margaretha
haughwout

(photo by zoey kroll)

live feed from hayes valley farm's interdepence day

this summer i am participating in chacha sikes' drupal open garden project

visit my new blog

visit art.walk.talk
12 second video responses. Belfast, Maine Art Walk. Friday, August 7, 2009

The Electro-Oracle is an interactive performance event. I work with a 21st-century divination set consisting of electrical components such as resistors, capacitors, etc. When these objects are selected, or "cast," individuals receive a "reading." The reading, as I interpret the selected objects, relates the individual to various meanings of power, empowerment, The Grid, etc. Each person who gets a reading also gets a unique URL that holds a snapshot of their spread and links to explanations so that they can access it later on for further review. more

it is the future. you live in a garden. a beautiful garden of the future. you are a key player in the functioning of the garden, where there are birds, bees, flowers and seeds. you belong to a privileged part of the garden buried deep in the heart of a humming green world. Might artistic action in a control society be more about shifting flows of power, or even moving forces towards their eventual destination in the quickest possible way? Contingent autonomous systems might be employed to reroute space and time and provide moments of intimate confrontation. f i n d a n o l d p o d , p u l l o f f t h e t o p , a n d t o s s i t b e y o n d t h e g a r d e n g a t e . m a y b e y o u c o u l d p u t a n o t e i n i t . a s s o o n a s y o u p u l l o f t h e t o p , y o u h a v e t o t h r o w i t f a s t o r t h e m e s s a g e w o n t l a s t . -- from text for nictoglobe

exploring intimacy and seduction through a myth/narrative about a "skeletonLady" who haunts miners' tunnels with a ribcage full of yellow canaries. when a canary falls, she sheds a tear, which if collected may become a virus to the living world. through this myth I mean to explore the way technology functions at the limits of our existence and knowledge, how we come to know ourselves through death. perhaps Narcissus' watery mirror was death, as McLuhan realized. we are both immersed in this other on the surface, and reflecting upon ourselves; we see our selves as self and other in the moment of death. in an immersive moment when we actually encounter an other, a similar death - function occurs. this is the nature of all media, mediation that occurs between individuals.

with josh alper(fearless leader), annette marinis, zachary james watkins
whysp is a psychedelic folk band.
full of rich harmonies, wandering lyrics, psychedelic drones, a sense of well being and gathering togetherness...

custom electronics, rfid readers, seeds, pods, military paraphenalia
the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds is a narrative exploration of the relationship between desire and violence, set in an imaginary future garden. the garden space functions as an allegory for the privileged space of the U.S., but also as an exploration of how war and flowers are similar. war and flowers both attract humans to further their own evolution. visitors are given an orientation through randomly selected introductory audio "scores," and may engage various objects to continue the narrative scenarios. one might place the bullets/seeds in the soil, toss a poppy pod, or run wirecutters over the potted flowers. more

presented at the pacific rim seminar entitled 'war /& theory':
In his introduction to War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa projects into the future when a robot historian born of the war machine writes its own history. Michael Pollan in his book, The Botany of Desire, describes the human's relationship to flowers in much the same way....

by ed osborn, with the assistance of Luke Bullock, Lea Cox, Chau-Marie Griffiths, Margaretha Haughwout, Brendan Salmond, and Marc Sciglimpaglia, all members of a project group in the Digital Arts and New Media Program at UC Santa Cruz

Electromechanical objects click and purr, while an array of small loudspeakers play slightly altered recordings of the sounds. Activation of the physical objects is based on current research in neural network modeling where software acquires knowledge through learning. The title "Outfield" references baseball, a game invented before the industrial revolution and therefore not structured around competition for a set period of time but on the completion of the game itself. Osborn's Outfield, developed with a project research group at the DANM program at the university of california santa cruz, plays itself, creating its own unexpected and temporary structure.

Abstract:
The Pool is an online project developed by faculty and students in the New Media Program at the University of Maine that aims to facilitate the sharing of skills and ideas among its users. Still in the development phase, while performing the "release early, release often" ethic of open source software development, The Pool's sources are mostly limited to a steady stream of students from the New Media Program. That The Pool to date, is limited to geographically local, and contextually specific use might engender answerable questions about the nature of evolving collaborative systems. This study explores where local context influences Pool development dramatically and where it appears to make little difference by focusing on three main themes: 1) collaboration; 2) student attitudes and strategies of resistance to The Pool; and, 3) licensing trends in The Pool. One of the most interesting aspects of the study shows that as a project develops, users tend to lessen the controls of attribution, and non-commerciality, while increasing the controls of no-transformations and no-combinations. This phenomenon reveals a surprising, anti-intuitive shift in emphasis during the creative process.

Published in First Monday

with julie greer. this project conceptually seeks to reconcile the boundary-less worlds of the emotions with the boundary driven culture of cartesianism which, as argues Simon Penny, finds it's completion within VR. the title, "::e.i.::" is a play on the much hyped idea A.I. the similarity between the two rests in that their real intelligence occurs when the system is emergent. this project is designed to be very modular. each module is a narrateme, and can be performed individually or within the context of the others. assembled together, ::e.i.:: is a four-part series of town gatherings that seeks to investigate and reveal emotional intelligence through participatory contexts. narrative space is constructed via a simple folktale which depicts the theft of emotions and a townspeople's failed attempt at reclamation. the fourth event allows for a magical, realistic, and emergent resolution to the townspeople's quandary. more

using a structure that is at once a theater and a game, this work seeks to explore the code and the cultural scripting of love thereby teasing out themes of "intimate distance" that occur on distributed, networked platforms. -- how do people feel safe in this medium and in games in ways that they do not in RL? what kinds of intimacies do these platforms allow for? in what ways does this game/performance space reveal cultural scripts that go unnoticed in RL? -- is there love in the telematic embrace, etc. the last part of this piece requests user input regarding their role-played or real feelings about the other player. the text that they enter goes nowhere; there is no storage of this information. my intent here is multifold; in an age of documention, where every piece of data is stored and fed back, the lack of feedback here creates a kind of mystery, and reveals the extreme to which digital culture has gone in terms of feedback, data storage and documentation. especially in love, we are desperate for some kind of feedback or assurance which we never really get. this piece was inspired and designed for Internet2; in future iterations of this piece i will experiment with it on this platform. more

with ivor hadziabdic. inital development: christina seeber. jerome knope. by juxtaposing broadcast media (specifically, for our project, television) next to an immersive, "interactive" environment, soapbox explores memes of interactivity and identity. soapbox is a space that provides a user with some degree of interactivity and choice as to conversation topics within a context of typical subject matter one might find on T.V. it is a satire that seeks to expose and examine the degrees to which the media determines what we think about, how we feel and how we conceive of ourselves. using the MAX/MSP programming language, three life-size, back projected video screens, cameras acting as sensors, and a database of video and audio clips, the user can manipulate their body to alter the topics being discussed by figures on the screens. as the 5 minute experience progresses, how the user impacts the media being presented becomes less predictable.