interactive installation

The reading of any text, or the translation from one language (or mode) to another relies on a process of interpretation. Following Derrida, in his theory of translation, Lawrence Venuti writes that ‘Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain (polysemous, intertextual, subject to infinite linkages), it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity’ (Venuti 2008: 13). These plural and contingent relations that have the capacity to produce different meanings were played out in Ana Cavic and Sally Morfill’s animation for ELO 2016 (Rules that order the reading of clouds). Lines, as signifiers, developed through gestures of drawing, reformed repeatedly to create different relations, and produce new meanings that shifted between the contexts of image and text. In the process of making Rules (2016), the active space where interpretation occurred and meaning was produced lay between the frames of animated movement. This between space, or gap - prone to perceptual failings - is at the core of a new collaboration between Cavic, Morfill and Tychonas Michailidis. I am not listening is an interactive installation in which the interpretative space between the aural, visual and haptic is exposed and activated. The audience is witness to what Roman Jakobson describes as ‘intersemiotic transposition’ (1959): verbal signs are interpreted by means of non-verbal sign systems, and vice versa. Where Jakobson stated that ‘poetry is untranslatable,’ a creative transposition provides the listener with vibrating sensory feedback that is in fact a direct translation of the text. A chain of translation processes begins with simple drawing gestures from which a ‘kit’ of lines is developed. These lines, translated into a material form (initially adhesive vinyl), are physically arranged and rearranged to construct a series of poetic texts or ‘sculpture poems’ that in turn provide the content for audio recordings of spoken word. While preparing the adhesive vinyl lines, the process of weeding (removing the unwanted shapes from the vinyl sheet) produces remnants that are rolled into spherical sculptural objects. These are reinterpreted in their final material form to incorporate vibro-haptic technology, providing an object-interface through which the audio recording can be manipulated. In this work, therefore, literature is mediated by technology. The inclusion of alternative sensory formats to support the listening/reading of a text both augments the experience of the audience, and underlines its incompleteness within a chain of signification.

Color Yourself Inspired™ is a generative artwork that creates unpredictable poetic phrases from Benjamin Moore’s paint color database; it is an interdisciplinary exploration of sound, color and language. An online collection of over 1000 unique color names are poetically sequenced using phonetic analysis and parts of speech analysis in a computer program designed by the artists. Instead of labeling color with language as the marketing team has done in the original database, Color Yourself Inspired™ (a marketing slogan from the Benjamin Moore website) inverts this relationship and uses language to generate visual information. (Source: http://thenewriver.us/color-yourself-inspired/)

Triggerhappy is a gallery installation whose format will be familiar to anyone who has encountered that early arcade game, Space Invaders combining an absurd quest for information with an old-fashioned shoot-em-up computer game. In this, it accurately reflects, and comments upon, the electronic environment in which we live, work and play. "In effect", the artists say, "triggerhappy becomes a folly. A self-defeating environment looking at the relationship between hypertext, authorship and the individual." They cleverly recontextualise existing representations and subject them to active manipulation on the part of the viewer, who becomes an unwitting participant in a meaningless game of "info-war".

-- Michael Gibbs, 1998

(Source: http://www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/thap.html)

These toponyms (names) exist throughout the world, they show the landscape and describe the context of a field. Retaining only those evocative names, Terra Incognita offers a refined mapping, cleansed of its informative layers. At a moment populated by Google Earth and omniscient views, the map in this work has no scale or legend, only the lines and contours of the coastal lakes appear on white background. It is presented as a touch screen in a device designed as a workspace, allowing for an intimate consultation. The navigation is done by meaning association, offering a sensitive and poetic movement, from a symbolic name to another.

(Source: Translation of the author's description)

The Operature is an interactive installation of narrative-poetic movements engaging themes of forensics, anatomy and 21stcentury embodiment. The work incorporates a range of historical and contemporary contexts of observation and anatomical analysis including early modern surgical theaters, Francis Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, and The Stud File, a methodical archive of personal evidence documenting the sexual exploits of Samuel Steward, a 20th century tattoo artist, gay pornographer, and friend of Gertrude Stein. In this iteration, 12 disks with biological symbols can be scanned by a webcam to access visual-textual movements as well as qr codes and augmented reality markers that can be examined with a smartphone. The Operature is a multi-modal project of the collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) with several large-scale manifestations including a 2-hour live performance and a 25-screen installation. This scaled-down version will include artifacts drawn from the larger body of work. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Bodybuilding is an interactive installation which ironically stages the relation between the body, technology, and language. The user is active in a bodybuilding machine. Moving the weights, he or she affects the text movement on the screen in front of him or her. The text consists of erotic fragments stored in a database and selected randomly according to the user’s action. Here, the body, being a consuming and styling object of the Techno-culture, serves—paradoxically in full action—for the imaginative access to the verbally mediated erotic world, where the body simultaneously is a central theme. However, during the reading process, the user’s hands have to remain above the blankets—i.e., on the machine. Beyond, the textual dialog simultaneously functions as a commentary on the user’s situation in the machine.

Source: p0es1s exhibition catalog record, 2004