Multi-User Art

Opens Friday, April 9th 2010. On view until April 18th, 2010.

Multi-User Art 

Digital interaction is everywhere: from a culture of texting to multiplayer uses of smartphones and game consoles, multi-user interaction has become interwoven with our society to the point of being invisible. But how can interactive digital art respond to the age of wireless users? How will artists deal with issues of accessibility and standardization? What happens when interaction must scale from one person at a time to a crowd? Can art, long a solo act, become multiplayer?

Multi-User Art is a gallery show and open laboratory for exploring these ideas, placing the control of artwork at the fingertips of the artgoer. Led by innovators in mobile interaction and creative control, the show literally hands the control and potential in digital art to the viewer. The gallery show allows open, wireless control via a variety of interaction models, from smartphones and computers, for any attendee. 

A weekend of workshops extend that open participatory model to learning about the evolving technologies that artists can use, including wireless control on devices like the iPhone, and open standards like the networking-savvy control protocol OSC.

Works include

SMALL STEPS
Eric Redlinger

Small Steps lets the viewer assume the role of an Apollo astronaut, exploring a shimmering, 3-dimensional lunar landscape by tilting and rotating their iPod.  There are even controls to 'space jump' to get an eagle-eye perspective, and camera filters to better discern the terrain by applying color highlights to crevices and craters.  Remarkably, the terrain is not just moon-like, it is the moon.  Small Steps generates its environment not through traditional 3D modeling methods, but rather by presenting actual, ultra-high-resolution NASA lunar imagery from the Apollo 16 mission, and then applying technology that extrudes shaded areas using an analog video technology developed by Bill Etra and Steve Rutt in 1972, the same year as the Apollo

SUPERDRAW/MULTIDRAW:GUIDED1
Joshue Ott

multiDraw:guided1 (working title) promotes collaboration and interaction with a unique system of multi-sensory stimulation, involving visual and audible elements. It allows the participant to create their own space within the space of the piece, crossing the boundary from being a passive audience member into the realm of creating the art itself, while remaining within the framework of the project.

superDraw was originally conceived as a visual alternative to a musical instrument, and has developed into a live generative art system, which uses a computer to augment the simple act of drawing - transforming it into an evolving process whereby the user can watch their input shift in a careful balance of control and chance. multiDraw is the multi-user version of the instrument, and creates an immersive experience for multiple people to engage with and share, in a marriage of technology and interactive art. 

THE ENIGMATIC BOX

Using an embedded computer system, The Enigmatic Box pokes fun at interaction by responding to user input in unexpected ways. On a

display and in semaphore-like patterns of LEDs, the installation is an anti-game, responding in foreign languages and sounds as if a

fragmented human memory is trapped in the computer. As the remnants of tangible, conventional interfaces sit inside shadow boxes like captured endangered species of the Amazon, the installation responds to and resists mobile input in novel sound and image. It's a "Busy Box" for adults.

"Qu Yuan Goes West",
Chris Jordan, 2010

"Qu Yuan Goes West" is an interactive light installation allowing for up to four people to control light and pattern using the iphone/touch interface. The installation utilizes computer, projector, mirrors, and motors. "Qu Yuan Goes West" examines the US/Chinese relationship; and how individual identity and capital (yuan) are transferred between nations. The title refers to the first 'named' Chinese poet Qu Yuan, as well as chinese currency (yuan)

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

JOSHUE OTT

New York-based visualist Joshue Ott creates cinematic visual improvisations, performed live and projected in large scale. Working from hand-drawn forms manipulated in real-time with superDraw, a software instrument of his own design, Ott composes evolving images that reside somewhere between minimalism, psychedelia, and Cagean chance, delivered with an inescapably human touch. Supple yet digital, ephemeral but instantly memorable, Ott renders sound into vision, yielding an immersive multi-sensory experience that is at once immediate and synergistic, a unique visual narrative born in the moment.

Performing with musicians from all genres between classical and avant-electronica, 

Ott's visuals have been featured at Communikey,  Mutek, the Plateaux festival in Poland, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Yuri's Night Bay Area, Le Cube (Paris), the Playgrounds Audiovisual Art Festival (Netherlands), Boston Cyberarts, and the 2006 Ars Electronica Animation Festival. He has performed with the American Composer's Orchestra at Carnegie Hall; with Son Lux at MASS MoCA; with Gina Gibney Dance at the Baryshnikov Arts Center; and frequently at venues throughout New York City, including Le Poisson Rouge, Monkey Town, Roulette, the Knitting Factory, and the Stone. 

ERIC REDLINGER

Eric Redlinger is a composer, sound designer and interactive media programmer. 

His musical background includes significant research in both extremes of the western musical spectrum. A long-time composer and 

performer of electronic music, Eric also plays lute and sings in the early music ensemble Asteria, putting him on an aesthetic map that 

embraces both the mystical lushness of the former as well the exacting control over sonority and acoustics made possible by contemporary synthesis and audio processing techniques. 

A research position at the Waag Society (Amsterdam) in 2003 marked the beginning of Eric's exploration of interactive visuals where he worked on the Keyworx project, a software platform devoted to inter-media synthesis and networked-based collaboration.

Eric holds a Master of Science degree from the Integrated Digital Media Institute (IDMI) at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY. His audio/visual work has been presented across North America and Internationally at major European festivals including Ultrahang (Budapest, Hungary) and Transmediale (Berlin).

PETER KIRN

PETER KIRN is a composer/musician, media artist, and technologist, as well as writer and editor of createdigitalmusic.com and createdigitalmotion.com. The Handmade Music event series he originated with Etsy.com and Make Magazine is now spreading to other corners of the globe, from Texas to Portugal. He has also written for Computer Music, MAKE, Keyboard, Macworld, and Wax Poetics. He is the author of Real World Digital Audio (Peachpit Press). His own work spans live visuals and computer music, collaborations with modern dance, music for early instruments and voice and ambient techno, working with original software in Processing/Java and other tools. He's currently

teaching visual programming and sound and music design at Parsons The New School for Design and is a PhD candidate in music composition at The City University of New York Graduate Center.

Workshops

Eric Redlinger
Getting your face out from behind the screen: creating a remote-control interface for your interactive project

The tyranny of the computer monitor is something that interactive media performers have long struggled with; while dancers, musicians and other performance artists are free to interact with the audience while performing, computer artists are generally stuck behind their screens.  With the recent explosion of consumer touch-screen devices, however, many of us now have the tools we need to get out from behind the screen already in our pockets.  This demonstration highlights one solution for using your iPod/iPhone to control your performance or installation by leveraging the free Mrmr platform, presented by a lead developer of the project.  You'll see an overview of all the steps in the process, including designing and creating your mobile interface, installing the interface on your mobile device, and connecting it all to your existing project.  This demonstration also serves as an introduction to the more in-depth and hands-on workshop "Smart Art: Making Digital Media Connect".

An overview of Mrmr can be viewed here:

Peter Kirn and Joshue Ott -- Smart Art: Making Digital Media Connect

Working with free tools, with an emphasis on Processing and Pure Data (the free cousin of Max/MSP), see how OSC can make control messages human-readable, intelligent, interactive, and precise. Connect software in different media, devices from computers to smartphones, and users in the same room or across the globe. Learn how network standards can make connecting easy - no system administrators required. And see how open, free development makes collaboration easier. Whether you want to collaborate with another artist or simply make music and visual software talk to one another for a performance, we'll give you the basic tools to get started.

Some basic experience in a tool like Processing, Max, OpenFrameworks, or Pd recommended, but no previous experience with OSC is needed.