Art Events Data Table

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.

On the road to her family vacation, Olivia, a 10-year old girl hooked on her phone and social media, is abandoned by her parents in a highway service area. Alone with her plushie, he tries to get her off her phone to play, but things take an unexpected turn!

#hererealnow: Darwin Community Arts will present an extended program exploring digital culture and connectivity in the Northern Territory. #hererealnow will bring together a range of digital arts activities, including works from The Portals, focusing on NT artists presenting, engaging, and developing skills and new ideas. There will be workshops, presentations and opportunities to play and learn.

The Chan Contemporary Art Space, Darwin, AU.

#iHeartRobotMusic is an interactive robotic musical instrument. Images uploaded through Instagram are transformed into compositions which are played through robotic actuators hitting everyday household items. The work examines how new technologies can be understood as connecting individuals in alternate, emergent ways that run counter to common expectations.

This mock trailer for a movie that was never made, but lives on the Web as a distributed narrative, refers to an eponymous artist whose artistic presence and remixed persona is a mash-up of mobile phone videos, animated gifs, Google Earth glitch imagery, and the corrupting presence of a literary voice summoned from the digital-beyond.

(+/-) Pendulum is an electro-mechanically driven kinetic sculpture based on the mechanics of a subverted Foucault Pendulum, which seeks to reflect on the current state of our digital lives.

Laser portraits that appear incomplete and fragmented as a result of disruptions, caused by the models’ movement and breathing during the scanning process, suggest a metaphor of instability in our digitally mediated identities

Musician Company. The 9 girls are performing Hawaiian Music.

Symphony 505 creates an orchestra of automobiles and re-visions their mechanic motion as dance. Working with a group of people within the lowrider community that have built and customized their cars, their lowriders will be further transformed, in their familiar landscape, into both musical instrument and dancer. Using wireless audio technology and suped-up sound systems, a conductor (or audience) will be able to “play” the cars as the drivers perform a series of movements and gestural sequences. Embedded within the architecture of Albuquerque, the vehicles’ ability to respond to and dominate their environment is the catalyst for this moving symphony.

RAMZi is the solo project of Phoebé Guillemot. She began to explore Ableton Live with the intuition that strangely electronic music would bring her closer to her ideal of organic and spiritual music. What came out after many years of exploration is this lysergic tropical musical world integrating elements of Caribbean, Baleric, Fourth World, dub, jazz fusion, glitch and video game music.

13 Eyes is an interactive installation that dynamically assembles monumental portraits of visitors by fusing together fragments of their respective faces. The resulting triptych conjures up imaginary beings at the intersection of familiarity and alterity. By sharing the microsocial space of the installation, (v)users’ self-representations blur with others in an uncanny fashion. Thus, the installation is an invitation to discuss the mediation of our self-image by technology and society and by our own vanity and fear.

The installation itself is a sculptural assembly of 13 obsolete, but fully working, iPhones. The devices are controlled by a hidden master charged with surreptitiously taking pictures, remotely manipulating them, and displaying the results. By invoking the ubiquity and cultural significance of the iPhone, the installation questions our relation to status and obsolescence, but also to surveillance and self-representation.

This artwork creates dynamic composite visuals that are neither fully generative nor entirely representative. Instead, the dynamic hybrid portraits inhabit a liminal space between familiarity and alterity. Visitors can recognize portions of their own corporality forcibly being merged with that of others. This creates a malaise that invites them to consider the human beings around them and the ways by which they are being collectively (mis)represented.

Who is it that I am sharing a face with? This performative quality of the installation extends the actual artwork beyond the interactive device to include the whole physical space and, more to the point, the visitors inside it. This creates a forum for the interactors to consider the ways through which technology mediates both the representation of self and of others. By using a cultural icon such as the iPhone, I hope to kickstart a necessary discussion about technology, about how it surreptitiously permeates and overtakes our human interactions and about how we hastily dispose of it when fashionably obsolete. In other words, this artwork’s strength not only lies in its aesthetic qualities but perhaps even more in its ability to bring about a shared discursive space.

A performing body moving in space is captured in detail at regular intervals and represented as data organized in a hierarchy. The data are abstractions that are then retargeted and reconstructed. New or different forms can be generated as the data retain elements of the original performance of the body moving in space – a system of inter-related parts – a movement system.

In this series of animated GIFs, “2023_untitledMovements”, the captured movement systems are interrupted, altered, and glitched while still maintaining elements of the original captured performance. Digital bodies that are bent, broken, and blurred as they become timeless… always existing in motion

“Alone_02” is one of an ongoing a series of animated artworks begun in 2022. The animation comes from a combination of motion capture sessions with generative 3D modeling of text characters. The music is influenced by the same motion capture data that drives the visual elements.

3.5 offers an immersion into a fascinating world. Its mediums are glass, video projection, drop shadows and sound, with their singular, ethereal materiality. The forms exhibited, oscillating between the mathematical abstraction of perfect polygons and the organic abundance of Kim KototamaLune’s “microcosms”, serve as a metaphor for our society – liquid, virtual, ephemeral – and its paradoxes with the body and physicality.

Glass, which the artist works with amazing virtuosity by spinning it into delicate networks, also appears to be an eloquent metaphor for our society. Firstly, through its material, silica, which it shares with the silicon used for most of the computer chips that flood our planet. By its transparency too, which responds to the ideology of our time and the glassy architecture of places of power. By its fragile strength, too. Solid, but brittle, like a system that is out of breath and that, every day, gives the feeling that it is in danger of breaking.

And finally, by its virtuality. Why 3.5? Because our bodies evolve in a three-dimensional space. And yet, the world is saturated with surfaces that overwhelm them. Screens, mixed, augmented or virtual realities add a layer of information to this three-dimensionality which, from then on, seems a little more. 3.5 is therefore a way of rendering virtuality, in all the thickness that the term has gained since the internet: the virtual as what is, but on the verge of not being; the virtual as a field of possibilities; the virtual as cyberspace.

Here is 3.5, an experience in the limbo of lesser existences, the mystical attempt to touch what is beyond our senses. 3.5 is the aesthetic response to a profoundly virtual society; it is the spirit of time encapsulated in the fragile transparency of glass, in the immateriality of the projected image and the shadows cast; so many fleeting, precarious moments that hold on to nothing. 3.5 is a microcosm, populated by organisms that seem to be aquatic, a small intra-uterine theatre, the interior of the body glitched by geometries too perfect to be natural.

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

Inkjet print on paper, 50 x 50 cm.
Courtesy of Binome gallery and Adagp, Paris.

With “3600 secondes de lumière” Thibault Brunet captures the ephemeral beauty of clouds by utilizing a virtual space created in a video game. He observes the effect of the passage of time on the colors of the skies by creating a cycle of virtual sunrise and sunset. He creates a series of 3D-modeled cloud portraits, illuminated by this virtual sun, taking on different hues depending on the time of day. Thibault Brunet thus compiles a catalog of clouds, a typology of their shapes and changing colors.

The images created by this project blur the distinction between painting and photography. The clouds appear to us as paintings. As we approach, we realize that these images are simulacra created by a video game engine.

The impermanence, or rather its fantasized disappearance by our contemporary world, which is sinking into materialism and the utopia of immortality, is at the heart of a new series by Brunet. It takes the form of a collection of clouds, or more precisely, virtual clouds designed for use by video game creators. Brunet has acquired around sixty of these fixed forms – a contradiction in terms, as cumulus clouds are inherently fleeting – which he has imported into a virtual space created for this purpose. Unlike our own ever-expanding world, «augmented» by the tools at our disposal, Brunet’s fictitious space is reduced to the extreme. It consists only of two elements, clouds and light, with the addition of one dimension, that of time. This opens up an immense field of possibilities from which Brunet makes selections.

The title «3600 seconds of light» refers to as many potential outcomes chosen from the infinite latency, comprising 60 states of light playing on 60 cloud models, within a span of 12 hours (12 minutes in the accelerated time of the game). The contemporary obsession with total(itarian) recording of the world, with omniscience, is transformed into a poetic gesture as trivial as it is magnificent.

Brunet’s clouds are both simulacra and artifacts. They are pure signs, with no other function than their own appearance – and perhaps their imminent disappearance. Because in the grip, emphasized by Brunet, of technology over these gentle billows of our childhood, one senses an unease, reinforced by the exhibition’s title: «Just a bit more») – of dream and mystery before they vanish, and us with them?

Exhibition Symbiosis, artport x ISEA. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21

4 identical archival images each in their own quadrant of men working in a field, next to a conveyer belt carrying vegetables.

Mimi Ọnụọha’s 40% of Food in the US is Wasted (How the Hell is That Progress, Man?) is an interactive video composed of archival video clips from the 1950s–1980s, drawn from the Prelinger Archives and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Advertising the technological optimism of big agriculture, the sampled footage and audio betray a narrative of agricultural systems geared towards ever-increasing production and yield rather than equitable distribution. The artwork’s title emphasizes the reality of food waste, referencing the USDA’s own estimates of 30–40% of food waste and questioning the message of its promotional videos. The presentation of the video clips in a repetitive grid formation that can be advanced by viewers through continuous clicking amplifies the redundancies built into the process of automation. Jules Faife’s accompanying music drives the narrative and pulls the viewer into it, but Ọnụọha also works against the score and archival audio, breaking up their momentum by inserting the question “How the Hell is That Progress, Man?”

Retrospectively, the archival videos function as a reality check to the solutions they proclaim, revealing practices that would be considered problematic by today’s standards. Documenting the demographics of the people working in the fields, at the conveyor belts, and in roles of oversight, the footage openly displays systemic conditions of production and labor. 40% of Food in the US is Wasted (How the Hell is That Progress, Man?) continues Ọnụọha’s practice of interrogating and exposing the internal logics of technology-driven progress.

The project tries to show the magnificent changes occurred on Dubai landscape and architecture in less than 50 years.

The project title derives from the astronomical practices of the original stargazers of Southern Africa, who first mapped isiLimela (later named the Pleiades), which constellates 444.2 light years away from Earth.

In this 6-DoF experience, these ancient practices are superposed on the geography and modern astrophysics of the Southern African Large Telescope.

Fly over and traverse the starlit & ghostly terrain of the semi-desertic Karoo, where volumetric fashion performance unfolds to a cinematic Afro-diasporic score.

Feminist and expressionist, costumed figurations and particle bodies morph in a triptych, entangling African cosmology with the technological sublime of inner and outer space.

Adam & Atau exploit a commonly available consumer electronics device, the Apple iPhone, as an expressive, gestural musical instrument. A live duo, gestural music performance, running Pure Data on iPhones, transforming this object of music consumption into an expressive visceral musical instrument that captures performer gesture. One device in each hand, in 4 hands duo, a chamber music for live sampling, time stretching, and granular synthesis. With sensors, signal processing, synthesis and sound output embodied on one device, it is a self contained digital musical instrument for the performance of post-laptop music.

The emphasis of 4^15 is on human cognition. I am primarily interested in the “evolution” of surface and the relationship between the resulting artwork and human cognitive processes.

818 Cubed uses morphing to change the apparent shape of the ICC into other internationally iconic skyscrapers. The sequence begins by highlighting the natural shape of the ICC. This is next “morphed” into a contour shape representing Taipei 101 (Taiwan). Nine structures are represented in the sequence. Various formal strategies are used for structures that do not conform to the slender, singular shape of ICC. In terms of sequencing, 818 Cubed relates the formal qualities of each structure as well as global economic and political contexts. Accompanying audio comes from airports of various cities where the towers are located.

‘93% Human’ is a media artwork exploring the multispecies nature of being ‘human’, the ‘promiscuity’ of DNA, and DNA data as a generative tool, through an investigation of DNA we exhale in our breath and inhale from others. The work highlights the intimacy of our unnoticed exchanges with human and non-human others, and ‘contamination’ as a necessary condition of being.

A performance video depicts artist Helen Pynor and bioinformatician Jimmy Breen breathing into a scientific glassware condenser device, to collect a shared breath sample. DNA extracted from this shared sample was found to comprise 93% human DNA, with the remaining 7% belonging to around 6700 identified microbial species. Composer Amanda Cole has created a microtonal, polyphonic choral score for classically-trained singers, who use their own respiratory tracts to sing and whisper the taxonomic names of hundreds of the species present in Pynor and Breen’s shared breath sample. This multispecies community is brought into the gallery as an 8-channel sound work. Videos depict DNA nucleotide data generated from Pynor and Breen’s shared breath sample, in ongoing flux and movement, while scientific glassware objects offer metaphoric breathing ‘organs’, referencing Pynor and Breen’s original breath collection performance.

The digital fashioned body performs in its anatomical form,

Posthuman.

Procedurally generated skins emerge from the digital body, confounding the codified layers of fashion.

Voronoi Lace,
Particles that Shroud the body,

Digital Body becomes Dress.
Dress becomes Body.

Drawing its title from the Visible Human Project, which created the first high resolution 3D models of human anatomy, 9318 is homage to the posthuman bodies, inscripted and incorporated (Hayles 1999) as digital humans from the transversal medical imaging of actual humans.

9318 is an exercise of digital fashion scenography in the fashion film genre.

Digital materiality is entangled with the physical materialities it derives from, and explored through fashion performance, which confounds the different orders of body and dress. As metasurface, the anatomical avatar’s skin is osmotic, becoming, as her body generates digital textile through movement in virtual space.

Group show: We are surrounded by plenty of phenomenon scientifically unverifiable and numerous hidden amazing occurrences existing behind our everyday life. We sometimes feel the casual presence of culture, history on things we run into, and suddenly realize the beauty in things on your way to school. Arts always make us realize the presence of ordinary occurrences and the casual presence of culture. For this event, we had video art projected on the wall of shopping mall, and works printed out gigantically with large format printer in the center of the port at night.

Exhibition. Le Cube Garges, April 27 – May 18

Inspired by medieval bestiaries, The Anthropocene Bestiary is a compilation of different hybrid creatures produced by our time. Presented on occasion in the form of an installation inspired by the cabinets of curiosities and showcases of natural history museums, these hybrid titles help us to observe, navigate and orient ourselves in the fabric increasingly artificial world. Plastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, antenna trees, Sars-Covid – 2, eagles fighting drones, standardized bananas… each of these symptomatic specimens of the post-natural era in which we live allow us to glimpse the future of the beings that will eventually populate our planet.

A Cycle of Air is situated with/in the emergent future that is now, when living collectively in the interior atmospheres of buildings might offer, unevenly and interchangeably, breathable air compatible with life and/or health- and life-threatening risk. The work sets multiple art interventions into intra-active relation with the spatial configuration and conditions of the building/site; the audience’s sensing and breathing bodies; and, the composition of gases, volatile organic compounds, aerosol particulates and airborne microbes that comprise the resulting air. Catalysed by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and escalating wildfire events, and now haunted by the spectre of ongoing pandemics of both emergent and resurgent respiratory pathogens, A Cycle of Air challenges the audience to sit with questions of how humans might ethically live and breathe with/in more-than-human ecologies amidst unstable atmospheric and biopolitical conditions. The work is situated in dialogue with emerging research informing the complex aesthetic, technical, chemical, biological, political, and behavioural entanglements that characterise our precarious human-building-air relations.

Within the project A Diverse MonoCulture, van Leeuwenstein investigates whether it is possible to use robots to find a new balance in our ecosystem. After all, mankind naturally deploys new predators when something needs to be restored in an ecosystem. In ‘A Diverse Monoculture’ various robots come together to form ‘a beehive’ of new predators. These predators are used to restore the balance in our ecosystem by eating processionary caterpillars. The caterpillars are then converted into the fuel cells of the robots, so that they serve as fuel to keep the robot alive.

Sound is voice. Voice is sound. Sound is Word. Word is sound. Sound is story. Words become story. Human communication. Story sound, crushing sound and melting sound. Words connect people.

ATU EOKA Kl KU KEKOSASISUSESOTATITUTETONANTNUNENO

HA HI HU HF. HO MA MI MU MEMO YA YU YO RA RI RU RE RO WA N

Decomposition and recomposition, forces that consume and combine, create this procedurally-generated environment. The non-playable character walks straight ahead through the forest and fields, the invisible parts of which are activated by the sound of rain. The visible flora and human/animal remnants of the landscape have been extracted from the results of AI text-to-image prompts, hand traced and animated as black silhouettes.

Prompts from which I derived trees, flowers, bushes, mounds and structures included, “bone formation under water”, “driftwood shaped like sleeping person”, “tree with sudden strong wind disappearing on water”, “moss ruin brain stem”, “wildflower nodding rattling”. These also inspired glimpses of humans created by the landscape.

There are other entities that wander the simulation as animals: sleeping, searching, eating, scratching (via an original game AI algorithm). Visually, they are blades of grass, bushes, moving and crying out like cats and rodents, creatures literally living on through the plants, decomposition exposing the permeability of separate existences.

In the Styly link, the audiences is surrounded by video capture on four sides. The realtime software can be found here: https://aaronoldenburg.itch.io/flies

A Model of Motions is a multi-media interactive installation comprised of three wood and metal vessels – ‘Swell’, ‘Footsteps’, and ‘Turn’—and a rustic ship anchor linked together by linked chain. The installation forms a snaked pathway for the audience to journey over sand and water, history and imagination, earthly desire and celestial wonder.

A New Dawn is a memoryscape, which takes a critical approach and uses the Aurora Borealis as an audio-visual representation of life out of balance. Imagine the magnetic fields have shifted through climate change and the collision of electronically charged particles would happen in our proximity. The Aurora’s symbolise a geomagnetic storm caused by nature’s exclamation of the ecological crises.

The last shift was worked on the 4 April 1985 and the former ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ turned into an industrial wasteland. The ironworks are not only a symbol of ‘Wertewandel’, the change of values, but also symbolises our addiction to artificial energy and its transformation into wealth. As a side product of the last century’s heavy industry, we are now faced with a climate crisis.

Simultaneously the interpretation of Aurora’s in dreams signifies a positive outlook. A dream with an Aurora means important things will happen and ‘magnetic’ outcomes are about to appear on the horizon. While climate change appears to be a nightmare of the industrial past, this experience hopes to recalibrate our outlook. In Greek mythology Aurora refers to dawn, combining paste and present this memory-scape takes a position to make an argument about an innovative planet and that we must act now in a holistic manner on the climate crises.

The affordances and aesthetic of this experimental screen production are utilised through the viewers presence in a hybrid space; partly dream object and partly architectural requiem. The visuals are interacting with an original soundscape. The moving-image artwork conceptualised spatialised storytelling based on a combination of soundscape and abstract filmmaking. This original method is supported by experimentation with motionscapes. On location an accelerometer microphone was utilized to record the sound of the fabric. Using intellectual montage, the factory was personified and ‘reactivated’ through the placement of visual and audio effects in the filmic space to demonstrate how nature reclaims this architectural requiem.

The project proposes an investigation into the Palm Islands, investigating notions of history of imagery versus construction, with the result being imagery that only exist in a post-digital context.

[e] movie works

Remote intimate sound environment, an alley, a boat hold, a cave, a deserted shore. Children struggling to learn beloved songs of the Emirates, Arab, Indian, Pakistani.

Original work of art: Immortal Blossoms in an Everlasting Spring by Giuseppe Castiglione

This installation presents four animated films that are inspired by Castiglione’s Immortal Blossoms in an Everlasting Spring. These films are projected onto four large screens set in a square, so that viewers who step inside are fully surrounded by the imagery. Due to the optical alignment of these animations the visitors feel as if they are actually walking through a virtual blossoming garden.

The artist uses a small, flatbed, A4 scanner to take multiple images of her subjects and digitally enhance them to create ethereal and beautiful portraits.

I am exhibiting one of my acid machines at the IMOCA in Dublin for reFunct 2009, I will also do a small talk and concert.

Southern Winter Exhibitions 2023 at Hangars Numériques, May 16 – 21, then August 1 – 15 

Acqua Alta: Crossing the mirror, 2019-2020
A pop-up and augmented reality book.

By viewing them through a tablet, the ten double-pages of the book Acqua Alta – Crossing the Mirror become small theaters, where a dance form unfolds thanks to the custom-developed application. Folded white papers and ink drawings meet in a graphic purity and the simplicity of black and white, the artificial life of dancing miniature beings in a world imbued with the imagination of water. An experience at the crossroads of theater, dance, comics, animated films and video games.

The Acqua Alta – First Rain drawing is an autonomous board, an extension of the world of the book, which constitutes the setting for a dance scene, visible in augmented reality.

Designed, produced and edited by Adrien M & Claire B, the Acqua Alta project tells a story. A woman, a man, a house. An absurd daily life full of discord. But one rainy day, life turns upside down: the rising waters engulf the house in a sea of ​​ink. The woman slips and disappears. All that remains of her is her hair. Living. It is the story of a catastrophe, particular and universal. It is the story of a loss and a quest. It is the story of the fear of the strange and otherness, and of its taming.

Print off a copy of your work and mark specific examples of where the two works are similar, particularly good evidence is if you can find duplication of unique aspects of your work, for example, if an error in your original has been duplicated in the copy.

Hacnum Exhibition. various locations, May 16 – 21

Change is an old revolutionary, returning to its birth village looking for recognition for all it has done. Change talks to four people, who seem to hold disparate views on what change should bring in the future. In the end, it becomes clear that change is never really welcome.

Ad Hominem is a philosophical choose-your-own-adventure game, based on Eutopia Unbound by Sofie Verraest, in which the player is cast in the role of Change. You are invited to pick one of two answers to questions proposed by four different characters who represent four distinct utopic ideas. Change is guided towards an event, organised in honour of its arrival, through a maze of historical quotes on collectivism, individualism, progressive thinking and conservatism.

Performance for 50 Ikea clocks, metal surfaces, contact microphones and amplification (2013)  The performance is part of Madan’s ongoing engagement as part of the Montréal-based collective [The User] with the ideas of György Ligeti surrounding determinacy and  indeterminacy in complex mechanical systems. The performer selects from a large pool of ostensibly identical clocks, placing these on one of several metal surfaces to which contact microphones are affixed. The performance relies on the subtle differences between each of the clocks, their rhythmic and timbral distinctions highlighted by the resonating characteristics of the metal sheets.
The Coincidence Engines series was begun by [The User] in 2008. Earlier works in the series
include Coincidence Engine One: Universal Peopleʼs Republic Time and Coincidence Engine
Two: Approximate Demarcator of Constellations in Other Cosmos.

Animals featured in Castiglione’s paintings burst into life in this 4K animation, the first of its kind that the National Palace Museum has produced. In this short film, the valiant dogs from Ten Fine Hounds and Long-haired Dog Beneath Blossoms take off on an adventure with the lemur from Cochin Lemur and the deer from Auspicious Roe Deer. By using the special powers of the ten dogs, the animals manage to overcome a series of obstacles and eventually come to appreciate the spirit of Castiglione’s art, a unique combination of Chinese and European techniques. The 4K-resolution animation, created by some of Taiwan’s best animators, brings out the full beauty of Castiglione’s art.

The proposal for this artist residency is to explore local craft and vernacular design cultures in Gwangju, along with the street-level electronics scene, and subcultural activities such as sound-system scenes, hacking and toy culture, combining these elements to create locally-relevant automatons. The artist will bring his design, interactivity, sculpting and fabrication skills to the project. The resulting work will reflect a combination of influences, those brought by the artist, combined with those of the locale, in the creation of hybrid, affective objects made from local material, which bridge cultures, ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and technology.

African Robots is a project to intervene in street ‘wire art’ production in Southern Africa, and in other locations with similar conditions.

In South Africa and Zimbabwe, subsistence artists make largely ornamental goods from galvanized-steel fencing wire and other cheap materials, which they sell in the street. African Robots brings DIY electronics knowhow and cheap components to produce interactive and kinetic forms of work; African automatons such as birds, animals and insects.

The project functions as interventionist art and design fiction while establishing new social connections and the exchange of knowledge. It plays on the aesthetic similarity between old school computer wireframe 3D, and handmade three-dimensional objects made with wire – particularly in the offshoot project SPACECRAFT, which sees the design and production of wire spaceships, including a Zimbabwe Space Station drone! The project refers to the history of mechanical automatons in the advent of computing, and pays attention to the affective aspects of robots and the animation of material objects. For ISEA 2018 in Durban, African Robots will undertake workshops with local wire artists and exhibit the work made.

African Robots is a project to intervene in street ‘wire art’ production in Southern Africa, and in other locations with similar conditions.

In South Africa and Zimbabwe, subsistence artists make largely ornamental goods from galvanized-steel fencing wire and other cheap materials, which they sell in the street. African Robots brings DIY electronics knowhow and cheap components to produce interactive and kinetic forms of work; African automatons such as birds, animals and insects.

The project functions as interventionist art and design fiction while establishing new social connections and the exchange of knowledge. It plays on the aesthetic similarity between old school computer wireframe 3D, and handmade three-dimensional objects made with wire – particularly in the offshoot project SPACECRAFT, which sees the design and production of wire spaceships, including a Zimbabwe Space Station drone! The project refers to the history of mechanical automatons in the advent of computing, and pays attention to the affective aspects of robots and the animation of material objects. For ISEA 2018 in Durban, African Robots will undertake workshops with local wire artists and exhibit the work made.

Recent developments with ‘digital photography’ and ‘electronic paint systems’ are bridging the gap between painting and photography. While on a Harkness Fellowship in the United States I have been moulding these two new tools into a powerful medium.

Having spent 1984-1985 al Massachusetts Institute of Technology pursuing these developments I decided to move to New York. For several years I have taught as a Professor at the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute of Art and Design. However it is on a night shift as a ‘Paintbox’ artist in a T.V. production house in New York City where my interest in the digital medium and portraiture has evolved. Called upon to make subtle changes and manipulations of broadcast images has helped me discover a fine line. The fine line that is the acceptable truth of photographic realism in the media.

Late al night some of the characters it has been my job to work with, trapped in the medium of video like insects in amber, have evolved into a series of portraits ‘Telegenic Charismas’. It is these figures culled from the media; the world of synthesized seamless characters. T. V. evangelists, talk show hosts and news anchormen that became an exhibition organised by the MIT Museum last year. The exhibition took the form of paintings, ink jets and thermal prints. The work in this show is from that series.

Afterlife is an immersive virtual reality experience inspired by Buddhist contemplation techniques where we can escape the sensory overload of our physical environment for a moment. Everything in this world is designed to focus the attention to simple things like colours, light and droning sounds or to let the spectator experience the vastness of space. The work created in collaboration with Herwig Scherabon, Arno Deutschbauer, Michael Ari and Lukas Fliszar, commissioned by sound: frame, aids in understanding the inconsistency of life and to detach oneself from one’s ideals and expectations. The experience invites the audience to be just a spectator and let go of his or her thoughts, expectations and worries.

The Agulhas Drifter project will launch an artist-created data collecting ocean buoy in the Agulhas current off the coast of Durban, and install an immersive light and sound installation that will respond to satellite transmitted buoy data in real time. The Agulhas current, off the east coast of South Africa, is one of the few areas where surface currents transport towards the Antarctic. It is here that oceanographers have observed the unique phenomenon known as Agulhas current rings. The data buoy will utilize an IMU to capture pitch, roll and vertical acceleration from waves, a thermistor to pick up sea surface temperature, and GPS to track currents. The gallery installation will enact data sets using stepper motors and kinetic sculpture to project a shifting horizon line of laser light based on real time ocean conditions. Public display of the piece will enable local Durban residents to virtually connect with constantly shifting ocean conditions in an immersive way.

Aheilos is an online virtual interactive 3d environment. The idea of Aheilos is to promote diverse creative, educational and informative activity on the edge of art, science and technology.

What would a future look like where humans canmore simply and directly understand the communication signals of other animals? What does it mean for society, for culture, for religion? For our moral values? For our in-built biases regarding who is labelled conscious and thinking and who isn’t? What would it mean for food production and animal agriculture? What would it mean for our philosophies and humanities? For misguided human-exceptionalism? Or would it change nothing at all? Would humans continue to inflict harm and oppression towards other species no matter what they might say? We are a species capable of great atrocities but perhaps with a little nudge from the right technologies we could reconsider our relations with other species. ‘AI what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?’ is four separate listening devices that have been developed using machine learning technologies. Accessible publicly via your smartphone and requiring your microphone to listen in real time the work will listen to specific vocalizations of either Australian Magpies, Pied Butcher birds, Noisy Miners and Grey-Headed Flying Foxes and interpret their vocalizations into written words and visual displays via your screen. Two of these species vocalise in ways that are known to science to have clear behavioural and situational contexts in other words ‘meanings’. However this project also includes two much more experimental cases, two improvisational songbirds: the butcherbird and the magpie. This project uses experimental and innovative techniques in the development of audio recognition AI models for reimagining birdsong and vocalisations and then uses techniques from combinatory and algorithmic poetry to present that data in a human language. Each model represents a long process of 1) research into the known and observable vocalization and behavioural habits of each species 2) audio recording fieldwork 3) choosing strong audio samples 4) audio classification of vocalization samples into classes to develop unique data corpori for AI learning 5) ‘teaching’ these classes to an AI and then importantly 6) considering how to present the outcomes of this via a visual and textual display.

Akousmaflore: Sensitive and interactive musical plants.
Lights Contacts: Interactive sound and light installation with body and skin from public.
In 2007, Scenocosme created Akousmaflore, which offers original sonorous interactions by  touching plants. In 2009, Scenocosme created Lights Contacts, an interactive installation where contacts between spectators create sounds and light according to the electrostatic energy of their bodies. In 2010, this artwork received the Visual Arts and New Technologies award at the Bains Numeriques festival.

The essential ‘otherness’ of frozen landscapes permeates this multi-channel video work. Based in part on writer Arthur Koestler’s press reports filed from the 1931 airship flight to the high Arctic, it explores “the polar imaginary” through material gathered on the sea and in remote locations around the Svalbard archipelago. No recordings survive of Koestler’s radio transmissions from this journey, noted for his vivid and entrancing account of what is essentially a largely invariant terrain of ice and snow; however, his newspaper dispatches are part of the public record. The polar territories have now been extensively explored and mapped, and are far better understood than they were in Koestler’s time, yet their qualities of spatial and geographic disorientation remain as essential characteristics. This work re-imagines the spaces of these reports, presenting them in a contemplative framework to allow “a long view of long views”.

Alethic’s broad conceptual terrain is multifaceted. It alludes to philosophical concerns, technoculture and futurism. As the work evolves it is also dealing with concepts of deep time, space time perception, cultural understanding of time, metaphysical and quantum physical scientific theories and developments, also the variant understandings and contexturalisations across different cultures. A wide range of vocal samples are used, many drawn from writers and thinkers informing my understanding of the world from the 1970s onwards.

The work is deeply rooted in speculative practice. My creative career has been based on researching the creative use of technology as it has evolved over the last forty years. Cultural contextualisation has been a major part of this and the role of the performer. My role is the conductor. Two Leap Motion devices monitor realtime movement, position and gesture of my hands from which complex signal flows control and influence sound and vision in a variety of ways. Conducting for the twenty first century. This is directly inspired by my work performing on stage within classical and contemporary classical modalities. Alethic is the most developed expression of my core practice to date.

The works takes the audience into deep immersion, physical and psychosensory. The work is variably formatted but at its’ highest delivery mode uses ambisonic sound to put the audience inside the 3D sound. Similarly up to 12 thousand pixel width visual content can fully surround the audience with the requisite technical production values and staging. All of this interactively controlled by my performance in real time. Video camera sources linear and realtime are also used and integrated at times. Much of the visual content is mathematically generated using a range of algorithmic styles and approaches including AI and machine learning.

Aliquid is a single channel video where the electronic signal is manipulated digitally to materialize into synthetic flesh. Slowly landing onto a glass architecture, this undefined substance is torn apart by sharp edges and eventually disintegrates into particules that spread into the atmosphere.

When we wave at machines, do they also wave back? All Hands is a software assemblage that explores this question, arranging a human hand so that it co-emerges on screen with a machinic conspirator it must trace to activate a shifting topology of ambient sound and light. The participant sits in front of a screen showing a minimal real time environment: a fractionally shimmering curtain of light. As they raise their hands above the Leap Motion controller, a multitude of virtual hands appear on the screen, and the participant needs to use a meshwork of sensory skills (embodied reflexes, micromovements, vision, and proprioception) to track and disentangle.

This work by artist Khan Lee has been developed as a site specific installation inside a mysterious vault at the ALSCO laundry facility that functioned for 50 years as a place to clean and store furs. The vault has never before been opened to the public. The work is a multi-channel original sound track composed by Andrew Lee of HolyHum and recorded in collaboration with HolyHum.

I became interested in computer-aided textile design, when I was a final year student at Chelsea School of Art in 1985. The programme we were using at that time was rather slow and primitive, so together John Couch, the technician/programmer, and myself developed “Drawmouse” – a textile orientated print design software package.

For the last 3 years I have been doing both traditional floral watercolour designs for furnishing, and computer-aided designs as well. These were used for experimenting with colourways, repeats, scales, ideas, etc. I have sold many “Drawmouse” designs to Marks & Spencer, mainly floral prints for toiletry packaging collections.

As well as freelance designs, I have lectured and taken workshops on computer-aided design (mainly textiles) to Art Schools and Colleges all over the country. I now work for KGB Micros Ltd in London, designing, training, demonstrating on a sophisticated “paintbox” like computer system, using Truevision and Lumena software.

All the Seas in the World is sound installation in which sea water purity/contamination data is measured and translated to the sound.

A performing body moving in space is captured in detail at regular intervals and represented as data orga-nized in a hierarchy. The data are abstractions that are then retargeted and reconstructed. The new or dif-ferent forms the data retain elements of the original performance because the body moving in space is a system of inter-related parts – a movement system.

Our bodies and worlds are words on the precipice of comprehension. finding connection. being alone – being together. communicating – failing communication. connecting – disconnecting.

“Alone_02” is one of an ongoing a series of animated artworks begun in 2022. The animation comes from a combination of motion capture sessions with generative 3D modeling of text characters. The music is influenced by the same motion capture data that drives the visual elements.

Juried artwork. Exhibition ‘AI, Kombucha, and Cyberfeminism’ at École des Arts Décoratifs, May 16 – 21

The altars for cosmic talismans compose a space of remembrance of the different facets of the same form of life. The staged discs can be perceived as material experiments, waste from a beverage production or ritual objects. They invite us to question what we believe in, our collective values ​​and their influence on our relationship to the world, the ways we have of collaborating with, caring for, cultivating or exploiting other living beings.

The Great Cosmic Talismanwas cultured from a mixed strain. Received the same week of June 2021 from Alexia Venot on the one hand and Maya Minder on the other, mixed, maintained and drunk all summer and autumn, until January 2022 when she met the Vivant Kombucha strain that gorged the bequeathed cellulose for the Biomaterials, Fermentation and Kombucha workshop in Unîmes. A few months later, cultivation with these liters of starter took place in Limbes in Saint-Étienne, before returning to Nîmes to seed the tea prepared with Jeanne Mainetti and the help of Melissa Marquet. It grew and then dried at the University of Nîmes during the summer of 2022. Untreated until last January, it received a two-sided massage with Vivien Roussel’s linseed oil / turpentine / beeswax recipe for thr34d5.
Like the symbiosis that constitutes it, it is only relations and circulations: commensalism, predation, mutualism, competition, amensalism…

In collaboration with Olivier Lellouche, Mial Watkins and Jeanne Mainetti. Thanks to Eugénie Zuccarelli, Mélissa Markai, Christophe Pornay and the University of Nîmes.

Alternative Communication@OSU Electronic Village was the event which was related to “ISEA2002”, “ISEA2002” was held in Nagoya, But, many presentations were given in the suburbs, We thought that “ISEA2002” was tied to the street. So, we made the space in Nagoya’s downtown “Osu”. And, “Osu” is “Electric Town” of Nagoya like Akihabara of Tokyo. “Osu” was a suitable place for “ISEA2002”. This was an experiment of the communication by micro electronic media, We made an FM station in a micro-area accompanied with Streaming (Internet broadcasting).

Timetable
FM narrowcasting : FM89Mhz
Streaming : http://tf.ff.tku.ac.jp/
October 26 (Sat.), 5pm-7pm ()ST)
“Report Exhibition ISEA2002 Nogoya in Garden Pier”
October 27 (Sun.), 5pm-7pm ()ST)
“Report Opening ISEA2002 in Nagoya”
October 28 (Mon.), 5pm-7pm ()ST)
“Sound Performance – Kenji Maehara -”
“Report ISEA2002 in Nagoya”
October 29 (Tue.), 5pm-7pm ()ST)
“Report ISEA2002 in Nagoya”
October 30 (Wed.), 5pm-7pm ()ST)
“Report ISEA2002 in Nagoya”
“Sound/Visual Session – students of Bauhaus Univ.
(Weimar) with Kenji Maehara -“

Ambient Pressure is an ongoing project that draws attention to the ways photography has literally and conceptually ‘framed’ nature. The artworks are created from a combination of analog and digital interventions involving the manipulation and physical modification of photographs. The images undergo two phases of composition: first during capture, and then through the transformation of negatives, scans, and prints using tools such as blades, lighters, markers, plastic, rocks, bleach, and other materials.

The term ambient pressure refers to the pressure of the medium where a specific object is located. In this work it is a metaphor for the processes applied that change the material surface of the photographs highlighting that photographs are not transparent windows to the world but rather constructed representations that create a distance between nature and human experience.

Our project takes a look at certain statistics about specific locations in Durban. These will be represented through dance and broadcast in highly populated areas in the city for public consumption. The public will be given the opportunity to vote whether they agree or disagree with the statistics via answering simple questions that should show what their interpretation or experience has been. This will then show how similar or different public perception is to specific data. In this way we hope to encourage the public to become more aware of their environment and engage with statistics that are readily available but hardly ever given the time of day.

An early outcome of the forthcoming Forest/Art Intelligence Project (FAI) (2024-6) which aims to return a currently cleared block of land back to high conservation-value forest at Samford Ecological Research Station (SERF), near Brisbane, Australia. As the forest ecology slowly returns to health, a symbiotic, experimental artwork is being developed across the entire site. When realised it will have both local and on-line presence and include a full scientific analysis of the site’s ongoing revegetation status.

This video installation (Analog Intelligence) speaks to the projects’ first tentative steps – into uncovering and bringing to attention the extraordinary natural intelligences of a land in self-repair after decades of clearing, providing the inspiration for a non-extractive, hybrid art-science work capable of growing and evolving with the forest, whilst also actively benefitting it.

Analog Intelligence explores the future artwork site by land, air and soil, speaking poetically to early findings into conceiving loosely coordinating site-wide artworks, able to bring the forests’ regeneration process to public focus, whilst finding and occupying their own intelligent, beneficial ‘niches’ within that re-emerging forest ecology.

This first outcome of the R&D phase was developed during the initial six months of the long-term FAI project, supported by a prestigious ANAT Synapse Art-Science residency (2024) and a creative development grant from Creative Australia (2024-5). The project is supported by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), Samford Ecological Research Facility (SERF) and the NCRIS-enabled Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and Dr. Dmitry Bratanov and Gavin Broadbent, Research Engineering Facility, Office of Research Infrastructure, QUT, Brisbane, Australia.

The major characteristic of Tacit Group’s work is not just creating a video that fits well with the music, but the visuals and music correspond with each other. For this event, the group presents Analytical, a piece that unfolds the music and visuals together. On this piece, Tacit Group transfers sounds into graphics through an analysis called ‘Fast Fourier Transform’. Then they create a basis waveform using this graphic’s figure. The first step of this piece is the Tacit Group’s execution on stage. Then the sound visualizes as graphics, which becomes its own sound, real-time. In the end the loop of graphics and sounds transforming to each other, is improvised as an audio-visual performance.

Hun-Min- Jung- Ak (Korean Letter) (2018)
Hanguel is the only letter in the world that the people who created it, the date of proclamation, and the principles of creation are exactly identified, and is registered as UNESCO Memory of the World. The piece which got the major motif from vowels and consonants of Hangeul, Morese ㅋ ung ㅋ ung, and Tacit Group’s representative piece Hun-min-jung-ak will be on stage. The combination of consonants and vowels that the players type in builds the music of Hun-min-jung-ak, and it is based on the principles of Hangeul creation. The basic rule of Hanguel creation is that the letters are made via horizontal and vertical constructions, and the components of the letters are based on the actual sound of the letter. Tacit Group used these two rules and materialized the piece by computer programming. When a player types in, each component of a letter changes into corresponding sound. Players make abstract shapes by combining consonants and vowels, or talk to the audiences by typing in letters with meanings, thus improvising the performance. Being able to communicate with the audiences via Hangeul, which also is the main music and video itself for the performance.

Morse ㅋung ㅋung(Morse Kung Kung) (2018)
This piece is also based upon Hanguel, the Korean alphabet. Like our world, there is no distinct line between determinacy and indeterminacy in the world of sounds. Morseㅋung ㅋung visualizes/sonifies this ambiguity with a whole new rule of connecting principles of morse code and Korean alphabet. When a performer types in a Korean letter to a computer, it changes into sound with specific rhythm. This rule seems natural at first. But if taken with a closer look, the performer’s contingency of unpredictable text writing is involved. Hence, it brings life into the world of sounds where determinacy and indeterminacy clashes.

Organized and sponsored by Art Center Nabi

In the Anatomies of Intelligence performance we create an intricate and intimate experience that centers around a demonstration/dissection of a single unsupervised learning algorithm, “K-means”. Inspired by the anatomical theatre of the early-Enlightenment, the performance unfolds in a unique setting whereby the two artists sit around a circular table with their laptops, sending javascript commands to a server which relays those commands to a bespoke audio-visual performance “theatre” based in the web browser that is accessible to a global audience during the performance.

Simultaneously, in-person the same distributed platform is used as the core audio-visual material to create an immersive experience for the audience on site where each step of the algorithm is slowed down, made visible, audible and felt.
Amongst our focus points are those that relate to tacit knowledge and a reliance on the senses when accumulating knowledge about bodies and body-like structures. The concept of “aesthesis” has been especially useful in shaping our work; aesthesis is a somewhat obscure term occurring in eighteenth-century European medical and philosophical dictionaries describing “the faculty or power of sensation” (1) in scientific practice. Our concept of aesthesis shapes a methodology for this project that looks at the “sensory power” displayed by machine learning algorithms, their representations and sets of training data.

Our research has been feeding a growing dataset and online repository (2) which gathers terminologies and techniques for a critical examination of the “anatomy” of learning and prediction processes and models of machine learning algorithms. The same platform is used to explore, through a performance practice combining live-coding, voice and meditative reflection, how such a collection and an artisanal algorithmic toolkit can confront the idealized bodies of artificial intelligence — its representational structures and sense-making processes.

(1) Hendriksen, M.M.A., 2012, Doctoral Thesis, Leiden University.
(2) Link: https://anatomiesofintelligence.github.io/catalogue.html

Taking the Fatberg as a metaphor of a new artificially created intelligence, the work represents an instant game of chance, where the only winner is the Fatberg itself. By clicking the “flush” button, the Fatberg is fed by our digital database: combining wastewater quality data and a vast number of analytical data taken over from the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia. It is a collection of our own heterogeneous by-products collected for over 20 years, from data on microbes to astrophysical measurements, toxins in the Danube, but also data on employment, bank accounts, calls within the telecommunications network, data on newborns, divorces and drug addicts in our country, amount of food consumption, on the value of dinar, on housing, on migration and tourists, on city traffic etc. Everything that makes life around us and everything that leaves garbage and floats further, refining new data and making possible for the Fatberg to (re)form.

Journey of the Ancients is a collaboration between Tracey Benson and Josiah Jordan. The project explores the iconography of the sea and natural environment as a juxtaposition to ancient runic symbols. These symbols represent a culture and language lost as well as a ‘proxy’ for ancestral links to the old country. This video installation features an audio composition created by Josiah using Tracey’s DNA. The raw DNA data was translated into MIDI notes and assigned instrumentation for each chromosome relevant to Tracey’s Norse ancestry. The resulting composition connects the audience to this ancestral link, while providing an abstract space for contemplation. Journey of the Ancients seeks to create a meditative space for audiences, one that takes them on a journey to the inner world of deep contemplation. Although the material is a reference to Tracey’s ancestral connections to Norse culture, the imagery and sounds are intended to evoke connection much more broadly. The use of the Runes is both as a means to connect ancient knowledge but also as a pathway to greater earth awareness. Each of the 24 runes from the Elder Futhark responds to an aspect of nature – both the natural world and our human nature.

Ancient Thoughts and Electric Buildings is an experimental, audio-led, virtual reality (VR) documentary that examines the portion of Toronto’s downtown core that extends along the city’s Gardner Expressway. This site traverses Canada’s financial nexus and has been the recent locus of extensive condo and commercial development; simultaneously, it exists as a region that is (and has historically been) occupied by a significant number of homeless people. This project seeks to foreground spatial and haptic sound as a key sensory modality distinguishing the conditions of the locale’s urban dispossessed from that of the privileged.

[e] movie works

Eyes on video monitors track viewers as they move. Initially, it’s almost comic, but gradually reveals itself as an unsettling comment on the ubiquitous nature of contemporary surveillance technology.

The possibilities of the discourses from the Global South have been restricted. The production chain of technologies originating from the Western tradition frames the creative possibilities of techniques within its own “program”: Creative discourses are then delimited and predefined by the political, philosophical, and cultural structures and mechanisms that the Global North and its industry establish through the determination of technologies and their consumption. Considering the subaltern nature of Latin American territories it becomes necessary to direct our research toward situated artistic practices that reimagine, adopt and deviate image technologies in a localized perspective of their use and adapt them to the needs and imaginaries that populate what we consider as “the south”.

It is a response to a workshop given by Italian artist Fabrizio Plessi that refers to a metaphor resonating with “the fluidity inside of us”, the fluidity that makes it possible for identities to be formed and cohered.

anfractuous, an interactive dance artwork that invites viewers/audience members to activate choreography through choice and play. Viewers assemble small dance vignettes into a collective whole, mobilizing and co-authoring the choreography. In anfractuous, time is not a measurable quantity, but instead a material that is warped and shaped through viewer actions and desire. The real-time temporality of the audience intertwines with the fixed duration of the filmed beings and a shared time emerges.
In an era where people are watching dance online more than ever before, this combines the physicality and visceral experience of dance, with choice-making. Theatrical and cinematic art works are becoming more navigable, shared and immersive with game-based platforms and this research proposes possibilities in how the performing arts can evolve with these paradigms.

MINDSCAPE is a metaphor of what we are becoming in this digital era. Like most people nowadays, the performer appears isolated and hooked up with a computer, his/her body connected to and surrounded by light wires, creating a distance between the own body and the environment, symbolizing the desire to become a machine or cyborg that attaches artificial technologies to its own structure. The performer appears rigid on the stage, but her inner emotional states give continuously movement and transformation to the audiovisual environment.
In MINDSCAPE, the performer interacts with a light structure made by electroluminescent wires and sound via a BCI (Brain-Computer interface), which measures her brain waves, which create and control the light and sonic environment.
The visual environment is created by a light structure made by electroluminescent wires (EL wires). The EL cables glare when applied to an alternating current (AC). Hence, once the AC has been activated, the data of the performer’s brain waves from the openEEG interface is utilized in order to turn on/off different cables and in different tempos.
The sound section of the work consists of a surround soundscape which changes depending on the information coming from the performer’s brainwave activity

These works deal essentially with the problems of transferring and transforming images drawn on the computer to other media. I work in a variety of media – paint, printmaking (photo-etching and linocut). stained glass and clay, the last providing me with an opportunity to work out in a three dimensional form images based on my computer drawings.

I like to draw freehand on the computer combining those images with the formal structures that most software programs have. Using the computer with its built in constraints results in the creation of an artificial space which is different in feel to paintings based on direct observation where the space surrounding the object provides a continuous structure for the whole image. And it is this manufactured space that for me distinguishes computer based art.

ln the Angry Sphinx I experimented with the combination of a free hand image overlaid with a formal structure which was based on a totally different abstract design drawn on the computer.

Anima explores the individual space of the unconscious mind of the male. This seemingly dormant part of the mind is the feminine principle, and lies constantly active based on Jungian theories. Through the abstraction of pixels, the artist attempts to simulate and animate the metamorphosis of the relation between the conscious and the unconscious in its transcendental chaos. The simulation is further accompanied by trance inducing tribal chants that are multi layered to express and trigger the unconscious mind. Within the context of Batswana people and Bantu people at large, a man’s sensitivity must often lie repressed. Due to this conventional outward composure, the inwardly directed anima becomes one of the most significant complexities in its autonomy. The feminine unconscious carries important psychological qualities within a man, and thus creates the necessary balance of archetypical consciousness.

Animated Truth – Niran is the beginning of a series of Polaroids that tell only half the truth. The Polaroid is a traditional format of documentary, whilst animation is considered far removed from documentary. However, in this piece the animation will inform the truth by giving life to the experienced truth that cannot be captured with Polaroid film. The piece is a standalone piece that demonstrates how a story of trauma that defines a person can be told with more meaning using the experiential world – the other world – created by animation.

Through annotations this Instagrammable work of j.p. mot’s personal archive pokes light jabs on the subject of Asians being seen as a foil to privilege and a scapegoat for identity politics: somewhat of a buffer to gatekeep class/race disparity and an “acceptable” output for triggered anger toward the perfect subaltern. As we are humble and nice we nod and smile…

There’s always the component of the lived experience vs the myth of meritocracy. In which there’s constant validation of this idea of the subaltern in the rhizome of society. Who, if they (the subaltern) work hard enough and are being an outstanding productive member of their society, can rise above their station. Without discounting anyone’s lived experience or qualitative information at hand… the problem is that it (the notion of meritocracy) is still deeply embedded in the notion of shame in line with normalizing instances of micro-aggressions toward minorities. How great do you have to become in this equation of inequity to have the same worth as the privilege to receive basic reciprocity? The myth of meritocracy extends and maintains itself through niceness and humbleness which both participate in conserving a sense of stagnation and status quo in racial disparities due to systemic and institutionalized bias.

Anomy, for U.S. News is a generative audiovisual artwork constructed with C# and Supercollider code to redact words containing the letter “e” from news streams across the United States in real time. Streams of text and black redaction boxes are programmed to circulate around viewers and generate notes in a musical score that neither repeats nor ends. Reminiscent of both piano rolls and classified documents, the work is intended as a diverse musical work and a thought-provoking visual record navigating mass media, censorship, and language in contemporary society.
The term “Anomy” was popularized in Emile Durkheim’s 1897 sociological study of the social roots of suicide and is commonly defined as a condition characterized by a breakdown in social values and norms. The multivalent qualities of contemporary media experience produce such breakdowns in language, truth, and meaning, as typified by disinformation campaigns and the cultural emergence of “fake news.” Inspired by constrained writing and concrete poetry such as Georges Perec’s “La Disparition,” we use the lipogram as an interpretation-form, emphasizing issues of subjectivity and control as well as conventions of style and language in news media. Centering itself around the loss of “e” both in text and sound, Anomy, for U.S. News seeks to induce viewers to contemplate new linguistic structures in a condition of absence

Original work of art: Chinese chess board painted on the back with flowers of the four seasons by Giuseppe Castiglione

A 3D computer graphic representation of Castiglione’s painted chessboard is horizontally projected onto a low table. The viewer uses an array of sixteen buttons, mounted on a pedestal, to flip each of the board’s sixteen segments and thereby create different combinations of its painted and chessboard aspects.

In 1970 the radical art and architecture group Ant Farm (1968–1978) travelled cross country in a “Media Van” shooting video and networking with other artists. Ant Farm Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule), an interactive sculpture made in 2008, invites users to leave a “donation” to a digital Time Capsule, but also functions as a small video theater showing works made in 1970. This on-going project migrates across time and space and intersects with new ubiquitous technologies.

Antarctica Underwater is largely constructed from incidental footage collected in icy cold Antarctic waters, hundreds of meters below the surface, as a seal bumped into an underwater camera and a serene jellyfish floated by, as did a ctenophore. Woven into these videos are the microscopic plankton comprising the primary focus of the Oceanographic researchers: barely visible shrimp-like krill, (food for seals, penguins and whales), and the microscopic plankton that produce half the oxygen in our environment. This work is intended as a subtle reminder that Antarctica is part of our world and life there is essential for our survival.

Antibodies is an interactive experience in the form of a never-ending video call. Participants only show up and do not have to say anything. Anyone can join at any time and all contributions are accepted. The experience uses the webcam to track the face of participants and record their face gestures. It was commissioned by the Maison de la culture Ahuntsic, in Montréal (Canada), to replace an exhibition of 3 interactive installations by the same artist.

Daniëlle Ooms graduated in 2019 from the Industrial Design Bachelor at the Technical University of Eindhoven, with her project Apple-Based Material. For her graduation, she constructed garments made out of her own biodegradable material, completely based on apples. She is currently studying the Master Industrial Design at TU/e, where her main focus is developing materials for a sustainable fashion future while provoking a conversation about the current fashion industry.

The AquA(l)formings project addresses the possibility of an empathic human relationship to more-than-human entities, drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of “tentacular thinking” as the ability to perceive the world through empathizing with more-than-human entities.
The project explores changes in the marine environment caused by human presence and tries to imagine how the new conditions (rising sea levels and water temperatures, new chemical composition, etc.) affect its inhabitants. Seas and oceans record such environmental changes as memories, either in individual organisms or as distinct shifts in ecosystem structures.

AquA(l)formings is a multilayered installation exploring “aquatic sensing.” The physical (biomaterial sculpture) and digital (audio, video AI models that interact with sensory data) form a tangible experience of changing conditions in the coastal environments.

The artists trace “threads” of the noble pen shell (Pinna nobilis), a marine inhabitant that has always aroused the curiosity of scientists and others involved with the sea, and use it as a visual synonym for the more-than-human entities. Today, however, the noble pen shell has succumbed to disease caused by environmental changes in the Mediterranean.  The use of AI technologies helps visualize the past and the future of the noble pen shell, and the vast underwater meadows of the Posidonia oceanica seagrass in the northern Adriatic Sea.

By presenting its story, the artists help to initiate research to explore the use and improvement of new biological materials that would not threaten the existence or habitat of certain organisms.

Aquadisia explores the queering of biopolitical power in the quest to engineer nonhuman life for human survival. For ISEA 2020, the project manifests as an immersive website and participatory performance about a new species of cyborg oysters that can cure climate change. Merging fact and fiction, the narrative centers around the genetic modification of a new species of cyborg oysters that can convert toxic water into an aphrodisia-inducing fluid. Harvested in innovative aquaculture farms, the fluid is piped into municipal water sources. By simply turning on your kitchen faucet, you can pour a glass of this magical liquid and take part in a more-than-human experience.

Playing on the libidinal myth of the oyster, a hermaphroditic organism, the project explores aphrodisia as a more sentient state of being and empowerment. The sensations move beyond mere sexual connotations into an awakened state of “Aquadisia” – a Sentience 2.0. It questions the contradictions within new technological models of bioengineering that can often adversely affect nonhuman life, and how creating more sentient and perceptible “humans” might be another path to consider.

The immersive website offers a glimpse into how the science meets a new Sentience 2.0. To participate in the performance, participants must log-on to the website and connect to the Aquadisia Network. And be sure to have a glass of water ready!

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

Oil sculpture series, 2014-2023
Mixed materials (oils, mineral gelatin, pigment, cast pmma, polymers, cotton, fabrics, motor, light system), 22 x 22 cm each. Device design Rémi Boulnois
Photos Matthieu Fappani, Golnaz Behrouznia
The series benefited from individual assistance in the creation of the Drac Midi Pyrénées 2014
Courtesy of Adagp, Paris.
[Translated from french by Google Translate]

“It’s hard to name what’s submerged in the glass containers of Golnaz Behrouznia’s Aquatilium 0.2 series, whose aesthetic often invokes the life sciences. She reminds us of the essential role of observation in both artistic creation and scientific research. Initiated in the artist’s studio-laboratory, these floating pieces are only completed with comments from observers. So it is that each and every one of us projects ourselves into such abstractions, daring to make our own personal interpretations, just waiting to be exchanged with others. And isn’t that what ideas are all about, in art as in science?” _Dominique Moulon, 2023

“Golnaz Behrouznia work on an extension of her Floating Pieces series, called Aquatilium. She brings movement to her sculptures, in the liquid they contain. It thus comes to remember the movement of the planets or the tremors of the flesh … The artist organizes the space of the room in the manner of an imaginary laboratory, with astonishing forms referring to those of microscopic nature, to chemistry, or even to elements of fiction. _Bérangère Brecqueville 2014​

By combining computational design and clarinet playing, I create performances that demonstrate a close affinity between music and visual imagery. For ISEA2014, the highpoint of my performance of Visual Music will be a work produced specially for the event – it’s called Arabesques. In advance of this, he performed two other works – ‘Memories are Made of This’ and ‘SHAPES’.

During the 2018 International Symposium on Electronic Art in Durban, South Africa, iGuzzini participated as a partner to highlight the efforts of the industry in finding relevant approaches for everyday challenges.

Architecture of Exclusion came about as a process of research-action created by the Frente 3 de Fevereiro and Afrofuturismo collectives. In this audiovisual production, we propose questions about the visible and invisible walls that permeate urban centers. A giant ball that reads “Haiti Here” was used to trigger dialogue and encounters. Is Haiti here? Responses from the Ipanema and Rio Carnivals reveal the territories of our historical perspective.

The Architectures of the Latent Space works are experiments in attempting to force abstraction by manipulating the ‘blind spots’ in AI. By seeking the spaces between the criteria in an AI platform’s translator, the resulting images exhibit a novel aesthetic but are not resolved. By wrestling with the representational space between text and media, this project attempts to subvert a space bent on concrete visual representation. What happens is a series of happy accidents similar to the outputs of artists from groups like DADA or Fluxus.

The average time to stay on a web page is about 15 seconds. In the Tik-Tok generation, how do users utilize new media art online archives? Without any browser menus including the address bar, Archiving New Media Art Archives only allows visitors in a gallery to use the mouse to navigate online archives with hypertexts and hyper-images. Whenever users click the mouse button, the computer takes a picture of a small portion around the mouse cursor and places it on another screen, which is invisible to users. This project visualizes how online users access new media art resources in a collage way. When they click five times to surf the online archive, the computer automatically turns to the next archive website. Users visit Prix-Ars Electronica Archiv first, then ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Archives and ISEA Symposium Archives in order. In the end, this project generates a collage image based on the users’ search activities on those three archive websites.

After each exhibition day, this project posts the final collage image on social media. In non-real time, as a spatial collage image, this project documents how users consume those archive resources and how users can reach different resources. This project is based not on scientific research about users’ online activities, but on an artistic method to visualize users’ history of access to online archive resources and examine users’ surfing consumption patterns on archive websites. As a delayed interactive art project, Archiving New Media Art Archives provides viewers with a certain time to appreciate the original purpose and function of digital art archives. This will contribute to not only showing how online new media art archives work, but also making creative spatial collage images with time-based online activities during the Second Summit on New Media Art Archiving at ISEA2022.

Anna Carreras’ work has a strong relationship to the Spanish landscape where she spends her time, and her piece in Social Codes, “Arrels,” connects drawing, code, and the environment through a cycle of growth and decay. While Anna looks to nature for the source of her work, she interprets and transforms her experience into carefully choreographed generative animation. In “Arrels,” growing tendrils the color of earth and sky collide in a vibrant dance. New growth in the arid soil overtakes the old, and the cycle continues.

Text by curator Casey Reas.

Clack, clack, clack – does that sound remind you of something? The moving sections of Solari Board flap displays echoed throughout airports and railway stations around the globe before the advent of LEDs, leaving their distinctive sound and mechanisms embedded within local and personal memories that span half a century. This installation, based on a disused Solari Board, attempts to piece together and offer up a fragmented universe of personal memories, from local archival documents, images, footage and interviews. Continually reconfiguring itself erratically, it searches for bits and pieces of the past; thus data is interwoven with imperfect human memories to create a hybrid and dynamic text-based representation which lies between a past that is being distanced and one that is being remembered – revealing the problematic natures of history and memory, of information and communication, and of our experience of time.

Art Plural Gallery, Singapore, and Streaming Museum are pleased to present a new public work by Spanish artist Tom Carr. Titled Arrival – Departure, the digital video shows silhouettes of urbanites ascending and descending an escalator within the frame of a pinhole. Arrival – Departure is touring Streaming Museum’s partnering public screens around the world. Arrival – Departure is a simple vignette of an instantly recognisable scene – of people riding escalators – that evokes contemplation of urban existence. They travel along the same path within the same space, and yet there is no communication. Depicting both the individual and the archetype, the silhouettes portray the universal condition of people in transit.

Check out a selection of fantastic local art cars including Doc Atomic’s Circuit Board Truck, Rusty Tidenberg’s Copper Motorcycle and more.

Art of sound is a mechanism of self-expression developed to visualize sound. The system allows any individual to evoke their own work of art by simply attaching their laptop/phone to the machine and play their chosen audio track.

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

2023
Two display cases 80 x 36 x 80cm and 36 x 30 x 80 cm, metal objects and notebooks.

n.a.

An audiovisual performance using mechatronic instruments, aiming to highlight potential aesthetics of ignored aural/visual phenomena of the urban life, by shifting the medium/location in which they normally exist.

No statement available.

Tally Saves the Internet is a browser extension that transforms data advertisers collect into a multiplayer game. Once installed, a friendly pink blob named Tally lives in the corner of your screen and warns you when companies translate your human experiences into free behavioral data. When Tally encounters “product monsters” (online trackers and their corresponding product marketing categories) you can capture them in a turn-based battle (e.g. “Pokémon style”) transforming the game into a progressive tracker blocker, where you earn the right to be let alone through this playful experience.

A camera slowly rotates, recording images of Belfast. The film projected from the freight container’s interior onto a screen, transforms it into a giant light-box. As the natural light diminishes, the projected work will emerge emitting an image of the city as if seen through a magnifying glass, focusing attention on architectural detail, juxtaposing the historic against the new.

Asian futures, without Asians is a visual analysis of 40+ years of American science fiction cinema. It draws from the histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, and weaponry. The multipart research project analyses how white Western sci-fi filmmakers depict futures inflected by Asian culture but devoid of actual Asian people. With coronavirus fears manifesting in irrational anti-Asian racism and conspiracy theories, this selection of images highlights how an old, xenophobic trope has persisted over two centuries.

At Play is a responsive audio-visual environment that invites visitors to make stacking combinations with plastic storage bins to build the architectural landscape of the installation. Miniature versions of containers that carry goods to world markets, these everyday objects are playfully moved around by visitors to the exhibition like pieces of an interactive puzzle.

Resonance chambers, light sources and dynamic projection surfaces all at the same time, the boxes are integrated into a pattern recognition system that matches each sculptural composition with a particular visual and sonic atmosphere. The projected images and sound ambiances embed the visitors in fictional worlds in which they become the actors.

The grey material of the objects, fused with the lighting of the projected 3D imagery, comes to life through multiple trompe-l’œil nuances. The acoustic universe takes its source from the immediate environment of the installation, and both image and sound undergo a series of transformations in real time that imbues the grey boxes with a mysterious expressive power that has political undertones.

Exhibition, Le Cube Garges, March 28 – April 1

Since 2013, Maxime Houot has created various sound and visual creations presented on the international scene. Exploring the limits of his own perception, he deploys an artisanal and conceptual practice. With a degree in applied physics, the world around him, even when put into equations, has always been a source of fascination and wonder. Most of his creations are produced by Collectif Coin, a company with which he also likes to experiment by crossing his work with that of other artists from other disciplines, such as dance, music and live performance.

“Ataraxie” means “peace of mind”. This ballet of red lights, whose forms become more and more complex as the performance progresses, invites us to reflect on the meaning of tranquility in a world in constant motion. The installation explores the unknown and asks if we can fill it with the comfortable and familiar, or find new ways to live.

Adapted from Lenz by Georg Buchner

Atmoscape is an experimental cinematic adaptation of the 1835 novella Lenz by George Buchner. Atmoscape interactively accompanies the protagonist as he traverses a spectrum of interconnected dream worlds generated through an Artificially Intelligent particle visualisation system, ranging from worlds composed by the microscopic particles of his body, through to worlds created by the macroscopic particles of the atmosphere as he floats 30,000 kilometres above the earth.

Buchner, best known for his revolutionary drama Woyzeck, was also a biologist and one of the first scientists to argue that all things are interconnected, constituted as they are by the same primary matter, namely particles.

Atmoscape interactively accompanies the protagonist as he traverses a spectrum of interconnected dream worlds generated through an Artificially Intelligent particle visualisation system, ranging from worlds composed by the microscopic particles of his body, through to worlds created by the macroscopic particles of the atmosphere as he floats 30,000 kilometres above the earth. Each world a door that opens unexpectedly onto the next.

Experimental Study component of Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant
ARC Discovery Grant Investigators: Dennis Del Favero, Jill Bennett, Neil Brown, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, Ursula Frohne, Johnny Chan with Som Guan, Volker Kuchelmeister, Rob Lawther, Alex Ong, Steven Sherwood.

“Audiolfactory Creolization” is an interactive installation which combines sounds with smells to reveal the complexity of creolized identities in Chicago. I started this project in 2009 by engaging in conversations with community members who shared a “mixed” experience: mixed race, mixed culture, transgender, bilingual or trilingual, and especially people who, through personal experience, have come up with their own definition of hybridity. I asked them to relate their experience to scents. The scents are: Pressurized Air, Tibetan Incense, Pine Tree, Tree of Heaven, Fresh Cut Grass, Soil, Chinese Incense and Moth Balls, Chai, Rum, Tar, Leather. In addition, I collaborated with sound artists to create audio files that would supplement the scents, and would thus assist the visitor in recognizing and understanding the fragrances. The sonic structure of each audio file also attempts at expressing “creolization.” Thus sounds and smells converge to propose a fragmentary experience of creolization in Chicago. There are five audio tracks associated to each scents, so there is a total of 55 audio tracks (11 X 5). Each time a visitor activates one of the scent diffusers, one of these five tracks is randomly chosen by Pure Data from its pool of five. Hence it ensures a rich and diverse aural experience, while managing the flow of information, should the visitor decide to linger. The interactive component of this installation was built with Processing and an Arduino board and used computer vision to monitor the displacements of visitors.

The subject of the installation is the inter-spatiality in art. The key challenge is to detach color (sensations) from form (representation) and make the creative process aboveboard i.e. to deal openly with the audience. “Augmented Abstraction” deals with the creation of a simple Augmented Reality (AR) system designed to create an immersive environment simulated by a computer. Consisting of a camera, computational unit and a display, the system is run on a tablet PC using a built-in camera. By using marker-based tracking, it captures the marker, which is a digitally painted nude depicted in a mode of everyday visibility, displayed on a large TV screen. The augmentation is in 3D, consisting of multiple parallel offset planes (and parallel to the marker), holding the Photoshop layers i.e. different abstract color patches, color patterns, brushstrokes etc. produced during the  painting process, thus creating complex 3D abstract permutations. By using the AR technology, the final result is the chance to observe simultaneously the real world, represented in the mode of everyday visibility, and the virtual elements which exemplify the idea or the abstract code.

“HARMONIUM – The only known form of life on the planet mercury.
The harmonium is a cave-dweller.
A more gracious creature would be hard to imagine.
– A Child’s Cyclopedia of Wonders and Things to Do.”
_Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan

The Aural Fauna: Illuminato project presents an unknown form of organism, aural fauna, that reacts to the visitor’s sound and touch. According to The Sirens of Titan, Harmoniums eat the song of the planet Mercury. They are translucent but the yellow light from the cave wall turns into vivid aquamarine through their body. Inspired by the harmonium, the aural fauna is a family of creatures that becomes “alive” when there is a sound or touch fed into them. The fauna also sing a song in harmony to the visitor’s sound to express their acceptance of the visitor’s presence.
The fauna’s bodies and sounds are generated using Machine Learning. The creatures’ bodies appear as 3D-printed sculptural objects or virtual form in the video projection. The unique form of each entity is designed by creative AI developed by the artist team. Their sound is generated in real-time in response to the participant’s touch.
The tablet interface on a music stand and the microphone in front of the swarm is the terminal for the visitor to interact with these creatures. The visitor touches the tablet interface’s screen or sings to it then the aural fauna responds in lights and sounds.
This project presents a utopian vision of the world where different species, possibly even machines, interact with each other with no fear and thus no rejection or hatred driven by the fear. The human visitor and the aural fauna create a harmony together.

This document and touchscreen from AURALROOTS show how audiences were encouraged to explore their tactile and aural sensory perception by engaging with oral histories within an immersive art installation. This interactive project shows how visitors were scaled down to 5 nanometres to interact with 24 hanging sculptures to trigger three various sonic compositions. The sculptural forms are inspired by the functions, behaviour and forms of stereocilia, tiny inner and outer hair cells on our auditory nerves located in the organ of Corti in the cochlea. Through AURALROOTS, art researcher, Jill Scott explores how sound and memory are related to the healthy conditions of our environment and the ways we learn inside three sonic environments: hearing in the womb, oral histories from First Nation elders in the landscape and experimenting in the audiology lab. These three compositions are based on low, medium and high frequencies. For example, in the mid frequency, AURALROOTS reveals oral history stories from traditional aboriginal cultures about the healing benefits of wild plants and roots. The overall aim is to explore learning through touch, sound and embodiment. AURALROTS is part of a large series of work called Neuro_Eco_Media -interactive art projects about sensory perception and environmental science.

In ancient Rome, there was a ceremony where predictions were made observing the flight of birds. These predictions were called auspices. Today, prediction is in the core of technical and scientific discourse: from big data to the growing interest in machine learning techniques. Are these current techniques, consulted by companies and governments, the embodiment of the ancient auguries?

This question is the seed of the installation Auspices. A contemporary oracle that replaces birdwatching with aircraft monitoring. An ADS-B device captures radio frequency signals from aircrafts and matches them with commercial aviation data. With every detection of an out-of-the-ordinary flight (private jets, luxury or military charter flights), the production of an omen is launched – an enigmatic message that appears on the LED screen. These are messages written by a machine -a neural network for text generation-, trained with a dataset of esoteric literature and macroeconomics prediction reports. As in the oracles of ancient times, the true art of these omens lies in their interpretation.

By linking archaic divination arts with the predictive technologies of the present, Auspices asks for a critical reflection on the mythologies of prediction.

Auspices funded by the art call UNZIP. The project uses generative neural nets in order to produce texts for a technological oracle, which launches predictions from real-time air traffic monitoring.

APS is an interactive near-future scale model of a gun that autonomously responds to viewer presence. It investigates the interrelationships between gaming culture, and military drone technology facilitated by communication technology

This art piece visualises the amount of known orbiting exoplanets in habitable zone and gives hope that an amazing discovery is just around the corner.  First exoplanet was discovered in 1996. At the end of 2015 astronomers have found over 2000 confirmed exoplanets with escalating speed. Over 250 planets were known to be in a habitable zone orbiting around their mother stars. Now we know what to look for and from where. Discovering extraterrestrial life forms would most likely have profound impacts on mankind and change the way in which we view ourselves among the stars and on Earth.

Awakening.

Awkward Consequence is a massive VR performance. It consists of individual experiences in a collective space. A live music performance attended that unfolds in a simultaneous virtual and actual experience.
The performance offers a sequential experience inside VR that resembles a journey. Starting from traditional “classic” VR imagery, through the introduction of elements that seemingly defy the physical reality, participants are exposed to a new, awkward and uncanny space. The journey lasts for about fifteen minutes. The music is played in real time and it influences the VR world, creating an immersive multimedia experience.
Originally inspired by the work of Paul Virilio, Awkward Consequence’s proposal appears contradictory: every participant shares an individual experience. The performance explores and stretches the notions of performance and place, existing in the simultaneous attending of an personal, unique, and private event.

Awkward Consequence uses the participants mobile phones together with Google cardboard-like viewers to experience its VR world. The app is built with Unity3D, with the 3D models and pre-rendered sequences done with 3DStudio.

We created a local WiFi network that allows 100+ simultaneous users. Although the app pre-downloads the content, the performance is orchestrated by a server written in C++ using OpenFrameworks.

B(I)(e)(e)(n)ding(s) is an on-going process based project, presented in Durban as a trio (Luca Forcucci, Cara Stacey and Mpho Molikeng) based on experiences and collaborations conducted by Luca Forcucci during last two years and a half in Southern Africa (Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland). The performance merges ancestral and contemporary technology. This includes field recordings collected in the Limpopo region at the border of Botswana. The trio proposes an exploration of bows and wind instruments within an electroacoustic context. Partially written, the collaboration dedicates a big part to improvisation and live composition. The core idea relates to an hybrid form merging Southern African virtuosic instruments techniques, live composition, electroacoustic music technology and collaboration.

Babil-on is a performance of augmented musical theater which metaphorically describes the fate of speech. If the birth of speech is marked by the enjoyment of phontation and the purity of the vowel, then babbling creates a hiccup of excitement and laughs when in crisis. At this moment an accident occurs: the irruption of a consonant. Through contagion, burst of disruption, and a continuous stream of linguistic actions, we can eventually impoverish the vocal material. In this work the word is exhausted by pure singing that allows us a return to original breath.

Baby Come Home prompts a reflection on the multiple meanings of research in the digital age—whether informative, identity-based or memorial—and the phenomena of disappearance and blurring that accompany it. An eight-minute video piece, the artwork depicts a mother’s search for her radicalized son through discontinuous text-based conversations superimposed onto online search results. This quest is scripted and displayed on a computer desktop and is complemented by a minimalist soundtrack dominated by the flickering of computer keys and the sound of incoming and outgoing messages.

Foundland Collective created this video for an exhibition in homage to Russian artist Olia Lialina’s pioneering work My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (MBCBFTW). This work, created in 1996, recounts the troubled thoughts and feelings of a woman whose soldier boyfriend has returned from the front. The form shows the erosion of dialogue and mutual understanding through the atomization of the interface. The adaptation that is Baby Come Home updates its purpose and form while remaining faithful to its approach.

Exhibition usb #5 window(s) on course. St-Pierre-le-Puellier collegiate church and ÉSAD Orléans gallery, Orleans. March 30 – May 28, 2023

Background_ 2022 is an installation of several animations using the primitive codes of certain video games from the 90s (clear foreground, panoramic view, multiple integrated animations) hybridized in landscapes mixing real and artificial. The muscular mechanism of the installation, oscillating between graphic naivety and electronic DIY, is an alternative response to this other background, that of the energy coming from the wall socket which continuously powers our works and our connected lives.

The design principle is based on the recycling of the previous version. Each new occurrence uses part or all of the materials from the previous one, which makes their simultaneous exhibition impossible.

Background_2022 was created during the year 2022 on the basis of Background_2019. The main change is the addition of a wind generator to produce enough energy to run a RaspberryPi, a screen and two LED lights. The installation, theoretically self-sufficient but without actually achieving this, raises the question of the constant power supply for digital works and the energy required in our everyday lives. This installation also lays the foundations for recycling its elements to produce the next piece, so that each piece in this series cannot be exhibited at the same time as the others, they are all unique in space and time.

Workshop

In the play, A Delicate Balance (1966) by Edward Albee, the characters Harry and Edna arrive unexpectedly at their friends Agnes and Tobias’s house, with a request to stay for a while, as they need to escape an unnamed terror. In explaining this terror, Harry and Edna state:

HARRY: There was nothing … but we were very scared.

EDNA: We … were … terrified.

HARRY: We were scared. It was like being lost: very young again, with the dark, and lost. There was no … thing

… to be … frightened of, but …

EDNA: We were frightened … and there was nothing.

As a starting point, Balance draws inspiration from this quote. The animation explores the relationship between real and imagined fears. It considers the extent to which we can sometimes feel controlled by invisible, unnamed terrors. In mapping imaginary landscapes, Balance aims to reflect upon the negotiations and manoeuvres made within the complex, at times disconcerting and chaotic space of South Africa. By uttering the fear and searching for ways to describe the phantoms, Balance endeavours to present a way to deal with the feelings such fears inspire. A sense of play is used to confront these nameless terrors. With a spirit of mockery and laughter, I hope to highlight an element of the absurd present in the strange worlds of imagined fears.

I stumbled into the world of computer graphics some six months ago. I was doing some type-setting for a student exhibition while teaching at St Martin’s and found myself in the computer graphics department. I was soon playing around with Paint programmes, amazed by their speed and agility. Here at last was a means of drawing in light. colour and shape simultaneously – a beautiful demonstration of Klee’s concept of line as a point in motion. The department was very helpful. and when I said what a marvellous doodling box it would be to have in the corner of my studio they lent me an Apple II plus inkjet printer over the vacation.

An idiosyncrasy of this machine was that the colours printed were quite different to those on screen -not just the usual discrepancy- so that reds always came out as green, and so on. Once I had figured this out, I set about composing colour ideas in quite alien keys to get the required printed colours, and of course these doctored colour schemes proved more interesting. I mention this because a computer can nudge your intuitive responses, make you think laterally and maybe more creatively – you can visualize so many more treatments, all with instant finger-tip control.

Since then I have graduated to an Amiga 500 with a Xerox 4020 inkjet printer, a much more refined set-up. The challenge, I now find, is to upgrade my paintings with this new alertness, this freedom. this sense of can-do.

[e] movie works

Bare Island is a work in a series of interactive video pieces each set at a different geographical site. The works run on a tablet, and allow the participant to navigate through a cloud of digital images corresponding to the viewpoints of the photographs used to build the work. These images suggests the original space through their distribution. Motion through the cloud and direction-of-view are controlled using the tablet’s touch-screen interface through swipe gestures, and after a period without interaction, the view will pull out and begin slowly moving through the space by itself. The works focus on aligning the position and behaviour of the camera with the viewpoint of a virtual inhabitant, giving an embodied experience of the virtual space. Navigation is driven by touch-screen gestures; the experience of interacting with the work an enveloped, tactile experience “moulded by hapticity and peripheral unfocused vision”. Looking around the space is smooth and intuitive, setting up a direct tactile engagement between the work and the audience through dragging the view, like moving foliage aside on a path through the jungle.