F-Hv1.0

Satellite Interview /

Roy Ascott, David Bowie, Brian Eno /

1995 /

Roy Ascott / David Bowie / Brian Eno

Opal Information was published between 1986 and 1996 by Brian Eno’s Opal Music label, Opal Ltd. It documented and discussed the activities of the artist and musician and the various collaborations and projects. Pages 8 to 10 of Opal Information (number 26, 1995) present an extract from a live satellite interview between Roy Ascott, Brian Eno and David Bowie where they discussed all things interactive and the emergence of a now faint memory, the CDROM.

Brian Eno was a student of Ascott on the Groundcourse at Ipswich Civic College and have maintained a creative dialogue over the years. In 1993 Brian Eno was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Plymouth University.

A PDF of Number 26 can be found here: MORE DARK THAN SHARK has no official association with Brian Eno or his representatives.

These telematic entanglements can be better understood by reading Ascott’s writings:

Telematic EmbraceVisionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness

by Roy Ascott (Author), Edward A. Shanken (Editor), December 2007

When I Grow Up/

Thom Yorke/

1991/

This image, along with around 5 others, are all that remain of Thom Yorke’s early Hypercard Stack experiments. Yorke was a student of Mike Phillips in Fine Art, 4D at Exeter College of Art, and one of very few students to use the Mac equipment for artistic purposes (as opposed to graphic design) choosing to develop interactive narratives which nurtured themes that are clearly evident in his later music output. He also contributed to the networking projects in collaboration with Roy Ascott and Robert Pepperell.

Phillips purchased Yorke’s hypercard stack for £10. Originally stored on an Apple 800k floppy and developed on a Mac Plus and Mac SE in Superpaint, the Hypercard Stack is now corrupted and unrecoverable. Audio samples, interactions and navigation have all been lost.

This fragment is exhibited in Future History v1.0 on a Mac SE curtesy of The South West Retro Computing Archive.

Bio:

Lead singer of Radiohead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Yorke

FUTURE HISTORY v.10: Constellation Columbia

‘Constellation Columbia’ is an autonomous space monument inspired by the writing s of J.G. Ballard. The scale/model/prototype seen on the Culture Show incorporated simple audio/radio recording and transmission, gyroscopes, gravity switches and light sequencers. The work is being developed for inclusion in future zero gravity flights with the aspiration for a full scale release from the International Space Station.

‘Constellation Columbia’, prototype monument for ‘Dead Astronauts/Cosmonauts’.

A survey of Arts Catalyst’s pioneering zero gravity projects carried out over the last 10 years. Beginning with a contextual overview, the book traces the development of the projects and discusses the collaborations with Kitsou Dubois and Imperial College’s BioDynamics group, and the inauguration of the MIR (Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research) consortium which gives international artists the opportunity to carry out individual projects in zero gravity. The book contains essays by Eduardo Kac, Marina Benjamin, Rob la Frenais, Kodwo Eshun, with an introduction by Nicola Triscott. It features projects by Kitsou Dubois, Mike Stubbs, Ansuman Biswas and Jem Finer, Andrew Kotting, Dr Antony Bull, Morag Wightman, Louise K Wilson, Flow Motion, Marcelli Antunez Roca, i-DAT, Otolith Group with Richard Couzins, Yuri Leiderman, Vadim Fishkin, Marko Peljhan, Dragan Zivadinov, Andrei and Julia Velikanov, Mikhail Ryklin, and Dr Rebecca Forth.

https://www.artscatalyst.org/zero-gravity-cultural-user%E2%80%99s-guide-2005

https://www.artscatalyst.org/attention-weightlessness

Zero Gravity Robot. Commissioned by The Arts Catalyst. as part of the. MIR Campaign 2003 at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, Russia. MIR Campaign 2003 supported by the European Commission Culture 2000 Fund.

Constellation Columbia, model/prototype, 2003. Zerogravity, A Cultural User’s Guide. The Arts Catalyst. 2005. Page 84-85 ISBN 0-9534546-4-9.

Zero Gravity: A Cultural User’s Guide
ISBN 978-0-9534546-4-8
Edited by Nicola Triscott and Rob La Frenais
Published by Arts Catalyst, 2005
Colour and monochrome, 98 pages, soft back
Dimensions 250mm x 250mm
Weight 510g
£15.00

Buy online at Cornerhouse Books

Deshmukh, S. Phillips, M. Bugmann, G.  2007. Self orientation of robot in zero gravity environment using optical camera and reaction torque of electric motors.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: CULTURAL UTILISATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. Arts Catalyst. The Science-Art Agency. 2006.

READ ME:

03/04/2003

Nicola Triscott <nicola@artscatalyst.org>
5 Meadow Close, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 3HZ

PROTOTYPE # 1: CONSTELLATION – COLUMBIA:

MODEL OF A SPACE MONUMENT

I-DAT: WWW.i-DAT.ORG

1: POWER…

2: LED…

3: GYROSCOPE…

4: AUDIO…

5: GYROSCOPE…

6: RADIO…

1. A) Simply click the red ‘ON’ switch and release into the environment…
2. B) Battery life is aprox 1 hour in total.

C)Please conserve energy by switching off when not in use.

1. D) To stop vibrating gyroscopic modules tilt to deactivate mercury switches.
2. E) Extend aerial on module 6: Please tune radio to appropriate static source.

GFP Bunny /

Eduardo Kac /

2000 /

Eduardo Kac and Alba, the fluorescent bunny. 

“My transgenic artwork “GFP Bunny” comprises the creation of a green fluorescent rabbit, the public dialogue generated by the project, and the social integration of the rabbit. GFP stands for green fluorescent protein. “GFP Bunny” was realized in 2000 and first presented publicly in Avignon, France. Transgenic art, I proposed elsewhere [1], is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings. This must be done with great care, with acknowledgment of the complex issues thus raised and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created.”

More details on GFP Bunny….

Bio:

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web ’80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”) emerged in the early ’90s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience (Uirapuru) to the cultural impact of biotechnology (Genesis); from the changing condition of memory in the digital age (Time Capsule) to distributed collective agency (Teleporting an Unknown State); from the problematic notion of the “exotic” (Rara Avis) to the creation of life and evolution (GFP Bunny). At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac opened a new direction for contemporary art with his “transgenic art”–first with a groundbreaking piece entitled Genesis (1999), which included an “artist’s gene” he invented, and then with “GFP Bunny,” his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000). Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Exit Art and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; and Seoul Museum of Art, Korea. Kac’s work has been showcased in biennials such as Yokohama Triennial, Japan; Biennial of the End of the World, Ushuaia, Argentina; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil; International Triennial of New Media Art, National Art Museum of China, Beijing; and Bienal de Habana, Cuba. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, London; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Frac Occitanie—Regional collections of contemporary art, Les Abattoirs—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Toulouse, France; the Museum of Modern Art of Valencia, Spain; the ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe, Germany; Art Center Nabi, Seoul; and the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo, among others. Kac’s work has been featured both in contemporary art publications (Contemporary, Flash Art, Artforum, ARTnews, Kunstforum, Tema Celeste, Artpress, NY Arts Magazine), contemporary art books (Phaidon, Thames and Hudson, Oxford, MIT Press) and in the mass media (ABC, BBC, PBS, Le Monde, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, New York Times). Kac has received many awards, including the Golden Nica Award, the most prestigious award in the field of media arts and the highest prize awarded by Ars Electronica. He lectures and publishes worldwide. His work is documented at <www.ekac.org>.

http://www.ekac.org/bio2pg.html

Spacex Gallery, 1 May – 22 June 2002

Generator: curated by Spacex & STAR, with support from the Institute of Digital Art & Technology and the Arts Council of England (Collaborative Arts Unit). Spacex Gallery, 1 May – 22 June 2002, and touring in the UK. Generator will present a series of ‘self-generating’ projects, incorporating digital media, instruction and participation pieces, drawing machines, experimental literature, and music technologies. All work will be produced ‘live’, in real-time, with some elements continuing indefinitely.

The exhibition can also be described as ‘generative’ in that it will develop and expand over time, by acting as a point of connection for different generative practices across disciplines, pointing to the relationship of visual arts to other media – especially sound works, performance, and issues relating to chaos theory and complexity, neural networks and artificial life.

http://www.generative.net/generator/

And …

STAR & Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys from Paignton Zoo
As part of the development of the Vivaria project, Generator hosted a troop of Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys from Paignton Zoo to test Infinite Monkey Theorem. The idea that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters for infinity could eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare was enacted in a monkey cage in Paignton Zoo…

Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare were produced in response to the familiar idea that if an infinite number of monkeys are given typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. It was translated to a computer environment, producing live updates published on the web, alongside a webcam view of the
production scene showing the creative activity in its fuller context. The text was first produced in Paignton Zoo by a group of Sulawesi Macaque monkeys as their contribution to the exhibition GENERATOR (1 May – 22 June 2002, Spacex Gallery), curated
by SPACEX & STAR, and supported by the National Touring Programme of the Arts Council of England and the Institute of Digital Art & Technology. The project forms part of a research stage of [VIVARIA.NET] also funded by the Arts Council of England. Thanks to the monkeys, keepers and staff at Paignton Zoo for their help in the production of this work.

Real monkeys: In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys “are not random generators. They’re more complex than that. … They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there.”

Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare Book.

Credits:

NOTES TOWARDS THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE BY: ELMO, GUM, HEATHER, HOLLY, MISTLETOE & ROWAN SULAWESI CRESTED MACAQUES (MACACANIGRA) FROM PAIGNTON ZOO ENVIRONMENTAL PARK (UK).

Bodies INCorporated /

Victoria Vesna /

1993~6 /

Started as a conceptual art project in 1996 – one of the first 3D net art pieces that was written about extensively and exhibited internationally. Thousands of bodies were created by participants and specially highlighted people from exhibitions in museums and galleries are still available to view. In progress now is development of Bodies Corp 2.0 — utilizing new and old (outsourced) technologies that have developed in the past 2 decades and offering ‘third eye copyright” to the audience.

http://www.bodiesinc.ucla.edu/

Bio:

Victoria Vesna, Ph.D., is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts (North campus) and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) (South campus). Although she was trained early on as a painter (Faculty of Fine arts, University of Belgrade, 1984), her curious mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work can be defined as experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation (PhD, CAiiA_STAR, University of Wales, 2000). Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience to students. Victoria has exhibited her work in 20+ solo exhibitions, 70+ group shows, has been published in 20+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society journal (Springer Verlag, UK) and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Minnesota Press) and another in 2011 — Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. (co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy) Intellect Ltd, 2011. Currently she is working on a series Art Science & Technology based on her online lecture class.

Post Human Condition / HEX /

Robert Pepperell /

[HEX: 1991-1999][Post Human Condition: 1995]/

The Post-Human Condition

This work challenges many of the humanist assumptions of Western philosophy, science and art. It proposes a view of the human condition building on the findings of quantum theory, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, cybernetics, cyberpunk and “New Ageism”, taking into account current scientific and technological developments. The author asserts that as we enter the Post Human era, many of our beliefs are redundant, most obviously the belief in the human being. Historically, the social evolution from the Agricultural era to the Industrial era was accompanied by a cultural shift from theism to humanism. The current shift from the Industrial era to the Technological era brings with it radical changes in cultural values and the impact of high technology and increasing automation is changing the way we think about ourselves and our environment.

Pepperell collaborated with Mike Phillips, following their postgrad at the Slade School of Art (1985-87) to support the networking activities of Roy Ascott.

In the early 1990’s Pepperell joined forces with Miles Visman to form HEX, a multimedia production group, producing games, interactive installations, CD-ROMs and VJ sets.

Bio:

Robert Pepperell studied at the Slade School of Art. He has exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Barbican Gallery, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the ICA, and the Millennium Dome, and published several books, including The Posthuman Condition (1995 and 2003) and The Postdigital Membrane (with Michael Punt, 2000), as well as articles, reviews and papers. He is currently Professor of Fine Art and Head of the Fine Art Department at Cardiff School of Art & Design, where he runs FovoLab (www.fovography.com).

Credits:

Planetary Fax Works: 1990-91 /

Chris Speed /

1990-91 /

Throughout the 80s  and 90s fax machines were common place in many institutions which provided a relatively ‘open’ channel for digital art practice to reach diverse audiences from galleries to businesses of all types. Three fax works were designed to engage strangers at the end of a fax machine to challenge their ideas of being in a globally connected world.

The three fax works featured in FUTURE HISTORY designed were through a combination of technologies including the desktop publishing tool Aldus Freehand and basic collage to produce a single A4 that combined environmental, temporal and spatial information.

‘Brighton via the Antarctic 1 & 2, were designed specifically for a relationship with the Tourist Information Office of the Falkland Islands. Embedded within both faxes is a message to the receiver, a personal image of someone waving / jumping, an image of the planet Earth, and a set of instructions of how to turn the fax paper into a sundial that would allow the recipient to wave through the planet in the general direction of Brighton, UK. At a prespecified point in time, the fax message invited Sally and Anna to wave back to the artist and collaborators.

IDAHO to WARSAW was a global fax message that was sent to 5 locations across the Earth that were aligned to construct a single ‘cognitive line’ across the planet. The fax visualised the line across a traditional map of the world, and encouraged recipients to consider the existence of other people and locations in a networked moment.

Bio:

Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He has a BA in Alternative Practice (Brighton Polytechnic, 1992), a Masters in Design (Goldsmiths 1999), and a PhD from Plymouth University (‘A Social Dimension to Digital Architectural Practice’, 2007). He was a PhD supervisor on the Planetary Collegium and a member of i-DAT.

Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where his research focuses upon the Network Society, Digital Art and Technology, and The Internet of Things. Chris has sustained a critical enquiry into how network technology can engage with the fields of art, design and social experience through a variety of international digital art exhibitions, funded research projects, books journals and conferences. At present Chris is working on funded projects that engage with the flow of food across cities, an internet of cars, turning printers into clocks and a persistent argument that chickens are actually robots. Chris is a co-organiser and compére for the Edinburgh www.ThisHappened.org events and is co-editor of the journal Ubiquity.

Chris was PI for the TOTeM project investigating social memory within the ‘Internet of Things’ funded by the Digital Economy (£1.4m) and the related Research in the Wild grant: Internet of Second Hand Things; PI for the JISC funded iPhone app Walking Through Time that overlays contemporary Google maps with historical maps; PI for Community Web2.0: creative control through hacking, a £40K feasibility study that explores parallels between virtual society (Internet) and actual society (communities); Co-I to the Sixth Sense Transport RCUK funded Energy project (£900k) which explores the implications for the next generation of mobile computing for dynamic personalised travel planning. He is also PI for the Travel Behaviours network funded by the RCUK Energy theme (£140k) and Co-I to both the EPSRC Creating trust through digital traceability project (Hull) and Learning Energy Systems project (Edinburgh).

Auto-Illustrator /

Ade Ward/Signwave /

2001 /

Signwave Auto-Illustrator is an experimental, semi-autonomous, generative software artwork and a fully functional vector graphic design application to sit alongside your existing professional graphic design utilities.

Use it to explore a wide range of generative and procedural techniques in the production of your own graphic designs. Discover how easy it is to produce complex designs in an exciting and challenging environment that questions how contemporary software should behave.

Download a demo version using the links above. You will need one of the operating systems above, a fast processor (G3/G4 Macintosh 300MHz, Windows 600MHz), atleast 64MB RAM and a full install of QuickTime 4 or higher. Requires Mac OS 8.6 or higher, built for Mac OS X.

Bio:

SIGNWAVE UK
Suppliers of Quality Software and Media since 1997

Background
Launched in 1997 as an online media exploration and development zone, Signwave began by hosting projects developed by students at i-DAT’s MediaLab Arts. During 1998, Signwave hosted a range of experimental online works dealing with issues of code-based authorship. By 1999, Signwave had become the official branding of a number of Macintosh software products that crossed a fine boundary between software utility and critical artwork. In 2000, Signwave formally became a company based in London, working on a diverse range of projects for individuals, artists, companies and corporations. Over the following years, Signwave focussed it’s attentions on releasing various software products for both Macintosh and Windows based computers.

In 2001, Signwave launched it’s first ever commercial software artwork, Auto-Illustrator. Having previously been in beta for a year and a half (during which time it won awards at Transmediale.01, Prix Ars Electronica and REAL Software), it was released commercially on Christmas Day, 2001. Auto-Illustrator continues to be used across the world by graphic designers who appreciate an artistically challenging and stimulating environment.

Other Signwave software products include Autoshop (a generative bitmap graphic editor, released Christmas Day, 2002), Finder Mail (a cut-down OS-integrated POP3 mail client), as well as other smaller, invigorating and stimulating offerings.

Signwave continues to offer specialist software design and production in a range of areas. We write custom desktop software for a wide range of operating systems, and develop media products to satisfy the needs of a wide range of individuals and businesses. Our attitude is that of stimulation and creativity, whether we are working for artists or global corporations.

Auto-Illustrator Tools.

Auto-Illustrator Users Guide Signwave Auto-Illustrator 1.1 PDF.