Garden city goes digital with conference

Christchurch will play host to a spectrum of digital artists, musicians, programmers, and designers this weekend for Tending Networks, the yearly symposium for the Aotearoa Digital Arts network. Highlights include a keynote and new work presented by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the Seoul-based masters of flash who first came to light with their cheeky, minimal work "Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site" shown above.

Stella Brennan will be discussing her most recent work, "South Pacific", a poetic micro-narrative overlaid over satellite imagery which I've previously reviewed.


Eddie Clemens, now based in Christchurch on residency, will be talking about his Pinball Lanterns installation in the Auckland Central Library space. Douglas Bagnall will show us how to "take the tedious work of experimentation, abstraction and learning out of the process of making art" via his myriad machine creations, which range from A Film Making Robot to Te-Tuhi Videogame machine and Cloud Classifier. Finally, cyber-performance group Avatar Body Collision will most likely focus on UpStage, working between countries, and the nuances of the virtual theatre.

Full Symposium programme here.

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.

Online artists tackle "AER" quality through exhibition

Belching through the city of Aachen in Germany on huge Mercedes-Benz flatbeds, Eve Andrée Laramée's "Parks on Trucks" is just one of the works shown in the "AER Project", an exhibition curated and released today by Andrea Pollie at Hunter College in New York.


Other standouts include Translator II: Grower, by Sabrina Raaf, a Mars-like rover with a much more down to earth mission, to monitor and visualise levels of CO2 in a room. Raaf balances what could be a patronising, overly-scientific piece with her execution - the robot draws grass along the walls with childlike glee, each blade corresponding to current carbon dioxide amounts.


My favourite was SuperGas by SuperFlex, a "simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of an African family." Visually strong, the huge orange blog resembles a giant Claes Oldenberg piece. But more interesting was the stance towards the "art", shifting the traditional concept from representation to tool, a practical object that invites participation and heavy use - deriving as much from the fields of engineering, science, and agriculture as contemporary art. Currently SuperGas is being tested in the field in Cheing Mai, Thailand.


Unfortunately after very tangible pieces like SuperGas and Parks on Trucks, works like Amy Balkin's Public Smog appear overly conceptual at best, pretentious and ineffectual at worst. And while the project's page disclaims that "Public Smog is no substitute for direct action", the piece requires too much suspension of reality to even work as an exercise in raising awareness.

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?

Robotics in art: moving past function

The cybernetic hand moves across the canvas at an eerily constant speed - perfect, flawless. It suddenly stops, dabs a brush into a pot and drags it across the canvas. The piece is the latest example of Simon Ingram's "Painting Assemblages", recently installed at the Adam Art Gallery. For the last few years Ingram has been pursuing his doctorate by investigating artificial intelligence and painting, relinquishing creative control over execution to an industrial machine. Painting Assemblages is a horrifically poor use of old technology - CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) techniques were developed by the US Air Force in the 50s for metal cutting techniques and are capable of extremely fine tolerances (.002 mm). And that's precisely why it's interesting. "Assemblages" runs roughshod over all the glittering conventions of robotics - a paint splattered machine made partially out of lego that is forced to stand-in for the artist.



Bruce Shapiro has spent the last 15 years in a grey space between science, technology and art. Like Ingram, he's repurposed CNC and motion control for far 'less functional' means. "Sisyphus III", Shapiros latest incarnation of his sand plotter, picks up on Japanese garden and Tibetan sand mandala traditions, generating flawless mathematical patterns continuously. Similarly, his "Ribbon Dancer", inspired by Chinese dance, was recently installed in the Science Center in Iowa, USA. "Dancer" populates the lobby area, drawing dynamic, fluid lines through the space.