I found this via StrangeMaps, a good blog for those interested in maps, cartography and visualization.
This is an interesting and amusing map that portrays Ireland has an unattractive country in a time of insecurity during the Second World War. It doesn’t make much sense to me to repeat the author’s words or even reformulate them. So you can take a look at the article here and to other interesting articles you can find there.
This piece is a classic of media already and a computer vision art work as well. Most of the media artist and media art interested public has bumped into this work somewhere. I saw this 4 years ago in Madrid in an enormous media art exhibition welcomed by Arco and organized by Medialab Madrid (today Medialab-prado).
Cheese was developed by Christian Moeller in collaboration with the University of California in San Diego, the Caltech and the Machine Laboratories, and is basically a sophisticated computer Vision system capable to recognize emotional patterns and measure the sincerity of the actresses smile and every time they fail in showing sincerity an alarm is displayed, after an hour is visible the pain and the difficulty of maintaining a natural smile.
You can watch an exhibition video here.
For those who have ever seen a Zachary Lieberman‘s presentation must recognize easily this work. Though I only saw this project as an installation, I should have put this project in number one on my favourite art project’s indications, not because I consider it better than the other (and is quite impossible for to classify this projects in that way) but was when I realised the true potential of interactive art as a way to think performance and I also think that this is one of the best examples of performances with digital art.
Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman developed this project together in 2003 and consisted in an augmentation of the voice and real-time sound visualization. What I just love about this project is the way that performers and digital-interactive environment are engaged. I’ve seen many performances and sometimes I get that feeling that visual components made with software are merely just an effect adding, a “décor”, being apart of what the performer(s) is doing. Like two elements that work independently and the only thing in common is that they are being executed in the same space. This is definitely not the case and that why both Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman are true maestros of interactive art.
Besides the performance, this project was adapted to a installation too. Well, I had the opportunity of seen it at the ars electronica museum, but unfortunately I was too shy to fully enjoyed it. But I still remember seeing kids shouting like crazy and having lots of fun.
There’s an excelent video of the performance here
Is hard to select only one project of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer since he has developed an amazing work. Still, one of his singular projects for me would have to be Body Movies. Digital art projects in façades are becoming very popular and there are a lot of artist doing a really great artwork on building, yet I personally cannot think on a project that surpasses this one mainly because Body Movies allows an interesting and theatrical interaction between the public and the images projected on the façade. The video speaks for itself.
And finally, Simon Heijden’s Tree project, which traces a reflection about the urban vegetation that is no longer a natural process but the wind that shakes the tree’s branches. This beautiful installation is often set in the urban public space, a simple white-shadow like projection of a tree that sensors the wind movement and everytime someone passes by its leaves fall down.
C+C 