Unreal Estate: Building a Dream Home on the Digital Frontier
September 2005

Troy Vogel is having an open house. I meet him at the art gallery he conceived as a venue for his own paintings and sculptures to tour the space and the artworks on display. Vogel’s Gallery V is an airy, rectangular atrium built on a grand industrial scale with shimmering red metallic walls and a ceiling made almost entirely of glass. Dressed in a tuxedo, Vogel shows me around the gallery, which he designed and built himself in October 2004. Immense canvases hang from the walls, depicting Cubist abstractions of Manhattan neighborhoods with titles like “Upper East Side” and “Hell’s Kitchen.” Vogel’s collection also includes an elaborate to-scale reproduction of The World Trade Center and, a three-dimensional timepiece with a floating pointer inspired by the clock on the Musée D’Orsay in Paris.

Despite my best efforts, I am having trouble keeping up with the tour. Vogel has vanished; he’s gone up to the roof, which, though transparent on the inside, as he explained, is an eye-catching solid metallic red when viewed from above. I can’t wait to see it, but there’s one tiny problem: I haven’t yet mastered the art of flight. more...

The easy way to reject creeps and psychos
16 March 2005

Jeff Goldblatt was in a bar with some friends in Atlanta, Georgia, one night when a young woman started hurling abuse at an older man. At first, Goldblatt felt sorry for the woman. "She was blonde, attractive and being harassed by this sloppy-looking, drunk fellow who wanted her phone number but just wasn't taking the hint," says Goldblatt, a 27-year-old entrepreneur.

But when the woman's shouts of indignation began to drown out the jukebox, Goldblatt's allegiances switched. "I felt bad for the guy. He was being publicly humiliated in front of the whole bar."

The incident gave Goldblatt an idea, and he set up the Rejection Hotline, a telephone service that allows women to hand over false contact details if they don't want to disclose their real number. When the unwanted suitor calls, they hear a pre-recorded message, which tells them, in no uncertain terms, that the object of their affection is simply not interested. more...

The Cult of Mac
March 2005

Thanks to Apple's evangelical fans, it's hard to imagine anyone using a Windows PC to undertake anything more creative than jotting down the grocery list.

When semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore predicted the exponential growth of computer power in 1965, he little imagined the way his now-famous law would be interpreted by one tiny but resolute group of future computer users: Mac fans. Connected to their machines like toddlers to teddy bears, some worshippers at the Altar of Apple would sooner spend $25,000 retrofitting an aging but beloved PowerBook 2400 with the OS X operating system, or give a defunct 128K Macintosh second wind as a novelty goldfish tank, than accept the popularly-held belief that a computer becomes obsolete the moment it’s off the production line. 

“The Mac is more than a computer,” writes Wired News columnist and self-proclaimed Apple nut Leander Kahney in The Cult Of Mac. “It's a community, an identity, a church.” more...

Genesis of a high-tech hub
11 December 2003

A century of philanthropy alongside military research has laid solid foundations for today's diverse sci-tech sector, says Chloe Veltman.

Today, San Diego's North Torrey Pines Road is a congested thoroughfare lined with gleaming high-rises, low-slung modernist office blocks and towering steel cranes. It's difficult to imagine what the epicentre of the city's science and technology community must have looked like before its boom days in the early 1990s.

Inder Verma, a senior scientist at San Deigo's prestigious Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has seen the landscape change beyond compare since he arrived more than two decades ago. "That used to be a hill," he says, indicating a local industrial park. "It was all wilderness. My daughter used to roam around here on her horse." more...

Viewing Scary Science Through Rosy Glasses
17 August 2003

In director Lynn Hershman Leeson's feature film "Teknolust," a biogeneticist covertly downloads a sample of her own DNA into her latest research project.

The clandestine experiment generates three clones or Self Replicating Automatons, or SRAs, who, despite the scientist's best efforts, break loose of their high-tech prison in her home and run amok through San Francisco.

Yet what sounds like a familiar sci-fi plot involving the terrors of a technology turns out to be quite the reverse. more...

Immortal kombat
29 December 2002

His work has always been spiritual, but Bill Viola has now set the ultimate test: can you find God in a computer game?

Take a walk to St John of the Cross, make a right at the Koran and turn leftat the Lotus Sutra," says Bill Viola matter-of-factly, sitting in his workshop in San Francisco. The internationally acclaimed video artist might have sounded like he was giving directions to a tourist attraction via an eccentric collection of London pubs, but he was in fact describing his latest digital art project. more...

No Longer For Scholars' Eyes Only
17 December 2002

Martin Luther, the father of the Lutheran Church, was branded a heretic by fellow Catholics when he nailed his "95 Theses" to the door of Wittenburg Castle Church in 1517.

But nearly five centuries later, the Vatican is doing its part to distribute writings by Luther worldwide on the Internet.

As part of its recently expanded Web offerings, the Catholic Church is giving the public its first glimpse of numerous historic documents from the Vatican's Apostolic Library, including Luther's handwritten letters and translations of Æsop's Fables into German. more...

A Film Fest That Transcends Films
8 October 2002

For most people, going to the movies is about watching larger-than-life images rolling across a screen against a cascading score and the sound of munching popcorn. But to the producers of the fifth-annual Transcinema Festival of Expanded Cinema, the definition of film is somewhat broader.

“Technology has made movie-making tools more accessible to artists,” said Gregory Cowley, director and curator of the San Francisco-based festival, which runs from October 8 - 12 at Bay Area arts venues. “As a result, the cinematic experience is changing. It’s no longer two-dimensional.” more...

Sound and Fury of HyperMacbeth
29 May 2002

A new treatment of Macbeth on the Internet probably won't impress Shakespeare purists. In fact, codpieces, ghosts and daggers are unmistakably absent from HyperMacbeth, the latest Net artwork by Italian new media artist dlsan. more...

Unraveling the Drama of Science
1 May 2002

It's been several years since British playwright Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, about the September 1941 meeting between the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his German counterpart Werner Heisenberg.

Littered with obscure references to Uranium 235 and the cyclotron, the playwright doubted whether the work would even get an audience, much less engender heated debate. "When I started writing the play, I didn't think anyone would actually come and see it," said Frayn, speaking recently at a symposium on Theater, Science and History in Copenhagen at Berkeley, California.

Yet people are still talking about Copenhagen, which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2000. It doesn't even seem to matter that the playwright doesn't know anything about physics. more...

Bots Invade the Arts
15 March 2002

Some artists sketch landscapes, some paint still lifes, and some carve busts out of marble.

Then there are those who build electromagnetic weapons systems, devise automata that throw 10-foot flames, and who encourage members of the public to log onto the Internet and fire explosives under high-pressure gas from remotely based ex-NASA avalanche control machines. more...

Art: In the Ear of the Beholder
15 February 2002

Eardrums in California are about to get a workout when artists gather to unleash the latest developments in sonic art upon the museum-going public. The fifth Activating the Medium festival, a major global sound art event, is hitting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Friday and Saturday, before resonating in four other California venues. more...

Fun factory
12 January 2002

THE workers in a former Del Monte fruit cocktail canning factory in Emeryville, California, have been asking themselves some searching questions lately. While some have been wondering how to make fish talk, others have been pondering what kinds of flowers monsters grow in their windowboxes. It takes several years and hundreds of millions of dollars for them to come up with the answers. But unlikely though it sounds, the return on the investment has been remarkable. more...

At An Ashram Near You: His Aura
4 December 2001

Meditation is not widely known as a spectator sport. The most introverted and ascetic of activities, it doesn't usually involve tech gadgetry, rave-style visuals or a sizeable audience. But when Ansuman Biswas meditates, people pay attention. Perched in the lotus position for six hours at a time, the Bengali-born, London-based artist is currently using a homemade electrocardiograph (ECG) device, laptop computer, video camera and real-time video imaging software to reveal his internal processes to the outside world. more...

Corner of Art Place and Tech Lane
4 December 2001

A new book by San Francisco State University professor and digital artist Stephen Wilson examines the ways in which contemporary artists use science and technology to explore their ideas. And while art and science have been intertwined for centuries, it looks like it's going to be a while before artists and scientists collaborate on an equal footing. more...

Animation wizards back staff talent
22 November 2001

Major movie studios are not well known for casting members of staff in their upcoming films. It is difficult to imagine Disney CEO Michael Eisner turning around to one of his producers and saying, "Hey, honey, you'd be perfect for the lead in our upcoming blockbuster picture". more...

Back in time to history's database
30 August 2001

I have never been struck by a stronger urge to study history than when I moved to Silicon Valley last year. Perhaps it was something to do with trying to get a grip on this accelerated universe of transient companies and ever-evolving gizmos, or perhaps the geek within was gagging to get its hands on the console of an Illiac IV. more...

Back to the source in the desert
6 September 2001

Brian Behlendorf does not fit the corporate mould. Bouncing around in jeans and a T-shirt with a long ponytail, he looks more like a partygoer who has just emerged from an all-night rave than a businessman. more...

Mean machines
28 July 2001

Not every police department has to face bands of marauding robots threatening mayhem and death. So pity the poor cops of San Francisco. Just seven weeks ago they were dispatched to raid a scrapyard in the Bayview district to halt a rampaging group of angry automatons. Again. more...

Geek temple of beauty
21 June 2001

Move over Kate Moss and make way for the geeks. Eight of the world's most gorgeous geeks will compete today for the spurious award of Sexiest Geek Alive at the San Jose Convention Centre in the heart of Silicon Valley. more...

A Put God into Google for a glimpse of cyber heaven
14 June 2001

The rabbis at askmoses.com, a Jewish website, are a busy lot. "How does reincarnation work?" asks one surfer on the site's "Ask Moses Now" live chat page. "I have a few questions about converting to the Jewish faith," says another. "Why do the Israelis think they own the world?" asks a third enquirer. Within minutes of typing in a question, the duty rabbi replies. more...

Call this a music festival?
7 May 2001

The Empire Polo Club is a very nice place. A palm-encrusted retreat in the Californian desert for suntanned tycoons and their hair-do'd wives, it is not the sort of place you would expect to find 35,000 scantily-attired ravers dancing to music loud enough to be heard in the next valley and puncturing the immaculate lawns with pick-up trucks and discarded pizza. Yet on a sizzling Saturday in late April, the Coachella Valley-based club transformed itself into a Mecca for California's growing hordes of dance music lovers. more...

Tellers sing me a song
22 March 2001

Remember a time before cash machines? The patient, 5pm queues in front of ponderous bank clerks; staying in on a Saturday night because you didn't get out of bed in time for weekend opening hours: a culture of cheque-books and IOUs? more...

A dream screen
8 March 2001

When Rodney Ascher stepped into a San Francisco bar for a cocktail one evening, he had no intention of turning a quiet drink into the subject of a film, least of all a film people could carry around with them in their pockets. more...

Lego's online dream
1 February 2001

In Douglas Coupland's 1995 novel Microserfs, a bunch of 20-something computer programmers flee their jobs at Microsoft Seattle to set up a company called Oops! in Silicon Valley. Short for object oriented programming system, Oops! is described as "virtual Lego - a bottomless box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms." more...

Tate drawn into the web
5 October 2000

The description of Tate Britain as "the home of 500 years of tasty babes" rather jars with one's normal impression of the art gallery, particularly when it goes on to mention having "psychological props of the British social elite". more...

Labels online
16 August 2000

IT'S Wednesday evening and you're on a plane, halfway across the Channel, when you remember that you've forgotten to pack the bright pink Gina mules which are the only pair in the world that perfectly match the beaded Boyd dress you plan to wear on Saturday night. For those among us who would consider jumping from the emergency exit, help is at hand. Open your laptop and click on Net-a-porter.com, a new London-based virtual boutique - think Vogue meets the Cross. And within two days of placing your order, a delicately wrapped pair of pink mules will be delivered to your hotel. more...