Author Archives for Regine
Invisible Suits
Commenting on the Invisible Coat, Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg to Daniela Kostova’s Invisible Suits performance.
The suits are made from special blue screen fabric (the chroma key used for work with video blue screen technique), where the blue color could be displaced by images or video footage. The material makes the wearer both very visible (in real life), and invisible (on video) as bodies merge with the visual environment. The effect is achieved by the use of two cameras: one mounted on the person wearing the blue suit, and another one shooting h/er from behind.
These suits allow me to explore issues of silence and absence, integration and estrangement in different political and cultural environments. While drawing from theoretical concepts like the “invisible immigrant” and the double consciousness, through this work I am also exploring the space between the objective and subjective points of view.
Britain first country to monitor every car journey
From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored.
Using a network of cameras that can read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to cover motorways, main roads, towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
The details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day will be recorded for at least two years and will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
If the police and security services can show that a national surveillance operation based on recording car movements can protect the public against criminals and terrorists, there will be a strong political will to do the same with street cameras designed to monitor the flow of human traffic. The Home Office Scientific Development Branch in Hertfordshire is already working on ways of automatically recognising human faces in a crowd by computer.
Via Varnelis< The Independent 1 and 2.
=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/74828596@N00/70839664/in/pool-1984/”>Image from flickr 1984 pool.
Free ride data acquisition vehicle
Frida V. is a computer-enabled bicycle that allows riders to map open WIFI nodes in urban spaces. It carries a small computer, GPS device, 802.11 wireless network transciever and a basic audiovisual recording unit. The system enables automated mapping of stumbled wireless networks, easy creation of location-tagged media and opportunistic synchronization with a server resource on the internet.
Luka Frelih is in residency in New York (at the Thing space, at 32 Avenue of the Americas (6th ave), cross Walker street) through January 9th. You can contact him (luka(AT)ljudmila.org) to ride his bicycle to locate WIFI hotspots and map/photograph/ whatever in your neighborhood.
Interview of the artist. Video of the bicycle.
Via post.thing.
Mobile video interventions in urban space
Fernando Llanos has built [vi video] a wearable projection system that allows him to screen videos in any context: an endless kiss on the walls and the bodies of a prostitution area, images of plane accidents on the facade of an airport, real people over the silhouette of a classical sculpture. The system is made of a camera, 2 decks miniDVs, a computer, a projector and batteries.
The artist is at the V Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brasil, through December 4.
Images.
Via Ad*e*e/sinapsis.
The BiblioRoll
Keio University has engineered the prototype of an electronic bookshelf. Called BiblioRoll, the device consists of three LCD displays in a transparent tube and aims to help readers who need to browse through several books, pick up ideas which could be a cue from each of them, and reconstruct them to come to the answer they search for.
Users can rotate a circumference of the device to display see different information on each tier. They can, for example, choose a book’s cover from the top screen and display different part of its contents on the other two LCDs.
The developers aim to complete 15 cm high product by 2010, its flexible display will use electronic paper or organic EL. The current prototype is much larger.
