Exhibition Artworks
Torso Target Trilogy
Andrea Ackerman
Torso Target Trilogy by Andrea Ackerman features a set of three 3D computer animations with stereo sound created to advance the seamless connection of digital to human.
Andrea’s work embodies visually and auditorily complex, emotionally compelling characters engaged in interactive relationships. Torso Target Trilogy plays with advancing 3D computer animation and sound processing techniques, originally developed for commercial applications, in alternative/aesthetically deeper ways.
On a geopolitical level, Torso Target Trilogy embodies the constant and ongoing struggle of women and all people for strong, independent positions in our world by embodying both strength and vulnerability in the face of relentless and sometimes overwhelming challenges.
Torso Target Trilogy is a non-narrative multisensory sculpture with a looping structure. Each loop is experientially unique as the different layered, crisscrossing, synchronous/asynchronous visual and auditory sensory experiences reach conscious awareness. The sound imagery is paired with the visual imagery to evoke the experiences of direct/indirect/touching/ non-touching interactivity.
Credits and support:
Stock sounds sourced from Articulated Sounds, FX Pro Sound, Jabameister, Sound Forge Entertainment, TibaSound, Sound and Effects, Raw Materials, Hauthaler/ Pond5.
Website: www.andreaackerman.com
Instagram: @andreaackermanstudio
Tectonic Lingering
Camila Colussi
Tectonic Lingering by Camila Colussi is a sound-light interactive installation connected to real-time earthquake data. Beams of light move in expectation of a new quake. If a tremor is detected, the installation lights up for a duration of time linked to the quake’s magnitude.
This piece is inspired by Camilla’s experience of living in Chile. It is a reflexive work about the Earth’s tectonic activity from a temporal embodied perspective.
The project also explores the use of computational technologies as affective systems. Living together implies to affect and be affected, to be part of a relational system of exchanges and dialogues.
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Are we more or less connected to our environments?
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What does it mean to be mediated by computational devices?
Today, while being “connected”, we seem more alienated than ever. From Camilla’s perspective, affection is a political act that can drive us to reconsider our social structures and how we relate with others.
INTER/her: Journey Inside the Female Body
Camille Baker & Maf'j Alvarez
INTER/her: Journey Inside the Female Body by Camille Baker and Maf’j Alvarez is an immersive installation and Virtual Reality artwork. This project focuses on post-reproductive diseases and the pain often associated with these conditions affecting women typically over 40: endometriosis, fibroids, polyps, Ovarian and other cysts, cervical, ovarian, uterine and endometrial cancers.
The sensory and emotional experience moves from the outside in, within a real dome space into VR space, with a 3D audio soundscape of the voices and stories of real women recounting their experiences, making it an intimate, emotional and possibly haunting experience.
The accompanying wearable haptic garment provides a visceral vibration responsive experience on the lower abdomen, where the various diseases occur.
Credits and support:
Maf'j Alvarez - Unity Interaction Designer & 3D Artist
Kat Austen - Sound Design Artist
Sarah Büttner - Tilt Brush/3D object artist
Paul Hayes - Electronics Engineer
Andy Baker - Unity Coding assistance
Websites:
inter-her.art and camillebaker.me
STRINGS
Unwired Dance Theatre, dir.Clémence Debaig
STRINGS is an interactive performance that gives audiences the power to control and dictate the body movements of a dancer remotely, using their mobile phones connected to wearable devices. The audience is introduced to the dancer as she battles anxiety, apathy, and a sense of isolation. Throughout the interactive performance, they are invited to hold her from a distance, each instruction acting as invisible strings to (re)animate her, ultimately helping her rekindle a connection to the people and world around her.
Audience members are able to control the dancer by interacting with four panels on their phone through a web app, each corresponding to one of her limbs. In this way, they have to works together using a majority vote system to choreograph the dancer’s body.
Initially created in response to the Covid 19 pandemic, STRINGS explores notions of physical vs digital presence and remote intimacy at a time when physical presence and interpersonal proximity are heavily policed. It asks and seeks to answer questions such as: “To what extent can a sense of presence, of physicality, of togetherness, of intimacy, be created in a purely digital environment?" This project explores one possible manifestation of digital touch, virtual physical blending, and a digital network of bodies.
It subverts and challenges ideas of bodyhood and control: the audience wields full power over the dancer’s digitally-figured body on their screens, while the dancer lacks control and agency over her physical body.
STRINGS is also a consciously gendered project that echoes concerns over women’s lack of self-determination when it comes to their bodies and lives. In parallel to the reality of women worldwide, the majority vote of a faceless, anonymous mass of people has the power to dictate how a woman relates to and chooses to operate her own body.
Unwired Dance Theatre makes immersive and playable experiences - for remote audiences, IRL and virtual stages, galleries and more unconventional sites. Unwired Dance Theatre is directed by Clémence Debaig who is a dance artist, designer and creative technologist.
Credits and support:
Unwired Dance Theatre - Direction, Technology and performance: Clemence Debaig
Music - Christina Karpodini
Web app & server development - Ed Boucher
Websites:
https://www.clemencedebaig.com/
https://www.unwireddancetheatre.com/strings
https://www.instgram.com/unwireddancetheatre/
https://twitter.com/UnwiredDance
Unreal Window
Chanee Choi
Unreal Window by Chanee Choi is a real-time virtual animation inspired by the experience of confinement and virtual communication during the pandemic. The animation is a recording of a continuously existing AI environment created through machine learning. Unreal Window addresses the slippery sense of reality in a world of media consumption, zoom meetings, and AI animation.
Website: www.chaneec.com
Instagram: @chaneec_studio
Facebook: @chaneecartist
Facades
Displace Studio by Kerryn Wise & Ben Neal.
Introducing Facades - put on your VR headset and embark on a unique choreographic journey, walking the line between reality and illusion. Facades is a room-scale dance-theatre virtual reality (VR) experience by Displace Studio created by Digital Dance Artist Kerryn Wise and Creative Technologist Ben Neal.
Inspired by iconic film scenes including Rear Window, The Wizard of Oz, and The Mirror, Facades uses the architectural features of mirrors, windows and doors as metaphors for duality, reflection and portals. This surreal ‘VR noir’ presents hauntingly beautiful choreography from unique perspectives to expose themes of vulnerability, trust, disembodiment and isolation, inviting the viewer to step into the frame, move beyond the veneer and take a closer look.
Credits and support:
Courtenay Johnson - Producer
Emma Hughes - Digital Producer
Tina Carter - Dramaturg
Dan Frazer - Sound Designer
Tim Bradley - 3D modeller
Victor Simao - Graphic Designer
Websites:
Instagram and Twitter: @studiodisplace
Brainbo: Colour Meditation
Ari Peralta
Brainbo: Colour Meditation by Ari Peralta fuses colour, binaural sound and neuroscience to create a 5-minute audiovisual guided meditation experience designed to elevate your mood.
Interested in embracing a new way to anchor your thoughts and inspire creativity with science-backed meditations that can help reframe your current state of mind? Brainbo uses specific sensory combinations to bring you inwards and stimulate your nervous system back to the centre.
Sensory designer, Ari Peralta, is one of the world’s leading voices in neuroscience and the senses. Ari has led innovative projects from NASA to Nissan that empower wellness in the Space, hospitality, retail, healthcare and automotive sectors. Through his research and applied insights, Ari continues to champion new ways we can use the senses to enrich experiences and promote self-awareness in physical spaces, web3 and beyond.
Credits and support:
Valerie Corcias, Mandy Jhamat and Riccardo Tristano Tuis.
Website: www.brainbo.co
Instagram: @mr_arigami @arigamiuk
The Nod
Luciana Haill
The Nod references the altered state of consciousness known as ‘Hypnagogia’ where we lightly enter sleep, receive subconscious surreal ideas, and often quickly return to waking life, somewhat bemused. Here the artist wearing an EEG monitor with the resultant brainwaves becoming her contextual surrounding imitates her evening train journeys where she often partakes in The Nod or watches other passengers falling in and out of hypnagogia. The artist Salvador Dali devised an analogue technique in the 1940s to encourage this investigation that he called 'slumber with a key' method - as you nod a key held in your hand hits a tin lid below, and the sound instantly awakens you - and you must write down any dream recall immediately! The EEG is realtime, you can see the waves slow down into Alpha/theta frequencies, and mixed live in GenieMo software.
Website: http://www.lucianahaill.co.uk/
Arthur Ducklin Peithotron
Terry Perk and Julian Rowe
Arthur Ducklin Peithotron is a project by Terry Perk and Julian Rowe. Arthur Ducklin (1917–1965) was an agitator and would-be demagogue who operated on the fringes of British politics in the 1950s and 60s as a self-styled leader of the right-wing League of Albion. He is best remembered for his innovative style of political activism. Ducklin was a fervent believer in Peithonics, a theory of mass manipulation pioneered by US psychologist S. McKenzie Strutt. The central tenet of Peithonics was that “persuasion has nothing to do with truth”.
As an adjunct to his theories, Strutt patented the Peithotron, an electronic device that he claimed could influence the mood of a subject through the generation of low-frequency electromagnetic radiation at levels matching those of human brain activity. By combining frequencies in complex interference patterns, this primitive attempt at manipulating the brain/technology interface could be tuned to render an enhanced state of suggestibility in anyone within range. In 1957, Ducklin acquired a Peithotron and deployed it at League rallies with the intention of making easy converts. The effect relied upon encouraging a level of excitement or anger in the audience, which the machine could then amplify.
Ducklin’s confused political ideology undermined his ambition to found a mass movement, and he eventually turned his attention to supporting the campaigns of others. He was often to be seen with his Peithotron in the background at political rallies around the world. His death in a remote town in Panama was both sudden and unexplained.
Credits and support:
League of Albion Publishing, the present owners of Ducklin’s original Peithotron, have generously agreed to lend the machine for exhibition purposes.
Websites: www.terryperk.com
Instagram: @julianroweartist
Sensory Kinship for the Third Kind
Allie E.S. Wist and Lisa Schonberg
Sensory Kinship for the Third Kind is an artistic research project by Allie E.S. Wist and Lisa Schonberg that engages in creative production through multi-sensory engagement with mushrooms.
The project team will share a poetic documentary video of their field-based workshop series. In their workshops, they will lead participants in interactions with mushroom and mycelial communications through the use of technology and creative prompts. The workshop includes activities that explore how we can sense mushrooms and speculate as to how mushrooms sense their own environments.
Fungal bodies represent a 'third kind' in their occupation of liminal spaces between life and death, hovering between our world and the underworld of subsoil. Although they are essential to the function of ecosystems, most fungal labour and energy are hidden temporally and spatially from human sensing.
The creators of this work are interested in what kind of interspecific relations can be forged through encounters with cryptic information that are primarily sensory and embodied. Their artistic work explores the potential for sensing mushrooms' 'third kind' liminality; from this 'in-betweenness,' we can learn much about the complexities of ecological entanglements.
Credits and support:
Most of the video footage was filmed by Jamel Mosely. Additional footage was filmed by A.E.S. Wist and L. Schonberg. We thank the following organisations for supporting this work: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, ASLE, Pioneerworks, NY Mycological Society, Green-wood Cemetery, Collar City Mushrooms.
Participants: Aaron Juarez, Jaehoon Choi, Avery Stempel, Shanna Goldman, Ian White & family, & Josh Goldman. Featuring audio from Ali Sifflet.
Websites:www.alliewist.com
www.lisaschonberg.com
Instagram: @lisaannschonberg @aeswist
Metaverse Divinations
Kimatica Studio
Metaverse Divinations involves real-time body tracking and AR generative visuals and is a research project funded by Arts Council England to create a series of augmented reality ritual performances. We translated our performances into augmented reality (AR) experiences developing new software tools and working with scientists and therapists. Using ritual design as a framework, this series of ritual performances promotes embodiment, interconnectedness, and connection to the self. The characters are representing light and shadow archetypes, exploring the collective unconscious and dream-like states. The AR real-time visuals represent natural elements and respond to the performer’s movement and the colours in the scene.
Website: https://kimatica.net/about/
Twitter: @kimaticastudio
Instagram: @kimaticastudio
Sonzai Zone
Liminal Vision - Emilia Tapprest & Victor Evink
Sonzai Zone (22min, 2K, 2019, Liminal Vision - Emilia Tapprest & Victor Evink) is an immersive video installation tackling the themes of intimacy and loneliness after the normalisation of ambient communication media.
An unlikely encounter between Yún and Souvd takes place in a near future where social interactions are primarily based on the mediation of human presence, known as ‘Sonzai-kan’. Shifting between XR games, Immersion Arcades, and spatial home displays, their insidiously orchestrated relationship escalates into an extreme idealisation.
Sonzai-kan 存在感 is a Japanese concept for human presence: a quality of existence or ‘affective atmosphere’ that we can perceive in other people. This quality is often lost in communication through screen-based interfaces, which are inherently not designed to mediate subtle, non-verbal cues about coexistence and affection. The idea that human presence can be mediated over distance in an ambient way has been explored in the field of Human-Computer Interaction since the late 90s.
Credits and support:
Film by Emilia Tapprest (NVISIBLE.STUDIO)
Co-development - Victor Evink
Lead role and costumes - Dasha Golova
Supporting roles - Taro Yamada, Annamaria Merkel
Website: https://sonzai.zone/
Instagram: @liminal.vision @nvisible.studio @s_x_m_b_r_a
Prehension Blooms
Neon Dance
Prehension Blooms (installation) is a precursor to a performance work by Neon Dance. Three robotic creatures inhabit a world of sand into which they carve marking with their biomimetic bodies. Humans occupying the same physical space, such as performers and audience members, can collaborate with the robot by sculpting the sand using their hands and feet. Audience members can also tele-operate these robotic beings, controlling the creatures’ motion via a video call, allowing them to view, and participate in the installation space from a remote location such as their home. This installation is an experiment in the use of robotics to explore new ways to expand performance and invite audience members to access creative spaces through stimulating new channels.
Website: https://www.neondance.org/prehension-blooms
Twitter: @SoftLabBristol / @neon_dance
Donate Yourself
Stacey Pitsillides with body>data>space
Donate Yourself is an Augmented Reality experience co-created by artist Stacey Pitsillides with body>data>space. It blends sound and 3D visuals to spark debates about our organs, tissue and body data, accessed by the public through augmented reality via QR codes.
By scanning the QR codes on the Donate Yourself banners with your mobile phone and listening to the audio stories, you will take part in an inspirational journey. The digital objects that you encounter will be seen through your phone/tablet imposed on the landscapes behind and, with the audio in your ears, stories of care, trust, immortality, consent and futures will unfold, exploring the important role our bodies play in scientific discovery.
Each experience questions how we see our body after death; as a collective source of knowledge for humanity, as a material to explore our biological make up, or even as a way of immortalising ourselves in cells. These AR sound and visual objects examine diverse perspectives on what donating parts of yourself mean to different people.
This sci-art project shares artistic interpretations of scientific imagery with the audience, from interviews with experts from the Human Cell Atlas research initiative and visual/written data from a series of artists workshops which are expanded through this unique digital experience. Gathered from a range of communities Stacey Pitsillides and body>data>space have created this AR experience to help us all consider the legacy of our bodies in this digital age.
Credits and support:
Stacey Pitsillides - Design and Creative Co-Direction
Ghislaine Boddington - Creative Co-Direction
Tadej Vindiš - Project Development and Production
Nick Rothwell - Sound Design and Technical Development
Ivor Diosi - AR Development and 3D Animation.
Donate Yourself was commissioned by One Cell At A Time, a programme of public, creative engagement activities, commissions and talks, inspired by the Human Cell Atlas. The project is based within the body>data>space AR Gifting Development Project supported by Innovate UK and the University of Greenwich 2020-21. Find out more about the project and how to access the AR experiences on the project’s official page here, or download it as PDF here.
Websites:
http://www.bodydataspace.net/2021/10/donate-yourself/
Twitter: @RestInPixels @bodydataspace
Latent Organism – A Tangible, Intuitive Interface for 3D Shape Generation
Ninon Lizé Masclef & Adrien Chuttarsing
Latent Organism is a novel technique for the creation of 3D objects using a tangible interface. Building on creations by generative algorithms, this tool allows anyone to create unique and complex 3D shapes through natural and playful interactions with an intuitive and sensitive tactile interface.
Credits and support:
Marianne Canu, Sophie Chen.
Websites:
