Lots happening these days in NYC.

Casey Reas is in town, leading to two exhibitions today at Bitforms and the Pratt Gallery. His new work from the Process series are really nice. Both shows are open through the first week in April.

ABSOLUT QUARTET, an interactive robotic musical installation by Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska is currently on display until April 25th at 186 Orchard Street, Lower East Side (map). You can enter a melody through the absolutmachines website, initiating an original and unique piece of music to be played live by the machine in its lower Manhattan home. A short lo-res movie of the piece in action can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e9AJVtuCKc

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“Eigenvekil” (”eigen deputy”) is a new piece by Ali Miharbi, now on show at Karsi Art gallery in Istanbul. Eigenvekil is the statistical average of the pictures of all the 550 congressmen in the current Turkish Parliament. A camera-PC-screen installation, where you can see the statistical reflection of all the congressmen on your face. To create this image Ali used the eigenface technique, which is commonly used by security officers for face recognition.

Ali says that “political representation, mathematical representation, or artistic representation, like all others, blur the properties of the subject that is represented. Eigenvekil uses these three representation techniques together to point the problem of representative democracy.”

More about Ali Miharbi
http://rhizome.org/member.php?user_id=1005051

The image below shows the top eigenfaces from the Ali’s program.

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I’ve created a new system called a stock market in life.

http://market.openio.org

a stock market in life is a market that uses the value generated by the immaterial labor of visitors at different urban spaces in Oklahoma City, Boston, Munich, and Istanbul. These spaces will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the Upgrade! A Day in Life event. For each location, sensors mounted in the entrance register how many people are in the room at any one time and send this information to the Stock Market central server. The number of visitors define the fair value for each place. Each location has 100 shares and the shares gain or lose value depending on the speculations in the market and the number of people in the local rooms.

You can contribute to the value either by just visiting the physical locations or by trading in the online stock market. The market is open now, you can sell and buy shares using the buraks you will have when you register – 25ß.

UPDATE! Events take place as these locations:
Oklahoma City: IAO Gallery
Gallery with large windows to street.

Munich: Muffathalle Cafe
Interior space, no view to outside. Popular cafe, part of complex of club spaces playing world music and often holding avant garde events.

Boston: Art Interactive
Alternative gallery near Central Square, Cambridge, halfway between Harvard and MIT. The space we have for this project is an interior space with no view of the street outside.

Istanbul: Zoo
A kitsch and playful night club in Taksim.

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View from a dinner and the sleeping spots.

The French pavilion in Venice Architecture Biennale is my favorite. While the rest of the biennale pavilions are showing images and concepts, creators of the French pavilion are living in the given space. They have a kitchen, a sleeping place, a bar, an office, a party space, a watch tower, storage space, and a sauna. Plus wireless internet and wine for everybody. They cook right in front of the visitors and serve them lunch and dinner. They have full on parties with homemade music and drinks. This place, Metavilla, is constructed out of scaffolding, the temporary framework used for construction. This modular system of metal pipes creates a raw aesthetic blended into the honest atmosphere and we experience a great architectural statement. Some architects naively criticized this as the revival of the 60’s commune life. However I think they are the real in the reality of architecture.

The exyzt group is the curator of this living environment. They will be living in this place during the biennale, you can keep up with their blogs, see pictures and movies on their website.

This kitchen was the most active place.

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I left Boston. I am right on the Mediterranean sea in Venice. I am on an island called San Servolo very close to the main Venice island and started to write this diary here to keep my sketches, news, observations, thoughts, and other personal things I’d like to share.

View from my room in San Servolo.

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