Events Calendar
In This Section
Vampire author Anne Rice set to release video book
Quicken Loans Arena likely to restore water fountains
Louis Gossett Jr. diagnosed with prostate cancer
'Witness for the Prosecution' keeps audiences guessing
Actor Gary Coleman pleads guilty in Utah court
Rich Heldenfels: 'Past Life' is unbelievable
Most Read Stories
Man robbed at Tallmadge Avenue eatery
Four teens restrain man, take items from his Akron home
Police: Ohio girl dies after fall into snow bank
Complaints against officer keep coming
Another winter punch heading toward Ohio
Cuyahoga Falls residents come home to find burning couch on balcony
Blogs:
First Bell - On Education:
No City of Akron basketball tonight
Pets:
Pet telethon re-airs
The Heldenfiles:
Chipmunks "Squeakquel" on DVD/BD March 30
Akron Zips:
Late surge gives Zips ugly road win
Tribe Matters:
Blogmail response on Hafner
Cleveland Browns:
Stallworth's contract terminated
Balanced Ledger:
QB in Browns future: another mock draft
Kent State Sports:
KSU Notes – February 9
Cleveland Cavaliers:
NBA Power Rankings from Around the Internet
Buckeye Blogging:
Buckeyes grab 18 players on signing day
Varsity Letters:
Garfield at Buchtel basketball
All Da King's Men:
Palin At The Tea Party Convention
Blog of Mass Destruction:
Republican Pre-Conditions
Akron Law Café:
Citizens United v. F.E.C. (Part 4): Kennedy's and O'Connor's Basic Approaches to Constitutional Decisionmaking – Top Down and Bottom Up
Car Chase:
Collector Car Hobby Loses One of the Best—Jim Roll
Let's Talk Real Estate:
Decisions Decisions: Credit Cards or Your Mortgage?
Ohio Travels with Betty:
Loucile is looking for a Lake Erie getaway in June for three kids, ages 1, 3, and 5.
Sound Check:
Talk of the Town – Top entertainment picks for the weekend
HRLite House:
Track HR Research
Akron Gamer:
'Tecmo Bowl' recreation of Super Bowl XLIV
See Jane Style:
Do IT this week: Layering
New media at center of 'Collider.' Images are subject to change
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Sep 20, 2009
Back in the late 1980s I invented an interactive calendar. That is, I designed what I hoped would one day become an interactive calendar.
It was a standalone, hand-held computer device that looked something like a BlackBerry, only larger. It would be a cheap, one-or-two function device so that everyone in an office or a home could have one. When one person entered an appointment, it would show up on everyone else's device linked to it.
I came up with the idea because I was tired of finding things had been entered on the kitchen calendar without my knowledge and in conflict with my office calendar.
I even made a drawing of the device, put the drawing in an envelope and mailed it to myself as a kind of poor man's patent idea. I still have the unopened envelope.
I called a computer consultant in Fairlawn and told him my idea. I wanted it to connect wirelessly, thinking that technology was just around the corner.
The consultant kind of grunted, then told me wireless technology was just a pipe dream. Maybe in a few years.
Now, many of us have BlackBerries with telephone, database and calendar included in the package. Anyone can take a computer to a coffee shop or even the Akron-Summit County Public Library (http://www.akronlibrary.org/hotspot.html) and sign on to a wireless domain. This summer the city launched Connect Akron, the first square mile of an initiative to widen public access to the Internet.
There's a lot of connectivity already going on out there on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and of course, YouTube.
Not all of it is earthshaking, to be sure. If you want to see the quality of some of the postings, just visit your alma mater's Twitter site. I did, and after taking a brief survey of it and others, I decided that no matter where you go on the college Twitter circuit the postings (if you ignore the universally low level of spelling, grammar and syntax) generally come out somewhere below the consequence of, say, the musings of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman, but without the wit or self-awareness.
This brings me to the subject of this review: Collider: Interactivity and New Media, which opens Monday at the University of Akron's Mary S. Myers School of Art.
The exhibit purports to examine the impact, implications and inspiration of the phenomenon generally known under the umbrella term ''new media.''
This show, organized by Tony Samangy, an assistant professor in the school's graphic design department, where he teaches interactivity and new media, is the first in a series of interactivity and new media exhibits the school hopes to organize.
''We envision a future show to have a more specific topic, such as wearable new media, which is a whole area unto itself,'' Samangy said.
''New media is to me more of a communication tool. We live in the physical world, but we have these alternate identities in the virtual world.
''Right now, we're in this gallery, and we're surrounded by all these computers, but there could be people visiting the exhibit's Web site and in that virtual world, changing things about the physical gallery. By the same token, we could be changing the virtual gallery as we sit here, in the physical gallery.
''I'm trying to tie those two things together,'' he explained. ''Our site is linked into all the social networking sites — Flickr and Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter — which are supposed to be about communication and connectivity.''
So it's supposed to show the meeting of the virtual and physical worlds through communication tools, presented in a way that rises to the level of art. Samangy is hoping to do that by bringing in some heavy hitters.
The show will have installations by Golan Levin, C.E.B. Reas, Akron native Jeffrey Fulvimari, Samangy, Chris Yanc and Nate and Kirk Mueller.
After the opening at 4 p.m. Monday there will be a 6:30 p.m. lecture in Folk Hall by Levin on his installation, Eyecode (2007).
Eyecode consists of a wall-mounted monitor and a camera above the monitor that is programmed to focus on the eyes of the person standing in front of it and record the image of those eyes on the monitor every time the person blinks.
The camera has a fairly short depth of field, so if you're not tall, your eyes won't be in its focal range, and will show up as a large upside-down comma-shaped squiggle on the monitor. But if you can put your eyes right in the camera's range, you can pretty much see their exact image on the screen.
Your eyes will continue to be recorded as long as you stand there and blink, which means you've recorded your presence in the show.
A few minutes later, however, you will be erased by the next few people to stand in front of the camera and blink. So it becomes a metaphor for the lightning-fast notoriety made possible by the Internet. You're there, and then you're gone.
Levin, currently director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and associate professor of electronic time-based art at Carnegie Mellon University, develops artifacts and events that explore new modes of reactive expression.
His work, which has been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial and in other national and international settings, focuses on the design of systems to create, manipulate and perform image and sound simultaneously, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of cybernetic communication. His recent projects, such as Double-Taker (Snout) (2008), for the Children's Museum in Pittsburgh, use interactive robotics and machine vision to explore human-machine communication.
The next talk on the exhibit will be held at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in the upper gallery by C.E.B. Reas, an Ohio native. An associate professor and chair of the department of design/media arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, Reas focuses on defining processes and translating them into images.
Reas' contribution is an installation called The Protean Machine, an image generator that uses punch cards that visitors fill out, which when read by the machine make alterations to the software as it's projected onto the wall.
The Protean image plays with the mutable nature of software, according to information on Reas' Web site (http://reas.com). Visitors interacting with this installation can change not only the image, but also the software that runs it.
''So future visitors can see you and what you've done as a visitor to that space,'' Samangy explained.
Another work, One, put together by three collaborators — Yoon Chung Han, Erick Oh, and Gautam Rangan — uses a petri dish with a spot of ink in it and a camera that videos the inkspot and projects the image on the wall. Visitors can interact with the petri dish and alter the projected image.
The lower walls of Emily Davis Gallery are surrounded by dozens of computer monitors that visitors in the gallery or on the Web site can control by choosing colors and sounds from an online menu, thus altering the ''mood'' of the gallery, Samangy said.
In the installation Second Life, participants can create an avatar, or virtual persona, which can explore and experience an online world. Samangy said, ''We have a Second Life island here at the University of Akron where teachers can distribute course materials.''
The windows in the upper gallery have been coated with a frosted film, onto which messages from the various social networking sites linked to the Collider site can be displayed.
''There will probably be seven installations, with other elements in the space integral to them,'' Samangy said.
Instant communication is here. I think it's time for me to open up that envelope in my office and throw away my little drawing, don't you?
Details:
Show: Collider: Interactivity and New Media.
When: Through Oct. 31
Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Saturday and until 9 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday.
Where: University of Akron Myers School of Art, 150 E. Exchange St., Akron
Information: 330-972-5950 or http://art.uakron.edu/exhibitions/collider-interactivity-and-new-media/
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
Back in the late 1980s I invented an interactive calendar. That is, I designed what I hoped would one day become an interactive calendar.
Get the full article here.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
Posted 11:51 PM, 09/24/2009
wow, Dorothy Shinn wrote an article without bashing Bush!
Sounds like a great show , I'm going to check it out.
