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19 September 2008 by nathaniel

Lumens

The fantabulous Marianne Petit and Matthew Belanger (Greylock Arts), along with the – also great – turbulence.org, launch a new project worth checking out….

An interactive light installation (re)connecting personal artifacts, histories, & communities.

Online at: turbulence.org/works/newadams/lumens

Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery51, and Turbulence are pleased to announce Lumens, an interactive light installation by artists Ven Voisey, Sean Riley, and Matthew Belanger.

A project of Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses, Lumens is an installation of lamps networked across three spaces: Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery 51, and Turbulence.org. Scores of personal lamps that usually inhabit and illuminate the interiors of homes and shops have been borrowed from the residents of Adams and North Adams, Massachusetts, filling two gallery spaces: Greylock Arts in Adams and MCLA Gallery 51 Annex in North Adams. In addition, their images and stories are represented on turbulence.org, which also serves to connect the two locations telematically.

Clusters of lamps have been outfitted with proximity sensors and arduino microcontrollers. Lamps illuminate in response to a visitor’s presence and simultaneously illuminate lamps in the counterpart spaces. Thus, an individual in Adams can communicate his/her presence to an individual in North Adams, and vice versa. Additionally, as visitors investigate the history of a particular lamp online it will also illuminate in the physical gallery space.

Lumens (re)connects North Adams and Adams — originally a single community — through an exploration of location, influence, history, and the present.

Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses is a collaboration of Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery51, and Turbulence. Lumens has been made possible through the generous support of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the LEF Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

http://greylockarts.net/lumens.

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23 July 2008 by nathaniel

MyArtSpace.com interview

Had a great email exchange with Brian Sherwin of myartspace.com over the last few days, which culminated as an interview published on the myartspace blog. There’re bits on my work,  dissertation, inspirations, even a question on Creative Commons and a few other little tidbits not published anywhere else to date. Check it out.

snip / teaser:

Art Space Talk: Nathaniel Stern

“… Brian Sherwin [myartspace.com]: Nathaniel, I’ve read that you are inspired by the Interactive art of David Rokeby and Myron Kruger. Can you tell us about these influences? What else inspires you?

NS: I believe Kruger’s core contribution to understanding interactivity was a concentration on action rather than perception – ’seeing’ in particular. He had little concern for illusion-based and simulated VR that replicated reality, and was more interested in stimulation – with a ‘t’ – and how people moved / getting them to move. I think Rokeby is brilliant in many ways, and his work, Very Nervous System (1986-1990), was one of the first and most important pieces to accomplish an affective intervention in embodiment through this kind of inter-activity. But what inspires me most about him is his contrariness. He almost always tries ’something else,’ never really accepting the limits or taken for granted in any given medium.


The Odys Series: The Storyteller, archival print on watercolor paper, 1189 x 841, edition 3, 2004
(screenshot from video)

My other influences are fairly idiosyncratic: from Hiroshige, the Impressionists and Homer’s epic tales to Liam Gillick or Camille Utterback and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. I often turn to contemporary fiction, theory and philosophy in my thinking and making. I should also say that my wife, Nicole Ridgway, is the most wonderful muse and crit I’ve ever met: my biggest fan and supporter precisely because she is also my harshest critic before a work is done….”

read more (2500 word interview)

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13 July 2008 by nathaniel

ArtHeat call for submissions

For my South African readers:

ArtHeat is calling for submissions for it’s new Project page. Depending on funds this will be happening every three months on a permanent basis. Here’s the deal:

ArtHeat is offering a grant of up to R1500 to any artist or group towards the production of new work. The medium is up to the artist although consideration must be given to it’s effective translation into a digital format. A portion of the money must be spent on producing editions of a print(or negotiably any other real-world manifestation), of which a least one must be donated to ArtHeat.

Submissions must include a detailed proposal, budget, and your name and can be emailed to artheat@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is Friday the 25th of July, and the first series must be ready by the 1st of August to coincide with the launch of the new ArtHeat site.

link

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27 June 2008 by nathaniel

DATA and the Debate in Dublin

Last night’s DATA, featuring Karl Klomp, Wolf Lieser and Jane Tynan, and part of the Darklight Festival (organized by Caroline Campbell and hosted by yours truly) was extremely rad. Ben’s photos will be up soon, and in the interim, I highly recommend doing a little googling on these three – especially interesting to me were Wolf and his gallery, curatorial projects, online digital art museum and, most of all, his lifetime digital art achievement award. Two amazing winners thus far….  Karl is a hot video circuit bender offering workshops over the weekend, and Jane spoke about some fascinating surveillance art goings-on in London. Great group, nice crowd, good questions.

Uber bonus was to have my good friend and talented South African artist Franci Cronje with me for the whole evening (and most of the week). We got to meet and chat with all three of the above, and the bonus highlight was to spend an after-evening pint of Guinness with NYU Computer Science rock star and Techy Academy Award winner, Ken Perlin. (My supervisor and department would kill me if I did not mention here that our own Anil C. Kokaram has also won one such award…)

Ken blogged about our conversation (more like a debate), and we’ve been emailing a bit about it, too. My RSS reader and blog links list has been updated to include his dailies – recommended!

I’m hoping to chat with Ken more in the near future. Nice to meet ya, and looking forward to more at Darklight over the weekend…

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30 May 2008 by nathaniel

holiday! (and more)

Had a fairly productive week working on my dissertation, and am now off to Belfast for a self-proclaimed long weekend – to celebrate Sid‘s 2nd birthday, Nicole and my 6-year wedding anniversary, and my own birthday (all of these in the span of 2 weeks)! We’ve never been up to Northern Ireland, and I have no idea what my better 2/3rds has planned, but it should be just grand. Will try to post some photos of that, and my folks’ recent visit to Dublin for Sid’s b-day (on her blog), when we’re back.

In the meanwhile… a proposal I’ve written with California-based artist and friend Scott Kildall (if you don’t know his work, you should definitely check it out; he’s an innovative and generous voice in the digi-arts community, and much of his work is not only smart but also beautiful) has been voted into the final round for a rhizome commission: Wikipedia Art. If you’re a member of rhizome, please take the time to rank the top 25 – and by all means, if you like ours (I’m biased, but I think you will), we’d really appreciate your rating it tops! Vote here (you need to log in first).

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