Without a Traceroute

Yesterday I went to see this art exhibition, Electrohype, here in Malmö. Billed as “the fifth biennial for computer based and technological art,” only a few of the exhibits really fit what I would consider “computer based” but most of them were pretty interesting regardless.

The theme for the 2008 exhibition was time and ongoing processes, so most of the pieces involved motion or activity in some way. For example, the piece in the above photo is intended to be a mechanical implementation of a neural network. Weights and servo motors are connected by a network of fishing line. Microcontrollers run the servos and try to compensate for disturbances to the systems in order to reach an equilibrium.

One of my favorite pieces was an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using bright, rapidly changing strobe lights as a display. Besides being cool-looking, and different every time you see it (I think the initial state was randomized), this was one of the exhibits that can legitimately claim to be computer-based. Perhaps most interesting in the context of my project is the fact that the Game of Life has particular significance within the hacker community. I tried really hard to photograph a glider, but my camera was too slow.

Life in Motion

Voldemars Johansons, Aero Torrents, 2007

This one was pretty cool as well. Basically, it was just shallow illuminated tanks of water in a darkened room. Large speakers aimed at the water played tones of varying frequency and intensity. The result is a vivid demonstration of sound waves.

These were a couple interesting mechanical pieces by the same artist. The first one is modeled after an old-fashioned music box, only instead of notes, it plays spoken syllables in two voices. The result sounds like an impossible-to-understand whispered conversation. The second device punches holes in patterns in a roll of paper according to “Rule 30,” but the little placard was not clear about the content of Rule 30.

This piece featured an extensive series of pipes and shower heads interconnected with electric motors. The motors would rotate at different rates and move the pipes around. There was something very melancholy and helpless about the shower heads writhing around on the ground.

Sad Showerhead

There were a couple other pieces that are really worth mentioning, but quite difficult for me to photograph. One is Black Stain by Serina Erfjord. At first, I thought it was just a small (3 or 4 cm) black circle on the wall, and I thought it was some lame modern art thing. Then I looked closer and realized it’s actually a dot made of ferrofluid, and therefore totally awesome. Ferrofluid is a mixture of magnetically reactive particles suspended in a liquid, usually an oil of some sort. When exposed to magnetic fields, it looks really sweet. In this case, the fluid on the wall was under the influence of a dynamic electric field from an electromagnet on the other side of the wall, meaning it was continuously changing appearance, becoming more and less liquid, and generally looking cool.

The other hard-to-photograph piece was easily the most computer-related of any of the exhibits. Entitled Semiotic Investigation into Cybernetic Behavior by Jessica Field, it consisted of two different computers/robots. One was equipped with sensors that only detected motion, the other with sensors that could detect distance, but not motion. The two robots would argue and discuss with each other, and try to reach an agreement about what they were seeing. A conversation might go something like this:
Robot 1: There is no movement from the objects. I believe we are perfectly safe.
Robot 2: You fool! Until a moment ago the object was 6 meters away, now it is so close it could almost touch my eyes.

As far as I could tell, the robots never reached anything like a consensus, but their dialog was fairly entertaining. The project reminded me a little bit of the famous Robin Hood and Friar Tuck hack.