In the wake of this summer’s Beautiful Data workshop, held at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museums, the metaLAB core team gathered together for a weekend retreat in Woodstock, Vermont. The occasion was intended as an opportunity to reflect on our first four years of work together and to craft a revised mission statement that better reflects our sense of: a) how we fit into the larger universe of experimental practice…
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Tag: networked art
Every now and then metaLAB holds a public event to showcase some work in progress, hack a device or two, resuscitate a multimedia piece or two from the vaults, and to start up some fresh conversations. In the past, such openLAB events have featured social games that make creative use of thermal receipt printers, Kinect-based gestural systems for remixing tracks on vintage vinyl recordings, an Arduino-armed book as an interface for navigating libraries. What’s an…
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This coming summer, metaLAB will be hosting a two-week workshop for art historians, scholars of visual culture, and museum professionals at all career stages on the topic of Beautiful Data: Telling Stories About Art with Open Collections. Supported by the Getty Foundation, the workshop will introduce participants to the concepts and skills necessary to make use of open collections to develop art-historical storytelling through data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital…
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Over the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of being involved in several projects that explore the limits of the World Wide Web as a support for live multi-sited performances as well as the potential for network latencies to become expressive features of such real-time performances. Instead of being understood simply as the enemy to be overcome in order to achieve a “live-like effect,” network latencies become a necessary, even desirable feature to be interpreted…
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In order to test the beta release of the new simplified Zeega editor, I thought it might be interesting to attempt a remix of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 experiment Un Coup de dés. Mallarmé’s pioneering poem waited a decade and half before achieving publication. Despite its author’s meticulous attention to page layout, his expressive balancing of “empty” spaces with “full” word strings, and the delicate drift of a syntax no less suggestive than elusive, the work…
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The on-site installation of GHOST at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art involves iPads distributed in ten locations within the museum. All are running GHOST live via wifi in the kiosk mode, so that as a landing screen visitors experience the open pages of a Guest Book where the (erased) titles of the six database documentaries fade in and out intermittently. The titles vanish the moment one touches (or mouses over them), even as the…
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Accessible online at http://guestandhost.herokuapp.com/ and installed on ten iPads at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art as part of the Host & Guest exhibition curated by Steven Henry Madoff, GHOST is a networked art piece made up of six database documentaries or “Zeegas” that are user actuated. Each is composed of hundreds of stills and gifs hosted across the World Wide Web. The media files reside in these scattered locations. They are not copied or…
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