http://www.dipity.com/user/xantherus/timeline/Virtual_Worlds

An interactive, collaborative timeline of the history and development of virtual worlds.

Bringing together 24 street artists from all over the world, Electric Windows is a semi-permanent installation of large-scale work exhibited on the exterior windows of a 19th century blanket factory in Beacon, NY. We traveled to the small town earlier this year to meet some of the artists and watch them make “urban art” in a not-so-urban setting. We also interview one of the organizers, Daniel Weise, a vet of the NYC street artist scene who recently moved to Beacon and co-founded Beacon’s Open Space gallery there.

via: http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2008/07/electric_window.php

“My Life as An Avatar” 06-08




Machinima of Xantherus Halberd in Second Life.


Part of ongoing “My Life as An Avatar” series by Annie Ok.




Song: TAIGA, “Savia de mil heridas”

http://bam.org/sundance/frontier_2008_LASER.aspx

http://graffitiresearchlab.com

From the website:

Graffiti Research Lab: L.A.S.E.R. TAG
Thu, May 29 & Sat, May 31

L.A.S.E.R. TAG is a Weapon of Mass Defacement (WMD) that gives individuals the power to communicate their thoughts on buildings, using a 60-milliwatt laser and a big-ass projector. On Opening Night and on Saturday, May 31, the G.R.L. will “bomb” the outside of BAM’s Peter Jay Sharp Building.

The Graffiti Research Lab is dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists, pranksters, and protesters with open-source tools for urban communication. Thousands of clandestine agents have been trained, via the web, and have used G.R.L. tools and techniques to create their own public actions in cities all over the world.

Graffiti Research Lab: the first season
Sat, May 31 at midnight
Free!

Meet the G.R.L. and watch a free screening of their documentary about their experiments with technology, urban centers, and random encounters with people on the streets.

G.R.L. The Complee7 First Season (Trailer) from fi5e on Vimeo.

Photo by poohka

From the website: http://www.billdaniel.net/who_is_bozo_texino/

THIS SPECTACULAR TRAVEL ADVENTURE FAITHFULLY PHOTOGRAPHED IN REALISTIC BLACK AND WHITE FILM AT CONSIDERABLE RISK FROM SPEEDING FREIGHT TRAINS AND IN SECRET HOBO JUNGLES IN THE DOGGED PURSUIT OF THE IMPOSSIBLY CONVOLUTED STORY OF THE HERETOFORE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE CENTURY-OLD FOLKLORIC PRACTICE OF HOBO AND RAILWORKER GRAFFITI AND THE ABSURD QUEST FOR THE TRUE IDENTITY OF RAILROADING’S GREATEST ARTIST WILL LIKELY AMUSE AND CONFOUND YOU IN ITS SINCERE ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND AND PRESERVE THIS ARTFORM.

Who is Bozo Texino?

by Bill Daniel

56 min. black and white, experimental/documentary

Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous and mythic rail graffiti—a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, “Bozo Texino”—a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years.  Daniel’s gritty black and white film uncovers a secret society and it’s underground universe of hobo and railworker graffiti, and includes interviews with legendary boxcar artists, Coaltrain, Herby, Colossus of Roads, and The Rambler.  Shooting over a 16-year period, Daniel rode freights across the West carrying a Super-8 sound camera and a 16mm Bolex. During his quest he discovered the roots of a folkloric tradition that has gone mostly unnoticed for a century. Taking inspiration from Beat artists Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, the film functions as both a sub-cultural documentary and a stylized fable on wanderlust and outsider identity. “I was drawn to the subject by the universal graffiti impulse and the classic, corny notion of freight train blues escape.”  - BD

AN AMBIGUOUS ANIMATION PAINTED ON PUBLIC WALLS

Made in Buenos Aires and Baden
Animation and Editing: Blu
Producer: Mercurio film
Soundtrack: Andrea Martignoni

via: http://www.blublu.org/blog

Norwayweb was originally part of a series called Protocol Performance realised in 2007 with the support of the Norwegian Cultural Council, section for art and new technology. This work uses specific data collected from a source or sources originating from the national system’s database. The information is scraped from about 4 million Norwegian tax payer’s databases. As soon as you visit the web page, you automatically trigger off the action of collecting the data. On the left side of the interface figures cascade down the page before your very eyes, which gradually evolves into what Magnhildoen calls a carpet. The term carpet is a reference to the textile based craft of weaving.

When opening the web page the viewer becomes a participant in the collection of the data, each number represents one singular individual which is added as you watch it in real-time. It stops when you close the browser and starts all over again if you return. Once the total of the numbers reach 3943077 the carpet is completed. If you leave the browser open on the page of the Norwayweb artwork for I minute, you will have triggered off and received information equivalent to 60 people. The whole work itself is complete once there has been 555 hours of viewing of it. By taking part in the process of web-scraping we become affiliated as peer scrapers in the accumulation other people’s personal tax details based in Norway.

Bjorn has mentioned that he is aware that collecting such data could be ethically questionable and is not clear himself how real it is that a law is actually being broken. As a kind of opt out clause or fail-safe he suggests that, visitors to the artwork could also be peer criminals due to the fact that they are (or we are) going through the systematic process of collecting this information and are not necessarily just passive observers. The complexity of acting out a simple thing as clicking onto a web page and becoming a co-conspirator without the intention of criminal intent, poses some confusing questions. Not only regarding our liberties in respect of are we really to blame for someone’s work of art by just viewing it? But it also begs the question that if Magnhildoen unintentionally (or intentionally) broke the law and involved other people visitors to the work, surely he is the main culprit. Like a drug dealer who peddles drugs, perhaps he is peddling illegal information, by actively setting up a system in sourcing it and then distributing it to others to potentially use. My guess is that all is fine if the Norwegian Cultural Council funded and supported the project.

Bjørn Magnhildøen uses network media for creation, distribution, exhibition, and documentation of his works. His main practice is analog and digital net media and covers a period of twenty-five years ranging from mail art to net art. His work might be characterized as marginal, fleeting, transient; changing, casual; unstable, deviant; ironic, contextual. Many of his recent projects deals with net art books, writing machines and software implemented on the net, live or performative writing and programming, codework, hypertext, and e-poetry. He’s the author of more than fourty books, many of them collaborative and generative works, and also publishes books concerned with net art and net writing.

In the eighties he got involved in mail art. These activities migrated into the emergent electronic networks in the nineties, as did his academic interests, from philosophy, via language, logic and information, to computer science. He has supported himself as a system developer, later as freelance programmer and artist within the field of art and new technology.

via: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=295

[...]Researcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks—bending the low-cost game piece to power an interactive whiteboard, a multitouch surface, a head-mounted display ... [...]
via http://www.ted.com/speakers/view/id/204

This past week Flickr started to allow Pro users the ability to upload videos or rather “long photos”.

Apparent Horizon, Derek Lerner 2008 Digital video 01:30:00 minutes 720 x 405 pixels

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project, 2007

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is derived from a six month long FBI investigation after the artist was erroneously reported as a terrorist. This experience led him to voluntarily develop a network device, which opens just about every aspect of his life to the public.

Throughout the FBI investigation, he actively decided to cooperate with them to a point of compliance to where the current work now borders on a collaboration with them, albeit unauthorized. The network device generates a database of imagery and locative information that combined with a web-enabled companion tracks him and his points of transit in real-time.

Since the development of this device, his FBI agent (along with everyone else) has been able to track him online. This video installation is created from the thousands of images captured and compiled by his mobile network device along with other information in the database.

Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders and frontiers. His work has been presented at the Venice Biennale; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Kulturbahnhof, Kassel, Germany; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia; and The Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center in New York, among others.

Elahi has one foot in art and one in science. His media is databases and all sorts of electronic information, essentially tracking himself as spies would. He explores the border between society and technology, attempting to bridge the human and the virtual worlds. He analyzes the way technology is packaged to be perceived as desirable and essential by people. Elahi’s process results in translations and mistranslations between the physical and the virtual, between the body politic and the singular citizen.

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project Website: http:/trackingtransience.net

Artist Website: http://elahi.rutgers.edu/

via: http://www.sundance.org

matter swallowing microscopic black holes, strangelets, & magnetic monopoles

The biggest experiment in particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider, starts this summer in Switzerland. The goal is to find signs of the Higgs boson particle (AKA the “God particle”) as it may ultimately lead to a grand theory of the universe.[1] 200 feet underground, a proton does 17-mile laps at nearly the speed of light. Guided by powerful magnets, it zooms through a narrow, circular tunnel. Then a tiny adjustment in the magnetic field throws the proton into the path of another particle beam traveling just as fast in the opposite direction which happens 10 million times a second. Massive superconducting magnets cooled to near absolute zero by liquid helium will bend 20 micron-wide beams of protons into precise trajectories and crash them into each other.

The Higgs boson, the most elusive speck of matter in the universe. It’s supposed to be the key to explaining why matter has mass. Physicists believe that Higgs particles generate a kind of soupy ether through which other particles move, picking up drag that translates into mass on the macroscopic scale. The Higgs is the cornerstone of 21st-century physics; it simply has to be there, otherwise the standard model of the universe collapses.[2]

Could black holes be portals to other universes?
Some physicists have theorised that black holes might act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, the builders of the world’s largest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet. The LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN’s headquarters on the French-Swiss border. Many new and exciting phenomena are expected to occur as a result of these very high energy collisions. It is hoped that some of them will be unpredicted and will point to new directions in our understanding of the structure of matter. At the same time it is legitimate to wonder whether any of these new phenomena may be potentially dangerous.[3]