Back in May the National Gallery of Denmark invited seven progressive musicians to create a piece of music based on their interpretations of an art work in the museum's collection.

The musical interpretations have been released one at a time, and now they are all available as an app that allows users to listen to the music, either at the museum or at home while exploring high-res photos of the art that served as inspiration.

Museum goers without smarthphones can borrow a handheld device at the museum. The app is in Danish but given the limited amount of content it should be possible for anyone to navigate and enjoy.

Music Made by Art features:
Giana Factory (painting by Abildgaard)
Stoffer & Maskinen (painting by Ejnar Nielsen)
Kasper Bjørke (painting by Valdemar S. Møllers)
Darkness Falls (painting by Casper David Friedrich)
Turboweekend (sculpture by Niels Hansen Jacobsen)
Thulebasen (painting by Jørgen Valentin Sonne)
Trentemøller (painting by an unknown artist)

• More info at The National Gallery of Denmark + Get the app on iTunes

The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T) has created a series of 100 QR stencil designs that can be used to provide directions, information, and warnings to digital nomads in urban space.

The project - called "Hobo Codes" - is inspired by the Hobo signs developed by 19th century vagabonds and migratory workers to cope with the difficulty of nomadic life.

QR codes usually direct users to a URL, but the digital Hobo Codes contains simple information, such as an advice or warning. Scanning the codes reveal messages like "vegans beware", "those aren't women" and "it's fake".

The stencils are made using the "QR Stencil Generator", a utility which converts QR codes into vector-based stencil patterns suitable for laser-cutting. The stencil generator is developed by Golan Levin and Asa Foster III.

• QR Stenciler and QR Hobo Codes

If you are in Denmark, you can follow the life of a homeless man called Allan via an SMS service.

Allan lives on the streets of Copenhagen and subscribers to the service will receive three text messages a day, for two consecutive days.

One of Allan's messages reads: "I just woke up. Slept on a bench behind Flintholm Metro Station with my dog Little Piv".

The service is called 'SMS from the streets' and the idea is to offer a bit of insight into the life of a homeless person.

The fee is 20 DKK (4 Euro) and all proceeds go to a magazine for homeless people (Hus Forbi). The service is provided by SMSpress, which is a small publishing house specialized in providing text based stories via SMS.

To subscribe, text "SP HUSFORBI" to 1277.

• The story on Hus Forbi (in Danish)

Rambler is a physical publishing format for the obsessive microblogger.

The format consists of a pair of sensor and bluetooth enabled sneakers connected to a Twitter account. With each step taken, the shoes automatically transmit a message to Twitter made up of the word 'tap' and punctuation marks.

A message - or tweet - generated by Rambler will typically look something like this: . . tap . tap tap . . . tap tap . . . . tap . . . tap tap . . . . tap . . tap . . . tap tap . . tap tap tap tap tap tap.

Rambler is developed by designers Ricardo Nascimento and Tiago Martins. The project is a witty critique of our need to share trivial information on social networks such as Twitter.

Related:
One-word blogging: Wordr
Freshly baked tweets: Bakertweet
Tweeting plant: Botanicalls
Tweeting from the womb: Kickbee

• Rambler Shoes on popkalab.com and on Twitter.

Selfpromotion: Here follows a description of a project I recently designed for a cultural festival in Spain.
---

Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled object designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space.

The object, which is shaped as an oversized 3-dimensional computer cursor (pointer), was placed on a square in Figueres, Catalunya during the cultural festival Ingràvid.

Here, people could touch it, move it around and sit on it as an alternative to the benches.

Despite being removed from its normal screen based environment, the cursor was still in touch with the digital world. Via an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted its geographic coordinates to a website. At the website, the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps thereby documenting the cursor's movements in the physical world and making it possible for participants to see how they collectively helped move the object around.

• www.urbancursor.com

The Danish music-poetry duo Bo hr Hansen & Nils Lassen has come up with a novel - and potentially very time consuming - way to promote their latest CD "Hvem er jeg?" (Who am I?).

Those buying the CD are offered a free private concert - via telephone.

In order to qualify for the concert, you need to send them an MMS (a photo via mobile phone) of yourself holding the CD, preferably with the receipt. Upon receiving the documentation, the duo will do their best to find a concert date and time that suits all of you.

Thanks Mogens for the link.

Related: Bubble Star At Home

• Private Telephone Concerts (Danish)

'Goodbye Privacy' was the theme at this year's Ars Electronica festival and perhaps not so surprisingly, there were a handful of projects and exhibitions dealing with the presence of web and surveillance cameras in public spaces.

One of them, 'Self Portrait With Webcam' by the Austrian artist Josef Klammer, is a series of photographic images seen through the eyes of webcams at different Austrian locations.

Klammer himself appears on every image with his laptop, which he used to position and capture himself. Each self portrait in the exhibition is accompanied by a photograph of the webcam along with information about its physical location as well as its webadress.

Related entry: Surveillance Camera Players

• www.klammer.mur.at

Conflux Festival #4

Wanted! by Harvey Loves Harvey (Matthew Nash and Jason Dean) is a collaborative game-like performance where the two artists (players/performers) seek neighborhood help to catch each other.

The artists will start in two different predetermined locations within a narrowly-defined area in Williamsburg. To locate each other, they will begin posting wanted-flyers that show the other artist's face, a short description and a phone number.

Both artists will be guided by calls from people who have seen the flyers, with the goal of eventually helping one of them catch the other.

There is no price for the winner, but the loser will be required to go take down all the flyers when the game/performance is over.

• Wanted!

It was the Italian team that won the Young Creatives Competition:Film 2007.

The competition - sponsored by Nokia Nseries - took place between Wednesday June 20th and 22nd in conjunction with the International Advertising Festival in Cannes.

Twenty young creative teams was given the same creative brief and 48 hours to create a 20-second TV commercial using the Nokia N93i.

The brief is not available from the website ('page not found') but from watching some of the films, it appears that it was politically correct and had something to do with creating an MTV-ad that promotes ecologically responsible living.

(From those I watched, my favorite is the Canadian submission)

• Competition website

Here is a brilliant work by Tad Hirsch that I came across when looking through a ppt presentation by Swiss researcher Nicolas Nova.

Tad Hirsch is a researcher in the Smart Cities Group at MIT's Media Lab, where his work focuses on the intersections between art, activism, and technology.

In 2006 he made the site-specific installation Tripwire, which responds to the relationship between San Jose International Airport and downtown San Jose in California

Hirsch custom-built sensors, placed them inside coconuts and hung them from trees at several public locations to monitor noise produced by overflying aircrafts.

Detection of excessive aircraft noise would cause the sensors to trigger automated telephone calls to the airport's complaint line on behalf of the city's residents and wildlife.

• Tripwire