Best Networked Art

The creation of design firms Urbain DRC and INVIVIA, MIMMI (Minneapolis Interactive Macro-Mood Installation) is an inflatable sculpture installed in the plaza of the Minneapolis Convention Center that captures and displays information from the activity levels in the surrounding area as well as aggregating the general sentiment of the cities residents using real-time Twitter data.

The inFORM project from MIT’s Tangible Media Group makes today’s most advanced touchscreen look as outdated as a DOS prompt.

Developed by Daniel Leithinger, Sean Follmer, and Hiroshi Ishii as a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically so that users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. inFORM can also interact with the physical world around it, for example moving objects on the table’s surface. Remote participants in a video conference can be displayed physically, allowing for a strong sense of presence and the ability to interact physically at a distance.

‘Chicago Faces’ is an installation by developer and artist Daniel Jay Bertner that investigates the “blurry legal boundaries to non consensual photography and distribution” that current technologies are enabling.

Description:“A guerrilla art piece that photographs (without consent) the faces of unsuspecting civilians using open source hardware and software. A street camera is embedded with a linux machine (Raspberry Pi) that is running a facial recognition algorithm.

Once a face is discovered, it is photographed, and automatically uploaded to the twitter account, twitter.com/chicagofaces/media/grid for public view”

Underwater is an installation piece by artist David Bowen that uses a combination of a Microsoft Kinect and 729 servo motors to articulate the real-time surface of a lake and translate it into the inside of a gallery located hundreds of miles away.

Recently exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts the Kinect device was installed just off the shore of Lake Superior and pointed towards a plastic membrane floating on the surface. Data points captured from the membrane’s movement were translated to a complex grid structure of rope and motors suspended from the ceiling in the gallery.

The Satellite Lamps are part of a long-term research into the representation of invisible urban networks. Examples of these networks are Wi-Fi, RFID and GPS when using smart phones, public transport chip cards and also objects in public space such as surveillance cameras, remote controlled bridges and street lighting.

GPS, a technology originally developed for warfare, has now become part of our daily lives through our cell phones. Although it is an important part of our climate of surveillance that has now come under attack, it is still necessary for our mobile itineraries and jogging apps.

The brightness of the Satellite Lamps is equivalent to the strength of the GPS signal and demonstrates how GPS pops up in our direct surroundings.

Alex Kiessling is a Vienna based artist that is looking to use the assistance of two ABB industrial robotic arms to simultaneously create a work in three countries.

Kiessling will begin working on a unique piece at the Oval Hall at the MuseumsQuartier complex in Vienna. At the same time stationed in London’s Trafalgar Square and in Berlin’s Breitscheid plaza the robotic arms will begin work on their own canvases replicating Kiessling’s movements in real-time.

The Rain Printer project tracks precipitation data in real time from Las Vegas, USA, and Bogor, Indonesia, juxtaposing and visualising the issues with freshwater and commodification around the world.

Unmoored reimagines the Barbican Centre as a vast brutalist airship, torn free of its surroundings and taking to the sky, buffeted by summer winds and driven across the country, and the world.

Taking live weather data from the roof of the building and using it to direct a wandering path. The view from the airship is visualized with Google Earth, and presented as a “window” in the foyer of the building – and online.

Going by the title “Objective Devices” the project looks at the “paradigm shifts that are occurring in modern physics and proposes a design methodology that collapses the space between science, technology, design, and culture.”

The first device “ignorant decay” is a Geiger counter device that detects radioactive signals, produces an algorithm and trades on the open stock market based on the stochastic behavior of radioactive decay.

Her other connected project in the series is “#fortunecookie” and plays off of the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment that explores if a cat is may be both alive and dead depending on an earlier random event.

Using Twitter posts and fortune cookies to make the experiment physical, the design creates “an alternate vision where Twitter is providing a new view of our future selves by taking existing tweets (which represent an event that has happened in the past to someone else) and changing the language to create a fortune (which will represent an event that has the probability to happen in the future to the receiver of the fortune cookie).”