This saturday (April 26th), I will perform pieces from Meta-Control at the SINK event at Reboot, East Village (map). This is a good summer night of electronic music and visuals. See you if you can make it.
Update: Unfortunately the party was shut down by the police. Devrim Kadirbeyoglu shot and edited a 4 min video (police at the end):
MYPOCKET, my new project launched on Turbulence.org, discloses my personal financial records to the world and predicts the future spending. To make the predictions I created a custom software that explores and reveales essential patterns in the daily transactions of my bank account. Sometimes I verify the predictions, sometimes I don’t mind, sometimes I am not conscious, sometimes the predictions determine my future choices, creating a system in which both myself and the software adapt one another.
MYPOCKET presents a three part interface to a living physical/digital process, which got many dimensions of responses from friends and colleagues. Some said “I want to use my bank transactions as well” and actually one of them sent a year of his bank transactions, some asked if I “want to start a new web service?”, some asked “what kind of a portrait is this?”, some compared to network visualizations, some read it as a “call for transparency in global economy”, some found it “brave!”, some found it “banal and intriguing”, some were excited to see what my rent is, some found the prediction model lacking. I am excited to hear all these and replying individually. But here I will try to address a few things.
I create systems, which mostly end up being complex. I couldn’t find a unified way of presenting a complex system yet. So this work ended up having a three part interface: a list, a graph, and an object.
First part is an RSS feed for predictions and actualized bank transactions. RSS feed is the most contemporary interface to a flow of data. Don’t even think about it, hook up your RSS readers to my bank account, on your handheld, on your laptop, on your whatever reader, you can reach my daily updated bank transactions anytime anywhere. An artwork, as open as it can be, not only for humans but also for machines.
Second part is a graph showing the dynamic relationships between transaction items and their effects changing overtime. This is the way I wired up the transactions to make the predictions. When the graph is processed, it generates a list, a list of predictions. Now rewind. When our activities are recorded, they are not always stored in a pure list format, they are in relation to other lists, which makes a graph, that is subject to analysis. For example, your activities in a social network service, or your bank transactions in the database of a financial firm are in the form of a graph, yet to be analyzed.
Third, predicted objects, objects whose being is predicted as a result of deliberate analysis + living. After a predicted transaction happens, I mark its receipt. Each marked receipt is a unique object, not only because it contains unique transaction information, but also its existence is predicted. Here I refer to master Duchamp’s readymades, the brilliant idea of 20th century art, found objects. If readymades –mostly mass produced objects– are found in the past, predicted objects are found in the future.
While creating this work I was highly inspired by today’s security politics and military condition. I will finish with a “poem” by the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
From the collection of Rumsfeld’s poems on Slate.com.
I’ve been doing a series of events in Istanbul for the last ten days. These include the Terms&Conditions show at the Amber Festival exhibition, lectures on generative and networked arts at Aksanat and Marmara University, Meta-Control performance at the Dugumkume party, and the Networked Arts Workshop at ITU TBT. The last event will be another Meta-Control performance tonight. Then I will fly back to New York.
Tonight we are performing with Özer Yalçinkaya (Klaustro at Myspace), he also put up the flyer below for tonight’s show. See you if you are around.
I will do a performance with Ali Demirel and Richie Hawtin at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (DEMF) tomorrow (May 27). Meta-Control is an ongoing collection of visual/kinetic performative artifacts. The collection started with the reincarnation of the selected pieces in Dynamic Compositions I did back in 2003. The software pieces in the Meta-Control collection have a single organizing principle: the control mechanisms are not hidden, and often explicit.
Meta-Control pieces have been performed at Time Warp 2007, Mannheim and Club Phazon, Tokyo. Both performances were done with Riche Hawtin’s music. After DEMF, Meta-Control will be performed at Sonar Festival, Barcelona. We still work on the documentation but here are some videos found on YouTube:
Meta-Control at the Time Warp 2007 Festival, Mannheim, Germany.
I will do a performance with Ali Demirel and Richie Hawtin at the Time Warp festival in Mannheim, Germany on April 1st. It will start at 7 am on sunday morning. Yes for the vampires! There will be no lazer shows nor fog machines, just the visual software set we call Meta-Control. Most part of the set is the reincarnation of the Dynamic Compositions I did back in 2003.
Here I put some shots from the software set for now. I’ll post movies and the source code after the show. We’ll also have a DVD of the whole thing including the footage by Demirel. For the reincarnated pieces, the 2003 version of the source code is available in the Dynamic Compositions pages if you want to play now.
UPDATE: Videos
Minus
Ticker
Drops
Master Balance
Walk 1D
Walk 2D
Cell Packing
Stairs
Gridnet
Hoffman Blocks
Surveil
Arb (See the ARB movies)
I’ve created a new system called a stock market in life.
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.
MYPOCKET del.icio.us/arikan