Acknowledgement: Sam Au Yeung for Sound Production, Polly @ InNoPO

:: Description ::

The project explores the embodiment and the cognitive interpretation of social data. Datascape is created by the collaborative texts and emoticons from Twitter with audience participation. Found data are remixed and reconstructed, revealing the network culture in an interactive environment.

Datascape has also further synthesized to “Emotive Expression” as a 30 minutes performance, in collaboration with Zoie So and Hugo Lee. Choreographer, Alz performs and interacts with the works ”Mediated Facial” and “Datascape”. The interactive performance explores the ideologies of emotive expressions within a physical, elastic and network system. Choreographer will work with the two kinetic and digital structures, where they synthesize into a mise-en-scene. This aims to enunciate a multimedia choreographic form arose from reflective practice, extracted data from Internet and dialogue from live audience.

Co-creators: Hugo Lee, Zoie So & Winnie Soon
Choreographer: Alz Ng
Music: Sam Au Yeung
Lighting: James Wong

… More on concept

Keywords: data, aesthetics, transmediation, cultural object, internet

Exploration direction:

• -aesthetics of live-data and found data
• -ideas of remix culture
• -data in relation to performance, relationship between writer and performer
• -data in relation to installation and interaction with audience
• -design visualization with different colors
• -audience traces and interaction ‘archive’
• -the blurring line between ‘live’ and ‘archive’
• -technical-wise: use of kinect, esp the depth parameter

::Video documentation::

Emotive expression performance video:

::How it works::

More about the research & testing: http://www.siusoon.com/dat/category/projects/2012datascape/

:: Review / Feedback / Press/PR::

• - Lingnan Arts Festival 2012: http://ln.edu.hk/arts/af2012/programme.php

:: Exhibition Record(s)::

• - Mar, 2012, Lingnan Arts Festival @ Hong Kong

:: Technical & Production ::

• -Software: Mac OS X 10.5.8+, Processing 1.5.1
• -Hardware: Kinect Tracking camera, projector, computer
• -Requirement: Internet connection

Work by Winnie Soon

Acknowledgement: Kinsun Tung @ Prototyping-lab, Dr. Johnathan Farris, Polly @ InNoPO, Mr. Yu Kwai Yau @ A-Plus Advertising Company.

:: Description ::

In collaboration with Karen Sam Norgard

Net.Portrait is a live and network-based installation combined with fine-art painting, kinetic sculpture and collective network data. While you are watching the piece, the artwork is also dynamically watching you by having different emotive eyes painted on a collection of wall mounted cocktail umbrellas. The live happenings of happy and sad smiley faces from Twitter are being transformed from a text, static and virtual medium to a kinetic and physical sculpture. Every bit of spinning action amplifies the network behavior, resulting in a continuous and flowing net portrait.

… More on concept

Keywords: data, aesthetics, transmediation, cultural object, internet

“All living situations must be treated in the context of a systems hierarchy of values”
– Jack Burnham.1968

Theorist Jack Burnham mentioned about the change of our focus from artifacts to art system in late sixties due to the technology shift. Particularly in Net.art, the impact of technological change is inevitable. As well, the growing informational data within the cultural production should also be taken into consideration as an art system rather than a discrete object. In viewing the aesthetics of the artifact, data and the process should be considered as an integral part in the piece of Net Portrait.

While we are experiencing the visual part of the piece, those painted & spinning eyes are constantly reminding the audience to observe the art system, to notice the network behavior. Those messages with emotive smiley faces will be brought to live again, and the writer subtly establishes a mysterious relationship with the viewer.

The artwork explores the aesthetics of data as well as the relational experience among the artists, viewers and the collective writers from the Internet.

… About Umbrella

Historical research on the umbrella as a cultural sign by Dr.Johnathan Farris

A very early image of the umbrella can be found in a relief of the Persian Emperor Xerxes I (c.500 BCE). In many parts of the world, an umbrella was used to signify status and leadership. This would include works like the bronze war chariot of Qin Shihuang (the first emperor of China, c.215 BCE) and reliefs in Cambodia portraying Khmer rulers at sites like Angkor Wat. Chinoiserie brought the frequent depictions of umbrellas to Europe in works such as the Chinese House at Sanssouci Palace and a pavilion at Drottningholm Palace.

As umbrella was commonly used in painting to express an intimacies between people. Some works from Goya’s oeuvre, “The Parasol” and “Couple with Parasol” would be prime examples of this. In Goya’s “Teh Parasol a woman is dressed in wealthy, French fashion but the man is dressed in a rather more middle class manner. He seems to be shading her from the wind and perhaps an oncoming storm. Therefore umbrella seems to be playing a role that combines protection and potentially seduction. In that case, there is a strong relation between romance and the umbrella, it can be interpreted as a romantic or “courting ritual” scene. A particular vision of femininity also seems to have been attached with the umbrella, example can be reference to the famous impressionist artist Claude Monet “Madame Monet and her Son”.

The umbrella became more pervasive in Western usage around the early to mid-19th century.

::Video documentation::

::How it works::
A custom-made controller board is linked with 16 motors (i.e 8 pairs of cocktail umbrellas). A software program (written by processing) is written to extract the live data from Twitter server, a set of pre-defined smiley faces act as the keywords to collect the whole message. This filtered message will display as an animated text as well as trigger the motors to spin, causing the optical illusion of the painted eyes on the cocktail umbrellas. A pair of eyes will spin every time the system detects a valid message, happy and sad smiley faces will result in spinning at different positions, pair by pair from bottom to top or vice versa, until all the motors are spinning together, then all motors will stop and cycle repeats.

More about the research & testing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/siusoon/sets/72157626986593954/

:: Review / Feedback / Press::

• - To be filled

:: Exhibition Record(s)::

• - Feb, 2012, PULSE Art and Technology @ Jepson Museum. Savannah, USA

:: Technical & Production ::

• -Software: Mac OS X 10.5.8+, Processing
• -Hardware: 16x Motors, Customized computer board, Projector (optional), 2x transformers
• -Requirement: Internet connection
• - Size: 377 (W) x 1161(H) mm
• -Proposed setup dimension: Height 197cm
  

Work by Winnie Soon

Year: 2011

Course Name: Survey of Computer Arts Applications

School: Savannah College of Arts and Design (HK)

Year: 2010-2011

Course Name: Apply the elements and principles of design (VBAU011), (Advanced) Survey of Computer Arts Applications

School: Savannah College of Arts and Design (HK), International Education College & Australia Holmesglen Institute (China)

Year: 2010

Course Name: Apply the elements and principles of design (VBAU011)

School: International Education College & Australia Holmesglen Institute, Wuhan

Year: 2010-2011

Description: Web banner expresses computer arts and put in the WordPress blog

Course Name: Survey of Computer Arts Applications

School: Savannah College of Arts and Design, Hong Kong

Year: 2010-2011

Description: Badge design with Adobe Illustrator, expresses the theme of ‘Harmony” with 3d elements in execution.

Course Name: Advanced Survey of Computer Arts Applications

School: Savannah College of Arts and Design, Hong Kong

Year: 2010-2011

Description: Your favorite toy

Course Name: Advanced Survey of Computer Arts Applications

School: Savannah College of Arts and Design, Hong Kong

Title: jsut code

Year of production: 2010

Medium: Interactive Installation

Acknowledgement:

Just code was originally commissioned by Writing Machine Collective and is supported by Highwire.

Polly Poon / Communication Associate@ InNoPO.com

:: Description ::

In collaboration with Helen Pritchard

Jsut Code is an installation where viewers are invited to decode electronic texts written by a collective of distributed writers. Statements on life and death are gathered in real-time, from the social media site twitter and displayed as geometric images.

Viewers encounter a continuously updating feed as the machine translates language to image and twitter message to QR code (a matrix bar code). The QR code “carries” a language of pattern and meaning, which is activated by the reader. Participants are invited to decode these images through the use of a smart phone or QR reader.

In this work the artists set up a structure of an evolving database in which the activities of reading and writing by human and machine are explicitly collaborative and distributed. Jsut Code performs questions about automated production, ‘collective’ intelligence and the value of labour and artistic production. The installation explores a continuously evolving and mutating database, which moves beyond and between languages.

To scan QR Codes, you need a QR scanner App on your mobile device. Go to your phone’s app store and search for “QR” or “QR readers. Once you download a QR reader, open up the reader and scan a QR code.

「Jsut Code」 是一個集體創作的裝置藝術作品。現場參與者將被邀拆解由來自四面八方協作者合作完成的電子文本代碼。

透過這件作品，作者建構了一個讓人類與機器共同參與的寫作和閱讀經驗。電腦搜尋來自社交網站TWITTER的文字，即時收集包含’生’ 與’死’關鍵字的留言，再把文字即時編譯成幾何圖案標誌-QR碼，參觀者將置身於一個充滿幾何符號的環境之中，他們可以智能手機的解碼軟件，直接參與解讀這些電子文本 。

代碼既是圖案和信息，但本身卻可以號召行動，並同時促使指令的執行。「Jsut Code」 的閱讀行動，是人、機器與代碼的合作演出 。 透過翻譯QR碼而進行解讀及重新編碼，再加上觀眾的主觀性認知去重新解讀信息。裝置探索文字在語言轉換（電腦和人類語言）的過程中所產生的演化和變異。

… More on concept

Keywords: Social Media, Identity, Telematic Culture, Message, QR Code, Information, Text and Language, Communication

In My Mother Was a Computer Techno-Literary Theorist Katherine Hayles states that it is an urgent task to “understand the nuanced and theoretically sophisticated interactions between code and language”(Hayles 2005 pg 15). In ‘jsut code’ we aim to explore the interaction, relations between code, language, readers, writers and the machine which take place on Twitter. To highlight and bring attention to the often invisible collaboration with code, the translation between natural language, binary code, high level languages which must happen every time a tweet is updated. As Hayles describes it the “juice” which comes when code interacts with speech and writing. We see code as a call to action, a call for execution. In ‘jsut code’ QR code acts as a call to action for the viewer, as they become an active user of a reading machine. In collaboration with a QR reading device the viewer can decode and recode the tweets within the installation.

The updates posted by users on Twitter might be described in the framework of Julia Kristeva’s notion of subjectivity that the relationship between the subject and language is ongoing “always in process”. As Joanna Drucker describes in the Visible Word – “Kristeva refines the notion of subjectivity into the proposition that subjectivity can only be understood as positionally. The relation of elements – speaker, system, ideology, desire, power – to each other in a situation of articulation describes a position which the subject occupies. Subjectivity is inseparable from this position a (Drucker 1994 pg 41). The installation of ‘jsut code’ explores notions of a subjectivity as always in process as the work, through the distributed authorship and mutilplicity of tweets which are continuously updated.

The project is using a continuous practice-based approach, as well as being an artist and audience to examine the performativity behavior from physical movement and computational coding.

Project research: Here

Conference presentation:

jsut code @ Future Everything 2012

View more presentations from siusoon.

::Video documentation::

Review / Feedback / Press:

“We are familiar with works about Social Media Site or those using QR code. This film is a mix of forms of installation and the characters of QR code. One scene that interests me is when the audience take out their mobile phones searching around like doing kind of performing art. But they are in fact having interactions through the words of the real and virtual spaces. The way to match the statements collected in this film well with the forms of representation or the thematic ideas has to be further developed” by Ng Tsz-Kwan, Executive Creative Director of yU+co. [Lab], 2012

” Soon and Pritchard playfully and industriously encode, decode and re-code message on Twitter to subvert and stretch the limits of ‘meaningful’ messages” by Dr. Linda Lai, Associate Professor in School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, 2011.

Exhibition Record(s):

• 2012, Future Everything: Manchester, United Kingdom
• 2012, Hong Kong Art Fair (by Pure Art Foundations), Hong Kong
• 2012, The 17th IFVA: Hong Kong Arts Center, Hong Kong
• 2011, Writing Machine Collective | Computational Thinking in Various Art Forms: Youth Square, Hong Kong

Technical & Production:

Work by Winnie Soon