English

Sonic / Reflection

 BiotroniK 2.0 Colective

22 Jan - 05 Abr 2015

Facade MNBA / Central Hall  / Sala Chile

  Coordinator: Claudio Rivera-Seguel

Exhibition Programed at: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Chile (www.mnba.cl)

Date: January 22 – Abril 05, 2015

Grant: FONDART2014, Chilean Ministry of Culture

Participating Artists: Mónica Barros, Matías Hermosilla, Roberto Larraguibel, Nury Gaviola (Colectivo Larraguibel-Gaviola), Felix Lazo and Claudio Rivera-Seguel,

Sonic/Reflection is a collective exhibition consisting of 6 synchronic audio-visual interactive installations, created by 6 Chilean new media artists, scheduled to be presented at the National Museum of Fine Art in Santiago Chile, from January to March 2015.

Even though each work can function as an independent and autonomous audiovisual interactive system, sampled sounds and ambient sound from each work is also emitted by a sound interface called the Sonic/Reflection Instrument (a hacked midi keyboard digital interface).

This instrument can also capture and play the general ambient sound been produced by the audience interacting with each installation and through a feedback sequence is reinterpreted and constantly retransmitted throughout the general exhibition venue thus creating an overlapping exponentially expanding sound sequences which reboots as they reach a predetermined sonic saturation point.

This user-generated sound sequence can be either played randomly and controlled automatically via the central Sonic/Reflection Instrument interface while the system is on idle mode, or played physically by the audience‟s interaction with the keyboard interface (Sonic/Reflection Instrument).

This central sculptural element is constructed in a hybrid fashion by using material and design elements of each of the exhibited works, thus creating a composite installation element that interacts and mimics the collective appearance and sonic perception of the entire exhibition.

The central sculptural and sonic component of the exhibition makes reference to the complex networked and hybrid social contexts within contemporary digital culture. Within this general exhibition concept one can also find that the individual works also address additional themes relating to digital culture aesthetics.

In this sense, the installation TView, by Rivera-Seguel, uses tactics of appropriation in order to address issues concerning mediatic hegemony and power structures within the communication industry. The work intercepts and disrupts the “Free to View” television transmissions, and modify the live feeds by applying a glitch esthetic. Through these “Media Infiltration” tactics -one of the artist‟s recurring research theme- by which he subverts and re-signifies media content within an eye-like communicational device. This appropriation and transformative methodology used within  the  context  of the  host  institutions façade,  in praxis exemplify an alternative scenario of technological and cultural cannibalism and makes references to the emancipating possibilities of the emerging DIY culture.

The Mecanogangsters installation presents us with a series of hybrid Bio-Digital mechatronic devices that map and mimic the audience‟s movements. This relational strategy intends to shed light upon the ubiquitous processes of surveillance and data-mining within everyday life. The insect-like devices attract and distract the public‟s attention acting as a metaphor concerning seamless manipulation and lack of privacy in the digital age. The Mecanogangsters hang in a collective manner in a synchronic pendular motion and buzzing sounds, until they become activated by the public‟s proximity. The installation‟s playfully swarm-like invasive arrangement makes reference to the excessive individualism and inevitable interdependency which restricts the development of a scenario of emancipation and social autonomy.

AbsoluteLess is a work that intends to reenacts within a poetic geo-semantic immersive audiovisual environment a virtual multilayered board-like scenography. A double-projection permeable and fragmented space creates replicating overlapping scenarios, in which segmented body parts and urban landscape imagery make reference to archaic notions of absolute truth. An overlapping projection on a vale like outer membrane create a space of diffused audiovisual imagery intended to replicate the contradictory scenarios of homogeneity and totalitarian truth within our globalized social context. This multilayered city scape backdrop acts both, as a tool for discovery and/or a labyrinth for despair, in which moving body and oral poetry make reference to life”s inherent and inevitable depolarized duality dialectics. This imaginary open-ended scenario encourages reflection between established meanings vs. holistic understanding.

Finally the Autopoietic Systems installation [999] by Felix Lazo presents his evolving research on generative environments, which are nurtured by interactive and feedback data. These works are, in part, inspired by Maturana‟s and Varela‟s primal biological organizational principals. This subject matter is a double edged sword that, on the one hand, addresses issues concerning the possibilities of supra-intelligence social innovation and on the other, the danger of self-generating artificial culture and excessive fixed cultural parameters. 

SONIC/REFLECTION ART WORKS

Work: AbsoluteLEESS (INTERIOR) Interactive Audiovisual Installation

Artist: Mónica Barros

AbsoluteLESS is an interactive audiovisual installation consisting of two overlapping projections, a Kinect sensor and a translucent screen. The first projection passes through a translucent vale and projects onto both the translucent surface and the white wall. When no one is present (idle mode) the projector runs a series of looped audiovisual sequences (imagery about the concept of polarity depicted in situations within urban contexts), from a pre-edited Backdrop Pool. Once the audience enters the installation space the second projector (which is situated at the interior of the kinect sensoring grid area) presents overlapping masked out videos, from a second Counterpart Pool (Imagery inversely related to the Backdrop Pool content).

The concept of polarity is expressed through the projection of a spatial mash-up audiovisual sequences that interrelate urban and social contexts with harmonious corporal movements and oral poetic statements, in order to create a multilayer immersive environment of audiovisual polarities.

The installation interacts with the audience by tracking them within a predefined area within the projection space. These juxtaposed audiovisual disruptive sequences vary in dimension and volume in accordance to their location (x and y axis grid) from the wall screen area and the opposing sides of the margins of the backdrop projected surface area. On idle mode the projections showcase only one of the audiovisual imagery pool content which repeats random fading loop sequences, until the next person enters the activation grid area, which reactivates de AbsoluteLess space.

Work: Mecanogangsters (INTERIOR) Bio-Digital Interactive Installation

Artists: Alfonso Matías Hermosilla & Colectivo Larraguibel-Gaviola

The work Mecanogangster is part of the collective installation „‟Reflejo/Sonoro‟‟ (Presented by BiotroniK Collective, at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, from January to March 2015), and it aims to transform the exhibition setting in a place inhabited by disruptive sonic beings.

Eight hanging objects will resemble minimalist flying organisms, which will work with the idea of bio-digital creations, highlighting the „‟intrinsic sonic vibration‟‟ of the venue, and distract the viewers by soaring randomly and synchronically above the audience, wrapped in flamboyant light-weight structures.

The viewers‟ attention is attracted by the synchronic vibration of the moving floating objects, forcing them to redefine the exhibition into a vertical interactive setting (up- down relation), where the body and object are symbiotically related in this new setting: the artifacts follow people like virtual dipterous and make the visitors uncomfortable by their sounds and interaction created by sensors and speakers located hidden in each of the hanging beings.

Mecanogangsters contemplates an interactive audio work in which, coding allows each being to act as a whole, or individually, depending of the stimuli or automated commands that it receives.

These beings will be hanging from the ceiling at a minimum height from the ground of 2 ½ meters, and its moving axis will be: right – left and forward - backwards, creating an operational area of 4 by 4 meters for each object.

Work: Autopoietic Systems [999] (INTERIOR) Generative Interactive Installation

Artist: Felix Lazo

Autopoietic Systems* [999]  is an interactive audiovisual installation consisting of a synchronic parallel projections (15 mts x 2.5 mts approx.) composed of 9 vertical strips of 250 x 166 cm. each of which corresponds to a different visual and sound interactive algorithm programed in C++ openFrameworks.

Each of these individual programs are apparently drawing simple shapes, colors and sounds, but in conjunction, produce a complex audiovisual open narrative that is constantly responding to the spectators movements and sounds. The data is captured by a system composed of: 3 microcomputers, 3 night vision cameras, 3 microphones, 9 custom made algorithmic programs and 1 audio system (Additive synthesis sounds system).

This body of works emerges in response to a series of concerns in relation to the synchronicity between sonic and visual data from my previous studies in Paris during 2002/2003 at CCMIX Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis. These works provide an organic solution to questions arisen from my interdisciplinary research practice. These works reference a series of conceptual issues put forward by recent visual and musical avant-garde art movements, which question the very notion of what a work of art is through process oriented creations. In this sense, the work of art exists solely during its interaction with the environment or, to put in autopoietic terms, “within the course of the structural coupling of the system and its environment”.

Within Autopoietic Systems [999] there is no direct interrelation between the nine projections and sound algorithms, all narrative of this work derives from the spectators data sensing input and his/her interpretative imagination.

*Autopoietic Systems are multimedia interaction and retro-feeding machines (software+hardware) that generate an audio and visual response in a symbiotic and synchronic relation to visual and sonic stimuli from the surrounding environment.

Work: TView / TVer (INTERIOR / EXTERIOR) Interactive Public Art Installation

Artist: Claudio Rivera-Seguel

3 large scale pair of eyes. Each eye, consisting of a flat screen monitor (51 inch), is displayed on the façade of the exhibition space. The TView‟s screens continuously display a hacked “Free to view” live feed from local television stations. The TV signal is modified by water-like digital filters that resemble and/or mimic water elements such as rain, fog, drops, river flows etc.

The audiovisual effects are in the form of a circular pupil-like semi-transparent mask that moves and modifies its color, intensity and dimension, by reacting to the audience movements using the Kinect camera sensors that is placed on top of the eye-like sculpture.

The sound effects produced by TView are amplified by multiple speakers within the eye and simultaneously at different interior and exterior locations throughout the exhibition venue.

In this manner, TView creates an interactive object that continuously intercepts, interferes and manipulates the local broadcast signals of public television Free to View channels. The audience interacts with the hacked retransmitted signals as they move near the flat screen monitors within each large scale pair of eyes. The resulting audiovisual effect resembles when viewing television through a fogged up window on a rainy day.