Art Events Data Table

Jean-Pierre Hebert is an artist with a background in engineering who first worked with computers in 1959 and began ‘drawing’ with them in 1979. He has modified an HP plotter to carry large ink reservoirs feeding the pens. Each of his works, generally sized from 5x5cm to 75x100cm, comprises a single unbroken line meandering under the direction of the artist’s custom software creating non-repeating but self-similar linear harmonies.

Hebert’s original drawings are the artefacts of a poetic exploration of the quality of line, texture and surface possible via the integration of the formal materials of this age-old discipline and the potentials of contemporary technology.

Work in exhibition:

1. Entrelacs, Cobalt & Sepia
2. Entrelacs, Cobalt & Alizariner
3. EntreLacs, Alizarine & Sepia

The images for Gulf War Memories were culled from cable television broadcasts and videotapes of the Persian Gulf war and commercial advertisements. The image column consists of six 11 x 14 foot back-lit duratrans prints of computer manipulated television, flanked on both sides by eight 4 x 4 foot box fans each blowing towards the viewer the aroma of bones from previously consumed Kentucky Fried chicken.Near the base of the piece is a bracket to house the empty bucket of chicken. This piece sets up associations of sensory information which are intended to provoke thought and contemplation about our nation’s recent history. The piece is an absurd memorial for an absurd conflict. The idea for this piece came about after reading of the large increase in fast food sales which took place during the Persian Gulf conflict as people rushed home from work to view the war on T.V. Gulf War Memories represents the absurd and ironic nature of our national obsession with this most recent television war which was consumed and forgotten as readily as a fast food dinner.

The piece is based on the texts of the late Roman philosopher Boethius, and deals with the fluid and ultimately impossible nature of identity. The work makes use of sensory deprivation and stroboscopic visual effects to immerse the viewer in a disorienting environment. The work uses remote visual sensing techniques to track the viewer. If the viewers’ remain static then they see nothing, are left in total darkness, but as soon as they move large human shapes begin to follow them about the room. At first the shapes appear to be shadows, but then resolve into the faces of young children, observing the viewers actions.

Solitary deals with the fragmentary nature of memory through time, and the ensuing fragmentation of identity. What is the relationship between identity and time? How does this indefinable medium within which we are all suspended shape our being? What are the traces we leave on the temporal surface? How do these traces, these shadows of ourselves, function in constituting our memories of ourselves, and thus our sense of being? Does the relationship between time and memory imply that we are not one, but many selves? Who are these selves, and how do they exist? What is the relationship between our actions, our being, and our sense of time, space and memory?

One viewer at a time may enter a large, dark and silent space. It is entirely empty, but as they move about the space they leave behind them a trace of black and white shadow-like figures. These figures however, are not their own shadows but the shadows of others. Each shadow-figure is composed of a short animation (walking, turning, falling, etc), and over a short period of time each figure decays (fades) to black. Subsequently there are never more than eight shadow-figures present on the wall, each darker than the other, creating the effect of a fading and extremely slow stroboscopic image of other people inhabiting the space with the viewer. The period of time it takes for a figure to fade away, and the number of figures visible, is a function of the viewer’s movement. So long as the viewer remains in motion then they will leave an unfolding trace of figures, but as soon as they stop moving the figures soon fade to black, leaving the viewer alone in the dark and silent space. Thus the viewer defines or creates their sense of time through the nature of their action. Time and space are seen as functions of the self.

Within the contours of each shadow-figure there is another animation cycle composed of children’s faces (smiling, looking, turning, etc), which follow the shadow-figures animation. The images of child-hood, in black and white, help evoke in the viewer a sense of memory, whilst the otherness of both these faces (who are unknown) and the shadows follow the viewer, as if they were the viewer’s own shadow.

Solitary utilises live computer graphics, remote visual sensing techniques and digital projection to immerse the viewer in another sense of time and space. The computer is used not only to make this possible but as a metaphor for the suspension of the self in contemporary information media. This can in turn be seen as a metaphor for the functioning of our own memories and the manner in which we construct our identities in the non-linear and fragmented nature of time and space. At what point does the time/space constitution of the self in the world and in media technology merge or collide? Is there a separation here, or are these two states of being inexorably merging into one world?

1 interactive video projection, black and white, silent 8 x 12 x 6 metres

In 1983, the quaternion images produced by Alan Norton shocked me with features that I had never imagined before. I felt I looked at the place I had to be. An unsatisfied photographer with real objects before the camera lens started `his computer-imaging project immediately.

All works exhibited here were generated by ray-tracing algorithms and primitives of hyperbolic-paraboloids. Although we can define parameters such as colours, light sources, surface attrib-utes and so on, it is hard to predict the exact result — especially in abstracts provided by the complicated ray behavour. Many trial images are needed in order to create a work. In fact, I produce numerous images in this time-consum-ing process. Nevertheless, because it is capable of producing images we have never seen before, math-based imaging is the only method I use in computer graphics.

In 1983, the quaternion images produced by Alan Norton shocked me with features that I had never imagined before. I felt I looked at the place I had to be. An unsatisfied photographer with real objects before the camera lens started `his computer-imaging project immediately.

All works exhibited here were generated by ray-tracing algorithms and primitives of hyperbolic-paraboloids. Although we can define parameters such as colours, light sources, surface attrib-utes and so on, it is hard to predict the exact result — especially in abstracts provided by the complicated ray behavour. Many trial images are needed in order to create a work. In fact, I produce numerous images in this time-consum-ing process. Nevertheless, because it is capable of producing images we have never seen before, math-based imaging is the only method I use in computer graphics.

There are many remarkable analogies between computing processes and biological processes (e.g. software generations, computer viruses). We can expect these analogies to become more transparent as computers evolve further. We assume that the ‘rulebook’ in our universe is the same for every information processing system whether it be the mind of a human or a chimpanzee, an abacus or a Disc Operating System (DOS). This ‘rulebook’ fascinated George Boole. He was convinced that if the laws of logic “are really deduced from observation, they have a real existence as laws of the human mind independently of any metaphysical theory”. He sought to identify those rules of thought and give them algebraic expression. In Proposition IV he identified the fundamental law of thought” as Aristotle’s principle of contra-diction — that It is imposssible for any being to possess a quality and at the same time not to possess it”. George Boole argues from its algebraic equivalent that “what has been com-monly regarded as the fundamental axiom of metaphysics is but the consequence of a law of thought, mathematical in its form.” If George Boole were living today he would stand in wonder and amazement pondering the magnificent machine language that has evolved since the publication of the Laws in 1854. I think especially that he would be transported to near ecstasy seeing the binary 1’s and 0’s in computer assembly language which symbolise the ‘on’ and ‘off’ bits. This is his Proposition IV evolved into a machine language that controls the electric circuits in everything in our daily world, from cash registers, airplanes, and washing machines to Cray Sumpercomputers. My illustrations have evolved from procedures made possible by Boolean logic. For several illustrations I adjusted my algorithms to use terms from Boole’s symbolic logic for the graphic improvisation. In those cases the 1’s and 0’s were distributed randomly around the centre of attraction. The visual effects are intended to suggest the dynamism inherent in logical systems. It is a tribute to Boole who perceived the value of a symbolic language of logical equivalence in advance of computer graphics.

Work in exhibition: Derivation of the Laws 5 copies of the limited letterpress edition of George Boole’s Derivation of the Laws with code generated illustrations by Roman Verostko (St Sebastian Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 1991)

125 copies, handpulled, 4 colours, type set in Gill Sans; 100 regular bindings, 20 deluxe binding, 5 artistes livers.
Works related to the books: Frontispieces sheet, 92.5 x 100cm Endpieces sheet, 100 x 60crn Gaia series, AM2, 100 x 60cm Gala series, AQ2, 100 x 60cm

These images explore archetypal correspondences between elements of nature and the organic body/psyche/soul. This work is the result of ongoing research into ways of circumventing visual conventions inherent to 3D computer technology such as linear perspective and ‘objective’ realism, which are, I believe, symptomatic of Western culture’s separation of mind from body, and self from nature. The intent of this research is to create metaphorical images that unify subject/object, interior/exterior, and physical/metaphysical realms of being, in order to reaffirm our essential embeddedness in the world.

The images are ‘still frames’ of three-dimensional computer-generated scenes, created with the 3D animation software SOFTIMAGE. They are exhibited as backlit transparencies as a means of recreating the luminosity of the computer screen, and to suggest the numinosity of archetypes issuing from a universal, morphogenetic ground.

These images explore archetypal correspondences between elements of nature and the organic body/psyche/soul. This work is the result of ongoing research into ways of circumventing visual conventions inherent to 3D computer technology such as linear perspective and ‘objective’ realism, which are, I believe, symptomatic of Western culture’s separation of mind from body, and self from nature. The intent of this research is to create metaphorical images that unify subject/object, interior/exterior, and physical/metaphysical realms of being, in order to reaffirm our essential embeddedness in the world.

The images are ‘still frames’ of three-dimensional computer-generated scenes, created with the 3D animation software SOFTIMAGE. They are exhibited as backlit transparencies as a means of recreating the luminosity of the computer screen, and to suggest the numinosity of archetypes issuing from a universal, morphogenetic ground.

These images explore archetypal correspondences between elements of nature and the organic body/psyche/soul. This work is the result of ongoing research into ways of circumventing visual conventions inherent to 3D computer technology such as linear perspective and ‘objective’ realism, which are, I believe, symptomatic of Western culture’s separation of mind from body, and self from nature. The intent of this research is to create metaphorical images that unify subject/object, interior/exterior, and physical/metaphysical realms of being, in order to reaffirm our essential embeddedness in the world.

The images are ‘still frames’ of three-dimensional computer-generated scenes, created with the 3D animation software SOFTIMAGE. They are exhibited as backlit transparencies as a means of recreating the luminosity of the computer screen, and to suggest the numinosity of archetypes issuing from a universal, morphogenetic ground.

This work is an interactive computer installation, but it is to be understood as a work that uses the medium against itself. I was inspired by a text by Kandinsky in which he compared the progress of each generation with a little beetle running beneath a glass plate. After a while the beetle can see, but can’t go any further. Thus I came to the sentence, “Little beetle, walk a bit further”. It expresses the forward-looking mentality one is exposed to when working with ‘interactive’ technology. But of course one strives to get away from this dull and stiff programming which excludes any flexibility and freedom. Even though, we still fear the day that we will have truly intelligent computers.

Another problem with interactivity was well pointed out by Herrmann Sturm, who said that true interac-tion is in fact stopped by so-called interactivity. Human acting is reduced to the pushing of keys; technical effects and results gain monumental proportions. Therefore Sturm’s question as whether experience is still possible in this push-button-world, sounds to me quite legitimate. These objections are reflected in the second sentence, “Lone searchers never trust serene lies”.

The two sentences are decisive for the work. In German each consists of five words. We have five fingers at each hand and five sensor keys at each side of the monitor. If the viewer wants to hear the whole sentence they must push all five sensor keys simultaneously, which is not so easy. If they want to hear the development of the first into the second sentence, they have to keep pushing. Pushing is ‘rewarded’ here, as it seems to be our main experience today — viewers will really have to work on their pushing-activity in order to receive the full information. The hologram is lit in order to be viewable from both sides (as a reflection and a transmission) and in order that the front image (from transmission) is reflected four times in four acrylic sheets, in the receding distance. This gives a kind of animated sequence of a repetitive image in a sculptural apparatus. The viewer is invited to look all around and in between the tripods supporting the four reflectors.

This is a self-portrait which is questioning my relationship — and human relationships in general —with technology: alienation or emancipation?

The ambiguity of holographic space symbolises intermediate time and space. It characterises that which is in a state of transition or transformation. When I employ the holographic medium, I seek to create a feeling of distance. White light transmission holography, with its rainbow of colours and transparent quality, allows me to more effectively explore the ambiguous and paradoxical relationships between natural and artificial forms. I wish here to emphasise the notions of fading, absence, fragility, emptiness and transparency.

The hologram is lit in order to be viewable from both sides (as a reflection and a transmission) and in order that the front image (from transmission) is reflected four times in four acrylic sheets, in the receding distance, This gives a kind of animated sequence of a repetitive image in a sculptural apparatus. The viewer is invited to look all around and in between the tripods supporting the four reflectors. This is a self-portrait which is questioning my relationship — and human relationships in general —with technology: alienation or emancipation?

This series is built on the juxtaposition of fragments from both personal and cultural history Ironically, the computer has placed me in a new relationship to tradition. It has provided me with the means to access my cultural legacy directly , and I often begin works by placing medieval Hebrew manuscripts inside the computer. I purposely quote sources from different times and places to tell the story of my own culture which comes form migrations over the last several hundred years from place to place as a subculture which is in and of itself a blended culture. A single work, for example, might bring together images from a 17th century Hebrew manu-script from Italy, the house I lived in as a young child, 19th century polish synagogues, and trees from the yard of my current home in Vermont. The work is totally conceived and developed within the computer, as the mechanism for the selective merging, layering, and melding of my sources. How the source images enter the computer (either through my own photographs or direct drawing) is not important, as in any case I must work hours with the sources within the computer to make them truly part of the evolving computer image.

What the computer offers is the means to create, shift, and emphasise hierarchies of both relationship and representation among pieces of the past which I bring together in my images.

This series is built on the juxtaposition of fragments from both personal and cultural history Ironically, the computer has placed me in a new relationship to tradition. It has provided me with the means to access my cultural legacy directly , and I often begin works by placing medieval Hebrew manuscripts inside the computer. I purposely quote sources from different times and places to tell the story of my own culture which comes form migrations over the last several hundred years from place to place as a subculture which is in and of itself a blended culture. A single work, for example, might bring together images from a 17th century Hebrew manu-script from Italy, the house I lived in as a young child, 19th century polish synagogues, and trees from the yard of my current home in Vermont. The work is totally conceived and developed within the computer, as the mechanism for the selective merging, layering, and melding of my sources. How the source images enter the computer (either through my own photographs or direct drawing) is not important, as in any case I must work hours with the sources within the computer to make them truly part of the evolving computer image.

What the computer offers is the means to create, shift, and emphasise hierarchies of both relationship and representation among pieces of the past which I bring together in my images.

This series is built on the juxtaposition of fragments from both personal and cultural history Ironically, the computer has placed me in a new relationship to tradition. It has provided me with the means to access my cultural legacy directly , and I often begin works by placing medieval Hebrew manuscripts inside the computer. I purposely quote sources from different times and places to tell the story of my own culture which comes form migrations over the last several hundred years from place to place as a subculture which is in and of itself a blended culture. A single work, for example, might bring together images from a 17th century Hebrew manu-script from Italy, the house I lived in as a young child, 19th century polish synagogues, and trees from the yard of my current home in Vermont. The work is totally conceived and developed within the computer, as the mechanism for the selective merging, layering, and melding of my sources. How the source images enter the computer (either through my own photographs or direct drawing) is not important, as in any case I must work hours with the sources within the computer to make them truly part of the evolving computer image.

What the computer offers is the means to create, shift, and emphasise hierarchies of both relationship and representation among pieces of the past which I bring together in my images.

This series is built on the juxtaposition of fragments from both personal and cultural history Ironically, the computer has placed me in a new relationship to tradition. It has provided me with the means to access my cultural legacy directly , and I often begin works by placing medieval Hebrew manuscripts inside the computer. I purposely quote sources from different times and places to tell the story of my own culture which comes form migrations over the last several hundred years from place to place as a subculture which is in and of itself a blended culture. A single work, for example, might bring together images from a 17th century Hebrew manu-script from Italy, the house I lived in as a young child, 19th century polish synagogues, and trees from the yard of my current home in Vermont. The work is totally conceived and developed within the computer, as the mechanism for the selective merging, layering, and melding of my sources. How the source images enter the computer (either through my own photographs or direct drawing) is not important, as in any case I must work hours with the sources within the computer to make them truly part of the evolving computer image.

What the computer offers is the means to create, shift, and emphasise hierarchies of both relationship and representation among pieces of the past which I bring together in my images.

The archetypal pattern of the maze or labyrinth is echoed in the design of the interactive videodisc world of Bicycle TV. Traditionally associated with spiritual initiation, growth and transformation, it is appropriate that the maze presented in Bicycle TV serves as a metaphor for the challenges and opportunities offered by new electronic technologies.

Pornography and tourism are the most obvious applications of virtual reality systems, particularly when computer graphics based. Videodisc based systems such as Bicycle TV offer alternate realities and experiences without confining them to the level of arcade games or popular culture’s equivalent, the pseudo-realities of high budget amusement theme parks.

This body of work is the first concrete product of a number of ideas I had formulated on fusing design, art, and computer technology. Chief among these ideas was to merge a typographic and visual communication into one unified composition and to accomplish this with unique technical innovations I had developed. This work was both an exercise in experimental typography and computer science. I describe my work as experimental typography. For most people, this intention is not understood at first glance because all that is seen is an image. On closer inspection of the work, it is discovered that the larger image is constructed by use of smaller images that are combined by the eye. The smaller images are actually characters of a font of type I have designed. In fact, the pictures are a paragraph of text and the font could be changed to another with the result of totally changing or destroying the picture. In a sense, the individual pictures (letterforms) can be seen (read) and combined to form a more complete idea than if my specially designed letterforms had not been used.

The fonts for my work are obviously not he conventional drawings of the letters ‘a’, ‘1)’, or ‘c’. The various font designs I developed are the same in every way to the design and structure of any font. Each character of the font still performs the role of identifying a particular letterform; the letterform, however, ultimately is used as a picture’s pixel. The first character of the font represents black, the last character is white, and in between are a range of greys. This opens a variety of creative opportunities as to what the letterform could look like. The letterforms in my fonts are both the symbol of a pixel’s value and the value. The only criterion of communication is that it is the correct grey value it symbolises.

A digitised picture is, in a sense, a paragraph of data. Data that in most cases does not give a clue to its content. It would be very difficult to know something about the picture by reading its data. The challenge in this poetic game is to treat a picture as a paragraph and to design letterforms using pictures and text. My intention is to articulate a new, more complex vocabulary of my life and ideas by the unique juxtaposition of symbols, phrases and pictures.

As fast as I could learn to integrate systems, they built boxes that could do it all. Hard shells with mysterious inner soft bits. Then at last interactivity, unencumbered. Now you, the interactor get to make some of the decisions at least. Puts you in the picture, literally. The passive experience of the art observer is no longer relevant. Motion and response loop endlessly through time. Space is now sensed but no less sensible.
My art practice is of a complex multi media nature. It utilises audio and visual production and control technology in sophisticated and synaesthetic ways. It manifests as performance, installation, computer graphics and animation, slides, soundtracks, video and prints. It is the crossover and interfacing of these technologies and the ability to create new artforms that particularly interests me, along with placement of body in these contexts. To this end, interactive control over the integrated system is currently being explored.
My conceptual concerns centre primarily in the two areas of dreams and the new technological revolution and the issues raised by it, in socio-logical, practical and moral terms.

Pragmatic considerations lead to the design of computerised vehicles allowing elegance and optimal flexibility while playing with ideas. The general approach is cognitive rather than procedural or mechanistic. We conceive and develop machine partners that assist the artist in the process of exploration and discovery. Digital media may encourage intimate machine interaction, i.e. the interactive evaluation of the behavioural potential of a given idea. In addition, the artist learns about the true nature of his intentions through visual feedback.

The objective of my work is conceptual navigation. Pragmatic considerations lead to the design of computerised vehicles allowing elegance and optimal flexibility while playing with ideas. The general approach is cognitive rather than procedural or mechanistic. We conceive and develop machine partners that assist the artist in the process of exploration and discovery. Digital media may encourage intimate machine interaction, i.e. the interactive evaluation of the behavioural potential of a given idea. In addition, the artist learns about the true nature of his intentions through visual feedback.

Consider the development of virtual work spaces of which the artist is both inventor and explorer. The central material component is knowledge, rather than information. This implies that we are interested in the meaning of things rather than their visual appearance. The auto-matic generation of intricate pictorial complexi-ties as such is of no concern. However, the study of levels of autonomy in the creative process is important since we aim to design computational environments that accommodate mental models of creative behaviour. Computers allow for the manipulation of ideas on the symbolic level. Arbitrary concepts like conflict resolution, adaptation or responsibility are formalised and activated in a simulated, virtual world. The activity in this world manifests itself in pictures. These pictures are visual representations that emerge from the inherent abstract activity and careful selection of physical attributes imposed by the artist. The pictures document themselves.

In summary, the sharing of responsibilities between human and machine — while aiming to create in a common effort — is at the heart of the matter. The initial spark for many incarnations of activity and interactivity is borrowed from examples in nature or it may be a product of human imagination. In either case, our objec-tive remains the interpretation rather than the understanding of the internal dynamics of the cognitive process. The idea is to create a context for the exploration of the psychology of humans as well as the psychology of machines. The final works are side effects of the very activity of navigating in unknown conceptual territories.

Portal to an Alternative Reality has been produced in partnership with the ZERO1 American Arts Incubator, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the U.S. Consulate General, Wuhan, and K11 Art Foundation China, Portal to an Alternative Reality acts as an access point where the public can immerse themselves in virtual and augmented reality experiences that document the rapidly changing city of Wuhan. In 2014, ZERO1 and the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs launched a new media and digital arts program, the American Arts Incubator. It showcases artists as engaged and innovative partners in addressing social issues, in addition to creating a cross-cultural exchange of ideas.

In 2015, public artist John Craig Freeman was selected by the U.S. Consulate in Wuhan to spend 28 days in Wuhan where he was asked to engage and empower the youth of the city. Early in 2016, a portal gate was built in the courtyard in front of the K11 art village in Wuhan. The construction was directed by local master craftsmen and mediated with four iPad viewing devices connected to a powerful projector with screen for evening events.
In April 2016 Freeman led an intensive five day virtual and augmented reality workshop, where he assembled and trained four production teams made up of faculty and students from local Universities. The goal was to have the teams engage the community to determine which parts of the city to document in virtual and augmented reality. The resulting work was then placed at the precise GPS location of the portal gate in the courtyard of the K11 art village.

The public was able to experience the work on smartphone mobile devices using a free downloadable augmented reality browser app and during special evening events using the iPad viewing devices. The virtual and augmented reality scenes were created with photogrammetry techniques. Photogrammetry is the science, technology, and art of obtaining reliable information from non-contact imaging and other sensor systems, in this case, to create 3D models from series of photographs taken at various angles. If an object, person or scene is photographed at multiple angles, software can analyze the parallax difference between key features in the image and extract a three dimensional reconstruction of the image in the form of a point cloud, points in space with XYZ coordinates and RGB color values. Polygons can then be created by connecting the dots, so to speak.

Augmented reality is virtual reality in a physical location. It is a new medium that has the capacity to support aesthetic research and artistic creation, particularly in public space. Viewed through the camera of common smart phones and other mobile devices, augmented reality allows vast audiences to experience new and emergent realities. Virtual objects can be located at precise longitude and latitude coordinates anywhere in the world. The mobile device becomes a kind of cybernetic prosthesis that can extend human perception and the sensorium, making the virtual world that is forming around us, visible.

Meaning is constructed in augmented reality much like montage in filmmaking where shots are juxtaposed. Rather than adjacent film clips cut together over time however, augmented reality juxtaposes the real and virtual, over space. Furthermore, looking through the virtual world to the physical world beyond disrupts our sense of what is real and what is virtual, causing a profound shift in our established ontologies. In May 2016 the project was moved to Hong Kong for exhibition during the symposium, and to seed a possible expansion of the project.

Xon Kon is a street game set in Hong Kong. Featured as part of the 2016 International Symposium of Electronic Art: 香港 Cultural R>evolution, the game results from a collaboration between interdisciplinary artists and game makers: Hugh Davies and Troy Innocent.

Drawing on the rich history of Hong Kong’s development as a global trading port, XonKon invites players to excavate the commercial forces that shaped the city from the tea and opium trade to the technology and finance sectors. Central to the game is the discovery, collection and translation of codes.

Cities are highly coded locations. Unique to Hong Kong is that its symbols and systems have been continually recoded over the past 200 hundred years. Transitioning from Chinese to British rule and back again (with a brief period of Japanese occupation in WW2) Hong Kong has been repeatedly rebooted: linguistically, politically, culturally and geographically. The remains of bi-lingual messages, remixed symbols, and obsolete fragments of code remain scattered at street level throughout the architecture, traditions, food and fashion. Walking around the Central Districts evokes an appreciation of the city’s complex multiculturalism, as well as its mercantile past and present.

Fundamental to Hong Kong’s foundation and continued way of life, is its role as a global trade centre. Established by Britain in the 1840’s, the city has served as a key port-of-trade connecting East and West. Once dealing primarily in tea, silk, opium, gold, cotton, and spices, the city’s more recent exchanges of favour are fashion accessories, consumer electronics and international finance.

Talking Spaces is a site-specific sound performance series in which situational audio recordings are converted into an improvised sound performance in public space. Through this performance series, the artist seeks to draw attention to the inseparable sonic bond between listener, space, and performer during performance, as well as between listeners and the fascinating sound environments embedded in their daily lives. With a microphone, audio of the space is periodically recorded. Recordings are processed to varying degrees and arranged into improvised music with a digital audio workstation and MIDI controller. The resulting sound, expelled from a speaker, blends with the natural sound environment, overlaying it with a modified version of itself. Each performance is totally unique, since its only materials are situational recordings gathered during the performance. This performance series is strongly tied to Sound Walks and Land Art. During a Sound Walk, the goal for participants is simply to listen to the sounds of the environment.

However, in addition to surrounding environmental sound, participants almost certainly make sound themselves by moving throughout the space, for example with their breath, footsteps, or clothing. Thus, the two seemingly separate entities of human and environment become sonically intertwined. It is a goal of this performance series to generate a similarly meditative and socioenvironmentally adhesive sensory experience for the performer and listener alike. Talking Spaces can not exactly be considered a “Sonic Land Art,” since its compositions are not comprised of natural materials but recordings of natural materials. However, like Land Art, performances are site-specific, derive their materials from the environment or public space, and position in/on that space an artwork which resembles but redesigns it in the aesthetic of the artist. Also, the two are ephemeral and sometimes created within the solitude of remote locations, preserved and viewed by third parties only by way of documentation. A passing pedestrian who sees audio equipment connected to speakers in public will likely assume it marks the presence of a street performance. Because conventions of sound or music performance command or suggest attention to the performed sound, the conversion of recordings of the surrounding environmental sound into a musical performance thus draws attention to listeners’ surroundings.

As a street performance in public space, the absence of a stage or rows of chairs for audience seating removes the conventional notion of separation between audience, performer, and venue. Instead, listeners may feel free to approach the performer and experiment making sounds into the microphone or even to engage in conversation with the artist. A Talking Spaces performance is comprised of three basic components: Electronics, Environment, and Performer. The electronic element of the performance is essential in that it facilitates the capturing, processing, and performing of digital audio. The quality and character of the sounds entering and exiting the devices depends on the quality and character of the equipment. While, in field recording, attempts are often made to prevent extensive sounds associated with the word “noise,” such as wind, feedback, or low fidelity, these qualities might instead be appreciated as a compositional contribution of the equipment to the performance. Other compositional elements affected by electronics include structures and processes within the digital audio workstation as well as effects featured on the speaker(s) or guitar amp(s) used to project the performed sound. The audio equipment as objects also provides visual cues to the audience. A microphone pointed away from the performer suggests environmental input and possible audience participation, should members decide to approach the microphone. The environment, of course, provides the sound material to be recorded and processed. The natural environment as a system of dynamic and everchanging patterns provides a generative compositional contribution to the performance.

Additionally, the visual appearance of the environment connects sampled sounds to their origins as physical events, which offers some transparency to audience members regarding the performance process. A performance in public space which draws attention to its dynamic sonic presence consequently draws attention to its visual presence as well, encouraging listeners to become active viewers of their environment. The performer’s role in the performance has much to do with awareness. As with a musician playing in an ensemble, listening, adjustment, and reaction are required of the performer, who decides the amount of sound and the character of sound to add to the pre-existing musical texture. Other fundamentally human qualities contributed by the performer for this project include personal musical tastes or influences, emotional expression, skill level, mood, sense of humor, and so on, all of which affect the musical composition of the performance. Though the project’s configuration provides some constraints, compositional possibilities are seemingly endless. DAWs enable field recordings to be manipulated and arranged quite elaborately, even during an improvisation. Depending on the physical controls featured on the MIDI controller in use, the performer has access to varying degrees of tactile expression, though digital options on the DAW can sometimes compensate. This particular artist happens to be heavily influenced by the textures and compositional arcs of large-scale symphonic works and techno alike. Decisions must be made, however, with the environment in mind. Thin textures sometimes subtly obscure the distinction between environment and performance, while, in contrast, heavy effects and mechanized repetitions can quite starkly distinguish the two from each other. This artist prefers to strike a balance and, perhaps most importantly, at the end of the performance, to leave the audience wondering if it’s over.

Musical Noice: City Ambient Sounds is a musical performance that captures the city’s ambient sounds as an artefact for textual building in the collaborative free improvisation by iLOrk, a laptop orchestra/ mobile device ensemble from the Hong Kong Institute of Education led by Dr. Lee Cheng. A collective of ambient sounds representing various cityscapes of this city will be recorded, which will then be magnified, distorted and/or synthesized to convert the meaningless signals to artefacts of this event. Values and meanings are therefore injected to the ambient sounds of the city, which are usually regarded as unwanted noise to the citizens. In this semi-structured and interactive performance, iLOrk members will collaboratively make music with ‘sonic trees’ – microphone and speaker stands that hanged with digital/electronic instruments and amplifiers – that surround the in-door and open space performance venue. Audiences are welcome to participate by responding to the city’s soundscape via interacting with those sonic trees. Art should be made to communicate ideas and values, and provide meanings to its audience. Musical performance as an art form should therefore be able to anchor people’s sonic experience, triggering their reflective thinking on the ambient sound that surrounds in everyday life. The title of this musical performance, Musical Noice: City Ambient Sounds, offers several meanings – it could mean an accented version of the word “nice”; taking out one stroke from the letter “N” it becomes “Voice”; interchanging the letter “c” with “s” it becomes “Noise”. Musical Noice responses to the sub-theme “Noise Contra Signal”, that noise can be interrupted, intervened and reinterpreted as a meaningful artefact, which contributes as part of the musical context. The emphasis on economic development and fast pace of life in this city have ignored the invisible layer of its ambient surroundings, considering the ambient sounds of this city as unwanted noise (and meaningless signals in the electronic understanding). The proposed event attempts to raise people’s awareness of the ambient environment through imbuing new meanings from the sound that susurrounds them, and therefore diverging people’s perception on noise and unfolding the possibilities on the involvement of noise in art-making.

The Internet of Shoes is an experimental swarm light installation and network for street-level interactions. In this installation, a group of pedestrians can perform collective actions on the street (e.g. triggering light waves that take hold of other participants) using interactive LED shoelaces that communicate with each other in a wireless mesh network (in collaboration with Lab 11 and DoIIT).

The Colours of A Wooden Flute (version ISEA 2016 Hongkong). Fragments of memories (produced both by human beings and by computer) generate a synthesis of sounds and visuals. The sounds of live instruments serve as interface in an audiovisually interactive concert that merges a sophisticated instrumental sound and realtime computing in an amazing improvisation. While visual images and processes are being generated during the concert, a multi channel granular synthesis, spectral delays and virtuoso chances fit together minute tonal par ticles that make up the instrumental sounds into a constantly changing acoustic stream made up of different pitches, durations and positions in the electro-acoustic space. The musical and visual components interact and reciprocally influence each other in order to blend into a unique, synaesthetic, improvisational work of art.

Improvised instrumental music and audiovisual realtime processes interact and reciprocally influence each other in order to blend into a unique work of art of realtime composition. While visual images and processes interact with the music during the concert, a multi channel granular synthesis and a a multichannel spectral delay generate a spatialization of frequency oriented delays, pulses and feedbacks which sometimes sum up to an even reverberating ambience and fit together minute tonal particles that make up the instrumental sounds into a constantly changing acoustic stream made up of different pitches, durations and positions in the electro-acoustic space. Our art work and research describes the hook-up between human and machine, between musical inspiration and digital concepts. Musical instruments act as interfaces for digital audio processing and enable human beings to communicate with digital technologies as well as to generate, receive and exchange data versus emotions.

Nowadays, as different forms of machine musicianship, are blooming where computer act like virtuoso musical instruments we are focusing on a very specialized form of realtime performance with a computer system virtuoso audiovisual interaction with musical instruments. Every performance of our interactive audiovisual works, even of the same title, is unique not only because of the inherent concept of improvisation, but also because the computer system and the progamming are further developed for every event. The realtime processes of an audiovisual interactive computer system collude with a free artists musical expression. Our art work and research describes the hook-up between human and machine, between musical inspiration and digital concepts.

WM_EX10 WM_A28 TCM_200DV A1.2FPP BK26 is a 10 channel audio/video noise installation consisting of ten pairs of CRT monitors and speakers.

The sound and video is generated through short circuits the artist produces with his wet fingers on opened devices. The skin’s resistance and the conductance of the human body combined with the components of the circuits are modifying the sound. The audio signals that are audible through multiple speakers are sent to tube monitors which are visualizing the signal in flickering and abstract shapes and lines in black and white. Different kinds of noise are produced and forming a time-based sculpture creating a sound and video scape.

The spectator is invited to move in and through the installation.

Is there a potential language below language? …below consciousness? …beyond the sign? What are the post/para-human potentials for language beyond linguistic signification, below the level of consciousness? What can the subconscious communicate, and what might such communication look like?

Performing Hypo-Linguistics considers these questions through its proposition of a technologically mediated, cyborg communication and collaboration system. In this system, traditional linguistic concepts/objects/materialities are impossible to relay. Furthermore, neither performer can enact conscious control of the system. Thus, each performer must rely on the instinctive reactions of their subconscious state to provide ambiguous, but instantaneous feedback to the other. Hence, the system proposes a communicative feedback loop beyond (and below, more visceral than) the consciously mediated realm of linguistic representation.

Neural Science, through the discovery of mirror neurons — neurons which mimic in our brains the mental state of the other — allows us to imagine the possibility of a para/hyper-linguistic system that is perpetually engaged, but inaccessible to our conscious minds. As we see in Abramovic’s Mutual Wave Machine, these neurons drive a perpetual process of synchronization. However, they also imply a form of communication — a constant state information transfer occurring just below our sense-experience. It is this communication that we seek to hijack and to hack. As such, we hope to create a harmonious discourse that reveals our distinctly human potential for collaborative evolution. Performing Hypo-Linguistics proposes an alternative enunciation of a pre/post-linguistic signification system that is realize-able only through the human-as-cyborg.

Foxconn Frequency (No. 2) — for one visibly Chinese performer investigates the consequences of disconnecting action and labour from sound. Using the poetry of Xu Lizhi (許立志) -a former Foxconn worker- as a structural blueprint to move through a series of dictations and testings, the piece seeks to create a space for failure and stakes. The most obvious and clear negation is the purposeful disconnection between the musician and her instrument. The use of technology here is meant to disrupt, instead of enable; to create a space of new possibilities through subtraction. For the core of the piece, a system was devised to “test” the performer’s competency with multiple exercises. This system calls these exercises (or “gestures”) differently every performance, keeping the performer present and engaged through-out the piece. The performer must execute these gestures successfully under shifting parameters that determine overall difficulty before progressing forward. This creates a scenario for the player to fail. While traditional scores have created difficulty, a software-driven system allows for new permutations. The generative and responsive nature of the system subverts any attempt for the performer to prepare.

The struggle becomes real and perceptible, a part of the piece as it unfolds. There are many reasons for the restriction of “one visibly Chinese performer.” In music composition, we often specify instruments (e.g for solo violin), but almost never the body itself. By making this distinction, it is my intention to draw focus to the performer’s identity, to engage the eyes as well as the ears, and to bring attention to the “extra-musical,” shifting the mode of audience perception to multiple modalities. It felt necessary to specify race when confronting the narratives of Foxconn and Xu Lizhi’s poetry, as it is the Chinese body at work. The piano, an iconic Western object, is an equal presence to the body, acting as the main resonator and origin of most sounds. They are separated by physical distance, allowing us to see these two entities as separate, and not together (as in most concert music), and to explore this reconfigured space.

Terrainor is a live performance work that uses the practices of field recording and site listening to provide both raw sound and video material and a structure for the composition built from them. The project is a form of expanded phonography that uses concepts of soundscape to structure readings of landscape. In it specific sites are documented on both micro and macro scales, and use the local acoustic conditions to guide the process of sonic mapping. This approach results in recordings that are not traditionally representational, but instead reflect the experience of moving into the sites’ geographies in ways that are idiosyncratic and reference the social and experiential definitions of site as much as physical ones.

In performance the field recordings are processed and spatialized through a multi-channel sound system accompanied by a single channel of video. The material cycles through a number of scenes each of which provides a distinct and particular method of navigation through it. The structure and pacing of the material is designed to encourage a sustained and focused experience, one that clearly demarcates the shifting representations of audio and video in each scene.

Boundary Synthesizer II is an interactive audiovisual system that translates familiar moving images such as cityscapes and fireworks into impressive sound. A horizontal “boundary” line is extracted from the outline in each video frame and directly transformed into a sound waveform. Users can interact with Boundary Synthesizer by changing the video contents, controlling the frequency and manipulating the image data using image effects such as wave, mirror and mosaic. Thus, this system is an audiovisual synthesizer in which the oscillator’s waveform is structured by the visual boundary. This waveform is changed in time by videos, and unexpected sound artifacts are continuously generated automatically. Therefore users can explore the intuitive and expressive connections of image and sound by operating the physical controller.

What happens when a contemporary sound artist and a jazz pianist remain shut indoors in a baroque castle in the Piemontese mountains for two weeks? The result is Sjö a collaborative project between the Zurich-based electronic composer Marcel Zaes (CH) and the Paris-based jazz pianist Andrea Manzoni (ITA). From the sheltered rooms of their baroque retreat, Zaes and Manzoni present a sonic research project which is as contemporary as it is versatile. Sjö explores questions such as what it means for a piano to make a sound in the 21st century in a century over-determined by an electronic environment. Starting from Manzoni’s jazz-based technical expertise, the duo experiments with electronic transformations and the impact of their environment whether low-key piano bar or deep techno club, their sound seeks to adapt the piano to different 21st century musical settings. The visuals accompanying Sjö’s sonic investigations are provided by the artwork of the Munich-based artist duo Anna Schölß (GER) and Kristijan Kolak (GER).

Sjö : två is a one-hour concert program consisting of nine cocompositions by Manzoni and Zaes. All compositions include a tonal-melodic piano part and an electronic part which is based upon sonic research ideas. Several research settings that get used by Sjö are inspired by the creation of artificial spatiality which exceeds the possibility of the acoustic instrument. One of them is the use of convolution reverb in live performance. Several pedal hits, microphoned in the inside of the grand piano, act as impulse responses, while the live piano’s attacks trigger these responses. The struck piano string, resonating in the inside of the piano, microphoned, going through a convolution reverb where it resonates again in the virtual inside of the piano, creates supernaturality. Another setting consists of the use/abuse of stereophony. For the sake of theater-suitability we limit our work so far to stereophony and try to go to its very limits. Stereo as an assembly of two mono channels instead of an “authentic” image of space is the underlying concept. The use of a “wrong” mapping of the piano microphones, phase inversion, the mixing down of the left and right piano microphone into one mono channel while the same signal passes delayed in the other mono channel, or the application of a convolution reverb on both piano microphones but with a different impulse response for both channels; all of this, when assembled again and played-back as if it were an “ordinary stereo”, results in an artificial spatiality which could not exist in reality.

The creation of artificial temporality is the second concept used by Sjö, as the interest lies on the temporal perception of sound. The live piano playing of Manzoni necessitates a human-created temporality, which Zaes with his algorithms interferes. Detaching the X from the Y axis, the temporal envelope from the momentary timbre is the underlying concept, which Marcel Zaes often uses in all of his works, not only in Sjö. The momentary piano event – an attack, a decay, a release or a piano body noise – is freezed with diverse granular and freeze algo rithms. Thus, the piano event results in an extemporal static sound, which then is shaped by Zaes again in function of time. The detached spectrum is joined with an artificially created envelope. Both the shape of this envelope and the parameters/ quality of the underlying freeze are controlled by Zaes on stage. Further ideas of temporality include the real-time reversing of a single piano note—a concept that for the reason of its physicality remains impossible—yet can be approached, or the concept of introducing pure sine waves as natural overtones in an ongoing piano note, as the played note—once released—is prolonged and results again in a continuous sonic event that can be artificially shaped.

Andrea Manzoni: composition, production, live performance, piano, synthesizer
Marcel Zaes: composition, production, live performance, electronics, programming
Anna Schölß: artwork, visual installation and video
Kristijan Kolak: video

The vibration of air molecules can be perceived as a tangible kind of beauty, at times extreme and other times subtle. This aesthetic abstraction both moves toward and pushes away from how we normally define synesthesia, in which two senses such as hearing and sight form a single, hybridized sensory experience.

This is an audiovisual work that explores a connection between the sonic, the visual, and space. The audiovisual elements are synchronized and unified into a new form of synesthetic experience. A custom designed patchable machine and sixteen channel software oscilloscope are used as apparatuses to connect sound, visual, and space. In the work, the oscilloscope has a functional tendency, which displays the representation of voltage in the center of the screen. However, in the aesthetical aspect, I stumbled on a way in which to detour the screen-centered display and to think about how to decentralize the elements. I used the relation between the screen and the wall, which became an important aspect of the piece, and it led to the decentralization of the main storyline.

Composed by Robert Rowe, performed by Harry Sparnaay

Hall of Mirrors (1986) is a duet for a human playing a bass clarinet and the 4X computer system. The computer takes in the sound of the bass clarinet and reflects it, sometimes faithfully, sometimes not. The human listens to what the computer does and modifies his own performance according to how his partner is playing. Humans and computers are very different things: Hall of Mirrors is an effort by the composer to let them make music together, realizing and emphasizing each other’s strengths. All of the sounds you hear come from the bass clarinet: the computer only shuffles around with what it hears, or multiplies it, or changes its speed. The image of the title comes from an idea of the piece as a series of reflections, fragmented, distorted, or true, cast back from the two patterns onto each other. The version of the piece played today uses a tape recording of the 4X part: since the performace of both partners changes with each playing, this represents a snapshot of the possible outcome. Hall of Mirrors is a commission from the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst of the Dutch Ministry of Culture. The support of IRCAM is also gratefully acknowledged.

Composed and Performed by Robert Mulder & Kristi Allik

Cometose (1986) was created with the financial assistance of the Media section of the Canada Council. Conceptually the work deals with the death of Samuel Clemens during the perihelion of Halley’s Comet in April of 1910. Clemens had said during his life that he ‘came in with the comet (1835) and would go with it’. In this story his wishes come through and he is transported with house and all to the core of the comet. There he views the world, reflects his own past and the present from within the safety of ‘Stormfield’, his house. During the major part of the voyage Twain watches as many strange and frightening things appear in the windows and his beloved pool table. When he returns to the orbit of Earth in 1985 he wakes up and looks at our busy world. Alas, before he can comment upon what he has experienced, the satellite Giotto, in collision course with the comet smashes his house.

The music for this work was created with electronic and acoustic means. Among the electronic sources were: the Casio CZ5000, Casio CZ101, Yamaha DX7 etc. The acoustic sources include Allik’s singing, narration of Clemens’ writing and the sound of simple toys. The original recorded acoustic material was processed using devices such as: the Yamaha REV-7, the Roland SL-50 digital sampler, a digital vocoder and other equipment.

The imagery was taken from some original material of the period.Interior shots were taken at Eldon House, London Ontario. The exterior of the house and other material was photographed from Mulder’s artwork, magazine cut-outs, drawings, complex models and original period photographs. The computerized material was created on an Amiga 1000 computer using A-squared Live! digitizer and Dpaint software. The synchronizing software was written in Electrosonic ESCLAMP on an Apple computer.

Composed and Performed by Daniel Brandt

Portable Music is a series of improvisational and rhythmic pieces for solo performer, an electronic percussion instrument (a Roland Octapad) and Midilodica (a unique MIDI) keyboard instrument built at STEIM in 1987). The musician plays the instruments which send data directly to a computer that is programmed to ‘listen’ and respond by processing the information and sending its output to synthesizers. The result is an interactive system, allowing real-time, gestural control over many layers of musical processes. Each composition exploits this performance system in a different manner.

Repetez, s.v.p (1987). The computer, operating as an interactive MIDI recorder, repeats rhythms that are performed on the Octapad. These phrases are layered one by one until a complex pattern is created. The performer then plays the Octapad, modifying and adding to the pre-recorded patterns.

Four Echoic Episodes (1987), is performed on the Midilodica. This portable keyboard, originally a Hohner melodica, has been modified to transmit a wide range of MIDI commands. These are sent directly to the computer which interprets them in a variety of ways. Each section of this composition has its own micro-tonal scale, and uses variations of a program that transforms a solo performance into that of an ensemble with the simple device of an echo.

The objectives of Sonic Electric: sonic recipes with experimental intermedia are located within the fields of experimental sound performance and electronic art as inter-media [sound/video, performative and community practice] to develop a strategic laboratory for collective engagement by exploring principles of participation and relationality. The aim of this project designed for ISEA Hong Kong is to develop a practice-based creative analysis of identity, power and place, through the immersive environment of the kitchen. The spatial politics of the communal kitchen workplace shape our daily experience. With a collection of hand tools and electric motors that will be gathered together from kitchens in Hong Kong, local participants will be bending kitchen instruments and appliances into doing things they were not designed to do and will learn to shift and reposition their status as tools and social markers, in ways that seek to open up sites of resonance and resistance. Participants will also learn how the spatial and deep listening experience of the kitchen interior may open through collaboration via the fidelity of kitchen utensils and motors to sonic textures in sound performance. Sound has the ability to create a relational space, a meeting point, diffuse and yet pointed. This makes sound a significant model for thinking and experiencing the contemporary condition, for as a relational spatiality global culture demands and necessitates continual reworking. It locates us with an extremely animate and energetic environment that, like auditory phenomena, often exceeds the conventional parameters and possibilities of representation. This connection is equally a spatial formation whose temporary appearance requires occupation, as a continual project, emphasizing our place and is also potentially, emphasizing our local community.

This dynamic provides a key opportunity for moving through contemporary social discourse by creating shared spaces; it belongs to no single public. It can exist as a network that teaches how to belong, to find place and still search for a new connection, for proximity. A critical and practical hands-on workshop will introduce recruits to, the concepts of Sound Improvisation from a dynamic perspective using kitchen tools and appliances and the manipulation of such tools and appliances. Utilizing Performative Improvisation, Sound Exploration, Music Electronics and Music Recording. Participants will also experience how to make deep listening an effective tool or as an active collective process. The workshop will finalize into a sound and performance art work presentation fusing cryptic beats and experimental noise with live sound improvisation created by the amplification of manipulated kitchen apparatus assisted by electronic hardware such as Contac mics plugged into bass guitar amplifiers. They will play their kitchen appliances through these devices for the final performance presentation.

“…there appears to be a complicated set of rules for computing with neurons which prevents many of them from working at once. The neurons are electrically triggered, and if the rules are broken we get an electrical overload. This is the cybernetic explanation (in brief) of what we usually call epilepsy, or (perhaps) what our forefathers called ‘possession’”. Stafford Beer, 1965.

Possession Trance is a live performance project spawned within underground D.I.Y. rave and experimental music communities. Slowly mutating for the past nine or so years the performance uses a combination of minerals, metals, electronic circuits, high powered stroboscopes, dense smoke, high volume noise and ritual incense in an attempt to create powerful, hallucinatory phenomena within audience members aimed toward provoking a liberating, communal and shared experience.

Initially using Nicolas Collins CMOS synthesisers in combination with stroboscopic light, the project has developed by examining the core underlying structure of electronic and computational circuitry. Currently this performance utilises self built crystal amplifiers constructed with iron and chalcopyrite, copper-oxide and copper solar cells, and will be soon incorporating magnetite and maghemite audio “tape” to create recorded feedback loops live.

Possession Trance tends to spirals sideways into bastard tekno, burrowing through noise infested cybernetics, crude neuroscience and distorted physiology in an attempt to piece together our fragmentary daemons and split the nine-fold reality layers of human perception; from communing with the dead to disturbing the holographic brain; from trance states to opening flicker portals in optic nerve fibres; these practitioners practice a dark hypnosis in psychoactive hyperventilation clubs. This is far more potent than those Burroughsian opiate dreaming machines. These are the dank back alleys of the contemporary Core clans; turbo charged amphet-psycho-triptamine splittercore; highly potent chemical potions releasing anxiety ridden, fraudulent time-travel. We live on the peripheries of our own being. The veil is removed. Portals are opened. The superimposed fluorescent grid clamps the mind like thousands of splintered fingers sinking deep inside the brain and pulling out neural pathways in all directions. The pathways split into rotating cylinders folding in opposite directions spiralling into infinity. The holoflux is engaged as Purkinje shifts in his nauseated hallucinations, Fechner lurches into view weaving his pattern induced flicker colours in Helmholtz’s face.

They all dissipate in photic voltages tracing themselves into oblivion through rods and cones penetrating dank neuronal alleyways at high velocity running unstoppable into head-on collisions with particles swarming from the OI! factory and binding with tactic centres of the inner muscular shell. The signal is now at the level of internal mineral solutions performing ionic transfers causing electrical lightening storms shooting through cells. Axon hillock is firing like a spasmodic machine gun spewing out incandescent howls and screams of white noise automatically reloading the onslaught continues as possession trance is manifest. Believe you are possessed by a god or deity. Something other has entered you, nonhuman. It is the nonhuman we are now in communication with.

Martial Law (Hong Kong Version) belongs to the ongoing Martial Law series, which consists of an evolving chain of interactive sound installations with electroacoustic, mechanic and electronic elements, which has already been reimagined for its showing in three different cities under very particular circumstances. Its main component is centered around a customized and repurposed tambourine the viewer can move with a joystick, triggering a series of unexpected visuals and sound events, as several objects glide across the tambourine’s head as viewed through a fresnel lens. The piece as a whole presents the audience with a stochastic sound and visual generator that is controlled via unclear interactive parameters, guiding the audience into an unmediated discovery process in which the artwork reveals its possibilities and nature in the midst of actual interaction. It plays with notions of free improvisation and the connections between body awareness, sound generation and synesthetic and cymatic phenomena. It stands as a complex and unpredictable self-organizing audiovisual system that the audience can influence and direct but not fully control. In all its versions, Martial Law is a sound installation that can also be understood as an electronic musical instrument. Using Arduino, hand-wired analog electronics and digital fabrication techniques, it is always conceived as an outgrowth of the space it is placed in, animating it through sound. Through its almost continuous sound emission, it erects a live streaming sound commentary on the space’s mood changes as its lighting and occupants change in the course of the day. Its visual presentation [text truncated in original, editor]

Its first incarnation was shown in Hamburg, in the context of an event that took over low-budget hotel rooms for the staging of small scale exhibitions under several different curators. At that time, it was displayed inside a small ceramic sink at the room assigned to curator Armando Rosales. In its next version, it was reconstructed for its display at Taipei’s Japanese diplomatic office, where it became a wall sculpture with a tabletop device. Its next incarnation took shape in Tokyo, at a group show themed around anatomical drawing and representations of the body, where it became a more ambitious sound installation and performance stage, including amplified stringed platforms and proximity-activated granular synthesizer. For ISEA 2016, the work has been adapted for its ephemeral installation at Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, entering into a dialogue with the building’s unique architecture. It will be greeting visitors in their way to performance stage, framing a performance by Aquiles Hadjis and Rie Tashiro and staying on for the rest of the day in order to be interacted with.

Is anything original any more? Can an artist create a completely singular work, free from outside influence? Derivative Works offers no answers to these questions. Drawing from a wide range of musical, timbral, methodological and ideological sources, Derivative Works takes the form of an audio-visual barrage, compressing complex rhythms into tight temporal spaces and offering neuro-linguistic diatribes. Shifting and groaning synths, triggered by an impossible drum machine. Inspirations: science fiction, gabba, object oriented philosophy, hardstyle, ui design, rubber, trap, native instruments, compressed air, open-mindedness, nike, rave, linn drum, history, candy, tr-808, matte black cars, computer music, recycling, time, guitars, cleanliness, careers, spatialisation, techno, strobe lights, family, automated testing.

Aquatint is a bespoke mix of Overlap’s award winning transitional landscapes: a mesmeric dance of shapes, lights and abstract imagery on the cusp of the recognizable, reflecting the emotional response we experience in powerful natural environments: atmospheric, sensory and textual, delivered through a systematic patterning within a void and augmented by their melodic minimalist music. A plastic view of nature.

Running Forest is a middle distance electromagnetic slide through an endless forest. Lazy Wave. Underwater sky, a surface never reached. Cloud Edged. Perhaps the purpose of abstract [original text truncated, editor]

Self-luminous 2 is an experimental handmade instrument shown as performance. It is a series-project which I have been working on since 2013 and finally developed into shape in 2014. I am looking for an intimate and personal instrument that reflects on the relation of digital sound and light code. In computer language, light on is 1 and light off is 0. If more than 2 lamps, it could be code or readable possibility by the meanings. When I press the button or turn the knob, the message will be sent to Pure Data, and the sound will be triggered in live by Pure Data.

The Data of sound such as frequency and volume, are analyzed and sent out to the second Arduino to control the light. The light, in this case, is an intuitive element for human beings. From this point, it is really close to sound which disturbs our biological body directly. The lights are visualized and they can be transferred them into messages. The message might be readable by coincidence with the link to the code. The light is bright enough to let audiences to have persistence of vision in mind. During the performance, the sound will be reproduced by code and part of it is impromptu.

In Hong Kong Algorave Performance, 160520 improvised programming generates danceable percussive music emphasizing generative rhythms and their variations. All of my interaction with the system is projected for the audience to see. The custom live coding system, a Haskell language library called Conductive. It triggers a software sampler built with the Haskell bindings to the SuperCollider synthesizer and loaded with thousands of audio samples (as many as 18,000). Through live coding, I manipulate multiple concurrent processes that spawn events, including the number of processes, the type of events spawned, and other parameters.

At least two methods of generation of base rhythms are used: stochastic methods and L-systems (an algorithm describing plant growth). In the former, sets of rhythmic figures are generated stochastically. From them, figures are selected at random and joined to form larger patterns. In the latter, L-systems are coded live and used to generate patterns. These patterns are then processed into a stack of variations with higher and lower event density. That stack is traveresed according to a time-varying value to create dynamically changing rhythms. Simultaneously, patterns in which audio samples and other parameters are assigned to sequences of time intervals are generated through similar methods. The concurrent processes read the generated data and use it to synthesize sound events according to the rhythm patterns described above.

This performance also uses additional agent processes which change system parameters (conductor agents) run alongside sample-playing agent processes (instrumentalist agents). These conductor agents are the result of my recent research into how autonomous processes can complement live coding activity. These conductors stop and start instrumentalists, as well as change the other parameters used by the instrumentalists for sample-triggering, such as which sample to play and which rhythm pattern to follow. The live coding involves not only the patterns for rhythms and samples but also the algorithms which the conductors use during the performance.

My interaction involves activities such as generating data, continuously reselecting which data to use throughout the performance, changing the number of running concurrent processes, and determining when changes occur. By manipulating both instrumentalist and conductor agents and the data they read, a rapidly changing stream of rhythmically complex bass, percussion, noise, and tones is improvised according to a rough sketch of the overall performance structure. This improvisation crosses the genre boundaries of bass music, noise music, and free improvisation. The projection shows all of my activities, including code editing and execution of code in the interpreter. When I press “Enter” on the keyboard, the line under the cursor is sent to the interpreter and immediately executed. Pressing F11 causes the code block under the cursor to be sent and executed. Text output of functions is printed in the interpreter.

The primary technologies used include:
– Conductive, a library for live coding in Haskell
– the Haskell programming language, through the Glasglow Haskell Compiler interpreter
– the SuperCollider synthesis engine (but not its programming language)
– hsc3, the Haskell bindings to SuperCollider
– the xmonad window manager
– the vim text editor
– the tmux terminal multiplexer
– the tslime plugin for vim

Other open-source tools are essential for the performance, including:
– an Arch Linux computer
– jackd
– the Calf Jack Host
– patchage

To afar the water flows reconstructs the city into a high-rise garden utopia, emphasizing a genuine harmony between man-made structures and its natural surroundings. A decade ago, I left my home in Beijing, where the rapid transformation of the urban landscape dramatically reshaped the city and people’s lives, and I came to America to begin an immigrant’s journey—migrating from the west coast to the east coast, and from the east coast to the Midwest. To afar the water flows is both a visual diary of this journey and a loving portrait of American cities.

My video installation is inspired by the concept of architectural relief (a technique where the sculpted elements remain attached but raised above the background plane). Audiences experience a gradual shift in the appearance and depth of the installation from a flat image to a three-dimensional view. I use techniques like relief and projection mapping to enhance the framed glimpses of scenes as well as emphasize the physicality of digital video.

In this project, we attempt to elicit the immensely upsetting yet anticipative feel at the ending of a chapter before moving on to our next journey towards the greater possibilities into the unknown.

The music is from Nicolas Scherzinger’s ‘inter-sax-tive’, a series of improvisational works for saxophone and interactive computer. It involves a variety of granular synthesis techniques and is produced by the computer and the performer interact with one another in real time.

Using Processing programming language, we build up evolving abstract compositions that were linked with the musical riffs and patterns. Through purposely emphasizing or neglecting certain aspects of music signals, the image arrives as the visual counterpoint of the music.

“The performative is no longer the domain of humans: matter has its own agency, pulse, vitality, rhythm.” Rewa Wright

Algorithms experience time as microtemporal, a series of quickly expressed mathematical events, occurring one after the other in a precise order. As humans, we cannot begin to comprehend the microtemporal in its real time unfolding, but we can attempt to approach it with that most flawed apparatus, the eye. What we see with the eye is never the whole story, and in this case it only gives liminal access to the performance recorded in the film ‘an algorithmic life,’ where vibrant virtual matter pushes forth to slice the eye with its microtemporal pulse. Generated using custom shaders and displacement mapping to create terrain out of entirely non-manifold geometry, this work simulates and speculates upon algorithmic ‘life’ as an emergent computational strata. Each frame is generated using parameters set loosely by the artist, over an extensive timeline of 20,000 frames, which is then left to render by itself for up to three weeks. The resulting rendered frames are mostly a complete surprise to the artist, who has taken a step back and allowed algorithms to generate their own performative record. Music is composed by Simon Howden using an improvisational technique that traces the contours of the visual recording.

dist.solo is inspired from the moment of intimacy in eye contact and the indefinite variables in relationships. “dist.” – the short form of distance or district. It is also a term widely used for mathematical and programming terminology for distance calculation. In this work, it represents as both relational and mathematical distance. We encounter momentary connections with people in our everyday lives. We synchronize and repel with one another from time to time. Attachment and detachment; the rhythmic dance as well as chaotic crash between the two create a metaphor for the momentary, temporary relationship that exists between them. The work involves kinetic intervention of the pendulum movement as well as the combination of digital sensors. The custom software generates random position of the unbalanced weight, hence the rhythms of swings are always indefinite. The work and the digital screen intentionally combine the rational and irrational rules, dynamic time, expressing the artist’s personal feeling towards human relationship in his current time.

B-face is a project that proposed hide all textual information of the user interface. All readable element will delete for get a layer of information about the organization of the screen. The procedure tries to reveal the different visual aspects of communication, detecting the component layers and highlight the semantic nature of the tool. Proposes an alternative to undress and examine the structure of the interface. Is a resistance attempt to face the daily over-information.

The context of his work is characterized by the use of tools and procedures, where the technique is formally manifested as practical and as theme of his work. The training acquired during the industrial school is present as application and conceptual axis. He combines different languages, such as video, installation and drawing.
Has focused its research on the relationship between artistic production and production technique. Taking this idea as a starting point, his proposal is developed in two lines:
– Procedures, processes and mechanisms of production.
– Social configuration of technology, intervention and use of tools.

Referring to the metaphorical bond between technology and nature, the film questions the realities we create using constructed and very similar illusive imagery that erase the line between real and artificial, obvious and mysterious, finding beauty in synthetic experiences. It questions our current obsession with a memory, which often becomes more important than the event itself. The title suggests the idea of neglected moments being put together to create, morphing from one form to another, the thread of digital existence. Synthetic Curiosities is an exploration of the contemporary friction, made through repetition and slight shifts. Our common contemporary identity is formed through repetition of events, blurring the line between the real and digital.

Talk with Your Hands Like an Ellis Island Mutt uses new media tools to explore cultural identity in a way that analog tools would not permit, suggesting that identity is the result of multiple lifelong collisions between elements of personality that we have inherited with or without knowing it. Designed for performative screening or interactive exhibition and built in the Korsakow cinema database system, HandMutt embodies my experience as a second-generation American whose ancestors came through Ellis Island from Europe (Poland, Hungary, and Scotland between 1907 and 1914), and whose identity is formed by a multi-generational assimilation process that often feels perpetual. With three of my four grandparents being born outside the US in non-English speaking environments (and the fourth born here not long after his own parents arrived), I have been aware of my own otherness all my life, particularly in regard to my working class and Eastern European heritage.

Part of the expression of that heritage is talking with one’s hands – a habit attributed in America almost exclusively to working class immigrants and their descendants. (One expected result of successful assimilation is the loss of this habit, which I did not achieve.) The idea for HandMutt came during the editing process for my digital lyric memoir daddylabyrinth, which premiered at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling in 2014 at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore. In its video footage I found many hand gestures that led me to reflect on my own heritage and on the multigenerational assimilation process of American immigrants. This resulted in the birth of HandMutt as a separate project. The technology-enabled fragmentation of story, image, and consciousness in HandMutt reflects the fragmentation of cultural identity itself, which is often so dispersed in our lives that we can scarcely identify it. The work generates a nuanced, intimate understanding of the immigration and assimilation experience that would not be possible with traditional monolinear narrative and noninteractive media.

Talk with Your Hands Like an Ellis Island Mutt is made of interlocking fragments. It consists of 157 short clips (most 8-12 seconds in length) including altered images of my own hand gestures, archived records and objects of my immigrant ancestors, and archival footage of newcomers arriving at Ellis Island—through which the majority of European immigrants passed as America’s population exploded between 1890 and 1920. It offers multiple unique playthroughs in an order determined both by interactor choice and the computational operation of its database. The video clips in HandMutt come from four distinct sources, and each is paired with short voice-over commentary by me. The largest group is a set of sixty-four of my hand gestures harvested from the video selfies in my digital work daddylabyrinth. Each of these gestures is isolated from its communicative context and broken down into micromotions -often only a few frames in length- that are repeated, reversed, and subjected to manipulations in frame rate using Final Cut Pro X editing software. This visual idea is an homage to my film mentor Ken Jacobs, whose performative Nervous System films of the 1980s and 90s created a similar “stutter” effect (one that we now see all around us, in altered form, thanks to GIF culture).

The second group of clips I worked with was harvested from public domain archival footage of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1903 and 1906, which are subject to the same Ken Jacobs-esque manipulations. I left these untouched in terms of color to keep the historical record of immigration as cleanly represented as possible. These images, which were shot with a primitive stationary camera, are blown up to capture the micro-dramas embedded within the larger frame—a squabbling couple, a frightened child, an old woman uncertain of the life ahead of her. HandMutt also includes clips of tangible family relics and photographs from my maternal and paternal families.

I have few possessions from either side, and many have achieved near-iconographic status for me no matter how simple or utilitarian they are. The final group is simple text animations of keywords that are used in the Korsakow database that resonated with themes which emerged from the other three categories of clips. These represent the emotions and psycho-social forces that have shaped my relationship with my ancestry. The overall result of these multiple strands in conversation with one another is that of many stories weaving together to form a narrative experience without the benefit of Aristotelian coherence—a mosaic portrait of American assimilation and its multi-generational challenges.

Interactors can experience HandMutt via installation or web browser. They navigate through a series of brief clips, choosing the next one from a set of thumbnail images that appear at the end of each— all representing other nodes in the video database. The short length of the clips forces interactors into an active viewing mode in which they must make frequent choices about which clip to watch next without knowing how that choice will alter their movement through the material. Choosing a given thumbnail affects the next set of choices, but does not set the interactor on a “path,” as there are no predetermined navigations in the work. Instead, the next set of clips is determined by the keywords used to describe the one that has just played; while the number of variations is by no means infinite, the computational operation of the Korsakow database makes it extremely difficult to replicate the same navigation twice. The project is designed so that interactors—or the author in a performative screening—can navigate it in approximately half an hour.

The exhibited installation through the means of photography and new media, presents the living space of the fishing village Tai O, with snapshots produced both with traditional techniques and with virtual three-dimensional technology. The photos and 3D virtual interiors on view here are the results of the research project, “Using digital visualisation to preserve local cultural heritage: a case study of Tai Ping Street, Tai O” GRF (General Research Fund). The work was supported by Drs Richard Charles & Esther Yewpick Lee Charitable Foundation and the City University of Hong Kong.

The interactive installation in view presents individual details of the interiors of family houses in Tai O. With the interface connected to the installation, the viewer can look around the interiors and examine the details of the furnishings and household objects up close. The appearance of the interiors, in accordance with the possibilities and limitations of digital technology, is precise and rich in detail. The home interiors presented in the installation are virtual reproductions of the real ones. These virtual 3D objects were realised on the basis of photos. Once they selected the suitable houses and came to an agreement with the homeowners, the artists took several hundred photos of the interiors, and wherever possible, of each object from many angles. There is a selection of these photos on view alongside the installation, as small prints.

There is also a large print behind the computer screen. It shows the part of the village where the house is located. The photos were indispensable in the production of the installations in a number of ways. With the application of photogrammetry technology, the computer is capable of automatically calculating a three-dimensional model on the basis of the photos taken from many angles. While this model could be extremely beautiful and rich in detail, unfortunately, it could not be used in the interactive installation. It was composed of too many details and became overly complicated. It was mainly effective in determining the precise position and dimensions of the objects.

The final models can be realised with either the reconstruction, simplification and paring down of the photogrammetry models, or to design them on the basis of the photos with handiwork. This is an extremely time-consuming, complex work that demands special knowledge. This work added up to a large portion of the time of the artists working in the project. The artists cover the surface of the models with details taken from the original photos. This texture mapping procedure renders the virtual 3D object true to life. Thus, we might say that the final installation is, in fact, a three-dimensional photo-collage, placing the details cut out from the original photos into the three-dimensional space, in accordance with the dimensions and position of the real objects.

Hong Kong is an extremely rapidly changing city. The old buildings quickly vanish, and with them, so do lifestyles. By the fact that the artists participating in the project attempted to document these spaces with as much detail as possible, and tried to model these objects as precisely as possible, with time-consuming precise work, the visual representation of these spaces will become a part of the material of a general knowledge, and they will be able to live on, and even constitute the basis for further research.

The technology employed in this project is not new. Many heritage projects use similar software and hardware. This project perhaps differs from the familiar similar projects in two respects. The first is that I have intentionally tried to use inexpensive technology that is accessible to everyone: for instance, open source software, typical cameras. The second is that while most similar projects present historically important and well-known buildings or locations, this project would like to introduce an everyday lifestyle of people living contemporaneously with us.

This work, then, is not a submission for a memorial, but a documentary endeavour. Just as the documentary filmmaker tries with her/his camera to present the lives of people, and just as, in the interest of this, s/he leaves out certain details and emphasises others, and in general tries with the devices of film to give as precise as possible a picture of the subject, in the same way I, in my own way as a new media artist, with my own special devices, and with the techniques and aesthetics that are suited to it, attempt to represent as precisely as possible the reality that I have selected and observed.

The Captcha Project aims to highlight the undefined boundaries between humans and machines, originals and copies. The project started as a reflection on immaterial labour and artistic practice in a neoliberal network society and takes the form of a series of paintings created by Chinese painters from the village of Dafen. Despite the fact that their work consists of a mechanical reproduction of preexisting images for the Western market, Dafen painters consider themselves artists and value their work. I signed an agreement with them, splitting the costs and profits of this project in half and sent them screenshots of CAPTCHA codes, which they transformed into precise oil reproductions. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) codes aim to obstruct criminals and companies whose goal is to use online services en masse, using bots and automated processes. They are easy for humans to decipher, but impossible for bots.

However, it is possible to replace bots with human workers in poor countries, who manually solve thousands of tests every day. These people are required to perform a mechanic type of work that a bot is unable to perform. CAPTCHA was invented partially to distinguish humans from machines, but its effect is the partial transformation of other humans into machines. At the same time, artistic production is shifting. In 2004, Dafen Oil Paintings Village, with its 5000 artists mainly involved in creating accurate reproductions of Western masterpieces for the Western market, was officially declared a “Chinese Cultural Industry Model Base”.

The viewer becomes involved in the art through the contemplation of empty space: a reflection based on the Japanese concept of “Ma”, where the gap or pause between two forms allows for intensification of vision and awareness.

(amended by artist 7/2020)

In China’s Zhejiang province in early spring of 2013 dead pigs began appearing in multitudes on the Huangpu River, which supplies drinking water to Shanghai’s 26 million residents. When the count was finally complete, over 16,000 were hauled from the water. Speculations arose about the unchecked productivity of pig farming indicating excessive supply despite increased demand (estimated at over half the world’s pork consumption) and the dispatching of pigs as a desperate strategy to maintain market values. Meanwhile, the polluted water that flows into the city’s taps can only be matched by the toxic visions promulgated by apocalyptic evangelicals in America.

This work is part of the “Repurposed Web Reports” Series, a series of “reports” composed entirely of media collected from the Internet. Using the web as an investigative archive, these works mine the margins of the public sphere for vicarious insights into the contemporary state of humanity. Each work is prompted by a Google search, with the results creating the parameters of information and research as well as the dynamic media (image and sound) to be used as source material. Typically the subjects or events are at the margins of Western media representation and the content is often generated by nonprofessionals amateurs, tourists, and other on site witnesses using portable personal recording devices but in some instances it is either mixed with reports from conventional media outlets or originates from them singularly. Through editing, dialectic audio and sound juxtaposition, lo-fi video and glitch EFX, and text interplay, I then recast and remix this material to better illuminate and critique the deeper meanings and insights that can be generated. This approach is akin to the Situationist’s strategy of détournement – a form of appropriation where the materials are altered and subverted so that rather than supporting the status quo, their meaning becomes altered in order to put across a more radical or oppositional message.

“Does it really say that?… I try to focus the words… they separate in meaningless mosaic…”
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (p.52).

“It makes mosaic-like combinations of particles possible, technical images, a computed universe in which particles are assembled into visible images. This emerging universe, this dimensionless, imagined universe of technical images, is meant to render our circumstances conceivable, representable, and comprehensible.”
Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 2011 (p.13).

The structure of language – musical at its origin – is the source of this installation. Based on texts and melodies originating from operas telling the Faust myth (the epic of human curiosity and desire), the installation explores the underlying contour of language. The work is made of industrial objects. 102 screens and speakers creating an emergent space, arranged in repetitive patterns. Blowing up the virtual into space. Phrases and melodies of the vocalists are constantly reproduced using machine learning software. Powerful algorithms, which transform the way we act and think, omnipresent in our society and in permanent interaction with us. A new version of Faust is created, fragmented and with varying degrees of legibility, recreated in light and sound movements. It is a game with the boundaries of perception. The point where language loses its meaning and becomes abstract. Language which is pushed to its limits, where nothing is left but pure rhythmic and melodic structure. It is the organic nature of language, imitated by a machine. This reveals the proper poetics – in all its absurdity – of the digital.

There are two questions at the foundation of this project: Language has evolved from something bound to a materialized object, like the book, to something virtual. It is becoming flexible, alterable, ductile. It is organized by digital machines, which allow us to interpret it in a new way. Our knowledge is regenerated by these machines, which enable us to understand the vast extent of human substance anew. The second question of the project: Our world is full of technical objects conducting us. Displays, images and sounds construct our urban environment. It is crucial for the understanding of our society to understand the nature of these objects and their messages. By the means of alienating their primary functions, their potentials can be explored.

We cut a swath through this tangled world. A straight line loophole for all intents and purposes and a far view over this jungle that only appeared to be intangible, multidimensional, but that we knew would turn out to be flat (once we flattened it). And rasterized. Composed of precisely arranged concrete districts, subdivided by straight tarmaced lines its sound, we discover that the city is full of hidden potentials.

Still, it is not the ever-advancing, hyper-engineered, super efficient vision of what is to come. But the idea of advancing in all directions: This future is an ocean and we are navigating on it now. Going nowhere and yet getting everywhere -in circles- or is it spirals? Complex systems and network processes, self-made code and circuits, hacked tools, misused instruments and objects of mass consumption have become crucial components of Truniger’s work. He is engaging in different notions of language, visual and acoustic potentials of algorithmic processes and their ability for an apparently organic behavior. He implements these formal ideas in sculptural objects, multimedia installations, musical performances and instruments as well as compositions.

In many nations globally, sex work is a criminal activity and the active status of the condoms as evidence of prostitution policy allows law enforcement to treat condoms as contraband. Advocacy groups internationally are actively promoting to repeal the condoms as evidence policy and to decriminalize condoms. Cops and Rubbers is a web-based narrative game adapted in 2016 from a tabletop game of the same name, which was originally commissioned by Open Society Foundations and which launched at the 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. This serious game serves as an interactive alternative to this report by employing role-playing and interactivity. The game allows citizen voters, law enforcement, and policymakers alike to connect to the human rights and public health issues of arresting for possession of condoms from the perspective of a sex worker, including increased vulnerability to HIV infection.

In 2012, Open Society Foundations (OSF) released Criminalizing Condoms, a report documenting the practice of treating condoms as contraband in six countries – United States, Russia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Kenya – and identifying their consequences on sex workers’ lives, including abuses to their health and human rights and their vulnerability to HIV. Open Society Foundations also commissioned Cops and Rubbers, a facilitated tabletop game, as a companion to this report.

In this serious game, players take on the role of one of six sex workers, who each have a set of game-end goals: to earn enough money for a personal need and to avoid a sexual transmitted infection. In each round, an outreach worker may provide each player with a condom that he or she must then hide from the police. Players can choose to hide their condom in one of three places that surveyed sex workers reported hiding their condoms: shoes or boots, purse or wallet, or underwear. If a player is caught in possession of a condom by the non-player police character, he or she must suffer the consequence, such as police damaging the condom or police extorting money or sex in exchange for avoiding arrest. All in-game police search narratives are inspired by accounts from real sex workers. Therefore, a related quote from an actual sex worker or a realworld statistic is also shared with the player to reinforce the reality of the in-game narrative. In-game character personas also cover a spectrum in terms of gender identification and sexual orientation to reinforce the reality that this practice of treating condoms as contraband is not isolated to a particular sex work demographic.

The digital adaptation of this game uses Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories, to broaden the reach of this role-playing experience. This online version provides the same narrative as the tabletop experience but adapted for an un-facilitated, singleplayer online experience. The addition of an online game platform allows for extended advocacy efforts awareness and ultimately to increase opposition to the practice of using condoms as evidence of prostitution.

These ingame character narratives provide players the opportunity to role-play, a theoretical concept dating back to G. H. Mead, who defined role-playing as being empathetic toward a character and adopting the character’s point of view. Allowing players to temporarily step into the shoes of a sex worker reduces the influence of stigma, particularly as each character has two key goals that are relatable to a general audience: earning money for their personal needs – such as paying rent, providing for loved ones, or saving for education or medical expenses – and protecting their health.

Role-playing as a sex worker provides the opportunity for players to develop empathy for this typically marginalized community. Preliminary data from a 2014 quasi-experimental study indicates that knowledge gain was statistically equivalent between participants who played Cops and Rubbers compared to participants who read the Criminalizing Condoms report but that game players were more likely to oppose the policy. Thus, the game is an effective advocacy tool that can elicit players’ personal reactions and conclusions regarding these policing practices, including increased intentions to oppose the condoms-as-evidence issue.

The installation is composed of two microscopes watching and recording each other and a three screen projection which visualizes the process of interpretive analysis occurring within the software.

The system acts as a rudimentary form of AI, where the visual stimuli is translated, in a performative act of seeing, in the centre image (which is comprised of the two microscope feeds concatenated into one). The resulting data is then transposed first to the image on the left, taking the form of a neuron and is responsive in both emergent growth and behaviour. The data chain continues, flowing to the right hand image of a neuron. In a “mirror neuron” scenario, this image is influenced by the actions of the first andindependently reacts and generates its own growth patterns and behaviours.

The audio created by the apparatus itself, coupled with a composed score is introduced into the system where it too acts upon the behaviour and responsivity of the images. The systems behaviour is, in a mimetic sense, reflective of several kinds of processes which operate under acts of translation and analysis. The parsing of information, existing as it does at the very foundations of embodied cognition, is central to our understanding of the bodies, networks and ecosystems in which we exist.

In the installation, the visual instantiation of complex notions of being collide with features of surveillance and even further into cartographic renderings of both the microscopic, in the form of neuronal imagery to the macro in terms of alluding to the mapping and visualization of connectivity (through data analytics) within socio-geo-politcal bodies.

A Digital Music Box Ensemble is a Music Box, which reads a punching card. When the holes of the punching cards flick onto a pin of a rotating wheel, it triggers a sound. Takahashi adapted a so-called “Punched Card Music Box” to a digital device. The most interesting part of the “Conventional” Punched Card Music box is the possibility by any user, even without any musical education, to easily compose music by making holes into a predefined grid on a card. However, no one has ever tried to add the possibility to modify the tone of sound by which the metal flicks. In order to fill in that gap, this device can convert the data from user created cards. It simply sends MIDI data via a USB cable to the computer built-in synthesizer, which play their favorite tones.

The pitch has been assigned to vertical axis of a conventional punching card. The holes on the card can be punched on a position on the Y axis from 1 to 8. These holes correspond to a specific audio channel previously set on a computer. This apparently simple device allows a wide possibility of music composition. It recognizes the instrument channels, the tones and the specific speakers. So the users can compose and experiment with many kind of music, which require a complex setting like an orchestra, or other stereophonic sounds that use multi-speaker system.

A concept of the device. Takahashi created this music box in order to highlight the concept that human handwork and computer digital processing can intercommunicate with the help of a simple device. To explain his work in more detail, Takahashi uses the term “soft generative” to describe a human type of input that generates digital data on a computer. It implicates that human inconsistency can also be part of the process of composition.

Takahashi’s artwork was inspired by the contemporary musician, Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), who had a very systematic and interesting way to experiment with micro-durational composition. Takahashi would also describe Nancarrow’s work as “soft generative”. “I completely had no interest in a harmony and a melody.” Nancarrow said himself, therefore he always focused on the rhythm and the tempo of the music from the very beginning. So he used his focus on the “Player Piano” in order to invent music, which was far beyond human instrument skills. The player piano is an instrument just like a regular piano but instead of a human player it uses the input of a perforated roll of paper, which contains the score of a song. It uses the power of the air to activate the piano mechanism. The rolls of paper used by Nancarrow are very similar to the punched cards Takahashi used for his work. Instead of writing a regular musical score book, Nancarrow used a different way to compose. He used piano tones and the complicated relationship between rhythm and tempo to make eccentric rhythm and tempo sonification with great precision. It opened new possibilities for the contemporary music field. The device Takahashi have developed is like Nancarrow’s experiment, which combines complicated rhythm and tempo. No other device uses the legacy from Nancarrow’s innovative ideas to create a simple way to convert human handwork and digital media.

System overview. Height different digital audio channels correspond to height specific positions on the Y axis of a punch card. For example, a hole on the bottom position of the card will activate the number 1 audio channel in the computer and a hole on the top position of the card will activate the channel number 8. On the X axis (left to right), users can punch holes on a defined grid system. They can use any length they want. After making holes into the card and insert it into the “Digital Music Box”, user can turn the handle to play their music. When a hole of the punch card reaches the switches connected to the micro controller, Arduino, inside of the Music Box reads the position of holes, and converts it to a digital signal. If the micro controller senses a hole, it sends a message “MIDI NOTE ON”, or if there is no hole, it sends the message “MIDI NOTE OFF”. After that it uses the hole position to create a flow of MIDI information and send it to the computer via a USB cable. On the computer, Max/msp and AbletonLive8 use the flow of MIDI information of the device, to produce sounds. The algorithm written in Max/ msp, was programmed to harmonize the MIDI signal and send it to 8 audio channels in AbletonLive8. Then, AbletonLive8 assign and play a digital instrument on each specific channel. In addition, the device offers the possibility to change the instrument played. The user can assign each audio channel from 1 to 8 in AbletonLive8 to an electric piano to channel 1, for example. Then assign a drum kit in channel 2 and a bass in channel 3 and so on.

The Unuseless Machine for Democracy was created in response to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong:

We saw a partial image of the Tiananmen Square Incident on September 28, 2014. The spirit of democracy lives on as the quest for freedom extends to the streets of Hong Kong. Forever reminded of the agonizing loss of 1989, we will continue to uphold the torch of democracy in peace.

“The Most Useless Machine, Ever!” is a renowned project, which gave birth to a philosophically challenging theme in the DIY circle through its contradictory ON/OFF function. By subverting this paradox, “The Unuseless Machine for Democracy” celebrates and supports the relentless spirit of the road to democracy.

35 Unuseless Machines are assembled to form the number “928”. Each Machine has an LED candle that randomly burns out. Once the light goes out, a dove will surface to peck at the candle, lighting it up once again. This cycle goes on forever.

The project developed further and a stand-alone version of the Unuseless Machine was created for supporters of the Umbrella Movement to make at DIY workshops. All together 52 Unuseless Machines were created at workshops held in Hong Kong, Taipei and Japan, bringing the total number of machines to 87, which symbolizes the peaceful retaliation of the unarmed Hong Kong protesters against the 87 rounds of tear gas fired.

Matière Sensible | Sensitive Matter is a sculpture made of very thin and delicate wood veneer sheet. Here the artists use ash wood. These sheet of wood has distinct sonorous touch zones that follow the natural veins of wood. The researches of Scenocosme have enabled them to develop an artistic and technical process invisible and delicate. A meticulous and invisible design work gives them the ability to define a musical score spread over different areas of the wood. They have invented this process that they call «interactive marquetry». This wood sculpture produces sounds when the spectators touch them. They use sounds to stimulate haptic and gestural behaviour. Thus, the design of these sculpture looks like instruments which reveal by the touch various kind of sounds.

Since many years, Scenocosme’s artists invent interactive works through a singular process of hybridizations between natural elements and technology. They create symbolic and sensorial relationships between the body and the environment natural or social. This wood sculpture offers a sensory and intimate relationship between the wood and the body of the viewer by revealing a sound memory in physical contact with the matter. The electrostatic energy of the human body is the trigger for this artwork. Interactive zones follow exactly the veins of wood.
Scenocosme has developped a sensitivity and a unique reactivity of the wood material, thus providing a new sensory interaction in the continuity of their artistic hybridizations between nature and technology. They have developed an original marquetry process with the material wood which is invisible, transparent, and sensitive. This approach follows their intent to create interactive, sensory artworks that enhance extra ordinary relationships with natural elements in which the technology disappears. As media artists, they explore capacities of technologies in order to draw sensitive relationships through specific stagings where senses are augmented. Their works came from possible hybridizations between the living world and technology which meeting points incite them to invent sensitive and poetic languages.They suggest to sound out, to feel elements of reality which are invisible or to whom we are insensitive.

They use the idea of the cloud as a metaphor of the invisible. Because it has an unpredictable form, it is in indeterminate metamorphosis, and his process escapes to our perception. Various natural and artificial clouds surround us (climatic, biological, energetic or electromagnetic). Through their artworks, they evoke invisible energetic clouds (electrostatic) which follow living beings like unpredictable shadows. Sometimes, these clouds cross together and exchange some information. In a poetic way, they interpret these invisible links through sonorous and visual stagings. Then, when they imagine the energetic clouds of living beings, the limits of the body become permeable, and with their technology , in a way they design extraordinary relationships, between humans, and between humans and environment too. Interactions they offer in their works make invisible exchanges sensitive. Rather than revealing clearly their complexity, they open everyone’s imagination. Between the reality and our perception, there is always a «blind point» which stimulates the imagination.

When they create interactive works, Scenocosme invent sonorous or/and visual languages. They translate the exchanges between living beings and between the body and its environment. They suggest interrelations where invisible becomes perceptible. Materialized, our sensations are augmented. Through a poetic interpretation of invisible mechanisms, technologies allow them to draw sensory relationships, and to generate unpredictable living interactions. Their hybrid artworks play with their own augmented senses. They live with technology and have reactions which escape deliberately to their control.

Z is a moving image analysis system that produces abstract representations of video sequences using a system of predefined grayscale disks. Visually, the disks are characterized by two properties: their radial order (the number of concentric rings) and their frequency or repetition (the number of circular sections). Disks of the same order are shown on the same column and those of the same repetition on the same row. The visual content of each frame in the movie is represented by rotations and brightness changes in the various disks. The video is thus rendered as a sequence of changing configurations of circular shapes. This representation does not correspond to any pre-existing concepts used in film theory and criticism. For instance, it is not the case that one disk represents the amount of camera movement while another represents the camera position or angle. None of the information contained in any of the disks has a clear interpretation in terms of traditional cinematic categories. Instead, Z proposes an alternative paradigm for the perception, description and analysis of moving images.

An important inspiration for this project is Soviet filmmaker S. M. Eisenstein’s suggestion that cinematic images are akin to musical overtones. An image is for Eisenstein the total sum of many visual overtones. The interest of Eisenstein’s proposal lies in the suggestion that we ought to pay close attention to the subtle and varying micro-events of a moving image stream, but the notion of a visual overtone was not precisely defined and has not been adopted by cinema theorists. Z supplies a mathematical formalization of Eisenstein’s idea, enabling a precise decomposition of an image into local harmonics. For this purpose, Z employs a mathematical framework originally devised by physicist Frits Zernike to describe the aberrations of microscopes, telescopes and other optical systems. The circular shape of the disks evokes the images seen through (e.g.) a microscope. Just as the microscope grants perceptual access to what cannot be seen by the naked eye, so the disks in Z draw attention to the often unnoticed micro-events of a moving image.

Z explores the application of Zernike’s framework to the analysis and synthesis of moving image sequences. The overall visual design of the system constitutes a diagram of the various procedural steps in the computation of the Zernike moments of a moving image, self-reflexively exposing the computational process on which the system depends. The graphical composition expresses the idea of a circuit, starting with the source image displayed in the lower part and ending with its reconstruction in the upper part. This visual approach affirms the aesthetic value of process-based diagrammatic representation in the context of computational art.

Dead Presidents, deceased dictators, passed poets and reigning sovereigns – they watch us daily, as we swap goods for labor-power, as we sell commodities and buy resources, as we hawk dues and invest in securities, as we barter mining rights for dumps and pass printed paper for vouchers, tickets, coupons, slips and receipts, ever so lightly tickled by Adam Smith’s invisible fingers. My prints of the Face Value series are enlargements of eyes from the ‘heroes’ on banknotes from various countries. The text and figures you find with an augmented reality app are quotes from specialists on finance and graphs of different situations, all connected to the person portrayed.

The first series consists of international notes such as Korea, Japan, UK, Singapore, USA and Vietnam, whereas the second series depicts only banknotes which were replaced by the common European currency Euro. Both series are printed as small booklet.

Beyond Non-deterministic Connections Version B (BNC B) is a sculptural network of Bayonet NeillConcelman (BNC) tee connectors and a two-channel video installation. Serving as a monumental analog video mixer, BNC B is also a statement and metaphor for global connectedness. With its sharp 90 degree angles its structure developed out of the aesthetics of L-systems, a class of generative algorithms that have widely been used in the modelling of plants and recursive processes and are representative for the governance of algorithms and data today.

As a combination of sculpture, installation and video art, BNC B is blurring the genre boundaries of current electronic art. Two DVD players and two small flat screen TVs are connected through video amplifiers to a sculptural network of 400 BNC tee connectors that topologically form a tree. Through their connections, the two video signals are mixed analogically, creating effects of colorful distortion and glitch. The two videos running on the DVD players are video works in their own respect, each between two and four minutes in length, consisting of footage taken from the artist’s video archive: all samples have been taken in public spaces in Brazil (Sao Paulo), Argentina (Buenos Aires), Germany (Berlin) and Poland (Warsaw) between 2013 and 2015, feeding the notion of a space in which meaningful inter-human connections can be established. In direct contrast, the almost surgical but still organiclooking sculpture in the middle of the installation serves as a metaphor not only for global connectedness through electronic circuits in its manifold forms, but also as a metaphor for the (usually invisible) inner wirings of modern day technology.

While the complete structure is visible to the spectator, its fractal-like appearance, which could have been the result of a Lindenmayer system generator with 90 degree angles, seems hard to trace. Even though being a completely deterministic system without any method of interaction by the spectator, BNC B produces highly colorful and always changing outputs that are seemingly random, but follow a very welldefined pattern that is only determined by the luma and chroma values of the composite video signals being mixed as well as the alignment of the two signals in the time-dimension.

Hentai Haiku is a series of interactive 3D environments, each involving the visitor in a virtual erotic encounter. Like traditional Japanese haiku poems each ‘hentai haiku’ aims to condense a rich sensual impression into a minimalist piece of art with no lengthy narrative: all for the visitor to see and play with is always right there in front of them. Hentai Haiku are outbursts from the vast realm of imagination that spins around physical sexuality, with themes ranging from common fetishes to outright ridiculous fantasies. Slightly beyond the limits of human anatomy, Hentai Haiku introduces characters of a fictitious human-like race that is all and only about our flesh’s desires, and where your mind may take them to. Hentai Haiku asks the visitor to assume an active role in each environment by providing the means to interact with scene objects. Like with 3D video games, Hentai Haiku’s visuals are generated in real-time from 100% synthetic character models, which would come to life as an immediate response to the visitor’s actions. Turning the visitor’s curiosity into playful exploration like this allows conveying more complex matters, an advantage well-deserved by an intricate topic like physical sexual communication.

To make this experience easily accessible, Hentai Haiku relies on video game technology and related paradigms for user interface design. Originally published for desktop web-browser via a dedicated website, the projects current implementation for ISEA 2016 is to explore the more casual user experience of touch-screen devices. The series’ pieces are based on a custom framework for procedural character animation. At its heart sits an AI running a model for sexual stimulation that continuously translates low-level sensory stimulus into higher level perceptions, adjusts internal states (such as arousal), and, based on the latter, generates feedback via multimodal expressive behaviors. Each Haiku now presents an arrangement of requisites, dynamic and static, set up to allow the visitor to physically interact with the virtual character’s body at varying degrees of freedom, where some allow to control limb motion restraints applied to the character, and others allow to cause sensory stimulation more or less directly. With visitor and character entering into this haptic dialogue (a key component of sexual interaction), physical believability becomes important. Here a second technological cornerstone of this work comes into play: All scene objects that may interact with each other (body parts, bars, clamps, ropes, …) are simulated using a state of the art video game physics engine.

Best described as a “fully animated ragdoll”, all character motions are carried out by applying appropriate muscle forces to joints of the doll’s skeleton. Muscle forces depend on various factors, such as determination, verve and fatigue, and will, in combination with obstacles and external forces, determine if and how far body expressions will come about. The result of this unique combination of techniques is playful exploration on the visitors’ part and continuous believable reactions of the characters’. Hentai Haiku explores a novel way of arts patronage through a custom crowd-funding model: While the series is published online via its dedicated website, the same site allows inclined patrons to have their own alias become part of the artworks they contribute funds to, thereby granting a partial virtual ownership.

Hentai Haiku is work in progress, and populating a wide and barely claimed field of artistic expression as well as technological disciplines pointing into the far future, Hentai Haiku is bound to evolve, with respect to visual and physical quality, artificial intelligence, freedom of user interaction and customization options. First and foremost however, future Haiku can be expected to explore more surreal spatial and mechanical arrangements, dissolving rigid rules of decency, asking what next is exciting, what is love and what is at all thinkable, in sex. The human need for sexual connection and unification is a blessing, a gift that is however little appreciated by societies around the globe. Canonized into highly repressive cultural rule-sets (often based on ancient morals), today sexual needs are widely used as a means to exert power on one another, thus cancelling out love, mutual respect and freedom of expression, while turning this graceful gift into addiction and shame. But we must celebrate sexuality! We are here to explore, express and implement our bodily desires, and to share them with the ones we love! ‘If sex was food, we’d all be on a bread and water diet. Or pretend to be anyway.’

Hentai Haiku is an excerpt from somewhere between the rapidly evolving worlds of 3D games, anthropomorphic robotics and VR erotica. When beginning to work on the by now published exhibition, back in 2013, I realized that proponents in neither of the aforementioned fields would embark on anything like a fusion anytime soon, for reasons both of technical and marketing challenge. Adult 3D entertainment would regurgitate concepts proven to sell, rely on scripted story to build up erotic energy, and then, for the climax, replay sequences showing short statically key-framed animations, with often rather restrictive camera navigation. Nothing procedural here, despite of obvious advantages. Robotics research on the other hand is all about procedural animation! They have to, because their agents must deal with unforeseen circumstances and surprises. But their grants usually wont be issued for anything adult-oriented. Even if erotic limb motions should be some of the easiest things to synthesize: Characters don’t need to stand or walk, just lie down. And then move erratically. So with Hentai Haiku I explore the possibilities in this interdisciplinary no-man’s land. It is as much an endeavor to raise the bar for physical interaction interfaces in adult video games, as it is a leap into uncharted terrain of surreal sexual dreamscapes.

Explosive Conductor is an artifact of the research project “Anästetiker” (2012–2013) by Evelina Rajca. The title is coind by the terms, “anesthetic” and “aesthete”. Within this research project different artifacts show experimentally to what extent the density and aggregated state of matter influences the presumed presence or absence of options for action they culminate in a complex mixed media room installation or they can be shown separately as audiovisual installations. In this research project Rajca was interested in elaborating different methods in order to figure out “how we can become aware of substances that we, for example do not sense `directly´ but that affect our well-being”.

Explosive Conductor is a two-channel audiovisual installation, here within the right channel an experiment with solid carbon dioxide (CO2) is presented, which doubles as a compositional sound study. Dry ice is placed in a sealed partial vacuum glass box. A brass pin inside the box strikes and drills through the dry ice. The pressure in the box rises due to the sublimation of dry ice. The needle moves in accordance with the concentration of the gas production. The sound piece ends with the explosion of the glass vitrine. Computers, sensors and detectors steer the process. The other channel shows a snowy landscape made out of dry ice, inspired by early geoengineering / weather modification experiments.

Solid carbon dioxide, also known as “dry ice,” does not naturally occur on earth, but it is an industrial product used, for example, for the cooling of food. As it changes from solid into gaseous form, there it develops a gas cushion around the carbon dioxide, which, when pressed against a suitable resonating body made of metal, generates extraordinary vibrations. This results in a variety of sounds –cries, sighs, calls of delight and of horror– that are based on different parameters such as volume, surface structure, and temperature of the materials and thus can be deliberately modulated by the instrumentalist. Depending on its density, carbon dioxide has different effects: analgesia –anesthesia– death.

Since the density and aggregate”d” state of a substance determines its level of toxicity, keywords and ideas such as irreversibility and fetish are also of central importance in Evelina Rajca research process “Anästhetiker” and plays a role in another artifact within this project: the sound instrument “fortune teller” made from antique, radioactive uranium glass plates. Mrs. Rajca’s interdisciplinary projects convince not least because of their surprising, yet sensitive interconnection of artistic experiment and scientific speculation. The work by Evelina Rajca is distinguished by a combination of high technical skill with the intelligent use of the symbolic and social aspects of a particular topic.

In Neuro memento mori: a portrait of the artist contemplating death, digital animations and live action video are projection mapped onto a 3D print of the artist’s head and neck. The 3D printed bust is made from data from scanning, firstly using 3D facial scanning and, secondly, brain data gathered during novel MRI experiments, designed in collaboration with two neuroscientists. In these experiments the artist viewed memento mori paintings and meditated on death in the scanner. The life-sized 3D printed sculptures are dissected to reveal the artist’s brain and ‘make real’ fMRI data gathered during the experiments in the MRI scanner. Computation is used to produce 3D neuroimages, 3D prints and computer animations that are projection-mapped back onto the 3D object. The artworks, made with neuroscientists, are contemporary memento mori made from data. Carl Sagan’s quote reminds us to remember our small scale in relation to the universe and to live better, more compassionate lives, as a result. Memento mori and vanitas artworks, popular in the seventeenth century had a similar function.

They supposedly reminded each viewer of their mortality, prompting them to live better lives. Neuro memento mori is inspired by an object in the Wellcome Trust Permanent Collection, “Wax model of a Female head depicting life and death” (Unknown 1701-1800). It shows a woman’s bisected head, the left half apparently a detailed portrait of a living woman, open-eyed, with painted lips and blond hair arranged in ringlets. Her left hand frames her face while the right half of her head is shown in post mortem decay. Resting on her skeletonised right hand, her skull crawls with insects, maggots and worms. A snake emerges from her empty eye socket. This compelling object prompted me to question whether, as we look at memento mori artworks, we do ‘remember, we must die’.

What parts of our brain are active when we look at these artworks, and, when we contemplate death directly, without looking at memento mori art? Made in collaboration with neuroscientists Zoran Josipovic (NYU) and Andreas Roepstorrf (Aarhus University), I looked at representations of memento mori while in a MRI scanner that records my brain function. Following Josipovic’s instructions, I learned to meditate, to contemplate death, and repeated that meditation in the scanner. Neuroimages were processed to produce 3D data of my brain, to make 3D printed sculptural objects. The form of the life-sized portrait sculpture refers to the Wellcome Trust object, the artist’s head is dissected, revealing the skull and brain. Video and computer animations are then projection-mapped onto the sculpture to create a contemporary memento mori.

Discussions of Big Data have drawn attention to the acquisition and manipulation of personal data, including medical data such as neuroimages which provide huge amounts of quantifiable data, most of which is indeterminate to the non-expert. Scholars of media art and comparative literature have drawn attention to the collapse of boundaries between information and embodiment and the ways that bodies are co-constituted with data, or emerge with data (Paul 2011, Thacker 2003) It is common for such writing to take either utopian stance, described by Katherine Hayles as the wish, “to be raptured out of the bodies that matter in the lust for information,” (Hayles 2008) or conversely, a dystopian view. This work shows that there are porous boundaries, or entanglements, between nonhuman animal and human, between life and death. It uses the artist’s corporeal data as media for artistic expression to subvert the formation of subjects by Big Data. The work specifially addresses the porous boundaries between life and death, growth and decay.

Neuro memento mori: a portrait of the artist contemplating death is one of a series of works made over the last twenty years that emerge through interdisciplinary collaboration. To a greater or lesser extent these works each owe a debt to conversations and insights gained from rich collaborative partnerships with engineers, medical researchers, surgeons and scientists. In this case they key collaborative partners are from the field of neuroscience. The MRI experiments were designed by us as a group and then conducted at Aarhus University, lead by Andreas Roepstorrf, who is the Director of the Interacting Minds Centre; his colleague, Joshua Skewes, working closely with the artist on the experiment design. From New York University, Zoran Josipovic developed the meditation experiment design and trained the artist for a year to prepare her for the experiments.

We always speak of “visions of the future”, but what if we were to let the auditory realm lead our imaginings?

Sounding the Future brings together the worlds of speculative fiction and audio art. It is an intensive program of research and creative development that will seek to predict what art in future will sound like. This act of prediction is inevitably informed by the present and thus it will also take stock of the sound of art today.

Sounding the Future will result in a body of ficto-critical works that can be delivered via gallery installation, radiophonic presentation and e-publishing. The spine of the work will be a number of future scenarios in which sound and its manifestation as sound art, is the dominant novum — the paradigm shifter.

The narratives revolve around two themes: Future Human — the integration of technology and biology resulting in trans- and post-human conditions; Future City — the exploitation of the sonic potentials of the new cities we imagine. Nested within these narrative trajectories will be non-fictional material  — Future Citings — short text essays, video, artist interviews interviews and studies which provide factual and theoretical grounding for these future speculations.

“Noor” (which translates as ‘light’ in arabic) is a brain opera that asks, though metaphor, analogy, sound, text, light, movement, brain sensors and audience interaction with an ‘actor’ wearing an Emotiv EEG brainwave headset just one simple question – “is there a place in human consciousness where surveillance cannot go?” Noor is an original ‘brain opera’. Though artists have been working with EEGs producing musical events since the 1960s and 1970s, this is a full a full audio visual brain opera. Using an EEG enabled headset, the performer’s emotional states will, at various times, launch digital databanks of video, audio and a libretto while simultaneously displaying the performer’s brainwaves live-time for audience viewing.

Noor is loosely based on the true story of Noor Inayat Khan, a Russian born, European raised Sufi-Muslim princess whose father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, brought Sufism to the west. During WWII, Noor became a covert wireless operator for British intelligence by parachuting deep inside occupied Vichy ruled France. For a period of three months, Noor (code name “Nora”) was the only communications link transmitting critical information back to the allies. Caught by the gestapo, who were unable to break her to find out any information about her transmission cell, Noor was shot inside the infamous Dachau prison shortly before the end of the war. Noor will be used as metaphor to work with issues of surveillance, privacy and faith.

In Noor, the performer moves through the audience. The audience either stands, or sits depending on the venue. The spoken word libretto based on the life of Noor is heard along with the sonic environment. The performer’s brainwaves are displayed live-time for the audience to see as they interact with the performer, and the story. As the performer’s emotional states change, different videos, audios, and parts of the libretto are triggered on four different screens. This in turn changes the performer’s emotional state, which changes the mood and responses of the audience. Only the screen displaying the performer’s brainwaves will be active all the time. The other four emotional states will cause the displayed images and sound to ebb and flow, depending on the live-time interaction between the audience and the performer.

The fifth screen will display the performer’s brainwaves live time. Though artists have been experimenting with the human brain since the 1960s and 1970s, new technologies, research and methods about the brain being developed through global government initiatives in the coming decades raises real concerns over issues of privacy, surveillance, autonomy and consciousness. Do our brainwaves contain the essence of who we are and what we think?

In the future how will our personal neurobiological data be used for security identification, thought reeducation, manipulating memory, and personal ‘brain fingerprinting’? If our cognitive process can be monitored and harvested, how do we prepare for this new frontier? ‘Noor (which translates as ‘light’ in Arabic) A Brain Opera’ uses the true story of Noor Inayat Khan, her faith, capture and murder by the Gestapo during World War II as a metaphor of the theatre of war to the theatre of surveillance in a live-time immersive, interactive performance triggered by brainwaves. Being able to view someone’s brainwaves during the performance serves as metaphor for the perfect storm brewing of potentially invasive and identifiable tools of cognitive analysis. These methods and techniques will potentially track, categorize, manipulate and surveil the human brain. The opera raises, but does not answer a simple question – ‘Is There A Place In Human Consciousness Where Surveillance Cannot Go?’

Using an Emotiv headset and max/ msp, a databank of images, sounds and a libretto is calibrated to launch according to different emotional states of the ‘actor’. Those states and databases are keyed to the following mental states:

1. Relaxation
2. Engagement (attention)
3. Interest (enjoyment)
4. Stress
5. A fifth screen displays the ‘actor’s live-time brainwaves

Untitled II builds on modified membraphones developed by Marianthi Paplexandri-Alexandri as main instruments utilizing Pe Lang’s motor-activated devices. The sound of Untitled II can be influenced by manipulating the tension of the nylon lines, changing the speed of the motor, turning on and off the motors or by depressing the membrane with the fingers while it is vibrating to vary the pitch. The work creates and explores a soundscape of machine-produced long sustained sounds and textures with organic character and without any post processing. It is a work adaptable to any space that can be presented both as a sounding sculpture and as an instrument in the context of a solo live performance, thereby questioning the role of the performer and the difference between performing and operating ( “music as art” and “music as music”).

Untitled V is a sound sculpture that consists of miniature speakers acoustically activated by a motor driven mechanism. A nylon thread is fastened through a hole at the center of the membrane; the end of the nylon thread is loosely secured to a motor turned rosined wheel to produce friction. Sound is produced by the action of the rim of the rotating wheel rubbing the thread as the wheel is turned. The two surfaces alternating between sticking to each other and sliding over each other, with a corresponding change in the force of friction. The motor speed is reduced at the lowest speed. The slow turn of the wheel creates changes in the tension of the thread, resulting as sounds (crackling impulse) in the membrane of the speaker. Untitled V creates a very quiet listening experience.

The artwork depicts the picture as a model of reality. The picture as a fact. The camera becomes part of the body. The natural eye sees only what the artificial eye looks at. A poetic portrayal in 5 sequences of an artist drawing a self portrait, pixelated within the virtual space. The mind begins to question everything and breaks down it’s confidence in seeing as a truth. The visible space becomes mental space.

Seeing is a tricky, dangerously-seeming-easy act of constructing a mental image. We interpret what we see. But what do we understand of what we see? My current artwork addresses the issue of ‘seeing things’ and is grounded in a practice-driven examination of methodology and subjective experience within art on issues of perception, embodiment and representation. Normal perception is a kind of blindness. We perceive what we attend to.

Perception is an act we hardly think about -it is a complex experiencing of spatial relations of subject-object within the environment- using on faces, on background objects, depth, colour, shadow, light-dark contrast and sound cues for example, all happening within the bottom-up processing of sensory information and topdown effects of learning, memory, expectation and attention. We interpret what we see. But what do we understand of what we see? Interested volunteers will have the opportunity to put their own perception skills to the test in the art experiment – to sample a selected art image being flashed at the edge of eyesight, to the right or left visual field only and paint/ draw what they perceived after a single visual exposure (up to 4 exposures allowed). The technique used is adapted from neuroscience. It is intended to demonstrate our relationship to the world.

A posthuman mythical hybrid beast, the Lamassu Kentaurosu Wagyu, poses in a pastoral landscape, unaware that she is being groomed for consumption.

A young woman of the future wonders what to write on her immigration form: can a being be reduced to its functional identity?

Pathetic Fallacy is an intergenerational dialogue about growing old. Youth doesn’t believe it will age. Age believes it knows best. Humans believe in the pathos of humanity. And the cycle continues. The screenplay wraps the empathic notion of kokoro around the subject of aging: aging of humans, of women, of technologies, of matter, of robotic or cyborg assemblages. The piece is a ‘two-hander’ between an elderly woman and a ‘young’ ‘female’ android. A conventional mother-and-daughter or Julietand-Nurse figuration is applied to an unconventional scenario, as the video explores a new familial paradigm. Pathetic Fallacy was the first two-handed dialogue drama created for film/video involving an actroid (see, since, Fukada’s 2015 feature Sayonara). The English term ‘pathetic fallacy’ denotes the ascription of human traits or feelings to inanimate nature. In keeping with this theme, Actroid-F’s simple face-detection and face-tracking software are employed in its acting. This robot cannot currently distinguish between individual faces or ‘decide’ to follow a face; its decisions are made by humans via computer interface. However, it often fools its interlocutors into believing that it can make these determinations. It mimics the human development of empathy via neurobiological mirror-learning: visual emulation in face-to-face situations. Framed as a fantasy, but yet endeavoring to strip back layers of fantasy and futuristic nostalgia, Pathetic Fallacy provides another snapshot of a point-in-time where science fact is not caught up with science fiction, and where speculation and education are based inelegantly upon what is known.

Elaborating a poetics of point-of-view, the actroid and the elderly woman discourse about aging in a dramaturgical möbius loop. Their dialogue comprises their attempting and not attempting to understand each other, and reveals a lack of clarity as to where one entity ends and the other begins. Insensibly entangled in a beatific human–robot mis/understanding, each character relies on what she perceives as empirical evidence to promote her own partial fallacy. Each character also relies on her typecasting with reference to specific cinematic emotions—the maternal fondness of the elder, the smart self-indulgence of the younger—and are unfortunately unable to break these time-honored molds (the gaze of the artist attempts to query, destabilize, break the molding for them). Mirroring the dialogue’s intersubjective mirroring, time is also on a loop in the video, which can seamlessly repeat and repeat; as long as each interlocutor is closed or oblivious to the other’s perspective, the loop remains closed and the questions remain open.

Pathetic Fallacy seeks to make explicit, and relate to technoculture, tensions between generational feminisms and non-feminisms in terms of claims to authenticity. In arguing about aging, even in their gentle, clichéd way, the old woman and the robot in the looping scene perform a claim-staking solipsism present in modern-day feminist discourse. They are both wrong, and they are both right. The gynoid will age, but not as the human elder thinks it will. The gynoid has the overconfidence of the (literal) digital native; the woman the overconfidence of the rational anthropocentric. The ‘child’ in the scenario is the burgeoning intelligence that exists in the mutual space between them, in their intersubjectivity: in the mirror.

Control is an art game experience that intends to provoke discussion and reflection on the limitations of the physical interface and the nature of the human computer symbiosis in videogaming as mediated through the manual game controller.

The game takes place in a computer that is part early IBM PC compatible, part tape loading 8bit home micro. Use the basic arcade control scheme of 8 directions and one action button to control a downsampled representation of your hand, while negotiating a series of increasingly complex videogame control devices.

Control has 10 levels. The first 9 of these are based on existing videogame controllers, while Level 10 is the ‘OctoPad’, an experimental concept prototype. The player must successfully press all the highlighted controls to proceed to the next stage. If the timer or energy level reaches zero then it’s ‘Game Over’!

The player is represented onscreen by a hand avatar, which is controlled using the basic arcade videogame control mechanism of 8 directions and one action button. The 5 digits of the hand can be individually used to press the onscreen game controls. In order to use one of the fingers, the player must hold down the action button along with directional control for either left, top left, up, top right, or right. Each of these 5 movements corresponds to a single digit, for example, the combination of left and action corresponding to the thumb.

Control echoes the hand to controller aspect of the videogame interface in the diegetic space of the visual interface through a downsampled meta interface. It makes the game interface the constant point of focus, rather than have it disappear to make way for an unrelated feedback visual. This goes against the notion of the ideal of interface design where an interface should be so intuitive that it for all intents and purposes ‘disappears’. In Control the visual interface will not let you forget that your are manually interfacing with the computer through a hand to controller link.

Control’s visual style is in part inspired by early PC gaming graphics, combining the colours from the different 4 colour CGA video modes into a new palette. This reference to early PC gaming is merged with the tape loader aesthetic of 8bit computers such as the Commodore 64. Animated raster bars are commonly associated with the anticipation of game loading, but in this case are used as feedback indicators, changing colour in response to the player’s progress. The audio is also kept deliberately lofi, combining samples of ZX Spectrum loading sounds alongside 4 channel loops generated on the Nintendo Game Boy.

By using a low fidelity reproduction of the hand in the playfield, both visually and in terms of the available control scheme, the game reflects the resolution divide between the analog and digital worlds. In addition to the challenge provided, the increasing button count of the onscreen game controllers is intended to reflect the evolution of game input devices. The final level of Control confronts the user with the speculative ‘OctoPad’ prototype game controller that exaggerates the complexity of existing devices. The progress a player makes through the game levels is a measure of their own patience and ability to play within a constrained control scheme and increasingly more difficult level layout.

Extensions of a No-Place (文徵明) is a fivechannel animation made in response to the Ming dynasty scroll painting ‘Imitating Zhao Bosu’s Latter Ode on the Red Cliff’ as well as the digital animation that is currently presented alongside it at the National Palace Museum (Taipei). I made this work whilst living in Taipei and able to study the painting for an extended period. My animation combines 3D modeling, green screen video and photomontage to recreate Wen Zhengming’s 16th century painting of the Yangtze River. It speculates on the layers of poetry, calligraphy and alcoholic reverie that characterise this particular landscape. My use of digital media drastically alters the visual qualities of the painting in order to highlight the changes that occur when an analogue artwork is translated into a digital medium. I also use this as a metaphor for the shifts that occur when studying a painting from outside its historical and cultural context.

Wen Zhengming’s scroll painting ‘Imitating Zhao Bosu’s Latter Ode on the Red Cliff’ refers to the second of two poems written by Song dynasty poet Su Shi (Dongpo). The landscape painting by Wen Zhengming visually illustrates Su Shi’s journey down the Yangtze River, and is punctuated with a similar deployment of cultural metaphors. Wen Zhengming was responding to Song Dynasty painter Zhao Bosu’s painting of the same poem, which introduced the blue and green style of painting to this poem as a symbol for the aesthetics and philosophies of the Tang dynasty. In the transparent brushwork of Wen Zhengming, scholars also trace a reference to Yuan dynasty painter Zhou Mengfu, who was also credited with using archaic painting styles as a means to comment on contemporary culture and politics. From this a cursory description, it is clear that the landscape images within this scroll enact a sort of cultural re-inscription, where the poetry and the paintings are engaged in a process of recreation and reconstruction to form an extended artistic conversation.

My recreation of this same landscape, using 3D modeling and photomontage sought to continue the conversation of re-creation. The underlying perspective for my study of Wen Zhengming’s painting was that landscape images are artificially constructed environments that comprise layers of accumulated symbols, and that to create a landscape is to enact a process of substitution and reconfiguration of those symbols. The five screens of this animation represent one half of the Wen Zhengming scroll, and were modeled by superimposing a digital image of the painting on top of my mesh, as well as by copying the scroll by eye (as painters work from other paintings). The surface of the mesh was covered with a photographic texture of the white ceramic tiles that are characteristic of many East Asian urban environments, such as Taipei and Hong Kong. The white gridded surface also recalls the post-war utopian architects such as Superstudio, and my use of this texture sought to connect the poetic landscape of the scroll to the intellectually conjured landscape of the utopian tradition.

My animated landscape makes a conscious aesthetic shift from Wen Zhengming’s scroll painting and seeks to articulate the levels of mistranslation involved in studying such a historical work. Philosopher and Sinologist Francois Jullien describes the material dependence between the analogue qualities of ink and the spatial indeterminacy of Chinese landscape painting. Jullien translates texts from theorists such as Wang Wei (8th century) and Guo Xi (11th century) to explain the importance of the transparency of ink and the incompleteness of painted forms in revealing the psychological potential of the Chinese landscape. Wang Wei describes forms “as if they were – as if they were not” and Guo Xi writes “if you wish to make the mountain look tall, do not show it in its entirety” to suggest that, according to Jullien, the ability of ink to seamlessly shift between representation and non-representation (or presence and absence), materially realises the philosophy of Chinese landscape painting. The dependence of Chinese literati theory on the phenomenological qualities of ink and brush suggests that the translation of ink and brush works into digital media must have some effect on the meaning system of the image.

Since 2011, the National Palace Museum has commissioned a number of digital animations that merge high definition scans of scroll paintings with high quality digitally animated content, which are often displayed alongside the original works in order to the communicate their historical and cultural content. Jullien’s argument would suggest that converting the scroll painting into a digital animation must alter the relationship between its material properties as a visual object and it’s cultural logic. The fluid relationship between foreground and background must become concrete according to the logic of binary code. Having both a mandate to preserve and to educate, the museum successfully employs contemporary technology to present historical works to the public, however by translating a landscape from ink painting to digital animation, it is interesting to now question how the landscape has changed in it’s spatial and philosophical structure. In 3D modeling the terrain of the Wen Zhengming painting, my gridded surfaces draw attention to the Cartesian environment of 3D animation. The spatial inaccuracy of my recreation highlights the process of translation that we enact when transferring such works between analogue and digital mediums. Having only studied the English translations of Su Dong Po’s poetry, my comprehension of the symbolic relationship between Wen Zhengming’s painting and its poetic references are similarly distorted. My recreation of Wen Zhengming’s scroll was inspired by my appreciation of the cultural conversation it embodies, and was structurally determined by the media and mediations that characterised my interaction with it.

The performative aspect of this work responds to a more general question associated with landscape painting, something along the lines of “What is a Landscape For?” Wen Zhengming’s landscape reperformed Su Shi’s expressions by painting images of the poet enacting the experiences described in the poem. After creating my own landscape of cultural resampling, my question also became how to inhabit (or ‘animate’) this environment? At the time of making the work, I had set up a makeshift green screen in my apartment, and after hours of modeling and compositing, I would perform actions in the green screen that came to comprise the character of The Lost Man, who inhabits this landscape. I performed various forms of exploration, from spatial wandering, to planting a small garden, and to meeting a second character 啊看(played by Taiwanese artist Nick Kan). The musical performance of The Lost Man was the final act that completed this extended metaphor of cultural karaoke.

AZ: Move and Get Shot is a net based piece which shows the landscape of the U.S. / Mexico border in the state of Arizona, through the eyes of six surveillance cameras.

These cameras are part of an online platform created by a group of landowners with properties in the U.S. border. The platform shows the images of six surveillance cameras located in the border territory. The main purpose of this community is to provide the public with raw images of immigrants crossing the border illegally through their lands. Each camera incorporates a motion sensor which triggers the capturing of images when detecting the slightest vibration of the landscape. Then, these pictures are sent to a server and displayed directly on the web page.

While the main goal of the landowners is to capture and disseminate photographs of immigrants entering the United States illegally, the camera is programmed to detect and record any kind of movement. By delegating the surveillance to a machine, the original human intention is lost, and the original purpose takes shape as a collection of images which reveal not only immigrants but all kinds of human, animal and natural activity. Therefore, the monitoring action becomes something uncontrollable and potentially meaningless.

The piece is composed of six independent films automatically made from the images captured by each camera. Every 24 hours, a Bot, which is running since 2011, detects whether there are, or not, new pictures. Then, these new images are saved to a local server and added algorithmically right after the last frame of the corresponding video. Thus, the films expand and reveal, day by day, the pace and the nature of the movement of the Arizona borderland.

The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Here something is constantly recreating itself. This symbol has a variety of interpretations and is found represented in number of ancient cultures, the two oldest being China and Egypt. One interpretation of the Ouroboros is the idea of the eternal return, where the universe is has been recurring forever.

Ouroboros the robotic artwork is an embodiment of this idea. Using various DIY mechanisms and components this robot extrudes a plastic coil like “tail” that winds across the floor. The “tail” ultimately is returned to the robots “mouth” as a vacuum and rollers in the machine intake the plastic “tail” grind it back up, melt it down and re-extrude the tail as a new coil. The interaction of material, process, variation and machine connects to many other possible interpretations including ideas from: biology, ecology, behavior studies, industrial production and micro-manufacturing.

HDPE, High Density Polyethylene is the common material used in everything from milk jugs to toys and cutting boards. With proper collection and resources this material is easily recycled. Instead of using a ready made filament or plastic pellet the Ouroboros robot only consumes shredded plastic milk jugs. It will thus only recycle and renew as long as it has its tail or extra shredded recycled plastic to consume. Obvious parallels are made here between the symbol of the Ouroboros and the potential of a recycling system.

The tail of this robotic serpent will have the capacity to enlarge as it recycles with each generation from vacuuming in additional the plastic source material covering the floor. In addition to the “tail” enlarging there will be variation in each new iteration of the tail. A form of reincarnation occurs through constant rebirth of the Ouroboros’s plastic tail. This “Tail” material is melted at a safe temperature of 350 degrees Fahrenheit or less where minimal off gassing will occur. All heat and shredding components are safely secured inside the “body” of the Ouroboros mechanism. Blow formed transparent polycarbonate panels will provide windows into the body of the serpent robot where observers can witness these processes unfolding. Select parts of the robot are also made from recycled cast HDPE using a different process than the extruded tail. These recycled mechanical parts will be cast and fabricated in Daniel Miller’s studio at the University of Iowa.

The processes used in Ouroboros connect to a larger DIY community where recycling of plastics into 3D printing filaments and other components provides a possible real low cost alternative for individuals and production at the local level worldwide. The DIY systems used within the Ouroboros represent a shift in hierarchy from governments and corporations to open source communities and individuals. This shift has been taking place for the past 20 years, as robotic technologies become ever more accessible at the local level. DIY systems used in the Ouroboros include: Ardunio controllers, homemade filament extruders, a repurposed vacuum cleaner and various prototype mechanisms. While some of the Ouroboros’s structural components are made with CNC tools other parts like the polycarbonate windows are made with simple electric cooking ovens and compressed air. The Ouroboros challenges ideas behind automation and manufacturing. Robotics has infiltrated ever level of manufacturing. Commercial production processes have been key to the ever-evolving bio-political relationship between humans and their natural world. The Ouroboros approaches these ideas from a more intimate and social level where the micro-manufacturer can change relationship between machine and body.

One can regard the human animal as not above, separate or other but rather equal to the world we inhabit. The effects of human technology are woven into the destinies of all beings of this planet. While the Ouroboros directly references the serpent or snake form, its mythology is also very much human. I am interested in the internal function and flow that occurs within the body. The recycling system that takes place within the body of the Ouroboros both looks at ideas of mechanical manufacturing and material processing and the biological analogues to these processes. Further correlations can also be drawn between this project and the natural recycling system of plant earth as shown through plate tectonics.

This work is can be installed on the floor or on a low platform. It is intend for the visitors to walk around the work and have access to view the inner works of the mechanism through the polycarbonate windows in the elements. If possible, it would be nice to allow the extruded plastic tail to hang down or trail over a stairwell, staircase or elevated floor. The dimensions of the project can vary with the space due the expandable hoses that connect the mechanical systems.

Floor Space Dimensions: 12ft x 12ft (3.65m x 3.65m) is preferred, with a minimum of 8ft x 8ft (2.43m x 2.43m) required.

Preferred Lighting: Spot lighting is desired for this work, general floodlights would be sufficient. When the project is complete it will have internal light sources in various components.

Power Requirements: This project will need one 100-240 VAC outlet with 10 amps available. A floor outlet is preferred but a wall outlet would be sufficient.

Unity Game Engine

War Zone: Reproduction of Historical Missile Launch Trajectories Using Google Earth

War Zone explores the military background of mainstream technology. In this video work based on historical facts, the artist reconstitutes three missile trajectories with a subjective camera angle using Google Earth. This work articulates around haunting high technologies by introducing cues of their military origins. Here we focus on the missiles, the ancestor of the space program and satellite launches, whose shots and cartographies we use on an daily basis.

So we follow the trajectory of a V2 rocket, developed by the Nazis and launched from the Netherlands to London in 1945. Then a Scud rocket launched from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, and finally an air-to-ground missile launched from Israel to Gaza in 2014. Riding our missile in the style of Dr Strangelove, we find ourselves wondering about the evolution of those instruments of death. From the poor precision of a V2 to the surgical strikes of Israel, the country with the largest number of start-ups, particularly in cyber-defence, and where the military is the prime crucible of innovation. This work is based on data gathered on newspaper archives, interviews, blogs, historical facts.

Paisaje para una persona (Landscape for a person) traces a path through different locations into a sequence of images. Places as the backdrop for a story that slips from its possible representation, building an invisible layer of meaning between the image and the story. This video was constructed from material filmed on Google Street View and then edited with audio interviews of people who were in conflict of transit or deportation.

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
— John Lennon, lyrics in The Beatles song “I am the Walrus”, 1967.

Walrus (2011 – 2016) is an interactive installation consisting of an augmented mirror that only reflects the face of its users, while supplanting the interactor’s face with a previously recorded one in the same position and with a similar facial expression. This supplantation occurs in every frame, using a different person’s face each time.

Walrus proposes a reflection on identity and self-perception, while also commenting on the current conversations on interaction, technology, and surveillance. Mirrors have always played an important role in culture. With a history dating back 8000 years, not only they have always been present in art and in myths, but they can also be thought of as the first interactive artworks. Mirrors have always been very popular in new media art, and new technologies are always used to create new kinds of mirrors.

With Walrus I attempt at leveraging this “design pattern” by creating a mirror that proposes a self-contradicting interaction: a mirror that infers a human essence, a common trait of all people (amalgamating all its users into a continuous stream of visual feedback), while at the same time maintaining its most basic behaviour. Mirrors, in Borges words, trouble the depths. They exist in the reflection of light, outside of the image, simultaneously expanding a scene and constituting its border, its limit. Mirrors are interactive, yet blind; however, Walrus’s manipulation of the image proposes a mirror that partially sees us, understands us, and explicitly constructs a representation of us. An idea of us.

The installation also inserts the dynamics of computational ubiquity and surveillance in which our identity is partially defined by the objectification of being “the surveilled”. It is in this reflection where the installation proposes a dialogue. In Flusser words, “the task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of—and thus its significance—in a world dominated by apparatuses”

“Walrus” uses a Microsoft Kinect Sensor, a computer, a screen and an oval-shaped picture frame. It uses the sensor to track the interactor’s head, and Microsoft’s Face Tracker to locate the face and extract some gestural features: mouth shape, eyebrows position, eyes opening, etc.

The computer stores each new face and its associated data into a database, and returns an existing one from the database. The database is organised as a hash table, with similar faces stored under the same hash entries. Face similarity is defined by an L∞ norm of the head rotation, plus similar gestural features.

When a new face is entered, it is put into the entry of the hash entry with most similar poses. To avoid running out of storage, there is a fixed maximum size of each hash entry, and an existing element is randomly deleted when the limit is reached. This can be considered as a cheap way of finding similar faces to the input through hashing.

Moving Objects is a kinetic sculpture consisting of motors, rings, and silicon wire that approach the visual phenomena between chaos and order and challenges the viewer to constantly seek patterns and principles. The technology behind the art – the machines, the wiring, the motors – is integral to Pe Lang’s piece, bringing the audience in touch with the technical processes that are so often hidden in our high-tech society.

Light Catcher is a dialogue between sound and light. The installation is composed of numerous optical fibres that interact with sound. Sound is the driving force, light is generating the space. An electric spark is igniting the reaction. Light is entrapped inside the optical fibres, reacting only to sound stimulus. Acting like a catcher, the installation absorbs and emits light. This results an emergent dance of light from the fibres and the reflections on the surrounding surfaces. The white light dominates the installation but shades of other colors exist to highlight an audio event, like the sounding French horn playing a minor second interval. The visitor is invited to walk around the installation and explore the different visual and audio aspects.

The project was created using C++ for designing the light choreography. The sound was generated in Pure Data along with acoustic instruments that were mixed together. In the final installation, a Raspberry Pi hidden inside, is playing the audio and controlling the LEDs using Python.

One of the oldest forms of colour articulation in complex dynamic performance media is the Cantonese Opera. All aspects of costumes, texture, masks and form are geared together to create a total work of art. Characters are articulated through elaborate colour coding, communicating mental state, behaviour, status and role. Such complex narrative materiality and communication is comparable with the transdisciplinary approach of cybernetics – one of constructed communication feedback loops in closed systems. Taking the local specificity of the opera’s rich history, we speculate on a new form of storytelling and non-linear performance. In the opera, characters are based on notated behaviors and roles, articulated through elaborate costumes and colour coding indicating mental state, behavior and character. The colours are static and so is the narration.

MASK (臉譜) takes the static codification and translates the narration and character development into a dynamic, reactive and cybernetic system of conversation. The work is the design of a continuous conversation between two protagonists of the Chinese Opera. It takes the form of an interactive installation with two newly designed 3D printed masks are augmented by the means of chemical and biological agents as well as 3D reactive projection mapping. Each of the augmentations is reactive and environmentally controlled. Each of the reagents has a particular time span to change colour, from the instant change of a projection map, the intermediate reaction of polychromatic pigments to the slow change of
bioluminescent bacteria or slow growing crystallisations. The mask here is object and condition at the same time. The reaction of the mask is recorded, played back and looped, creating a 2nd layer of influencing input, suggesting the layered repetition in the opera. stimulating and inhibiting the crystalline growth.

Using 3D projection mapping, that as a source takes the recordings from the biological augmentation as well as the polychromic stimuli, allows the audience to interactively stimulate the masks behaviour up to the point of chemically altering its shape through the precipitation of Aluminium potassium Sulphate – the curing of the mask in its disfiguration. The narration culminates and form is lost for chemical augmentation and change. The extreme time spans from the instantaneous colour changing of the pixels in the LED matrix of the projector to the long curing of the mask using crystalisation are only able to be seen as a process and never as a whole-similar to the momentous perception of the enacted Opera.

Well-formed breasts…coincidence? is a video performance created for the camera. This video work makes reference to the power of the symbols (archetypes) that at the same time are shapes and, consequently, numbers. These symbols, as well explained by C.G. Jung, have dominated our life because they are part of our collective unconscious determining what is beautiful and good and what is ugly and bad. Thus, the religions and governments have used them throughout the history in order to create resounding effects that manipulate the society.
It means that strong or weird physical experiences can turn into aesthetic and pleasant experiences (images) just because they follow powerful and inherited patterns and symbols. This video talks about the most important numeric sequence, Fibonacci sequence, and about the master number par excellence, the number 11, which is interpreted as the resonance of the oneness. Through this work, which is part of a specific communication project, Jai Du wants to reinforce the concept of the importance about the unification of the science and spiritual worlds.
Poetically it can be explained as follows:

Maybe you don’t remember this number sequence
maybe even consciously you don’t know what it means
search on Google!
The name is Fibonacci sequence and it has nothing to do with esoterism
remember it not only if you want to win the
Euromillions
it can also help you to understand everything around you:
the DNA defining you
the Egypt’s pyramids
the terrorist attacks of 11S and 11M
the power of British monarchy
the black holes and even the hole of the Bic pen also why you have to wake up every morning
to work at an office that you don’t like at all
this sequence explains everything!
because it is part of the collective subconscious and, obviously, the abstract art has never
existed
because God exists.

A contemporary update and a creative reworking of Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”, S for Sisyphus is an experimental video game project aiming to explore action, meaning, and human intentionality via a simple animated and playable experience. It consists of two related but standalone versions: S for Sisyphus ¬ (playable version) and S for Sisyphus ∞ (machinima version), each articulates the theme of the work with a slightly different accent and experience.

In the playable version, the player is confronted with a cube, and is left with the choice of a single action in the game world: pushing the cube forward in an endless horizon, or else ending the game by taking the character’s life. The player has the choice to experience from four different perspectives: the Player, the Cube, the Other and the Anonymous God, as the action unfolds.

An alternate and extended version, S for Sisyphus ∞ is a live animated film that complements the game version of the project. The major difference between the “game” version and the “film” version is that no human player is involved in the latter. Instead the game is “played” by the computer software automatically in real-time.

Surveillance is a impromptu performance, co-operated with Sharky(red) and George(black). During the performance, Sharky & George are being tracked by a really-time analysis system, which shows the speed they are moving, the distance they have moved. In the performance, Sharky & George are talking to each other the latest news from BBC News Service in real time. The news is updating in every 10 seconds. The really-time analysis system are keep tracking Sharky & George’s movements and project the processed information back to them in real time.

Graphite Piano is a wooden sound instrument, shaped to resemble a piano. It is built with 3 sets of 8 pencils, each with a different darkness ranging from B to 8B. The instrument also has 24 keys, one per pencil. Each pencil is placed above one key. The keys have been drawn on the wood with various shades of pencils. The shade of each key is the same as the shade of the pencil that corresponds to it. The pencils in each set are all placed at three different distances from the keys. Therefore, the same pencil shade will generate different tones, depending on its distance to the key.

Musicians can play the instrument by pressing the keys. This action facilitates the contact of the pencil and the key, which will complete the sound oscillator circuit and generate the tone. The pencil and its marks thus work as a sound switch. This idea is related to other instruments or sound generating devices, including Louis Bertrand Castel’s 18th century Clavecin pour les yeux (Ocular Harpsichord) (Hankin 1995, 73), as well as Theremin created by Leon Theremin and the Moog synthesizer by Robert Arthur Moog (and others), both made in the 20th century. The main mechanism of playing the Moog synthesizer is based on flipping on/off switches, so as “Graphite Piano” by pressing the keys to turn on/off of the sound circuit. Besides, musicians can play “Graphite Piano” by waving their hands above the keys. Similarly, sound generation in the Theremin is based on the player’s interaction with an electromagnetic field.

Using the pencil as one of the electronic components for generating sounds seems absurd yet completely makes sense because of its physical properties. The pencil core is made of graphite, which enables the pencil to serve as an electrical conductor. It is also a tool traditionally associated with writing and drawing. The physicality and the function of pencil make it an ideal element to be used in my sound sculpture. This work expresses my interest in the physical aspects of sound and language.

In this 3D animated video, classical sculptures in the museum participate in a destructive performance triggered by software glitches, distortions, and misused simulation, turning the space into a madhouse theater with both classical beauty and digital chaos. It attempts to connect the sense of space, history, turmoil, and transformation to the idea of technological sublime in a twisted way, breaking the restrictive association between advanced graphics technology and high-end cinema production while attempting to put classical art into a contemporary digital aesthetic context.

The work tries to engage with our cultural heritage in a disruptive way, occupying the static space of a cultural institution and turning it into a chaotic digital performance. In the computer, each of the sculptures has a triple identity: a human or animal figure, a sculptural ornament, and digital data. The original sculptures were crafted by the old masters with care, treasured in their time, broken and tossed in historical turmoil, and preserved and admired again. The original delicacy and the torment of time together created a new sensibility. In the video, they are destructed not only as ornaments, but also as bodies with cultural associations, which resonates with the Greek idea of the tragic and the sublime.

It is also an attempt to reimagine the aesthetic directions we can take using high-end visual effect technologies. Today, moving images are heavily computer generated. The shiny cars or glittering beer in TV commercials are 3D models rendered photo-realistically, not to mention all the collapsing and explosions in Hollywood blockbusters. Taking the tools that big visual effect studios use, but working alone as an artist instead of with a team of hundreds, I try to reclaim the independency of the technology. Most of the “effects” are created through errors or misused simulation, celebrating rather than concealing the “wrong” and “mistakes”.

Every once in a while, a new technology makes the world a better place without demanding some sort of major trade-off (think Polio vaccinations). More often, however, our advancements require that society shift to accommodate their less desirable effects. ThreeYearContract calls our attention to the impossible promise of the smartphone: simultaneous presence both here and somewhere else. TYC is made up of two identical units, each appearing to be no more than a simple block of wood. When an audience member pressed their forhead against one of these blocks, it places a cellular phone call to its counterpart. This call can be answered when a second participant adopts the same peculiar stance as the first. The work’s absurd interactive requirement forces both its users to commit fully to the conversation at hand, and encourages reflection on a growing culture of tele-absence.

This artwork contemplates the screen and its origins. The moving image’s preference for the clear screen ignores its historical roots in translucent organic materials. Naturally-occurring translucent materials (dove feathers, fur, reptile skin, seeds, and seashells) were selected for their unique qualities to diffuse light. Embedded in organic resins, the materials’ variations in texture, color, and density affect the video playing on the commercial-grade LED grids behind them in custom-made raw steel frames.

The relationship between the video image and the screen are key to the piece–nature acts as an organic lens and filter for a digital image. The light sculpture explores both mediated organics and translucency’s ability to create both a material and discursive surface, looking at and looking through. Using a simple walk cycle, a foundation of animation, the sculpture shows a man pacing, trapped between a mediated environment and a constructed nature.

The work was developed concurrently with the Sustainable Cinema series of five public sculptures and provided another perspective to cinema’s relationship with nature. The five machines created the moving image with natural force; this work intends to consider the origins of moving image screen. In each, cinema’s beginnings are reimagined by designing an alternate fictional history that maintained the original natural power systems and early organic surfaces. The works both dream of a world where the moving image was not appropriated by the industrial and digital ages. Media archaeology and new media art are placed in a new, co-dependent relationship with an active natural environment once again.

Hiatus [gap, break, void] is an installation where every visitors actuation reveals a dark patch in the light field of a light object that is otherwise appearing clean and functional. The light object is installed at the ceiling where 16 pull cords in various lengths and positions are applied to 18 identical shades which are positioned in a white grid gadget. The outgoing light is warm-white tempered, which is in general associated with comfortable impressions. That impression is irritated by a cold manufactory-like design and by the malfunctioning of the light performance, which becomes a constant part of the room situation. The dark patch vanishes for a moment but then it returns falteringly in a different shape each time a pull cord is actuated. The programmed gaps in the matrix are activated randomly by pull switches. The pull cords are adjusted according to the spatial conditions so that some of them touch the ground, some are too short to do so and one is of excessive length. A leading motive of the setup of the room installation are the several recurring forms discovered in the pull cords, the cones that complete them, the shades, the framed misprints and the diverging dark patches.

Commonly, hiatus describes a short pause in which nothing happens or a space where something is missing. On the other side I understand it as a reference to the state of in-between. For the setup of the room installation I chose different recurring forms and I used a set of rules to create a clean and functional impression which should be questioned and contradicted by a scattering and faltering nonfunctional light performance and by the soothing variety of pull cords. The answer to an unambiguous signal, evoked by the use of pull switches, triggers a diffuse and edge transcending reaction of the light. The outcome of the performative human-object-interaction can be read as a dusty answer or open up room for reflections. The framed pictures of reproduced misprints are taken from daily work life. The diffuseness and the malfunction of the light object are a kind of disrupting „noise“, just like the misprints are a product of noise, too. That correlates to the noise that is attributed to signals in modern communication technologies. It is in fact an attribute of life itself. Malfunctions or noise can be disturbing or empowering, they can take a stand against unambiguity. The installation was built in an old customhouse and asks for the sense and senselessness of daily human actions.

“Heraclitus says that everything changes and nothing remains and by illustrating the flow of the river he says that you cannot step twice into the same river.” by Socrates, after Plato, (Cratylus). After the conquer of Ionia by Persians in the middle of VI century B.C. many Greeks emigrated to western colonies, to the so called Great Greece (southern part of the Italian Peninsula and part of Sicily) with philosophers such as Xenophanes and Pythagoras amongst them. Xenophanes was the ancestor of Eleatic School of Philosophy and Pythagoras was the progenitor of Pythagorean Union. For Pythagoreans the most important substance of the universe was not matter, but the form it acquires by the inscribed information. Driven by such assumption they were discovering the harmony of the world (cosmos) associating it with music. The world cosmos (κόσμος) was applied to the Universe by Pythagoreans and it means harmony and order. One of the tools for learning philosophy was the monochord – a musical instrument by the help of which Pythagoreans discovered the harmonic tones. The most significant supporter of Pythagoreanism was Plato. He developed the concept of idea (ιδέα) as a matrix of all objects of the same kind existing in the material world. He considered the world of ideas as real and the material world only as a copy shaped by it (as it can be seen in the known parable about the cave). Aristotle saw the matter (ύλη) as host for the form (μορφή), which by his understanding was the information inscribed in the initially unshaped matter. For the Pythagoreans (numbers) and Plato (ideas) the substance (ουσία) was the information itself and for Aristotle it had dual nature, consisted of form (information) and matter (host). The word information comes from the Latin word informare, which means applying form, shaping.

The analogical word in Greek language, μόρφοση, stands for education. By considering the etymology of that notion, a wide definition of information would be: shaping anything, material or non-material, in a way that it could be later extracted and read by the receiver. The dualism of the substance (ουσία) consisted of unshaped matter (ύλη) and the information as a form (μορφή) was introduced by Aristotle. In physics (φυσική – physics, φύση – nature) there is a notion of entropy that can be described commonly as a measure of disorder. According to the second order of thermodynamics the entropy in a closed system always proceeds to the state of equilibrium that is a configuration with maximum entropy. There is a singularity in such system called life. Life decreases entropy and produces information in its spot. In nature there is a common process associated with life endless replication of information for the purpose of its propagation and preservation (DNA). According to the second law of thermodynamics life is a singularity and it is like a time-reverse process. The word history comes from the Greek word ιστορία, which comes from the word ίστωρ witness, critic and that in turn comes from earlier form ίδτωρ, the combination of ιδ (from οίδα or είδα I know) and ίστμι (stream, record). Contemporary concepts of space and time are classifying time as another spatial dimension. In physics there are still unsolved outlooks about the nature of gravitation and magnetism and paradoxes of timespace, like e.g.: while time travel is theoretically possible, what would happen if we would go back and change some properties of the past? Would this change the course of history?

This artwork shows the idea of turbulent time-space that is constantly changing its form, where it is not possible to go back or forward to the place that existed or will be existing, because the target is never the same that it was in the past or it will be in the future. A section of a four-dimensional object generates a three-dimensional form. By moving the section’s location steadily in time, the resulting form will be subject of change depending on the properties of the four-dimensional object and will give the impression of motion. If the parent object is dynamical, re-section of a previously cut (“past”) location will give a different result. By analogy, a place of a future section will produce different image from the one generated by the assumed “present” section steadily moved in time. The future and the past generated from present point of view is different than those generated by the “present” section moving in time. The projection “You will not enter twice into the same river” presents this idea by animation, on a model reduced by one spatial dimension.

Animation is dynamic, architecture is static. Animation renders on a flat surface, architecture is three dimensional. Animation requires a medium, architecture is medium and content at once. The projected artwork is fusing the inherent qualities of animation with those of architecture. It utilizes architecture as a canvas for animation and utilizes animation as an emphasis of hidden dynamics in architecture. It virtually breaks walls, transforms concrete surfaces into human faces and let geometry dance. It dissolves the rigidness of architecture by mapping animated projections on its surface and embodies animated shapes through physical structures.

33 1/3 Revolutions is a game art installation that deals with Hong Kong’s record store culture and with vinyl records as objects of tangible heritage and cross-cultural importance. A single player computer game built with the Unity3D editor will be made accessible to festival visitors as well as a browser game that can be played online. The game presents a fictitious urban environment that is constructed from pictures that are taken from Hong Kong record stores. The level consists of a vinyl hero, a ‘digitization spaceship’, buildings and huge vinyl records that are larger than (wo)man-sized and invite the player to start and stop the respective music contained on these records.

The cultural history of 20th century apparatuses contains two machines that became iconic for youth culture, film, and Western civilization, both use a revolving device to achieve their functionality: The revolver (predecessors date back to the 16th century, but it is popularly known as the “colt” in Western movies) and the record player. Both of these apparatuses (let’s forget about the third potential sibling here: the KODAK carousel slide projector) meet in a game that celebrates turntables and vinyl music and equips the player with a revolver to fight against the dematerialization of music. The revolver equipped music connoisseur has to make his way through the streets of an urban environment that contains famous Hong Kong record stores like the ones of Paul Au at 239 Cheung Sha Wan Road in Sham Shui Po or by Ho Hing Ming at Lamma Island.

The player is attacked by a digitization spaceship, but he or she can shoot back, can duck and cover and can play the rough and warm sounds of the analog vinyls that are a threat to the digitization spaceship. Vinyl records have almost completely disappeared from the shops and homes of Hong Kong for more than two decades, before the inhabitants of Hong Kong once more fell in love with vinyl. It is interesting to see how certain cult shops keep a nostalgic collection of outmoded bands like The Who, Bob Marley’s Wailers and the like. The unpredicted phenomenon of a revival of vinyl is not unique for Hong Kong, it rather mirrors a global tendency that shows a 400% increase in global vinyl sales in between 2007 and 2014. However, what is typical for Hong Kong is the radical enthusiasm about media innovations, which quickly drop into oblivion. In regard to vinyl this has been described by record collector Paul Au: “Hong Kong people like to follow trends. They listen to whatever is popular, so they throw away a lot of old things. In the 80s, they threw away all the things from the 60s. They cannot stick to one lifestyle for long and they also don’t give many genres a chance. Back in ‘83, when Metallica started getting famous, local record dealers imported only 50 copies of their first album. Only 50 copies for the whole fucking colony! What kind of a city is this?” (hk-magazine.com/city-living/article/vinyl-hero-storeowner-paul-au)

The game is an open exploration single user computer game that can be played as a download on Apple IOS, Linux or Windows machines and also as a browser game in conventional web browsers like Safari Internet Explorer, Firefox etc. The games level has been built in Unity3D and exported for the respective platforms. The game has an expected playing time of 8 to 30 minutes per player and can be restarted at any time or continued by a successor player. In order to make the game accessible for as many players as possible in conditions of crowded festival conditions an automated change of players will be facilitated. A message of the type “Please hand over the system to new players… or continue” will be displayed if activated by the system operators.

Tunnel finds Edwin Abbott’s novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions as an inspiration. It is a story centered on a two-dimensional geometric figure. A square. A Mr. Square. Who is occupying a land of flatness, a land of only length and width. Through a series of encounters with a higher dimensional being, a three dimensional sphere, discovers a greater reality outside of his own limited perception. First he refuses to believe, but comes to understand, despite his limitation, the concept of a third dimension. After Mr. Square’s mind has been opened to a new third dimension, he dreamed of a visit to a one-dimensional world (Lineland), where he in turn was the higher being. Inhabited by single dimensional lines, He attempts to convince the realm’s monarch of a second dimension; but is unable to do so. Dejected, he travels about and meets a singular point. “Can you consider having length?” Mr. Square asked. “Length? What humorous thoughts I come up with,” the point responded.
The Sphere came and explained to Mr. Square, that he had arrived in Pointland, and that the points here do not acknowledge dimensions at all: “You see, how little your words have done. So far, as the point understands your words at all, he accepts them as his own – for he cannot conceive of any other except himself – and plumes himself upon the variety of Its own thought, as if it were an instance of his own creative power. Let us leave this god of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: Nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction.” Flatland is an allegory of an idealism. Through its examination of the view of multiple dimensions, it offers an insightful metaphor towards human being’s existential relationship to the larger cosmos. This is where Fu’s work invites and engages its viewers.

As in flatland, Fu’s virtually rendered work guides the viewer into a metaphorical higher dimensional world, where the artwork becomes a physical symbol for the viewer’s physical perception, in relation to the greater reality, and the installation, posing as a limitation to the viewers perception, is a port to that world. One is either detoured or offended by the limitation presented by the installation, or one accepts his or her limitation and humbly explores what can be seen.

Tunnel is also inspired from one particular experience Fu had going through a small mountainside tunnel on a trip to Arizona. “There were five windows carved out of one side of the rock tunnel, giving glimpses of an extraordinary expanse of the Arizona landscape, in an otherwise pitch-black tunnel. The guide explained that there are six windows, each increasing in size as you traveled. I counted as we went along. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Where was the sixth? As we came to the mouth of the tunnel, the guide said, this is the sixth window.” Fu took that as a metaphor of human understanding of the larger physical, spiritual, and metaphysical. In that, She is interested in the nature and significance of the reveal and expectation.

The following quote from Woody Vasulka’s Notes on Installation summarizes the characteristic of the digital space revealed in Fu’s Experimental 3-D animation and installation:

“…digital space has no generic method for looking at the world the way that a camera does through its pinhole/lens apparatus. Digital space is constructed space, in which each component, aspect, concept, and surface must be defined mathematically. At the same time, the world inside a computer is but a model of reality as if seen through the eye of a synthetic camera, inseparable from the tradition of film. Yet, in this context, no viewpoint is ever discarded, the internal space is open to a continuous rearrangement and access to a selection of views and narrative vectors in infinite, not only to the author, but also, with the use of certain strategies, to the viewer. Once the author constructs and organize a digital space, the viewer can enter into a narrative relationship with it. A shot in film indicates a discrete viewpoint. Its narrative purpose is to eliminate other possible views. In contrast, the world in the computer contains the infinity of undivided space, undissected by the viewpoints of narrative progression. In the world of the machine, all sets of narrative vectors are offered in an equal no-hierarchical way. The machine is indifferent to the psychological conditioning of a viewpoint. All coordinates of space are always present and available to the principles of selected observation.”

Fu’s animations as a whole reference C. D. Friedrich’s painting, “Wonder Above Sea and Fog”, on the account of the emotional response of the contemplative figure encountering both the physical and metaphysical infinity, which is also a major concern in Chinese Traditional Landscape Painting. With a former painter’s sensibility, she approaches the subject of the sublime using topographical computer rendered abstraction set on a time line. The animation projected into space becomes a necessary physical metaphor for the discourse of human physical perception. This invites the viewer to physically and mentally enter into a liminal Gordon Matta Clark like interior within a digitally constructed space, where the viewer’s body is motivated to expand their perception but their physical ability to perceive all that is potentially visible is limited. The limitless virtual world entices and calls, but the physical fights against it. Like Friedrich’s painting, her abstract perception as a frame and opening to another world and experience, invites the viewer to look into the virtual landscape. “Tunnel” continues Fu’s formal and conceptual exploration. The piece functions as a window into a parallel dimension that stimulates an awareness of both consciousness and space, extending out from the pictorial and expanding into the land of virtual reality.

Jane is a dialogue for two actors that you can change throughout while maintaining credible meaning. There is no definitive version, no directors cut. It is rather the sum of its manifold possibilities. The work in many ways belongs to the theatre with its black box setting. And it owes probably more to work of Samuel Beckett than anyone else. At its strange heart the piece is a writing automaton. It chooses what the algorithms decide for it against the carefully calculated script.

The situation is absurd. John and Jake talk about a woman they share called Jane. Both, more than coincidentally, are married to a woman called Jill. The men exhibit no rivalry whatsoever over Jane. They know she belongs to everyone and no one. Jane is simultaneously a daydream and a nightmare. Shape-shifter extraordinaire, she is the constantly mutating remainder of male desire. Whatever men crave and fear in the female sex, Jane exemplifies and amplifies. Jane herself knows full well that she is the empty heart of desire for she is the absence that gives birth to desire itself. In a very concrete sense, Jane could only be expressed in something as fluid and pliable as the work that takes her name.

John and Jake too are rather ambivalent. They can be read as individuals or the same person separated by the attrition of time. Taken as individuals, John is the older, more jaundiced and stoic of the pair. He is also probably happier or at least more accepting of his marriage and its inevitable compromises. Jake is the more idealistic and yet the more troubled too. He bears the burden of a sexual ambiguity both in himself and the troubled relation his wife has with her father. Originally I had in fact planned a companion piece called ‘James’ where the wives called Jill would similarly fantasize and fear. There I was also entertaining the possibility of the intriguing male to female interweavings that could ensue.

Jane is also about itself or rather the types of story that something like Jane can tell. I tried to get the most out of the line by line granularity of change by investing the alternatives with as much narrative content as they could hold. One way was to use the well known films in the conversation ‘Old Films, New Endings’ and thereby leverage, extend and subvert narratives already known by many. The conversation ‘Bedtime Stories’ does much the same, and harkens back to our childhood need for night time narrative that like cinema unfolds itself in the dark. In ‘Filmic Fantasies’, I evoke actors throughout and use their names to conjure the clouds of narrative allusion associated with each. And then there is Jane. Of her occupation we know that it was once something cinematic: director, actress, editor, and auteur.

In other interactive stories that are varieties of choose-your-own-adventure, the main narrative branches at key decision points. Progression then leads to a normally limited set of outcomes. I eschew this approach and use instead variants that have localized polyvalence. This creates a cumulative field of multiplying nuance where one change can directly or indirectly affect the rest. Alternatively, I also allow for the absence of any interaction like you normally would expect in the passively received medium of film. You can simply auto-generate a film and play it without changing a single line or camera angle; you can dictate the script or be dictated to.

All this does mean that the narratives I produce are less directed than other approaches. The films you see in Jane are therefore more like vignettes than conventional stories that end in a tidy little knot. They are the equivalents of the groundhog day conversations we engage in daily with others or ourselves and upon which we gently improvise in a meagre exercise of will.

Il ne reste plus que l’attente (Wait and See), is a software linked to the web and made with a video game engine (Unity 3D). Every 15 minutes this software check on Twitter via its search query, the occurrence of a list of expressions.Those expressions are made of words related to the lexical field of liquidity combined with terms usually used in finance (liquid, stream, wave, flow, finance, exchange, management, market, etc). The more those expressions have popped on Twitter, the more the sea seems agitated, on the opposite, the less the words are use, the more the sea looks quiet. This program acts like a barometer of the discurses about liquidity and finance on the internet. This witness of the speeches which reactivate today a collective image linked to water, questions the figure of the ocean as the new paradigm of our digital society: a liquid world with many streams where everything communicate, and in which we evolve without being able to embrace all its complexity and inner mechanisms

Three Bankers: Volcker, Greenspan, Friedman

This is a grouped set of video portraits of three important bankers and monetary theorists: Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Milton Friedman. These portraits are taken from a larger, ongoiong series concerned with the ideologies of monetary policy and the worldwide economic collapse. Like all the portraits in the series, the base images for these videos were taken from public domain video. The originating footage was re-configured to a standard 720 x 1080 vertical format. Source images were then re-rendered as single frames, rotoscoped, placed on 3D layers, re-lit, and color graded to establish an underlying uniformity across the base layer. Layers were then processed through GLSL shader scripts written to create generative patterns of fracture, noise, and distortion specific to each of the portraits. The series is formally benign, bankers facing us, gesturing in blue light, an atmosphere reminiscent of network broadcast or video reportage, etc. However, as the distortion of each image plays out ,the bankers create a space beyond the fact of appearances, each portrait establishing an image more accurate that the originating figure itself.

“A distortion which distorts itself into fact,” as Francis Bacon has memorably said of his own work in portraiture, in other words, a distortion that restores accuracy to the originating image, a distortion which undoes the semblance of stability proposed by an official version of each figure, a distortion used to return the image to fact. The public provenance of the base images is appropriate to the project. One way to interrogate systems of power is by appropriating what is put forward as journalistic, factual, and credible. To allow standard, mass broadcast images of those in control to continue undisrupted or to be society’s predominant representations of the turmoil engendered by current economic philosophies is, in a way, also a means of denying our experience of those policies.

Tiff image sequence, three channels, colour, silent

Unsavory

Policies engineered by lobbyists can be shortsighted. The National Restaurant Association aggressively opposes mandated sick day legislation because they assume it will increase operating costs. While well-paid employees can easily take time off to recover from an illness, for employees making minimum wage, the decision to stay home could mean financial suicide. And in the restaurant industry, employees going to work while sick could result in a public health crisis. Unsavory is a mobile game designed to put the player in the precarious position of choosing between their personal health, public health and their financial wellbeing. Like other activist games, the intention is to create awareness and empathy around an issue that is best understood as part of a larger system.

Additionally, the game seeks to be a catalyst for change by embedding a social media campaign into gameplay that encourages players to share meaningful facts and statistics regarding restaurant workers, access to health care, and paid sick day legislation in the United States. The objective of the game is to pay all of your bills at the end of the month by working at a minimum wage job. At your job, you prepare tacos, quesadillas and burritos by tapping on the ingredients in front of you that match each order slips. Each round equals one day, and the game difficulty increases by introducing a new type of order slip. Every 5 days, the time allowed between orders is reduced to increase player difficulty. A player is allowed to screw up an order twice in one day without being penalized. However, if the player makes a third mistake and receives a third strike, they can either quit for the day or use a “re-shift” to play the round over again. If a player is out of re-shifts and goes home early more than two days out of the month, they’re fired.

Each day the player is welcomed to work by their boss. The boss admires a strong work ethic and is a bit slow when it comes to arguments presented by the player’s dialogue. The intent to is work through the logic of how things play out in the real world with dry humor. Players expect a challenge in a game, so a boss with tough love isn’t a stretch for the cultural context of a video game. At the end of each week, the player is paid for time worked. Typically, this is a full 40-hour week but if the player went home early the time they were unable to work is deducted for their paycheck. After work, the player is transported to their apartment where they are able to pay their bills, take medicine, and call in sick. To ground the game further in reality, the bills to be paid by the player are a simplified version of a financial plan created for McDonald’s employees in the United States by Visa.

The key takeaway that Unsavory attempts to impress upon players is that a person making minimum wage without access to paid sick days is systemically forced to work while sick. In the second week of the game, the player catches a cold. The screen begins to shake and the player must wipe their nose in time in order to stop the nose from releasing a torrent of snot onto the food trays. Each time the player wipes their nose a timer is reset. The sicker a player gets, the shorter the time period between required nose wipes. If the player sneezes, their boss realizes they are sick and sends them home for the day. The boss is upset that the player would come to work while sick, failing to understand that the player has no real choice in the matter. The player can opt to buy and take medicine or take a day off from work to increase their health, but they are not paid for that time. This makes paying the all of the bills impossible if the player takes more than one day off from work. Each proceeding day the player is fully aware that they are sick yet they continue to come to work and hide their condition. As the boss continues to interact with the employee, the original tough love dialogue now comes across as mean spirited and unrelenting. The system is laid out for the player to see as they have experienced it.

Beyond exposing the system, Unsavory seeks to promote a dialogue about paid sick day legislation. When the player first becomes sick, they receive a letter from an advocacy group that informs them about paid sick day policy in the United States. The player continues to receive messages with additional information about paid sick day legislation each time they come home from work sick. The messages act as a silver lining and point towards a better future. Each letter invites them to participate in a social media campaign within the game. From this campaign screen, they can select various tweets that highlight the issue through different lenses (with regards to business, public health, human rights concerns) and target specific hashtags and accounts related to the campaign. Thus, the game promotes a call to action that allows players to go beyond the gameplay and get actively participate in addressing and trying to fix a real-world problem.

The world is not black and white. Many gray areas exist. While perspectives are subjective and every bit of rhetoric can find some thread of reason to tug at, sound logic is fleeting from our world. Our world is full of systems. Systems control the world around be cold and calculating, so creating sets of rules for humans to play with allows us to tease out fact from fiction in a given system. We can’t unconsciously cheat a computerized system. We have to interrogate a system and understand it fully before we can hope to change it. This process goes back and forth with the artist and the audience, working together to find a mutual understanding through interaction.

Games are a collaborative endeavor. Relying on the strengths of other people to create something is humbling. The process of design is a constant reminder that by working together, we can achieve something fantastic.

Vanishing is a project on the role of data in photography, and the tension between visual information and hidden data of the digital image files. Created with custom software that writes historical data to the image exif code (names of victims of a terrorist attack, dates of bombings of a war strike, etc.), the photograph gets visually degraded while its data becomes enriched with the event information. This creates a hybrid document that reveals the complex ontology of digital images, standing between reading and seeing, coding and decoding. It makes the tension between visual output and data processing in digital images visible, it questions the notion of photography as a document, interweaving the signifier and the signified, noise and signal, requiring the viewer to open the file code to make sense of the image. Vanishing consists of a series of digital videos and digital image prints accompanied by small publications. The pictures are all appropriated images of iconic historical photographs, that have been “glitched” through a custom software. The intervention to the data file creates the visual loss of information, thus making the image visually degrading while at the same time making the information of the image richer. The original and the resulting images are presented with a small printed publication of the exif code, where the viewer can read the pixel data and historical information. Additionally a video of the process shows the performative act of the rewriting of the image.

The video installation utilizes the iTunes visualizer to play and interact with a political science lecture from Yale University on Tocqueville’s notion of democracy as obtained freely from the open source of iTunes U. In the lecture, the cautionary tone with which Tocqueville approaches it are emphasized, touching on notions such as the tyranny of the majority and the danger of soft despotism. In relation to phenomenon such as open access, free culture, and MOOCs, Trebor Scholz talks extensively about the tyranny and aggression with which gift economies perpetuate the dominance of power structures.

As he cogently argues, “openness functions as public relations.” The joint venture of iTunes and the top universities such as MIT and Yale might be veering on the side of despotism as the lecture forewarns. The bespectacled form that such as discourse is presented in is emblematic of the “leveling‟ of the present age (Kierkegaard), while each party reasserts their unrivaled leadership and monopoly in their respective industry: that of the techno-media entertainment and that of the prestigious discourse producers.

Patterns is a sequence of digital animations in which raw images and sounds are generated by computer algorithms and conformed by the artist into meaningful shapes and sounds. The piece’s premise is that the digital medium is a world. A world to be explored and cultivated during the artistic process. It is a world because it is a platform for the existence of beings and events. It is an alien world with different natural laws; It is a discrete world in which atoms are pixels and single audio samples and in which forces are computer processes which manipulate the digital matter. Before it is cultivated by the artist, this world is incomprehensible to human perception. The end product is a strange combination of familiar and alien. It gives a feeling that there really is a world out there, inside the computer. Maybe it is the afterlife, maybe it is a refuge.

Following are short explanations of the different parts of the piece accompanied by related still frames:

1. Portal. A transition from the continuous world to the discrete world. A mathematical equation of a circle represents a circle with infinite accuracy. But on the screen it is reduced to a finite representation by pixels. The Portal is a sequence of circlerenders on a grid of pixels. As the grid gets smaller and the circle is represented by a decreasing amount of pixels, the computer is lesable to represent the circle and it becomes pixilated and broken (due to statistical errors of the representation algorithm). Thus, the idea of a circle is lost but the materiality of its repre-
sentation subsists.

2. One white pixel, as if it were infinitesimal, disrupts the black void that surrounds it.
Repeated manipulations by blur and sharpen algorithms make it expand in space (in a diffuse pattern), beyond the frame and to infinity. Rotating the screen’s plane in 3D space creates the illusion of a camera, a human point of view.

3. The Colors of Noise. Similarly to white light which contains all colors white noise contains all frequencies. Using filters, it is separated to high and low frequencies in audio and in video. The combined pattern of frequencies makes an image of sea, wind and waves.

4. fah th-er . Words are made of consonants and vowels. Each vowel has a unique frequency signature. White noise becomes a word by combining frequency patterns in the order and dynamics of that word.

5. From Noise to Tone. In order to isolate a single frequency from noise we reduce the noise to a single white pixel and to a single audio sample and then start adding them up in an orderly manner. The construction principal is that the disturbances should appear in equal time intervals. In the beginning, 10 pixels flicker, each 5.5 times per second and form a sound with a frequency of 55 hertz. More pixels add up and form other notes. Low notes have few white pixels and high notes have many. Eventually 4 octaves of the F major scale are formed, represented by a gradient of grey shades. Playing the sounds in a certain rhythm and in a certain order makes a recognized tune: “Music alone shall live”.

6. Epilogue

Marginal Consent Channel One Poses associated with hysteria in the late 19th century are re-enacted (inhabited) by the artist and posted on amateur porn/ tubesites on the Internet. Channel Two Scroll of collected comments left by users of the porn/ tubesites. By using early photographic images of female hysterics (1890-1910) as a reference for re-enactment (inhabitation), and then (re)positioning them on porn sites, the definition of sexual content is challenged. The work was removed from RedTube for not being sexual in nature, and has been taken down from other site for a myriad of reasons. Despite being diagnostic aids, there is a sexual under/ overtone in many of the original “hysteria” photographs. Due to the limitations of early photography, the patients needed to hold the poses for several seconds for documentation; thus there are elements of voyeurism and (solicited?) performance that resonates with the voyerusitic/exhibitionistic nature of Internet porn.

In Motion is an essay on the poetics of movement representation. Forms on Movement, colors on Movement and look on Movement. This experimental and abstract movie was possible after the a three years research with ARTIEFRACT software. The Movement-creation opportunities, offered by this new tool, are completely different from any other, as the software create between two forms a sequence of forms, always moving, that ultimately give rise to one another, completely different from the first. This creation is controlled by controlling the functions and attractors, though it can always be a quota random. This project will aim to a poetic of movement, or its representation can have on the surface of the screen. The movement that occurs in the passage of the color A to the color B, the way this is fused with the movement of forms and the waythat how this form is transformed into another one, cheering and populating the screen in constant rhythms and cadences. This project synchronizes two objectives that are important in my career as an experimental creator, the innovative and experimental technological side by side with the creation of representation of movement-essence of the motion representation of animated cinema.

Cunt Touch This is inspired by Tee A. Corinne’s Cunt Colouring Book from 1975. The game is a meditative drawing activity accompanied by sounds. Using fingers on a touchpad players can admire, care for and add their own artistic colouring to the detailed shapes of Corinne’s drawings. Pacing of strokes is important for the aesthetic look: slow strokes create thick colour lines while fast strokes add a coarse graffiti style. Randomly placed sensitive areas respond to the touch: Careful work around these gives more time to draw, while too much interaction will cause the image to pulsate in a slow motion cunt explosion before the image fades to white leaving the message “thank you, it was a pleasure”. The option “Cuntinue?” invites the players to encounter new levels. Sensitivity area and pleasure length on each vulva are unique just like each drawing shows the diversity of female bodies.

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an immersive digital media project that foregrounds veterans testimonies of US military interrogation practices and human rights abuses during the Iraq War, often by young and ill-trained soldiers who never entered the military expecting to become torturers and who find themselves struggling to reconcile the activities they were asked to do. Drawing upon extensive interviews with veterans carried out by political scientist John Tsukayama following the Abu Ghraib accounts of abuse, this project is unique in building understanding of how a military with a just vision of its practices might allow the conditions for human rights abuses to occur. The hybrid project was developed through a unique collaboration between filmmakers, artists, scientists, and researchers from four universities and developed in the immersive 3D CAVE2 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) for exhibition, educational institutions, museums and libraries, and distribution using tablets/ipads and Oculus Riff.

The Virtual Environment: Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project was developed at the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) for the CAVE2™, the next generation large-scale virtual-reality 320-degree panoramic environment which provides users with the ability to see 3D stereoscopic content in a near seamless flat LCD technology at 37 Megapixels in 3D resolution matching human visual acuity. The CAVE immerses people into worlds too large, too small, too dangerous, too remote, or too complex to be viewed otherwise [1]. The immersive 3D environment of the CAVE is here intended to provide an affective environment that produces a space for interpretation. The visualization environment serves as a disposition for enacting individual and cultural memory of an institutionalized atrocity.

The project presents the audience with a narrative environment that begins in a reflective temple space with four doors opening to ordinary American domestic spaces: a boy’s bedroom, a family room, a suburban back yard, a kitchen. The user navigates the environment using motion tracking and a wand, a 3D mouse, to interact with and control a VR experience in the CAVE2™. The virtual scene is continuously updated according to the orientation and position of the head, as measured with head and arm trackers, and the 3D view of the scenes is focalized on this perspective.

Moving through and exploring each these rooms inside the virtual scene creates a sense of being immersed in the virtual environment. Using a wand with buttons, the navigator triggers individual objects, such as a toy truck, a Boy Scout poster, or a pair of wire cutters. When each object is activated, the walls of the domestic space fall away and a surreal desert landscape is revealed in 2D surrounding panorama, and one of the four voice-over actors is heard recounting particular acts and memory related metaphorically to the object selected. The objects also function very much like hyperlinks in moving us from one narrative element to another. Viewers travel through the domestic spaces and surreal interior landscapes of soldiers who have come home transformed by these experiences, triggering their testimonies by interacting with objects laden with loss. The project extends and make accessible disturbing narratives based on the actual testimonies of veterans who bravely chose to share their experiences.

The immersion the system provides allows for a different type of affective experience of these accounts, activated through the visceral immersion afforded by the visual and auditory environment. The work offers models for engaging with testimony and oral history. It uses visualization to build new discourse around challenging topics and to create communicative virtual environments that enable storytelling through visual metaphor. While many uses of visualization technologies are focused on providing accessible representation of “big data”, in this case, the same technologies are being used to narrativize a complex contemporary issue and to provide a platform for discussion and debate of military interrogation methods and their effects on detainees, soldiers, and society.

Spaces. Places. Memories. is a time-based series exploring how spaces transform into places. A discourse from the literature Space and Place by Yi Fu Tuan, Spaces. Places. Memories. documents three spaces in Singapore – Canal, Grassland & Road – transforming into places through communal initiative and gathering. As Yi Fu Tuan wrote in Space and Place, ”Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other”. The notion of “Place is security, space is freedom” is resonated in this series as we see the individuals create and enjoy their activities in the respective grounds. We see how the people interact with their surroundings in search of a purpose. In the midst of these interactions, memories are formed, leaving a social and cultural mark on these spaces. Underlying concepts of memory-making, one’s relationship to the surroundings and how human spatialise time are conveyed in this series too.

The “Longkang (Canal)” is a space which holds my personal childhood memories. When I was young, my friends and I would mischievously climb down the longkang to play. Occasionally, we get reprimanding from bypassing adults who warn us of the danger but we would ignore them and run away. Despite the danger and unhygenic conditions in the longkang, that is a space where we were free from any rules. In that space, we instantly become “kings” because we were the only ones down there and we could do whatever we wanted. In the artificial waterways, we compensated the lack of “tools” to play by exercising our creativity to find fun. We will salvage leftover containers to catch small fishes or tadpoles in the waters and use whatever items we found in the longkang to play with water. When we got bored of those activities, we make use of the vast space the longkang offers to play “catching” (a game similar to police and thief). Our naivety surfaced in these activities within our “paradise”. Our mischievousness and desire for fun has changed the longkang into our playground. However, such scenarios only exist in the form of memories today. Children today have found fun elsewhere. The longkang has since been deserted, as a result, and returned to its initial state.

Like “Longkang (Canal)”, the idea of “play” is evident in “Cricket” although it is different in nature. On weekends, the group of migrant workers come together in an open grass patch to play their favourite game of sports cricket. To any passerbys, the empty land is probably ignored and deemed as useless but to the migrant workers, this space is identified as a cricket field. With the sports equipment and their enthusiasm, the migrant workers transformed the grass patch (space) into a cricket ground (place) and found joy in the field. Immediately, the impression of the land changes from being useless to a place of significant entertainment value. Cultural values and memories are planted upon the land as the game of cricket takes place. The profile of the space, as a result, has taken the shape of the activity performed in that space.

In “Thieves Market”, we observed that the road was originally a road that is hardly used by any vehicles. The vendors, on the other hand, see opportunity in the barren road and use their freedom to interact with the space. As the day starts, they gradually move in with their goods and props to set up their stores. That process instils a stronger sense of security and evokes curiosity in the space. Subsequently, more people enter the space and a crowd is formed. While some come to sell their goods or in search of particular items, others are there to explore. The crowd has also attracted unexpected individuals into the space – security guards. Although the security guards are there for different reasons, they add a different dynamic into the space and reveals the significance of the place. The accumulation of activities has harnessed enough interest to gather people of all backgrounds in that space. While people come and go, bargaining voices filled the air. Transactions and memories are made in the midst of the chaos. The tangibles (vendors, visitors, goods) and intangibles (conversations, bargaining, transactions) layered the space with cultural heritage and memories, assisting the transition from a road (space) to a market (place).

The series is presented in the medium of projection on photography. In each piece, the photography shows the stillness, emptiness and neutrality of the space. The projection, on the other hand, adds life into the work. It enriches the photography with cultural and social content through moving images and sounds. The faint projection is an attempt to convey the concept of memories asethically. Spaces. Places. Memories. is based on and inspired from different individuals’ personal memories at different locations. More importantly, this series draws attention to the transition from space to place through the spectacle of individuals’ memories.

Intergovernmental Panel on Capitalism (IPC) is the leading international body for the assessment of capitalism. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in capitalism and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Capitalism (IPC) is an ambitious attempt to edit all online materials published by the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by programmatically replacing every instance of the phrase “climate change” with the word “capitalism”. Founded by the United Nations in 1988, the IPCC is the “leading international body for the assessment of climate change” and is tasked with assessing and synthesizing research around climate change. This edit is made to all of the IPCC reports, web and video content and the resultant materials shed light on the tension between environmental issues and contemporary economics, calling capitalism itself into question.

Deleuze and Guattari wrote in Anti-Oedipus, “there is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together.”

Traditional bi-polarities of the body and the world beyond it are collapsing due to ideas emerging from eco-critical theory and ecological precarity due to anthropogenic impact. Our research practice is predicated upon the idea that “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world”. Finite human bodies are embedded in flowing, unbounded ‘non-human’ processes; water, air and food molecules we ingest, have passed not only through the Earth but further reaches of time and space. Yet the intimate experiential knowledge of such phenomena is unperceivable through our naked senses. In Object, we speculate, can future technologies that fuse (wet) biological processes and (dry) computational systems, enable us to access a dynamic flow of data-energy, between inner (body) and outer (environment) worlds?

We imagined a device that enabled us to experience a flowing information exchange between internal somatic and external material systems. The object discovered by the protagonist allows her to experience herself as indivisible from the flow of matter and energy surrounding her. By exploring her interactions with the object through a journey of discovery, we question and re-imagine our relationship with technological artifacts and their roles in mediating and co-shaping our relationship with the world.

Object and Woman. The object prop was an architectural model based on a double Mobius strip design, a factor that resonated with our instinct that it should have a strange mystique. Comparisons were later drawn between our object and the enigmatic obelisk Hipgnosis designed for Led Zeppelin’s Presence LP. The serendipitous discovery of a model with distinctive formal and aesthetic qualities reinforced the conceptual blurring of the inside and outside a psychological process Lacan termed Extimacy, which we sought to speculate upon as a mode of catalysing discourse. We chose a visually non-technological object to evoke a sense of arcane, timeless, and possibly alien in intelligence and design. In Nostalgia de La Luz (2010), Patricio Guzman draws elegant comparisons between calcium in long dead stars seen by astronomers based in Chile’s Atacama desert, with bone fragments reclaimed by relatives of the victims of Pinochet’s 1973 coup. The aesthetic and formal resemblance of the object to fossils and shells, and its’ presumable marine origin, invokes sacred geometry and principles of a code intrinsic to natural phenomena like Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Sequence, as exemplified by the shell of the chambered nautilus. When the object grants her moments of indivisible communion with an unbounded flow of material energy from which she, as a human being, is usually excluded; perhaps, like the moment when Neo ‘sees’ The Matrix, she ’knows’ that the spirals in her DNA are repeated and infinitum in galaxies above her “A spider’s DNA is expressed in its web. The environment, then, from the perspective of the life sciences, is nothing but the phenotypical expression of DNA code.”

Interpretations and Implications. Cosmic Womb. One of most informative interpretations came from a writer, who enriched our perceptions when he read the object as both shell and womb, “The sound of the cosmos is still in our ears in the womb as is the sound of the sea in a shell.” Which echoed Jack Kerouac, “The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?”

Optimism Futures. An Australian curator took a more optimistic tone, “The film made me feel strangely optimistic for the future of the human race… Looking deeper, I suppose it’s an optimistic representation of the relationship between human and ancient mystery / new technology… I thought it showed a sort of idealised and beautiful relationship, similar to how I feel about my laptop…”

Dystopia. “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

Many noted a melancholy tone akin to dystopian Sci-Fi, and thought the glitch sonics processed through generative algorithms implied her lapsarian revelation came at a price, and she now shoulders a burden of great responsibility. She sits, eyes closed at the water’s edge to the sound of an aria from Handel’s Xerxes the first audio radio broadcast of music to a general audience, transmitted to ships in the Western Atlantic on 24 December 1906. But the aria is reversed so when she breaks the fourth wall to directly confront us, is this a first broadcast from a new human being? Does she plead with us to share her responsibility, or like a Mobius strip of water and time, is it a warning and her look one of pity, or disgust? Has she become a “parahuman fusion of code and nature” a harbinger that ‘teleological trajectories of humanity could be supplemented with parallel alternatives’; and in her eyes do we see the return of the repressed of ecological consciousness?

“Object” was quickly made in response to site-specific conceptual and environmental stimuli. To illustrate how it enabled the woman to perceive normally invisible material and chemical processes she interacts with, we first displayed graphical overlays of environmental data-flow captured with an Arduino Smart Citizen device. This data was captured during Mark Shepard’s Design Fictions for Data Geographies workshop in locations around Oulu, Finland. However, during screenings it became apparent that “Object” elicited surprisingly profound audience reaction. People were emotionally affected and drawn to speculate on contemporary human positions relative to our environment and the cosmos. It also became apparent that data-flow visualizations limited scope for readings from the humanities end of the spectrum. We chose to remove the visualization as we found it more critically interesting to enable broader scope for reflective interpretation.

Black Moves in Square is a framed mini video installation that continues the series focus in exploring natural transformation via digital imageries and the interplay between virtual and physical space. From a distance, the image displayed inside the black frame appears to be still; yet as the audience approaches closer, subtle and gradual transformations of the image appear and start to pull one into this deep and endless microcosmic world. The tiny ultra-resolution display commands and heightens the audience’s perceptual attention and experience, intensifying the infinitesimal complex transformations on the screen, playfully mirroring the original work with an inverted scale.

The Listeners is an installation and linguistic performance – enacted by visitors with an Amazon Echo. The Echo embodies a voice-transactive Artificial Intelligence and domestic robot, that is named for its wake-word, Alexa. The Listeners is a custom software ‘skill’ built on top of this infrastructure. The Listeners have their own ‘interaction model.’ They listen and speak in their own way – as designed and scripted by the artist – using the distributed, cloudbased voice recognition and synthetic speech of Alexa and her services.

John Cayley introduces The Listeners and addresses certain contexts and circumstances surrounding The Listeners and the voice-transactive infrastructure on which they are built. Cayley believes that transactive synthetic language will reconfigure practices of language generally, including the arts of language, and that it will encourage the emergence of an aurature – practices of aesthetic languagemaking characterized by the fact that their artifacts exist – both archivally and in-the-moment – supported by aurality rather than by visuality: rather than by graphics, typography, and print, as literature. Cayley’s talk will also touch on related issues and circumstances which are critical for our current historical moment.

Transactive synthetic language and its art has statements to make about synthetic language and human embodiment; the robot imaginary; identity, integral embodied identity, and new modes of being; the voice and individuality; the ‘neutral’ voice; the inner voice; the voice of reading; artificial intelligence and identified artificial intelligences (AIs); network services and personhood; network services, AIs, and surveillance; artificial intelligence, AIs, and social relations; network services, AIs, and privacy; the ‘smart’ home; transactive synthetic language and domotics; the terms, control, and ownership of network services and their artifacts; the future of reading; the future of literature; the future of the archive as language. It is difficult to exaggerate the consequences of the developments that make The Listeners possible for the art of language and also for political economy and culture as a whole.

A Word Heap is a single channel experimental video animation produced using facial recognition and motion capture software, motion graphic effects, algorithmic 3D renderings, and collaged audio design. In this work, the artist adopts various avatar personas (rendered as floating, talking heads) to conduct performative readings of various texts, exploring the notion of ‘avatar poetics’ within the mutable, special-effects driven environments of the screen. “A Word Heap” compiles texts from various online sources, most notably anonymous ‘troll’ commenters and from auto-generated word streams inserted into the body of spam emails (presumably in an attempt to flummox the recipient’s spam filters). These ‘word heaps’ randomized fragments of content culled from news, literature, online media and other far-reaching sources, often scrambled and illegible are deliberate introductions of pseudo-authentic ‘noise’ into a communications medium… a kind of Turing Test that seeks to outwit the A.I. of the user’s inbox, rather than the user.

These texts are edited with the intent of presenting them as succes- sors to the tradition of Surrealist automatic-writing poetry, or the free-association experiments of postmodern fiction. They are thus re-framed and performed with the added lyricism of an avant-garde poetry slam (or the most perplexing virtual reality karaoke ever). The performing characters themselves seem like simulated figures from a retro era cyberpunk floating heads statuesque, xeroxed and painted over older forms attempting to convince each other of their autonomy, their authenticity.

Freud’s House: The Double Mirror Brass Art’s new work forms the second chapter of an ongoing project (Shadow Worlds | Writers’ Rooms) and allows them to enter the domestic spaces that selected authors occupied. For this recent project they investigated the Freud Museum, London having previously explored the Brontë Parsonage, Haworth. During a period of residency, the artists inscribed themselves into the domestic space of Sigmund Freud’s former London home. Using Kinect laser-sensors and Processing software to capture intimate-scaled performances throughout the rooms, staircase and hallway, Brass Art developed a visual response to the notion of the uncanny using strategies of repetition and simultaneous ‘doublings’.

The Resonant Site. The allure of visiting Writers’ rooms or homes brings the promise of direct experience re-enervating the writing or legacy of the works, as the site of creative inspiration or toil, offers up something of the personality or circumstances of the writer. Writers’ Rooms, as an investigation of simple, domestic spaces, creates the possibility of thinking about the everyday, the ordinary and the familiar as the most vivid potential sites for uncanny revelation and transformation. In re-animating the ‘familiar’ domestic spaces of chosen authors – via hallways, staircases, private and public rooms Brass Art’s sojourn invites a re-evaluation of each of these spaces, with their particularities and peculiarities.

Any collection has restrictions put upon it for the conservation of the artefacts these are obvious and explicit and Brass Art have pushed these as far as possible performing, sometimes in an uncontained way, within circumscribed, hallowed spaces. There is an interesting dimension to playing ‘beyond the walls’ of the museum or heritage site; in this moment the space is alive to being re-worked and reanimated. Perhaps less clear are the unspoken restrictions around the mythography of the subjects: who owns or directs those, and what that might mean for the emergence of potential counter narratives created by the artists. Their performances with capture technologies, create an unfixed and constantly evolving form: a direct copy of the original space a double but with shifting and unexpected points of view in immeasurable time periods, with their doubles the surprising and submerged occupants. These out-of-hours temporary occupations bringing props and costumes, set the scene for a gesture, movement or dance to evolve. The identities the artists adopt in response to the sites are specific, recurring and other. Being both present and also absent (through the use of disguise) is vital to the way they translate and give ‘form’ to the space. Thus duration articulates space; and practiced space becomes place.

The Double Mirror. ‘Doubling offers another disturbing and yet familiar set of personae in ways of telling the self; permutations of inner and outer selves catalyse uncanny plots about identity’ (M. Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, 2004, 161-203). This notion of doubling underpins Brass Art’s collaborative practice, enabling them to examine intimate ideas and move beyond the private self. Their intention to copy and perform others’ actions was important from the outset. The idea of using repetitive actions and sonic refrains gave them the opportunity to create a piece that would flow through the spaces of the house – moving both in and out of step with time. Thus, ‘the double’ in this work is a signifier of the uncanny experience, triggering a sense of the familiar yet strange. Sharing disguises and attempting to mimic each other’s movements and gestures results in a mirror-image performance where the protagonists ‘refuse’ to replicate their doubles. In the editing and redrawing process something unexpected occurs – the protagonists switch, move in and out of step with linear time, and extend the dream-like register of the piece. Retrospectively the artists themselves cannot always be sure who inhabits a particular role; identities are submerged and disrupted, and thus the doubling succeeds in ungrounding them. In terms of Brass Art’s creative process this playfulness is crucial.

The Haptic Light. The unnatural and inexplicable bringing to light of something (which surely ought to remain hidden) has particular resonance in Brass Art’s use of the Kinect sensor, in that it allows walls to appear permanently permeable, ‘revealing’ the reverse of the scene as the scanner rotates. The inexplicable light is comparable to the scanner-eye of the Kinect laser rolling over and skimming surfaces until it renders the scene (unseen by the artists at that point) in shimmering pixels. This supposed ‘revelation’ of the literal fabric of the building can be seen as another ungrounding – the passage from home to unhomely. The artists recall Thomas De Quincey’s development of the spatial uncanny, doomed to forever repeat the same futile movements through spaces, staircase and corridors. Anthony Vidler sees him, “… caught in a vertigo en abîme of his own making, forever climbing the unfinished stairs in the labyrinth of carceral spaces.” (A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely 1992, p.37)

During the sojourn in Freud’s house, ambient audio was simultaneously captured by electroacoustic composer Monty Adkins. He recorded fleeting and involuntary aspects of the performances and coaxed sounds out of long-dormant objects. The resulting audiovisual work takes the form of a two-screen ‘double’ digital video installation. This pixelated and seemingly fragmented re-imagining of Freud’s house reveals exactly what is there and what is ‘unseen’ as the Kinect footage appears to bisect walls. Brass Art create a dynamic exploration of the domestic interior as a site of creativity, measuring the space through their bodily presence and a virtual ‘peeling back’ of the architectural layers. The accompanying soundscape, experienced binaurally, evokes the intimacy of being in the space itself; synthesizing the gestures and movements of the artists with creative data visualisation processes. This synthesis of digital data (performance) and field recordings (site) offers a new spatial approach for electro-acoustic composition, and a novel reading of the historic/cultural sites revealed via scanners as part of a process of ‘re-translation’.

Abra: A Living Text is an interactive artwork distributed as a free app for iPhone and iPad that invites readers to play with a constantly-mutating and evolving text. Pushing at the boundaries of the book, Abra presents a text that refuses to be held to the page, refuses singular authorship, and allows the reader / viewer to make it their own. Game-like, but not a game per se, Abra is a text toy that takes advantage of algorithmic processes to decentralize authorship and create an unpredictable, unruly, generative text.

The recipient of an NEA-funded Expanded Artists’ Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, Abra: A Living Text is an exploration and celebration of the potentials of the book in the 21st century. Coupling a limited-edition hand-bound book printed with heat-sensitive ink and other features that animate print together with a free iPad and iPhone app in which readers can bring the text to life, Abra blurs the boundaries between the page and tablet as touchscreen interfaces, encouraging readers to see the book as an ever-changing form whose mutation they can participate in. The artist’s book and app can be read separately or together, with an iPad inserted into a well in the back of the book.

For consideration for the exhibitions at ISEA2016, we submit the free app, which contains the same text as the artists’ book, but which does not simply remediate it. Rather, the app takes advantage of the touch-screen interface to make Abra a customizable experience that is different each time it is read.

The app, programmed by Ian Hatcher, and collaboratively designed with authors Amaranth Borsuk and Kate Durbin, makes reference obliquely to print’s history and future. It presents poems in colors that emulate those of medieval manuscript illumination, floating on the black screen. A dial composed of rainbow-hued ornaments from a 17th-century typeface allows one to navigate through the text, which mutates helically from one verse to the next. When words are shared between lines and across stanzas, they are kept visually intact and animated to new positions, shifting into place as the dial is spun. One stanza swallows the next, an ouroboros that leads from the Abra’s first to last word: “heaving”.

As the text heaves itself into being, readers may change it as well, selecting from a toolbar at the top of the screen a number of “spells” they can cast with their fingers. “Mutate” changes words when they are touched, substituting language and emoji from the app’s lexicon based on relative symbolic similarity. “Erase” removes those words the reader touches, leaving gaps in the text. “Prune” both trims away words and closes up the space. “Graft” lets readers type in any language or symbolic set their device is capable of handling, including emoji, allowing them to paint their words into the text.

These words are added to Abra’s lexicon and can appear at will when the autonomous mutation setting is active. The “Cadabra” button casts an unpredictable spell, drawing randomly from a range of algorithmically-determined behaviors that include visual re-arrangements, animation, word transformations, selective censorship, and erasure attuned to sound and language.

When they have shaped the text to their liking, readers can share their creations using built-in screen capture and social media buttons. Abra is thus a collaboration between Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher, and a potentially infinite number of readers. The seed text – a series of conjoined poems by Borsuk and Durbin that meditate on mutation and excess, rely on unruly images that merge the digital and natural worlds, and reflect upon the hive-minded nature of collaboration itself – refuses to stay on the page. This living text adapts to its reader, absorbing new language and images and incorporating them into the constantly-changing text.

Ecstasis I is a video on 4 screens featuring the correlations between film, the war and the rides in the amusement parks and the logistics of perception in popular culture.

The rides are framed, cut: only appear on the screen some parts, fragments of the machines operating in the sky. These vessels, these articulated arms of catapults, these spears, those big wheels, trimmed with electric colored lights moving in the sky sometimes as a hypnotic tool, sometimes as a menacing machine, then sink into the hors-champ. We distinguish on some pictures, the body of viewers taken in the movement of the machine. Footages of the First and Second World War are juxtaposed to these images that evolve to a contemplative, hypnotic pace. These extracts from a documentary show the handling of weapons: machine guns, artillery and other guns. The soldiers come in. They no longer suffer the movement but they initiate it. The mechanisms of these war machines fit directly related to those used in the manufacture of rides.

Modeled colored 3D images are displayed on a fourth screen. Here the camera is subjective, the viewer becomes an actor, he holds the weapon, it has a viewfinder, advance in a reinvented and reconstructed space. The weapons are fake, the target is not defined. Everything becomes purely virtual although the images are recreated from archival images of the First World War.

Then, an explosion of colors animates the screens. abstract images, lines and shapes on the projected surfaces. Inspired by the lost files, corrupted by the machine, the virus invades the movie screens. The image transformed by the computer that failed, destroyed and sunk becomes another image that does not convey anymore information. This animation imposes a different pace to the work. The rhythm of the images is accelerating with the modernity of proven mechanisms. A series of still images, in black and white and in color from archival footage, traces the history of optics taking as a starting point the eye, dissected and diagrammed organ. The history of photography and film, from analog to digital is thus traced through this series of jerky images. Then these optical-related pictures give way to the weapons of the First and Second World War. Subliminal images of a memory, they show a rapid evolution of optical and correlations between vision, entertainment and war.

Continuing the reflection of Paul Virilio in his text “War and Cinema – Logistics of Perception” (1984), published in Cahiers du Cinema, where the author draws a parallel between the manufacture of weapons and those of optical tools, are added movements and forms of the rides amusement parks: the Ferris wheel, spear, catapult, rocket … the park was the first time in history where entertainment puts the body of the spectator in motion, using the same mechanics that arms and discoveries in optics. Thus, amusement parks are the first democratic space where every class is alongside the other. There is no difference in class on the rides unlike means of transport, the ride is the space where a person of the middle class can touch, brushing against a person of the working class, where people of different social classes are in the same area embedded into the same entertainment movement. They have the same experience in the same conditions. This democratic space is also an important concept in the concepts in Ecstasis I. In fact, the photograph appears as an accessible art medium: anyone can buy a camera from the 60s and become a photographer, make art without being part of an elite. Family, traveling, in his everyday life, photography saves fragments of reality and stages them in the frame. Finally, the war is a means for democracies to impose democracy to countries subject to other policies. War becomes a non-democratic means to impose democracy. This questioning of the war and democracy is led by Judith Butler, in particular in his book “Precarious Life: The Powers of mourning and violence” (2004).

Finally, Ecstasis I creates a hypnotic microcosm where fascination combines with fear and war becomes a menacing spectacle. Exploring the history of photography, and the association with the history of the manufacture of weapons, it highlights the dematerialization of two techniques: photography becomes digital, supports getting smaller, dematerialized while images of war are no longer shown. This video work questions the systems for recording images and paperless media. Once the digital images can be corrupted by the machine, destroyed, that there remains a culture? What images do we keep?

Ecstasis I is the first chapter in a series of works exploring the relationship between the images of war and the spectacle, the representation of war given to public through the media and issues of perception of these images and of the political climate and the consequences of this type of representation in popular culture. This work was created after a first series of photographs taken in November 2004 in Coney Island, New York, a few days after the re-election of G. Bush. This first series of black and white photographs shows a deserted amusement park. The sinister atmosphere, the end of the fun caused by Bush’s reelection are captured in this series.

The dizzying issue is also explored through the second chapter of the entire work Ecstasis, through image processing of the First Gulf War disseminated by the media as the first surgical war and the non-representation of the conflict. These intriguing pictures aims to create a reflection on representation of war in the mass media and a questioning on the picture in general by the impulse of an emotional state between an aesthetic fascination and the terrible issues raised in the work.

Panopticon I (2015) is a continuation of an ongoing series of digital still and moving image works which feature groups of digitally generated and animated groups of figures engaged in often complex activities, frequently in relationship to specifically created digital environments. These works create views of intricate digital colonies from elements which are produced in a professional 3D animation software program. Here an endlessly rotating point-of-view of a circular panoptic structure is presented, exploring conceptions of the utopian and dystopian, constructs of order and control, and the spaces between human and technological agency. The panoptic construction is populated by an ever-expanding taxonomy of animated figures, plants, objects, and architecture which interact, assemble and re-assemble, simultaneously fixed and unstable, trapped in ceaseless loops and cycles in a form of animated stasis.

The Panopticon was an institutional design concept created by 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, wherein a single watcher is able to observe all the inmates of an institution simultaneously. Inmate knowledge of this surveillance would be an effective means of self-monitored behavior control. Originally considered a progressive and enlightened solution to societal problems, the Panopticon has come to be read as a central metaphor for modern “disciplinary” societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalize, most notably by French philosopher Michel Foucault in his work Discipline and Punish (1975).

A generic animated figure is employed as a building block in this creation. The replicated figure is assembled and reassembled into units of performed actions, loops and cycles, creating ongoing series of patterns of movement vocabulary. These bodies’ movements are brought to a form of uncanny life using two methods, activated either by hand using key frame animation, or by the use of digital motion capture whereby a live performer’s bodily motion is recorded as 3D movement data, and then applied to a digital character’s skeleton. The combination of fluid captured motion with the generic digital form can lend an eerie ‘liveness’ to the figures, creating ambiguity around their status as performers with inherent agency.

Natural elements such as plants are animated using dynamic simulation tools whereby natural phenomena such as wind, gravity, bounce and friction are generated algorithmically, and can be customized by altering numerical values via software interface controls, replicating a convincing realism in natural movement which is extremely challenging and time-consuming via traditional key frame methods.

The corporeal body is transformed into proliferating avatars whose resistance to the panoptic structure seems negligible – they exhibit a range of responses from resignation, to ecstatic ritual, to enacting seemingly mindless and/or compulsive repetitive actions, and small acts of resistance to this order seem futile. Here structuring principles of cycles, loops and modularity can be seen as resisting ideals of linear progression, and time and space become ambiguous factors here – the environment rotates past the viewer situated in a kind of metaphysical ‘no-space’ reminiscent of a video game environment.

Tethered to the endless cycle of looped actions these figures resist the conventions of linear narrative progression, trapped in a kind of compulsive stasis with no clear beginning or end. They also form discreet units of action, which can be arranged and rearranged at will in the creation and construction of the work. The loop forms the most elementary form of the structures of programming language, which involves the altering of the linear flow of data structures through control structures such as the loop. Lev Manovich champions the loop as ‘a source of new possibilities for new media’, and conceptualises it as an ‘engine’ which puts narrative in motion. Loops retrieved from the ‘database’ are a ‘multitude of separate but co-existing temporalities’ – units which do not so much replace each other in a ordered flow, but are rather are already-activated elements which are composed in one of any possible sequential chains. This condition of the loop and its apparent inability to achieve resolution, or perhaps the illusion that it creates of some kind of perpetuality, recalls animator Robert Breer’s comments on metamorphic transformation:

“…time doesn’t move forward, things are going, but sideways, obliquely, down and backwards, not necessarily ahead. The sense of motion is the issue. That idea seems hard to defend, because our locomotion drives us forward with our faces looking at new things. But since that movement is toward oblivion, in my philosophy anyhow, it might as well be backward. It’s a delusion to think you are getting anywhere.”

Drawing on and remediating a range of sources including the photographic studies of Eadweard J. Muybridge, nineteenth century optical toys, and the contemporary digital video game, this work presents figures which occupy a space between the animate and the inanimate, between automata (devices that move by themselves) and simulacra (devices that simulate other things).

Another touchstone is the elaborate geometric ‘choreography’ of 1930’s Hollywood musical director Busby Berkeley which featured armies of women whose individualism is also radically reduced – as though all cast from the same mold. Here ‘their identities are completely consumed in the creation of an overall abstract design’. It is not so much choreography on display, as Lucy Fischer describes, but ‘kinetic designs’ and ‘mechanical decor’, they are ‘elaborate pre-programmed machines for action’ and ‘repetitive movement’. The association with the rhythms of mechanical movement seem always present when discussing Berkeley: Theweleit observes “the legs and hands of the line-series are not saying anything, rather they are performing something: the modus operandi of cogs, mechanical links, belt transmissions…”. They are “ornaments of the technical performed”: machinic, subject, malleable, compulsively aping technical processes. In the creation and execution of this work a hybrid space is explored where human and natural agency are uncertain: phenomena of nature are simulated algorithmically, human activity is seems essentially passive and annulled, where gesture does not follow thought or emotion, but instead is generated zombie-like by another’s will.

Consumption: Hong Kong (Vol.1) is a research-based project, which traces the relationship between private sphere of individual decision making (e.g. what to buy for dinner) and the public sphere of aggregated socioeconomic effects which we get to know from the news (company revenue, stock price, GDP, unemployment, etc.) in the specific circumstances of Hong Kong. The work consists of an artist book, a multiple-channel video and supplementary materials. All elements come together in an installation setting.

Economists like to use term ‘dollar voting’ to explain an analogy between consumer decisions and political decisions: In the same way citizens select between a number of political candidates, consumers use their dollars to select products and companies which will be the ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ of the market race. Theoretically, this example is used to highlight the ultimate power of consumers over producers.

Consumption: Hong Kong (Vol.1) traces the author’s consumer decisions during 12 months of his stay in Hong Kong (September 2013 – August 2014) and relates them to news items. It thus documents a personal narrative of a visitor, which can however be related to a more general experience of living in Hong Kong: For example the market concentration means that most people buy groceries in one of the two major supermarket chains as the author does. Also the average monthly expenditure level documented in Consumption: Hong Kong (Vol.1) is similar to that of the majority of Hong Kong households.

The project does not work with detailed assumptions but uses a ‘decision recycling’ process, where previous independent consumer decisions (decisions made during a period preceding the project itself) are used to determine the selection of the news item of each day within the monitored period, allowing for a flexible interpretation by the reader.

The Soundscapes series is part of Bar-Shai’s body of work Objectivity [tentative], a series of experiments and interventions that explores the intersection of Art, Science and Technology. Bar-Shai applies traditional lab techniques as used by scientists and artistic inquiries to visualize the “chemical tweets” of microorganisms as exceptionally beautiful and rare image patterns, while drawing a link between microbial morphogenesis and designed ecosystems. Taking inspiration from the work and research of Prof. Eshel Ben Jacob who studied “The Social Life of Bacteria”, this body of work explores the complex network and communication systems of “smart” microorganism known for its advanced social behavior, reflected in development of colonies with highly complex architecture structures. It looks into biological systems of selforganization and collective decision making, the immense complexity within seemingly simple structures, creativity and problem solving among billions of microorganisms and the process of achieving dramatically varied results with slight alterations in initial settings.

In addition to the advanced social and morphological abilities, as well as the patterns and unique structures that these microbial colonies create, what fascinates Bar-Shai is that eventually, the outcome we witness here is a visual representation of a communication system. Microbial conversation that generates an image. An ever changing, developing, evolving image. A language? A map for communication? A story? A poem? The “Soundscapes” series, on display at ISEA2016HK, part of the body of work Objectivity [tentative], looks into morphogenesis, complex social behavior and decision making of micro-organisms, using pure sound waves and a range of frequencies as a variable replacing traditional scientific factors (such as temperature, moisture, nutrients and antibiotics), to initiate the growth of complex compositional structures among bacteria colonies. The Soundscapes installation on display here, consist of petri plates with lifeless microorganisms. These living maps of bacteria social and communication systems are created using scientific technique and creative experimental practices. Audio waves are transmitted through liquid agar, a bacterium growth medium, as it solidifies, forming sound-generated topographies for the bacterium to grow on. Each outcome is unique and directly conditioned to the initial settings introduced to the bacteria – a collaboration between the microorganism and the artist.

Generated using pure sound tones and a range of frequencies.

The experimental video Hive takes a look at the unplanned urbanization, which has been paraded under the guise of “urban renewal”, Istanbul has been undergoing for many years. This unplanned urbanization creates mega cities made out of concrete, by destroying the existing historical and cultural legacy. Today, Istanbul has become a giant construction site where the terrifying reflections of the applied urban politics can be seen through the disappearance of ethnic identities, and the gap in the living conditions of individuals.

This situation is conveyed through the visualization of Marx’s bee and machine metaphor. This metaphor exemplifies how, due to the heavy work load, the workers become mechanical; how they are not only exposed to the adverse effects of this workload but even pay for it with their lives. The workers forced to work at such a speed and yet this speed leads to the creation of both abundance, but also nothingness. At the same time, the metaphor represents the impossibility for the workers to own the very building they help produce.

This video collage is a surreal visual representation of a skyscraper which consists of 160 videos containing eight horizontal and twenty vertical. It has an experimental language, leaving the traditional horizontal video format behind for a vertical design. The framing and point of view aim to create an illusion. Reality is broken in this new form created through documentary footage, where micro human figures move at a rapid pace, reflecting the speed of the world in which we live in and creating a façade of time. The momentary black pieces shows up to symbolize the death of each worker because of the security gap which is a huge social problem encountered in Turkey. And then they appear so fast with a worker again which is too easy to replace with. In this sense, Hive focuses on the workers’ working conditions, contract labor, human rights and urban renewal.