Art Events Data Table

Mixed media (Foreskin cells, Stem cells, reprogrammed neurons, tissue engineering, electrophysiology, computer controlled devices and sound, foreskin cells, stem cells, neurons)

In potentia is a liminal, boundary creature created as an artistic and speculative techno-scientific experiment with disembodied human material, diagnostic biomedicine equipment and a stem cell reprogramming technique called ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’ (iPS). It is a functioning neural network or ‘biological brain’ encased within a purpose built sculptural incubator reminiscent of eighteenth century scientific paraphernalia, complete with a custom-made automated feeding and waste retrieval system and DIY electrophysiological recording setup. Created by artists Guy Ben-Ary and Kirsten Hudson in collaboration with Mark Lawson (Course coordinator of Product and Furniture design at Curtin University) and Stuart Hodgetts (Director of the Spinal Cord Repair Laboratory at the University of Western Australia), in potentia prompts us to consider how techno-scientific developments have led us to a point where, rather than being a concrete and discrete category, who or what is called a person is a highly contingent formation.

Grow is a work in progress. Stereoscopic projection, 6min duration with circular polarised glasses.

Part of an ongoing exploration of the production of environmental information, this work monitors electricity use within a public building and translates the information into an olfactory experience. Smell is a primal mode of communication from which it is difficult to be intellectually distanced; by manifesting electricity information in this way, the work not only explores the mechanics of perceiving information, but also suggests new possibilities for designing a more evocative human-infrastructure interface.

The Korean term ‘Inyeon’ expresses the spontaneous force that exists between people, a force which brings us together and creates a trail of interactions throughout our lives. The Trans-Emotion Room is the first work in a series titled Inyeon. Central to these works is the occupation of one of the most personal spaces we inhabit, a space that carries us across landscapes, a space that we mold with each step: our shoes. In The Trans-Emotion Room, participants are asked to share a small room in a pair of shoes provided. The shoes act as an interface, monitoring the body for variations in body temperature that occur when personal space is thus shared, and the room responds to this connection by subtly altering the colour spectrum of the light surrounding the participants.

RE-COG-NITION explores the question: “What is the work of art in the digital age, in relation to the contemporary state of interactive art and electronics?” A cracked LCD TV hangs on the gallery wall. As the audience approach, their presence causes changes in the image. Abstraction unfolds. The image from a video input connected to the broken TV is distorted through the dysfunctional character of the screen. As audiences simultaneously recognise both themselves and the surface of the technological other, the work acts as both a mirror and a window, revealing both the human and the technological. Instead of a disconnected, mediated experience, RE-COG-NITION connects the audience to the immediacy of technology.

Communication is mediated by complex systems. Both machinic and biological, it is through engagement with these systems that our lives are shaped: we perceive ourselves and experience our world through the lens of the system. But what do these ubiquitous systems look like? Can we communicate with them, and what do they have to say? Do they even exist without our presence? Interactive art explores these relationships through systems that require engagement to be realised, and increasingly blur the lines between author and viewer-turned-participant. If a system fails in a forest … addresses questions of communication, authorship and the temporal, emergent nature of art making in interactive media. 107 Projects is the vision of seven of the driving forces behind Knot Gallery, The Frequency Lab and Token Imagination. In collaboration with a community of dedicated creative practitioners, these collectives have been working together to produce arts events since 2001. From 2001–05 the groups operated an artist run space in Surry Hills renowned for its relaxed, welcoming environment. The space was one of the most active artist run venues in inner Sydney, presenting close to 500 events and home to a wide spectrum of music, performance, spoken word, poetry and visual arts. Moving to Redfern in 2012, the space at 107 Redfern Street is a place for creative practitioners to perform, exhibit, develop new works, hone their skills, engage in workshops and continue to grow professionally. 107 Projects is a non-profit association DGR registered charity.

Twitch Of The Death Nerve seeks to explore the idea of the uncanny and the unsettling feeling of seeing elements of the face cut up, recombined and reanimated through simple electrical motors.

A return to the origins of art? … this work is an apparatus for cave wall light painting. A carnival mirror missing its glass, we playfully shape the pixel pastiche, as our bodies are made malleable. Cave Light explores the impact of the tangible on the virtual; by using touch, the participant can expand present time through the screen and beyond.

Horizontal Intuition 14 explores the expressive and emotive qualities of nature and the quotidian, as light, shadow color, shape and line each reveal its own intrinsic “intuition” of its place in the world. Using close observation as a starting point, the images are pushed to the edge of abstraction. The moving white planes become a psychological space for the mind.

Bringing the E-Culture Fair 2010 to a close, large interactive video projections controlled by visitors can be seen in the sizeable audiovisual outdoor installation of MediaLAB (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) on the facade of the office building, next to the Dortmunder U. MediaLAB’s “U-Turm Project” was developed in collaboration with video artist Matthias Oostrik, Beam Systems, and Virtueel Platform. It combines interactive, large-scale projections with music and video art. The silhouettes of every visitor stepping onto one of the four stages on the Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse are recorded and projected onto a window of the facade. Through their movements, players can steer their images in different directions.

This show was curated by Sheena Barrett, Dublin City Council and Saoirse Higgins, IADT. If you were in this show, please contact us.

Alerting Infrastructure! is a physical hit counter that translates hits to the web site of an organization into interior damage of the physical building that web site or organization represents. The focus of the piece is to amplify the concern that physical spaces are slowly losing ground to their virtual counterparts. The amount of structural damage to the building directly correlates to the amount of exposure and attention the web site gets, thus exposing the physical structure’s temporal existence.

A journey into the depths of a unique machine, which is the legacy of the composer Max Brand; the ancestor of the Moog synthesizer, it is a monstrous instrument that took decades to develop. Played by a first-rate pianist, it bristles and rattles through the ether of subharmonic frequencies. A journey to hell with no return.

The first circuit diagram by Bob Moog is dated in 1957. In more than ten years the young engineer Bob Moog together with the composer Max Brand are developing this unic machine. The interface design bear traces of Max Brad, who used to play the machine and probably was one of the first studio musicians: 2 keyboards, 2 bandmanuals, 4 foot pedals! The heart are 2 master oscillator with frequency dividers generating up to 20 subfrequences, which can be regulated separately in three blocks by a matrix – and the first by Moog designed voltage controlled modules like VCA, VCO and VCF.

This machine is the result of a collaboration between a visionary composer and a genius engineer and force us to beat out its mighty sounds and elicit subtle vibrations from it.

Elisabeth Schimana: composition for the Max Brand Synthesizer; Manon Liu Winter & Gregor Ladenhauf: operators

Sound Poem (2008)

Almerija Delic (HR/DE): mezzo-soprano

Dirk Reith (DE): composition, sound transducer and Klangregie

New work (2010), premier performance, for 4-channel-tape

Red Light, a newly commissioned project by Redmond Entwistle reflects on the indeterminate space that Belfast finds itself in between the unfinished work of the peace-process, and the phantom promises of the market economy.

Five previously unpublished photographs from Belfast Exposed’s archive will be conventionally hung in the main exhibition space and integrated in a sound and light installation feeding live sound into the gallery from different locations around Belfast’s city centre. The images selected were taken in the early to mid-1990s and are photographs of large crowds, both Nationalist and Unionist, in the centre of Belfast listening to speeches. These photographs are now over a decade old and yet for many in Belfast it seems as if the city is still in a state of suspension. Post conflict, the centre of town has developed as a neutral space through regeneration and improved commercial prosperity, but the overwhelming sense is of a space for consumption and possibly of employment, rather than a civic or communal space where political and cultural differences can be worked through.

While the exhibition at Belfast Exposed reflects on the recent transformation of Belfast’s city centre, three short films shown outside of the gallery in cinemas around the city anticipate some of the prospects and perils of the near future. The films are each approximately 90 seconds long and will be screened within the advertising and preview portion of feature film screenings. All films are based on original interviews with young IT workers in their early to mid-twenties who see a possibility of social or economic mobility in working in the IT industry in Belfast. Three actors re-perform short anecdotes, related during these interviews, which hint at the thwarted desires for mobility and economic participation at an international level that characterises the aspirations of the new economy and the attempt to develop an IT industry in the city. In most of the cases where the films will be shown, the features will be North American commercial films. In conjunction with the feature and in relation to the actual geography in which they are made and then shown, these fragments play on the inconsistency between the circumstances of viewing, and the prevailing cultural experiences and economic aspirations of Belfast.

ARCADE (1991/92)

the sleep, the mouth and the dream screen (2010) for 4-channel-tape

1. Lesley Olson: flute
2. Scott Roller: violoncello
3. Susanne Achilles: piano

Daniel Mayer about Lokale Orbits:
By working with computer algorithms especially the experimental aspect is important to me – neither the transformation of abstract concepts nor the approximation to preceding imaginations of sound. One is confronted with results that demand immediate further development, also against the original intentions. As a consequence I decided for a procedure, which allows to concentrate exactly on this flexibility and restricts planning to the framing experimental conditions. In the sequence Lokale Orbits instrumental sounds, recordings with the musicians concerned, are the starting point. Granular synthesis – actually: buffer granulation, the synthesis of tiny particles of a basic sound – allows a huge bandwidth of results, a gradual transition from real sounds into electronic space and is therefore suited for “mixed” instrumentations.
Structuring the compositional process this way does not suspend historical-dialectical thinking. The reference to historically mediated structures is omnipresent and demands respective individual decisions – thereby I’d like to take the freedom to newly perceive wellknown relations (e.g. simple intervals and progressions) under microscopical and macroscopical changes.

Daniel Mayer about composition with computer algorithms:
[…] In using algorithms their continuous modification as reaction to generated musical results is my aim. The own relation to memory has influence on modifications of the original procedure and the valuation of its outcome. The dynamical adaption of an algorithm and not its strict musical „realization“ is the paradigm. Finally in aesthetical regards, independant of their range of complexity, at no time only structures are relevant for our valuations. It‘s always decisive how new structures scratch along the old ones. Just for that reason complexity, as well as simplicity, is not interesting as mere quality of structure, but primarily within the historical context. […]
(Program excerpt, Cultural Center at Minoriten, Graz)

Lokale Orbits, Solo 5 (violoncello) and Solo 3 (flute)

Images influence sound and sounds influence image within a constantly changing installation. A live performance leaves traces that become part of the evolving installation. /… and the walls threw back echoes…/ is concerned with memory, resonance, and the changing states of matter. Barely audible sounds become audible, and fragments of small objects from barely visible environments are projected at a large scale.

Sabine Vogel takes the sounds from inside her flute, exploring the microcosmic sound world of the flute, and transports these sounds into a sound-able-hear-able world, thus bringing what is inside to the outside. She combines this world of sound with self-made field recordings, the natural macrocosm of existing sound, forming a composed mixture between the macro and the microcosmic.

Kathy Hinde works in an interdisciplinary manner, combining artforms in a live context. Her aesthetic combines the hi-tech with the lo-tech for example, using physical computing to control the movement of objects, lights and cameras. The changing states of matter (eg, water, ice, steam) is a recurring theme in her art, alongside an ongoing concern with environmental change.

Performance and installation by ORNIS, Project supported by STEIM, Amsterdam, NL. Sabine Vogel : composition, flutes, live electronics, Kathy Hinde: live video, objects.

A musical and medial ramble through the history of the Institut für Computermusik und Elektronische Medien (ICEM) at Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, DE.

5Ch-audio/video installation in the Kammermusiksaal

Ecolocated combines marine ecology data with location, sound, stills and video in an installation at the Catalyst Arts gallery.

Ecolocated is an exploration of littoral zones near Belfast, areas where human impact on the marine ecology is strongest and where local communities have a long association with the sea. The term littoral describes the juncture between land and sea, where the experience of the sea as an every day environment for marine life, work and leisure meets with historical and romantic sensibilities.

Ecolocated recordings include marine environmental and meteorological data; interviews with scientists and local communities and sonifications. An important aspect of the project is shaped through a local workshop programme exploring marine ecology and maritime history.

The first phase of the exhibition is a cumulative work charting the journey to Belfast across the North Sea in the projects’ floating studio base. The Ecolocated artists will publish the journey as a map based interface and a blog, presented simultaneously with the CDPDU.

The content of the exhibition’s first phase will grow during the residency whilst the Ecolocated crew works in the Belfast maritime environment to develop a large immersive surround sound installation in collaboration with the AudioNomad team.

Founded by artists Tapio Mäkelä (FI) and Marko Peljhan (SL/USA), M.A.R.I.N. is a mobile residency programme set on board a catamaran sailboat, redesigned and equipped to be a sustainable environment for transdisciplinary research in arts, sciences and technology.

M.A.R.I.N will host an 11-week long residency, Ecolocated – Littoral Lives on the Irish Sea starting from ISEA2009 in Belfast and travelling down the coast of Cumbria to Liverpool. A highlight part of ISEA2009 exhibition, hosted by Catalyst Arts, a gallery exhibition shows work developed during the residency by the artists Tapio Mäkelä, Nigel Helyer (AU), Andreas Siagian (ID), with AudioNomad collaborators Daniel Woo (AU), Michael Lake (AU) – please see next page for details.

Also part of the exhibition, CDPDU – Common Data Processing and Display Unit (M.A.R.I.N. Alpha) is a data display and processing architecture built to open hardware and software standards, combining different satellite and sensor data feeds on marine ecology. The CDPDU will serve as one of the public faces of the M.A.R.I.N. project, and the API (Arctic Perspective Initiative, http://arcticperspective. org). The CDPDU is co-designed by Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman (USA/CA) in collaboration with PACT systems and University of California Santa Barbara, Media Arts and Technology Program, and several individuals and supporters.

ESC is taking part in the ISEA2009 exhibition at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. ESC’s ‘Moment of Truth’ Exhibit will be a constructed space that manifests and embodies the act of storytelling.
We will physically represent the process of cognition through a compact corridor structure. The audience will be encouraged to use this space as an opportunity to bring a thought, connect with that thought and record the subsequent truth to camera. Participants will move progressively through the corridor recorded by a camera mounted at the opposite end of the channel. When the participant reaches the last stage they record a truth to camera in words or actions.
The ‘Moment of Truth’ exhibit creates a space and opportunity for expression without manipulation. It is the participants’ choice to engage, connect and act or not. The reality is that the opportunity has been created.

Ground Pulse is the new Syntfarm’s mobile unit that enables artists to perform with impulses gathered from the movement of the ground. Design of the Ground Pulse is based on the Lehman’s seismometer principle. The unit is capable of detecting minute movements of the ground including: long distance earthquakes and short distance impulses produced by human bodies.

This unit is connected to the Syntfarm’s output ‘box’, with a wireless connection. Generative processes that visualise and sonify the input data drive the output of the system. By focusing and exploring the translations of the body movements into synthetic world of real time visualization and sonifications, Syntfarm are developing a system, which can be used to enhance and make the experiences and learning from natural environments more accessible to others.

In this reactive sound installation, noises from the artist’s immediate surroundings are transformed into chime-like sounds. These sounds set a matrix of glass rods in motion, causing
them to resonate.

The project uses the online game Second Life to expose real humans as virtual objects in the
exhibition space. Avatars get paid for standing still and answering personal questions which are
asked by a computer programme.

A bowl in the shape of an eyeball fills with black ink. A suspended writing tool invites the exhibition visitor to tap the ‘ink pupil’ and write. Linguistic expression and the experience of pain are mutually dependent.

Various measurements, recorded at Laach Lake in the volcanic Eifel region, were transformed into notations that were then vocalised by a Korean singer (the spiritual in nature makes itself
heard). These unique acoustics become tangible in the three-dimensional exhibition space.

Borrow an aura backpack and experience this unique sound world, but be aware that you destroy the world as you listen to it; in fact the landscape you hear is created from the remnants left from other users’ walks. Eventually the artwork will be completely eroded.

Aura is a located sound project that explores notions of consumption and ownership by allowing users to effect an audio landscape as they move within the Real World. Your movements are tracked by GPS as you explore the area around the Waterfront Hall and are layered onto a record of all the previous users; the resulting topography around your position on this map is represented in surround sound. You can hear the resulting eroded landscape, left to right and front to back

Imagine a playing field after a fresh falling of snow. The snow lies evenly and un-trodden. This represents an empty aura sound world, which, if you wore an aura backpack, would sound like soft white noise balanced with a gently undulating hum. Someone walks across the field leaving footprints, the snow is sullied, eroded; the walker has left a patina in the world. In the aura world this patina is first represented by shifts in the intensity and changes in filtering; the audio moving as you cross the footprints. As more people walk in the world the sound becomes more and more fragmented and distorted, leaving smaller and smaller pockets of un-consumed beauty

As a device, Optical Handlers – eeyee consists of two parts: 1) the goggles and 2) the gloves. Within the goggles, are four viewable LCDs, which connected to four spy cameras (two as a pair) on the gloves, and both ends are in stereoscopic setting. User therefore perceives a doublestereoscopic vision, which directly mobilised by his/her own hands. The mobility of one’s vision becomes a literal and corporeal experience as you move through space. This double mobile realtime stereoscopic viewing device has a redundant reality that questions, ‘Aren’t we living in a 3D world already? Or are we?’ eeyee, facilitates a hyper entanglement exclusively for the users. It dissects embodied visual experience by challenging users’ perception and conception of viewing and space. Users have to manipulate their body and invent their ways to cope with their surroundings primitive down to making a step forward. Eventually, users will meet and interact with the public. Thus learn how to socialise and co-exist in this “hyper” active space. Optical Handlers provides experiential situation for users to play with their own body and to make fun and interact with people around them.

eeyee has a set of identical LCDs that faces outward, which enables bystanders to see what the users are looking at as close as they want. eeyee essentially blinds the users as well as heightens their senses to create a tension between their followers and the place where it is played.

In Seoul, Korea and Cologne, the distance between herself and people nearby who attracted
her attention. The length of each stretched nylon cord represents a distance measured.

“ruhrprotokolle” incorporates fragments of everyday life narration and relates them to the auditive surroundings of the Ruhr area. The voice recordings are binaurally processed, which, by listening over headphones, embeds them into the urban sonic reality.

“KaiserFreiStuhl” – two chairs that make two places talk. The coking plant Kaiserstuhl and the
shopping centre Westfalen Forum Dortmund at Freistuhl between the central station and
the city centre – today everyone is an emperor and the chair is free.

“Untitled (Capsule)” is a sculpture, made from simple materials, following human proportions, a sketch of a single cell, designated as a place to retreat.

“I did not choose me” is an installation with optical illusion. Two portraits of the artist made into 3D objects appear immaterial in space, reflected by hidden mirrors.

A moving latex surface generates a second surface which reflects the first. This surface is a
border between the real world of haptic material and the materialization of light in virtual worlds.

Since the beginning of the use of nuclear energy in Germany, two sites have become synonymous with the end of a technical-feasibility fantasy – the fast breeding reactor Kalkar and the waste repository Asse II. “Dream Water Wonderland” transposes the remains of atomic industry into a dream about half-life durations.

This collaborative urban installation brings together multi-user virtual environment research within a site-specific Second Life urban intersection, designed and constructed for presentation at the Waterfront Plaza in Belfast. By reflecting on the ironies of contested spaces, and stereotypes in multi-user virtual environments, this project exposes the cultural identity, gender roles, digital consumption and virtual desire within this augmented world. The installation utilises live video streaming and motion capture as alternative navigation, with fire and water interfaces in Second Life, allowing the participants to interact and direct the narrative by their presence and movements immediately in front of the projection screen on the Waterfront building.

The installation environment in Second Life reflects on the surroundings of Belfast, drawing inspiration from its local history and community. Reliant on user interaction and input, the audience will form an integral part of this installation that aims to transcend borders and boundaries of culture and gender as interactive storytelling and memory building in post-conflict society. Staged in the regenerated landscape of the Waterfront Plaza, this utilitarian space will be used as a stage set to represent an augmented garden where we will explore the concept of perimeters and territories, as a metaphor of the local social history. As the participant leads us through this virtual landscape, first and Second Life inhabitants come together ‘face-to-face’ on screen. The participants complete this artwork as a live digital mural is revealed on the facade of the Waterfront Hall building.

Taste, an important sense in ordinary life, has been almost ignored in art. To introduce taste to media art, we suggest the mixology of cocktail as a metaphoric methodology of mixing images and sounds, thereby enabling people to taste them. In this work, we present tangible user interfaces with a network connection to blend image and sound: bottle, table, and dish interface. Here, weather, the content of a bottle, is a metaphor for humans’ emotions, and audience can express their own feeling in mixed realty by blending and tasting weather. To embody this idea, we borrow the method of mixing weather from the cocktail mixology, and provide audience with a bar surrounding as an exhibition space. These afford audience the following interaction flow: Select – Mix – Pour – Taste – Keep. There, with the bottle, audience can choose images and sounds of weather on the table to insert them into the bottle. By shaking it, audience can blend them in realtime like mixing cocktails. By pouring the mixed weather into a dish beside the table, audience can produce virtual weather, an audio-visual mixture. Then, it appears on a front screen as a media collage and participants taste (appreciate) their own weather. Finally, the result is automatically stored and partially displayed on a wall screen as the keeping procedure.

Negotiations is a project that explores crosscultural communication and interpretation. Over a period of two years Daniela Kostova and Olivia Robinson developed an interactive system that utilises blue screen video techniques as a tool for manipulating human bodies moving through unknown environments. The system has been performed in three distinct public environments: Sardinia, Italy, New York City, USA and Sofia, Bulgaria. As both a conspicuous costume and virtual assimilation act, each performance has fostered the development of a site-specific story. Recurring themes emerged from the performances: estrangement and integration; placidity of legality, territory and ownership; and mediation of experience.

The Negotiations system uses readily available computer and surveillance technology to create the real-time video. Two characters embody the system, an Alien (in blue) and an Authority (in black). Each has a video camera, which is linked to a computer embedded in the Authority’s costume. Custom software composites the two video streams to create a negotiated final video. The resulting imagery is solely from the Authority’s point of view as she surveils the Alien. The Alien’s image though been replaced with her own point of view. The Alien carries a hand-held monitor which displays the ‘negotiated’ video and passers-by can view the final video as it is being created. It becomes the focal point, allowing relationships to form during performances and highlighting the double-consciousness of crosscultural communication.

The Emotion Light is a sculptural light in the shape of a large uterus that uses biofeedback technology to visualise the holder’s emotional state in changing light patterns emerging from the shape. To achieve this, physiological data like GSR (galvanic skin response), heart rate and movement are tracked and translated via code into changes in light patterns.

The Emotion Lights are portable and don’t show any invasive technologies. The visitor is asked to sit down and listen to an emotive sound sequence whilst he/she can directly see his/her bodily response visualised in the varying hues of the light

This work externalises the internal body, symbolically in terms of the female reproductive organs, which are normally hidden from view, and physiologically by visualising the holder’s heart rate and sweatiness (which is obtained from GSR). The shape is simultaneously ambiguously reminiscent of a ram’s head and of spermatoids as well as fallopian tubes. Stylised into a quirky portable object, this artwork provides an introspective experience that is embodied but can also be observed by others in the space. A faster heartbeat reflects in a faster pulsing light and a higher level or arousal translates into warmer colours with the maximum set at red, and lower arousal translates into blue and green hues.

This artwork avoids the explicitly medical or therapeutic uses of biofeedback technology to explore the less literal complex relationships between sound, colour and bodily response.

This ‘wearable without wires’ fashion series by Marguerite Charmante is drawing on patterns, made of so called Sema-Codes, which can be decoded by particular software. Now for example, if an image of the dress is taken with a mobile phone, on which the software is installed, then the encoded information is made visible, which was embedded in the Sem-Code pattern. In the case of this dress it is Botticelli’s Venus, which is exposed piece by piece. The photo taken is automatically replaced by an image of nakedness. In such a manner this fashion-series enables an urban game, which derives friction from antagonism of public, private and hidden. This work introduces a new strain of Wearables without wires or electricity on the body, featuring natural materials as linen and silk. The technology needed to decode, mobile phones and wireless networks, are present in everyday lifes’ Umwelt (environment).

As political critic on surveillance by private images uploaded to anti-social networks, the X-ray qualities of this encoded clothing morphs public and private Naked City. This wearable must be worn and not just watched, to experience another take of the work, those of being exposed. Voyeurism and Surveillance converge in a participatory game of taking absurd images of body parts, which never appear for the player, but which are uploaded. The semi-invisible wearer’s cold shoulder pushes towards the consequences of being read – parallel in the city and in social webs. A Neo-pataphysical collection of body closeup images could grow virally in gamefashion.org’s online memory

Specious* Dialogue III consists of a pair of movable, sculptural concrete forms that house wireless audio playback systems. Mounted on pairs of swivel castors the forms are designed to be played with – pushed, rolled, kicked and shoved around the exhibition space. They are physical audio curiosities with personality.

The mobility of the work enables the pair of forms that comprise Specious Dialogue to intervene in other artworks, be muffled by a coat, encroach on visitor conversations, or be united in a conspiratorial corner. However they are encountered, they expect to be touched or moved in some way, at the very least they want to be listened to. By enabling this physical interaction with the objects the listener perhaps becomes an unwitting performer moving the sound, catching it, passing it to someone else, changing the sound dynamic in the space.

The pair spew an emotional dialogue, they bicker, coo fragments of love, they shout, scream and whisper, they are lonely lovers or clinging siblings. They miss each other, but also get angry and need their space. These multi-layered, twisted, specious conversations flip between mundanity, humour, drunkenness, apathy, passion, conspiracy and irritation.

The work explores the gap between conversations, and asks what the audience is prepared to fill in. Are we happy to overhear? Can we empathise with a disconnected voice?

* specious – plausible but false; Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious; Deceptively attractive; Apparently good or right though lacking real merit.

Drawings of a Floating World is an immersive, responsive digital media environment, which invites participants to engage in a playful, intuitive, kinesthetic and social interaction, through the simple and universally familiar metaphor of drawing and painting. Fluid patterns and sounds are projected on to a series of encircling, floating planes which dynamically respond to participants’ movements and gesture. Digital media is presented as a tangible and malleable medium that can be pushed, pulled, stretched and sculpted. The intention is to initiate a compelling and affective experience through embodied interaction, and to promote spontaneous and open-ended social interaction through ludic engagement and physical action.

Audience involvement is integral to the work, which is co-created in collaboration between the participants, computer system and authors. Generative graphics are drawn in real time by the computer, in response to the behaviour of the participants and in relation to the parameters set by the authors.

The installation uses computer vision and motion tracking techniques to detect movement within the space. Infrared (IR) imaging via live web cam feeds, pick up light transmitted by paintbrushes fitted with IR emitting diodes and map their movement across a series of calibrated screens. Visual and audio responses were programmed using Open Source software programs, including Processing, Pure Data and TouchLib.

An evening-long concert drawing on the underworld mythology of heavy metal and noise music for an audience of one, taking place in the narrow confines of an elevator car filled with an overpowering, physical mass of sound pressure.

Último Esfuerzo Rural (‘Last Rural Effort’) was premiered in Valencia at the Ensems festival of contemporary music, in May 2004. It is composed of two rather different installations. Both produce sounds, big or little, always coarse, sensitive and individual. One part consists of maximum nine giant zambombas (lions roars), made of barrels, measuring 1m30 and played by pneumatic cylinders. The other part are hayforks which scratch on metal plates or glass. Both machines have such a peculiar sound world, that its origin cannot be other than the countryside. A feeling which comes out of the deepest inside, like the braying of a donkey. The hayforks make up a small machine with a long-range energy radiation while the barrels, on the contrary, compose a grotesque machine with a relatively small energy radiation (when not amplified). The minimum with the maximum performance, or the maximum with the minimal performance, the result is similar: In this paradox poetry is born.

Technically both machines span and unite the rural, industrial and computerised eras. Mentally they predominates the rural thought. The rural world is ‘self-thoughtful’: The individual himself looks for simple, but creative and playful solutions for the problems that happen in the world surrounding him (with sweat, strength and courage.) A state of mind that is disappearing in our globalised world. We do not want to romanticise rural life but the original thought and strength of the individual. We think this is how the creation of our work takes place. Último Esfuerzo Rural continues the vibratory tradition, which characterises a great number of our previous works. The sound colour of the work is a mixture of very low frequencies, even inaudible ones, with atonal scratching.

After insolvency, 23 ex-employees report on the slow disintegration of their working  environment. The recordings of these reports are broadcast simultaneously from a tower of loudspeakers. The voices overlap in a complex overall composition with waves of silence.

An experimental ‘machinima’ filmed inside an online computer sex game. Laying real images onto virtual images, the artist superimposes her own maternal fantasy onto the male computer sex game; the desire of a female avatar to abandon her passive role and to create new images.

Mixing Cities brings together the real-time (‘live’) sounds of several cities in an audiovisual installation. The interface consists of two speakers and a panel with five faders and five lamps.

The environmental sounds at five locations are picked up by microphones and directly transmitted to Mixing Cities. One can adjust the volume of the incoming sounds by using the faders. In this way it is possible to listen to the sounds of one or more cities at the same time.

Apart from the live sound, the current lighting at the locations is registered with sensors and directly translated into the light intensity of the lamps. By choosing and switching between the cities one can make his own journey between the cities and get a different experience of distances and space.

ANYCAST embodies the energy of groups and their capacity to contribute their underused energy, or ‘spare cycles’ to enable others.

Participation is democratising the media space, leaving a slew of disruptive innovation in its wake. Traditional notions of hierarchy are being questioned as we see the rise of the crowd as power broker

ANYCAST is a participatory work that examines the emerging creative interactions enabled by networked communications technologies. It is a temporary, free, public, mesh, wifi network set up to enable a dialogue between people in the city of Belfast. The strength of the network comes from the support of individuals and organisations willing to share their unused bandwidth. The more participation, the stronger the network, the greater the creative output.

The crowd is self organising and breeding new levels of altruism. They are designing and building new ways of doing things by extending existing systems to meet their needs and interests. ANYCAST signifies the power of the crowd and its ability to invoke large-scale action.

Development and technical assistance – Cameron Adams
and Mark Burza, Additional thanks to Jiann Hughes

Drawing parallels between the use of bacteria and culture in traditional breadmaking and the generative condition of network art, Cultural_ Capital is a transformational artwork in which a sour-dough starter is created and grown from the bacteria generally present in the air of the gallery, and is cared for by the curators.

The artwork gives attention to the role of curator as carer. In their 2006 text ‘On Misanthropy’ Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker note that ’[t]he act of curating not only refers to the selection, exhibition, and storage of artefacts, but it also means doing so with care, with particular attention to their presentation in an exhibit or catalogue. Both “curate” and “curator” derive from the Latin curare (to care), a word, which is itself closely related to cura (cure). Curate, care, cure.’(1) The starter is very fragile. Without care it will die. The curators literally care for the artwork: keeping it alive, and passing it on safely to the curators at the next venue.

Theoretically, cultural capital (Bourdieu 1979/1984) is the social power collected around the producer, collector or owner of highly valued objects. Cultural capital turns ordinary objects into works of art and gives them ‘symbolic power’: it has its own currency and brings its own opportunities.

Supermono 2/3 is a tactile and sonic environment. It consists of a multitude of objects incorporating custom electronic or mechanical components. They embody the features of contemporary toys by means of simplified cute shapes, close personal contact with users, and the construction of micro-worlds through modularity and limited, mostly sound-based responsiveness.

The setup consists of three groups of objects. Two objects from the first group have interconnected components that enable the transformation of sound and video signals. In second segment, contact microphones or devices for the production of minimalistic sounds are placed within a number of smaller objects that react to touch, and produce various sounds that after being amplified and modulated are returned to the space, to join the sound generated from the synthetic sources. The sound is reproduced through the objects from the third group, where microphones are placed within amorphous bodies, which each reproduces a mono signal.

Supermono 2/3 belongs to the ongoing cycle of works Discrete Events in Noisy Domains, consisting of tactile-sonic objects or ambients based on multiple nonlinear video and sound systems that recode events into audio-visual noisy data streams

Production: Zavod Exstat and Društvo B-51(Ex-ponto); Producers: Jan
A. Kušej; Documentation photographers: Suncan Stone, Jan Kusej, Nada
Zgank, Miha Fras

The electronic design project presents an experimental narrative accompanied with five electronic design objects, aka ‘scientific probes’. Ordinary products – a rocking chair, a pair of shoes, a pair of boxing gloves, a doormat and a chest belt – are supplemented with electronic digital counters that count peculiar interactions with their users. For example, the chair counts its swings, whilst boxing gloves count the number of the punches they make. By ‘purifying’ the nature of the digital intervention to a simple counting act, the objects are transformed into interactive props that serve as both sarcastic tangible rhetoric and avant-garde products.

The project’s ambiguous nature is amplified even more by dressing the objects with a series of anecdotal stories of fictitious research. In this storyline, the ‘probes’ are used to collect statistical data of domestic psychological, social and physical dynamics and interactions in order to design a better domestic space. Research fails, alas! Though, happily, stimulating results are produced that prompt to rename the research Objects for Arithmomaniacs, crowning the comedy of the poetic failure.

Arithmomania is a mental disorder that may be seen as an expression of obsessive-compulsive illness. Sufferers from this disorder have a strong need to count their actions or objects in their surroundings.

comob is an experiment in mapping environmental footprint and pollution through the spatial and social relationships between people in motion.

Using the iPhone gps application comob we will produce live, mobile visualisations of the movements and connections between people rather than each individual’s track. Using their ‘collective’ body to detect, describe and demarcate issues that are central to sustainability and community, groups will contribute to a collective mapping of subjective responses to the invisible environmental characteristics of the city. By choosing to outline a space, or walk closer together and further apart in response to an urban system, participants will be simultaneously engaging in the discussion of both the subject matter and in the process of mapping it

From negotiating a crowded shopping street to knowing how to find a friend’s house, we simultaneously negotiate both our own route through a place and our spatial relationship to other people, and in doing so, modify our movements to accommodate both. This workshop will experiment with mapping spatial relationships between people and how they modify movement through space.

The relationships between people and spaces elicits a variety of responses, including intimacy, irritation, and exhilaration. We are interested in an awareness of where other people are and how that affects our experience of place. This workshop will look at how those relationships can be mapped, as live and moving visualisations, and in the playful uses of group mapping that emerge through practice on the ground.

lumiskin uses projections to create an amorphous, reactive architecture, delicately enshrouding visitors, responding to their every move, dancing with them as they move through its ether. It spatialises surveillance tracking technologies in an exploration of ‘ambiveilance’ – the twin sides of surveillance that both empower and entrap its subjects. It both ensnares and aggrandises its visitors, who drift into a light mist and accrue luminous spatial fragments – a generative architecture constantly reforming its space around the occupants.

lumiskin combines camera-vision, computation and tracking systems with projectors to explore the way people behave when tracked, and to visualise the kind of spaces their behaviour creates. In contrast to much interactive work, it creates spaces rather than drawings, and enables a complex web of inter-personal relations. Cameras co-located adjacent to projectors scan the scene and detect movement.

Custom software inscribes an enclosure around the moving body, feeding it to the projector, whose luminous emissions of points and lines stretch into vectors and surfaces as they move through the light fog, conjuring an ever-shifting series of territories around the visitors.

Promised Lands is a multimedia project exploring the idea of the promised land in relation to accounts of contemporary and historical migration.

The promised land is the founding trope of the migrant adventure, which confers a larger than life, metaphysical dimension on often life threatening journeys into newness. It is a figure of speech and writing, thinking and feeling, faith and necessity, found in popular and folk cultures both sacred and secular.

Communicated through sonic, textual, and visual material, it is an idea whose force and resonance is contingent on questions of culture and religion, politics and history, desire and necessity. The promised lands of slaves and former slaves in 19th century America were Liberia, Sierra Leone, California and Chicago. The promised lands of Jewish Zionism are the contested territories of Israel and Palestine. Ethiopia was among the promised lands of the churched slaves and colonised peoples of the Caribbean. Oil rich Sudan is among the promised lands of 21st century capitalism. For African asylum seekers and displaced Eastern Europeans, the promised land is Western Europe.

With Promised Lands Flow Motion propose a creative rethinking of the idea of the promised land – a transformation of the idea from a geographical space of nation and region, singularity and sovereignty, into a multiplicity of zones, located as much beneath as above the land, as present in the soul of the song as in the will of the state, and whose identities, locations, and protagonists shift and change over time.

Cities Tango: Between Belfast and Sydney is an interactive work with two connected screens, one in Sydney Australia and one in Belfast. Cities Tango generates changing colour stripes, mixed with location images, from its internal logic. That logic, however, is changed in response to the audiences in each country. In each location the work picks up images from the screen location and reacts to the degree of motion detected. At the same time, the analysed image information is sent over the Internet to the other location and forms the second influence on the work’s behaviour. Images of and from the remote location are dynamically revealed within the otherwise abstract structure. The colours used, the times of day selected and the pace of the work are influenced in each location by a combination of the detected audience behaviour at both locations. The two cities, Belfast and Sydney, interact with one another across continents and time zones. In particular, the colours, stripes and timings used are driven by movements at the remote location, so that in the European day Belfast will see ‘night’ colours, for example, and Sydney will see ‘day’ ones. On the other hand, the display of real time images from the remote location is influenced by the local audience. Immediate responses to movement are seen by the ‘audience’ in their own location. The live connection is sensed through the real time images of people.

Particle explores urban conditions on an abstracted level. While projects like Undercurrent, Latitude and Surface look at city life in its social and psychogeographical dimensions, Particle zooms in on details of the urban fabric and reveals a web of rhythms, patterns and textures that exist in a space in-between the real and the virtual. Particle alludes to the fragmented reality of everyday life in the city through its highlighting of discontinuities, giving rise to a deconstruction of lived space into a series of images and sounds that are removed from the experiences and relations in which they were originally embedded.

Empty Stomach! is a large inflatable interactive bouncy sculpture by Andy and Merja. Empty Stomach! incorporates embedded sensor technology to create a playable and intuitively understandable physical interface, an allencompassing multi-sensorial experience of sound, touch, balance and social interaction. Data from the physical activity of the participants is sent via custom electronics to controlling software creating a real-time interactive soundscape of sounds, music and voice.

Empty Stomach! is a surreal ‘Day of the Dead’ version of the witch’s gingerbread house from the fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Popular cultural references to the power of fantasma of toys, magic rituals, circus, and amusement parks are insinuated through the visual design of the artwork. This surrealistic world of imagination is juxtaposed with the sombre realities of everyday surroundings and conventional habits of action as the work invades the public space as an invitation for other, more political layers of interpretation

People are eaten by the monster house as they crawl in through its three gaping mouths. The space inside – its stomach – is entirely red in colour, providing an immersive dive into a psychedelic sensuous experience. Besides its conceptual qualities the piece employs a variety of sensory realms like vision, hearing, sense of balance, and tactility in engaging the full body experience. Some people have even licked the surface! By shaking up some of the most profound ways of experiencing our physical surroundings the artwork spontaneously creates a strong sense of shared ownership and social interaction amongst its users.

The artwork (exhibited on iMac) is conceptualised through a ‘cube’ with a stainless steel finish. Benoît Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, has unequivocally declared, “the idea that perfection is a cube is over”. However, for mathematicians and artists alike, the cube continues to retain its fascination as an embodiment of pure form. We affirm that the most practical, economical, and sometimes the most resilient architectural constructions often tend to be cubic. This installation invokes and interrogates the complex and imperfect space of the urban ‘cube’, through penetrating the configuration itself. The artwork probes these tensions and their link to urban ecologies, and the ways in which modernity relentlessly locates uproots and resettles lives, livelihoods and cultures. The narratives are taken from the book A New Exciting Space is Opening Soon, produced during a six week residency with Khoj International, New Delhi, India in 2008.

Editorial support: Smriti Vohra, Prabhat Kumar Jha
Documentation: Anuradha Pathak
Translation: Indira Mukherjee

The 52 Card Cinema project is an exemplar of the unique architecture of cinematic pieces mapped on to the real world, made possible by Augmented Reality technology. The concept is simple: 52 cards, each printed with a unique identifier, are replaced in the subject’s view by the individual shots that make up a movie scene. The cards can be stacked, dealt, arranged in their original order or re-composed in different configurations, creating spreads of time. The technology used is marker based augmented reality, where special printed markers are recognised in the video feed and pass data regarding their unique identifier, their position, and their orientation. The computer then feeds a display overlaying the video clips of each shot onto the appropriate card and continually mapping their position and orientation.

Technical Support: York University, Future Cinema Lab, Toronto
Andrew Roth – A.R. System Design; Andrei Rotenstein – Lead Software Developer;
Mikhail Sizintsev – Software Developer
AR Marker Tracking System: ‘ARTag’ by Mark Fiala

The Los Angeles River flows for fifty miles through the city from the mountains to the sea, chiefly along a concrete channel designed to prevent it flooding. A video work intended for gallery projection, Fragments of the Los Angeles River brings together fragments of footage from the artist’s journeys along the river.

These images present varied, contradictory visions of the river, and as such are difficult for the viewer to assimilate into one coherent portrayal. The piece has no voiceover to help the spectator privilege one perspective, and the structure of the work does not prioritise one representation over another.

Indeed, the video is not designed to depict the river in a strongly univocal way, merely as a post-industrial nightmare for example, or straightforwardly as an unlikely haven for wildlife. Instead it portrays the river as a nebulous cloud of different qualities with little apparent relationship, order or hierarchy.

By refusing to structure its portrayal of the river into a coherent statement, Fragments of the Los Angeles River raises questions about the nature of representation, and implies the process of exclusion or arrangement necessary to produce a conventional documentary. As a result, our basic systems for understanding and describing a place – or any subject – are intended to come to the fore as we watch the piece.

Naldjorlak is an acoustic composition by electronic music pioneer Éliane Radigue, whose unique characteristic is working with the arp synthesizer. The Tibetan title of the composition Naldjorlak refers to the motion of all life towards unity. Initially developed for Charles Curtis, Radigue extended the piece later to a subtle trilogy of fine, vibrant sounds. Naldjorlak was premiered in Bordeaux at the contemporary art museum (CACP) in 2009.

Curtis has gained long-time experience in transposing electronic music e.g. by interpreting La Monte Young or Terry Jennings. He plays with a deep insight into the musical arrangements; the arrangement was developed cooperatively by the two artists and with special respect to Curtis’ own musical technique.

Radigue wrote Naldjorlak II for the two renowned basset horn players Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez. The evening will be concluded by a performance of Naldjorlak III, with an introduction by the composer and the three instrumentalists playing a trio.

1. Éliane Radigue: composition
2. Charles Curtis: cello
3. Carol Robinson: basset horn
4. Bruno Martinez: basset horn

In Tesserae of Venus, I am exploring alternative energy sites at the rough, natural urban edge in California – windfarms, natural gas installations, geothermal systems – as if Venus has arrived on Earth – meaning, carbon saturation at the tipping point in Earth’s atmosphere. To do this I create large scale drawings based on the Jet Propulsion Lab Magellan photographs of the surface topology of Venus. I follow the ‘tesserae’ or tiling forms, which are characteristic of the intense heat-generated forms of Venerean surface tectonics, building models of paper that I leave out to weather in the sun and rain, then photograph and film. Then I layer the images of the tesserae into assemblage with the energy site landscapes. I am interested in a cybernetic linking between the tesserae models and the intensive invasion of energy technologies into delicate liminal ecosystems, often along rivers, deltas, swamps and inland seas. Are the tesserae surfaces a conceptual image of the future tipping point, when the feedback loop of carbon saturation in Earth’s atmosphere kicks in? Could the models attempt to describe sheltering structures that we will build in the spaces that emerge within places where the biosphere and large scale technology blur and mesh? As if to anticipate a future architectural environment built of ‘tesseracts’? The film animation frames accumulate skin-like incidents of nip and tuck, folding and unfolding, as if to gather a future archive of photographs from a carbon saturated Earth. The ‘arrival’ of Venus, beautiful and dangerous, is also an opportunity to imagine shelters from the carbon storms – to imagine how we will love our landscapes in the strange weather of the coming crisis.

‘…Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back?” or “ Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “Does your journey take place only in the past?”’ Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

In an increasingly peripatetic society there are few who haven’t shifted, uprooted, travelled. But how does this affect our attachment to place? Does increased movement offer a fractured experience of place? In response to this do we construct histories, places, fictions to fill the gaps? Do these fictions increase our longing and nostalgia?

Current work centres on Super 8 footage found amongst old family archives. The Super 8 offers a version of the past which is incomplete being that the context, the people and places are now speculative or forgotten. As our relationship to this past can only ever be abstract, fiction seems a fitting way to engage with this found footage. In supplementing the material with additional fictions, the Super 8 footage exceeds it’s own limits. This suggests a blurring of the distinction between past, present and place, between Super 8 and digital, between the still and moving image.

DeV: Amongst the found footage are brief glimpses of DeValera inspecting a parade. Walking away from the camera is the incomplete figure of a man who had a significant influence in reconstructing a notion of ‘Irishness’. Here, the past is mismatched with the present, our gaze is directed to the gaps and the difference between nostalgia and history.

Kids: Against an idylic backdrop children play fight, however, on repeated viewing it appears more brutal, then they begin to dance. The contrast is highlighted and the awkwardness of the performance replayed when the artist attempts to assert her presence through animation.

This video installation explores illegal immigration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. Nearly 6,000 immigrants have died on the frontiers of Europe since 1988. Among them 1,883 have been lost at sea in the Sicilian Channel between Libya, Tunisia, Malta and Italy. Migrants pay unscrupulous smugglers 1,500-2000 euro to travel from North Africa. The journey can take more than five days in dangerously overloaded wooden fishing boats inadequate for the task.

Prospect consists of two complimentary channels of video. A metaphoric journey filmed in the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Malta, and the in-between spaces of a former school; a refugee centre in Malta, and a small room on the North Circular Road in Dublin, where the two protagonists, Sadik and Warsame have found temporary accommodation.

Warsame narrates his perilous journey from Somalia to Europe, an epic journey that can often take more than three years. This firsthand account is a powerful testimony of forced migration across some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world.

The vantage point of the camera places the viewer in the position of sub-Saharan migrants travelling through endless miles of shifting sands and floating on turbulent waves in the sea.

There is a tension between the two video works. The anonymous and threatening force of nature, a landscape of endless sand dunes and rolling seas is juxtaposed with the intimate lives and temporal homes of the two protagonists. Warsame’s articulate critical reflection of both his personal journey and the predicament of similar people caught in the stasis of European transnational migration policy.

Set in a world where nuclear winter was implemented as a radical solution to global warming and subsequent flooding, the installation Post Global Warming Survival Kit represents the home of a person, who watches over the sea shoreline in a post-apocalyptic landscape almost devoid of life. The image processing used for the installation is in the near infrared section of the light spectrum, which is invisible for the bare human eye but visible with night vision devices and modified digital cameras or camcorders. This approach is based on the assumption that when much of the sun light has been blocked out from reaching the surface of the Earth (as in the nuclear winter scenario), seeing in infrared becomes the only survival mode. Besides projection, all the lighting in the installation is also in infrared, which produces sensations of emptiness and fullness simultaneously when the visitor walks around the shelter and enters inside. The project fiddles with pseudo-scientific concepts used in mass media, such as nuclear winter and global warming, suggesting them as solutions to each other, and raises the question what the future is to bring and what output of technology, biotechnology and contemporary culture can be utilised for surviving in climate change environment. References to key sci-fi books and movies are deliberately made. A medley of analogue technical devices is found in the shelter. The shelter itself was designed in the first half of the twentieth century as part of an ambitious plan for providing mobility to the masses in Nazi Germany.

The video used in the installation has been filmed on the North Sea coastline, now seriously affected by climate change and before – being the focal point of the Industrial revolution. Thus in the sequence with the loop of the sped up tide, environmental and climate changes converge with the effects of the Industrial revolution. There is one more circle of convergence in the installation: the missing guard of the coastline, replaced by the viewers who become observers of the environment but also of themselves.

In 2008, from March 12th to April 6th, over the course of 26 days, using a treadmill customised for cyberspace, I re-enacted Mahatma Gandhi’s famous 1930 Salt March in Second Life. The original 240 mile walk was made in protest of the British salt tax; my update of this seminal protest march took place at Eyebeam, NYC and in Second Life, the Internet–based virtual world. For this mixed reality performative re-enactment, I walked the entire 240 miles of the original march both in RL and SL. My steps on the treadmill controlled the forward movement of my avatar, MGandhi Chakrabarti, enabling the live and virtual re-enactment of the march. Over the course of the re-enactment I became very attached to my avatar. I began to envision the creation of a monumental sized Gandhi figure based on my avatar data. I settled upon using a shareware application, Pepakura Designer, which is a popular paper craft programme used by enthusiasts to create some rather amazing – albeit generally tabletop scale – reproductions of everything from anime figures to airplanes. I adapted this programme to create a 17’ tall reproduction of my Gandhi avatar out of cardboard and hot glue. The resulting 17’ figure is a monumental physical representation of MGandhi created from very simple materials. The figure was made to be the same height as Michelangelo’s David – a fitting conceptual connection to this iconic work of art history depicting the Biblical figure of David just before slaying Goliath.

Watching Democracy is a critical analysis of a newly built monument in Kliptown, Soweto, South Africa. The monument is called Kliptown Freedom Mall and was built as part the urban regeneration of the Kliptown area after democracy was reached in the country in 1994. However, the monument complex consists of a five star hotel, conference centre and upscale shopping area, which have been built in one of the poorest parts of Soweto. Watching Democracy seeks to examine the link between what used to exist in the area, a former buzzing market place, and what it has been replaced with today.

With “evaporated landscapes” Mette Ingvartsen creates an environment devoid of humans. Based on perishable materials such as light, sound, soap bubbles and foam the performance creates a continually changing artificial world. Choreography here no longer means the organisation of bodies and their movements in space. It is rather understood more as a relationship between volatile elements, elements which slide and disappear in space and which are both reminiscent of ‘the natural’ and not too distant from ‘the artificial’, suggesting possible futures. The volatility of the landscape reveals itself not only on stage, but also in the bodies of the audience, brought out by the impressions and sensations experienced during the performance.

Concept: Mette Ingvartsen, Light design: Minna Tiikkainen, Sound design: Gerald Kurdian,  Production management: Kerstin Schroth, Production: Mette Ingvartsen / Great Investment, Co-production: steirischer herbst festival (Graz), Festival Baltoscandal (Rakvere), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Kaaitheater (Brussels).

In her latest project, Seiko Mikami addresses the relationship between human and machine agents. A matrix of sensors, mini spotlights and surveillance cameras is arranged across the space and follows the movements of visitors. Every movement a viewer makes sets off a response from a whole swarm of small surveillance units, each using their stepper motors to find the right position for pointing at the body present in the room. An uneasy dialogue may evolve in which the visitor looks for strategies to either confuse the machine sensing system, or become completely invisible by standing still.

There are three parts to this work; the first and second part are being shown in the TRUST exhibition. The first part, Wriggling Wall Units consists of 180 devices distributed across a wall. As soon as a visitor enters the area in front of the wall, the devices’ heads start blinking. They move in the direction of the visitor in synch like an insect’s tentacles. Highly sensitive cameras and microphones able to detect motion and sound beyond human perception record the visitors’ actions and send the recorded images and sounds to an integrated database. From there they are transmitted to Compound Eye Detector Screen. Compound Eye Detector Screen is the second part of the work, and this image is like facets of an insect’s compound eye; countless hexagonal parts make up one large screen. Accumulated visual data in the database from wall cameras, as well as data collected by surveillance cameras installed in public spaces around the globe, are projected onto the single facets that form this screen. Detailed real-time images of visitors’ skin, eyes and hair are projected onto the screen facets where they are mixed with pre-recorded footage of other people and with surveillance images recorded at public places such as airports, parks, hallways and crowded streets from around the world. The accumulating compound eye can be considered a device that illustrates the automatic generation of desire, (data) based on information collected in contemporary information/surveillance society.

I have been recording landscapes from computer war games. I used cheats to kill all moveables so there was no one around. The result is a collection of empty, digital, frozen moments of beauty:
It was a very bright high-resolution day with a peaceful slow sunshine down in the valley. A pressure in the air, dense soft seconds into hours of waiting invisible standing… One could imagine a world of silence where nothing really happens as time spins around the shaders and frames. It is the Day of the Tentacle when one has managed to sit down and contemplate the silent remains of nature itself. Those short journeys in search of that centre. Those experiences without words eventually led by a sharp and pure instinct.

This is the file left by Wojtek Kubasik at the site of impact close to ‘Le Château des Pyrénées’ long before the Great Erasing Day: ‘machine quickly seizes the area, prompting me to dispatch an elite team of Special Forces Operatives on a fake rescue mission.’ I say no! During the Shredding, the true nature of the artefact quickly emerges, pointing to the existence of several disturbing corporate entities on Earth, and ultimately the trigger for a massive-scale bewildering operation. The battle to save Earth begins as a flash freezes the tropics into a ghostly-white frozen landscape, a nameless land… the area in which the disasters have turned into a barren wilderness, filled with artefact-hunting characters and vicious mutants. As you wander the land in search of items and people on your objectives list you’ll find out you are absolutely alone. ‘Silent is around like a company that whispers low and calm. You can listen to your own heartbeat, you breathe deep, you wish then there was someone there or at least some far very low rumour which would warm you enough.’ It is the crisis of the self, a shock imposed by our own biology (‘now that things have lost their common sense contemplation holds us together’). It is the shift of time which leads us to the unknown Stalker, the emptiness of dead rooms in space.

Based on original material from Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced (2009) by William Forsythe, Norah Zuniga Shaw, Maria Palazzi. This installation is on display in the PACT Café.

In Synchronous Objects, reproduced Norah Zuniga Shaw brings visitors into an encounter with the deep structures of a dance and the generative ideas contained within. A world premier developed for ISEA2010 RUHR, this multipart installation is a spatial and temporal re-imagining of its web-based antecedent, Synchronous Objects created by William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi and Zuniga-Shaw at The Ohio State University’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. Focusing on the celebrated ensemble piece One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) choreographed by Forsythe, the project reveals the interlocking systems of organization in the dance through animations, interactive graphics, and other parallel virtual manifestations. Choreography is commonly understood as inextricably linked to dancing and to live performance. But both the installation and the screen-based original start from an expanded view of choreography, asking, what else might physical thinking look like?

By Norah Zuniga Shaw in collaboration with: Marc Ainger, Shawn Hove, Joshua Penrose, Julian Richter, Petra Roggel (Goethe ­Institute München), Benjamin Schroeder, Lily Skove & Stephen Turk.

Through a process of trial and error while tinkering with Braun tube televisions, Ei Wada discovered their inner workings. He developed a playing technique using his hands as pseudo antennas and the televisions and PC-controlled video decks as musical instruments, or ‘light synthesizers’.

This project is part of the international cooperation Exchange Emergences between the Japan Media Arts Festival (jp) and the Coded Cultures Festival (at).

Housed in a geodesic dome, The DEW Project is a remote radio station positioned on the Yukon River, Canada, that continually monitors and transmits the sounds of the river’s ice and underwater flow. Parallel to the radio data transmission there is a video projection showing footage of the Arctic landscape and various communication technologies used throughout the Cold War.

Thirteen sculptures enable the visitor to access and blend various video sequences through physical interaction. On the central projection screen impressive scenes from the choreography of the Dutch dancer Regina van Berkel appear. This poetic focus on physical effort is accompanied by motifs of industrial energy supply, which link the work to the Ruhr region.
For the new presentation of Exchange Fields, basic conservation measures were required for the complex technical equipment, which were realised under the direction of imai – inter media art institute, Düsseldorf, in cooperation with Cologne Institute of Conservation Sciences/University of Applied Sciences.

Bill Seaman produced the video installation Exchange Fields in the year 2000 especially for the exhibition vision.ruhr, which was shown at Zeche Zollern II/IV in Dortmund.

Nucleus is a kinetic interactive sculpture that searches location-specific internet news and commentary for keywords defined by the artist, in order to visualize the social and economic state of society. Through high-speed rotation, a line of light emitting diodes is transformed into a three-dimensional body. It changes its form with every incoming internet report and represents the continuous information flow in digital media.

Nucleus is a kinetic interactive sculpture that searches location-specific internet news and commentary for keywords defined by the artist, in order to visualize the social and economic state of society. Through high-speed rotation, a line of light emitting diodes is transformed into a three-dimensional body. It changes its form with every incoming internet report and represents the continuous information flow in digital media.

We deny the concept of torture as self defence, but we accept it as part of rock culture. Enhanced Interrogation (Torture), Extraordinary Renditions (CIA kidnappings), Supermax Prisons, Unlawful Enemy Combatants and Child Imprisonment: Mixing Supermax brightness with blacksite darkness. We do not emulate reality – our world is staged, superficial and amateurish, but still the user can experience the ubiquitous perversion and go into a supervised shock.

The installation Superenhanced Tribunal Room is based on photographs and personal descriptions of the Guantanamo Military Tribunal Rooms. All military personnel is substituted by a machine (Superenhanced Generator). Additionally, a series of photographs (digital composites) of a Guantanamo Prison Guard as well as Detainees are integrated into the room. The Superenhanced Generator is an interrogation software which automates, dehumanises, familiarises and therefore optimises examination. The willing user is presented a set of questions; it does not matter if ones answers truthfully, lies or avoids being specific, the system looks for answers it needs to satisfy it’s database. The software’s goal is to label any participant by either being potential future interrogator, an enemy combatant or an intelligence officer. The digital tool uses Google and Facebook to back-check on personal user-data thus generating further intelligence. The questioning does not stop after one session, but continues to penetrate the user’s mind and existence via email.

A Textile Media Triptychon through which I look at the Internet and its social networks by employing more traditional artistic styles and craft. It reflects our existence in between a physical and digital world by interweaving off- and online spaces. Snapshots from Google Earth (The Rialto Bridge in Venice/Pont Neuf in Paris) and from Second Life (Manchester’s Big Wheel on Exchange Square) were printed onto fabric, additionally embroidered and stretched onto frames. Digital networks are reflected as the contemporary way to share place and space. Consequently the ornamental tapestry renders them domestic and decorative and from a distance the transitions between the layers of stitched-out object and digital surveillance scenery seem fluid. The collages come into view as artefacts and relics of collective memory and journey, creating a nonplace and gap in space and time. In return the virtual media space is framed as the new ‘fabric of society’ with its underlying concept of authenticity appearing fictional and illusory.

The project forms part of current experiments that I call Textile Media Narratives – new aesthetics and works in textile and installation in which I explore digital media and mapping through fabric print, image patterns, embroidery techniques and other formats of physical object and embellishment. Corporeal model replicas are manufactured that mirror digital media and networks as duplicates of identity, body and habitat. Fabric is explored as another screen, interface and second skin, whilst drawing on methodologies of Applied and Conceptual Art

redTV (Brad Todd, conception/design, Elie Zananiri, code/implementation) is an installation incorporating a live TV signal, a small Television, custom software and a projected circular video image. The TV signal is fed into a laptop using a analog to digital video converter and is then accessed via the redTV application, using the OpenFrameWorks library for C++. The image is analyzed and any areas of red are then isolated and tracked in real-time, leaving behind a trail of image outlines, which gradually, over the course of several minutes, fade away. In this manner a complex and dense environment of filigreed lines emerges and dies out, tracing and mapping an evolving history of the underlying visual mechanics at play.

I have used red as it seems to be the most resonant tele-visual color (and in a neurological sense is associated with caution and even danger), often employed liberally for garish news headlines (think Fox network fascist-hysteric graphics, or The Colbert Report’s parody of same), ‘terror’ alerts, cartoons, weather graphics and music videos, et al. Another analogy is that of blood, where the stream of images coursing through cables and satellites is seen as a correlative, in some sense, to a bodies circulatory system. The video projection takes the form of a circle to elicit associations of a Petri dish, microscope, or planet, heightening the sensation of seeing some sort of biological processes at work as in the early films of Jean Painlevé, or contemporary nano level imaging.

Throughout history artists have created works to give context to their society’s condition. Children of Arcadia [COA], draws from this tradition. The piece is continually being updated with information gathered from the Internet about the United States and its society as it relates to national socio-economic events. It translates this information into a large-scale Baroque-style projection. As gathered information changes, so does the world of COA. The changes produce shifts in the piece that draw from paintings of the Baroque to Rococo eras.

COA combines important architectural structures from Manhattans’ financial centre (New York Stock Exchange, Federal Hall Memorial, and the Federal Reserve) with a virtual environment of lush, rolling green hills.

The work gathers two types of information from the Internet to determine the outcome of COA and its inhabitants. The first is information from the NYSE, which determines the condition of COA’s environment. For example if the NYSE is up, the environment will be utopian. Conversely, if the market is down, the environment will be harsh and apocalyptic.

The second type of information gathered from Google News Headlines determines whether society is generally good or evil. Google News Headlines will search breaking headlines for phrases associated with ‘American democracy’ and words synonymous with good, and compares it against a search for ‘American democracy’ and words synonymous with evil. Depending on the result the inhabitants will perform a variety of interactions drawn from Baroque and Rococo masterpieces.

Technical support: Damon Baker

10 Steps to Your Own Virtual Sweatshop is a humorous how-to for aspiring virtual entrepreneurs based on the mixed reality performance installation Invisible Threads. The project explores the growing intersection between labour, emerging virtual economies and real life commodities through the creation of a designer jeans sweatshop in the 3D online world of Second Life. Simulating a real life manufacturing facility that includes hiring Second Life ‘workers’ to produce real world, wearable jeans sold for profit, the project provides an insider’s view into new forms of global, telematic manufacturing.

In the physical space, gallery visitors are able to purchase a pair of Double Happiness Jeans on demand through a retail kiosk equipped with a Second Life (SL) computer interface. A microphone and web cam connected to a computer creates a live stream of each customer’s order into the virtual factory. The audio/video stream, projected inside the factory, enables SL workers to see each customer and hear their order. On the assembly line, the first worker starts the production process that involves loading cotton bales into the Jacquard loom. Once the fabric is made it moves down the assembly line through each machine – dye vats, sewing machines, quality control. Each worker is responsible for selecting the correct options based on the customer’s order. Customers watch their jean orders being produced in real time in the virtual factory via a computer projection in the physical space. At the end of the production process, the jeans go through the SL to real life ‘portal’ resulting in an output from a large format printer onto fabric.

Permafrost is a sound sculpture about the freezing process of water. The crystallization process becomes a sound source; the growing mass of ice becomes visible and tangible. In the installation we can observe and hear the constantly repeated cycle of freezing and melting. Jacob’s work exposes the complexity of a natural process and translates it to something that can be individually experienced.

A Planetary Order is a terrestrial globe showing clouds from one single moment in time: precisely 0600 UTC on 2 February 2009. It is a physical visualisation of real-time scientific data. The shimmering white cloud globe freeze-frames the entire operation of the global atmospheric regime, and subtly highlights how fragile the environmental (and informational) systems are.

The project Life at the Witch Trails is based on the idea of creating ‘living’ structures through sound. Video footage from x/y-stereo displays will be used. The sound source is a special audio composition that could not be realized without direct visualization. It contains full-on, sound-dependent motion dynamics and forms complex, moving ‘cathode ray objects’ which allow direct visual access to the smallest details of the composition.

0,16 is a light installation which translates shadows into a pixelated image in real time. A static headlight illuminates a translucent wall that is divided into an array of open compartments. The shadows of passing visitors are broken into squares. The uneven light distribution is mixed in each compartment through three layers of paper into a homogeneous gray tone at the front. The actual resolution of the ‘screen’ is 0.16 pixels per inch.

School of Perpetual Training is a webcam enabled website designed as an ironic instructional training programme that exposes the underbelly and not so glamorous side of the computer video game industry. Most people associate jobs in the computer video game industry with information based labour such as 3D graphics and coding game programmes. Yet the majority of the industry relies on the sweat and stamina of migrant and low-income labourers working for electronics contract manufacturers in developing countries.

By following a series of training exercises, participants learn about the precarious employment and unjust labour conditions of workers in the areas of overseas digital game manufacturing and distribution. A virtual ‘personal trainer’ leads participants through a series of training exercises that use motion detection and require a full range of body motion to play. Rather than using a mouse or joystick, the motion detection demands the participants ‘labour’ to complete the training exercises, emphasizing the extreme physical nature and motion economics of these jobs. The individual training exercises recontextualise popular classic arcade games – Dig Dug, Tapper, Space Invaders and Tetris – in order to train participants for jobs in mineral mining, printed circuit board assembly, box build and global shipping. At the end of the training programme, participants can gauge their ‘global market value’ to find out how much they are worth in contrast to white-collar workers in the industry

KRFTWRK = Kraftwerk (power plant)

KRFTWRK is a social-political statement and an ironic comment on current problems like production and waste of electricity in industrial states, and overweight and lack of fitness of its population.

The target of KRFTWRK is to create a consciousness towards these topics with artistic measures. The project is situated in the fields of architecture, installation, net art and fine arts and consists of artistic parts happening in virtual and real space.

The official ambition of KRFTWRK is the planning and realization of a new generation of industrial plants, which gain electric energy by muscle power and chemical processes of human bodies.  KRFTWRK will be staged as a ‘reliable’ and ‘globally acting’ company in the Internet.

To test the global possibilities of KRFTWRK, there will be the chance to simulate a virtual connection to an electricity network, and there to the combined power supply, on the website. Per every ‘work unit’ on a home trainer or in a fitness studio, the participant informs the central coordination system on the KRFTWRK website about the length and intensity of the training units. In the end the total amount of energy gained by the worldwide operating KRFTWRK community can centrally be recorded and evaluated.

Usable power-producing sculptures consist of adapted or specially developed fitness tools with connected generators, for example oversized hamster wheels for a couple of people at one time.