12.17.06 - 8:53 p.m.

Staying in on a Sunday night... OH YEAH!!!!!

Last night was fun even though the music sucked. It wasn't Metro Area, it was one of the two dudes from Metro Area, playing disco all night long. It is 2006 and this is not acceptable.

Rx was redeemed though by device art. Best interactive device-art exhibit of the year, hands down! Favorites:

Veljko Zejak - Sex Machine
(cycled endlessly through many positions... totally hypnotic)

Milica Ru�ičić - Kisser

Nika Oblah/Primoz Novak - The box
"Contemporary art is nothing but a business, we take it as a joke."

Teo Spiller/Tadej Komavec - X-lam

This last blew my mind. No picture up because even more so then these other pieces, it required participation & can't be conveyed by a static image. It was a column of flashing green lights... nothing special looking. You went up there and saw all these people standing around looking weird, not sure why... you looked at the green lights and didn't get it... and then as you turn away, boom. First time it happened to me I seriously thought I was having a druggy moment, like a flashback or something. Then realized it was displaying a series of detailed images that you could only perceive through peripheral vision. You had to look away from it to see it.

How did it work? According to their website, "T.R.I.P. is a method to project columns of a raster image fast, one after other, on the eye background. As the view moves over X-lam, all the columns of the image for a moment unites for a moment into a picture."

I don't really get the details, but I do like these kind of things because they throw the constructive nature of perception into sharp relief. Your brain is constantly running software that converts a 2-dimensional array of pixels into a 3-dimensional representation of the world. Optical illusions such as x-lam are essentially hacks that exploit the bugs in this software.

All these guys were from Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia. Is it something in the water?

DJ Unk - Walk It Out
Big Oomp, 2006.

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