Extract from essay "Ghost Words" by Nikos Papasteriguadis & Victoria Lynn]]> Excerpt from the radio program Poetica, Radio National]]> Artist Statement
The Disappearing is a free app for Apple and Android devices that (literally) maps poetry and place. As an ongoing project, The Disappearing uncovers poetry’s invisible currents in the world around us. Using geo-location to map poetry to place, the app charts fragmentary histories, impressions and memories, encouraging readers to interact in a non-linear way. Not only is The Disappearing a pocket-sized library of poems about places, the app is also an alternative travel guide that preserves and shares experiences, emotions and ideas that vanish over time.
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Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters brings Shakespeare's world renowned and extraordinarily influential play Macbeth into a virtual worlds environment. This is an appropriate, timely use of pop culture as an adaptive bridge between classic texts and new media technology. The poetic use of metaphor, image and symbol that permeate Shakespeare's language can be brought to 3D life using the online world as a discursive design space where visitors experience the motivations and emotional journey of character, and explore and make personal sense of the universal themes of Shakespeare.
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Bystander is an immersive environment composed of photographs, sequences of short text, and musical patterns that all knit together to conjure haunting moods and stories for a large, darkened gallery space. The images, texts and sound files of Bystander are all governed by computer systems to form an environment that responds evermore intelligently, semantically and aesthetically to the behaviour of visitors interacting with the historical material over time. Feedback relationships develop between the visitors and the environment so that the 'eco-system' of Bystander offers emergent patterns of narrative and ever-altering rhythms of dynamic reaction.
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Life After Wartime is a suite of multimedia artworks by Kate Richards and Ross Gibson. Based on 3000 archival scene-of-crime images from Sydney and thousands of evocative texts by Gibson, each iteration within the suite uses various design and interaction techniques to engage its audience. The suite comprises: Crime Scene 1999-2000 Justice & Police Museum Sydney and touring; Darkness Loiters 2000 an interactive story engine; Life After Wartime CD-ROM 2003 exhibited nationally and internationally, for sale through the artists, funded by the Australian Film Commission. Life After Wartime live with The Necks Adelaide Fringe Festival 2001 and Sydney Opera House 2003 a live improvised event with world renowned jazz trio The Necks; Street XRays 2005 Gibson's re-photography installation at ACMI. Bystander 2007 a 5 channel interactive and immersive video installation at The Performance Space@CarriageWorks Sydney 2007.
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Development stage of a multi-disciplinary performance work based on the notebooks of First Fleet marine / astronomer / surveyor William Dawes who recorded his encounters between 1788-1790 with the indigenous peoples of the Sydney foreshore area most notably young Cadigal woman, Patyegarang.[...]The live action process will involve the opening up of the primary source notebook text through the actor's physiology of movement, voice, physical and emotional inter-relationships with Dawes text (words, correction marks, and spaces/silences between the words) and each other. Other source material will be diaries and letters that refer to Dawes and Patyegarang (i.e., Elizabeth Macarthur's letters & journals).
The secondary source material will be current writings and interpretations of their encounter (i.e. Inga Clendinnen's Dancing With Strangers). The other source text will be what the artists bring of themselves to the work, personal text, cultural stories, constellation and creation myths and their 'speakings back' to Dawes and Patyegarang from varying viewpoints. We aim to devise a chorus ensemble of indigenous performers to counterpoint the dual Dawes Patyegarang protagonist/s structure.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Tableau's website]]> Artist Statement
When ELIZA, the world's first chatbot, was born in the 1960s, users were startled at how much the psychotherapist in the program resembled a human. Since then, chatbots have become increasingly sophisticated; some predict that a computer will pass the Turing test of successfully impersonating a human within the next decade. But in the age of Big Data, does it make sense to say that bots are imitating us? Many already are us, constituted from the thoughts and emotions we share every day online.
B.E.T.T.Y. seeks to draw attention to the ghost in the machine of AI the humans who unwittingly control the wonderful Wizard of Oz from behind the curtain, and crouch inside the Mechanical Turk. Audience members are invited to share their private thoughts with an entity created by data-mining millions of social media messages in real time. Is artificial intelligence really so artificial after all? And do these cyborgian interlocutors lend us an empathetic ear, or cold comfort? B.E.T.T.Y. was a new media installation for the Art Gallery of New South Wales Society Contempo series exhibition in February 2014.
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Millions of people are sharing their intimate secrets on social media. Every day, over 300 people across the globe will tweet 'don't leave me' to their significant others or try to reassure anxious loved ones by tweeting the words 'everything is going to be OK . Part of the 'Underbelly Arts Festival' on Sydney's Cockatoo Island in August 2013, Everything Is Going To Be OK addresses this unprecedented intrusion of private thoughts into the public sphere, and how the smallest details of our emotional lives are being appropriated and aggregated by remorseless, corporate-controlled data streams that come to mirror our hopes, fears and personalities. The work features projections of short form monologues and dialogues, constructed in real-time out of data from Twitter.
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On the Internet, a heart breaks every 4 seconds.1000 Broken Hearts was an installation presented at Oxford Act Factory in October 2013 as part of the City of Sydney's Art and About. It reconfigures the last thousand heartbreaks from the Internet hive-mind as spectral projections that dance and flicker at random intervals in three-dimensional space. It asks us to consider the nature and meaning of emotion in the digital age, when the line between suicidal angst and quotidian frustrations is increasingly blurred. Projected into a smoke filled glass cube the words of a 1000 individuals crying out to their networks can be seen to float momentarily in space then disappear in a fleeting moment of connection. 1000 Broken Hearts builds on a series of data artworks that enquire into the emotional valence of text in networked spaces.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Description from the blog ISEA2013, RealTime ]]> Artist Statement
It's a real-time question and answer session which gives audiences the chance to query the Internet collective consciousness on any subject and receive real-time, generative responses. To make it work from a technical point of view, we've needed to define a series of complex (and sometimes simple) algorithms that query online data streams in order to return relevant answers without any intervention from us. Currently we're focused on testing the app that drives the artwork by priming it with questions (if you tweet a question now with the hashtag #enquire Sydney or #enquire Darwin it will be added to the list). We've been finding that the answers given by the digital hive mind offer some glimpses into its emergent personality.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Anne Phillips, blog Visual Arts Hub]]> Artist Statement
We live in an age of big data, when much of what we say and do is captured and stored in vast, searchable databases. What is the future of the novel that most personal and intimate of artforms as private lives are increasingly turned into public data? DataFiction v0.1 is part of a major new collaboration between myself and artist Andrew Burrell that aims to create a real-time, data-driven novel. These excerpts of generative, network-sourced prose were presented as early work-in-progress, with the aim of inciting audience interest and critical feedback.
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Welcome to Panopolis explores the im/possibility of uniqueness in digitally networked environments - places where almost everything we want to say is always, already being said by someone else. It uses geographically disparate pieces of data to create a virtual space with distinctive emergent qualities where readers can examine and reflect on the un/predictable, un/reliable nature of online information. By filtering and re-combining social media content, Welcome to Panopolis incites new textual and narrative possibilities.
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Don't Leave Me, Baby is a digital poem created out of live social media data. Messages of emotional anguish and insecurity are sourced in real time from Twitter and matched with expressions of consolation and reassurance. Tears are wiped away as soon as they are shed; hearts are mended as soon as they are broken. In the data stream, our emotional evolution takes a great leap forward; the human psyche becomes a flawlessly resilient, self-correcting system.
The work is part of a wider exploration of the emergent personality of the Internet and the possibilities of data-driven text by hybrid media artist Andrew Burrell and writer Chris Rodley.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Description from Media Art Net, website for media artwork]]> Artist Statement
Passage Sets is a generative visual poem. It includes an interactive poem generator. The users of the system can position themselves in front of the screen and select words and/or phrases from four lists that become visual as they enter into differing proximities in relation to the screens. Moving forward and/or backward, then stopping in the center of the field, enables the participants to make selections from specific lists authored by Seaman. These words then flow across the screen and become part of an ever-changing line of text at the bottom of the screen.
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The work expands Seaman's set of exhibitions related to the Thoughtbody Environment and Neosentience [ongoing collaboration with Otto Rossler] and extends Yeong-woong Cheong's work in terms of computer graphics/video generative systems. A large-scale generative visual poem is presented on a number of large format screens in the lobby and outside of the SK building, Seoul. The poem addresses the notion of "communication" from many perspectives. Seaman shot video in Seoul and across the Korean countryside. A combinatoric poem Seaman explores many notions of the space of communication and the poetic communication of space.
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The World Generator promotes a form of active looking/listening/interacting/understanding. Through interaction with this virtual world generator, text potentially qualifies differing emotive aspects of the current computer-based emergent context. Media elements also inform the understanding of the text. All of the media-elements present meaning forces that operate on each other. Different interactions and 'negotiations' of the space promote an ongoing meaning summing.
Excerpt from author's article The Illusive Nature of Context: The Negotiation of the Thoughtbody]]> The work also incorporates a "Recombinant" section enabling the user to re-order Seaman's video, generate a new soundtrack by choosing from 144 different musical sections - layering up to seven at a time, as well as recombine Seaman's texts via this pen interface. The work functions as a companion work to Passage Sets / One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue which was also influenced by the Mallarme text.
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Exchange Fields (2000), commissioned by the Vision Ruhr Exhibition in Dortmund Germany, incorporates the recorded dance and choreography of Regina van Berkel. The programmer Gideon May also became involved in this project. The central question dealt with the generation of a new kind of interface - how might an embodied experience of interface be layered into the content of an interactive media/dance comprised of video, text, a sculptural installation and music? Exchange Fields sought to develop a novel interface strategy by eliciting culturally determined environmental 'behaviour in relation to objects' as a grammar of gesture that could be used as input to the reacting system. The work sought to tap into pre-linguistic environmental knowledge related to the use of particular varieties of objects. A series of furniture/sculptures were developed. Each furniture/sculpture was designed with a unique implied "suggestion" of how the body might be positioned in relation to that object. This suggestion was non-logo-centric. It was embodied in the form of the physical interface itself and reinforced through linguistic captioning affixed near the work.
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The Net.Art Browser is a means of conjoining information space with the museum space and hybridizing the interactivity of surfing the Internet with the museum tradition of wall mounted images. While painting, cinema and TV construe images inside a fixed frame, the notion of 'augmented reality' that accompanied the development of the virtual reality technologies offers the new paradigm of a mobile viewing window that reveals images that are spatially embedded in the real environment. Using this model, the Net.Art Browser's web sites, curated by Benjamin Weil, are virtually placed side by side along a white wall. A motorized large flat screen (linked to a cableless keyboard) allows the viewer to move this display window linearly (in either direction) from one Internet-connected web site to another.
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