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After receiving three grants: from the Council for the Arts at MIT, SHASS’s Peter de Florez Fund for Humor and from Eyebeam, the WoW Pod will be exhibited during the MIXER event in New York!
Cati Vaucelle, Steve Shada, Marisa Jahn’s WoW Pod is an immersive architectural space that provides and anticipates all life needs of the World of Warcraft player. Outfitted with toilet throne, hydration system, and meals at the ready, the WoW Pod makes daily human function possible without ever stepping away from the game. In addition, these tasty meals are cooked via a cookset that connects a hotplate to the computer, allowing the player to let their World of Warcraft avatar know when the meal is ready to eat.
The official call!
MIXER: EXPO
Eyebeam presents an alternate “World’s Fair” with airborne surveillance balloons, guerilla media towers, and computerized prayer booths. A temporary village occupied by a dozen creatively engineered pavilions, performances, and DJ sets by Tim Sweeney and Juan Maclean.
Friday, March 6 & Saturday, March 7, 2009
9PM – 2AM
Tickets: $15 per night in advance; $30 for both nights in advance at www.eyebeam.org; $20 per night at the door.
Eyebeam 540 W. 21st St. (btw 10th and 11th Aves.)
Limited press passes available: RSVP: rebecca@eyebeam.org
Installations will remain on view at Eyebeam, Saturday, March 7, Noon – 6PM, with free entry.
New York City, February 20, 2009 – MIXER, Eyebeam’s quarterly event series dedicated to showcasing leading artists in the fields of live audiovisual performance, interactive and participatory art, will present its fifth iteration on Friday, March 6 – Saturday, March 7, 2009. Using the World’s Fair as the framework, Eyebeam will transform its rugged warehouse space into a temporary village of utopian pavilions for a two-night extravaganza called MIXER: EXPO.
Both evenings will include musical guests: Tim Sweeney (Friday, Midnight – 2AM) and Juan Maclean (Saturday, Midnight – 2AM); multimedia pavilions by Angela Co + Aeolab, Anakin Koenig, Chris Jordan, and Caspar Stracke, and Not An Alternative; interactive installations by Taeyoon Choi and Cheon pyo Lee, The Institute for Faith-Based Technology, Mark Shepard, Cati Vaucelle, Steve Shada, and Marisa Jahn; and fashion performances by Di Mainstone.
MIXER: EXPO – Background
From London in 1851 to Chicago in 1893 and New York in 1939, the World’s Fair has been an influential cultural spectacle that promised a utopian “world of tomorrow” while packaging and promoting the national and corporate agendas of the day.
MIXER: EXPO is an alternate take on “World’s Fair” expositions, a faded cultural phenomenon that set the tone for urban planning in the 19th and 20th centuries. The World’s Fair also championed the philosophy of better living through technology, presenting innovative strategies that continue to resonate through contemporary life and leisure – from shopping malls and theme parks to natural history and science museums; broadcast media and exhibit display to sell consumer products, technological innovations, and nationalistic ideologies.
Like the best science fiction and social satire, MIXER: EXPO constructs a fictitious place in order to examine a world that might have been, that has come to be, or that might be on the horizon.
Musical Acts
Friday, Midnight – 2AM
Tim Sweeney (Beats in Space) is a respected international club DJ, remixer, and host of Beats In Space, a weekly radio show mixed live every Tuesday night on WNYU. Sweeney rocks the party with a mix of electro, disco and No Wave.
http://www.beatsinspace.net/
Saturday, Midnight – 2AM
Juan Maclean (DFA Records) first garnered attention in the early 90s as the guitarist/keyboardist for electro-punk band Six Finger Satellite, but has gone on to wider acclaim in the last decade as a solo artist on DFA Records (founded by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem). Maclean’s recordings combine his multi-instrumental virtuosity with tight beat production inspired by house, techno, and funk classics. His DJ sets dig deeply into the same vault of musical riches.
http://www.myspace.com/thejuanmaclean
Installations / Participating Artists
Taeyoon Choi and Cheon pyo Lee’s sculptural installation and performance,
Grey Belt tells the story of an undiscovered nation located in a demilitarized zone. The land of Grey Zone is the world’s purest natural site, secretly inhabited by mutant animals, abandoned war machines and the exiled living in a zero-gravity landscape.
http://www.tyshow.org
Angela Co + Aeolab’s Weather Making Balloon utilizes NASA materials technology for its own “Space Mission”. The metalized thermoplastic skin of the Balloon functions as a mirrored surface through which attendees can be monitored and captured on film. Playful interaction with the responsive surface of the puffy, cloud-like Balloon masks its primary function as a surveillance tool.
http://www.studio-co.com
http://www.aeolab.com
The Institute of Faith-Based Technology, or InFaBat™, was founded in 2006 by techno-theologists Aaron Meyers and Jeff Crouse to bring religion into the digital age. Praying@Home is the name of a suite of technologies developed by InFaBat™ and installed for use at Eyebeam, which is designed to broadcast a worshipper’s “Prayer Signature” directly to God. Unlike humans, who need to take breaks from praying to fulfill biological needs, computers need no breaks, resulting in 24/7 prayer output. Praying@Home represents a revolutionary breakthrough in the field of Digital Prayer Technology.
http://www.ifbt.info
Media artists Anakin Koenig, Chris Jordan, Caspar Stracke pay tribute to the “retro-futurist” utopian dwellings of the 20th Century with TripleFlow, a large-scale inflatable architectural structure. Referencing Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, the three-chamber biomorphic dwelling creates a fluid, immerse experience through responsive lighting, and live audio and video performance by Jordan and Stracke.
http://www.dennisdelzotto.com/
http://www.seej.net
http://www.videokasbah.net/
The nomadic-citizen of the world is never lost because she is always at home. Di Mainstone’s SHAREWEAR questions this utopian ideal, through a performance that incorporates a set of modular dresses that explore our desire for a connection to “home” in an increasingly transient world. Referencing familiar icons of the home, such as the armrest on our favorite sofa, SHAREWARE is comprised of a pair of modular electronic dresses housed in crates that are unpacked, assembled on each performer’s body, and then physically slotted to one another, unleashing the potential for intimate interactions.
http://sharewear.projects.v2.nl
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7kc41dKjA1c
The Subsumption Machine by activist collective Not An Alternative is a skeletal multi-level media tower hacked with video projections, TV monitors, billboards, stage sets, live video feeds, and surveillance cameras. As the audience walks through the chaotic architectural structure, they are captured on camera and unwittingly inserted into the media stream. The Subsumption Machine represents the postmodern dystopian world as a biopolitical “prison house of language”, and in a Warholian gesture, flattens all images into a non-hierarchical supersaturated mix.
http://eyebeammixer.pbwiki.com/Proposed-Pavilion
Hertzian Rain is a wireless audio broadcast system designed by Mark Shepard that responds to bodily movement. Just as land and water are limited resources, Hertzian Rain demonstrates the limits of the electromagnetic spectrum. Wearing wireless headphones and carrying an umbrella covered with electromagnetic-shielding fabric, users walk around the exhibition space tuning into an audio broadcast of a live music performance while creating interference into the audio broadcast signal with the umbrella, and as a result destroy the shared resource. Live performances will be provided by Doug Barret, Craig Shepard, Daniel Perlin, Al Laufeld and others.
http://www.andinc.org/v3/hertzianrain
Cati Vaucelle, Steve Shada, Marisa Jahn’s WoW Pod is an immersive architectural space that provides and anticipates all life needs of the World of Warcraft player. Outfitted with toilet throne, hydration system, and meals at the ready, the WoW Pod makes daily human function possible without ever stepping away from the game. In addition, these tasty meals are cooked via a cookset that connects a hotplate to the computer, allowing the player to let their World of Warcraft avatar know when the meal is ready to eat.
www.marisajahn.com
www.steveshada.com
http://www.architectradure.com
Tickets: $15 per night in advance; $30 for both nights in advance; $20 per night at the door. For more info and to purchase tickets visit www.eyebeam.org.
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Founded in 1997, Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital experimentation. It is a lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with the larger culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its output to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution.
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
Technorati Tags: art, interaction-design, world of warcraft, technology, installation
