Via email from Francesco Monico:
Dear fellows,
I’m glad to announce that my installation TAFKAV, is exposed at Body-Process Art Festival AMBER’07 in Istanbul – Turkey from 9 to 17 november 2007, http://www.a-m-b-e-r.net/ . This installation could be considered a moist medium that explores the pragmatic communication paradigm with the hypotesis to use it on the technoetic research;
The work aims to be a research artwork;
First Conclusions from TAFKAV:
1. If plants are sensitive living things, then they are not molecular machines that can be patented like chemical formulas;
2. If plants are living things then they are sensitive and can a pragmatic communicative relationship with humans can be defined (this communication will be only man oriented);
3. Articulating this pragmatic approach ought to allow man to define a poetic “self” through the punctuation form created while communicating with plants. This poetic self should allow man to formulate an original interpretation of himself in an era of profound anthropological mutation.
Thanks for this version at Massimo Banzi (Interaction Design – Arduino), Steve Piccolo (Music and sounds), Emanuele Lomello (Max MSP);
installation blog:
http://tafkav.blogspot.com/
you can hear the sound emitted and see the video
http://video.google.it/videoplay?docid=7659330316442601255
–
Francesco Monico
PhD Researcher CAiiA
Egg is a fluid organism manipulated through a stomach interface.
A small microphone is inserted inside the user’s bellybutton, and is the user’s only source of control – no mouse or keyboard. Everything that the user’s body does affects Egg – slight movements, breathing and tummy rumblings. The user can flex his/her stomach to interact with it, discreetly making small movements beneath his/her shirt.
Egg is made of two independent parts, an outer shell and an inner yolk. Both of these are comprised of independent vertices, who move and interact with eachother, continually trying to return to equilibrium. As the user irritates Egg by flexing his/her stomach, the yolk collides with the walls of the shell, making the yolk grow and the shell shrink, increasing general chaos.
As Egg gets too chaotic, the user must stay completely still to let Egg return to equilibrium – often this leads to desparate measures, such as holding your breath. Every movement, even unintentional (or intestinal!), affects Egg, forcing the user to stay completely focused on the interation. While control over Egg is simple, the user and the organism begin to merge, making a bodily connection.
By Guthrie Lonergan.
Snake in the Grass is a kinetic sculpture comprised of a 3′ x 3′ square of living grass, a hidden air compressor and microcontroller. Those viewing the installation see a “safe” plot of green, perhaps transplanted from a suburban lawn. Periodic motion can be detected amongst the blades: an illusion of compressed air exhaled through a series of strategically placed vents. The motion has an animal quality, giving the impression that a small mammal or reptile (snake) is scurrying through the grass.
Though the popularity of the suburbs in the United States is predicated on an ingrained desire to flee urban density, those who live outside the city exhibit an ambivalence towards nature, and grass in particular. Suburban lawns are not wild: special care is taken to purge them of bugs, reptiles, and small mammals. Enormous amounts of money and natural resources are spent each year on the creation of perfect green moats. Sterilized, carefully manicured lawns are lifeless: it is the house at the end of the cul-de-sac with the slightly untamed brush that feels so full of life (and simultaneously, so dangerous).
A work by Krister Olsson.
Blue Morph is a piece in progress that has been under development for the past two years. This project is a close collaboration of an artist and scientist interested in collective consciousness shifts in relation to sound, vibration and color. The piece is based on vibration measurements of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a Blue Morpho butterfly. The Blue Morpho butterfly in particular interested us for the nano-photonics involved in iridescent Yves Klein magical blue color that is not pigment at all but patterns and structure.
This butterfly has intrigued scientists for generations with its optical engineering – the lamellate structure of their wing scales has been studied as a model in the development of fabrics, dye-free paints, and anti-counterfeit technology such as that used in currency. Today, its dazzling iridescent wings are giving rise to a market to try to mimic its wonder and create a counterfeit proof currency and charge cards. Most important of all in relation to this project is the realization that sounds of metamorphosis are not gradual or even that pleasant as we would imagine it. Rather they happen in sudden (violent) surges that are broken up with stillness and silence. It is also interesting to note that there are the eight pumps or “hearts” that remain constant throughout the changes, pumping the rhythm in the background. This juxtaposed with the abstracted images of the wings on nanoscale is pretty powerful on its own, but we wanted to make this an interactive experience that would be inverse of what one would expect.
By Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski,