randform

The images display two batrachians: a real toad (a gulf coast toad) and one from the nvidia demo (of their current graphics card flag ship). One can interact with both of them now (gulf coast toad and nvidia frog). While the graphics are amazing (but obviously still not photo realistic in case of the nvidia frog), the simulated frog seems to miss quite some ai. So maybe they should give it some boost with an ai accelerator card.
(images from the respective links)

image from CIANT’s project ETUDE

Just an announcement: The International Centre for Art and New Technologies CIANT in Prague is announcing a lecture about Vilem Flusser. Albeit if Prague is rather close to Berlin (in fact I know someone from Berlin who is going to school there!) I am not sure if I find enough time to attend this very interesting lecture, since I have an upcoming really heavy work load in the outside-media-art world.

But at this place it is very worthwhile to also have a look at the projects, which are presented on the site like e.g. D.A.N.C.E, ETUDE, the transISTor classes or the former project ALTERNE (Alternative Realities in Networked Environments):

Unlike traditional virtual reality that constructs visually realistic synthetic worlds the ALTERNE platform supports artistic exploration of such complex concepts as causality, alternative laws of physics or alternative forms of life.

Read the rest of this entry »

the nabla symbol was first used by Hamilton. Read the rest of this entry »

Today the bauhaus Dessau celebrates its 80th birthday. It opened on Dec 4th 1926 as “Hochschule für Gestaltung” (before that the bauhaus resided from 1919 to 1925 in Weimar and afterwards 1932-1933 in Berlin and 1937-1938 in Chicago). The building was reconstructed over the last 10 years. The renovation is now almost finished, where an emphasis was placed on a changed color appearance of the Bauhaus.

In 2005 there was an exhibition about the wall-painting workshop of the Bauhaus at the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin with a catalog. The catalog gives a quite good overview about Bauhaus colors and color compositions, respectively.

->images from the Bauhaus building in Dessau
->for a quick impression about the exhibition these two links-> 1,2

Some Monthy Python for the rest of the weekend:

-> youtube link.

In my last posts I was metaphoring about iterations/recursions and fractals.

Read the rest of this entry »

While the chess human-computer show duell between the world champion Kramnik (human) and Deep Fritz (software) has reached its half time Read the rest of this entry »

Also if my recent obsession about nested polygons, nested documenting and nested exhibitions gets may be a bit boring and nerving (this is why iterations are nowadays done by a computer) – this post here is a short report about a foto report about an exhibition about which I was reporting in this randform exposition which was about online exhibitions in real exhibition spaces.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ira Schneider talking about his and others works at Treffpunkt NBK/meeting point NBK (Neuer Berliner Kunstverein) on Nov. 15, 2006

At the Treffpunkt “In and out of context” Ira Schneider was showing excerpts of old and new video works, including a videowork, which is a video documentation about a current exhibition in Madrid called “First Generation: Art and the Moving Image 1963-1986” (see also here). This video documentation was finished 3 hours before his presentation at the Treffpunkt.

Hence I am reporting now about a recent real life documentation about a brand new video documentation which is about a current museum documentation about video culture in the seventies/eighties (which videos are probably documenting also all sorts of things)…. – so no wonder that this made me think about iterations/recursions and convergence/fixpoints and hence fractals which are usually sets of fixpoints…:)

Ira Schneiders documentation treasured every moment and interaction, he named almost every person in his video. His mixture of documenting the things/works and the “life around” them displayed his true wish to understand the humans involved with the objects and situations they have to deal with.

And yes – I was reminded of Prousts famous citation from La Prisonnière (1923), and I will cite it again (also if I hear already the berlinAntikitschPolice coming). Can one say that (at least) this citation is a kind of literature fixpoint (??:-O):

Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est.

The NBK – a collective for supporting Berlin artists – is hosting next to their exhibitions, lectures etc. an Artothek i.e. a “public library” to loan out artworks. You can support NBK by e.g. bying one of the Jahresgaben and – being a recurrent theme – I couldn’t resist to link to Guenther Ueckers Jahresgabe..:)

—————————————————————————————————————-
Below are some excerpts from Ira Schneiders exhibition:”Mysteries in Reality”: his installations echo (1975) and timezones (1980) (where echo was in a seperate room, as are his video works) and his contributions to the famous magazine radical software (where I recommend to read also the intro by David Ross at that link). The big hall at NBK contains also stills – or almost stills…:) : – like snow and water.