Art Events Data Table

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.

Virta-Flaneurazine (VF) is a potent programmable mood-changing drug for Second Life (SL). It is identified as part of the Wanderment family of psychotropic drugs because it automatically causes the user to aimlessly roam the distant lands of online 3D worlds. VF was originally developed to treat Wanderlust Deficit Disorder (WDD) an increasingly common disorder characterized by long hours of rote repetitive Internet use and the inability of individuals to depart from their daily routines in both their physical and virtual lives. As the prograchemistry takes effect, users find themselves erratically teleporting to random locations, behaving strangely, seeing digephemera and walking or flying in circuitous paths. Many users report that the experience allows them to see SL in a renewed light, as somehow reconfigured outside the everyday limitations of a fast growing grid of virtual investment properties. VF derives from a formula which the authors of this study, Dr* JC Freeman and Dr* WD Pappenheimer, synthesised some time ago. For obvious and important reasons, Pappenheimer and Freeman have conducted a complete laboratory synthesis and began clinical trials so that the nature, effects and side effects of the drug can be reliably documented. The clinical study includes an exhibition that dispenses and evaluates the drug for volunteer subjects. The installation includes an exam area, a waiting room and live SL projection screens for patient and public viewing. Visitors can observe and participate in the trial experience of the drug.

Locative media, wireless and networked systems are actively expanding our cartographic imagination through the proliferation of portable devices allowing space-based exchange of information and experiences. Coupled with new cartographic technologies and the web, TheWall engages with emerging new spatial vernaculars to convey the impact of a 15-mile segment of the security/barrier wall currently being built in the West Bank, upon selected U.S. and Canadian cities. Like trade routes that residually altered the cultures and communities through which they passed, TheWall similarly colours local, familiar experiences and memories as the structure’s impact shadows its trajectory upon local communities and lives

Composed of a website, a series of mapped overlays and individually designed locative walks, TheWall is underway with the first overlay upon San Francisco and the locative walk in development.

TheWall is the second in a series called Shadows from another place (http:// shadowsfromanotherplace.net) which uses cartographic interventions, Global Positioning System coordinates, maps, city sites and the web to translate and represent the impact of political or cultural traumas – such as wars or shifts in borders and territorial boundaries – that take place in one location, upon another. The first in the series, San Francisco <-> Baghdad collapsed distinctions between ‘foreign’ or ‘domestic,’ creating a hybrid space that erased the safety of geographic distance and portrayed the impact of the first U.S. invasion of Baghdad in March, 2003, in local terms/on local ground.

The Spomenik project looks at the notion of the stories places tell in the context of mass graves spread throughout Slovenia. In 1945, Yugoslavia set upon a programme of purges of political opponents and undesirables at the end of World War II, resulting in over 400 known mass grave sites holding tens of thousands of victims. Spomenik is a monument as well as an archive. It is an online archive that has the records of over 21,000 victims of the massacres. However, the archive is incomplete, and a lot of the stories that go with these people are unknown, or are scattered across the globe with all the people who fled.

The fundamental notion of Spomenik is ‘Here = There’. What it does is take the map of all of these mass gravesites scattered throughout Slovenia and shrinks it to overlay on the centre of Ljubljana. Each of these transposed ‘places’ around the city centre would be accessible via mobile phone, with which one could experience the story of one of the victims of that particular ‘place’.

As the victors usually write history, so too do they build the monuments to that history. However, technology and the ideas about place and memory that it brings with it, offer a new hope. It offers another kind of history book, one that everyone, not just the winners, can write. It offers the casual passer-by a new type of monument, one maybe small in size, but big on relevance.

DotRed is a playful application on the Internet – a serious game – that enhances the federation of the Internet users around humanitarian, social and environmental actions in order to facilitate the passage between the virtual world and the real world. DotRed offers to its users virtual cities cut up into several million parcels for sale in a 3D interface covered one to one by a cartographic application similar to Google Maps. The game aims to collect money that will be redistributed in the form of donations to officially recognised organizations and which concerns correspond to the objectives of the missions. DotRed started off its action with the sale of Paris during an exhibition shown at the Centre Pompidou in May 2008.

The website DotRed:After the player’s registration on the DotRed website, he will be able to choose to buy one or several plots of land of 100 m² on the city map selected at the price of X euros per plot (For example, two euros for 100m2 in Paris).

• A 3D cube is going to appear on the game’s map, at the postal address where the player will have bought the plot.

• That cube has a standard size but the user can call on his social networks (by using facebook for example) or create a mailing list to promote the city’s sale as fast as possible. He thus also becomes a promoter of the game.

• As a reward for his proselytism, the 3D cube size will increase in height, such as a growing skyscraper that comes along with the player’s capacity to federate the highest possible number of people.

• Each cube can be tagged thanks to paint tools and different presentations allow a hypernavigation from cube to cube and from city to city. After the city of Paris, new cities and region maps will be suggested to the players, each time combined with a humanitarian, social or environmental cause, a partnership with local or national associations and art.

Public / Pirate Community Radio is an adhoc mesh network of micro powered FM radio transmitters. They work as an autonomous Radio Bulletin Board System allowing anyone in the local community to phone in and add their message to a streaming broadcast. The system
tries to be as cheap as possible using common off the shelf products and open source software.
The system is designed to facilitate international connectivity between local communities through the use of Voice over IP. Members of a local community can become more connected by having a pervasive forum to voice their interests and concerns. Multiple communities with related interests can foster a sense of connectedness, even internationally.

The Kritical Works in SL II exhibition has built upon, and extended, the first phase of the project and is a major exhibition showcasing artworks produced in, and for, Second Life (SL). As phase two of Kritical Works, this exhibition not only presents the SL island artworks and trans-locates them into a real-world gallery space, it also presents the virtual artists invited, while documenting and recording the inWorld curatorial process itself. This additional data offers a point of reflection that is critical to the understanding of the paradigm shifts occurring through digital technologies, and in particular, virtual worlds.

With a focus on artistic and inWorld collaboration we invited a selection of artists to explore the physical space of the gallery and the virtual space of Kriti island in SL. Three existing works, Paul Sermon’s Liberate your Avatar, Lynn Hershmann’s L2 project, and Joseph DeLappe’s small Gandhi figure that was part of the Tourists and Travelers exhibition, are re-presented in the exhibition. Five new and adapted works are also presented: Taey Kim’s Strangers in the Neighbourhood, Jackie Morie’s Traceroutes, Jo Mills’s Dysmorphia II, Annabeth Robinson’s Gestalt Cloud, and Denise Doyle’s Meta-dreamer, a piece investigating digital materialization processes and virtual space. The staging of the artworks of Kritical Works in SL II in a gallery environment further explores the relationship between the virtual artist and curator and how new virtual practices are transforming creative opportunities in online and virtual worlds.

dead-in-iraq commenced in March of 2006, to roughly coincide with the 3rd anniversary of the start of the Iraq conflict. I enter the online US Army recruiting game, America’s Army, in order to manually type the name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person, who has died to date in the War in Iraq. The work is essentially a fleeting, online memorial and protest for those military personnel who have been killed in this ongoing conflict.

I enter the game using as my login name, dead-in-iraq and proceed to type the names using the game’s text messaging system – the ‘text-to-speech’ function is used to read my input and the reactions of the other players. As is my usual practice when creating such an intervention, I am a neutral visitor as I do not participate in the proscribed mayhem. Rather, I stand in position and type until I am killed. After death, I hover over my dead avatar’s body and continue to type. Upon being re-incarnated in the next round, I continue the cycle. As of 15/06/09, I have input 4042 names. I intend to keep doing so until the end of this war. As of this date there have been 4313 American service persons killed in Iraq.

In Siti Hijab Nurbaya (2003), Hasnul Jamal Saidon’s video installation addresses questions of gender and identity within the global mainstream media.

In Video Reflux (2007), Niranjan Rajah addresses the decline of the power of video in the face of the sharing, recycling, appropriating and annotating of content over the Internet.

The Spoon River Metblog, an Ambient Fiction, or A Hyperlocal Blogging as Epic Poetry Cycle. Ambient Fiction embeds story and fictive content in web-based locations that are traditionally used for non-fictive purposes. Hijacking these tools for the repurposing of classic texts allows them to slip past objections to the ‘old’ and ‘irrelevant’. The Spoon River Metblog is a modernization of the 1915 Edgar Lee Masters poetry classic ‘Spoon River Anthology’ in the form of a hyperlocal group news blog. ‘Spoon River Anthology’ is an epic cycle of 245 one-page poems, each the voice of a deceased resident of the town. The 245 individual voices combine to give a picture of life in Spoon River, and multiple meta-stories are woven throughout the narrative.

The Spoon River Metblog updates this complex narrative to today. The story is told in the form of a Metblog. Metroblogging.com is a worldwide syndicate of city-specific blogs, where groups of authors write stories about life in their city from a personal, hyper-local perspective. Bode Media, the publishers of Metroblogging, built a fictional Metblog site in the middle of their real-world network for Spoon River where the epitaphs were published in small batches over several months. Each blog post is written in a syllabic prose that contains coded messages leading to hidden parts of the story.

The Spoon River Metblog was first published on the web in the second half of 2008, and can be found at http://spoonriver.metblogs.com

The relentless 24/7 global media stream has radically transformed our viewing experiences of images and has thrown in doubt our concept of what an image is. With this installation we challenge the wisdom of this shift in techno culture away from object-based images produced on paper towards real time images produced and viewed on a computer monitor.  We question the increasing dominance of machine-made images and the corresponding decrease in human-made images and the role they play in the formation of cultural and personal memories. Furthermore, this installation negotiates the collision between traditional forms of perceptual drawing and visual memory making with what Paul Virilio has identified as techno culture’s headlong plunge into ‘visionics’, machine-based vision and image production.

The drawings for the installation will be made on two portable painter’s easels, which have been outfitted with laptop computers, locative media, and the capability to communicate with each other over the Internet. The ‘local’ easel will be installed in the Golden Thread Gallery and will transmit as well as receive commands, images, and information from the ‘remote’ easel in the field. Drawings will be done on the ‘remote’ easel at two locations during the month of August: Location 1) our studio in the United States; and Location 2) various WiFi hotspots on the streets of Belfast. In the gallery a composite image of the desktops on the laptops of the ‘local’ and ‘remote’ easels will be projected on top of actual drawings done on daily newspapers.

In 2007 in Erfurt in what was formerly East-Germany, the artist collective C.CRED carried out a series of interviews centred around the archives of personal files left behind by the Stasi at time of the German unification. These interviews set out to explore the complex intersection of political engagement and biographical body that characterise participants’ relationships with their personal files specifically and with the GDR period in general. Set within a politically charged post-unification context, this interview project became an attempt to map out political dissention both historically and, by means of these histories and the politics of how and by whom they are told, also within the contemporary context of a Europe now purportedly united.

Revisiting the project in 2009, Ola Stahl and Kajsa Thelin, two former members of the artist collective, isolate and extract the questions that were asked from transcripts of the interviews. In a recorded process, they then carefully rehearse the asking of the questions, trying to get as close as possible in their delivery to the way in which the questions were originally posed. Returning at times to the interview recordings for a point of reference, commentary, citations and reflection are continuously allowed to interfere with the rehearsal process. SPOOLS is an edit of the resulting sound recording. It is an attempt to explore not the issues raised in the original interviews themselves, but rather the ways in which questions are asked, what could perhaps be called the question of the question, and what resides at its very core: the politics and contexts of testimony and witnessing as an access point to history.

The Stealth Project is a two-player experience loosely based on the classic board games of Connect Four. Players sit opposite each other and use the grid of buttons in front of them to fire missiles across an abstracted 3D space. Once launched these projectiles are either detected by radar, hit by another incoming missile, or make it to the opposing side, grabbing a point. Each event simultaneously adds to a collaborative spatial musical composition – missiles emit sounds based on their position and elements they encounter along their trajectory. The piece explores the materiality and visual possibilities of a 3D grid of individually addressable lights. Missiles are represented as small points of smoothly flowing light – compressed energy, present yet chimerical, reflecting the overarching quality of this form of visualisation. The missiles have a presence, an ominous glow, as they fly inexorably across the sky. The grid becomes a scale model of airspace. Yet, simultaneously, it is an abstract representation, as the diagrammatical radar sweep is superimposed onto the model in a parallel visualisation. At either end vertical walls of the grid represent game boards or bombed urban spaces in twin twisted vertical cities.

NOVA is the world’s first three dimensional, freely configurable video LED system offering 360° vision.

Twenty years on from the fall of the Berlin wall British artist Pam Skelton investigates the Stasi network of ‘safe houses’ in Erfurt, a city in the former German Democratic Republic. A visual arts and social research project, Dwelling in the Space of Conspiracy uses a dossier from the archives of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) to locate these once secret safe houses. The exhibition uses fieldwork, cartography and archives to construct a video installation that identifies 483 ‘conspiracy dwellings’ active between 1980–89. The city’s architecture, its buildings, streets and neighbourhoods unfold in a web of control and deception. In these discreet rooms the East German secret police would meet their informers to receive their reports. Informers were recruited to spy on friends, relatives or colleagues creating a state that relied on deception, fear and suspicion. Dwelling in the Space of Conspiracy raises questions around state control and surveillance that continue to be relevant today in a world adjusting to the threat of global terrorism. First shown in Germany in October 2007 as Conspiracy Dwellings // Konspirative Wohnungen this project created a furore of public debate leading to coverage in the German national press. Pam Skelton’s exhibition for ISEA2009 is in part a response to this debate and includes new material to acknowledge and further reveal the issues regarding victim, activist and perpetrator that still remain unresolved and painful for many today

When Enlightenment scientists worked to discover, study and preserve exotic fauna and flora found in the new world, they presumably did not intend this knowledge to enable destruction of the environments they explored. Nevertheless, indications of this potential were evident as exotic creatures were prized mainly as taxidermy specimens for display as symbols of wealth and status, and as trophies from travel to distant lands. e. Menura Superba is an interactive artwork that explores this paradox between our fascination with the exotic, and the dystopic futures devoid of many species, that may lie in store as a result of human activity. The work hybridises 17th to early 20th century aesthetics with refined post consumer waste materials, to create a simulacra of a lyrebird. Australian lyrebirds (initially designated Menura Superba) have the remarkable ability to mimic natural and human sounds in their environment. This vocal range, and their unusually long, wispy tail feathers, made this bird a 19th century curiosity. As a taxidermy specimen, it was the most prized of all Australian birds. The lyrebird repertoire has been known to include sounds such as camera shutters, flute and piano melodies, even chain saws. Beyond it’s value as a curiosity, it is also an interesting gauge of our acoustic environment, as it mimics sound pollution – an often overlooked interaction between humanity and the natural world. In this work the naturally shy lyrebird becomes curious. It is especially attracted by colourful clothing, and will sing and change the colour of its plumage in an attempt to attract an audience.

Programming: Glen Wetherall
Metal Work: Dayataminda Rajapatirana
Additional bird recordings: courtesy of Sydney Curtis

The Listening Station explores the partial and ongoing decommissioning of the British army communications post on Black Mountain, Belfast, examining the psychic history of it’s recent past. The listening station was initially put into service during the Cold War and has subsequently figured as a totemic sentinel of Britain’s political and military surveillance of Belfast, being visible from nearly anywhere in the city on it’s strategic vantage point. The facility is currently being dismantled after the land was sold to the National Trust for environmental conservation in 2005. Some features of the installation still remain and function but many have gone. The work explores the site as an active agency and its current, ongoing devolution to a former, ‘neutral’ existence. Specific references to both time and decoding are an aspect of the synchronization that forms a structural crux of the work. This is activated through references to the ‘number stations’, ongoing yet implicitly synonymous with espionage of the Cold War period and standard hypnotic induction for regression through time. The work aims to negotiate the conditions of surveillance, contrasting the exterior panoptic visual profile of the facility against the enclosed and internalised activities of the listener. A dynamic is established between the viewer and the audio elements of each screen whereby listening, as much as looking, is marked as an activity of production and creates an unstable space where the process of synchronization is in continual formation.

The Blackstaff River, a principal tributary of the Lagan River, flows underground from the south of the city to the centre. The majority of the river was culverted (constricted to artificial channels beneath the city) in the late 19th century. A second major culverting operation was undertaken in the 1990s. Prior to Belfast’s industrialisation, the river coursed through woodland, parkland, meadows and natural flood planes. By 1881 the river had become severely polluted and was regarded as an obstruction to urban growth. A news piece from the time commented: ‘All agree that the Blackstaff must be buried out of sight’. Blackstaff is Belfast seeks to unearth the Blackstaff River. The river is to be rehabilitated and reinstated. It shall, once again, flow freely through the heart of the city. The inflictions of modernity that had rendered the Blackstaff River grotesque shall be remedied. The river will once more become a source of growth and beauty. Visitors to the host gallery, Ormeau Baths, are invited to undertake a short augmented walk along the course of the river. Through the use of mobile technologies, a participant will be able to hear the sounds of the river flowing underground. As the walk continues history shall be reversed and the river will begin to surge back on to the land. The walk will culminate at the site where the Blackstaff River had previously entered the Lagan. Here the participant will experience the river as it was before urban settlement: a time of natural harmony. In accompaniment of the above, an abstract video document of the river will be presented. Additionally, a catalogue of images and texts accounting the geography of the river over the last 400 years will be exhibited.

Revolving upon notions of coincidence and synchronicity, The Ammonite Order, Or Objectiles for an (Un) Natural History explores a nondeterministic relation between digital mediation and spatial practice that supplants the primacy of real objects present in gallery space. The theme for this work evolved out of imaginatively projecting a fictive ‘correspondence’ between two local personages: the architect George Dance (the Younger) and naturalist Charles Darwin. Enamoured with the idea of the museum as a ‘haunt of the muses’, the narrative fabula unfolds as a multidimensional installation that combines an inventory of installation elements (or ‘props’) with an accompanying collection of portable media ‘samples’. These forms gain added force through their recycling and recombination. Collectively, these motifs establish an iconography that operates across the exhibition’s interconnected, narrative structure.

The exhibit sends out contradictory signals: the appearance of order associated with its measured use of gallery space is confounded by the disorientation of its intertextual, mediated narrative. Through creating an unpredictable and open-ended aesthetic experience in which the viewer is invited to actively intuit associations between the constituent parts of the exhibition, the conventional expectation placed upon digital mediation – in which the interpretive role of the ‘gallery guide’ is intended to supplement the primary experience of an art object – is inverted. The Ammonite Order was developed as a practice-based demonstration exhibition as part of the PhD thesis, ‘Without Walls: Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition’. The artist acknowledges the cooperation The Slade School of Fine Art, The Grant Museum of Zoology (University College London), the support of the Outside Studies Program (OSP) of Monash University, the Faculty of Art & Design, ISEA2009 and Apple in the realisation of this work.

Assistance animals – from guide dogs to psychiatric service cats – unlike computerized machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Could animals be transformed into medical devices?

This project proposes using animals bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement. The use of transgenic farm animals, or retired working dogs, as life support ‘devices’ for renal and respiratory patients offers an alternative to inhumane medical therapies.

Could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts? Could humans become parasites and live off another organism’s bodily functions?

The promises posed by new reproductive technologies such as IVF, test tube babies and egg freezing, are blurring perceptions of the reproductive cycle amongst women, and consequently, the age of conception is constantly being challenged. The female body clock relies on moonlight to regulate the menstrual cycle. The use of artificial light and contraceptive hormones, along with the growing pressure to develop a career, are distorting the body’s reproductive signals. The Artificial Biological Clock compensates for this increasingly lost instinct. This object acts as constant reminder of the temporary and fragile nature of fertility. Given to a woman by her parents or partner, it reacts to information from her doctor, therapist and bank manager via an online service. When she is physically, mentally and financially ready to conceive the object awakes, seeking her attention.

Natural Kingdoms and the Post-biological World As technology develops the ability to break the boundaries between natural kingdoms and fuse the organic with the artificial, we are slowly liberating ourselves from the limitations imposed by biology and redefining our anatomy, mind and environment. Advancements in biotechnology and medicine allow our bodies to be moulded, manipulated and juxtaposed with other materials. As such we can take many confusing, questionable roles. This cross-breeding of the kingdoms opens up new design opportunities and a space for debate.

The relationship between technology and biology is complex and interweaved. Technology has evolutionary consequences; it alters the human body and then compensates for the loss with artificial solutions. The work developed out of this premise explores ideas of inorganic biological urges, interspecific symbiosis and human enhancement. The project consists of two speculative design proposals exploring possible implications of developments in life sciences. The Artificial Biological Clock uses digital interfaces in order to analyze and influence behaviour, functioning as a remote prosthesis replacing a lost instinct rather than a dysfunctional organ. The Life Support project proposes using animals bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement. The work aims to provoke and trigger a debate concerning bioethics and the nature of persuasive or intrusive medical technologies.

Ant colony, 2 turntables with Arduino stepper motors, video projection, flat screen for data analysis visualization, surround sound system set (5.1), 2 digital video cameras for motion capture, 2 microphones for audio capture, 2 computers with 2 licenses of Cycling 74’s Max/Jitter, 2-4 UV spot lights for illumination of the ant’s nest.

0h!m1gas is a biomimetic stridulation environment based on the activity of an ant colony, which is being video and audio surveilled, transforming the ants’ social interaction into information that is translated into turntable rotation. Thus, the ants become DJs of their own cybernetic ecology. The system itself is a sociobiological sound reactive space, which reveals the connection between scratching as an aesthetical expression, created by human culture, and the natural stridulation phenomena produced by ants as a communication method. Ants represent a natural super organism that can be sensed and understood as a colony of hyper instrumental entities generating sound waves, bits of frequencies and musical beats if we analyze and channel their movements and stridulations. Maybe there is a way to create a feedback system and communicate with ants. The ultimate goal would be to explore a possible cybernetic playground in order to study the ants’ response to the vibrations and sound compositions they create. 0h!m1gas is a biomimetic stridulation environment with a life of its own, extending and transforming the self organization in ants while opening our human senses to a new form of emerging music.

Key Notes is a live work for our time, our appetite and our audiences. Previously presented at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, Live Art Falmouth and the Colchester Arts Centre, it has evolved from the quest for the all-encompassing platform of power and exquisite influence. As an artist working almost exclusively in industry for six years I witnessed many extraordinary things. I heard about the future and the vision. We went up together, exponentially, and we came down. Sometimes I’d be addressing the whole company of 600, as the global reach extended and the monthly meetings became more surreal. Then I was leading the event. The community was mine. The strategy is up for grabs. I know what I’ve seen. And the technology was implicit. We all need a little helping hand now and again. Especially these days. The bus is leaving. Can you afford to step aside when the driver has a story to tell?

Syren is a shipboard example of augmented audio reality, designed to operate with an array of surround sound speakers installed around the ship’s Helipad on the forward upper deck. Geo-spatial information is accessed as the ship navigates the electronic charts associated with each of the three ports of call. Syren experiments with concepts of designing large-scale virtual soundscapes. For each of the ports we have designed a specific ‘sonic seascape’ – sound files, located in a digital cartography, are apparently positioned on, or around, the various features of the port and its navigational and maritime structures. Special attention is paid to local maritime narratives, histories and specifically maritime ‘keynote’ elements of the soundscape / seascape.

These sounds are interwoven with a unifying sonic narrative derived from both ancient epic voyages (as the title implies) as well as contemporary political and cultural life. As the ship manoeuvres through and around the port (on entry and departure) the software will call up elements of the soundscape and ‘place’ them in the appropriate direction and distance – simulating a real sound associated with the landscape/seascape. One of the principal effects of Syren will be to suggest a series of parallel audio realities that appear to overlay the visual seascape and open a possibility to acknowledge a historical and cultural axis pivoting on a geo-spatial point. Owing to the potentially vast scale of the geographic area covered by the Syren project the system is designed to operate in and around each of the three ports that the ISEA ship will visit with some additional points en-route

Simultaneous Echoes is a practice-based research project. The project explores how fragmented musical elements, which were recorded in different locations and at different times can be reconstructed in cyberspace. The cyberspace is used as a musical notation, a ‘3D locative music score’. The fragmented sound and images of the location are sampled with a set of audio recording and video cameras and with the support of GPS data sampled in specifically selected locations in and around Londonderry and in collaboration with communities of interest there including choirs. As a music score constitutes a kind of thinking space for a music composer, this spatial, locative music score is also a media thinking space for conducting music in a new way. It reframes in innovative ways the process of producing whole data, recording, capturing, editing and disseminating music and soundscapes.

Baglady 2.0 is a live performance with a customised electronic performance tool: a bag with an antenna and an embedded board, programmed for live wireless broadcasting on-the-fly of sound, digital images [motion jpeg]. It probes found wifi zones as a platform to pipe through this data. It highlights how such ephemeral oral or folk histories on the street can be played out on the WWW, being such an inhabited and ubiquitous place at present.

Networked performance, custom built interface – suade bag, Alix3c3 mini eurocard format with Audio, VGA and Award-BIOS (super expandable) 500 MHz Processor antenna, Battery Power – 12 V.8 Gb Cf card, USB webcam Logitech CamPro 9000 is 1600×1200 ( HD-TV), LFS linux from scratch, KNOPPIX kernel, audio streaming darkice as client, encoding ogg vorbis, Webcam UVC video module

shruti is a live cinema performance that uses field recordings and video footage collected in the streets. Kolkata, India as material for an open live cinema performance. Each iteration of the project is unique footage and audio is triggered and manipulated live in the moment, in response to the material itself and the environment. shruti is an improvised performative exploration of the city that moves fluidly between the streets of Kolkata, and the greater space within ourselves. A meditation on sound and identity, Sinha’s performance uses the everyday sound of Kolkata to craft a travelogue of universal proportions.

Like much of Sinha’s work, shruti is a work that both embraces and troubles our concepts of heritage, identity and tradition. It has been performed as a live cinema project, a radio broadcast, and disseminated as an audio art performance installation.

Performance with Gary Mentanko iLogs, m-Logs, laptops, wood and saw

Over the last few years we have become known for a distinctive range of wooden musical and sculptural instruments that critique human interaction with computer interfaces and our increasing appetite for new and often disposable technologies.

Since 2004 we have been developing a range of portable instruments that mimic the desirability of hand held gadgets but are more rustic in appearance and obscure in functionality. Examples being the iLog Rustle which records up to 20 seconds of sound and reduces it into distorted fragments, the iLog Photosynthesiser which converts light into audio, and the m-Log (a wooden gestural computer interface).
We have performed across Europe with these instruments and they have featured in design books, magazines and blogs globally. Shifting between being desirable design objects, musical instruments or simply logs, they raise questions about the use of technology within live performance and their value as objects, their potential for mass-production and our refusal to do so.
Rather than standardise production in the face of working with uneven logs and unusual electronics we prefer to let these objects resist mass production and thus no two are ever the same. Embracing this limitation we invite participants to join us in making their own variation. Through this social process our customers become developers rather than consumers and our range of instruments continue to evolve, placing an emphasis on cultural and social capital rather than the physical.
The members of the Owl Project have their own unique Art practices but come together to create desirable and crafted artwork with perspective shifting focus; from commenting on the disposability of technology, to Interface Design, from questioning industrialisation and humanity’s relationship to the means and knowledge of production, to a strong reputation as Sound Art performers.
Faced with a rapidly growing demand for our instruments to be bought and used we have typically responded in a thought provoking manner, refusing to be drawn into an obvious cycle of production. By encouraging people to make their own Owl Project instruments we turn clients into producers and developers; a new cottage industry or social artwork?

Owl Project is a collaborative group of Manchester based artists who share interests in human interaction with technology and process-led art. The group currently consists of Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall and Steve Symons.

Performance Night @ SARC

This performance showcases work by SARC researchers and presents a programme of selected ISEA works tailored for SARC’s unique Sonic Lab.

Featuring, among others:

1. Owl Project
2. mLog exchange project
3. Bart Koppe, Mixing Cities
   

• SARC is the SONIC ARTS RESEARCH CENTRE, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Performance with projection, sound.

astro+prism’s Identikit Muse is a unification of audio and visual technologies. A composition of software and hardware audio production, found sounds and sampling; vocals and effects, graphic design, digital video, FX & editing.

Performance lecture, printed materials (posters, flyers, text info for presentation); bookworks and artefacts for presentation

3D Thinkers in a 2D World is a performance lecture by conceptual artist Benedict Phillips. Developed out of his 14 years of research and creative projects around dyslexia, he aims to expose the inner workings of what he describes as the dyslexic ‘3D thinking’ experience. This includes some of the unusual advantages available to those who think in a ‘dyslexic’ way.

By unpicking his creations such as The DIV*, Benedict highlights and examines presumptions about intelligence, communication and perception to unravel numerous misconceptions surrounding dyslexia. He shifts the focus away from the traditional emphasis on reading and writing to explore the unforgiving rigidity of formulae and social structures within the 2D ‘lexic’ world. Through this work Benedict offers insight into how to invert society’s perception of dyslexia and, by breaking away from excepted rules and regulations, to empower the lexic and dyslexic alike.

Benedict’s ongoing collaboration with fellow dyslexic adults, architects and technologists sees the ‘3D thinker’ expressed in a variety of forms, from designs for database and web navigation to intelligent architecture. His ongoing body of work on the subject embraces new media, photography, installation, performance and public discussion. 3D Thinkers in a 2D World is the public interface for this work, and strives to facilitate the debate around who should inform the dyslexic agenda.

* subverted from ‘div’ which in the UK slang means ‘an idiot’ or ‘stupid’, to ‘DIV’ or ‘Dyslexic Intelligent Vision

Performance

G. H. Hardy penned A Mathematician’s Apology in the twilight of his academic career. It was at a time when the worldview fostered throughout modernism was suffering widespread critique and Hardy’s apology stands, in many ways, is a eulogy to the failing doctrine of the Enlightenment that dominated Western thought in science and aesthetics at the turn of the last century.

A usual fashion to hear music nowadays is through headphones. The mp3- player made music more transportable than ever before, and public spaces are crowded nowadays with people, living in their own acoustic world. This project is about reversing this situation. I am walking around the city, playing music from an mp3-player, this time not for creating private music, but for diffusing it out of two big yellow hornloudspeakers, radiating the sound to the environment. The siren is both a mythological woman, having the body of a bird and the head of a woman as a noisemaker, used to warn in emergency cases. The sirens as bird women were known in Antiquity for their beautiful singing. It was unable to resist them and most of the men who heard them did not survive. The emergency siren is a noisemaker and can be seen as a survival tool. I used both as an acoustic, visual and conceptual starting-point for the project Hearing Sirens.