danish company Lyrec (“Lyngy Recorders”) made very attractive machines. When it was new the price tag was approx. 9.000 euros. This Sunday I paid 13 euros for mine.

Guide for using Windows-based computers in art pieces

2007-05-10T21:27:00.000+02:00

During the last few years I have made several art installations using computers with Windows OS. If you plan to set up a piece in a gallery and have it running unattended, I have several hints for you. Download the guidelines as PDF

Closing the Artnode office

2007-04-29T12:02:00.000+02:00

This is a sad day. The Artnode Foundation is closing the office in Copenhagen. We wish to spend our restricted funds on activities, and have decided to shut down our office space. So far we have no plans - nor money - to open in another location. We will continue to function as always, but without a physical location.

Festival of Research Opening

2007-04-29T11:54:00.000+02:00

We got it all together before the Research Festival opened. Here the Danish minister of research, Mr. Helge Sander is at the bar. (Photo courtesy of Festival of Research)

Festival of Research

2007-04-11T15:25:00.000+02:00

I am building a smaller and more portable version of the Hørbar / Audiobar. This one is made of acrylics and aluminum. And the software is running on a single mediacenter computer. This version is going to be presented at the starting event of the Festival of Research in Denmark. We are a small team of 3 persons working hard to get it finished before April 26th. At the moment the trickiest part is getting hold of the RFID-tags. The Danish supplier would not sell the 160 tags. Their minimum order is 5.000 pcs. So now we are trying to get then from USA.

Magazine download

2007-03-28T21:55:00.000+02:00

The Danish Ministry of Culture publishes a quarterly magazine called “Kulturkontakten”. The December 2006 issues features a short interview with me (and a weird photo of me). My installation “POM 3” is featured on the jacket of the magazine. You can download the issue as a PDF (2.8 mb) from the website of the ministry.

MAXXI Exhibition

2007-03-24T00:44:00.000+01:00

I'm showing my work "A Reactive Self Portrait" at Net Space exhibition at the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome, Italy. The museum chose to put a screendump of my piece on their invitations for the opening. And it looks great!

Processing – the book

2007-03-23T21:14:00.000+01:00

The Processing book is finally out on MIT Press. It’s not the “missing manual” (the Processing website/community is much better for this). But last year I was asked to read and comment the manuscript, and even if I skipped the code (which I didn’t), the book was full with great ideas from some of the most talented people among the “creative code” folks. Sadly it is 50 dollars. But US dollars come quit cheap these days.

LPT Freeware

2007-03-12T14:46:00.000+01:00

Last week I was doing a workshop at the Art Academy of Jutland. We need a simple way of controlling motors and toys from a remote webbrowser. We ran a server on an old inexpensive PC with a printerport, and I wrote a small commandline tool for switching pins on the port on and off. You can download this extremely simple program. The program is freeware and a small text file with instructions is included – but I don’t offer any support .

Lilibeth Cuenca performance

2007-03-12T10:11:00.000+01:00

Saturday I went to the Kirkhoff Gallery to see artist Lilibeth Cuenca re-enact a whole series of performances by Klein, Ono, Orlan, Paik, Abramovic and a lot others.
I got “signed/tagged” by the artist.

Street Name Hack

2007-03-09T17:35:00.000+01:00

Activists in Copenhagen has renamed a number of streets by covering the real street names with a new one - "Jagtvej".
Jagtvej is a reference to the the recently demolished Youth House (Ungdomshuset) located at the address Jagtvej 69.
(from Guerilla-Innovation.com)

Building the Audiobar/Hørbar

2007-01-04T22:23:00.000+01:00

I'm currently building my "Hørbar/Audiobar" installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. It's a bar with several hundred RFID-tagged bottles. When you place a selection of bottles on the table, the installation will select a suitable piece of audio from the huge collection of the museum. The bar is planned to open on Friday 12th of January (2007).

Happy Not Year on WMMNA

2007-01-02T14:56:00.000+01:00

I just found the "Happy Not Year" card on We Make Money Not Art. I was very surprised - and honored - as one of my works is included in the artwork.