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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
You&Me-isms / part I
Boris Petrovsky
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Drawing on historical technologies, such as optical telegraphs, and telex or display systems such as Nixie tubes, “You&Me-isms” – as a media system – is a cyberpunk communication machine with very distinct features: 440 neon characters have been woven into a 50-square-meter, multi-layered carpet that for users becomes a playable interactive matrix of illuminated signs.
Via SMS, Twitter and special input terminals, users can enter messages of up to 160 characters and read them as each character lights up sequentially in the matrix. The Internet reacts to each user message with a reply. Messages appear to materialize in the neon tubes, before they disappear again like apparitions.
Yet the information isn’t lost: the messages are stored on the project website where they may be read, rated and played back virtually in a simulation or in the matrix itself. The writing does not occur linearly in space and time: as each message is displayed, the parameters are varied in real-time via random control. And so unpredictable layouts are created in different typefaces and character/word routes. By “ascribing” messages, the user literally gives the tangle of material, lines and characters structure and with words makes linguistic sense – or nonsense.
At the same time these messages overwrite the inventory of characters, which is revealed as they light up, as well as its origin as material used in the illuminated advertisements of commercialized public space.
And so for one luminous moment, in an interplay of communication and material, “You&Me-isms” becomes the artwork of the user. The visitors’ expectations and ascriptions of meaning are thrown back on them and into their perceptual, conceptual and theoretical apparatuses. As users, their activities are not only an integral part of the process but also a “conditio sine qua non”.
Links: http://youandme-isms.net
Via SMS, Twitter and special input terminals, users can enter messages of up to 160 characters and read them as each character lights up sequentially in the matrix. The Internet reacts to each user message with a reply. Messages appear to materialize in the neon tubes, before they disappear again like apparitions.
Yet the information isn’t lost: the messages are stored on the project website where they may be read, rated and played back virtually in a simulation or in the matrix itself. The writing does not occur linearly in space and time: as each message is displayed, the parameters are varied in real-time via random control. And so unpredictable layouts are created in different typefaces and character/word routes. By “ascribing” messages, the user literally gives the tangle of material, lines and characters structure and with words makes linguistic sense – or nonsense.
At the same time these messages overwrite the inventory of characters, which is revealed as they light up, as well as its origin as material used in the illuminated advertisements of commercialized public space.
And so for one luminous moment, in an interplay of communication and material, “You&Me-isms” becomes the artwork of the user. The visitors’ expectations and ascriptions of meaning are thrown back on them and into their perceptual, conceptual and theoretical apparatuses. As users, their activities are not only an integral part of the process but also a “conditio sine qua non”.
Links: http://youandme-isms.net
Programming: Georg Nagel; graphic design: Nina Martens (DE). http://www.stereomorph.net
This project was exhibited at Kunstraum Kreuzlingen (CH) and Kulturzentrum Konstanz (DE) in conjunction with the City of Konstanz’s 2009 Year of Science. It received assistance and financing from the European Fund for Regional Development, the Swiss federal government’s Interreg IV program, and other associates. Additional support was provided by Klinger und Hansen Neon (DE).
This project was exhibited at Kunstraum Kreuzlingen (CH) and Kulturzentrum Konstanz (DE) in conjunction with the City of Konstanz’s 2009 Year of Science. It received assistance and financing from the European Fund for Regional Development, the Swiss federal government’s Interreg IV program, and other associates. Additional support was provided by Klinger und Hansen Neon (DE).
Boris Petrovsky (DE), born in 1967, is a freelance visual and media artist. He studied at the University of Fine Arts (HfBK) in Hamburg, under Prof. Henning Christiansen, and graduated in 1997. Since 2007 Boris Petrovsky has lived and worked in Constance, Germany.