A great friend of mine is currently getting her master’s in New Media at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. As a wrap up for one of her seminars, she and a colleague are working on “The Cubinator Project“, an exploration into the roles time and space play in new media. Here’s what they say about it:

Anna Munster observes how speed becomes our new unit of measure for distance in the virtual realm. We tend to experience closeness when response is very fast. Consequently, lag in response creates the effect of remoteness. In the globalized 24-hour economy, strongly supported by digital media, we are also prompted to believe that everyone or everything is always working and available. Our interaction with a computational device somehow erases human constraints (our biological rhythms, our physical distances) in our imagination.

With our project we aim to expose the regimes of perception that virtuality engrave our sensory system. After exploring … the relationship between bodily perceived space/time and new digitally created space/time parameters … we will try to produce a direct experience of these collisions between the physical and virtually perceived space.

That high-level upper education talk is to say that the two students are holding a 24-hour performance of “The Cubinator Project”. During this 24-hour period, the public can contact them through digital media channels and request the creation of an origami cube. The two students will broadcast this 24-hour performance live on the internet to show their real time interactions and cube creations. The more people that interact with them, the more cubes they’ll create and the larger their cube art sculpture will become. Cool, right? You can read up on more of the details here.

The performance will take place on April 17th at 7:00pm (Amsterdam time). Tune into the project’s website to join the fun.

On a side note, my friend also has a A+ blog called Munt Thee about happenings in Amsterdam. I highly recommend it to those visiting/living in the city. Sure makes me miss it!