Ice core modulations: Performative digital poetics

Andrea Wollensak PhD, Bridget Baird PhD and Judith Goldman / USA

Ice Core Modulations is an inter-disciplinary collaboration involving electronic generative art and simultaneous live performance (approx. 13mins). In each unique enactment, a visual artist, a poet, a computer scientist, and a composer engage with collectively developed processes for exploring and creatively interpreting the climate data on the Earth's atmosphere from ancient through contemporary times, collected from Antarctic ice core samples.

The visual-graphic elements of Ice Core Modulations have been developed in Processing visualization language. Data on changing CO2 levels through geological time are used as a driver to shift the behavior and appearance of representations both of CO2 bubbles trapped in the ice and of ice cracking due to global warming.

Ice Core Modulations poetry component includes both visual and composed sonic elements, using language culled from scientific research on ice as atmospheric archive. As the poet performs, textual fragments appear and visually interact within the landscape of evolving and dissolving gaseous and crystalline forms. This on-screen generation of phrases and live voice is processed in real-time and uses effects such as reverb and distortion. With the ice's CO2 content increasing over time, the processing of the poet's reading becomes more extreme.

  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    hivemind

    Gwyan Rhabyt / USA
    California State University East Baynone
    www.gwyanrhabyt.net/
    Hive Mind connects an active beehive in the Santa Cruz mountains of coastal California with a gallery installation built of over 1750 individually programmable LEDs in a creative, abstract visualization. The beehive is tracked in real time with sensors monitoring the temperature, humidity, sound level, activity level, population, honey reserves, and, via cameras and computer vision algorithms, the arrival and departure of each bee as it forages. This information streams live from a small computer at the hive to another computer at the gallery which uses the data to control LEDs hanging from an aluminum frame in a 3D configuration. It is wall mounted with core dimensions of 193cm x 160cm x 61cm.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Bed of Oblivion

    Alejandro Jimenez Londoño and Liliana Maria Vergara Zambrano / Brazil
    Pontifical Javeriana University - Cali
    An extensive visual experimentation and new languages that relate to different technologies from basic informatics have marked XXI Century. This new media meets with multiple visual representations that generate effects and changes in the image's symbolic construction so that education and communication models art transformed. Digital art as a new expression media, where digital image has turned, within these few decades, in the new iconographic form. It has allowed technical procedures such as Video Mapping exploration to boom and constantly evolve in diverse contexts both graphic and audiovisual, yielding relevant changes in space and image perception, technique and interactivity, therefore promoting a progressive digital culture.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Matters of Gravity

    Nahum Romero and Ale de la Puente / Mexico
    independent
    www.nahum.xyz
    Two years of reflection and a few seconds in zero gravity were the origins of a series of artist works that have been completed at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. There, on board the iconic Ilyushin 76 MDK, 9 artists and 1 scientist from Mexico were subject to an environment of weightlessness. A few seconds were enough to experience eternity, to tell a story, to break a paradigm, to liberate a molecule, to have an illusion, to experience movement without references, to create poetry out of falling bodies, to make the useless become useful and to search for the impossible embrace.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    escaping chair

    Takeshi Oozu, Aki Yamada and Hiroo Iwata / Japan
    University of Tsukuba
    A furniture-device is the device having a furniture appearance and physical input and output functions. The Escaping Chair is a furniture-device capable of having physical and dynamic interaction with a subject to create self-awareness towards the intent of their actions and personification of the furniture-device. The chair interacts with the bystanders by trying to move away from nearby people. By doing this, the device tries to make a person unable to sit on it, stimulating their perception towards their sitting action, while also making the person consider the Chair's "personality".
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Anatomy for Movement: Line 3

    Monica Bate Vidal / Chile
    University of Chile, Flores Foundation
    etab.cl/monica-bate
    Anatomy for Movement: Line 3 is a project where you can see wire that has the characteristic of being composed of two materials (Niquel and Titanium) that react differently when they are exposed to a certain temperature. This makes that this object, generically called Muscle Wire, appears to be an object gifted with life that twists itself when stimulated with electricity as if it was a little Frankenstein. The act of observation has become scarce in this fast-paced world. In Anatomía para el movimiento, the author turns this wire into an observation subject, in the same way that the scientists contemplate a flower, an animal, a part of the body or any natural phenomenon; to then translate these observations to a medium that can make that act (the observation) to last through illustrations.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Diligent Operator

    Byeongwon Ha / USA
    Virginia Commonwealth University
    www.bwonha.com
    Nam June Paik (1932-2006) exhibited a progressive music environment for audiences, Random Access (1963) in his first solo show. It allowed audiences to make their own sound collages by interacting with visual audiotapes on a white wall. The interactive approach of Random Access was mainly intertwined with his musique concrète composing experiences. This paper examines the relationship between Paik's work and musique concrète, and articulates Paik's contributions to making a prototype of musical interactive art. Based on the study, Diligent Operator (2016) suggests a creative musical space with Max/MSP Jitter and Arduino.
  • Date
    May 24, 2017

    Floating Painting

    Byeongwon Ha / USA
    Virginia Commonwealth University
    www.bwonha.com
    Floating Painting explores visitors' passive role as a portrait model in interactive art. This visualizes the process of drawing a painting over a long time just as drawing a real portrait painting. A webcam scans a visitor's face into an 18-by-32 pixilated image, and the LED canvas emits one color pixel of the image per three hundred milliseconds in order, then the webcam simultaneously re-photographs the LED colors on the canvas. Next, viewers can see the drawing process that illustrates the face on the wall. Unlike most interactive art projects with real-time closed-circuit video systems, in Floating Painting, visitors as passive models experience temps mort, or dead time to see their slow portraits, and to rethink their role in interactive art.
  • Date
    May 24, 2017

    GeoObs/Geometry of the Observation

    Daniel Cruz / Chile
    University of Chile
    www.masivo.cl
    “GeoObs” is a mixed media installation which observes the relations of three layers, Device, Image and Data, to build a dialogue to define the blurred definition of the privacy in the actual system of the visual representation in the global net. The installation explores the joints, cracks and displacements the contemporary context of the global net, confronting models and complex systems to build alliterations and iterations through visual strategies like site specific action, social and geopolitical relations, as also territorial gestures to highlight the concepts of invisibility , transparency, tracking and trace.
en_USEnglish