Solar Flare

Michael Fox-Jessica Rodrigues / United Kingdom-Mexico
University of Hull-University of Guanajuato
jessicaariannerodriguez.wordpress.com

A1-SolarFlare | B1-StillTransmitting | B2-Even When I'm Gone A piece in three movements inspired by the film Sunshine. The piece was made with a damaged synth, and recordings of an old family piano; The synth constantly warps like how traveling through space involves the distortion of space and time itself, and the detuned piano samples are manipulated to express more than the raw sounds can. The distorted and twisted video effects reflect and amplify these themes.

  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    TOPICS

    Anil Camci / USA
    University of Illinois at Chicago
    anilcamci.com

    THEMES (tr. contact, touch) is a stochastic audiovisual performance. The software underlying the performance integrates the artist into a generative system as a module of analysis. The software interface affords control over probability distributions instead of immediate parameters. Sound acts as a seed; the artist listens, and in return, performs probabilities. All sounds and images are generated in real time. The graphics, which react to sounds, guide the viewers through the diegetic layers of the performance; the unfolding visual narrative highlights the contrasts between the alternating tools of the performance (ie a laptop and a modular synthesizer). The software design of Themes draws inspiration from Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte, Morton Subotnick's Touch, and Curtis Roads' Touche pas. Temas, which generates purely abstract sounds and imagery, stochastically traverses the fine line between the organic and the synthesized, forming contacts with representationality.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    SYNTHCITY 

    Anil Camci / USA
    University of Illinois at Chicago
    anilcamci.com

    SYNTHCITY is a generative audiovisual installation which constantly creates unrealistic versions of a city by algorithmically blending its real landscapes, objects, sounds and people. In doing so, this work aims to highlight our acculturation to modern means of industrialization, and its often-ignored impact on social and civic systems. In Soundscape theory, lo-fi acoustic environments are those that exhibit an overpopulation of sonic elements. A lo-fi soundscape is often the mark of an industrialized urban environment; The acoustic affordances of such an environment are deemed disproportionate to human physiology, and can be amplified to hazardous levels. SYNTHCITY explores the relationship between hi-fi and and lo-fi acoustic environments from a multimodal perspective: as it computationally blends organic and inorganic sound-producing objects, and resonant spaces of a city, it does so in both the auditory and the visual domains . The result is an unlikely mixture of mundane objects that are out of proportion and out of place. By contrasting the thresholds of audiovisual stimulation in various parts of a city, it realigns the viewer's perspective on what tends to be regarded as natural or comfortable in everyday environments.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    parallel 

    Lawrence Bird / Canada
    University of Manitoba
    vimeo.com/lawrencebird

    A continuous video of moving satellite imagery captured along the 49th parallel, the Canada/US border, "parallel" mobilizes imagery from Google Earth's historical database to expose discrepancies in the archived image of the planet. As one follows the pan, anomalies in the image become apparent: digital artifacts having to do with when a given area came under the eye of a satellite, and at what resolution. As the virtual camera moves, the physical border appears, disappears, is replaced and displaced by both geographical features and media artifacts. Blurrings, double exposures, seams between satellite tiles, images from different seasons or times, all create a parallel landscape with its own boundaries, topography, areas of density and intensity. Digital and material realms mingle, charged with the politics of two nations and the legacy of colonial epistemology. Soundtrack comprises found audio, and ambient sound from ISS and an MQ-9 Reaper drone.  "parallel" is an evolving, frequently updated project. Previous iterations have been screened at: Coder et Decoder la Frontiere, Anti-Atlas of Borders, Université Libre de Bruxelles (April – May 2016) Once is Nothing, Inter/Access Gallery, Toronto (Feb. 2015); Movable Borders Furtherfield Gallery, London, UK (May 2013), Another Atlas, RAW: Gallery of Architecture & Design, Winnipeg (April, 2013).
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Decomposing Landscape

    Buddhaditya Chattopadhyay / India
    University of Leiden
    budhaditya.org

    We have arguably entered the Anthropocene epoch, a new geological era defined by unprecedented man-made disturbances over earth's ecologies and cultural heritages. In this era, the ecological integrity as well as traditional cultures and heritage of bucolic landscapes in the emerging economies like India are endangered due to governmental pressure for rapid growth in technological infrastructure and industrial development. In this context, multi-channel sound composition Decomposing Landscape as part of a sound and video installation is developed through extensive field recordings made at specific sites now considered Special Economic Zones, situated in the eastern part of India. The work creates a discursive auditory situation to facilitate a contemplative observation of such transitive landscapes. The work intends to delineate the transition of India from a pastoral past gearing fast towards the contemporary urban, rendered within a mode of questioning. The large-scale media art project aims to practice digital technology to mediate engendered sites in contemporary art and helps disseminate cultural values to trigger public awareness. The project not only intends to foster the capacity to preserve heritage, but also records cultural transformation of conflict- ridden sites and landscapes for public intervention and artistic transformation to address the possibility of achieving reconciliation and peace.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    PIXELDUST

    Jesse Drew, Glenda Drew and Spencer Mathews / USA
    University of California at Davis
    www.jessedrew.com

    In a world increasingly threatened by erosion of civil rights, environmental destruction and economic disparity, PIXELDUST presents a visual/aural display of hope, faith and resoluteness through short autobiographical texts and visual portraits from inspirational figures in world history. Participants approach a shrine/altar that triggers a visual dust storm of pixels that rise from the bottom of the screen. While the 'pixeldust' swirls, an autobiographical statement is heard/displayed from an unknown person, taken from a position of hopelessness, despair or fear expressed in that person's life. As the voice/text ends, the pixels assemble and reveal the person's identity, easily recognizable figures who clearly overwhelmed their weaknesses and made substantial contributions to our world. PIXELDUST is designed to be an “engine” built to accept public contributions of inspirational figures from all points of the world. It is designed to be a public display resource to console and give hope to people around the world who fight for peace and social justice.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    wake vortex

    Dejan Grba / Serbia
    New Media, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of the Arts in Belgrade; Digital Art PhD Program, Interdisciplinary Studies, University of the Arts in Belgrade
    jangrba.dyndns.org

    Wake Vortex is an ongoing series of generative videos and images built around the idea that digital raster image can be treated as a three-dimensional object and viewed not just frontally but also from any other side. This process can be understood as line-scanning of digital imagery. Viewed orthogonally from the side, the image is perceived as a one-pixel wide line, while orthogonal scanning of a stacked set of video frames creates a new set of images which can be animated, and certain combinations of source materials and scanning sides/directions produces interesting results. Wake Vortex employs (re)creativity with orthogonal scanning of the artworks and cultural artifacts which were themselves developed through various modes of innovative combinatorics. Dimensional collapse in orthogonal scanning reveals new formal values and facilitates layered observation. While visually estranged, the generated imagery retains the suggestiveness of the original so the viewer intuitively regards it analytically. In aviation and seamanship, wake vortex is often a dangerous, unpredictable turbulent trail generated by the craft's motion. In this project, it points to the complexity of the imperceptible or unregistered default values of an artwork or cultural artifact, to their unforeseen expressive, cognitive, ethical and political consequences.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    scars&borders 

    Mitra Azar / USA
    independent
    vimeo.com/mitraazar/collections

    Scars&Borders is an ongoing archive of images shot by the artist investigating crises locations at geographical borders from the imaginary yet real perspective metaphorically located at the buffering areas between two confining countries - where technically and symbolically there's no proper jurisdiction of a country's law over another. The political danger of this zone is underlined by their prison-state status and by the strategies of distraction enabled on site via presence of duty frees and/or touristic attractions, both responsible for anesthetizing the subversive strength of those spaces. Those borders are selected on the basis of their sociopolitical and aesthetics potential in regards to disclosing narratives in the frame of challenging political situations, and studied from the point of view of an aesthetic of crises. Thus, the praxis of the artistic research looks at borders not anymore as frozen scars but rather as virtual lines of flights, optimal for the beginning of a process of deterritorialization from a certain type of bio-political control, for example the one on the notion of human movement. Scars&Borders generates a series of site-specific works with the means of photography, filmmaking and performances at borders' areas around the globe.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Wake up! the fight does not only last one day

    Johana Marcela Jimenez Orozco / Colombia
    Pontifical Javeriana University-University of Caldas
    urbansoundscapes.tumblr.com

    Since a couple of months the Colombian state has taken a little more consciousness about the need to protect one of the most vital resources for every living creature: the water, the element that most value should have for the human being, which is only 0, 4% (potable water) in the entire planet, which is, nowadays, a big part contains contamination traces, result of unconscious human actions; one of the protection measures that are being carried out in Colombia I am interested in sticking out one of them, located in Villamaría, in Gallinazo county, place where mining activities were intended and would directly affect the river and all the nearby water sources; These tasks were recently suspended for legal actions implemented by people of town. I want to highlight all these fights that have the objective to look for the wellness of everybody and I want to make a call of attention with the proposal to continue supporting this goals that make this world a better one, we want to join more people to fight with us, and partner this world with the nature enjoying all that it does for us.
en_USEnglish