Eröffnung Opening: 26.01.2012, 19:00 Künstler ist anwesend
Artist is present Ausstellungsdauer Duration: 27.01. – 18.03.
2012 Öffnungszeiten Opening hours: täglich daily 10:00 – 22:00
Kuration Curation: Ruth Schnell and Wolfgang Fiel.
Schauraum quartier21 (Electric Avenue)
MuseumsQuartier
Museumsplatz 1/5
1070 Wien
Vienna, Austria.
www.dieangewandte.at
www.digitalekunst.ac.at
Spectre explores the potential of data as material for manifesting things that lie outside our normal frames of reference - so far away, so close, so massive, so small and so ad infinitum. The spectre of Schwaiger is made manifest from the atomic forces that bind the Schauraum dust. A space dreams.
spectre [ˈspɛktə/] noun
1. a visible incorporeal spirit, a ghost, apparition, phantasm, phantasma, phantom.
2. a mental image of some entity of terror or dread: the spectre of death…
[C17: from Latin spectrum, literally 'image, apparition', from specere 'to look at']
Spectre builds on a portfolio of data driven work and ‘nano’ art developed by the artist and collaborators, such as A Mote it is…2 (Phillips, M. 2010) and i-DAT’s Operating Systems1. These projects explore the ubiquity of data streamed from an instrumentalised world and its potential as a material for manifesting things that lie outside of the normal frames of reference - things so far away, so close, so massive, so small and so ad infinitum. These digital practices use alchemical processes that enable a series of transformations: from data to code to experience to behaviour.
The instruments that now do our seeing for us translate their visions through data. The emergence of digital imaging technologies that provide access to photons from the edge of the universe and the atomic force that binds molecules offer us a whole new vocabulary for articulating the world. Atomic Force Microscope, Scanning Electron Microscope, X-ray computed tomography and the Radio telescope open up new dimensions, as more dimensions are unveiled, more realities are modelled and more truths envisioned. There are (to paraphrase Hamlet) more things in heaven and earth than currently dreamt of in our media philosophy.
“A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.”3 A Mote it is… explored our relationship with technologies that troubles the mind’s eye. Our ability to shift scales, from the smallest thing to the largest thing has been described as the ‘transcalar imaginary’4. Hamlet’s Fathers Ghost is seen but not believed and one is left to wonder if it is just the seeing of it that makes it real - its existence totally dependent on the desire of the viewer to see it. The ‘mote’ or speck of dust in the eye of the mind of the beholder both creates the illusion and convinces us that what we see is real. Something just out of the corner of our minds eye, those little flecks magnified by our desire to see more clearly. Yet the harder we look the more blurred our vision becomes. A ‘mote’ is both a noun and a verb. Middle English with Indo-European roots, its early Christian origins and Masonic overtones describe the smallest thing possible and empower it with the ability to conjure something into being (so mote it be…). This dual state of becoming and being (even if infinitesimally tiny) render it a powerful talisman in the context of nano technology.
i-DAT’s Operating Systems5 project was initially inspired by early work exploring the potential of spaces recording events that happened within them. Arch-OS was described as a ‘Psychometric’ Architecture, a viral infection of a building that replayed at night the activities that took place during the day. A kind of dreaming architecture. Psychometry… “The concept of objects (or places) seeming to record events and then play them back for sensitive people is generally referred to as psychometry. The objects can be called psychometric objects or token objects”6 (Morris, R. 1986).
Spectre suggests that the Schauraum is such an architecture and that the memories of the building are bonded to its fabric by the atomic forces that have now been unlocked by the Atomic Force Microscope. Spectre builds on the collision of A Mote it is… and Psychometric Architecture by drawing on the experiences of Professor Gustav Adolf Schwaiger, the Technical Director of the Austrian Broadcast Corporation, and his collaboration with famous medium Rudi Schneider in the late 1930’s to the early 1940’s. “G.A. Schwaiger… conducted some private (and rather obscure) experiments with the famous medium Rudi Schneider in the studio of a female painter… In fact the flat could have been right above our exhibition space (Schauraum).”7 (Fiel, W. 2011).
According to Mulacz’s History of Parapsychology in Austria, “Schwaiger in his research focussed on investigating that ‘substance’ and its effects applied then state-of-the-art apparatus, such as remote observation by a TV set.”8 (Mulacz, P. 2000). That ‘substance’ was the ectoplasm that would emerge from Schneider mouth during their experiments. Spectre extends these experiments by broadcasting live feeds from the space of the Schauraum and simultaneously replaying the physical remnants of these happenings as captured in the atomic forces binding the dust from the their laboratory.
The spectres of Schwaiger and Schneider or the ectoplasm they conjured up are manifest through the Spectre installation.
References:
1: Phillips, M. ‘A Mote it is…’ Art in the Age of Nano Technology, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, WA. For exhibition in 02/2010. http://www.i-dat.org/a-mote-it-is-update/
2: http://www.i-dat.org/i-dat-launches-op-sycom/
3. Shakespeare, W. Hamlet. Act 1, Scene 1, Line 129.
4. Transcalar Imaginary. “mundus imaginalis traversing the micro, meso, and macro…” Curated by David McConville. http://www.scoop.it/t/transcalar-imaginary/
5. http://www.i-dat.org/i-dat-launches-op-sycom/
6. Robert L. Morris (Koestler Chair of Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh 1985 to 2004) in a letter to the artist 21 October 1986.
7. Email correspondence with Wolfgang Fiel. 2011.
8. Mulacz, P. History of Parapsychology In Austria. Notes for a History of Parapsychological Developments in Austria. Paper presented at The Parapsychological Association (PA) – the 43rd Annual Convention held from 17th to 20th of August, 2000 in Freiburg i. Br., Germany, hosted by the ‘Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene’ (IGPP). http://parapsychologie.info/history.htm#paper
With thanks to:
Luis Girao for MAXing out…,
Chris Saunders and Dr Simon Lock at i-DAT,
Wolfgang Fiel for the Ghost hunting,
&
Professor Genhua Pan at the Wolfson Nanotechnology Laboratory at Plymouth University, for the AFM scan.
Image:
Spectre-AFM Schwaiger Trace.jpg 13cm x 10cm, 300 dpi
Caption: Atomic Force Microscope Spectral Trace of Schwaiger.
i-DAT is collaborating with Boundary Work 1:
Boundary Work I is the first in a series of exhibitions designed to facilitate a survey of work that operates in the space between art and science and as such aims to encourage a dialogue between the sub-disciplines of these fields.
New Media Art can stimulate a mental image of a genre that breeds on techno-aesthetics alone. However, such a view short-changes the diversity of opportunities opened up in recent years through moves such as artists-in-labs programmes and the development of programming tools for artists. More significantly there is a growing public consciousness that evolving technologies hold significant implications for future human cultures. Such developments have assisted in the emergence of wet or living art, the growth of networked and intelligent artefacts, and a vision of the world enabled through new instrumentation designed for the investigation of macro or nano scale material environments. In addition to new genres, supported through access to new technologies, existing established practices in the arts have critiqued or been inspired by the technology and market driven actions in science.
So while science and art are often identified as opposing fields of knowledge technology can be seen as a common driving force in both. This gallery event attempts to draw activities in both of the worlds of art and science together in a dialogue where technology is the common agent.
The exhibition therefore is a representation of work that treads the boundary between art & design and science and an invitation to participate was extended to artists, designers, and researchers in practices particularly relating to science and/or technology.
http://www.transculturetek.com/boundarywork/index.php
i-DAT has contributed to LA PLISSURE DU TEXTE 2 (LPDT2) (Incheon International Digital Art Festival 2010 (INDAF), 01-30/09/2010, Tomorrow City, Songdo, Incheon, Korea) a Twenty First Century reimagination of Roy Ascott’s famous telematic work LA PLISSURE DU TEXTE from 1983. This Second Live version (built and enacted by Elif Ayiter , Max Moswitzer and Selavy Oh, in association with Heidi Dahlsveen) is installed at INDAF incorporates an Artificial Intelligence which enables the public to enter into an SMS conversation with the LPDT2 metaverse.
http://www.indaf.org/e_sub02_02.asp
LPDT2
THE SECOND LIFE OF LA PLISSURE DU TEXTE
Roy Ascott 2010
LPDT2 is the sequel to Roy Ascott’s initial La Plissure du Texte, the generic telematic project about distributed authorship, and the pleasure and pleating of the text, created for the exhibition Electra at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris in 1983
<http://artelectronicmedia.com/artwork/la-plissure-du-texte>.
Now, three decades later, LPDT2 seeks a new level of artistic creativity and technological expertise, dealing with distributed authorship in the metaverse of Second Life, involving textual mobility and the fluidity of an emergent poesis. Just as, in the first LPDT, when artists explored the telematic technology of the early 1980s, LPDT2 involves leading artists and designers in Second Life, and their associates, in the conception and construction of worlds of non-linear text, transforming the metaverse into a purely textual domain. The field of operations is a horizontal screen: the table-top motif that runs throughout Ascott’s oeuvre.
Principal Co-Authors
Elif Ayiter aka Alpha Auer is a designer and researcher specializing in the development of hybrid educational methodologies between art & design and computer science, teaching full time at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey. She has presented creative as well as research output at conferences including Siggraph, Consciousness Reframed, Creativity and Cognition, ISEA, ICALT, Computational Aesthetics (Eurographics) and Cyberworlds. She is also the chief editor of the forthcoming journal Metaverse Creativity with Intellect Journals, UK and is currently studying for a doctoral degree at the Planetary Collegium, CAiiA hub, at the University of Plymouth with Roy Ascott. http://syncretia.wordpress.com/ http://alphatribe.tumblr.com/ http://www.citrinitas.com/
Max Moswitzer, born1968, lives and works in Vienna and Zurich. Moswitzer’s output is in Fine Art and the construction of playful situations, using dérive and détournement as methodology for transformation and reverse engineering of networked computer games and art systems. Since 1996 provides his own server <http://www.konsum.net> and is founding member of www.ludic-society.net <http://www.ludic-society.net> . In 2007 Moswitzer moved some of his creative practice into the metaverse, i.e., Second Life. His architectural installation „Whitenoise“ was one of four winners for the first Annual Architecture & Design Competition in Second Life, an internationally juried event of Ars Electronica 2007. He recently completed „Ouvroir“, a virtual museum in Second Life for Chris Marker commissioned by the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich.
Selavy Oh was created in 2007 as an avatar in Second Life, where she works using the virtual world as medium. She presented her work in solo exhibitions within Second Life, e.g. at IBM exhibition space, Arthole Gallery, and Odyssey. Her work was selected for the Final 5 exhibition of the mixed-media project “Brooklyn Is Watching” at the Brooklyn art gallery Jack The Pelican Presents. Her work has been covered by prestigious web publications such as SmartHistory and art:21. Selavy’s creator works as neuroscientist at the University of Munich investigating topics from spatial perception over computational neuroscience to human-robot interaction.
Associates
i-DAT is a networked entity catalyzing Art, Science and Technology research [www.i-dat.org]. Chris Saunders is a Research Assistant at i-DAT and a digital media developer for organisations as diverse as Deutsche Bank and Creative Partnerships. Mike Phillips is the director of i-DAT and Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Plymouth. His private and public sector grant funded R&D orbits digital architectures and transmedia publishing, with particular application to ‘Full Dome’ immersive environments and data visualization. i-DAT’s LPDT2 SMS augmentation enables visitors to the LPDT2 installation to SMS the system through an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that feeds the Second Life environment. The LPDT2 AI learns, interprets and evolves through its mediation between the installation and visitors.
Heidi Dahlsveen aka Frigg Ragu is a storyteller and assistant professor at Oslo University College, touring in Scandinavia as well as internationally, performing stories for children and adults. In 2009 she published her first storytelling book. Her main occupation and interest in the virtual world are the performing arts and how to tell stories through poses and animations. Dahlsven was was given a grant from the Norwegian Arts Council to research and compare performing arts in virtual world with real life in 2009/2010. <http://www.dahlsveen.no>
art in the age of nanotechnology
A Perth International Arts Festival exhibition - 5 February - 30 April 2010
The unique works developed for art in the age of nanotechnology operate at the intersection of art, science and technology, demonstrating innovative examples of contemporary art and scientific collaboration.
The exhibition will comprise of a series of collaborative projects designed to challenge, explore and critique our understanding of the material world and will bring together artists and scientists from the around the world to present new ways of seeing, sensing and connecting with matter that’s miniscule and abstract.
art in the age of nanotechnology will feature internationally-recognised artists and scientists such as Christa Sommerer (Austria) & Laurent Mignonneau (France); Paul Thomas (Aus) & Kevin Raxworthy (Aus); Mike Philips (UK); Boo Chapple (Aus) and Victoria Vesna (USA) & James Gimzewski (Scotland).
http://johncurtingallery.curtin.edu.au/exhibitions/future.cfm
A Mote it is… (from the ‘art in the age of nano technology catalogue).
“A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.” (1)
Words spoken by Horartio to describe Hamlet’s father’s ghost. In this Shakespearian play the ghost is seen but not believed and one is left to wonder if it is just the seeing of it that makes it real - its existence totally dependent on the desire of the viewer to see it. The ‘mote’ or speck of dust in the eye of the mind of the beholder both creates the illusion and convinces us that what we see is real. Something just out of the corner of our minds eye, those little flecks magnified by our desire to see more clearly. Yet the harder we look the more blurred our vision becomes.
A ‘mote’ is both a noun and a verb. Middle English with Indo-European roots, its early Christian origins and Masonic overtones describe the smallest thing possible and empower it with the ability to conjure something into being (so mote it be…). This dual state of becoming and being (even if infinitesimally tiny) render it a powerful talisman in the context of nano technology.
Throughout the last Century we were reintroduced to the idea of an invisible world. The development of sensing technologies allowed us to sense things in the world that we were unaware of (or maybe things we had just forgotten about?). The invisible ‘Hertzian’ landscape was made accessible through instruments that could measure, record and broadcast our fears and desires. Our radios, televisions and mobile phones revealed a parallel world that surrounds us. These instruments endow us with powers that in previous centuries would have been deemed occult or magic.
Our Twenty First Century magic instruments mark a dramatic shift from the hegemony of the eye to a reliance on technologies that do our seeing for us - things so big, small or invisible that it takes a leap of faith to believe they are really there. Our view of the ‘real world’ is increasingly understood through images made of data, things that are measured and felt rather than seen. What we know and what we see is not the same thing - if you see what I mean? The worrying thing is that for a long time we thought the invisible world was made of layers of transparent electromagnetic fields, now through technologies such as the Atomic Force Microscope we are faced with the reality that the ‘invisible’ is actually what constitutes our material world, we can reach out and touch it!
It is our relationship with these technologies that troubles the mind’s eye. Our ability to shift scales, from the smallest thing to the largest thing has been described as the ‘transcalar imaginary’ (2). In this context astronomer Carl Sagan described the Earth as a “mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.” (3) The famous image taken from Voyager 1 in 1990 shows the planet suspended in an infinite Universe. A mote that seems so large to us, but which is in fact so cosmologically small, disturbs our sensibilities and desire for order in our world.
About A Mote it is…:
A Mote it is… is constructed from data captured by an AFM (Atomic Force Microscope) from a ‘mote’ or piece of dust extracted from the artist’s eye. The whirlwind of data projected within the gallery is rendered invisible by the gaze of the viewer. The more we look the more invisible it becomes - look away and it re-emerges from the maelstrom of data. A ghost of the mote can be seen in viewers peripheral vision but never head on. – if you see what I mean?
Notes:
1: Shakespeare, W. Hamlet. Act 1, Scene 1, Line 129.
2: http://www.twine.com/twine/12vx9k6qs-2zp/transcalar-imaginary
3: Sagan, C. 1994,Pale Blue Dot, Random House. p6
Many thanks to:
Lee Nutbean and Justin Roberts at i-DAT.
Professor Genhua Pan and Yuqing Du at the Wolfson Nanotechnology Laboratory at University of Plymouth.
More images:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Mike.Phillips.net/AFMAMoteItIs#
The Syncretic Sense
Roy Ascott
4 April 24 May 2009
The first UK retrospective exhibition of the pioneering cybernetic artist Roy Ascott, curated in collaboration with i-DAT (Institute for Digital Art and Technology, University of Plymouth).
http://www.plymouthartscentre.org/art/future.html
Long before email and the internet, Roy Ascott started using online computer networks as an art medium and coined the term telematic art. Since the 1960s he has been a pioneer of art, which brought together the science of cybernetics with elements of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Pop Art. Parallel to his artwork, Roy Ascott is a highly acclaimed teacher and theorist of art pedagogy.
This exhibition explores the influences and rhetoric of Roy Ascott’s work, mapping the impact, history and development of technology and looking to the future of Web2 and Second life. Roy Ascott sees telematic art as the transformation of the viewer into an active participant in creating the artwork, which remains in process throughout its duration. Significantly, the content of his projects were often spiritual: staging the first planetary casting of the I Ching with an early form of network in 1982; whilst his major installation at the Ars Electronica centre in 1989 explored Gaia theory.
The exhibition also looks back at the impact of Roy Ascott’s experimental years of art education. In the 1960s Roy Ascott was the head of Groundcourse at Ealing College of Art and developed one of the most influential and unorthodox approaches to teaching foundation studies in art. The basis of the course was developed around cybernetic theories of systems of communication: the flow of information, interactive exchange, feedback, participation and systemic relationship.
Roy Ascott studied under Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at King’s College, Newcastle, University of Durham. His exhibitions include Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica Linz and Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil. He was President of the Ontario College of Art and Dean of San Francisco Art Institute. He is President of the Planetary Collegium, an international research network based in the University of Plymouth www.planetary-collegium.net
Press enquiries: Contact Hannah Prothero
Marketing & Communications Manager
Phone: 01752 276993
Email: hannah at plymouthartscentre dot org
Image: Roy Ascott, Plastic Transactions, 1970
