Videogrid at Decode: Digital Design Sensations at the V&A

Decode looks at three current themes within digital design: Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke and tailored, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool; Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence; Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/decode/exhibition

Taking More Libertys

Taking More Liberty's celebrated the creativity and exuberance of London streets with a unique photographic interactive situated in the Carnaby Street windows of Liberty between 5 - 26th October 2009. The project was the sequel to the 2004 project Taking Liberty's; this time engineered especially to dovetail with SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution at Somerset House. Passers-by posed in front of the camera and the images were uploaded live to be showcased as part of the exhibition and in the above gallery.

Incheon Digital Art Festival 2009

The exhibition presents a vision of a new city where people communicate, cross borders, and traverse time zones in a digital environment. The show's three sub-themes -- Inter-Face, Inter-Space, Inter-Time -- reflect on the aesthetics of new media art. INDAF strives to explore the impact of contemporary information society through media art works.

Head to Toe for Super Contemporary

http://www.designmuseum.org/headtotoe/

For this interactive installation, four pods around London take short videos of the heads, bodies or legs of the people standing in front. Use the arrows to flick through the participants or click on a video for a random selection. Visit the pods at the Design Museum, Selfridges, Covent Garden or Ideas Store and get yourself featured here.

Head to Toe is one of fifteen new commissions in the Super Contemporary exhibition presented by the Design Museum and Beefeater 24.

27,000 videos + so far!

Art Rock

Videogrid was displayed as part of the digitial art exhibtion at Art rock 2009

Funky Pixels, The new Ars Electronica Center

Design Cities at the Design Museum

Design Cities at the Design Museum London showcases over 1000 moving videogrids captured when the exhibition was in Istanbul. Visitors can browse the collection using two buttons in front of a large lcd screen





photos by luke hayes

Ars Electronica 2008 - Honorary mention Interactive art

Camera, light and touchscreen at the OK Center in Linz,Austria.

POPVOX - Abbey Road

A video installation created for SHOWstudio during Fashion Djs. A machine asks 5 questions and then edits and uploads the finished video to showstudio.com. Willing participants include Mike Figgis, Mick Jones, Boy George and Jourdan, amongst many others.



Click here for all the videos

The Replenishing Body wins Honorary mention at Ars Electronica Grand Prix 2008

Replenishing Body has won an honorary mention in the interactive arts category at this years Ars Electronica Grand Prix. Started in 1987, Prix Ars Electronica is the foremost international prize for computer art so I am really pleased that the project has been recognised.

Design Cities - Istanbul Modern

I was fortunate to be included in the selection for a new exhibition called design citites which starts in the Istanbul Modern before moving to London's Design museum in September.





Some information on the exhibition:

This exhibition, curated by Deyan Sudjic, looks at the history of design from the mid-19th century through to the present. It stresses the conjunction of urban centers with great designers and traces how these have moved around the world until the present.

This exhibition will give the opportunity to look at the masters of modern and contemporary design through their sketches, drawings, models, objects and furniture that they have designed and created.

Highlights of the exhibition include work by the following:

London: Owen Jones, William Morris; Vienna: Joseph Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner; Dessau: Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt; Paris: Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Eileen Gray, Cassandre; Milan: Achille Castiglioni, Bob Noorda, Gio Ponti, Joe Columbo, Vico Magistretti, Ettore Sottsass; Los Angeles: Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Eliot Noyes, Saul Bass, Harry Beroia; Tokyo: Sony Research, Yamaha research, Issey Miyake, Shiro Kuramata; London: Ron Arad, Jasper Morrison, Ross Lovegrove, Zaha Hadid, Jonathan Barnbrook, Sam Hecht, David Chipperfield, Peter Savile.

İstanbul Modern’s new exhibition "Design Cities" is bringing together some of the most significant design products of the last century for the first time in this country. Seeing all these design icons in one setting will no doubt be a major inspiration for anyone that has any interest in the subject.

Deyan Sudjic writes that "The Design Museum is delighted to be working with Istanbul Modern in producing a spectacular exploration of the way in which design has shaped contemporary culture."

Replenishing Body project video

Brit Insurance Designs of the year

The Replenishing Body (see below) was shortlisted in the Interactive category in 2008's Designs of the year currently running at the Design Museum. The following is taken from the exhibition program.

"The Replenishing Body Kiosk was created by Ross
Phillips, head of interactive at SHOWstudio, the online
fashion broadcasting company, founded by Nick Knight.
For this project they partnered with Evian to devise
an exhibition at a London west-end gallery, allowing
visitors to become part of ‘The Replenishing Body’. The
interactive video installation, inspired by the fact that the
human body is made up of 60% water, used a 25 section,
touch screen video grid where visitors were invited
to make a one-second video recording of a close-up
section of their body, which was added to a constantly
moving, composite video portrait. Each recording was
then added on top of previous footage so that the video
grid became a continually transformed display thanks to
the visitor’s participation."

Nominated by Dee Halligan

More information here

The Replenishing Body

An interactive video installation created in collaboration with Evian, The Replenishing Body consists of a grid of squares (5x5) which can each record a 1 second loop of film. Participants can create and orchestrate a giant composite moving creature, or simply a collage of moving snapshots by recording a close-up section of their body part. The grid starts empty at the beginning of the installation and becomes a constantly changing collorative artwork. Grids are periodically uploaded to a gallery which can be viewed on http://www.showstudio.com








Check out the full project here (and see higher quality movies)
http://www.showstudio.com/evianreplenishingbody

CONFESSIONS

Who's 'a wanker'? What male stylist can't keep their clothes on? Which former curator of a national museum smokes in Grade 1* listed buildings? And what esteemed fashion writer has 'the back of a swimmer and the head of a monkey'?!! We knew champagne + a fashion crowd would yield sensational results, but add the SHOWstudio 'Confessions' Interactive and there was controversy! View the scurrilous secrets of the Bal Masqué's guests in this highly entertaining series of confessional clips.




http://www.showstudio.com/projects/balmasque/confessions/

LYRIC

Twelve leading creatives from the fields of fashion, music and image-making have come together to produce eight distinct projects under the mantle of 'Lyric', an umbrella project that pioneers creative ground using the latest 'third generation' mobile-imaging technologies. Each contributor, or creative pairing was issued with a 'Motorola' handset with video call facility on '3's video mobile network, and asked to make a series of short films or 'motion clips' that visually interpret the song lyrics of their choice - producing one clip for each lyric line.

The contributors have produced a clip for each lyric line, and each lyric and clip is released one by one over a month-long period, gradually revealing the visual interpretations of each maker in numerous audacious, provocative outcomes On completion, each song sequence imparts a sense of the personality of the practitioners.

The concept was Nick Knight's but I was involved in the implementation of the videos as well as working with the artists in various capacities such as selection and editing.



http://www.showstudio.com/projects/lyric/start.html

PSP AMAZE ME

AMAZE ME is inspired by the brief issued by art director Alexi Brodovitch to photographer Richard Avedon — simply to “amaze him”.
The challenge asked you, the public, to respond to a brief set by a panel of six leading creative industry figures in six different territories. The interactive booths were installed in London, Antwerp, Rome, Dublin, Barcelona and Berlin. Entrants came to one of our micro-studio booths and made a 30 second video pitch. The best six entrants won a PSP™(Playstation®Portable), plus an exclusive opportunity to work with the panellist they attempted to amaze.




http://www.showstudio.com/projects/pspamazeme/en/

Check out a few of the winning videos

daddy_winner.mov
fink_winner.mov

MODELCARDS

An interactive casting booth that asked the questions that are normally written on a models card but in this case are filmed and uploaded automatically to SHOWstudio. After entering the booth and stating their name, the models are then asked questions about their agency, their physical appearance and then finally, where they are heading to next.



View them all here.

http://www.showstudio.com/projects/sittings/casting/

DARE

DARE is an interactive installation piece designed and created specifically for the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The exhibition has run from June 19th until October 26th, 2003 in the Museums’ Warner Room.

DARE, the title of which refers to the Italian verb "to give" and the English verb meaning "to be bold”, consists of four touch-screens and a video projection. Each screen is interface and display: they require action as well as observation, writing as well as reading. At the opening, the exhibit was essentially a black canvas, awaiting and inviting visitors to be participants and to play along. On the other hand, on October 26th at the end of the show, it included stories told through a sequence of marks and images that recreate the past and the present of those museum visitors who in four months interacted with it. DARE creates its own documents, its own accounts of itself and its own records of those who contributed to its making.

DARE consists of four pieces: GRID and FACE, that relate to images, whereas DRAW and MODE relate to gestures and the creation of lines or marks. All pieces are playful; they all record user’s interactions onto a hard disk with a date and time stamp. These can all be recreated as a time based sequence.

Text Taken from
http://www.fabrica.it/project.php?id=63

I was responsible for Grid and Face which have since been used in various other situations.

See here and here for further description of individual pieces.




Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI)

UNITED PEOPLE

United People uses Apple E-macs as video kiosks and local DSL services to connect to an Oracle database and Benetton's web servers. Users put themselves online, look at the faces already in the database and send messages to anyone that appeals to them. The system can be used to flirt, play, show off, or simply send messages to friends. United People is currently installed in Benetton stores in Hong Kong, Rome and Birmingham and will be extended to Barcelona, Moscow and London in the next 2 months. Already Benetton are taking advantage of the system to run local marketing initiatives like the highly popular 'Are You the Face of Birmingham?' promotion which ran in the Birmingham Bull Ring store between September and December 2003. One Birmingham 'face' will be selected to be photographed as a Benetton model in February 2004.

United People augments the space of the Benetton megastore with a virtual network which mirrors the global retail network and in which the global customer can insert his or her message. It gives a voice, and a face, to the client. It reverses the usual flow of communcation, whereby the corporation speaks and the consumer listens. It's also a lot of fun. You never know, it might just catch on.

excerpt taken from
http://www.nmk.co.uk/article/2004/02/11/art-and-retail








UNITED PEOPLE

FACE

Face is a piece that came into being as a proposal for the Venice Bienale. It has since been reworked and reused in various locations around the world (see DARE, Taking Liberties, Collette and Piacere). The core idea is simple. You take a photo using an automated camera and that image is then added to a visual list of all previously taken photo's which scroll through in rapid succession. ADD A BIT HERE THAT YOU WROTE FOR TH IDN BOOK.

VIDEOGRID

Taken from ARt&D - Research and Development in the New Art Practice (Paperback) by Joke Brouwer (Author)

GRID allowed users to input a short video sequence into one of its grid rectangles, which then looped repeatedly, until someone else decided to re-record over the same grid rectangle.

The effect of GRID was of an evolving and complex set of repeating patterns – a matrix of differently looped actions, often created by different people at different times, each with their own internal phase patterns. The whole thing adds up to a novel kind of polyrhythm, a compelling visual music of syncopating facial expressions and body movements created by the audience for the audience.

GRID, like the TRIPTYCH piece mentioned above, is an unwitting descendant of Krueger’s REPLAY, the VIDEOPLACE interaction which grabbed a 16 frame silhouette sequence from the audience whenever the system detected motion, and then looped it back and forth until the next motion detection occurred. But REPLAY, according to Krueger’s description of it, is a simpler work, so simple that it might be argued that it fails to fully realize its potential. We have already seen how for Krueger, as for many artists who program, the invention phase, the creation of the basic idea, can become the end of the process, rather than the beginning of a new phase of applied creativity. Ross Phillip’s GRID on the other hand starts simply, but goes on to build complexity from this simple base by overlaying and juxtaposing loops together day by day for 4 months, and in doing so creates an artwork which is full and resonant and satisfying. In the way it uses full images rather than silhouettes, by putting the moving images into a spatial relationship with each other across the grid and by giving the artwork a memory, GRID empowers it’s audience to make a personal and collective statement, while the artwork as a whole constitutes a statement about the nature of interactivity and authorship.

You can see a (slightly) interactive version of the grid here.