C. 15:33 - FILE 2009 - Interactive Light Installation by Phillip Stearns

WARNING: STROBOSCOPIC INSTALLATION - The viewers and exhibitors waive all liability for potential physical or mental injury which may be caused by the installation, c. 15:33, and hold harmless the creator of the work. Since this installation may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment in certain persons, you are cautioned to remain in the exhibition space only at your own risk. A qualified physician should be in attendance.

As the visitor enters the installation, they are presented with a sprawling web of lamps and wire suspended from the ceiling reminiscent of depictions of networks found in science text books. The lamps pulse and flash in evolving patterns and are spaced apart, inviting the visitor to enter the space of the work. As the visitor moves amongst the hanging lamps, their presence is registered by light sensors; they are essentially altering the topology of the network of lamps by blocking light from reaching the sensors. Each lamp is controlled by an identical configuration of electronics that turns the lamps on or off depending on the total amount of light gathered by the light sensors. Because the level of light determines which lamps are on and off, thus effecting the total level of light, the system becomes equilibrium seeking; the exact topology of the network determines whether equilibrium is reached or whether dynamical generative patterns emerge. The resulting experience is of being bathed in softly flickering light that ripples throughout the space, surrounding the visitor with generative patterns of light and dark, varying from steady states to stroboscopic chaos. Playfulness, exploration, and discovery are encouraged through the interactive translation of movement into very immediate, tangible and yet slightly unintuitive shifting patterns of flickering light. These flickering patterns of light will generate an experience similar to the stroboscopic hallucinations produced by Tony Conrad's film, The Flicker. Rather than use the medium of film to trick the visual cortex into forming visual hallucinations, c. 15:33 exploits the generative nature of neural network models.

At the center of a culture that is now becoming more accustomed to visual forms communication is the phenomenon of light and its relationship with electricity. McLuhan's idea that "electric light is pure information; it is a medium without a message" is used as a departure point for investigating the connections between biology and telecommunications technology. The photon, the quantum of light, is a communicator of electromagnetic force and the elementary subatomic mediator of all interactions involving electric charge --- including those electrochemical interactions taking place between neurons in our brains. With the advent of the Internet and world wide web has created vast networks of interconnected computers reminiscent of biological neural networks. c. 15:33 invites the visitor to interact physically with the intersection of these concepts of biological and telecommunications networks.

The development of visual based media technologies resulted in a shift from continuous modes of analog representation (used by analog audio) to a discrete time based upon "frames". The continuous linear methods of representation and storage used in audio technologies were --- at the time the development of cinema --- inadequate for carrying the amount of information required for the representation of visual media. In the media of film, the frames advance at a rate just quick enough for our visual cortex to smooth the image into the illusion of continuous motion. Although we are not aware of it, this flickering is the foundation for any and all visual media. As our society progresses, the smallest unit of measurable discrete time shrinks. From hours to minutes to seconds, the passage of the day is divided into a seemingly infinite multitude of packets; the smaller intervals between measurements affords us greater temporal precision, the refinement of which has brought us into the accelerated pace of the digital age. Representation is a process of cartography --- the terrain is incomprehensible in all its detail regardless of scale, and so the mind reduces it to representations; the mind cannot contain infinity but it can conceptualize it by representing it as a finite object of thought. However, this process of conceptual representation leaves us susceptible to deception and perhaps the greatest of all deceptions is self imposed: to mistake the map for the territory. As clock speeds push binary information in streams at ever greater rates and volumes, the maps we create --- our representations of the world outside of us --- become ever more convincing, blurring into a grand illusion in which we fail to truly see that which is right in front of us.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Phil
• Phillip
• Stearns
• Phillip Stearns
• Pixel
• Form
• Pixel Form
• FILE
• FILE 2009
• SESI
• interactive
• electronic art
• art
• experimental
• neural network
• artificial life

[manekoneki1111]

This is insane. I'd probably find out I get seizures if I got to entwined in this installation, but I would try it out anyway.  Worth it.

[sagelewismusic]

awesome installation.