‘Ere Be Dragons

Project Description:

‘Ere Be Dragons plays games with your heart.

’Ere be Dragons playfully recasts players’ relationship both with the space they inhabit and with the unseen space within their bodies. The player’s own body becomes an engaging new companion, a soft machine whose physical response to their exertions they can sense and understand as they walk along.  To play you will need to book in for a 20 minute walk exploring the surrounding city streets.

‘Ere Be Dragons is a metaphor based on the maps created in the West in the Middle Ages. Explorations of the unknown areas of the earth were often illustrated as being populated with dragons, forests and wild beasts. Mapmakers were reliant on anecdotal information from explorers keen to impress with tales of bravery and as consequence the information was embellished with fantasy and hearsay.

Partners and Funders:

'Ere Be Dragons has been developed by Active Ingredient in collaboration with Robin Shackford, Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, London Sport Institute at Middlesex University, Hewlett Packard Mobile Bristol, and the Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham University

'Ere Be Dragons has been funded by a Sci-Art Research and Development Grant from the Wellcome Trust and a commission from the Radiator Festival for New Technology Art 2006.

Artist’s Statement:

Active Ingredient’s motivation in the development of ‘Ere Be Dragons was to create an experience that used the tools of game play to build a visualisation of the player’s internal and external worlds.  The aim was to generate levels of conceptual and mythological meaning from the feedback of the player’s heart rate as they walked through a real physical landscape, therefore creating a map of the player's personal interaction with their environment.

Active Ingredient is in the process of exploring computer games from an artistic perspective. The aim within the ‘Ere Be Dragons project was to create an experience through game play that went beyond the traditional definition of a game or artwork.

The project’s conceptual thread lay in the artist’s ideas about creative mapping.  By using heart rate as a means to map real space we were interested in the representation of an emotional city, seen less as streets and buildings but more as a visualisation of the internal processes of the players.

‘Ere Be Dragons became a project where we could explore ways of altering the experience of the real world through game play, virtual space and remote space, themes that have been recurrent in our work since 1996.  The liveness and the live feedback (through the heart rate of the players) are therefore central to this experience of interaction.

www.i-am-ai.net

Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which over the last three years almost 1000 people have taken part in. In the context of regular, local workshops, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.

www.biomapping.net

the daily practice of map making

If at the end of your life, you could look at the shapes your wanderings over the earth have made, what patterns would you see? What words might be formed that take a human lifetime to write?

Dan's work crosses a number of disciplines: performance, psychogeography, locative media, video and fine art. Since April 2003 he has recorded every journey he has made with a GPS.

Dan is fascinated by the idea that locations (interior or exterior) serve as a mnemonic for the stories that we tell about our lives and often work to reveal these human narratives (my own and other peoples') bound to a place.

http://www.planbperformance.net/dan/

Undercurrent

Undercurrent brings together sound and visual artists based in the UK and China in a cross-continental collaboration. The project feeds from a pool of audio, video and photographic material collected by D-Fuse from cities in both countries. This is being re-interpreted in response to questions of urban architecture, economic and social change as well as our personal relations to the space that surrounds us. Undercurrent is a multi-screened, immersive environment of high-resolution video/images and sound.

 

Locations:

Shanghai, Guangzhou + Chongqing

London, Liverpool + Sunderland

 

D-FUSE

D-Fuse are artists working in a trans-disciplinary method with cutting edge technology, across wide range of creative media from the Web, Print, TV, Film, Art and Architecture, to Live A/V Performances and Mobile Media.

 

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

8gg, Actop, B6, D-Fuse [Michael FAULKNER + Matthias KISPERT], Ariane GEIL, Haus M Commune, LIN Zhiying, Davide QUAYOLA, Barney STEEL, Axel STOCKBURGER , THOM Chin, WAN G Geezer, XU Cheng, ZHONG Minjie, Zip Design

 

Project Producer - Keri Elmsly

Project partner and Sunderland component commission - /sLab [Keith Whittle + Marian Downes]

Project representation - powers of 2

Supported by Arts Council England, Visiting Arts, British Council and /sLab

www.dfuse.com

A recent work ‘Shoot me if you can’ utilized mobile phones for a city wide muli-player game, in which teams compete against each other to be the first to photograph their opponents and the last to be captured themselves.

Erik investigates the impact of technology on his hometown of Bandung, Indonesia, and through new media comments upon the city’s social, cultural and daily life.

http://butonkultur21.org/

Curator of Urban Vibe at NABI Art Center, Seoul, So-Hyeon has been working with artists, scientists and technicians to explore the city through mobile and locative media.

http://eng.nabi.or.kr/project/view.asp?prjlearn_idx=119

Sensity by Stanza

Visualizing the dynamic data around my district as an audio visual artwork. I have set up a wireless sensor network around my house in London. I live nearby a railway line, a factory, some trees and a mobile phone mast. (This is using real data). This is version three of this project.

The city is made up of bits of data that change. This artwork captures this change to try to understand the underlying fabric of city space.

Sensity is part of "The Emergent City" series of works by Stanza.

Collecting data across the city of London which visualized to make art. The whole world is a dynamic real time artwork. The city data space becomes mirrored online and the environment becomes an emergent series generative artworks

Sensity artworks are made from the data that is collected across the urban and environment infrastructure. A network of sensors, some fixed, and some embedded, collects data which is then published online. The sensors then interpret the micro-data of the interactive city. The output from the sensors displays the emotional state of the city online and the information will be used to create installations and sculptural artifacts.

These artworks made will represent the movement of people, pollution in the air, the vibrations and sounds of buildings, they are in effect emergent social sculptures visualizing the emotional state of the city. The sensor network can be moved from urban to rural setting and different types of visualization can be made depending on the environment. Sensity is an open social sculpture that informs the world and creates new meaningful experiences.

http://www.stanza.co.uk/sensity/index.html

“At the seashore, between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship in the physical and digital worlds.” Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Media Lab

This is a world where people live online – working and communicating; inhabiting online spaces – in a state of continuous connectivity, everything is done via the Internet.

We are now at the dawning of the age of ubiquitous computing. When computers are starting, no longer, to be the box on the desk or the slab warming our legs. The computer as an artefact will disappear. As they become embedded and ambient, our interaction with will become more invisible; more human. We will become more human. (We are not there yet). But as yet, the people who will be most affected by it, the overwhelming majority of whom are non-technical, non-specialist, ordinary citizens of the developed world, barely know it even exists (is even possible).

A mobile phone can be switched off or left [forgotten] at home. A computer can be shut down, unplugged, and walked away from. Yet, this coming ambient, ubiquitous technology will be capable of insinuating itself into all the apertures everyday life affords it. An environment will be formed in a way that current technology cannot possibly ever create.

I am contactable, and I am findable, in the digital world. It is easy to find me, write to me, work with me, and speak to me. However, people have trouble meeting the physical me, in the physical world. I have become so findable and so contactable: I hide. Perhaps not purposely, more though the perception I do not need to be physically present, because I feel present already.


Addressing the imbalance

I will use an off-the-shelf smartphone, on a standard service plan with a major telecoms service provider. Combined (via a custom server application) with an open-source geo-mapping application; I will publish constantly, live, my exact physical geographical location to a distance of within three meters (talking distance). I am presenting myself with the option of trading away access to the most intimate details of my movements in return for increased convenience.

By becoming findable – to anyone, anywhere – in the physical world, I can participate fully and with anyone: I become the absolute citizen.

I become a citizen of both the physical and digital worlds, coexisting as one (the same device that makes me visible and findable, allows continuous instant connection – communication – via any digital means); I cannot hide (and I become vulnerable).

www.greyisgood.eu

Life Speculatrix

"Life Speculatrix" is an evolutionary physical skin based on feedback retrieved locally and globally. Locally it responds to sound, light and proximity of people around it. Globally it responds to RSS/Atom environmental feeds retrieved through the webspace: pollution levels, climate features, sound, from around the world will affect its performance continually. With this experiment we argue that a human computer interface framework has to include the phenomenological environmental matrix and the complexity of human input in order to create a truly living interactive experience and not just a detached interactive art device. We will observe the “evolution” of this piece according to different stimuli, give it our feedback and observe how it learns to adapt itself continually to the evolutionary properties of the environment, thus becoming a universal situated living piece. All the necessary and sufficient conditions are therefore present for a “hidden dimension” to be added to a global/local phenomenology and a poetics of visual space.

http://www.augmented-architectures.com/

Taking a photo means making a memory. Choosing a moment in time and framing a situation. Archiving it or making it public. Either way, we create a visual item that we have an emotional attachment to through our memory. Photos help us to remember moments in our past. Often they even become a memory in their own right. For many, making their moments public through services like Flickr is already part the process of photography itself, creating archives which contain a vast collection of visual fragments of individual lives.

Buttons takes on this notion of the camera as a networked object. It is a camera that will capture a moment at the press of a button. However, unlike a conventional analog or digital camera, this one doesn't have any optical parts. It allows you to capture your moment but in doing so, it effectively seperates it from the subject. Instead, as you will memorize the moment, the camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment.

Essentially, it is a camera that - using a mobile communication device - takes other's photos. Photos that were created by someone who pressed a button somewhere at the same time as its own button was pressed. Even more so, it reduces the cameras to their networked buttons in order to create a link between two individuals.

After a few minutes or hours, depending on how soon someone else shares their photo on the web, an image will appear on the screen. In a way, it belongs half to the person who had pressed the button and still remembers that moment. Because of that connection, the photos are never dismissed as random, no matter how enigmatic they may be.

http://www.pohflepp.com/

 

 SYNTFARM 0.3

 

 

SYNTFARM is a modular ecosystem that cultivates the synthetic environments and creatures, which do not represent the maps, or visualizations of the physical world but its extensions that have its rules and self-governing life. Each module in the ecosystem, the so called farm, questions and reinvents our usage, interactions, relations, and reinventions of the present technologies and our surroundings on socio-political-environmentalist contexts.

         
SYNTFARM 0.3 will be the third in the series of performances and public appearances of SYNTFARM. First part would include hiking on one of the mountains near Tokyo(probably Mount Takao) and collecting GPS data, temperature, humidity, pollution(VOC), ambiental sounds and visuals from nature. after the hiking trip, we would use the data in predesigned system(which is written in processing.org) which we use for performances and installations. in the installation, there will be visualization and sonification of the trip. this type of information will work almost like a try to preserve or archive data from nature. the other type of data is the creation of a synthetic farm which creatures will feed on the data we picked up in nature. the rules of this  synthetic ecosystem will be determined based on the naturalist and geo-spatial data gathered from the forest. the dis-location and transcoding of the impulses from nature to an urban environment - a gallery would be translocated in space and in time.

http://syntfarm.org

scanMemories

scanMemories is an interdisciplinary art project that uses RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), databases and mobile and wireless technologies and. It opens a heterogeneous and direct access to the memories materialized in physical spaces and objects. The project examines how memory practices in death can be altered by information technologies. This includes the questions about how information can alter embodied relation with the materiality of memory objects and space, and how this can change the issues of identity and privacy about the dead.

The main characteristics of the scanMemories system are:

n      The database is populated with media contents by those who want to share their lives after their death, or the bereaved who wish to cherish the memory using an online tool created for the project.

n      RFID tags are implanted in memory objects (such as tombstones or clothing) which serve as gates to access the memory database.

n      The information can only be accessed in the exact location where the RFID tag has been placed as the deceased wished, and it is retrieved by the people who the deceased wanted to share with. The people use wireless and mobile devices customized for the application.

With our project, we explore how information technologies can alter our perception about the post-identity of the deceased and also our sensory relation with memory objects, and how they can produce complex meaning about the death and remembrance in a highly networked society.

scanMemories is funded by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) and supported by Arts Council England.

www.scanmemories.org

Address

Address is a handmade jewellery piece designed and created by Mouna Andraos and Sonali Sridhar. When you first acquire the pendant, you select a place that you consider to be your anchor – where you were born, your home, or perhaps the place you long to be. Once the jewellery is initialized, every time you wear the piece it displays how many miles away from that location you are using a GPS component built into the pendant. As you take Address around the world with you, it serves as a personal connection to that special place, making the world a little smaller or maybe a little bigger.

http://www.missmoun.com/

Des lendemains radieux (Beautiful promises) is an attempt to reconsider our environment through the prismes of prospective and poetry, by awakening the attention about the extraordinary interactions between the man and the nature, from the history of the world until the sudden appearance of modernity. "Culture... is what made the human kind something else that an accident of the universe" André Malraux. 

www.laurentpernot.net

www.estherharris.com
 

We all fade away (2007) begins with a slow zoom into a still image of tourists, all gazing at something we cannot see (the photograph was taken at the Niagra Falls). Over time each spectator is blacked out as they are transformed into birds that slowly fly off into the distance. The animations are accompanied by an atmospheric soundtrack of beats and synths.  

The work is about death and loss – the rise and fall of human endeavor – but it isn't melancholic.  Articulating an apprehension of our fragility and promoting a longer view, it unties by playing on our shared humanity and inspires a philosophic feeling of the 'bigger picture', a cyclical view of life from an alternative perspective.

Solarigrafica shows the paths of the Sun by using the Pinhole camera technique. This photographs are taken with exposure times from 1 day till 6 months. By doing so the invisible movements of the Sun can be made visible in landscapes. A Soundscape of recorded and with a granular synthesis processed samples creates a spherical, alienated atmosphere.

www.andreaszingerle.at

J9 - Computational Video

J9 is a video installation that explores the relationship between journey and narrative; it uses sound and image to draw the audience into the rhythmic cycles of travel. Working with a 9 minute editing structure generated from both audio and visual pacing, multiple versions of a sequence are created using a video database of a diverse range of physical locations.

The installation makes reference to the use of “computational video” as it incorporates software systems to sequence the audio and visual video edits.

The use of a recurring form is intended to evoke the way in which we map our own internal experience onto diverse locations and cultures as we travel.

The soundtrack is composed from location audio samples and musical elements,allowing the audiovisual rhythm to evoke an emotional sense of transitions through different physical environments. The piece loops on multiple screens in the gallery space and as we follow the same narrative, each of the 9 iterations takes us on a different audio-visual journey

julian konczak J9

Jeremy Avis – Music Score and Performance

Peter Dale – Music Recording Engineer

Jon Pigott – Audio Treatments

http://zerok.tv

ReadyMadeLife

Video made exclusively with images filmed by video-surveillance camera monitors. This images are taken in the city I live, Genova (Italy) and in Zurich (Swiss).

The central meaning is  the predetermination of the experience implicit in all our life. I think that   our behavior depends on the cultural and the linguistic system that each individual takes on in order to know the world and everything within it.

This mean that we don't choose our mind system, our ideas, but these depends on the context in which we grow up.

We are spoken to by the codes with which we are equipped and constantly immersed in a relationship of power which builds our behaviour and our desires.

I'd like to show this fact with an instrument of observation of social life. Technology is used to control each individual and to create behaviour.

This means “Ready Made”. In all our lives there is a part that doesn't depend on us, but is ready made and depends on the linguistic system we take on.

It is an investigation into the concept of “Biopolitics” coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is a category which analyses the profound relationships that link the individual to power

This kind of link is based on a system of permanent reading of the subject in which science and technology converge .Every subject is a never-ending source of data which makes up an archive of knowledge through which it is possible to organise social behaviours.

The sounds of the video are made by a software created by Pieter Suurmond of University of Amsterdam. This software convert the movement of subatomic particle in acustic waves.

This is to suggest that the human life is  the results of a social context but also of the laws of physics and nature.

"Shanghai Shanghai"

"Shanghai Shanghai" is a montage of virtual images touting the development program to developers and tourists and presenting the city as it will be when building is finished, with images of the construction sites taken by the artist himself, showing how whole neighborhoods are being destroyed as their inhabitants are expelled, and sometimes even before they get out! We see a woman busy in her kitchen with, on one side, a blank space where the wall used to be...

"SHANGHAIEXPRESS"

A video shot all day from the 56th floor of a homebuilding. A look at Shanghai harbour's hive of activity.

http://zhenchen.free.fr

Wilderness Trouble V1.0, 2007

DVD Running time: 3:30

 

“Wilderness Trouble” is inspired by William Cronon’s article entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” which argues that the concept of wilderness is a historical and cultural construction and that the preoccupation with conserving “natural” spaces untouched by humans fails to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and their environments. This meditational DV considers technology in this reevaluation of wilderness—by refusing to separate modern human life from relatively “natural” environments and by thinking about nature and the digital technologies that make this video possible in the same frame.

www.ecoarttech.net
 

Framing the Frame with Distance

NaoKo’s work highlights the ambiguities and confusions of national and individual identities often played out through language. Focusing on issues of dislocation, re-location and representation in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual society, she explores processes of continual translation: from thought to voice, between one language and another, through one media to the next.

Framing the Frame with Distance is a live performance in both linear and non-linear environments. Naoko uses live linked webcast projection to examine the paradox of virtual and actual spaces.

www.naokotakahashi.com

A movement duet each month in the same moment from different sides of the world. Over 30 minutes an improvisation develops in response to each environment as well as images/movements/presences that arise from awareness of each other being (t)here. Each month we choose a different location which will have similarities in atmosphere or form.

Transglobal Duets is the continuation of movement explorations together that started in 2000 to do with communication, environment and place.

www.transglobalduets.myzen.co.uk
 

Inter(nal_in)vention is a new performance video made especially for Dis-locate. While in Manchester, UK, the artist gave directions to another artist in Tokyo using a map of Manchester. The dialogue was made via mobile phone. The action took place at 12.15 UK time and 20.15 Tokyo time. Exploring the outer landscape enables us to find our inner landscape, and, in the same way as following the wrong map, mobile technology can both confuse our sense of place and enrichen our experience of it. Inter(nal_in)vention is about how a place can be internalised in imaginary ways whether it has been seen, visualised, visited or inhabited, and the subjectivity of interpretation.

Thank you to Yoshinori Niwa for following directions. www.niwa-staff.org

www.lisamee.com
 

Re-presentations

A city is both a geographical location as well as a collective identity that is often represented through architectural icons, tourist attractions, historic sites, public spaces, cultural institutions and popular locations.

The images that get depicted through the news, in journals, in films, on websites, on postcards, and in the newspapers often become icons of a particular city, frequently illustrating a story, sometimes reaffirming a sense of place and overtime become part of the collective image of these locations. It is often through technologies that these locations are created and reaffirmed, while at the same time, these technologies allow one to experience locations while taking away a certain need to ever be at, inside or near the actual site.

While in New Delhi, Maria started collecting images from local newspapers, searching specifically for architectural structures and the boundaries between locations, sites of interest or interaction. Choosing thread colours from the selected newspaper images, these representations were sewn onto paper, paying particular attention to the boundary where a site meets with another location or gets obstructed in the image. Through this process, gaps are formed in the selected site, giving the impression of an erasure or exclusion but also of a site currently being constructed. The newspaper image remains mostly hidden on the back of the drawing, leaving the viewer to see a reversed stitched outline of the way a particular site is represented and a sense of something lurking underneath with only the title (the picture caption from the article) as a direct guide.

postcard…

I collect and send postcards. I have always been interested in postcards as objects of documentation, in their ability to affect people and as a form of communication. Even in this age of instant electronic worldwide communication, people still ask to be sent postcards by those they know who travel. Why?  I believe it makes people feel more connected to the person sending the card. We seem to value the time it takes to send a postcard more than an email. It is as if the sender has sent a part of themselves. It’s interesting...Postcards are objects we don’t delete.

Between April 30^th, 2007 and July 15^th, 2007 I travelled around the world. During the course of the trip I collected digital images of actual postcards from the places I visited.

For Dislocate 07 I have installed a simple stack of postcards on a table. The postcard has an image on one side made by a traditional stone stamp I had made while travelling; the other side of the postcard has an email address and instructions for the viewer. Individual viewers are invited to take a postcard, which will then allow them to interact with the artist and to experience a part of the artist travels around the world. The individual may select a date between April 30 and July 15 and email it to the email address on the card. After receiving the email the artist will send the individual a digital image of a postcard from the location the artist was on that day.

Artists: Harry Levene/Jon Pigrem

 

This piece uses techniques of spatialised sound. It employs our ability to differentiate and locate streams of audio information and guide us to a point of comprehension. It is psychoaccoustically designed to create overlapping pockets of sound, facilitated by our perception of aural distance and frequency.

 

All the sounds are derived from original voice recordings in Bengali, Chinese, Turkish and German. The script comprises critical notes on the construction of the sigil ”What you give…”  

The languages represent present-day local communities in the east end of London which generally have little contact with the world of contemporary art, though they exist side by side. The voices discuss the form a design derived from the (ritual) language (Hebrew) of an earlier community, now largely dispersed; so that this becomes a work about migration, history and a connection with spirits.  See www.sigil8.com for a full introduction.

 

 

8 to the power 2 (digital movie)

Artists: Harry Levene/Jon Pigrem

 

The work 8 to the power becomes the sound track to a new digital movie in which the sigil ”What you give…” radiates from or orbits around the centre of the screen. Within each segment of the sigil dial are chroma-keyed images (enhanced video of people walking in markets in the east end of London); so individual bodies appear and disappear within the schematic bodies of the design. The imagery works together with the layered sound to create an environment that prioritises sensory over cognitive experience. Rectangular shapes may be appreciated first without any connotation and then as elements of the segmented body representing brain, face, torso and arms, genitalia, legs.

www.sigil8.com