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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered that the Milky Way Galaxy is warped and vibrates like a drum due to the influence of two nearby galaxies.
The vibrations have been analyzed to consist of a chord of three 'notes' (although these are millions of ocataves below human hearing range).
In 'The Tuning of the World', Murray Schafer discusses the nature of worldly soundscapes and breaks a geographical soundscape into elements. The first element is the 'keynote.' This could be called the fundamental frequency of a geographical area and may be influenced by he presence of water, ice, sand, buildings, people, etc.
Following Schafer's methods, then, this chord of the Milky Way's vibrations, then, might also be called the keynote of our galaxy.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/060110_drumfrm.htm
In July I will be spending a month in Taipei, Taiwan for an artist's residency at the Taipei Artist's Village. I'm very much looking forward to it, especially to investigating the wireless technologies that are apparently more advanced and much more a part of life in Taiwan than in the US.
While doing a little research, I came across a new technology being developed by a company in Taipei that sends data over the surface of the skin, through the body's natural electric field. This field, what might be called an 'aura' by those who believe in the new age philosophy, is modulated by the data which can be accessed without direct contact, but within 20cm of contact with the body.
Read about it in this article:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2005/03/20/2003247076
In November I participated in a workshop on collaboration at CITU at the University of Paris 8 called IN/OUT. The concept of the workshop was that an international group of artists would create works that would receive and send some kind of digital information to the other projects in the group. Information about the project is here (in French):
http://www.citu.info/index.php?page=projet.php?id_projet=25&cat=1
For my part, I wasn't sure what kind of project I would do, I knew that it would involve some kind of data translation and most likely some kind of real time data in addition to the information coming from the other projects. What follows is the most recent project description (still in development)
IN/OUT Citu Proposal: Terminal 1.0, January 07. 2006 Andrea Polli
Air travel has become a part of daily life. Jets pass over even the most remote parts of the Earth, piercing the air with the sounds of jet engines and creating visible trails across the sky, but interaction in global airspace is shrouded in mystery. What is happening inside the planes you see when you look up at them in the sky? When you enter airspace, you become disoriented, passing through time zones and cultures in minutes, flying above the weather and outside of time. This airborne frontier has become a site of political action, a lawless place where unmarked jets might contain torture victims and air busses can be used as missiles.
Although it may seem impossible to monitor activities in this remote sphere, traces of interactions in the form of radio and video communications fill the airwaves. By following these traces with technology and vigilance, individuals who call themselves ‘plane-spotters’ have been able to find and expose unusual activity in airspace.
Plane-spotters identified a Boeing passenger jet with tracking number N313P and tracked its flight as it traveled from Macedonia to Kabul, Afghanistan, making a stop in Baghdad. This plane was later identified as the flight used to transport German citizen Khaled El-Masri, who says he was taken against his will to these places and tortured by the CIA. (The CIA's Torture Taxi, The San Francisco Bay Guardian vol. 40 no. 11 http://www.sfbg.com/40/11/cover_plane.html)
What if every citizen had the ability to monitor real time air traffic and listen to real time air traffic control easily? How would this information reflect who we are as a global society? Terminal 1.0 explores this possibility by presenting real-time air traffic control radio and airport webcam images mixed with real time video, audio and sensor information from an exhibition space. Using several small flat screen monitors and speakers distributed throughout the exhibition space, Terminal 1.0 provides ambient monitoring to exhibition visitors. Visitors see and hear air traffic movement and communications intermixed with their own movements and communications on monitors reminiscent of airport gate departure/arrival screens. The remote sphere of the air is brought to land creating a visceral connection between our lives and the activities above us.
Images and sound are manipulated in real time by input data from other art works, particularly video, sound, and sensor input. I am interested in collaborating. An extension of Terminal 1.0 could be sending the images and sound to mobile devices given to exhibition visitors. To develop this aspect of the project I would need a collaborator with interest/skill in creating media for mobile devices.
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