real-time

This is an artist's talk about "Ocotillo." It is a textual and visual work. The basic idea is to read from generated arrangements of textual strings, performing real-time versions of poetic works. These are not generator works but deliberate modifications within textual fields, a continuing stage in the evolution of this particular, and literary rooted form of practice. The objective of this creative work is to push these kinds of concentrated poetic textuality further, offering it as one possible direction in the field. (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

VIDEOPLACE is a responsive video projection environment mapping users movements and actions in a real-time build etween 1975 and 1984. The system is Krueger's first implementation of an Artifical Reality enivronment, an interactive immersive environment where the user get in contact with the virtual without any use of googles or other interface devices.

The works GLOW FLOW, META PLAY, and PSYCHIC SPACE were the precursors to the VIDEOPLACE environment, which now of comes with 25 different programs.

"Two people in different rooms, each containing a projection screen and a video camera, were able to communicate through their projected images in a «shared space» on the screen. No computer was involved in the first Environment in 1975. In order to realize his ideas of an «artificial reality» he [Krueger] started to develop his own computer system in the years up to 1984, mastering the technical problems of image recognition, image analysis and response in real time. This system meant that he could now combine live video images of visitors with graphic images, using various programs to modify them. When «Videoplace» is shown today, visitors can interact with 25 different programs or interaction patterns. A switch from one program to another usually takes place when a new person steps in front of the camera. But the «Videoplace» team has still not achieved its ultimate aim of developing a program capable of learning independently."

(Source: Media Art Net work record)

Our deeply ingrained need to trust language enables Feed to generate an endless simulacrum of social commentary cum mythopoeic narrative spontaneously from largely random associations of charged words. It presents cultural observation through the blind eye of chance. The blank passing moment becomes the creator of mythos. It allows us the opportunity to turn ambiguity into poetry, absurdity into satire, unexpected fortuitous alignments into insight. Feed chronicles the mechanisms of the chronicle rather than its subjects. It removes “realism” from the equation, flirting with the meaningless and parading arbitrary associations before the reader under the banners of archetype and metaphor. Feed historicizes, editorializes, moralizes, sings, dances, and wears funny hats, all in the name of “analyzing” its own inventions.

(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI Conference)

Electroboutique is a unique creative electronics production company, a media art gallery and an artist collective. Our products are developed in modern technological forms, - user-friendly electronic devices and computer programs, which at the same time are the artworks. Our products exist beyond national and cultural borders; they could be seen in trendy interiors, as well as at contemporary art exhibitions and art fairs. Our amazing products are born where cool aesthetics meets information technologies, modern design, pop-art and real-time data processing. Our techniques amalgamate open source and proprietary solutions with best media art inventions of past decades. We make up-to-date market-friendly art, following recent critical discourses. Pride is a natural feeling of the owners of our products. (Source: www.electroboutique.com)

Programmatic or computational art is often, although not necessarily, related to art in other media: visual, performative, conceptual, and so on. The art systems of The Readers Project relate to writing and to reading, to our encounters with literary language. This project is an essay in language-driven digital art, in writing digital media. The Readers Project visualizes reading, although it does not do this in the sense of miming conventional human reading. Rather, the project explores and visualizes existing and alternative vectors of reading, vectors that are motivated by the properties and methods of language and language art.

Visualization, especially as a function of computation, is now quite commonplace in artistic practice, but it has little culture moment unless it provides critique, and it is not art unless it conveys an aesthetic. The Readers Project is a visualization of reading but it is implicitly critical of conventional reading habits. Further, because the project’s readers move within and are thus composed by the words within which they move, they also, effectively, write. They generate texts and the traces of their writings are offered to the project’s human readers as such, as writing, as literary art; published as real-time streams of live-writing, available to anyone with internet access.

Computationally-engaged text generation has a significant, if marginal, history in literary art practice. The Readers Project is innovative, however, in having found a number of ways to display the primary source of a text generator’s inputs within this source’s typographically structured literary environment. A less obvious but equally important aspect of the project is its use of current natural language information—especially concerning the relative frequencies of words and phrases considered by the readers—culled from the largest corpus of human language that has ever existed, a universe of language no longer deep within or distant from us, but now made visible to all by the free demons of web indexing and, more recently, by active cells of the Natural Language Liberation Front (http://nllf.net/).

(Source: Artists' Statement from the project site)