Psychogeography Comes to Central Square

Art Interactive and Glowlab, a local "network of psychogeographers" is using Central Square as an exhibition and investigation space for the next nine weeks, conducting experiments with laughing bicycles, art/clothing made from trash, and other psychogeographic phenomena.

Wikipedia says, "Psychogeography is "The study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals", according to the article Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, in Situationniste Internationale No. 1 (1958) ."

I first heard the term psychogeography while reading J.G. Ballard's The Terminal Beach, Concrete Island, and Crash. Richard Calder is a more recent example of a writer working with these ideas. (Note to the curious: Calder's writings include some *unusual* tastes and flavors.) Calder may have optioned one of his novels for film production. Of the members of the Situationist International mentioned by Wikipedia, I'm most familar with Guy Debord's writings, from quite a few semina sessions on media theory, cultural theory, postmodern theory.

Regardless of psychogeography's origins, all roads lead to the internet now: a quick Google query turns up psychogeography.org.uk, which links to an essay titled Dada Photomontage and net.art Sitemaps that compares Dadaist photomontages to the familar sitemap. The first two citations in the piece are the Yale Style Guide, and Tufte's Visualizing Information.

The circle closes easily, since one of the link threads leads to socialfiction.org, where you find a page on [Generative] Psychogeogrpahy. Random note; socialfiction's banner carries references to "carthographic sadism * gabber avant-gardism * experimental knowledge * DIY urbanism" - all likely cadidates for Amazon's SIP statistically improbable phrases listings. Perhaps most intriguing is "disco socialism". Now that might catch on in some public policy circles that could use a bit of help picking a good back beat...

A quick selection of events that looked interesting:

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 15TH, 6:30PM - 8:30PM
6:30PM - 8:30PM: N55 Artist Talk & Dinner
Hosted with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT
Danish artists' group N55 creates mobile tools and situations for everyday living: a workplace, a modular boat, a shop, a factory, a clean air machine, a commune, and even a personal rocket. Food & Drink provided. NOTE: This event is hosted at CAVS, 265 Mass Ave, 3Fl (Bldg N-52, Rm 390), Cambridge MA.

THURSDAY OCTOBER 27TH, 6PM - 9PM
6PM - 9PM: Glowlab Party!
Hosted by the Boston Society of Architects. All young artists, designers, architects and their friends are invited to enjoy good food and cheer and become a part of a growing network of young professionals who are shaping the future of Boston. Free drinks & entertainment. RSVP to bsa@architects.org.

For those of you with fashion inclinations (spurred by watching too much InStyle?)

SATURDAY DECEMBER 10TH, 12PM - 6PM
12PM - 5PM: DIY Wearable Challenge
Make an interactive outfit from Cambridge trash and discarded electronics Led by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki.

local tags: architecture, art, cambridge, ia, information, jgballard, psychogeography, science_fiction, situationists

The User Experience of Interactive Art: Boston CyberArts Festival 2005

Prompted by curiousity, and a desire to see if interactive art really is irritating, I took in several exhibits for the 2005 Boston CyberArts Festival, at the Decordova Museum this weekend.

Sarah Boxer's review of Trains - a landscape made of tiny model railroad buildings and figures, adorned with movie images from famous movie scenes, and populated by passengers that appear only on the video screen of a Gameboy - offers several stellar insights about the emotionally unhealthy states of mind brought on by attempting to interact with computerized interfaces. Boxer says:

Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances of interactive art (prurience, ritual, ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce a mega-annoyance: total frustration. Case in point: John Klima's "Trains," at the DeCordova Museum School Gallery, in the Boston suburb Lincoln, which is a model train set guided by cellphone.

It's clear from this that the emotional or other content of the art installation itself was obscured by the user experience Boxer had to negotiate in order to engage with the piece. Boxer's expectations for user experience quality might have been lower if she were trying out a new spreadsheet, or Lotus Notes, but that's just an example of how the software industry has trained customers to expect abusively bad experiences. See photos of Trains here.

One of the more usable - if that judgement applies - is Nam June Paik's "Requiem for the 20th Century". Requiem - photo here - according to Boxer is less annoying "...a relief to just stand there and watch the apocalyptic montage! No interaction. No instruction. No insults."

Once past the interface, I found Requiem elegiac as expected, but unsatisfying for two reasons: first by virtue of concerning mostly Paik's work in video art, and second by being strangely empty at heart (or was that the point?). The svelte physicality of the Chrysler Airstream art-deco automobile contrasted sharply with the ephemeral nature of the video images showing on it's windows, in a clear example of concepts that were well-thought-through, but in the end, this is another example of art (post modern and/or otherwise) that is clever, yet incapable of engaging and establishing emotional resonance. "Requiem" is not even effectively psychological, which would broaden it's potential modes of address. To ameliorate this weakness, I recommend obtaining the audiobook version of J.G. Ballard's "Crash", and listening to it's auto-erotic on headphones while taking in the silvered spectacle.

From the description: "Requiem sums up the twentieth century as a period of transformative socio-cultural change from an industrial based society to an electronic information based society. The automobile and the television figure as both the most significant inventions of the century as well as the most prominent signifiers of Western consumerism."

The most interesting installation was a wiki based soundscape, the first example I know of in which information architecture becomes both medium and art.

From the official description of the festival:

The creative connection between two of Boston's most vital forces - the arts community and the high-tech industry - is once again in the spotlight, with more than 70 exhibitions and events in and around the Boston area from April 22 through May 8. It's the first and largest collaboration of artists working in new technologies in all media in North America, encompassing visual art, dance, music, electronic literature, web art, and public art.

local tags: art, boston, culture, cyberart, festivals, jgballard, namjunepaik, ux

Plant a (Virtual) Tree With Your Cell Phone

For those who would rather plant trees than cell phone towers:

The Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media Lab in collaboration with the SEED Collective will unveil an innovative interactive art installation, SEED, during the �scopeNew York Art Fair, March 11th to 14th at Flatotel, 135 West 52nd in New York City. This public interactive art installation invites participants to use their cell phones to plant "seeds" to grow a virtual forest.

SEED explores the convergence of rich media and wireless technology in the creation of a collaborative and evolving work of art. Through sound and imagery users create and populate a forest together. By dialing a particular number, each audience member will be given a "seed" to grow using the keypads of their cell phones. With each punch of the keypad, audiences have the ability to grow their seeds, choose the type of trees they want to plant, and change their texture and colour. After the three days at the scopeNew York Air Fair, the end effect is that all trees created by audience members will reveal a virtual forest.

local tags: art, cellphones, cyberart, mobility, virtuality

Do You Want to Rock - in ASCII?

C404 - an art/media group - brings you music icons including The Sex Pistols, Hendrix, AC/DC, and Van Halen performing live in videos rendered in Wachowski-style cascades of glowing ASCII text.

I create categories professionally, which means it's almost inevitable that I'm interested in things that challenge and escape categories (the "mind forg'd manacles" Blake labelled so well) by their nature.

Though I'm sure this will appear in an over-miked commercial for toothpaste or pick-up trucks soon, at the moment it's a new way of looking at several very familiar cultural properties that questions the thresholds of recognition, percpetion, and identification we rely on every day.

local tags: art, cyberart, music, visualization