The Twitter Cloud is a visualization of real time Tweets (messages) posted on Twitter.com. The system automatically scans specified user feeds, and visualizes new messages as they arrive. This piece was programmed in Java using the Processing API.
This project was also linked with the Tweet Station so users could be identified with RFID and allowed to post their own messages through a touchscreen kiosk. In the context below, conference attendees entered their Twitter feeds to be tracked so that others could read about their experiences as they posted from their laptops and phones. The Twitter Cloud visualizer has also been used within virtual worlds – both as a live event Tweet tracker, and to track and visualize avatars as they traveled to various locations within the world.
The Human-Computer Interaction Lab housed in Music Technology is a learning and exploration ground in how electronics can interact with the arts. Students who take the MuMET 440 Special Topics course in HCI can use the lab to develop projects in augmented musical instruments, electronic installation art, analog audio processors, synthesizers, robotics, wireless sensor systems, and other electronic mayhem. The course teaches equal parts basic electronics like power regulators, op amps, etc. and programming techniques for microcontrollers – the TI MSP430 and the Arduino. Most of all, the lab serves as a proving ground for ideas and a space for exploration.
Traversal for Pipe Organ is a virtual performance exploring connectivity between worlds. As the name implies, it is a temporary link between the live pipe organ in a concert hall and a multi-user virtual world. “Physical” actions and events in the virtual realm compose the work in real time with the end product being a physical and aural realization of virtual performance.
As elements of the virtual instrument were engaged, their physical interactions – touch, physics, collision events – were used to create performance gestures on the organ in Sursa Hall. John Fillwalk, who had created the performance environment and virtual instrument as well as collaboratively conceptualized the work, performed live camera for the event that followed the performance for the live audience. Jesse Allison composed the controllable sound events, and managed the communications link between the virtual and physical during the performance.
“Eco-Net” is an attempt to connect wireless network data with nature by visualizing that data with plant-like structures and organic motion. Each plant represents a computer connected to the network and each IP address is displayed above the corresponding plant. Collective network activity is displayed as websites are browsed and emails are sent. This piece represents our constantly connected state, simulated through plant and root structures, and the constant barrage of data that flows through the air all around us every day. This piece was created completely in Java, using the Processing API.
ENGAGING TECHNOLOGY
A HISTORY AND FUTURE OF INTERMEDIA
BALL STATE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
NOVEMBER 17, 2006 THROUGH MARCH 11, 2007
https://idialab.org/engagingtechnology/
Engaging Technology traces a range of both pioneering and contemp-orary works exploring the intersections of electronic media and various modes of art-making. The artists selected for this exhibition – Richard Bloes, Hans Breder, Adam Brown, Dick Higgins, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, Golan Levin, Nam June Paik, and Alan Rath have contributed works encompassing a broad array of forms including video, sculpture, sound, music, electronic installation and interactive environments.
The opening of this exhibition happens to coincide with the coining of the term intermedia forty years ago by the fluxus artist, Dick Higgins. Below, Higgins addresses a societal question central to artists working within technological media.
Higgins asks:
…For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media… Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the intermedia [which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by formal, even abstract means], the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for?
Dick Higgins
Statement on Intermedia
New York
August 3, 1966
Intermedial investigation is generally interdisciplinary and often collaborative in its exploration of center spaces between genres, media and established boundaries. These expanded intermedial approaches can find their center in potentially any discipline including visual art, music, engineering, performing arts, architecture, social theory and the sciences. Although intermedia art is not always necessarily technologically based, the artists represented in this exhibition explore electronic intermedia art in its various manifestations. Intermedia artists are often interested in the relationship between a viewer and a work of art. In encountering that threshold of engagement, the viewer is invited to enter into a partnership in shaping the direction of the work. The engagement and experience of the viewer is therefore essential to the completion of the work’s meaning.
Engaging Technology is supported by the Ball State University Museum of Art, the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts and Animation, the Center for Media Design and Lilly Foundation, Inc. I would like to thank Peter Blume and Tania Said at the BSU Museum of Art for their support in organizing this exhibition and my mentor and friend, Hans Breder for his continued guidance and insight throughout the years.
John Fillwalk, Curator
Director
Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts
Ball State University
The project allows the user to manipulate a digital world with wireless objects. Through the use of Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID), the virtual world can detect the presence of real-world objects and use them to manipulate its own attributes. In the case of this project, physical cubes link the user with virtual cubes within the system and allow the user to call up media such as video and sound. The system uses the software Quest 3D for real-time VR rendering and interactive animation, and Max/MSP for harvesting and inputting RFID data. Additionally, users can navigate the 3D virtual world with the use of a trackball.
Students participating in IDIA’s Immersion Seminar were named as a winner for an Award of Excellence at the International Digital Media and Arts Association (iDMAa) 2007 National Conference. The award included a $250 cash prize and was presented to only two groups out of the twelve universities participating in the conference’s student showcase. iDMAa hosted the Ideas 07: Beyond Boundaries conference in Philadelphia on November 7-11.
IDIA is creating a media rich interactive digital kiosk for the Digital Fabrication Institute’s MMFX Exhibit hosted by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Students participating in the IDIA Immersion Seminar in Virtual Worlds are developing the interactive interface, which will act as a station within the exhibit where viewers can attain additional biographical and portfolio information– employing a custom designed, coded and fabricated dynamic media experience.
[un]wired by Jesse Allison, John Fillwalk and Keith Kothman is a processing network visualizer that responds to interactions from personal radio-frequency devices such as mobile phones, WiFi signals, Bluetooth signals and car-key fobs. It tracks real-time statistical information from wireless access points (designed for seamless handoff of moving wireless traffic, like a cell phone network), along with periodically updated information from hand-held and wireless access points. The interactions then appear in sound and shapes on the screen. Users interacting with the piece can then visually see their interaction live on screen. The control information is collected from network services via the MySQL database and transferred into Max/MSP/Jitter. [un]wired was exhibited at SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 in Singapore.
This device was designed to take you on a journey through the history of intermedia art. The kiosk, made by the IDIA in collaboration with the Institute for Digital Fabrication at Ball State University, allows the user to interact using hand gestures to move through the timeline. The work includes a short bio, image and description of works from 30 intermedia artists of the 1960s to the present. It was displayed in conjunction with the BSU Museum of Art’s Engaging Technology Exhibit. Jesse Allison programmed the piece with help from Mike Sayre. Dustin Headley and the IDF designed and constructed the kiosk.
IDIA Lab’s new Flickr Gettr launching soon – shared & mobile virtual world mashup artwork – preview Flickr pics here http://bit.ly/bCWQCL
Flickr Gettr: Shared and Mobile Media Mashup Artwork
Virtual World/Social Media Mashup: Flickr Gettr v4
The Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA Lab) at Ball State University
IDIA Labs Flickr Gettr connects the social image repository of Flickr to virtual worlds and mobile devices through an interactive 3D and sonic experience – immersing the viewer in a dimensional cloud of user searched imagery and sound.
Background
Flickr Gettr in Second Life, leverages the new SL shared-media plugin architecture to provide rich spatially integrated web experiences. Participants query to search public image folders at the Flickr web-service. Queries then pull in related images from Flickr and feeds them back to be spatialized in an immersive visual and sonic environment. As each image spawns, it generates a sound which parallels the environment of imagery that surrounds the viewer in their selected imagery and related tags that are spoken in synthesized voice.
Flickr Gettr positions virtual worlds as a platform to navigate media in the information metaverse. Virtual worlds have the potential to position the Internet as a three-dimensional information and communication platform where live data can flow in and out to visualize, contextualize, communicate, and to inspire.
In Flickr Gettr, an external web service was used as an intermediary to query Flickr, receive images and format them for delivery as a texture. It then passed the aspect ratios and tags in a second query to be able to map the textures properly. To make these interactions more flexible, the intermediary web server was employed to collate and prepare information to retain states that can be queried from external applications. The web application effectively serves as an intermediary between the virtual world and outside environments, providing the communications link and logic to assimilate the information. This can make the creation of Web 2.0 mash-ups much simpler as the code for doing these sorts of queries and logic is already highly developed in Java, Ruby, and Perl for example. Flickr Gettr also triggered music files upon the rapid rezzing of objects to create a cumulative ambient effect.
In 2010, IDIA Lab was invited by the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India to to install Flickr Gettr at the their annual technology festival – the largest of its kind in Asia – which hosted more than 65,000 attendees.
Traversal for Boston Cyberarts was a live performance and hybrid reality installation that bridged the physical and virtual worlds. It connected Faneuil Hall in Boston with a bell tower with midi controlled carillon as part of the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival.
Virtual participant could perform the physical bell tower via an interactive online virtual instrument built by IDIA – located in a 3D model of Faneuil Hall. Participants from all over the world could play the actual French carillon on top of Shafer Tower via their avatars. The ringing of the bells of Shafer Tower was streamed and simulcast back into Second Life, so the virtual participants can see and hear their interactions. Participants at Shafer Tower could also connect to their virtual counterparts through technology set up at the base of the tower and perform the bells locally through the same virtual interface.
IDIA collaboratively designed and built this interactive artwork for the Boston Cyberarts Festival.
AM Radio’s The Red and the Wild Opening Reception Sunday, April 26th 2009 7 pm SLT
IDIA is pleased to host artist AM Radio as the inaugural artist-in-residence at IDIA Labs – an exhibition and installation sim for virtual installation art and performance. IDIA hosts AM Radio’s The Red and the Wild as the inaugural artist-in-residence at IDIA Labs, an exhibition and installation sim for virtual art.
The Red and The Wild is an experimental shift in my work. The Red and Wild has its basis in earlier builds, notably Husk and Beneath the Tree that died. This time, a third house structure appears, based on a house which figures strongly in my childhood memories. The train that appears as a symbol in many of my works returns, but revived. A doorway represents an impossible or at least implausible path. Water towers dot the horizon, displaced in the context of an over abundance of water. A large red shape looms over the water and into or out of the house.
The title itself has its origins in a film and music artist friend from Atlanta. He had sent me a collection of music experiments of his just as I was in the midst of trying to understand why I was feeling a need to bring in abstract and maybe creepy shapes into my work. One of the tracks sampled some audio from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The audio lead me to watch the film again and read Capote’s Novella. In the story, the main character Holly invents a world around her in reaction to her anxieties and fears which she describes as the “mean reds.” Holly says, “But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll just end up looking at the sky ”
-AM Radio
THE INSTITUTE FOR DIGITAL INTERMEDIA ARTS is a hybrid art and design studio established as part of the Center for Media Design at Ball State University and funded the Lilly Endowment, Inc. The institute’s interdisciplinary studio collaborative explores the intersections between arts and technology – employing virtual reality, visualization, simulation and human computer interface.
The Twitter Cloud is a visualization of real time Tweets (messages) posted on Twitter.com. The system automatically scans specified user feeds, and visualizes new messages as they arrive. This piece was programmed in Java using the Processing API.
