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"Media artist James George and photographer Alexander Porter want to turn photography into a desk job. Well, even more of a desk job. As digital cameras and ever-larger memory cards have negated the need to think about scarcity while shooting pictures, the pair\u2019s work to combine digital SLR photography with the Microsoft Xbox 360\u2019s Kinect infrared camera have made the medium even less immediate, turning Henri Cartier-Bresson\u2019s decisive moment into a prolonged sifting process performed at a keyboard instead of behind a lens or in a darkroom.The end results of this is a new hybrid form of photography, ghostly collections of data points that fragment the image and destabilize the role of the photographer. This new format is&amp;nbsp;highlighted in \u201CWired Frames,\u201D a group exhibition open today at Eyebeam.&amp;nbsp;The details of George and Porter's process are fascinating. Instead of snapping a photo and awaiting the outcome on film or on a screen, they take their camera-combine out to collect data rather than visible light, gathering spatial information from the Kinect\u2019s infrared sensor and color from the more traditional camera. Using a custom&amp;nbsp;software kit called RGB+D (red, green, and blue, plus depth), the pair process the information they collect, rendering the Kinect data as three-dimensional clouds of dots and lines that can be \u201Cpainted\u201D with the SLR data, adding washes of relevant color.For their \u201CDepthEditorDebug\u201D series, George and Porter took their setup to a subway station platform and came back with a series of images depicting wavering visualizations of human figures, architectural emptinesses, and subway cars turned into clouds of points. The images, also on display in \u201CWired Frames,\u201D are all created from the same set of data \u2014&amp;nbsp;because of the depth sensing, the camera has no fixed viewpoint; through the software, the computer can parse the information and map relevant color onto depth from any angle.Though it may be surprising to find a traditionally trained photographer dismantling his own medium, Porter has embraced the RGB+D format. The process of creating images changes, becoming a search for \u201Cphotographic moments in the software,\u201D explained Porter in a recent conversation at Eyebeam. \u201CIt doesn\u2019t ruin the essential things for me.\u201D Through the software, the serendipity of photography persists, with some added twists: There are new variables to play with, like altering the way color is mapped onto spatial points or how the depth points are distributed. \u201CThe impulse behind it is the same,\u201D Porter concluded.George, who is currently an artist in residence at Eyebeam, identifies with the New Aesthetic label that recently went viral with novelist and futurist Bruce Sterling's Wired essay, but worries about making work that is simply \u201Cabout technology,\u201D rather than using the technology to make innovative art. With this work, they are \u201Cappropriating technology made for machine consumption for expressive capability,\u201D he said, using the tools \u201Cin ways not intended by the people who made them.\u201DThe other artists in \u201CWired Frames\u201D are equally adept at twisting technology to their own creative ends. Kyle McDonald, who is famous for hacking into a Mac store full of computers and hijacking their webcams, collaborated with Arturo Castro to create \u201CFaces,\u201D an installation that uses a webcam and McDonald\u2019s FaceOSC software to track viewers\u2019 facial movements and overlay a real-time virtual mask of a different face on top their own. For the exhibition, McDonald has also curated a selection of projects that other people have created using FaceOSC, from artists to developers and hobbyists.By including these other projects, \u201CWired Frames\u201D exposes the greater community behind technology-based art and underlines the participating artists\u2019 status not just as makers of objects, images, and videos, but creators of public tools and resources and members of an extremely active online community. Both RGB+D and FaceOSC are open source, meaning that anyone can use or adapt the software without licensing restrictions. One issue that technology-based art confronts is that the idea of the single author is increasingly irrelevant \u2014&amp;nbsp;all work is based on the machines, tools, and software already created by other artists and developers. Unlike the contemporary art norm, the key here is to acknowledge your immediate peers and influences properly, and participate in the community by keeping your own creations accessible and open.\u201CThere\u2019s no conflict of interest there, it\u2019s only supportive,\u201D said George. According to the artist, a creation like RGB+D might not be an art object in itself, but it is nevertheless \u201Cvalidated when work from other people comes out of it\u2026 There\u2019s [original] work made with it, but it also enables other people.\u201DGeorge and documentarian Jonathan Minard further trace the outlines of their artistic community in a new documentary, \u201CClouds,\u201D filmed with Kinect and SLR, which will make its debut in the Eyebeam exhibition. Advancing the aesthetic of the earlier \u201CDepthEditorDebug\u201D images, the film is made up of interviews of new media luminaries including artist and professor Golan Levin, curator and critic Regine Debatty, and computational designer Karsten Schmidt, with each video portrait composed of colored point clouds that whirl and zoom as the figures speak. Their dialogues, ranging from musings on the future of data to explanations of the Kinect technology, are fascinating, but the effects created by the artists heighten what would be a straight talking-head documentary into a computational art piece, a new media philosophy made visual.\u201CClouds\u201D looks like the future, with its swirling data points and polygonated, holographic gurus of digital life. But what\u2019s most surprising about the work is that it\u2019s heavily invested in the present tense&amp;nbsp;\u2014&amp;nbsp;not some distant, utopian future, but our own near future, the coming visual aesthetic. \u201CWe\u2019re using the language of our time to talk about our time,\u201D one of the film\u2019s subjects, artist Sonia Yuditskaya, pronounces. Her face is an etched series of data points against a blank black ground.&amp;nbsp;[content:advertisement-center]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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