Cartography as controversy

Julian Oliver sends word about his recent keynote at the Inclusiva Net conference:

From the earliest world maps to Google Earth, cartography has been a vital interface to the world. It guides our perceptions of what the world is and steers our actions in it. As our knowledge about the world has changed, so have maps with it (or so we like to think).

In this lecture Julian shows a darker side of map-making, covering various reality-distorting effects innate to the graphic language of cartography and how they can be easily exploited for gain.

Searching for the perfect image

Belgian artist Martijn Hendriks Untitled I (Google Sleep) consists of 10 Lambda prints which he handselected from an archive of 1000 images found through Google Image search. But why stop there?

The rise of broadband, cheap digital cameras, and social networks like Flickr, PhotoBucket, and Fotki built around tagging and sharing photos has meant there are millions of shots publicly available. And while stock imagery sites like Getty keep redesigning to make finding images easier, scientists like James Hays and Alexei Efros at Carnegie Mellon University employ a new 'brute strength' visual approach.


Their paper, recently presented at Siggraph, describes how algorhythms can power their way through a database of millions of shots, returning a piece (actually lots of pieces) that could match the missing section of an image. Don't like those rooftops in the foreground? Highlight it and choose from alternatives that match the perspective, colour, and lighting in your photograph: trees, a calm bay scene, or a flotilla of ships blended into the original.

It's a small world sharing a large amount of data. In a test case, Hays selected some scaffolding on a European city monument he didn't like. Combing through the millions of possibles, the result came back. The same shot. From the same angle. Taken just prior to construction by another tourist.

Quicktake: Small Global and Never been to Tehran at MIC

Currently showing at MIC, this exhibition by renowned new media artists D-Fuse tackles globalisation and it's impact - both in terms of architecture/environments, and in business. The first room is an ambitious, multi-channel installation centreing around the viral growth of fast-food giant McDonalds. World maps chronicle the time and position of every franchise, from local California eatery in the 50s through to global domination towards the turn of the millenium. As usual, the curatorial staff at the Moving Image Centre 'hung' the show impeccably, even adding multiple translucent screens to create a triplicate projected effect (see images).

But what's problematic about the work is it's over the top slickness. The data could actually be displayed in any web browser - via Google Maps or Google Earth - but dfuse instead use a barrage of electronic looking tickers and LED interfaces. What could be a dynamic, intelligently networked piece hooked up to data sources worldwide is turned into static video because of a perceived need to seduce the viewer. Adding another layer of irony, this piece about globalisation is fundamentally localised due to it's media, although d-fuse plan to add more video content as the show makes it's way around the world.


Next door, the superficially simple, "Never been to Tehran" is a case in point. The ambitious worldwide photography project challenged artists to "take photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like." Participants upload their shots to a Picasa Web Album, allowing a single hub for coordinating, as well as built in features like 'geotagging' to show origin of each image, and RSS feeds allowing blogs to incorporate it into their sites. This open framework means that curators worldwide can re-present the show in a variety of formats.

Putting the old back into new media

Alessandro Ludovico is no stranger to technology - he worked with a group on the controversial Amazon Noir project. Scripts repeatedly mined the booksellers "Look Inside this book" feature, piecing back the hundreds of random pages into complete novels, then redistributing them via P2P (Peer to Peer) filesharing software. Together with Paolo Cirio, he also staged "Google Will Eat Itself" a couple years ago, filtering funds received from Google AdWords to purchase stock in the global search giant. So at the "still/open" artists workshop in Melbourne last week, as Janine Randerson reports, his topic was very surprising. Paper.


Ludovico's talk, the Persistence of Paper deconstructed the hailed 'paperless office', and elaborated on the strength of the humble book as an historical record amidst a very transient web, an autonomous lo-tech solution which is "reliable and not dependent on the lack of tcp/ip waves or electricity". He moves on to suggesting "just in time" publishing - newspapers or magazines that are feverishly updated until a few moments before cheap offline production onto paper.

Helmut Smitt's "Pamphlet" work riffs on this new ease of publishing, allowing visitors to type in a message and have a printer spit out a brochure from the 10th floor of a tower block. Services like online publisher lulu.com make significantly bigger works possible - send a PDF, choose distribution methods, and even get an ISBN. Gmail announced it's "Paper Gmail" feature, allowing printouts of archived mails, as an April Fools Day joke. But users, and reporters fell for it, some even requesting it after they uncovered the prank.

Giving up control with generative art

In 1896, William Morris, founder of the arts and crafts movement, drew his last design, a subtle wallpaper pattern called Compton. Over 100 years later, a machine called Hektor spraypaints it on the wall of a gallery in Amsterdam. Like the original, the execution isn't perfect - the automated spraycan wobbles on it's strings and the paint bleeds, introducing an element of chance and performance that the software that created it has tried to negate.

Engineered by Uli Franke, the mechanism plays back a drawing from Adobe Illustrator using Jürg Lehni's Scriptographer plugin. Scriptographer attempts to break the stranglehold of closed, limited tools like Adobe's by creating both a software library and website that allow scripts to be posted, improved, and shared. What's more interesting is that the tools shift the creation paradigm. Instead of drawing, erasing, and redrawing, the artist now tweaks variables like "rotate", and "randomness". They also allow aesthetics which can't be achieved manually: fractal letters condense infinitely small, organic trees grow upward, letters extrude based on colour values.

Giving up control, and using words to control aesthetics is at the heart of Google Synth, created by Paul Andrew at art.gen.nz. "Based on an algorithm by Micheal Ashikmin in his paper Synthesizing Natural Textures it attempts to recreate the "target" image using the textures present in the "input" image. Some aspects can be controlled by the user, but it mostly does its own thing." Users click Random while the software cycles through a list of words, then click Generate when they're reached the word they want. Want to see what "inarticulate + merriment" looks like?

Green pixels: Thinking sustainable in art and technology

From An Inconvenient Truth to LiveEarth, terms like 'sustanability' and 'carbon-neutral' have been thrown around frequently lately. But what does it mean for us working in the arts and technology space here in New Zealand?

"The little rivulet down the hill has to pretty much dry up for this to happen! However 23mm of rain the other day has brought it back to its normal capacity. Yippee, the coffee maker can be started up again."

The quote above, taken from Thinking Unlimited, is a response, albeit one which might send a groan through the average tech-savvy artist. But electricity consumption is at the heart of the digital space, so it makes sense that's where bloggers like Mark Ontkush start. His post stating that "An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.” led to an all-black version of Google, titled Blackle. And while the intent is there, posters to the ADA list looked past the hype, calculating that the savings here are negligible.

> > > BTW, this 750 megawatt-hours/year is not actually very much at all.
> > > If you convert it to megawatt hours per hour, which is to say,
> > > megawatts:
> > >
> > > 750 / (365 * 24) = 0.0856
> > >
> > > you get 85 kW. Heaters, kettles, and vacuum cleaners use in the
> > > order of 2kW each

Programmers working on alternative operating system Linux have focused on power heavily in the last few months, releasing a series of patches that aim to conserve and minimise whenever possible - such as backlighting and a new 'tickless idle' feature. Normally processors 'wake up' every millisecond to keep the system clock going and synced, tickless idle disables this function, resulting in a cooler, less power hungry processor that's truly idle. This PowerTOP project demonstrates some of the basic plusses for open source - their channel regularly has between 30 and 50 volunteer coders exchanging ideas, contributing features, and fixing patches. Their reward (besides saving the earth) is something much more tangible - their laptop batteries last a few hours longer.

et al: the fundamental practice at Artspace

Sneaked into Artspace on the final day for Et Al's repurposed Venice exhibition, the Fundamental Practice, and thought I'd mention a couple quick thoughts on the digital aspects.

While it has been shown before, the Artspace version has been "reordered, regrouped, restored". This was evident in aspects like the sound - the curatorial intern was kind enough to play a CD of recorded sound from the previous incarnation, which seemed much more solitary and quiet. The expansive concrete rooms of the current space meant that the sound channels boomed and echoed, mixed and collided. CNN style news headlines shifted with white noise and more melodic elements as you moved between areas.

Photographs by Jennifer French provided courtesy of Artspace

The Fundamental Practice also utilised a Google Earth element - playing back a series of waypoints and camera angles generated with the mapping tool. Strangely the locative element didn't anchor the work in a greater spatial context, instead zooming and panning around a collection of tiny village names in an (for myself unknown) Middle Eastern country (Iran, Iraq?). Overlaid in a circular pattern over 5 of these were obelisks, lending the whole thing a totemic, conspiracy theory quality which focused on a single village in the middle. This was reinforced by a second screen constantly scrolling through propoganda text - a mixture of military jargon and religious commands displayed in a raw code (think notepad) type format. As p. mule states, "Fundamentalism was rife throughout the process from all sectors. Is humour important (in the work)? p.mule: Yes. (or) It’s fundamental."