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Written by biotica
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Saturday, 19 December 2009 16:56 |
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The interactive video installation 39˚ 44′ 11″ N x 104˚ 59′ 21″ W opened on November 14, 2009 as part of EMBRACE!, an international exhibition of 17 site-specific installations at the Denver Art Museum. The temporal works were commissioned as collective artist response to the architecture of the Daniel Libeskind-designed Fredrick C. Hamilton Building.  39˚ 44′ 11″ N x 104˚ 59′ 21″ W is a site-specific interactive video installation that seeks to develop a dialectic between ecological memory and architectural space and form. The work brings forward the ideals of ecological memory as the historical, cosmological and environmental ground for the evolving architectural memory of the Hamilton Building. Ecological memory is re-mediated through the interpretation of contemporary and historical data from the celestial to the terrestrial to the biotic into an immersive interactive environment that responds to audience movement and the range of interactions associated with the data interpretations of the installation. The title of the work 39˚ 44′ 11″ N x 104˚ 59′ 21″ W is based upon the latitude and longitude coordinates of the Denver Art Museum’s Fusebox Gallery. The gallery is transformed into an “observatory” site for the translation of datastreams into creative ecological memory within the Hamilton building architecture.  The installation project is composed of two major media elements; initially a video flatscreen triptych that acts as the prolog and epilog of the work. The audio elements of this work are composed of a Latin aria of chanted names of recent extinct organisms of the region extended by a sound bed of DNA and protein music translated from genomic and biochemical characterizations of the extinct Rocky Mountain Locust (Melanoplus spretus). This media segment is a foreshadow to the central interactive installation space. Physical audience movements in this space bring together visual and sonic bits of the lost and endangered ecologies of the site as an immersive digital cinematic experience. The interplay of sound layers in the installation space comes from audio composed from solar storm data, voice work mediated from historic climate data, and bio-acoustic sounds recorded from current organisms related to the extinct locusts and the lost bird species of the region. The resulting immersive experience visually and sonically reunites the lost residues of the former lifeforms of the region. Audience interactions are simultaneously tied to a present version of ecological memory while speculatively re-mediating the ecological ghost stories of the historical past.  The eMAD artist team is a collective of graduate and undergraduate students from the DU eMAD Program invited to assist Weaver on the project. Josh Fishburn developed software that coordinates data interpretation for a portion of the sound design of the project. David Fodel focused on the sonic interpretation of celestial/solar wind data from the NASA ACE satellite. Brigid McAuliffe explored the voice interpretation of historic climatic data that coincides with the time period of the Hamilton Building’s construction. Nick Meyers built the software system that brings together video content with audience interactions in the project installation space via IR tracking. More information on EMBRACE and 39˚ 44′ 11″ N x 104˚ 59′ 21″ W are available from the DAM website. The EMBRACE! exhibition runs though April 4, 2010. images courtesy of Jeff Wells / Denver Art Museum, ©Timothy Weaver |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 19 December 2009 19:53 )
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Written by biotica
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Monday, 20 July 2009 08:49 |
 Participation in this year's FILE 2009 in Sao Paulo - FILE 10 NURBS PROTO 4KT, includes the introduction of the Tools for Life Cinema project at the FILE SYMPOSIUM 2009 and screening premiere of the biomedia video work Biological Narrative #9: manuMindo at FILE HIPERSONICA 2009. This year's FILE is the 10th year of the new media festival events in Brazil. FILE events run from July 28 - August 30, 2009 at the FIESP - Ruth Cardoso Cultural Center, 1313 Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo. The FILE SYMPOSIUM runs from July 28-31, 2009, daily from 2 - 6:30PM in the Mezzanine of the FIESP.  The Tools for Life Cinema project brings the experimental hybridization of digital live cinema and performative bioinformatics into the form of "life cinema." This subgenre of new media/digital cinematic performance builds upon the open-ended multimedia output of live cinema and the bending of biological computing, artificial life, ecological modeling and biomimicry to deliver sonic derivatives and visual translations of biological/environmental sensibilities into immersive new media forms. This presentation introduces/reviews an authoring tool base for new media-based biological narrative creation. These tools are both functional and exploratory and can be broken down into the following tool classes:
1) novel performance interfaces & surfaces,
2) translators and modifiers of bioinformatic (re)sources to sonic and visual outputs, and
3) generators of speculative biological narrativity |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 19 December 2009 19:02 )
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Written by biotica
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Monday, 30 June 2008 14:34 |
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 Performance and presentation of "Biological Narrative #7: Danaus" was part of this year's 11th Subtle Technologies Festival 2008: LIGHT, held in and around Innis Town Hall and U of T in Toronto from 29 May to 1 June, 2008. The festival was the 11th international gathering of artists, scientists, theorists and audience, whose mission is "dedicated to catalyzing the development of new emergent practices in new media art by investigating the artistic relationships and collaborations between artists and scientists within the realms of art, science and technology. Bringing together creative practitioners from diverse fields in a week long festival with symposia, workshops, exhibitions, screenings and performances under a topical theme, Subtle Technologies provides a forum to pose and explore questions, exhibit, screen and inspire work that is relevant to the implications of new artistic developments at the intersection of Art, Science and Technology."
Extending the performance of the live cinema work - "Biological Narrative #7: Danaus" was a symposium discussion of the biological narrative that emerges from the enchainment of visual protein sequences to photoreceptor reactions to pattern recognition to locative/migratory expression and on to the broader roots and recognitions that compose and evolve ecological memory from light.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 20 July 2009 11:29 )
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Written by biotica
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Friday, 06 February 2009 15:06 |
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CAMPEPHILUS is an interactive video installation that speculatively remediates a loss of ecological memory through a physical commitment to stillness and the recognition of the residues of extinction. Part ecological ghost story/part ecosemiotic poetic; the work mediates sound and moving image from the ambient field recordings of lost habitat, bioinformatic characterizations, protein audio translations, digital zoological imaging and the bioacoustic taxonomy of the presumably extinct, Imperial Woodpecker (Campephilus imperialus). The Imperial Woodpecker is/was native to the ancient forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico; including the remote territories of Chihuahua and Durango States and the Copper Canyon. Cited as the world’s largest woodpecker, the Imperial Woodpecker is/was sacred to the Tarahumara and Huichol indigenous populations of the Mexican Sierra for the curative powers of its’ plumage. Hunting and indiscriminant logging are chiefly responsible for the obliteration of the species and its’ breeding habitat. There have been no confirmed sightings since 1956 and no field photos or audio recordings have ever been captured of this specie. |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 19 December 2009 18:42 )
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Written by biotica
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Monday, 28 May 2007 18:00 |
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 Pre-print of “Biomimetics: Emulation and Propagation in Post-traditional Ecologies", in “Second Nature: Reproduction and the Artificial in Art, Science and New Media”, Rolf Hughes & Jenny Sunden, Editors, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden is available for download as PDF HERE.
.:: A B S T R A C T ::.
 The strategy of applied biomimetics has been heralded as design innovation inspired by nature. The inclusive process takes in phases of bioprospecting, biophilia, and emulated biosemiotics to arrive at an implementation of engineered design that ideally might carry implicit biological/environmental sensibilities. Applied elements from this strategy can be found in cybernetics, therapeutics/medicine, structural engineering, militarized intelligence and now in the propagation of new media art practices. While the idealized practice emulates a platform of honoring/sustaining the original thru the preservation of context, the extended practice in post-traditional ecologies frequently crosses the lines of biopiracy and sustains a distancing spiral of simulacra thru a re-wiring of ecological consciousness.
This essay examines the intent and impact of applied biomimetics across a spectrum of creative and technological-mediated processes through three comparative lenses: as the scientific characterization of natural biological systems; as historically-rooted sociocultural performances/practices and as contemporary engineered-design and creative media-based expression. The objective of comparison through these three perspectives on the biomimetic approach to the appropriation and emulation of natural systems is to align the phenomena and practice within the contextual realms of traditional and post-traditional ecologies as a means of characterizing the distance between origin and derivative in this creative biocultural practice.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 19 December 2009 18:47 )
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