engaging technology ii: art + science

The interplay of art and science—a concept at least as old as Leonardo da Vinci—is the focus of “Engaging Technology II,” an exhibition at Ball State University’s David Owsley Museum of Art which ran September 28, 2017 through December 22, 2017. Museum patrons experienced a selection of work from internationally renowned artists whose explorations on the topic include installations, code art (artwork generated by computer programming), art/science, augmented reality and human-computer interaction.

The exhibition was curated by Ball State’s John Fillwalk, director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA Lab) in the College of Architecture and Planning and is both a sequel and a new concept, according to Robert La France, the museum’s director. This exhibit builds on the success of a prior exhibition curated by Fillwalk, that examined the emergence of the genre of Intermedia Art, with a particular focus on the intersection of technology and artmaking. The new show shifts the curatorial emphasis on STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.

This exhibition continues to position Ball State as an international center of STEAM innovation. A goal of Engaging Technology II was to invite artists exploring the edges of art and science into discourse within our community—advancing our University’s conversation regarding interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. This collection of artists examines various aspects of the physical and life sciences, from code and biology to chemistry and physics.

Among those individuals whose work is featured in the exhibition is Adam Brown, an associate professor at Michigan State University. His live biochemical installation, The Great Work of the Metal Lover is a work that sits at the intersection of art, science and alchemy. “It uses microbiology as a technique to solve the mystery of the philosopher’s stone,” said Brown, who described the centuries-old “stone” as a legendary substance sought by alchemists who believed it capable of turning metals like mercury into gold and silver.

His installation uses custom lab equipment to introduce a “highly specialized” bacterium into an engineered atmosphere, turning toxic gold chloride into usable 24K gold over time during the course of the show. “By the end of the exhibition, the process will produce enough gold to put in the palm of your hand,” Brown said. Other innovative contributors to “Engaging Technology II” include code artist Casey Raes; composer and visual artist Tristian Perich; and Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, European-Russian artists who create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices.

“10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid” is Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s live, audiovisual performance which was presented on the fulldome projection screen of Ball State’s Charles W. Brown Planetarium. The artwork uses a penetrating laser beam to scan the surface of soap bubbles, the behavior of which model the unique properties of cell membranes.

Throughout the run of Engaging Technology II, a series of invited performances, lectures and workshops were scheduled on campus and in the Muncie community to enhance the exhibition’s reach. Classes, workshops, lectures and family events were offered for local and regional audiences.

By Gail Werner, BSU Media Strategist
Et al.

Adam Brown

Adam Brown (born 1972, Evanston, Illinois) is a conceptual artist whose work incorporates art and science hybrids, including living and biological systems, robotics, and molecular chemistry taking the form of installations and interactive objects, Brown’s creative research is informed by a background in Intermedia, a philosophy that provides a framework for breaking down and combining different models of thought and bringing together disparate disciplines, leading to the establishment of new forms of research and creative activity.

His most recent project, The Great Work of the Metal Lover (with Kazem Kashefi) is an artwork that sits at the intersection of art, science, and alchemy. The work received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica 2012 and received an Award of Distinction from Vida 14. Another project, Origins of Life: Experiment #1x, is a working scientific experiment using simulated lightning, heat, and primordial gases that is repositioned as art installation (with Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein). In 2011 the work was selected as part of Ars Electronica with the Synthetic exhibition in Vienna. In 2012, Brown and Root-Bernstein received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue this project.

Brown currently is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University where he created a new are of study called Electronic Art & Intermedia. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts at Ball State University, and serves as an Artist-in-Residence for the Michigan State University BEACON (Bio/Computational Evolution in Action Consortium) project, funded by the Nation Science Foundation. He received his BA, MA, and MFA from the University of Iowa.

The Great Work of the Metal Lover

Historically, Magnum Opus or The Great Work was an alchemical process that incorporated a personal, spiritual, and chemical method for creating the Philosopher’s Stone, a mysterious red colored substance that was capable of transmuting base matter into the noble metal of gold. Discovering the principals of the Philosopher’s Stone was one of the defining and at the same time seemingly unobtainable objectives of Western alchemy. The Great Work of the Metal Lover is an artwork that sits at the intersection of art, science, and alchemy, re-examining the problem of transmutation through the use of modern microbiological practice and thus solving the ancient riddle.

Gold production is accomplished by the pairing of a highly specialized metallotolerant extremophilic bacterium and an engineered atmosphere contained within a customized alchemical bioreactor. The extreme minimal ecosystem within the bioreactor forces the bacteria to metabolize high concentrations of toxic AuCl3 (gold chloride), turning soluble gold into usable 24K gold.

Extremophiles are microorganisms that are able to survive and flourish in physically and/or chemically extreme conditions that would kill most of the life on our planet. It is believed that extremophiles hold the key to understanding how life may have originated due to their unique ability to metabolize toxic substances like uranium, arsenic, and gold chloride.

Casey Reas

Casey Reas (a.k.a Casey Edwin Barker Reas, C. E. B. Reas) was born in 1972 in Troy, Ohio. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Reas’s software, prints, and installations have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Recent venues include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent commissions have been awarded by the New World Symphony in Miami and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Reas’s work is also in a range of private and public collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences as well as a bachelor’s degree from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001. Processing is an open source programming language and environment for the visual arts.

MicroImage

MicroImage is a series of software, prints, and animations developed from 2001–2003 and then revisited in 2014. The concept for MicroImage originated with the book Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by the neuroanatomist Valentino Braitenberg. As Braitenberg spent his career studying the nervous systems of insects and mammals, he distilled generalizations about how nervous systems work.

He wrote, “I have been dealing for many years with certain structures within animal brains that seemed to be interpretable as pieces of computing machinery because of their simplicity and/or regularity.” He used the term synthetic psychology to define the construction of personality/behavior through building up structures of computing machinery.

In Vehicles, Braitenberg defined a series of 13 conceptual constructions by gradually building more complex behavior with the addition of more machinery. The software processes in MicroImage are analogous to Braitenberg’s Vehicles 2 and 3. Simple layers of code combine to create the deceptively complicated behavior of these software machines. Each machine has two simulated sensors to detect the environment and two simulated actuators to propel itself. The relationships between the sensors and actuators determine the specific behavior for each machine. In the thousands of software machines simultaneously running in MicroImage (Software 2), there are four distinct types, each specified with a color.

Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand

Dmitry Gelfand (born 1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Evelina Domnitch (born 1972, Minsk, Belarus) create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry, and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Current finding, particularly regarding wave phenomena, are employed by the artists to investigate questions of perception and perpetuity. Such investigations are salient because the scientific picture of the world, which serves as the basis for contemporary thought, still cannot encompass the unrecordable workings for consciousness.

Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, Domnitch and Gelfand’s installations exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these rarely seen phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being intermediated, they often serve to vastly extend the observer’s sensory envelope The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion. Domnitch received her MA in philosophy from Belorussian State University and Gelfand received his FA in film/video from New York University.

Hydrogeny

Nature’s simplest atom and mother of all matter, hydrogen feeds the stars as well as interlaces the molecules of their biological descendants—to whom it ultimately whispers the secrets of quantum reality. Hydrogen’s most prevalent earthly guise lies within the composition of water. Slight electrical perturbation splits water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, resulting in diaphanous bubble clouds slowly rising towards the liquid’s surface. Emanating from an array of electrodes at the bottom of a water-filled chamber, strings and strata of hydrogen bubbles meticulously trace their emergent surroundings. A white laser sheet scans and illuminates the hydrogen bubble trajectories. Each quivering bubble-lens divides the white light into its constituent spectrum of colors, thereby inciting enhanced, prismatic depth perception.

Hans Breder

The exhibition incorporates an important conceptual sculpture from DOMA’s collection: Ordered by Telephone by Hans Breder, who passed away in June 2017. Breder, a pioneer of interdisciplinary in visual arts, spent his career working across media, producing performance-based conceptual works that combine painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound, technology, and science. In 1968, he founded the Intermedia Program at the University of Iowa, which he directed until 2000, and which was premised upon the unique exploration of what he defined as the liminal spaced between the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Hans Breder was born in Germany in 1935. He studied architecture and painting and in 1964 moved to New York, where he became Indiana sculptor George Rickey’s assistant. In 1967, Breder has his first New York show—a sold out presentation of constructivist sculptures at the Richard Feigen Gallery. Shortly afterwards he accepted a teaching job at the University of Iowa where he founded the Intermedia and Video Art Program—one of the most influential programs of the time.

Breder’s challenge to his students and for himself was to break out of the traditional way of teaching art by combining the disciplines of painting, sculpture, installation, performance, music, film, photography, and video. At a time when the social, political, and artistic mores of the West were undergoing dramatic upheaval, Breder was a powerful experimental voice.

Ursonate

Ursonate 1986 is the result of a transference process utilizing computer and video technology to transport the 1932 phonetic poem, Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters, from the cultural setting of that period into a contemporary context. In the early part of the century, Dada artists who experienced with phonetic poetry were exploring the concepts of pre-language and pre-consciousness. The title of Schwitters’ piece, Ursonate, can be translated as “primordial sonata.” In Ursonate 1986 video and computer technologies, extensions of the nervous system, are used to parallel and extend Schwitters’s attempts to excavate the roots of language and to articulate the primordial. Repetition creates a pattern. The concept of this artwork then is for the listener to get into a state of non-thinking.

John Fillwalk - Curator

John Fillwalk (b. 1962) is an Intermedia artist working in video, interactive installation, virtual reality and hybrid artforms. Fillwalk directs the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts [IDIA Lab] at Ball State University. Initially founded though support by Eli Lilly Foundation, Inc. the IDIA Lab is an interdisciplinary and collaborative studio exploring the intersections of art, science and technology and also serves as Senior Director of Hybrid Design Technologies at Ball State University. Fillwalk is a leading figure as an artist and technologist in virtual and hybrid environments. He is president of the Hans Breder Foundation – an international non-profit for the study, archive and sponsorship of intermedial artforms. He has received numerous grants, awards, fellowships and presentations.

He positions his work to act as a mediator between tangible and implied space, creating a potential for the transformative nature of encounter and experience- pursuing the realization of forms, sounds and imagery that afford interaction at its most fundamental level. The significance of the tangible becomes fleeting, shifting the emphasis away from the art object, and toward experience. His artwork has been exhibited internationally at festivals, galleries and museums. His most notable exhibitions include: SIGGRAPH 2010 Los Angeles; SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, Singapore; 404 International Festival of Electronic Art –Italy and Switzerland; CYNETart 2004: 8th International Festival for Computer Based Art in Dresden, Germany; 2011 Les Instants Vidéo: Numériques et Poétiques, France, Italy and India; 4th Salón de Arte Digital at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Maracaibo, Venezuela; VIDEOFORMES 2007 and 2005: International Video and New Media Festival, Finalist for Grand Prix de la Création Video, Clermont-Ferrand, France; SIGGRAPH 2003 and 2001 International Computer Graphics Conferences; 404 International Festival of Electronic Art (2005), Rosario, Argentina; Galerie Paris-Sud, France; InteractivA ’03 at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Merida, Mexico; Synthese 2005 and 2004: 35th and 34th International Festival of Electronic Music and Art, Bourges, France; 2003 and 2002 Digital Art Competitions, Beecher Center for Art and Technology, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; iMOCA: Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; Digital Sur Festival- Arte Digital Rosario 2003, Rosario, Argentina; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the ASCI Digital ‘02 Exhibition, New York Hall of Science, New York.

MaelStrom

MaelStrom is a site-specific augmented reality (AR) installation designed by artist John Fillwalk and IDIA Lab (with Neil Zehr, Aaron Anderson, and David Rodriguez). Designed for Engaging Technology II: Art + Science, MaelStrom visualizes live, daily wind data from Washington, DC, to inform the wind direction and speed affecting virtual paper airplanes that fall from a skylight above to the ground in a circular force. In this multiuser-networked piece, users are assigned a unique color through which they can paint nearby airplanes and also move them by walking and colliding. The museum geometry is both live-mapped by ARkit and also through a custom mesh that supports the unique architecture of the museum’s Sculpture Court.

Visitors launch the work by standing on a floor sign that states Stand Here and pointing their camera at an image target that says Look Here. The sound is based on processed wind chimes and each player has a unique ID and tone—forming a chorus of sound in the space. In this work, the viewer becomes a participant in the process of a constant stream of messaging and data—uniquely affecting its design while collaborating with other users.

Tristan Perich

Tristan Perich (born 1982, New York) work is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics, and code.

1–Bit Music, his 2004 release, was the first album ever released as a microchip, programmed to synthesize his electronic composition live. His works for soloist, ensemble and orchestra have been performed internationally by ensembles including Bang on a Can, Calder Quartet, Eighth Blackbird at venues from the Whitney Museum and MASS MoCA to Sonar and Ars Electronica. He has received commissions from Bang on a Can, Meehan/Perkins Duo, Dither Quartet, Yam/Wire, and others.

Perich was a featured artist at Sonar 2010 in Barcelona and, in 2009, the Prix Ars Electronica awarded him the Award of Distinction for his composition Active Field (for ten violins and ten-channel 1-bit music). Rhizome awarded him a 2010 commission for Microtonal Wall, an audio installation with 1,500 speakers Perich attended the first Bang on a Can Summer Institute in 2002. He was the Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room in 2008, at Mikrogalleriet in Copenhagen in 2010, at the Addison Gallery in Andover, Massachusetts and Harvestworks in New York in 2010, and at the Watermill Center in 2012. His work has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the American Music Center, Meet the Composer, and others.

Machine Wall Drawing

Pen on paper or wall drawings executed by a machine that I designed and built—employ randomness and order as raw materials within a visual composition. I see randomness and order as occupying opposite ends of a continuous spectrum, and I use them to dictate the immediate motion of the pen. Varying levels of randomness—the probability the pen will change direction—produces the difference between straight lines or dense frenetic motion. While the motors’ movements are the result of code executed precisely by machine, the final drawings come from the motion of pen on surface, and are wedded to effects from the physical world: the ripple of the string connecting pen to motor, the gradual depletion of ink, the texture of the paper. It is this balance between code and physics that excites me most, since the drawings couldn’t be made without the code, and code needs to be realized in the physical world in order to be more than a set of instructions.

Slowly Next to Her

Slowly Next To Her exists in a few forms, as a music composition for solo pianist playing a player piano with data output, as a video, and as a dance. The music was composed for the Yamaha Disklavier (a special kind of player piano that can be played by a computer, but can also send data as output when performed). In this case, when a human pianist presses keys on the piano, an electronic sine wave at the same pitch is also played. As the piano’s natural tone fades away, the sine tone remains until the key is released. The video also is based on sine waves, which control aspects of how the massive line segment slowly bends, returning to a rest state when all the sinusoidal periods converge. I created the work when I was first beginning to work with 1-bit data and the square waves it is capable of, but while I was still creating video work on a conventional desktop computer.