The 2nd TakeAway Festival hosted in the Dana centre is presenting an exhibition of a mix of interactive DIY projects created by a group of innovative international artists.
The Austrian Lukas Berg is introducing the “Human Tool” interactive installation. Birk posits the notion of a human avatar as a tool for vicarious control, not in a game environment but in reality itself with the help of visitors to the exhibition. With a web cam, projector, computer, screens and audio tools, “Human Tool” transforms remote sensory information into data. A must see in this years TakeAway extravaganza.
TakeAway veterans Someth;ng, a London based creative practice, are this year showing their Timelines project. The project is exhibited at Takeaway with the help of sponsorship from Bytemark, Firstserve and Wavetrend. Using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies, Someth;ng have created an interactive environment that is able to record visitor location and other data during the TakeAway festival and this then becomes part of a festival scrapbook and photo album.
The resulting archive system not only offers an added value to TakeAway participants but also engages them with past and present highlights of the whole event.
Dune & Devil; is a project by Grischinka Teufl a.k.a Georg Russegger and Tina van Duyne, who split their time between Tokyo, Vienna and Germany and are very much in keeping with their cosmopolitan lifestyle. The online application produces a sociographic mix of data from two geographical locations. This unique geosocial application combines GPS(Global Positioning System), audiovisual media, mobile technologies, telecommunication tools and specialized software, to synchronize two concurrent urban experiences. The two individuals, one located in Austria, the other in Japan offer us an elision of their very particular DIY habitats.
Italian Matteo Menapace who is on the verge of finishing his Masters Degree at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design is introducing his thesis Project “NooSpeak”. The online application, which manipulates data provided by a very popular search engine, takes certain aspects of the typical searching experience to develop a different form of verbal communication between the user and the software agent, a kind of chat facility between the user and the search engine. “NooSpeak” questions the assumed transparency of a search engine both in terms of content and expression. With search engines being such standard tools in today’s Web environment, Menapace’s work is a timely reminder of their influence on behaviour and language.
Rocca Gutteridge from Edinburgh, is presenting his “Touching Apples” sculptural installation. He describes his project as follows: “When the gradually rotating paintbrush strokes the apple’s dehydrating, rubbery skin a copper switch is activated, expelling intriguing and unnerving real- life, pre-recorded human ’slurps’.” Gutteridge’s machine sculpture debuts at the TakeAway exhibition 2007.
London based designer Suki Beg is exploring the interaction between environments and humans. Her interactive route narrative “As the Ice set” taking place on Whitechapel’s Commercial road, presented as an audio guide, accompanies the listener through the past and present of the area’s vibrant history.
Parisian self-proclaimed media mutant, founder of the “The Mass Culture Movement (mcmparis)”, radio DJ and video artist Xavier Faltot is delighting us with his “Transmediaquizz” and “Videodrone” visual attack. He engages in newsworthy topics such as ecology, corporate power, mass culture, America and controlled society. Faltot sees his video creations as tactical video weapons, a contemporary aesthetic to catch the audience and work with the subconscious mind to embed powerful ideas and to create or dethrone ideologies in post-MTV style.
Last but not least Dave Miller, who also took part in last year’s festival, will present an online comic strip generator. Miller tells stories through images and text-based works, mixing topical social and political issues, trends and events, with his own experiences and life-views. His generator allows visitors to become author, collaborator, and even a character within the story. Participants are able to add their own comments, gossip, drawings and can also develop storylines. All the input created is mixed with dialogue generated through distortion of live news taken from web feeds. In true DIY fashion visitors will be able to take home the material they have put together.
