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Tangible Media Group

Transform

A few months ago, an MIT team showed the inForm physical interface, which mimics its movements in real time. This week in Milan, they presented the next iteration of the system, much bigger and even more sophisticated. You need to see the videos. The team is called Tangible Media Group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii; they explore how digital interfaces – present in every gadget we use – can be transformed into physical objects.

And we also have this new prototype, called Transform, which comes even closer to that vision. The team describes the table to Co.Design as a piece of furniture transformed into “a dynamic machine driven by the flow of data and energy”, thanks to the three panels on its surface.

Eliška Sky

WOMANEROES

“Eliška Sky’s tribe of ‘womaneroes’ stand bold and bright, their bodies and heads adorned in vibrant shapes, colours, and textures. Beneath the wigs and paint are women of all ages, shapes and ethnicities, photographed with a large-format camera to capture every detail, rough or smooth, with the intention for the images to eventually be printed and exhibited life-size. “It started as visual play, but transformed into a series that challenges depictions of women’s bodies,” explains the London-based Czech photographer. “In light of my own experience of working in the fashion industry, I felt the need to portray the body in new ways and forms, with an element of playfulness and humour in opposition to western media advertising”.” Marigold Warner

Andrew Schneider

YOUARENOWHERE
Conjuring a futuristic sort of shamanism, Andrew Schneider’s YOUARENOWHERE experiments with the virtues of sensory overload via quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and the “Missed Connections” board on Craigslist. Battling glitchy transmissions, crackling microphones, and lighting instruments falling from the sky, one guy on a mission and a tricked-out interactive new-media landscape merge to transform physical space, warp linear time, and short-circuit preconceived notions of what it means to be here now.

Refik Anadol, Kilroy Realty Corporation and SOM Architects

Virtual Depictions
Parametric data sculptures
The main idea of ‘Virtual Depictions:San Francisco’ is to bring 21st century approach to public art to define new poetics of space through media arts and architecture and to create a unique parametric data sculptures that has an intelligence, memory and culture. Through architectural transformations of media wall located in 350 Mission’ lobby, home of Salesforce, main motivation with this seminal media architecture approach is to frame this experience with a meticulously abstract and cinematic site-specific data-driven narration. As a result, this media wall turns into a spectacular public event making direct and phantasmagorical connections to its surroundings through simultaneous juxtapositions. The project also intends to contribute to contemporary discourse of public art by proposing a hybrid blend of media arts and architecture in 21st century.

Vjsuave

Suaveciclo
File Festival
Vjsuave is Ygor Marotta and Cecilia Soloaga, a new media art duo, based in São Paulo, Brazil. As specialists in animation, moving projection and digital graffiti, they have realesed 4 short films, “Run”, “Homeless”, “La Cena” and “Trip” Their main performances are: “suaveciclo” – a tricycle adapted to project in the streets, live painting and animation with ipad, live audiovisual performance, video mapping and site-specific a/v installations. They want to comunicate love through light. Their performances are poignant, warm, and personal, crafted from hand-drawn and hand-painted media, transformed into digital animation, then projection-mapped in a way that seems to bring São Paulo’s streets alive. Characters dance and run across the urban landscape, with a convincing blend of simulated movement and real moving projection.

JAIME E OLIVER

Silent Percussion
File Festival
The “Silent Percussion Project” (SPP) consists in building a set of computer musical instruments that use human gestures to control sounds, composing and performing with them in an attempt to re-incorporate the body in music performance practice. The “SPP” is a response to the question: what kinds of musical instruments does live computer music performance need? To answer this question it researches the aesthetic qualities and language of non-live electronic music, action-perception systems and new media theory to experiment new ways of bridging between gesture and sound. In that sense, the “SPP” looks to address the problem of sound control by introducing new sensing techniques that take advantage of our sensorimotor capabilities. The Silent Drum and MANO instruments analyze shapes made by hands and transform them into multiple streams of continuous data. These streams, or variables, are directly applied to sound control, avoiding the key paradigm. Continuous data is analyzed to extract discrete features of the signals. The variables resulting from analysis are interdependent, that is, changes in one result in changes in the others, creating complex systems that the performer learns by experimentation.