A computer controlled spotlight projects a cone of light when a person enters the space. It pulses and flickers based on a person’s distance to the light, emitting a crackling, watery noises as the light changes. The closer to the centre of the light, the more chaotic the sounds become. It is an experiment in making light tangible, through sound.

Here’s a video of the installation in action:

Introduction

While the Gross National Happiness (GNH) of Bhutan has been criticised for being naïve and an attempt to deflect attention from the material poverty of its people, there is no doubt that its citizens have benefited from the emphasis on well-being and the environment their king has instituted. The advent of television and Internet has nevertheless raised questions of the fragility of this so called “Last Shangri-La”. Part of the success of the King’s GNH is based on the preservation of traditional customs and culture which the spectre of materialism inherent in both on-line and broadcast media threatens to unravel.

The smile detection machine in Thimphu.

Description

Grand Mutual Smiles is an installation that explored networked mediated happiness through an international smile exchange.The project captured the smiles of people and transmitted them across the Internet to display them in the city of Linz in Austria and Thimphu in Bhutan. Using cameras equipped with smile detection technology, installations in both cities progressively captured pictures of smiling people, displaying them both locally and remotely. In both cities the pictures of smiling Bhutanese and smiling Austrians were projected on video screens. The motivation was to encourage people from the respective countries to communicate with each other across the Internet in a non-verbal and humoristic way, by smiling.

Website & Photos

The project website can be found here: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/grand_mutual_smiles/. The website describes the project in more depth and contains a large selection of smiles capture by the installations in both Austria and Bhutan.

Video Documentation

Here is a video of the opening of the Grand Mutual Smiles installation in Clocktower square, Thimphu, Bhutan, on the 17th June 2009.
The proceedings were opened by Her Royal Highness Ashi Chimi Yangzom Wangchuck.

Frame Seductions is an interactive work that plays with our expectations of the video frame by creating an immersive and surreal space that lies beyond the traditional borders of the screen.

The project explores the concept of looking outside of the video frame by tracking the head movements of people immediately in front of a camera-enabled screen. As people turn their head to the left or to the right the perspective of the video on the screen will change to follow their gaze.

In the language of cinema, hors champ (out of scene) is considered to be the space and time of the filmic world outside of the range of the camera. Viewers of Frame Seductions are able to access material outside of the initial scene, blurring the boundaries between the frame and the hors champ. Lurking in the sidelines of the original scene, various mundane but provocative scenarios are playing themselves out much to the surprise of the viewer.

The Frame Seductions installation in Lima

Description

In the 21st century the concept of the frame persists in incarnations both old and new in painting, video, television, and cinema. Today, in the face of a steadily growing plethora of screens, projections and LCD’s the content of the frame has the ability not only to animate but through technological contrivance to also respond to our movements and gaze.

This project is exhibited as a video depiction of several ordinary scenes in the tradition of genre painting. Genre painting or photography depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. In Frame Seductions however the actions of the people in the scene are often mysterious or nonsensical, creating a slightly surreal, magic-realist atmosphere. Characters appear in several places at once, exit through doors to only reappear elsewhere and are often seen giving the viewer or each other quizzical looks.

The installation plays back panoramic video, of a width much larger than the screen frame itself. The screen acts as a window into this larger panorama, and the head movements of a person just in front of the screen causes the focus of the viewing window to shift either to the left or to the right, exposing new material.

The installation appears as a static looking picture from a distance, however as people approach closer they are given the opportunity to peer into the sidelines of the image revealing dynamic ‘hidden’ scenes. In addition, the ’side-lines’ play sound, whereas the central image is relatively silent, teasing people into looking out of the central frame in order to locate the source of the noises.

Video material for the screen was shot using actors, using multiple camera perspectives to achieve a panoramic effect and then processed by software. At any one time the panorama consists of three videos played back side by side asynchronously. Each video is looped seamlessly, occasionally swapping out when not visible to be replaced by new content. The algorithm controlling the selection of the videos takes into account the content of the videos and the perspective of the viewer, i.e. which part of the scene they are currently watching. Tracking of the viewer’s head is achieved using proprietary 6-degrees-of-freedom head-tracking software.

Videos

A video of the installation can be viewed here:

A demonstration of the software can viewed here:

Credits

• Pierre Proske – Concept, direction, programming.
• André Mintz (Brazil)- Video processing and consulting.
• Federico Andrade (Argentina), member of the Modular collective – Art direction, dramaturgy, photography.

Support

This project would not have been possible without the support from the following institutions:

An Australia Council Visual Arts board development grant assisted in the background research of the technologies involved in the project, while Medialab-Prado assisted in the first realisation of the piece at the Magic & Technology Interactivos workshop in Lima, Peru.

Macro-micro structures is an installation that visualizes elements of a lateral city model translated into 3D electronic space. Two different pressure pads in front of a projection space allow participants to either grow the city larger or visit locations in the structure. The piece explores the tension between macro- and micro- structures in urban environments; the micro scale, symbolized by privacy and individuality, is captured by analogue photography of urban apartment block interiors and community garden plots, documenting individual spaces which arrange and cluster within the cellular urban structure. The macro is represented by digital algorithms which create a complex achitectural struture within which the photographs are embedded. Code and user interaction are responsible for a self-organizing emergent structure. At a certain level of growth the structure reaches a critical threshold at the ‘edge of chaos’, echoing the urban core reaching a critical mass of architectural entities. Consequently the domestic entities start to reposition within the clusters, whilst simultaneously cells start to sprawl outward.

More details on Clarissa’s site here…

Macro View

Micro View

The essence of this piece is a large monolithic dark wall that is represented both in the real and virtual worlds. It is a one-way portal to the virtual world through which people can whisper their thoughts, scream their frustrations and convey regret without the privilege of reply. It is a wailing wall through which to mourn the loss of our humanity to the virtual network.

CATERWAUL is an interactive sound installation that operates as a one way “portal” to Second Life via the Internet. A physical wall in operates as a totemic locus of grief. People approach it with intent to wail and mourn. The mourners grieve their lost loved ones who spend more time in virtual and on-line worlds than they do communicating in real life. The cacophony of the lamentation is recorded by hidden microphones in the wall, transmitted across the Internet and piped out of an “identical” wall in the virtual world Second Life (http://secondlife.com). A website displaying a simulation of the wall allows other people, on the threshold of “real” and “second” life, to vicariously eavesdrop the wailing.

Project webpage: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/caterwaul/

Smart Fridge Poetry Magnets are an extension of their predecessors that distinguish themselves from their analogue counterparts by being able to individually access large dictionaries of words, select words based on the content of neighbouring magnets and learn a basic sense of grammar through user interactions.

Each magnet has a lexicon of words and their associated parts of speech (POS), words defined in relation to their grammatical function. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and adverbs are all parts of speech.

Magnets learn through positive interactions what parts of speech are preferred neighbours. The desired outcome of this is to explore the possibility of an emergent abstract poetry, as well as a whimsical, playful approach to agent-based learning.

The flow of interaction is as follows:

- The user selects a magnet and places it on the fridge.
- The magnet communicates with its neighbours and finds out what POS they are.
- If the user leaves the magnet on the board, it learns that its left and right neighbours’ POS are valid with respect to its own POS.
- A magnet can have its current word changed by depressing a button on the magnet. The magnet then selects a new word through a probability distribution based on the history of its left and right neighbours.
- The user then selects the next magnet to place on the fridge. This can be placed to the left or right of any words already on the fridge.

Communication between magnets is effectuated through bi-directional infrared transmitter/receivers.

PROTOTYPE TECHNOLOGY

The hardware prototypes of the Smart Fridge Poetry Magnets each consist of the following:

* A microcontroller
* A 16-character LCD display
* Infrared based transmitter/receivers on each side of the display (to communicate with neighbouring magnets)
* An SD (SecureDigital) memory card interface which enables us to load different databases of words into each magnet
* A button to change the displayed word

Project web-page: http://digitalstar.net/projects/smartpoetrymagnets/

Rear view of the Crass robot

Project website: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/crass/

True Blue Love is a mobile phone social networking experience, designed to explore the politics behind intimate phone-based relations.

Inspired by a trip to Tokyo, Japan, the capital city of mobile technologies, I was struck by the ability of the mobile phone to enhance polygamous activity through non-verbal and thus unnoticeable phone text messaging.

True Blue Love is a networked real-time experience which is intended to run in public, social spaces. Possible scenarios would be to have it run concurrent with a cocktail party, book launch, workshop or other such gathering of a variety of people. Alternatively, designated zones could be established throughout the city, encouraging people to run the software in certain areas, increasing the chances of interaction between participants.

Each person is supplied with a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone running custom client software written in the Java programming language. Each participant selects from a predefined list of options
the characteristics of their ideal sexual mate from within the software. While the software is running, every time another phone comes within range, a “love” metric is calculated which is a representation of how close the incoming person matches the participant’s ideal mate. If the match is close, the phone will emit a raucous mating call that will be unique to that participant.

The concept behind the triggered mating calls is to attempt to undermine the silent technology of messaging and email with vocal communication that expresses the user’s desires through a public
broadcast, a broadcast that harks back to more primitive exchanges. The ridiculous sounds should function as social ice-breakers, and the unwilling couple may want to discuss what it is that they have in common that triggered the noise.

A fully functional prototype of True Blue Love was developed for dLux Media Arts and the Mobile Journeys exhibition in 2005 (http://dlux.org.au/mobilejourneys/pierreproske.html).

Project web-page: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/truebluelove/

The project is essentially an automated, algorithmic system for creating collages of images obtained through high resolution digital microscopy. Conversations with scientists, laboratory work, field trips and self-directed research resulted in some custom artistic software and an initial body of work. The ability of an algorithmic collage to assemble contrasting and diverse images and to produce an overarching narrative was useful in the portrayal of natural and cultural ecologies.

Through photographs taken using various camera-equipped microscopes from a laboratory in the Department of Archaeology and Natural History I created the visual source material for 2 pieces of software that I wrote during the residency period. These images were edited to isolate particular micro-organisms or fossils, most of which were pollen, and then fed into my customs programs and subsequently used to create large-scale abstract prints. The prints were created by organising the smaller image fragments using specific rules. A non-linear, never-ending computer animation of pollen and other microscopic fossils was also created.

The Abstract Microecologies project involved studying generative processes in the arts and the sciences, where generative refers to systems which generate ecologies of interrelated, distributed elements. Generative processes seem to be particularly good at creating morphologies and narratives from large quantities of data and this proved to be a useful tool to navigate the reference collections in the lab I worked in.

The residency blog: http://www.digitalstar.net/microecologies/

In human speech the basic acoustic unit is called a phoneme. The visual equivalent is called a “viseme”, a basic speech unit in the visual domain, in other words a facial expression that can be used to describe a particular sound. Using this analogy, I have written a piece of software which describes sound using basic visual units to represent recorded frequencies.

My inspiration for a basic visual unit came to me while staring at a wall where I had hung up three Japanese fabrics covered with repeating iconic motifs. Here was an already established set of visual patterns comprised of small repeating elements.

These textile motifs seem appropriate for use in a computer artwork as they are already tiled in a networked, matrix fashion and their morphology resembles miniaturized automata. Woven textiles form part of computing history, through Joseph Marie Jacquard’s automated patterned textile weaving machine in 1804 which led to punch cards in computing devices.