Art Events Data Table

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mirror IV : Stranger is a two-screen installation developed to explore the nature in which trust and suspicion is confronted when empathy is being established within a context of polarisation. Mirror is conceptualised as a series of two-screen works considering polarised perspectives, drawing alternatively on assumption and objectivity; this project is designed to explore the common human characteristics that could provide a stronger empathetic bridge between strangers than their contexts, roles and attire might suggest. Portraits of individuals are constructed in a manner that they transcend or challenge place, prejudice, projection, assumption and fear of the other – while at the same time providing insight into nuanced internal negotiations and narratives. At a time when the extraordinary polarization of half a century of war, appears to be coming to a close, we propose the  development of a new research-based artwork modestly considering the enormous challenges of reconciliation and forgiveness. The project Mirror IV : Stranger is a collaboration between the UK-based visual artist, David Cotterrell and Sri-Lankan screenwriter, Ruwanthie de Chickera. It is a contemplative study of the process and obstacles to the normalization of individual interaction within a context of deep historical division.

We present a prototype for a Tangible User Interface designed for interactive data visualization, which we believe will be useful for facilitating collaborative work in data analytics. Our hybrid system combines a tabletop graspable user interface with a two-dimensional screen display; the users interrogate the data by manipulating tokens on the tabletop and the screen displays the results of the user’s query. We demonstrate our system with demographic data from the UN, but we have designed our system such that the user can enter their own data to visualize.

This video features popular songs and imagery combined with computer-based aesthetics. Visual elements feature iconic images, 8-bit, pixel and glitch. The sound is the result of sampling and mixing fado.

In Moving Saturn, a maroon Saturn sedan is pushed slowly and with great effort across a picturesque landscape. The various sounds – a nearby river, rustling grass, snippets of conversation, and birds – are subtitled. Without explanation or context for the events that are portrayed in the film, the viewer focuses on the subtitles, which present the possibility of narrative but ultimately resist categorization.

Surface Noise is comprised of recorded vinyl surface noise pressed in a limited edition of 10 LPs. Over time, the actual surface noise is intended to blend seamlessly with the recorded surface noise. The recording will eventually be indistinguishable from the real occurrence of surface degradation. Surface Noise is an attempt to realize a simultaneously closed but endlessly accommodating format. They have little or no beginning reference point and no possible distortion through reproduction and dissemination. Each album, in the edition of ten, is unique because no two LPs have identical wear and tear. Depending on the owner’s care of the record, the surface noise will be greater or less, but it will be difficult to know what the pristine recording actually is. This piece concerns preservation, chance, and the relationship of recorded media as a material artifact in a changing material circumstance.

EquityBot treats twenty-four states of human affect as tradable commodities, ‘investing’ in emotions such as anger, joy, disgust and amazement. It then links these emotions with actual stocks to make investments using a simulated brokerage account. During stock market hours EquityBot generates simple data visualizations that illustrate how the world is feeling alongside the market performance of its emotional equities. In addition to the internet artwork, EquityBot includes a physical sculpture that links to the online artwork.

Emergence invites the viewer to think about what differentiates the electrical impulses of the internet from those impulses constantly traveling throughout the human body.

In Shannon Novak’s String Section, blank walls and architectural features are transformed into musical instruments that the audience can interact with using a mobile device. When a smartphone or tablet is held up to a geometric form, the form animates and generates a single musical note. People can interact with the work alone or play with others to generate musical scores. The geometric forms visually and sonically disrupt the otherwise blank canvas of the environment, and disrupt social patterns of everyday flow.

‘Whose Weather is it Anyway’ is part of a series of interventions that seeks to decipher, expose and contrast informational patterns that exist in natural ecosystems and that of man-made informational representations of command, control and dissemination mediated by its infrastructural aspects.

Amidst narratives and decisions surrounding recreational tourism, festivities, food, livelihood, calamities and stock prices to which weather conditions are central, lies the colonization of local and global weather information into an intellectual property regime that often makes weather reporting and predictions through opaque informational conglomerates that fuel climate change debates and environmental policy. This project explores the interplay between ‘the climate of economies’ & ‘the economies of climate’ in the age of networked Big Data, critically examining these interfaces while engaging the audience using emerging methods in data sonification and networked media art practices.

Sarlacc is an audio-visual performance that features visuals live coded within the OpenGL fragment shader that are reactive to incoming audio frequencies parsed by band. Sarlacc merges elements of EDM, J-Pop, Gif-Culture, and mechanical and electronic-inspired audio and visuals. The overall experience is unequal parts pop-culture, abstract expressionism, and glitch-art.

In film-strips I capture the energy of urban environments using a photographic camera in the manner of a movie camera. The film-strip at ISEA2011 depicts a section of a 90 second handheld pan of the UK student protest march against budget cuts in Whitehall 9.12.2010.

In film-strips I capture the energy of urban environments using a photographic camera in the manner of a movie camera.

In film-strips, I capture the energy of urban environments using a photographic camera in the manner of a movie camera.

n this installation, a paper plane was made of the magazine cover of LIFE (June 2, 1967), which ran a story of the escape of famous Chinese musician Ma Sitson from China. It flies on strings at variable speeds synced with the tempo and level of two songs: Long Life Chairman Mao (1966), and Yesterday (1965). But the playback music is barely heard by the audience.
In May 1967, a year after the nationwide Cultural Revolution took place in China, large-scale anti- colonialist riots broke out in Hong Kong. Lots of Chinese propaganda slogans and music were broadcasted from the loudspeakers at the Bank of China Building in Central, Hong Kong. It was loud and heard everywhere in Central. Then the Hong Kong government installed 6 large military speakers on the roof of the nearby Government Information Services office building, playing loudly the jazz and western pop music including The Beatles to counteract the propaganda. In the “Hong Kong Under the Gun” issue (July 31, 1967) of Newsweek magazine, there is a line in its cover story, “Many of the rich and the middle class have had their airline tickets bought and paid for months, or even years.”

Networked Optimization is a series of three crowd-sourced versions of popular self-help books. Each book contains the full text, which is however invisible because it is set in white on a white background. The only text that remains readable consists of the so-called “popular highlights” – the passages that were underlined by many Kindle users – together with the amount of highlighters. Each time a passage is underlined, it is automatically stored in Amazon’s data centers. Among the books with the most popular highlights, there is a striking number of self-help books. This points to a multi-layered, algorithmic optimization: from readers and authors to Amazon itself. Harvesting its customers’ micro-labour, the act of reading becomes a data-mining process. The series consists of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The 5 Love Languages of Love, and How to Win Friends & Influence People.

In 2012, if:book Australia created a project that took a book from concept to print within a single twenty-four hour period. The book was written and edited using an online platform where every edit made to the text was captured and stored in a database. Willow Patterns documents the complete output from that database: authors and editors at work. In its online component, Willow Patterns creates an API and searchable interface to the data, making every version of every story accessible and open to remix and response. Its physical component is an export of the book’s complete database published in a lavish 28-volume hardcover with a continuous spine design. If the future of the book includes print as an aesthetic choice, then Willow Patterns highlights the possibility of printed books designed for purposes other than reading, borrowing from print’s powerful symbolism without devaluing the collected stories within.

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

Andy Warhol’s real-time eight hour film Empire (1964) heralded the onset of structural film as an artistic medium; since taken up by Michael Snow,
Anthony McCall and Douglas Gordon, among others. Empire consists of an unadorned shot of the Empire State Building and captures what was the ultimate symbol of the New York City skyline. Simone Jones and Lance Winn revisit Empire from a post-9/11, post financial-collapse perspective. End of Empire is a custom-built, robotic projection machine that projects a 14-minute video inspired by Warhol’s film. The robot’s motorized camera arm enables the frames’ movement and projects a black-and-white video image of the Empire State building across the gallery wall and ceiling, and then reverses back to its original position to eventually reveal its disappearance from the skyline. Never seen in its entirety, the viewer has to piece together their perception of the film as it unfolds over time and across the physical space of the gallery. The projection machine, with its numerous progenitors – from 19th century optical instruments to Edward Ihnatowicz’s Senster – cheekily involves the audience who must move around the machine to fully view the image, thereby enrolling them in its forlorn search for the absent skyscraper.

Six people from around the world working through the online platform Odesk were employed to meet with the artist on Skype to create a digital rendering of their physical workspaces. The piece uses the collected screen captured footage of these encounters to explore the potential for sensing and capturing the presence of others through layers of digitization. The work asks how today’s communication technologies challenge our sense of presence, as more and more day-to-day interactions are absent of physical bodies and spaces.

In many of Songül Boyraz’s works she deals with the human body and its fragmentation. Closely connected with the space created by the medium (video and photography) the concentration on the pars pro toto without any accessories and deception allows her works to tell in detail about the brutality and tragedy inherent in everyday situations.

Kainga a roto (Home Within) consists of videos, soundscapes, music, spoken text, and a physical space. Each video is a system of allusions and symbols, relating the personal to the environmental, cultural and cosmic systems.

This C++ program maps its own code structure to sounds that recorded using only the built-in microphone on an iMac. The artist recorded samples of herself singing, typing, pushing on the desk, tapping on the computer, and breathing. The program goes through its own code line by line using the characters, whitespace, punctuation, and line length to generate the music. Strong programming is elegant and concise, and, like a poem, it makes good use of whitespace. This piece translates how programmers describe their work, strangely poetic, into sound, but it unexpectedly does so with a female voice.

We work from the Maori concept of Te Kore, the void of potential, as the moment before the universe began. The breath bridges the sacred and the everyday.

Visually stunning, Phosphori’s shimmering images emerge from the darkness with the grace and fluidity of human movement. Images dissolve and reform as the performers sweep across the space, towering above the crowds. Phosphori embraces the world of technology to stunning effect, bringing to the streets a hi-tech performance collaboration between human and machine. These cyborg figures transport us to a future of beauty and grace fed by colour and light.

Performers: Kathryn Puie, Lee-Anne Litton, Rick Everett. Director: David Clarkson. Design: Alejandro Rolandi. Music: Peter Kennard.

Filmed in the Florida Keys, the Chihuahuan Desert and the German Green Belt, e-scape v explores the presence of technology in open spaces, revealing with a sense of magical realism the ways in which electronic equipment, infrastructure and refuse can alter our perceptions of the outdoors. In this series of abstract narratives, nature revives a discarded TV, then consumes it; a window on a train both divides and duplicates our view of a mountain landscape; an electric fence supplies power to electric sheep; kabuki beacons stream festive data into an otherwise stagnant swamp; and a Trojan virus, physically manifested to resemble its namesake horse, escapes into the wild. e-scape v was created with the support of Arrow Electronics and scored by the Kevin Costner Suicide Pact.

e-scape is a digital media project that was originally created and presented in an environment without electrical services. At its core is a video poetry series that explores and interprets the literature and landscape of Cape Cod National Seashore.

Mountain is a series of digital images of generic mountains generated from photographs of lava-cone formations in Iceland. The images have been manipulated to render the mountain forms perfectly symmetrical for part of their height. These are not images of particular mountains, but diagrams of the concept of “mountains” realized as iconic conical forms.

Stephen Jones & Pia van Gelder created a huge video synthesiser, to manipulate (analogue) video.

“The Tetra Vision Synth (TVS) or Tetrasynth is an analogue modular video synthesiser made in the shape of a tetrahedron. The electronics have been built using original schematics designed by Stephen Jones in 1996. The synthesiser is composed of a total of 12 modules made up of three distinct designs: the VCO module or video oscillator, the effects module, and a patching and viewing module. Each of the identical three faces of the TVS contribute to the red green and blue analogue outputs which appear on the final display. Unlike the traditional rectangular modular synthesis designs, the three faces of the TVS stand at an axis, inviting participants to engage in synthesis in a collaborative and relational manner.”

Surófona is a medium and collective of Latin American artists of diverse disciplines. Through its online experimental radio, it intervenes and interprets exhibitions, festivals and other events in the region, involving arts and new media. The main contents are: talks with artists, sound art, electro-acoustic music, improvisations, sound poetry, reviews of works, telematics concerts, soundscapes, field recordings, sound cartographies and Latin American geolects. The collective develops installations, objects, urban interventions, performance actions and workshops, which expand the discursive and aesthetic processes of emissions.

These portraits lie between painting, animation, video and sculpture. They draw from all of these practices and whilst entirely constructed in 3D software the motion of the subject is recorded from real life.

Another Dream, a hybrid animated documentary and VR game, brings the gripping, true love story of an Egyptian lesbian couple to life. Faced with a post- revolution backlash against the LGBTQ community, they escape Cairo to seek asylum and acceptance in the Netherlands. An accompanying installation allows audiences to reflect on what they have seen, heard, and felt in VR.
Another Dream is part of Queer in a Time of Forced Migration, an animated transmedia series that follows the stories of LGBTQ refugees from Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia across continents and cultures — from the 2011 Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa region to the world today.

‘Invisible Istanbul’ – an augmented reality (AR) intervention into the Istanbul Biennial that uses GPS positioned artworks to create surrealistic and poetic juxtapositions within the physical space of Istanbul and the Biennial.

Biomer Skelters is a participatory public artwork connecting body rhythms to potential ecosystems. As participants walk the streets, a wearable biosensing system repaints the cityscape with fantastic augmented reality vegetation.

Vinyl text, 2500mm × 2000mm. Te Taiao Maori is a representation of Maori whakapapa (genealogy) and cosmology.

In this intimate installation, participants are invited to join a partner inside a private booth. With electronic stethoscopes and transducers, the duo share the rhythms of their hearts in real-time, stimulating sites of pulsation on one’s own and one another’s bodies.
Issues of mutual trust, consent, and play are negotiated nonverbally, as the pair transgresses
boundaries of internal versus external, and self, other, and environment. Individual bodies are
spread further as the heartbeat of each person is used to enliven an interactive, haptic sculpture and sonic installation throughout the public space, for everyone present.

Selection of artworks inspired by light, using multiple digital media based on instant and
random inspiration. 1964-2011.

The common flow is an exhibition in the Archaeological museum of the Caldas University, in which is proposed, through a perceptual language, a relation between original pieces of the first indigenous cultures, videos of the river, digital’s flow simulations and fractal geometry images. The exhibition offers a relation between original indigenous cultures and the new perspective of science about the nature of the flow.

The Digital Skin Series is composed of self-portraits in which I pose “under the digital skin” of strangers I’ve crossed paths with in the past. To create this series, I first used a 3D scanner to obtain an accurate tridimensional model of my face. Then I used a camera-prototype to acquire HD portraits of strangers. Finally, I applied their portraits to my digital skull as if they were simply an additional layer. The result is a series of photographs where bidimensionality and tridimensionality collide in an intimate and unpredictable way. In the past, myths about skin were common across cultures and related to radical biological metamorphoses. For example, in the Navajo tradition–which considered the skin a mask–if you were to lock your eyes with those of the skinwalkers, they could project themselves into your body and transform into you. In today’s network society, bodies have left that organic condition and are characterized by transient statuses: individuals have become di-viduals, data aggregates, samples, signals. The last boundary between us and the world, our skin, has become a transient membrane that changes along with the trans- and meta- human forms under it. The space that was occupied by the skinwalkers of the past has been taken over by infinite reconfigurations and mediations. What remains the same is that to be human still means to constantly shift through generative metamorphosis, corruptions, and de-generations that escape any clear categorization.

The Twitter, tweet refers to a point in time that takes on new form and meaning when viewed in different contexts. When seen in this way, a tweet contributes to an expanded sense of place as one that is a composite of space and time, network and process; or in Michel Serres’s terms a topology. The emergence of new topologies and their connotations in a tweet’s re-translation in new contexts is revealed in the asynchronous, overlapping and cyclical flow of our connections in different networks. The net-art work “The river is everywhere at once” references how tweets move us to a point in time that is quickly made composite, ambiguous and unanticipated through the ever-changing nature of our relations in a network.

Thomas Ankersmit – A solo set with computer, modular synthesizer and acoustic alto saxophone; Phill Niblock – Music and Images (from the Movement of People Working films).

Through the Aleph* is a net art project offering an unprecedented interactive and visual experience where many places on Earth and in space can be seen simultaneously in an instant. It visualizes the diversity of human civilizations (microcosm) and the unity of humanity without borders in the ever- changing universe (macrocosm); it draws the connections between individuals and the global environment, Earth and outer space, eternity and time, and art and science. With an unexpected approach to surveillance cameras and global networks this meditative web project uses live data to create an abstract landscape in an open source environment. It not only embraces the dream of peace on Earth but also explores the bond between humankind and nature through time and space in the present moment. *The project title was inspired by two great literary works—“The Aleph” and “Through the Looking- Glass.” Perhaps the computer screen is our modern day looking-glass, and we are all Alice as we peer through our screens at an alternate reality.

Here the basic elements are the luminous fabric of the screen pixels with the red, green and blue light mixing to produce over 16.5 million colours and the hidden procedures of the computer operating at ultra fast speeds that drive them.

Here the basic elements are the luminous fabric of the screen pixels with the red, green and blue light mixing to produce over 16.5 million colours and the hidden procedures of the computer operating at ultra fast speeds that drive them.

Here the basic elements are the luminous fabric of the screen pixels with the red, green and blue light mixing to produce over 16.5 million colours and the hidden procedures of the computer operating at ultra fast speeds that drive them.

Invited in 2014 in the Meetings Arts-sciences of St Priest,Guillaume Marmin and Philippe Gordiani collaborated with the Research center in Astrophysics of Lyon in the production of Timée, review of Platon’s eponym work. Between mathematical and metaphysical, the philosopher describes “Timée” as the solar system where the distances between planets amount to harmonious musical intervals. The universe would be ordered such a completed baptized partition Music of Spheres. Based on exchanges and reflections around this theme, the installation delivers a subjective and poetic interpretation of the origins of astrophysics.

Memopol-3 is an installation that visualizes the visitors’ information field. It’s an Orwellian dystopia which is built on the technology of today. The tools of the surveillance economy are abused to create a personal physical surveillance experience. Physical and virtual identities are quantified and processed into a stream of data. After the phases of data collection, the visitor experiences a transcendent reflection of oneself that combines the past and the future, physical and immaterial into an audio-visual ceremony.
The experience of Memopol-3 starts with the visitors identifying themselves with passports or ID-cards. The visitor is asked to connect their Android or iPhone smartphone to the system. All private information stored in the smartphone is copied and analyzed by algorithms and neural networks. Contact lists, messages, call histories, WiFi networks, photos, videos, etc are used to create a 10-minute-long animated graph of the visitor’s life. The audio-visual piece is presented privately in a separate room. Relationships, daily behaviors, important life events, and photographic memories are viewed from the perspective of a big brother.
The terms and conditions of Memopol-3:
1. By using the machine you agree to the collection and processing of your private information.
2. Data will be collected from your smartphone and from the internet.
3. Your data will be visualized in a private room.
4. All private data will be deleted after the visit.
5. People aged under 13 must have parental permission.
Memopol-3 works only with Android phones and iPhones. You need a passport or ID-card to access the installation.
The duration of the experience is around 15-30 minutes and depends on the amount of data stored on the phone.

2K-Reality is an audio installation that invites basketball players to play within an acoustic environment, drawing on the conventions of NBA TV broadcasts and sports-sim video games. Players and spectators obtain a different experience of performance, motivation, aspiration and fantasy by playing with this immersive real-world, digital hybrid.

Exploring the intimacies and vulnerabilities of human emotions through video, wearable technology, emotion sensing interactivity and installation.

Flower from the Universe is a gigantic light flower with a heart mode, led on a nerve cell, encircled by a garland of graceful stems. A circle of seven pods lies under the heart, where the seed of movement is hidden. By walking around the artwork, visitors set off a wave of moving colors. The nerve cell in the heart has illuminated offshoots that follow or are in contrast with the colors in the garland.

Untitled is a life-sized video projection of the artist – acting as Jesus – hanging on a wooden cross. The video was captured on Good Friday 2013, the day traditionally marked as the day Jesus was crucified. Lasting approximately 3 hours, the duration of the video references the estimated time that Jesus hung on the cross. The artist was unable to outlast Jesus due to critical physical conditions.

The work Glass Mutations III contemplates the biological phenomenon of primordial cell mitosis – the beginning of life. The process of mitosis occurs when cells split and build organisms that are more complex than the single cell organism. Glass mutation III translates this evolution into a geometric and material complex interplay between the traditional craft of glass and the contemporary craft of 3D modeling a printing.
Formally, instead of imitating the symmetrical, binary mitosis, always splitting from one cell into two, Glass Mutation III, is a construct of two sets of individually merged glass volumes, comprised each of a three-fold split. In biological terms, this mitosis would not be able to occur with three cells involved on a regular basis. Similar to cancer, where certain cells are able to split into more than two daughter cells, the work diverges traditional notions of evolution and enters the territory of mutation.
In material and crafting context, on the one hand, the brief moments to shape the glass in its temperature-induced plasticity contrast the enormous longevity of the resulting annealed glass object. On the other, digital 3D design is a timeless process. Binary digital data is without a time component – without a moment of plasticity and without the opposite – decay or withering. 3D printed artifact, a reified object, is fragile and has a moderate half-life of less than 25 years before the UV receptive resins and polymers are starting to break down.
In the analog, each working step leaves traces and is a unique combination of viscosity and force – impossible to repeat. While the digital embodies unlimited history-based modeling steps – enabling the sliding forward and backward in the making process – a process of flux rather than concrete design steps. The binary condition of the work results in the establishment of a hybrid – a Digital Craftsmanship.

Slow Selfie_3.0 is a slow growing sculpture that transforms crystal condensation into a three dimensional self portrait. The work uses a chemical conversion similar to analog photography that reduces silver halides into silver metal. The crystalline mask is accompanied by projection mapping that stimulates and affects the activity of the crystals. The work comments on the perpetual relevance of human vanity and the ontemporary obsession with the digital portrait.

Paul Greedy works with light and Tom Ellard with sound. Their collaboration resulted in a Clavilux, a machine that manipulates light through emotions. The emotions are represented by colours. The first machine that visualises emotions through colour is from 1919, built by Thomas Wilfred (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wilfred), who coined the term Clavilux, and this version is the 11th Clavilux, world-wide.

Hybrid Spaces interrogates whether or not three dimensional audiovisual imaging technologies can act as a clear cut barrier separating digital space and physical space and raises the question: Are virtual objects now capable of generating the same perceptual effects as real objects? By converging laser beam projections with OpenGL graphics and sound source panning, the installation induces an ambiguity of multi-stable, digital/physical space.

Memoirs of the Blind is an interactive installation, consisting of an acrylic box containing a screen showing a desaturated photography of a face with its eyes closed. When the interactor blinks, the installation detects it and takes a photo at the exact time of the blinking. Once the new face is obtained, it is processed and the installation substitutes the displayed face with the new one.
The artwork becomes a fleeting testimony of its visitors, interacting with it, but not seeing it. The piece captures a moment where the visitor becomes at the same time subject and object of the artwork.
Memoirs of the Blind reflects on the power asymmetries that technology crystallizes, providing a contemplative reflection on the aesthetics of our relationship with it, while simultaneously showcasing the advancements in computer vision that allow for supra-human abilities. In effect, the piece highlights the differences between what Paul Virilio called “metabolic speed”– the speed of the living being–and “technological speed”, the artificial speed of machines.
Emile Devereaux commented that Nam June Paik’s work, like Derrida’s “extend the framework of the symbolic and destabilize spatial locations through demonstrating the postal principle” (how a letter may not arrive at its destination). This piece, whose title is inspired on Derrida’s book “Memoirs of the blind: the self-portrait and other ruins”, artistically appropriate this principle, proposing a poetic dimension of the power choreography in human interaction.
In addition, the installation explores our relationship with automated surveillance, subverting the subject-object relationship between itself and its visitors, while exploring the aesthetics of such subversion.

Silence/Noise is collage video work that combines random information, video clips, and images from the web in order to investigate the explosion of visual consumption that has taken place within the social and sharing environments of the internet.

Triangulation Device is a participatory sound piece that generates networked soundscapes between two users using the movement of the body as a compositional device.

TRANSMISSION [v.2] is an audiovisual performance that explores the place of electronic interfaces in our society. In this work, different media such as television, computer screens, monitors, GPS, drones, and satellite views are explored, remixed, repurposed, and disrupted. The design integrates the visual and noise disturbances from these technologies in order to produce a visual experience where degenerative alterations are part of the creative process. These aesthetic choices allow the audience to consider unpredictable and disruptive elements as tools of expression that evoke dystopia.

Generative artworks explore extended time frames, greatly inspired by the diversity in nature. Computational technology is used to simulate natural patterns, behaviours and intricacies that gradually change.

The project Art Value examines the notion of political economy and neoliberal values in the art processes, i.e. production, circulation and consumption. The economy standards and its influences to the art world and to creation in general is a key theme of the project. Critically appropriating principles of such dichotomy discourse, the artist seeks for a synthesis between those two different and opposite paradigms. The viewer of the exhibition is invited to rethink the existing connotations of those philosophical assumptions, elevating the moral and aesthetic values. It is a speculative project questioning artwork’s reception and perception through economic principles, i.e. through rethinking the notion of the artwork as commodity. It is also a critique of one of the main characteristics of the contemporary art world – the segregation of the art world and its public escalation of the monetary values. Art Value is taking place through the exposition of numbers. This aesthetic turn is examining the contemporary notion of contemporary human (post-human), who radically and decisively believes in numbers. Questioning the exponentially growing trust in numbers and data, its inclusion in everyday life, abstraction and unification of everything what is around us, also through what is digitalized, coded and quantified: through clock time, media archeology, algorithmic procedures, computation, quantified-self movement, Big Data, and other.

The STRATA project is concerned with the limits of human senses at those edges where the boundaries dissolve. In an audiovisual film both the audio and the visuals work together – to create evocative and extreme experiences. The project explores the aesthetic properties of analog and digital transformations formed by the limitations and qualities of various forms of sensing apparatus. The result takes the form of noisy and hypnotic soundscapes. An abstract animation is directly and in real-time generated from the sound itself; audio frequencies affect the pulsation of the RGB diode. The artist plays with several parameters affecting the light (e.g., amplitude, frequency, phase, frequency modulation, and wave shape). The camera captures the pulsation of the light and generates moving colorful lines through that. In such a generative process, there is no need for any post-production technique. The STRATA film project is closely related to S T R A T I C audiovisual performance project.

Beyond body: multiple is a videoart piece. A theater stage, where black predominates, the set boundaries of shadow direct the eye only to where the light reaches. The enunciation of the feminine and masculine body affirm the diversity, the multiplicity and the deconstruction of one unique identity. The black background unifies the images and the body becomes multiple.

‘The Institute For Advanced Augmentiform Development and Release’ consists of virtual and augmented realities that are dynamically linked through live interactions and data exchange.

In his seminal work The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch coined the term “wayfinding”, which describes the process of using spatial and environmental information to orient oneself and navigate to a destination. Lynch elaborated to define four unique stages in this process: orientation, route decision, route monitoring and destination recognition. Throughout history, many approaches have been used to accomplish the four stages of wayfinding, and one of the most powerful devices and symbols has been the compass. While we have all experienced wayfinding and its four stages in a spatial sense,how does this principle analogize to the path one chooses in life, and its potential ever-changing influences by society? Furthermore, how does the notion of wayfinding evolve and morph as our sense of destination is largely unknown and ultimately impacted by the people we meet and their subsequent aggregate of chosen paths? By abstractly paying homage to the design principle of wayfinding coupled with the theme of metamorphosis, this responsive installation serves as a metaphoric representation of an electro-mechanical compass that seeks to reflect on the paths one chooses in life, the individual and societal offshoots and the subsequent periods of chaos and harmony.

Coburn adopts Fable for Tomorrow as the title for a second related work in which two Victorian bisque toddlers, a boy and a girl, sit with their arms aloft, expressions askance as silhouettes of numerous insects are spread across their tiny and fragile bodies. These exquisite looking figurines, found at a church sale and known as piano babies, were popular in the late 1800s as decoration on grand pianos. One assumes the children’s gesture was intended as one of music appreciation, but the ambiguity of their expression enables Coburn to conjure up a very different narrative for this tiny audience. According to Sherry Turkle “we think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with”. For Turkle, evocative objects act on us emotionally and provocatively, and Coburn’s sculptures function in such a manner. Fable for Tomorrow vibrates with metaphors from our collective responses to climate change and its attendant fallout. There is no doubt the Green Revolution of the 1960s with its broad use of agricultural technologies such as irrigation, pesticides, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and high-yielding crop varieties came at a cost. Half a century later, Coburn sounds the alarm, poignantly asking us to prudently reconsider Carson’s project.

Somewhere between 2005 and 2007, Wendy Coburn found a consumer-grade pesticide sprayer in her neighbourhood. It was an elegant machine, with a wooden-handled pump and silhouettes of numerous species of insects mapped over the barrel. For Coburn, “It was a beautiful object that claimed no discretion or bias in its task.” With as much attention to detail and terrible beauty the artist has replicated the spray gun in bronze. Titled Silent Spring, the sculpture is directly inspired by Rachel Carson’s germinal 1962 text of the same name. With remarkable foresight Carson warned of the dangers of synthetic pesticides, and in fact referred to the chemicals as biocides for they were toxic to all living beings. A prescient allegory comprises the first chapter of Silent Spring. Titled Fable for Tomorrow, it tells the story of a vibrant country village whose children and elders, meadows, creeks and skies, fall prey to a strange silence as a white dust covers the countryside. Coburn redirects this story to her own community. Fearing for her loved ones, she etched the names of friends and family across the spray gun equating her human companions with the endangered lives insects, animals and  botanicals that Carson so vigorously defended.

Wheels is an installation with real-time computer simulation, simulating a universe of circles in the background which determines the movement of the human bodies in front.

“Where have you been?” is an installation investigating the personal data leaked by networked mobile phones. It consists of a projection displaying seemingly random scenes from Google StreetView. These scenes, however, depict places members of the audience have visited in the past: a frequently used airport, a favorite café, or the own front yard. This information is harvested from the mobile devices entering the exhibition space, which search for available WiFis and by that reveal the networks they were connected to before. “Where have you been?” tries to link these networks to geographic origins, using WiFi location data collected by a wardriving community. It is based on passive WiFi scanning – a simple surveillance technique that is employed by government agencies and advertisers alike – and it relies on data from a public counterpart to the private location information inside the databases used by Google and Apple.

White Cart Loom has been produced in response to scientific research looking to interpret and understand data encoded in the biological process of shell formationin the now endangered freshwater pearl mussel. The project connects biodiversity with human creativity and its first expression through programming, with textile designers use of the first programmable machine; the Jacquard loom. In Paisley Scotland, this process was used exploring the creative possibilities of the world renown paisley pattern. Rapid industrialisation of textile production contributed to habitat destruction and freshwater pearl mussels are now locally extinct.

In Boy’dega: Edited4Syndication, Wickerham & Lomax present a dense, sprawling narrative universe that engages forms and themes from media and fan fiction. The episodic web project at duoxduox.com presents the lives of characters posited as Baltimore residents who are drawn in relation to the shifting roles they occupy within the formal structure, such as character, actor, author and fan. The artists manipulate media tropes like the Director’s Cut and Pre-Visualizations to create a deep, iterative work that investigates television drama, consumerism, indoctrination, and criminality.

The eyeDazzler project combines traditional Navajo weaving and design with QR codes that lead viewers to the project’s website. It is a transcustomary collaborative expression, which brings together innovation, traditional Diné design, 76,050 4mm glass beads, over 1,000 hours of artistic labor, and a portal to another dimension.

The gif image How to get the Mao experience through Internet… runs on a computer screen through a browser. With its specific characteristics of grainy texture, continuous looping and cinematic sequences, the artwork questions how the digital format might reconfi gure the experience of a public space and the public fi gure of Mao Tse-Tung. Inspired by Matthew Britton’s 2012 piece ‘How to get the Mona Lisa experience through Flickr…’, Soon’s work places images of Mao gathered from the network at the center of every image to produce an animated gif. The work appropriates images from wider platforms, including Google, Flickr and Baidu image searches, which form a collaborative animation with more than 30 known and unknown Internet producers. The work explores representations of Mao through different spatial/temporal/social/political happenings, medium specificities and subjectivities.

Several events informed our perspective: Huge global deposit of emotion database collected by companies such as Affectiva. Impact of psychological warfare in tech as revealed by the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal. China’s social credit system. Against this backdrop, we created a smile evaluation and training system that uses a muscle sensor and a TENS unit to train participants to become a citizen of the preferred society, where they are guaranteed better future prospects. The only entry requirement is that they smile well enough.
Through an extreme approach, with reference to ideas from psychology and experience design, and devices from graphic design and theatre, we hope to shock our audience into thinking about the control and ownership of our emotions in the current societal and technological landscape.

Cyma {Fos} (from Greek: küµa, meaning “wave” and cpωʕ meaning “light”) is a real-time data-driven kinetic light and sound sculpture highly inspired by natural repeatability and wave movement. An array of light acrylic bars, connected only with a metal wire passed from the center, is hanged from the ceiling and reaches the floor. The bottom bar is rotating periodically and sets the whole sculpture in motion. The motion of the bottom bar is creating a wave that physically spreads from one bar to the other. Real-time data of the solar wind are defining the motion of the wave. The whole sculpture is waving without any mechanical force (except the bottom bar), in the natural fundamental frequency and in higher modes called harmonics in a hypnotic and mesmerizing way.

The movement of the sculpture is driven in real time by live data of the solar wind. The strength of the wave movement (amplitude of the modulation) is controlled by the solar wind speed and the mode of waves (fundamental or harmonics) is controlled by the north-south direction of the interplanetary magnetic field (Bz). A screen placed near the sculpture projects the data and movement visualization.
While the sculpture is moving, the horizontal bars light in various colors. The position, speed, amplitude and other properties of the wave motion are affecting the light patterns of the sculpture. At the same time, the sound is following a similar approach. There are 58 sinusoidal audio oscillators, each for every light bar, with different frequencies (from 50 to 150 Hz). The position of each bar is changing the volume of the oscillator. Additional sounds have been added to the final soundscape.

Ichographs is an audio and video artwork that explores the relationship between visual forms and audio by transforming the colors and textures of 9 famous paintings – and one forgery – into sonic frequencies. A work of Caravaggio is transformed from a single tone into an intense spectrum; light on the surface of Monet’s water lily pool produces a multi-colour drone. The video frames were created using C++ and Cinder library while the sound was generated in Pure Data.

Eyes is an interactive biometric data art that transforms human’s Iris data into musical sound and 3D animated image. This artwork is created as a series of
biometric data artworks. The idea is to allow the audience to explore their own identities through unique visual and sound generated by their iris patterns
based on iris recognition and image processing techniques. Selected iris images are printed in 3D sculptures, and it replays the sound generated from
the iris data and projects 3D converted image images. There is an interactive art installation that audience members can capture their iris data and experience
3D animated eye image with a unique sound in real time. This research-based artwork has an experimental system generating distinct sounds for each different iris data using visual features such as colors, patterns, brightness and size of the iris. It has potentials to lead the new way of interpreting complicated dataset with the audiovisual output. More importantly, aesthetically beautiful, mesmerizing and a bit uncanny valley-effected artwork can create personalized art experience and multimodal interaction. Multi-sensory interpretations of the iris data art can lead a new opportunity to reveal users’ narratives and create their own “sonic signature”, which will be able to trigger a new way of “intersections” in the fields of art and science. Using camera sensing technologies, 3D printing and audiovisual experience, this artwork allows the audience to experience how arts and biometric science can create a new aesthetic.

What does your voice sound like? This question may seem simple, but surprisingly, it can be problematic. The reaction to hearing one’s voice played back through a recording is often of disgust or disownership. “That’s not how I sound”. However, this version of your voice is much closer to the way others hear it. This reveals the duplicitous nature of the voice – there is a conflict in your own perception of it and what others hear. The answer to the question: “what does your voice sound like?” depends on who is asked. Your Hearing Them is a wearable technology artwork that presents the experience of someone else’s voice from their experience. The headset allows you to hear their voice as they do. The experience is deeply empathic, as two people can converse in a way in which their subjectivities are shared.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1)
BOOK OF A HUNDRED GHOSTS is a virtual reality installation, a Chinese parable staged in the form of a virtual tableau. It reimagines the history of an ancient land as a book of falling words and crushing signs, inciting awe, fear, pain and carnal pleasure

Clouds Fall is a series of virtual tableaux, a speculative portrait of violence and its aftermath at the end of time. Together with Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012) and The Plastic Garden (2013), Clouds Fall forms a trilogy created using hacked and reworked materials from the video game franchise Call of Duty. The work attempts to unearth hidden poetics while creating parallels through a kind of uncanny observation and navigation in the found virtual landscapes.

Polyscape is a “floating island” made of recycled polypropylene plastic, the material used to make disposable bags and drinking bottles.The suspended, kinetic piece mimics the motion of water and undulates when it detects human motion. lt comments on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, aka the Pacific Trash Vortex, a floating island of ocean debris made of plastic, estimated to be 100 million tons and twice the size of Texas.

In recent decades, China has had a severe environmental crisis with millions of people suffering from bad air, polluted water and vegetation degradation. Instead of finding sustainable solutions, some local governments make a “big show” of decorating landscape surfaces by using “artificial colors”, such as paint, fabric, or printed imagery to physically cover the no-longer naturally colored environments. At Laoshou Hill, thousands of square meters of mountain were painted green to hide red coal mine pits. In Beijing, the sky surprisingly became blue and clear during special “showing” days like the Olympic Games to let “guests” forget the extremely high concentration of PM2.5.

In this work, I use the standardized/ industrial meadow green to highlight this “artificial color”. I call it “The Green Project”, a camouflage by the government that uses fantasy to maintain power structures. In this situation, the environment becomes an artificial landscape where citizens are forced to exist within it. The green is a portal to travel between the decayed reality and the fictionalization nature, it blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality, covers the truth with layers of deceit, which makes people’s trust in the government evaporate. The more layers of color, the “greyer” the truth becomes.

Thousands Li of Rivers and Mountains repaints a traditional landscape painting from the northern Song dynasty using 2014 data from the air quality index of Beijing. The data introduces the reality of environmental degradation into traditional views of the Chinese landscape, raising questions about contemporary values.

As if I didn’t is a hyper-real soundscape of a dream. Composed of field recordings, it tells a story of an individual’s struggle with waking up, as she tries to find her way through a synthetic environment of abstract and real objects. The piece starts with a gloomy atmosphere that includes very few representational sounds. But as the piece moves forward, a balance between concrete and abstract sounds emerge to signal the individuals “ascent” to consciousness, This consciousness, however, swings back and forth between reality and a dream. The final gesture blows the whistle on the narrative of the piece.

Inconnu is originally composed for a 20-channel Acousmonium, which is commonly known as a “loudspeaker orchestra”. Each sound is designed for separate speakers, but each channel is considered to be laid out in a linear fashion where one sound could only travel into adjacent
channels, implying a strict directionality. However, the loudspeakers for the performance are placed on separate levels and asymmetrical spots in the construction in a non-linear fashion.
Furthermore, when the piece travels in the space, the structure itself adds various effects
beyond what the composition affords and further interrupts the linearity of the sonic trajectories. Through the specialization scheme I follow for the performance of the piece, I aim to obscure the trajectories I determined during the composition process. By blurring these
trajectories with an uneven dispersion of speakers and the resonant characteristics of the structure, I choreograph a metaphor for how an individual’s path should be ambiguous and distinctive. Still, through close listening, the audience can untangle this ambiguity and
recognize the underlying trajectories that are deeply embedded into the composition

Shih Chieh Huang is creating organic ‘living’ robots from common, everyday objects. Slide to Unlock 2012 is an installation that merges everyday, store bought artificial materials such as zips, computer parts, lights and toys and dissected electronics to create interactive organic living environments and sculptures. The result is a large scale, mechanical installatlon that enlivens the senses. Visitors can walk through to hear the whirring and beeping of the many robots at work in his 21st Century ecosystem. Video:

French art collective Scenocosme presents Lights Contacts. A large scale, interactive and sensory artwork, it challenges ideas on personal space and the proximity of strangers. Viewers position themselves under a light filled dome. By touching a metallic ball and each other, their bodies are transformed into a human instrument that transmits light and sound. The artwork therefore creates a poetic consideration of intimacy and physical closeness.

digital video with sound  3’29”

Drawing on my experiences of living in Norway and learning Norwegian, Untitled #1 (fish) is a self-portrait performance video that investigates a partner’s influence on learning a language through how to fillet a fish. Not simply exploring the idea of being lost in translation, it examines the interpretation and appropriation of words. In this video, the use of the knife embodies a disconnection in the self when taking on another’s tongue and trying to fit it to one’s own desires, without having a history or experiences to draw on in the language. I know how to perform the task because of general knowledge and experience in my mother tongue, such as how to hold a knife. Nevertheless, I cannot follow the instructions correctly because I do not yet own the new language. For the foreign learner the knife also represents a kind of butchering of the language; what it can feel like when first trying to pronounce foreign words.

Natalie Bookchin presents Mass Ornament, a collection of YouTube clips of people dancing alone in their homes. The artist has edited these solo clips to form a dance sequence, set to a soundtrack drawn from two 1935 films, Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. By creating an ensemble out of lone performers, the work is both a portrait of isolation and connectedness. The dancer, alone in her room, performs a dance routine that is both extremely private and extraordinarily public, and is a perfect expression of our digital age. Natalie Bookchin’s videos and installations explore new forms of documentary and the stories we are now telling about ourselves and the world.

Katie Turnbull presents Modern Vanitos: an engaging animation work that mixes analogue and digital practices and is a contemporary version of a pre-cinema toy, resembling the zoetrope. ln this contemporary version, the images are the artist’s interpretation of modern day Vanitas, still life images in the tradition of memento mori. Symbols of life, death, time, globalisation, digital technology, communicatlons and transient ephemera are all represented. Drawing upon the morbid and religious overtones of the baroque Vanitas genre art, Turnbull’s images are a reminder of the transience of life.

For her Experimenta work, Jess MacNeil transports viewers to Paris in winter. Outside the iconic Hotel de Ville, a game of Sparrowhawk is played on ice. In this work, the bodies of skaters will be digitally erased, their presence revealed by their shadows and effect on the ice. Ice skaters become visible in brief flashes when they make physical contact with one another, punctuating the work and heightening the sense of disorientation and aesthetic tension. The work is immersive and poetic.

Christopher Fulham, uses his time-based video works to explore perception, awareness and attention. Fulham is fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between an artistic intent, captured moments and the post-production process. Milieu is a 58 minute, single screen work, which was filrned in a single session. The artist captures a public, urban setting in the melancholy mid-afternoon. The work provokes curiosity as viewers are drawn into the inner lives of those depicted on screen.

Intro
Look down. Down on the floor of RMIT Gallery. That’s where artist Charlie Sofo’s video work is. And as you look, you are mesmerised. You see a hand – Charlie’s hand – and it is touching objects; grass, glass, sand, metal, wood – all of a sudden you feel those sensations on your own skin. At the artist talk on the first weekend of Experimenta Speak To Me at RMIT Gallery, people crowded around Charlie’s work Touch (Dunedin) 2011 – and looked down. “It makes me feel like a child again!” exclaimed one person. Another added, “I almost flinch when you pick up a broken bottle”. Charlie said his work, a short, single-channel video made during a residency in Dunedin, New Zealand, is a visual diary, a “certain framing of experience” that allows for empathy. “When you make an artwork, you invest an object with some sort of meaning. While the subject matter of the video is very simple – it’s about experiencing the world through touch – it is also about constantly tracing and retracing particular things, memories and the environment”, Charlie said. “I could touch things that are of great importance to me, but that seems kind of clear already, it is safe I suppose. However, when I went to New Zealand, the locality meant there was a lot more nature than where I live in Brunswick. It was new. It’s also very bucolic. That’s the other thing as well; the mapping of space in such a place, one that I wasn’t familiar with, it just seemed to make a lot more sense”.

Source: Evelyn Tsitas: THE HAPTIC MOMENT: Charlie Sofo’s video touches viewers. RMIT Gallery, 2012. RMIT Gallery is the main venue for the launch of Experimenta Speak To Me.

Thirty years ago the movie Blade Runner introduced the visionary idea of turning entire building façades into large digital screens. Today this vision is becoming reality in an increasing number of cities across the world. The exhibition showcases six seminal media façades through large light posters and moving images as well as a selection of new media façade projects from around the world. The exhibition is curated by M. Hank Haeusler and Martin Tomitsch and presented by the Media Architecture Institute and Customs House in collaboration with Vivid Sydney and ISEA2013.

Professor Richard Goodwin discusses his ARC funded research with Russell Lowe, which has modelled much of Sydney’s CBD in the Crysis Gaming engine. This work has been done in order to prove his theories about urban Porosity, Parasitic Architecture as a sustainable design strategy for the future and as a way of satisfying the needs of security services for creating computer modelling which enables scenario planning for future catastrophes in the city.

City Jam is part of the Running the City exhibition. Kuchelmeister discusses his work City Jam and the immersive qualities of the video and technical aspects employed to create a panoramic experience. City Jam is an interactive, expanded cinema installation that reconfigures the gallery space into a vertiginous, theme park environment. The work takes the viewer on an immersive ride through some of Sydney’s iconic landmarks, such as Bondi Beach, the CBD and Sydney Opera House. Accompanied by a fast-paced sound track form Australian 80s indie-punk band XL Capris, the semi-circular projected imagery is exposed to glitches triggered by the presence of spectators in the space.

Run Motherfucker Run is an interactive installation whereby anyone in good physical condition may try his or her luck in a city of empty streets, deserted intersections, ominous alleyways and unexpected obstacles. When you take position on the treadmill before an enormous 8 x 4 metre screen you are subjected to a mix of film and 3-D imagery. The distance you run on the conveyor belt is the same distance you will cover in the virtual city in front of you. By quickening your pace, the acceleration of the belt as well as the speed of the image increases and depending on your running behaviour and the directional choices you make, the progress of the film is determined. A film with an atmosphere somewhere between a thriller chase and urban horror. The interface is a manipulated industrial assembly line with electronically variable speed. With a range of 0 to 30 kilometres per hour, the treadmill measures 5 x 2 metres. Physically the interface will not allow the most natural course of navigation through the virtual environment. On the contrary, it is an individual element with a will of its own. The conveyor belt can only move straight ahead and you must move in order to see the image. Although you are free to determine the speed of the belt, only if you run fast will you get an optimum image at full brightness. As you slow down the image fades. So physically there is a mechanized pressure to keep up the pace and an urgency to hold onto the imagery of the world in front of you. This in combination with the tangible power of the machine creates a temperamental balance between control and non-control of the situation you voluntarily entered into when you first stepped on the treadmill.

A project by Marnix de Nijs in co-operation with Reinier van Brummelen, Noud Heerkens and Boris Debackere. Software development: V2_lab (International Lab for the Unstable Media), Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Producer: RMR_Organisation, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Having clocked up 3135.7 km to date in runs in sixteen locations around the world, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba speaks about the premise and importance behind his ongoing body of work, Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 (commenced 2007). This ongoing video series by one of the world’s leading contemporary video artists will be shown in the Running the City exhibition. It follows the artist as he runs through cities of the world, including Tokyo, Geneva, Singapore, Chicago and Canberra. Running the City will present all the artist’s runs so far in a multimedia installation across several gallery spaces.

Big data, the mobile Internet, social media and the Internet of things (IOT) generate more information than ever but the aggregation of social intelligence remains far from realising it’s potential. Two exemplary works, “mediated_moments” and “plasma_flow”, exhibited at Beijing’s China Millennium Monument Museum of Digital Arts in 2012 model the scalable potential of urban media to weave itself into the city’s social fabric, mapping and visualizing individuals’ thinking/intelligence onto a mixed-reality urban canvas.

ZONE is a self-sufficient and kinetic installation made out of an everyday, adaptable streetbarrier. The installation focuses on the process of demarcation, the definition of ban zones, and the exclusion linked with it. It also addresses the process of individual demarcations within public space.

Eternity consists of 30 electric clocks rear-mounted to a large sheet of white acrylic. The black hour and minute hands of the clocks are aligned to spell the word “eternity.” The hands move when the last power strip is flipped, and the word becomes a jumble of moving black lines, returning to their original positions every twelve hours for a split second.

Digital HD moving image, duration 03:50 mins, looped, col, sd, 2010. Courtesy of the Artist. One of 3 art works in the Naala-ba exhibition.

This ‘lo-fi’ film merges past and present while anchoring ideas of spiritual practice in a historical context. Using movement to access altered states of awareness is a common practice worldwide. In ritual the movement often accelerates, and sound becomes louder, layered and intense, as energy is raised. In this work, in contrast, the image is slowed down and the sound bed minimal, in order to allow the viewer access to ‘the space that is experienced in between’. Shifter reflects aspects of self co-existing, each informing and experiencing the other – shifting and morphing, yet holding the same space, represented by the circle. The work highlights a capacity, and often a need to shapeshift in the world. In its broadest sense, shapeshifting is when a being has the ability to alter its physical appearance; cultivated, this becomes a skill and an asset, and allows for multifaceted expressions of authenticity.

Digital HD video, duration 01:54 mins, col, sd, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. One of 3 art works in the Naala-ba exhibition.

This work is Gordon Hookey’s response to the occupation of Australia by the establishment of Terra Nullius, and its subsequent legacy for generations of disempowered and uprooted Indigenous people. He uses the iconic Australian marsupial, the kangaroo, as his motif of resistance; ironically the same animal that is used to adorn the Australian flagship carrier Qantas. Hookey coined the term ‘Terraism’, taken from ‘Terra Nullius’, to push an Aboriginal agenda in the debate in regards to the continual fight for land. Terraism is an attempt to disarm the hypocrisy of the governmental finger pointers, whilst emphasising that Aboriginal rights are the last thing to be considered when it comes to the investments, decisions, and excuses made over land by the Australia government.

Digital HD video, duration 06’52”, col, sd, 2012. Courtesy of the artists, Fremantle Arts Centre and Martumili Artists. One of 3 art works in the Naala-ba exhibition.

Cannibal Story brings to life ancient carnivorous beings that live beneath Kumpupirntily (Lake Disappointment), a salt lake at the heart of Martu country, in the Western Desert, Western Australia. Yunkurra Billy Atkins is the great animator of the dark narratives that score this area where Martu fear to tread, and his beguiling paintings have intrigued and challenged art lovers for many years. Now new audiences are invited into the world of his art, his imagination and his country, as Yunkurra’s paintings are brought to life through his collaboration with award-winning animator Sohan Ariel Hayes. Cannibal Story gives sound and emotion (and a touch of violence) to the beauty and danger of Yunkurra’s original paintings.
Cannibal Story is a co-production of Fremantle Arts Centre, City of Fremantle and Martumili Artists, Shire of East Pilbara, supported by Martu People Limited and BHP Billiton.
Carriageworks is a cultural facility of the NSW Government and is supported by Arts NSW.

Carriageworks and ISEA2013, in collaboration with Vivid Sydney, present Ryoji Ikeda. A highlight of the program is the Australian premiere of test pattern, a stunning large scale immersive installation by renowned Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda. Like many of Ikeda’s electrifying works, test pattern represents the intense energies of massive digital data flows that increasingly shape our globalised world. Ikeda recently staged a similar installation at The Armory in New York, described by The New York Times as a ‘sublime spectacle’ and ‘spectacular, trippy and fun’. New York Magazine described Ikeda’s work as ‘an extreme and elaborate visual and sonic environment’. test pattern is a system that converts any type of data (text, sounds, photos and movies) into barcode patterns and binary patterns of 0s and 1s. Through its application, the project aims to examine the relationship between critical points of device performance and the threshold of human perception.

In the times of the printing press we gave rise to mass literacy, but only a few people could print, thanks to printer’s privilege accorded by the King. Then we had the encyclopedia giving access to knowledge to the many,but only a few could participate in contributing to the encyclopedia. In our modern times, we have the invention of the internet and browser, and now you have the tools to either personally publish via a blog, or publish your own media, and contribute to the development of global knowledge via Wikipedia.
But what’s really interesting about this data is when its seen as a cohort, not when its seen on its own by the user themselves. People want to be able to compare their data to data from people (or families) that are similar to their own – such as having the same size and age of family members, same size of house, and so on. Utilities don’t have level of personal data, only individuals can provide it.
The solution developed here is to give people a widget they can install on their PC, using the same username and password as they have to access their utility bills online. The widget displays emissions relative to a similar cohort, presented as an average, and based on what the community of widget users inputs. And then the widget is in a position to make suggestions of how you can do better, based on what people in your situation can and have done. The widget downloads the data and uploads it for you, and provides the data that is then available for the larger scale visualisations.
This gives rise to the second dilemma: we might be emulating the old model of the King’s privilege where only a few have access to the data and visualise it for everyone else (a broadcast model). The solution is to make everyone a data publisher. So cities, banks and utilities have the data, but as citizens we take data responsibility and publish it ourselves. Xively together with a device called the current cost monitor allows people to broadcast their realtime energy usage to the world. From this you get your own personal cloud of data. With many people doing the same there are societal patterns you can plot and education tools you can develop.
But the model has a few flaws. First, it’s costly (to produce and purchase these devices) and it’s wasteful. The current cost meter is a device that gathers data that we already
have – the utilities already have our personal energy data. Privacy concerns are what prevents our access to it in any other form than a quarterly bill.

In this project, Kaye and Snow are looking at ‘retrofitting generative relationships’. Examining the case of urban developments where a particular piece of green equipment or infrastructure, such as a water recycling facility, has been installed and how data art and data visualisation can be used to monitor, communicate and incentivise its sustainable operation over its lifetime.
The dilemma is that developers install green infrastructure to get green accreditation. However, the system requires compliance from the residents. For water recycling systems it requires them not put certain products like milk, oil and medicines down the sink. But people are not motivated to comply, and no one wants to report upon the failure of the system as it will reflect badly on them and the rating of the building. Compliance with the system requirements is particularly challenging because it only takes one person to wreck the system – one person to put the wrong things down the drain.
The team proposed a data collection structure that requires that each building block is measured separately, in order to drive a competition between them. Next is a system to communicate how the water recycling system is performing, allowing people to pledge to adopt the right behaviours (whilst waiting for the lift). There is an artwork which offers a beautiful installation in the foyer to track progress. And if everyone is doing well in all the buildings, perhaps there is a fountain that comes on in the courtyard (because the water is of good enough quality to become airborne). The key to the whole system is information feedback and reward–broadcasting how many people have pledged, asking for more pledges, and rewarding good behaviour. This starts the broader education process.
Ideally, the data would be reported by floor or by apartment to personalise the feedback further. If Council were actually to legislate for monitoring data, then it would change the incentives quite drastically. Technical solutions like dual flush systems, so some things can be flushed out without affecting the recycled water supply, would also make the challenge more achievable. Other longer term solutions could include the creation of a water bank or encouraging the building to operate like a water utility, selling the recycled water and offering a monetary incentive for communal management of the resource.