The paper deals with three artistic examples of humanistic transposition of smart technologies that reshape our reality. Computer vision technology redefines the classical notions of space that we enhabit and repostulates Shakespear's verse “All the world is a stage.” New media objects that simultaneously participate in our everyday life and in the “internet of things” pose new networked information on the state of their handling. The Forest of Arden, the metaphor used for the new mixed and smart reality, is neither a totality of paradise nor the Arcadia of easy living but a challenge for the scientists, artists and humanists alike. It is a semiotic forest, where the melancholic philosopher Jaques, confronted with people from all classes and with various problems, faces the given notions and tries to make new sense out of them

Bovcon, Narvika

English

ePrints.FRI

New Media Spaces and New Media Objects  Narvika Bovcon 1, Aleš Vaupotič 1 1 ArtNetLab Society for Connecting Art and Science Trubarjeva 76a, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia E-mail: narvika@bovcon.com ales@vaupotic.com   Abstract – The paper deals with three artistic examples of humanistic transposition of smart technologies that reshape our reality. Computer vision technology redefines the classical notions of space that we enhabit and repostulates Shakespear's verse “All the world is a stage.” New media objects that simultaneously participate in our everyday life and in the “internet of things” pose new networked information on the state of their handling.  The Forest of Arden, the metaphor used for the new mixed and smart reality, is neither a totality of paradise nor the Arcadia of easy living but a challenge for the scientists, artists and humanists alike. It is a semiotic forest, where the melancholic philosopher Jaques, confronted with people from all classes and with various problems, faces the given notions and tries to make new sense out of them.   Keywords – computer vision, video installation, digital video, internet of things, virtual space   1. INTRODUCTION      The projects If you look back, it won't be there any more (2005-08), IP Light (2008) and Presence (2008) are joined in the exhibition entitled Jaques (Vžigalica Gallery, Ljubljana, February 2009) and through the artistic research carried out by Narvika Bovcon and Aleš Vaupotič in the post 2005 period. Following the reflection on the reconstruction of a logical unity from a world, that has disintegrated into a mass of bordering and permeated archives - on the level of an image, e.g. a computer interface - a new field of questions opened: how has the world that surrounds us changed?    At the overview exhibition entitled Algorithmic Revolution [1] Peter Weibel emphasised how all aspects of the world that surrounds us constantly change, and yet the world appears to remain as it had always been. The Jaques exhibition presents three different projects in a new and changed dimension of the world of reacting to spaces and within them layered meanings and objects that were through Manovichian cultural transcoding shown as something else then before they became subject to manipulation by algorithms. [2] A special factor of this change is included in the concept of the techno imagination (as perceived by Vilém Flusser), which deals with the acceleration of mankind's performance of procedures, e.g. in the form of computer algorithms. [3] For instance, the world appears in different dimensions when viewed through a Google search.    In opposition to the two dimensional image, the border represented by the planet Solaris and the film medium in Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) – in numerous aspects similar to the 16th century Flemish painting and later to the video surface –, the theme of all three projects found in the Jaques exhibition is the entrance of man with his body and a politically sharpened thought into a space that is not homogenous. The movements around it mean that movements on the level of numerous layers of meanings, desires and constraints have to be made. This space is inhabited by people and objects, both of which exist simultaneously in the real world as well as in cyber reality. The metaphor that we have chosen for this experience is Shakespeare’s The Forest of Arden from the comedy As You Like It. One can enter it, escape into it, or even permanently live in it, just like the former nobleman Jaques, who exchanged the aristocratic material possessions for the openness of the abstract forest.    2. SMART SPACES, SMART OBJECTS     In the following  sub-chapters special examples of smart spaces and smart objects as developed in the projects at the exhibition Jaques are presented.  2.1. Presence     The move from the everyday world into the changed reality of the Jaques exhibition can be found in the project Presence (programming by Damir Deželjin, Jurij Porenta and Andraž Sraka), in which the visitor of the computer video-installation is placed in the position of the person in audience with the king. The video material is taken from the digital animation To Brecknock, while my fearful head is on (2006) by Narvika Bovcon and Aleš Vaupotič, which depicts the height of dramatic action in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Duke of Buckingham finds himself in the moment in which King Richard rejects his demand. There is only one way in which this can continue: a confrontation, which – for Shakespeare’s characters outside the Forest of Arden – can only mean death.     In the project Presence Buckingham's position is taken over by the viewer, who is thus a substitute for the character in the play (in a fictitious situation) as well as the body of the actor on stage. The theatre is a mediator as the model of a new media smart space is being established. As encountered increasingly often through the everyday use of smart devices, in this installation - as an example of a smart space - the visitor finds himself in a gallery space and in a narrative reality at the same time. The king's presence becomes even more realistic, for the computer vision is capable of recognising what is happening in front of the projection which it then adjusts accordingly - thus fitting the viewer's behaviour: one should not look the king in the eyes and the installation does “not work” if we look at it, for the computer vision includes face detection. At this the double use of the computer vision is important for the installation. The first change is caused as the viewer enters the shot in the active field of the installation as a smudge. At this level it is merely a sensor, however as soon as the computer decides that it is looking at a human and not a faceless object, its vision becomes similar to human vision and thus the computer can play a role in the ideological field in front of the installation. Presence thus opens the complex issues on artificial intelligence that - with a high level of analysing activities - surpasses the mere recording of surveillance cameras and thus poses questions as to the ideological connotation of the supposedly unbiased view of the machine.    From the theoretical aspect of the medium the relations between avant-garde traditions of excluding the actor's bodily presence from the theatre - for instance with the superpuppet (Übermarionette) of Edward Gordon Craig [4] - and the photo-realistic procedures of digital animation are also important for this project. The notion of synthetic realism [5] could represent a bridge between the seemingly opposing sides: if modern theatre excluded the serendipity of meanings that the actor's never fully controllable body carries around (from the statement in the theatrical plural media language), the virtual computer worlds establish “realism” in parts, synthetically, and thus on a completely different level; the image of man carries merely those meanings that are coded within, for there are no remnants of the physical presence of the human body.  2.2. If you look back, it won't be there anymore     On the meta-level, the project If you look back, it won’t be there anymore successfully materialises the dialog between two artistic starting points: the concept or the “script” of Barak Reiser and the execution of the virtual space in the context of research in virtual spaces by Narvika Bovcon and Aleš Vaupotič (programming by Igor Lautar). In opposition to the search for unity as in VideoSpace (2003) and its installation in Friedhof Laguna (2003) [6], the project of the new virtual space - which through various interfaces entered the real space and turned it into an augmented reality or mixed reality - demanded to exit the closed scope of realistic elements and open up. The creators of the Jaques exhibition also saw the link to the project Mouseion Serapeion (2004-07) as important. This project finally opened up in Mouseion Serapeion Wiki 2.1 (2006) [7] and tested the algorithm construction of the relations within one archive on the base of its use on the internet. The core of the project If you look back, it won’t be there anymore is a three dimensional computer generated space Data Dune, in which the objects appear as a result of the user's manipulation and movement through space.     Fig. 1. Digital video Lounge is an example of composited mixed reality      The projects Presence and If you look back, it won’t be there anymore activate the volume of the gallery space in different ways. The projection of the virtual - in real time - drawn space in Data Dune is on one hand linked back to the “media historical”, into the direction of video and video-installations in which the viewer used his imagination in order to “see” the co-existence of two realities, and, in a negative way, it establishes a relation towards hardware interfaces such as CAVE, [8] EVE (by Jeffrey Shaw), [9] as well as the data helmet and similar. The project addresses the issue of video on two levels: first through the projection of the digital video Lounge (2008) shown in Fig. 1, in which the authors place themselves into the digital model of the installation by Anton Henning, [10] and secondly through the sole issue of the digital and at the same time high resolution video in the project In illo tempore (hi-res data video) (2005) [11] that is a part of the “rooms” of virtual reality. It consists of a ready-made video simulation of the creation of the universe (that could be executed only on super computers) and the recordings of the interview with a research cosmologist who explains the physical cosmology in his home kitchen, outside of the scientific institution. With this the video explored the borders of the visible, i.e. the view at the beginning of time, space and matter. At the same time, to some extent unintentionally, it also explored the art and political border of video as an author’s media manipulation of images, especially in the form of practices such as remixing and found footage.     As an installation the project If you look back, it won’t be there anymore opens into the direction of digital objects, of which one is actually present in the gallery space – as an animated model in the video and at the same time in the form of a three dimensional print on the machine for rapid prototyping as the Dragonfly (2007), shown in Fig. 2. The digital image thus appeared without a stitch in reality, in which it can - as a piece of information - vaporise once more.     Fig. 2. Three-dimensional digital print Dragonfly is an example of how digital information can take shape in the material world     Two referential projects place the digital object context into a political perspective. Trigger Happy (2005) by Tim Stolzenburg consists of a file which includes information on how to make a model gun. At some point in the future this information could make any object available at any time with the use of the “printing” objects technology. The potential contradiction of the project is shown in Cameron’s film Terminator 2 (1991), when the good terminator (Schwarzenegger) says that the bad one cannot make guns from liquid metal because: “It doesn't work that way”. Maybe the various characteristics of materials such as metal springs, oils, etc. are still far from technical realisation through three dimensional prints, and Stolzenburg’s gun is thus merely a metaphor that has proven to be of no interest for Jaques’ political consideration of ideological values in the Forest of Arden.     Julius von Bismarck’s Image Fulgurator (2007/08) - the emitter of flashes of light - seems more dangerous. This project was the last winner of Ars Electronica in the field of interactive art. With the aid of reversing the technology in a photographic camera reality was subverted at a point where it was most vulnerable, in its media mediation: what is on a photograph is true, but with von Bismarck photographs lie.  2.3. IP Light     Finally, at the exhibition, the fictive Jaques finds a challenge in the new media object, i.e. a light that is at the same time in real space as well as a unique entity on the internet – it has its own IP address, in the same way as servers do (programming and hardware by Matevž Grbec, Marko Ilić and Samo Mahnič). The light provides for at least two practical uses: it can be used as a reading light, or it can transfer a message as it is turned on and off over the internet.     The project contemplates the so-called “internet of things”, where each of our possessions will be found in real space and cyber space at the same time. [12] This will result in the fact that these objects (and the people who are linked to them) will be easily traceable and their actions documented, as everything will be reflected in the changes of the positions and conditions of objects. IP Light [13]  is merely one type of object that enters the cyber world and it is shown in Fig. 3; it is an electrical appliance to which we, without larger expenses, add some circuitry that manipulates it as an object that has a specific place and task in our world. At the same time the objects in the “internet of things” are accessible through computer manipulation, and this increases human capabilities to magical limits.     The second type of integrating objects into the “internet of things” is computer vision, whether in the form of standardised code for object recognition or through the analysis of models of the various states of visibility of individual objects. In fact any sort of sensor can pass on data to software, which, with a skilful analysis of various manipulations of an individual object – for instance a smart table that a person touches – forms a piece of information and offers an additional understanding of the situation to which one or the other object can respond with regular practice (if we borrow the term coined by Michel Foucault, which was of course coined for describing human operations). An important consequence arises from this: as we will regularly meet with for instance smart responsive walls, non-living matter will be given life. The feeling for materiality will change, for we will read it as an interface object in our dialogue with the environment.    Fig. 3. IP Light from the “internet of things”    3. CONCLUSION     The exhibition Jaques presented three different ways of how technology changes the living space of the contemporary man: IP Light is an object of the world as we knew it, but it includes something more; If you look back, it won’t be there anymore is an example of mixed reality, used as an independent artistic medium, as a language for considering the reading of the world; Presence realises the two edges of the sword controlling the individual – in his novel The First Circle (1968) the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talks about photographic cameras, integrated into doors – and the fulfilment of the dream of artificial intelligence, which will grow as an archive of symbols from the detailed analysis of the regularity of the everyday world. In his book Search [14] John Battelle searches for an answer to this enigma, in the relation between the intention and the search. He turns to the debate with Danny Hillis, in which he stated that it is not hard to find something: “My problem is understanding something.” That, he continues, can happen only if search engines understand what a person is really looking for, and then guide her toward understanding of that thing, much as experts do when mentoring a student. “Search,” he continues, “is an obvious place for intelligence to happen, and it is starting to happen.”   ACKNOWLEDGEMENT     The authors would like to thank Prof Franc Solina and Prof Srečo Dragan for their mentoring.   REFERENCES  [1] Die algorithmische Revolution, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 31.10.2004 - 7.9.2006, http://www. zkm.de/algorithmische-revolution, (22.5.2009). [2] L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001.   [3] V. Flusser, Ins Universum der technischen Bilder. Göttingen, European Photography, 11985. [4] E. G. Craig, On the Art of the Theatre, Routledge, 2008.   [5] L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001.   [6] N. Bovcon, A. Vaupotič, G. Jemec, Friedhof Laguna, http://black.fri.uni-lj.si/recyc/flr, (22.5.2009).   [7] N. Bovcon, A. Vaupotič, Mouseion Serapeion, http://black.fri.uni-lj.si/mouseionserapeion, (22.5.2009).  [8] “Cave Automatic Virtual Environment”, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_ Automatic_Virtual_Environment, (22.5.2009). [9] "Jeffrey Shaw: EVE (Extended Virtual Environment)", Medien Kunst Netz, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/eve, (22.5.2009). [10] A. Henning, “Oktogon für Herford, MARTa, Herford 2005” http://www.antonhenning.com/ doku/views/ 05Marta.html, (22.5.2009).       [11] N. Bovcon, A. Vaupotič, In illo tempore, http://black.fri.uni-lj.si/inillotempore, (22.5.2009).   [12] N. Gershenfeld, Internet 0, http://cba.mit. edu/projects/I0, (22.5.2009).   [13] N. Bovcon, A. Vaupotič, IP Light, http://black.fri.uni-lj.si/iplight, (22.5.2009).   [14] J. Battelle, Search, Penguin, 2006, pp. 16.   

Cave Automatic Virtual Environment”,

EVE (Extended Virtual Environment)&quot;,

Ins Universum der technischen Bilder.

Mouseion Serapeion,

Oktogon für

On the Art of the Theatre,

The Language of New Media,

New Media Spaces and New Media Objects

University of Ljubljana Computer and Information Science ePrints.fri

New Media Spaces and New Media Objects 
 
Narvika Bovcon 1, Aleš Vaupotič 1 
1 ArtNetLab Society for Connecting Art and Science 
Trubarjeva 76a, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia 
E-mail: narvika@bovcon.com 
ales@vaupotic.com 
 
 
Abstract – The paper deals with three artistic examples of humanistic transposition of smart technologies that 
reshape our reality. Computer vision technology redefines the classical notions of space that we enhabit and 
repostulates Shakespear's verse “All the world is a stage.” New media objects that simultaneously participate in 
our everyday life and in the “internet of things” pose new networked information on the state of their handling.  
The Forest of Arden, the metaphor used for the new mixed and smart reality, is neither a totality of paradise nor 
the Arcadia of easy living but a challenge for the scientists, artists and humanists alike. It is a semiotic forest, 
where the melancholic philosopher Jaques, confronted with people from all classes and with various problems, 
faces the given notions and tries to make new sense out of them.  
 
Keywords – computer vision, video installation, digital video, internet of things, virtual space 
 
 
1. INTRODUCTION  
 
   The projects If you look back, it won't be there any 
more (2005-08), IP Light (2008) and Presence 
(2008) are joined in the exhibition entitled Jaques 
(Vžigalica Gallery, Ljubljana, February 2009) and 
through the artistic research carried out by Narvika 
Bovcon and Aleš Vaupotič in the post 2005 period. 
Following the reflection on the reconstruction of a 
logical unity from a world, that has disintegrated 
into a mass of bordering and permeated archives - on 
the level of an image, e.g. a computer interface - a 
new field of questions opened: how has the world 
that surrounds us changed? 
   At the overview exhibition entitled Algorithmic 
Revolution [1] Peter Weibel emphasised how all 
aspects of the world that surrounds us constantly 
change, and yet the world appears to remain as it had 
always been. The Jaques exhibition presents three 
different projects in a new and changed dimension 
of the world of reacting to spaces and within them 
layered meanings and objects that were through 
Manovichian cultural transcoding shown as 
something else then before they became subject to 
manipulation by algorithms. [2] A special factor of 
this change is included in the concept of the techno 
imagination (as perceived by Vilém Flusser), which 
deals with the acceleration of mankind's 
performance of procedures, e.g. in the form of 
computer algorithms. [3] For instance, the world 
appears in different dimensions when viewed 
through a Google search. 
   In opposition to the two dimensional image, the 
border represented by the planet Solaris and the film 
medium in Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) – in 
numerous aspects similar to the 16th century Flemish 
painting and later to the video surface –, the theme 
of all three projects found in the Jaques exhibition is 
the entrance of man with his body and a politically 
sharpened thought into a space that is not 
homogenous. The movements around it mean that 
movements on the level of numerous layers of 
meanings, desires and constraints have to be made. 
This space is inhabited by people and objects, both 
of which exist simultaneously in the real world as 
well as in cyber reality. The metaphor that we have 
chosen for this experience is Shakespeare’s The 
Forest of Arden from the comedy As You Like It. 
One can enter it, escape into it, or even permanently 
live in it, just like the former nobleman Jaques, who 
exchanged the aristocratic material possessions for 
the openness of the abstract forest.  
 
 
2. SMART SPACES, SMART OBJECTS 
 
   In the following  sub-chapters special examples of 
smart spaces and smart objects as developed in the 
projects at the exhibition Jaques are presented. 
 
2.1. Presence 
 
   The move from the everyday world into the 
changed reality of the Jaques exhibition can be 
found in the project Presence (programming by 
Damir Deželjin, Jurij Porenta and Andraž Sraka), in 
which the visitor of the computer video-installation 
is placed in the position of the person in audience 
with the king. The video material is taken from the 
digital animation To Brecknock, while my fearful 
head is on (2006) by Narvika Bovcon and Aleš 
Vaupotič, which depicts the height of dramatic 
action in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Duke of 
Buckingham finds himself in the moment in which 
King Richard rejects his demand. There is only one 
way in which this can continue: a confrontation, 
which – for Shakespeare’s characters outside the 
Forest of Arden – can only mean death.  
   In the project Presence Buckingham's position is 
taken over by the viewer, who is thus a substitute for 
the character in the play (in a fictitious situation) as 
well as the body of the actor on stage. The theatre is 
a mediator as the model of a new media smart space 
is being established. As encountered increasingly 
often through the everyday use of smart devices, in 
this installation - as an example of a smart space - 
the visitor finds himself in a gallery space and in a 
narrative reality at the same time. The king's 
presence becomes even more realistic, for the 
computer vision is capable of recognising what is 
happening in front of the projection which it then 
adjusts accordingly - thus fitting the viewer's 
behaviour: one should not look the king in the eyes 
and the installation does “not work” if we look at it, 
for the computer vision includes face detection. At 
this the double use of the computer vision is 
important for the installation. The first change is 
caused as the viewer enters the shot in the active 
field of the installation as a smudge. At this level it 
is merely a sensor, however as soon as the computer 
decides that it is looking at a human and not a 
faceless object, its vision becomes similar to human 
vision and thus the computer can play a role in the 
ideological field in front of the installation. Presence 
thus opens the complex issues on artificial 
intelligence that - with a high level of analysing 
activities - surpasses the mere recording of 
surveillance cameras and thus poses questions as to 
the ideological connotation of the supposedly 
unbiased view of the machine. 
   From the theoretical aspect of the medium the 
relations between avant-garde traditions of 
excluding the actor's bodily presence from the 
theatre - for instance with the superpuppet 
(Übermarionette) of Edward Gordon Craig [4] - and 
the photo-realistic procedures of digital animation 
are also important for this project. The notion of 
synthetic realism [5] could represent a bridge 
between the seemingly opposing sides: if modern 
theatre excluded the serendipity of meanings that the 
actor's never fully controllable body carries around 
(from the statement in the theatrical plural media 
language), the virtual computer worlds establish 
“realism” in parts, synthetically, and thus on a 
completely different level; the image of man carries 
merely those meanings that are coded within, for 
there are no remnants of the physical presence of the 
human body. 
 
2.2. If you look back, it won't be there anymore 
 
   On the meta-level, the project If you look back, it 
won’t be there anymore successfully materialises the 
dialog between two artistic starting points: the 
concept or the “script” of Barak Reiser and the 
execution of the virtual space in the context of 
research in virtual spaces by Narvika Bovcon and 
Aleš Vaupotič (programming by Igor Lautar). In 
opposition to the search for unity as in VideoSpace 
(2003) and its installation in Friedhof Laguna (2003) 
[6], the project of the new virtual space - which 
through various interfaces entered the real space and 
turned it into an augmented reality or mixed reality - 
demanded to exit the closed scope of realistic 
elements and open up. The creators of the Jaques 
exhibition also saw the link to the project Mouseion 
Serapeion (2004-07) as important. This project 
finally opened up in Mouseion Serapeion Wiki 2.1 
(2006) [7] and tested the algorithm construction of 
the relations within one archive on the base of its use 
on the internet. The core of the project If you look 
back, it won’t be there anymore is a three 
dimensional computer generated space Data Dune, 
in which the objects appear as a result of the user's 
manipulation and movement through space.  
 
 
 
Fig. 1. Digital video Lounge is an example of 
composited mixed reality  
 
   The projects Presence and If you look back, it 
won’t be there anymore activate the volume of the 
gallery space in different ways. The projection of the 
virtual - in real time - drawn space in Data Dune is 
on one hand linked back to the “media historical”, 
into the direction of video and video-installations in 
which the viewer used his imagination in order to 
“see” the co-existence of two realities, and, in a 
negative way, it establishes a relation towards 
hardware interfaces such as CAVE, [8] EVE (by 
Jeffrey Shaw), [9] as well as the data helmet and 
similar. The project addresses the issue of video on 
two levels: first through the projection of the digital 
video Lounge (2008) shown in Fig. 1, in which the 
authors place themselves into the digital model of 
the installation by Anton Henning, [10] and 
secondly through the sole issue of the digital and at 
the same time high resolution video in the project In 
illo tempore (hi-res data video) (2005) [11] that is a 
part of the “rooms” of virtual reality. It consists of a 
ready-made video simulation of the creation of the 
universe (that could be executed only on super 
computers) and the recordings of the interview with 
a research cosmologist who explains the physical 
cosmology in his home kitchen, outside of the 
scientific institution. With this the video explored 
the borders of the visible, i.e. the view at the 
beginning of time, space and matter. At the same 
time, to some extent unintentionally, it also explored 
the art and political border of video as an author’s 
media manipulation of images, especially in the 
form of practices such as remixing and found 
footage.  
   As an installation the project If you look back, it 
won’t be there anymore opens into the direction of 
digital objects, of which one is actually present in 
the gallery space – as an animated model in the 
video and at the same time in the form of a three 
dimensional print on the machine for rapid 
prototyping as the Dragonfly (2007), shown in 
Fig. 2. The digital image thus appeared without a 
stitch in reality, in which it can - as a piece of 
information - vaporise once more.  
 
 
 
Fig. 2. Three-dimensional digital print Dragonfly is 
an example of how digital information can take 
shape in the material world 
 
   Two referential projects place the digital object 
context into a political perspective. Trigger Happy 
(2005) by Tim Stolzenburg consists of a file which 
includes information on how to make a model gun. 
At some point in the future this information could 
make any object available at any time with the use 
of the “printing” objects technology. The potential 
contradiction of the project is shown in Cameron’s 
film Terminator 2 (1991), when the good terminator 
(Schwarzenegger) says that the bad one cannot make 
guns from liquid metal because: “It doesn't work that 
way”. Maybe the various characteristics of materials 
such as metal springs, oils, etc. are still far from 
technical realisation through three dimensional 
prints, and Stolzenburg’s gun is thus merely a 
metaphor that has proven to be of no interest for 
Jaques’ political consideration of ideological values 
in the Forest of Arden.  
   Julius von Bismarck’s Image Fulgurator 
(2007/08) - the emitter of flashes of light - seems 
more dangerous. This project was the last winner of 
Ars Electronica in the field of interactive art. With 
the aid of reversing the technology in a photographic 
camera reality was subverted at a point where it was 
most vulnerable, in its media mediation: what is on a 
photograph is true, but with von Bismarck 
photographs lie. 
 
2.3. IP Light 
 
   Finally, at the exhibition, the fictive Jaques finds a 
challenge in the new media object, i.e. a light that is 
at the same time in real space as well as a unique 
entity on the internet – it has its own IP address, in 
the same way as servers do (programming and 
hardware by Matevž Grbec, Marko Ilić and Samo 
Mahnič). The light provides for at least two practical 
uses: it can be used as a reading light, or it can 
transfer a message as it is turned on and off over the 
internet.  
   The project contemplates the so-called “internet of 
things”, where each of our possessions will be found 
in real space and cyber space at the same time. [12] 
This will result in the fact that these objects (and the 
people who are linked to them) will be easily 
traceable and their actions documented, as 
everything will be reflected in the changes of the 
positions and conditions of objects. IP Light [13]  is 
merely one type of object that enters the cyber world 
and it is shown in Fig. 3; it is an electrical appliance 
to which we, without larger expenses, add some 
circuitry that manipulates it as an object that has a 
specific place and task in our world. At the same 
time the objects in the “internet of things” are 
accessible through computer manipulation, and this 
increases human capabilities to magical limits.  
   The second type of integrating objects into the 
“internet of things” is computer vision, whether in 
the form of standardised code for object recognition 
or through the analysis of models of the various 
states of visibility of individual objects. In fact any 
sort of sensor can pass on data to software, which, 
with a skilful analysis of various manipulations of an 
individual object – for instance a smart table that a 
person touches – forms a piece of information and 
offers an additional understanding of the situation to 
which one or the other object can respond with 
regular practice (if we borrow the term coined by 
Michel Foucault, which was of course coined for 
describing human operations). An important 
consequence arises from this: as we will regularly 
meet with for instance smart responsive walls, non-
living matter will be given life. The feeling for 
materiality will change, for we will read it as an 
interface object in our dialogue with the 
environment.  
 
 
Fig. 3. IP Light from the “internet of things”  
 
 
3. CONCLUSION 
 
   The exhibition Jaques presented three different 
ways of how technology changes the living space of 
the contemporary man: IP Light is an object of the 
world as we knew it, but it includes something more; 
If you look back, it won’t be there anymore is an 
example of mixed reality, used as an independent 
artistic medium, as a language for considering the 
reading of the world; Presence realises the two 
edges of the sword controlling the individual – in his 
novel The First Circle (1968) the Russian novelist 
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talks about photographic 
cameras, integrated into doors – and the fulfilment 
of the dream of artificial intelligence, which will 
grow as an archive of symbols from the detailed 
analysis of the regularity of the everyday world. In 
his book Search [14] John Battelle searches for an 
answer to this enigma, in the relation between the 
intention and the search. He turns to the debate with 
Danny Hillis, in which he stated that it is not hard to 
find something: 
“My problem is understanding something.” That, he 
continues, can happen only if search engines 
understand what a person is really looking for, and 
then guide her toward understanding of that thing, 
much as experts do when mentoring a student. 
“Search,” he continues, “is an obvious place for 
intelligence to happen, and it is starting to happen.” 
 
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
 
   The authors would like to thank Prof Franc Solina 
and Prof Srečo Dragan for their mentoring. 
 
 
REFERENCES 
 
[1] Die algorithmische Revolution, ZKM, 
Karlsruhe, 31.10.2004 - 7.9.2006, http://www. 
zkm.de/algorithmische-revolution, (22.5.2009). 
[2] L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 
MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001.   
[3] V. Flusser, Ins Universum der technischen 
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[4] E. G. Craig, On the Art of the Theatre, 
Routledge, 2008.   
[5] L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 
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[6] N. Bovcon, A. Vaupotič, G. Jemec, Friedhof 
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[8] “Cave Automatic Virtual Environment”, 
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[9] "Jeffrey Shaw: EVE (Extended Virtual 
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(22.5.2009). 
[10] A. Henning, “Oktogon für Herford, MARTa, 
Herford 2005” http://www.antonhenning.com/ 
doku/views/ 05Marta.html, (22.5.2009).       
[11] N. Bovcon, A. Vaupotič, In illo tempore, 
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[14] J. Battelle, Search, Penguin, 2006, pp. 16. 
 
 


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