My recent creative projects have employed a diversity of new media vehicles for the iterative investigation of emerging forms of narrativity. I have been drawn to time-based media and motion graphics as meta-media vehicles/vectors for my metaphorical interests in the ideas of life cycle, interlaced ecologies and the influence of temporality on our perception of vulnerability and ecological memory.
These time-based media projects began with the creation of interactive animation and audio loops that became the multimedia streams for web works created in 1996-2001. (see web works for examples). My recently realized live cinema and video works are available for online viewing from menu links under this project heading and as an available high resolution DVD video set.
Since 1999 I have been pursuing works which have focused on the exploration of emerging forms of narrativity whose storylines or story webs are juxtaposed upon the patterns, lifecycles and processes of biological and ecological exchanges and interactions. I have used these biological and ecological models and patterns as backbones for the narrative architectures of my new media/sonic compositions and speculative inquiries. As an initial reduction-to-praxis for a new media-based biological narrative, my first realizations were produced as captured video output.
The project, Biological Narrative 1 thru 5 (2004) is a multisegmented dvd-video work whose content mediates from a convergence of biomimetics/biologically-inspired computing, biosemiotic threading and a regard for the biophilic aesthetic. The individual chapters of the work include primata, pulmones, homonculus, bushmeat and clemency. Through a convergent merger of biological modeling, artificial life visualizations and video/audio compositing these segments emulate a collective narrative of biological and environmental sensibilities that draw on a spectrum of voluntary thru involuntary response from the metabolic to the ecological. The biosemiotic foundations in the work includes the re-narration of extinction, the emergence of life, biological time, the duality of sustenance and the internal drama of pain – all parts of an internally realized narrative which runs through our cells and veins and continually define the common storylines of vulnerability between all lifeforms. Online links to this project are available from the menu on the left.
Exhibition/presentation of this project at Transmediale.05 – Basics, brought forward expanded explorations into live cinema as a new media-based form of the biological narrative. Live cinema as a performative digital audio and video form offered further incorporation of temporality, gestural interactions and speculative outputs into the process of creating a cinematic experience in the presence of the public eye.
In 2006 the project microMacroCosm was undertaken as a live cinema collaboration with Trace Reddell. This project was an exploratory line into a speculative exchange of locative cosmologies with origins from the earthly to the celestial. A video prospectus of this work is linked here.
The iterative platform of these live cinema projects has enabled an extended investigation into emerging forms of the biological narrative capable of perceptualizing bioinformatic datasets though the crosslinked process patching of performative audio and video channels.
Biological Narrative #7: Danaus (2007) is a live cinema performance of a digital video | biological/proteomic music hybrid whose platform is built upon electronic translations derived from the protein-based sun compass of the migratory North American Monarch Butterfly. The work is elementally derived from the genotypic origins of this navigational system in combination with the phenotypic expressions that are exerted to fulfill an annual multigenerational journey across the North American continent from Canada to Mexico and back. The Danaus specie’s navigatory locative/visual protein complex mediates the lifeform’s relationship to color wavelength, as well as terrestrial and biological time. In the live cinema performance, the sonic equivalents of these locative proteins, are developed into a multi-layered audio score derived from genetic sequences of the blue, ultraviolet, and long wavelength opsin proteins found in the vision system of Danaus plexippus.
This sonic work is joined with the visual and light pattern characterizations of this migration consisting of video field recordings, time-lapse documentation of the organism’s migratory path, and virtual reality of the butterfly’s microscopic anatomy. The resulting work bends the sensibilities of the Danaus species across multiple data scales to re-mediate the essential ties that all organisms have to journey, vulnerability and survival.
The performed version of the work 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, ecosemiotics and biomimicry to deliver speculative new media forms of ecological memory.
Recent project venues for these works:
Biological Narrative #7:Danaus
2008
“Light”, 11th SubtleTechnologies Festival 2008, Innis Town Hall, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
FILE (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica) POA 2008, Santander Cultural, Porto Alegre, Brazil
FILE (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica) RIO 2008, Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2007
FILE (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica) HIPERSÔNICA 2007, SESI Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil
ArtTechMedia 07, 1st Internacional Congress ArtTechMedia, Ministry of Culture, Madrid, Spain
“Thinking the Multiple”, Liebling Center for Film, Photography, and Video, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
"Beauty and it's Discontents", University of Denver, Myhren Gallery, Denver, CO
microMacroCosm
2006
“microMacroCosm”, (collaboration w/ Trace Reddell), Universiteitstheater, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Biological Narrative 1 thru 5
2006
Korean Experimental Arts Festival 2006, Seoul, Korea
2005
New Forms Festival 05 - Ecologies, NFF 05 Cinema, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
transmediale.05, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
SeNEf 2005 - 6th Seoul Net Art & Film Festival, Seoul Art Cinema, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
MAF05 - Thailand New Media Arts Festival 2005, Alliance Francais, Bangkok, Thailand
“Personal Ecologies”, Sarai, the New Media Initiative, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India
2004
FILE 2004 (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica), SESI Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil
3rd International Rest Cycling Art Festival, Backfabrik, Berlin, Germany
Machinista 2004, International Arts and Technology Festival, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Scotland
“In House”, Faculty Triennial, Myhren Gallery, University of Denver, Denver, CO