abstractmachine

A few weeks back, the cool French journalist Marie Lechner asked me to collect a list of interesting YouTube videos. I was originally going to do something more interresting than what I came up with, but I was busy travelling and so I quickly scraped together this fairly traditional list along with a there-goes-the-professor-again accompanying verbiage. Even if you don’t read French, the videos are fairly explicit: there’s insolent stuff, code stuff, remix stuff, political stuff, etc. Here’s the link: Playlist #1 par Douglas Edric Stanley. If you want a translation, Google will do it for you here: link.

My list will be followed in the next few days by people far hipper than I, such as Anne Laforêt, Vincent Epplay, or Michaël Sellam.

• Installation : Déplacements (français) / Déplacements (english)
• Artist : Manuel Braun
• Exhibition : bbb, Centre régional d’initiatives pour l’art contemporain, Toulouse, France
• Dates : October 2006
• Developped at : Aix-en-Provence School of Art
• Video: Déplacements

This is a work that Manuel Braun developped for his Diplôme Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques in June, and which has just been exhibited in Toulouse at the Centre régional d’initiatives pour l’art contemporain. It is a 5 x 5 pixel array made out of computer fans. Each fan represents one pixel which together make a very singular display. On that display runs an artificial life program based on Coway’s famous Game of Life. It‘s a beautiful work, quite mesmerizing and yet very simple. When Brigitte Bosch from the bbb gave me « carte blanche » to select the work of a young multimedia artist for an exhibit she was preparing, I chose this work — principally because I wanted to defend a certain tendancy we currently have been exploring in the Atelier Hypermedia : i.e. the move away from purely screen based work by introducing visual algorithms increasingly into the phyiscal space. But I was also particularly happy with this work having watched Manuel’s research over the years on the infinite variations one can inflict on the idea of the « pixel ». I felt with this work that he had evolved from the research stage into a coherent phase plastique. And finally there is the fairly obvious (and humorous) reversal of the role of matérial/mimetic component, a sort of digital form of the old support / surface debate.

I don’t usually talk about other people’s work here, using this blog mostly as an easy form of communication. But I probably should talk more about my students’ and former-students’ works, as their work is so influential to my own, especially given the very particular structure of the Atelier Hypermedia. I’m also mentioning it here because this work was the first final-year diploma installation to use Processing and more importantly the PicoIP Processing library Stéphane Cousot and I developped last year for Jean-Pierre Mandon’s PicoIP project. When I look at the work we were doing with Macrodobe’s Director and the work we’re now doing with Processing, I think the change was definitely worth it.

Information post-only / no rants / just letting people know that Arborescence ’06 is yet again here upon us in « lovely Aix-en-Provence ». The festival is slowly detatching itself from the Art School where it began and spreading out into the city of Aix as well as onto the site of the Friche bel de mai in Marseille where there will yet again be an evening of concerts, performances and installations on the night of October 6th — notably yet another installation-lite of the ENIAROF project. I will not be showing anything personally (well you never know with ENIAROF, but nothing officially anyway, maybe we’ll improvise something, I’ll let you know). Then the festival returns back to its home town the following evening, on the 7th, for the official opening of exhibits throughout the city, where it will be ending up at the Art School for an evening of more concerts, installations and performances. The exhibits last until October 14th, but the best time to see them is on the 7th where you can finish up with the concerts at the Art School which are always very popular.

On the night of the 7th, the 2nd-year students will be showing their Spectacle Psychorotatif in the school’s courtyard alongside several other installations. I actually had very little to do with this project, to my great regret, as it was mostly a production of the students with the core-team of the Laboratoire L.O.E.I.L., and with Jean Racamier and Eddie Godeberge — I was too busy elsewhere. But I really enjoyed the little time I had working with this group of students, especially during their 2-week workshop exploring Processing — they built some brilliant prototypes and installations with very little (if any) knowledge of programming or even what you could do with it. An inventive bunch, I look forward to working with them this year. Their performance for Arborescence will be both simple and complex: based on a structure borrowed from Peter Sinclair’s « Fée Electrique », they have built a three-story multimedia rotating projection tower, with moving video projectors, live sound generation, actors, robots, prosthetics of all sorts, inflatable structures, shadow-puppets, and other literally kitchen-sink utensiles (i.e. there’s a giant bionic man+blender+robot thing). It all spins around and makes noise. Students run around taking pictures of the audience and allow them to take a ride by uploading their pictures into the manege as it spins around. It’s both cool and ridiculous. Performance on Saturday the 7th.

I should also mention two former collaborators have participated in an interresting object called the Voyage Immobile. It will be sitting in the parking lot outside the Friche during the evening on the 6th in Marseille. Although it’s signed « Digital Deleuxe » (I don’t really know their work, in fact); the sound was created by my friend and collaborator Julien Hô Kim who fans will recognize as the the sound designer for both The Signal (2004) and Asymptote (1999); and the interactive image/program was created by Stéfan Piat, who was a very active member last year of ENIAROF, my Atelier Hypermedia, and Plot. Stéfan actually did a clever job taking what was basically a fairly classic commission to illustrate the works of Cézanne digitally for the overbearing/chaotic Cézanne 2006 exhibit in Aix-en-Provence, and turned it into a far more subjective melding of the painter’s works and the locations that inspired him. It is esthétically very similar to his installation forsinicola. Digital Deleuxe then built the structure around these two artist’s collaboration, and also (somewhat pretentiously) signed it as their own. I suppose I’m subjective, but come on, it’s just a container built to house what is basically these two artists more significant contribution.

Update: the Jean-Michael Bruyère / Jeffrey Shaw installation has been moved from the previous site in a centralized park, to the Fondation Vasarely. This does not suprise me one bit, given the difficulties the festival has had in getting permits for anything. I’m only an advisor for the team that produces the festival, but I’ve seen them tearing their hair out for what is ultimately a generous proposition for the city: bringing highly spectacular interactive installations out into the fabric of the city. This is the third imposed location change. Ah, city planners…

• Speaker: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Presentation: « Une rencontre pour tisser des liens entre art, jeux vidéos, œuvres et pratiques ludiques »
• Date: 19h, 13 juin 2006
• Location: Le Cyber, Friche bel de Mai
• Address: 41, rue Jobin 13003 Marseille
• In partnership with: CCSTI - Agora des sciences
• More information: ZINC

Sorry to all my English-language readers, but I’m just about to leave for a presentation in Marseille and I promised to list a series of websites dealing with art + video games, or better said artistic explorations of video games and gaming culture. This list comes from a larger list I compiled for a multimedia festival looking to catch up on what’s going on in this scene.

Voici donc la liste pour la présentation de ce soir, de jeux video et quelques réappropriations artistiques de ce champ. Il s’agit de pièces historiquement importants pour la plupart, cherchez donc à mettre dans le contexte de l’année où elles auraient été crées. Il ne s’agit pas non plus de pièces uniquement fonctionnels, comme dans le premier cas:

• Space Invader
• Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds
• JODI, Untitled Game
• Painstation
• Alison Mealy, Unreal Art (cf. également son blog)
• Vuk Cosic, The ASCII Unreal
• C-Level
• Eddo Stern, Waco Ressurection
• Time’s Up
• Niklas Roy, PongMechanik
• nullpointer (a.k.a. Tom Betts), QQQ
• Ben Fry, Deconstructulator, Dismap, Mario Soup
• Natalie Bookchin, Intruder
• Perry Hoberman, Cathartic User Interface
• Exposition Games: Computer Games by Artists - Tilman Baumgärtel, Curator
• Art Games: An Introduction

Puis, des étudiants de L’école d’art d’Aix-en-Provence:

• We-make-terrorism-not-art
• Jankenpopp (cf. son diplôme DNSEP, aussi: Jankenblocks, Nimoloop & Lunch)
• ENIAROF
• Antonin Fourneau (cf. aussi le site d’ARI)
• le projet Play+mobile (cf. travaux)
• NAO

There are obviously many more artists who should be mentioned. But this is just to get the evening started… ;-)

• Speaker: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Presentation: « Une rencontre pour tisser des liens entre art, jeux vidéos, œuvres et pratiques ludiques »
• Date: 19h, 13 juin 2006
• Location: Le Cyber, Friche bel de Mai
• Address: 41, rue Jobin 13003 Marseille
• In partnership with: CCSTI - Agora des sciences
• More information: ZINC

I will be speaking again at the Friche bel de Mai, this time about my work in relation to video games, their langage, their culture, and their influence.

It all started when I made a selection for the festival Arborescence of artistic reappropriations of video games. These ranged from more recent works such as Unreal Art to older significant works such as JODI’s Untitled Game. Mixed in there were other classics, such as Painstation, C-Level, Pong Mechanik and Super Mario Clouds. Somehow this selection got back to the people at the Friche Bel de Mai who were looking for someone with some knowledge about video games. But instead of talking about that subject (which I don’t really have the time to prepare), we ended up with the proposal to simply present the gaming aspect of the abstractmachine project. I will of course post the previously mentioned list on this blog once I’ve cleaned them up, and in time for the talk. I am also hoping to have an early prototype of « Plot », my machine for making Gameboy fun.

• Festival: Arborescence ‘05
• Location: Aix-en-Provence, France
• Date: 30 September - 8 October 2005
• Website: Arborescence

Every year at the end of the summer, the Arborescence festival is the meeting point for numerous artists coming from all around the world.

Those artists, through their creations question the relationships between art, nature and new technologies. New problems arise around themes such as the future of mankind, ecological issues and the benefits of new technologies in the context of globalisation.

The Arborescence festival is imprinted in a cultural project where art, nature and new technologies can conjointly bring hopes of renewed ethics and aesthetics.

Note: As I mentioned previously, I was part of the selection committee for this year’s festival. As it turns out, I will be performing after all at Arborescence, as part of the group 8=8. Our performance will be at the Cabaret Aléatoire in Marseille on October 8th, 22h30 sharp.

Peter Sinclair and I were part of the selection committee today for Arborescence 2005. That’s what you get for criticizing a festival: they invite you to be part of the following year’s selection committee. This year’s selection looks more interresting than last year’s, which lacked focus. Arborescence has actually been doing quite well for itself. A young festival organized by a dynamic young non-profit Terre Active, it’s held its own in an ever-growing field of digital arts festivals in France.

They also asked me to submit a proposal for this year, but I have yet to find something appropriate. Perhaps something with the Atelier Hypermedia.