Reverse Engineers is an exhibition of contemporary media, computing and installation art by twelve artists and artist collectives. Curated by Julia Dzwonkoski and Kye Potter, the exhibition brings together works by Tony Conrad, Ernest Gusella, Christian Jankowski, Natalie Jeremijenko, Barbara Lattanzi, John Olson, William Pope.L, Paper Rad, Dylan Reiff/Joe Korsmo, Aïda Ruilova, Haim Steinbach, and Brian Springer

To dismantle the whole in order to understand its parts; to use existing objects and technologies in a manner unforeseen or unintended by their manufacturers; to invent new forms by breaking down the codes that underlie old forms; to provoke systems into revealing what they’re made of. These are some of the tactics associated with reverse engineering as practiced in a variety of fields and contexts: from industrial design and software development to anthropology and medicine. As a practice that emphasizes “know-how” over material advantage, it is no coincidence that reverse engineering has emerged as a strategy in wars that are increasingly asymmetrical and in a world where power and resources are increasingly concentrated and unequally distributed. The artists featured in this exhibition variously embrace reverse engineering as a means of critically understanding, intervening in and reinventing this world.

HowStuffisMade project by Natalie Jeremijenko is an on-line encyclopedia of labor conditions and manufacturing processes involved in the production of contemporary products. These "photo essays" can be used both as a consumer guide to commodities (blue jeans, plastic bags, fortune cookies, paper clips, etc.) and as a prototype curriculum for training future engineers and designers. The HowStuffisMade website is designed as a TWiki, an open-content, editable system that allows visitors to modify, correct and/or contribute new content. As the artist writes “this system has the potential to change design practices, and industry practices… Because future generations of designers and future managers will be introduced to manufacturing and labor issues much earlier and much more vividly in their career (most engineers and almost all management students graduate without a single visit to a manufacturing facility), they may be better equipped to explore and develop designs to address these issues.” >from *reverse engineers exhibition site*.

related context
> blurring the boundaries: installation art 1969-1996. january 23, 2001
> % hacking the xbox_ : an introduction to reverse engineering. may 26, 2003
> kop - kingdom of piracy: piracy as net art form. october 2, 2002
> open_source_art_hack: new museum exploration. april 30, 2002
> the magic of light: light art exhibition. february 8, 2002

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imago
> reverse the curve:
from the whole to the parts

Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link.

You can make street art with grafedia, or just leave behind simple calling cards for others wherever you go. You can have running dialogues between authors, or create interactive narratives or poetry in public spaces. Grafedia is a boundless, interactive publishing platform, base, cheap, and easy to use. It is an open system - the places and ways to use it are limitless. With grafedia, every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world can be joined with the Internet.

Grafedia authors can make hyperlinked text at any time in three easy steps. Simply: 1. Choose a word. 2. Send a media file from your cell phone to that chosen word plus '@grafedia.net', e.g. 'myword@grafedia.net'. 3. Write that word anywhere in the real world in blue with an underline. That word will then be linked to the media file the author sent to grafedia.net, and viewers will be able to retrieve the file. You can also upload media from your computer directly to the grafedia.net server in order to create grafedia with more precise images.

Grafedia was created by John Geraci at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU. >from *grafedia*.

related context
> spatial annotation projects. a list of spatial annotation projects and platforms
> yellow arrow. merges graffiti and sticker culture with wireless media
> semacode. a URL barcode
> click n'share. wireless usb flash drives. (video demo)
> active posters. spring/summer 2005
> redtacton. exchange data from personal information devices worn on the body to computers embedded in the environment. february 18, 2005
> invisible post-its. location-based sms: digital graffiti service. february 2, 2005
> banksy: graffiti art. december 3, 2003

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> hyper_link urban surfaces:
the means of connection between the physical and the virtual

Phil Gamblen y Guy Ben-Ary will be talking about their work as members of SymbioticA Research Lab as well as their solo projects, about MEART-The Semi Living Artist, and about their most recent projects, Mother and Living Screen.

SymbioticA, The Art & Science Collaborative Research Lab, is a research laboratory dedicated to the artistic exploration of scientific knowledge in general, and biological technologies in particular. It is located in The School of Anatomy & Human Biology at The University of Western Australia. SymbioticA is the first research laboratory of its kind, in that it enables artists to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department.

MEART is an installation distributed between two (or more) locations in the world. Its “brain” consists of cultured nerve cells that grow and live in a neuro-engineering lab, in Georgia institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA (Dr. Steve Potter's lab). Its “body” is a robotic drawing arm that is capable of producing two-dimensional drawings. The “brain” and the “body” will communicate in real time with each other for the duration of the exhibition.

Andy Gracie – hostprods creates digital artworks dealing with issues caught between the arts and sciences. Much of this work involves a dialog and/or interchange between technological and natural living systems or natural phenomena. A current area of investigation is in the development of 'irrational' Artificial Intelligences to build spontaneous communications between machine and animal, to allow a new language and learning space to develop. He will present us his last two projects:

- small work for robot and insects is an installation designed to illustrate the intersections and mutual mediation of technological and natural systems. it stages the attempts by a robot to establish some kind of meaningful dialog with a colony of live crickets.

- fish, plant, rack is an installation which allows the phenomenon of the electrical discharges of the virtually blind fish ‘gnathonemus petersi’ to instruct the actions of a robot whose task is to monitor the development of plants in a hydroponic system.

Mónica Bello Bugallo, independent curator, will talk about her recent collaboration with these artists in the exhibition Organismos, esto es vida, in which six artworks showed ways to explore the aesthetic possibilities of living organisms, as well as the interaction between artistic and scientist creative methods.

openfriday@straddle3
········································
hostprods (andy gracie) + SymbioticA (phil gamblen & guy ben-ary),
introduced by mónica bello bugallo, independent curator
plus videoclip 'transgenic attack . intervención video espacio público' by telenoika.net
and mantis crème - microbiotic sound theme by zherji
friday, february 11, 2005. 20 h
straddle3. c/ riereta, 32 1-3
barcelona

related context
> the bios initiative. open source biotechnology is born. unveils the 'kernel' of the world's first 'explicit open source' biotechnology toolkit. february 9, 2005
> urgent information about steve kurtz. june 2, 2004
> autoportraits. genetic self-portrait. june 27, 2003
> working with wetware: ethics of artist-created and manipulated lifeforms. june 27, 2003
> one trees project: genetic determinism and environmental influence. june 25, 2003
> synchrony: order is inevitable. april 9, 2003
> CleanRooms: art and biotechnology exhibition. october 9, 2002
> gene(sis): contemporary art explores human genomics. april 5, 2002
> science commons: building a free flow of knowledge. march 15, 2002
> information arts: intersections of art, science, and technology. january 15, 2002
> transgenic artwork gfp bunny. february, 2000

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> robot stories: fish and crickets

Men and women use different brain areas to achieve similar IQ results, UCI study finds.

While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence.

The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance.

“These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior.”

In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of – or connections between – these processing centers.

Study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests. >from *Intelligence in men and women is a gray and white matter*. January 20, 2005.

related context
> diversity: there’s more than one way of doing things. july 9, 2004
> low latent inhibition: one of the biological bases of creativity. october 13, 2003
> costs of intelligence. october 10, 2003
> emotion and cognitive skills: how emotion influence brain performance. march 21, 2002
> why do men fight? explanation of aggressive behavior. october 24, 2001

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related tags
> intelligence
> gray matter
> white matter

imago
> no worries, plenty of matter for both
just different