On the 21st of january will be the opening event of the Palm Top Theatre exhibition at V2 in Rotterdam. The Palm Top Theatre (or i3DG) is a small device invented by Jitsuro Mase and Tom Nagae that sits on top of an iPhone and transforms it into a 3d-ish peepbox with three semitransparant planes. It is a very nice way to turn an iPhone into a custom-device and it works in the sense that the images can seem three-dimensional. It remains very much a baroque-theater kind of 3d though: more 3-plane than 3-d. The aspect I liked most about it, is the smallness and preciousness of the images in it; it is great to hold a small box with images like this.

the baroque theatre in Český Krumlov.

the palm top theatre

Maki Ueda and Nae Morita, the curators of this exhibition, invited a number of artists to make pieces for the Palm Top Theatre, this time for the first time also shown in an iPad format.
The starting point for what I made was the software for my live-cinema piece #43, very much adapted for a multi-plane setup. The official blurb runs like this: “The agents in this piece are based on the first attempts of computerpioneer Alan Turing to model biological phenomena. They navigate a sonic space that stretches from Indian meditations on virtuality and dualism on the one hand, to workers who get on with things on the other hand.”