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Todd
Matthes
university
of oregon
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Faraday's
Garden
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Another type of web place is that which documents "real world"
activities and makes them accessible to internet browsers with
photos, quicktime movies, and descriptive text.
In
Faraday's Garden, participants walk through a landscape of innumerable
household and office appliances, power tools, projectors, radios,
phonographs, and various other personal comfort devices. The floor
of the room is carpeted with switch matting, a pressure-sensitive
covering designed for home security systems.
The
machines wait silently, ready to be activated at any moment by
the footfalls of the public. When stepped upon, the switch matting
triggers the various machines and appliances, creating a kind
of force field of noise and activity around each viewer. As the
number of participants increases, the general level of cacophony
rises, creating a wildly complex symphony of machines, sounds
and projections.
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Electronic
Garden / NatuRealization
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Imagine
a garden in which you feel the presence of the community around
you, where you run into shadows of the past and hear whispers
of your neighbors, past and present -- an "Electronic Garden"
in which your presence and movement define your experience. In
the center of Washington Square Park, artist Miroslaw Rogala's
Electronic Garden/NatuRealization brings together multiple voices
using infrared sensors and computer chips in an interactive sound
installation.
The
viewer/listener creates the soundscape. Movement through the open
structure triggers up to four prerecorded speeches simultaneously,
creating a "debate"
that spans time and space with the rotating archive of two or
three dozen one-minute speeches. The individual, through participation,
must negotiate and attempt to balance collective and sometimes
opposing voices in Electronic Garden/NatuRealization. As
a site on the World Wide Web, eGarden can provide a more reflective
environment, in which biographies, historical background, and
texts are included, creating a different experience for the viewer
in the private space of the web as compared to the site-specific,
outdoor sound installation.
Although
not in complete working order at this time, the idea is creative-
actualizing cracks in the space-time continuum where virtual meets
real. Taken to the next level, texts entered by net browsers could
be recorded over the net and played at the garden, bringing even
more presence to the installation.
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Autodrom
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Clever! Imagine a pavilion where human controlled machines' movements
and actions are monitored and modeled in a virtual matrix that
occurs simultaneously with them. This double-environment experiment
was undertaken by Autodrom, and is now documented on their web
site. The idea is ground-breaking, but I yearned for some video
footage or access to the virtual matrix.
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