The Project for Urban Intimacy
The Project for Urban Intimacy offers projects that transgress and counter the rationality and efficiency that infect our cities. Many of these projects seek to alter your daily encounters: moving them past the brief, efficient, and cordial towards the poetic, delayed, or absurd.

The Urban Parlour Games are a set of updated Victorian parlour games. Like the original games they are based off of (and for the most part - carry the same name as) they encourage more intimate forms of interaction. From the Urban Games website you are able to download materials that will let you take these games "to the streets".

Transitory Contact is a collective representation of the intercourse and exchange that takes place, often unnoticed, as we travel innocently to and from work. This piece uses the internet to gather and distribute these stories of contact in order to create a growing collective map. On the website, the user scrolls over a different city area bus maps to read about the encounters that took place along the corresponding bus lines. Additionally, the user is encouraged to deposit their own accounts on the web site so that they can become part of this collective document. The end result is the creation of a secret social map that can be laid over our everyday physical one.

Sleep is a viewer built performance using one's self and a sleeping computer. Your computer accompanies you as you drift off to sleep. Its noises intermix with yours, lulling you and sending transmissions to you.

Solfataras is an on-line collaborative play. Scenes are proposed through photos, a printed manual, and user input to a website. Participants may go online to view instructions and meeting times and places left by myself or other participants. Likewise, there is an on-line forum for individuals to create their own scenes. These can be acted out independently or be extended as invitations to myself and others.

Picasso

I like Picasso - he is my brother,
but times changes and
we must change with them.
Let`s smile, laughing
about our past -
it is best hope for our future.

The Presence of Absence

In Peter Horvath's films for the web a multi screened, quasi-narrative unfolds with the participation of the viewer. Many of his pieces examine family histories, the city as organism, matters of the heart and the complexities of connection or disconnection with others. His audiovisual reveries share some of the open-ended qualities of the films of Chris Marker, Jonas Mekas and Tarkovsky's The Mirror. With The Presence Of Absence the iconic face, etched with opaque information, is the key to navigating the site, just as we often read into the face of others for signs of recognition.

From Marble to Pixels

This work sets out to create a web project based upon data that allow a reflection on the image representation and the exchange of information within a metropolis. This departs from the premise that a city, the size of Sao Paulo for example, can only be partially experienced, in a fragmented, multiple fashion. It may belong to one or more nuclei with such experiences building distinct narratives (and distinct urban meanings).
Visual information about urban space seeks to reduce the scale of an image to one intelligible whole. It is however, a work involving the concretization of a point to view, which at first presents itself inventively, demanding a cognitive process elaborated by the interpreter. What might occur with the reiteration of a figurative format is that the latter, shedding its informative load, comes to be perceived as the object itself. It is the persuasive power of metaphors and more intensely, of symbols, which at the same time makes use of perceptive violence preventing the separation of sign and object, thus subjecting all perceptions to one single framework.

Continued reading From Marble to Pixels : Influenza - Raquel Rennó and Rafael Marchetti...

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BIO: a post-human despair

BIO: a post-human despair is the first photofilm developed under the concept of chronocollage.
BIO is introduced into the contemporary problematic from which no human being shall succeed to flee nor scape, and from which there shall be no return. Human "essence" reveals itself ephemeral when cultural memory has the power to modify genetic memory, and then a crossroad appears to Humanity: Shall there be a choice?

Body Language Sequences

In the Body Language Sequences I walk through the streets of Antwerp City, to investigate how people are using 'silent language' and 'personal space'. I am interested in the temporality of speed, acceleration, slowness and pause. How 'sub-movements' are expressed. How motion precedes emotion. Up to 90% of all of our communication is nonverbal. The direct actions of the human nervous system are usually subconscious, instinctively meaningful and more honest than verbal communication. Bodies do not lie. The 'subliminal' messages of the body are playing a major role in how we relate to others and how they see us. Our bodies are the most public signals of our identities, and private reminders of who we are. We imagine by remembering, or vice versa. In the ritual quality of interpersonal actions there is a hidden code of behavioural patterns, through which hierarchical and social power structures emerge. The body language sequences of the human figure in motion, are a display of our motives in the flow of time.

The Body Language Sequences are a cinematic study of visualising and discovering time patterns of interpersonal behaviour. The revealed moments are giving an insight in the instinctive feelings, attitudes, expressions, gestures and emotions of human communication. In a series of experimental ultra-short films, each looped sequence draws attention to its own syntax —a rhythmic pattern of body language in motion. These visible acts of meaning are a search into what people tell with their bodies. During the montage I saw the world differently. I became aware that I was also documenting the diversity of changes in life style as an emerging element in society. The re-entered world became transposed, intensified, electrified. It was my intention to explore the micro-motions of human acts, extracted from the flux of life, to convey a message which brings an articulation of visual thinking into play.

Shadows of Computers

Shadows of Computers is a series of eight short flash animations which tell the story of Professor Bulwer, Inspector Ashe and the critic M.de Sarriac who are plunged into the heart of an incredible investigation where they encounter humanoids with seaweed hair, dreaming microorganisms and oppressive ancient things.

Surrounded by a hypnotic soundtrack, Shadows of computers take us into a graphic world somewhere between film noir, manga and medieval iconography

Destroy Evil

Please do your morally upright part and: destroyevil.com. Created the night after George W Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech. Official launch July 4, 2002. Evil animations added daily. Deliberately on-going. By July 4th 2003 site will contain 365 pages. Urls dated by day: destroyevil.com/january_10 etc.

Excerpt from Artist's Statement/Press Release:
'When asked how long she will work on destroying evil and why on the day of its launch, destroyevil.com was still a 'work in progress', America's Favorite Lady abruptly responded "Look, the American people must understand that I have no timetable in mind. I don't have a calendar on my desk that says by a certain date or by this Super Bowl, all this business has got to end." Bush went on to add, "That's not how it works! That's what the EVIL doers want. They want me to quit, because they think I'm impatient. But it's not going to happen. It can't happen!"

99 Meditations on Chords and Colors
(Internet Explorer only)
Classical music has been created in an informationally poor environment. The people from 17th century and before were not acquainted with noise. The loudest sounds were thunder and church bell. In such a world, any new musical information must have been refreshing and exciting. The 20th century was significantly noisier. The Internet (and our age of informational pollution as well) in general is definitely the noisiest environment so far.
Consequently, the music for the Internet and our century should rather open new empty spaces and create new silences. The understanding of silence expressed by this work is an inner silence that blocks the noise from outside, and a rest from informational bombing.
The work consists of 99 HTML pages. Each page is connected with all the others. Each page is completely filled with one color and plays one chord of unlimited duration. The observer enters and chooses any page out of 99 pages offered. If its atmosphere satisfies him/her, the observer remains there long enough. As the time passes, the perception of individual vibrations of the chord changes. Here, the observer is the one that changes with time, not the music. In any moment, if needed, the observer may choose another page that complies better to the current mood.
The musical result of such an interaction with this work is either one chord or several chords of very long durations, like an electronic "ison" (ison is a long sustained note, often encountered in medieval orthodox church music).

Pages of Madness

Taking the psyche of a mentally ill person - using interplays of text, sound, photographic and video image - it involves trans-media re-conceptions of concrete poetry and the ciné-roman, investigations in narrative space and construction, and explorations of notions of cyberspace in relation to Asian ideas of void.

The exhibition provides an experimental response to medical studies which conclude that because of racism black people in the U.K. are many times more likely than white to experience mental illness. Professor Robin Murray, from the (British) Institute of Psychiatry, states that the experience of black people in the U.K. almost drives them mad.

Condition Red
ISEA 2004, the International Electronic Art Biennale, took place on a ferry, moving between the Baltic capitals of Tallinn, Stockholm and Helsinki.
This game was commissioned for the event as apart of the ICOLS Arms Fair. Passenger were invited to particpate in a game where winning was not necessarily the most favourable outcome:
To mark the ICOLS Arms Fair, you are invited to attempt to sink the ISEA ferry armed only with small arms and a speedboat packed with high explosives on a three minute timer.
By participating, you become not only the protagonist, but, if you successfully carry out your task, one of the victims of this 'terror' attack.
Alert condition is RED and you have changed the status of the ISEA ferry to that of 'terror target'.

The Central City

The form and content of this work is a visual world of the city and its structure. Networks of information technology are contrasted with organic networks and city networks. The city becomes an organic network of grids and diagrams. I wanted to develop analogies for the organic identity of the city as an urban community and make links with electronic networks and virtual communities. This organic interplay is contrasted with man made structures, as well as patterns and forms of urban design. The form and content of this work is a visual world of the city and its structure. Each aspect of city life seems to demonstrate specific characteristics, which can be developed into individual parts of the labyrinth, making up the images that will be used. The city has moved from metropolis to megalopolis to the ecumenopolis

Bien Commun

biencommun.com is a Web site with an interface showing twenty four patterns based on biologic cells representations. This interface allows one to manipulate a Flash™ animation program, without prior knowledge of this software. It offers the possibility to amend and instantly visualize its properties, following one's own feelings.