Category: Art

DATE – 2001
DISCIPLINE – art
MEDIUM – Telepresence robotic installation
STATUS – Exhibited simultaneously at Interaccess in Toronto and the WAAG in Amsterdam
WEBLINKS
https://openlab.ncl.ac.uk/publicweb/publications/L-paper227.pdf

The LiveForm:Telekinetics (LF:TK) project re-imagines the familiar objects and utensils of our everyday social spaces as an electronically activated play environment, capable of transmitting over distance the physical presence and social gesture that comprise such a vital element of human interaction. Furniture, decorations, cutlery, doodads, and bric-a-brac come to life as both kinetic art and telecommunication interfaces, building a complex arrangement of movement and gesture. Imagine a shared creation, a social ritual, a dance through objects, an electric dinner-table that is played.The Liveform Telekinetics exhibition was funded through a Media Arts grant from the Canada Council of the Arts.
Created by Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran
Guest artists, Graham Smith, Jim Ruxton, Veronica Verkley,

DATE – 2000
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Telepresence robotic installation
STATUS – Displayed simultaneously at the Flykingon Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden and Interaccess, Toronto, Canada
WEBLINKS
http://interaccess.org/exhibition/pandoras-box
http://www.year01.com/archive/issue6/pandora.html
http://victoriascott.org/index.php/portfolio/occult-chemistry/
http://www.year01.com/archive/issue6/victoria.mov
http://www.year01.com/archive/issue6/amand.mov

This exhibition was curated by Graham Smith and Dinka Pignon and for the first time linked 2 Cybercity models in 2 cities via IP based video links. The first model was located at the Flykingon gallery in Stockholm Sweden and the second at Interaccess gallery in Toronto Canada. Each model had its own robot that was linked to the other space thus creating a situation where people could control the far end robot yet the robot in their space was only controllable from the other space.

ARTISTS
Chrsitian Bock, Joe Davis, Francis LeBoutillier, Victoria Scott, Thomas Liljenberg, Kent Tankred, Dinka Pignon

DATE – 1995
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Interactive robotic installation
STATUS – Displayed at the Net@works exhibition, National Centre of the Arts Mexico City
WEBLINKS
http://www.brookemediaarts.ca/exhibition/networks/gallery/smith.html
http://www.brookemediaarts.ca/exhibition/networks/gallery/curatorial.html#smith

In the 1994 cultural exchange between Canada and Mexico, the exhibition “Los Colores de la Voluntad”, a meeting of the minds of new media and computer artists initiated the concept of an exchange exhibition from Toronto to Mexico City of Computer Art, New Media and Technology. In the following documents and visual support material you will see how this idea has unfolded into a powerful display of work from Toronto, interconnecting it with an international multi-media exhibition from one of Torontos major institutions.
Selected works from TechnoArt, curated by Faye Greaves, of the Ontario Science Centre and Derrick de Kerckhove of the McLuhan Program, along with a collective of Canadian artists from Toronto curated by Steev Morgan, “Net@Works”, create the next cultural exchange art exhibition that travels to Mexico from Canada. Included in the program is a lecture series comprised of 6 artists from TechnoArt and “Net@Works”. They will travel to Mexico to install their work and give lectures and slide presentations about their research and process and Canadian Computer Art, New Media and Technology.

We have been invited to exhibit this work at Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City. This is a new institution that opened in November of 1994. It houses all of the schools of art in Mexico City, as well as extended courses in all media; and galleries to exhibit the work of national and international artists. We are working with NAFAA-Mexico, and Director Jorge Morales, and sponsored by the Centro MultiMedia at the CNA and Coordinator Andrea di Castro. Jorge was the curator and coordinator of the Mexican art exhibition, “Los Colores de la Voluntad”, and Andrea is a multimedia artist who came to Toronto as an artist and lecturer with Los Colores.

This exhibition is a direct outcome of “Los Colores de la Voluntad”, and an example of how these exchanges can create an ongoing relationship between our two countries and cultures. These events are crossroads, and facilitate new ideas and opportunities for people, artists and institutions of both countries.

This project is the continuation of a series of cultural exchanges between Canada and Mexico sponsored by NAFAA. It is through this kind of artistic interaction and Inter-access’ that our two worlds can bridge the gaps between their differences and build a solid base on which we can begin to grow into the future together.
Director – Eleni Mokas

DATE – 1995
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM
STATUS

This exhibition was exhibited at ISEA in Montreal via a videoconference link Interaccess in Toronto and was linked via ISDN based videoconferencing to numerous sites around the world and allowed the audience to control the robots direction remotely. The Electric Skin exhibition was funded through a Media Arts grant from the Canada Council of the Arts.

ARTISTS
Doug Back, Francis LeBouthillier, Johanna Householder, Simone Jones, Steev Morgan, Jeff Mann, Catherine Orfald, Nancy Nancy Paterson, Kathleen Richardson, Victoria Scott, Graham Smith, Karen Tzventarny, Norman White

DATE – 1988
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Interactive kinetic sculpture
STATUS – Display at Interaccess in Toronto, Canada
WEBLINKS
http://www.xraylab.org/References/NOW%20On%20-%20Entertainment%20-%20Feature.html

Local artists tackle robotic challenge

NOW MARCH 27-APRIL 2, 1997

By DEIRDRE HANNA
Just imagine something that is not only beautiful but does something meaningful — because it knows how to.
The concept of an intelligent sculpture is singularly compelling, so much so that few art forms carry a sexier cachet than robotics. Yet robotic art, sadly, is still very much in its infancy.
Anyone who wants a taste of where it might be going can get a major hit this weekend with the Spaceprobe exhibit of electro-physical art and the seventh annual Sumo Robot Challenge, which pits mechanized creations against each other in gladiatorial combat.
Fortuitous links
Spaceprobe is the second show the Toronto-based Art and Robotics Group (ARG) has put on at Inter/Access in the past six months, while the Sumo Robot Challenge has become a highlight on OCAD’s academic calendar.
Despite the fortuitous timing overlap, the links between the two events are mostly coincidental. According to artist, teacher and Sumo Robot Challenge coordinator Norman White, about three-quarters of ARG’s members have passed through various programs at the college.
ARG director Jeff Mann is adamant that his group’s creations have little to do with OCAD’s electronic sumo wrestlers.
“There seems to be a culture around robots,” Mann says from the midst of the Spaceprobe installation. “Autonomous carts that zoom around or the toys that little kids play with tend to be the first things that come to people’s minds.
“That’s fine, but this is something else. I founded ARG to bring together people who want to explore electronics in three-dimensional spaces.
“To some extent, this work is interactive in that there’s control and feedback, but what this show is really about is process. This is the kind of work that doesn’t go anywhere until you see what actually happens when you try to put it together, and for the past year ARG has met every Tuesday evening for workshops.”
The workshops tend toward the purely practical, with various members outlining tools and techniques they’ve used to make something in particular work. It’s a gritty, hands-on approach that for Mann represents a reversal in the computerized direction most electronically driven art is taking.
“When I was at OCA, everyone in my program was working with motors, and I was trying to get people to write software. Most of what I’ve done since then is in the box, using computers, video and sound, but I find that stuff leaves me cold.
“Dealing with space, not just the virtual, is far more interesting.”
Mann’s own Spaceprobe offering, Spirit Catcher, is elegant and deceptively simple. A transparent plastic sheet billows above a white-housed fan while discrete antennae sense changes in electrical fields made by the movement of the plastic. These fluctuations are reflected in changes in the sound emitted by three tinny speakers.

Punning organ
Other highlights include James Ruxton’s Heavy Breathing, a device that amplifies the viewers’ breath; Rob Cruickshank and Wendy Whaley’s Transmit/Reflect, featuring a vagina-esque booth that uses a laser to transmit images of those who enter to a fur-lined viewer; Graham Smith’s reflective, revolving Rain Sphere; and Paul Davies’ The Quantification Of Humans, a sisal mat that shows the relative position of those standing on it on a tiny neon chart.
Robert Erlich’s No Escape roves around like a Jetsons-era robotic cart while projecting images between Inter/Access and Gallery 1313, in the heart of Parkdale. Robert Bernecky and Brad Harley take a comical turn with their Windows Of Opportunity, an off-key, pun-rich organ made from PVC pipes and rubber flipflops that plays a painful rendering of Mary Had A Little Lamb.
Other pieces are far less rewarding. Mann reveals his acute awareness of Spaceprobe’s unevenness when he quickly notes that this show is completely uncurated. A week after the opening, two participants still haven’t completed their installations. Shortcomings aside, however, Spaceprobe bristles with potential.
And the Sumo Robots are always a blast. As White observes, “It’s an art form that allows for a lot of irony.”

DATE – 1995
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Telepresence robotics
STATUS – Displayed at the Trevi Fountain in Rome, Italy

A project for Intalian Telecom that linked journalist Piero Desecqalie from los Angels to Rome via the telepressence robot Wilma.

DATE – 1994
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Telepreseence robot
STATUS – Displayed in front of the White House in Washington DC
WEBLINKS
http://www.ecafe.com/museum/hilites/1994.html

A project done in collaboration with the Electronic Café in Los Angles that linked a series of musicians and poets located at COMDEX in Las Vegas to the telepresence robot Wilma who performed in fro=nt of the White House in Washington.

The Washington Post
Cyber-culture: The Louvre to the Lewd – Tom Allen
Sunday December 4, 1994, Page G8

MEDIA RARE– But suppose you’re a struggling young artist. Someone who grew up on Nintendo Co. who’s been using computers since grade school call who graduated from college with an Internet address but no corporate work ethic. Wouldn’t it be nice to create your own music studio in cyberspace — or even a television studio? Some were no wide world, you just might find an audience for your art that’s the whole idea of the open info — road, isn’t it? Power to the people?

On our rainy November day, across the street from the White House, a video robot named Wilma is trolling for content. A 25-year-old poet named Josie steps before Wilma’s lens and rants blasphemous verse:

I bake bread and make stuffing!
Cook our trespassers, spread them apart and eat them!

Leads him into temptation!
Forgive me who art is in heaven:

We are all evil and this is how it is on Earth.

The robot transmits Jose Sandoval’s “New Lord’s prayer” to New York City and Las Vegas, where appreciate the truth audiences of techno — beatniks or watching the videocast live as it comes over digital telephone lines hooked up to monitors. It’s an experiment put on by the electronic Café in the McLuhan program of the University of Toronto underwritten by Motorola.

Here on Friday afternoon in Washington, you can glimpse the farthest reaches of the info superhighway, where fringe artists create their own interactive broadcasting technology and talk of quotation marks “PMC — MOO poetry slams” and the figure minus ground environment (which is a concept from Marshall McLuhan’s the global village which despite all its prophecies never mentioned digital cleavage)

“McLuhan saw artists as having and insights that the rest of society didn’t yet have,” Graham Smith, the bearded, shaky — haired project leader, is saying. “McLuhan knew that artists were not tied up in conversations what were doing here is something that has never been done in five years it will be your telephone.”

Smith, 35, cobbled together Sen. or Willem Wilma pobot — a mobile videoconferencing system — using a 486 computer loaded with $6000 worth of picture tells software and hardware, servers both feet dry cell batteries and 200 feet of ISDN cable which he spooled out of 7th floor window of his room at the Hay-Adams Hotel on the H St. below. He’d wanted to use the ISBN antenna — go wireless — but the Secret Service didn’t like the looks of a yard long silvery thing aimed at the White House from the hotel window. Agents paid a visit, effectively mixing that techno — trial

“For people on the street, this is their first video conference, says Smith. The idea is to give people control over this technology. It will mean the death of the TV stations because once the technology is in place we all become TV stations.”

Visionaries such as Smith like to think this technology will revolutionize society by fully democratic sizing access to media. The talk of smashing the one-way broadcasting monopoly that spoon feeds asked lowest common denominator programming they proclaim a future in which Internet offers everyone the ability to create and disseminate art. This goal is noble. And in time it might even be possible.

DATE – 1993
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Telepresence robotic installation
STATUS – Displayed at the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy and the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada

This exhibition was linked to the 1993 Venice Biennale as part of their “Aperto” program from The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto via ISDN based videoconferencing. The German group MASA out of Cologne organized the overall project as part of something called the “Casio Container” which was a shipping container converted into a mobile electronic café which was the place people controlled the robot in Canada.

ARTISTS
Doug Back, Vera Frenkel, Francis LeBouthillier, Simone Jones, Steev Morgan, Cathy Orfald, Nancy Paterson, Runt, Jim Ruxton, Victoria Scott, Graham Smith, Karen Tzventarny, Norman White

DATE – 1992
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Interactive panoramic sculpture
STATUS – Image du Futur, Old Port, Montreal, Canada
WEBLINKS

A panoramic imaging display exhibited at the “Image du Futur” exhibition in Montreal, Canada

DATE – 1989
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Panoramic Photography
STAUS – Displayed at Museum Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, Germany and at the Harbourfront Photography Gallery, Toronto, Canada

A series of panoramic images shot at the Berlin Wall in Berlin Germany. The exhibition was funded through a Media Arts grant from the Canada Council of the Arts.

The Toronto Star January 17, 1989
G4 – Christopher Hume
Roving cameramen pieces world together

IMAGE – Panoramic jigsaw. Graham Smith’s Checkpoint Charlie photograph puts day and night the same picture says critic Christopher Hume.

Roving cameramen pieces world together
most photographers use a camera to freeze the moment. Graham Smith sees it as a means of freeing time and motion.

The 30-year-old Toronto photographer inventor has devoted the last two years to devising ways of allowing the camera to see the world in a more complete and human way.

The result of his latest experiments, on display at the photography gallery at harbor front until January 29 are an interesting as anything done recently with the camera.

For one thing Smith doesn’t concentrate on single images but assembles huge panoramas comprised of hundreds of ports. The three large pieces in the current show titled intersections through time Berlin 88 or impressive visual documents but more than that intriguing explorations into the nature of perception.

The works consist of groups made up of photographs arranged five deep unruly dozens long. They were taken from a camera device of Smith’s making that scans the scene team shot from almost every angle possible, from straight up to directly down. At the same time the camera is receiving from the scene as it turns 360°.

Initially the effect is confusing takes a minute or two to realize were looking at a three-dimensional view flattened out and rendered in two dimensions. To see the same view in real life we would have to rotate three or four times while walking backwards.

I create my own technology for each piece I do Smith explains in this case I want to record movement through time. I was shooting a length of space as wall as a panorama spiraling through space.

He calls his works progress and through time. To emphasize the point, the bottom photograph in each row of the clock on it. Peace taken about two hours to shoot. Smith is also started to take his panoramas late in the afternoon to the picture gets darker as time and evening events.

This is best seen in checkpoint Charlie work taken roughly between 4 PM and 6 PM. Justice this technique turned straight lines into U-shaped curves but stay a night into the sky at the same time.

Photographers always think in terms of a single instant of time but nothing is static’s missives. It just can’t happen. Besides we didn’t just look at one thing or see everything at once we scan.

All three pieces were taken last fall at sites along the Berlin wall. As well as being full of graphic appeal specially the combination of uniformed guards and graffiti on the scenes provide a fascinating glimpse and the realities of the Cold War.

Berlin is the New York of Europe, Smith says. They help me in every way they could than evens exhibited the work.

The East Germans provided less helpful. They refused to let me cross over and appear only as inquisitive heavies on at all sure they like what Smith is doing.

He could’ny cross the border but his camera did