Thursday 09/27/07

Monday 09/24/07

A 20-foot-tall, narrow, tapering object with a pyramidal top, Damián Ortega’s Obelisco Transportable stands on a grassy platform on wheels, as though it has been uprooted from a previous location and made portable. Since ancient times, when the form first emerged in Egypt, obelisks have served as visible centerpieces of cities. Ortega characterizes Obelisco Transportable as “a mobile landmark” that one could potentially move anywhere to commemorate anything. It offers a pragmatic yet wryly playful approach to a global society in which the balance of power is constantly in flux, and in which populations shift and drift from one place to another.

Pictures from the Conference can now be found here, or in this Flickr set

See more pictures on The Head’s Flickr page

Here is some conspiracy theory about my own avatar lurking around in Amsterdam while I was fully occupied by trying to solve the connection problem….

http://wirxliflimflam.blogspot.com/2007/09/oslospace-audiospace-and-bibbespace.html

However it was great that the Orchestra could play in the end. Unfortunately, problem solving took so long that we could not discuss Second Life as a public space which was my intention. One nice thing about the performance besides the quality of the concert was that there were other avatars lingering around in virtual Amsterdam who did not have a clue what was going on. Lovely how the playing avatars were animated, jumping and flying around creating these swirls.

Thursday 09/20/07

View from the other side, on my way to the West Coast of Norway.

Use your hands! Collaborate and Create!
www.datenform.de/sandbox.html

Workshop 3 – 5 October 2007
and Exhibition 6 – 14 October 2007

The Sandbox is a place available to all inhabitants of Second Life as a test platform and experimental field. Each user can produce and programme new objects with their own individual textures. The Sandbox is a clash of cultures - of digital and analogue clichés - a place of interaction in every form.

Sandbox Berlin translates this field of experimentation into public space in Real Life. In a three-day workshop, production of custom objects in a spontaneous and collaborative process will be tested in Real Life. Everyone is invited to join us on a deserted area, formerly part of the Berlin Wall, in the Mitte district, to build whatever they want. Tools, wood and other materials will be provided by Sandbox Berlin, so that flexible groups can quickly design and materialize objects.

Let’s test the Sandbox as a collaborative field of interaction in Real Life! Which phenomena will find their way into reality from the digital world? How will digital and physical space interact? How will the city react to a Sandbox?

Call for Participation

Everyone can take part! If you interested in helping to write the history of Sandbox Berlin, please register by e-mail. Spontaneous participation and visits to the workshops are welcome, completely in the spirit of Second Life.

The deadline for e-mail registration is 30th September 2007
Contact: Gordana Jovetic
sandbox@web.de

A total of seven open-air screenings of live surveillance took place throughout the city of Oslo from September 14-20th. The week-long cycle of open-air surveillance cinema was completed by the screening of “Traffic” a live video feed of a traffic camera that was projected onto the surface of a garage door somewhere around the corner of Biskop Gunnerusgate and Storgata. This occured with much peace and contemplation and no police intervention.

Here are some images from the week…

Carwash

Traffic

Bagdad Cafe

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Cradle Will Rock

The solarium complex was completed one week ago on Thursday, Sept. 13. As installed, it contained a lounge unit (capacity 3 persons)

A rest bed, with storage underneath,

and a picnic table with attached benches.

The inside of the structure was posted with a variety of found advertisements from the Oslo streets, notices concerning the urban interface exhibition, and a variety of business cards, notices and advertisements found as parasitic advertising on NYC subways. The intention was simply to provide a fecund base, or (fake) naturalized history for the structure—as if it belonged, but in some wrong way, to the site.

The freestanding walls, covered with plastic sheeting and orange webbing, were designed to loosely define and contain the space, but also to allow for a wide variety of configurations and topological possibilities.

The surveillance camera set up inside Atelier Nord at the beginning of the project to gain information about the use of the site was disactivated.

The completed structure:

It was noticed that a person slept on the bed the first night after installation, and in the following days was in continual but not constant use.

A trash can was installed as well as an industrial ashtray in response to quantities of cigarette butts and trash left in the structure.

Checking the structure in the morning, the foldable walls were closed over the entrance by an overnight user.

Increasingly the structure became naturalized as a site for drug injection.

Discussions have been underway to fix one of the folding walls so that it could not completely close over the opening of the solarium—a change which will perhaps balance the desirability of the structure to a wider variety of users, while still allowing for the above use.