Metropolis.5

the artists of a city and especially the street artist today, are the ones who really interact with their city's. the average occupant only acts interactive with the city if it's given to him, for excample by us. the artist on the other hand, surches for his own niche and his own interactive option within the city.
one excample for such an "interactive city user" is the street artist "blu", who has worked in lots of the big cities all over the world and is well known in the street art scene.
here is one amazing excample of his work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4


here his website:


http://blublu.org

Another work by Carsten Nicolai about that fact that we get way more information than we can understand.
This fact is transfered in form of a chiffre that can not be read.



"Today's world is confronted with an information flood whose decipherment is a challenge to logic. Both panels, entitled chiffre, cannot be decoded. Since their intrinsic logic is insufficient access depends on the degree of vision. Unambiguous decoding is denied − similar to texts that have been written in unknown alphabets. As soon as the logic of a language is deciphered it loses imaginativeness becoming a one-dimensional statement. The bar code-directed panels recombine to form new combinations legible only by abstract means."

How to combine different film/media for a certain effect.
This example by Harun Farocki also emphasis that within media you can underline somthing that is happening, or you can simply turn everything around.


Harun Farocki, Phantom Images, in: Public, Number 29: Localities, Ed. by Saara Liinamaa, Janine Marchessault and Christian Shaw, Toronto 2004, p. 12-24

"A computer can process pictures, but it needs no pictures to verify or falsify what it reads in the images it processes. Fot the computer, the image in the computer is enough. Nevertheless, the “objective language” pictures are distinct by degrees from the “meta-linguistic" pictures, much as the aesthetics of the machine are distinct from commodity aesthetic. And the axe of Roland Barthes's lumberjack is not simply a manifestation of goal-related rationality: even a tool communicates not only with the materials of its trade, but also with the human senses." (Harun Farocki)

Working with interactivity and digital structures doesn't have to be noisy.
What might describe Carsten Nicolai's work best is a sensitivity that wants us to be patient and observant.



carsten nicolai website
alvanoto on myspace