Press

Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition
Jury Report

"Corkscrews whirl and spin, toasters with arms made from knives and forks wave rhythmically in the air, tea-strainers open and close their mouths in harmonic accompaniment. A joyful gathering of everyday kitchen equipment, appear to dance together to the beat of the music. But on the surface what looks like just ‘too much’ happiness and fun becomes sobering. It is disturbing to realise how easily a whole value system which promotes functionality, seamless productivity and efficiency, from the world of business communications machinery has been absorbed and accepted as the ‘normal’ tools, behaviours and etiquette for network communications within our personal and social lives. LiveForm:Telekinetics clearly shows us how our communications with the people we care for and love are being limited by the tools we have uncritically accepted. The enchanted objects celebrate through the social mediums of music and play, new communication languages, new networked social experiences, and the creative social processes in the production of the objects themselves, reminding us what it is we have been missing all this time."

Vida 8.0 competition website

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Tres obras 'site specific', distinguidas en el concurso de Fundación Telefónica
November 3, 2005

La séptima edición del concurso de Fundación Telefónica recibió 69 proyectos de 23 países. El segundo premio (7.000 euros) recayó en Liveform: Telekinetics, un autómata fabricado con utensilios de cocina que reacciona con la música, de la canadiense Michelle Teran y el alemán Jeff Mann.

Bajo la apariencia lúdica del baile de tenedores, tijeras, sacacorchos y ralladores, la obra es una crítica a un sistema de valores centrado en la funcionalidad, la productividad y la eficacia.

-- el pais

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note: Jeff Mann is not German, as described in the news report, but Canadian.

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Nosotros somos los robots
Manuel Muñiz Menéndez

LiveForm:Telekinetiks (LF:TK), proyecto germano-canadiense firmado por Michelle Teran y Jeff Mann, crea una escena que, a primera vista, podría pensarse sacada de una película de Walt Disney: los utensilios de cocina hacen una fiesta, bailando al son de la música. Los sacacorchos giran, las tostadoras marcan el ritmo agitando tenedores y cuchillos, las teteras se abren y cierran a compás haciendo coros... Muy curioso y alegre. Hasta que nos paramos a pensar cuándo fue la última vez que nos lo pasamos tan bien en el trabajo. Los objetos han conseguido regular férreamente nuestras acciones laborales y ahora que nos dominan pueden divertirse.

--abc.es

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Affective Systems - Céline Pourveur
DEAF04 Affective Turbulence: the art of open systems
17 Nov 2004 , report

"Interesting about LF:TK is that a new sort of social space is created, not entirely physical, not entirely virtual. There is also a kind of seductive poetic dimension to the project: rethinking how communication can take place between two physically separated persons without the use of mentally orientated (speech, text) media, but through physical objects. Mann & Teran also encourage people to reinvent the idea of what a social space can be. At the same time they are making an ironic comment on the limiting virtual character of chat rooms and virtual platforms on the Internet by reintroducing playful physical sensations."

Full Report

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Locative Media & Instantiations Of Theatrical Boundaries

"This temporal and spatial coherence has conventionally been upheld in performances offering a communion of direct, living perception, described by Jerzy Grotowski as being the fundamental condition of theatre. Yet if shared *in vivo* experience is indeed the essential condition of live art, then durational locative media works forming communions of interactors can be seen to create the premises of a novel kind of theater. The *Telematic Dinner Party*, where Michelle Teran and Jeff Mann convened Amsterdam and Toronto guests to a shared virtual space, was orchestrated to enhance the sense of community amongst geographically and temporally dispersed members. Time differences required the dinner to be staged over a five-hour afternoon, and strategies were devised to create spatial and temporal continuity amongst the groups of guests. Devices highlighting interaction included automated wine servers which filled glasses on each side of the Atlantic, sensored "Glass Clinkers" which called for toasts, and a speech-mediating animatronic fish. Drawing on an age-old social event with easily recognizable customs and protocols, the *Telematic Dinner Party* serves as a modern echo of the theatrical banquets that form a determinant though often overlooked part of performance history."

— Sally Jane Norman for Leonardo Electronic Almanac

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Social handle on high-tech

The front room at Spectrum Gallery looks like the aftermath of an electrician's dinner party. Kitchen utensils and electrical wires are strewn across a table while spoons clatter on glasses and bottle openers jump up and down. This is no normal gathering around the dining table, this is LiveForm:Telekinetics' addition to Data Difference, part of BEAP (Biennale of Electronic Art, Perth).

LiveForm, a collaboration from Canada and the Netherlands, connects the eating and drinking utensils we use at social gatherings with the internet via electrical circuits. These everyday objects then become physical surrogates for friends on the web. The bottle openers and colanders jump up and wave when absent friends want to say something. In this way, common household appliances become the interfaces for communication, not the screens of computers or mobile phones.

As in kinetic art, everyday objects become central in our association with others. We tend to communicate over or through objects, so why not use them at the interface for digital communication? LiveForm's work defines the socialisation of technology, which is central to the theme of Data.

...Data is not a whiz-bang exhibition of you-beaut technology. It is an unnervingly quiet, almost conversational show. But it is no less challenging because of this quietness. The artists might not be interested in the aesthetic look of their work, but they are genuinely involved in developing new forms of social interfacing.

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DataDifference: Configuring verandah space

"Michelle Teran (media artist) and Jeff Mann (electro-kinetic artist), both Canadian, discussed their collaborative work 'LiveForm:Telekinetics', an adapted version which was exhibited at 'DataDifference'. Driven by the urge to facilitate remote involvement in everyday social spaces like a picnic, the team has developed real-world interfaces made out of household objects including bottle openers and colanders. The 2002 pilot of LF:TK was designed around a shared dinner between friends in different countries. Across the table, half in Toronto and half in Amsterdam, the guests were able to communicate with each other using these objects. Speeches in one country were broadcast through a talking fish, while a sensor in the hand of one guest controlled a bottle pouring device to refresh the glass of another. For Teran and Mann the "network is largely a social space" that needs real-world interfaces to allow physical presence in remote locations."

–Christy Dena for RealTime Arts

Full Review

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No apron strings…: Liveform: telekinetics

"Conjuring up images of psychic endeavours and world saving feats, the Liveform: telekinetics installation takes the form of a mobile test kitchen. Michelle Teran and Jeff Mann's intention is to involve the public in a collaboration on a series of site-specific installation/performance works connecting hybrid physical/virtual spaces using streaming media and networked kinetic objects. The artists are challenging traditional commodity relations and creating an array of spaces in which different experiences might be articulated and different voices heard."

— Therese Sweeney for RealTime Arts

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Embodiment and euphoria: DataDifference conference

"Canadian artists Michelle Teran and Jeff Mann also discussed their project on display at the DataDifference exhibition. Liveform: Telekinetics involves thinking outside the square of the computer screen with a network interface where remote participants are able to control small robotic devices based on familiar household items that act as surrogates of their physical presence. There’s a whimsical, Inspector Gadget-like quality to some of these avatars: corkscrews that turn their heads and raise and lower their arms, bottle-pouring robot arms and talking fish. Social spaces such as dinner tables and picnic rugs act as mixed-reality platforms where remote participants interact with live users through their robotic puppets."

— Russell Smith for RealTime Arts

Full Review

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The power of play: DataDifference Conference

"Michelle Teran and Jeff Mann also use physical props in conjunction with telepresence. Their experimental performances involve the use of various technologies to link sites for social purposes such as a picnic or dinner party. LiveForm: Telekinetics involves a complex interaction of everyday household objects with internet technology to establish the telepresence of guests at the dinner table. Mann describes it as providing a body: "I don’t want to go to that shop because I don’t have a body and I can’t exist there." The table or the picnic rug becomes a social interface. The collaborative group sees the network as an essentially social space; they premise the social interactive-ness of their work on this notion. They posit current models of computer/screen interfaces as not conducive to social interaction; they are business machines. By using kitchen utensils and household objects they are drawing upon an already established body of social usage, essentially they have positioned the body as the main tool for interaction."

— Kirsty Darlaston for RealTime Arts

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Dutch Eletronic Art Festival DEAF04 Affective Systems (seminar) featuring LiveForm: Telekinetics

"At DEAF 04 the LiveForm:Telekinetics project co-founded by Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran was launched. By animating inanimate objects via the internet, they frame this kinetic display around the social ritual of eating. They are doing a series of events in Amsterdam in collaboration with Montreal, in which these spaces are mediated via objects that act as an interface of presence via the other non local space. This is a profoundly more imaginative and three dimentional way of communicating human complesity than a computer or mobile phone screen using the potential of the internet."

— Nancy Mauro-Flude for Mediamatic

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Dutch Electronic Arts Festival '04 (DEAF '04):
Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems

"As author Gerd Ruebenstrunk, a psychologist who wrote his thesis on "emotional machines" described during the Affective Systems seminar at DEAF, serious research into the nature and the role of emotions has only recently taken off. Popular science writers, like Antonio Damasio and Robin Dunbar, have made the subject fashionable and respectable and many more are seriously developing promising new theories. Aaron Sloman from Birmingham and Andy Clark from Edinburgh, among others, have more or less successfully bridged the perceived gap between consciousness, cognition, and affect. But there remains a lot of work to do, and artists seem to be the natural allies of scientists to show how to do it. At the same Affective Systems seminar, artists Angelika Oei and René Verouden (NL), Michelle Teran and Jeff Mann (CA/NL) and Phoebe Sengers (US) explained how they directly included machine emotion and feelings in their multimedia environments, haptic, and hybrid interfaces and media works respectively. Owen Holland from Birmingham made in his inimitable way the reverse trip from scientific research into artistic expression."

—Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen for Leonardo on-line

Full Review

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Short introduction on the context and background of the seminar series
DEAF04 Affective Turbulence: the art of open systems

"Current consumer devices or trendy gadgets often lack the space or openness for the D-I-Y variant, or other challenges to use ones creativity. For creative purposes, these shortcomings of assumed functionality often mean the avoidance of real ‘personalization' or empowerment of the end-user or operator. In the experimental electronic arts, we witness experiments with non-task oriented applications and devices where the operator or participant is provided a considerable amount of freedom to (co-)create her own experience and interact with other persons and machines. Here, social aspects come into play, and the roles in the human-machine interaction diagram are changing drastically. When the user becomes a participant, technology becomes less dominant; this demands a revision of our present interaction models and new critical interaction approaches."

— Anne Nigten

Full Report