illusions

"A thaumatrope is a toy that was popular in Victorian times. A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.

The invention of the thaumatrope is usually credited to either John Ayrton Paris or Peter Mark Roget. Paris used one to demonstrate persistence of vision to the Royal College of Physicians in London in 1824. He based his invention on ideas of the astronomer John Herschel and the geologist William Henry Fitton, and some sources attribute the actual invention to Fitton rather than Paris. Others claim that Charles Babbage was the inventor.

Examples of common thaumatrope pictures include a bare tree on one side of the disk, and its leaves on the other, or a bird on one side and a cage on the other. They often also included riddles or short poems, with one line on each side.

Thaumatropes were one of a number of simple, mechanical optical toys that used persistence of vision. They are recognised as important antecedents of cinematography and in particular of animation.

The coined name translates roughly as "wonder turner", from Ancient Greek: θαῦμα "wonder" and τρόπος "turn"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaumatrope

"Two-way and Three-way Pictures
A form of vertical montage.
Two-way pictures date back to the seventeenth century.

Initially they were made from spars with a triangular cross-section; later, accordion-pleated card was used. Both methods produced a background of vertical angled planes facing in opposite directions. Alternating picture ‘strips’ with different scenes or images were painted or glued onto the spars. Viewed from the front they make no sense. The two images only resolve when they are viewed from one side or the other. Whether one looks from the right or the left, only one of the two images will be visible as a complete picture. This technique enjoyed its widest popularity in the nineteenth century. The preferred motifs were predominantly religious, with combinations such as Crucifixion/Resurrection or Jesus Christ/The Holy Virgin. The same tradition also includes three-way pictures known as trisceneoramas. The three pictures are again painted as strips: a recessed ‘central picture’ with the other two pictures on the strips forward and to either side of the back strips. Seen from the front, the main motif is visible; seen from the sides the other two paintings are revealed, their themes generally connected with that of the main motif. "

http://wernernekes.de/00_cms/cms/front_content.php?idart=522

Ondulation by Thomas McIntosh, Mikko Hynninen, Emmanuel Madan

"Ondulation is a composition for water, sound and light. It employs a two ton pool of water which is set into motion using sound. Beams of light are projected onto the surface of the water and reflect onto a projection screen. The pool becomes a "liquid mirror" that is slowly sculpted into perfect three-dimensional expressions of a musical composition. In turn, the light on the screen is modulated by the movement of the water into complex visual forms which maintain perfect congruity with their musical source. The resulting fusion of sensory experiences is a temporal sculpture: a construction of water, sound and light which evolves as a composition in time."

http://www.ondulation.net/about.html


"We enter a room and are plunged into semi-darkness. The room is dominated by an immense basin of water, ripples radiating across its surface in concentric rings. Intuitively we know that the sounds around us are closely related to the ripples, a fact reinforced by the water’s reflected movements on the surrounding walls through a sophisticated play of light. As we get closer, it becomes clear that the sounds are emanating from speakers concealed under the basin, the source of the ripples on the water’s surface. The water acts as a medium in the sense that it acts as middle ground: stimulated by the sound and swept by the beams of light, it produces richly evocative reflections. A latent photographic metaphor is at play in the installation: the water seems to take on the properties of a sensitive plate, with the sound imprinted upon it and revealed by the movement and stunning reflections projected on the walls."

http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=35#n1

VOM FUNKEN ZUM PIXEL kunst = neue medien

(FROM SPARK TO PIXEL art + new media)

"These striking installations combine experiences in the perception of time and space with a reinterpretation of the role and participatory potential of the observer."

http://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/aktuell/festivals/11_gropiusbau/mgb_04_rueckblick/mgb_rueckblick_ausstellungen/mgb_archiv_ProgrammlisteDetailSeite_6543.php

Thomas McIntosh with Emmanuel Madan and Mikko Hyninnen, Ondulation, 2002. Photo: Lepkowski Studios

"Ondulation, by Thomas McIntosh in collaboration with Mikko Hynninen and Emmanuel Madan is a truly hypnotizing composition for water, sound and light. A two-ton pool of water is set in motion by powerful loudspeakers. Waves travel across the basin, rising or falling in response to the sounds. Lights, bouncing off the moving surface, send reflected ripples over the walls of the gallery. The surface of this “liquid mirror�? is slowly shaped by the sound into a kind of 3D expressions of the music which in turn become reflections on the wall. The simultaneity is such between the sound and light waves that we are left with a sense of seeing the sound and hearing the image."

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/12/i-finally-got-t.php
http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/12/from-spark-to-p.php


i like Thomas Mcintosh' works in the from spark to pixel show, these pieces are very beautiful.




"plays with the reflection of light transferred to a water surface area, which means he loudspeakers in motion, as was men playing from a score. be emitted from layers of light that spread out to infinity. every sound finds its expression in both light and space."
(VOM FUNKEN ZUM PIXEL kunst + neue medien :CATALOG translated in google translate)

VOM FUNKEN ZUM PIXEL kunst = neue medien

(FROM SPARK TO PIXEL art + new media)

Curator
Castelli

PROJECT 2

Yoko Ono, Sky TV 1966

"Sky TV is one of the earliest examples of video sculpture and Yoko Ono's only video work. A camera placed on the outside wall or roof of the gallery, trained on the sky, transmits live images of the sky to a television monitor in the gallery, projecting the exterior world into an interior space.

Sky TV reflects Ono's conceptual approach to video, in which the idea becomes the subject of the work. Sky TV was made shortly after the Sony Portapak was introduced on the market and before the advent of videotape; a time when all images on television were generated and controlled by a few commercial television companies and cable TV was still a dream. Further, the ubiquity of surveillance camera technology in contemporary society was largely unknown in 1966, indicating how precocious Ono's vision was. Significantly, the camera is aimed not at the viewer but at the sky, implying the necessity of considering an infinite world beyond the ego and the hypnotic pull of commercial television. Into the Light."

TEXT AND IMAGE http://www.orbit.zkm.de/?q=node/24

This work by Yoko Ono is REAL TIME, capturing the Sky from outside and displaying it inside a gallery.

Laika

THE FIRST DOG TO ORBIT IN SPACE http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/skys-the-limit-for-typecast-animals/2008/04/17/1208025384678.html

"High Altitude Flight Dogs
Small, female, stray dogs were gathered from the streets of Moscow and taken
to a Russian research center nearby. Dogs were chosen as the scientists felt
they would be able to endure the long periods of inactivity better than
other animals. Females were chosen because they did not have to stand and
lift a leg to urinate. These dogs were trained to stay still for long
periods of time and wear such pieces of clothing as a pressurized suit and
helmet."
+ Laika (Barker) was launched into space in Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957.
Laika, whose real name was Kudryavka (Little Curly), was a huskie-mix.
Huskies are called "laika" in Russian. Confused by the many Russian words,
the world came to know her by that name. Other nicknames given to her by the
Russian research scientists were Zhuchka (Little Bug), Kurdrajevskaya, and
Limonchik (Lemon). American newspapers of the time called her Muttnik. She
was the first living creature ever to be launched into earth orbit. She
lived anywhere from one to seven days before dying in space; no one seems to
be certain. She may have died from heat the day after launch when her
capsule bounced off the atmosphere; she may have died from cold or lack of
oxygen when her life-support batteries ran down some 7 days after launch;
she may have been gassed or fed poisoned food just before the batteries ran
down. Different sources vary. Sputnik 2 fell back to earth on April 14, 1958
and burned up during re-entry. Laika was the only animal Russian scientists
knowingly sent into space to die. There was no recovery method for true
orbital flights designed at that time. In 1998, 79-year-old Oleg Gazenko,
one of the lead scientists on the Soviet animals-in-space program, expressed
his deep regrets during a Moscow news conference: "The more time passes, the
more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it.... We did not learn
enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog."

text from http://www.silverdalen.se/stamps/dogs/library/library_space_dogs_russian.htm

MONKEYNAUTS

"U.S. Air Force Maj. Richard Benson (left) examines Ham the chimpanzee on January 31, 1961, after the ape attained suborbital spaceflight aboard a Mercury-Redstone rocket. The animal was found to be fatigued and dehydrated but otherwise healthy.

Nine months later another chimp, Enos, became the first chimp to orbit Earth, setting the stage for the first U.S. human orbital spaceflight in 1962."

"No, rhesus monkey Sam isn't shilling for Oscar Mayer. Wearing a hot dog-shaped "contour couch," Sam launched aboard a Mercury spacecraft in December 1959, following in the paw steps of monkeys Baker and Able, who made their historic mission 50 years ago this week.

Sam's mission was to test the craft's launch escape system. About a minute into the flight, Sam's capsule was ejected from the rocket. After soaring 51 miles (82 kilometers) above Earth, the capsule landed in the Atlantic Ocean, where Sam, unhurt, was recovered. The monkey was later returned to a training colony, and he lived until 1982."
"May 29, 2009--A squirrel monkey named Baker peers out from a 1950s NASA biocapsule as she's readied for her first space mission. Baker and a rhesus monkey named Able launched aboard a Jupiter AM-18 rocket on May 28, 1959—50 years ago this week.

The pair returned to Earth alive after a 15-minute flight, becoming the first primates to survive a trip into space. Miss Baker, as she came to be known, spent the latter part of her life at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. She died of kidney failure in 1984 at the ripe old age of 27.

Ten years earlier a rhesus monkey named Albert II had become the first living monkey in space, but he died on impact when he returned to Earth."




IMAGES AND TEXT FROM http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/photogalleries/space-monkeys-fifty-years/

Before humans actually went into space, one of the prevailing theories of the perils of space flight was that humans might not be able to survive long periods of weightlessness. For several years, there had been a serious debate among scientists about the effects of prolonged weightlessness. American and Russian scientists utilized animals - mainly monkeys, chimps and dogs - in order to test each country's ability to launch a living organism into space and bring it back alive and unharmed.
THIS TEXT FROM http://history.nasa.gov/animals.html

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Monkeys In Space,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

I find this relevent because of the communication that must go with the people watching the monkeys.. having communication so the humans know whats going on. I cant find much about the communication, and how they keeped watch, watched data, but im pretty sure they did. although it is really sad!

Bruce Nauman

Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001)
"The piece consists of seven large-scale DVD projections of footage shot at night in the artist’s studio in Galisteo, New Mexico. The piece is accompanied by multiple audio tracks. Seven wheeled chairs that can be pulled up in front of individual projections heighten the installation’s immediacy. Nauman recorded the tapes, which are five hours and 45 minutes long, in segments of about an hour over the summer of 2000, when his studio was temporarily infested with mice.

The results are mesmerizing. The infra-red photography is a murky grey-green, but its painterly surface pulses and shimmers. In stationary, low-angle shots moths skid through the air, tracing ethereal trajectories; a lizard hangs on the screen door; a black cat without a tail wanders through, peers out into the night-time landscape, and then attempts to stalk the mice. At certain thrilling moments glowing feline or rodent eyes pierce the pea-soup gloom like car headlights. Nauman himself makes brief, somewhat smeary appearances.

Of the installation’s myriad and mysterious effects one of the strangest is that it makes the viewer - who is dwarfed by the projected images - feel like a stand-in for the artist and for the other creatures that make use of the space. This underlines the fertile uncertainty of Nauman’s investigative brand of art-making; it also highlights the palpable sense of exhilaration and unease in which cat, mice, objects and artist all seem to share."

image and text from http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/bruce_nauman/

This work has inspired me for this SYSTEMS10 project, looking at a space through another device, watching 'something'.

The viewer somehow becomes part of my project, using the devices that are in use to 'make' the work work. ...

you watching rats watching you watching rats

The idea for my SYSTEMS 10 project is to be able to watch them via a network. You will be able to watch them in REAL TIME while they will also be watching you, so you (the viewer) can talk to them and try get them to respond back. And just observe them.

To make this work I will be using skype which is a social networking tool which is online. You can talk to anyone else who uses skype. You call them, so it is just like a normal telephone/cell phone call, except it is in the internet. you can have video calls using web cameras, so you can see who you are talking to.

SEEK RESEARCH ... orange highlights are my highlights......

"Seek had a video camera that observed changing patterns of blocks in a large enclosure. The blocks were moved around by gerbils."

Image and Text from: http://www.cyberneticians.com/slideshow/seek2.html


"As a final example, Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group (precursor to the MIT Media Lab, which Negroponte now directs) submitted "Seek," a computer-controlled robotic environment that, at least in theory, cybernetically reconfigured itself in response to the behavior of the gerbils that inhabited it. I interpret Seek as an early example of "intelligent architecture," a growing concern of the design community internationally.[11] By synthesizing cybernetics, aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics, Software emphasized the process of audience interaction with "control and communication techniques," encouraging the "public" to "personally respond" and ascribe meaning to experience. In so doing, Software questioned the intrinsic significance of objects and implied that meaning emerges from perception in what Burnham (quoting Barthes) later identified as "syntagmatic" and "systematic" contexts."
(Burnham, 1971. The Structure of Art, pp. 19-27)

text from: http://variantmedia.co.nz/journal1.html


"First displayed in 1970 at Software, an exhibition of artistic uses of computer technology, Seek was a Plexiglas-encased, computer-controlled environment inhabited by gerbils, whose primary activity consisted of rearranging a group of small blocks. Once the arrangement was disrupted, a computer-controlled robotic arm rebuilt the block configurations in a manner its programmers believed followed the gerbil's objectives. The designers, however, did not successfully anticipate the reactions of the animals, who often outwitted the computer and created total disarray."

text from: http://www.facsimilemagazine.com/2009/10/index.html


Seek was a work by Nicholas Negroponte for a exhibition titled SOFTWARE in 1970. It observed some gerbils in a artificial environment which was monitored by a computer and controlled by a robotic arm. The robotic arm re-made the original set up of the artificial environment when the gerbils moved blocks which made the environment. The gerbils were closely watched, both by the computer and by the audience. this is a system and network.