TIME MACHINE Dorkbot-Syd
Bringing you an extra special Time Machine Dorkbot-Syd with people doing strange things with electricity.
Presenters:
Lachlan Anthony, Michael Candy & Andrew McLellan – Age of Ease
Alex Cuffe and Benjamin Kolaitis – Creo Nova
Erin Gee – Swarming Emotional Pianos Project
Lachlan Anthony, Michael Candy & Andrew McLellan – Age of Ease
An open, participatory environment of auto-destructive architecture. Brisbane artists Andrew McLellan, Michael Candy and Lachlan Anthony will award several machinations to break the embedded restraints experienced under happy duress, creating an alternative ideal: an alternative Age of Ease. TVs, fluorescent light tubes and ceramic tiles will be brought under the affirmative freedom of mechanical hammers, mouths and turbines.
Michael Candy is a Brisbane-based new media/kinetic artist with a specific interest in mimesis, technological archetypes and the discourse that exists within these contemporary parallels.
Andrew McLellan is a Brisbane-based artist who spends his quality time on Cured Pink: a project that works within self-built instrumentation, ludic robotocism, crowd dissuasion, apolitical public intervention and audio engineering.
Lachlan Anthony is a Melbourne-based sculpture and installation artist. His practice maps the values of social culture in consumer lifestyles within zones such as the home, the office, the mall and most recently, the franchise gym.
Alex Cuffe and Benjamin Kolaitis - Creo Nova
Genesis of Biosynthiais an installation devised by the collaborative duo Creo Nova: Alex Cuffe and Benjamin Kolaitis. Genesis of Biosynthiaprovides an interactive platform for the audience to sonically engage with plant matter. Ideas surrounding cartesian duality between forms of nature and science are inherent to this work. Through melding artificial and organic materials and processes within the construction of the installation, the project hopes to shed light on how these two forms can, and do, interact with each other.
Benjamin Kolaitis is a Melbourne-based sound and sculptural artist. He currently works with electronics and programming in developing sound sculptures, invented instruments and improvised performances. Conceptually Ben’s focus is to engage the audience to interact with new forms of gestural control and interactive tools such as fruit, light, graphite drawings and touch controlling sound, light and video through handmade MIDI gestural controls.
Alex Cuffe is a Melbourne-based multi-disciplinary artist who works across sculpture, installation and experimental sound. In his practice, Cuffe approaches the materiality of objects in relation to convoluted theories drawn from science, geometry, astrology, kinetics and acoustics. His works utilise the aesthetics of the ‘backyard inventor’ where lo-fi materials and natural matter coalesce, transformed through new media technologies.
Erin Gee - Swarming Emotional Pianos Project
Discussions between Canadian sound artist Erin Gee, neurophysiologist Vaughan Macefield and roboticist Dr Damith Herath have led to the establishment of a collaboration aimed at developing a performance work that employs a new and experimentalset of musical instruments based on real-time processing of physiological markers of emotion. This project follows Gee’s successful residency at MARCS Institute (University of Western Sydney)in 2011 at the invitation of media artist Stelarc, where she realized Orpheux Larynx,a robotic opera-inspired performance, at the Powerhouse Museum.
The aim of this new collaboration is to couple neuroscientific research with robotics in order to develop a set of new musical instruments. Using invasive intraneural recordings of skin sympathetic nerve activity(SSNA) together with non-invasive physiological measures (such as heart rate, respiration, sweat release, skin blood flow, pupil diameter) – during emotional arousal and emotional state changes in human performers, these signals will be used to drivewireless, mobileinstrumentsduring performance.
You - Show and Tell
As per usual – Dorkbot concludes with a final open segment available to anyone for hijacking. Bring along your own project to share or just have a ramble about some ideas you are scheming!
Image Credit: Andrew McLellan