Art Events Data Table

I Sit Inside You Crying transforms images from a domestic environment into three-dimensional glitch artifacts. Images of a house in Sydney are refracted and simplified until they become abstract structures. The work explores how we make meaning in a contemporary mediascape awash with imaging platforms and their inherent glitches.

Digital archiving strives to compensate for the rapid decay or obsolescence of digital platforms, material substrates, and displays on which these works depend. Digital materials seem to have a shorter half-life than even the unstable materials used in the early eras of film-making. This condition raises key ontological and epistemological questions: What is the essence of a work? What is permanence? What is solid? How must we rethink these notions when our works are inherently fluid — when they even melt into air?

This project engages with these problems by replaying an early work of cinema on a broken contemporary device. The project consists of eight sequences from Fritz Lang’s 1931 film “M”. The series begins with “Index”, a sequence shot in Berlin’s police archives, where a fingerprint provides the first clue in the hunt for a killer. Through subsequent sequences “The Hand”, “The Hunt”, “The Cell”, “Protokoll”, “The Stairs”, “Before the Judge”, and “Cower”, the film offers a meditation on the tension between our attempts to capture, protect, preserve and place before the law on the one hand – and on the other, to escape, to elude logos.

These sequences were filmed from a malfunctioning computer monitor; the malfunction superimposed successive frames of the footage, blurring or dissolving anything which moves. The malfunctioning screen thus renders two distinct architectures: that of the moving body, fluid; and that of its spatial and material frame, super-solid.

“M”, like most of Lang’s films, is known for its use of architecture. The project translates Lang’s use of architecture, which intentionally located that medium in relation to the medium of film, into a new dissolving or reworking of architectures provoked by contemporary conditions of media, existing somewhere between digital and analogue materialities.

In considering various questions embodying the possible, we find resonance. “How to fight climate crisis and global warming?” Performance of this work serves as a time-based contemplation. It provides a space to consider how to slow, stabilize, or even reverse the effects of human behavior on climate conditions and the consequences. As the work represents shifting states of water and the language we use to name natural phenomena, we are asked to consider the interdependence of our actions to the conditions of nature as nature ourselves.
How might we relate with nature in order to transform our world so as to support continuance of its inhabitability? In relation to the witnessed realities of climate change, foregrounding “the possible unfinished real in front of us” as distinct from fostering ingrained doubt or disbelief, the work encourages the perception of current environmental challenges through rigorously focused consciousness, awareness, and iconography. Put more directly: if we don’t change we will perish; if we don’t pay attention, we’re doomed!

Considering our current circumstances,the possibleoffers an opportunity to cultivate an understanding of data-driven scientific approaches only if we sensitize ourselves to the consequences. Forced human migration, plant and animal displacement, extinction, and cultural collapse are realities we face. Data and persuasive writing may inspire intellectual engagement and artistic production, or else, at the other end of the spectrum, bring into question what many (most?) witness and experience to be normative.

The creation and performance of this work foregrounds both aesthetic and lived observation with an openness to experiential understanding. It attempts to untether us from strictly data-driven arguments, from stubborn political and contrarian opining, from self-defeating impossibility thinking, to a positive possible we can embrace.

Polar ice is the most visible yet inaccessible indicator of climate change. The effects of climate change visible in Greenland are a prelude, a four-dimensional window into deep time. The “Ice-Time” cine-installation is a poetic response to the accelerating changes we are observing in Earth’s ecosystem, investigating environmental deep time using polar ice as a unique window onto ecosophic issues of climate change. The immersive, multi-projection video and audio mediascape acts as an architecture of spatiotemporal experience, engaging the body and memory in a somatic montage – in the decoding of a tangible, spatial poem.

Glaciers are crystal tesseracts that contained the time axis of earth’s climatological history. “Ice-Time” occupies a hexagonal architecture echoing the structure of both water crystals and tesseract shadows in three-space. The ambisonic audio occupies the space as a sonic matrix of possibilities – a glacier-like, fluid landscape that changes with the listener’s attention, position, and trajectory. Through a vivid, material presence of image, sound, data, and time, the immersive installation establishes an embodied, dynamic interaction of form and content. The “Ice-Time” mediascape allows the beholder a sentient, intrinsic experience of the environmental implications of polar ice and the essential role ice plays in anthropogenic climate change.

Exhibition. Centre Culturel Canadien, May 16 – 20

The work entitled If U Seek Amy is a role-playing game (RPG) that explores the duality between a pop star’s public persona and her private life, the overlap between the two, and the steps taken to keep them separate. The project also explores the fascination of a young queer person – namely the one who created this game – with this star and questions the boundary between sincerity and performance in this admiration. The two protagonists live a quest for identity each in their own way through what they project voluntarily or not, what is said about them, what they internalize from the perception of others and what they reject.

A true tribute to Britney Spears, this game explores with a touch of humor the different ways in which she has integrated the popular consciousness, whether through memes, unusual remixes of her songs, the legends she generates or her most famous quotes. In this way, the work reveals how people reappropriate an icon to address the special and one-way bond between a celebrity and her fans.

A simple gesture of hand clapping – flickering big and small on the ICC building – creates a mechanical texture of light and is accompanied by sounds of both clapping hands and electronic beats. In the age of overflowing electronic gadgets and sophisticated technologies, even a straightforward expression becomes overcomplicated. All the same, we still become enraptured in the glowing moments of the city and lights.

14 sec towards carbon neutrality or the point of no return With this new series, Diane Drubay plays with colour-psychology to create an immersion that is both fascinating and shattering. She takes the viewer into an idealized vision of a world where interference colours cover the sky, creating a subjugating sense of calm. In this piece, seconds become years. Gradually this mesmerizing world is being transformed into a darker, but equally fascinating vision.

14 seconds to experience the metamorphosis of utopia into dystopia. 14 years to reach carbon neutrality or the point of no return. Her speculative visions are drawn by the aesthetics of social science fiction literature and current climate science discoveries. She advocates for optimistic images interpreting shocking stories of possible futures.

Imaginary Sunset is an AI-generated video that investigates how technology interprets collective memory experience. The machine learning model generates a set of fictional landscape pictures using a dataset of sunset and dusk photographs taken by individuals around the globe on social media platforms in 2020. It explored how artificial intelligence is being used to interrogate between reality and fake and is supposed to recreate memories about the pandemic lockdown from a machinery perspective. The dusk landscape is a typical and commonplace photographic subject. Even so, in the midst of the worldwide pandemic, it takes on a significance that cuts over cultural and political boundaries, as though as a symbol of humanity observing the times.

This project utilizes visualization and sonification of portions of an enormous historical CBC Newsworld data corpus to enable an ‘on this day’ experience for viewers.

This project utilizes visualization and sonification of portions of an enormous historical CBC Newsworld data corpus to enable an ‘on this day’ experience for viewers.

Host imatges. Parasitology of vision and other symbiosis studies artificial vision and its nature of parasite of images. If until recently images were opaque to data extraction, artificial vision tools break down that resistance and operate today behind any image that circulates in a digital environment. We could say that images have increased its thickness; what a camera captures is no longer just an image but also the starting point of all kind of processes that adhere to it to extract their nourishment. Host imatges show these processes by laminating their operation layer by layer and leaving visible only what they extract.

A series of video recordings of an urban environment have been processed with four artificial neural networks –devoted to different tasks: object recognition, segmentation, pose detection and depth inference– isolating the graphic output of each of them. The installation show these images running in sync. Their sum does not reconstruct the original image but only discrete aspects of it –which elements are considered important and which are not is the basis at the design of these tools–. The set of screens allows us to see each of these processes separately, as a first step to ask ourselves about their operations and uses.

Made within the Immaterial 2021 call of Tabakalera – Medialab (Donostia)

iMine was created to help all of us come to terms with the dark material reality brooding behind the luminous utopianism of the digital age. Through a networked game interface, users are brought into the world of mining raw materials for electronic components.

Exhibition, Interactive installation, Forum des images, May 18-21

Designed as an interactive installation, Immaterial Display immerses its visitors in a multi-layered journey that expands on their own actions and is therefore always unique. The spectator is therefore not only an observer, but also an actor who delves into a digital experience of which they have full control. It grants them the ability to roam through space, select, and approach the numerous exhibited objects in two fundamentally different digital models of two past landmark exhibitions: Les Immatériaux (1985, Centre Pompidou, Paris) and Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (2002, ZKM).

The exhibition models were developed by research teams at the institutions where the shows were staged at. A digital model, being an interactive presentation of exhibition concepts, is a novel approach to the exploration of exhibition histories, as well as to the themes, curatorial methods, and engagement with representation and mediation these exhibitions brought about. These models are not “digital twins”, in other words virtual copies of past assemblages of artifacts and the surrounding architecture, but rather the digital transposition of the exhibitions in an experiential manner, in line with their curatorial concept, was set as a goal.

Generating an exhibition through an immaterial constellation on a digital display was previously explored by Jeffrey Shaw through his installation The Virtual Museum (1999), a vital reference for the current project. The Immaterial Display is comprised of a screen as display. The current installation is equipped with a “driver’s seat” – a term used by Shaw to describe a chair that comes with a hand-held controller in which an incorporated self-regulating joystick offers inclusive accessibility. In both mechanisms the system is intuitive and is able to detect front/back, left/right, up/down directions, offering a complete range of motion and visual perspective as a result.

The Immaterial Display establishes a connection between virtual and real space, linking the featured exhibition models, and their respective institution with its own scenography and the area where it is physically located. Moreover it interconnects the two exhibitions with one another, while at the same time bridging the gap across time, space and spheres.

Research team:
Corina Apostol (Tallinn Art Hall)
Philippe Bettinelli (Centre Pompidou)
Julie Champion (Centre Pompidou)
Adela Demetja (Tirana Art Lab)
Lily Díaz-Kommonen (Aalto University)
Felix Koberstein (ZKM | Karlsruhe)
Marcella Lista (Centre Pompidou)
Cvijeta Miljak (Aalto University)
Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (ZKM | Karlsruhe)

Head of project: Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (ZKM | Karlsruhe)
Technical management: Thomas Schwab
Display Design: Commonplace Studio
User Interface development: Matthias Heckel

On May 21, team members from Centre Pompidou, Paris and ZKM | Karlsruhe Philippe Bettinelli, Marcella Lista, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás and Marie Vicet will join a panel as part of the symposium program to talk about the exhibition Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter. Past Exhibitions as Digital Experience.

“Immersed” is a video installation specifically created for the Open Sky Project in Hong Kong. This project transforms the ICC LED Façade to a huge water tank where color inks create nice swirling patterns while they get mixed in the water. Audience may feel immersed and relaxed from the dynamic movements of water. We acknowledge immersion as a primary aesthetic phenomenon because the immersive experience is fundamental to our senses, realized through bodily interaction in its wholeness. Immersion in this project means that mind, body and environment interweave and communicate with each other through the technically mediated and illusionary space.

In Search of Aztlan… is an intervention-based work that follows the artist as he explores the territory around his childhood home looking for an understanding of his Chicanx heritage and in doing so cracks a window into the US/MX border. By merging dashcam videos, along with audio recordings of radio signals, the work explores how borders, both physical and psychological, shape our individual and collective identities.

In silico et in situ proposes to take the art out of the gallery and into the environment by creating site-specific installations through the use of 3D scanning and printing technology. After manipulating the source material virtually (in silico) with 3D software, the sculptures are physically manifested through the use 3D printing in a variety of materials and then placed back into either nature or the urban environment (in situ), where the source material was harvested (3D scanned) or inspired from. As the pieces become publicly accessible they allow for a playful discovery of the work. The landscape is intricately linked with the artwork, converging in the creation of contemporary voxel sculptures. In silico et in situ fauna habitats (Pollinator waters, Spider Rings and Turtle platforms) are developed via 3D printing to co-exist as sculptures and fauna habitats.

This installation creates a gap in the goal-directed organization of the data world, allowing access to meta-space and offering an immersive meat-verse experience in real space.

There is an interrelation in everything in life and every dimension. This connectedness can be observed in living and non-living beings and our memories. The project “In the Gap of Data World” with its immersive installation will make the invisible tracks of these interrelations visible.

The research art project In the Gap was realized through workshops, in-depth interviews with mathematicians, and round tables with scientists to reveal the invisible workings of life and to develop new practices with an open relationship to today’s digitized technology, in collaboration with Seçkin Maden and Abel Korinsky.

This project relates to the main concepts of “order and organize.” We can observe the order in life, but organizing is a goal-directed approach. Neumann implied that “order lacks end-directedness, but organization is end-directed.” The way we use technological equipment is mainly for classifying and organizing, which is an end-directed approach. If we aim to realize enhanced experiences, we need an open relationship with technology that can create generative experiences. This can lead us to discover meta-space and experience the invisible aspects of life.

The project was aimed at opening a gap in the data world and creating new practices that integrate with the integrity of life.

While humans are dreaming, the physical human body exists, but does not ‘exist’ in our perception. Human consciousness constantly moves back and forth between the boundary. During this process, we experience surreal and random senses in the virtual space called a dream, and it symbolizes an aspect of unpredictable possibilities of humanity.
In the Gray is a Virtual Reality film that probes into the relationship between error and humanity in human dreams so that artificial intelligence can perfectly mimic mankind. The title ‘Gray’ symbolizes a variable area that cannot easily be dealt with in a world where black and white are clear-cut and that there are numerous random layers that exist between clarity and obscurity. This work depicts a conversation of artificial intelligence and a dreaming human being in the beginning, and it unravels the contemplation on ‘humanness’ that is illustrated through error and incompleteness in virtual reality.

This artwork was created with the support of ZER01NE.

In the Time of Clouds is a mixed-media installation that utilizes the networked “cloud” to explore our collective sensorial relationship to the sky. The project responds to a February 2019 Nature Geoscience article that speculates about rising carbon dioxide levels leading to a possible future without clouds. The project attempts to archive these ephemeral forms and document their influence on our collective imagination before they disappear from our atmosphere forever. Utilizing both social media discourse about clouds and live video streams from public observatory cameras, the project amalgamates linguistic and visual data, mining this data to create an atmospheric triptych of poetry, ice cream, and ceramics.

The installation is composed of three intertwined parts: Part I (The Observatories), a series of videos that combine algorithmically generated poems and livestreams from networked observatory webcams; Part II (Terracotta Clouds), a collection of handbuilt dessert wares based on unique cloud forms culled from the videos; and Part III (Cloud Ice Cream), an ice cream whose flavor profile is derived from social media discourse speculating about the taste of clouds, a “cloud ice cream”.

In Transition is mixed media installation based on slow motion footage captured in many different locations around the Earth.

The project was built around the idea of uncertainty. Both garments are activated by the spectator’s voice.

If the earth beneath our feet could speak … Incompatible Elements: version 02 re-presents the relationship between nature and culture by reconfiguring land as active rather than neutral, verbal rather than mute, and therefore able to comment directly on the impacts of climate change. Building on the long tradition of artists combining text and image to communicate ideas and concepts, poetic texts are digitally embedded into satellite images of landscapes in crisis. In each digital print and video these texts reveal themselves dynamically, growing out of the landscape in different ways, the text design and method of reveal reflecting the qualities of the landscape. The focus is the Asia-Pacific region, with texts sourced from local custodians or appropriate works of literature.

The future of the universe is uncertain, but there are many theories on how it may end. The history of mankind is very short and we are just a small chapter in the timespan of the world’s journey across time and space. Against the backdrop of this eternal flow of time towards our end, it is strangely comforting to know that our own human struggles on this pale blue dot are but small and temporary in the scale of the larger scheme of things. We are but specks of dust against the repeating cycles of creation and destruction.

Performance, Focus Québec Programme, Le Cube Garges, May 19-20

You are invited to live this human/ machine symbiosis by participating in this extraordinary robotic performance, Inferno, at Le Cube Gagres, executive producer of ISEA2023. Inferno is a participative robotic performance, an absolutely unique show. In this 75-minute involuntary choreography for 2 x 24 participants, the latter wear an exoskeleton that allows the artists to control their movements in synchronization with the music.

In addition to the 18 exoskeletons, electronic music and lighting, the version presented at the Focus Québec ISEA2023 is augmented, with the addition of video and robotic cameras. The result is a unique immersive experience that participants will not soon forget.

The specificity of the performance lies in the fact that the portable robotic structures or exoskeletons created by the artists are installed on the bodies of volunteers from the audience. The participants become an active part of the performance: sometimes they are free to move, sometimes they are in a position of partial or total submission, forced by the machines to act/react in a certain way.

Inferno takes its inspiration from the representation of the different levels of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno or the Singaporean Haw Par Villa’s Ten Courts of Hell (which is based on a Chinese Buddhist representation). In Inferno, the concept of “circles of hell” is mainly an artistic framework, a general working theme under which the different parts of the performance are grouped.

Focus Québec is presented with the support of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications, the Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie as part of the Year of Franco-Quebec Innovation, under the auspices of the Délégation générale du Québec à Paris.

Infodemic is a neural network-generated video that questions the mediated narratives created by social media influencers and celebrities about the coronavirus. The speakers featured in the video are an amalgam of celebrities, influencers, politicians, and tech moguls that have contributed to the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus by amplifying rumors, repeating narratives that are contrary to those of official health agencies, or developing technologies that amplify untrue content.

The talking heads in Infodemic are generated using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that predicts the pixels for each frame of a video through an algorithmic process similar to those used by search engines and social media news feeds. Search and content recommendation algorithms that once promised to provide access to more information and enable the public to make well-informed decisions have actually made it more difficult to find accurate information on important and politically-charged topics. There is a disconnect between the optimistic Possibles promised by the technocratic elite and the dangers posed by a power structure that can hide behind proprietary algorithms and circumvent criticism due to a general public’s limited technological understanding.

The cGAN in Infodemic was trained on a corpora of multiple individuals simultaneously. The result is a talking head that morphs between different speakers or becomes a glitchy Frankensteinian hybrid of different people that contributed to the current infodemic speaking the words of academics, medical experts, or journalists that are correcting false narratives or explaining how misinformation is created and spread. The plastic, evolving, and unstable speakers in the video evoke the mutation of the coronavirus, the instability of truth, and the limits of knowledge.

Can data form a habitat for life? “Infranet” is a generative artwork–installed in three international cities since 2018–in which a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks thrive upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the host city as their sustenance and canvas. The found data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system in which non-human beings flourish by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. Born curious, they form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions.

Artificial Nature is a family of interactive artworks by Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield spanning fifty international exhibits since 2007. These installations invite humans to become part of biologically-inspired complex systems through immersive mixed reality, using computation to plunge deeply into what nature is and find our place within it.

Performance, La Muse en Circuit, Alfortville, May 17

Immersive performance with audio-reactive electronics, video and 3D
Annabelle Playe, Marc Siffert & Hugo Arcier, are ISEA2023 selected artists

Passages, crossings and metamorphoses weave the odyssey of InLAND | come back in broad day. These universes are explored live as a 3D video game in which we wander. This exploration is carried out on site or remotely with Discord gamer tool.

InLAND is a hybrid project between electronic lutherie, digital art and video game “let’s play”. The performance draws as much from the tools of creating games as from its abundant visual culture, creating a porosity between the two worlds. InLAND opens the doors to a meta universe, where artists explore the notions of passages, crossings and metamorphoses…
Annabelle Playe will be the guest of Laurent Vilarem for his program ‘Journal de la création’ (France Musique) on Sunday May 14 .

Annabelle Playe: concept, composition, live electronics, voices
Marc Siffert: composition, live electronics
Hugo Arcier: video of audio-generated sythetic 3D imagery
Estelle Bordaçarre: body work
Halory Georger: visual design
Dorota Kleszcz: costumes
Perrine Cado: lighting
Samuel Herbreteau: direction
Production : AnA Compagnie
Coproduction : Scènes Croisées de Lozère, Biennale NEMO, Ville de Mende

Focus Québec Exhibition. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21

Inscape, 2019
Print installation
Inscape is a single channel video mixing 3D animation and video synthesis. By an interplay between points of views, depth of fields and textures, new details are revealed, transforming the space into abstract compositions. Inspired by the paintings of Kay Sage, Inscape depicts a psychological landscape, where perspectives are constantly shifting.
Print installation, 115x172cm
​Installation is on loan from Galerie Charlot

Two years after the Tunnel Under the Atlantic was developed, the Paris – New Delhi Tunnel connected France and India, confronting historical references and languages. In 1995 and 1997, during the digging, a virtual director recorded and edited the process of humans connecting with humans, what MoBen included later under the concept of H2H interaction.

In 1995, when the Web was just emerging, Maurice Benayoun created a virtual underground world using images from the collection of French National Museums and the Museum of Civilizations, Quebec. The work took place simultaneously at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal – linking the two cities in the world’s first virtual Tunnel Under the Atlantic. Images from the museum collections formed “cultural obstacles” that visitors had to dig through in Paris and Montreal respectively, led by nothing other than sound and music composed by Martin Matalon in order to meet each other.
Unlike the virtual reality technologies prior to this, which worked predominantly with predetermined, fixed virtual environments, the structure of the virtual tunnels are a formless mass of data and uninformed matter until the user makes certain decisions. The users are thus the pioneering navigators of a constellation of information points that shift based on their input. Benayoun had conceived of a society of intelligent virtual agents, each of whom facilitates the user to discover this virtual environment, while also producing artworks within this world. The team consists of:
• The Librarian: a content manager – draws up the images from the museum collections,
anticipating visitors’ desires.
• The Architect: facilitates the digging into these images to form the tunnels
• The Video Director: shoots and edits footage of the entire journey in real time
• The Photo Reporter: captures still shots of the tunnel digging and all the “galleries” created by the participants
• The Composer: composes music and manages the audio mixing in real time
Each agent evolves, improving their skills and changing their topics or their resources, learning alongside the participants.
In his 1995 review of the Tunnel Under the Atlantic published in Le Monde, Jean-Paul Fargier describes the experience of digging as, “indeed entering images. Not only in what they represent, but in their very fabric. Walking, discovering secret channels, curling up in their folds, being lost in their frames, watching them throb, and bouncing from one to the other like playing hopscotch in an infinite curve”.

The work,Tunnel Under the Atlantic is recognized as the:
· First intercontinental virtual reality installation;
· First virtual reality installation with real time dynamic
· architecture, and;
· First virtual video director;
· First virtual photo reporter;
· First virtual librarian using artificial intelligence;
· First virtual composer;
· First real time video meeting inside a virtual reality environment;
· First user centric content in a virtual reality environment.

Original work of art: One Hundred Horses by Giuseppe Castiglione

Chinese panoramic scroll paintings were originally designed to be laid on a table and rolled from one end to the other. As a consequence the scroll’s iconographic narrative would gradually reveal itself as it passed beneath the viewer’s gaze. To reconstitute this manner of reading the over seven-meter long “One Hundred Horses” scroll, this interactive installation lets the viewer with handles with which to unroll a full size digital facsimile of the painting across a video screen mounted in a table.

Original work of art: Folding fan with painting by Giuseppe Castiglione and calligraphy by Zhang Ruoai

A 3D computer graphic representation of this fan is shown on a large video screen. It can be interactively folded and unfolded by the viewer by turning a knob mounted on a plynth in front of it.

Interactive Glowing Cube is an immersion experience of Emirati life stories written through Facets Short Stories.

Intersection*ology is an experimental stage piece and art installation-in-motion co-created and performed by artists Lori Hepner and Kendra Ross. The piece consists of lighting, image and video elements designed by Hepner in conjunction with musical compositions by Ross with their collaborative movement throughout. Working at the intersection between art, gender, race, and technology, Hepner & Ross use light, sound, movement, and image to situate memories of the feminine past and corporeality in the natural world into new, technologically mediated locations and spaces. The artists insert sonic and image-based queries at particular points in how they process women’s pasts into future technological landscapes of digital information. In doing so, Hepner & Ross explore how their physical, female selves are adapting, morphing, rejoicing and revolting to/in how they are perceived both physically and digitally, as their digital ecologies grow parallel to that of their physical ecologies in this new space.

Focusing on the Red Sea coral reefs during her artists-in-labs residency at the Integrated Ocean Processes Research Group at the Red Sea Research Center, Sandra Kühne explored ways to showcase different themes of interaction, balance and symbiosis through her art.

InTouch Wearables is a set of wearables that consist of dresses and shoulder pieces that allow mother and child share remote touches through garments with ambient feedback. This was developed to explore how remote touches can convey emotion and help people stay connected between remote locations. This project was created based on the lead artist’s personal experience with her child. In InTouch Wearables, a parent can increase the vividness of her conversation with a child through contextualized touch, and the loved ones may enhance the affective tone of their communication using a remote touch technology. All the electronic components of the garment for sensing human touches and actuating color-changing garment are integrated on the main fabrics. If accepted, we will be available to exhibit two dresses and four shoulder pieces on mannequins and hangers. Audience will be able to touch and activate interaction between garments.

IN_SIDE VIEW is an installation whereby the viewer, seated in a chair, is able to explore a series of stereoscopic panoramic photos using a Samsung Gear VR head mounted display. Turning the chair rotates these panoramic scenes, which offer a conjunction of photos of Angkor Wat showing foliage amalgamated with stone, and of the interior of a Sydney hardware store after it had been ravaged by fire. The viewer controls these changes of scene using a tongue-operated switch that is held in their mouth.

In IN_SIDE VIEW senses are senselessly conjoined, the world put back together, in side out in the circle of confusion, amongst trees / stone scaled / snake roots // eyed / tongue in cheek / switchback // past / future / present // cable / tie // wrap / around // heady / giddy / techy / tacky / vroom // memory / aromatic / terror // ruination / fervid bedlam. The wherewith-all in_side a pataphysical allegory for the multi-sensory encounter between the body and the perceptual imaginary, between nature, manufacture and ataxia.

Software: Leith Chan
Production: ALiVE/ACIM, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong
Photography: Volker Kuchelmeister, Jeffrey Shaw

The accompanying video is the summary of my iPhone life performance at the ISEA2016 closing party at the Cattle Depot in Hong Kong. The show hk_reload is curated by Ellen Pau.

I propose that the idea of Afrofuturism can be much more than just a visual and academic field of interest, and I want to examine the extent and modes in which Afrofuturism emerges as a black consciousness movement for the upcoming and current young generation. In a context of under-development, displacement of people, the erosion and/ conflation of ethnic culture in the face of transnational corporation determined to extract material and cultural wealth from Africa, I suggest that Afrofuturism presents as a counter-narrative to Afro-pessimism. We live in an age of self-visualization, this visual composite of self affects personality, self-worth and how young African generations see themselves in relation to the rest of the world. I wish to suggest in my research that Afrofuturism has the potential to help many young Africans imagine futures not shaped by colonialism and racism. Through the development of digital art focussed on African futures, I propose on indigenous ways of knowing and being, arts, healing practices and  scientific innovation, to offer an entry point or a lens through which postcolonial futures can be imagined. Through a digital art project, I hope to spark a conversation and debates, not only about what futures are possible but also what aspects of our collective history will survive in such a future.

Tindrà lloc aquí a Barcelona (It will happen here in Barcelona) is an immersive experience that reframes questions of sea-level rise, migration and extinction, in which familiar places — and the memories and dreams that attend them — are transformed by rising waters; the work gives rise to acts of recognition, utterance and transformation. Viewers travel along the marshlands and industrial wastelands of our local watershed and others worldwide that are shaped by industrialization. The sounds, images and text flow like waters, following a computer-code based system that gathers materials together in ever-changing experiences. Like ocean tides, the code-driven work is always changing. Roderick Coover’s images, gathered over the past decade from journeys on and around shorelines, combine with field recordings, voices and electronic music composed by Adam Vidiksis. Nick Montfort draws from Coover’s logs to create a continually evolving, poetic text.

The remarkable spectacle reveals forces of flow, floods and chemical contamination. Visitors plunge into the imaginaries of times present and future in a work that attempts to put into words the unspeakable threats posed to existence, time and belonging. Disruptions of language, spatial disorientation and fragmented media propel users to refigure history and give utterance to current crises. Written observations and images filmed at local industrial, post-industrial and natural sites are entered into the system to merge like images of other shores to intermingle histories, conditions and consequences as well as suggesting local differences. The music and sound design accentuate the collision of natural and industrial rhythms and the power of irrational forces, evoking imagined futures through dream-like sequences and by moving between surface and submerged realities and sentience. By compressing and distorting the scales of time that normally confound human imagination and undermine human action, the work opens possibilities for recognition, utterance, connection and action.

Itówapi Čík’ala (Little Picture), developed by Suzanne Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) and Devin Ronneberg (Native Hawaiian descent), interrogates the relationships between human and non-human entities and intelligences. Through Oglála Lakȟóta ontologies, even materials such as metals, rocks, and minerals can be capable of volition. By considering the ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’ capabilities of nonhuman entities, a method of engagement reliant upon mutual respect and responsibility becomes possible. As Itówapi Čík’ala (Little Picture) speaks, listeners may respond to it by bending and moving its braids, affecting the sounds.

This project continues Melikhaya Noqamza’s investigation into transhumanism, the merging of human consciousness with machines, which he sees as the future of mankind. It also comments on the symbiotic relationship of the old and the new. The new is reliant on the old physical form of a human being’s consciousness to become more than glorified remote controls. Transhumanism is the height of machinery, which is artificial intelligence combining with the height of human evolution. Steve Jobs didn’t simply create machinery: he created himself as a machine. Apple products have been based on one man’s visions for a greater part of their existence. The work drew inspiration from Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha, where he places a TV (representing modern day enlightenment) opposite a statue of a Buddha,  representative of traditional enlightenment and self-reflection.

The MAIF Social Club exhibition Le Chant des Forêts presents an additional immersive work, a journey through time, into the Mayan forests.

The Maya are one of the oldest civilizations in America. Their history is marked by many upheavals that could be linked, at least in part, to the relationship they had with their environment. It is considered today that the Maya abandoned their cities because of a devastating drought that took place between 730 and 900.

Itzan is an archaeological site located in northern Guatemala. Produced by digital artist Timothy Thomasson and researcher Benjamin Keenan, the artwork called ITZAN converts biological and geological data collected on site into a film that accurately represents the evolution of the population, vegetation and climate over 6,000 years.

The work also speaks to our own times and the ever-present need for reorganization and resilience.

For a total immersion in the forest, you can enjoy a free visit in the exhibition Le Chant des Forêts.

What happens when an everyday encounter becomes not so everyday? This interactive installation explores the boundaries between what’s OK and what’s not in daily life. Participants become performers in a drama in which they have little control. Animated frame-by-frame using paper puppets and a diorama of a train line, the work is a stand-alone cabinet of wonders. Interact with the work and transform yourself into someone quite unexpected.

Jacob Wrestling With The Angel consists of a video camera attached to a motorized camera mount, a video monitor and a number of objects arranged in a semi-circle around the camera. The motor rotates the camera similar to an airport surveillance camera. As the camera pans around the room, the motor pauses it as it points at each object. The objects are recorded on video tape along with audio tones which start and stop the motor. On play-back the camera pans around the room, stopping at each object as it did when the objects were recorded. To the viewer, it appears that the camera is “looking” at each object and displaying them on the video monitor. However, the camera is no longer on. The video monitor is showing pre-recorded images. The objects have all changed over time. Flowers which were fresh when the video was recorded now lie wilted on the floor; the monitor shows a block of ice in a pan, on the floor there is now a pan of water, etc. A position sensor attached to the motor sends information to an Apple II computer which changes this information to audio tones which are recorded on the video tape along with the video picture. On play-back the audio tones are sent back to the computer, and converted back to position information. The computer compares the position that was originally recorded, with the current position and can speed up the motor that the camera is mounted on, to synchronize the past to the present movement.

Junkspace is a time- and location-sensitive video installation and corresponding iOS App that highlights two forms of waste. Earthbound (electronic waste) are the remnants of the many devices that fill our lives, transformed from objects of desire to trash through a self perpetuating cycle of obsolescence. Celestial (orbital debris) consists of the millions of pieces of junk currently circling the Earth, left behind by decades of satellite and space missions.

From one extreme to another …
By juxtaposing two radically different environments, the Tasmanian wilderness and the extreme urban development of Hong Kong, this interactive installation explores place and representation. In an apparently endless stereoscopic 3D giga-pixel panoramic montage, the two locations merge seamlessly from one into another as the observer manually turns the circular ‘screen’ to control both the viewpoint and the related soundscape.
Supported by  COFA (College of Fine Arts), UNSW, the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research and ASPERA Australian Screen Production Education & Research Association.

Apr 2 – Sep 3

On the occasion of her new exhibition at the Maubuisson Abbey, Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves narrates in her own way the intersecting destinies of man and the cosmos. Most notably inspired by ancient Egyptian stories on immortality and the nocturnal journey of the solar god Ra on his boat, she invites the spectators on a poetic and metaphysical trip to the land of shadows and reborn light.

Through mirrors and sculptures in which light plays a predominant role, the artist questions the deep fields of space and time. She questions humanity’s relation to the beyond through the cycle of matter within the universe, the birth and death of stars. Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves provides enough to make us dream as well as meditate : of which distant dreams are we the memory ?
Text by Olivier Schefer, writer and philosopher

Between art, astrophysics and mythology, Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves did not want to make a choice. From his many loves was born the exhibition Khépri, going out to the day, which we discover after a trip by RER C to the Abbey of Maubuisson. The art center of 95, through its spiritual past, is charged with a particular energy which gives the cosmic works of the visual artist another dimension.

An invitation to silence, the exhibition alternates spectacular installations, luminous sculptures and colorful paintings to explore the relationship between Man and the cosmos. While the first space invites us to follow the course of the Sun from Mars, a gigantic reproduction of an ultra-photogenic eclipse announces the penumbra and reveals the masterpieces of this exhibition: three Nekromanteion which make the room of the Nuns shine. These large luminous mirrors are transformed into openings on the world which reflect each other indefinitely, revealing dark nebulae. What the scientific world has long taken for black holes actually hides the birth of stars, and it is tirelessly that we watch them come into the world and then die out, to the rhythm of a sound installation by Marc Billon.

Nothing escapes in the end, and we poor mortals are made of the same stuff as the stars. A link highlighted in the last spaces of the exhibition which also question renewal. When a star explodes, a whole universe is created. What happens when it’s our turn to shut down?
_Zoé Kennedylundi in Time Out Paris (17.07.2023)

This artwork uses an EEG headset to provide luminescent biofeedback on a participant’s level of focus and stillness. It measures Beta waves, associated with attention, and Theta brainwaves, associated with drowsiness, and motion with an accelerometer [1,2]. This information is visualized on a custom reflected light LED display, and changes color and pattern based on a deterministic flocking algorithm, shown in the included image. Since each LED’s position is fixed, the flock does not progress through XY planer space but through RGB color space. After establishing baseline values, the participant’s Beta and Theta power influence the alignment and separation of the flock respectively. With high focus the color of the display becomes uniform and monochromatic as each LED tries to align its color with its neighbors. When distracted the colors separate as each LED tries to become unique in color.

Life on a shelf as a snowman trapped in a snow-globe blizzard can become wearing, especially when you’re surrounded by knickknacks from sunnier locales. When the jaded snowman finally breaks free of his glass house, his vacation plans are cut short.

The artwork seeks to create a peaceful space where we can explore the nature of our universal connection through shared genetic code. DNA is the technology of life, and the piece utilizes modern technology to express our biological code in novel, accessible ways. By transforming the raw DNA sequence data for a set of individuals into music, and sampling a single chromosome from each person to create the final composition, our individuality and collective connectedness are simultaneously celebrated. The stone circle becomes a comfortable womb in which the participants can experience and reflect on the beauty of existence and the core connection we have to each other, with the projected visuals from above making the participants themselves a central component of the artwork while they explore the space. The tactile and multi-sensory nature of the piece reveals what is otherwise abstract in a visceral and universal way that is hoped to inspire discussion and profound wonder… and above all, bring us together

“Kryophone“ is a sonorous and luminous interactive sculpture made of ice reacts to the electrostatic touch of bodies. Sounds and light evolve according to the intensity of contacts. At the same time the human heat will transform and model in a new way the ice sculpture.This fragile sculpture invites audience to question our relationship with the environment.The interaction with the sculpture is necessary in order to generate sound and light, but the heat of each touch will transform, influence slowly it shape. Qualities of shape, density and transparency will evolve according to the unpredictable melt generated by human heat and climatic variations. The sculpture represents an icosahedron: symbol of water, among one of the five solids of Plato. The sonorous feedbacks evoke liquid, organic, fragile and deep matter. This artwork renders visible imperceptible exchanges.

The work is a fragment of a digital image extracted from an exhibition project entitled Poétique D’Un Instant that explores the infinity of a moment lived under a waterfall. Later, as a co-artist, Jaime de los Ríos joined the project, to create a macro project that redefines and expands the physical, intellectual and artistic dimensions of the work.

This work was made by Marie-France Veyrat at the beginning of the project. It refers in particular to the evocation of different textures and dimensions that flowing water offers.

Light. Joy. Playground.
Starry and emotionally warm lights bloom out and reach to your heart. Light, the first thing of the beginning interacts to your motions. It actively responds to you by bursting with positive energy.
LamX is an interactive light artwork that simulates the light talking to you. Physical light bulbs with digital light waves make a mixed reality and unique environment. It is a delightful dialogue, an aesthetic scene, and a beautiful moment. When redefining the light in the artistic language, Lee was interested in how light spreads out and fills the air when it slows down. With the question “How does light interact when considered a living creature?”, LamX was given a personality which is shown through the choreography of lighting.
When interacting with LamX, the light leads and follows the viewer wherever one goes. It is positive and waiting to play with humans. It calls and invites the viewer to the playground and shelter. Lee often brings rain into his artwork as a sample of immersive sound and dynamic reactions. Rain to him symbolizes the power of life that comes alive by its movement. Rain fills the air emotionally like a light. He borrowed it, the result making the analog emotions of light richer. He uses round and line which are 0 and 1, as primary graphic elements. The binary codes are aligned with wires, light bulbs, and ripples. LamX also has two light shows full of emotional scenes and story-telling. It is a 7min-length unique light show that performs at a certain time with motion graphics, lightings, and motivating emotional music that has been composed and performed by Lee.

Interrogating intersecting modalities and technologies of power that reproduce colonial legacies in the everyday, Farouk works towards carving out spaces for playing with, looking at, discussing, speaking alongside/performing alternative and hidden archives. The way in which questions of gender, race, sexuality, class and the body/ embodied intersect with food, eating and foodways, can reveal a great deal about the ways in which colo- niality is reproduced as well as resisted, reimagined and unsettled in the present. Ismail wants to delve into these spaces of the intimate, the visceral, the eaten, the edible and practices of consumption in order to unsettle his own sensory and epistemic geographies of meaning, towards imagining alternate possibilities.

In 2021 Dement and Brown were awarded an ANAT Synapse Residency and CreateNSW grant to collaborate with Dr. Carmine Gentile and his Cardiovascular Regeneration Group, School of Bioengineering, University of Technology Sydney.

Cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and heart failure, is the leading cause of death worldwide. Dr Gentile’s multidisciplinary team has created a novel way to 3D bioprint heart tissues using patients’ own cells to repair heart damage and regain cardiac muscle function. Cells isolated from skin or blood are used to generate stem cells and then transformed into heart cells. Using state-of-the-art facilities, Dr Gentile has developed a new way to form ‘cardiac spheroids’–clusters of cardiac cells–which contract or beat synchronously to produce patches for damaged hearts.

May 2021 artist George Schwarz died from cardiac failure and Linda recorded his last breaths. Audio values were retrieved to generate sequential images of 2D geometry. We imported these images into 3D Slicer (software normally used to create 3D models from MRI or CT scans)  as if we had run an MRI scan on sound rather than a body.

We printed models first in hydrogel to discover shape, consistency, size, and then with live cardiac spheroids, on a LumenX bioprinter which uses crossbeams of light to harden light sensitive gel, printing upwards in 100 micron layers, substance emerging from liquid under violet light.

Through this project, human cardiac failure, expelled as breath and recorded as sound, is transfigured to 3D form as terra-firma for growth of human yet inhuman life.

This artwork responds to the research of the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group. Their work traverses terrains of life and death, bodies and technologies, human and inhuman, the strained edges of wounded hearts and the stretching extremities of bio-technical possibility.

Every hour since 1999 Stephen Cartwright has recorded his exact latitude and longitude with a GPS to create multi-media art offering a unique perspective of a transit through life.

Lavoro Macchinine is a collaboration between Alexis Grey Hildreth (moving image) and Ora Cogan (sound) that deconstructs the opening credits and reimagines the musical overture in the title sequence from the Italian period drama Il Gattopardo (1963).

Lavoro Macchinine occults the film’s original static text with a mercurial, kinetic typography, built from the very glyphs it is at pains to obfuscate. Through gestation, approximation, replication, and assimilation; Lavoro Macchinine discovers its own alien properties of form and behaviour, while simultaneously exploring the boundaries of its cinematic environment.

The living word produced by Lavoro Macchinine is propelled and propagated by a hunger for and the digestion of, Il Gatopardo‘s diegetic space. It longs to hide within it; to become part of it. The building blocks of language are hijacked: letterforms bifurcate in an imitation of manor gates, logographs elongate into fragile towers, conveyor belts composed of graphemes disseminate across the laneway, ligatures roll out of ideograms to scrutinize Roman busts, alien marginalia breach the balustrade, cedilla scrupulously scale the villa walls, extraterrestrial dingbats lodge themselves into the ruins of a world that no longer exists, ogonek laden emissaries probe the cinemascape in order to become it; to become us.

2010, 8 channel sound sculpture

The Law of the Tongue ~ Symbiosis and Betrayal. For Millennia, Killer Whales (Orcinus Orca) have hunted Baleen Whales along the coasts of Australia, driving them into shallow bays from which they cannot escape. Likewise for Millennia the Yuni people of Twofold Bay near Eden (New South Wales) have formed a spiritual bond with the Orcas (Beowas to the Yuni) whom they considered to be reincarnations of their tribal ancestors and whom they sang; believing that the Orcas responded by intentionally driving Whales to strand in the Bay as a food offering to their tribal members.

The Law of the Tongue installation operates with eight parallel audio tracks, six driving Solid Drive audio actuators that activate the skeletal vessel, and three ship’s oars, the remaining two tracks drive two large sub-woofers buried in the three metre long neoprene ‘Whale’s Tongue’. click below to listen to fragments samples from the sound library ~ naturally these are simple stereo mixes and not actual tracks from the installation but give a good idea of the sonic content which is drawn principally from sonified water quality data, whale recordings and hydrophone recordings

Galerie Sator, May 16-20 

On the occasion of the 28th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2023) organized by Le Cube Garges, we will present the artist’s Cosmorama video in our Marais space.

Shot in the surroundings of an observatory (in a lava desert where the NASA recently tested Martian rovers) and in a primitive forest which gives us an overview of the state of the world 50M years ago, the film uses a near-infrared imagery process with which astronomers usually observe the deep reaches of the universe. It also makes audible the light pulsations emitted by distant stars and galaxies by transposing radio-telescopes data into sound. By disrupting our usual spatiotemporal markers, Cosmorama allows the emergence of a sensitive and collective experience of pure perception.

A machine forms large smoke rings, rendering visible the movement of air, something that is usually beyond our realm of the senses. Le silence des Particules invites us to contemplate millions of moving particles covering a surface area of over 100 metres; to have a sensory experience of the emptiness that surrounds us.

Is it inevitable that only our largest organizations, with their vast data sets, will decide how we will use AI? What if, instead, we could start small, to work at the scale of the personal, and to engage directly with AI? Could doing so allow us to develop new intuitions and understandings of what the technology is, and what it could enable?                                                                    Learning Nature is a set of photographs generated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI), taught with David Young’s photographs of upstate flowers using a GAN(Generative Adversarial Network)-an artificial intelligence/machine learning technology. Learning Nature started out in the hope of creating a new perspective towards AI and exploring new possibilities through an aesthetic experience. Young states that AI was utilized as a tool in Learning Nature in the rural context of upstate New York and the domain of nature where the painting was used to express the relationship between mankind and nature at Hudson River School. The result is a unique interpretation of AI visually drawn out, which not only captures the machine’s understanding of the subject but also raises questions on the subject of interpretation and misinterpretation of nature. With Learning Nature, it is intended to rethink about what it would mean for an AI today to understand/interpret that same nature, further pointing to the anthropomorphizing of technology, data, and the human “intelligence” in the code.

The series LEGEND includes the computer generated images processed by a variation of the ray tracing algorithm. Un-normalized shading system provided rather complicated features of the surfaces of hyperbolic paraboloid in the Cartesian coordinates. For me, the most interesting aspect of the creative work with computer is the ability of the formula driven image generation. Manipulating the parameters of quadratics and the definitions, such as lighting, surface attributes, location and colors, provides rarely attractive and often boring results. Three years of experience in this series will not make me a master of image control; trial-and-error is the sequence of my way. The yield rate is very low. However, I believe I can find many more good scenes in the mine. The computer is not a tool to process existing images, but a colleague to create images with.

Presentation of the interactive audiovisual installation LEIKHĒN, which combines biomedical signals within an immersive interactive environment. The project is inspired by the composite plant of lichen (from Greek: leikhēn), which is the result of a hybrid partnership between a fungus and an alga. The installation is therefore a reflection upon the interaction and mutualistic relationship between two organisms, and how this union impacts on their behaviours inside a created audiovisual space. The installation was created in the frame of an artist in residence invitation at the Immersive Lab (IL), ICST – Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich University of the Arts (ZhdK), Switzerland.

Having been raised abroad for most of his life, Mgoboza’s work deals with a globalized African sense of self, a Western upbring- ing, and the liminal spaces in which these identities exist. From the deconstruction of stereotypes, Mgoboza investigates the conflicts that arise from the encounter between cultures and their respective histories and questions the meaning of identity models and labels.

Les noctiluques is a community-oriented activity. In response to the 2020 COVID-19 health regulations and recommendations in Montreal, the art event was cancelled.

Screening, Nuit Blanche at le Point Éphémère,  June 3

Screening, Le Cube Garges, May 15 – 18 May,  17:00

Dasha Ilina is a selected ISEA2023 artist

Let Me Fix You explores the relationship between humans and robots in the context of care work. The film highlights the irreplaceability of human workers in providing emotional interaction, physical touch, and avoiding alienation and isolation in patients.

Let Me Fix You is an ASMR video, similar to the many others that appear on Youtube specializing in “robot repair”. However, Let Me Fix You does take an unfamiliar turn: instead of going into the details of what will be replaced in the viewer’s imaginary robotic body, the mechanic notices something strange which leads her to realize that the care robot she is meant to repair is not really broken but has become conscious of its inability to provide proper care for his owner because he is simply not human.
The project discusses the ethics and the feminization of care work, as well as the questions around the place of robotics in the field of elderly care. While some robot care workers are considered to be quite “intelligent,” studies have shown that what elderly patients need most in their everyday life is human interaction. Human workers are essential when it comes to avoiding emotional alienation, physical isolation and lack of physical touch, and this installation highlights that issue.

Script excerpt:
*take out clipboard and check it*
Good thing there’s no critical damage, I can proceed to the standard check.
*noting things on the clipboard*
What about your sympathy emulator. It looks a little outdated, what model is this? TC180.. well that’s strange, no wonder the owner was unhappy with your behavior, your emulator is not compatible with your software at all.
Alright, I need to check your conversation logs.
*getting the logs* *scrolling through them*
My god, you’ve had no ability to pretend to sympathize with your owner whatsoever. How could this even be?
*looking through the logs* *look through clipboard*

“Licht, mehr Licht!”, in English “Light, more light!”, were Goethe’s dying words. The mysterious utterance can be understood as the mystical final pronouncement of the great author and scientific thinker, who developed his own theory of optics.

The aim of this installation is to give physical form to sound frequencies, translated into a three-dimensional state through luminous flux.

Often left behind or disregarded by the powers that be, Durban’s urban innovators show off their resilience and ingenuity on a daily basis, piecing together and repurposing discarded and unwanted items to create hybrid and often multi-purpose products. Photographer Samora Chapman gives us a ‘slice of life’ look at life hacking in the city of Durban, honouring the everyday knowledge systems of the street and the creativity born from necessity.

Hacnum Exhibition. Various locations, May 16 – 21

Ecosystem Services Estimation Experiment

This artistic provocation seeks to estimate the orders of magnitude of critical ecosystem services fundamental to all planetary life processes.

It is common to describe our relationships with society, the world, and the biosphere with metaphors from economics, which has specific understandings of value. Today’s prevailing economics conventions are unable to recognize intrinsic value of the ecosystems on which all life depends. In cultures overdetermined by concepts from economics, we are left without adequate discursive instruments to socially or politically address the importance of ecosystem contributions to life on Earth.

This experiment consists of 1 square meter of wheat, cultivated in a closed environment. Critical inputs such as water, light, heat, and nutrients are measured, monitored and displayed for the public. This procedure makes palpable the immense scale of ecosystem contributions, and provides a speculative reference for a reckoning of the undervalued and over-exploited “work of the biosphere.”

Conception: Disnovation.Org, Baruch Gottlieb
Web Developer: Jérôme Saint-Clair
Hardware Developers: Vivien Roussel, Thomas Demmer
Installation, 1m2 Of Automated Cultivation, Led Grow Lights, Camera, Live Video Streaming
Production: Imal (Be) | Coproduction: Biennale Chroniques (FR)

Limbology explores a geolocation experiment in the stratosphere performed with a beacon attached to a probe balloon.
The balloon is released in an open space, where it begins its ascent at the mercy of air currents and with an uncertain destination. Floating in the sky, the balloon seems to be nowhere (therefore, in limbo) but at the same time, its position is fixed with precision thanks to the GPS beacon. As it rises, the beacon’s capacity to transmit the data decreases until it reaches a height where it loses connection and subsequently, due to the decrease in air pressure, the balloon expands until it bursts and starts its vertiginous decline. The data of the position of the beacon during the journey are translated into a sinuous line that rises and stops abruptly. The artist visualizes this route with a neon tube suspended from the ceiling and a video that captures the trip of the balloon. Consciously realized as a failed experiment, the action shows the limits of technology while reflecting on how we conceive space as something that can be mastered by means of measurements and maps.
Text by Paul Waelder.

Liminal aims at enhancing the tension in inbetween spaces, while simultaneously creating an awareness of negotiation between temporary presence and absence of public space, using hacked quadcopters equipped with loudspeakers.

Narcissus’ digital mirror – Ovid’s metamorphosis as a real-time wave AI algorithm.
Liquid Views simulates a pool of water that reflects the image of viewers whose physical interaction ultimately disturbs the integrity of the reflection. Liquid Views anticipates the selfie moment of Greek mythology, in which the image and the self are becoming increasingly difficult to parse. In this interactive installation, audiences participate in a digitally activated “mirror of Narcissus” experience as a monitor equipped with a touchscreen and mini camera simulates a water surface that appears to reflect the image of the viewer. By touching the screen’s surface, participants activate algorithms that generate waves and the sound of water, that distort and dissolve the viewer’s reflection.

Additional intervention increases the disturbance, and the image can only regain its calm form by the absence of contact between participant and screen. In the background, the participant’s mirrored face is displayed on a large projection, turning the “introverted” gaze into a public spectacle.  Looking up, the interacting person perceives themselves from a different perspective – as if from the outside.

Wherever interactive environments and audience “talk” to each other, participants develop performative presence, and their participation contributes to a new embodied knowledge. The visitor is simply asked to take part and explore this Mixed Reality World as a “thinking space”. “Liquid views” is a pioneering work that takes up one of the central themes of media art by exploring the interface between the real and virtual world.

It is a common practice to associate and add human like characteristics when representing inanimate objects. In this project I was curious if reverse was possible. Could a building become person like. One of the challenges of this project was to make a projection that made sense from different angles. For this reason, Lisa has two faces and two expressions, depending on which corner of the building you view her from.

Listening Post is an artwork that visualizes Internet chatroom conversations. Listening Post uses custom computer programs to automatically collect thousands of chatroom and bulletin board conversations. The conversations are then parsed by the software into smaller phrases that are displayed on a hanging grid of 231 vacuum fluorescent text displays. The displays are hung in a grid format 12 feet high and 21 feet wide, suspended in 11 rows and 21 columns. A text-to speech synthesizer voices some of the phrases as part of the accompanying soundtrack. Writer Adam Gopnik described its soundtrack as “intoning words and sentences one by one in a sepulchral BBC announcer’s voice or chanting and singing them in fugue-like overlay”.

The work is included in the collections of the San Jose Museum of Art and the Science Museum Group collection in the United Kingdom [source: Wikipedia 170620]

Listening Space is an artistic research which explores transmissions ecologies as a means of perceiving the surrounding environment beyond our human abilities. Conceptually the project seeks to define transmissions ecologies as raw material for artistic expression, to understand and re-imagine in poetic means, representations of audio and images broadcasted from space, while regarding knitted textiles as a physical medium for memory storage and archiving. Through hands-on experimentation, we sought to intercept the NOAA weather satellites’ audiovisual transmissions using Software-Defined-Radio and hand-crafted antennas. The intercepted signals were then knitted into textiles named Satellite Ikats, as a means of physical archiving of the detection and decoding process.

By investigating the energies that have been harvested by humanity to knit this complex layer, a turbulent sea of radio waves that penetrates the fabric of our everyday lives even if it remains unseen and unheard, we aim to create poetic connotations between textiles-as a means of data detection, collection and archiving, and bodies as agents of power to re-interpret current technologies through handmade crafting techniques. Specifically, by focusing on electromagnetic-field (EMF) and radio frequency (RF) detection, we aim to reclaim the depth of transmission ecologies, evolving at a higher rhythm than liveness, through our environment and bodies.

Pungwe is an interdisciplinary project circling African music with related contemporary arts discourses and spaces. This collaborative practice expands into the current project “Listening to a Listening at Pungwe”. We perform through an experimental platform, “Pungwe Nights”, to track and reimagine transnational sonic cultures in southern Africa. We re(hear)se historical and contemporary recordings between Namibia and Zimbabwe on a reel-to-reel player, turntables and computer. Our practice with sound technology has parallel currents, whilst it draws on research on the use of African bodies in phonetic experiments in colonial linguists and ethnomusicology, we explore the concept of the body as sound technology and translation of voice to various instruments and vice versa.

Through our performance we engage the possibilities enunciated by technology, the ability as Alexander Weheliye elucidates, ‘to split sound from source’, only to later reframe and amplify the sound within phonographies. We playback Machiri’s mbira tongues (lamellaphone) from Mhondoro, Zimbabwe in response to khoekhoegowab orature recorded by Ernst and Ruth Dammann. We re-code tongues and produce a new loop anchored in the recordings’ socio-historical context and the performers mastery of their instruments. Using the remix framework, we interrogate the preservation impulse of hegemonic archives and permit the notion of an un-originary sound or speakerly texts connected to source.

This surrealistic picture illustration deals with the psychological process of failing relationships, covering how it all begins little by little then suddenly fails beyond repair. Through a therapy session, my main character reflects on how things deteriorated with his loved one, these include fights, misunderstandings, mental issues or as the main character states: “a simple case of feelings wearing off”. The intended purpose for this project is to show the gradual phases of problems, from miniscule to immense. I then use Surrealism and dreams to depict the inception and unconscious states of such problems as they develop.

Live Wheel is a documental sound installation about the contemporaneous migration wave in Greece. Audio samples are organized in sound groups passing through sea crossing, boats and water noises, prayers and chants inside refugee’s camps, human steps and body sounds then building a soundscape.

Live Wheel presents to public a reflectance about a remote reality: The gigantic migration wave in Europe. It is a sound documental work that brings the capacity of an artifact holding an immersive landscape, enabling to experience, test and incorporate the original noise strength in order to process the remote reality questions.

This installation has a technological system in different channels and a specific interface created to manage 300 files divided into 6 different groups. The audio samples are organized into sound groups, passing through sea crossing until the corrosive wait inside refugee camps for then build a soundscape. It is a generative sound system, where sounds rotate through space and are constantly being redrawn.

Muhannad Shono worked within the Drinking Water Microbiology Group, lead by Dr. Frederik Hammes. Based on his exploration of the scientific research on Bacteria he developed his own fictional organism. He compares this organism with LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), the hypothetical last common ancestor and foundation stone of all organisms. On a metaphorical level his project led to the origins of civilisation. Referring to the creative processes in the arts and in scientific research groups, the artist puts the fictional organism in the context of his artists-in-labs residency: «It’s a behavioural organism that originates from within our internal microbiome, a physical manifestation of a human behaviour or need. It appears to be an organism who’s only purpose or reason for being is the propagation and spread of ideas, this idea rich institute seems to be the ideal environment for this organism to grow.

The project a Campfire conversations/performances centered on the theme Location/Dislocation, set in Muskoka, Ontario, The resulting video to be part of Arabian Nights campfire projections in the desert

Lost, but not lost forever is a sound performance that uses old media devices to create new soundscapes. The set-up is made from few cassette players that are continuously playing changeable cassette tape loops; radios are also added to play random AM/FM frequencies and create a depth to the sound. A sewing machine is the central piece with piezo microphones positioned on its surface to detect the vibrations and transform them in audible waves, also an adjacent rhythm is created using the metal needle perforating the surface. A light sensor from a S I G N U M device is used to create the principal beat and the bass. A small PCB (printed circuit board) is the last one to be added and used to close the performance. The title Lost, but not lost forever is a tribute to old media that doesn’t exist anymore (or dead media) but we still remember their existence. Also puts the question “What’s the life expectancy of a media?”. Of course, depends from type to type, but at the end, somehow, they all die. Or “Is there a medium that never died?”. “What’s the new medium that is going to conquer the world?”.

“Lotus Flower” is an installation art piece. First, each leaf of the lotus flower was made of ribbons that are twinkling and transparent. As needed, I included ribbons with wires, ribbons with laces, and normal ribbons to maximize the characteristics of the flowers and thus maximize reality. Second, I controlled the light in the flowers using Arduinos so that the flowers respond to the movement of audiences. Each leaf responds to one audience. To see how all leaves of the flower are responding, a collaboration of multiple audiences are needed. Third, I added the design of Korean alphabet “O”. For the Lotus, two colors, i.e., red and white, will be displayed by LEDs. When all red LEDs are turned on, it will form “O” whose Korean name is “ieung.” “O” is the first consonant in the word “Lotus Flower” in Korean. To make “O”, several audiences have to collaborate. In this way, my work shows the beauties of the Lotus flower, the Korean alphabet, and collaboration of audiences for the public art.

Louisiana Re-storied is a web-based, interactive documentary that maps important spatial and cultural histories regarding pollution regulation in the Southern United States.

The LSS (Life Support System) is a hydroponics modular system for plant cultivation, in which the well-being of the plants depends on participants ‘donation’ of Co2.

Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013. 

Kate Mitchell’s Lucky Break is a seven-sided heptagram shape, each side is a different coloured screen and together they make up the colours of the rainbow. Here Mitchell breaks through each of these coloured sheets – her videos are always shot in one take with the artist herself undertaking these often dangerous actions. There is a humourous, slapstick quality to many of her works which is really enjoyable. [source: Kathleen Linn, https://www.artshub.com.au]

For Sydney-based artist Kate Mitchell, the idea of art as work and the artist as both manager and worker is important. Her videos document the artist working tirelessly to achieve seemingly reckless and unattainable tasks. While there is a comic quality in her work, the actions make us think about the limits of what is acceptable and normal.

M-Ark is a project that tackles the prospect of a future in which humanity has rendered our planet inhospitable; a prospect made all the more possible with the United States pulling out of the Paris Climate Treaty. M-Ark uses the philosophically compelling theory of panspermia, the notion that life is spread throughout the universe by comets, asteroids, planetoids, or even artificially as its core concept. M-Ark is a small satellite that carries on board a human microbiome, capitalizing on the hypothesis that human evolution was guided in part by our microbiome. This small satellite is designed to crash back down to earth at such a point that climate conditions have once again become favourable, kick-starting panspermia and possibly altering the evolutionary journey of another species.

Exhibition. ISEA2023 selected artwork. Nobody Sees Us Rewiring Our Communication Systems exhibition,  IESA Arts and Culture School Gallery, May 23 -30 

Machine intelligence is increasingly being used in the world, with much artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) built on ideas that centre extraction, competition and control. This also positions AI itself as a resource to be extracted and controlled, paving a troubling path for speculative futures where AI may gain ambiguous levels of sentience or experience. These ideas are part of a historical trend where humans place themselves above the other-than-human world, and this has formed the basis of an extractive and one sided relationship with that world.

These works speculate on the kinds of futures we may come to share with synthetic cognitions, wondering what capacities for experience may be emerging within the black boxes of AI. A series of textile panels show machine-generated illustrations of artificial neural networks. A generative diffusion model has been asked to illustrate the parts of its ‘mind’ that process human emotions like grief, loneliness and hope. While it is likely that a speculative synthetic cognition would actually have experiences and emotions greatly different to our own, it is compelling to work with human emotion as this capacity is often what we use to arrange ourselves above other creatures.

These works are styled as botanical illustrations, referencing that historical way of documenting the new. Plants also have cognitions very different to our own. Their sensing apparatus and ways of responding shape their own unique plant worlds that are unlike human worlds. This highlights the fact that we actually share many worlds with other creatures – with each world emerging from the unique sensing systems and cognitions of plants, insects and animals. What worlds might emerge from the sensing apparatus and responses of artificial intelligences?

Machine Imaginings was first shown at Assembly Point, Narrm Australia between August 1-31st 2022, and the development was supported by an Australia Council for the Arts grant in 2022. It was also selected for the 2023 International Symposium on Electronic Art ISEA2023 and exhibited at I.E.S.A Gallery in Paris, France in May 2023.

Macrophonics II presents new Australian work emerging from the leading edge of performance interface research. The program addresses the emerging dialogue between traditional media and emerging digital media, as well as dialogues across a broad range of musical traditions. Recent technological developments are causing a complete reevaluation of the relationships between media and genres in art, and Macrophonics II presents a cross-section of responses to this situation. Works in the program foreground an approach to performance that integrates sensors with novel performance control devices, and/or examine how machines can be made musical in performance. The program presents works by Australian artists Donna Hewitt, Julian Knowles and Wade Marynowsky, with choreography by Avril Huddy and dance performance by Lizzie and Zaimon Vilmanis. From sensor-based microphones and guitars, through performance a/v, to post-rock dronescapes, movement inspired works and experimental electronica, Macrophonics II provides a broad and engaging survey of new performance approaches in mediatised environments. Curated by Julian Knowles and Donna Hewitt.

The Made In… series are drawings that utilize a projector to create large-scale miniature paintings that explore colonialism, globalization, and world politics.

This project combines digital photography and digital image manipulation with the  longstanding intaglio printmaking tradition. The digital photographs are separated into Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black layers and each layer is etched onto a separate copper plate. The copper plates are then inked with their respective colours and printed over each other on an etching press in rapid succession to produce a nuanced interpretation of the original photo on cotton etching paper. This project explores the crossing over of digital photography and fine art printmaking to introduce new methods of image creation.

In Mapping the Empire v.1, four HD video cameras are strapped to my wrists and ankles as I traverse a rock formation. A “map” of the terrain emerges from the process that suggests a mode of perception that is distributed, and polyvalent. This work is inspired in part by Umberto Eco’s essay, “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1” The “map” I create nonsensical — more accurate as a record of motion defined by the logic of living flesh, rather than a systematic grid-like construction of space and time. [source: Vimeo].

Maraya: Sisyphean Cart is a mobile ‘sousveillance’ cart mounted with an automated pan-tilt-zoom camera pulled along the Dubai Marina seawall Marina Walk interacting with local residents and visitors.

Animation based on images made with Ochre on Stringybark

Marrwakara Story, Mawng Language, Goulburn Island, Western Arnhem Land, NT.Ochre on stringybark. RM and CH Berndt collection, 1964.

Computer Graphics Research Group, Ohio State University: Student Work

Winner of the 2021 International Alliance of Women in Music Ruth Anderson Prize, Women’s Labor is a feminist-activist project that repurposes domestic tools to become new musical instruments. Using embedded technologies, these household-devices-turned instruments are explored in interactive installations, commissioned compositions, and performances. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, we interrogate domesticity through public engagement and performative spectacle.

The new instruments are based on laundering tools that highlight gender performativity through clothing. Thefirst instrument featured in installation/performance is Embedded Iron, based on an early-20^th century wooden ironing board and antique iron. Both the public and musicians can “iron” fabrics, including their own pieces of clothing, to make music. Using spectroscopy, the Embedded Iron has a color-sensing ability—‘seeing’ the color of the fabric to play different timbres. Using machine learning Wekinator, the Iron can interpolate unique sounds for any given fabric. The iron’s placement on the XY-axis of the ironing board determines pitch using LIDAR and ultrasonic technology.
The Iron plays sounds of resistance, combining two sound modules in Pure Data: physical modeling of a violin—an instrument on which women were discouraged to be played in the nineteenth-century—and electric guitar-pedal like audio FX. Both of these modules evoke sounds that are historically associated with male musicians—put on an iron to subvert these very associations.

Two texts chosen from an oppressive 19th-century marriage manual are mapped to a special “white apron” for ironing on the left and right side of the board, using granular synthesis. While the text may seem ludicrously outdated, the intentions behind the text are, ironically, still eeriely prevalent today.

ISEA2018 closed with a large party at the Durban city hall. The whole PS2 team including its partners “Elektro Moon Vision”, “Xenorama”, “HOP ON”, the “Amasosha Art Movement”, “BAT Centre” and more engaged in organizing the event. Result was a digital jam session in the digital “share jam” style: all participants, artists, digital artists, DJs, musicians, singers were asked to co-create a sound layer for the visual mash up of all the works from the different PS2 workshops and art activities, e.g. the digitalized art works from “The Public Space as Shared Museum”. The result was a projection from the balcony of the city hall on the pavement of the great public square in front of the building.

Material Music is an installation developed in an effort to underscore the significance of physical materiality within the field of object-based sound art. The work consists of a linear array of eight kinetic sound sculptures, each of which is comprised of an electromechanically-struck block of solid matter.

While all eight units are identical in terms of design and functionality, they each utilize a different type of physical material. At the start of the piece, two actuators begin to strike the material blocks synchronously, at the rate of once per second. With every pulse, the left and right actuation instances in each sound-sculpture are offset based on an ever-growing delay time unit that is derived from the speed of sound travelling through the specific material type. As the piece develops, the accumulating delay times gradually shift the actuation pulses out of phase.

With the passing of time, the delay offsets become more and more audible and visible, producing rhythmic patterns that morph in and out of phase across all eight sound sculptures. In this way, Material Music is a process-based composition that interlocks a steady pulse with ever-changing phasing audiovisual patterns that themselves derive from the very essence of the constituent audio/visual materials.

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I was inspired from the sounds and architecture of Istanbul and the ancient geographical referents of the central Australian desert. The artwork is created with specialized software using my meditating brainwaves.

Another cutting edge premiere for ISEA2013 – combining ancient religion and tradition with modern technology, this work is scored for Tibetan singing bowl robots and live flute, with multichannel surround-sound electronic processing and ambisonic field recordings made in Australia and Arizona. A meditation on being present in the landscape, the work is part of an ongoing enquiry into the ways in which we converse with nature.

dLux MediaArts brings to ISEA2013 the inaugural MEMEBRAIN Art Hackfest. dLux MediaArts is partnering with Dorkbot (Sydney), Darwin Community Arts (Darwin), Kulchajam (Byron Bay) and The Portals (Darwin and Sydney), to bring together artists, designers, techies and more in a cross-locational Hackfest. Collaborators are invited to explore the participatory nature of technology and art. In a unique hot house environment, creative teams will design, play and build prototype projects that challenge the way we use art and digital media to affect cultural perceptions. MEMEBRAIN Art Hackfest will provide an important opportunity for the local Sydney community, partner locations in Darwin and Byron Bay, and ISEA2013 delegates to engage in momentous electric exchange in a casual, entertaining and social atmosphere. The general public are invited to interact with the projects online throughout the hack, through large urban screens in Darwin and Sydney, as well as join the teams on the final day for a closing exhibition and live performances.

Exhibition. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21

Bastien Didier is an ISEA2023 selected artist

Mental garden allows everyone to create, collect and share memories materialized by mental flowers. Mental Garden is an interactive experience based on the collection of brain waves. The experiment aims to create a collection of stored, shareable and exchangeable mental flowers. The device allows visitors to record a mental memory in a time-stamped digital capsule then uploaded on an eco-friendly blockchain to be authenticated.

Thus, each user is invited to equip themselves with the headset and start recording to monitor their brain activity. As he thinks about his memory, his brain activity is translated to generate a digital plant which is the materialization of his thought. With the different creations, a mental garden is created representing the mental memories recorded by the visitors.

At the end of the experience, the visitor’s creation is minted on OpenSea, the decentralized NFT marketplace. Each visitor then becomes an artist and has the opportunity to share or sell their owned artwork. Through the collection, every creation contributes to a collective artwork.

The real-time generative design is made possible thanks to brain-environment interfaces allowing everyone, regardless of gender, age or physical condition, to generate their mental flower in an inclusive way.

Thinking about the garden means having to go back to the foundations of the world and humankind. The garden offers a form of appeasement, calm and serenity. Let’s cultivate our mental garden!

Message in the Sky, taking shape as a site-specific/crowd-responsive installation, pools together the city’s modern-day 1001 dreams, and casts them away into the celestial using a radio telescope. The installation invites local public to bring in their favorite fragrances and spray on hand-gold-leafed paper cards. In exchange, they are given unique codes which enable them the privilege of casting their hopes and dreams as messages to the stars.

2013, interactive media,  display objects  

The Book of Luna, a transmedia Meta-Book is a physical, illuminated manuscript merging sculpture and film and literature. It is a tactile poem in a cinema of pages integrating text and paper with embedded media technology. Its subject is a lyrical history of humanity’s empirical and allegorical relationship with the Moon.
MetaBook: The Book of Luna is presented as an electronic Wunderkammer. An expanded cinema installation combining text, sculpture, interactive media, magic tricks, and dynamic video within the enclosed architecture of a tabletop object, The Book of Luna narrates a poetic essay about the Moon’s place in the historical imagination. The nature of love, madness, the unknown, and our capacity for the sublime are amongst the intellectual passions that have crystallized around our only satellite

Performance at Opening Launch

This kinetic sound installation and live performance instrument is based on the Leslie rotary speaker used in the 1960s-70s to create early stereo vibrato effects, notably with the Hammond organ. The system is powered by direct, fluctuating audio voltage and bass frequencies which govern the speed at which the horn spins, creating an uncanny pattern of sound frequencies with stereo modulations and spatial sonic reflections. The sounds played through the horn are composed from field recordings made at the former Mungo Scott Silo complex in Summer Hill, Sydney.

Design & Animation: Wilson Burrows
Associate producer: John Donkin
Production co-ordinator: Scott Dyer
Dynamic motion software: James Hahn
Rocketry assistant: Flip Phillips
Plasma control: Andy White

Produced by the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, Ohio State University (Charles Csuri, director, Thomas Linehan, associate professor).

Thanks to Susan Amkraut, John Fuji, Joan Staveley, Chris Wedge and the Ohio Supercomputer graphics project.

Calculated on a Convex C-1 computer.

Metaphone- the art project consists of interactive apparatus, painting technique and sonic art. The machine captures bio-data from participants and creates paintings and sounds through the interaction.

Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013. 

Lauren Brincat’s video work Mexican Standoff shows a performance she undertook in Mexico City. Here a group of female horse riders, including the artist herself, standoff with a statue of a heroic man on horseback at the Museo Nacional de Arte. The work forms a response to the lack of statues of heroic women on horseback compared to the many, many public statues of men portrayed in a heroic manner. [source: Kathleen Linn, https://www.artshub.com.au]

Sound: Bree van Reyk
Cinematographer: Rafael Ortega
Special Thank you: Aline Hernandez & Nayeli Garcia

We explore a hybrid language that not only processes formal symbols but also interacts with the oral microbes. This materiality of language takes on meaning against the background of the parallel decline in the diversity of microbiomes and languages.

In our performances we harvest oral microbes from the audience. Using a voice spectrogram, repetitively spoken phonemes drive pumps that add pheromones to the microbes for a time. For some replication cycles the microbes remain adapted to the individual phonemes, which ecologically favours some phonemes. When the visitors change alphabetical sequences they ecologize their oral sphere. In the webstream version we work with speech recognition and algorithms that use data from previous performances. We propose a ‘microbial language’, in which microbes and language protect each other, as a category between semantic, phonetic and ecological meaning.

The project is a call to recalibrate the approach to design by recognizing the microbiome as an additional parameter and overlooked agent of terraforming. The technological mediation of the continuous, interchangeable and entangled relationships between microbiomes, environments and ourselves allows for higher resolutions of perception in the way we compose synthetic landscapes. When germ theory originally framed microbes as pathogens, design was driven by “sterilization” and aimed at the “extermination” of microbial life and the production of highly tempered and sealed environments, propelling a culture of cleanliness. With the potential advancement and accessibility of metagenomic sequencing, we may be at the cusp of refining our understanding of these microbial systems, and reframing our design practices from the reactory to the nuanced, adaptive, and proactive. Manifesting alternative, more precise compositions across various sites and scales of intervention, the project narrates how sequencing could become a potential design tool to inform deliberate terraforming.

Artist Jess Holz creates ‘microsculptures’ incorporating insect and plant material, imaged by scanning electron microscopy. By collaging materials into small sculptures she creates imagined interactions between entities present. Most recently, she’s been experimenting with bizarre distortions due to charge buildup (an imaging artifact) as a way to challenge the assumed objectivity of scientific images.

Mirror Sonata in Four Kinetic Movements is a flexible site-specific video-animation project that incorporates animation of the visual elements in my painting, where I explore the ideas of cultural pride, the self as maker of past, present and future, the self as creator of melody and movement.

Missing Black Techno-fossils is an Afrofuturistic project consists of augmented reality, digital 3D art, and 3D printing, to address Tania Inniss’ notion that “the absence of Black representation in art” is erasure. The project looks at monuments as Afrofuturistic technofossils along with being examples of sankofanology, meaning they are human-made preservations connecting the past, present, and future through its existence very much like the Sphinx of ancient Egypt, and the bronze Edo Oba monuments of ancient Benin.

The project brings attention to the erasure of Black stories in the Canadian landscape, especially with Toronto being one of the only major cities in the world without any monuments of Black people. Along with Montreal, although being the residence of the first documented free Africans in North America in the 16th century, it contains no monuments of that history. Through speculation, the project explores how the absence and lack of representation give space for a lack of validation, valuing, and connection for black people with themselves and their memory or data for the future. While also, this erasure causes a disconnect for non-black folks to see them as being contributors to society.

Mist Collector is a long-term research and developing project focusing on exploration of various surfaces that allow collecting water from moisture in the air.

In Miziara Architects we follow father and son through their design journey, which we see taking shape as a 3-D structure. As they debate and collaborate, an architectural narrative unfolds, which opens doors to sociological norms and generation gaps. The video spans across three generations as each floor is envisioned.

The experimental video “Models for Environmental Literacy” invites us to rethink the nature and application of artificial intelligence in the context of the environment. As three A.I. voices guide us through a series of landscapes at the intersections of nature and human intervention, we follow a dialogue somewhere within the spectrum of human and non-human language. How does our reading of this computer-generated language point back to our own personal subjectivities and our own environmental literacy? And equally so, how can encounters with non-human language act as a kind of dress rehearsal for future relationships with the Other?

In the face of climate change, large-scale computer-controlled systems are being deployed to understand terrestrial systems. Artificial intelligence is used on a planetary scale to detect, analyze, and manage landscapes. In the West, there is a great belief in ‘intelligent’ technology as a lifesaver. However, practice shows that the dominant AI systems lack the fundamental insights to act in an inclusive manner towards the complexity of ecological, social, and environmental issues. This, while the imaginative and artistic possibilities for the creation of non-human perspectives are often overlooked.

With the long-term research project and experimental films Models for Environmental Literacy, the artist Tivon Rice explores in a speculative manner how A.I.s could have alternative perceptions of an environment. Three distinct A.I.s were trained for the screenplay: the Scientist, the Philosopher, and the Author. The A.I.s each have their own personalities and are trained in literary work – from science fiction and eco-philosophy, to current intergovernmental reports on climate change. Rice brings them together for a series of conversations while they inhabit scenes from scanned natural environments. These virtual landscapes have been captured on several field trips that Rice undertook over the past two years with FIBER (Amsterdam) and BioArt Society (Helsinki).

Moments in Place is a series of site-specific performances inviting visitors to consider movement qualities of different locations using augmented reality to explore relationship between the performance and location.

Fusion of the Possible, Topographie de l’art, April 15 – June 15

2020
Photogrammetry (scans and 3D animation), 120 x 120 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Charlot.

Monades is a series of prints made with 3D scans of the artist’s body, which became the raw material to be digitally sculpted, deconstructed and re-contextualized. Many inspirations have informed this project, such as the concept of the cyborg by Donna J. Haraway, Hans Bellmer’s drawings, Greek Mythology as well as an underlying reflexion on self portrait and the place of the body in the digital world. Captive within the limitations of their own subjectivities, these cyborg/goddesses embody the concept of monade, where each individual is a fragmented mirror of a larger reality.

A live geo-locative game addressing the mobility between nature, vehicles and culture.

he game Montañas a Mesas uses a game structure similar to tag and scavenger hunt along with a geo-locative mobile app while players assume the character of an auto, balloon and roadrunner. Montañas a Mesas is a city game simulating the effects and challenges of mobility by air, vehicle and animal using the landscape of Albuquerque from the Sandia Mountains to the West Albuquerque Mesa. Similar to how you can collect a wearable pin when a balloon lands, each player can collect a pin at designated locations throughout the game. If you collect a pin at each site then you win the game. You may compete against yourself or others.

GAME CREDITS Game created by Bay Area Artist and New Mexico native, Danielle Siembieda, in collaboration with Artist/Producer DC Spensley.Game played at ISEA 2012 in Albuquerque, NM and the Come Out and Play Festival in San Francisco, CA.

Where is the moon right now?

Moon Pointer is a slow-time kinetic sculpture that continually points at the moon, wherever it is located, whether above or below the horizon, in daylight or night, clear skies or overcast. A computer-controlled mechanism will calculate the current position of the moon as viewed from the city of Gwangju – and point to it. The pointer will describe a continual presence to the moon’s movement. Its design refers to the history of scientific instrumentation, the timing is incremental. It is formally and mechanically minimal – and calculated to perform the singular task of tracking the moon. By tracing the entire path of the moon’s complex movement, the Moon Pointer offers viewers a heightened awareness of their spatial and temporal place in the universe and a series of insights into the most frequently considered object of vernacular celestial observation.

The Moon Pointer consists of a computer-controlled mechanism that computes the location of the moon by accessing locally stored ephemeris data in accord with the current local time. The time is acquired by reference to a local real time clock module and checked against network time via a Wifi connection. The computers use these positions to run a set of motors that move their respective pointers to the correct azimuth and elevation. Photographic images (from NASA) accompany the Moon Pointer and depict the daily phases of the moon as seen at lunar transit from Gwangju for the period of the exhibition. A related version was commissioned by the Western Washington University and the Washington State Arts Commission.

Joint projects: Cummins / DeMarinis, Luna Drift: Sun and Moon Pointers and Light Reign:The 2006 Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai Museum; ISEA2004 at the The Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki, Finland, the 2008 Biennial of Seville, Spain and a Washington State Arts Commission for Western Washington University, 2014.

Light objects, 28 x 11 x 8cm, Three painted steel casings, three LED-light sticks, each equipped with 128 elliptic LEDs, three circuit boards with microprocessor, flash memory, two light sensors, power supply

The term to see” is often used in common speech synonymously with to understand” or to grasp”. The phrase “If I am seeing this correctly” is used to signify understanding in consensus with others, while those who “don’t believe their eyes” experience something unexpected and untoward. But in general we do believe our eyes; so much so that we consider the information our visual senses present us with to be an accurate image of the present moment, to be reality. The work MotU #4 — #6 from the series Mirrors of the Unseen challenges this supposed credibility of the visible. The habitual process of seeing is infiltrated by words and icons made of light; they seem to emerge from three flickering LED beams and float hologram-like in front of the surrounding architecture. Nothing can get in the way of these translucent (written) images. They are present, and yet at the same time do not exist: only individual perception makes them accessible to the viewer. Ruth Schnell started developing so-called “light sticks” at the begin-ning of the 1990s. Since then, the works created using these media have been technically advanced; they befuddle our idea of perception.

Assistence media content: Patricia Köstring, Lea Schnell
Programming: Alexander Pausch

Moving Moving-Image-Journey to the West (2014) was created as a 6-tv-set moving sculpture cluster with choreographed movements displaying found video clips from our popular cinema. The only way to inspect this work is through a live-performance. During the 2 grand opening weekends, our artist Bill Tam and his team will perform this 15-minute scored work for your inspection.
“This is a “new” medium for narrative. I name it “moving moving-images,” a new relation between theater space and cinematic space.” _Bill Tam

A voyage between dimensional planes, reaching beyond the observable universe and into imagined environments where the laws of physics are ever changing and unrecognizable to our own.

Musebots are pieces of software that autonomously create music, collaboratively with other musebots. The goal of this project is to establish a creative platform for experimenting with musical autonomy, open to people developing cuttingedge music AI, or simply exploring the creative potential of generative processes in music. Not simply a robot jam, but individual virtual instrumentalists coming together, like a band, to autonomously create (in this case) downtempo EDM. For this Canadian premiere of the MuseBot ensemble, we have contributions from Europe, Australia, and North America. Curated by Arne Eigenfeldt & Oliver Bown.