A few weeks ago, i went to Newcastle for the opening of the Picture House exhibition. It was at least minus 37 degrees up there and i was walking from one room of Belsay Hall to the other, watching the installations and following a girl with a nice bag that sported a funny phrase in crooked french. I still don't know if it was the bag or the girl i was stalking but i ended up having dinner with her under a (non-heated) tent. Anyway the girl with the funky bag was in fact Sarah Cook , researcher, co-founder and co-editor of CRUMB (the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), an online resource for curators, producers, commisioners and exhibitors of new media art. Sarah is also a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Sunderland (England) and an independent new media curator. She has organized exhibitions, commissioned new media art and managed educational projects for BALTIC, Gateshead; Bellevue Art Museum, Seattle; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Banff New Media Institute; Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland; Locus+, Newcastle; etc. Oh! and she did an interview of me, should be online soon here.

You co-edited the book Curating New Media in 2002. Has the panorama evolved a lot since you wrote that book? Are new media curators still facing the same challenges?

That book was the result of a three-day conference CRUMB organised in Newcastle/Gateshead in May 2001 and in retrospect might be considered the first such meeting of curators and producers of new media in the UK (it resulted in at least one marriage and baby!). At that time we were talking a lot about net-based art and how museums such as the Tate were commissioning artists to make work for their websites (in part because there was a dearth of venues for media art in the UK). We had curators with backgrounds in film and video (who were defining themselves as moving image or lens-based art curators), debating with commissioners from the Science Museum who were interested in interactive installations, debating with sound artists and net-artists who were just trying to get their work commissioned fairly. So while there were disciplinary boundaries to overcome, there were fundamental concerns which affected everyone up for discussion: funding, audiences, institutional support, and professional development.

Curators are still facing a lot of the same challenges today – what is this new art, who is making it, where do I find it, how do I install, collect or preserve it? – but their self-definition is helped by the fact that the landscape of art exhibition has changed and become more multifaceted. For new media art it's not just a question of whether to show it 'on the web or not' anymore (Though getting the Tate to realise that is still a challenge as I understand from the curators there). Art is now exhibited in spaces and places other than white cube galleries – from science museums to media museums to festivals and even airports. The web has changed enormously too, so what we might have thought of as net-art then we might think of as research or social networking today. Curators understand that some work uses the web but doesn’t result in a project that is solely exhibited on the web (it might have a physical component to it too). Artists, as usual, are using whatever medium necessary to realise their work and curators should be responding to that, no matter what their backgrounds may be.

How optimistic are you about the near future of new media curating? Do you see things of positive (and fast) changes?

CRUMB has organised a few workshops for new media curators which have taken the form of 'crisis centres' playfully suggesting that there are deep tensions at the heart of new media curatorial practice, most of which can be partially relieved by a good chat over a nice cup of tea. [For the Enter Festival in Cambridge in April we ran a ‘Bliss Out Centre’ with Indian Head Massage, Open Source Embroidery – courtesy of Ele Carpenter – knitting, fortune teller games and other activities.] These tensions usually are from uncertainty about definitions of the art but also of the curatorial practice. What is the role or value of a curator in the age of 'user-generated content', to be only a filter or editor? How do the other seemingly invisible skills curators have – about dealing with the press, being the interface between the art and the audience – get supported? How do you learn the necessary skills to engage in the production of publicly sited art? I think curatorship, as a field of practice, is quite slow to evolve (certainly slower than the art is changing), and mostly because it is only in the last 15 years that curatorial practice has become reflexive (and some argue, overly so). But this is predominantly in the field of independent or freelance curating, which I am optimistic about. For instance in the way curators might evolve their social networking skills based on how we live and work on the web today, and therefore make their curatorial process more open, more collaborative (though does that result in better shows? Not always).

I suppose I am less optimistic about institutional curatorial practice as far as new media art is concerned, but only because art museums are themselves in a state of crisis and are dealing with it by moving away from having curators with any form of subject specialties at all (resulting in the cancellation of experimental programs or the closing down of departments - look at MoMA with its Media Department which is focused on video installation). If new forms of art aren't getting collected and well documented and written about or shown, then the depth of knowledge of the mainstream art curators who have to be generalists and have knowledge about everything is going to be limited (to what is written about in magazines, and to what they see when they go to the big art fairs). This means they might not be able to respond easily to the exciting projects that challenge the structures of the art museum or challenge the idea of what art is. Sorry, this is becoming a big long chew of a mouthful of an answer.

What do you think are the elements that hamper the integration of new media art pieces in museums?

In art museums I think a lot of the resistance to new media art has to do with the traditional ways of judging and valuing art – new media art isn't always an object (it's a process or event), it isn't always unique (it's easily reproduced or made collaboratively, sometimes, god forbid, by the audience participating!), it therefore isn't always collectable (it can be ephemeral data or code) or even predictable as to what it will be. And it plugs in, so could break down, and that scares curators who are trained to put on exhibitions of unchanging, static objects.

I get bummed out having to write answers like that one above because while I know a lot of that is to a certain degree true, I also think good curators will be able to look to art history and say, but wait, conceptual art is ephemeral, live performance art is a time-based, interactive process which can't be collected, and still we have long histories of supporting that! Good curators look for the balance between form and content, and don't get hung up on the form or, in the case of new media art, the technology. That said, you do have to know something about the form – enough to know why it might be significant for this particular work of art, or at least to know what you don't know!

I have had directors of museums tell me that they don't believe there is an audience for new media art, certainly not enough of an audience to warrant what they perceive to be an overly costly investment in it ("It costs £7.00 per head to put on a live media art event here and I'd rather give them £10.00 each and tell them to stay away!" one director had the gall to say to me). And I've had other art gallery directors say to me, "We don't show new media art because I haven't seen anything that I think is very good" when they are sitting next to the artists whose show they've just opened whose CVs include winning prizes at the Venice Biennial and only working with digital video or immersive and responsive sound environments. Hello?! Neither would admit they haven't seen very much new media art, or don't know where to look, or even what it looks like.

So that's art museums, but your question didn't specify. In Science museums and Media museums it seems to me as though the integration is less hampered, perhaps because the curators there are less afraid of the form. Some of the only permanently installed, commissioned new media works on view in London are in the Science Museum – perhaps because part of their remit is to engage in technological culture. The new British Film Institute Southbank venue has a gallery which is capable of showing all forms of interactive, immersive, responsive, data-driven new media art; though whether they’ll show anything more than film and video installation remains to be seen.

Your webpage says that you are a curator of contemporary art. Your practice is mainly concerned with new media art. Do you regard new media art as a distinct entity or would you rather see it as "just" another form of art?

I've worked in museums and galleries of contemporary art and feel comfortable in each world. My background is in philosophy, modern history, contemporary studies, not art history. I think it's funny two of my degrees have the word contemporary on them, written in Latin, loosely translated as Aetatem recentissiman pertinentibuss as there is no actual word for "contemporary studies" in Latin – there is only 'pertinent to the recent time' studies. So for me new media art is the most 'pertinent to the recent time' art. New media art IS art (not JUST art) and as an ever-changing field of practice it has the potential to completely redefine what art is, just as it might redefine what new is, or what media is.

What are the conditions required to achieve "upstart media bliss"?

Tea and cookies and wifi? As a curator, keeping up with the times but not “dancing the novelty hustle� (as Barbara London has said); having a sense of history is important. Challenging the system – be it the art system, the museum, or the format of the exhibition – and not being afraid to take a risk (generally being an upstart). At the same time, remembering to take care of the artist and the work, take care of other people and your ethics. Creating situations for contemplation and reflection (bliss doesn't have to be monumental, it might only last a minute, but a minute worth remembering).

If you could teach new media art bloggers one thing, what would it be?

To inspire others to do what they do. Because I think there is room for a lot more of them than there are now. I'd like some of them to be more rigorous and critical. To get their work published in non-new-media print magazines, newspapers, and journals, or to take those established formats on at least.

Natalie Bookchin's Databank of the Everyday, part of Database Imaginary

I've always loved the title of an exhibtion you co-curated with Steve Dietz, "The Art Formerly Known As New Media." That was a provocative title (I think). Which kind of discussion were you hoping to raise with such title & exhibition? Did a debate take place as you expected?

The curatorial remit for that exhibition was to look back across ten years of activity at the Banff New Media Institute in Canada, and so expectations were that we might curate some kind of 'best of' retrospective. Steve and I weren't as interested in that mode of exhibition making as we were in choosing works which might redefine for us what 'new media art' is, or what art is in the age after new media, if indeed we are in such an age. We looked at the work of hundreds of artists who had ever been to a new media event at Banff and asked many of them what they were doing now. We considered some of the big themes which had recurred in the discussions at Banff – artificial intelligence, the body and biological matter, data visualisation, social networks, identity, memory, interactivity – and thought about art works in relation to those.

The title caught people’s attention, though I'm not sure the show generated much debate (except perhaps over the way we installed the work of irational.org). It coincided with Re:fresh, the (so-called) first conference on the histories of media art and science, and I think the historians who attended might have liked to have seen a ‘best of’ retrospective after all, which would have been nice, but to us it didn't feel like the right mode to work in. Steve and I, with Anthony Kiendl, had before that curated the exhibition Database Imaginary, and so we were still asking questions like 'what is this thing called newness?' or ‘what is the behaviour of these works in relation to me?’ or ‘what does this work of art tell me about the 'postmodern condition' or the informational-technological world I live in?’ We hope people who saw that show (and you can still buy the t-shirt if you want!) left asking similar questions.

Together with Sabine Himmelsbach, you curated the exhibition "My Own Private Reality" at the Edith Russ Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg (Germany.) The works selected reflect the phenomenon of social communities on the Internet and its democratisation. What is your view on these issues? Critical? Openly enthusiastic?

I have what could be called an irrational aversion to the myspace.com 'phenomenon' because (of Murdoch but also because) I have what could be called a nostalgic snobbish adherence to earlier, better made, smaller, smarter versions of just about everything (depending who you ask I'm either old before my time, criticising that 'they don't make them like they used to' or I exhibit the all-consuming enthusiasm and desire of the early adopter). I think that some so-called web 2.0 technologies are the corporate world's way of creating dependent consumers and thereby discouraging alternative peer-to-peer computing from flourishing. Which is why I love Cory Arcangel's work BlueTube which just serves to remind viewers of the infrastructure which they so mindlessly meld in to. But I equally believe that these softwares (and especially the open source ones, which allow you to learn a little, and share, and to move beyond the generic template) make possible meaningful activity, through the social communities they encourage, which deserves a look in. It is interesting to see how having an alter-ego online, being a part of a community on the web, has come full circle – from in the early 90s putting yourself online, to in the late 90s and early 00s being someone else online, or someone you can’t be in your offline life, and now in the late 00s to a mix of those modes. Being part of an online social network is now an enhancement of your offline life. People are still learning the nuances and social manners and etiquette of this new hybrid existence.

I think curating is about challenging yourself and your beliefs, assumptions, and contradictions, so that’s a reason I took the approach I did. I also wanted to curate this show because I knew of a lot of great art projects which are about the using the web to talk about the social impetus in all of us and I wanted the chance to think about that work all together in a space – works which embody both of my views on the technology itself. Working with Sabine and her team at the Edith Russ Haus was fantastic; it's so vital to have spaces like that in the world where there aren't the pressures of a museum collection to maintain or enormous spaces to fill and instead there are artists in residence making new work for consideration (in our case Hans Bernard/Ubermorgen and Annina Rust).

My Own Private Reality (more images)

How does one get to be like you, an internationally-esteemed curator of new media art?

Well, gee, hmmm. Having a degree from a curatorial programme (in my case Bard College) and working in esteemed institutions (The Walker Art Center; The National Gallery of Canada) helps gets the ball rolling. Then having a full-time research post at a University that is supportive of your freelance curatorial work (Thank you University of Sunderland) is invaluable. Otherwise, I’d suggest that you find good people to collaborate with and learn from them (Thank you Steve Dietz). Try and be in the right places at the right times (Thank you Sara Diamond and Susan Kennard and the Banff New Media Institute). Don’t be a hermit, except when you have to; in other words, network, but moreover, do good work, even if it means doing less (such a hard lesson to learn) (Thank you Beryl Graham). My favourite tea-leaf fortune says: Let your manners speak, your deeds prove, and your delivery impress.

Any upcoming CRUMB or personal project that you could share with us?

When I'm not under the blanket of the book CRUMB has been writing, one thing I struggle to do is give back to my city, to think globally but act locally. So while a lot of the curatorial projects I've done of late have been focused internationally, I hope to do something lasting for where I call home before I move elsewhere. So I'm trying to keep some time aside to work more with the awesome collectively-built and volunteer-run Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle (which is a cinema and so much more!) and (fingers crossed) I will be curating and commissioning work for the next AV Festival which takes place across the North East of England, on the theme of Broadcast.

Thanks Sarah!

September 2004. My first Ars Electronica. I knew nothing about media art and loved everything i saw there. When i look back i'm a bit less elated, though i still won't listen to the party poopers whose favourite game is to sneer at what they see in Linz. Each year i feel like a kid in Wonderland at Ars. Anyway, three years after my first ars, i still believe that the Seven Mile Boots are one of the most extraordinary piece of art i've ever seen at the festival. This pair of boots allows their wearer to wander through virtual space. When walking, users stroll through the net, when standing still they can listen to several chat rooms simultaneously. They were created by Laura Beloff, Erich Berger and Martin Pichlmair.

A few weeks ago, i was participating to the Mobile Music Workshop together with Martin and lucky me! he agrees to answer a few questions.

Martin Pichlmair is a media artist, practitioner and theorist whose art works have been exhibited at prestigious festivals such as ars electronica, ISEA and microwave. He is also working as assistant professor at the Institute of Design and Assessment of Technology at the Vienna University of Technology. His research focuses on theory and practise of interactive art and design - from game design and physical interfaces to open source development models and community media.

You received a doctoral degree in informatics and work as assistant professor at the Vienna University of Technology. This is a serious background and i suspect that your current job is keeping you busy. So how did you get into art? And how does your work at the University connect with your art practice and vice-versa?

I always knew that I want to do art. I chose to study computer sciences because I thought that learning technical skills is more important than what an art university can teach me ... That kind of thoughts you have when you are nineteen. Before studying I did drawings and etchings, programmed some simple computer games, and wrote poems and theatre plays. After some years of studying informatics I had to re-approach art from a more technical perspective. Through a friend I got the opportunity to join the Ars Electronica Futurelab for a couple of months. That was like a crash-course in media art. The supervisor of my doctoral thesis, Peter Purgathofer, also kept pushing me towards media art. Through him I was able to marry my profession and my other profession.

Of course my job is keeping me quite busy. But I was hired to research and teach exactly what I need for my art practice - and the other way round. Everything connects quite well. On good days it feels like getting paid to do your own media art projects. On bad days I realise that I often have to travel afar to get inspiration from fellow artists, since my university is a technical university.

I first got across your work at ars electronica when they exhibited the seven mile boots that you developed together with Laura Beloff and Erich Berger. Can you explain us what was the impetus for that project and what were the biggest challenges in developing the piece?

Like so many of my art pieces it all started with a device. Laura brought along an iPaq, a pocket PC, after we both agreed that we want to do a mobile piece together. While both of us embrace technology we are still concerned with the lack of imagination in technology and especially mobile communication (you can see that clearly in Laura's
recent pieces like the fly farm). So we wanted to make a critical, even nasty, piece of art. The three of us developed several iterations of wearable pieces. One could say we did a lot of prototyping. In the end we settled for the unpredictable, capricious boots. A non-locative mobile piece about the personal experience of being surrounded by mass communication. Instead of boiling down mobility to the personal experience at a specific place and time, as it is done in so many locative art pieces, we wanted to broach the issue of the ubiquity, unpredictability, permanence, and location-independence of communication. Of course that is only a part of the whole picture.

There were a lot of challenges while doing this art piece. That's why it took so many years. The biggest was for sure that we are living in different countries. Laura and Erich lived in Norway most of the time, back then. We only met every couple of months, but then we worked very intensely for a few days or weeks. Then there were of course the expected, typical technical challenges of mobile art pieces: weak machines that use too much power, unreliable sensors and cabling, the choice of the right materials, etc. We had to switch sensors a couple of times, and I think I programmed the software at least thrice. When it comes to exhibiting the piece, the most interesting challenges are the preconceptions people have about boots. But those are a part of the art piece. People quickly attach to them and project their very own expectations and imaginations on the boots.

FAMULUS is an intelligent modified vacuum cleaner meant to substitute the desktop metaphor feature of the trash bin. How does it work technically? What inspired the project?

Technically it works over cable. So it is not mobile in that sense. A vacuum cleaner without cable is not a vacuum cleaner anymore. The cable is connected to a server that does all the work of receiving spam mail and turning it into noise. My problem with this piece is that the original device I started with is stronger than any art piece I can build out of it. The vacuum cleaner model I use, produced by the Styrian company Famulus in the 1930s, is already such a perfectly beautiful piece of design, it is very hard to retrolutionise. The project was of course inspired by both - the stupidity of the desktop metaphor and the masses of spam I receive every day. I think I have to redo this piece as FAMULUS2 before I ever show it.

Another project you worked on together with Laura Beloff is called Tratti. The devices generate noise and sound and music according to what the kid is looking at. Can you explain us how this colour code works?

The colour code started off as a technical necessity. The piece should be controllable to a certain degree. But we did not want to have any controls on the instrument itself. The colour system turns the surroundings that you play with into an interface, into a score. Different colours trigger different manipulations of the audio you speak into the device. Of course the mapping between a specific colour it is pointed to and what it generates out of it is arbitrary. That is how musical instruments work: If you train and stay disciplined you get an exact tune. But often it is more fun and rewarding to just fiddle around. Both ways of playing should be possible with the system we are designing.

A few weeks ago, at the Mobile Music Workshop, you mentioned that Tratti might look too much like a design piece. Is that a good or bad thing? Can you elaborate on that?

I would not say that TRATTI looks too much like a design piece for us, but it might do so for others. It is a very straight-forward musical instrument. Since it is aimed for kids it has to be manufactured to be very rugged. It has no decoration beside the colour of the plastic parts. And it features a very timeless - maybe even retro - style. You could shoot beautiful photos of TRATTI for glossy design journals. For this piece I think that fits very well.

It is interesting to see how differently and art piece is perceived when it is designed in that way. People compare it to devices and toys rather than to other art pieces. And they are asking us what is the reason for doing this piece and what the piece is for. No one would pose these questions if TRATTI was clearly an art piece. Personally, I do not care too much about the invisible permeable border between art and design but if we shift or cross it we should do so attentively and purposeful.

I'm quite intrigued by your clocks that spin faster than time. What are they exactly?

The clocks were done for an exhibition on Alice in Wonderland that I did together with the off-theatre group toxic dreams called "Jabberwocky". This piece is not interactive simply because you should not interact with time. I bought a bunch of clocks (I think there are seven) at flee markets and antique stores, opened them up and exchanged parts of the clockwork with a slow geared electrical motor. It is hard to tell what it is about them that makes them immediately fascinating. If you are in a room where seven clocks spin at different speeds, all of them faster than real time, it makes you feel odd in a very substantial way.

Is there anyone or anything you would like to work for?

Not really. I am not good in working for anyone but myself. Of course there are people I would like to work _with_. In the moment I am trying to get used to the fact that people work for me.

Any upcoming project you could share with us?

Pinball before and after appropriation

Of course. I would like to take this opportunity to point you to my (nearly finished) newest piece. It is called Bagatelle Concrète and based on a pinball machine from the 1970s. The piece is another musical instrument, a pinball machine that constructs music. It samples itself and manipulates those samples according to how you play pinball on it. We removed all competitive and all decorative elements of the pinball game and put digital electronics into this analogue electro-mechanical machine. While the gameplay is technically unaltered - all the bumpers and traps are still in place - the effect of playing is a composition instead of a highscore. Bagatelle Concrète is related to and inspired by musique concrète and Japanese musical media art pieces like Fujihata's "A small fish", Toshio Iwai's music games, and Maywa Denki's instruments. I am submitting the piece to a number of
festivals. Before it goes on any show there will be a public beta test here in Vienna at the end of June at a dorkbot event.
(video)

You seem to be a pretty successful young artist, having exhibited internationally and at the most prestigious festivals. Do you have any advice for young would-be media artists?

Thanks for the flowers. I do not think that I am particularly successful or well known, but if I am it is only because I work with the right people. Those come from very diverse backgrounds: photography, music, theatre, fine art, philosophy, film, sociology, design, etc. All of them are professional in what they do. That is maybe the most important advice I can give: Work with the pros while you are young. Learn from them.

Martin's studio/office

It also helped me that I decided some years ago that I rather want to do few large art pieces than many small ones. That protects from getting distracted. Another important thing (that sounds quite trivial) is: work as good as possible. While critique of curatorial practices in media art is sometimes appropriate, one thing is sure; strong pieces supersede. That of course also involves doing pieces that attract and challenge the audience at the same time. The last advice: being a workaholic and having fun helps a lot. (Now I really feel like a professor ;-).

Thanks Martin!

Eduardo Fernandes, Flávio Reis, Geandre Tomazzoni, Gustavo Godoy, Frederico Ming, Maurício Brandão, Olavo Ekman, Rodrigo Araújo and Sandro Akel are the members of Bijari, a Brazilian collective of artists/activists whose portfolio is one of the most impressive i've ever seen. They work for commercial corporations without loosing their soul, freshness and identity, they are also well-known for their VJ activities and somehow they even find some time to invade cities with their critical and witty interventions that comment on contemporary urban issues.

Bijari is 10 years old this year. How did it all start and how did you grow over the years? Were you planning to cover so many areas (artistic urban interventions, web design, graphic design, video installations, etc.) right from the start?

The art collective was born in 1997, when we began to meet for common interests, research, chats, parties. Since 2001, we think about art with regard to the city, architecture and urbanism issues (most of us are graduates of the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo). Through the extended field of art and the countless symbolical forms that it offers, we distinguish a very interesting way of developing considerations and criticisms about the metropolitan condition as well as about architecture, since we never have made architecture strictly speaking.

Diversity and elasticity always were our priorities, and we are constantly researching and linking diverse knowledge areas, in order to create more possibilities of transformation in our works as well as to extend the number of potential clients, something very inconstant in this market.

Bijari engages with many media and technologies. Does it mean that each member of the group has a specific role and its own competences? Or is each project always developed through a "total team" work?

Nowadays, we are an enterprise with nine partners, distributed over a horizontal structure in which we perform all productive and administrative functions. We participate and function as art directors on the commercial market (video, VJ, graphic design, web, scenery). At the same time, we have our own art project that gives us some independence as to the necessity of art-products commercialization (most of them aren’t "consumable" like a sculpture is, for instance, consumable at an art gallery). Thus, a lot of those works are more focused on the process than on the final products.

Among us, there are varied talents and, depending on the nature of the work and availability of each partner, we organize groups for each job. A job differs from other one and the group organizes itself according to this. Some works are made by all of us but other not.

Resistant Architecture was an artistic investigation of non official activities and architecture of excluded citizen in central Sao Paulo. Can you give us more details about these non official activities and architecture of excluded citizen. Which form do they take? What was the outcome of your artistic project?

The Arquitetura da (R)esistência project (there is there a play on words: resistance-existence) was conceived through a look on the non-official urban equipment and architecture of downtown São Paulo city. Analyzing clandestine and parallel inventions and constructions over and for the urban network, we have created devices that drive attention on the manifestations that we regarded as creative and resistant expressions in front of the restrictions of the official, controlling and standardizing city. Through them appear some design and desire for adaptation and resistance.

Their image expresses concepts of polyphony, multiplicity and organicity which are typical of Brazilian culture. Thus, we want to establish an inclusion of this present and non-official memory, allowing other looks stirring up reflections on this phenomenon and asserting the dissonant image that is typical of the real city.

Bijari also developed a very intriguing "Chicken Project". How exactly did the intervention use the volatile? How did people react to your action and what did the project reveal that you might not have
suspected?

Using a camera to register, we’ve inserted a chicken in a street refuge where hucksters and pedestrians fought against cars and buses. After that, we moved the chicken to the front of a famous shopping center in Faria Lima avenue. The chicken acted as a kind of thermometer that could reveal us differences among people that use the same space.

On the one hand, the chicken was the solution! Several people started to cluster and run after it. The gallinacean had become an object of fascination and provoked greed – an opportunity to take away, bring home and maybe eat! On the other hand, it was a problem! In another place, after the chicken had begun to move in front of the shopping center, pedestrians deviated, looked distrustful, somewhat astonished by its presence in the city. Some people deviated, other hesitated before crossing it. Little by little, we were surrounded: three keepers appeared after a watchman had reported the situation by radio. A minute after, there was a guard vehicle over the sidewalk. Some nervous men accosted us, demonstrating some fear because of the situation: there was a new element scratching and pecking at their ground.

We thought that we would have met with situations of resistance, or strangeness, but we never considered the presence of so many watchmen. This short story illustrates the approach of architecture Bijari is concerned about – the one that develops in spite of the ready space established by political wishes imposed from top to bottom. In fact, we understand architecture as a space under permanent construction, subject to participation and pressing inclusion.

Are there urban phenomena you see emerge whatever the country you are in due to gloablization trends? On the other hand, what are the urban characteristics of Sao Paulo (or Brazil) that are peculiar to the place?

The great metropolis is an excluding place. The perception change on the appropriation of space – and its consequent appropriation from those who live in it – is the goal of our work.

The constellation of global cities, where city chains influence and polarize other ones around it, configure homogeneous cities that acquire the same aspect, one becoming like the other. It’s impossible to recognize if we are in São Paulo or Hong Kong. Urban space becomes pasteurized, sterile. We loose local identity and design tramples the living body of the city. This trend is sold to us as the unique truth and the paradigm for progress and modernity.

By creating a resistance to the general movement of globalization, the city preserves its own characteristics and learns to say no to certain ready-made proposals for a new world. The city is a living body; architecture must be thought as the possibility of building a space that welcomes its manifestations and essential activities.

In the last four years, we conceived projects that question the functions of public place, revealing relations of power hidden in everyday settings. We did and do this by using artistic artifices that serve to crop and amplify some aspects of the city. In an inverted process of architecture that builds solid structures, we create almost ephemeral works that guide themselves by rupture of standards in each individual, allowing a reflection on the approached themes.

Bijari is also involved in a series of projects developed for the commercial corporate market. How do the purely artistic projects relate to "hired" ones? Do the commercial and the art works feed each other?

We produced commercial works for some enterprises. Working commercially allows us to get some financial income and, also, to support part of our artistic research with a certain level of independence.

We take advertising as a reference for us because of its brutal visual and communication power, although the sense used in our art projects are completely inverted. The knowledge as a tool in trade or advertising works helps us working formally better in the image construction.

Lastly, we use our knowledge in interventions, installations and urban performances for developing projects in Guerrilla Advertisement trend, non-standard media. In those works we try to convince clients to invest in pieces or happenings that privilege contents creation and new experiences that are not pure branding.

How do you feel about the advertising world finding inspiration in and using the tools and mechanisms of alternative culture as it is happening more and more in urban areas*?

I guess new media are appearing, people are more and more online, communication pulses and information flows are more opened, in several paths and from interlocutors different from official media.

There will always be moments in which market has devours art and uses it in order to create new products and esthetics that support themselves for generating behavior and consumption trends. This is a natural cycle, in which art also devours market and its esthetics, where all created things are transformed in new forms and purposes, acting as incentive and feeding artists’ reactions, their offsprings will in turn be devoured and absorbed by market and advertising.

It’s important that, among this, anything gets fixing and changing mind of the people to a more conscious present and active participation in this world. Our times are very dynamic; people must gain enough mobility to accompany its speed, and enough action that ensures that they don't become mere coadjuvant actors.

Any advice for young creatives who dream of setting up a group like yours?

It’s important to keep updated with what's going on in the world, references, researches, to be attentive to the senses and always present some critical sense imbued with pro-activity.

Working in group demands that we reconsider our egos, become tolerant, learn to listen, become very persevering and focus on long term goals.

How is the contemporary art scene in Sao Paulo? Could you name us a few artists who deserve to get more attention from the public?

Because we are a group of nine artists, it’s difficult to know on which each one is connected at this moment. But, generally, we have some common references and we can quote those in areas we act them.

Beginning from video universe, we admire works of video-makers as Michael Gondry (“Eternal Shine of a Mind without Remembrances� and videoclips for White-Strips and Chemical Brothers), Spike Jonze and Johan Soderberg (with his instigating charge sheet against global consumption “Surplus�).

From Brazil, we would quote the documentary-makers João Salles and Eduardo Coutinho that possess a very strong work associated to urban urgencies. Thinking on integration of video with multimedia, Joshua Davis and his crazy work developing systems for standards generation.

It’s to be remembered also the recently deceased Korean Nam June Paik, father of video-art and member of Fluxus group, that acted at 1960 and 70 decades proposing plays, actions, performances, concerts, demystifying art, bringing it closer to the dynamics of daily life. Mentioning a contemporaneous video-artist, the young Uruguayan Martin Sastre and his creative fantastic-realistic videos in which he performs as character of his paranoid stories (in one of them, he proposes that Lady Di isn’t dead and lives hidden in Uruguay).

Migrating to art works, more specifically those related to public space and possibilities of interaction non mediated nor controlled by conventional forms of communication (interest focus of our art nucleus), we can quote satirical aspects of work of English artist and graffiti-painter Bansky, the playful and new-tech of Graffiti Research Lab, the engagement and formal precision lend from mass-media expressed in Barbara Krueger and Jenny Holzer works, as well as social expression/liberation vehicles of the Polish Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Quoting some artists that work with this approach here in Brazil, we can mention works of Daniel Lima and Frente 3 de Fevereiro [February the 3rd Front], that mixes theater, music and art with an appeal for the black cause. The Integração-Sem-Posse [Integration-Without-Possession] project (on which we were involved), linked to social movements fighting for housing; Contra-Filé group searching short-circuits in media and solo works of Cildo Meireles, Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg, Rubens Mano, Marcelo Cidade and graffiti-painters Zezão and Orion, just quoting some of them...

In the VJ area, scene in which we many times act, we mention the japs of Glamoove (that have developed a powerful software for image mixing), improvisations on jingles by Eclectic Method (UK) and VJ Anyone (UK) with whom we are developing a project (see also w.roland.com/audiovisual).

Other generic references that have inspired us but aren’t directly related to our artistic making: Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his critic and acid look on contemporaneous metropolis, studies involving deleuzean concepts and psychoanalysis in the structuration of contemporaneous being by Suely Rolnik, the book Abusado [Bold] by Caco Barcellos on Rio de Janeiro city’s drug traffickers, the Canadian electronic music producer Richie Hawtin and the fanzine Sociedade Radioativa [Radioactive Society] drawn by cartoonist friends.

Thanks Flavio for having orchestrated the interview!

* cf. this article.

Stephen Wilson is a San Francisco author, artist and professor who explores the cultural implications of new technologies. His computer mediated art works probe issues such as interaction with invisible living forms, information visualization, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc. But most of all he's interested in exploring the role of artists in research. He is Head of the Conceptual/Information Arts program at San Francisco State University.

I actually first got to know his through his writing. When i started getting interested in new media art, i was so clueless about the field that i asked people who knew (and still know) much more than me about it which books they'd recommend me. Most of them advised me to get my hands on Information Arts – intersections of art, science and technology. I did. It's a hefty volume, a wonderful reference i usually turn to when i need some information on a particular aspect of the domain where science/technology and art meet.

You wrote "I am simultaneously awed and troubled about the course of scientific and technological research. Historically the arts kept watch on the cultural frontier. I fear that in the contemporary technology-dominated world they are failing that responsibility. Historically, the arts alerted people to emerging developments, examined the unspoken implications, and explored alternative futures. As the centers of cultural imagination and foment of our times have moved to the technology labs, the arts have not understood the challenge." but surely there must be some artists around who are doing a good job at engaging with the advances of research, don't you think so?

Yes, I didn't mean to imply artists were not involved in these kind of explorations. In fact, many of the artists highlighted on WMMNA are good examples of artists willing to engage frontier areas of research. But there are some problems. One is the mainline definitions of art. Technology/science art research is still marginalized as a fringe activity. In a technoscientific culture, artistic probing the world of research is a critical, desperate need.

We need people looking at these fields of inquiry from many frames of reference, not just those sanctioned by academia or commerce.

Another is scope of artistic interest. Scientific and technological research is proceeding at breakneck speed - moving into fascinating areas of great cultural impact. Examples of areas are: genetic engineering, designer drugs, brain functioning, bionics, stem cells, materials science, alternative energy, extreme environments. There are tools now available such as microarray biology labs on a chip that enable research that used to take years to be accomplished in minutes. And these tools are becoming affordable for independent artists. There are a few artists beginning work in these areas but there should be many more. Where are the artists? It worries me to read about exciting, provocative new research areas without artists even aware of them. Also artists may need to get involved at a deeper level than they have so far.

Maybe the other problem is that even though the work of some artists comments on science and technological advances, they strive to find an audience. Where and how do you think works like yours can find an audience? Are festivals and museums the only channel to exhibit challenging projects?

Audience and support are major problems. Alternative art spaces and festivals have been a lifesaver for my practice over the years. They have been willing to show exploratory work. Mainstream museums and galleries have not been very interested. There are hopeful signs. For example WMMNA and sites like it attract not just people in the arts. In the Conceptual Information Arts here at San Francisco State University where I teach, I get students who come from outside the arts and media. They seem to have a more generalized cultural thirst for experimentation. Now the challenge will be to convert this spectator interest into a producer interest. The DIY and open source movements are other hopeful signs. They encourage people to think of themselves not only as passive consumers but potentially as producers and innovators. The web makes for a whole new venue for finding audiences but the museums need to do some catchup.

What triggered your artistic interest for scientific or technological research?

It started when I was finishing college. It was America in the 60's so social change and justice movements were important foci in our lives. Everyone had to do a senior thesis. I was in humanities/social sciences so professors thought I would do something in those fields. I noticed, however, that electronics were critical forces in our lives. We listened to radio and music. Radio and TV were shaping the political mind of the society. It struck me that we didn't really know how radio worked. How did this device capture sounds from far distances? For most of us it was a 'black box'. I thought that was culturally dangerous - to have something so central be a mystery. I made self study in electronics and radio the subject of my senior thesis. My professors were not happy but I did learn how radio worked. Even more importantly I learned that things that had been mystified could be understood and that one didn't need to be an expert in a field to do interesting work with it.

Later in 1980 when I was an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was in a program called Generative Systems run by a fascinating artist named Sonia Sheridan. She encouraged us to tear things apart to understand them. Microcomputers had just come out.Up to that time most people thought of computers as specialized devices only relevant to science and business. My gut told me they were going to have a more profound cultural impact than that. I wanted to work with them artistically.

Most of the other art students and professors thought it was a waste of time. There were few information sources in the arts. Even academic computer scientists thought the microcomputer was a toy, not worthy of their attention. I was somewhat on my own. I had to search out resources. I had to teach myself. I had to find other researchers wherever they were. I came up with ideas that people told me were impossible. I experimented. I did them anyway. It all taught me to be somewhat skeptical about common knowledge in any field. Learn what there was to learn but be willing to follow unpopular lines of inquiry. The arts have a long venerable tradition of iconoclasm that will serve them well as artists pursue frontier areas of scientific and technological research.

Does the public understand immediately what is at stake in your work? How do they react to your installations?

I try to create installations that can be appreciated at many levels. The audience can be provoked, intrigued and have fun even if they don't understand the bigger issues. For example, children usually get involved in my installations. I'm not sure how many in the audience think about the larger issues. That's a problem not only with general audiences but even the judges in festivals. IntroSpection and Protozoa Games got shown in a few places but mostly got rejections. Some judges felt they were too much like a 'science fair'. (Protozoa Games let people play games with protozoa - single cell animals. IntroSpection let people play games with their own cells and microorganisms.)

Many audience members dealt with Protozoa Games and IntroSpection only as unusual games. But the installations did have more critical agendas. In Protozoa Games I wanted people to think about the complexity of life even at the single cell level and the relationship of humans to other animals. In IntroSpection I realized maybe 99.999% of people had never looked at their own cells and the microorganisms living inside of them and never had experience with basic biology research processes such as taking samples and using microscopes. I felt that this level of unfamiliarity was culturally dangerous in an era where biology research was becoming so critical. I thought it was an fitting role for the arts to appropriate the tools, bring them into public media, and comment and intervene in this situation of unfamiliarity.

IntroSpection

What do scientists make of works such as Protozoa Games (video) and Introspection? Are they "awed and troubled" or do they see the pieces as complementary to their own work for example?

Mostly they ignored them. In doing research for my book Information Arts I was distressed to learn of scientist attitudes. Many are rather arrogant - they doubt that even other scientists outside their discipline can contribute to their work - let alone artists. Even though many are great supporters of classical forms of art, music, theater, ballet etc., their interest and knowledge of the art stops in the 70's. They had little interest and familiarity with contemporary experimental conceptual, critical, and technological arts.

But there are hopeful signs also. There are several efforts around the world to involve artists in research - all based on the idea that artists can bring unique perspectives to the research process. For example there is the Artists in the Lab program in Switzerland, Interactive Institute in Sweden, SymbioticA in Australia, Hexagram in Montreal and many others. It's not clear how they will all turn out but its a great start. Web viewers can find a more complete list at my art/research organizations page.
In creating IntroSpection I got a glimpse of the possibilities. I consulted with a Biologist at my university who is a world expert in bacteria. I wanted to learn more about the bacteria in the mouth since they might be important in my art installation. I was amazed to find out that in spite of all her knowledge, she had never taken a sample of her own mouth to see what was there. We had a good time together seeing what we could find in our mouths. We found some bacteria but they were all immobile. At that time in the development of my installation I was planning on using the movement of the bacteria in my art game so it was troubling. She pointed out that most organisms don't move around if they have what they need in the niche where they are - it costs unnecessary energy. So we hypothesized about what could get the bacteria moving. She said she had never encountered that issue in the literature. We did several mini-experiments with coffee, alcohol, sugar, stimulants, drugs without much luck. We both learned from each other. I doubt it had any profound impact on her research, but I think it opened up some new ideas and approaches for her. I hear similar stories often repeated from artists who have worked with scientists.

Would you say that Protozoa Games and IntroSpection belong to the bioart category? What happened to bioart? It seemed that it was booming around 2003, at the time of the L'Art Biotech exhibition in Nantes (France). Is it back into marginality now?

I guess a lot of the fields in this hybrid art/science/tech world dwell in marginality. Some rise in attention and then recede. Bioarts continues to be an area where many artists are working around the world. In the last few years there are several books that have come out. As is probably clear from my work, I think it is cultural suicide for the arts not to pay attention to new developments in biology research. My hope is that gradually the importance of many of the art/science fields will be recognized and that it will become part of the mainstream expectations for artists to work in these fields. I joke with my students that the art supply store of the future will include sections for electronics and biology research supplies.

IntroSpection uses microorganisms. What is/are the biggest challenge(s) when working with tiny human cells?

There is so much to learn when working with microorganisms. I guess the biggest challenge artistically is how to bring these cells into cultural and art discourse. They are so alien at first for viewers and so easy to dismiss them as science. Also, many of the cells you can get to easily - eg on the skin are not very active. More lively stuff is more intricately involved in bodily processes - eg blood, sexual fluids, feces. You can well imagine art venues don't want to deal with this stuff or the processes to get it.

What did you try to achieve with the work Body Surfing?

At the time of installation there was much discussion about the irrelevancy of the body. Virtual experience (eg Internet, online, games, vr, animation, etc) was seen as more important for the culture. I felt those themes were being oversold and people were ignoring the ongoing importance of the physical world. I have great interest in crossover areas where information and computational technology intersect with the physical - for example, physical computing, tangible interfaces, biology, materials science. I tried with Body Surfing to create an installation that didn't do much unless the viewer exerted their body.

One section had digital movies that required viewers to run around the room; the speed and direction of the running directly controlled the speed and direction of the movie. Another section required people to stretch and contort their arms and legs in order to access information. Another section required people to beat on an African drum to control the digital world. I wanted people to come out of the installation sweating and thinking about the joys and limitations of the physical body.

You published Information Arts – intersections of art, science and technology. It was in 2002. Do you still keep a close eye on what's going on in that artistic field? Have the interests and practices of artists evolved since the book was first launched? Do you think that it's time for an Information Art, volume 2?

*** I do keep up. I love the risks artists take to work in these research areas. For example, I get such a kick out the artists that appear in WMMNA. It is a bit harder now to keep up because more work is going on. I am working on a new book for Thames & Hudson (a UK publisher famous for publishing big format art books). It will focus on artists working at the edges of scientific and technological research and will emphasize work created since 2000. It will be highly illustrated and will be aimed at the general public. I am looking forward to finding a way to explain this work that makes it understandable but preserves the integrity and complexity of the artists' intentions. People will walk into the art section of their bookstore and there, right next to the big books on Monet and Picasso, will be this book full of fascinating artists working in this hybrid research. Perhaps that will help reduce the marginality we discussed earlier.

Thanks Stephen!

More information about Wilson's installations, essays, books, and the Conceptual Information Arts Program at SFSU where he is teaching.

List of artists, organzizations, essays, books, and festivals related to the intersections of art, science, and technology.

Leonardo - International Journal of Art, Science and Technology (40 year history of monitoring this kind of art).

My three year long interest for new media art has brought me several time to Barcelona. At some point i even started wondering "Isn't there any other city that supports the world of art and technology in the Iberian peninsula?" There is! Gijon recently opened a very swanky exhibition centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries called Laboral (head to Douglas Edric Stanley's place to check out the videos and words) and the Spanish capital is getting increasingly busy showing, promoting and creating works of media art.

One of the main protagonists in the area is Medialab Madrid which aim is to bring art, science, technology, and society together. I got the opportunity to know more about it a few months ago when i met Marcos García during the festival Ars Electronica where MlM was exhibiting several projects developed during a workshop called Interactivos?. Together with Laura Fernández, Marcos is in charge of the activities of Medialab Madrid's educational program which they both started 3 years ago.

MLM is launching a second Interactivos? workshop inspired this time by the strategies of magic and illusion (deadline for applications is 27th April at 24h), which provides me with a very good excuse to ask them a few questions:

Magic Torch and xsense

I've been following the activities of Medialab Madrid from afar for a couple of years but i don't know its history. How did Medialab Madrid start?

Medialab Madrid started in 2002 as an initiative of the Cultural Center Conde Duque and the director Juan Carrete.

From the beginning it was conceived by directors Karin Ohlenschäger and Luis Rico as a transdisciplinary program focused on the intersection between art, science, technology and society. There were four channels of action: exhibitions, learning, support for artistic practice and research.

Under their guidance, four large international curatorial projects brought to Madrid some of the most outstanding new media art projects and the exhibitions were accompanied by an intense program of activities which included workshops and symposia where scientists, communication theorists, artists and activists discussed the themes of the projects and the day. Cibervision 02 (http://www.cibervision.org/), which explored the topic of fluid dynamics as a metaphor of life and communication processes; Banquete 03_Metabolism and Communication, a coproduction between the ZKM, Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona and Medialab Madrid; and Banquete 05_Communication in Evolution, which presented cultural, technological and biological evolution as inseparable processes.

Experimental Music Encounter and Programming workshop

How did Medialab Madrid evolve over the years? Did the programme modified its objectives or fields of research?

Between the large events, we programmed workshops, seminars, presentations and smaller exhibitions were came to be quite celebrated. Through this intense education and community program a local group of curious visitors became regulars.

Our focus now is to create a structure to foster this local community. The orientation is towards research and production understood as permeable processes with the participation of anyone who comes. To make that possible we have started different stable lines of work which incorporate different models of participation – the learning should arise from the processes of research and production and the exhibition is tightly linked to the projects that are being developed.

So the main goal is to attend to the needs of the many different kinds of medialabmadrid users: from professionals to amateurs, from recognized experts to unkown experts, from regulars to first time visitors, and being able to integrate them into the research and production processes.

At the heart, we'd like to foster the figure of the collaborator. To make that possible it's very important to us the role of the cultural mediator, researchers that are always present here, studying the contents and welcoming the visitors, introducing them to the projects and giving them information depending on their demands.

Interactivos?

During the last edition of Ars Electronica Medialab Madrid exhibited some of the projects developed over the Interactivos workshop. I heard that you are working on a new workshop. Can you tell us what it will be about, who will be leading it, what typically happens in those workshops and what you'd like to achieve with it?

Interactivos is an advanced workshop for the collaborative development of projects which are selected through an international open call. The topic for this year edition is "Magic and Technology", and deadline to present projects is 27th April. Once the projects are selected, we will issue a second call for people who want to participate in the development team of one of the selected proposals.

The workshop will be led by Daniel Canogar, Simone Jones and Zachary Lieberman.

We did the workshop last year, and in those two weeks, an intense work atmosphere is created. Artists, engineers, hackers, designers, musicians (and wizards in this case) work hand in hand to get the proposals developed with the help of the three teachers. And the whole process is open to the public, which can come into the working space, ask questions, talk to the developers or even join a team.

After these two weeks, the participants themselves set up their results in a full fledged exhibition here at the Conde Duque center. Last year’s was a very popular success with visitors.

Another fundamental part of Interactivos? is the social interaction. Participants work together, exchange knowldge and ideas, and at night we take over Madrid as a huge group.

Additionally, the open source approach is an important focus. The workshop revolves around open software and open hardware tools like Arduino, PD and Processing. This year we will also be using openFrameworks, a c++ library that is available in pre-release, but will be released publically to coincide with this year’s workshop.

Medialab Madrid is onto new adventures with upcoming new lines of work like a platform for research and production in data visualization. Why did you choose to focus on that particular field?

This platform is entitled “Visualizar� and it is directed by Jose Luis de Vicente, who has very interesting ideas about the social and communicative implications of data visualization. Data visualization is an area of work that tends to be collaborative. It’s easy to see how one project might gather many different fields of knowledge together. It’s also very clear that we live in a world that is generating a huge amount of data constantly.

This November there will be a symposium and a production oriented workshop where the participants will propose projects that explore ideas, data sets, design and visualization tools, and coding techniques in order to find new ways to represent and clarify complex systems.

Now there's also a net-culture platform and a Commons Lab in the pipeline. What are the objectives of these two projects?

The net-culture platform is called “Inclusiva-net� and it is run by Juan Martín Prada. It responds to the lack of theoritcal websites in both Spanish and English, and to the idea of creating a meeting point for the theoretic production at the medialab. It will be presented next week and like the other lines of work, functions with an open call for participation.

The “Commons Lab,� organized by Antonio LaFuente, consists of a group of twelve researchers from different fields such as biology, ecology, medicine, pharmacy, philosophy, law, activism, urbanism, economy, and technology, that will gather once a month in an open round table to discuss the commons, those resources that belong to all but also to no one like the air, the water, and the radio spectrum. One key objective of this project is to develop strategies to visualize these commons.

The overlaps between these projects are interesting. For example, this month we are celebrating a workshop of OpenStreetMap and cartography is a part of “Visualizar�, but also brings some questions about geodata’s uses, property and licenses. Could the geographical information be considered as a common as well? These overlap are an important part of our programming.

How does Medialab Madrid function (how many people work there permanently or not, how do you get the fundings, etc.)?

Medialab Madrid is financed by Madrid`s City Council. There are seven people working permanently, in planning, administration, graphic design, audiovisual communication and technology. Also, we have two full time cultural mediators, who interface with the public, as well as a dedicated staff of interns and volunteers. In addition, for each line of work that we start, we collaborate with outside experts.

Dorkbot Madrid: Circuit Bending (image by Carlos Alarcón) and Hans C. Steiner + Javier Candeira

Are there other programmes, events, institutions or organizations in Madrid that do works similar to Medialab Madrid or is your programme unique in the Spanish capital? How does Medialab Madrid fit into the cultural panorama of the city?

Over the last years you can see that a very strong community is growing in Madrid, and it’s clear that it’s now a very exciting moment where a local community of makers, theorists and acivists are coming together.

It’s important to highlight the role of Dorkbot Madrid in making this possible and the organizers Javier Candeira, a truly important figure in the spanish digital culture, and Juan Carlos Alonso, who has led the Arduino community here in creating an education system for secondary schools.

Intermediae is located at the old madrid slaughterhouse and, while recently opened, there are huge expectations about it.

Last week the project Vida started with a new program of workshops with one given by France Cadet, with the notion of supporting more locally produced projects.

Another important media art figure in Madrid is Vicente Matallana, who has been fundamental for media art initiatives during last years in ARCO, like the Black Box and various symposia on digital art and intellectual property.

Finally, there is an extremely active center called La Casa Encendida, which organizes workshops, events, and an interesting radio laboratory.

Could you recommend us a few artists from Madrid who should get more attention from the public?

I would love to mention some collectives, which is a very popular way of producing work here in Spain. SinAntena is a community tv station based in the active neighborhood of Lavapies. That area also is home to Ladinamo, a very active cultural collective that hosts dorkbot.

La Fiambrera Obrera, a Madrid collective, are responsible for Border Games, a community based videogame production platform developed together with a group of young inmigrants to Madrid.

I would also like to highlight Manifestómetro, a group that has developed a very simple and effective way to calculate the number of participants in a demonstration, a very popular practice in the capital during the last years (image). The creators have just launched a new web project called Lo prometido es deuda: a record of polititians’ promises in order to see if they are realized. And there's also a collective of architects called Basurama, who are working around creative uses of garbage.

Basurama - circuit bending

All of these projects and more make Madrid an exciting and inspiring place to be working.

Thanks Marcos!

Hurry up! The deadline to submit projects for Interactivos: 27th April at 24h.

I recently spotted on rhizome the work of a young artist called David Bowen. His growth rendering device provides light and food to a plant in the form of hydroponic solution. The plant reacts to the device by growing. The device in-turn reacts to the plant by producing a rasterized inkjet drawing of the plant every 24 hours. After a new drawing is produced the system scrolls the roll of paper four inches so a new drawing can be produced during the next cycle. I found it so charming i decided to ask him a couple of questions about the piece. It rapidly evolved into a full-fledged interview.

Bowen is interested in the outcomes that occur when machines interact with the natural world. Although he has only received an MFA degree from the University of Minnesota in 2004, he has already exhibited internationally and is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

Growth rendering device

Where does your interest for devices, machines and other systems come from?

As a kid I was always taking things apart to see how the worked. When I got older I began to be attracted to machines as formal objects. I am fascinated by the beauty of systems and machines how their shapes, movements and compositions are determined by their intended function. I became interested in steel and kinetic sculpture as an undergrad. My interest in kinetic sculpture flourished as a grad student at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis under the guidance of my mentor Guy Baldwin and the time I spent working with the Mechanical Engineering Department.

24leaves and 72stems

Some of your devices look delicate, almost fragile. What governs their appearance?

Many of the forms I construct arise from the function they are intended to perform. If a device uses wind to produce a mark on paper then it should logically be delicate and light in order for the wind to articulate it. In a composition of multiple units the individual devices are given more freedom to move and interact if the are constructed from light weight materials. I used to work with steel but I discovered that manipulating steel is very hard your tools and body, and heavy objects are much more difficult to articulate. Formally plastics and aluminum create a greater contrast with natural forms, movements and systems.

Phototropic drawing device

I'm particularly intrigued by the Phototropic Drawing Device. How did you come up with the idea? What were the challenges you encountered while developing it?

Phototropic drawing device came after a piece entitled 50drones in which 50 individual units where intended to create organic compositions. The drones where tethered with wires in order to give them power. The phototropic device came from the desire to create a more autonomous device.

In many ways the devices are living things they are powered by and attracted to the nearest most intense light source. They will even detect and respond to the ambient light in a room. When they are not in use I must place the devices solar cell down on my desk, otherwise the will work their way to the edge and commit suicide.

Early experiments with the devices involved setting groups of them near pools of light and allowing them to work their way toward the light, observing the compositions which occurred as the devices attempted to displace one another. This could only go so far because the devices would jumble up and no longer move. The addition of the charcoal and paper allowed a single device to produce a drawing based on its search for food.

50drones

Do you feel that the drawings made by your interactive drawing devices belong to you in a certain way or do you feel that the drawings are made at 100% by the devices? Why? Do you regard each of drawings as pieces of art or is it the process of the drawing that constitutes the artistic component of the work?

I believe the drawings are sort of collaboration between myself, the device and, in the cases of interactive devices, the participants. The drawing devices I construct collect highly qualified data based on it's construction and the way it and the participant respond to the situation. In many cases the drawings on their own are beautiful formal objects, and I do sell/exhibit them on their own. But I feel there needs to be an awareness of how they where created through didactic, video or ideally seeing the device itself in action.

Your pieces are very lively. They interact with natural elements, sensors, other devices, people passing through the exhibition spaces, etc. They seem to have some kind of independent life and you're not part of it. They don't need you anymore. Is my rapid analysis too superficial? How much free will and independance from you do these devices really have?

See previous answer.... In many cases I after creating the device and system I step away and let it do its thing. For example I set up phototropic drawing device in my studio and let it draw. I can go have a sandwich and it's still drawing... I can go teach a class and it's still drawing... one of the drawings featured on my website was produced over four months of continuous drawing. One of my pieces titled sonar drawing device is drawing in the Tweed Museum of Art as I type. The do at times need fresh charcoal or crayons but the do function with relative autonomy.

Many of your pieces feature several units. 50drones, for example, "consists of 50 aluminum and pvc units connected to 10' tethers. Each unit moves independently as they displace and arrange one another in random and unpredictable patterns." What do you see as interesting in objects moving in groups?

"50 drones" came from a desire to eliminate the literal natural form like a twig or leaf, as used in previous pieces, in favor of emulating a natural behavior. The device could be seen to represent a crowd of people a school of fish or particles in a state of disbursement.

What did you try to achieve with Growth Rendering Device? What did you learn by observing this intimate relationship between a plant and a machine?

With growth rendering device I wanted to create reciprocal relationship between a natural object and a mechanical system. The piece is still very new so I continue to observe. But I find it interesting when mechanical systems, motors and micro-controllers behave in unpredictable ways where plants have the tendency to grow in very systematic mechanical ways.

Who are the artists whose work inspires you and why?

I am influenced by many past artists you would expect like Jean Tinguely, Arther Ganson and Cy Twombly for their use of kinetics both literally and through mark making. I am of course influenced contemporary people working with technology like Edwardo Kac, Stelarc, Simon Penny and Natalie Jeremijenko because the address technological elements as materials and utilize technology to integrate mechanical systems with the natural world.

David Bowen's studio

Any upcoming projects you'd like to share with us?

I have an upcoming exhibition at the Rochester Art Center in Rochester, MN opening May 19th. The exhibition will feature "growth rendering device" which will produce a 50 foot scroll drawing of a pea plant as it grows over the three month exhibition. I was awarded a full fellowship to attend the Vermont Studio Center this June and I was awarded a fellowship to attend The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in June, July and August of 2008.

Thanks David!