Virtual <-> Actual (workshop @ KHiB, Bergen, Norway)
5 days Workshop @ the Bergen National Academy of the Arts with Melinda Sipos, 2011
Actively or passively but we all take part in the immense data flow that surrounds us, and among many aspects we may consider this as a rich source of inspiration. Information architectures, interfaces, widgets and social networks begin to take on as much importance as urban conditions, built structures, objects and our social environment. The five day long course entitled ‘From virtual to actual’ is exploring the possibilities of interpreting phenomena which occurs in our digital life into physical space and vice-versa.
Through various activities lead by the workshop tutors (discussions, presentations, research, strategies etc) workshop participants are getting an insight into the topic with an active participation and critical reaction to the topic. The goal is to develop scenarios and build prototypes/artworks that embody a kind of transformation or implementation of a virtual phenomena into a physical one or, the other way, add a virtual aspect to a physical one. The result can be both analog or digital.
The actual workflow of the workshop started with a presentation series shaping concepts for media lab culture, individual projects that are related to the field among a basic overview of the accurate technologies that can be used to access digital presence (social network graphs, simple databases, mapping). Open databases, open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), open source software frameworks were introduced.
On the second & third day, collaborative idea generation, feedback discussions helped to find each individual participants interest in molding the boundaries between the concept of presence as a physical and virtual entity. The wide range of ideas covered diverse fields of contemporary discussions such as wireless network territories that function as spaces for confronting the public with the private, or virtual celebrities that exist as memes in the networked society.
Day 4: hands on. Broken electronics, fans, arduinos were occupying the room. Several strategies were introduced: reverse engineering (to understand existing, functional technologies at their basic level), modding / hacking, critical attitude (be aware of the long-term consequences that one can do within the digital space), rapid prototyping (getting quick results, doing tests iteratively with the system before we implement it into a more solid state).
The workshop output got a bit multilayered. Some ideas remained as general concept descriptions with some visual representation (mockups, diagrams, drawings). As an interesting result a tangible celebrity meter should be mentioned: amount of “likes” of a virtual celebrity were controlling a fan that blew up a plastic bag. Thus breathing, “liveliness”, size of the physical plastic bag were controlled by single clicks made of huge amount of people (total number of likes were around 37 million… guess who that might be..?) Olav Paulsen (Egil) wrote a php script that extracts number of likes of the selected celebrity based on Facebook’s Graph API. The result was then saved to files and read by Pure Data that controlled the Arduino with the fans. As a simple, minimal visual setting, the number of likes were projected back onto the bag. Another interesting project was a kinetic, reversed animation system by Jacob Alro where “the screen is the moving part, the object remains fix” (see video below).
We were really impressed by the people and the workshop, also thanks for Brandon Labelle for the organization and coordination of this collaboration.