Computing Culture Group

Shifty’s newest experiment Web Synths is now online. You can sequence synthesizers and a drum machine and move real knobs on vintage analog synthesizers remotely. Plus, mp3 streaming lets you hear your changes. Go to Web Synths to check it out.

The Director just returned from being a juror at the VIDA international art & artificial life competition. He felt that it was gratifying to give away money to artists that he hadn’t earned himself. Telefonica, which did make the money, is upping the prizes to 20k euros each next year, for both completed works and project development. More information on the prizes can be found at www.vidalife.org.
Pictured is Swamp 1.1 by Douglas Easterly, one of the prize winners. It’s a plant that represents a contract with Home Depot, being watered proportionally according to the success of their stock prices.

Erkki Huhtamo is a new media archeologist, curator, and Professor of Media History and Theory at UCLA. He was a guest lecturer at MIT on Monday November 15, 2004.
Media experiences have often been associated with fixed locations. Erkki Huhtamo brings up that in recent decades, media experiences have begun to “break out” from fixed locations, taking place in all kinds of intermediate spaces. He discusses how mobile phones, pagers, personal digital assistants, MP3 players and pocket game consoles are changing the ways we conceive communication, mobility, social space and the formation of identity.
Contrasting new media devices with hand fans, cameras, watches, and even clothing, Huhtamo points to a continuity of, if not the technologies, then the ways that people have thought about and used and reacted to personal devices. At once informative, entertaining, and charmingly obsessive, Huhtamo mesmerized us with his magic lantern show.

Blendie has been travelling.

CCG exhibited some documentation of research at the Microwave Festival in Hong Kong.

We met some remarkable people there, like Bundith Phunsombatlert, who The Director respected for the length of his name, as well as his exquisite artworks. Thanks to Fion Ng and the astounding Videotage crew for their patience and support.

CCG Member Shifty travels to Manhattan with the rest of the DSP Music Syndicate to take part in Spectropolis. More information, including music sample

available here.

Ayah just got back from Amsterdam where she presented SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW? in the first academic conference on netporn. The Art and Politics of Netporn was organized by the Institute of Network Cultures and took place on September 30th and October 1st in Badcuyp.

On September 29th 2004, CCG took on the task of doing a serious E15-020c fall cleaning… vacuuming, scrubbing, scraping, scrapping, hauling…

12 hours, 20 IKEA boxes and 4 pizzas later, there was an office.. .

The Director has just finished a solo show at Location 1 Gallery in Manhattan. The two large-scale installations describe contemporary technical dilemmas: Our increasing containment in technologies, and technologists’ urge to control the world. The former is embodied in Skin, a massive, full-sized section of a 737 that cuts through the gallery, emerging from the floor and disappearing into the far wall. Made of aluminum with over 6500 hand-countersunk rivets (thanks, Jean and Sebastien!), the airplane vibrates as if still in flight. The latter, Control is a huge control panel, modeled on the one used in the reactor at Chernobyl. Many many knobs, and what they’re for we’ll never know. Special thanks to Location 1 Gallery, our strategic ally, bringing thoughtful art to the Burroughs since the turn of the millennium. More photos here.

CCG showed at the Millenium Museum in Beijing, as part of the First Beijing International New Media Art Exhibition and Symposium. Pictured is our installation of research-in-progress, displayed on the edgy product assembly line. Yes, the secret is out: All of our work is really manufactured in China, we just brand it. Kidding. Thanks to Zhang Ga and Tsinghua University for a lovely opportunity to get to know a little bit about the Beijing arts community. The second half of the festival will happen in May of 2005.