Presse: Lektoren-Vereinigung Korea

12.06.2009 – 04.10.2009
Bei der Ausstellung EXPosition of mythology – ELectronic technology des Nam June Paik Centers in Yongin ist unter anderem die Installation alan∂ zu sehen – eine kollaborative Installation unter Mitwirkung der HfG Karlsruhe und des ZKM. alan∂ ist eine Abkürzung für Al-Andalus, die Region Spaniens, die vor einem Jahrtausend das Vorbild für das einzigartige Zusammenleben unterschiedlicher Kulturen und Religionen war. alan∂ huldigt dieser Einzigartigkeit, indem es Andalusiern eine Plattform bietet, ihre Bilder über mehr als 22 recycelte Flachbildmonitore und 68 hochauflösende OLED mini-Displays zu präsentieren. Die Art der Zusammenstellung zeigt die Veränderung des Denkens im gegenwärtigen künstlerischen Schaffen, welches Begriffe wie vernetzte Zusammenarbeit, geistiges und gemeinsames Eigentum hinterfragt. Die Installation wurde entwickelt von Jayoung Bang, Daniel Burckhardt, Linus Stolz, Lorenz Schwarz, Alex Wenger, Yunjun Lee, Julian Finn, Philip Pocock. Ort: Exhibition Hall 2 of Nam June Paik Art Center

http://lvk-aktuell.blogspot.com/2008/10/veranstaltungen-und-termine.html

The 7 zen rules of Dataism

Kanso (簡素)
simplicity, eliminating all unneeded things to find the clear structure.

Fukinsei (ä均整)
Asymmetry or irregularity. If an algorithm is to symmetric it gets boring. Try to find the balance between symmetry and the asymmetry to get dynamic.

Shibui/Shibumi (渋味)
Reaching coolness and beauty through a clear design and nothing more. Don’t decorate or hide.

Shizen (自然)
Naturalness. Try to avoid pure artificial constructions. Everything has a root in nature.

Yugen (幽玄)
Showing more by showing less.

Datsuzoku (脱ä)
Freedom from habit or formula.

Seijaku (静寂)
Tranquility or an energized calm (quite), stillness, solitude. Avoid unintentional noise and disturbance.

ƒlirp

ƒlirp, the title of this project produced for CAR, plays with quirky web2.0 naming conventions. In fact, ƒlirp is an acronym for exactly what it is – a ‘fast loop image recycling process’.

There are two sides to the ƒlirp coin: it is simultaneously a ‘cinema house’, it’s own interactive, mobile, green, micro movie house; and, ‘House’ cinema: the plot, rural homes for sale or in repossession due to the current mortage malaise in America; the ‘fabula’, a narrative conjured in the minds of audience members while interacting with ƒlirp’s solar-battery-driven Organic-LED responsive screens. It has been said of art cinema that the movie exists in the cut, the space between the frames. In ƒlirp, that could not be more apparent, extending this notion to include the interactive space between spectator and screen.

Creating and installing a tiny multi-screen cinema house for this event, not much larger than a few cell phones, ƒlirp senses the presence of spectators. In turn, their proximity edits the screen contents, a ‘House cinema’ story unfolds,  juxtaposing insides and outsides of homes on the New Depression Era skid,  encouraging the spectator to imagine or project human stories into these settings.

ƒlirp recycles user-generated real estate and home repossession images from the web, primarily homes and former homes on the American Prairies, harkening back to 1930s Dust Bowl Depression Era, which along with current blog and net news media, catalyzes story-creation in the mind of the observer in front of miniature responsive screens. ƒlirp also appeals to concerned media artists and culture producers to embrace sustainable and recyclable energy sources. For ƒlirp’s power needs, the sun is enough. Its light powers both ƒlirp’s ‘cinema house’ while empowering its ‘House cinema’ audience.

— Alex Wenger | Jayoung Bang | Julian Finn | Philip Pocock | Yunjun Lee

data quantified

Exploding Brain gravure image
cartoon of an overloaded brain flipping its lid.

 

Here’s a list of data storage units and their approximate storage capacity:

  • 1 byte: A letter
  • 10 bytes: A word or two
  • 100 bytes: A sentence or two
  • 1 kilobyte 103: A very short story
  • 10 kilobyte: An encyclopedia page
  • 100 kilobyte: A medium-resolution photograph
  • 1 megabyte : A novel
  • 10 megabytes: Two copies of the complete works of Shakespeare
  • 100 megabytes: 1 meter of shelved books
  • 1 gigabyte = 109: A pickup truck filled with pages of text
  • 1 terrabyte = 1012: 50,000 trees of paper
  • 10 terrabytes : The printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress.
  • 1 petabyte = 1015: The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data
  • 1 exabyte = 1018: Berkeley studies estimated that by the end of 1999 the sum of human-produced knowledge (including all audio, video recordings and text/books) was about 12 exabytes of data. The study also estimated that “telephone calls worldwide on both landlines and mobile phones contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form”, and “it would take 9.25 exabytes of storage to hold all U.S. [telephone] calls each year.” International Data Corporation estimates that 161 exabytes of digital information were created, captured, and replicated worldwide in 2006.
  • 1 zettabyte = 1021: The IDC estimates that by 2010 there will be 988 exabytes, just under a zettabyte, in all computer storage world wide.
  • 1 yottabyte = 1024: IBM estimates that soon after 2010 the volume of online data will approach a yottabyte, or 1 trillion terabytes.

That’s a lotta data. [Sentient Developments]

How Much Data in the World?

In 2006, the world created 161 exabytes — of digital information. That’s like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the  sun.

By 2010, about 70 percent of the world’s digital data will be created  by individuals. [ASSOCIATED PRESS ]

How Much Data in the Human Brain?

Nobody knows the data compression algorithm (psychology, association…), or a methodology to actually quantify this.

One commenter on a page dealing with this puzzling issue Of Two Minds gets so mad at the discussion, he writes: So.. um… the storage capacity of human memory is whatever a computer science person says his hard drive is, plus 10%. Ok? Not good enough? How about: the storage capacity of human memory is purple.

“The storage capacity of human memory is an asshole.”
“The storage capacity of human memory doesn’t care about your feelings.”
“The storage capacity of human memory slept with your mom.”

And so on. They’re all equally accurate.

Database Imaginary

 

database imaginary exhibition website screenshot
database imaginary exhibition website screenshot

‘Dataistic’ exhibition and symposium at Canada’s Banff Center for New Media some years ago, sets the stage for thinking about ‘dataism’.

DATABASE IMAGINARY:
Databases drive culture. 33 artists take us on an imaginative and subversive ride. The artists presented in Database Imaginary use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The term database was only coined in the 1970s with the rise of automated office procedures, but the 23 projects in this exhibition – which includes wooden sculptures, movies and telephone user-generated guides to the local area – deploy databases in imaginative ways to comment on everyday life in the 21st century. Using newly inflected forms of visual display arising from computerized databases, the works seem to raise questions about authorship, agency, audience participation, control and identity. Some ‘dataism’-related images from the exhibition and the process of setting it up.

One Database Imaginary curator Steve Dietz’ thought piece for the show: The Database Imaginary:Memory_Archive_Database v 4.0

Diariodesevilla schreibt über uns

Autoría colectiva

Susana Serrano | Actualizado 16.12.2008 – 05:00
http://www.diariodesevilla.es/article/ocio/304414/autoria/colectiva.html

Google’s translation is actually readable:

Jayoung Bang, Daniel Burckhardt, Julian Finn, Yunjun Lee, Philip Pocock, Lorenz Schwarz, Linus Stolz and Alex Wenger are the components of the team since the ZKM has created for the third Biennale of Contemporary Art of Seville draft Aland (elta). Apart from the brilliance of their approaches and their complex mise en scene, the book deserves our attention because they are a clear indicator of artistic creativity more current.

This collective project, multicultural and interdisciplinary, makes visible changes in the paradigm of artistic creation in recent decades. Among them, the value given to the shared ownership. This mode of work. or collaborative networking, is a basic principle of such projects. Has a particular significance because it questions the system of institutionalized art: transforming the traditional idea of an artist, shows that have become obsolete old patterns of production and reveals inconsistencies that exist around the idea of intellectual property.

The installation presents various complexities. The physical space is organized around three half-cyborgs Cyclopean sculptures or offering a plot linked to the three protagonists of the poetic before us: Muhammed Ibn Tufail, Moses Maimonides and Federico García Lorca, three and three Andalusian cultures. In this way is an analysis of the visual culture of Andalusia, remixed through the various devices in the living room and software that continually place and used material obtained from the maelstrom of information flowing on the Internet. The multiple screens that look, they look and watch us operate in the manner of a large mosaic of the twenty-first century, inspired by an almost mythological Al-Andalus. The art and technology come together here to show the infinite spectrum of the image-code (open), mestizo, fluctuating and acronyms

Aland 2008 on the BIACS3 Bienale in Sevillia/Granada

biacs3youniverselogo

The title of our current collaborative installation at BIACS3 Seville Biannual, Aland, is an abbreviation for Al-Andalus, celebrating the exhibition site’s unique moment of cultural and religious conviviality a millenium ago. Aland is also ‘a land’, a Deleuzian ‘any place whatever‘, such as the consensual space of cyber-documentary pictures of contemporary Andalusians from which Aland draws the bulk of its visual content, montaged, more precisely, ‘mashed up’ over 22 repaired or recycled flatscreens and 68 brilliant, hi-res OLED Organic mini displays.

Aland consists of 3 interactive and interacting sculptures, portraits if you will of a Modern, Muslim, Jewish historically acclaimed literary figures, Fedrico García Lorca, Muhammad Ibn Tufail and Moses Maimonides. They interact by simulating a conversation, exchanging dialogue composed by algorithmical linguistics, consciously dadaistic in character, yet subconsciously, subtextually retaining an uncanny verisimilitude to each interlocutor. The Lorca-presenting character draws its replies from translations of his poetry; the Ibn Tufail digital mimic recombines into workable sentences phrases from his 11th C. philosophical novel Alive, Son of Awake; and Moses II as Maimonides is often nicknamed, playfully revises the rigorous logic in his Guide for the Perplexed.

It is the vocabulary uttered by these 3 so-called Chatbots that links their never-ending verbal exchange with pools of Andalusian user images that have been tagged by descriptive words online. The main screen in each sculpture is fed by these stream of visual consciousness pictures, arrayed in a freestyle mosaical manner. Visually scripted to reduce size on-the-fly, these picture streams become fair game for batteries of webcam-modified birdwatching scopes and various optical instruments surveilling close-ups and details of their visual presence on their respective target screen. It is not an individual but their image, not a person in public space but a screen space that is surveilled. These digital monoculars and spyglasses are scripted to capture screen images and feed them into vast pools of Andalusian cyberdocumentary pictures, on the look out for similar pictures. Pictures look at pictures according to pattern, light and color. Each pictures content diverges to generate implied narrative natural to the contents’ cohesive context, Andalusia, while being informatically abstract. According to scripted levels of picture similarity, numerous playlists of pictures are displayed rhythmically on numerous screens in real time in the installation.

The public interacts by sending any image to a sculpture via their cellphone camera or storage locally via Bluetooth, by mobile- and e-mail to alander@zkm.de, by upload from the aland website, or locally again by two webcams adorning the Moses and Federico sculptures, namely, the SmileCam which locates biannual visitors faces, zooms in, and if a smiling expression is identified, a picture is taken and fed into the database to generate its movie clip mash up of similar cyber-Andalusians; the other, Linecam, only records single pixel width lines of persons before its lens over time, its morphed slices of visitor-time scripted to capture and send at intervals an image to the database and screen its resulting mashup.

The 6 scripted Linux computers themselves form the bodies of the 3 sculptures. Lorca’s computer housings have been sculpted and worked as a birdhouse on which are perched 2 bronze figures Pointer and Sitter, and draped with a discreet grey silicon mandala. Muhammad has 4 supporting tripods piercing through its working computers, only centimeters from his motherboards. Adjunct to this are 3 tripods supporting a telescope, model fruit tree and screen, Gardencam, which uses visual feedback and subtle scripting to reproduce live the magnified model tree on screen in some magical weather conditions. Moses body is perched across the upper rungs of a tall ladder. Atop his Mooncam, a vignetted realtime stream of images spied on one of his screens as the base of the ladder.

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