Presented by ISEA2013, 107 Projects and the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW.
Communication is mediated by complex systems. Both machinic and biological, it is through engagement with these systems that our lives are shaped: we perceive ourselves and experience our world through the lens of the system. But what do these ubiquitous systems look like? Can we communicate with them, and what do they have to say? Do they even exist without our presence?
Interactive art explores these relationships through systems that require engagement to be realised, and increasingly blur the lines between author and viewer-turned-participant. If a system fails in a forest … addresses questions of communication, authorship and the temporal, emergent nature of art making in interactive media.
107 Projects is the vision of seven of the driving forces behind Knot Gallery, The Frequency Lab and Token Imagination. In collaboration with a community of dedicated creative practitioners, these collectives have been working together to produce arts events since 2001. From 2001–05 the groups operated an artist run space in Surry Hills renowned for its relaxed, welcoming environment. The space was one of the most active artist run venues in inner Sydney, presenting close to 500 events and home to a wide spectrum of music, performance, spoken word, poetry and visual arts. Moving to Redfern in 2012, the space at 107 Redfern Street is a place for creative practitioners to perform, exhibit, develop new works, hone their skills, engage in workshops and continue to grow professionally. 107 Projects is a non-profit association DGR registered charity.
Curator: Scott Brown
Creative Producer: Carli Leimbach
Scott Brown is a Sessional Academic and PhD Candidate at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. His research looks at sensory experiences in physical, interactive media, and is currently examining the potential of these artforms to facilitate communication in autistic children without written or verbal language skills. Brown completed a Bachelor of Digital Media (Hons) at UNSW in 2011 and received the University Medal. His work and ‘ill-considered ramblings’ can be found at www.kodamapixel.com.
film screening event: 6-9pm, Thursday 13th June.
Electrolapse is a collection of new experimental video art that challenges normal viewing habits and looks at the systems by which we consume audio and visual content. This is an exhibition of video about video, addressing themes of system failure, manipulation, distortion and opportunity. Each presenting artist deals with the video medium in a unique and surprising way to communicate new possibilities through glitches, mash-ups, appropriation and generative programming.
Electrolapse presents a selection of emerging and established Australian and international artists, includes a number of exciting Australian and world premieres and is just a whole lot of intensely awesome nourishment for your eyes and ears.
Curated by Electrofringe Artistic Co-Producers Peter Fitzgibbon and Roslyn Helper.
Presenting Artists: Kane Ikin (MEL), Mogan Beringer (UK), Joe Hamilton (MEL), Jason Galea (MEL), Alan Proctor-Thompson (NZ), Nina Buchanan (SYD), Aristides Garcia (GER)
Future Calls The Dawn Chorus
Jenny Gillam, Eugene Hansen, Dr Kron and Daniel Shaw (NZ)
An installation juxtaposing a flock of mass-produced contemporary cyber/kitsch bird alarm clocks perching on a wall of graphic design with an audio/video performance and two streaming webcasts. Intended to heighten viewers’ sense of place, awareness of their own sensory perceptions and limitations, and how technology mediates that experience, it deliberately conflates the places that popular culture, the natural world and art occupy in our lives. The work also points to the relationship between the real and virtual experience, whilst the use of live-streamed audio and video is both an ironic reflection on the dysfunctional nature of surveillance in contemporary life, and a pointer to the changes technology is making in our perceptual space.
www.jennygillam.com
vjrex.info
Jenny Gillam holds an MFA from RMIT, Melbourne. Her installation practice, which includes elements of photography, audio, moving image and video mixing performance, engages with aspects of current debate around ecological tensions, ‘place’ as a construct, and nature and its artifice. She has recently begun exhibiting living organisms within the gallery. She develops series of exhibitions, sometimes in a site-specific manner, often produced collaboratively with other artists or with practitioners from other fields.
Eugene Hansen has been practicing and exhibiting professionally for over twenty years. He trained as a sculptor in the late eighties and early nineties at Canterbury University, Christchurch, NZ, and gained an MFA through RMIT, Melbourne. His multimedia, often collaborative installations frequently include audio and video performances, and his use of audio and video is as much about the physical properties of the materials as their metaphoric, symbolic or narrative potential.
Gillam and Hansen collaboratively develop art projects which investigate the socio-politics of ecology within a broader framework of urban neurosis and its manifestations in popular culture.
Dr. Kron, a.k.a. John Malcolmson, is an avid consumer of popular culture living and working as a freelance graphic designer in New York. He is a graduate of School of Fine Arts, Christchurch (BFA) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA), and has collaborated on several art projects, including designing the wall drawings for the previous two iterations of this project.
Daniel Shaw holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massey University. He currently works as a web designer to support his art practice, which is predominantly audiovisual performance. He has collaborated with Hansen on several previous projects, including a previous iteration of this work at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand.
MYRIAD (2012)
Loren Kronemyer (Perth/USA)
An artistic exploration of insect communication, framed by relationships of control and exchange. The body of work results from a year spent researching social insects within entomology labs with the aim of achieving a form of interspecies dialogue. Communication is approached here as a form of drawing, creating lines that reference both human writing and ant trails. The resulting images are living drawings that transform under the shifting influence of insect and human intelligence, taking on forms that are only briefly recognisable to either entity. By turns evocative, profound, and absurd, MYRIAD represents an attempt to cross evolutionary boundaries and create new forms of awareness between humans and the organisms we live intimately with.
This project was created in collaboration with SymbioticA Lab, the Centre for Integrative Bee Research (CIBER) and BeeLab Sydney.
rubicana.info
vimeo.com/53761359
Loren Kronemyer was born in LA, California, graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 with a BFA in New Genres and the department’s highest award. She has recently received a Masters of the Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Her work involves poetic yet absurd interactions between the individual and the environment, including other humans, animals and forces of nature. In attempting to reach across boundaries of time, place, scale and species, she implicates the dominant cultural forms of the present to create meaningful documents of alternative relationships to the world.
Sneaky Time
Ozge Samanci and Blacki Li Rudi Migliozzi (USA)
The human body could be compared to a clock; heartbeat, blinking, breathing … the rhythmic functions of our autonomic nervous system mark the passage of time. The very continuity of such autonomic bodily functions means that they go unnoticed, as does the passage of time. While we cannot control the progress of time, in Sneaky Time participants have the opportunity to symbolically do so. The clock only moves and ticks when the participant blinks; the synchronous sound created foregrounds this silent, usually unnoticed activity, subtly reminding both participant and viewer of their mortality.
www.ozgesamanci.com
vimeo.com/46451082
Ozge Samanci is an Assistant Professor in the Radio, Television and Film Department, Northwestern University, and a former Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Art Practice Department, University of California, Berkeley. She has an extensive background in comics and media arts, and is a published comics artist. Her interactive-digital media installations and other collaborative works have been exhibited in numerous venues including Tech Museum San Jose, SIGGRAPH, Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE), Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI), Eyedrum New Media Gallery and Sonic Generator Concert Series. She holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media (School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology), authored the book Animasyonun Onlenemez Yukselisi (The Irresistible Rise of Animation), published in Istanbul, and is currently working an autobiographical graphic novel, Dare to Disappoint, under contract.
oprahagogo (2005)
Scott Morrison (Melbourne)
oprahagogo “came about by watching people who were watching people on the TV screen”. The follow-on reactions of people in the real time world was married amazingly with the broadcasted, edited audience reactions of a ‘live’ studio environment; “Scott thought, “let’s party”, so he took them to the Queen, to the bee’s knees. She knows a good party.”
Scott Morrison is a sound and video artist whose practice encompasses live performance, gallery installation, and festival screenings focused towards the synergistic properties of the moving image. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions around Australia, and his audiovisual works have screened extensively nationally and abroad. Morrison has released work as limited editions with Room40, and is represented by Beam Contemporary, Melbourne.
RE-COG-NITION (2013)
Tara Cook (Melbourne)
RE-COG-NITION explores the question: “What is the work of art in the digital age, in relation to the contemporary state of interactive art and electronics?” A cracked LCD TV hangs on the gallery wall. As the audience approach, their presence causes changes in the image. Abstraction unfolds. The image from a video input connected to the broken TV is distorted through the dysfunctional character of the screen. As audiences simultaneously recognise both themselves and the surface of the technological other, the work acts as both a mirror and a window, revealing both the human and the technological. Instead of a disconnected, mediated experience, RE-COG-NITION connects the audience to the immediacy of technology.
Tara Cook is a Melbourne based contemporary media artist, academic and gallery director. She creates interactive, temporal, expanded and embodied works centred around relationships with technology. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, and also in Bulgaria, China, Greece and Japan, and has been the recipient of a Sydney City Council grant and a GBK Award. She is the founder and sole gallery director of New Low, an artist run initiative located in Melbourne, facilitating monthly shows of contemporary art, performance and writing. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from the University of New South Wales, where she created an expanded understanding of the topic of ‘glitch’, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of Arts, University of Melbourne. Her practice-led research attempts to reframe the aesthetic history of the pixel beyond the digital.
What the Frog’s Nose Tells the Frog’s Brain
Tega Brain (Sydney)
Part of an ongoing exploration of the production of environmental information, this work monitors electricity use within a public building and translates the information into an olfactory experience. Smell is a primal mode of communication from which it is difficult to be intellectually distanced; by manifesting electricity information in this way, the work not only explores the mechanics of perceiving information, but also suggests new possibilities for designing a more evocative human-infrastructure interface.
Tega Brain is an interdisciplinary artist whose work re-imagines infrastructures, technologies and institutions that facilitate our interaction with the biophysical world. Coming from a background in environmental engineering, her practice is inherently interdisciplinary as it explores and rethinks issues of science and environmental engineering. She is interested in the creative and experimental use of technologies, and works across a wide range of time based media, sculpture and installation.
Cave Light (2013)
Tom Hetherington (Sydney)
A return to the origins of art? … this work is an apparatus for cave wall light painting. A carnival mirror missing its glass, we playfully shape the pixel pastiche, as our bodies are made malleable. Cave Light explores the impact of the tangible on the virtual; by using touch, the participant can expand present time through the screen and beyond.
Tom Hetherington (Hethro) is a media artist working predominantly with moving image and sound. His work explores the rhythmic relationship between body, mind, spirit and universe. He has a specific interest in the implementation of time, place and the moving image in a performance context, and his work is often inclusive and interactive. He completed a Bachelor of Digital Media at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, and with a final Honours year pending, has taken time off to focus on numerous projects including performances with Optic Soup, a live visuals collective who perform regularly throughout NSW. He is also an organiser and contributor to Space Trash, an underground cinema night held monthly in Marrickville, Sydney.
The Trans-Emotion Room (2013)
WildPark: Yiwon Park and Peter Wildman (Sydney)
The Korean term ‘Inyeon’ expresses the spontaneous force that exists between people, a force which brings us together and creates a trail of interactions throughout our lives. The Trans-Emotion Room is the first work in a series titled Inyeon. Central to these works is the occupation of one of the most personal spaces we inhabit, a space that carries us across landscapes, a space that we mold with each step: our shoes. In The Trans-Emotion Room, participants are asked to share a small room in a pair of shoes provided. The shoes act as an interface, monitoring the body for variations in body temperature that occur when personal space is thus shared, and the room responds to this connection by subtly altering the colour spectrum of the light surrounding the participants.
Yiwon Park is an emerging artist who emigrated from Korea to Australia in 2003. She obtained her BFA in Korea and an MA from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, where she is currently completing her Masters in Fine Arts by research. She has had four solo and numerous group exhibitions in Korea and Australia. She was awarded a Residency program at Camac-Centre d’Art Marnay in France in mid-2012, for which she received a postgraduate research travel grant from the College of Fine Arts. She also presented a conference paper on her work at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conference in 2012.
Peter Wildman has been interested in interaction ever since, as a baby, a hanging seascape was placed above his cot. Recently he has been interested in absolute nothing, and trying to make something from it. He is also working on a project allowing other people to shape his life. His work ethic and drive has brought him to graduate from a Bachelor of Digital Media with First Class Honours (COFA, UNSW) and publish his thesis. He hopes to build his art practice further, and looks forward to interacting into the future.
This project has benefited from an Arts & Design Grant courtesy of Arc @ UNSW Limited.
