Ars Electronica Center – Radical Atoms

Radical Atoms Exhibition

Vanessa Graf — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 15:02:18 +0000

Developed in cooperation with MIT Media Lab Professor Hiroshi Ishii, this exhibition is arrayed along a thematic and chronological axis. It demonstrates how ideas derived from art can lead to new technological concepts. Visionary examples are provided by the work Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media Group was already doing in 1999 in conjunction with their musicBottles. inForm (2013) registers gesticulations and sets actual objects into motion. bioLogic (2015) is a sort of second skin that reacts to movement. The exhibition, which also features projects by Carlo Ratti (IT), Joachim Sauter (DE) and the Ars Electronica Futurelab, will continue to run after the festival at the Ars Electronica Center, where it dovetails nicely with the extensive program of the Digital Art and Science Network, an EU-subsidized alliance that’s attracting more and more prestigious scientific organizations. Artist-in-residence programs have already been conducted with CERN–European Organization for Nuclear Research, the European Southern Observatory and the European Space Agency. The Festival is showcasing works produced in conjunction with these residencies.

This project is presented in the framework of the European Digital Art and Science Network and radco-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
In cooperation with GREINER GROUP.

“Unless a work inspires people, it doesn’t stick; people never start thinking differently, and they will forget. To inspire people, there must be some profound message, beauty or aesthetics which people find very moving.”

Hiroshi Ishii, director of the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group, explains his vision of Radical Atoms on our blog.

Active Wood Products

Traditional wood-bending techniques require com- plex steaming equipment, labor-intensive forming processes and a high degree of expertise. In addi- tion, the natural pattern of wood grain and its physi- cal properties make it difficult to curve into complex shapes.

Rovables

We envision that future wearable technology will move around the human body, and will react to its host and the environment. To proof this concept, we developed Rovables, miniature robots that can move freely on unmodified clothing.

bioLogic

bioLogic is growing living actuators and synthesizing responsive bio-skin in the era where bio is the new interface. Natto bacteria are harvested in a bio lab, assembled by a micron-resolution bio-printing system, and transformed into responsive fashion, a “Second Skin”.

jamSheets

This work introduces layer jamming as an enabling technology for designing deformable, stiffness-tunable, thin sheet interfaces. Interfaces that exhibit tunable stiffness properties can yield dynamic haptic feedback and shape deformation capabilities.

PneUI

Energy or substance, air is one the most abundant resources on earth. In many mythologies across culture, air brings life to and animate static substance. PneUI explores the dynamic interaction between the air and sheet materials.

Infinite Cube, 2006/2010/2013

Infinite Cube is a spatially concentrated, but at the same time expansive, kinetic installation. The spheres follow a computational narrative that moulds them into a fluid succession of abstract shapes.

Lift-Bit

Lift-Bit is a modular, digitally reconfigurable furni- ture system that allows a sofa to seamlessly turn into a chair, a chaise longue, a bed, a complete lounge and a myriad of other configurations.

LineFORM

Lines have several interesting characteristics from the perspective of interaction design: abstractness of data representation; a variety of inherent interactions; and constraints as boundaries or borderlines.

inForm

inFORM is a shape display that gives physical form to digital information. Motorized pins extend from a tabletop to form a physical sculpture that users can view, touch and deform.

Topobo

What is it like to sculpt with motion? Topobo is a construction toy with kinetic memory, able to record and playback physical motion. Snap together Passive (static) and Active (robotic) pieces into a creation, and with a press of a button and a flick of the wrist, you can teach your creation how to dance or walk.

SandScape

SandScape is a tangible interface for designing and understanding landscapes through a variety of computational simulations using sand. Users view these simulations as they are projected on the surface of a sand model that represents the terrain.

musicBottles

musicBottles is an interactive installation for visitors to interact with soundwaves encapsulated in bottles. The installation consists of a set of bottle that encapsulate sounds from Boston, Cambridge and the MIT neighborhood.

Deep Space 8K

Martin Hieslmair — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 14:24:19 +0000

Just in time for the festival, Deep Space 8K—the ultimate attraction at the Ars Electronica Center—is premiering a series of new and fascinating visualizations. Thanks to 16×9-meter projection surfaces on the space’s front wall and floor, 8K resolution and sophisticated technical features like laser tracking, festivalgoers are in for breathtaking worlds of imagery and mind-blowing experiences over the five-day festival run.

Deep Space 8K: Intel DRONE 100

Ars Electronica and Intel present: “One rarely experiences moments in which it becomes crystal clear how important and rewarding it can be to defy all the naysayers, to steadfastly pursue a vision and to work unwaveringly for years to bring it to fruition.” That’s how Horst Hörtner, director of the Ars Electronica Futurelab, summarized what was going through his head when 100 drones took off in pursuit of a world record in November 2015. In Deep Space 8K he personally presents the DRONE 100 project.

Deep Space 8K: Prima Materia – a stereoscopic audiovisual journey

Deep Space 8K: 8K Vision, toward 2020 by NHK

NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting company, will show the highlights of NHK 8K programs and share some of the things they experienced and learned as they went through the production process.

Deep Space 8K: Chant of the Proto-Alchemists

Deep Space 8K: Rhizome

Rhizome is an experimental animated short film that has its foundation in the homonymous philosophical concept coined and developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gattari, involving research that is close to Steve Reich’s serial music, Escher’s mathematical art work, Bruegel and Bosch’s paintings and various scientific theories about the development of life, genetics, the infinitely small and the infinitely large.

Deep Space 8K: VH AWARD

The VH AWARD’s purpose is to uncover promising but relatively unknown Korean artists creating media art. It seeks to support these young, talented media artists’ art-making process, but to also help them gain international recognition.

Deep Space 8K: RadianceScape

RadianceScape is a data-visualizing audiovisual piece. It based on the live radiation data from the Safecast.org, a global sensor network for collecting and sharing radiation measurements, to generate a cityscape

Deep Space 8K: Flow

FLOW is an immersive interactive installation specially designed for the deep-space media display. Inspired by the natural phenomenon of the tides, the multimedia environment offers a sensory experience, poetic, playful and aesthetic principles of the rise and fall of sea levels.

Deep Space 8K: Cooperative Aesthetics

Cooperative Aesthetics is an exhibition by Gerhard Funk (AT) of a collection of programs designed to enable audiences to enjoy collective audiovisual experiences. The intention is to transform Deep Space into a setting in which visitors can move about freely and thereby influence the visual output of the wall and floor projections and the sounds audible in the space

Deep Space 8K: See what you made me do

See what you made me do is a generative performance for two characters, playing and interacting according to roles and rules of power present in social intercourse. According to archetypes of behavior, our attitudes and actions are determined within a dramaturgical thread and intertwined with an immersive visual and sonic interpretation.

Deep Space 8K: Pathfinding in the Human – Computer Medicine

During the last three decades we have witnessed the growing complexity of technology and a flood that is filling our hospitals today—functional imaging, full gene sequencing, automated laboratory medicine and much more. But the role and responsibility sharing in healthcare, clearly structured into specific disciplines, has remained almost unchanged despite almost complete digitization.

Deep Space 8K: White Point 2016

The starting point of AROTIN & SERGHEI’s art Installation WHITE POINT for the Deep Space 8K is the smallest possible visible image: a single shining white light pixel of the matrix of 66 million of the 16 m x 18 m projection space is shown pulsing in the rhythm of a heartbeat.

Deep Space 8K: VR Playspace

Virtual reality applications tend to focus on the experience of an individual, creating an immersive experience that practically separates the user from the real world. VR Playspace strives to achieve a collaborative hybrid VR experience by integrating multiple VR players and live spectators into a cooperative game

Deep Space 8K: Paguro Idea

Paguro Idea initiated its first project in Nepal to support the reconstruction of villages, starting with Raghuchour in the Kavre Palanchowk district. Engineers without Borders supports the project in creating a concept to construct earthquake-resistant buildings with local materials and local resources as well as improving the water supply to secure a third crop.

Deep Space 8K: Media Wall Nexus

Media Wall Nexus is community forming public art project of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Art & Heritage Museum, Singapore. It explores new terrains to enhance digital interactive media and fine-art expressions

Deep Space 8K: Orbits

The aesthetics of man-made objects in space, their appearance and especially their orbits are transformed into a minimal audiovisual performance, showing the poetic dance satellites and their trash perform while revolving around us. Seemingly chaotic paths mutate to amazing patterns of an almost organic nature—all of it due to pure physical necessity.

Deep Space 8K: Cinematic Rendering—Dissecting Theatre of the Future

Considering how computer tomography (CT) makes it possible to look inside the human body without resorting to a scalpel is actually quite fascinating in its own right, but the app Cinematic Rendering at the Deep Space 8K takes the teaching of the anatomy of the human body to the next Level.

Deep Space 8K: Scalar Fields

This work visualizes the pressure field around the soles of shoes. By using the fluid simulation software developed by the artist, the propagation of pressure in air is visualized in 8K video, with a marvelous sound experience.

Deep Space 8K: Sounds like Universe

Take an audiovisual tour of the cosmos together with students from Soundfactory EXTD (staged jointly by Linz Music School and the Ars Electronica Center) and the piano and flute class taught by Marco Palewicz and Petra Wurz

Deep Space 8K: Another Dimension of Fashion

Linz Art University’s new Fashion & Technology program invites festival-goers to take a virtual journey that opens up unexpected dimensions of the anatomy of clothing. Cinematic rendering, a new form of computer tomography, reveals garments’ interior structures that are invisible to the naked eye.

Deep Space 8K: The Conduit

The Conduit is part performance, part interactive installation that investigates social engagement and the consequences of speculative technological and political frameworks. Participants will negotiate an eight-bit simulation of the future and its effects on our everyday social interactions.

Deep Space 8K: SEEC Photography

SEEC Photography is a science-art project that investigates how light moves across objects. This happens at the speed of light and within a few nanoseconds.

Deep Space 8K: Best of

The very best of the regular Deep Space 8K program at the Ars Electronica Center in German and English language.

Future Self Mirror

Martin Hieslmair — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 14:14:22 +0000

CIID Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (DK))

How will we look in six months if we keep up at our current rate as far as diet, dental hygiene and sports are concerned? Who’ll we see in the mirror a year from today? These questions still have to be answered with “Haven’t the foggiest,” but students at CIID are already working on another, more visionary concept. The smart Future Self Mirror is designed to enable us to gaze into the future of our physical development.

Instead of raw data or abstract predictive diagrams, the Augmented Reality data tracker shows us an impressively realistic image of our future self. Maintain, increase or reduce body weight with our current eating habits? Is our dental hygiene regimen satisfactory or are we heading straight for discoloration and cavities? Regardless of what the smart mirror on the wall says, it’s definitely a great motivator—to change our ways or to stay the course of our dietary, tooth-brushing and exercise practices.

Credits:

Team Members: Andreas Refsgaard, Line Birgitte Borgersen, Manu Dixit and Riccardo Cereser
This project was a part of the Enchanted Objects course taught by David Rose, Adrian Westaway and Francisco Gomez Paz at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Moises Bottage helped in managing the space and materials.

Alchemists of Art and Science

Martin Hieslmair — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 09:49:26 +0000

The huge current interest in forms of interdisciplinary collaboration shines what or many people is a long-overdue spotlight on the multifarious possibilities that can emerge from exchange and cooperation among, on one hand, art and creativity, and, on the other hand, science and technology. Moreover, an increasing number of observers are applauding the fact that, above all, there is finally widespread realization of a paradigm shift having occurred in a world that is now globalized not only geographically and economically but intellectually as well. Driven by correspondingly wide-ranging motivations, more and more artists are lighting out to explore these territories. They are in search of new sources of inspiration, and they also want their artistic work to make an impact beyond the confines of the art world. In going about this, they often pursue trails that were blazed long ago, and sometimes without knowing too much about that back story.

What is striking is the greatly increased readiness on the part of both individual scientists and a growing number of institutions to make a commitment to these liaisons. Such prestigious research institutions as CERN–European Organization for Nuclear Research, the European Southern Observatory and the European Space Agency now host artist-in-residence programs under the aegis of the European Digital Art and Science Network subsidized by the EU.

As a member of an extensive network of cultural institutions in Europe and other parts of the world, Ars Electronica will be displaying works created in conjunction with these artist-in-residence programs and also staging a series of exhibitions showcasing exciting, innovative projects at the nexus of art and science. New methods of fabrication and of 3-D printing, concepts for rapid prototyping, work in the field of 3-D animation, and artistic strategies for the visualization of scientific data—the exhibitions cover a broad range of approaches, many of which are still in the prototype stage. “The Alchemists of Art and Science,” the second installment in this series, spotlights speculative, futuristic visions that have emerged from the amalgamation of artistic and scientific approaches—for instance, wearables that measure cosmic radiation in their immediate surroundings; clothing grown out of fungi; a 3-D-printed lamp you can create at home with an app and a laser scanner, wearable devices designed to reduce your CO2 output; and concepts for interactive windshields.

Artist Lab Jussi Ängeslevä

Jussi Ängeslevä
Beyond Prototyping is a research project looking at the dynamics between the designer, manufacturing process and the consumer in creating everyday products in the age of digital fabrication.

MycoTex

Neffa / Aniela Hoitink
The purpose of MycoTEX was to create a textile out of living material and to develop a real garment out of it. Aniela started by combining mycelia with textiles, in order to create flexible composite products.

Interface I

Ralf Baecker
Interface I by Ralf Baecker investigates the boundary between two interacting systems rendered into the physical.

Project Florence

Helene Steiner, Paul Johns, Asta Roseway, Chris Quirk, Sidhant Gupta, Jonathan Lester
Nature has many languages. Project Florence takes advantage of the sensibility of plants to different light frequencies and uses it to trigger electrical responses by a plant and compares the similarities between plant signals and natural language processes.

Implant

Eric Dyer
Implant is an imaginary medical device that fits into a blood vessel, neuron, etc. It is super-enlarged, making the viewer feel microscopic. With a genetic retinal disease in his family’s DNA, Dyer has closely followed developments in gene therapy, including the insertion of healthy genes into the body using viruses.

Second Story: Linz

Artist Aoife Van Linden Tol invites the residents of Linz to submit material for the second incarnation of her project Second Story, where she creates explosions in books and on paper that have emotional value. The performance can then be seen at the Ars Electronica Festival 2016.

Future Self Mirror

Deep Space 8K: Prima Materia – a stereoscopic audiovisual journey

Deep Space 8K: 8K Vision, toward 2020 by NHK

NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting company, will show the highlights of NHK 8K programs and share some of the things they experienced and learned as they went through the production process.

Cosmic Bitcasting

Cosmic Bitcasting employs sensors to transform the cosmic radiation that neither the Earth’s atmosphere nor the outer layer of our own body shields us from. With light signals and vibrations, the interface reports the detected presence of every elementary particle that, as radiation from outer space, has found its way through the atmosphere to us.

The Culture Series

An article of clothing with sleeve appliqués of leather and copper fabric and neoprene sewn into their structure? And integrated into this electrical circuit is an Arduino microcontroller that interacts with the sleeves’ sensors and transforms the garment into a hybrid organism that reacts to the wearer’s heartbeat? How about matching earrings with a built-in pulse sensor?

MASSES: Motors And Stones Searching for Equilibrium State

Quadrature’s installation manifests the meaning of a Sisyphean task. The sole purpose of the machine is to maintain two large stones on a steel plate in perfect equilibrium. An endless succession of feedback effects and adjustments is necessary to prevent the incessantly threatening, imminent loss of balance.

STONES: Storage Technology for Observed Nearby

Compared to the cosmic dimensions of time and space, a human life and human civilization come across as rather modest. Nevertheless, we tend to interpret findings in the field of astronomy from our limited point of view—for example, such momentous revelations as the fact that there are 40+ known planets on which water—and thus, life—could exist.

Obscurity

For Obscurity Paolo Cirio cloned mug shots of over 15 million U.S. prison inmates from various websites and then disguised the photos. An algorithm systematically scrambled the appurtenant information—name, age, crime convicted of and length of sentence—to make each individual completely unrecognizable.

Window to the World

An automobile’s windshield only had to be transparent and shatterproof heretofore. But now, “Window to the World” manifests a futuristic vision of mobility in which the glass front panel separating the passenger compartment from the world extends an invitation to a new form of interaction between inside and outside. The pane becomes an interface that moves driving beyond transportation and makes the car a vehicle for entertainment, play and information.

Ghost Cell

You’ve never seen Paris like this before. Antoine Delacharlery’s animated film isn’t just a close-up of the French metropolis; it’s as if it puts Paris under a microscope. The urban organism with its inventory of streets, buildings and open spaces as well as the people, trains and cars moving about among them comes across like a concatenation of pale cells and nerve fibers.

Deep Space 8K: Intel DRONE 100

Martin Hieslmair — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:44:11 +0000

The Spaxels: From Pilot Project in Linz to World Record with Intel

Since the summer of 2012, an Ars Electronica Futurelab crew has been working on how to put aloft a large group of LED-studded quadcopters that autonomously execute preprogrammed formations. All of the many experts who were initially invited to collaborate on this project took a pass: an undertaking of these dimensions—and one to be implemented outdoors, no less—was said to be impossible to pull off in the allotted timeframe. Nevertheless, the Futurelab staffers were bound and determined, and their perseverance paid off. In September 2012 at the Linzer Klangwolke, a multimedia extravaganza spanning the Danube, a group of 50 illuminated drones ascended and formed a huge eye in the night sky. This one-of-a-kind performance created a worldwide sensation, and it wasn’t long before the first prominent client came calling. In conjunction with the promotional campaign preceding the premiere of “Star Trek – Into Darkness,” Paramount booked the Linz-based drone swarm to perform its aerial artistry immediately adjacent to London’s high-profile landmark, the Tower Bridge. By this point at the very latest, the Spaxels Project had taken off. There followed airborne performances in Bergen, Norway (International Bergen Festival, 2013), Ljubljana, Slovenia (Ljubljana Festival, 2013), Brisbane, Australia (QUT Robotronica Event 2013), Umea, Sweden (official opening celebration of the 2014 European Capital of Culture), Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (official opening celebration of the 2014 Islamic Capital of Culture), Hannover (official celebration of the 25th anniversary of German unification, 2014), Dubai (The UAE’s National Day festivities in 2014) and Linz (2015 Eurovision Song Contest). These commercial appearances made it possible to finance the ongoing enhancement and tweaking of the spaxels. Then, in autumn 2014, the Ars Electronica Futurelab received mail from Intel for something they called Drone 100. And the rest is history.

Deep Space 8K: Prima Materia – a stereoscopic audiovisual journey

katjani — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:43:33 +0000

Alchemical authors have compared the “prima materia” to everything. To male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass. It contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals. There is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself.

The stereoscopic piece by the Istanbul-based multidisciplinary Studio NOHlab will take the audience on an audiovisual journey.

This project is presented in the framework of the Europen Digital Art and Science Network and co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.

Credits:
Art Direction and Visuals by NOHlab
Sound Design By Giray Gürkal

Deep Space 8K: 8K Vision, toward 2020 by NHK

Martin Hieslmair — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:35:43 +0000

NHK is Japan’s public broadcasting corporation. In August of this year, we initiated the world’s first Super Hi-Vision 8K test broadcast. We’ve developed various kinds of 8K TV programs, including live coverage of the Rio Olympics. We’ll show the highlights of NHK 8K programs and share some of the things we experienced and learned as we went through the production process. 8K Super Hi-Vision technology offers new expressive power through a strong sense of realism and presence based on research in human science fields such as visual perception.

Note: On FRI September 9, SAT September 10 and SUN September 11, 2016, an one-hour workshop on 8K for enthusiasts, amateurs and professionals will take place after the presentation at the conference room of the Ars Electronica Center (level -1).

Project credits:
Jun Ochiai, NHK
Tatsushi Tachibana, NHK Enterprises
Kotomi Watanabe, NHK MediaTechnology

Cosmic Bitcasting

Martin Hieslmair — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:29:09 +0000

Whether human beings are exploring subatomic worlds or outer space, wherever our journeys of discovery take us, we’re able to get a picture of the invisible only by means of measured data. Afroditi Psarra implements this idea in the form of an interface worn right on the body, and thereby reinterprets the connection between human and cosmos.

Cosmic Bitcasting employs sensors to transform the cosmic radiation that neither the Earth’s atmosphere nor the outer layer of our own body shields us from. With light signals and vibrations, the interface reports the detected presence of every elementary particle that, as radiation from outer space, has found its way through the atmosphere to us.

Credits:
Cosmic Bitcasting was developed during a one-month residency at ETOPIA – Center for Art and Technology in Zaragoza, in the context of the residency program REVERBERADAS, part of the European Art and Science Network, curated by Fermín Serrano.

The Culture Series

Martin Hieslmair — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:23:26 +0000

The origin of the idea for these hand-fashioned e-Textiles is indeed in science fiction. The very existence of The Culture, the fictional civilization in the “Space Operas” by sci-fi author Iain M. Banks, depends upon such sophisticated devices and machines, all of them sentient.

Credits: “The Culture” Series was created during a two-weeks residency at WeMake – Milan’s Makerspace
in February 2015, curated by Zoe Romano. wemake.cc

Deep Space 8K: Chant of the Proto-Alchemists

katjani — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:11:41 +0000

For that there still are chants beyond humanity that have not been sung, yet.

Alchemists deal with matter and meta-physics; they integrate human understanding of the world, visions, ideas, and their desire to reach ultimate enlightenment in their search for knowledge and creation. Fundamental knowledge must be communicated in a language that conveys all information and is accessible to all those, but also only those, who are adepts. Like the proto-human language, the origin of all linguistic understanding and development, proto-alchemists knew about the one language of those long gone worlds in order to bequeath their secrets. This lost proto-alchemist language was fundamental to cymatic (sound and resonance) transformation of matter. The alchemists of our time seek to find a proto-human language in the coding languages that they apply to transform matter, to program new material forms and to develop worlds that transcend the physical reality known to humans.

After Quadrature (2014) and The Sixth Wave (2015), the third part of the trilogy, Chants of the Proto-Alchemists (2016) reflects on the very sensual, instinctive, and in other words people’s very Dionysian side, which is as important to growth, spiritual development and divinity as the analytic, rationalistic, Apollonian side.

Text: Claudia Schnugg

Credits: Sound: Chris Bruckmayr (AT) & Dobrivoje Milijanovic (RS) aka raum.null; Vocals: Siegmar Aigner (AT) aka Mussurunga; Visuals: Didi Bruckmayr (AT) and Florian Berger (AT); Production: Claudia Schnugg (AT)