The futureplaces exhibition 2009 wiki-catalog can be found here. Updated regularly.

Below are the synopses of the competing pieces.

canal*MOTOBOY

Online Platform

Antoni Abad

Since March 2007, 12 motorcycle couriers (motoboys) from São Paulo have been documenting their everyday experiences on the Internet using mobile phones with built-in cameras. They use tags to describe each photo, audio file and video they publish, thus contributing to the creation of an online database that, by means of those keywords, makes it possible to relate them with their correspondent multimedia units, proposing an alternative view of the city based on the motoboy’s community problems and expectations. Even today, after 2 years of activity, the motoboys and motogirls Adriana, Alexandre, Anderson, Alexandro, Andrea, Cleyton, Edison, Eliezer, Franscisco, Luiz, Matheus, Renato, Ronaldo, Tadeu and Tadeu Luiz continue their mobile transmissions on the web site of the project.

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Outhouse

Installation

Brian Cohen. TRAX

Outhouse is a roving participatory installation which turns the old style photo booth on its head by replacing it with digital media technology & adding unique functionality. Our adapted home-away-from-home affords its occupant the ability to record intimate testimonials in 60 second chunks in the safety & comfort of what was once a porta-loo. Users are presented with two choices, push the red button to record a private testimonial, but pushing the green button risks comfort & anonymity triggering a live public broadcast.

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Over the Eyes

Installation

Maile Colbert

Our sense of identity, of who we are and what we have done, is tied to our life of memory.  But a vivid and detailed memory may be based upon inaccurate reconstruction of facts, or self-created impressions that appear to have actually occurred. Continuity of memory is no guarantee of truth; disruption of memory is no guarantee of falsity.  Memory is believed to be a reconstructed phenomenon, and so can be strongly influenced by expectation, emotions, the implied beliefs of others, inappropriate interpretation, or desired outcome. Is the measure of a life well lived based on the quality of memories?

Then what of missing memory?  Of a trauma that forces the memory into repression, or forces a disassociation, or a false memory…invented memories taken as true due to gaps in memory.

“Over The Eyes”, inspired by the old saying…”to pull the wool over the eyes”, is a multi-media installation made in October 2007 for a residency based in a small village in Northern Portugal.

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Huta Artzine

Software platform

Jacek Doroszenko & Marcin Sipiora

The Huta Artzine program is a unique platform that shows not only extraordinary postindustrial spaces, but also presents work of artists invited by the authors. The artists were selected on the basis of the common denominator which is the direct or indirect inspiration with city reality. This time, the space of Huta was designed in such a way, so as to facilitate presentation of artistic work.

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“outro eu”

Installation

Diogo Figueiredo & Nicolau Moreira

An installation in which each user contributes and/or is transformed into an alternative version of him/herself. The artifact, the mirror, a highly symbolic object, raises in the user-spectator a willingness to introduce him/herself. “outro eu” explores a multitude of possible versions of the user; these versions may become metaphors for the various decisions that might have changed one´s life.

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Where is Love?

Locative media

David Fodel

Where is Love? is a locative media project that utilizes GPS technologies and cell-phone triangulation to pinpoint users on a emotional map of the city. Specially packaged condoms with instructions printed on them will be distributed at bars, nightclubs, and other festival locations around the local area.

The condom is merely a way to suggest intimacy, in a recognizable, non-ambiguous way. What is important is that we all contribute to an emotional map of our physical territory, and this project creates tangible traces of something always already there. We all understand how vulnerable using these technologies makes us, and yet we share our most intimate stories and secrets using them.This project bridges the idea of intimacy, with this notion of technological vulnerability, using shared emotions as social currency.

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What It Is Without the Hand That Wields It

Videogame/installation

Riley Harmon

Violence is an inevitable, mechanical function of the human brain, hard-coded down through time by culture, genetics, and evolution. Mediated experiences of killing change our perception of violence and death. As players die in a public video game server for Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, the electronic solenoid valves spray a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of nebulous kills. In simple terms it is about manifesting experiences that are purely virtual, or only ‘real’ in a psychological sense, into the physical world – physical computing.

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Oporto-Dumbo Bridge

Installation

Naomi Kaly & Alyssa Casey

Oporto-Dumbo Bridge is an interactive installation, making room for a “thought bridge” that creates a hybrid Oporto-Brooklyn community. The fruit of an ongoing collaboration between Naomi Kaly, an Israeli New Media artist, and Alyssa Casey, an American painter and paper maker, the installation explores ways in which technology fosters new forms of communication, meant to bridge cultural, linguistic and ethnic gaps.

Based on the observation that the Dom Luis I Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge roughly reflect one another across a horizontal axis, the installation for Future Places evokes the Brooklyn Bridge, while the installation for the Dumbo festival represents a bridge in Oporto. In place of the horizontal “roadway” of each bridge are conductive threads with encoded audio that symbolically connects the two remote sites.

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Watching Utube Together II

Installation

Wolfgang Kemptner

The installation refers to the contemporary global format of a small group of people sitting together around a screen and presenting each other videos from video-platforms, as practiced in offices and homes alike. This format playing around a media facade during the festival meant to take it into a slightly larger setting, as could be called experimenting with global TV in local public space.

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Animatic: Virtual Marionettes

Interactive animation; PC software

Luís Leite

Animatic is a system of virtual puppets with a focus on art of manipulation, using multiple modes of interaction as a way to recreate the various styles of puppetry, including marionettes and direct manipulation. The goals of Animatic are: To demonstrate the potential of real-time animation based on interfaces of diverse interaction; The possibilities of applying virtual puppetry in different areas, namely education, the performing arts, on television and cinema. The system makes use of interfaces such as the microphone in order to create facial expressions and body language. The results of the prototype demonstrate the feasibility of the project in commercial and artistic ventures, and envision new ways of looking at animation in real time.

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RTiVISS [Real-Time Video Interactive System for Sustainability]

Interactive installation

Mónica Mendes

RTiVISS proposes innovative ways of using and reflecting on real-time video in artistic contexts, simultaneously contributing for an environmental cause to help forest protection through a surveillance metaphor: as a representation of nature, by displaying the local forests with a subjective point of view in a poetic framework leading to aesthetic fruition by contemplation; as raw material for artistic experiments, with the excitement of freely processing data as if it were ink. This is motivated by both technological trends and the fascinating dynamics of subtle changes of the mystery that every frame encloses, for it is the unknown Future that is being constantly presented. An activist facet blinks due to all the RTiVISS potential in

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Wonderland

Video

Hye Yeon Nam

When I moved from Korea to the United States, my body became a gauge that felt my displacement and recognized not only the conformity inflicted on me in the United States, but it also allowed me to deconstruct the rule from my hometown that I had taken for granted as normal. In my video piece, I attempt to convey the feeling of displacement and conformity by acting of walking. I perform walking forward and other people seem to be walking backward. However, I was walking backward in the real scene and I made it simply reversed. The space of being neither here following correct rule nor there following incorrect rule is precisely what I try to convey in this video.

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Things to Burn: Inversed metaphors

AV installation

Rudolfo Quintas

This interactive Installation is a new work from the series ‘Memory of the Future: looking to the past never ends’ witch includes the awarded performance “Burning the Sound”(2008) and “inversed Metaphors” installation (2009).  In “Things to Burn” (2009) participants are asked to burn elementary 3D figurative objects until its total abstract transformation. This action is perceptually achieved by the use of used fire from a regular match as interface to modulate, animate and lighten the 3D objects – as an adventures dialogue between the poetics of form.

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Interestrelar

Sound installation

André Sier

Interestrelar is an audio-visual device that broadcasts sounds of cosmic collisions, spiraling galaxies on black holes, through woofers with ink that make automatic galactic drawings operated by the occasional movements in the street. A generative, infinite, unrepeatable installation, performing abstract automatic drawings that recall space charts, a machine that generates space sounds from the analyzed movement of a surveillance camera.

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Losing Ground (Verlierend Erdet)

AV composition

Phil Taylor

‘Losing Ground’ is a musical and visual response to a recent visit to former East Berlin’s ‘TV Tower’ – the revolving section at the top of the tower provided a 360 degree view of the city. The title of the work, ‘Losing Ground’, has a dual meaning: the physical height of the TV Tower and a personal reflection on loss.

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Master and Margarita

AV Performance

Video Jack (André Carrilho and Nuno Correia)

“Master and Margarita” is an audio-visual adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece with the same name. Video Jack are presenting it as a audio-visual performance, in a first stage. It uses the same software engine (InGrid) as previous Video Jack project “Heat Seeker”, but the atmosphere and graphical style are substantially different.

The visual style of Video Jack’s “Master and Margarita” brings together a graphical collage of photographic and drawn elements into interactive animations, with a strong influence of Soviet-period imagery. The surreal, almost demential, universe of Bulgakov is captured graphically. In sonic terms, the references are Kurt Weil, Igor Stravinsky, Can, Tom Waits, Einstürzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth, Pan Sonic, Vladislav Delay and Alva Noto.

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