summ( )n

Hylozoic Grove was one of the most impressive and (literally!) moving installations presented this year at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. It is a creation of Canadian artist and architect Philip Beesley – who calls it ‘geotextile mesh’ – constructed with a help of quite large team of engineers and developers.

The creation (or better, the creature) combines nature and technology within an electrokinetic intelligent environment. It consists of a dense net of proximity sensors, microcontrollers and actuators, responding to the movements of its ‘guests’ with waves of its parts spreading over the whole structure.

The symbiosis of organic forms with high-tech materials makes interactions – again, better called dialogues – of the installation and the visitors somewhat mysterious: do you watch or are you being watched?

I recall a strange mix of admiration, curiosity and fear with which I was entering the space of the installation – as you see, it’s sizable enough to absorb a few people inside itself. The interaction was not very obvious, and often left visitors puzzled if any ‘interactivity’ was demonstrated at all. But both the physical beauty of the space and its gently waving, vibrating moves created a very special ambience, memorable and powerful.

There was no any sense of what we can describe as a ‘gameply’, no scripted rules or other such things (at least, I didn’t find any). I don’t want to say that there always should be such things, but I also noticed that such a noticeable purposelessness of the creation was a bit difficult to deal with for people who interacted with the system. After a few first probing moves, and not being lead to some sort of purposeful experience, many people were leaving, wowed yet slightly confused – “Is this it?”. Kids did play with it, although some with their very typical brutality, trying to squeeze or even torn apart the ‘leaves’.

Lately this blog became abandoned a bit, with all the crew being busy with their summer holidays and post-holiday recovery. This doesn’t mean, though, that nothing was happening; on the contrary, life was full of very interesting and inspiring events and encounters with people & places. Perhaps, too full even, since it didn’t leave much time to reflect and record here.

I am sure it all will change soon, in face, now. The blog will start, well, blogging, about Summ()n and its activities, being projects, research or simply something interesting we came across.

Ars Electronica festival in Linz this year was definitely ‘something interesting’, and I foresee quite a number of postings and stories about the show of this year. Ars Electronica festival are always a place to be, to enjoy and to learn from, but this one was really a special one. It was the 30st anniversary of the festival, a moment to remember and reflect (and a huge, almost 600 page catalog provides a lot of materials for that); but it also was quite a remarkable even on its own, hosted in the newly established building where Ars Electronica Center now lives (see the picture), with a large and intensive program that combined a symposium, workshops and presentations, a sheer amount of installations and exhibitions all over the city, concerts and artistic performances, and – on a top of everything else – a city-scale open-air opera Flut (The Flood).

The latter was not, technically speaking, a part of Ars Electronica, but rather an climax of the year-long celebration of Linz as an elected Cultural Capital of Europe 2009. But by its spirit and technical excellency this performance fit the festival perfectly, and was seen by mane (us including), as a natural extension of AE. As always before, the events were perfect demonstration of current hyper-global thinking and doing: there were participants and guests from all over the globe, there were projects and installations combining very diverse knowledge and practices, and expressing a multitude of opinions and ideas.

The theme of this year’s festival, Human Nature, left plenty of space for such a diversity, since not participant or a project had a totally identical take on the matter. I guess, this itself points to a good definition of Human Nature, as the one ever exceeding existing boundaries, ever expanding, and ever redefining itself.

Stay tunes, more letters, images, sounds, and movies will follow here.

I am a psychologist and communication professional, with a focus on cross-cultural and cross-generation communication. I studied psychology and human-computer interaction, and specifically speech communication with computers and other smart devices.

During my post-graduate studies I taught general and social psychology at the Kazakh State University, and then worked as a communication consultant and researcher with a number of PR, advertising, direct-marketing and market research agencies (including Burson-Marsteller, the world-largest PR group, where I was involved in a large scale communication programs in the former Soviet Union countries).

I lately focus on communication issues in (and via) social networks, including internet communities, on-line games and virtual worlds.