Art Events Data Table

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.

Primetime and Lunch Hour presented Tasman Richardson’s rhythmic video series where the image track becomes the sound track and vice versa, pure concepts visualized through scavenged material.

These works close in on the television, a collapsing spectacle and fantasy world programmed exclusively for individual viewing.

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

By employing the metaphor of the ear and its pinna, which punctuates the documentary overseeing the project, The New Organs is an archive of the micro-surveillances impacting one’s exploration of online content.

The artwork is a collection of personal accounts that reveal, through a multitude of singular experiences, the constant tracking of internet users. At Sam Lavigne’s request, they have provided him with testimonials of events that may seem insignificant, but which are clues to the constant eavesdropping and spying of conversations and itineraries, online or offline, carried out through our electronic devices.

This plethora of testimonies tell the same story: that of the constant and unpunished violation of the right to privacy. Exploring the work generates a certain sense of powerlessness that can hopefully lead us to regain control of our behaviors and habits. Through his work of investigation and participatory inquiry, Lavigne not only reveals the monitoring conducted by GAFAM but also creates a form of counter-surveillance that allows us users to spy on the algorithm that tracks us.

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.

516 ARTS presents the Downtown Block Party during the Intel Education Day for ISEA20l2 Albuquergue: Machine Wilderness, the 18th International Symposium on Electronic Art. Everyone is invited to this free, outdoor celebration, featuring artworks focusing on the theme of transportation and fun for all ages. ISEA2012 is a symposium, multi-site exhibition and season-long series of programs around the region, all exploring the intersection of art, science and technology. It focuses on the natural environment and how technology can help sustain life on Earth. ISEA2012 features over 100 artists and over 400 presenters from 30 countries.

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.

Value Manifesto declares its own commercial value to be art, as the first crypto- multiple* in the history of art. Value Manifesto is accessible to everyone via the internet and can be traded via its own marketplace without intermediaries and collusion. The price of the editions is determined by the Value Manifesto’s Blockchain based web platform on which bids are accepted for the acquisition of a single edition. Each crypto-multiple of a limited edition of 250 units is represented by an ERC-271 token on the Ethereum Blockchain. The value (defined in Swiss Francs) can be seen on the Value Manifesto bidding platform and on all 250 manufactured Value Manifesto IoT decryptor displays.
The reduction of the present artistic concept to its market value is a provocative statement in the ages of a hyper-commercialized, multi-billion dollar art market. In the case of the Value Manifesto, the prices are not created by galleries, auction houses and collector circles, but by real and unfiltered market request. In its existence in a purely digital form as a crypto-token, it introduces the philosophy of the technically reproduced multiple to the Zeitgeist of the digital age. The time has come to experience the moment of Blockchain Enlightenment in the art market and question the market authorities and their non-transparent business approach of the past. The principle of this project stands for the moment of enlightenment in the art market. As a continuous and long-term experiment, the findings of Value Manifesto shall be used to demonstrate the application of Blockchain technologies in the art market.
*Multiple: a technically produced art edition

Credits
Technical Concept: Dr. Matthias Frank
Hardware: Dalibor Farny: Dr. Matthias Frank (b.1983, Germany) developed the technical concept of Value Manifesto. Dalibor Farny (b.1984, Czechoslovakia) succeeded to bring back nixie tubes back from extinction after six years of researchTrimplement (Platform of Value Manifesto) : – he delivers the hardware. Matthias Gall (b.1979, Germany), Natallia Martchouk (b.1974, Belarus) and Thijs Reus (b.1980, Netherlands) are 3 co-founders of trimplement, who provide Value Manifesto’s platform with Ethereum blockchain integration.

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.

Fundamental to the Scientists/Artists Research Collaborations (SARC) is the precept that science-art collaborations should be of mutual benefit to the furtherance of both the arts and the sciences, and to their positive implications for society. SARC is initiating a pilot series of professional artists’ collaborations with Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories research teams. Santa Fe Institute (SFI) has invited the artists and Lab collaborators for working group presentations, discussions and interactions with SFI scientists. The Bradbury Museum, and other partners are providing public presentation and discussion opportunities. Additional artists and scientists are being invited to be part of an expanding SARC Pool. The start-up projects and interactions resulting from these inaugural SARC collaborations pave the way for an ongoing program that is planned to result in new research, exhibitions, and publications. SARC has been initiated in partnership with 516 ARTS for ISEA2012, and is currently funded in part by Los Alamos National Labs/New Mexico Consortium, and Sandia National  Laboratories/Lockheed Martin Foundation.

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.

Wielding soldering irons over a ramshackle overhead projector, Tristan Perich, Kunal Gupta and Katie Shima wire up live musical circuits. Punctuated silence occupies the first few minutes of their set while the initial circuit is wired up on an antique overhead projector. The resulting explosive sound is dense and grows as more microchips are added.

In the project titled Turbidity Paintings, principal investigators Thomas Asmuth (UWF) and Sara Gevurtz (VCU) are artists who propose a methodology for visualization of water quality which integrates image capture and data metrics into one data-object (time specific images encoded with data metrics). The project leverages wide availability of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) and low costs of open source hardware (OSH) that has critically impacted and supported the citizen science movement. The combined data-objects will be used to construct a baseline data library from a variety of domestic and international locations. Turbidity Paintings explores and challenges the divide between the arts and the sciences and directly questions the role of the artist when dealing with science and scientific data. The iterative process and procedure are nearly indistinguishable in art and science. The role of the artist and the art in this project is to create an experimental model which leads to new dialogues on water quality.

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.

Future Matter 001 + 002 are two retro ‘future’ cocktail dresses combining couture fabrication methods and high-tech engineering know-how. These dresses are a combination of understated style, and cutting-edge technology.

The designs have a series of embroidered LEDs (12) and a motion sensor, transforming the rhythm and illumination of the LEDs in tandem with the wearer’s movements. The dresses are made of hand-woven cotton fabric, digitally printed silk textiles, electronic hardware, and hand-embroidered hard & soft circuits. The designs can be bought as finished garments only. The electronics are coin cell battery operated.

Ilinx is a performative environment for the general public provoking an intense bodily experience that blurs the senses of sight, sound and touch. In the environment, a group of four visitors at a time wear specially designed garments. These wearables are outfitted with various sensing and actuating devices that enable visitors to interface with the performance space. During the event, a ritualistic progression which lasts approximately twenty minutes, the natural continuum between sound and vibration, vision and feeling becomes increasingly blurred, extending and stretching the body’ boundaries beyond the realm of everyday experience.

The project is inspired by work in the area of what is called sensory substitution – the replacement of one sensory input (vision, hearing, touch, taste or smell) by another, while preserving some of the key functions of the original sense.

The term ilinx (Greek for whirlpool) comes from the French sociologist Roger Caillois and describes play that creates a temporary but profound disruption of perception as is common in experiences of vertigo, dizziness, or disorienting changes of speed, direction or the body’s sense in space. “…An attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.”

Strokes&Dots is a micro-collection inspired by early Modernist representations of speed, graphic design, abstract art and technology—as well as the print work of Russian/French textile visionary Sonia Delaunay. Created with rapid prototyping technologies of the 21st century such as digital textile printers, and the integration off-the-shelf technological add-ons, the garments are designed to be DIY-assembled.

The designs have a series of embroidered LEDs (5-12) and a motion or light sensor, transforming the rhythm and illumination of the LEDs in tandem with the wearer’s movements, or by reacting to immediate environmental light fluctuations.

The garments are made of digitally printed silk textiles, electronic hardware, and hand-embroidered hard & soft circuits. The designs can be bought as DIY kits or as finished garments. The electronics are coin cell battery operated.

Symmetrical Modern 001 + Asymmetrical Modern 001 are two dresses inspired by abstract and natural organic shapes found in nature such as lightning and wave forms. They are Modern and dynamic dresses for everyday use.

The designs have a series of embroidered LEDs (12) and a light sensor reacting to immediate environmental light fluctuation. The garments are made of digitally printed silk textiles, electronic hardware, and hand-embroidered hard & soft circuits. The designs can be bought as DIY kits or as finished garments. The electronics are coin cell battery operated.

synapseWear is a wearable device & fashion collection for recording your motion and environmental data to create playful visualizations / sonifications.

Small and light the synapseWear wearable device includes 6 sensors to capture your motion and environmental data. You can use it as an attractive air quality monitor or a way to enhance your performance art. The sensors act as mnemonic recorders of your sentient experiences perceiving: C02/TVOC, temperature, humidity, pressure, light, movement (9DOF) and ambient sound levels.

The synapseWear device is designed to attach to a uniquely designed garment collection featuring a special fabric that has been integrated into the seams. This permits you to place the device wherever you like – on your shoulders, the nape of your neck, hips, legs and so on. If you wish to wear the synapseWear device with your own garments it also comes with a clip that lets you wear it with any garment or accessory.

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.

Cached is a personalised interactive experience that engages with the repercussions of our individual online presence. Our online personality is cached and used to create a digital model of each of us to learn as much as possible. The cached experience offers a glimpse of your digital self, revealing how the outline of your online activity is quantified, interpreted, and profiled by contemporary social media algorithms.

Upon entering the room, the spectator is left alone with a glowing tablet, prompting to log in. Once they have connected, a mirror lights up and greets the spectator by their name. The following experience takes the form of personalised audiovisual storytelling, to illustrate just how your activities online contribute to the way in which machines see you.

Based on a textual analysis of your social media posts, Cached reveals your character traits, interests and consumer preferences. Using IBM Watson, the installation generates a psychological profile that describes your personality, behaviors, and predilections. It illustrates how machines are learning to perceive you as a social creature and the assumptions they make about you. At the end of the experience, all personal data is erased, and the visitor receives a unique printed receipt containing a summary of the analysis. It is the only record of their data, which can be shared, kept secret, or destroyed at their convenience.

The interpretation of this sort might not be as accurate as direct data on Clicks, GPS points or biometrics. Nevertheless, the very idea that we are perceived as social beings rather than quantitative datasets raises the data privacy discourse to a new level. Cached is a user-friendly wake-up call; the experience invites you to critically think about the reflection of your personal online behavior casts.

During his residency at the Harwood Art Center, visiting artist Waheguru Khalsa forms a temporary collective with local community members to create The Cultural Urban Mapping Project. Through a series of workshops, participants examine various ways of sharing and representing oral histories. Together the stories and objects that emerge from this process create a portrait of the participants’ collective experience and memory of this place. The project culminates in the creation of a free, self-guided cell phone audio tour of Albuquerque, and an accompanying map with QR codes.

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.

YOUR DRUGS MY MONEY is a collective of experimental artists and musicians from Los Angeles. They embrace the utilization of unconventional instruments and eerie undertones, that you could describe as an ambient durge. This has lead them to journey out of Los Angeles now for the second time to collaborate with other avant garde artists such as ARGUMENTEX and MATTRESS. YOUR DRUGS MY MONEY is all about exploring new dimensions in the field of sound. The echo’s will stretch, and your idea of what music is will be questioned.

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.

The core questions of the Social Media Workgroup are: What are the social and cultural effects of defining the natural and man-made environment as “information” space? What kinds of mobile, locative media and ubiquitous computing platforms can help users engage with their local environment and how can this practice connect and extend to communities globally?
The City Data Slam offered members of the SMW the opportunity to develop an experiment in real time, local environmental data gathering and response as an initial prototype for an ongoing project called GNOME: the Geolocative Networked Outdoor Monitoring Environment.
At the Data Slam the group was interested in the need for examining microclimates of buildings and communities and experimented with a number of sensors including light, temperature and motion in order to create a kind of ‘slow’ or ambient visualization that might be used for a feasibility study of a microclimate. However, through interacting with other Data Slam participants, SMW found their interest and activity more focused on the social aspects of the environment, specifically the data gathering efforts centred around the local participating coffee shops. Therefore, the final prototype used the ubiquitous paper coffee cup as a playful interface device for recording and playing back public ideas about the 2030 Sustainable Sydney vision. Riffing on the lo-fi children’s toy paper coffee cup telephone, the project allowed a kind of public ‘shout out’ or opinion gathering asking: “What will it take to reach the city’s ‘Sustainable Sydney 2030’ vision?” Users lifted one coffee cup and spoke into it to record their thoughts, and across the room (presumably across the city), users could pick up another coffee cup to listen to the ideas of others.

The goal of this project was to look at energy consumption data in a way that would enable owners of cafés – and their visitors – to visualise where their energy consumption is going, in order for both to make more informed choices. McCormack and More were interested in allowing one café owner to compare their energy performance with other cafés in their area. They sketched ways to bring that data to people who buy coffee too, in order to encourage them to participate in driving a lower carbon footprint for the café industry.
The team investigated the data first by colouring coding similar appliances and energy uses, e.g. lighting and heating, in order to visualise where energy is going in each café. The DNA of each café shows the difference between cafés in terms of the relative burden of each source of energy consumption. In this way it’s possible to prioritise efforts focusing on addressing the biggest consumers first. For example, it became quite obvious that it makes more sense to undertake a few changes in the highest energy consuming cafés than to focus on working with the bottom 100 cafés, in terms of reducing the total energy consumption in the city. It’s also really easy quickly spot the outliers.
The question then becomes, how do you address this visualisation challenge at the urban scale? Can we create a network where cafés compare themselves with similar cafés? What if we colour stamp cafés on their exterior walls or on the coffee cups themselves? The aim is to bring it back to a cultural issue. To have the ability to look at the energy consumption in tangible ways enables people to start a conversation, leads to greater awareness and encourages cafés to continually improve performance and contribute to the ongoing dialogue.

The Lycra Index is a project that explores anxieties associated with cycling speeds in Sydney. It responds to the considerable media attention given to anti-cycling lobbyists in the wake of the construction of the Sydney’s controversial cycle way network. The Lycra Index is calculated from speed data collected by the City of Sydney, data that they choose not to publicly release. This data is analysed to predict the ratio of lycra-clad, fast moving cyclists to slower moving casual cyclists in an attempt to forecast cycling conditions throughout the week.
The index is expressed using the familiar forecasting language of meteorological predictions. It also correlates the speed clocked by the sensor network to cycling sterotypes such as MAMILS (Middle-Aged-Men-In-Lycra) who tend to travel at the highest speeds. The Lycra Index was found to be highest during the morning peak hour with very low incidents of high cycling speeds being found during the weekend.
Finally this project proposes that the Lycra Index predictions be publically displayed along Sydney cycleways in a public feedback experiment and to dispel misinformation about the risks of cycling in Sydney. By demonstrating that typical conditions on Sydney’s cycleways are low speed, The Lycra Index reveals that anxieties associated with cycling speed do not reflect actual conditions on city’s new cycleways.

Cycling 365 is a very simple visualisation tool for the public that shows cycling data across the whole network of Sydney’s cycleways, through different lenses – geographic, timebased and so on. In investigating the data set, of the fine grain data is exposed in a rich way that reveals the patterns of data. One immediately notices the weekends when it’s quieter, the weekday commuter peaks in the morning and afternoon, and the seasonal changes – such as no cycle traffic on Christmas day. It’s also possible to drill down to different stations.
One also discovers interesting anomalies, such as a huge spike in one location in October 2012. Further research reveals that there was a cycling festival on this day. It’s not an error – it’s real data. Whitelaw is particularly interested in these stories and how it’s possible to reveal other data through this data. Overall, the tool tells the story of steady and continued growth in cycling. It speaks of pervasive use of cycle ways and of a groundswell. In speaking with the City of Sydney cycleways staff, Whitelaw discovered the strongly adversarial nature of the debate around cycling in Sydney. This became the dilemma with this Data Slam project. While one might expect a comfortable, rational view that “of course everyone should cycle and the cycleways are fantastic”, this actually ignores the existence of an incredible rage associated with cycling that is prevalent in a certain subset of the population.
One can’t solve this dilemma by throwing data at it. The dilemma becomes, how do you represent the culture wars, the discourse, the hostitility the defensiveness, how do you untie this? Why has the growth in cycling attracted such negativity when it clearly works for so many people? Whitelaw sees the tool he created as a way to start opening
up that conversation.

Activist Apparel launches a standout Autumn/Winter ‘13 collection at the City Data Slam. Presenting a range of speculative garments, the collection engages with future urban data streams, presenting them on a variety of different wearable platforms. This exciting new range proposes ways that information can be geolocated and displayed in public space by concerned citizens. The collection considers ways to develop a more nuanced and collective understanding of predicted changes to our urban environments.
Activist Hosiery shows the height of predicted sea level change in year 2100 at your location in the city assuming a business as usual approach to carbon emissions. Wearable LEDs light up along the leg to show predicted changes to our shorelines. Based on the same assumptions the Activst Brooch conveys this information by gripping the wearer tightly every time they cross the edge of this future shoreline.
The Activist Umbrella changes colour to indicate the energy footprint of the buildings in its vicinity. It enables the curious wearer to assess the energy footprints of different buildings and streets in their locality. Finally, the Activist Socks give future urban heat island predictions based on the colour of embedded wearable LEDs. This season data is the new black. In stores soon.

Elemental Bodies: Shiver is an immersive, interactive environment, integrating programming, electronics, and a recycling water system into a prefabricated architectural framework with specialized fabric walls. They create a room filled with cascading water flows, which develop organic patterns and move symbiotically along the wall to engage the surface, activate the senses, and bring the body into direct relationship with its environment.

This structure communicates a contemporary vision of the American west: the idea of no infinity yet no separation, which is the opposite idea of the original “west”. A fence is an artificial structure built to restrict and control movement, preventing us from engaging in transformation, whereas a tunnel speaks of a pathway.

Mesh 1 is based on Cartwright’s running and cycling mileage over several years. Seams running parallel to the edges of the pieces plot average mileage over the course of a year, illustrating seasonal and year-to-year variation in activity.

This interactive installation uses a microcontroller, called the Nekoboard, and an onboard camera to capture three frames per second of movement in its field of view. It translates the viewer’s movement into a shift through the color spectrum in the LEDs as well as motor speeds inside the sculpture.

SRSS is a model in the tradition of the “spatial city,” combining ideas of art, architecture, and science to propose utopian houses and city models for extreme living conditions, such as metropolises and regions endangered by natural disasters. This model of a utopian city is built out of cheap local and recyclable materials in order to initiate unlimited creative work toward rethinking urban planning, elevated city layers, and social conventions of city spaces.

To coincide with ISEA2013, John Tonkin presents two new responsive video works that continue his ongoing research into perception and cognition, exploring ideas of interiority and presence. These sensor-driven interactive video systems respond to the viewer’s proximity to the screen, forming a dynamic coupling between the motion of the user’s body through space and the resulting real-time manipulation of video and sound. The viewer is located within “a kind of first-person sensorimotor temporal play” made up of many small moments of everyday lived experience, hinting at the fragmented nature of our engagement with the world. For video documentation of earlier works in this series, go to: vimeo.com/36280779

Ionic Satellite Fountain is an artwork that establishes a sensorial and spectral connection to the satellites passing over the installation site. The liquid jets created by nozzles are made of salt water, a very conductive medium. The flow of these jets is controlled by a computer that predicts the passes of satellites, positioning them with the best direction and angle for reception. The jets are connected to a radio so visitors can hear signals emitted from the satellites, with the streams serving as antennas.

Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video art, using televisions themselves as a sculptural medium, and integrating video imagery into sculptural objects. Paik’s medium aroused controversy when his collaborator, cellist charlotte Moorman, was arrested for public indecency while performing wearing only television sets. In this compilation video, Paik reimagined video footage with a video synthesizer to electronically manipulate images recorded during Moorman’s performances of TV Cello.

Population is an art and video installation that uses custom extruding machines to generate an imaginary population made of Play-Doh, with everything that a populace might need to sustain, distract, and destroy itself.

The Matter of Memory is a free, custom app using smartphone GPS tracking that allows anyone to submit a three-minute audio recording tethered to the location in which it is created. Others are able to listen to the recording when they are within 100 feet of origin point of that recording.

The result of extensive archival research and remastering of key historical material, this project revisits the 1981 exhibition Video Art from Australia, presented in Venice and subsequently toured through Australia (before disappearing in transit). Works from the original exhibition have been supplemented by some key additions, creating a unique insight into early video practice in Australia.

Featuring work by: Pam Brown, Warren Burt, Peter Callas, David Chesworth, Malcolm Ellis, Mick Glasheen, Miles Green, Marr Grounds, Stephen Jones, Peter Kennedy, Eva Krczag, Gilly Leahy, Bob Pollock, David Perry, Paul Pholeros, Jill Scott, Bush Video, Bruce Tolley

Smoking Bolts features a cluster of machines that will take up occupation in the Artspace Gallery. Successively marking out different compositions and notations, they paint live in the space through an operational system run remotely by the artist in Auckland. The title refers to a clandestine operation in which ‘a special entry team breaks into an enemy installation and steals a high-security device, like a code machine, leaving nothing but the smoking bolts.’

Accomplice features an infestation of autonomous robots — a colony of curious, social machines hidden within the Artspace gallery walls — that function as an allegory of our world’s complex machinic ecology. Each robot is equipped with a motorised punch, a camera, and a microphone to assist in the complete transformation of the surrounding environment. Collectively, these robots explore, learn, play and conspire by knocking against the wall, producing holes and patterns that mark the evolution of their social development.

HEK 293T: The Transformation of Johni or Oliver comments on my experiences working with basic genetic engineering techniques during a three month residency at SymbioticA in 2010. In particular, the work explores the transformation of human embryonic kidney cells using green and red fluorescent proteins isolated from marine organisms. The work focuses on the transformation of the cells and the strange conflicts new biotechnologies inspire.

Decay can be a sudden, long, visible or invisible process. It may take place across vastly different time scales and or in forms that are difficult for our human senses to comprehend. In Sound of Decay, a computer “listens” to the events inside the desiccator, and creates an audio frequency range we may comprehend. Sound generated by decay is extremely low and soft; inaudible to humans. The desiccator provides an auditorium for the performance, complete with an amplifying stage.

This project explores the language used to advertise “cosmeceuticals”, an emerging class of skin care products claiming pharmaceutical benefits at the cellular level. This language is taken literally here and applied to the “material” it refers to. Skin cells have been manipulated in the laboratory to form letters and words which in effect “re-incarnate” the promises of the cosmeceutical industry. While this biological material is shown to be controllable to a certain extent, moments of successful stabilization are quickly followed by entropy.

Paper Mache, crystalline minerals, performance, video, latex bodysuit, vacuum cleaner, vegetable matter, performance, silicon, tumour casts, electronics, performance.

“I died as violence and knew conceit
I died as freedom and enjoyed great pleasure
I fought for my body, and it died”                                                                                                          _Sufi Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

TechnoCulturalBodySuits is a triptych of ethics, articulating different orientations toward the membrane; to be violated, endured & indulged and defended. Each TCBSuit references the violence of biological progression with the centrality of the human body in regards to cultural conceit and social-political mortality. A progressive polemic emerges from the competing & contradictory ethics while I argue for the dissolution of oppressive borders, while paradoxically supporting the same borders/barriers. The titles refer to the poem by Sufi Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, translating into English as ‘I Died as Mineral’.

Stainless steel, scientific glassware, plywood, inert biological contaminants, eggs, message board, audio devices.

Membranes are selectively permeable structures, controlling the exchange of ions in our synapses, structuring the flow of surveillance information at airport security, or filtering migration to our shores.  SPPS drifts in interstitial spaces between biology, politics, culture and history recalling how the membrane functions as border, a cultural and linguistic filter and a generator of difference. SPPS is an omnisexual bacterium ingesting histories and narratives that associate through powerful metaphorical bonds.
Visualisation: Duncan Bond.

Inert biological material, glass jars.

When we humans walk in a city, run through the halls of a busy airport, roll through a bus terminal or a train station, we are traveling through not only streets, hallways and stairs, but through microbes. The series of sculptures are made of human and pig skin and biological synthetic virus called Lentivirus, a derivative of HIV strain 1, so that transfection and contagion would occur at the cellular level. The virus, cells and tissue are inert now and the biomaterial reveals areas of bluish brownish stains.

Corrie Van Sice, US, is a researcher developing new materials and methods of fabrication. She earned her Masters at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the self-proclaimed “center for the recently possible.” As a professional fabricator, Corrie has worked with individual artists and institutions doing hardware engineering, mold-making, sculpture and generative digital modeling. Her research initiative, Designed Morphologies, applies concepts of bio-mimesis, sustainability and ecological design to the production of fabrication technologies (Source: Linked-in)

Slide sample of human canine hybridoma, drawings on paper.

This installation speaks to the contradiction between scientific ‘reality’ and its expression within popular consciousness. The monstrous kynical cell is reduced to an almost invisible dot, unable to live outside of the supports of the laboratory, preserved dead between glass. While the surrounding drawings, allegories of the ancient kynic, reinforce stereotypes and play with the bombastic representation of human anxieties over scientific interventions. Step right up and see this freak of nature – a totem for renewed kynicism.

Semi-ready-made school furniture, Perspex, Petri dishes, chalk, Black-board paint, electric lights/cables, transgenic bacteria.

In Proto-animate 20TP a novel code sequence is comprised of 158 DNA bases derived from an ostensibly non-coding region of a gene. This gene known as the APOE4 gene (Apolipoprotein E4) is associated with Alzheimer’s disease in humans. This sequence was inserted into E.coli bacteria and used as temporal paint-media to depict small living portraits. Through this process a previously inanimate, non-coding section of DNA is poetically expressed in interplay of memories and learning within a simulated 1970s childhood classroom.

Mixed media (Foreskin cells, Stem cells, reprogrammed neurons, tissue engineering, electrophysiology, computer controlled devices and sound, foreskin cells, stem cells, neurons)

In potentia is a liminal, boundary creature created as an artistic and speculative techno-scientific experiment with disembodied human material, diagnostic biomedicine equipment and a stem cell reprogramming technique called ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’ (iPS). It is a functioning neural network or ‘biological brain’ encased within a purpose built sculptural incubator reminiscent of eighteenth century scientific paraphernalia, complete with a custom-made automated feeding and waste retrieval system and DIY electrophysiological recording setup. Created by artists Guy Ben-Ary and Kirsten Hudson in collaboration with Mark Lawson (Course coordinator of Product and Furniture design at Curtin University) and Stuart Hodgetts (Director of the Spinal Cord Repair Laboratory at the University of Western Australia), in potentia prompts us to consider how techno-scientific developments have led us to a point where, rather than being a concrete and discrete category, who or what is called a person is a highly contingent formation.

Grow is a work in progress. Stereoscopic projection, 6min duration with circular polarised glasses.

Part of an ongoing exploration of the production of environmental information, this work monitors electricity use within a public building and translates the information into an olfactory experience. Smell is a primal mode of communication from which it is difficult to be intellectually distanced; by manifesting electricity information in this way, the work not only explores the mechanics of perceiving information, but also suggests new possibilities for designing a more evocative human-infrastructure interface.

The Korean term ‘Inyeon’ expresses the spontaneous force that exists between people, a force which brings us together and creates a trail of interactions throughout our lives. The Trans-Emotion Room is the first work in a series titled Inyeon. Central to these works is the occupation of one of the most personal spaces we inhabit, a space that carries us across landscapes, a space that we mold with each step: our shoes. In The Trans-Emotion Room, participants are asked to share a small room in a pair of shoes provided. The shoes act as an interface, monitoring the body for variations in body temperature that occur when personal space is thus shared, and the room responds to this connection by subtly altering the colour spectrum of the light surrounding the participants.

RE-COG-NITION explores the question: “What is the work of art in the digital age, in relation to the contemporary state of interactive art and electronics?” A cracked LCD TV hangs on the gallery wall. As the audience approach, their presence causes changes in the image. Abstraction unfolds. The image from a video input connected to the broken TV is distorted through the dysfunctional character of the screen. As audiences simultaneously recognise both themselves and the surface of the technological other, the work acts as both a mirror and a window, revealing both the human and the technological. Instead of a disconnected, mediated experience, RE-COG-NITION connects the audience to the immediacy of technology.

Communication is mediated by complex systems. Both machinic and biological, it is through engagement with these systems that our lives are shaped: we perceive ourselves and experience our world through the lens of the system. But what do these ubiquitous systems look like? Can we communicate with them, and what do they have to say? Do they even exist without our presence? Interactive art explores these relationships through systems that require engagement to be realised, and increasingly blur the lines between author and viewer-turned-participant. If a system fails in a forest … addresses questions of communication, authorship and the temporal, emergent nature of art making in interactive media. 107 Projects is the vision of seven of the driving forces behind Knot Gallery, The Frequency Lab and Token Imagination. In collaboration with a community of dedicated creative practitioners, these collectives have been working together to produce arts events since 2001. From 2001–05 the groups operated an artist run space in Surry Hills renowned for its relaxed, welcoming environment. The space was one of the most active artist run venues in inner Sydney, presenting close to 500 events and home to a wide spectrum of music, performance, spoken word, poetry and visual arts. Moving to Redfern in 2012, the space at 107 Redfern Street is a place for creative practitioners to perform, exhibit, develop new works, hone their skills, engage in workshops and continue to grow professionally. 107 Projects is a non-profit association DGR registered charity.

Twitch Of The Death Nerve seeks to explore the idea of the uncanny and the unsettling feeling of seeing elements of the face cut up, recombined and reanimated through simple electrical motors.

A return to the origins of art? … this work is an apparatus for cave wall light painting. A carnival mirror missing its glass, we playfully shape the pixel pastiche, as our bodies are made malleable. Cave Light explores the impact of the tangible on the virtual; by using touch, the participant can expand present time through the screen and beyond.

Horizontal Intuition 14 explores the expressive and emotive qualities of nature and the quotidian, as light, shadow color, shape and line each reveal its own intrinsic “intuition” of its place in the world. Using close observation as a starting point, the images are pushed to the edge of abstraction. The moving white planes become a psychological space for the mind.

Bringing the E-Culture Fair 2010 to a close, large interactive video projections controlled by visitors can be seen in the sizeable audiovisual outdoor installation of MediaLAB (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) on the facade of the office building, next to the Dortmunder U. MediaLAB’s “U-Turm Project” was developed in collaboration with video artist Matthias Oostrik, Beam Systems, and Virtueel Platform. It combines interactive, large-scale projections with music and video art. The silhouettes of every visitor stepping onto one of the four stages on the Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse are recorded and projected onto a window of the facade. Through their movements, players can steer their images in different directions.