AMT Lab Contributor Mandy Ding explores how Artificial Intelligence has found its way into the arts.
An Overview of VR Hardware Options
CREATE Lab: Creating Social Impact Through Empowering Communities
CREATE Lab creates multi-disciplinary learning experiences that allow communities to become technologically fluent. CREATE Lab’s novel combinations of visual arts and technologies provide a wealth of new potential tools to arts administrators and their organization. This article will introduce a few of the exciting projects that CREATE Lab is already testing in the Pittsburgh community, as well as access points for administrators and educators who are interested in implementing them.
Hollywood Stock Exchange: A League of Its Own
First launched in 1996, HSX is a free web-based multiplayer gaming simulator of American film industry. The rules are simple: players use virtual currency to buy, sell, short and cover “shares” of films, directors, actors and other related virtual securities. Although the exchange is entirely fictional, it reacts to actual industry-related news, making itself a community and information hub for both professionals and enthusiasts in the film industry.
How Museums Are Dealing With New Media Art: Part 2
In 2000 the Washington DC based Smithsonian American Museum of Art announced the creation of the New Media/New Century Award. The New Media/New Century Award became one of first projects to support new art created for the Web. The museum accepted proposals for original Web-based projects that explored the subject of American landscape, and how the new medium of Web art affected the American landscape as a subject.
Though the project is over 10 years old, it demonstrates the early and exceptional sensibility of the Smithsonian’s curators. They understood the growing relevance new media art and especially Web-art, and its impact not only on people’s everyday perceptions, but also on the art scene as a whole.
Free Open Access Database On Rhizome To Preserve Digital Art
Promoting Digital Media Art through Digital Media tools
In our technology-stuffed world, the difficulties faced by video artists seem paradoxical. Due to high up-front costs, and the difficulty of handling and selling digital technologies, established institutions such as art galleries and museums often shun their work. Artists may look at the entertainment industry as an alternative, but find themselves unfulfilled, as musicians typically come first in these sorts of collaborations.
Artful.ly Unchained: Have Nano-Nonprofits Found the CRM of Their Dreams?
On October 21st, 2013, Fractured Atlas officially ended the beta phase of their cloud-based CRM solution, Arful.ly. Over 1,400 organizations participated in this five-year process, characterized by what the Fractured Atlas team called “community-driven design.” Harnessing the collective wisdom of organizations and arts professionals, they took suggestions both online and through a number of sessions, soliciting ideas for features to include in the finished version.
PIPS:lab Diespace, Interactive Multimedia Experience
PIPS:lab recently made its US debut during a festival featuring Dutch artists here in Pittsburgh. The Amsterdam group has been performing together for about a dozen years. The work that they performed was categorized as absurdist media theater and was a short evening length work without intermission. The use of technology for this performing group is integral. The performance itself was noteworthy for its innovation on a number of different levels. It is worth noting, however, the problems that PIPS:lab had in functionally executing the performance due to glitchy technology. The performance, Diespace, was essentially an introduction to a fictional new social network site that audience members were encouraged to visit after they die (or die in order to visit). The actors polled the audience about their opinions regarding whether or not there is life after (or before, humorously) death. These polls were conducted with a cool audience participation tool of light capture setup where the audience essentially wrote on a screen upstage.
The other insertion of tech into the performance involved video/audio remixes of various clips taken of audience member during and before the show. These clips were then edited in real time into the performance. This, in turn, served to engage the audience but through a pretty controlled format. The display of the video and audio taken from the audience drew laughter and made the audience excited and was a high point of the performance lending to greater investment from the collective. Additional audience participate was to be had through a lottery during the show where the faces of the audience were put into a virtual tumbler on the screen upstage. Three audience members won prizes with the grand prize being a premium account for Diespace (which included significant stage time for the audience member who won it).
The performance unfolded at a relatively brisk pace with musical interludes to cover moments where the technology and content was being prepped. The problem with this was that the performers ended up being a bit un-invested in the music and as a result it was hard to be carried away by the performance. It was easy to check out during these scenes through the distractions on stage. It was the sense of this reviewer that there was only one true musician on stage, a fact that was born out by the program notes about the artists backgrounds.
At least three times during the performance there were loud warnings of a computer crash each time forcing the performers on stage to repeat a few moments to a few minutes of the action. This in turn lent to a stutter stop feel to the performance. Execution of Diespace did not look like it was easy and to be certain what PIPS:lab is trying to do is not easy in general. They deserve applause for attempting to stitch together so many constituent elements in the moment. It was fascinating at times to see the failures of the technology and there was rarely a moment where the audience did not have something that they could try to be engaged in. The relative successes and failures of this performance reinforce the point that some technologies have a ways to go before they are both accessible to independent performing artists.
The innovation of groups like PIPS:lab hopefully will be the wave of the future and it is gratifying to see media artists take the stage with musicians and actors. The combination of talents of stage was a rich soup and Diespace was a valuable experience for the insights that it gave with regards to generation of true multi-disciplinary live work.
Creators Project in San Francisco
Last weekend the Creator's Project garnered significant attention from national media. From the mission statement on the website "The Creators Project is a global celebration of art and technology." and "The Creators Project is a new kind of arts and culture channel for a new kind of world." As an intersection between art and tech it seems appropriate that the blog weigh in and take a look at what they did, how they did it, and the implications. The Creator's Project has major sponsorship from Intel Corp and VICE with significant online free content focusing on mostly short form interview of Creator associated artists. This Project offers similar promise to other ventures to offering culture and arts online to ideas such as On The Boards TV and Jacob's Pillow Virtual Pillow but is already operating on a much larger scale than either of these.
The Creators Project offers arts and culture online at a scale that is extraordinary for such a young institution. The levels of participation on information sharing that is happening through their website looks unparalleled and should be looked towards as a model for successful integration of technology and the arts. The Creators Project was started in May of 2010 by VICE and seems to have two major interfaces with the public. There is a exhibit/show that has toured around the world each year and an expanding web presence that now counts video downloads in the millions. The content is broken out into six different categories: Music, Film, Art, Design, Gaming, and Fashion and has engaged with artists from all of these areas to provide content online and for the annual festival. They will be rolling out content collected from the event last weekend (March 17-19, 2012) in the coming weeks.
Current content on the website is a mind blowing array of new directions taken by artists in each of the fields. One of the standout artists at the event last weekend was a new work from visual multidisciplinary artist Chris Milk. The installation called the Treachery of Sanctuary incorporated user interaction with digital transformation to look at elements of flight. Visuals of this can be found here.
Anther fascinating example that was found on the Creator's Project website was the Electronic Shadow from France. Electronic Shadow uses imaging technology and software to generate interactive 3D maps of people places and objects. These images then can be used and manipulated in artistic fashions. The implication for this technology would, for instance, be a game changing one for other art forms such as dance.
Exchange of ideas such as Creator's Project bring together the bleeding edge of Technology and the Arts and as such should be a point of engagement for institutions that are looking to modernize and include new audiences (and younger audiences). The artists involved have obviously successfully engaged these audiences already and by following the lead of these success stories arts leaders at more conventional organizations can find hope in a new direction in reshaping structure and content to address the demands of a more complex world.