solitary automata

Generative music and visuals gig

A bit of fun…a gig with Alice (on cello & laptop) and Ollie (laptop) doing some generative music with some visuals supplied by VJ Jeeves. Stutter at Horse Bazaar Wednesday 12 November.  

Add comment November 12th, 2008 exhibitions

21:100:100

21:100:100 is a gallery-based exhibition of \”100 works by 100 sound artists produced in the 21st century\”. Developed by Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in collaboration with artists Oren Ambarchi and Marco Fusinato the exhibition featured all 100 works playing through individual headphones in the gallery space. Visitors can listen to each for for as long or as little as they like. While at first it seemed rather incongruous to use a visual arts space for sound art, the blue-light visual aesthetic, against the rats nest of headphone cables spiralling up into the ceiling like some kind of sonic life-support system, actually worked.

Naturally enough, a survey of this size features many local and international works of significance. Attempting to listen to all 100 works in one session is fairly ambitious, and your tolerance for focused listening may fade at some point less than 100 works…it\’s a fine line between sonic popcorn, noise and something deeper.

One of the standout works for me was David Dunn\’s The Sound of Light in Trees: The Acoustic Ecology of Pinyon Pines from 2006. Recorded using specialist microphones placed inside the bark of a pine tree in New Mexico, Dunn layers two years of recordings of beetle activity into a 1 hour soundscape that is both familiar and strange. 

Add comment October 19th, 2008 ecosystems • exhibitions

Digiville: forms of life

Turbulence is part of the line-up of works showing at the Digiville workshop \”Forms of Life\”, Brighton, UK on the 1st September.

Here\’s the Programme and the Press release.

Digiville 1st September
Lighthouse, Brighton

Forms of Life

From research into our relationship with microbiology in her Normal Flora
project, to her role as the ‘self-organising’ artist in residence in the
Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex University Anna
Dumitriu’s work looks at the very nature of Life. What is the relationship
between microbiology and artificial life? Is life something that can be
abstracted from organic processes? And how can these abstract concepts be
made physical and tangible for us?

To respond to these questions Anna has curated a full day Digiville Event
(come for the day Arduino Physical Computing Workshop or the evening talks
or both).

Speakers: Anna Dumitriu, Simon Park, Milton Mermikides, Blay Whitby

Artworks: Milton Mermikides, Simon Park, Steve Downer and Pattie
Hendrie: Microcosmos; Paul Brown: Chromos and Sandlines; Anna Dumitriu: Normal Flora; Jon McCormack: Turbulence; eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger): International Airport Montello ; Peta Clancy: Visible Human Bodies; boredomresearch: Micro-Biomes

Add comment August 30th, 2007 exhibitions

Artist makes Video

ARTIST MAKES VIDEO : art rage survey 1994 -1998
art rage: artworks for television
Featuring over 80 of Australia\’s best known contemporary artists who were invited to make a video work for TV in the 1990s; on show during the 20th anniversary of ABC\’s rage.

With special guests;
Megan Harding, ABC TVs Executive Producer for Arts, Comedy and Entertainment, and Kim Machan, originating Curator and Producer of art rage: artworks for television, and Director of MAAP (Multi Arts Asia Pacific)

Venue: DELL Gallery @ QCA
Date: Friday June 22
Time: 6.00 – 8.00pm
Flyer for the event

Add comment June 22nd, 2007 exhibitions • exhibitions

New Nature

Universal Zoologies is currently showing at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Aotearoa, New Zealand as part of the exhibition New Nature. The exhibition includes site specific work– Takashi Kuribayashi’s installation, ‘Washstand’, Fiona Hall’s garden, ‘Mown’ with its 2,500 New Zealand plants, and Tom Mulcaire’s I-TASC project ‘Groundhog’ installed on the foreshore with its wind turbine and ‘snow lounge’ Antarctic-based soundtrack. Curated by Rhana Devenport.

Add comment May 26th, 2007 exhibitions

Eden at Espacio Cultural El Tanque

Eden is currently showing at Espacio Cultural El Tanque (and old petrol tank converted into a gallery) situated in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canary Islands) 27th April – 27th June 2007

More publicity.

Add comment April 26th, 2007 exhibitions

Transcapes Symposium

I\’ll be giving a talk at the Transcapes Symposium on Friday, 3 November 2006, at UTS, Sydney. There is also an associated exhibition, \”Artificial Nature 1\” which runs from 31 October — 24 November 2006 and includes my Impossible Nature book and DVD.

Add comment October 24th, 2006 architecture • exhibitions • talks

Turbulence in the Canary Islands

Turbulence is currently showing in the Canary Islands as part of the exhibition \”El Surrealismo en la era de las Tecnologias\” in Las Palmas 22.09 – 29.10 and in Tenerife 10.11 – 09.12.2006

Add comment October 16th, 2006 exhibitions

John Lansdown Prize

Eden has been awarded the John Lansdown Prize for Interactive art. (More information about Eurographics Awards)

Add comment October 10th, 2006 exhibitions

Shanghai

Arrived in Shanghai on 20th July. The image above shows the Pudong new development area from the other side of the Huangpu river, near the popular \”Bund\” precinct. Hard to believe that in 1990 much of Pudong was just boggy farmland and a dream in a developers eye. The popular Oriental Pearl TV Tower (also shown below at night) is one of Shanghai\’s more ostentatious architectural marvels. It takes on a more graceful appearance at night, where the consequences of massive electricity consumption are cast to the wind, and Shanghai becomes a city of colourful lights.

The most appealing architecture is the Jinmao tower, apparently currently the world\’s fourth tallest building at 340m. The view from the 88th floor observation deck (below) is both spectacular and frightening. For someone coming from a country like Australia, with a relatively modest city population density, it is difficult to grasp the scale and density of Shanghai. The hazy plume of emissions over the city seems symbolic of a planet drowning in its own development. The golden haze at sunset has an eerie, subtle beauty, like a classical painting. The summer rains can wash the sky temporarily clean (bleeding pollution down on the streets, to be washed into the river and out to sea).

Once there were bikes, now there are cars. Lots of cars. Who can deny China\’s aspirational middle class the right to enjoy the same convenience and disposability that other countries currently have. Shanghai is a frightening glimpse of the future and gives a sense of scale of the serious problems our planet faces in terms of consumption, population density, dependence on diminishing resources, water quality and climate change.

I visited the Shanghai museum of Science and Technology, which includes a special exhibition space on Shanghai management strategies for addressing environmental problems, however many of the initiatives have dates that have already expired, with few commitments to quantitative measures or any quantitative summary of results achieved to date. Interestingly, a display of hydrogen fuel cell concept vehicles is on display and Beijing has purchased a single fuel cell bus (cost around $2M!) in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.

I\’ve spent most of the last few days setting up my work for the exhibition. Communication problems extend the setup time, right up until a few moments before the opening! Here is the entrance to the museum from \”Thumb Plaza\” with one of my Morphogenesis series images (unfortunately uncredited) used for the exhibition poster. The exhibition of Australian art and science collaborations (written up in a previous post runs from 23rd July to 28th August 2006. There was a day-long symposium on Sunday, 23rd July, with a number of the artists speaking about the ideas that informed their work and a response from a number of Chinese academics and artists. The translation process slowed everything down, and, to some extent limited the depth and complexity of ideas that could be discussed. It seems that the same initial issues keep cropping up (such as \”What is art?\”), limiting the time to cover more interesting ideas. However, as a cross-cultural event, bringing awareness of current ideas in new media and art/science collaborations, it was a success.

More information on the Novamedia news page.

Add comment July 23rd, 2006 architecture • exhibitions • travel