the SpaceProbe show - an exhibition of electro-physical art

Front Page
Introduction and Essay

Descriptions and Artist Statements:

Robert Bernecky and Brad Harley: Opportunity Knocks
Rob Cruickshank and Wendy S. Whaley: Transmit/Reflect
Paul Davies: Quantification of Humans
Erlich, Robert T.: No Escape
Jodi ALIZON Franklin: Intense Babes
Tom Leonhardt: ICUv2
Jeff Mann: Spirit Catcher
Jim Ruxton: Heavy Breathing
Graham Smith: Rain Sphere
Mike Steventon: Intelligence Artificial
Jean Trivett: FurBot

Opportunity Knocks

"Flip in C," the predecessor to "Opportunity Knocks", was driven purely by random processes and primitive composition. Nonetheless, it provoked attempts to interact with it that convinced some viewers that they were, in fact, controlling the music. Opportunity Knocks is a musical instrument that offers total control over its operation, yet it hides its mode of interaction in time and space -- an exercise in discovery for the audience.

"Opportunity Knocks" is a visual pun. Computer-driven, it draws on computational concepts, including ³flip-flops² (a logic element as well as footwear) and "pipes" (a UNIX mechanism for interprocess communication).

Directly controlled robotic art is boring, as it offers the audience no sense of the unexpected. Intrigue and excitement derive from non-linear mappings between action and reaction, particularly those divorced in time, yet connected by a window of opportunity. Non-obvious interaction offers a space to explore, probe, and discover.

Robert Bernecky is a computer language designer, compiler writer, and computer programmer. He does sporadic electronic art, theatre, photography, and bad music.

Brad Harley is an artist, sculptor, set and costume designer, actor, and playwright.

Transmit/Reflect (drawing spatially with light)

There are two complementary parts to the piece: Part 1: using a laser, calls the viewer's attention to existing surfaces. These surfaces are created when the viewer interacts with the laser inside the enclosed space. While this is happening another viewer can watch the 3D patterns the other person is creating, essentially allowing the viewer to use their body as a 3D drawing tool.

Part 2: By moving and emitting light,calls attention to itself. Experiencing the piece in real time, the viewer is only able to understand its short-term behaviour; the 3D patterns created over long periods of time are invisible. These are made visible using time-exposure stereo photography. The viewer of the photographs, however, has no appreciation of the motion of the machine that made them. By viewing the piece in different ways, the viewer may gain an appreciation of how our perception of visual patterns is interlocked with our sense of time.

Rob Cruickshank: Our aim was to make the machines part of the process, rather than ends in themselves; the piece is about their behavior in time and space, rather than their physical existence. The end result of all the wires and software simply becomes trails of light.

Wendy S. Whaley: As the world we live in becomes increasingly complex I find it necessary to explore the dimensions which are often taken for granted but can boost our level of sensation and awareness to new heights.

Rob Cruickshank is an installation artist and electroacoustic composer. Wendy S. Whaley is an artist whos work incorporates varying combinations of holography, audio, film, digital imaging and animation, video, and electronics, etc. Her work explores multiple dimensions and is usually interactive.

Quantification of Humans

Quantification of Humans (qoh) is a measuring device. qoh measures the quantity of humans in a set area. The resolution of qoh is one bit: it converts a person into a single digital bit. qoh consists of two major components: a four-by-four grid of weight sensitive floor mats and a primitive terminal consisting of four-by-four dots. There is a one-to-one correspondence between a mat and a displayed pixel: a weight on a given mat causes the appropriate pixel to activate; without weight the pixel is black.

As a culture, we imbue physical, technological objects with the ideas, values and themes of our time. Our Western culture has an uncontrolled need to constantly remake itself, and continuous invention creates a steady stream of discarded technology. By revisiting these technological artifacts, they become re-contextualized, and the ideas that they are vessels for are open to reinterpretation.

Paul Davies is an interactive media artist living in Toronto, Canada. His work explores issues of technology, culture, and the individual through the medium of technology. His interactive installations make use of electronics, robotics, computers, controllers and reclaimed technology.

No Escape

Two mobile machines in geographicly distant locations explore their local environments, communicate and co-relate their findings. This work attempts to move the perspective granularity of 'artificial intelligence' from the individual to the community.

The world that human beings percieve is implicitly filtered not only through the limitations of our senses, but the tranformation of our own consciousness. The mappings of 'objective' and 'subjective' are to humans as 'data' and 'information' is to machines. How are the observations of one set of machines interpreted by others? What would the observations mean to people? Where are the intersections? My work explores meaning and its representation.

Erlich, Robert T. is a charlatan living in Toronto

Intense Babes

These works are made using small rubber babies, a toy tank, and a sound recorder. The tank is operated by battery driven hand controls. When the tank bumps into objects, sound recordings of babiesı voices in varying intensities are triggered.

The mystique around technology weaves its way through the future. Face to face with technology, we hardly ever see the insides of technology. (unless we are fixing it). Technological vulnerability is disguised behind physical armaments and the armament of mystique, hence fear.

Jodi Franklin is interested in probing aspects of technology, by exploring sound, sensors, motors, computer chips, $10 toys etc. She works as an interface designer for a software company. She is interested in learning and breaking down the barriers of control that are excercized by mainstream technology. She intends to produce art by opening the envelopes of human creativity and fusing human and technological behaviour which is not functional, but poetic.

ICUv2

ICUv2 (Interactive Camera Unit) is voyeur, surveillance device, party mingler searching for gossip, and media spyder ready to pounce on its next event. A miniature robotic video camera hovers unobtrusively above the gallery space waiting for activity below to pique its curiosity. Sensing something interesting, it scurries across the room to settle above the action and continue on with its silent observation. Wherever it goes ICUv2 continues to transmit its signal to a video monitor projecting its point of view. We see through its eye and ponder its fascinations.

We are drunk with technology. Through the delirium of infinite possibilities we search for algorithms of humanity. The butterfly effect ... an and/or gate flips deep inside a microprocessor as logic rolls through reactive systems, tripping a forgotten moment in someones memory map. They press the red button, nothing happens.

Tom Leonhardt is interested in using new information technologies to enrich our lives. He works extensively in the arts and culture milieu as an artist, educator, developer and curator. As tomtom interactive he designs media interfaces. Currently he's developing a networking and promotional web environment for Canadian new media artists.

Spirit Catcher

A plastic sheet is suspended in an updraft produced by a fan. Its complex undulating movements create changes in electric fields which are detected by several antennae. Small speakers emit sounds that vary in pitch accordingly.

"Spirit Catcher", after Ron Baird's sculpture of the same name, builds on Mann's earlier works of video, audio, and touch-interactive sculpture involving images of birds and satellites navigating resonant electric/acoustic waves and fields. It evokes a human experience of complex signals and systems, in gesture and language as well as in the struggle to extract meaning from a turbulent current of symbol and sensation.

"The essence of a thing, its truth or spirit, can be approached only through an intense process of listening, an empathy of the senses and mind, yet we never grasp its actuality. We are left ultimately with a reconstruction; a simulation within ourselves of the entire universe. We create that which has created us."

Jeff Mann is a graduate and former faculty member of the Ontario College of Art. He has been employed as telecommunications art specialist at the Banff Centre and at InterAccess, where he is currently a board member and coordinator of the Art & Robotics Group and SpaceProbe project.

Heavy Breathing

"Heavy Breathing" is an interactive piece for two people. By breathing into a sensor one person can transmit a physical manifestation of their breath to the other person. A fan is used as the breath generator on the "far end". By blowing softly one can transmit a gentle breath. Blowing harder transmits a strong wind. When two people spend time with the "Heavy Breathing" apparatus they learn to communicate their moods by using merely their breath.

Jim Ruxton is a graduate of the University of Ottawa Electrical Engineering Department, and the Ontario College of Art New Media Department. He is interested in bringing technology into the arts in dance, film, installation and theatre. He currently runs Cinematronics a film special effects company.

Rain Sphere

"Rain Sphere" is an interactive sound sculpture that translates the movement of the viewer into the sound of rain. The main component is a metal sphere supported by four motors that have rubber wheels on them. Surrounding the sphere is a ten-foot wide circular carpet with switches hidden under it. The switches are grouped into segments so that as the viewer comes up to the piece the sphere rotates away from them creating the sound of rain. As more people gather around the piece, the sculpture takes on a random movement and sound that mimics the physical environment surrounding it.

This piece is a reflection on earlier work I have done which translates an environment into another sense dimension. As a former west coaster I have always held a fascination for the magical effect the sound of rain has on me and this piece is an attempt to recreate this effect through kinetics and interactivity.

Graham Smith is a former photographer who is working currently with interactive robotic sculpture. He is a former researcher at the University of Toronto's McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and has exhibited his work internationally.

Intelligence Artificial

You hear the sound of a television and a faint moaning. A patient is lying on a hospital bed, looking into the television mounted above their head. As the images on the screen modulate, the patient struggles to be nearer the screen; the nearer the patient gets the more intense the strain and thus the moans. On a medical monitor at the foot of the bed is a visualisation of the patient's responses to the televisual stimulus. It shows a slice that moves through the brain from bottom to top as the intensity of the patient's struggle increases.

TV gives us information we can't act on; this leads to information anxiety and apathy. Not having the information necessary to test a statement's truth, we judge the ability of the presenter to act as if they believe what they are saying. In this way our intelligence is artificial. TV makes us invalid.

Mike Steventon has been working with electronic media for 14 years. He is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and collected a distinction for his Post Graduate work at St. Martin's College of Art, London UK. Currently Chairman of the Board at InterAccess.

FurBot

A simple educational robot kit has been modified to sense touch as well as sound. It has also been decked out to mimic an organic form with eyes and funfur obscuring its metal/plastic/electronic component frame. It is activated by a viewer approaching its floormounted corral and races around changing direction when bumping into the confining walls, some of which have pictograms of dinosaurs which growl menacingly when triggered. The FurBot also responds to loud noises, giving a certain randomness in its behaviour which has led viewers to feel they have more control over its actions than they actually do.

As an exercise in collaboration when building my first robot, I solicited votes on four possible configurations from the attendees of the XXX Works in Progress show at InterAccess last September. The favourite was the FurBot, and so that is the concept I worked with when the basic kit had been assembled. A whimsical naivete helps overcome the connotations of cold technicality in the new media, resulting in work which pleases children while expressing my frustrations with imposed limitations.

Jean Trivett has recently expanded her work from representational drawing and painting and fabric sculptures into the realm of electronics.


Front Page
Introduction and Essay