MW2MW is a collaboration between Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg. Started in 1997, both artists work independently but come together on long term projects such as Apartment, Wonderwalker, Thinking Machine and Noplace.

Name Voyager

2004

Name VoyagerExplore the sea of names, letter by letter…watch trends rise and fall, and dive in deeper to see your favorite name’s place in the historical tides.

The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America’s name choices. Start with a “sea” of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you’ll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name’s changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.

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Futureface

2004

Futureface Futureface is a group of 8 people that met once a month over Saturday brunch to discuss the future of interface. Each month there is a set topic and each person provides one image and a short text. Our intention is to then create an installation/exhibition based on our thinking.

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Third Person

2004

Third PersonThird person is a temporal mirror. Using camera recognition technology, it replaces realtime video of people at the installation with clips recorded earlier. In the present, people’s movements are ‘averaged’, a little like a Muybridge photo sequence, so that they form the canvas onto which the previous footage then plays.

People are visible only as dark silhouettes against which, perhaps, you can see a previous clip of a figure in white descending the same staircase.

Third Person was shown at the ICA, London, as well as at LMCC, 4 Walls Film Club and by appointment.

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Parade

2004

Parade ‘Parade’ is made from an exaggerated physiognomy, reacting to the movements of the passers by. Parade is part of a site-specific new media project called Third Person.

Parade is an interactive cinema installation shown in the town of Hudson in New York on December 4th 2004. Between 4pm and 8pm, 10,000 people took part in a ‘Winterwalk’, during which time we projected on the two windows of 330 U Gallery.

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History Flow

2003

History FlowHistory flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia.

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Thinking Machine

2003

Thinking MachineThinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

Installation, London ICA, 2003. Ars Electronica 2004. Launch

Dialogtable

2003

Walker DialogtableDialog Table is a shared interface where you use hand gestures to discover more about any dynamic information. Several people can gather around and together explore the table’s movies, narratives and 3D journeys. The table provides an opportunity for people to discuss with each other their thoughts on what they have seen, whether it be an artwork. a game or a service.

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Shape of Song

2002

Shape of SongWhat does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see–literally–the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.

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TimeMaker

2002

TimemakerOnce at a family reunion we were talking about time. It turned out that everyone had mental images of time, but they were all different. For instance, I imagine time as a rug that I am making, close by its all strands and colors but from a distance the rug forms into patterns. My uncle saw it as a 3d spiral thing. We decided to do a piece that looks at how people imagine and navigate through time.

TimeMaker, a commission by Art Center Nabi, is a place where individuals can express their subjective thoughts and experiences about the abstract theme of time. It is a Clock Gallery where one can take a look at other people’s interpretations of time.

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Idealine

2001

IdealineFrom the beginning, net art has travelled multiple paths. More than a medium, the net is a environment uniquely hospitable to many diverse media: programming and animation, video and audio, gameplay and community. Each individual artist picks up these threads and weaves them in novel combinations. The Idea Line is designed to let you follow these threads of thought yourself, and discover how each work is part of a larger tapestry.

The Idea Line displays a timeline of net artworks, arranged in a fan of luminous threads. Each thread corresponds to a particular kind of artwork or type of technology. The brightness of each thread varies with the number of artworks that it contains in each year, so you can watch the ebb and flow of different lines of thought over time. Launch

Apartment

2001

ApartmentViewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer’s words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships.

Apartment is inspired by memory palaces. In a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-It era, Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then reciting that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations. Launch

Light Threshold

2000

Light ThresholdThe Light Threshold was designed as a gateway to the Olympic Complex in Sydney, Australia. The work is a threshold of light that perpendicularly crosses the northern entry road/bridge to the park.

Five masts establishes a vertical plane that cuts across the access roadway in an open landscape. At the top of each mast is a 3m high stainless steel assembly with a series of nozzles that disperse a fine cloud of mist into the air.

This drifting cloud of mist is animated by reflecting a yellow/gold stream of sunlight through its center off of a system of mirrors. The mirror system, gimbaled atop a sixth mast, is controlled by a heliostat computer programmed to follow the sun’s path. More…

Wonderwalker

2000

WonderwalkerA commission of the Walker Art Center, WonderWalker reimagines the 16th/17th-century Wunderkammer as a communal collection space.

The WonderWalker is a collection of shared objects. Like the Wunderkammer collections of the 17th century, the map is conceived as a phantasmagoria of web objects, whose reason for placement in the collection is dependent on an independent eye.

Anyone can be a collector. You become one by dragging a button to your browser’s toolbar. Then anytime you browse and something catches your eye, just add that to the collection. Launch

Pancinema

2000

PancinemaA series of panoramic cameras are located throughout milan, pointed at the sky, at people in front of the train station, at trees and from the tallest building. Their output is continuously streamed to the server which then stores them chronologically.

These panoramic image feeds are collaged and shown on a giant glass cylinder in front of milan train station., so forming a memory of the city that starts at the inauguration of the sculpture.

The archived images are played as continuous time-lapse movies on the glass cylinder. The circular balustrade acts as in interface, each section of which marks a period of time past. More…