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In October of 2009, Linden Lab initiated a series of policy changes involving DRM and content, coming down squarely against the art community in favor of commercial content creators. This process marked the beginning of a painful decline of creative involvement in Second Life. Such a change is of course inevitable, but avatars don't know this, and stage protests accordingly. LA REVOLUTION EST MORTE! VIVA!

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I have always loved subterranean passageways and subways for the way in which they carry you through them in odd little bubbles of climate controlled comfort. The lights inside glint off the interior glass and prevent you from seeing what's really out there, but you know: there are creatures, old stations, homeless camps, cold war bomb shelters, thirty foot rats. It's a voyeristic game really, flying by at speed, only occasionally glimpsing curious shapes, spaces just beyond reach.

I commute on the subway almost every day, except when I work at home. This short video blends an audio clip of my commute with a subway-like view of my house (beginning next to my desk and ending somewhere in the dining room.) Here be dragons, or dogs at least, and who knows what else.

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Crowd Reign is a piece constructed especially for the Transparent Text Symposium reception. This projection is of a rain simulator whose drops are controlled by the volume of a crowd in a space. The louder the crowd, the more raucous the rain. Very loud or sustained noise will create extremely large and colorful drops, obliterating the notion of "rain" completely and substituting it for a disco-like effect.

This piece reflects the mood of a space by either celebrating the energy of the crowd or providing a gentle meditation in response to the environment. Crowd Reign is based on rain simulation code originally written in Processing by David Miró.

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During the early days of subway travel, it was believed that prolonged journeys under the earth caused memory loss. As a public service, most underground train companies provided a means of recording important thoughts and ideas, so that the traveller could retrieve them upon return. Early examples include the Greater New York Memory Container (GNMC), which was installed in 1904 during the construction of City Hall station. This device was unfortunately removed in 1931 because of the value of the metal to the ongoing war effort, but originally consisted of 30,000 miles of memory enhanced alloy tubing curled tightly around the station in concentric rings. A mouthpiece near the ticket booth allowed riders to deposit their thoughts, and a listening post located at the top of the exit stairwell allowed for retrieval once the rider was safely above ground.

Later models substituted lengthy tubing for a tank of whale oil. Whale oil memory containers represented a major technological shift but were shortlived, soon to be replaced with devices making use of the newly discovered Viscous Memoriae, a fluid consisting of equal parts mercury, coal oil and ground bone.

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A bowl of water sits on a pedestal in a small room. A ladle sits in the water, and as you stir and pour you hear the sounds of the ocean, which grow louder the more you trouble the water.

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Boston Globe May 18 2009 Sod Off! and Meditations on Burst Philosophy at Maker Revolution

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A 100 square foot lawn rests in the middle of the gallery. Visitors are invited to walk, sit and enjoy. This lawn, however, is made of grass which refuses its role as a passive groundcover. Sit or stand a while and the grass begins to growl, growing steadily louder until the floor shakes.

Sod Off! is the latest in a series of works exploring the emotional lives of the botanic life forms which share our space. In particular, the great American lawn, the humble groundcover which so long has been without a voice, is now given a say in its role as an underfoot organism. With every step, consider your beautiful ChemLawn; be glad it cannot speak.
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Canadian version:
Deeply concerned with the current state of botanical slavery, artist and plants-rights activist Andrew Sempere has joined the small but growing movement to return a sense of agency to silent, captive vegetation. Routinely crushed underfoot, subjected to the inequities of mere groundcover, lawns are nonetheless made to adorn nearly every residence in the US. Exposed to car exhaust, garden parties, the pressure of thousands of feet and the myriad indignities of tennis, polo, mini-golf, and lawn darts, these under appreciated organisms bide their time, silently suffering, never complaining. Armed with little more than a soldering iron and a near photographic recall of The Lorax, Andrew seeks to return the voice of protest to the lawn. Plants will be given teeth! Flowers will speak! Grasswill no longer hold it's throat in silent servitude! Viva Festuca Arundinacea!

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Boston Globe May 18 2009 Sod Off! and Meditations on Burst Philosophy at Maker Revolution
Seattle Post Intelligencer Sept 2005 Review of Sod Off! at the Bumbershoot festival
Seattle Post Intelligencer Sept 2005 Coverage of Sod Off! at the Bumbershoot festival

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A pot of ordinary living grass rests on a glass-topped box, underlit by a soft purple glow. People are encouraged to touch the grass, and as they do so notice that the color of the glow changes from purple to blue and eventually to bright green. The grass is happy! Complimenting the color changing light is an animated display. Along the bottom of the display is a scope-like indication of how long the grass has been in contact with a human. Above this display is an anthropomorphic animation of the grass - the face on the animation becomes happier the more the grass is touched!

I believe in building authentic objects. GrassHappy works as advertised. I hope you have fun playing with the grass, take the opportunity to think about how it feels to touch grass, and to think about the fact that grass is alive. At the same time, I hope that you wonder: isn't this all just a bit silly? Computation these days is ubiquitous. It is fast, cheap and embedded in everything. The trend continues with the assumption that by embedding computation in everyday objects we increase usefulness, efficiency, productivity and ultimately: quality of life. As with any technology, just because we can doesn't mean we should! Technology allows us to explore some amazing spaces, but it should not be taken for granted that a computational intermediary increases understanding (even across species). This piece uses capacitive sensing (detecting the electrical force of a living body) to express the emotion of a plant (a strange thing to do). It relies on the fact that all living creatures, plant and animal, carry electrical current.

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Half public studio, half performance, the Jackals were conceived before "making" was a movement. A multi-city, multi-year touring project involving public hacking of toys, networks and ideas, the Jackals were tech evangelists for the voiding of warranties. As a team, they dressed in white jumpsuits and masks and would descend upon various locations for limited engagments, reconstructing their environment and sharing the results in public.
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Siggraph statement:
In the grey space between utopia and dystopia we who are jackals live on the edges. Opportunistic omnivores who are, unavoidably, circling your city! There have always been jackals, there always will be jackals. We are the ones who put your tech to use, the ones who recycle the glut and make it useful in aesthetic glory. The technology is neither servant nor master, but merely our raw material, to gnaw, rework, shape and build.

Stealing as appropriation is appropriate to this venue. The building is the making is the thinking is the reason. Invited or not, we will be watching, thinking, reshaping. The making of art is the making of the future from the past. Moore's law doubles the power of the past yearly, making the present at least half as strong as it will be. The building of our work is the process by which we internalize your world and construct our own. Websites, plasma displays, high modernism, biotech, abstract expressionism, history, postmodernism, mechanical engineering, physics, philosophy, IP protocols, circuit boards and solder are all dropped into a blender with a bit of irony. The resulting concoction we call art and technology, the horrible crossbreeding of the best and worst of our thinking.

Scientists have combined spinach and pigs, painters have reworked painting as photo as handmaiden of science as art object as commodity into market. And we who are neither do neither and both and render your commodities useless as market art objects, even evolving something of our own.

The Jackals will live on the outskirts of metropolis, watching, collecting, repurposing what they can to construct a new reality of techno-art. We will arrive with only enough supplies to survive. The nature of the work depends on what we can scavenge. We invite all participants of the conference to watch, or better yet, participate in our work.

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Press

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BBC News Aug 14, 2002 In pictures: Hi-tech art attack Coverage of the Jackal Project at Siggraph 2002
BBCi Aug 5, 2002 Go Digital Radio/Webcast Coverage of the Jackal Project at Siggraph 2002 (and we don't have their laptop... urm... *chomp*.... nopenope)	bbc080502.rm (9MB Realmedia)
Wired News July 27, 2002 Interact With Art at Siggraph Coverage of the Jackal Project at Siggraph 2002
WTTW 11 Chicago April, 2002 Artbeat Coverage of the Jackal Project at MCA Chicago Version 2.0 Festival	artbeat040002.mpg (41MB MPEG)