[spectre] Fwd: Pockets Full of Memories at Kiasama, Helsinki

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 22:15:24 -0700
To: gl at georgelegrady.com
From: george legrady <legrady at arts.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Pockets Full of Memories at Kiasama, Helsinki


Please distribute:


Pockets Full of Memories
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
May 7 to August 1, 2004


Pockets Full of Memories (PFOM) will be on view at the Museum of 
Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki from May 7 to August 1, 2004. 
Curated by Perttu Rastas for Kiasma, PFOM was inaugurated at the 
Centre Pompidou, Paris in the summer of 2001 and has been exhibited 
at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, 2003, Ars Electronica 
Festival, 2003, and the "Aura" exhibition, Budapest, 2003.

The installation invites audience participation by requesting the 
public to digitize and describe an object in their possession into a 
database which is visually projected in the gallery space and also 
featured on the internet. The collection of objects is continuously 
being organized by a vector quantization, self-organizing map 
algorithm that positions objects of similar descriptions near each 
other based on their semantic properties. The goal of the project is 
to visually map out the range of descriptions by which the public at 
each venue considers the objects they have at hand. The Kohonen 
algorithm used in this project has been described as an artificial 
neural-net based algorithm as it exhibits emergent behavior in its 
unsupervised learning processing, where local actions result in a 
global order over time.

The collection of contributions can be viewed online at 
http://www.pocketsfullofmemories.com where comments and messages can 
be added to any of the objects.

Additional information can be accessed at 
http://www.georgelegrady.com and a detailed description of the 
project at 
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/publications/publ_art/textpfom.html




Pockets Full of Memories Seminar
Museum of Contemporary Kiasma
May 7, 2004, 13:00

In conjunction with the exhibition, a seminar is being held on May 7, 
2004 to discuss research perspectives related to Pockets Full of 
Memories. Participants include Perttu Rastas, Kiasma media curator; 
Philip Dean, Dean if the MediaLab Graduate program, University of 
Helsinki, who will address perspectives on art and research; 
Professor George Legrady, University of California, Santa Barbara 
will give an overview of the installation; Finnish Academy of Science 
Professor Teuvo Kohonen will discuss self-organizing maps; Professor 
Mauri Kaipainen, Medialab will present related projects from 
Medialab; Professor Timo Honkela, Helsinki University of Technology 
will discuss self-organizing maps in natural language understanding.

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