Cardiomorphologies, by George Khut
Artist’s Description
Cardiomorphologies is an interactive installation developed by George Khut that enables participants to explore aspects of their own psychophysiology, with the aid of a custom-designed biofeedback artwork.
Breath and heart rate data collected by sensors are used to control a video projection consisting of a set of halo-like concentric circles that pulsate and blush in time with participants’ own breathing and heart rate patterns. Participants hear their breathing and heartbeats transformed into a gentle sound scape of wavelike noises and subsonic impulses. More details…
Video
My Involvement
Cardiomorphologies was developed by George Khut using “computational toys” that I developed as part of my PhD work. These toys were designed for George to understand how to map the signals of input data to the sound and graphics engines (the latter of which I also built), without needing to rely on the aesthetic interpretation of a third-party.
Outcomes
The work has been exhibited in Performance Space and the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia, and the Arnolfini, Bristol, UK. George Khut used the work for his Doctor of Creative Arts Thesis.
Impossible Geographies 01: Memory, by Petra Gemeinboeck
Artist’s Description
IG01: Memory dynamically traces visitors’ actions, mixing them in unexpected ways with memories held and stolen by the physical space. Throughout the exhibition, those memories of visitors and actions seep into the environment, creating a virtually woven fabric of events that grows and evolves over time.
A room is threaded with a network of laser beams, coated with video projections and equipped with cameras, its ‘eyes’. When crossed, visitors interrupt the space and trigger a fracture through which a virtual space can seep into the physical present. Each of the ‘neural extensions’ of the space allow for the creation of fragmentary, connected and fluid narratives. As a result, the space becomes infused with the presence of past events, making slippery the relationship between the fictive and the ‘real’ memory.
My Involvement
I was programmer for this piece. The work was technically demanding, requiring snippets of video to be stored over a several-week period, then warped and merged in real-time, according to participants’ interactions with it. Specifically, not all pixels of video played at the same speed, producing a haunting temporal warping effect. I developed the interactive effect whereby recent videos ‘bubbled open’ to reveal different videos from the past.
Outcomes
The work was exhibited at Studio Soto in Boston, MA, in 2005. The Boston Globe described it as ‘a powerfully absorbing interactive work’ in its review. Petra and I are currently developing Impossible Geogrophies 02: Urban Fiction, which uses a mobile phone interface, for exhibition in August 2007.
Sea.nce, by Norie Neumark, Maria Miranda, Greg Turner
Artists’ Description
The sea.nce takes place in a networked environment, in which the audience is not necessarily physically co-located, with each member logging on to the Flash-based interface. Through a system which relays the collectivised motion of the players’ avatars, the planchette (the ouija board’s pointer) is moved around the board from letter to letter. When the planchette lands on a letter it responds with the sounds of the spoken alphabets selected, according to the ‘e.motionographic’ results of the players’ ‘e.motions’, from over twenty languages. This selection ‘audiolises’ the networked emotions of the players. At the same time players type their interpretations, questions, feelings, thoughts and ideas into the message box, creating a corresponding textual cacophony.
Video
Outcomes
The piece was developed for ISEA 2004, the prestigious biennial symposium of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, and was performed on a boat travelling between in Helsinki, Finland, Marienham, Sweden, and Tallinn, Estonia, with satellite internet connection to online participants (which worked intermittently—it was cloudy!).
Our 2004 paper Uncanny Interaction: A Digital Medium for Networked E.motion described the project, and was published in the proceedings of Interaction: Systems, Practice and Theory, Creativity and Cognition Studios Press, Sydney, Australia.
cubeLife, by Dave Everitt and Greg Turner
Artists’ Description
When exhibited, cubeLife exists only in response to audience input via a heartbeat monitor. Initially, the screen is blank. Each participant creates a new magic cube entity in virtual 3D space by putting a small heartbeat clip on their finger. This mathematical entity is thereby given a finite life and travels about the space leaving tracks and playing a sound that builds up an audio presence in combination with the sounds of other cubes in the space. After a while each object dies, leaving only its tracks. At the end of a session, there is silence and the frozen image represents the collective heartbeats of each participating viewer.
My Involvement
I initially started this project working for Dave on a voluntary basis, to learn about virtual reality and Java programming, but was quickly seduced by the aesthetic and technical challenge of making interactive art, to the extent that I became co-artist. cubeLife’s development was the topic of my 2002 Master’s thesis in Computer Science.
Outcomes
cubeLife was constructed in 1999–2002, was exhibited at the 1999 bioMatrix show in Loughborough, UK, and is permanently online, with a minor update in 2005 for an exhibition in Derby, UK.