Ethan Ham

Off for the 4th

2008-07-04T09:26:00.001-04:00

Back on Monday!

Rotating skyscraper

2008-07-03T09:30:00.000-04:00

The Dynamic Tower, designed by Italian architect David Fisher, is being built in Dubai with another one planned for Moscow. The floors, powered by the wind, rotate independently from one another to drive electricity-generating turbines. A rotation takes about an hour. I wonder if an apartment-owner can lock the apartment's position when desired.

Another unique feature is that the floors are pre-fab units--apparently a first for skyscrapers.

Tim Prentice

2008-07-02T07:35:00.000-04:00

Tim Prentice is an amazing sculptor in the spirit of George Rickey. He says he steps out of the way and turns the art over the air and let it make the design decisions. The results are beautiful.

Be sure to check out his website... his home page video of his Cilli Opener is particularly striking.

[via Make]

Creepy robotic water snake

2008-07-01T09:05:00.000-04:00

ACM-R5 is equipped with paddles and passive wheels around the body. To generate propulsive force by undulation, the robot need a resistance property as it glides freely in tangential direction but cannot in normal direction. Due to the paddles and passive wheels, ACM-R5 obtains that character both in water and on ground.
The control system of ACM-R5 is an advanced one. Each joint unit has CPU, battery, motors, so they can operate independently. Through communication lines each unit exchanges signals and automatically recognizes its number from the head, and how many units join the system. Thanks to this system operators can remove, add, and exchange units freely and they can operate ACM-R5 flexibly according to situations.

[via jwz by way of Make]

Yuri Suzuki

2008-06-30T09:05:00.003-04:00

[via We Make Money Not Art]

Yuri Suzuki recently earned an MA in Design Products program at the Royal College of Art.

The projects of his that caught my eye include Sound Chaser (which is a bit like a toy train that rides/plays rails of records, see above) and Prepared Turntable (a five-armed record player, see below).

Interventions with The Image Fulgurator

2008-06-26T09:28:00.016-04:00

Julius von Bismarck's The Image Fulgurator is a reverse camera... instead of capturing images, it projects images. More specifically, it briefly projects an image when its light-detector senses the flash from another camera. The idea is that the artist can lurk around tourist sites and secretly overlay his own images onto the photographed subjects so that when the tourists look at their photos they'll find them manipulated.

From von Bismarck's site:

People's great trust in their photographic reproductions of reality was what motivated me to develop the image Fulgurator. A camera can be used as a personal memory tool, since people do not doubt the veracity of their own photographs. Hence, photos can reproduce the reality of an individual environment or public space. At sacred or popular locations, or those having a political connotation, an intervention with the Fulgurator can be particularly effective. Especially objects with a special aura or great symbolic power are good targets for this kind of manipulation. In other words, with the Fulgurator it is possible to have a lasting effect on those kinds of individual moments and events that become accessible to the masses only because they are preserved photographically.

This video below shows an intervention at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. The manipulation is intended to make connections between the former East Germany/West Germany border and the US/Mexico border today.

A compelling & interesting project, but I wonder about the gun-fetish aesthetic. Not only does the camera have a pistol grip, but von Bismarck's video has him assembling the camera ala sniper-gun movie cliche. The pistol grip seems particularly notable since it is counter to the (presumed) desire to have the fulgurator be as innocuous as possible.

His logo (above) references the Red Army Faction's (below). I honestly wonder if he's really thinking through and taking responsibility for using this kind of imagery (or if it is just easy dramatics).

The Image Fulgurator won this year's ARS Electronica Prix's "Golden Nica" for Interactive Art.

[via Make]

Hydraulophones

2008-06-25T08:05:00.002-04:00

A hydraulophones are musical instruments that uses pressurized hydraulic fluid, such as water, to make sound. They were invented by Steve Mann ( who is perhaps best known for his work in wearable computing). I particularly like the instrument's public art incarnation:

Pachelbel's Canon being played on the hydraulophone:

Overview of the instrument including early prototypes:

A variety of hydraulophone-related videos, photos, & links can be found at Steve Mann's wearcam website.

Pure Data

2008-06-24T09:25:00.003-04:00

I've recently been working with Pure Data, a cross-platform graphical programming language for audio (as well as some video & graphical) processing. (See an earlier post about a project using Pure Data).

Pure Data is an open-source project that was started in the 1990s by Miller Puckette (who continues to maintain it). It's similar & somewhat interoperable with Max/MSP (a commercial product based on Miller Puckette's earlier Max programming language). It's a bit humbling to realize that there's a such a long-time, interesting multimedia of which I was largely unaware.

Pure Data is certainly fun to play with (though I keep fearing that I'm going to make a mistake and blow out my expensive speakers). Puckette has written a "patch" (an extension) called fiddle~ that analyzes a sound's component frequencies and is exactly what I need for one of the projects I'm currently working on.

I did a bit of graphical programming using Edith (The Sims scripting language) when I was at Maxis, so the paradigm isn't completely new to me. It's interesting to so clearly see a program's control flow and I'm tempted to incorporate the language into my Multimedia 2 course at CCNY. However, I do wish Pure Data handled conditional statements more straightforwardly... I'm new to the language, so it's very possible that I'm missing something, but the following (which seems kinda hacky to me) was what I came up with for doing an if-else statement:
What I'm wanting to do is to check a sound's amplitude and if it's less than 0.04, set it to 0, otherwise set it to 0.5. The above does the job... if you know a better way, don't hesitate to post a comment!

UPDATE:
I figured out a better way of doing the above operation.

">= 0.04" returns "1" if the value being evaluated is greater than 0.04 and "0" if it is less. Conveniently, I'm looking for the outcome to be 0 when false and 0.5 when true--so I can simply multiply 0.5 with the 1/0 value coming out of the >= operation.

Still, I think a if-then-else would be a good addition to PD.

Popcorn

2008-06-23T08:50:00.002-04:00

I think this is my first ever blog posting that isn't art-related... so if you're looking for popcorn art, you can visit my earlier post on Popcorn & Parrot Art.

When I moved to NYC a couple of years ago I ruthlessly thinned out my kitchen gadgets & tools so that I could better fit into a New York-sized living space. I overdid it a bit and found, after several watery salads, that I actually do need/want a salad spinner. But I didn't especially miss my popcorn popper--I don't really eat popcorn that often and microwave popcorn had been satisfying the occasional need.

Still, I do find microwave popcorn kinda gross (and unnecessarily expensive). It contains all sorts of weird chemicals and, presumably, trans fats.

The other day I was at my corner store buying popcorn and noticed that for the same price as 3 serving of microwave popcorn, I could buy 25 servings of regular popcorn. I decided to give stove-top popcorn a try... and you know what? It's the best method I've come across for making popcorn. I heated 2 tablespoons of oil in a 3 quart pot, added 1/3 cup popcorn, covered it with a lid, and 3 minutes later I had popcorn... and every single kernal popped! There were no old maids or duds!

According to the Wikipedia:

Two explanations exist for kernels which do not pop at proper temperatures, known in the popcorn industry as "old maids". The first is that unpopped kernels do not have enough moisture to create enough steam for an explosion. The second explanation, according to research led by Dr. Bruce Hamaker of Purdue University, is that the unpopped kernel may have a leaky hull.

So it could be that I'm getting such good popcorn performance (yes, I'm reveling in my newly found popcorn geekness) because it's a freshly opened bag of popcorn and the kernels' moisture hasn't gone stale.

But if that's a factor, I think a bigger one is that my gas range is putting a lot more heat on my kernels than an electric popcorn popper does. Perhaps that intense heat overwhelms any kernels that are slightly leaky.

Anyway, what is striking to me about this isn't really that all the kernels popped--it more that I can't understand what purpose electric popcorn poppers serve and how they came to be so prevalent. I imagine most people are like me and find the idea of making popcorn on the stove almost inconceivable (aside from ConAgra Foods's JiffyPop).

Somehow we've been convinced that popcorn poppers are somehow the only way to go even though they are slower, take up storage space, are more difficult to clean, and don't pop as well. I wonder if it started with this (a so-called "back to basics" popcorn maker):
That elaborate stirring mechanism is completely unnecessary... I've been making my popcorn over high heat (which I think helps the kernels pop) shaking only occasionally in the three minutes it takes it to pop. But maybe this once this expensive pot started being used, it introduced a drudgery (of constant stirring) that made people were happy to buy yet another gadget (an electric popcorn popper) to avoid.

Anyway, enough of proving I'm my father's son (he often writes & blogs about the superiority of old-fashioned safety razors to today's cartridge razors)... tomorrow, back to art!

Markus Copper at PS1

2008-06-20T09:15:00.001-04:00

Markus Copper's Kursk (2004) is probably the creepiest piece of art I've ever come across. It's set up as a formation of old-fashion diver's suits hanging just off the floor in a unlit room in PS1's basement. When I first peeked into the room, I wasn't sure it was an exhibition space or if there was even anything in it... then I saw a jerking motion and heard a clanking. It was an uncomfortable feeling being in the room--it was barely larger than the installation itself, so there is no buffer space between the viewer and the the suits.

The suits occasionally make a spastic, unexpected motions. The sword-like tools in their hands might suddenly move, or a light inside a helmet might switch on or off. Even though I was alone in the room, there was the overwhelming sense of someone else being there, inside one of the suits.

It wasn't until the next day that I realized that the title refers to Russian submarine that sunk in 2000 with all hands lost. The installation certainly communicates the grimness of that event.

The images of the installation on Copper's website are fully lit. I wonder if this is how the installation was originally shown (or if it is just so that the photographs can capture all the detail). I'm glad I saw the the installation in the dark--I think a lot of its power came from the unsettling environment.

Kursk is part of a very interesting "Arctic Hysteria" exhibition of Finnish art that's at PS1 through September 15th. Also included in the show is a room that explores the work of Erkki Kurenniemi. I'll probably be blogging more about him later on.

PS1 Director Alanna Heiss made an interesting about contemporary Finnish art: "Finnish artists are independent from the contemporary mainstream, and open to new ideas and materials but not addicted to the new..."

Tristan Perich

2008-06-18T09:00:00.003-04:00

Tristan Perich is musician, artist, & hacker. Marisa Olson posted about his work recently on Rhizome:

Unsurprisingly descended from Warhol-era conceptual artist Anton Perich, the younger Perich has become a fixture in the local avant garde scene, bringing his own brand of circuit-bent instruments to the contemporary music sphere. His band, The Loud Objects, have made a very well-received international magic-show of their singular work, which involves soldering musical chips together atop an overhead projector--clad in futuristic sunglasses, no less!

I have a copy of Perich's 1-Bit Music (2004-2005), pictured above. It is a clever bit of electronic hackery that is contained in a CD jewel case. Plug in headphones, flip a switch, and you have lo-fi electronic music that puts many 16-bit works (the bit-depth that compact discs are recorded at) to shame. I picked up the Whitney Museum store's last copy, so if you'd like a copy of 1-Bit Music your best bet is Perich's online store (which sells a variety electronic, musical goodies).

Tonight (Wednesday June 18th), Perich is premiering his untitled (Bernadette Mayer) 5 voices and 15-channel electronics at 8pm in the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

Here is Perich's Active Field, 10 violins, 10-channel 1-bit electronics (2007)

See The Village Voice for another profile of Perich.

Oblivious

2008-06-17T09:45:00.005-04:00

Olivia Robinson's Oblivious is a naked man on a table who reacts to touch.

Robinson described the work:

A naked man is sleeping on this table. As you touch the soft surface of the table, the man reacts physically. He wiggles, leans or rolls over in response to your pokes, prods, caresses, tickles and slaps. In response to the intensity and frequency of your touch, as if shrinking from this unbidden intimacy, his image fades away. Oblivious touches on issues of power, vulnerability, potential for abuse or intimacy, as well as our level of comfort with a naked male body.

The image of the man fades in the areas that have been touched the most. Over time, as more and more people interact with him, those areas will become rubbed or "touched" away. His evolving body becomes a record of people's hands and where they have chosen to touch him. At the beginning of an exhibition he will be completely opaque, present and oblivious of your existence; over time he will change in accordance with the collective interaction.

Is it just me, or does that guy look a bit like a young Jean Tinguely?

Inbed (2008) is a similar (perhaps derivatively so) project by ITP student Drew Burrows.

Burrow's describes the project:

In the piece a person climbs into an empty bed with a projected woman sleeping on it. Though the bed is empty, the projection gives the feeling of having someone there beside them. As the person climbs into the bed the projected woman moves close to cuddle and reacts accordingly as the person moves around on the bed. I wanted to give both the sensations of being alone and having someone in the bed with the viewer at the same time.

The aim of the piece was to speak on the feelings of loneliness, affection, and intimacy.

I'm also reminded of You Are Now Becoming Who You Are To Be (2004), a non-interactive work by Holly Andres. That work consists of a video of a young woman projected upon a bed. She shifts around on the bed and her silk chemise slowly changes from white to red.

All the news

2008-06-16T09:37:00.002-04:00

Martin John Callanan's I Wanted to See All of the News From Today displays the front pages of hundreds of newspapers.

I find the title interesting... "See" is the right verb, not "Read." Very little of the text is legible--either the type is too small or the language is unknown.

I initially found the project interesting, but was a bit frustrated that I couldn't click on a front page and get a closer look at it. Wondering if this was an artistic choice or a technical limitation I took a closer look to see where Callanan gathers his images from, which led to Press Display.

For a reader, Press Display's interface is much more useful than Callanan's collaging of it. On Press Display the reader can look up particular newspapers, blow up the page so that it is readable, sort on language, country, search on a particular word or phrase, etc.

Perhaps the "I" pronoun in the title is significant. Is the project a whimsical thing thrown together to satisfy Callanan's visual curiosity? Or is there an intention beyond that; something that he wants to provide us viewers? Maybe just the awareness of news coverage beyond the few outlets we choose to use? Perhaps forcing us into being viewers, not readers?

RPG outsider art

2008-06-14T13:46:00.005-04:00

Yesterday Art Fag City posted about PlaGMaDA (the image above is from The Play Generated Map and Document Archive's homepage), an internet archive of art & documents done by roleplaying gamers.

Paddy Johnson (of Art Fag City) wrote:

Game nerds rejoice! The Internet brings you great tidings this time in the form of PlaGMaDA, an archive of play generated manuscripts and drawings depicting shared places. Notably, the project is more sophisticated than a database of Dungeon and Dragon collectible illustrations, the drawings resembling artifacts you might see at the Folk Art Museum. The site does however break from the art world tradition of labeling everything "Untitled" typically opting for purely descriptive titles.

I wanted to include a couple of my junior high school era (ok, ok... maybe early high school era) roleplaying documents. I dug around in my files and came up with what's below. Showing them to my girlfriend saying, "I couldn't find the really geeky stuff... just these." Based upon her expression, I could tell that the spaceship maps were plenty geeky enough.

Online art auction

2008-06-13T07:25:00.001-04:00

Portland State University is having an online art auction. It's a great chance to pick up a nice work of art for a nice price.

There are 100 works including ones by Dan Graham , William Wegman, Miranda July, Harrell Fletcher, Chris Johanson, Jeanne Finley, Mads Lynnerup, Bruce Conkle (whose Endless Snowman, is pictured above), etc.

Harrell Fletcher explains the auction's method:

The auction uses an unusual system. There are 100 pieces by 100 artists ranging from Dan Graham and William Wegman to PSU students and faculty. We are selling 100 certificates which redeem an auction piece at prices from $2500 to $100 apiece. The higher priced the certificate the sooner the collector gets to pick their piece from the site, giving them a greater chance of selecting the piece they want. There are only two certificates at the highest price and there are thirty-five at the lowest price. Everyone who buys a certificate will get a piece of art and will be helping to support Portland State University's Art Dept in the form of scholarships, visiting artists programs, and helping to support PSU's MFA including the new Art and Social Practice Program.

2 works by Olafur Eliasson & 1 by me

2008-06-12T09:12:00.003-04:00

1m3 light is a box that's defined by light in a mist-filled room. Just as I was leaving the gallery, I realized that none of the 15 or so people who entered the room while I was there had walked through the work, even though it has no physical presence. I turned around and walked through the cube... it felt very transgressive.

I only see things when they move (2004) is a roomful of shifting colors created by a chandelier of slowly moving prisms. It strongly reminded of Sublime Zips (see below), which is part of my Frames installation.

Zips was created using a modified 16mm film projector. Film projectors work by constantly (and very speedily) pausing on a single frame of film, covering it with shutter, moving to the next frame, pausing, and uncovering the shutter. Despite the common impression, film does not move through the projector at a constant speed--instead it moves in a jerky, start/stop motion.

Zips has its shutter and intermittent device disabled, which causes the film to be projected in one continuous motion and eliminates viewers' persistence of vision. The projected image becomes a field of shifting colors.

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For a broader perspective of Eliasson's work, Rhizome has a nice write-up of his shows at MoMA and PS1. Also Tyler Green had an interesting series of posts (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) earlier in the year that compared Eliasson to other artists.

What My Dad Gave Me

2008-06-11T16:07:00.000-04:00

This summer looks to be shaping up as a good one for temporary installations in NYC. David Byrne's Playing the Building (see earlier post) opened at the beginning of the month, Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls opens in a couple of weeks, and Chris Burden's What My Dad Gave Me opened yesterday in Rockefeller Center (a place that Burden's dad once worked as an engineer).

Chris Burden is best known for his 1970's body-art performances which included being shot in the arm (he only intended the bullet to graze) and being crucified to a Volkswagen Beetle. But he's long since left that oeuvre behind for installations usually involving toys & vehicles.

What My Dad Gave Me is a 65 foot, stainless-steel Erector set skyscraper. Sixty-five feet is equivalent to a 6.5 story building--a pretty decent size in most towns, but just a scale a model of a building in mid-town New York.

"Dispatchwork" at Venti Eventi

2008-06-10T13:00:00.000-04:00

These Lego patches are Dispatchwork (2007), Jan Vormann's contribution to the group project Venti Eventi (20 Events). The group of artists developed projects for 4 villages of the Sabina region of Italy.

Associated with the project is an edition of 18 boxes filled with 18 original works by the participants (including Karin Sander, who is one of my favorite artists).

[via BoingBoing]

Jenny Holzer Twittering

2008-06-09T07:30:00.000-04:00

If there was ever a technology that was ready-made for an artist, it is Twitter for Jenny Holzer.

View Holzer's twitter entries

Phyllis Chen & her toy pianos

2008-06-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

The other night I heard a fantastic performance by Phyllis Chen at the Christopher Henry Gallery on Elizabeth Street (NYC). It's amazing to see & hear virtuoso piano playing on the tiny keyboards. Each different toy piano seems to have its own unique characteristics, but overall they are more percussive than regular pianos.

Here's a video from the performance:

Meridith Pingree

2008-06-05T18:36:00.000-04:00

Meridith Pingree makes cool kinetic sculptures.

My hard drive is experiencing some strange noises

2008-06-02T10:41:00.002-04:00

Gregory Chatonsky's project uses sensors to translate (using Pure Data) the vibrations from a malfunctioning hard
drive into sound.

Add-Art

2008-05-29T08:11:00.000-04:00

From the Add-Art website:

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.

Reviewed in Magazine Ciel Variable

2008-05-27T09:57:00.003-04:00

Magazine Ciel Variable is a Canadian magazine (that looks quite good) focusing on fine art photography. The most recent issue has an article on Web Photo Projects 3: Digital Photo Albums by Sylvie Parent that includes a review of my Self-Portrait project.

Unfortunately only the introduction to the article (and one of my "self-portraits") is available online, so I don't really know what it says.

Some People

2008-05-23T12:25:00.000-04:00

Some People is Harrell Fletcher's new web-based project. Like Learning to Love You More, his earlier collaboration with Miranda July, the project is platform for others to publish their interpretation of an artistic-ish task. Whereas Learning to Love You More has a growing list of tasks to choose from, Some People focuses on people documenting others' lives.

From the website:

Some people get to be well known and other people live their lives in obscurity. For this project you get to choose and present someone that you think other people should know about by making a documentary about them. Your documentary can take any form that can be presented on the web — video, sound, images, text or any combination of those things. The hope is that this will eventually become an archive of interesting people that previously were not well known, from all over the world.

Some People very neatly combines Fletcher's work that prompts others to take part in a social, creative act and his work that takes the form of documenting another's life/interests such as Boy (a 1999 show about a ten year old Seattle boy named Gregory).

[via Marisa Olson @ Rhizome]