I am interested and delighted to see that almost the very moment the T up a temporary plywood wall at Park Street, the surface was covered by graffiti of the geekiest kind. Amid the Sherlock Holmes references, and obligatory references to body parts and sex acts, I noticed this:

I’m trying to decide what I think: the initial +1 impulse, and the subsequent backlash. Has the omnipresent culture of online commentary and response permeated physical experience to such an extent that even this most ancient form of grafitti writing has been co-opted? Have we actually lost, without realizing it, the ability to experience an exchange of ideas unmediated by the language and regulations of corporate digital media? I guess, in less pretentious terms, I wonder if all our screen time has led us unwittingly to perceive every surface literally as a screen, with a screen’s capabilities and conventions. Has this ruined our ability to create a spontaneous, disobedient  response to writing in a public place? If true, as a graffiti enthusiast I can’t help feeling this would be a terrible loss of an opportunity for equal-access, call-and-response conversation that’s been going on as long as drawn imagery has existed.

On the other hand, what have on-screen communities like Tumblr and Twitter taught us? That everything, no matter how significant or mundane, is a legitimate source for commentary and response. That anyone with the ability to read is granted, instantly and without questions, the right to respond to what they see at any level of sophistication from misspelled curse words to scholarly analysis (and this writing itself, somewhere in between). Have our online communities actually made all of us more likely to cross the boundary from typed to hand-written graffiti, when we feel the conversation warrants continuation or provocation?

Have you noticed how phone cameras have accustomed us all to looking at the world through a little aperture, with an eye toward documentation? I sometimes wonder if my growing desire to capture and catalogue every visual experience is interfering with my ability to be aware in the moment of what I am seeing and feeling. I have found this tendency in myself particularly troubling in galleries and museums, where I think the idea is to be looking at things and thinking about them, not squirreling away blurry, low-res simulacra of those things for future (maybe) examination.

Looking now at someone else’s photos from the Bromfield Gallery SOLO Show opening, I realize that this totally unnecessary documentation impulse can be repurposed in service of spontaneous, unconscious, and collaborative performance. Have I found the key to something here?

Drag and drop:

With input from summer Intermediate Web Design student Patrick S. I discovered a pretty awesome combination of jQuery scripts leading to this: draggable objects randomly placed! This experiment uses the jQuery UI’s “draggable” function in combination with rockechris’ nice jQuery.random number generator script. Refresh to see the random placement in action. I added a little CSS to make sure that the clicked object floats to the top of the pile for easier sorting and moving. According to the internets, the jury’s still out on whether CSS3 transitions work with z-index. For those who are wondering, this is an excellent example of pretty complex user interaction made possible with simple code in an accessible, non-Flash environment.

You can get over to the piece by itself and borrow such code as you like here:
www.virtualunrealityproject.com/lettersRand.html

Wiring a 2-pin sensor

This time I made a breath sensor, using a mini condenser mic from Radio Shack and a tutorial at Chris3000.com. Being still pretty much an electronics dumbass, I had major trouble decoding Chris 3000′s (admittedly very simple) wiring diagram until I found a helpful primer on wiring 2-pin mics. Thank you very much, good people of Tibbetts Technical Application Notes. Turns out Radio Shack also makes a 3-wire version of this little mic, which is more intuitive to wire up, possibly a little less sensitive, and definitely requiring some work with wire strippers and the soldering iron before use.

I also want to add props to Radio Shack #01-1186. While looking for the mic, I visited three other RS locations, all of which, according to the internet, had part #270-090 in stock. At each location either they couldn’t find the part and told me it was sold out, or the salespeople were so interested in selling cell phones that they disdained to take 5 minutes away from the counter to give me a hand. The good people of #01-1186 (“Woburn Cambridge”: two towns not in the least contiguous) took ten seconds to actually look for the part in question, and easily found it, misfiled in the wrong drawer. Where have all the good electronics geeks gone, you ask? 344 Cambridge St. Woburn, MA.

This one gets its data from weather.gov/ NOAA RSS feed, measuring current windspeed at Boston’s Logan Airport.

Take a look at code if you want to see exactly how this works.

In the original version of this sketch, nothing happened until a visitor moved his or her mouse over the canvas, at which point a plume of smoke would trail to show wind direction and speed. I love the unexpectedness of that interaction, but I eventually became concerned that users’ tendency not to interact with a seemingly blank screen would prevent some people from seeing the visualization at all. I made some adjustments to accommodate both my preferred interactive mouse play, and a more passive viewing experience.

I encountered one major unexpected challenge with this project: retrieving the XML data via my Processing sketch when the sketch was not housed locally on my computer. When the XML was requested through the PDE inside an HTML5 canvas element (using the usual xml = new XMLElement(this, “myURL.xml”); syntax) I got an error back from my server. Turns out, this kind of cross-server data request is a no-no for security reasons (so if the XML had been hosted on my server, it would probably have worked fine).

I got around the problem with a wonderfully simple PHP script written by (and borrowed from) Brad R. at Autumn8.co.za who seems to have created the world’s only comprehensible tutorial for cross domain XML requests using Processing.js. I am deeply grateful, and highly recommend his explanation, here: http://www.autumn8.co.za/posts/loading-cross-domain-xml-into-processing-js Even a PHP noob like myself was eventually able to figure out how this works. Brad’s PHP retrieves the XML data as a String (just text) which can then be re-parsed back into XML that Processing understands. Look through my code to see where and how this happens. After that, the rest of the sketch proceeds normally.

UPDATE! I upgraded my server setting to PHP5, and suddenly the visualization stopped working. XML data was still retrieved, but out of order so the wrong data were ending up in the wrong variables. I discovered that I needed to make a minor adjustment to my PHP code (which actually simplified it) now that I am running PHP5. For those with PHP5 installed, try this:

$weatherdata = file_get_contents('http://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KBOS.xml');
echo $weatherdata; 

I also found, once the PHP XML request was working, that the sketch was somewhat unreliable. Sometimes it would start right up with no problem, other times it would show an empty square, sometimes the upper lefthand text would appear with all values “null.” After hours of tinkering, I determined that the sketch was running into trouble because the Draw() function was starting before the XML had fully loaded (in retrospect, I’m pretty sure I learned about this issue with external data in class… I guess I was asleep that day). I added a Boolean (again, thanks to Autumn8′s demo) to check if the parseXML function was complete before drawing anything to the screen, and the problem seems to be solved.

Can Processing.js work with WordPress? You bet it can my friends! Download a nice plugin like this one (http://www.keyvan.net/code/processing-js) and you’re ready to go.

Wriggle your mouse around below to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I’d love some non-spam comments re: How fast does this load? Does it work in your browser? etc.??

My conception of performance art begins at the basic definition I helped write for teenage art students: “performance art is not scripted theater, but instead calls on the artist to use his or her body in real time and space to express an idea.” The key words in this sentence, body, real time, and space, express a fundamental truth about my experience of performance art: it’s all about the relationship created between an artist and her audience. The nature of this relationship, be it antagonistic, confusing, erotic, cooperative, or something else, is the raw material of a performer’s work. Curator and art critic Nicholas Bourriaud, in his series of essays Relational Aesthetics, suggests that we inhabit a moment in the evolution of art history when artists have begun to privilege the relationships that artworks enable over the production of objects. The “art object” in this context can be considered a byproduct of an experience of interaction among viewers, orchestrated by the artist. Interactions and relationships among viewers are the real media in which contemporary artists work, and physical objects are simply a lens through which an artist might choose to focus or express these interactions.

As with any other medium, performers can exert more or less control over their materials during the creative process, but that control wavers when another person or people enter the equation. The beauty and the terror of audience lie in the utter unpredictability of their responses — will this be a hit? A disaster? An embarrassment? A fire-code violation? After the audience has viewed my work from every angle, will I still recognize what I originally made? Performance art invites this introspection, both in the moment of a piece’s presentation and in retrospect. In scrutinizing the behavior of an audience towards a performer, there is potential to learn about the relative success or failure of the performer’s concept, but also a chance to observe the unexpected interpretations those outside the creative process bring to the work. Perhaps more than any other artistic discipline performance relies on the active presence of viewers to complete a piece, their reactions to and interactions with the performer making meaning from a relationship among individuals. When live bodies and real time, two increasingly complex variables, enter the equation, the outcome of a work can change all its participants and their relationships to each other.

A sweet post about Where I Live… on the Boston CyberArts blog!

http://bostoncyberarts.org/festival/blog/where-i-live

MassArt Bakalar Gallery
April 18 – 26, 2011
Opening Reception: April 22, 6:00 – 8:00pm