Art Events Data Table

ROVER: the Reactive Observant Vacuous Emotive Robot, is an interactive sculpture that navigates the gallery and sings emotively  when it finds people. Based off of audio and emotion research, ROVER modulates audio qualities like timbre, fundamental frequency, contour, mode, and tempo to portray emotion. It also learns the space, mapping obstacles and people, while navigating using proximity, bump and heat sensors. This is an experimental platform for human robotic interaction, and has been used to conduct research on human’s affective response to emotive sounds produced by an embodied agent. ROVER has two modes, an active mode where it moves about the space looking for people to interact with and a passive mode where it is stationary and will only interact when approached. ROVER is an uncomfortably biological alien-like form attempting to learn how to communicate and express emotions. Its towering 6.ft tall thin white frame with a translucent cover stretched over it is reminiscent of a ribcage covered by skin.

LPDT2 alludes Roland Barthes’s book ‘Le Plaisir du Texte’, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. LPDT2 is the Second Life incarnation of Roy Ascott’s new media art work La Plissure du Texte (‘The Pleating of theText’), created in 1983. LPDT2 does not attain its textual input from discrete individuals but from generative text which is being harvested from the online Gutenberg Project. Thus the project brings together the voices of many authors and epochs, pleated into a poetic waterfall of distributed authorship that is mapped both onto a three dimensional metaverse architecture as well as its (robotic avatar) inhabitants.

Building upon the tradition of modifying production automobiles into rolling, dancing sculpture with sound systems, Ruben Ortiz-Torres has modified a commercially produced scissor lift used to elevate workers, into a lowrider that also goes high. With a digitally designed front grill, chromed hydraulic system, customized sound track, and an upper basket that spins, tilts, and lifts off its base, the sculpture is a 32-foot-tall, automatic, adjustable, contemporary tribute to Constantin Brancusi’s Endless column, Egyptian obelisks, and memorial columns through the ages.

Rui shall present two videos made around the theme of light. Lamp consists on a deconstruction of the first fractions of the second, when a light bulb is turned on. Library.Lights is a video documentation of a performance within QUB’s old main library building. Both of the video pieces, served as an inspiration for a collaborative improvisation with musician and sound artist Sergio Bernardo Gregorio.

West Again is a reinterpretation of a Conestoga wagon outfitted with a mobile greenhouse and open-source agricultural controllers.

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

Red, Green, Blue explores the relationship between natural spatio-temporal experience, and the space experienced through the illusionary surface of a painting. The sense of space within each section of the video is reinforced by a resonating acoustic frequency. Each Still life presents a warm to cold colour shift, from Red, to Green, to Blue.

unfold.alt is a single screen version of unfold which is originally developed as an installation. It contains 10 phases presented in reverse chronological order of stellar formation. In the original installation version they are arranged in chronological order as: Interstellar medium, Molecular cloud, Massive star impact, Filament formation, Pre-stellar core, Protostar formation, Nuclear fusion and magnetic field, Supernova, Gravitational collapse, Neutronstar. Inspired by the latest discoveries in the field of astrophysics, unfold. alt seeks to translate the phenomena surrounding the formation of stars into sounds and images.
Ryoichi Kurokawa is concerned with the synaesthetic, merging audible and visual materials, in the service of an art/science project inspired by recent discoveries. These finding have been made by astrophysicists at CEA-Irfu, based on data produced by the satellites of the European Space Agency and NASA and more specifically by the Herschel space telescope. The telescope’s observations of far infrared radiation have revealed some of the conditions of star birth and the history of the life of galaxies, over the course of 10 billion years. In addition to this data -which allows us to trace the cosmological history of star formation, especially the filamentary structure of molecular clouds where stars are born- the artist also based his logic on numerical simulations intended to model the universe and its structures, produced by astrophysicists at CEA-Irfu, with the help of supercomputers. The project, created under the supervision of astrophysicist (and researcher at CEA-Irfu) Vincent Minier, also enables the viewer to go beyond research and scientific discovery, in order to question the representation and publication of the data collected.

Concept, Direction, Composition, Programming, Design: Ryoichi Kurokawa
Programming: Hiroshi Matoba
Producer: Nicolas Wierinck
Scientific Consultation:
Vincent Minier/CEA-Irfu, Paris-Saclay
Scientific Dataset:
CEA (Herschel HOBYS, COAST, Frederic Bournaud,
Sacha Brun, Pascal Tremblin, Patrick Hennebelle, Remi Hosseini-Kazeroni), ESA, NASA, BLAST Experiment, SuperCOSMOS H-alpha Survey
Co-commissioned by
FACT(Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Stereolux and University of Salford Art Collection Co-produced by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Stereolux/ Scopitone, University of Salford Art Collection, Arcadi and DICReAM
Produced by Studio RYOICHI KUROKAWA

With support from CEA-Irfu, Paris-Saclay (Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission/ Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe)

2015~2018

Breath is an interactive light and sound installation/performance, operated by human breath. As a wind instrument, this work has been developed to control sound and light with human breathing, made of DIY circuits and e-wastes. Breath uses amorphous energy from the human body and transforms it into different shapes: breathe to light and sound, vitalizing an inorganic object and shaping the narrative. This is contrary action to turn off lights (candle), however, this can be interpreted as a vitalizing inorganic object. Human breathing is transformed into light and sound and the respiration is visualized by dimming bulbs. An individual’s breathing activates the machine from a nonliving object and involves functioning. The piece has been made of electronic junks such as old telephone’s microphone and old PC’s metal frame to illustrate life from death and to allude a transformable relationship between human/natural elements and machines. To show the interactivity in real-time, moreover, the piece has been developed to a performative instrument that can be performed with live sound by my mouth and glitch like a sound from the software. The progress has started from simple method and mathematics in code and switching between on and off to dimming by the intensity of my breath and combining acoustic and electronic sound.

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

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

Synopsis of U$AAR is based on social media platforms in which stealTH analytics and algorithmic lifestyleTM are depicted in tiny gifs of laugh. U$AAR focuses on how data is shaping and twisting social and political events.

Using the textual matter and metaphors of Homer’s Odyssey, [Play;] proposes a contemporary reinterpretation of the epic as a mode of online navigation and discovery. Divided into eleven chapters or songs, the titles of which refer to episodes from the famous epic (Penelope, The Cyclops, Calypso, The Sirens), [Play;] asks the spectator/player to wander with their cursor through various disjointed fragments that cross the pantheon of Greek heroes with contemporary web mythologies (dating sites, chat rooms, downloads, geolocalization). Deumier rethinks the distance that separates users from networks and the relational and phantasmatic modes associated with the world of the query by modelling them on the wandering tale of Odysseus (Ulysses), the hero of the Odyssey.

This digital occurence is part of a larger project, since [Play;] is also a video and stage performance in which the artist, wearing equipment reminiscent of virtual reality paraphernalia and resembling a digital avatar, recites some of the excerpts found on the work’s website. Deumier appears in pairs with a musician who accompanies her voice and a strange electric lyre designed for the occasion. The performance seems to put into perspective the role of the aède (lyric poet) in our contemporary societies.

A choreography that was processed with analog synths and a wobulator, a modified monitor known as Paik Raster Manipulation Unit – first prototyped by Nam June Paik, at Signal Culture.
The performer is Annamaria Ajmone
Soundtrack by Von Tesla

It’s a mystical and hallucinatory journey of a resilient subject, not yet completely seduced by the machines; entangled in their challenging system, but radiating dynamism while struggling for self determination. Getting lost, falling apart, splitting, vanishing and resetting. Finding balance in between.

As Cuba opens up to the outside world, the Cuba Underground series explores the island’s alternative culture and goes out in search of Cuba’s new generation of rebels. Skateboarders, graffers, punks, designers, and tattoo artists… On the edge of the law, they break with social conventions and create new trends to make Havana one of the cultural capitals of the world.

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

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

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

By looking at the aggregate cab data from San Francisco, Cabspotting reveals the Bay Area’s economic, social, and cultural patterns. The work is meant to inspire viewers with an awareness of the vast simultaneous activities of their fellow human beings. The piece reveals the possibilities of benevolent and inspiring uses of surveillance technologies.

The core “engine” of Cabspotting is an online system that anonymously tracks and records movements of Yellow Cab vehicles throughout the Bay Area. The Cab Tracker builds an alternate “map” of the bay area based solely on cabs movements, and generates a series of time-lapse videos.

Cabspotting is also an open source framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues suggested by cab traces. Where do cabs go the most? Where do they never turn up? Commissioned and volunteer Cab Projects are vehicles for artists, writers, or researchers to explore these questions.

During the Fashion Show, Kelly Dobson presented, ScreamBody, a bag for recording and releasing personal frustrations.

From the portable museum to the make-shift stand of the street corner trader, the migrant’s battered suitcase tied with string acts as an echo of Wittgenstein: “The World is everything that is the case”. (In each case) The contributing artists explore the migratory nature of artistic practice; acting as a global mediation between the aesthetics of trade along the peregrine, wandering routes that lead towards meaning. CURATORS: Sean Cubitt , Vince Dziekan, Paul Thomas. ARTISTS Karen Casey; Mark Cypher; Tina Gonsalves; Mark Guglielmetti & Indae Hwang; Nigel Helyer; Joel Louie, Jan L. Andruszkiewicz, Bryan J. Mather, Kevin Raxworthy, Julian Stadon & Paul Thomas; Mitchell Whitelaw.

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

This project goes into ITC (Instrumental Transcommunication) not due to its exoticity but because we understand this as a field wheretruth is difficult to be established, a field made from uncertainty and therefore questioning. Our intention is not to prove other dimension’s existence but rather create a deep discussion around some materialistic goals that are probably keeping us far from creating new universes. Also, considering that ITC was a big success during the 1970’s, we strongly believe in the possibility of finding people like Hilda Hist who knew the Friedrich Jürgenson EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) method but haven’t shared their findings anymore. If we succeed in this search, enrolling these former practitioners, it will be a beautiful bridge between old and young people that are open to dream beyond nowadays political and economic standards.

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

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

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

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

The roadside environment – where the tarmac stops and the grass embankment begins – is full of the detritus of city commuters, and rich in plant and animal life thriving in the nitrogenous air.

The cellular noise-maker is one of a noise farming devices that capture the ethereal turbulence of these roadside ecosystems, transmit these samples in data streams, or display them in light patterns. The Cellular Noisemaker explores not just how to live, but how to live well in urban environments which have an ever-increasing and complex electronic component.

Just as householders tend their gardens to improve the outlook, residents of Edge Town can adjust the position of electronic sensing machines (ie. Cellular Noise Maker) to better capture the ethereal turbulence of these roadside ecosystems. Physically austere, but with points of vulnerability (the sensors), these machines sample flows of roadside materials – the rate of dirt build-up, the shapes of pieces of dust, the rhythm of passing cars – and then transmit these samples in data streams, or display them in light patterns. In a well-tended ‘garden’ these transmissions are received by noise broadcasters, machines which re-transform these pieces of electronic data into images, sounds and shapes of different resolutions.

The cellular noise-maker is a portable steel box comprised of a central fluorescent display surrounded by a pattern of aluminium flexible flaps. It resembles a large portable radio, and can be carried around, keeping the house’s occupants company. As data is received by the device from other noise farming devices, it is stored in its memory and shown as an intricate pattern of dots on the central display (1). When its memory is full, the noise-maker uses its stored data patterns as a score to generate a sound burst of many simultaneous clicking noises by using electromagnets to rapidly move the flaps on its surface (2). The clicking noise ends in a sharp FM radio pulse (3) which is a highly compressed data burst of all its memory contents. Following this, the memory is wiped and the process starts again.

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

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

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

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

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

Golem was a two channel video installation where the two monitors were arranged like the pages of an open book. The imagery was derived from medieval illuminated books so the overall effect was of an electronically illuminated manuscript. The work took as its theme the ancient Jewish myth of the Golem, a human-like creature created to do the bidding of its creator, the genesis of the Frankenstein story. The work deals with the issues around contemporary technologies such as Genetics and Artificial Intelligence.

Golem included a two channel video installation, structure, 24 framed prints and a 12 channel audio environment (audio by Hans Peter kuhn, featuring the voice of Marc Camille Chaimowicz).

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

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

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

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

Discover Belfast as an adventure playground. Try out the strange costumes and tools of a scavenger, meet real dirt birds, watch footage of local creatures in their natural habitats and take a stroll to the big fish and back in jelly fish disguise. Leave in a state of readiness for the unknown adventures that await you in the world outside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Device for the Elimination of Wonder tells a Sisyphus-like tale of our preoccupation with mapping, grids and ordering the world. A simple kinetic system obsessed with quantifi cation, it is ultimately a feedback-loop manifesting itself as a machine. The device rolls back and forth along the length of two parallel cables that span the gallery and selects a location to begin taking measurements. It then lowers a metallic bob until it makes contact with the surface, measures this height and then represents this measurement as a grey scale on a page, finally dropping the page with its graphic data to the floor below. Eventually the paper sheets build up in height while the tone of the image lightens, reducing the gradation from dark gray to none at all. It then moves on to the next spot. Daniels has created a mechanical device that instrumentalizes the gallery, and in turn reifies our obsession with data. With objectivity fixed within the system the device stops, measures, exhausts its interest in the site, and then moves on. Its behavior could be considered the antithesis of liveliness, nonetheless the irony of the narrative is inescapable as we witness the futility of the device’s mission.

Check out a display resulting from the Research Gizmology Workshop taught by Steve Storz at Taos Academy, featuring ‘Main Frame of the Future’, a kinetic sculpture by student Dylan Cline, age 11. His inspiration was Sci-Fi movies. Students participating in the workshop learned several STEM plus Art skills, including how to build an electronic circuit.

Counterweight (2008). Director: Stuart Sloan. This film matches images of cranes throughout Belfast with nameless and faceless interviews of individuals about the city and its growth.

The film aims to make no specific or explicit conclusions about the issues involved, and Counterweight hopes to portray the complicated process of how Belfast is beginning to develop an identity that has little to do with war.

33 Seagulls (2009). Director: Michael MacBroom. A short documentary about homeless artist Robert Bodel. The film charts several days spent with Robert following him in his daily pilgrimage to a little park in East Belfast that is his sanctuary from the world.

It is Robert’s art which is often the dominant character in the film, all abstract works, each meticulously drawn on the back of little envelopes.

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

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

Suzan will create a live paint work conveying science/art as a physical force, movement of energy and life matter and how man-made objects create pressure which is scientific and technology based has a connection to body movement.

Inside the Chrysalis is a science fiction that is happening now, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Wrapped in their cocoons, people dream of new worlds… Inner landscapes and strange bedfellows… What will emerge?

This 360VR video by Taien Ng-Chan is made in collaboration with artists who were asked to construct a cocoon out of common household items, however they wished. This artwork is available to experience online.

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

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

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

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.

Turn-over 2 is an installation to prompt spectators to touch the art works directly. The artist wants you taste the colors and feel the paper.

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.