Last week I uploaded “Traveling Through Space and Time Without a Permit”, an ongoing multimedia series about man’s relationship with the night sky. The web gallery can be viewed via this link:
Traveling Through Space and Time Without a Permit
Limited Edition Prints will be available soon. You can email me ahead of time if you would like to purchase one.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.com
Watch Steve Belovarich @ Electric Art on Veoh.com
Exhibition of Steve Belovarich’s work at Electric Art in Syracuse, NY on April 10, 2009 included an Installation called “No String Attached”, where two mannequins say what is available on the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist; “.highway”, a visualization of the GPS grid as someone drives on the highway through mountains and cityscape (viewed through a video headset); and “Audiobombs”, devices that are for sonic graffiti (any audio can be implanted in a space, hopefully jamming that environment by revealing sounds that were once there, potentially will be there, or are missing because of human intervention).
Electric Art is the annual MFA exhibition for Computer Art MFA Candidates at Syracuse University. Other artists who participated were Heath Hanlin, Sean Hovendick, Bret Malley, Ryan Marchand, Christopher Prior, Blake Carrington, and Diana Salles. Electric Art 4 was held at XL Projects in Armory Square in Syracuse, NY.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.comThe history of graffiti will reveal the political rhetoric of the oppressed through images and slogans. Indeed, the voices of many otherwise unheard have shined through the use of graffiti. Look at all the tagging of graffiti artist signatures on trains and underpasses. The graffiti image may seem ambiguous and ever changing, sometimes incomprehensible. This is in stark contrast, or perhaps camouflaged against the never ending sea of advertisements that are meant to be recognizable. When the graffiti image is rendered in a style that relates political messages or utilizes visual iconography, it usually pulls from existing visual tropes, similar to its advertising counterpart, as advertising seeks to consume the entire visual field of those wandering through the spectacles of society.
The creativity of street culture shines when public spaces are reconfigured in a creative way by the public, the community, or even a group of urban adventurers. Think skateboarders, bmxers, graffiti artists: these people utilize urban environments in ways that break through the social milieu analyzed by the Situationists in terms of The Spectacle. Graffiti is rooted in the practice of the Situationists, who believed that through the act of The situation is defined by the group as “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.” Skateboarding is a literal example: the moment one grinds the rail is detournment, the wandering around the urban landscape is the derive, when someone gains an intellectual understanding of their relationship to architecture is psychogeography. Billboard Liberators and culture jammers exemplify this sort of existence, weaving in and out of consumer culture to reveal some hidden meaning in the advertising messages that surround the public at large.
Occasionally, the flaneur will wander by the stencil of an image and ponder on the aesthetic of the spray painted stamp on a cracking and decaying urban backdrop. Do we mostly remain passive, only able to suckle on an endless supply of the same entertainment formula? As more of the younger generations remain cut-off auditory from the environment, trapped in a soundscape of genre specific tunes on an iPod. The real and the virtual blend in ways in regards to human perception very few have begun to understand. Until we all wear virtual headsets to work, there is still hope to break open the social milieu in ways that will make people question everyday existence. The creative impulse rests between the wrists and the keybaord of most computer users, machines capable of producing only what the mind can imagine.
Audiobombing is a form of sonic graffiti that is beginning to happen all around the world. Audiobombs come in all shapes and sizes. A cheap device can be made out of a simple recording module found at Radioshack for less than $10US. This is suitable for pranking in an enclosed space or somewhere without a lot of noise. Kang Chang, Kyle Millns, and Mike Fleming, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created audiobombs out of old cassette tape decks and magnetic tape. This project involves stringing up magnetic tape and using a hacked tape deck with exposed heads to listen in on whatever is recorded onto the tape. While is design does reuse older technologies, its design involves a lock/key method of having to hack a cassette tape deck to hear the hidden messages recorded onto the magnetic tape. But if you are looking for a programmable alternative, Ladyada has developed the Wave Shield for the Arduino microcontroller. With this device, you can load WAV files onto a SD card and write a custom program that triggers sound to play through an 8 Ohm speaker. This method involves knowledge of soldering electronics and basic audio theory.
In Syracuse, NY, audiobombs have appeared on sites around the Syracuse University main campus. Audio bombs that were planted emitted the sounds of the crow. Audio agents embedded themselves among murders of crows weeks previous to capture the sounds of those animals who would usually inhabit the space, despite human intervention. Audio bombs were planted in response to the academic institution’s persistent use of sonic devices that that deter crows from inhabiting the wooded areas on top of the hill. This interferes with the crows’ typical migration patterns. Technology is thus placed as a countermeasure to interfere with existing man made measures, a jamming device.
This mission was successful, as minutes after the audiobombs were planted, crows began descending from the sky, perching on top of the very academic structures that are the reason for their exclusion. Audiobombs thus produce an environmental change in the immediate space, but it is yet to be tested whether or not these devices can be a prelude to social change, in comparison with image and textual based graffiti. Indeed when audiobombs catch you off guard perhaps it may ignite a mode of critical thinking about your environment, or in my case the impact of humans on the surrounding.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.comIn the second episode of the online TV series “The Tourist”, Steve and Al go shopping at the Mall.
“The Tourist” is an online video series about the relationship between a man and his wearable computer named Al. The series takes an absurd look at the relationships man has developed with his machines in the early 21st century.
Runtime: 04:46
Watch The Tourist on your favorite site.
YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, Metacafe, Google, Revver, Break, DailyMotion, Veoh, Crackle and Imeem
To receive e-mail notifications for new episodes of “The Tourist”, e-mail tourist@installationspace.com with CONNECT ME in the subject line.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.com“The Tourist” is an online video series about the relationship between a man and his wearable computer named Al. The series takes an absurd look at the relationships man has developed with his machines in the early 21st century.
Watch The Tourist - Ep 01 - The Tourist Runtime: 04:52
Watch The Tourist on your favorite site.
Yahoo, MySpace, Metacafe, Revver, Break, DailyMotion, Crackle and Imeem
To receive e-mail notifications for new episodes of “The Tourist”, e-mail tourist@installationspace.com with CONNECT ME in the subject line.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.com
The Tourist is Coming Soon - October 16, 2008
The first episode of the upcoming web series called “The Tourist” was screened inside a portable storage container today, Sunday September 28th at The Celebration of the Arts in New Paltz, NY. The POD screening was curated by Betty Greenwald. “The Tourist” is an online video series about the relationship between a man and his wearable computer named Al. The series takes an absurd look at the relationships man has developed with his machines in the early 21st century.
Check back in the next couple weeks for the online release of The Tourist.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.comInformation Hunter Gatherer, a video game where the player shoots down news headlines and gathers the content of the news story, premiered at the Electric Art Show in Syracuse, NY on April 26, 2008. The program and installation was created by Stephen Belovarich.
Information Hunter Gatherer is a video game where the player can reflect upon their relationship with mass media. The player takes on the role of hunter as they point an electronic toy gun at a projected screen. A target appears on the projection wherever someone aims the gun. When someone walks up to the game, they are greeted by on screen instructions that read “Shoot down news headlines,” “You only get five shots,” and “Read the News Stories.” After pulling the trigger and shooting the word “Hunt!”, the player has five bullets to shoot down five or more news headlines. The installation tells the player to walk to the computer monitor after they run out of ammo. The participant is then welcome to read the news stories associated with the headlines they shot down, where they gather the information.
Using a gun originally intended for the Nintendo Wii, I attempt to draw younger people into the role of news hunters and gatherers. The original impetus for this project was a study of my own behavior when selecting news stories from Internet RSS feeds. I saw myself and began to observe others as consumers of information. Consumer is not used here in the sense of purchasing goods, but instead the eating of food. This logically brought me to the conclusion that since most Americans are detached from the process of food creation (hunting/farming), they replace this primordial survival instinct with the consumption of information provided by the mass media. Most news stories are centered around violence, whereas Cro-Magnon man experiences violent acts in the killing of animals. This predatorial instinct is not lost when someone is merely sitting on a couch watching the 24 hour news, it is translated into habitual viewing and reading.
The installation consists of projector, computer monitor, Nintendo Wii Gun, sensor bar, mouse, keyboard, speakers, broadband internet connection, and computer running at least OS X 10.4 and Max 4.6.5 with a video card w/ 128mb of RAM. The computer periodically downloads the news from the RSS feeds of the most popular news outlets in America (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, New York Times, L.A. Times, BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, and the Syracuse Post Standard were included for the Electric Art Show). The installation then streams the headlines across the projection screen similar to a news ticker, but instead the headlines seem to flock or swarm together. The participant shoots down news headlines using the supply of five virtual bullets. The bullets are represented by a five icons on the top right of the projection frame, one disappearring each time a kill is made. The sound of a rifle cocking and shooting happens every time the player kills a headline. The news story of the killed headline then appears on the computer monitor adjacent to the projection.
Taking the role of cultural anthropologist, I observed several people using the installation for the first time. It is important to note that several participants did not read the on screen instructions or were confused as to the gameplay element at first. Some individuals needed verbal instruction. There may be a possible design flaw in the implementation of on screen instructions. Sometimes pop up windows failed to appear due to a computer error. Older participants had difficulty reading the streaming headlines, it is possible to slow them down a bit. Another sample of the audience massacred headlines on screen without reading the news stories, while others really took the time to explore the game for what it was, a conduit to real time information from all over the world. I was told later in the evening that someone who studied journalism wanted to play the game in her home and would use it everyday to read the news. If one were to spend several minutes hunting and gathering news stories with Information Hunter Gatherer, they may begin to observe the interrelationships between media outlets that are owned by the same media conglomerate.
Information Hunter Gatherer is part game, part cultural artifact. The work takes on the characteristics of a game and is treated as such, but to a video game industry that is heavily indulgent in fantastic graphics and fiction, this would look more like an old school arcade game that is too sociopolitically charged to be a viable commodity. This is one possible reason why Information Hunter Gatherer finds its place in an art gallery, where sociopolitical underpinnings are welcome in a work. But even this setting, usually reserved for the image hanging on a wall, the sensory experience of touch is awkward for the viewer. It seems that the eventual place Information Hunter Gatherer will be most suitable is on the home computer or entertainment center. I will continue to develop this work over time, hoping that it will mature to an online release on the Mac platform.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.comI Walk, Don’t Run, When I Drive I’m on Drugs. The drugs of the information age. Sometimes I walk to school on the weekends. My fiance and I share a 2001 Subaru Outback Limited Sedan. She drives to work, a twenty mile roller coaster ride, while I trek 2.5 miles through South Side Syracuse with heavy equipment in my backback to sit still, quiet, be a ghost in a lab full of interior designers. The students leave their Pepsi bottles, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and wadded up snot rags all over the desks in a lab where they are not supposed to eat or drink around the computers. I don’t give a fuck, but I passive aggressively write a note on the chalk board that says “Don’t Jersey the Lab or I’ll Trash Your Interior”. Mindless iPod listening drones, hopefully I can break it to them they have an inner voice, perhaps a soul. But how am I any different? I’m sitting here, my auditory sense enveloped by Ambient music in what remains of my stolen iPod, the earbuds. Thank you whoever stole that piece of shit. I listen to my surroundings now, the immediate environment is much more inventive and interesting than anything that essentially negates it. But I still keep the earbuds on just to blend in. I can understand listening to music in a car, or on a plane, train, any other high speed mode of transportation. I hope the astronauts are listening to some really heavy classical music as they launch into orbit. The speed and time must be just right to get through three movements of any of the Romantics. But my environment today consists off the resonanting hum of a server box and several Intel Mac Pros. The synthetic heartbeat dulls me.
When I tell someone I walk to school they usually gasp and ask me why. There are certainly other alternatives: the bus, a cab, ride a bike. I’ve found it’s no use to explain it to people. It’s still mysterious to them why I choose to be stuck in the middle ages. I am walking to understand this place. Every piece of geography has unique points of interest that no map can clearly resolve. Why am I so interested? Because the camera and the screen can’t really take me places, only my legs can. TV is no substitute for reality. The news is not a clear representation of anything.
What is really strange about walking in Syracuse is that no one walks on the sidewalks in the Winter. Everyone is willing to risk getting hit by a car and walk in the street after the snow falls. I think this is great because I can claim the sidewalks for my own. I lace up my Goretex boots, put on some winter pants and trudge through snow that no one else dares to walk on. Sometimes I aimlessly wander so if someone were to follow my footprints, they’d hopefully stop and stare and think about the things I do. Sometimes I go down to the water, walk circles around trees, try to act like a real animal. I feel like I am really alive.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.comI grew up outside a small city in Maryland called Westminster. When I was a child, Westminster was situated beyond the outskirts of Baltimore’s suburban northern rim. Farms still ruled the landscape and economy, alongside a few corporations and the local branch of the Lehigh Cement company in Union Bridge. I remember a farm where the local TownMall of Westminster currently stands. The Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market used to reside in one of the shopping centers until they were forced out by the owner who wanted to raise rent on the property. Westminster has seen a large population growth from people who moved there to commute to both Baltimore and Washington D.C. Suburban homes decimated the local farmers whose only option was to sell off the farm to survive financially. I witnessed this transition as homes around my family’s property sprouted up one after another. I saw the struggle between the old farmers and new suburbanites. The largest indicator of the economic boom in Westminster was not the new construction or figures on a financial census. It was the supermassive plume of light that slowly overtook the milky way every night.
Street lights need only point down. Typical Urban Street Lights spread light in all directions. Bad engineering and design leads to further disruption in the connection between man and nature. Fifty years ago everyone outside of cities could see a brilliant night sky from their backyard. Now the light of cities blanket the night sky. Outdoor lighting provides a sense of security for most. Shopping centers, strip malls, billboards, government buildings, roadways and car dealerships all spew unnecessary amounts of light into the night sky. Few can walk outside and view a natural night sky anywhere on the East Coast of America.
Urban lighting separates humans from nature. But what doesn’t in the Information Age we are living in? Information itself has become a basic need. Humans living the Information Age stare into illuminated screens to receive a structured outlook on the World. Lighting is a security blanket. Humans bathe themselves in light to feel safe and secure, to feel illuminated. Screen technologies connect human beings on a Super Information Highway. The electric extension of man’s central nervous system Marshall Mcluhan once wrote about can be viewed from space.
The latest work of Electronic Artist Steve Belovarich documents the effect of light pollution on suburban and rural landscapes in a photographic medium. Belovarich is also developing an LED map of the United States as viewed from space at night. The LED Map called “Artificial Extensions” is meant to reveal the connectivity between man and the subtraction of natural elements. “Artificial Extensions” rests on the floor or is displayed on a wall with photographic supplements on either side. The LEDs respond to the time of day, lighting up as the sun sets in a specific region of the United States and dimming when the Sun rises. The Installation requires an Arduino Controller, LEDs, resistors, wires, and breadboard. “Artificial Extensions” is the visual representation of the extension of man’s central nervous system and the pollution created by artificial light on the night’s sky.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.comUntitled is an experiment in human perception and augmented reality. Visible light is usually represented in the center of a graph of the electromagnetic spectrum. This graph reveals the narrow bandwidth of electromagnetic radiation humans can actually perceive. Cameras and antennas can be calibrated to sense all other wavelengths. This dependence on the apparatus for sensing the remainder of electromagnetic radiation exposes both the voyeuristic nature of man as he reaches closer to the all-seeing God and the rather limited scope that is nature to him. Humans require an exterior minds eye to sense the world in the age of information. Imagination is replaced by the screen and speaker.
Human beings now seem to require an apparatus to see and understand the exterior world. This in turn, manipulates the minds eye to produces images and sounds in terms of cinema, television, radio, and now the computer. The youngest generations in America flock to television, the Internet, cell phones, and iPods: all screen based media. The news is often disseminated through visual and audio reports. The television is meant to extend your visual and auditory reach, but instead it is cluttered by synthetic sound and motion. The central nervous system is directly extended into communications systems. Humans are part of a synthetic landscape, a virtual map of the Earth provided by GPS.
Maps have always been a representation of a vantage point that human beings could not directly realize. Each map is limited by resolution. Topography adds a third dimension with contour lines or relief shading that provide a sense of depth. Traditional maps tend to prefer a large scale, while the digital map can provide seemingly unlimited resolution. Digital mapping allows for the rotation of vantage point. Google Earth can resolve the urban street, allowing for the perspective of looking out a moving car’s window or standing still on a super highway.
The GPS grid covers a smooth ellipsoid. Each point on the GPS grid is separated from every other point by a line 3 meters in length. The grid is minimal, yet expansive. The virtual world of GPS is invisible to the naked eye, it exists as a metaphysical extension of the environment. The vantage point of a person on this grid must be explored.
Typical 3D approximations of reality simulate the illusion of real space with super-realism (Renaissance painting) and cinematic lighting techniques. This experiment is minimal in contrast, it illuminates the virtual GPS surface that constantly surrounds humans but is otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
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In Untitled, the artist Stephen Belovarich roams the landscape wearing a visor fitted with LCD screens, camera, and a laptop computer inside a backpack. Belovarich investigates the impact of visible light on the virtual GPS grid, his perceptual awareness extended by the technical apparatus.
Written by Stephen Belovarich :: info@installationspace.com