Second part of the report from the Algorithmic Revolution. On the History of Interactive Art, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany.

The Rules Are No Game (1999), by Markus Huemer, is based upon Jackson Pollock’s image “No.32”. The floor is covered with a reproduction of the picture. Two text projections with auto-generating sentences are randomly projected on two screens. The audience has to move to and fro, generating new lines of text, their actions being monitored and “interpreted” by the Net. Through this immersion into the “virtual outside” the visitors will lose their status as subjects and become the objects of a description by the Net.

Perry Hoberman’s Bar Code Hotel (1994) covers tables with printed bar code symbols that you can scan in order to control a projected real-time computer-generated stereoscopic 3D world.

(Un)Plug Building (in italian), by R&Sie, is a concept commissioned by the research department of the French public electricity company in 2001, to develop a building that gains its energy from the sun: the office building would feature a reactive façade to respond to renewable energies: hairiness of the façade for thermal sensors, swelling of the glass skin for the photoelectric cells, disconnection (unplug) of the building from the urban ground and its energy network.

Jim Campbell‘s fascinating Library (2004) is composed of a high-res photogravure of the New York Public Library, printed on rice paper and placed in a Plexiglas frame suspended in front of an L.E.D. surface containing a 25-minute video chip loop of low-res moving images. Indistinct images of birds and people appear to move in and out of the library and across the facade.

Part 3 tomorrow.