talking art

there are no pictures of this work, because it was an invisible chatbot specifically written for brooklyn is watching. you can read about it in jay's blog post "art critical chat bot" and hear what they said in their podcasts 58 and 59. the bot scanned the environment for objects, and made specific comments about them on the chat channel, mentioning the title and the owner of the work embedded in a statement such as "did you see XXX by YYY?".
here's part of my comment at the BiW blog to some of the reactions to the work:

what the bot chats is “rather empty”, it lacks subtlety, it quickly becomes “boring and annoying”. yes. this was my intention. the bot’s phrases are dull, repetitive, and uninformed. that’s the reason why i used a pretty simple ‘algorithm’ for generating the phrases, about 20 prefabricated ones (including one with a typo) with a placeholder for the work. far from anything intelligent. i even chose a fixed delay between each utterance, which adds to the machine-like stupidity.

why creating such a work? this spambot was my reaction to the decreasing quality of discourse at BiW, a reflection on the current state of BiW, and as such it should mention the names of the objects on the sim and their owners, but it was intended to be uninformed and annoying (again: i really like the comment in the podcast: smart but uninteresting, yes!).

the circle (chain reaction)

the circle is the centrepiece of my level at the museum of hyperformalism curated by dc spensley. it evolved from several experiments with uniform units influencing each other locally, that is, within a certain range. each of the 180 cubic cells of the circle is identical, and touching anyone of them will start the chain reaction, which slowly will destroy the whole circle. upon touch, a cell will spawn rectangular prims, which slowly float away from the mother cell. when one of the child cells collides with another cell, that cell will also start spawning. each cell can only spawn a limited number of children before it vanishes. once all cells have vanished, the circle will start its life-cycle again by rebuilding itself.
a modified version of the circle can be seen at imagine plus: 180 portraits together with bark aabye, see the video by bark!

rebuilding structure

work for the show THE POST-CRISIS ERA curated by aino baar (for that occasion, i called it resurrection, but i prefer the more descriptive title). a chaotic pile of simple white poles slowly configures itself to a perfectly regular structure when an avatar comes close enough, and breaks down again when the avatar leaves. the work was also shown at BiW, but with an additional component: each breakdown caused some poles to get lost, because they went off-world or ended up on adjacent parcels from where they could not return. thus, the structure became more an more incomplete, slowly loosing its form, and never returned to its initial perfection. see machinima by DC Spensley.

the basic cube

sketch by sol lewitt. particle cube by selavy oh.

the particle cube consists of one base prim and one moving prim for each edge (12 prims). the edge prims draw the edges by dropping so-called particles, i.e., two-dimensional texture patches.
a larger interactive version of the basic cube is on display now at the museum of hyperformalism curated by DC Spensley (aka DanCoyote Antonelli).

mapping space

work for the contest of the Spencer Museum of Art of the University of Kansas. a slightly different version than the one in the image was submitted, and was awarded the second prize. the work consists of 27 prims and is 2.56x2.56 m. the whole area of the sim is represented by 26 prims, which scan the space, collect data on cloud density and ground level, and display these data as particle relief, scale 1:100, with the particle luminosity reflecting cloud density. since all prims are completely transparent, only the particles are visible as flickering three-dimensional pattern.
the black&white version is on display at mab macmoragh's soup project.

representation

site-specific installation for Brooklyn Is Watching consisting of a miniature version of the exhibition space, an avatar tracking system, and modifications to the original exhibition space. the installation was discussed in podcast 57, but unfortunately the severe modifications to the exhibition space (hedges, stage, tower, stairs) escaped the panel. in my comment to the podcast, i mentioned that

there was actually more about the miniature version of the BiW space. the mini-space was an abstraction of the original space. just as the visitors, the avatars (not being but representing the visitors), were represented by their appropriately scaled bounding boxes (their virtual-physics representation). when i worked on achieving an appropriate abstraction/representation of the original space, i realized that the easiest way would be to also transform the space itself. i placed green prims around the hedges, covered the stairs, and placed appropriately colored prims around parts of the tower. thanks to these transformations, the original, but modified space and the representing miniature space were almost exactly scaled versions of each other. constructing the representation modified the original.

modified base and stairs of the BiW towermodified upper part of the BiW tower (the cabin was no longer visible)