Tag Archive for: Performance

@SelfiesBot: It’s Alive!!!

/by

@SelfiesBot began tweeting last week and already the results have surprised me.

Selfies Bot is a portable sculpture which takes selfies and then tweets the images. With custom electronics and a long arm that holds a camera that points at itself, it is a portable art object that can travel to parks, the beach and to different cities.

I quickly learned that people want to pose with it, even in my early versions with a cardboard head (used to prove that the software works).

Last week, in an evening of experimentation, I added text component, where each Twitter pic gets accompanied by text that I scrape from Tweets with the #selfie hashtag.

This produces delightful results, like spinning a roulette wheel: you don’t know what the text will be until the Twitter website pubishes the tweet. The text + image gives an entirely new dimension to the project. The textual element acts as a mirror into the phenomenon of the self-portrait, reflecting the larger culture of the #selfie.

Produced while an artist-in-residence at Autodesk.

aaron
mikkela

And this is the final version! Just done.

selfes_bot_very_good

This is the “robot hand” that holds the camera on a 2-foot long gooseneck arm.

robot_hand
yo

two_people

martin

 

Welcome to the Party: @lenenbot

/by

Say hello to the latest Twitterbot from the Bot Collective: @lenenbot

vlad_john_lenen

Lenenbot* mixes up John Lennon and Vladimir Lenin quotes. The first half of one with the second half of the other.

Some of my favorites so far are:

Communism is everybody’s business.
It’s weird not to be able to run the country.
Revolution is love.

There are more, surreal ones. There are about 600 different possibilities, all randomized. Subscribe to the Twitter account here.

 

 

* I chose the name “Lenen” to avoid confusion. Lenonbot and Lenninbot look like misspellings of Lennon and Lenin, respectively. Lenen is it’s own bot.

@helenkellerbot and @abelincolnbot go live

/by

I just activated two more of my Quotebots — Twitterbots that produce daily quotes on the hour + minute of their progenitor’s death —@helenkellerbot and @abelincolnbot.

These are both new members of my Bot Collective project, which is a series of algorithms that post on Twitter (or potentially other places), joining @marktwainbot and @suntzubot.

Helen-Keller

AbeLincoln

@helenkellerbot’s first twitter quote summarizes the mission of the Bot Collective: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

Babula Rasa with Second Front

/by

Second Front performed Babula Rasa as part of “The Artist is Elsewhere” — a one-night performance event hosted by ZERO1 and curated by Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert. These are some stills from the event.

My idea was to use Google Docs, specifically its spreadsheet as a virtual Tabula Rasa — a blank slate for performance. I had imagined word-play, formulas, formatting changes and text-upon-text revisions and edits. I’ve often found Mail Art to be a source of inspiration, where artists re-purposed communication networks for art discourse. I was hoping for a similar effect with Google Docs, a space normally reserved for business documents or household expense sheets.

However, my Second Front compatriots always surprise me and they quickly begain inserting images into Google Docs. Who knew? Apparently everyone else but me.

Projected live for 2 hours during “The Artist is Elsewhere” event, this quickly became a group collage. In the first 30 minutes what appeared was the “I Say” Shark, various blue women appeared, Patrick Lichty’s birthday cake, and lots and lots of cats.

Images from various Second Front performances popped up: Last Supper and Wrath of Kong. And lots of memes from popular culture, reminding me of How Conceptual Art Influenced the World Wide Web.

We could overhear the other performances live on a UStream channel. At one point, one of the performances seemed to be carrying on for a long time and someone (maybe me) uploaded Chuck Barris from the Gong Show.

At the 1-hour mark, the Shark is still there but now with the Shaggy D.A., the Tweets in Space logo, Dr. McCoy, an evil bunny and more.

Does this embrace, reject or dry-hump the New Aesthetic? That’s for you to decide.

And like all Second Front performances, we had to bomb the virtual venue when we were done…only this time with cats.

Participating Second Front members: Yael Gilks, Bibbe Hansen, Doug Jarvis, Scott Kildall, Patrick Lichty, Liz Solo with stealth guest appearance by Victoria Scott.

Performa Book launch with Wrath of Kong

/by

If you are in New York this weekend, come on out to P.S. 1 this Saturday for the Performa 07 book launch. We’ll be there in spirit or maybe even in Second Life.

Wrath-group-photo

For Performa07, Second Front performed Wrath of Kong, which mixed the Kong Kong legend with the pop-culture iconography of Donkey Kong.

Featured in the catalogue essay on virtual worlds is an analysis of the early performance art works in Second Life, including work by the Mattes, my own Paradise Ahead series, Patrick Lichty, Gazira Babeli and of course Second Front.