Aram Bartholl – Blog

Last week I gave a little workshop to a group of 9-11 year olds at my sons school in Berlin. While we were building paper craft models and painted swords from the game Minecraft I talked with the kids about pixels. Children today often look at very high resolutions screens ( ipads, tablets etc). Pixels became so small over the past 5 years that you hardly can see them with your eyes any more. This is one of the reasons why generation retina doesn t really understand the retro-pixel-look reference in Minecraft. For them pixels ARE Mincratft. :)) I showed them a bunch of old games like Boulderdash and Doom II. We talked about how 2D games became 3D  and the diffrerent perspectives like the first person view etc. It was fun! In the end they ran off with their freshly painted wodden swords to play Minecraft in the yard. ;))

DIGIGRIPPER from olafval on Vimeo.

A beautiful project by Olaf Val. Climbing on a screen while depending on the changing pixels is a very physical way of interacting with the digital space. I like Olafs work a lot. He has a nice series of screen pieces and is quite involved in physical computing (arduino workshops) and more. Thanks for the invitation to Kassel, Olaf! See you around!

Full documentation of Digigripper PDF.

“A human sized 5 x 7 dot-matrix display becomes a climbing wall. The individual display dots protrude from the wall and thus form steps and handles to allow the climber to hold on to the display. However, if one uses an unilluminated dot, this dot will cave in, causing the climber to slip and to tumble to the ground. Prior to climbing the display one has to memorise a continuous series of letters, as this is the only way to change the dots one is holding on to in time for the next change of letters. In doing so one can key into a terminal a short sentence. Whoever manages to hold onto the display the longest is the winner. The longer one holds on to the display the quicker the change of letters.”

And by the way. Yes, I do know Angela Bullochs’ piece “Z-point”. People keep asking me that.
(Although i didn’t know it when I created TV-Filter in 2006, anyway…)

This nice analogue screen piece by Julien Collieux involves 64 people. Each person is in charge of one pixel turning it on/off by a wire.

Installation /visual performance
cards, strings, 64 persons

For a performance on 16. Februar 20.30 at Gallery 5213 Reichenbergerstrasse 124 Berlin Julien is looking for 63 people helping performing this piece.
www.juliencollieux.com

Nice! I hope i can make it.