Virtual Bed-friend

There has been some active talk about a “Virtual Girlfriend” create by Drew Burrows, a NYU student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring Show at Tisch School of the Arts. So you come home everyday to an empty bed. How lonely can it be? Lonely enough for Drew to create a Virtual Girlfriend 2-D virtual person, then project the image onto his bed using an infrared-sensitive light projection, to cuddle with. (The projection keeps her clothes on at all times).

See the rough video footage from drew.

It is interactive: it responds to human movements using an infrared sensor connected to a light projection: “Lie on your back, she snuggles up right next to you in a log position. Curl up in the fetal position, she spoons…Give her kiss on the check and she rolls over and buries her face in the pillow.

Although there are many projects out there dealing with empty beds, this is the first of its kind to be fully interactive in a human sense. Some of the controversy surrounds the fact that it is a virtual “girlfriend”, but as the video shows, there is also a woman in bed with the projection.

Drew’s website is here: 

http://drewburrows.com/

Another similar project, although earlier (1992): 

http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/~sermon/dream/

Leather Jacket Made From Mice Stem Cells Euthanized

2008 is shaping up to be a real out-there Art year. A dog is starved in a gallery, a woman conceives and aborts multiple times as an undergrad piece, and now this at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in New York.

What is it this time? One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the MOMA in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened…

Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

Link