WaterBar

Title: WaterBar
By: Marc Böhlen
Featured: @ Fluid Culture 2011
Where: Ellicott Square Building (Main Atrium), 295 Main St., Downtown Buffalo, NY
When: October 10-14, 2011

WaterBar: Geo-engineering for the Public Realm (Adding a Missing Filter Step)

WaterBar is the first of a series of installations of Future Public Technologies that investigate the relationship between informatics and materiality in the public realm. WaterBar is a public water-well designed for the post-sustainability age.

WaterBar geo-engineers mineralized water. It begins with a cleaning stage via a slow anthracite filter and/or exposure to UV light for bacteria control. The water then passes through a filter bank with select properties. These properties are real: physically, due to their ability to impart trace elements and culturally, due to their origin and history.

WaterBar includes quartz-rich granite from Inada by Fukushima, home of the latest devastating high-tech catastrophe; sandstone from La Verna, Italy, where St Francis cared for the poor; marble from Thassos Greece, beginning and end of democracy; and limestone from Jerusalem/Hebron, Israel, source of eternal conflict and shared hopes. An internet-scanning, text-processing control system continuously circulates water through these filters, and mixes them in proportion to the intensity of related problems found in pertinent RSS feeds to a daily mineralized water mix for shared concerns.

Thirsty? Curious?

For more information, click here.

STRANGE KNOWLEDGE: NOTES ON MEDIA ARTS RESEARCH ON ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS presented by Marc Böhlen

The Geography Colloquium Series, Spring 2011 presents:

Strange Knowledge – Notes on Media Arts Research on Environmental Conditions
Presented by Marc Böhlen

When: Friday, February 4, 2011 @ 3:15 pm
Where: 145H Wilkeson Quad (Reception to follow in the Hallway outside of Wilkeson 108)

The first Department of Geography Colloquium of the Spring 2011 semester will be Friday, February 4, 2011 at 3:15pm in Wilkeson 145H (the GIAL lecture room) with a reception to follow in the hallway outside of Wilkeson 108. Please join us!

Abstract: Media Arts have a history of engaging knowledge from other disciplines. The results that emerge from such engagements can take on odd yet at times revealing forms. In this presentation, Böhlen will discuss examples of media arts that query landscapes and the environment to generate discourses that expert groups (such as environmental scientists) do not readily generate. Böhlen will also discuss how such works can contribute to new research agendas, originating in the arts and feeding back into other disciplines.

Artist-engineer Marc Böhlen designs information processing systems that critically reflect on information as a cultural value. His projects derive qualitative potential from the realm of quantitative information and query the relationship between people and machinery in fundamental ways. Böhlen is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department
of Media Study at the University at Buffalo where he directs the PuCoMe (Public Computational Media) Lab. Recent art work has been shown at the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria, 2010). Recent publications include Ambient Intelligence in the City (Springer, Berlin, 2009) and Future Data Culture (Thresholds No38, MIT, 2011).

For more info on the Colloquium Series, contact Jared Aldstadt at: geojared@buffalo.edu

This Event is Co-Sponsored by the Undergraduate Geography Student Association (UGSA) & Geography Graduate Student Association (GGSA).

MEDIA ARCHITECTURE COLLOQUIUM

MEDIA ARCHITECTURE COLLOQUIUM
2-5pm, Wednesday, March 17, 2010
301 Crosby Hall, South Campus
University at Buffalo

This half-day event brings together artists, architects and researchers to examine the evolving overlaps, intersections, and exchanges between the fields of Architecture and Media Art in the 21st century. As media, communication and information systems become embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of our daily lives, new opportunities (and dilemmas) emerge for the design and construction of the built environment. At the same time, these pervasive transformations in how we access, consume and produce contemporary media and information challenge traditional models for how we conceive, perceive and interact within physical space. Bringing together faculty from the departments of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo with faculty from the Media Architecture program at the Bauhaus–Universität, Weimar, Germany, this international gathering aims to highlight emerging transdisciplinary practices that integrate architectonic and medial space in the creation and construction of these emerging hybrid environments.

The program consists of a six presentations and pair of panel discussions accompanied by a live, networked event/performance involving students from both Buffalo and Weimar.

REMARKS BY:
Dean Brian Carter, College of Architecture and Planning and Senior Associate Dean Charles Stinger, College of Arts and Sciences

PRESENTATIONS BY:
“Micro Public Places”
Marc Böhlen, Associate Professor, Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo

“Current Projects in Interface Design”
Jens Geelhaar, Professor, Faculty of Media, Bauhaus–Universität, Weimar

“Cosmopolli / An Atmospheric Commons”
Jordan Geiger, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo

“The Blind Screen”
Omar Khan, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo

“Wandering Line: performing sites through sound”
Teri Rueb, Professor, Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo

“MediaArchitecture at the Bauhaus”
Sabine Zierold, Professor, Faculty of Architecture, Bauhaus–Universität, Weimar

Organized and moderated by:
Mark Shepard, Assistant Professor, Departments of Architecture and Media Study, University at Buffalo

MARC BÖHLEN'S January 2010 Presentations

PRESENTATIONS
Experiments in Embodied Collective Intelligence
Shanghai AI Lecture Series
Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
http://shanghailectures.org/home

Micro Public Places
eksperimen menuju arsitektur yang memitrakan
Universitas Islam Indonesia, Yogyakarta
http://csd.uii.ac.id/guest-lecture-micro-public-places

RealTechSupport
Communication and New Media National
University of Singapore
http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/cnm/news/TalkBy_MarcBohlen.pdf

SHOWS (Opens January 8th)
Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA, USA
http://beallcenter.uci.edu/calendar/0910.php

DIGITAL ARTS & CULTURE 2009: Marc Böhlen, Mark Shepard & Brian Clark present

Starts: Saturday, Dec 12 2009 (evening)
Ends: Tuesday, Dec 15 2009

Media Study faculty Marc Böhlen and Mark Shepard and MFA Candidate Brian Clark will present their research at the Digital Arts and Culture 2009 conference at the University of California Irvine Dec. 12-15, 2009.

The DAC ’09 is the 8th in an international series of conferences begun in 1998. DAC is recognized as an interdisciplinary event of high intellectual caliber.

This iteration of DAC will dwell on the specificities of embodiment and cultural, social and physical location with respect to digital technologies and networked communications.

DAC09 is structured around themes, each theme being composed of panels. DAC09 will be held in the Arts Plaza of the University of California Irvine.
Simon Penny is director of DAC09.