Archives for the Month of July, 2010

XXXY – Scenographic Transfigurations

Luma - XXXY
Luma – XXXY

XXXY, formed of the Rome based duo of Sladzana Bogeska & Giuseppe Pradella, are currently creating live cinematic performances that eschew typically fast moving graphics or explicit sound reactivity. Luma, their most recent piece, is an extremely slow transforming abstraction that alludes to landscape topologies and psycophysiographical terrains. The shifting movements of the contoured surfaces, in Luma, takes place at a very slow pace rendering the transformations almost imperceptible, creating a kind of chimerical and paradoxical effect – as seen in the video documentation. Sound forms an important expressive aspect to XXXY’s live cinematic performances, augmenting the alluvial transfigurations, with passages of slowly shifting noise envelopes and drones. XXXY most recent performance of Luma was on a 3 screen span at that the Cronosfera Festival in Turin in May.

Selected Tweets #8 May-July 2010

The Pyramid - SublueThe Pyramid – Sublue

Microblogged: Recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream. Very occasionally a post may have additional descriptive text, overriding its original 140 character version.

Black Rain by Semiconductor utilises Heliospheric imaging of solar winds and coronal mass ejections.

1-Bit Symphony by Tristan Perich is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip.

Organizing Critters, by Seung Joon Choi, where Critter bots double as frenetic action painters.

ButDoesItfloat collates drawings by Robert Horvitz, who’s Quantum Symmetries were mentioned previously at DataisNature. http://tinyurl.com/33vholl

Variable4 uses meteorological sensors & algorithmic scores to translate weather conditions into music.

Tele-present wind, by David Bowen, where Installation dynamics are derived from outside wind measurements.

Magic Mountains & Impossible Clouds – Alex Yudzon’s pattern-map scenographies.

The Pyramid by Subblue. Hazy pyramidal recursive structures that transform into mountains over time.

Impossible Cloud 9 - Alex Yudzon & The Pyramid - SublueImpossible Cloud 9 – Alex Yudzon

Defetto’s Moiré consists of 3-Dimensional trapezoid transformations set to Jan Jelinek’s music.

The kinetic sonic sculptures of Chung-kun including Kong, a light sensitive percussive contraption.

Fabric Machine – Katrin Stumreich. Light sensors measure moving fabric opacities and use the data to generate sound .

UVA’s Speed of Light. A fibre optic installation that generates intersecting light beams.

Alex Mclean & Geraint Wiggins have uploaded their paper on ‘Bricolage Programming in the creative arts.’

Sphere & Torus Autologlyphs [ via Selective-Laser-Sintering] by Henry Segerman for Bridges 2010.

Clint Fulkerson – Autocatalytic life-forms

Cross
Cross Section of a Pre-Fab Pollen Grain – Clint Fulkerson

Clint Fulkerson is one of a growing number artists dedicated to hand generating computer-like patterns, geometries and complex mathematical forms. The procedural aspect of mark-making Clint uses is derived from an auto-catalytic self-organising principle, a self-reflexive recipe that has as much in common with morphological systems as it does drawing.

‘I create my artwork through the slow application of decisive marks. As I draw, I follow a loose formula based on what I’ve already drawn, filling areas of the picture plane gradually, without making initial layout sketches. This makes the final product somewhat unexpected and emergent.’

In this sense the drawing could be seen to be a system in action whereby local agents (drawing marks) define successive marks to create global structures of complexity that are often unaware of their ongoing mutating configurations.

This emergent behaviour has been noted in morphological systems and biological colonies, at length. No surprise, then, that many of Clint’s drawings have titles alluding to the development of organisms such as meiosis and mitosis. In some some of the drawings Voronoi-like meshes appear to generate tensile forces of subdivisioning cellular activity.

Related:
Emma McNally – Emergent Cartographies
Bruce Pollock – A Scroll Through the Alluvial Cellular Terrain
Robert Horvitz – Quantum Symmetries
Matt Shlian – Everything, Everything
Erwin Keustermans – Patterns by Partition
Human Robots & Space-Filling Emotions

Materia Obscura – The Transmutational Chemograms of Jürgen Reble

Materia Obscura - Jürgen RebelMateria Obscura – Jürgen Reble

Jürgen Reble Materia Obscura and Instabile Materie films utilized the process of chemical degradation of celluloid to create rich textural morphologies that act as visual insights into the films own materiality. Instabile Materie was created by exposing 16 mm film strips to crystallizing salts and other corrosive materials, the resulting lattices and patchwork aggregations appear to record, as if using a scanning electron microscope, the chemical and molecular structure of the salts themselves. The ‘chemograms’ stills created from Instabile Materie were later digitized and used to create the more recent high definition Materia Obscura. The speed of the frame sequences were further slowed down enabling the analysis of new kinds of transitions and transformations, pertaining to the geological as well as the alchemical. Materia Obscura was shown accompanied by a multi-channel soundtrack by Thomas Koner at this years Sonic Acts Festival. Footage can be found here

Jürgen is no stranger to the techniques of the manual processing of film footage using mechanical, chemical and even biological influences. From 1979-1989 he was a member of the artist collective Posted in no boxes! | 1 Comment »

Philip Beesley – Reflexive Forests, Fields and Reefs

Philip Beesley - Reflexive Forests, Fields and ReefsHylozoic Soil – Philip Beesley

Philip Beesley’s sculpture and installation works utilise automated geotextiles, lattices of acrylic tiles, and reflexive materials to create artificial plants, reefs and cybernetic forests. Incorporating an array of sensors (whiskers) and actuators, these ecosystems interact with the environments and anyone wishing to wander through its digital/mechanised undergrowth.

Hylozoic Soil, an immense chandelier of intricate forest-like material contains branches holding feathers and fur, which reach out to stroke or be stroked.

‘The sculpture responds to human ‘occupation’ with air movement, produced by peristatic waves of motion within distributed fields of lightweight-pores. Arrays of capacitance-sensing whiskers and shape-memory alloy actuators are used to pull air and organic matter through the occupied space.’

In action, there appears to exist a tension between the apparent cyborgian, and arguably ominous triffid-like forms, and their soft benevolent actions and behaviour of calm curiosity.