For the past year, we have been working feverishly behind the scenes on our new film (What is) the White Matter? The film combines into a 50-minute package everything we hold dear at Breach Candy Group: creative use of new digital technology, innovative ideas, visual aesthetics, working in difficult locations with real people, originality and thinking outside conventions.

The film was shot in entirety over 10 days (and over 40 degree temperatures) in Varanasi, India.  We used only cheap HDSLR cameras and a GoPro underwater camera for the shoot. What normally involves a budget of tens of thousands of dollars, we were able to squeeze into a guerilla film-making shoestring production that innovated with ideas and technology rather than with getting stuck on funding.  We will be writing here more about how this is possible when you believe more in your ideas rather than established models of getting things done.

We are, needless to say, delighted with what we have achieved.  You can see the trailer below.

Besides, a comment from the film’s sneak preview makes it all worth it:

“Well that was a proper mindbender! Above all, I was drawn into the mood…the soundscapes and such created almost a space to itself, it was the sound of the ‘void’ in motion…?…it certainly places the viewer in the position of “K” , and the imagery in time lapse and other styles created a sense of transcendence/atmosphere for me that was otherworldly even while being very much in the world…I enjoyed the the intermixing of the city-history, the bending of time and space, the aura of claustrophobia and even mortal dread, they all combined into a visual treat for the senses…”

We will be posting showing times shortly on our film website at www.whatiswhitematter.com.

BCG has been giving a bit of our expertise to a community arts project in Wood Green, London.  The project – titled Intergenerational Jukebox – brought together professional artists, actors, youngsters and retired people to perform and create a musical together at a community centre. This show was based on the life stories of mostly Indian immigrants and their long journey from India to first Kenya and then finally the UK.  It told stories of youth, travel love; but also stories of displacement, sorrow and loss.

We performed the piece to a full house two nights in a row at the Asian Centre in Wood Green. Our role in the show was to provide support for script development, visual design, live visual projections as well as the sound design for the show.  You can see some of the visual examples here:

And you can see the full show video below:

Our latest project looks at the different ways we can use emerging digital technology to help understand the environmental changes taking place today especially in rural Asia and Africa.  That is, if proper ecological management and knowledge around climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, urbanisation etc will be one of the biggest challenges of the future, how can then our unique style of research, technological prototyping and art experiments help us prepare for what is to come. The project that we are launching – at this point tentatively called The Internet of Nature (or Project ION) – will therefore combine classical research, technology and experimental art around what we believe to be some of the key topics and themes of the emerging future.  How could such work then help us predict and prepare for the changes that will be reality, say, 2, 5, or 10 years from now?  What is needed?

We have already started work around these important questions and hope to expand to more areas with increased time and resources:

1. BOOK CHAPTER/CONFERENCE: We are next presenting at the “Between mainstream and the fringe: environmental activism in a globalised world” conference on December 9th and 10, 2010 in Delhi.  This conference is co-organised by University of Heidelberg in collaboration with Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Milia Islamia University in New Delhi.  We will also write a book chapter for the conference book, which will outline explicitly some of the theoretical and practical issues that we are dealing with around environment, research and digital media.

2. MCO2.  We have been already working for the past year on research and a technological prototype around a mobile-based solution for climate change  targeted especially towards the millions of smallholder farmers in Asia and Africa.  The project is done in collaboration with environmental scientists and farmers in Ethiopia. The following description gives a good overview of the kind of work/research we are developing:

CHASING THE LONG TAIL OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The core idea behind mCo2 is simple: you provide us with the details of a tree or a plant – we calculate the amount of carbon dioxide tied into its biomass, its change over time and its current market value. On top of this simple concept, all kinds of services from agroforestry management tools to carbon offset trade platforms to even environmental gardening communities can be built.

Current approaches to climate change so far, we believe, have been too focused on reducing the harmful effects of consumption, our so-called carbon footprint. This, however, neglects the fact that most people in the world are not only consumers – they are also producers. This is to say, they are involved, in one way or another, in the production of plants and trees into which carbon dioxide is tied in complex ways. This applies as much to the millions of smallholder farmers in rural Asia and Africa as it does to hobbyist gardeners in US and Europe. Given this fact, then, how could we reach out to this ‘long tail’ of climate change: the millions and millions of people involved in the production of biomass for their livelihoods and who are now increasingly connected by the rapid spread of mobile phones and the Internet? Moreover, how could we best encourage the positive effects such activities can have both on the environment but, as importantly, for the livelihoods of the people involved?

Our solution is simple. By combining innovative web & mobile-based technology with sophisticated science, we are able to develop new tools that make this paradigm shift possible. The low carbon economy of the future will be as much production-based as it will be consumption-based – our mission is to make this possible. We are currently testing the demo version of mCo2 together with a project working with farmers in rural Ethiopia, of which you can see the first version here being tested out.

Please read more about this here at New York Times or at our prototype website HERE.

3. INTERNET OF NATURE – THE BOOK. We are eventually also planning to write an experimental theory-technology-art book around these themes.  The planned book would of course contain some of the the philosophical-theoretical foundations around the concept of “the Internet of Nature” but also examples of the technological and art experiments that help us best understand this “archeology of the future.”

We are publishing a book chapter that sketches out the kind of work we are doing in a slightly more academic setting.  The book Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change is published by Routledge and its fancy description at Amazon says it “starts with the premise that it is within the mass media where we can best understand how this change is imagined. From a kaleidoscope of perspectives the book interrogates this articulation and the myriad forms it takes – across India’s newsrooms, television sets, cinema halls, mobile phones and computer screens.”

Our co-written chapter is called “Emerging Digital Cultures in India: Theory and Practice” is described in the book as follows:

In the eighth chapter, ‘Theory and Practice in Emerging Digital Cultures in India’, Soumyadeep Paul and Matti Pohjonen look at how rapid changes in the digital media has problematised both the academic research into these technologies as well as the practice behind creating them. Because of the speed of development, the chapter argues, we need to come up with a new method of ‘creative experimentation’ to keep up with the pace of change. The problem is both theoretical and practical. From the theory perspective, the slow turnover of academic publishing and conservative frameworks of analysis prevent us from seeing what might be new and innovative and relevant in especially theemerging digital cultures in India. From the practice perspective, the rapid development of such new technologies and the necessity to constantly innovate, does not allow for structured ways of developing new technologies. The article therefore argues for a more collaborative approach where such theoretical and practice-based work can escape the ‘double bind’ of theory-praxis by working together to create and criticise both how new digital technologies are developed and what their broader social implications might be. Focusing especially on a software project the two authors havebeen involved in, the article concludes that it is exactly such collaborative theory-practice experiments that are better suited to capture this object of change rather than older frameworks of analysis, based on slow reflection and analytical certainties.

In addition, Matti here is one of the editors of the book and has written its introduction.  He has also provided the cover image for the book and compiled a set of illustrative pictures for the book together with photographer Kazumuddin Ahmed.  Both have included six pictures exemplifying the theme of mass media and change in India.

“Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…”

I have been wanting to play with Processing canvases that reflect one’s social state on the web, and I finally got around to it.

Above is a screen grab of my Processing canvas – the logic is simple: dip into twitter search and streaming api, and as an individual’s twitter retweets / mentions are found, reveal a bit more of his persona.

The revelation of the above image (my own) is done through a simple algorithm – start from a single origin, and fork out slowly based on rate of twitter references, with the growth rate being directly linked to the number of retweets / mentions.

The canvas, slow in emergence for me, works best for twitter celebs.

I am still tweaking the visual style, and the underlying logic, but I find the idea of visualizing identity emergence extremely compelling.

For the past six months Matti and Surpreet have been providing some BCG expertise (as the digital artist & the technology poet) to an innovative UK-based community art project in Bradford.  The project  Sounds Like Graffiti combined audio plays, rap music, theatre, drama, video, digital storytelling and mobile technology to come up with a new innovative way of doing location-based art and guerilla broadcasting in public spaces using the potential of new and accessible and cheap digital technology.   See some of the coverage for the project HERE and HERE.

Another description of the project reads as follows:

Since February, 2010, we, a group of international artists from the UK, Finland and India have been working together with young people in Bradford, UK, to create short sounds plays audiences can listen to via their mobile phones in one of the city’s most historic landmarks. This cross-media project – titled Sounds Like Graffiti – uses a diverse range of methods from participatory theatre, digital art and video, rap and electronic music to produce two minute audio plays that reflect the lives of the youth in the city notorious for its crime, poverty and ethnic tension. The final result, a 35-minute play, aims to help the young people of Bradford’s most deprived communities to express themselves through creative writing, audio production, mobile telephony and audiovisual forms as well as to celebrate a new generation of young artists emerging from the city.

This art project will finally culminate in a weekend-long locative media exhibition in one of the oldest landmarks in the city, Lister Park, where the members of the public will be able to walk through the park and tune into these short episodes using their mobile phones (as well as through an online multimedia exhibition). The story follows the adventures of one girl sent out to find her wayward brother. On her quest, she walks through the park and gets lost. The journey takes her through a series of fantastical adventures mixing the story of Odysseus with elements of the tough life young people face in Bradford today. The public walking through the park will be able to move closely together with the story through the different locations while listening to these adventures being played out either via their mobile phones of with the help of volunteer tour guides armed with

mp3 players and speakers.

Few summer days in London this year (2010) were bright enough to warrant some IR photography experiments, and this is a result of that.

Olympus E-520 remains a superb camera for IR. As described in great detail here by Wrotniak,

…the E-510, while showing an average (for a digital SLR) or even low (in absolute terms) sensitivity to infrared, can be quite useful in IR applications because of the live, electronic image preview. The low IR sensitivity is partially offset by low noise levels, certainly up to ISO 400, and generally pleasing nature of produced images. No ghosting or fogging is definitely a plus.

All limitations aside, this camera turns out to be the best infrared performer among digital SLRs I have seen so far (August, 2007), unless you spend an extra $300-$500 for a filter surgery on one of your bodies. With this, I may be doing more infrared than ever this year.

The additional tweaks I did are with the white-balance settings – rest of it is almost without any post-production.

Equipment used: Olympus E-520, Hoya R72 (filter)

Whenever I get time away from the more classical research- or development-oriented work, it is good to keep up with the latest developments in Machinima and other virtual reality and/or game-engine methods for art and design.  While for some more purists, this admittedly sounds geeky and probably as exciting as a can of tuna, I have found that there is quite a lot that can be done and said using these “machines.”

The primary problem with more classical animation, drawing and painting (and 3D) is that it is very time-consuming.  Being sometimes peripatetically cross-displine and cross-media, I am interested in doing things in almost every possible format that I get my hands on.  But, say, if I wanted to create a digital character with some facial expressions and mix it with some photography or video to get some idea across, doing these with the old ways would take days to complete.  A simple expressive character, in the end, is rather difficult and laborious to create properly and with style.

Now take a game engine such as Spore.  What these virtual reality and/or game engines allow one to do is quickly create a prototype of some idea or another — develop an “element” that can be used to explore an idea at its initial stages.  It is not perfect by any means; you do not get full control of what you get.  You get instead a rather rich set of parameters to play around with but this is still not the quasi-complete freedom you get with doing things analogically. However, what you do is get possibilities do things that would not have been available before unless you wanted to spend days and days creating every little element yourself from beginning.

So a part of the Uncanny Valley experiment is to develop a workflow that allows the quick production of such “mixules” and / or sketches that can be later worked with to develop more complete projects and designs.  I have played around with Spore mostly here as its the most recent of these games but will probably do my rounds around Sims, Second Life etc and whatever will be useful.  Each of these sketches have taken — on average — about 30 minutes to complete.  Most of that to try to work shadows etc (though in some pictures I have not spend enough time on this admittedly…)

The theory here could perhaps broadly be said a play around “locative media” and “ubiquituos computing” where the overlap of virtual and non-virtual reality is predicted to be the next evolution of the Internet. I am especially interested in conceptualizing the blurry notion of reality between the virtual and non-virtual as an experiment in both content and form.  Something close to evolutionary art but not quite.  I will do a series based on this eventually when the idea crystallizes but meanwhile just working out some of the techniques here — also thinking how some of these engines could be perhaps used to do short videos etc.

During the 2009 winter protest in London – Gaza, G8 – I wanted to push the boundaries of digital photography one step further from what I had done before.   I used here an experimental combination of HDR photography, matte painting and other digital effects to come up with an effect that captured the dramatic nature of being involved in one of these protests where emotions run high.  I called the series “Apocalypse tourism” as this is perhaps the best way to see a city: camera in hand, witnessing the outburst of chaos, unpredictability and emotion. I am working here towards coming up with a semi-random style of mixed media (photography / painting with light / painting on canvas) to master this new style I want to develop.  The idea is to make myself eventually the printer for these photographs, that is, transform these pictures, which started out of a camera finally into large-style paintings where the boundary between the machine algorithm and the human vision/hand is blurred beyond recognition.