2 thoughts on “links for 12 May 2006

  1. On a slightly related note, you should check out this paper from MIT Medialab student Hugo Liu, which deals with extracting mood from blogs – not a million miles away from the “We feel fine” except it’s not as much fun. Very, very interesting, though, as is most of Hugo’s work –

    http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/publications/papers/IUI2004-wwtt.pdf

    But on to digital Art. Most of the stuff I like has come from Japan. That’s probably partly because I love Japan, but I think it’s also that there’s a good deal more experimentation happening there, and it’s well supported.

    Other things you may like: The great Toshio Iwai, with his “Well of Lights”, and the ever-popular “Music Insects”, which must be my favourite installation ever –

    http://ns05.iamas.ac.jp/~iwai/artworks/well_of_lights.html
    http://ns05.iamas.ac.jp/~iwai/artworks/music_insects.html

    I also like the work of Yasuaki Onishi –

    http://www.geocities.jp/yskons/index.htm

    A few years back at the Experimenta “House of Tomorrow” exhibition in Melbourne I saw Takahisa Suzuki’s Info.Table, which I loved. It was a book, which appeared to be blank until you put your hands near it, whereupon patterns would appear on the pages and react to your movement (I’m over-simplifying – you have to see it to get it).

    A lot of Japanese interactive art seems to blur the line between game and art. In my experience a lot of Japan seems to blur the lines between life, game and art, too. Anyway, there have been some astonishingly good interactive artworks out of Japan over the years, and some of the best work by artists from other countries has been done while in Japan (Bill Seaman, Peter Callas, various others).

    I’m quite partial to this piece of bizarreness, in which you capture goblins with a vacuum cleaner. Part game, part “Ghostbusters”, it’s more than a little strange –

    http://chihara.aist-nara.ac.jp/ivrc2005/en/invisible.html

    Not all interactive art is bad photoshop work!

  2. hey Rachel – thanks for all those great links. I’ll be sure to check them out.

    yeah, i know, I was probably being a little harsh… but I reckon there are about 50 crappy digital art pieces for every great one.

Comments are closed.