Primetime and Lunch Hour included Northern Shipping Broadcast’s short political documentaries.
Featured here is a selection from Northern Shipping Broadcast Company, curated by Konrad Becker. As co-founder of Public Netbase, a non-profit internet provider and a platform for the participatory use of information and communication technology, Becker’s short political documentaries are reflections of the role of new media in the political development of a democratic information society.
All Appears Orange is a multimedia project that investigates disaster and warning systems. Through multiple performances and temporary sculptures, orange marking flags were used as the primary material to both signal and explore ideas around agency, safety, and environmental change. The installation includes hundreds of photos documenting these performances.
Sun Notations is an experimental video that animates over 50 still pinhole photographs – a work that merges an early primitive process (pinhole photography) with new technology. The original images capture the pathway of the sun rising and setting over time, with exposures that last one day up to an entire year. Light leaks, dirt, dust, fingerprints, even rips in the paper, become part of the visual alchemy, and serve as metaphors for the delicate balance we share with the physical world. Here time and space expand, overlap, and then dissipate as clusters of dust appear like stars, insects fall from the sky, the landscape morphs into abstraction, and the sun traces across the screen like a drawing in motion. Throughout the work, references to creation and destruction call attention to both our immediate present but also to the grim possibility that our planet may not have a “forever”. Audio: Matt Steinke, Production Assistants: Ashley Lane & Annie Sungkajun
Electrosmog is concerned with themes of electromagnetism and material processes which sonify inaudible events. Using an electrosmog high frequency receiver, Roos captures sounds produced by mobile phones, wireless phones, wifi, microwaves, and other electronic devices with frequencies between 800 MHz – 2.5 GHz. Will the electrosmog created by our wireless devices eventually be looked at the same way as the emissions from burning coal that once choked North American cities?
This performance of Ursonate by Dada/Intermedia artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) merges two distinct approaches. Kristen Loree gives a tour de force performance of the complete text, set against a backdrop of 1260 projections by Jack Ox. The digital syllables derived from Ox’s visualization move simultaneously with the sound. Her original 800 sq.ft. (74 m²) painting is a metaphorical mapping from Schwitters’ original composition and performance. The performance includes information on mapping techniques, visual sources and readings from Kurt Schwitters’s son’s (Ernst) letters to Ox. Introduced in this performance is the VJDJ artist, Jane daPain, creating electronically collaged views of the performers and an improvised cadenza with Loree.
Born and raised in the west end of the Greater Toronto Area, Memetric was steeped in the tradition of the city’s great DeeJays, music “knowledgists” and Hip Hop “culturattis”. While deeply influenced by his Caribbean background and Toronto’s international-but-perennially-mixed-up culture, it was Hip Hop that helped him connect the dots between styles, sounds and people on the dance floor.
In Radio Nippon, 652 Geiger counters all over Japan are used to create an audio map that plays the level of radioactivity at these sites. Of particular note is the area of Fukushima, in central Japan, still exhibiting dangerous levels of radiation. The data are generated by official government counters, amidst strong indications from the public that they misrepresent the true magnitude of the disaster.
That’s how the mass behavior analysis manifest: the days, the evenings and the nights connected amongst themselves showing a whole idea of the cultural coffee landscape with common sounds full of social chaos caused by these networks where time goes fast and showing how everyday passes by, full of lights and the independent beings inside their “own world”, but dependent on a network created with an identity of masses and informal fraternity. The ceremonial and ritual behaviors are, without a doubt, important elements that contribute to producing the “us”, which is the self-representation without which the group can’t exist. We must understand how the connections between the countryside and the city caused a complete transformation of these two, affecting their environment and changing the identities that made them different from each other…they unify and begin to understand the same language, their behaviors and the chaos itself. It’s the kind of self individuality of the metropolis that has sociological bases that defend around intensifications of the common stimulus of beings which comes from subtle and continuous changes on the reception of different types of impulses to maintain, internally or externally, mechanized for the appropriation of our environment.
This program comprises two parts, a screening of short works and a live performance. These works identify patterns of information that lie below visible and audible thresholds and bring them into perception. Drawn largely but not entirely from the Arab world, the films, videos, video database (CAMP), and live cinema performance (VJ Um Amel) are all alert to seemingly random patterns that, when organized into information, can be rendered audiovisually. Moiré patterns, shadow puppets, analog video decay, surveillance technology, and other media collect and give shape to disavowed histories and the voices of the earth. In some cases these acts of translation permit a heightened political analysis. In others, they unfold histories, places, and events from dry data into the sensory responses of the viewer. Laila Shereen Sakr, aka VJ Um Amel, is known for her founding and ongoing work with the R-Shief project that uses social media extraction and data analysis of contemporary global struggles, people’s movements and national crises (using Egypt and the US as her targets) to study our communications over such crises as the recent war in Gaza and the Ferguson protest, and what they say about us. R-Shief issues a global call for participants to view, study, and use its unique and colossal archive – as a form of counter-surveillance. Shereen Sakr will talk about these ideas and more, preceding her performance. Video: VJ Um Amel Retrospective
The legendary Laurie Anderson, icon of the electronic art and music world, performs her brand new show at ISEA2012. DIRTDAY! looks at politics, theories of evolution, families, history and animals in a riotous and soulful collection of songs and stories. The third and last in her series of solo story works, which includes Happiness and The End of the Moon, DIRTDAY! is the culmination of Anderson’s ground-breaking work in this genre.
A continuous video of moving satellite imagery captured along the 49th parallel, the Canada/US border, “parallel” mobilizes imagery from Google Earth’s historical database to expose discrepancies in the archived image of the planet. As one follows the pan, anomalies in the image become apparent: digital artifacts having to do with when a given area came under the eye of a satellite, and at what resolution. As the virtual camera moves, the physical border appears, disappears, is replaced and displaced by both geographical features and media artifacts. Blurrings, double exposures, seams between satellite tiles, images from different seasons or times, all create a parallel landscape with its own boundaries, topography, areas of density and intensity. Digital and material realms mingle, charged with the politics of two nations and the legacy of colonial epistemology. Soundtrack comprises found audio, and ambient sound from ISS and an MQ-9 Reaper drone. “parallel” is an evolving, frequently updated project. Previous iterations have been screened at: Coder et Decoder la Frontiere, Anti-Atlas of Borders, Université Libre de Bruxelles (April – May 2016) Once is Nothing, Inter/Access Gallery, Toronto (Feb. 2015); Movable Borders Furtherfield Gallery, London, UK (May 2013), Another Atlas, RAW: Gallery of Architecture & Design, Winnipeg (April, 2013).
The Land Art Cook-Off takes place in the shade of a large canopy. Featuring vegeterian and meat dishes, a watercolor table, and a solar-powered boom box, this event is open to all. Situated at the Alvarado Urban Farm, visitors are encouraged to consider the garden as a model for utopia.
For ISEA2013, Leah Barclay has composed an electroacoustic performance piece based on environmental field recordings made during her Sound Mirrors project, in which she travelled through Australia, India, Korea, China and Brazil capturing the sounds of significant rivers and collaborating with their surrounding communities. The source materials range from hydrophone recordings of the Amazon River Dolphin in central Brazil to pilgrims chanting at dusk on the banks of the Pamba in southern India. Shifting Nature explores rivers as the lifeblood of communities and underscores the value of listening in our current state of ecological uncertainty, weaving diverse cultural and natural soundscapes into a dense and unpredictable sonic environment.
The Sonic Explorers Workshops encourage young people to experience the environment in new ways through experimental explorations in sound. Led by Australian composor Leah Barclay, participants will capture sounds using digital recorders and learn about acoustic ecology. All resulting soundscapes are planted in the sound map at sonicexplorers.org
URME Surveillance creates photorealistic 3D-printed prosthetics of the artist’s face in order to protect the public from facial recognition software. When worn in public, cameras identify the wearer and their actions as belonging to the artist, so that the artist’s identity becomes kind of defense technology. URME Surveillance challenges the public to consider relationships between identity and technology while disrupting highly networked surveillance systems through disinformation.
Whanaunga (family) features the Maori demigod Maui, he is the Trickster and Shapeshifter figure in Maori cosmology. Maui was believed to be still-born, and is cast into the ocean in his mother Taranga’s topknot of hair.
List of Insults is an artwork involving collaborative participation. Visitors should reach each others hand and at the same time hold the metal tubes on the wall. Videos on the TVs start to work, presenting dialogues between fictional personalities who are discussing art, politics, and poetry. The participants could be two or more than two, but one person is not able to reach the tubes on the wall. In that sense, the single visitor should engage somebody in the exhibition room to be able to experience the artwork.
Commissioned by Concordia University as the inaugural piece for the newly built Visualization Studio, Proteus is an interactive public art piece which creates a sense of wonder and immersion through interactions with a dynamic particle system. A 30-foot touchscreen array becomes the interface between two worlds, as you comes face to face with a mysterious creature. Proteus is imbued with a sense of ‘aliveness’ through fluid and impulsive motion which reacts to your touch and movement. The system is aware of your presence and follows you through space, enticing you to play. Complete with a responsive, generative sound design and an interactive color system, you are met with a sense of dark wonder as you are invited to approach the unknown.
Proteus was designed to feel alive and for its actions to reflect its own agency and intentions—rather than it simply being an interactive particle simulation. Artworks such as Proteus provide a moment of first-contact for the general public to encounter a digital system that is capable of sensing, reacting, and provoking empathy; thereby engaging with questions of non-human sentience in a meaningful and memorable experience.
Liminal is an interactive installation that seeks to reify the boundary between present and past through a play of projected light. It employs a photographic process called slit-scan to spread out time in space. Its visual aspect stretches out time while spatiality is expressed via its audio component. Appearing as a glowing portal of light, the installation mirrors the interactor, albeit with a temporal distortion. This manipulation of time acts as a visual metaphor – the present constantly replacing the past – which is inexorably shifted into the oblivion of white light. In a sense the artwork emphasizes that light is the past – the twinkle we see in the night sky is but a momentary snapshot of the stars’ former appearance. Light is the manifestation of events that have already occurred. The audio component of the piece enhances the performative aspect of the experience. The intersection of the interactor within the two-dimensional space of the ring generates sound according to her spatial position. The acoustic ambiance (manipulated white noise) originating from the installation is modulated according to her vertical location, and its intensity is correlated to her physical involvement within the portal. The body of the interactor exacerbates the musicality of the work since the installation can be “played” like a musical instrument – a light Theremin in a sense. Both of these modes of interaction are not stated explicitly to the public. The installation’s affordances require experimentation and deduction on the part of the interactor. Its physical appearance (a portal) offers clues about the manner in which it may be approached, while the narrow sliver of present time on the projected image from which emanates the past hints at the mechanism used by slit-scan photography. Likewise, the musicality of the audio component becomes self-evident through trial-and-error. The spontaneous discovery of these means of interaction becomes an important source of gratification for the interactor.
What does the internet look like? What place does the network occupy on our planet? Can its unfolding be mapped? These are the main questions of Critical Atlas of Internet, a research and graphical exploration project led by Louise Drulhe at the EnsAD. The work offers a series of textual and visual excerpts—a collection of aphorisms—indicative of the shifting perspectives induced by cyberculture and the encyclopedic pressure of the digital. Critical Atlas of Internet questions internet uses, organizing methods and data collection as well as the reflexive dimensions of the web.
This atlas gathers a series of images (maps, diagrams, sketches, photos, drawings, 3D animations), responding to its primary function: to represent the space of the web, which is particularly resistant to being fully grasped by an egocentric subject. “On Earth, people move towards their centers of interest; on the internet, we are at the center and the space is created around us,” says the artist. In addition to its online presence, Critical Atlas of Internet is also accessible in book and poster form.
The project is a site-specific composition. The performance space and its architectural resonating characteristics are included. The main idea focuses on the body of a dancer as the main sonic source. The sound recordings of two performances in San Francisco and Switzerland were then composed at NOTAM in Oslo Norway, leading to a piece intended to be played in the dark and thus magnifiying the sonic memories of the audience. The project includes fifteen days field recordings at the border of Botswana, Limpopo Region, South Africa with a biologist and composer (Francisco Lopez). I conducted the research further as an expedition in other regions of South Africa on the base of a text of the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (The Viral Epidemic). The novel was published originally in the column of a Swiss newspaper, which describes a virus transforming the body of white persons into black ones. A text about privileges and how those are kept in a specific context. I explored the country with the text in mind and observed the division after the end of the apartheid. The composition includes layers of cut-up text, pictures, video and sound composed into a an electroacoustic piece, like a road movie.
Blocked : Sound Sensitivity plays with the interconnection between neurodiversity and media design, using auto-ethnographic data based on my observation of my acoustic disorder of hyperacusis, as well as inputting parallel insights from my high-functioning neurological condition of Asperger’s. Hyperacusis is an auditory condition in which exposure to everyday sounds is perceived more loud than normal, creating pain, discomfort, vertigo, fatigue, as well as related reactions within anxiety and depression. In this video artwork, He briefly reflect on the relation between surrounding sound that the hyperacusis condition affects, changing the sensorial narrative, making everything more artificial, uncoded, wrongly filtered and channeled disruptively. Part of the hyperacusis condition brings sensorial reactions in relation to sound and also light there is a sense of in-between, of penumbra of sound and noise, as well as distant emotional reactions which feels at time artificial and looked from outside. Not being able to work with sound itself (due to the condition), here he tries to express the feeling visually with computational graphics and text. The artist is currently following a variety of therapy programmes in relation to the hyperacusis disorder, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). As part of this therapeutic programme, he collects notes on my different levels of moods, reactions, and reflections each day. This creates patterns and data that I also use as part of my auto-ethnographic work; He can then be more analytical and explore artistic interpretations of this data, observing what the sensorial disorder brings up and classify triggers and reactions. Looking into shaping an ethnographic narrative, here he interprets and reads this data in the form of poems, relating to the emotional human experience in response to the hacked sensorial disorder. And so, to underline this conceptual relationship, he interwines art and technology in the process of making, abstracting the ethnographic data to create new graphic visualisations of silent hacked sound, layered with a written and spoken poem that is shared with a human emotion and artificial computed identity. This process allows a representation of the specific acoustic neurological exploration, via words and visual pixellated related sound, conceptually visually interpreting and reflecting the disruptive action that hyperacusis creates in the acoustic sense.
This film is a visual art, science, and ecology exploration which traces the historic, genetic, material, and poetic journeys of a 1950s teak bed found in a Singapore junk store back to a location in Southeast Asia where the original teak tree may have grown. The project brings together cross-cultural natural histories, micro- and macro-arboreal influences and DNA timber tracking technology.
In this piece, the artist works with Supercollider to map the two dimensional matrices of 0 and 1 from John Conway’s Game of Life into musical structures. Retaining the behaviours of the Game of Life, the structures are permanently evolving to new states, repeating themselves, or becoming still. The piece references a transposition between states of being across life and death, information, and sound.
Ingis Fatuus conjures the ghostly echoes of contemporary life, positing a dark parallax to the perception of social media as a benign creative space of opportunity and friendship. The ghost is an increasingly prevalent aspect of the contemporary world because life has become an immense accumulation of ghosts. Everything that once directly lived is now haunted by itself.
In A Prayer for the Dead, subjecting the body to the purifying power of water evokes ideas and feelings of renewal and cleansing. This project started as an impulse to communicate through water. It slowly took form in its attempt to portray the universal experience of release. Unexpectedly, the work mirrored rituals of which I wasn’t aware, like the Buddhist funerals, where “water is poured into a bowl placed before the monks and the dead body. As it fills and pours over the edge, the monks recite: ‘As the rains fill the rivers and overflow into the ocean, so likewise may what is given here reach the departed’.”
Grasshopper is a HD looped video showing a couple leisurely enjoying a late afternoon on the beach. The interpretations of time, the meaning of space are explored the way one might bounce off one reality to the next while thrown into the chaos of alternative dimensions. The fragments of existence were reassembled, displaying incoherent timelines existing within a single digital video. “Time is supposed to be intangible and invisible, yet its signs are clearly visible all around us. We can sense the passage of time when we feel the wind blowing; we can see time flowing through the waves of the ocean, and the passage of time is embodied by our footprints in the sand – tracing the multiple trajectories of our frenetic activities. Like grasshoppers, sometimes we stop and we deceive ourselves with the idea that lying down while enjoying the world is all we should to do in our lives. It’s a peaceful feeling, one of connection with the environment, but also one of disconnection from the struggles hidden within our environment. And then we start moving again, frantically struggling for a missed instant. Like jumping grasshoppers we navigate the world as if it were a hypertext. In this new digital world the classical idea of continuity is abandoned in favor of jumps and deviations from linearity: multiple layers are hidden within the most mundane views, and different timelines intersect each other in unpredictable ways.”
This large scale work can be presented as a video projection or a multimedia installation composed of a photograph on a plexiglass superimposed onto a digital monitor displaying video with sound. The work incorporates unusual depth and monumental dimensions achieving a particularly emotional effect. “The word emotion comes from the latin emovere, which is historically connected with the idea of movement. An eternal movement that moves the viewer emotionally and conceptually, and that the artist observes and try to preserve with his creation. In the presence of the work, the viewer can connect with a larger emotional landscape that embraces all of us and lives without and within; because we are all part of a larger spectacle.”
Can media art, now deeply influenced by the diffusion and power of emerging technologies, help us feel again in a deep, spiritual way? Can emerging media arts help us rediscover a long lost sense of connection with nature? Could that be a key factor in the effort of re-balancing our sociopolitical global situation? In the face of planetary-scale computation and digital realities spinning out of control I look for a renewed sense of peace and harmony. People today are losing the ability to focus and contemplate, submerged by a constant flux of signals, images and sounds. Will media art necessarily contribute to this trend or can it help us rediscover ourselves? I’ve always been looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary. I started my career as a fine art photographer, however, in the last five years, my work has been deeply influenced by both emerging technologies and by the new technical and conceptual possibilities offered by them. My latest works are suspended between Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea that to photograph is to hold one’s breath with all faculties converged in an effort to capture fleeting reality, and the belief that flowing processes that transcend reality cannot be entirely captured by static images. My goal is to capture the natural world, illustrating my motivations and emotions, looking for the precise moment when mastering a composite moving image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Maraya: Sisyphean Cart is a mobile ‘sousveillance’ cart that conducts a site-specific participatory spatial investigation of Vancouver’s False Creek and the Dubai Marina. It premiered at the 20th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Dubai in November 2014, and completes its second leg for ISEA 2015 in Vancouver. This custom-designed hand-drawn cart is mounted with an automated pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera and pulled along the both waterfront seawall paths. Imagery produced by the skyscraper-facing camera will provide alternative perspectives on this built environment, from vantage points that intentionally torque a conventional streetview perspective. Through a custom designed program, the PTZ camera searches for connections, similarities and anomalies, generatively remixing its HD video capture with imagery from its doppelganger. Archetypal architectural forms surround the camera, reflecting the masterplanned urban landscape that in turn reflects the design and desire of lifestyle and capital that is so fluid and mobile in today’s globalized economies. The cart itself, and significantly the pulling of it, invokes the spectre of labour – purposeful walking as a form of resistance to readily consumed images of idealized leisure – and the Sisyphean weight of this vision. Meaning mirror or reflection in Arabic, Maraya focuses on the re-appearance of Vancouver’s False Creek in the Arabian desert as the Dubai Marina. The Sisyphean Cart is the culmination of an ongoing investigation of these large-scale urban developments that share the same architects, engineers and urban planners by the Vancouver-based collaborative team of artists M. Simon Levin and Henry Tsang and cultural theorist/writer Glen Lowry. Previous projects by the Maraya project have included exhibitions at the Museum of Vancouver, ISEA2014 in Dubai, Art Dubai, Centre A, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, outdoor projections and installations, public talks and walks, and an interactive Online Platform. The neighbourhoods of False Creek represent a new form of urbanism, heralded by architecture critic Trevor Boddy and others as Vancouverism, a homegrown response to an outmoded Manhattanism. Indeed, it was the transformation of the post-Expo’86 lands that attracted the attention of Dubai-based EMAAR Properties to realize a new version of False Creek in the Arabian Desert. As a result, Vancouver’s towers of glass and steel set amongst urban waterfronts have become synonymous with an emerging global city built for and populated by newly mobile middle classes from the Middle East and Asia. Against this backdrop, the Sisyphean Cart functions as a foil that challenges the audience to consider the vital social processes that are lost behind the proliferation of glass and steel facades. Cities as apparently distant and disparate as Vancouver and Dubai have become key sites in unfolding the narrative of neo-liberal mobilities. The historic flow of ideas, people and money between Vancouver to Dubai is a story that binds developers and planners to the goals of capital; it chronicles a zealous faith in returns on investment — rather than addressing concerns around affordable housing, public amenities and usability and the importance of growing civic involvement. We ask, what is missing in this spatial collusion of urban mega developments, real estate speculation and city planning? Is the promise of the livable city another marketing ploy to lure tourist dollars and the capricious flow of international investment? Set amidst the false “green” of Vancouver and the genuine “bling” of Dubai, the Sisyphean Cart reflects the desires of these cities to compete for attention on the world stage, upstaging the local inhabitants in the search for global capital. marayaprojects.com
Braindrain (knowledge that is leaving to other places) is a bold couture design by fashion designer Maartje Dijkstra in collaboration with music producer Newk and programmer Neon en Landa. The Dutch (northern) costume period of 1850 was the starting point of this design project, specially made for the exhibition- Groninger dracht meets fashion tech.
Dark and melancholic electronic music is a big inspiration within her work. For this interactive design Newk used sounds from an old big Dutch church organ and sounds from nature like the sea and ground shoveling to create an ominous soundtrack.
The sculptural design is build up out of different layers, melted into one story. The black parts of the dress are totally manual 3D printed, meaning using a 3D printer pen as a progressive tool to create fabrics. The structure of the fabric is inspired by Chitin, the building material of exoskeletons of insects, connected by hand with black polyester wires. The golden parts, that revers to the Dutch golden ear-iron from the 1850 time period, are 3D laser printed, shaped out of white Nylon powder, finished with a special golden spray paint. The many golden parts are connected to small motors and LED’s that together for a play of pulses, movements and stroboscope effects all interactive on the rhythms/beats of electronic music by Newk. The movement gives the design an lively feeling, like its breathing, taking in the sound and sending it back into the world.
Optic Traces is a sculptural couture design by fashion designer Maartje Dijkstra. The dress is totally manual 3D printed, meaning using a 3D printer pen as a progressive tool to create unique fabrics. Inspiration that led to this spherical piece are influences and details from the Baroque period, ‘dead nature’ like ivory and melancholic, dark and loud sounds/ music.The dress was presented for the first time during GOGBOT in collaboration with Con-seq aka Newk and C02RO.
The base of the dress is made from white, hand executed leather parts, covert with big ice blue hand printed crystals and shimmering surfaces. This dress is printed in a special way, creating layers by using black 3D print filament that covert transparent white surfaces, transforming it into this beautiful color. The printed crystals contain traces and almost a collage of different structures like squared mirrored surfaces and details of baroque objects. They form traces of simmering light and will break the light into different eagles when wearing it, showing a interaction between the design and its surroundings.
Surface Distortion is a progressive and interactive couture design that is focused on an all-encompassing experience in which fashion, technology, music and architecture merge together. The design is developed by fashion designer Maartje Dijkstra in collaboration with music producer Beorn lebenstedt aka Newk and programmer LIN. A big inspiration when creating this piece is the location, where she first launched the project during the Future Flux Festival in Rotterdam. This art and technology event took place in an old submarine pilot, located directly at the waterfront in the harbor of Rotterdam. The industrial building gave her the inspiration to create a piece that captures this same feeling.
For the presentation in the pilot Newk composed a track using samples of sonar and sci-f movies and hardcore beats. Light designer Co2RO used lasers, stroboscopes and old school overhead projectors to created a composition of lights that interacted with the beats and melodies of the music and with the light panels inside the dress so it all merged together into a spherical performance.
The dark grey dress is totally build up out of manual 3D printed parts, meaning using a 3D printer pen as a tool to create textures, all sculptured together by hand with black polyester wires. The different structures and shimmering layers are inspired by chitin, the building material of exoskeletons of insects. Integrated into the dress are 15 EL light panels with special 3D moire effect (watered silk) that refers to the movement of water.
Fireworks is a live cinema coding performance that shows the idiosyncratic singularities of extreme rites, where syncretism and geopolitical sensitivities are mixed with computational processes.
An abstract entity is a door to the unknown of understanding human thinking. It is the purest form of transmitting aesthetic information bringing interpretation to a new level of communication.
Manifest.AR cyberartist group invites you to come to the Kasa Gallery and view our Venice Biennial artworks, even though you are „Not There“.
WaterBar is a public water-well deigned for the post-sustainability age, when clean water is simply not good enough. It includes quartz-rich granite from Inada by Fukushima, home of the latest devastating high-tech catastrophe; sandstone from La Verna, Italy, where Saint Francis cared for the poor; marble from Thassos, Greece, the beginning and end of democrary; and limestone from Jerusalem/Hebron, Israel, source of eternal conflict and shared hopes. An algorithm mixes these remineralized waters in proportion to the intensity of related problems found in pertinent real-time news.
Are we living in a globalized world that is becoming increasingly homogeneous? Languages, plant and animal species are continuously decreasing. Supermarkets, buildings and cities look more and more alike. Places are emerging, which could be anywhere in the world without a real local identity. Technological progress is accelerating this process. Fast means of transport and communication such as airplanes, satellites and the Internet enable ever faster and apparently more comprehensive access to information. 10.000 Moving Cities poses the question of what the ever-growing similarity and homogeneity mean. With the Augmented Reality App 10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different every place becomes a city. High towers rise into the sky. One moves between the imaginary buildings via smartphone and tablet and participates in the digital communication streams and social movements of our time by means of inserted Social Media Posts. The buildings can be destroyed and rebuilt by the users. But beware! Every-one sees what the other is doing from different perspectives. The more buildings disappear, the more creatures appear. In the multiuser version, users can simultaneously experience an identical virtual city consisting of posts from social media networks. Interactions in the virtual city, such as the destroying of building blocks, are also visible on all connected devices. Marc Lee has created four different versions of the 10.000 Moving Cities. At ISEA you can experience the AR version. There is also a VR version, a mobile version and a version with real cubes. All four versions are similar in content, but made with very different technologies. marclee.io/en/10-000-moving-cities-same-but-different-ar Visitors can use their own Android or iOS tablets or mobile phones. The apps are downloadable from Play Store (Google) and App Store (Apple) for free. marclee.io/ar
Credits: Marc Lee in collaboration with the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratory (ISAS) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Error 502 404 410 enhances the audio qualities of a server error. The rarely noticed sounds that accompany technical errors are normally not perceived in terms of aesthetics. In this work, a variety of hard disk errors or connection failures become audible. The names of the errors are engraved on the surface of the disks, determining how the disks will turn. The work reveals a kind of cognitive dissonance that is derived from reflecting on error as a feature of the computer as a cultural machine.
In this work the artist corrupts digital data to mimic her own noisy, dreamlike visions. This draws parallels between the glitches of machines and the mental experience of humans.
Clams (2019)
Clams is a collection of kinetic sound sculptures which convert data from water quality sensors into sounds and movement. Each ‘clam’ is constructed from recycled waste plastic and contains a speaker. The continuously evolving microtonal soundscape gives each shell a subtle, life-like opening and closing action. Real-time readings from an industry-standard water purity sensor placed in the river, lake or sea of the cities where the artwork is presented, form the basis for the music, which is generated through a constantly shifting process based on water quality levels over time. Clams invite the audience to draw connections between media art, data sonification and environmental sustainability.
Swans (2016)
“Swan” seems like a harmless and naive name for the radical yet subtle intervention in nature accomplished by this work. Irony is a clearly recognizable element of this installation made from eight satellite dishes, seven white and one black, obvious waste elements of our society representing the power of mainstream TV and mass media. Brought to life by sound, wind and water, these animals float peacefully in a pond, merging perfectly with the nature surrounding them.
Speakers installed above the bases of the former satellite dishes serve as the animals’ heads. Two layers of sound design consisting of bass frequencies and human breath passing through brass instruments provide them with voice and motion. Eight individual audio channels are used to transport the sound through the swans, bringing them to life and remodelling the landscape. This image provokes both a sense of revulsion and an intimate feeling of familiarity, serving as a hack of the natural environment while challenging the audience with its amalgamation of tech waste and wildlife. The omnipresent hand of humanity is unmistakable in its role as a kind of god in the same way that humanity relates to nature.
Woodpeckers (2018)
The Woodpeckers transform in real time the invisible radiations used for mobile communication and wireless technology into audible and visible drumming patterns. The sonic result is a generative acoustic composition which undergoes constant transformation. A live soundscape which resonates as an invading drum ensemble into urban and natural environments.
DMT is DonnaRumma, Michalakos, and Tanaka, a trio of visceral electronic musicians that interface corporeal gesture and physical gesture with pulsing electronic noise. Based in Edinburgh and London, Marco, Christos, and Atau are 3 soloists coming together to form a trio that is greater than the sum of its parts. Marco DonnaRumma plays the Xth Sense biosphysical muscle contraction sensor system to sonify the performer’s body. Atau Tanaka runs granular synthesis algorithms on the iPhone, with one in each hand. Drummer Christos Michalakos creates feedback looks to electronics from his drums. Together they create a wall of sound that is live technological thrill.
Music for Flesh II (MFII) is an interactive music performance for enhanced body. By enabling a computer to sense and interact with the sound of human muscle tissues, the work approaches the biological body as a means for computational artistry. Muscle contractions and blood flow produce low frequency sound waves. Two microphone sensors capture the visceral sounds produced by my body, and send it to a computer. This develops an understanding of my kinetic behaviour by listening to the friction of my flesh. The sound of my carnal tissues is then algorithmically processed by the machine and played back through loudspeakers. The neural and biological signals that drive the performer’s actions become analogous expressive matter, for they emerge as a tangible haunting soundscape. The ISEA2012 performance of MFII is supported by an Alt-w award from New Media Scotland.
The Object Permanence series explores the underlying mechanisms of perception, seeking to create situations of conflict between higher level consciousness and lower level perception.
Diamandini is an autokinetic interactive sculpture which progresses through different stages, exploring if intimacy between a human and a robot is possible and acceptable.
Original Concept & Artist/Interface Design: Mari Velonaki
Robotic Systems Design: David Rye
Mechanical and Electronic Design: Mark Calleija
Lead Programmer: Cedric Wohlleber
Mechanical Fabrication: Bruce Crundwell
During one year María Molina Peiró carried a wearable camera taking a photo every 30 seconds. The enormous collection of photos collected by the camera are shown in an online archive that instead of “remembering” creates a creative amnesia of her year´s digital memory. One Year Life Strata proposes a visual metaphor of forgetting by transforming the digital images into what is likely the ultimate memory trace that will remain from us: The geological record. The project, in a sort of digital geology, mines the data from the strata and invites to investigate one year of María Molina Peiro´s life through an AI vision system which doesn’t concerned about the personal memories include on those photos but in the collection of patterns and numbers they contain.
Loophole is a sound art installation that depicts the transitional period from conflict to peace, a temporary stage in the Colombian society reconciliation process. The piece proposes a journey by the Colombian Coffee Growing Area soundscape, through audio samples taken in pedagogical practices carried out in the project “Laboratorio Sonoro de Caldas”. The audio samples were taken in provinces and small towns of the Caldas Department: Chinchiná, Guayabal, Villa María, Supía, San Lorenzo and Arboleda, where violence imprints and collateral effects of the Colombian armed conflict still remain. In Loophole the listening space is endowed with a multichannel speaker system in order to project the sound recordings in a 3D diffusion mode. Therewith the visitor will be able to experience sounds coming from a 360° virtual space surrounding him. Besides the multichannel audio system, Loophole offers an optional Virtual Reality (VR) experience through three cardboard glasses that are located in the center of the installation space. Through the glasses the visitor can get into a virtual environment based on 360º photography of the Cultural Coffee landscape.
Cleanse is an interactive video installation addressing issues of technological and visual literacy. Literacy is fundamental to the shape and form of human communication, as our ability to construct, organize, and understand symbols determines our existence and successful participation in a community. Being able to decode the messages, rules, and laws of a society is necessary for inclusion in its social life. In today’s age of digital communication, the most essential form of literacy for membership in or exclusion from a community is technological literacy. The technological tools are the users voice and language; without the current materials one cannot be easily heard nor understood.
Within this new form of literacy the technological and the visual intercept, as technology is constructing a new culture of literacy that is predominantly visual. Language expression is rapidly moving away from the written text and narrative and into the realm of the image -even the text as image. Knowledge, meaning, emotion, value, and custom, traditionally expressed textually, are now conveyed through images; a culture of iconolatry shapes our social literacy in the electronic age. Cleanse attempts to provide a critical view on the iconolatry of modern visual and technological literacy, through the metaphorical cleansing, or purification, of an eye. The focal point of the project proposes that we examine critically the advents of technology and how it alters the way we see, think and communicate. The two cement cylindrical structures were placed in a dark corner of the gallery. The larger one of the two structures resembled a well. Bending over to look inside it, one sees that the bottom of the well consists of a video screen (7 1/8″ x 9 3/8″) displaying imagery of an eye in extreme close-up. In the image, the eye looks tired and overwhelmed by visual overload. An eye dropper appears periodically to cleanse the eye by dropping liquid into it. The sound of a drop falling in a puddle is then heard. This imagery covers the bottom surface of the well and repeats itself constantly. Above the screen (between the viewer and the bottom of the well), a cylindrical transparent glass container holds water, whose level reaches the tip of the well and contributes to the reflection, distortion, and diffusion of the image below.
The viewer of the installation is able to observe the eye through the water and may participate in the cleansing process by using the long glass eye dropper, which is placed on the mortar nearby. The white porcelain mortar is filled with water and sits on a bed of shiny black pebbles on the second cylindrical structure. A pin spotlight shines a dramatic circle of light to the center of the mortar, drawing attention to the minimal yet slick and somewhat sterile setting. The water is also sensitive to movement in the surrounding environment, The cylindrical glass container holding the water is sensitive to movement as it is flexibly attached to the structure, thus provoking light movement to the water. The drops also create ripples in the water, contributing to further distortion of the image, in addition to adding to the water volume of the “well”.
One would expect the video imagery to be responsive to the actions of the viewer who bends over to drop water in the eye with the eye-dropper. Contrary to this expectation, the viewer does not affect the world of the eye. The eye continues to blink and to become flooded by the liquid poured into it, regardless of the viewer’s attempts to cleanse it.
Materials:
video 12″ monitor a cylindrical structure made of cement with a metal lid, 30 1/2″ height x 26″ diameter a smaller cylindrical structure made of cement, 22 1/2″ height x 18″ diameter black sand black pebbles a porcelain mortar a glass eye-dropper tap water
“Flores Sonicas, viaje a la intimidad del sonido” is a sound installation inspired by the harmony and peaceful coexistence of different sonic ecosystems. A 24 channel system using alternative loudspeakers made with paper, metal, cardboard and totumos diffuse a sound work composed of soundscapes recordings from the Manizales region and from the west coast of Finland. The installation has been designed to share the acoustic space of the exhibition space inventing to a holistic experience. Aquatrio presents a sound installation performance made of small sonic sculptural modules spread around in a garden and resonating multicultural diversities of both Finland and Manizales region. The detailed nuances of the sonic experience will take the audience into a subtle and intimate listening adventure. Visitors can feel how divergent sonic ecosystems organize themselves as a supportive and colorful whole and how listening is a key to creating this whole.
The Aquatrio is an electroacoustic ensemble from Finland with members of cultural origins from Colombia, Mexico and France. Aquatrio has realized projects and concerts in Turku, Helsinki, Venice, Ljubljana, Weimar, Mexico City, Morelia, Cuernavaca, and Oaxaca. It has integrated in its works sonic elements and observations from each of these places. Aquatrio is a working group engaged with the sonic arts and artistic research. Using methods of experimental recordings, synthesis and sound diffusion the Aquatrio ensemble proposes listening experiences bridging technology and nature. The three members of the group: Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski, Alejandro Montes de Oca, Alejandro Olarte are affiliated to the University of the Arts Helsinki teaching and researching at the Centre for music and technology.
Gila 2.0 visual signage is displayed at the Gila Wilderness trailheads or roadside, and in other graphical formats. The focus of the signage is the reintroduced Mexican Wolf, centrally positioned in the nature/culture debate that arises when interests (non human as well as human) intersect. Seen either as the endangered poster child for native wilderness or as a competing predator, the Mexican Wolf coexists with landowners, livestock, game hunters, pets, and ecotourists. The signage leverages native “prehistoric” Mimbres/Mogollon designs -the animistic and geometric pottery that has become a graphic signature for the Southwest- and uses tracking data gathered from the radio-collared wolves, in order to visualize the complex set of relationships that comprise a contemporary ecosystem.
The secret life of Burton is part of an anthology of real time narratives named “X short stories” that investigate different aspects of narrative construction in multimodal environments. “Transconsistent composition”, a name derived for these practices by the artist, is a systemic approach to the construction and interpretation of meaning based on processes and gestures such as framing, gesture, and temporal sequencing.
“Active Tele-spaces” proposes the production and realization of a group of telematic performances in which assemblies of participants distributed in diverse geographic places, contribute, raise and develop collaborative telematic works. Each piece of live interaction elements consists of a soundmusical part of another visual with manipulation of live video, one more of corporal expressions and a last technological one that approaches subjects from the computer vision and BCI (Brain Computer Inteface) To HCI (Human Computer interaction) and Telematic interfaces, which integrate the artistic and aesthetic proposals of each work. For this year TEA4, directed by Mario H. Valencia Teacher of the Caldas University, proposes the realization of 4 telematic works, all in formats of audiovisual performances where fields such as expanded documentary, live performance, computer brain interfaces, social interfaces, and telematic interfaces.
Remix your life or else someone else will remix it for you. Film stills from a feature-length mobile phone film.
The installation Propositions 2.0 will enable participants to interact with and generate different cumulative worlds based upon the manipulation of sand in a suitcase.
Attack on Silence is a series of works initiated by Fell in January 2008 following an invitation from his friend and colleague Mat Steel to submit a work for the POV event (Wanchai, Hong Kong 2008). For this, Fell developed an almost entirely static computer generated audio-visual piece that he described as a “reaction against the highly dynamic VJ style performances” of his peers. In this piece, visual patterns are not plotted in response to a real time analysis of sound, but instead elementary relationships between sound and image are specified at an algorithmic level that is prior to both sound and image. Initially intended as a computational exploration of extremely simple visual and sonic structures present in both sacred geometries and technological interventions in mind control, this work developed into a series of screenings, performances, print and a DVD. In his most recent work in this series, subtitled Isomorphism and Totality, Fell works with a blurred radial image and minute spectral change prompting one to consider if the perceived image exists on the screen or retina; the viewer becomes acutely aware of their mental activity and inability to focus on the image as their perceptual system struggles to make sense of the environment it encounters. (from https://www.25fps.hr/en/film/attack-on-silence-isomorphism-and-totality)
“Adventures In Illegal Art” is a 90-minute storytelling and film presentation by Mark Hosler, founding member of Negativland, with Q and A to follow. No lawyers were harmed in the making of this event. Pranks, media hoaxes, media literacy, the art of audio and visual collage, creative activism in a media saturated multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, artistic and funny critiques of mass media and culture, so-called “culture jamming” (a term coined by Negativland way back in 1984)…. even if you’ve never heard of Negativland, if you are interested in any of these issues you’re sure to find this funny and thought provoking presentation worth your time and attention. Video: Negativland – Adventures in Illegal Art | A Performance by Mark Hosler
ALBIREO is a trio of robotic creatures that communicate with one another and interact in motion and sound. When the sun rises, they aim their panels toward the sky to charge. As the sun gets iow in the sky, they run out of energy and put themselves to sleep for the night: with some chirps, squeaks, and flickering LED lights.
Exploring the performative qualities of an electrical field while conjuring and animating it, Martin Messier’s latest work lays bare invisible and inaudible power flows through constant plugging and replugging of cables set between a diptych of connection panels. This “field” becomes an instrument and Messier’s body becomes a conduit, a part of the field, as he conducts the electric currents and composes them into sound and asymmetrical rhythm. Light and darkness interplay as wires illuminate and projections of Messier’s movements provide ghostly apparitions of modulated magic. Created in collaboration with Thomas Payette (Robert Lepage/Ex Machina) and premiered at MUTEK 2015, Field produces multiple variations on sound, light and space as he captures, manipulates and visualizes for the audience, a collage of electromagnetic fields. With the help of a microphone that features lectromagnetic transducers, he harnesses residual electrical signals that are imperceptible to the human ear, and uses them as the driving soundtrack for his choreography of interventions.
Zen-borg is an audio-visual, biofeedback piece. The idea consists in creating a musical experience that is directly influenced by the performer’s vital signs. By wearing brainwaves and heartbeat detectors, the data coming from these devices is sent to different parameters inside the music system. This creates a cyclical interaction between the performer, the sound, and the environment which then re-influences the performer and affects the outcome once again. The intention of this is to explore the implementation of a tool that was developed for medical purposes in a creative application. It also constitutes a personal exploration about how to embrace your limitations and take advantage of them. Heart surgery at birth set up the base for a lifetime interaction with biofeedback devices. By taking a personal element that defined me, and merging it with a lifetime process of becoming an artist, I implement the biofeedback paradigm. The piece is intended to be performed in a meditative state. Meditation is the practice of self-awareness and has effects in how we engage with our daily situations. Depending the state of mind and the heart rate, the piece will go from a quiet and consonant state to a noisy and chaotic one.
This project works with concepts that lie at the intersection of art and politics. By pushing for a direct action, the work attempts to rethink relationships between the human and the system. The work presents an interactive eye that can follow up to five people. When more than that number of people congregate in the zone, the system glitches and fails.
“Creative Games” is a new emerging discipline at the crossroads of Computer Games, Media Art, Architecture and Urban Planning, Heritage and Advanced Digital Technologies.
Unknown Meetings is a site-specific augmented reality project that takes as its premise the awkward and surreal encounters of daily occurrences during commutes. Designed by artist Matt Roberts and poet Terri Witek for Vancouver’s local transportation system, SkyTrain riders can see a floating, out of place object on their smartphones, and hear a poetic fragment. These take place whenever the train approaches a station, creating unexpected juxtapositions that shift the anxiety of arrival onto disruptive, ephemeral “connections”.
Two years of reflection and a few seconds in zero gravity were the origins of a series of artist works that have been completed at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia. There, on board the iconic Ilyushin 76 MDK, 9 artists and 1 scientist from Mexico were subject to an environment of weightlessness. A few seconds were enough to experience eternity, to tell a story, to break a paradigm, to liberate a molecule, to have an illusion, to experience movement without references, to create poetry out of falling bodies, to make the useless become useful and to search for the impossible embrace.
Always Oneness (Ghillie Theremin) is a Kinectbased project that uses the artist’s movements in a Ghillie suit as a means of creating acoustic drone tones. The work was part of Gabie Strong’s Crystalline Morphologies performance at the Hammer Museum in LA and was shown through the KCHUNG.TV programming for the Made in L.A. Biennial. The project became a music video for San Francisco-based band Bellavista for their song Always Oneness.
Allan Kaprow produced an extensive series of books to complement his activity-based projects. These books took the form of instructions and were meant to help people create their own versions of the activities being described. Warm Ups (for Allan Kaprow) refers to Kaprow’s work in which activities create warmth in different ways. In my reinterpretation of the work, the user engages in modified versions of several of the interactions found in Kaprow’s Warm Ups. The viewer is asked to perform these actions and then respond to cues from the piece, therefore completing the piece through their performance.
Delay Orkestra has been created for ISEA2015 as a targeted media intervention within the active public space of the atrium at Simon Fraser University’s Woodwards campus located in the centre of the Downtown Eastside. The atmosphere in the atrium features a mix of commerce, art, and sports, with chain stores, government offices, and a basketball court that occupies space alongside Stan Douglas’ well-known photographic work Abbot and Cordova, which restages the Gastown Riots of 1971. The space evokes the complex relationships between private interests, government and the public, which play out in the space of the basketball court that lies at its centre. In this work Gingold captures the sound of the game and processes it in real time to produce an audio work.
Vehicle #1 : PetriTable (for Valentino Braitenberg) is comprised of a coffee table that houses small solar-powered machines, which twitch about when exposed to sunlight. The work is inspired by Valentino Braitenberg and his series of the Light experiments outlining his theory of synthetic psychology.
In Vehicles, Matthew Schoen imagines a large retro-futuristic machine. An organized structure of beams, wires, pistons and gears is slowly revealed from its smallest components to its larger and more complex mechanisms. This video work takes inspiration from the Braitenberg Vehicles created by Italian-Austrian cyberneticist Valentino Braitenberg as thought experiments that can autonomously move based on sensor inputs.
Face Trade is an Art Vending Machine that dispenses unique prints of computer- generated face drawings. Instead of paying with money, buyers trade a mugshot that is taken on the spot in order to be permanently stored in the Ethereum Blockchain, consequently turning the transaction into a semi-permanent Face Swap.
The work is a violent parasite infection. Video and audio were made by hex editing Atari 2600 ROM files.
The following research-creation will talk about the pollution in rivers, streams and its impact on the coffee cultural landscape. To this goal the sound bridge will be approached as an ethnographic tool and a way for the artistic creation. The prevention of the environment is a topic that acquires relevance in the expressive forms of the contemporary art. It sees the need to manifest how pollution in all its variants puts in danger our ecosystem, economy and cultural identity. No matter our work, social status, race or religion; we must to react to this devastating scourge that has become the common factor today, because the lack of planning in the management of our waste.
The Harmonic Cicada is a soundscape that shows the transformation of the natural territory in the Cultural Coffee Area Landscape (some Risaralda and Quindío municipalities) from the sonorous intervention of the artist when simulating with his voice the sounds produced by the cicadas with their abdomen and wings (insects from the Cicadidae family). The interaction between the answer of the actual cicadaes and of the local fauna to the author’s sounds, appoints to the passage of the topographic territory to the symbolic one from the audible language, providing a new interpretation which ascribes inherent characteristics of the animal evolution to the mutual experience. Through the sound connotations of the death and life states associated to the different audible manifestations of the insect during its displacement, rooting, metamorphosis and habitat, the installation proposes to register the audience bodies with the characteristic realities of the landscape that are built through the sound language. From a poetic dimension the relationship between the fauna and the human being questions the reality of the physical territory creating a representative and immersing world with the use of language.
Columbiritmos” (“Columbi”: Columbia “ritmos”: Algorithms) is an interactive, digital, kinetic, geo-location performance project that uses algorithmic functions calculated in a custom GPS tracking phone application to direct the field-user to navigate the city of Manizales, which is presently the main center for the production of Columbian coffee. Influenced by the Situationists who, before the time of computer code, experimented with numerous rules for navigating Paris with the intention of breaking from routine to re-experience Paris from new perspectives, “Columbiritmos” will use a custom phone app that, when the phone is shaken, uses an algorithm to direct field-users to move in specific directions for specific distances, sample local coffee that is GPS tracked for region of the city, listen to and transmit GPS located stories acquired from the locals, which are all transmitted back to the gallery space to activate of multiple automated kinetic coffee dispensers that deliver coffee with varying degrees of intensity from areas within that region to gallery visitors. Depending on the passenger experience as they navigate, the phone application directs the field-user to respond to a “field- intensity” meter, which in effect makes stronger or weaker cups of coffee for gallery visitors.
Feral Cityis a mobile media, augmented-reality, walking tour, which invites participants to explore a constellation of situated events mixing the physical and the virtual. Narratives of the city’s ecology emerge regarding human interchange with urban animals. The tour includes sound narratives and landscapes, virtual graphics, and virtual 3D interactive sculptures, a number of which are large, semitransparent spaces that the participant can enter and investigate.
Desert Oyter: How Did I Get Here? is an augmented reality application that traces an oyster’s travels from the sea to Albuquerque for consumption by local residents. Desert Oyster is an offshoot ot Oyster City, an eco-psychogeography AR game featuring the rise and fall and rise of oysters in NYC.
EDEN AGAIN allows people to experience themselves as “living machines” – inseparable parts of the Machine Wilderness – using the waste from their bodies to create an Edenic, ecologically balanced space. The project is a public Water Closet sculpture sustaining reed species, mimicking Iraq marshland vegetation mulched with recycled glass. Subsurface, the plants’ roots filter the effluent.
METATOPIA is a nomadic, interactive & performative environment for outdoors & indoors spaces that merges dynamic physical & digital architectures, with 3D and multisensory immersion, focusing on indeterminacy, unpredictability and open- ended relation to bodies and surrounding environment, an indeterminate space of emergent behaviours and movements that defies prediction and control in the Big Data Era.
Juan Jose Diaz Infante and the Mexican Space Collective built a satellite called Ulises 1. Inspired by and in response to Mexico’s drug war, Infante wanted to make his own reality and illustrate the idea that the future varies for different generations. The project involves launching the satellite into space, after which it will play an algorithmic opera, making the satellite a musical instrument.
The works in The Hermeneutics Cycle displace the role of the reader and the text onto moving image technologies that are in some ways alien to one another. Each work initiates an encounter between technologies with their own inherent way of reading and interpreting information in order to exploit the artifacts produced in the process. Second Hermeneutic and Third Hermeneutic are the two most recent entries in the cycle. Both works are expanded films that are performed in real time.
Composed for accordion and electronics, Within and Without uses the rich expressive control and timbral palette of the accordion to “drive” a music of rhythmic pulsation. The piece is in a popular idiom, and its title refers to the George Harrison song Within You and Without You, which provides some of the melodic motifs. The electronic modules used are the filters and samplers that have been around since analogue days, and the central instrumental technique used in the piece is the tremolando effect – shaking the accordion in fast rhythmic repetition – usually synced tightly with the electronic pulsation.
Light Pollution works with sounds that are characteristic of digital audio production and playback mediums. Traditionally, listeners ignore the sounds produced by playback devices, such as the crackling of phonographs or the lossy .mp3 compression from YouTube. In Light Pollution, these by-products are presented in the foreground, allowing them to fully assert themselves as primary compositional materials. The work is comprised of sounds from old radios, broken turntables and other playback apparati. The materials were repeatedly subjected to a variety of digital-only processes.
Hand-cranked electrical generators separate H2O molecules into tiny bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen. Glinting as they ascend a brightly illuminated water column, the bubbles collect in an underwater ignition chamber where these elements are dramatically rejoined with an explosive ‘pop’ sound.
A piece in three movements inspired by the film Sunshine. The piece was made with a damaged synth, and recordings of an old family piano; The synth constantly warps like how traveling through space involves the distortion of space and time itself, and the detuned piano samples are manipulated to express more than the raw sounds can. The distorted and twisted video effects reflect and amplify these themes.
Print Wikipedia is an artwork in which software parses the entirety of the Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out a full set of over nearly 7500 volumes and then uploads these volumes to Lulu.com, a print-on-demand website. The installation displays a set of these printed volumes against a print of a schematic rendering of one bookshelf of volumes. This bookshelf will contain 150 volumes, or 2% of the whole set. The adhesive print is mounted to the wall, and one shelf is mounted on top of the print; this shelf holds the set of books.
Lulu.com
Rapprochement is a computer-coordinated kinetic sculpture that uses an ultrasonic rangefinder to sense the proximity of visitors. When activated, motors slowly grind two brick fragments against one another, turning at times in opposite directions, and sometimes in the same direction. The bricks engage each other in a process of mutual accommodation. The version of Rapprochement shown at ISEA2015 uses brick pieces from Berlin, Germany; one originates from the East, one from the West.
We Are Experiencing Some Turbulence is a site-specific installation by Santa Fe bricoleur Michael Schippling in the Axle Contemporary mobile gallery. It comprises a truck full of small objects which move in what might, or might not, be random patterns. Proximity sensors allow the viewer to exercise some control over the motion so it becomes a meditation on our ability to distinguish the random from the regular. youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=jZSh00ut6g4
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.
In this sonic VR experience, you will embark on an immersive journey – to listen differently to your daily life, the world around you and find the music within. Immerse yourself in the world of surreal landscapes and high-end spatial sound design where you can make, hear, see and feel sound in a way not possible before and compose your own score. Listen intently. Can you already hear the world becoming music in your ears? The project premiered at VRHAM!, Reeperbahn Music Festival and IDFA Doc Lab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction 2019 and is listed among the best XR installations of 2019 according to Forbes Magazine.
If you have access to a VR headset, you can request a Steam access code to view this work. To request a code, please fill out the form at docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdvpkyFNOh99jIkly0laUK9-xq0PsTyDNfHfD4wzk5k-AJ_MQ/viewform
General Event statement
Until the mid-1980s, democracy did not seem to concern philosophical reflection in the field of political sociology. It was enough to think of it as the regime opposed to communism and dictatorship. Since then, critical thinking has developed in several ways, giving the impression of some discomfort when it comes to thinking about the solution to the great contemporary challenges, for example: social difficulties, injustice, inequalities, crisis of political and party representation, institutional deficiencies and the treatment of culturally or religious orders, violence, etc.
In collaboration with engineers, robotics experts, geographers, car enthusiasts, military historians and other, Miguel Palma has converted a former military vehicle into a remote exploration vehicle that explores desert surroundings during the day and returns to urban areas to project the desert imagery on buildings and other spaces at night.
How the shark’s electro-sensory system evolved, from simple(r) to sophisticated creatures? Seems to me there’s a story there, about art and science and storytelling as ways of seeing and navigating.
Generative processes and digital fabrication addresses growth, materiality, locality and the network. Bowl-like forms are framed by a network diagram in which our familiar hyperconnectivity disintegrates into local islands.
Myth and Infrastructure is a multi-media, live performance using projected animation. As Matreyek walks behind the screen, her shadow becomes an integral part of the fantastical world she has created. She traverses oceanscapes and cityscapes as she conjures magical scenes with light and shadow. Video: 4 Minute Excerpts
NOISE SQUARE is an audiovisual installation in which evolutionary patterns of cellular automata are translated into the physical realm through a set of four mechatronic sound sculptures. The sound sculptures are comprised of a small DC motor in a clear box with a pivoting door that is controlled by an actuator. Micro-controller programming is used to change the speed of the motors and to open and shut the instruments’ doors. As the cellular automata evolve through new generations, the installation produces sound and light.
Our world is an alien landscape filled with toxicities. Thanks to petrochemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries, we live in a toxic landscape that has been colonized by hormones. These endocrine disrupting molecules are able to transfect change at the morphological level, queering our bodies and bodies of non-human species. But there is no need for sex panic. The Molecular Queering Agency will guard you against the old notion of a stable body, extracting hormones from bodily fluids (urine) and ecological fluids (rivers). From xeno-forces arise xeno-solidarities, capable of collectively hacking the systems of hormonal colonization.
mollysoda.exposed is both an artist’s portfolio and a diary: bringing together images, videos and hypertexts scattered and juxtaposed on a web page in the manner of a collage. The heterogeneous contents—from kitschy thumbnails of sexy girls to animated GIFs and numerous videos—constitute self-representations, as well as fantasized or stereotyped images of young women.
The artist’s online interventions play precisely on the blurring between public and private, reality and fiction, and create a distinct and coherent persona as images of herself and intimate “confessions” multiply. Soda’s work is situated in this gap between belonging to cyberculture and critically or ironically distancing from its norms. More specifically, mollysoda.exposed questions the place of girls and women on the web by portraying an adolescent femininity, both excessive and vulnerable, and reveals the role of social networking platforms for self-representation.
The title of this piece refers to Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969), in which Lucier records himself narrating a text and then plays the recording back into the room, effectively re-recording it. To create this new work, Ohkubo compresses sound using an MP3 converter, creating a disruption, and repeats the process in order to explore the aesthetic of glitch and experience the beauty of morphing sounds.
Muta-morphosis was obtained by reducing panoramic images in one axis. The lack of a single perspectival structure due to multiplicity of perspectives can be linked to ottoman miniatures and connects the global contemporary representation to tradition.
Grand Theft Love Song is a machinima video work where the video game Grand Theft Auto IV: Liberty City is played in order to make Nico Bellic dance in his safehouse. The video is set to a Creole Love Call, a public domain song with a history of disputed copyright.
Soft Revolvers extends Myriam Bleau’s practice of exploring the sonic potential of everyday or familiar objects that engage audiences by triggering subconscious physical memories of their lived experience with those objects, including the ways in which they inform behavioural expectations, function and symbolic connotations. A music performance for four self-built spinning tops composed of clear acrylic, each top is associated with an “instrument” or element in an electronic music composition. The tops are equipped with gyroscopes and accelerometers that communicate wirelessly with a computer where the motion data collected (speed, unsteadiness at the end of a spin, acceleration spikes in case of collisions) informs musical algorithms. LEDs placed inside the tops illuminate the body of the objects in a precise counterpoint to the music, while the positioning of the lights creates visually stunning halos around the tops, enhanced by persistence of vision effects and projections. With their large circular spinning bodies and their role as music playing devices, the spinning top interfaces and some of the mappings between gestures and sound, have been borrowed directly from the bimodal action of turntables and the sampling culture of hip hop.
Lessons on Leaving Your Body features Jake Wells, DIY drone builder and possibly the world’s first Remote Control (RC) Christian Minister. While flying, crashing and repairing his homemade drone in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, Wells recounts the story of his techno-spiritual awakening, from a life in which he felt remotely controlled by other forces, to his current state. Footage of Wells observing himself from the drone’s point of view using First Person View (FPV) gear, and shots reminiscent of romantic landscape paintings depicting the wider wilderness setting in which he resides, are woven together with monologues based on Wells’ own brand of theology that is concerned with the connection between FPV flight, out of body experiences and the nature of the soul.
Beautiful Midden: Reclaiming Machine Space provides deep links between the arts and ecosystem restoration. The project location is gateway to a 400 foot canyon, a spectacular place of beauty and natural drama that has been trashed and neglected. Beautilul Midden reclaims disturbed areas (turning trash into sculptures). and re-envisions social relationships to nature through communal creative acts that honor culture, wilderness and spirit. Beautiful Midden furthers the ISEA2012 vision of redefining “Machine Wilderness”. beautifulmidden.org
Weather Patterns: the Smell of Red creates feedback loops between air currents and haze, smells and electronics, architectural and groundbased elements, stasis and interaction, in order to amplify how movement and transformation are sensed. The work is installed inside the space of a room where the audience is invited to linger. Using spice, kinetic electronics, fans, fabric, mist, funnels and wind, the work asks how the smell of red affects the event of time
This piece takes two cast off toys – Action Man and My Little Pony – and brings them together to form a new whole. The two toys work in harmony to bring to life a dose of 80s synth pop.
Toggle is a customized browser plug-in that allows users to modify or overwrite any website. A text or web installation might be installed on a bank’s homepage, for example, or on a particular news site or blog. The collective would then invite ‘digital fellows’ such as artists, activists and writers to write critical texts, make poetic interventions, artworks, interviews etc. Any visitor who has installed the plug-in, which will be available via 221A’s website, will be able to toggle between versions of the site’s original content and that produced or selected by participating digital fellow. Toggle creates a metapage on top of any existing web page. The plugin interface allows users to upload content in the form of text, hyperlinks, and images. To use graffiti terminology: you can, like, tag any website.
The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text, discovering a network of poems called “the Worl” within the World Wide Web. The Deletionist, based on the work of book artists and erasure poets, takes the form of a JavaScript bookmarklet. It can automatically create erasures from any Web pages the reader visits. Similar methods have been used to erase all text and to turn webpages into Katamari Damacy environments or Space Invaders levels, to make a game of destroying language. Between such extremes and the everyday Web, The Deletionist finds a space of texts that amplify, subvert, and uncover new sounds and meanings in their sources. Neither an artificial intelligence nor a poetry generating system in any standard sense, The Deletionist has a repertoire for uncovering patterns and revealing poetics at play within our most extensive textual network.
Presented as a world premiere at MUTEK 2013, frequencies (synthetic variations) is the second instalment in Nicolas Bernier’s avant garde audiovisual series, in which he tampers with sound waves and light bursts in real-time – like a sculptor would carve out a mold as he prepares to realize his creation. Just as impressive as frequencies (a) was at simultaneously rendering sound visible and a stream of light audible, frequencies (synthetic variations) finds the performer processing sequences of light and purely synthetic sounds with extreme precision – resulting in intermittent light blasts within small acrylic structures. Whether he’s hatching inventive sound installations, musique concrète or live video art, the multidisciplinary Bernier is ever mindful of striking a delicate balance between intellect and sensuality, materiality and ephemera, and between organic sounds and digital processing.
The work of Nicolas Sassoon makes use of various computer-based processes to generate fantasized visions of architectures, landscapes and domestic environments. While most of his work is published online as animated GIFs, Sassoon also materializes his web-based practice into sculptures, prints, textiles, and site-specific installations, as well as collaborations with other artists, architects, music producers and fashion designers. Sassoon’s work often explores the contemplative and projective dimensions of the digital, as well as the manner in which virtual space can (or cannot) be inscribed within the physical realm.
To create Lake Ontario Portrait Nicole Clousten collaborated with Lake Ontario, mud, and microbes to explore bodily borders, responsible collaboration, as well as our connection and responsibilities to a broader ecology The work is comprised of fifteen prisms filled with mud from fifteen locations around the Canadian and American shores of Lake Ontario. When exposed to light, the microorganisms begin to flourish, becoming visible in the form of vibrant marbling. The work is alive and constantly changing as the microbes live and die revealing the vast array of life in soil and how we are connected by it.
Cultural and ideological relationship between two Empires, Britannia and Cathay (China) both of which regarded themselves as the hub of the Universe.
One Hundred and Eight is a wall-mounted installation mainly made out of garbage bags and cooling fans. The bags are selectively inflated and deflated in controlled rhythms, creating wavelike animations across the wall. One Hundred and Eight, exhibited in ISEA2011 Uncontainable, became the starting point for a series of installations based upon the inflating and deflating of cushions made from different materials. The largest one was made from 252 large silver bags for the exhibition captured – a homage to Light and Air. This was followed by further site specific installations such as Thirty Six Art for Lab Gnesta, Forty eight for the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Seventy Five for Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei and Eighty Eight commissioned by the Gewerbemuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland. Nils Völker’s most recent work is 64 CCFL, a light installation that is mainly made with so-called cold cathode fluorescent lights which are normally used as backlights for computer screens.
SOUND COLONY functions as an acoustic chamber, a human-scaled portal into the communicative modes that connect the world of the hive with the practice of beekeeping. It references the visionary architecture of R. Buckminster Fuller, whose research into energy and material efficiency was inspired by universally occurring patterns in nature.
Nina Waisman’s works highlights the roles that gesture, rhythm, and miroring play in forming our thoughts. Scientists call such ‘physical thinking’ the preconscious scaffolding for human logic. How might our new tech-inflected gestures, then, be shaping our relationships with bodies and systems we connect to when we move with technology? Waisman creates an interactive sound installation in collaboration with 6th to 12th grade students at Albuquerque Academy.
NONOTAK Studio is the collaboration between the illustrator Noemi Schipfer and the architect musician Takami Nakamoto. Commissioned by the Architect Bigoni-Mortemard to create a mural in the lobby of a public housing building in Paris, NONOTAK was created in late 2011. In early 2013, they start to work on light and sound installations, creating an ethereal, immersive and dreamlike environment meant to envelope the viewer, capitalizing on Takami Nakamoto’s approach of space & sound, and Noemi Schipfer’s experience in kinetic visual. They presented their first audiovisual installation at the Mapping Festival in May 2013. In summer 2013, NONOTAK come up with a performance, LATE SPECULATION, where they are the creators and contents of the project. NONOTAK have been commissioned by the Mapping Festival (GENEVA), EM15 ELEKTRA / MUTEK (MONTREAL), la Nuit Blanche (PARIS), Roppongi Art night (TOKYO), Axcess Art Gallery (NEW YORK), Stereolux (NANTES), Playgrounds Festival (TILBURG), Mirage Festival (LYON), Vision’R, Insanitus Festival (LITHUANIA), FUZ Festival (PARIS), Lunchmeat Festival (PRAHA), KIKK Festival (BELGIUM), Nokia by Lumia (ISTANBUL). Their work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries including Tokyo Grant Hyatt Hotel, l’Opéra de Lyon, Batiment d’Art Contemporain de Genève, Theater de NWE Vorst, La Fabrique, Pavillon Carré de Baudouin, Le Générateur.
For this year, the duo NONOTAK presents the inaugural performance called Late Speculation of the 16th International Image Festival / ISEA2017. In addition to that, it brings an exhibition called Zero Point Two that is part of the artistic activities of the event.
For this year, the duo NONOTAK presents the inaugural performance called Late Speculation of the 16th International Image Festival – ISEA2017. In addition to that, it brings an exhibition called Zero Point Two that is part of the artistic activities of the event.
Arium is an audiovisual holographic installation, formed by the projection of images onto a plexiglas box filled with hazer. Using both hazer and mapping technology, the result is nowhere near a classic mapping, a huge semi- transparent holographic projection creating a 3D effect. By incarcerating light in a glass container, light waves are manipulated, revealing the various possible forms. This way, the reality we know shatters, and a different kind of reality unveils. Directly born out of the concept of Lux Aeterna, Arium aims to contain the light and transform it into visuals, altering the reality. Physics of light embody hallucinations in the air. The divine and immortal light change shape yet not the quality, while the forming visuals expand and have a three-dimensional identity. Light escapes but is refound in the optics of the human eye and neurons in the brain. Where light ceases to exist, another entity in the form of the shadow is born. Penumbra carries Umbra whereas Umbra reforce Penumbra to life and light.
This work is algorithmic, procedural techno with a twist of acid house. Norah Lorway will perform a live coding Algorave set that is similar to her recent raves in Belgium, Slovenia, and the U.K. amongst others. The performance will feature live coding techno and acid house in SuperCollider and Fluxus.
Splish Splash One is a prototype for a light mural commissioned in 1974 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for the foyer of its Vancouver offices. The mural simulates raindrops falling randomly on the surface of a quiet pond. Still functioning, Splish Splash Two dominates the audience lounge at CBC, providing a simulated natural environment for its users. The modest Splish Splash One is just one of a number of artworks dependent on a cellular automaton, a light/logic grid in which each cell is programmed such that it is off or on within its neighbourhood of cells in order to create a pattern. John Conway’s Game of Life (1970) exploited the evolutionary nature of this particular automaton. Norman White, however, had produced a similar logic machine/art work, First Tighten Up on the Drums, for his 1969 submission to Some More Beginnings, the E.A.T. exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. First Tighten Up on the Drums was a germinal electronic media work for White, and Splish Splash One provides a second iteration of White’s foray into cellular automata. It is the first of many works that explore the wonder of basic electronics and, in this case, offers the audience an enchanting experience as they watch its hypnotic flickering surface.
During her residency in the desert of Los Lunas, artist Nova Jiang gathers water through an experimental solar-powered atmospheric water generator invented by artist Jamie O’Shea. Passing clouds observed in Los Lunas are documented, modeled in software, and BD printed in ceramics. Participants are invited to a water-tasting party where they use the ceramic cloud vessels to sample the water gathered. After the residency, the cloud vessels are abandoned on site, where they will most likely never be seen again. novajiang.com/projects/cloud-vessels
In Homage to Studio Vision Pro, Ollie Bown builds on his practice of live generative music performance that was developed during his collaborations with electronic music duo Icarus and in various electroacoustic improvisations. The title of the work refers to Studio Vision Pro, a digital audio workstation similar to Cubase and Logic, which has superior capacity for MIDI manipulations and a powerful audition tool that Icarus adapted for live performance. Studio Vision Pro was dropped in 1999 when their parent company Opcode was acquired by Gibson. This project is Bown’s simplified imitation of the powerful Studio Vision Pro audition tool, but with generative elements built in along the way.
For several years I was living just a few 100 meters away from the Yongsan US- army base. The army base covers about 2.6 square kilometers and is located near the Han river right in the middle of Seoul. The helicopters going back and forth between the Yongsan garrison and other US-army bases where a daily routine. Every time tensions got complicated between North- and South-Korea, the fear that war could brake out also was a part of every day live. In the Yongsan army base facebook-feed I came across an advertisement that announced the screening of a documentary called “the original image of divine mercy” at Yongsan army base. The documentary deals with a painting that originates from the visions of catholic saint Maria Kowalska, it shows Jesus with red and white light rays emerging from his heart. The image for the facebook announcement however didn’t show the original painting, but showed an US soldier in combat gear on the ground looking at a Chinook transport helicopter that hovers in front of an orange sunset. That advertisement gave a main inspiration for creating this work. My work shows an imagined part of the Yongsan garrison. Some soldiers are enjoying a bbq meal, others are sitting in front of their computers dreaming, children in halloween costumes are running around for trick & treat. There is a part of the Korean neighborhood, where a Korean right wing protester build his tent on the street waving a Korean & American flag. Above all a chinook helicopter hovers in the air. A guy in halloween costume with gas-mask leaning out the side-door. Most of the soldiers on the ground are astonished and staring at the hovering helicopter, one of them is opening his arms in expectation of a holy miracle.
Text by David Rosenberg
To Samarcade, the vision is clouded and deepened by the contact of architecture and its innumerable ornaments. Everything is of a vibrant fixity: the ties compose and decompose fleeting motifs. Everywhere, on the ground, on the walls, on the surface of the domes, a mute art unfolds, whispering of words, an abstract art generating penetrating visions. Mosaics prefigure our pixelated images. The fabrics and their reflection of “moiré” effect, the carpets and their imbricated motifs aspire the look, capture it and animate it of a kaleidoscope movement. We are at the heart of an abstract universe, mathematical and spiritual based on rhythm and repetition; Where the eye is no longer the starting point from which the “images” are ordered, but the crucible where they are formed and dissolve. A hypnotic or meditative geometry: this is how Pascal Haudressy characterizes what is the source of the first series of works presented here. Simply titled Organs, this is a set of “video-loop” (loop) where each organ -heart, brain and lung- is represented in isolation by a specific color -red, blue or green- on a black background. The works can also be combined in the form of diptychs or triptychs. From the point of rendering, they evoke medical tomography, but the comparison stops here. With these “drawings,” it is more a matter of processes cycles and rhythms, than of anatomical accuracy. Satori visual: the gaze is rocked by a double movement; That of the organ itself (diastole/systole of the heart, inspiration/expiration of the lungs, neuronal activity) and drawing, constantly being reconfigured. Formation, deformation, information: Flow of images and incessant calculations that underlie them. A cyclical movement similar to the waves. A vibrant silhouette as in weightlessness. To produce this new pictorial matter, at once chaotic and orderly, Haudressy “spoils” computers. He introduces “glitches” (electronic bug) and some “bugs” that will in turn induce uncontrolled modifications of the image. Alterations, transformations, deformations: The computer is obliged to constantly recalculate the coordinates of each point or pixel. Taken in an iterative process without end; The drawing produces no more a fixed structure, but some evolving forms. This work may evoke the dynamic and fractal focus of Julie Mehretu’s drawing, the graphs of Jorinde Voigt, or Giacometti’s “additive” method that takes the figure not through a definite line, but a series of entangled approximations with the others. It is also possible to cite, by virtue of more distant artistic affiliations, the software “Life Forms”, from which Merce Cunningham used to elaborate his choreographies or the investigations of the OuLiPo, prototypes of an art that generates evolutionary structures.
Deepening Scenery is a 30-minute audiovisual performance using “component” music and imagery designed to be mixed live, and incorporating a balance between the pre-designed and the accidental. Overlap utilize systematic obscuration, sound/image disparity, and representations of landscape juxtaposed with a stream of manmade objects (components from everyday items), which moves from flowing abstraction to split second interventions. An endless conveyer of the beautiful yet unknown, accompanied by a melodic minimalist soundtrack. In a world of ubiquitous, immediately interpretable imagery and information, perhaps a crucial purpose for abstraction is a kind of universal yet personal sensory mapping. Curated by Philippe Pasquier and Vicki Moulder.
Getting To Know You is an art app for iPhone, Android and Google Cardboard virtual reality viewers. The app tells a story through the exploration of moving landscapes experienced by the viewer when rotating the device or moving their headset in physical space. The environment contains six levels based on separate visual themes using 3D animation and algorithmically generated sound, text and textures.
Plink Blink is an interactive art installation that allows three participants to make collaborative music by blinking their eyes. Human beings can blink voluntarily and involuntarily but generally they do not think about blinking. Blinking goes unnoticed because it is silent, but it is also rhythmic. In this work blinking becomes an input for sound generation.
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Global Direct illuminates the idea of worldwide democracy within the tradition of utopian artistic visions. To illustrate the conceptual work, the artist composed a series of fifteen diagrams of alternative protocols, procedures and policies for actualizing a global participatory democracy. These creative organograms were informed by research on contemporary forms of democracies which the artist assembled and offers as a documentary component of the project. Further, the artist promotes Global Direct as a visionary political movement by producing appealing slogans, visuals and videos with statements by prominent advocates of participatory politics. Ultimately, the artwork is presented as a political philosophy that structures global direct democracy. This occurs through the opportunities offered by distributed network technology for participatory decision-making, transparent accountability and civil awareness.
Recombinant Fiction is a political and aesthetic fiction genre of new immersive and participative forms of art which defines a unique genre able to drive tactical activism and dramatic purposes.
Curated for ISEA2012, Currents 2012 is represented with a looped single channel screening. Curated by Parallel Studios, Currents, Santa Fe International Media Festival, explores the role of technology and the diverse applications of new media in the arts. This year’s festival showcases single channel video, video and sound installation, interactive new media, animation, computer modulated sculpture, multimedia performance, experimental and interactive documentary video, Digital Dome projection, art gaming and art web.
Vortical Filament is an electronic installation inspired by the photographic series Geometrie Experimental. The early scientific photographer, Etienne Jules Marey and Franz Melde’s famed experimental device demonstrates standing waves on a string. The work evokes the lost tradition of the Baroque Tornitori (the craft of turning). Through the phenomenon of persistence of vision and the natural oscillation of rotational fields, the piece seeks to create a field condition of immaterial and ghostly waveforms in constant search for equilibrium within a seemingly unstable system.
Paul is an obsessive artificial drawing entity that sketches people who pose for it. Its sketching style resembles Patrick Tresset’s own.
Nobody never gets to heaven and nobody gets no land. Terra nullius is the “geological” activity of a software entity, in the disembodied and abstract nature of a computer system. This activity creates the variables of its orography, whose movement can be well-read in turn as sound variables. This micro/macro universe is observed/listened from the intimacy of an alien eye/ear that attends (without any intervention) to its natural evolution. Inside an infinite scale, a minimal, uninhabitable, and impossible landscape gets created and destroyed, thanks to the fragile balance between opposite forces.
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.
The beginning of time back to the cradle of civilisation, with humility and desire to inspire thinking about our relationships with nature, to create a framework to re-invent our views and behaviours with nature.
Thomas and Raxworthy create an immersive aesthetic experience that sonically places the viewer inside the ‘thinking’ matter of the quantum computer, the atom. The sonic work is constructed with scientific data, where the spin of subatomic particles is made audible. Scientific research was conducted in collaboration with Andrea Morello. The work brings into question scientific research and discoveries by exploring new experiential languages.
Site-based, low-tech, non proprietary, free-range, Peoples PCR is an experimental project by New York-based artists Paul Vanouse and Joan Linder. Predicated on Do-lt-Yourself locating, collecting, and incubating of Thermus aquaticus (an organism native to thermal springs and at the heart of contemporary biotechnology), the artists utilize geothermal features of Northern New Mexico to “take back” molecular biology. Peoples PCR presentations and interactive installations are featured during NeoRio, an annual outdoor public symposium and celebration at the Wild Rivers Recreation Area near Ouesta, New Mexico. This special project was facilitated by LEAP and hosted by the BLM Taos Field Office. Documentation of Peoples PCR can be found online: leapsite.org
MIMMiC (Mobile Interactive Modular Multi-screen iPad Canvas) allows artists to create and exhibit work interactively on a matrix of iPads. The touchscreens can be displayed dynamically in 2D and 3D spaces, responding in unison activated by the viewer. Paul Wong and Patrick Daggitt are collaborating with Vancouver-based artists Sammy Chien, Evann Siebens, Adam Myhill, and Christine Wallace to redefine the canvas for the digital age. Each of these artists will present individual works using the MIMMIC system.
Far from the utopias of smart, anthropomorphic and responsive machines, and inspired by the Maya’s creationist mythology, TZ’IJK is a blind, deaf, and speechless autonomous robotic agent made from mud. Drawn from the lessons of mestizaje, and motivated by Latin America’s anthropophagic, cannibalistic, and hybrid nature, TZ’IJK proposes an alternative and disruptive approach to the development of embodied artificial life forms and advocates for the integration of high and low technological materials, processes, and cultures. Consisting of a large mud-covered sphere with an internal robotic mechanism, TZ’IJK establishes a non-reactive and unpredictable bodily interaction with the viewers. This creates the emergence of a new kind of synthetic agent that allows contradictions and ambiguity, complicating the traditional dichotomies of craft/technology, western/indigenous, modern/ traditional, global/ local, and developed/undeveloped.
TZIJK.1 from pga on Vimeo.
My work is driven by the observation and reaction to moments in time and place of landscape. In the current work this is willow trees reflecting onto a rippling river.
Data Stones explores the overlap of Chinese and European philosophies offered by data visualisation. A database of every message sent between two people, accumulated through the regular internet usage is transformed into a computer generated rock. These stones are produced procedurally from the mun- dane dialogue accumulated by the everyday use of instant messaging. I download thousands of messages sent between two people and sort them according to length, date and content (using Latent Dirichlet Allocation). These various means of processing extract patterns and sentiments in what never had any intrinsic order. The stone is treated like a graph, where the statistical patterns my sentiments determines its shape, and becomes an object for contemplation and speculation. Data Stones relying on the logic that if a system encoded a stone, then it can always theoretically be decoded. In contemplating these stones, we hope to crystallize our thoughts, and finds ourselves, staring back. Data Stones is presented as a single-channel video animation of a unique procedurally generated stone, accompanied by a musical composition. The stone is generated from the accumulated conversational data between my sister, and myself and the musical composition is based on the LDA analysis of the dominant topics that have emerged over the years of our relationship, based on what has been recorded by our use of instant message applications. Sound by Tom Smith.
In this work, eighteen corporate/brand logos that are mostly green in colour take turns competing for screen space using artificial life simulations based on John Conway’s Game of Life. The viability of any one logo is determined in real-time using live, stock market data feeds. The work references tensions between representations of environmental corporate responsibility and moments of crisis such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosion.
Phallaina is the first scrolling graphic novel. A hybrid narrative device by Marietta Ren and the Studio Small Bang, composed of a digital graphic novel designed for tactile screens, as well as a 120 meters long physical fresco with an interactive audio system.
Untitled (Cables) V072739A is from an early series of generative art videos designed for ambient use in living and working spaces. The motion picture portion was created using video feedback as well as various in-camera techniques. Video feedback can be considered a complex generative system because it exhibits deterministic chaos. The audio portion was created using MIDI synthesizers driven by a sequencer application created by the artist using the Max/MSP programming environment. As the two streams of audio go in and out of phase, long term rhythmic variations are created.
Désordre is a vast memorial space, where everything is jumbled up like a bazaar. The project, originally intended as a site presenting the photographic work of Philippe De Jonckheere, has gradually evolved into a sprawling work where photos, videos and sound extracts cohabit with texts of various kinds: diary entries, literary creations, remakes and collages.
At the antipodes of methodical research, the exploration of Désordre must follow the principles of drifting or random discovery of its fragments. Browsing through the site, one can see that the projects contain hyperlinks to other projects on the site, and so on. In other words, de Jonckheere proposes a complex universe whose delinearized mode of perception is closely linked to the medium that makes it possible, the hypertextual space of the web.
One of Désordre’s main references is the work of Georges Perec, with whom de Jonckheere shares a passion for the infra-ordinary. In addition to remaking several of Perec’s works, de Jonckheere has a marked taste for the ordinary, the everyday, the trivial.
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.
Inside Mount Lu will drop you in a borderland between discovery and creation. you will be challenged to create a transition from functional sound towards expression and perhaps even to a musical experience
The Pillflower Project consists of scanned images of pills and tablets, digitally manipulated into flowerlike Mandelas, as well as actual medicinal pills physically assembled into miniature flower sculptures. These two and three dimensional pillflowers are then used to decorate both functional and sculptural work to create a veritable pillflower world. The Pillflower App is a gamification of the project where the user can grow, gather, play with, dream with and gift the pillflower designs. The grow function allows user to challenge themselves to recreate pillflowers. The gather function leads to collecting all 200 plus pillflowers that have been designed. The play option allows users to interact with their collection of pillflowers rearranging them, expanding and contracting the individual designs as well as multiplying them. The dream function is a relaxing mechanism in which a meditative Mandela of gently changing pillflowers loops along with music of the user’s choosing. Finally the gift function allows users to superimpose their collection of pillflowers on real world photos and then gift them to others. The app is simple to use with humble aspirations.
Banana Installation intervenes into space with a multitude of large, inflatable bananas. Each banana responds to the viewer with an inflation and a deflation. The movement is accompanied by a burst of sound: vocalizing the syllables banana. These are not real bananas. These are symbols, icons, disassociated from our physical experiences. They are brought into a public space to activate a tangible, shared experience, revealing a rift between the real and the virtual.
PlantConnect is a human-plant interaction system that combines the electrophysiological and photosynthetic activities of plants, the breathing of human interlocutors and the analytical abilities of intelligent computational systems to connect plant and human on a perceptual and physiological level. Part of larger investigations into alternative models for the creation of shared experiences and understanding with the natural world, the project explores complexity and emergent phenomena by harnessing the material agency of non-human organisms and the capacity of emerging technologies as mediums for information transmission, communication and interconnectedness between the human and non-human. The system measures the photosynthetic and bioelectrical activity from an array of plant microbial fuel cells (P-MFCs) and translates them into light and sound patterns using machine learning. Bioelectricity, light, sound, CO2, photosynthesis and computational intelligence form a circuit that enhances informational linkages between human, plant, bacteria and the physical environment, enabling a mode of interaction that is experienced not just as a technologically-enabled act of translation but as an embodied flow of information. In doing so, PlantConnect affords a novel experience of otherness, a heightened experience of otherwise mundane, unseen — but nevertheless vital — interdependent biological processes.
Play Connected is a project by Cym in which she creates a computer game together with the input of local children. In several workshop sessions she explores the local surroundings together with children.
The PrayStation invites you to pray or meditate. Equipped by a medical grade brainwave interface, you get to choose a belief system for which you wish to pray or meditate. A population of agents will appear on the screen that paint some iconic images related to the belief. The size and dynamism of the population varies with the quality of your prayer. Eventually the various iconographies will conquer and compete for the precious canvas space. The piece is thus a user-driven collective painting that portrays the war and peace caused by the co-existence of such a diversity of beliefs systems. The collective brain-driven antpaintings on the digital canvas are archived and the system starts anew every morning.
An immersive interactive media composition and visual/aural quantum synthesizer that splits a hydrogen-like atom’s electron into superposition combining various orbital shells.
PROBABLY/POSSIBLY? is an immersive, visual, aural, interactive, composition/installation that tracks the probability currents and gradients of a hydrogen-like atom’s electron while in superposition, combining two to three different probability wave functions according to the time dependent Schrodinger equation. Spin on the x-axis of the electron is displayed through different hue-color combinations that show spin-up and spin-down of the electron, resulting in a possibility of up to 6 spin relationships on the x-axis alone, among the three wave function combinations. We present our studies in composing elementary wavefunctions of the hydrogen-like atom and identify several relationships between the physical phenomena and musical composition that has helped the process. The hydrogen-like atom accurately describes some of the fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena of nature and supplies the composer with a set of well-defined mathematical constraints that can create a variety of complex spatiotemporal patterns. PROBABLY/POSSIBILY? explores the visual/aural appearance of these various combinations of two and three wavefunctions of an electron with spin in a hydrogen-like atom, highlighting the resulting symmetries and symmetry changes as visual/aural narrative.
Oracle is a palm-reading machine foretelling the future of the viewer. In a perverse manner the installation brings an experience of a myth of oracle, which in an enigmatic way can predict the future. The work recalls subconscious cultural traditions such as chiromancy and ancient Greek oracle, whose foretell is difficult to verify. After scanning the viewer’s papillary lines, the machine tells his or her fortune. The whole installation is a programmed machine that randomly reveals its personality – sometimes the prophecies tease the viewer directly (presenting messages like “how about a date tonight” or “you have such beautiful eyes” from time to time). This is yet another strange and contradictory experience since the viewer tends to adopt a meek and pious stance, in expectation of a scientific vision. Instead, what the viewer has is another aporia of rationality: the machine is demanded to legitimise scientifically an ancient human superstition. Nor is there much sense in the fact that the word ‘oracle’ has entered the colloquial language to mean an unquestioned authority, connoisseur or expert in a particular field. The work plays with the concept of artificial intelligence and its aim to create machines with human characteristics, with an ironic take on the confidence we place in modern technology. This is yet another author’s experiment with the emotionality of machines, or rather the emotionality roused in a human due to contact with a machine. Since a mechanical device tends to be perceived as impartial, people are inclined to take its pronouncements more seriously than they would those of a street fortune teller. Thus, the artwork encourages reflection on trust in technology and our dependence on it, as well as the fear of its domination.
Throughout the past hundred years, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong mostly worked as a community that with military and political function, it maximized the ability of improvisation and compatibility, and finally developed into a huge and comprehensive urban system. The issue of governance of the site which had permitted the unfettered development of these few hectares was finally resolved and the decades of growth ended in 1990s. Scientist Ray Kurzweil defined the acceleration of development of technology as Law of Accelerating Returns. He reckons that technology is growing exponentially that human could make the progress of the entire 20th century with only 20 years in 21 century, and we are here right before the “explosion”, what will happen decades later might threat all human being. Having conducted extensive research and interviews on the history of the Kowloon Walled City, the artist utilises these old memories and scientific prediction, and reimagines a fantastical Underground Walled City that evolves into the last defence of human being against artificial intelligence. Through the daring escape of a VOKKALO series artificial intelligence, the conflicts was revealed. Huge data flows between these two gigantic memory systems, how the future world would become? What functions will the Underground Kowloon Walled City have, what progress will it have made? What kind of role will it play between artificial intelligence and human being?
A solitary and self-contained male figure eats at the table of Tangaroa (the god of the sea) in a dark water world, which is at once sensuous and forbidding – evoking narratives of Narcissus, Maui and Hine nui Te Po.
In this work the artist deconstructs the road atlas. Detached from their contexts, the pieces form new visual topologies that suggest computer circuits or constellations.
Baboons as Friends is a two-channel video installation juxtaposing field footage of baboons with a reenactment by human actors, shot in film noir style. A tale of lust, jealousy, sex, and violence transpires simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds.
Rainy Garden is an interactive installation that creates a moment of sensory awakening and playfulness through tangible and immersive interactions. It is comprised of seven umbrellas hung from the ceiling and an Arduino compatible circuitry embedded in each umbrella to create sensory immersion. Rainy Garden is inspired from our childhood memories about nature: jumping in the rain, gardening, fresh smell from a garden, etc. Nature is a refuge that provides shelter and comfort. Nature is a nostalgic inspiration and becomes one of core aesthetic components of our work. Rainy Garden becomes a refuge of nature, an idealized immersion, immersion without vulnerability. A touch to each umbrella handle creates a personal boundary with distinct sensory stimulations and a unique floral design print. In the gallery, umbrellas look like big flowers in the floating garden. UV LEDs attached to the outer surface of the umbrellas slowly animate creating raindrops effects. Once a visitor holds a handle of the umbrella and stay underneath of it, the space responds to the viewer and evokes narratives through visual, haptic and sound experiences. Depending on the quality of touch by a visitor, hidden visual patterns, vibrations, cricket-like sounds will appear and create a sensory-rich environment.
During the Open Space Residency, sound artist Ranjit Bhatnagar uses found and salvaged materials from the Bosque to create a set of sound sculptures that are activated by the wind. These sculptures, inspired by windmills, turbines, wind chimes, and so forth, are placed around the site for visitors to discover and to play by hand if they wish.
Albuquerque-based artist Raven Chacon will give a 30-minute solo performance of his composition, Totem of the Total Siren. His work utilizes his custom-built electric ard electoric instruments: an antler-glass harp, a snare-oscillator, and various throat-amplifiers. Chacon’s sound, visual and installation work aims to anticipate the near-future sonic, graphic, and political landscape of this desert region and its peoples.
To take something at face value is to believe the way the thing appears is the way it really is. At Face Value challenges some people’s narrow views of what an Aboriginal person looks like. As the faces morph, viewers are asked to shift their paradigms and accept, at face value, that the person they’re looking at is Aboriginal. In an international context, the dominant culture in most countries attempts to define aspects of who their first nations peoples are; and it’s often reinforced through stereotyped images. In Australia, this is primarily done through tourism advertising. In reality, First nations peoples and cultures are far more diverse and sophisticated than is convenient for the dominant culture to acknowledge. At Face Value is a series of 25 portraits of family and friends.
Italy’s Rekimbinant deliver a glance into the growing world of independent video activism and its role in the new free delivery of information today.
In this body of work, Stone alters and re-purposes five obsolete mechanical devices. Each device in the series significantly contributed to reengineering the conditions of everyday life and anticipated the changes associated with digital technologies. Stone’s alterations destabilize the meaning of the original objects. The viewer is drawn into a conversation about change and renewal through the disruption of place, time, and intention, and points to the objects and concepts left behind.
Using a variety of tools, uniformed figures destroy a car, live-generating a variety of audio and video samples, rhythms, timbres, envelopes, frequencies, and imagery. The raw sonic and visual materials are live-streamed from performer– and car–mounted cameras and microphones to mediating composers for processing and remixing, then reintegrated into the performance space. The simultaneous destruction and reconstruction create a singular composition.
This is a concert focusing on recovering and make known part of the history of electroacoustic music from Latin American.
The political and economic instability in many Latin American countries have been deeply affecting the life of its inhabitants for decades. Support for artistic activities has usually been postponed to solve urgent social problems. In spite of that, the development in the region of the electronic arts in general and the electroacoustic music in particular, is really astounding. To name but a few examples: Mauricio Kagel composed eight electroacoustic studies in Argentina between 1950 and 1953, according to Hugh Davies’ International Electronic Music Catalog. José Vicente Asuar in Chile, Joaquín Orellana in Guatemala, Reginaldo Carvalho in Brazil, Horacio Vaggione in Argentina, Héctor Quintanar in Mexico and Juan Blanco in Cuba are only some of the many names in the ocean of electroacoustic music creativity that has always been Latin America.
The compositions on this program presents a significant sampling of music created between the 50s and 80s by artists from various Latin American countries. The program includes: “Valsa Sideral” (1962) by Jorge Antunes from Brazil and “Bolivianos…!” (1973) by Alberto Villalpando from Bolivia, among several other works.
Wiff Waff is a monthly ping pong club in Belfast where participants can battle it out in game after game of Killer Pong! Everyone gets around the table at the start of the game and rotates around, one hit and move on… Slowly it narrows down to the final two to decide the winner. Will it be you?! Game after game it will test your ping pong skills with the emphasis on the playing and not winning. This special free Wiff Waff event will close OUTSIDE ISEA and will run outside the container. All delegates and public are invited to join in and play to celebrate the end of ISEA2009.
The Silva Field Guide to Birds of a Parallel Future centers around a series of 18 short 3D animations. The animations mix birdwatching and ornithology with multiverse and quantum theories. Each animation reveals a new dimension, where the birds and their environments oscillate between representation and abstraction.
Scientific photography aims to record and illustrate data and experiments that differ according to specific disciplines. Although scientific photography can be considered non-aesthetic, since its main purpose is not to convey beauty but rather accurate information, its ability to record material in addition to that which is merely informative allows it to also serve expressive, subjective, and aesthetic purposes. In my project, I use scientific photography to achieve an objective (scientific) resemblance of individual water drops to their subject, but the resulting images are highly selective in what they show and how. I try to create „expressive portraits” of water drops. My artistic intervention of a scientific process through experimenting with the SEM is a way to find what potentially different things my images can say about water to a viewer. Transforming the microworld to a macro level, I play with the meaning of presented images. My images and digital installations evoke an interest in that water composition is shown as being beautiful. This causes a dilemma for viewers, particularly because the gallery space is different from a laboratory.
Districtis a gallery touring, interactive, video-art lnstallatron concept designed to create an amalgam of public interaction and private digital expenence. When viewers enter the installation space, a combinatlon of motion trackers and cameras scan their figures to create abstract avatars, which then launch onto the large format video screens and interact with other previously generated characters inside of the installation’s memory.
After having ended the long-term collaboration with video partner Lillevan Pobjoy in 2007, Marc Weiser now collaborates with the media artist Robert Seidel. Marc Weiser aka rechenzentrum @ ISEA2009 will present a turbulent mix of irritating and innovative sound architectures that, at the same, provide a thrilling minimal construction for the dance floor. All of this is visually supported by Robert Seidel’s meandering, abstract imagery.
The installation is an interface for navigating an expanding database of youtube videos. These videos are downloaded, transcoded, segmented and catalogued to form a palette for algorithms to forge new music. At the end of the installation there will be a short performance accompanied by Peter Bennett on the BeatBearing.
“The pandemic and the intensification of life uncertainty, made me connect more with my ancestors. During the quarantine I have been developing a video art alongside the relatives I share my house with, which are my grandmother and my mother. In parallel of this video process, I’ve been creating a series of digital images and photo-collages entitled “Self-declarations”. In this series I intervene on my family photographic archive to invoke my matriarchal heritage, as seen at the 3 “Matriarchal Ensigns “ artworks. A mixed-race and syncretic Brazilian iconology is then channelled through symbolic interventions on my genealogical imagery.” – Rodrigo D’Alcântara
ROVER: the Reactive Observant Vacuous Emotive Robot, is an interactive sculpture that navigates the gallery and sings emotively when it finds people. Based off of audio and emotion research, ROVER modulates audio qualities like timbre, fundamental frequency, contour, mode, and tempo to portray emotion. It also learns the space, mapping obstacles and people, while navigating using proximity, bump and heat sensors. This is an experimental platform for human robotic interaction, and has been used to conduct research on human’s affective response to emotive sounds produced by an embodied agent. ROVER has two modes, an active mode where it moves about the space looking for people to interact with and a passive mode where it is stationary and will only interact when approached. ROVER is an uncomfortably biological alien-like form attempting to learn how to communicate and express emotions. Its towering 6.ft tall thin white frame with a translucent cover stretched over it is reminiscent of a ribcage covered by skin.
LPDT2 alludes Roland Barthes’s book ‘Le Plaisir du Texte’, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. LPDT2 is the Second Life incarnation of Roy Ascott’s new media art work La Plissure du Texte (‘The Pleating of theText’), created in 1983. LPDT2 does not attain its textual input from discrete individuals but from generative text which is being harvested from the online Gutenberg Project. Thus the project brings together the voices of many authors and epochs, pleated into a poetic waterfall of distributed authorship that is mapped both onto a three dimensional metaverse architecture as well as its (robotic avatar) inhabitants.
Building upon the tradition of modifying production automobiles into rolling, dancing sculpture with sound systems, Ruben Ortiz-Torres has modified a commercially produced scissor lift used to elevate workers, into a lowrider that also goes high. With a digitally designed front grill, chromed hydraulic system, customized sound track, and an upper basket that spins, tilts, and lifts off its base, the sculpture is a 32-foot-tall, automatic, adjustable, contemporary tribute to Constantin Brancusi’s Endless column, Egyptian obelisks, and memorial columns through the ages.
Rui shall present two videos made around the theme of light. Lamp consists on a deconstruction of the first fractions of the second, when a light bulb is turned on. Library.Lights is a video documentation of a performance within QUB’s old main library building. Both of the video pieces, served as an inspiration for a collaborative improvisation with musician and sound artist Sergio Bernardo Gregorio.
West Again is a reinterpretation of a Conestoga wagon outfitted with a mobile greenhouse and open-source agricultural controllers.
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