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‘fabricative knowledge’ the capacity ‘to know’ through making and to manifest ideas through the creation of artefacts across multiple and varying disciplines |
VISUAL DOCUMENTATION
The video and photo documentation on the website is separated into three parts;
- Art Practice - Interactive Installations -
represented by "InTime" an FRQSC funded research/creation project 2015-18 | "Einstein's Dream" an FRQSC - Appui au Project Novateurs Program 2013
- Interactive Performance -
represented by two interactive theatrical works "Practices of everyday life | cooking" and "Frankensteins Ghost"
- Research | Knowledge Transfer -
application of our research within the fields of architecture and medicine | examples include "Solar Decathlon China" and "Sonifeye"
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All of the examples included on this page represent the many faces of our creative vision. Our hope is that they clearly illustrate the processes that energize and drive our search for new and dynamic ways in which to develop interactive technologies and responsive environments that are capable of crossing the boundaries between disciplines. The documented outcomes also represent important milestones and new compositional paradigms for activating responsive environments and apparatus and is the foundation on which we will build our research creation projects.
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Art Practice - Interactive Installations | "InTime", FRQSC funded research/creation project | "Einstein's Dreams", FRQSC -Appui au Project Novateurs Program
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InTime
FRQSC funded | Research Creation Project | 2015-2018
Rather than using technology as an instrument for measuring time, InTime focuses on creating an interactive environment that uses technology as an organic means for altering its perception? Saint Augustine once said, “God did not create the world in time but with time. InTime is inspired by this proposition, as it clearly describes our desire to create a responsive environments that challenges our perception of time, while steering clear of crafting clockwork like installations simply made up of regions of mimetic time. This avenue of investigation and hybridization, which combines theatrical techniques and new technology, has changed not only the way we design responsive environments but how we create new conceptual frameworks and devise strategies for affecting how these responsive environments are experienced.
InTime - Finished Project | Exhibited - Paris Biennale - Némo December 2017 - ARS Electronica, Linz 2016
AQUAPHONEIA
2016 -2017
Aquaphoneia is an alchemical installation centred around the poiesis of time and transmutation of voice into matter.A large horn floating mid space echoes the ghosts of Edison, Bell, and Berliner’s machines. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released: The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.In one corner, voices bubbling inside a sphere of fire are brought to entropy and transmuted into a timeless concentration of spectral mist and phonetic vapour. An ouroboros chamber twists fermented vowels into distilled consonants to release a thin blade of prosody. This viscous alchemical matter lowers itself to the terra beneath where matter dances to its own affective tonality. Another module separates speech into vital elements a drop at a time: words into phonemes, into phono particles, and the invisible quanta of silence.
2016 -2017
Aquaphoneia is an alchemical installation centred around the poiesis of time and transmutation of voice into matter.A large horn floating mid space echoes the ghosts of Edison, Bell, and Berliner’s machines. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released: The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.In one corner, voices bubbling inside a sphere of fire are brought to entropy and transmuted into a timeless concentration of spectral mist and phonetic vapour. An ouroboros chamber twists fermented vowels into distilled consonants to release a thin blade of prosody. This viscous alchemical matter lowers itself to the terra beneath where matter dances to its own affective tonality. Another module separates speech into vital elements a drop at a time: words into phonemes, into phono particles, and the invisible quanta of silence.
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InTime - Prototype - Phase 2 | Projects to be completed 2017-2018
PASSING LIGHT
2016 - 2018
In a darkened room sits a precariously balanced metal plate. Alchemically transformed, light in liquid form rests on its surface. Entering the space, you are shadowed by luminescence, equilibrium is disturbed. Light cascades down the tilted steel sheet creating a waterfall of illuminated atoms that find their way onto the floor and across the space. In this installation the line that separates the physical properties of water and light are blurred in an ever changing cycle of animated play.
2016 - 2018
In a darkened room sits a precariously balanced metal plate. Alchemically transformed, light in liquid form rests on its surface. Entering the space, you are shadowed by luminescence, equilibrium is disturbed. Light cascades down the tilted steel sheet creating a waterfall of illuminated atoms that find their way onto the floor and across the space. In this installation the line that separates the physical properties of water and light are blurred in an ever changing cycle of animated play.
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SHADOW PLAY
2015 - 2017
Traces of light are left as vestiges of time. While shadows are burned into the nearly visible landscape. Leaving behind still moments encased in light.
2015 - 2017
Traces of light are left as vestiges of time. While shadows are burned into the nearly visible landscape. Leaving behind still moments encased in light.
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Parle
2016-2018
Parle is an alchemical apparatus that turns speech into air. Like the breath behind the voice, phrases are transformed into a concoction of words and wind, accumulating deep inside an inflatable chamber. Metal trumpets form the final stage of translation. From herevocal patterns are released back into the atmosphere.
2016-2018
Parle is an alchemical apparatus that turns speech into air. Like the breath behind the voice, phrases are transformed into a concoction of words and wind, accumulating deep inside an inflatable chamber. Metal trumpets form the final stage of translation. From herevocal patterns are released back into the atmosphere.
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Einstein's Dreams
FRQSC -Appui au Project Novateurs Program | 2013
Einstein's Dream proposes to build time conditioning installations & techniques that create palpable alternatives to the everyday time that’s governed by calendars, universal clocks, and Internet services that never sleep. We’ll do this by building physical zones in which objects and fields of lighting, sound, and video change in concert with the inhabitants’ movement to create powerfully alternative senses of time, rhythm and pattern. We will thus develop a new architecture of kinetic material and digital media in which time becomes an elastic medium of expression, learning, and invention - a new art of time for the 21c. The floor of the space was covered with 13 metric tons of sand in order to provide an organic surface with which the body could interact. The ability to play with the material that one walks on and the ability to change the spaces architecture by moulding the sand provided a unique opportunity to interact with reality and its technologically augmented cousin at the same time.
FRQSC -Appui au Project Novateurs Program | 2013
Einstein's Dream proposes to build time conditioning installations & techniques that create palpable alternatives to the everyday time that’s governed by calendars, universal clocks, and Internet services that never sleep. We’ll do this by building physical zones in which objects and fields of lighting, sound, and video change in concert with the inhabitants’ movement to create powerfully alternative senses of time, rhythm and pattern. We will thus develop a new architecture of kinetic material and digital media in which time becomes an elastic medium of expression, learning, and invention - a new art of time for the 21c. The floor of the space was covered with 13 metric tons of sand in order to provide an organic surface with which the body could interact. The ability to play with the material that one walks on and the ability to change the spaces architecture by moulding the sand provided a unique opportunity to interact with reality and its technologically augmented cousin at the same time.
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Interactive Performance |represented by two interactive theatrical works "Practices of everyday life | cooking" and "Frankensteins Ghost"
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Practices of Everyday Life |Cooking
Canadian Premiere | Société de Musique Contemporaine du Montreal |Montreal New Music International Festival - February 2015
European Premiere | Ars Electronica Linz, Austria, 2017
A performance choreographed around a chef and sonified objects: fruit, vegetables, meat, knives, pots and pans, cutting board and table. Cooking*, the most ancient art of transmutation, has become over a quarter of a million years an unremarkable, domestic practice. But in this everyday practice, things perish, transform, nourish other things. Enchanting the fibers, meats, wood and metal with sound and painterly light, we stage a performance made from the moves (gestures) of cooking, scripted from the recipes of cuisine both high and humble. Panning features virtuosic chefs who are also movement artists, such as Tony Chong. "Cooking"is the first part in a series of performances exploring how everyday gestures/events could become charged with symbolic intensity. We use responsive media to poetically charge everyday actions and objects in ways that combine sound and visual composition with the participant's contingent nuance. As the participants grow accustomed to the instrument’s responsive quality, everyday gestures may become aesthetically invested or charged with emotion or social meaning. Participant’s gestures not only lead to unexpected musicality but to narratives about shaping relationships with the world. "Practices of everyday life" synthesizes state of art techniques in continuous gesture tracking and sonification in a paradigm of calligraphic gestural media developed by Navid Navab at the Topological Media Lab. Technical methods include corpus-based concatenative synthesis, haptic-acoustic transcoding, gesturally driven granular processing, physical models, real-time machine-learning, and gesture following
Canadian Premiere | Société de Musique Contemporaine du Montreal |Montreal New Music International Festival - February 2015
European Premiere | Ars Electronica Linz, Austria, 2017
A performance choreographed around a chef and sonified objects: fruit, vegetables, meat, knives, pots and pans, cutting board and table. Cooking*, the most ancient art of transmutation, has become over a quarter of a million years an unremarkable, domestic practice. But in this everyday practice, things perish, transform, nourish other things. Enchanting the fibers, meats, wood and metal with sound and painterly light, we stage a performance made from the moves (gestures) of cooking, scripted from the recipes of cuisine both high and humble. Panning features virtuosic chefs who are also movement artists, such as Tony Chong. "Cooking"is the first part in a series of performances exploring how everyday gestures/events could become charged with symbolic intensity. We use responsive media to poetically charge everyday actions and objects in ways that combine sound and visual composition with the participant's contingent nuance. As the participants grow accustomed to the instrument’s responsive quality, everyday gestures may become aesthetically invested or charged with emotion or social meaning. Participant’s gestures not only lead to unexpected musicality but to narratives about shaping relationships with the world. "Practices of everyday life" synthesizes state of art techniques in continuous gesture tracking and sonification in a paradigm of calligraphic gestural media developed by Navid Navab at the Topological Media Lab. Technical methods include corpus-based concatenative synthesis, haptic-acoustic transcoding, gesturally driven granular processing, physical models, real-time machine-learning, and gesture following
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Frankenstein's Ghosts
SSHRC funded | Interactive performance piece - 2009-2011
Frankenstein’s Ghosts is a collaborative creation-research project. The aim of the project is to generate a hybrid performance work based on the substantive issues raised in Mary Shelley’s novel. In June 2007, several of the project collaborators received SSHRC funding to bring together an interdisciplinary team of academics and artists to share in a deconstruction, analysis and exploration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This came from a desire among academic scholars to explore artistic transformations of their discourse as a way of pushing their thinking even deeper into the subject matter - working with artists who will transform their research into another “language.” For the artists, the impulse came from a desire for deep understanding of the many substantive themes emerging from the novel before embarking on artistic creation.
SSHRC funded | Interactive performance piece - 2009-2011
Frankenstein’s Ghosts is a collaborative creation-research project. The aim of the project is to generate a hybrid performance work based on the substantive issues raised in Mary Shelley’s novel. In June 2007, several of the project collaborators received SSHRC funding to bring together an interdisciplinary team of academics and artists to share in a deconstruction, analysis and exploration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This came from a desire among academic scholars to explore artistic transformations of their discourse as a way of pushing their thinking even deeper into the subject matter - working with artists who will transform their research into another “language.” For the artists, the impulse came from a desire for deep understanding of the many substantive themes emerging from the novel before embarking on artistic creation.
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Research | Knowledge Transfer | application of our research within the fields of architecture and medicine | "Solar Decathlon China" and "Sonifeye"
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SOLAR DECATHLON
funded and sponsored by: http://teammtl.ca/sponsorship.html
A collaborative project that explores the concept of “Deep-Performance”. which implies a socially, culturally,and technologically advanced architecture that embodies qualitative and quantitative notions of performance in addressing energy efficiency, comfort, wellbeing, affordability, environmental sustainability and ecological awareness. Custom built media/data architectural features, aesthetically codify, translate and transform performance data, from an array of sensors, as visual and sonic experiences to raise awareness of consumption, performance, and behaviour.
In "liquid light", one of several projects being produced by the Topological Media Lab for Solar Decathlon, water consumption data is gathered and the weekly usage is compared to the recommendation index provided by Ministry of Natural Resources, ambiently giving residents a general sense of adequate consumption on one end of the spectrum, to excessive levels of consumption on the other end, and any gradient in between. Through refraction of light in mineral oil and manipulation of this liquid, which acts as a filter, a textural palette is created. On the periphery of sight, the visualization remains peaceful and non-intrusive; however, when at the focal point, this gradient of textures allows for a generalized comprehension of overall consumption habits. Controlled drops of water create ripples that get magnified and mapped. The poetic language is simple here, drops of water correspond to gallons used per week. Multiple drop falling simultaneously symbolizes the excessive amounts of water used during that time period. The material texture of sensor data (water) is directly tied to the visualization strategy, which uses the same medium to communicate with the resident.
http://teammtl.ca/index.html
Liquid Light| one of several projects being produced by the Topological Media Lab for Solar Decathlon
2016 -2017
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Sonifey
2016-2017
Sonic interaction as a technique for conveying information has advantages over conventional visual augmented reality methods specially when augmenting the visual field with extra information brings distraction. Sonification of knowledge extracted by applying computational methods to sensory data is a well-established concept. However, some aspects of sonic interaction design such as aesthetics, the cognitive effort required for perceiving information, and avoiding alarm fatigue are not well studied in literature. In this work, we present a sonification scheme based on employment of physical modeling sound synthesis which targets focus demanding tasks requiring extreme precision. Proposed mapping techniques are designed to require minimum training for users to adapt to and minimum mental effort to interpret the conveyed information. Two experiments are conducted to assess the feasibility of the proposed method and compare it against visual augmented reality in high precision tasks. The observed quantitative results suggest that utilizing sound patches generated by physical modeling achieve the desired goals of minimizing the cognitive load while improving the user experience and general task outcome.
2016-2017
Sonic interaction as a technique for conveying information has advantages over conventional visual augmented reality methods specially when augmenting the visual field with extra information brings distraction. Sonification of knowledge extracted by applying computational methods to sensory data is a well-established concept. However, some aspects of sonic interaction design such as aesthetics, the cognitive effort required for perceiving information, and avoiding alarm fatigue are not well studied in literature. In this work, we present a sonification scheme based on employment of physical modeling sound synthesis which targets focus demanding tasks requiring extreme precision. Proposed mapping techniques are designed to require minimum training for users to adapt to and minimum mental effort to interpret the conveyed information. Two experiments are conducted to assess the feasibility of the proposed method and compare it against visual augmented reality in high precision tasks. The observed quantitative results suggest that utilizing sound patches generated by physical modeling achieve the desired goals of minimizing the cognitive load while improving the user experience and general task outcome.
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Other Works
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The Sound that Severs Now from Now
associate researcher Garnet Willis The Sound That Severs Now from Now is a physical work of soundsculpture that employs its large pendulum swinging in time as an aural/visual means of mechanically diffusing a beam of sound in space. Stemming from ideas elucidated in Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature (2013,) this work proposes a critique aimed at global socio-political inaction regarding climate change. This sculptural and sound-based work is premised upon friction created between a ground consisting of the slow ticking of time, and a beam of sound sonically punctuating the space to create a sensory aural-spatial map that confirms, in a familiar, or perhaps even comforting and embodying way, the viewer’s moving-thinking-feeling aural perceptual location within space. The presence of the piece is intended to imbue the exhibition space, both sonically and visually, with cultural cues that come with the sound of the pendulum mechanism. This work plays with the ideas implicit in the idea of keeping time: that these mechanisms somehow contain time within their motion – materializing it and in so doing, making it compatible with the very rational models which led to their development. Drawing on the sound of the ticking pendulum – this historical anthem of rational positivism –meting out time as regular commodified packets, provides the means by which this pendulum can supply both a central visual point of focus and apt point of cultural reference, setting the stage for a symbolic juxtaposition, against which the second part of the work is balanced. This second part - the perception of a quietly destabilizing sonic figure-cum-vitality-form, will propose a subversion that calls into question the objective historical pride and increasingly apparent eco-folly represented by such devices as they slice, measure and render the world, serving it up to the utility-maximizing calculus of human appetite.… |
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