Arrhythmic Suite (original) (raw)

Projecting Heartbeats: Participant Experiences of a Pulse Responsive Artwork

Western culture’s current obsession with the external form of the human body and instrumental application of biosensing technologies is being challenged by some artworks. This paper explores one such work. ‘Membrane’ is an interactive pulse-sensing installation that draws attention to our inner bodily processes, probing affective entanglements and the permeability of our personal barriers. The artwork mines human bodies to extract the heartbeats of participants. It relies on contact-free technology to covertly measure this intimate rhythm of life. Real time changes in the participant’s heart rate are made publicly perceivable; sonic representations of the changing rhythm are amplified and a live video feed of the participant is manipulated and projected. The installation offers new ways of relating to and critically engaging with a technology that has been promoted as the solution to perceived health, safety, and security problems; it is a playful laboratory that provokes perceptual enquiries, social interactions, and experiences of embodied exploration. The work places the curious centre stage, turns the spotlight on affect, and locates the passer-by as witness and collaborator. A number of participants who engaged with Membrane offered their experience of encountering the artwork. Their reflections pull focus on what comes to matter in our entanglements with biosensing installations.

Improvising Polyrhythmic Space: Exploring a Continuum of Musico-Spatial Creative Practice

2018

My dual practice as musician (drums) and spatial designer (architect) provides a unique perspective from which to conduct cross-domain design research. I explore a continuum of practice that reveals rich territories for investigation within and across the musical domain, the spatial domain and a speculative ‘musico-spatial’ domain. The research follows two main trajectories: an exploration of improvisation as a methodology for design research and, working synergistically with this, an exploration of the cross-domain representation (XDR) of digital drumming. I develop a three-dimensional spatial drum notation and spatial prototypes that reveal ‘affordances’ (Norman, 2002) for the understanding of my drumming ‘referents’ (Pressing, 1998) through XDR. I then explore modalities of drum-based augmented musical improvisation through a series of experimental Digital DrumScapes and extend the practice of improvisation into the spatial domain through spatial improvisation where forms are generated through spatial thinking-in-action on the digital drum kit. I bring the two trajectories of design research together through the development of a virtual drumming environment and the evolution of an augmented musico-spatial improvisational practice. This dynamic virtual environment forms a counterpoint to static spatialisations of polyrhythmic drumming and, together, these provide a repertoire of workflows to inform the continuum of cross-domain design research.

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

2006

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition-respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram -an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal "jamming" that transduces the lived experience of a "biogram," a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual -intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal.

BB got your beat: Visualising Heartbeats within a Biosensing Artwork

This paper considers participant experience of the interactive artwork BB got your beat, which uses a contact-free biosensing technology to covertly measure the heartbeat behaviour of passers-by. The artwork reinterprets these intimate bodily rhythms using audiovisual feedback to support critical insight into the potential applications for this technology. BB got your beat hints at the surveillance potential of this biosensing technology using the dramatic device of cross hairs and a visual treatment reminiscent of the thermographic visualisations employed in the military surveillance of human bodies. It visualises changes in the pulse rate using as its screen a magnified, high contrast, real time video of the subject’s face – a technique that engages the subject in re-embodying their biodata. The paper discusses the artistic choices and aesthetic theory that inform the visualisation used in the artwork. It considers the phenomenological methodology that grounds this research before discussing the experiences of some of those who encountered the work.

The Polyrhythmic-scape of the City

Materia Architectura, 2018

This paper shows the work of the 'Cosmopolitan Workshop', which is part of the Arts and Study Abroad Program (ASAP) at Tokyo University of the Arts. ASAP encourages interdisciplinarity and practical design research strategies out of the studio, the university, and the country. Especially, the Cosmopolitan Workshop explores a way for understanding and conceiving the complex connections between humans and the environment of the city, while focusing on King’s Cross redevelopment area in London. Drawing on ideas by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, and with reference to Bernard Tschumi, the participants in the Cosmopolitan Workshop aimed to describe a series of ordinary 'direct actions' as 'rhythmanalysis' of humans, architecture, and space, through the assumption that this not only proposes different readings of spatial function, but also configures ambiguous relationships between “every being, every entity and every body, both living and non-living”. With ...

Selections for the Tenth New York Digital Salon (Zkm Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe)

Leonardo, 2002

Can the brain hear itself? The localization of acoustic stimuli and of our surroundings is among other things sensed through the phase difference between the ears. Even the movement of the head is involved in this process of identifying space through sound. When using earphones these localizers do not apply. Head Spaces, only to be experienced with earphones, are not representations of exterior space. Head Spaces are works specifically created for the interior of the head. The head-conceived as hollow volume. Nothing but an empty, globe-like receptacle.

The heartbeat, neuroaesthetics, artistic research, and creation through mind and emotions

Creating Through Mind and Emotions, 2022

This chapter reflects on the emerging field of Neuroaesthetics, artistic research, and the connection of mind and emotions in the realm of artistic creation. It also explores the connection between the multidisciplinary field of Neuroaesthetics and the multidisciplinary approach of artistic research while promoting this form of practice-based research methodology for emancipatory strategies within academia. It shows different approaches within fields of Neuroaesthetics, as proposed by Charles T. Wolfe, and describes artistic research by demonstrating the capability of such a methodology. Finally, it reflects on the connection between Neuroaesthetics and artistic research while arguing for a connection between mind and emotion to expand mediated experiences for artistic creation.

Listen (Awakening): A Composition with Auditory Display

2008

For the ICAD conference 2004 in Sydney a sonification of ECG and other data was carried out to merge the boundaries between artistic sonification and scientific auditory display. Listen (Awakening) attempts to create in sound the activity of the brain becoming aware of a piece of music and gradually building in its subconscious reaction and appreciation. Certain constraints were put on the sonification exercise. It was to be data driven and time constrained to the original length of the piece of music by David Page [1]. With these limitations the challenge then was to make the result sonically and musically interesting as well as conveying to the listener the human physiological response to music in an auditory display. The resulting composition consists of 15 sound files which will be mapped during the performance directly to the 15 speakers in the Sydney Opera House Studio. A 16 th sub-bass channel will convey the low frequency content of the music. 1.

Flow Vertical: Composing and Improvising Original Music Inspired by Bodily Sound Vibrations

Leonardo Music Journal Volume 29, p.78-82, 2019

This text analyzes the process of composing and improvising the musical experiment Flow Vertical. This artistic exploration for chamber orchestra responds to a theory of biosignals, incorporating a putative sonic mapping of “inaudible” sound vibration of the author’s biofield as understood to be measured by an SCIO device. The interpretation and represent ation of measured frequencies influenced the creation of an “assemblage,” the system of interconnected human and nonhuman agents within the piece. The artist applied an original eight-week-long method of creation, investigating how this idea of body vibration and a specific yogic routine could aesthetically affect music.