2020
Exhibition
Location: Corwin Pavilion
Curators: Gustavo Rincon, Kio Griffith, Sam Bourgault, Elizabeth Hambleton and Sahar Sajadieh
Installations:
Title: Doppelgänger III (2019)
Artists: Weilu Ge and Kelon Cen
Abstract:
Doppelgänger III is an interactive audiovisual installation that explores the idea of self-awareness. It's a part of IMUU's installation series that explores the human condition in a future dystopia where machinery analysis and prediction of our mind become possible, and data monetization becomes uncontrollable.
This project utilizes virtual reality, motion-sensing camera, 3d sound and brainwave(EEG) headband. There is a "mirror portal" in the virtual world that reflects the audiences' physical bodies as well as their psychological activities. The audience is brought into the VR world seeing a primitive state of the mind and they may consciously or subconsciously interact with the visual elements and the movement of surrounding sound by using their brains to influence their level of concentration and calmness. Meanwhile, all five brainwaves are constantly modulating different harmonic partials of a computer-generated sine tone.
****
Title: Affordance (A Fjord Dance), 2019
Artists: Rachel Wolfe and Harald De Bondt
Affordance (a fjord dance) is what the environment offers the individual, and refers to all action possibilities depending on users’ physical capabilities. For example, a chair “affords” being “sat on,” “thrown,” “stood on,” and a continuing use of probabilities. James J. Gibson, coined the term "affordance." A dance at the fjord for movement research and technology lab-work was developed from the Solfège Souche dance recorded and projected in an art installation in Venice, Italy, 2018 for the Moving Art Lab. The relationship between the human body and the natural world remains full of misunderstandings and spaces for insight. As people move rapidly into life immersed with technology, the question of what is knowing, intelligence, and where knowing arises from is looked at in the video/movement works.
The videos in Solfége Souche and Affordance aims to consider understanding and convey new complexities in the construction of virtual realms. In Affordance, the sounds are generated from an open source library of wind sounds. The wire frame is constructed by mirroring the joints of a flesh toned body form at the water's edge. The shape of the joint is the marker to call upon the sound references. The wire frame of the body becomes the composer, making a track of wind sounds as an echo of the movements of the body. The video is intended to be projected with sound, to create an immersive experience for viewers to consider the themes of technology, the body, nature elements. The experience provides a multi-sensory meditation on the possible meanings and implications of the emergent technology.
Performance and editing, Rachel Wolfe, www.rachelwolfe.com Affordance Technologist, Harald de Bondt, www.movingmaking.com Videography, Børge Indergaard, www.indergaard.net
About the video work Affordance was developed upon: Solfège Souche is, by definition, the root of a forgotten connection with nature. The work is in development with an affordance technology research project. Solfeggio (or solfège), refers to a music education method developed to teach sight-singing and pitch accuracy. Originating in 11th century music, theorist Guido of Arezzo, assigned six syllables (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la) recognized now as the major scale. Ut queant laxīs resonāre fībrīs; Mīra gestōrum famulī tuōrum; Solve pollūtī labiī reātum, Sancte Iōhannēs. Much later, the "ut" was changed to the open syllable "do", "sol" sometimes to "so", while "si" (later changed to "ti") was added for the seventh scale-note, giving rise to the modern solfège. Souche is stump (of a tree), a virus (une souche virale inédite a fait au minimum vingt morts), unknown and to have caused at least twenty deaths. Souche means root in Latin and refers to genealogy.
Solfège Souche records a presence of connection and resonance with nature; of a remember and genetic nature, giving reference to theological writing, Japanese Butoh influences, and the dysphoria of utopian ideas for an artificially intelligent future.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLu88a0pLQ7ZrhlEK_4D8roYs9SXyjSK-O
*****
Title: Vacuoles: bioremediating cultures (2019)
Variation.
Artist: Maru García
Ceramic piece containing lead-contaminated soil from South East LA, two-channel video projection.
This project resulted from research into an environmental and social crisis specific to South East LA, where thousands of families are facing a severe case of lead contamination in land affected by a company recycling car batteries. As part of the research, soil samples were collected and encapsulated in ceramic pieces. This artwork responded to the bioremediating action that some plants perform in their vacuoles, where they absorb the lead and encapsulate it in these cellular organelles.
****
Title: Building Frames and Breaking Nature: The Plasticization Clinic
Artist: Lauren Ruiz
Abstract:
I operate under the fictive medical corporation GLEI Inc. to provoke a collective reflection on the intersections of corporate authority and personal data, environmental pollution and the human body. My past installations, Plasticization Clinic and Plasticization Clinic II, provided information both factual and speculative, under the guise of a medical clinic waiting room, about the trajectory of human existence in relation to the amount of tangible plastic waste that pollutes the water supply, toxicants that are released from single use plastics over time, and the startling amount of microplastics that are regularly consumed as a result. The installation featured at the AWMAS 2020 conference centers around the fictional company created through the Plasticization Clinic projects and the sharing of biological data across institutional and digital systems. The GLEI Box, which extends the social impact of the two plasticization clinics, redeploys the structural mechanisms of home ancestry kits to problematize issues of identity, trust, and privacy in the medical sciences, and to question the relationship between reason and compromise in proposed solutions to anthropogenic climate change. Modeled after at-home DNA kits that have grown in popularity over recent years, The GLEI Box is available to participants who would like to order a kit through the GLEI Inc. website, and send back their saliva and personal information to be tested and archived.
*****
Title: airMorphologies
Artist: Yin Yu
Abstract:
A facial mask, as part of the daily outfit for people living in an air polluted environment, has become a barrier for social interaction and self-expression. Can we add another dimension for social communication while wearing a mask? AirMorphologies, a voice-activated pneumatic wearable device, shapes our body and its social space, and the manner of social interaction. Controlled by users' voices, airMorpholgies allows two users to wear the shape-changing devices and communicate through their new bodies. By changing the appearance, users gain a novel way to control their bodies and express themselves.
http://yinyudesign.com/#/airmorphologies/
*****
Title: Carcasses Solubles
Artists: Sam Bourgault & Emma Forgues
Abstract:
Carcasses solubles exhibits the duality existing between the metaphysical, spiritual and statistical essence of human beings and their embodied, mortal and material nature. From this first posture results the Anthropocene, referring to humanity as the main actor in the recent environmental changes. Opposed to this human-centric point of view, the artists use their bodies as a bond between their own existence and the Earth. They project on themselves images, which account for urbanization, migration, epidemics, information overload, and exploitation of natural resources.
http://sambourgault.com/carcasses.html
*****
Title: Repository
Artist: Weidi Zhang
Description:
Repository is a virtual reality experience created around the issue and question of data authorship and data oblivion. It builds a world of data in motion merging the structure of a server farm (A place physically store data) with a paper shredder (A machine deconstruct data). Repository gradually transforms from a surreal bank safely stores memories into a space filled with floating shreds of letters and characters through assembling and fragmenting varies conversations borrowed from Twitter posts in 2019. Its non-linear narrativity, interactive experimental sound and surreal aesthetic provide a conceptualization of an alternative model of human-machine interaction, and questions whether we have the right to be forgotten, at the same time as the right to be remembered?
*****
Title: Department of X (2019)
Artist: Nanna K. Hougaard
Abstract:
n the sound work Department of X (2019), the listener becomes the center of a fictitious meeting between researchers in various disciplines, where the conversations follow an unpredictable pattern that neither leads to agreement nor disagreement. Eight researchers from astrophysics, philosophy, brain research, informatics, evolutionary biology, anthropology and dance have been interviewed based on a selection of their academic articles. Based on mapped themes between the researchers' statements, an algorithm generates combinations that are continuously transformed.
With Department of X, Nanna K. Hougaard attempts to break down existing patterns of knowledge production by resetting and reuniting the understanding of how scientific knowledge works. The work opens up endless potentials of knowledge production by establishing possible links between topics that have no immediate connection. Hougaard’s artistic research is influenced by new materialistic researchers such as Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Graham Harman. At the core of New Materialism lies the break with correlationism – the interdependency instituted by Kantian philosophy between thinking and being, that claims that being cannot be thought of apart from a subject. This, ultimately in the course of the last centuries, has formed a number of philosophical dichotomies among which the understanding of Nature as something divided from Culture is dominant – the ordering of what relates to human activity as different from what by traditional standards does not - the Nature/Culture divide. ‘Department of X’ addresses this outdated conception and in the framework of New Materialism calls for a new scope of vision.
****
Title: [Coral research]
Artist: Sophie Nebeker
*****
Title: RMV | Interactive Visualization
Artist: Xindy Kang
Description:
Sound can be visualized in a number of ways. It can be expressed in the time-domain, as a function of its amplitude over time, or in the frequency-domain, via a Fourier transform, as a function of its frequency and phase content. These forms of representation are typically used as analytical tools in the context of scientific inquiry. Ring Modulation Visualizer (RMV) is an audio-visual installation that allows the audience to interact with (ring-modulate) a waveform with their own voice through a microphone, and experience both the acoustic and visual results. The audience is encouraged by the visual feedback from the waveform and the audio feedback from the ring-modulation filter to produce more interesting results with their voice. With more experimenting, the audience can deduce certain patterns hidden in the algorithm of the visual pattern and gain control over them.
http://www.kangxindi.com/?fbclid=IwAR0-D0gm-es-bQFxIZzzYbGZdn9TE_jnlLDW8DSAaVRBQAyuhLBYyjmXpk8
*****
Title: Shape of Sound
Artist: Riley Henningsen
Description:
Shape of Sound, a comparative study of three songs displayed through audio visualizations.
*****
Title: Solar Circuit PPM
Artist: Christina McPhee
with music by Pamela Z: “Biospheres I/II” from “Carbon Song Cycle”)
Abstract:
Starting from Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, and moving immediately to the Gulf of Mexico, Solar Circuit Parts Per Million is a visual and sound poem to the oceanic biosphere, photosynthesis, acceleration of climate change, and biological field work. The film collages visualizations of climate change data within scenes from a biodiversity study voyage, in December 2010 in the wake of the BP oil spill... with cuts to NASA shots of the sun's orbit over Earth from astronauts' cameras. Animations are made from still images in the journal Nature: Climate Change. Special thanks to Drs. Suzanne Fredericq and Darryl Felder of the University of Louisiana, microbiologists, together with their team aboard the Pelican; and to Dr Fredericq for access during the height of the spill, in July 2010, along the closed beaches of Port Fourchon, Louisiana. The film emulates the circuit of light and photosynthesis as an accumulating cycle of intensity, which is amplified by the sound-scape of voice, electronics and ensemble, in resonant layers resembling bird and animal cries. Music: "Biospheres II" by Pamela Z; from the suite "Carbon Song Cycle" , a multimedia performance project by Pamela Z (music) and Christina McPhee (images), 2013, which was supported by grants from the MAP Fund and New Music USA, and premiered at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in 2013. The sound recording is live from the east coast premiere of Carbon Song Cycle at Roulette, Brooklyn later the same year. Since then, the film has screened at Black Hole Cinematheque (Oakland), and OLGA Project Space, Hamilton, Aoteraoa.
http://www.christinamcphee.net/
*****
Title:
- Body Code
Body Code is a live performance art piece that encourages the viewer to scan the artist’s body with a QR code app. The scan from the printed QR codes (found on the artist’s latex suit) will take them to the Body Code website (bodycodeart.com). Depending on where the viewer scans, they will read Google searches consisting of two key words: data and the part of the body (eye, muscle, throat, etc.).
- Proximity Cinéma
Inspired by the Valie Export piece “Tap and Touch Cinema”, Proximity Cinéma is a live performance artwork. During the performance, Trenda will hug and touch a participant and allow the public to touch her. She wears a vinyl red suit with thirty-eight cell phone screens. The image on the screens change by the use of proximity sensors and by touching the screens.
- Ubiquitous States
Ubiquitous States is an interactive performance that combines live heartbeats into a data visualization by new media performance artist Tiffany Trenda, 3D Systems (the largest specialized 3D printing company) and designer Janne Kyttanen. Trenda will don a 3D printed dress that has an embedded computer screen. The image on the screen will show a data visualization of both the participant’s and Trenda’s heartbeat. During the performance, the artist will approach a spectator and place a heart monitor (located at Trenda’s fingertip inside the glove) on the participant’s body. Once the sensor reads the pulse of the user, the imagery on the screen will change and show both pulses simultaneously. Then Trenda and the participant will try and match each others’ heartbeats.
Artist: Tiffany Trenda
*****
Title: Eric, Turn Off the Nintendo
Artist: Elizabeth Hambleton
Description:
Interactive videogame-driven sound installation.
****
Title: Please Keep Your Eyes Closed!
Artist: Sahar Sajadieh
****
Title: GAN abstraction
Artist: Stejara Dinulescu
*****
