At some point towards the end of our stay at Montalvo, we realized that we needed more textures for our 3D architectures — computer graphics lingo meaning the wallpaper that we paste onto the planar surfaces of the structures that you see — and decided to scour our surroundings there, taking pictures to use for this purpose. This has become one additional way in which every installation of the project is specifically of the place where it is being shown.

As we walk around Seoul, to and from our workspace at Nabi, we’ve been consciously always taking different paths, wandering around through different neighborhoods, and snapping pictures to use as textures along the way. Our workshops are helping to determine what types of images to gather.

This morning as we were doing this, we realized this process is really essentially an example of the Situationist dérive — a way of kind of trying to understand a place on an empirical level, without any preconceived notions such as zoning rules, socio-political history, etc. If [here][now] is an example of our society as spectacle, then these walks, manifested in the project via the images as textures, are a way of understanding the real reality that the project represents virtually.

So most of the day yesterday I spent a lot of time doing a lot of really boring work. But it needed to be done. Essentially, I had to take all our server code (ie, the stuff that manages the database that we use to store data about avatar location and appearance) and install it on the server machine that we will be using for the installation. Unfortunately that server is now several years old and so this process was quite laborious and riddled with hoops that needed to be jumped through.

Continue reading organizing electrons…

Really happy with how everything is looking so far though we still have a long way to go …

Continue reading First test run at nabi…

Stumbled across this:

In 1975, Milan Kundera moved to France. There he published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) which told of Czech citizens opposing the communist regime in various ways. An unusual mixture of novel, short story collection and author’s musings, the book set the tone for his works in exile. Critics have noted the irony that the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia in the book, “is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there” which is The “kind of disappearance and reappearance Kundera explores in the book.” ^[3]

That is from wikipedia.

But this idea of forgotten geographies was an early motivating idea to the project and has shaped several key elements of the piece.

The first workshop at Nabi produced a series of elements to be used as organizing principles for the project. The workshop instructions.

Continue reading Workshop 1 : Nabi…

[here][now] is being workshoped at Nabi in Korea prior to our installation at the Incheon Digital Art Festival.

[here][now] investigates concepts of space and society through a virtual environment. The virtual and the real are counterpoints that serve as a dialectical springboard to a discussion about the ways that we, as modern citizens of the Information Age, function within the structures around us – in both virtual spaces, and in the physical spaces of our communities. The workshops are essential components to our work, as the exhibit is a reflection of its Korean location – to synthesize how people conceive of the city around them and find ways to characterize the relationships that they have to each other.

“   Our language does not possess epithets fine enough to weigh, as it were, the degrees of its reality, to define its pliability. Let me say it bluntly: the tragedy of this district is that nothing here ever reaches completion; nothing transcends its definitivum — all movements, once begun, hang in the air; all gestures are prematurely exhausted and cannot proceed beyond a certain deadlock. We can now appreciate its great luxuriance and prodigality — in the intentions, projects and anticipations that characterise this district. It is all nothing more than the fermentation of desires, prematurely luxuriant and, therefore, impotent and empty. Every merest whim germinates in its atmosphere of inordinate facility; a fleeting tension swells and grows into an empty, puffed out excrescence, a shot up, grey and light vegetation of downy weeds — colourless shaggy poppy heads composed of a weightless tissue of illusion and hashish. A languid and profligate aura of sin rises over the whole district, and the houses, shops and people not uncommonly seem to be a shudder on its fervid body, the gooseflesh of its feverish reveries. Nowhere so much as here do we feel so threatened by possibilities, so shocked by the propinquity of fulfilment, scared pale and stiff by the pleasurable terror of realisation. But it ends there.”
Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schultz

[here][now] will be part of the Incheon Digital Art Festival in Korea. Opening on Friday 7th August 2009 and closing on September 20th 2009.

More information about the exhibition is here…