The style of the film takes on a educational tone in order to make sense of the complex image that is built up, and although essentially a piece of explorative art, the work brings with it a sense of a science and art research project. The film was commissioned for an American Arts DVD ‘Toc’

S.T.I. is funded by the SciArt programme (supported by the ACE, the British Council, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, SAC, the Wellcome Trust and NESTA), and turns the technologies that look to deep space for Alien Intelligence back onto Planet Earth in a quest for ‘evidence’ of Terrestrial Intelligence. Looking at Earth from space the project will develop processing techniques using autonomous computer software agents. S.T.I. moves beyond irony by engaging with our understanding of the ‘real world’ through our senses, whether real or artificially enhanced. Will these autonomous systems ‘know’ the ‘truth’ when they ‘see’ it?

The S.T.I. Consortium: STAR, Dr Guido Bugmann, Dr Angelo Cangelosi, Laurent Mignonneau, Christa Sommerer, Dr Nick Veck.

http://www.vivaria.net/

http://www.i-dat.org/projects/artefact/

A modified version of this 3D engine is used to drive the Recombinant Architecture Project.

Performance Research: a quarterly journal of contemporary performance arts ‘On the Page’ Vol.9, No.2 (June 2004 ISSN 1352-8165)

With the support the Centre for Creative Enterprise and Participation at Dartington College of Arts and the South West of England Regional Development Agency/ Knowledge Exploitation South West ‘Proof of Concept’ funding, Performance Research is able to commission a number of works from artists and practitioners based in or related to the South West area for an issue to be called ‘On the Page’ and published in June 2004.

‘On the Page’ will take to another stage the journal’s investigations into the relationship between print, digital media and performance. Commissioned pieces, which the editors hope may include practitioners in a number of disciplines, for example including architecture, musical composition, choreography, will show concern for the future of the page as a vehicle for ideas and for navigating the limbo between the tangible mutable world of paper, the event/ space of performance, and the digital realm.

Performance Research
The journal Performance Research (Routledge/ Taylor & Francis) founded and edited by Ric Allsopp, Richard Gough and Claire MacDonald has been an important and distinctive voice in the world of contemporary performance arts since 1996, publishing work by a wide range of artists, practitioners and scholars from the UK, continental Europe, the USA and Australia. As well as speaking for contemporary concerns in the spheres of performance, theatre, dance, and critical practice, Performance Research also tries to redraw the boundaries of academic publishing in its engagement with the visual language of textual practice. It has been unusual in encouraging academics and theoreticians as well as artists and practitioners to contribute material in the form of ‘artists’ pages and to consider the printed page equally as a discursive and performative space.

read-write-fold.pdf

For the majority, these microbial worlds remain anonymous for a lifetime; the microscopic nature of their residents and the benign interaction with our daily lives provides a perceptual camouflage. However there is for some scientists a great potential interest. Just as humans developed settlements, and devised lifestyles dependent on permanent habitation, so developed a large number of microbial hazards. Respiratory diseases such as colds, influenza, legionnaires disease and more recently SARS have given aerobiologists food for thought. Other malign infectious agents stimulate vigorous debates about sanitation, filtration, UV treatment and disinfection.

Any ability to model microbial life within the built environment could have many scientific and technological benefits. Real time data and modelled predictions converted into digital images may give insight into the issues highlighted above as well as workplace health issues such as “sick building syndrome”. Above all, this virtual approach could do much to further the public understanding of biological science. Just as the early scientific illustrators engaged and enthused the lay public, contemporary media could draw many to the scientific arena. We should not here confine ourselves to consider modern deterministic and rational science, but also those interested in the science of qualities, chaos and complexity. This project could represent and illuminate a truly Goethean science of sensory perception and evaluation.

It also seems to me that this project would also offer much to the artist. A consideration of how to present the invisible, how to represent life and living organisms in four dimensions, and how technology can drive both artistic and scientific expression.

In our living building, we could see the mechanics of microbial contamination, the formation of transient and permanent biofilms, the movements of airborne bacteria, viruses and fungi as well as the biological events stimulated by human occupation and interaction. Millions of microbes are shed from the body of humans and other animals through natural processes, the sloughing of skin cells, the loss of hair, the aerosol formation from breathing, coughing and sneezing, as well as the regular processes of excretion and elimination.

In our living building we could hear the diversity of microbial life around us; number and variety represented by sound. Our living building could communicate with us, giving us details of the biological statistics it produces on a day to day basis; biomass, energy production, electrical power and genetic process.

Dr Andrew Evenden

For example, the infection and spread of the HIV virus in the human lymph gland. The space of the gland will be mapped onto the space of the room in which the installation takes place. Sounds that are made in the installation space will, in turn, feed into a sound-producing algorithm. The room is ‘infected’ with the virus and we shall hear the infection and its development in compressed time.

Sloth-bots build on robotic technology developed by Dr Guido Bugmann famously incorporated into Donald Rodney’s “Psalms”.

“Psalms” was exhibited in the South London Gallery as a part of Rodney’s last exhibition entitled “Nine Night in Eldorado”, in October 1997.

The wheelchair uses 8 sonar sensors, shaft-encoders, a video camera and a rate gyroscope to determine its position. A neural network using normalised RBF nodes encodes the sequence of 25 semi-circular sequences of positions forming the trajectory.

http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/soc/research/neural/research/wheelc.htm

The control system comprises a laptop PC 586 running a control program written in CORTEX-PRO, and linked to a Rug Warrior board built around the 68000 microcontroller.

With compliments to Robert Breer, EAT70

Sloth-bots use additional technology to link between the Arch-OS vision tool and the autonomous architectural forms.