2017 Tag

RadianceVR

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

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.

Ideas Lab Denmark

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

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

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

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.

Jury member for Equitable Bank EDAA

I am pleased to have been selected to join the jury of the 2017 competition for the Equitable Bank Emerging Digital Artist Award.  Equitable Bank’s Emerging Digital Artist Award celebrates early-career artists doing exemplary works in digital media, reflecting their interest in creating opportunities for digital innovation.

Award Program Description

The Emerging Digital Artists Award (EDAA) is one of the only corporately funded digital art awards in Canada, designed to foster experimentation in the work of emerging artists and build on funding opportunities currently available to those working in digital media.

The Equitable Bank Collection

Equitable Bank began collecting art in the early 90s and currently holds over 150 artworks in its collection. Our collection focuses on modern and contemporary Canadian art, with a particular interest in modern painting. Our contemporary collection also includes video animation—an area of continued growth, concurrently with the growth of the EDAA.

For more information,

http://edaa.equitablebank.ca/

Project H.E.A.R.T.

Project H.E.A.R.T. (2017)

2017

A biodata-driven VR game where militainment and pop music fuel a new form of emotional drone warfare.

A twist on popular “militainment” shooter video games, Project H.E.A.R.T. invites the viewer to place their fingers on a custom biodata device, and summon their enthusiasm to engage their avatar, Yowane Haku, in “combat therapy.” Fans of the Vocaloid characters may recognize Haku as the “bad copy” of Japanese pop celebrity Hatsune Miku, a holographic personnage that invites her fans to pour their content and songs into her virtual voice.

The biosensing system features a pulse sensor, and a skin conductance sensor of Gee’s design. Through principles of emotional physiology and affective computing, the device gathers data relative to heart rate and blood flow from index finger, and skin conductance from middle and ring fingers of users. The biodata is read by a microcontroller and transferred to Unity VR, thus facilitating emotional interactivity: a user’s enthusiasm (spikes in signal amplitude in skin conductance, elevated heart rate, and shifts in amplitude of the pulse signal) stimulates the holographic pop star to sing in the virtual warzone, thus inspiring military fighters to continue the war, and create more enemy casualties. At the end of the experience the user is confronted with their “score” of traumatized soldiers vs enemies killed, with no information whether this means that they won or lost the “game”.

The user is thus challenged to navigate soldier’s emotional anxieties and summon their positivity to activate Haku’s singing voice as soldiers battle not only against a group of enemies, but also against their own lack of confidence in times of global economic instability.

The landscape of Project H.E.A.R.T. was built from geopolitically resonant sites found on Google Maps, creating a dreamlike background for the warzone. In-game dialogue wavers between self-righteous soldier banter typical of video games, and self-help, bringing the VR participant to an interrogation of their own emotional body in a virtual space that conflates war, pop music, drone technology, and perhaps movement-induced VR nausea.

As Kathryn Hamilton pointed out in her 2017 essay “Voyeur Realism” for New Inquiry,

“VR’s genesis and development is in the military, where it has been used to train soldiers in “battle readiness,” a euphemism for: methods to overcome the innate human resistance to firing at another human being. In the last few years, VR’s usage has shifted 180 degrees from a technology used to train soldiers for war, to one that claims to “amplify” the voices afflicted by war, and to affect “world influencers” who might be able to stop said wars.”

Credits

Narrative Design: Sofian Audry, Roxanne Baril-Bédard, Erin Gee
3D Art: Alex Lee and Marlon Kroll
Animation and Rigging: Nicklas Kenyon and Alex Lee
VFX: Anthony Damiani, Erin Gee, Nicklas Kenyon
Programming: Sofian Audry, Erin Gee, Nicklas Kenyon, Jacob Morin
AI Design: Sofian Audry
Sound Design: Erin Gee, Austin Haughton, Ben Hinckley, Ben Leavitt, Nicolas Ow
BioSensor Hardware Design: Erin Gee and Martin Peach
BioSensor Case Design: Grégory Perrin
BioSensor Hardware Programming: Thomas Ouellet Fredericks, Erin Gee, Martin Peach
Featuring music by Lazerblade, Night Chaser and Austin Haughton
Yowane Haku character designed by CAFFEIN
Yowane Haku Cyber model originally created by SEGA for Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA 2nd (2010)
Project H.E.A.R.T. also features the vocal acting talents of Erin Gee, Danny Gold, Alex Lee, Ben McCarthy, Gregory Muszkie, James O’Calloghan, and Henry Adam Svec.

Thanks to the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and AMD Radeon, this project was commissioned by Trinity Square Video for the exhibition Worldbuilding, curated by John G Hampton and Maiko Tanaka.

This project would have not been possible without the logistical and technical support of the following organizations:

Technoculture Art and Games Lab (Concordia University)

Concordia University

ASAP Media Services (University of Maine)

Exhibition history

November-December 2017  Worldbuilding @ Trinity Square Video, Toronto

February-March 2018 Future Perfect @ Hygienic Gallery, New London Connecticut

April 26-28, 2018 @ Digifest, Toronto

June 7-17, 2019 @ Elektra Festival, Montreal

January 2020 @ The Artist Project, Toronto

October 2020 @ Festival LEV Matadero, Spain

Links

Project H.E.A.R.T. official website
Worldbuilding Exhibition Website
Review in Canadian Art
My research blog: Pop and Militainment
Featured on Radiance VR

Video

Project H.E.A.R.T (2017)
Installation and Gameplay

Gallery

MediaLive Festival 2017

Happy to announce that I will be presenting a new version of my “BioSynth” at the MediaLive festival (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art) in May.  This year’s festival features an amazing group of artists, gathering under the theme THE VOID.  For this upcoming performance I will be moving towards a more sophisticated sonic treatment of the physiological signals, and returning to the ideas of “choir” and “vocality” of emotion that I began with my earlier work “Song of Seven: BioChoir” with the Hamilton Children’s Choir.