8oinks

Megumi Naitoh: In our contemporary world, mosaics are not just ceramics, stone, and glass, they are also digital. In some respects, the meaning of mosaic has changed over time. Mosaic used to be a technique to reveal design and imagery, yet the idea of the digital mosaic in contemporary society is used almost in an opposite manner. It is used to obscure nudity, obscene gesture or identity.

Real Life/virtual Life
wall relief with 3 vantage points

iphone portrait series

Trevor Brown aka Babyart made an installation at the Hotel Dare in second life. Mescaline Tammas made an explosive little clip as a document of the SL installation; a tribute to Trevor Brown’s work. Music by Venetian Snares.

Rob Matthews has created a physical version of Wikipedia’s featured articles. The 2,559 digital articles have been transformed into a massive, 5,000 page hardbound book that is around 2 feet tall. Though thoroughly impractical, the project beautifully illustrates the usefulness of digital information. (via)

Recording our everyday lives has gone from the privacy and simplicity of writing in a diary to real-time, digital exposure on the internet. This exhibit reveals the many ways we see ourselves in the 21st century. Watch your portrait quickly emerge from lively patterns on a flat screen TV, view an artist’s 70lb weight loss via video in a matter of minutes, or experience a decade of an artist’s life through daily Polaroids. These works and more showcase the art of today’s self-portrait. Read more at Shiffman.net

Mike Bracco shares some interesting thoughts about popular cameras, smartphones and convergence:
“After picking up my iPhone 3GS and using it for almost a month now, I’m officially calling it: the point and shoot camera is dead. It’s kind of a bold statement but I truly believe they are fast becoming a relic of the past. Obviously high end SLRs are not going anywhere but the middle ground between SLRs and “camera phones” is really starting to disappear and become a meaningless distinction.”
Read more at thenextweb.com

OpenProcessing is a basic gallery with code for Processing sketches of all kinds.

it is the work of Sinan Ascioglu, an NYU ITP student. Sinan has also built OpenVisuals, a site dedicated to easily visualizing data in a consistent way, also using Processing. Q: “Any data should be visualized. Visualized well.”

Browse the galleries, learn more skills in the classrooms and share your own work.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It can be downloaded from  processing.org.

(Find more links and inspiration at Create Digital Motion - Code as Art)

When we think of networks, we think of humans and the cables we’ve run around the world to connect our species. Figuring out how to move electrons has transformed human society, but we are not the only species on earth that lives in a wired world.
Recent research shows that single-celled organisms are able to grow electrical connections out of their own bodies. Bacteria may be sending electrical-mails of their own. A feat beyond all mortals.

Read more at WIRED’s From The Fields Series, or at dailygalaxy

In this interactive sculpture, 22,528 recycled computer keycaps and 192 custom keycaps are embedded into a continuous textile. The keys spell out a line-by-line transcript of the email correspondence between the artist and fabricators regarding the creation of the artwork. As a result, the sculpture documents its own making. The project speaks to the pervasiveness of email in our lives while commenting on the fact that, despite the modern technology of virtual communication, our written language is linked to the tactile sensation of moving our fingers over an outmoded typewriter system. (read more)

This music video was shot for Sour’s ‘Hibi no Neiro’ (Tone of everyday) from their first mini album ‘Water Flavor EP’. The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam. 

Jay Rosen of NYU and PressThink describes the ethic of the link in blogging and
news media. This is an excerpt from a Carnegie Council panel on April 3, 2008.  
Read this good read over at MediaFuturist: A new economy of Links & APIs,
and the Interdependent Content Ecoysystem  (via crashroots)

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

Here is my contribution to “what is collaboration”. In my quest for answers, i entered the twisted dungeons of second-life. This massive online world with more inhabitants then many small countries is supposedly at the cutting edge of online collaboration.

I asked around about what collaboration means inside this virtual dungeon community, here´s a good quote:

I explore collaboration as a process by framing it in three phases: problem setting, direction setting, and structuring. During the problem-setting phase stakeholders negotiate their right to participate. Agreement on the problem and what actions and resources are needed to address it are established during the direction setting phase. During the structuring phase, those agreements are implemented by allocating roles, responsibilities, and resources.

an outpouring of people power not seen here since the 1979 Iranian revolution 

Mona Lisa (also known as La Gioconda) is a 16th century portrait painted in oil on a poplar panel by Leonardo da Vinci during the Italian Renaissance. The work is owned by the Government of France and is on the wall in the Louvre in Paris, France with the title Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo.

The painting is a half-length portrait and depicts a woman whose expression is often described as enigmatic. The ambiguity of the sitter’s expression, the monumentality of the half-figure composition, and the subtle modeling of forms and atmospheric illusionism were novel qualities that have contributed to the painting’s continuing fascination. Few other works of art have been subject to as much scrutiny, study, mythologizing, and parody.

Today, you can find thousands of replicas by known and unknown artists, used in advertising, design, fashion and art. Explore the 72 Mona Lisa remakes in this list and discover over 4000 Mona-Images on MegaMonaLisa.com

The new Caldo-Magazine is out! 95 pages of inspiring new artists and writers, discussing the fascination of online identites in a very ironic way.

i’m featured too take a look at the full set here

escribes

Eddie Breen says about himself: “Born 51 years ago in Natick, MA, Eddie Breen is my brush name, my given name is Chris Sammartano. I didn’t start painting until relatively recently. Over the years I’ve worked a variety of jobs, but never picked up a paint brush - except when, as a bike messenger in Boston, I felt the need to fill the inspection certificate holders in elevators with my own artistic expression.”

Art-critic M.D. Dublin says: “Eddie Breen was born lucky. He does not have to suffer the foolish tropes of previous generations who have been burying art and digging it back up every season only to find no pulse and to declare it dead again. Painters like Breen have cast the irony out and filled their bronzes with gold. In 20 years, when the last Boomer has keeled over from mutual fund fatigue, Fun will dominate the Land and honest pioneers who made flawed maps rather than tracing the territory, those who saw clearly the brilliance and intrinsic motivation in artists like Darger, Lobanov, Breen, Nek Chand will live like pashas.”