Author: Erin Gee

Rule35 @ Transfer NYC

08.01.2018 , Exhibitions, News

 

I submitted this “speculatively sexual” GIF, featuring myself soldering my recent BioSynth boards, for the Rule 35 animated GIF exhibition as part of Faith Holland‘s Speculative Fetish exhibition at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn. Click here for a preview of the GIF exhibition on Hyperallergic. 

I am far from a master of the animated GIF medium, but enjoy playing with all the truly talented people involved in this exhibition and am honored that Faith Holland invited me to participate.

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TRANSFER
1030 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn
Saturday, January 6th 2018
6–10PM
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‘Rule 35’ asks more than 35 artists to respond to the Rules of the Internet, which state:

Rule 34. There is porn of it, no exception.
Rule 35. If no porn is found at the moment, it will be made.

Invited artists speculate on fetishes that do not exist, from getting turned out by the beam of a projector to a particularly salacious abstract painting and everything in-between.

A Bill Miller, Ad Minoliti, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alma Alloro, Andrew Benson, Anthony Antonellis, Carla Gannis, Christian Petersen, Claudia Hart, Daniel Temkin, Ellen Donnelly, Emilie Gervais, Erica Lapadat Janzen, Erin Gee, Eva Papamargariti, Georges Jacotey, Giselle Zatonyl, John Munshour, LaTurbo Avedon, Lorna Mills, LoVid, Mark Dorf, Melanie Hoff, Molly Soda, Morehshin Allahyari, Nicole Killian, Nicole Ruggiero, Pastiche Lumumba, Paula Nacif, Rafia Santana, Rebecca Goyette, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Theo Triantafyllidis, Tristan Stevens, V5MT, Will Pappenheimer, Yoshi Sodeoka

The screening will be accompanied by ARPA-Cake by Sam Warga. It is inspired by the first modem of the internet, the Interface Message Processor. Consisting of funfetti mix, fondant, and hours of research, it is the artist’s first cake experience and will be shared with all attending.

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About the Exhibition

‘Speculative Fetish’ addresses the way that technology functions as metaphor for the body, both in the language we use and in the ways we behave. Our use of personal devices is inherently intimate; tiny computers hug our thighs in our pockets and light up when we touch them. Such intimate relations–created by accessing sexts, porn, and lovers’ messages–also engender care. We update and maintain as push notifications and pings direct our attention. The exhibition consists of Faith Holland’s two new bodies of work, ‘Queer Connections’ and ‘The Fetishes’, as well as an online component, a catalog, and events.

Her Environment Chicago

08.01.2018 , Exhibitions, News

I am previewing a new work I made in collaboration with Sofian Audry, tentatively titled DeepASMR at Her Environment in Chicago in a few days.

Without giving away too much, I’ve been working with Sofian on how AI can be processed, embodied, and felt as a personal relationship through gentle whispers and vocalizations. The work exists as a sound recording for the moment.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Murmurs and Palpitations is a show about ritualized processes of healing and understanding. The show confronts the politics of navigating emotional responses within an environment of virtuality by directly remediating our lived experiences. The pieces in this show pose the question of the dynamic between intimate and immersive media and the ontological self, as experienced through multiple senses and ritualistic gestures. Interpreting Murmurs and Palpitations as sensory and experiential – living electronics – listening to the pulses and vibrations of the works, as they change rhythm through the practice of their language, their breath, the sound and smells of their environment.

Her Environment is an expanded new media art series highlighting feminine spectrum artists. Our focus is on broadening the understanding of how New Media practices can be used in multiple forms of art making, from video to installation and performance. Our aim is to show pieces that challenge how new media can be used, and the male dominated culture that surrounds it.

/
murmuring of screens, of bodies
living electronics, low, soft voices
breathing && quivering
chattering
palpitating
actions
actions
actions
incoming messages && touches
exercise in the form of repetitive motions
healing

Curated by
Chelsea Welch & Iryne Roh
w/ Allie Shyer & Nina Berman

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Video Games:
Paloma Dawkins – Gardenarium (Canada)
Tahutahu Studios – Idearum (Madrid, Spain)

Installations:
Hannah Newman – Sky Water (Portland, OR)
Samantha Fickel – Touch Screen (Illinois, US)
Rena Anakwe – Living Narratives [iter.03] (Brooklyn, NY)
Madeeha Lamoreaux – Obtained | Retained [Blood Battery] (Chicago, IL)

Videos:
Hiba Ali – Con-tai-ner (Chicago, IL)
Hifsa Farooq – Two Fans (Lahore, Pakistan)
Yaloo Pop – Workout Routine 2018 (Seoul, Korea/Chicago, IL)

Sound:
Erin Gee and Sofian Audry – Deep ASMR (Montreal, Canada)

Performance:
Mitsu Salmon -Formosan Wood (Chicago, IL)

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01/10/2018 ~ 01/27/2018
MURMURS AND PALPITATIONS is open for viewing from January 10th through the 27th!

RadianceVR

17.12.2017 , Curatorial, News

Project H.E.A.R.T. (2017) has joined an interesting collection of VR works on the website radiancevr.co

If you find yourself looking for great examples of VR art, I’d highly recommend browsing the works on this website!

Founded by curators PHILIP HAUSMEIER and TINA SAUERLAENDER

“Radiance is a research platform and database for VR art. Its mission is to present artists working with VR from all over the world to create visibility and accessibility for VR art and for faster adoption of virtual technologies. The platform works closely with artists, institutions and independent curators to select the highest quality of virtual art for public institutional exhibitions.”

Review in Canadian Art

09.12.2017 , Articles, News, Reviews

I really appreciate this article by Tatum Dooley for Canadian Art on the Worldbuilding exhibition curated by John G Hampton and Maiko Tanaka at Trinity Square Video. My work Project H.E.A.R.T. which highlights VR and emotions made with Alex M Lee is featured, among other great works by Jeremy Bailey Kristen D Schaffer Eshrat Erfanian and Yam Lau.  Following is an excerpt from the article:

“The gamification of our bodies renders the physical form void, replaced by screens where our bodies and emotions can be morphed and manipulated. Perhaps the only way to create art with technology as advanced and recent as VR is to reckon with its potential consequences.

Gee’s project, the most realized out of the four artists in the exhibition, masters this reckoning. I spoke with Gee in the lead-up to the exhibition, and she explained the conceptual backbone of the piece. “I’m working through questions of emotional sincerity when it comes to self-help. In theory, if you can technologically master your emotions, if you can just make yourself excited, then you can make yourself a better, happier person. I don’t know how sincere that is…”

Click on the link below for the full article.

VR and the Failure of Self-Help Technology

In general, I feel very proud of this work but also very exhausted by it.  Through the project I’ve been working through the relationship between pop music and war, self help and sincerity, and ultimately I’m working through these issues of technique and technology in how life and trauma comes to us.  During the panel for the exhibition, there was a question of whether I was “pro-war”, and it’s one that I have received a few times in facebook messages from curious friends from far away.  The project is complex and difficult to read because I think it has to be.  It reflects my own mediatized understanding of international conflict, maybe my own frustration at my lack of understanding.

The best I can understand war is how it is mediated to me: through video games and news cycles, through abstract discussions on the radio. The goal of this project was never to address the terror and complexity of geopolitical conflict, but rather, to propose a psychedelic pop culture mirror, imagining a video game ruled not by characters that espouse self-righteous violence and grit, but technologically manipulated empathy and enthusiasm.  This game fails to address war in the same way that all technologically mediated attempts to do so fail to address war.  I also am also dissatisfied at the idea of an artistic protest that makes a cartoonish, morally didactic utopia where rainbows and love shoot out of guns instead of flesh-tearing bullets. I think the answer about the politics of this game lie in the end screen: an abstract screen that confronts you with statistics of death and trauma as a result of the battle itself.  I don’t think there is a way to win the game.

Affective VR Workshop

15.11.2017 , Workshops

Welcome

Welcome to the Emotional Data and Unity/VR workshop!  This workshop is hosted by Erin Gee, a Canadian artist and researcher who has worked in emotional biodata and art since 2012.  She has created work for emotional biodata and robotics (Swarming Emotional Pianos, 2014), children’s choir (Song of Seven, 2017), and now for VR with her latest work Project H.E.A.R.T (2017).

She is an active promoter of open-source and feminist culture, and publishes all of her technical work (Arduino code/Unity code) under the GNU GPL 3.0.

What is the GNU GPL?

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

TLDR: You may use, modify, redistribute this code for free.  If you redistribute, you must acknowledge my original authorship, and you must always allow other people to also modify and redistribute for free.  Any violation of this agreement means that you are breaking my copyright!  If you do modify aspects of this code, please share the love and contribute to the GitHub.

If you are not sure how to contribute to a GitHub project, feel free to contact me at erin dot marie dot gee at gmail dot com (or just the contact form on my website) and I’ll set you up!

For the full documentation of GNU GPL v3, click here.

Contextual Resource Section

BIOSENSORS IN GAMES

April 13th, 2011

Jacob Aron first reported on a variety of games that were taking advantage of biosensing technologies in an article published in New Scientist.

Aron, Jacob. (2011). “Emotional Video Gaming Makes the Action Real.” New Scientist.  Accessed November 15th 2017.

October 2016 – BfB Labs’ emotionally responsive game “Champions of the Shengha,” is dependent on a user’s emotional control — measured by a heart rate sensor — for success.

October 2016 – Nevermind is an adventure game where you explore strange worlds and solve puzzles to unlock a mystery that lurks within each “patient’s” inner psyche.  The Windows and Mac versions of Nevermind use biofeedback technology to detect your feelings of stress while playing, dynamically responding to those feelings to affect gameplay.  You can also play the game without this technology. http://nevermindgame.com/

BIOSENSORS IN CINEMA

Published by The Verge on 18 Jul 2017.

Lauren Goode goes inside Dolby’s little-known biophysical labs, where the company has been embarking on a five-year project to track people’s emotional responses as they watch movies and TV shows.

Biosensors are used by Dolby to study viewers’ emotional responses to

  • Aural frequency ranges
  • Dynamic color ranges
  • Audio volume as well as screen brightness
  • Music and sound effects

VR and Empathy – A reading list

Ebert, Roger. (June 23, 2005.) “Ebert’s Hall of Fame Remarks.” Roger Ebert’s Journal. Accessed November 15th 2017.

Bye, Kent. (January 31, 2017). “VR as the Ultimate Empathy Machine with Gabo Arora.”  Voices of VR Podcast.  Accessed November 13th 2017.

Hamilton, Kathryn. (February 23, 2017). “Voyeur Reality.” The New Inquiry. Accessed November 15th 2017.

Yang, Robert. (April 5, 2017). “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you have taken their shoes”: empathy machines as appropriation machines.”  radiator design blog.  Accessed November 15th 2017.

Scientific Resources

In this section you will find information on the science behind how emotion is generated by the brain, and how it can be “read” by sensing instruments.

What is Emotion

Emotion is a multi-component response to an emotionally potent event, causing changes in subjective feeling quality (psychological dimension), expressive social behavior (behavioral dimension), and physiological activation (physiological dimension) of the subject. (Kreiberg 2009)

Psychological/neurological frameworks for understanding emotion itself are articulated very well by Dr Lisa Feldman-Barrett, a scientist at Northeastern University.  She speaks particularly of the complexity of the human body, which might be experiencing a host of physiological effects from the ANS system, and how these are interpreted and perhaps also constructed by language.

On her website you will find many plain-language resources for emotional understanding from a contemporary neuroscientific point of view under the heading “Articles.”

How Scientists detect Emotion

The physiological techniques presented at this workshop were made according to psychologist Dr. Sylvia Kreibig‘s 2010 review of 134 publications dating from the 1970s to the 2000s. While the techniques viewed in this document are not weighted for “success” of the cited studies, and the literature clearly shows that there is no one “technique” for applying these skills, this document that has been cited over 1000 times in scientific literature since its publication, including over 200 times in 2017.

Source:

Kreibig,Sylvia D. “Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review.” Biological Psychology 84 (2010) 394–421.

 

Continued research
If you would like to continue keeping up with scientific research in this area, an academic journal search using the databases PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, and PubMed is recommended with the following search terms:

[emotion] and [autonomic nervous system or cardiovascular or cardiac or heart or respiration or respiratory or electrodermal or skin conductance]

 

Technical Resource Section

Unity Tutorials

This section is dedicated to technical resources, tutorials and code to get you started playing around with the biosensors.

Mirza VFX teaches amazing tutorials in particle creation.  Plug your biosensors in to manipulate beautiful particle-driven environments.

(Inspiration: Mufson, Beckett. (Aug 29, 2014) “A Team Of Artists Are 3D-Printing Their Emotions As Abstract House Decorations.”  Creators Project.  Accessed November 15th 2017.)

GitHub

Erin Gee’s BioData Duo Github

Prossel’s UnitySerialPort GitHub

Hardware Resources

Materials list for Erin Gee’s BiodataTrio PCB board.

Don’t forget to prepare your PulseSensor before you use it!  Click here for instructions on how to apply the protective decal and provide a gluegun seal.  The rest of the advice you can take or leave, but these two steps are ESSENTIAL to the longevity and accuracy of your device!

When buying cables to build your sensors – Look for cable that features 2 signals that are shielded.  The biosensors are picking up on very, very sensitive electrical information from the body – any disruption in the electric field could make your readings less accurate.  Especially if the sensor cables are placed near to one another!

To prevent this, you can either buy shielded cable (like this) and solder the silver shielding to your ground connection (pick whatever you like for the other two, maybe red for power and black for signal?)

Or if you’re in a pinch, you can just twist the ground wire around the signal wire that you are trying to protect from outside interference.

Here’s a link to my Respiration Belt Instructable.  After a few years I didn’t find that a respiration belt was as interesting to me because the belts are awkward to strap into for the average person, but if you’d like to go for it, here is a simple way to make it happen!  This signal is perhaps best amplified, and you might need to calculate the relative drift of the elastic and account for it as an offset in order to capture things like when someone is holding their breath.

Ideas Lab Denmark

12.11.2017 , News, Teaching, Workshops

I will be giving a unique and in-depth workshop hosted by Emotional Data Lab (Aarhus University), Interactive Denmark and Ideas Lab in Aarhus, Denmark from November 21-23.  The workshop consists of 3 three-hour sessions where I will share my materials and experiences with incorporating physiological markers of emotion into the VR-compatible Unity environment.

Participants will be placed into “teams” in order to work together, experiment, and discuss the promises, problems and potential of using biosensors to capture a user’s emotional experience through digital tools.

WorldBuilding: TSV Toronto

07.11.2017 , Exhibitions, News

November 3rd – December 9th 2017

Trinity Square Video, 401 Richmond, Toronto Canada.

My work made in collaboration with 3D artist Alex M. Lee for VR and emotional-biosensors, Project H.E.A.R.T. (2017) was debuted on November 5th at Trinity Square Video, Toronto.

This project was commissioned by TSV by curators John Hampton and Maiko Tanaka, thanks to the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The exhibition also features amazing works by Canadian artists Jeremy Bailey and Kristen Schaffer, Eshrat Erfanian, and Yam Lau.

Visit the Worldbuilding website by clicking here.

 

KidzLab Montreal

28.09.2017 , News, Teaching, Workshops

KIDZLAB September 28-29 2017

Perte de Signal is happy to announce the launch of its first edition of KidZlab, a 4-day digital arts festival for young creators: “Un laboratoire d’innovation pour l’imaginaire.”

For this first edition of KidZlab, I presented a workshop entitled “Strange Theremin” – teaching teams of young people to work in groups to assemble a circuit that allows them to manipulate musical tones with their skin conductance.  This new musical instrument allows students to explore touch, sweat, and emotional engagement as a potential musical material.

Here’s what my young students had to say:

 

The event also featured very interesting workshops by artists:

Eric Cariat (BE) – Stephanie Castonguay – Maxime Damecour – Erin Gee – Alice Jarry – Roby Provost-Blanchard – Alexandre Quessy

at Perte de Signal 5445 De Gaspé – Espace 107 (RDC) Montréal.

With thanks to:

Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
Wallonie-Bruxelles International
KIKK Festival 2017
Les Journées de la culture
Le Fab Lab du PEC

For more information (in French):
https://perte-de-signal.org/kidzlab-festival-dart-numerique-pour-le-jeune-public/

KidZlab Laboratoire d’innovation pour l’imaginaire from PERTE DE SIGNAL on Vimeo.

William Basinski @ Pop Montreal

27.08.2017 , Artist Talks, Interviews, News

September 15th, 2017 – 17h POP Box (3450 St Urbain, Montreal)

In the context of this year’s Pop Montreal Festival Symposium, I have been invited to engage in a public conversation with avant-garde composer William Basinski .

Click here for more information on the Pop Symposium, taking place September 14-17, 2017.

Creator of the widely acclaimed album set Disintegration Loops (2002), Basinski is an intuitive composer of ambient electronic music who works work magnetic tape loops to access dreamlike acoustic spaces.  He once described himself as investing incredible amounts of meditative energy towards improvisation and locating the “timeless, amniotic bubble” of sound one could float within. A bubble is an apt metaphor for these sounds: expansive, swirling voids that physically emanate from thin slips of magnetic tape.

Among other topics, I’m looking forward to this opportunity to speak with Basinski about the physicality of sound, both in the sound producing bodies (the magnetic devices he charms into circles and feedback-song) and the receptive media bodies (us leaky humans).

Take a listen below to Basinski’s soundcloud account in order to experience his processes in tape loop and delay systems, found sounds, feedback, and shortwave radio static.