Art.ficial Emotion

Neon Organic – Marius Watz

Back into the loop finally after a few weeks in wonderful São Paulo, Brazil. I’ve had an excellent time with the curators and production crew of Art.ficial 3.0 as well as many artists who took part in the show together with the speakers involved in the connected symposium.

I’ve finally relented and opened a flickr account and my first batch of photos of the show is up for viewing. The ever-industrious Marius Watz has of course already done the same with this great set.

The exhibition brought together an exciting group of works with impressive variety that all explored in some way elements of cybernetics, interaction and interface. Many of the works could be seen classic’s in the field, take Golan Levin’s and Zachary Liebermans installation version of ‘Messe de Voce’ for example where speech, shouts and songs produced by participants of the work are augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software.

Alongside the exhibition ran a symposium of talks by international guests (artists & scientists) on such topics as interface science, cybernetics and computational art and their inter-relationships. Specific information can be found here.

It is of course worth noting the theme of art & cybernetics has fertile history. In 1968 Jasia Reichardt, Assistant Director of the ICA, curated the now seminal show of tech/computer art, Cybernetic Serendipity. Jaisa was invited to talk at the symposium giving a compelling account of history of computer/machine art and some great insider info on the Cybernetic Serendipity show itself.

I was fortunate enough to travel back to London with Jaisa and Otto Rössler (who gave a talk on Endophysics) and so took the opportunity to interrogate them for some more details bout their work.

My piece for the show, Talysis 2, utilises video feedback as a generative principle. The recursive properties of video feedback allow for complex symmetrical geometric forms to evolve in real-time as the system interfaces with itself – The software used was the excellent VVVV. I will post more documentation on this piece sometime in the near future.

São Paulo from above and below

São Paulo is a fantastic city with a special thing going on – a mega-city rated among the largest few on the planet. From 20 floors up its possible to view its amazing expanse in every direction – a crystalline sprawl of hi-rise buildings throw up an endless carpet of fascinating geometries.

Thanks to the Itua Crew – Marcos, Kuja, Sofia, Guilherme, Ricardo, Vini, and Marcel for making my time in Brazil such a great and memorable one!

Dataisnature transmissions will now resume their normal frequency.