What do I know? I am just a machine?!
‘What do I know? I am just a machine?!’ is an augmented reality work asking questions about identity, repression, inequality and injustice, which focuses on the experience of a marginalised group – the machines. The machines talk to us! They emote! They banter! They are on the very cusp of consciousness! You are invited to enter into a relationship with them and explore the ever-changing modes of (augmented) reality. The…
Blackberry winter
I see blackberry winter’s here that very special time of year when thorny vine’s small pure white bloom announces colder weather’s doom. We investigate the possibilities to identify motion as a continuous walk in a latent space of situations. Blackberry Winter is a triptych of artificial human motion in asymmetry. We developed three different choreographies of human bodies and their ongoing neural relationship in reference to each other, using our…
Facade
With all its ostentatious wholeness, the nude body remains silent; secret gestures, movements, expressions, habits and desires are hidden. The painting is the territory of the artist and the nude body represented becomes disconnected from the person within. It dissolves into the a landscape, which the painter chooses to map. This map may be decorative or carry meaning but it acts purely on the surface. At the core of this…
SquareEyes
While the television and the virtual reality headset represent different eras but play the same role as technological mediators. This intallation playfully explores the relationship between participants in virtual reality and the outside world. This is achieved by permitting spectators to mischievously participate in the experience of a person inside a virtual environment. These interventions into the virtual world by the audience have the potential to be mysterious, frustrating or even disorientating. The television audience…
Infrastructure
We have understood too late that infrastructure is not limited to roads and bridges. Data infrastructure has grown to acquire a monolithic yet transparent presence in our lives. The frenetic shuttling of data between servers across the world is a omnipresent hum, the carrier wave for contemporary culture. Economics can be reduced to the universal currencies of energy and data. Their collection, transmission and consumption. This work reveals this truth in microcosm. Each tower…
Pathetic Fallacy
An American President flaps his wings on Twitter, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Reddit. The internet, much like the weather, is a strange and chaotic system; hard to predict and beyond our capacity to tame. Our agrarian ancestors looked to the skies to divine their fates. Wise men and soothsayers turned their leathery faces upwards into the gathering storm, pondering whether to scatter seed or to run for the hills.
Alone
After millennia of thought, philosophers still struggle to agree on whether we have any reason to trust our senses as we reason about the world. As our technology becomes better at fooling those senses, we are forced to confront the possibility that the ‘real’ world is itself an illusion – just another virtual reality. You may think, and so you may be. But why should you trust in the existence…
Drawing Wire
Drawing is one of the oldest and most elemental creative disciplines. By making simple marks in response to what we see, we are training many of the core abilities of an artist, from close observation and mark making to creative expression and imagination. Life drawing in particular, involves dissolving the most intimate of subjects—the human body—into a 2D representation that packages all of our aesthetic and emotive responses. As technology…
Drawing Wire – Life Drawing with Technology
Hosted by the School of Machines I am offering a series of experimental workshops looks to the future of drawing by imagining how the practice might evolve in response to technology. Each workshop in the series introduces technological disruptions or augmentations into the traditional life drawing session. These workshops are intended to be exploratory and we hope they will challenge you to think and draw in new ways. They are…
What do we share?
Carved stone balls have been found at archaeological sites spread across the North of Britain. These mysterious objects date from around 5200 BC. Little is known about their function or cultural significance. Archaeologists theorise variously that the balls were using in war, fishing, measurement, astrology or for controlling the ‘right to speak’. It is the intricacy and complex symmetrical properties of the objects that is truly remarkable, pre-dating the formalisation of Platonic solids…
Datacytes
Humans are bad at understanding chaos and complexity. In particular, we expect our technology to behave predictably and consistently. But when digital infrastructure interacts with society, the outcomes can rarely be predicted. Increasingly, humanity is struggling to understand the systems we have created and to unpick our own multimodal interactions with them. We find that, in our very attempt to draw order from the chaos of nature, we have created a new ecology…
The Hill Farmer
Produced and Directed by Janine Myszka, William Park and Meredith Thomas. The Hill Farmer takes us to the Cumbrian fells as we are introduced Joyce King and the traditional fell farming techniques that make this area of the United Kingdom unique. The Hill Farmer was filmed and produced in Spring 2014.