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Science and Technology in Cultural Context

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HYBRID HIGHLIGHTS EXHIBITION

- science with fancy and art with facts

Exhibition Opening: Wednesday 8 October, 16:00 - 19:00
Exhibition Dates: Thursday 9 October to Monday 8 December, 10:00 - 18:00

About the Exhibition

Although long under way, the hybridization of art and science presents itself as the most significant challenge for society today. The boundaries between the sciences are poorly delineated and those between art and science are as well. However, these poorly delineated boundaries form commonly shared areas where the stull unknown can be explored and where points of suture between disciplines can be made. It is here that artistic and scientific forms of knowledge begin to merge and are allowed to develop into hybrid formations which bear new knowledge and offer unique experience. And if hybridity is the landmark of artistic and scientific practice, the exhibition “Hybrid Highlights” is indicative of such hybridized territory that goes beyond art and science while exploring and expanding through the possibilities offered from the still “unknown” of the poorly delineated

Artists & Researcher

Haru Ji (KOR)
Graham Wakefield (GBR)
Raffaello D’Andrea (CAN/CHE)
Art Clay (USA/CHE)
Instant Coffee (KOR/CAN)
Noxious Sector (CAN)
Procedural (CHE)
Art Clay (USA\CHE)
Enrico Costanza (ITL/GBR)
Raffello D’Andrea (CAN/CHE)
The Human Brain Project (CHE)
K-Soul (CHE)

Venues
SNU MOA → more info

HYBRID HIGHLIGHT ARTWORKS

AN PROTOSCAPE Haru Ji (KOR) and Graham Wakefield (GBR) The installation is a programmed, self-sustaining, digital ecosystem as an immersive environment, with organisms that consume, grow, metabolize, reproduce and respond to activities within an endless fluid environment. An artificial nature is not a simulation however, it is a new realm with its own logic, life forms and relational dynamics. This world does not live alone: the child-like curiosity that inspires our work is extended to the viewers, whose movements and actions influence the ecosystem as it unfolds, allowing world, organisms and viewers to partake in each other's lived time. It forms part of the ongoing

BALANCING CUBE Raffaello D’Andrea (CAN/CHE) The Balancing Cube can balance on any of its edges or corners, thanks to a series of six rotating mechanisms located on each face of the cube. Like individual members of an acrobatic troupe, each mechanism coordinates with the others, pushing, pulling and adjusting its own center of balance to keep in equilibrium. Each balancing mechanism is a self-contained unit with onboard power, sensors, computer and motor. Data captured from the mechanism’s sensors is sent to its computer, combining its sensor data with that from its peers to send appropriate commands to the motor. The motor applies torque to the balancing mechanism, which rotates and adjusts the center of gravity of the overall system. This is similar to the problems that tightrope walkers face when they adjust their balancing pole. The work is called a cube for the following reason: the corners are simply the corners of a cube. A more common term for this shape is the star tetrahedron; less common is the stellated octahedron.

ART GAMES→ more info Swiss Arts Council (CHE) Computer games have become an integral part of our everyday culture. The games industry is now the branch of the culture industry with the highest turnover. Artists from a wide variety of disciplines are contributing to the creation of ever more complex digital worlds. In its programme «GameCulture», the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia is tackling social, economic and aesthetic issues connected with computer games, and focusing on them as a new art form. Since the launch of the programme in 2010, Pro Helvetia has issued several open calls for unique gaming projects, inviting computer game developers in Switzerland to submit. The calls resulted in the presentation of many new games with strong artistic contents. The exhibition for Seoul will highlight the next generation of game design with apps for mobile devices and will be set in an ambient scenography. The exhibition will offer a peek into the play of tomorrow in terms of design, platforms, technology and storytelling, and provide visitors with a unique space to enjoy this new genre of art.

HOERROOM SEOUL Art Clay (USA/CHE) The installation concept of >HoerRoom< is a “point and line to plane” sculpture, which uses points and lines to define an interactive plane that becomes a playable virtual space as visitors interact with it. The installation makes space “variable” by using a series of newly developed interactive light and sound objects that when mounted on elastic cables function as “media pendulums”. To create the installation, a low-resolution matrix of points is mapped onto the space. Then, odd groups of vertically related points are selected and paired. These points are extended into lines using elastic cables upon which the media-pendulums are mounted at varying heights. Together the lines of the elastic cables mark the passive form of the space and when the cables are “plucked” into motion by the visitors, the lines swing back and fourth in harmonic motion, emit sound and light and delimit the active form of the space. A space within a space.

GAME OF DRONES Noxious Sector (CAN) Game of Drones is a simple game. Teams throw video cameras at each other as they run around the city. The cameras are networked with GPS, which maps and registers the trajectories drawn by the flight of the cameras during the game. The video cameras and sensors capture all the activity and provide a visualization of the game as it takes place in Seoul. The documented results form a multi-channel, video panorama installation in the gallery. This video content features the results of the game¬–our experiments conducted locally in-and-around Seoul in collaboration with Dr. Jin-Kyu Jung (from the University of Washington Bothell), a geo-visualization expert from Korea. Dr. Jung’s documentation and data visualizations collected during the game are also presented as overlapping projections in the video environment. The project utilizes MaxMSP to integrate multiple video streams, including didactic information describing the "game" and the conceptual framework for the project, as well as the analytic data synthesized by Dr. Jung. The game and it’s use of video cameras as drones is as much a metaphor for technological living as it is a playful way to engage the concept of militarized vision in a highly regulated social and political world.

FINGER PRINT CITY Procedural (CHE) The Finger Print City project employs Procedural Inc's „CityEngine“ technology to create a personalised digital world of a fictive city. The digital world on view is a qualitative representation of geographical, statistical and topological data, such as terrain, population densities, and even street network. The representation can be combined with biometrical information from a visitor in order to create a unique, personal representation of a city to each visitor. In contrast to other similar approaches, we do not attempt to create a "virtual" version of an actual city that simply copies and augments artefacts from the physical world but create a possible city out of the vistor’s features. Thanks to its generative nature, the project is extremely content rich, can be interactively explored and makes the invisible visible.

BOOK OF STAMPS Art Clay & Enrico Costanza (USA/CHE, ITL/GBR) The « Book of Stamps » is a travel guide between sonic landscapes from cities to urban cultures. The sheets of the book provide a “recording surface” and the ink stamps with their various patterns provide the ability to place sounds into the book. Together they act as an interactive tangible interface for a variety of time based musical tasks that form a collaborative composition by its users. There are two sets of ink stamps: The stamps that look like natural things like trees, bushes or stone paths belong to the “Country Sounds” category; Those that look like buildings belong to the “City Sounds” category. By stamping a book page with a combination from both categories, a soundscape is created that will either tend to sound like a city, a country or an urban sonic mix of both. In this manner, sonic spaces are created for each of the pages and when the user turns the pages to other already stamped pages, it lends him or her the impression that they are actually “traveling” between places sonically.

BLIND JUGGLER Raffello D’Andrea (CAN/CHE) A Blind Juggler is a robot that can keep a ball bouncing on a paddle without any sensory input. That is, it does not use cameras, microphones, or any other sensors that tell the robot where the ball is. All of the Blind Juggling Machines can juggle balls without seeing them, and without catching them. Most of them, in fact, can juggle balls without any sensory feedback, such as sound or contact; this is achieved by exploiting the dynamics of these machines to achieve stable ball trajectories. This is very much in contrast to how most human beings would perform the same task: we would use our eyes to determine where to put our hands, for example. The Cloverleaf Juggler on exhibit here features four separate concave areas that have the same parabolic shape as the Blind Juggler, allowing the simultaneous juggling of 4 balls. Unlike the other juggling machines, the Cloverleaf Juggler has contact sensors on each paddle. This information is used to generate complex trajectories that would otherwise be impossible to realize without feedback.

HUMAN BRAIN PROJECT EPFL Switzerland (CHE) The Human Brain Project (HBP) is a research project which aims to simulate the human brain with supercomputers to better understand how it functions. The end hopes of the HBP include being able to mimic the human brain using computers and being able to better diagnose different brain problems. The project is directed by the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and co-directed by Heidelberg University, the University Hospital of Lausanne and the University of Lausanne. It is supported by the European Union as a 'FET Flagship' project and the 86 institutions involved will receive one billion euro in funding over ten years. Neural networks expert Geoffrey Hinton has expressed his doubts that the Human Brain Project will succeed, because it depends on "too many moving parts that no one yet understands"

DYNAGRAMS K-Soul (CHE) Over the past centuries, painters have sought to integrate the light and movement into their pictorial work. After more than fifteen years of research, K-soul realized by means of new technologies the first living light painting in art history : the high-tech canvas "Jardin Cosmique Dynagram". The Holokinetic painting is entirely handmade. It integrates traditional techniques with modern technology. An electronic screen serves as a canvas. By this way, this high-tech canvas allows the artist to paint directly with the light ; all the movements of the brush are recorded and integrated into the canvas. The high-tech canvas "Jardin Cosmique Dynagram" contains 20 holokinetic light paintings of more than 5 hours and a half. To achieve 10 minutes of holokinetic painting, over 500 hours of work are needed. This twenty-first century canvas becomes an art gallery. It incorporates all the creations of the artist.

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Page last modified on July 24, 2014, at 04:10 AM