[rohrpost] George Legrady: Pockets Full of Memories, Kiasma

[oliver grau]

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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