Real World

Jame Bedell’s Greener Lighting Design in the Real World

Check out this presentation by lighting designer James Bedell. He originally gave this presentation at an event for the Broadway Green Alliance exploring Greener Lighting Practices in the theater. As a sustainability advocate, James encourages lighting designers to integrate sustainability into their design priorities whenever working on a project.

Virtual Public Art Project

The Virtual Public Art Project is an Augmented Reality platform for the public display of digital works of art. VPAP is the first mobile AR outdoor art experience ever, and maximizes public reception of AR art through compatibility with both iPhone 3GS and Android phones!

Unlike current AR smart phone utilities that enable users to view a location with an additional layer of information about that location – i.e. information about a restaurant, VPAP creates site-specific sculptures at a location that invite viewers in for close observation from all sides and from multiple perspectives.

Augmented Reality and Public Art

Augmented reality is a view of the physical real-world environment merged with virtual computer-generated imagery in real-time. VPAP merges the real-world physical environment of public spaces around the world with site-specific virtual sculptures that can only be viewed in-the-round using the iPhone 3GS and Android phones when one is at the sculpture’s real-world location.

Virtual Public Art Project.

Video | Feral trade cafe: buying a narrative with your coffee.

Feral Trade Cafe, London from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
A Flip camera video.

It’s interesting to see how the best media art moved on from the idea of creating networks in the virtual world, to seeing how those networks could affect the real world. Early net communities were full of idealism; how far does that ability to change the way we interact with each other spill over into the physical?

Earlier this year I talked to Amy Francheschini about the way ideas from her art practice asFuturefarmers informed the creation of Victory Gardens 2008+ in San Francisco. On Friday I dropped into North London’s HTTP Gallery, where media artists/gallerists Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett have created the Feral Trade Cafe implemeting artist Kate Rich’s Feral Tradenetwork in their gallery space.

The cafe is sourced by real personal trade networks – artists bringing back Turkish Delight from Montenegro or discovering a source of honey in Rotherhithe. By using virtual space to record each trade route, every item you consume in the cafe comes with a  narrative. the bland, impersonal act of trade can suddenly come alive with stories, showing us how the items we buy under the normal rules of trade disconnect us from the world in which we live.

Read Ruth Catlow discussing Catlow and Garrett’s we won’t fly for art at the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology