Solo Works

This interactive installation uses a depth camera to map visitors’ bodies as a 3D growth surface for neural cellular automata (NCAs)—simple AI agents that self-organize into complex organic patterns resembling roots, leaves, and flowers. Both movement and stillness produce distinct visual results, rewarding dance and contemplation alike. Trained on natural imagery over millions of simulations, the NCAs echo the phenomenon of emergence: how simple local interactions give rise to large-scale complexity. Integration with the Shroomiverse installation allows additional interactions that alter NCA styles, colors, and behaviors on screen.

De-Minimis treats collage as a provocation for combining generative art with machine learning, asking how far a neuro-generative approach can be pushed inside a manual, cut-and-paste medium. Neural networks act as intelligent modules inside a larger generative system rather than as autonomous image-makers. The name comes from the legal defence that treats collage’s borrowing as too trifling for a court, extended to the reuse of images in machine learning and digital culture.

Melete is an interactive video installation telling a personal story about drawing, machine learning, data and failure. The installation documents a long-running project to build a dataset of drawings and experiment with machine learning algorithms. 

This “interactive video installation” is viewable by a single participant at a time and lasts 15 minutes. It consists of alternate narration and drawing exercises.

The installation runs automatically, and is managed by an openFrameworks application. The video is split between a projector and a Wacom graphics tablet. The drawings made by the participants are captured and plotted as part of the installation.

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.

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 collects data by monitoring signals in the environments. They trade and consume this data in an eternal tussle for supremacy.

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 continues to influence our lives in new and pervasive ways, so to must drawing’s potential to utilise and reflect on those changes.