Swarming Emotional Pianos Tag

Erin Gee To the Sooe exhibition image

Review of solo exhibition – Canadian Art

To the Sooe” is my first solo exhibition in a major Canadian institution, curated by Tak Pham at the MacKenzie Art Gallery . I am happy to announce the exhibition was recently reviewed by artist and curator Lauren Fournier and published in Canadian Art. This is my first solo exhibition in a major Canadian institution and I am thrilled by the positive response from critics.  The exhibition closed early due to COVID-19, which is noted elegantly by the reviewer:

“Erin Gee’s “To The Sooe” reflects on the valences of emotional life in a post-internet world, gesturing to the many resonances between humans and machines in a time when the humanity of algorithms, data and screens might seem at odds with the complexities of feeling. Having visited the exhibition just weeks before the gallery’s temporary closure due to COVID-19 physical distancing measures, I am now struck by how prescient the work is in this moment of quarantine and self-isolation, when, for most of us, our primary means of communication, intimacy, and connection with others is through technology.”- Lauren Fournier

Click below to read the full review on Canadian Art.

Erin Gee

Cover Story: Leader Post

I was surprised for my exhibition To the Sooe to be featured as front-page news on January 27, 2020 in the Leader Post, the leading newspaper of Regina Saskatchewan. Inside the paper you can find an interview with exhibition curator Tak Pham and I regarding my solo show at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, To the Sooe.

““Erin’s work is very, very immersive. It’s really bringing the reaction, the chemistry, the biology within your body and really bringing it outwards and put(ting) it on display,” said Tak Pham, who curated this exhibition at the MacKenzie.”

Click here to read the full article.

 

 

Cover Story: Prairie Dog Magazine

“Modernity and the Age of Reason kind of championed the brain as this really important thing that defined us as human,” she adds. “I’m interested in recent scientific studies that [show] it’s not all about the brain. Our thinking process actually happens in concert with our body beyond the brain. What I’m interested in is using technology to create a culture of the body.”

“I’m interested in making a conversation about technology that doesn’t centre on intelligence but on emotion.”

– Erin Gee, excerpts from interview with Gregory Beatty

My exhibition “To the Sooe” at the MacKenzie Art Gallery is front page news in Regina’s Prairie Dog Magazine!  The Prairie Dog is Regina’s top source for what is going on in entertainment and the arts, so it is a great honor to be featured.  I also appreciate the reporting done by Gregory Beatty on this interview.  Click here to read the full article.

As a very brief aside, I want to address to the use of the words “Sound-Shaman” on the cover of this magazine.  I have never used these terms to describe my practice, as I am not currently practicing any form of spiritual faith that would qualify me to do so. These words are not my own, but were an editorial decision that I do not identify with and strongly reject.

Book: Robotic Imaginary

My robotic artwork Swarming Emotional Pianos is featured in image and text on p 131-132 of Jennifer Rhee’s newly published book: The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (2018, University of Minnesota Press).  The image above is just a photo of me relaxing with a coffee as I read the first few pages…

This amazing book details AI from a perspective that is driven by emotion and humanity, while referencing the work and the influence of women and poc in a way I haven’t seen before. I found myself constantly thinking: yes, yes as I read the book!

 

From the official description of the book:

The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.

Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized.

 

Click here to view more information on the book at University of Minnesota Press

 

esse magazine spring 2018

My work Swarming Emotional Pianos is featured in an essay written by Lindsay Leblanc in esse magazine 93 – Printemps / été 2018. The essay also features two media artists that I respect very much, David Rokeby and Jean-Pierre Gauthier.

Following is an abstract:

Sketchy Machines: Propositions Around Three Robotic Artworks

With the increasing presence of machines in public and private life, we continue to find new ways of articulating our relationships with them. In this article, the author uses the sketch as a frame of analysis for machine artworks by Canadian artists David Rokeby, Jean-Pierre Gauthier, and Erin Gee, and argues that the sketch is a fundamentally interdisciplinary and material state that accounts for machines’ complex engagements with human and other-than-human agents. Highlighting the sketch’s unfinished, imperfect, and adaptable qualities, the author attempts to define a “sketchy materiality” as it occurs in robotic art.
Lindsay LeBlanc

To learn more, or to purchase this magazine as a digital PDF  –
https://esse.ca/en/sketch

Forward-Thinking Artists: Canadian Art Magazine

I’m featured in the January 2017 edition of Canadian Art Magazine! I’m particularly honored to be a part of this issue, entitled Futures. Including essays by the amazing Kai Cheng Thom, indigenous futures, an article on Xenofeminism, as well as a feature on “Forward Thinking” Canadian artists, I feel like this publication really reflects my attention as an artist equally engaged with science fiction as well as political realities of the moment.

Click here to read the full feature written by Rea McNamara, which includes 10 profiles of amazing Canadian artists working across media.

canadian_art2017

Vocales Digitales

Erin Gee
Vocales Digitales
March 26 – May 14

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 26, 2:00-4:00pm

Artist Talk and Catalogue Launch: April 23, 2:00pm
Biosensor/Arduino Workshop: April 24, 10 am (full day) $25 registration required
Original Performance with Daniel Àñez and the Hamilton Children’s Choir (June 25, 2016)

Hamilton Artists Inc. is pleased to present Vocales Digitales, a solo exhibition by new media artist and composer Erin Gee, featuring installations exploring the potentials of human voices in electronic bodies as well as electronic voices in human bodies. Based on a robust research practice, Gee draws from neuroaesthetics, a field that investigates the potentials of neurological and physiological data, as both the basis of, and inspiration for, her technologically complex installations. Turning the inside out, Gee culls data from physiological sources such as the human larynx as well as intangible sources such as human emotions, and transforms them into highly realized aesthetic and musical compositions. Using languages of notation, code, and data, Gee explores the flesh and experience of human bodies, seeking out poetic languages of machine visualization to return the quantitative once more into a space of aesthetics through the experience of music.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual publication featuring essays by Maiko Tanaka and Eric Lewis. The catalogue launch will be accompanied by an artist talk and will take place April 23, at 2:00 pm. The catalogue can be downloaded HERE (4.5mb).

Erin Gee - Swarming Emotional Pianos

Swarming Emotional Pianos

Swarming Emotional Pianos (2012 – ongoing)
Aluminium tubes, servo motors, custom mallets, Arduino-based electronics, iCreate platforms
Approximately 27” x 12” x 12” each

2012

A looming projection of a human performer surrounded by six musical chime robots: their music is driven by the shifting rhythms of the performer’s emotional body, transformed into data and signal that activates the motors of the ensemble.

Swarming Emotional Pianos is a robotic installation work that features performance documentation of an actress moving through extreme emotions in five minute intervals. During these timed performances of extreme surprise, anger, fear, sadness, sexual arousal, and joy, Gee used her own custom-built biosensors to capture the way that each emotion affects the heartbeat, sweat, and respiration of the actress. The data from this session drives the musical outbursts of the robotics surrounding the video documentation of the emotional session. Visitors to this work are presented with two windows into the emotional state of the actress: both through a large projection of her face, paired with stereo recording of her breath and sounds of the emotional session, and through the normally inaccessible emotional world of physiology, the physicality of sensation as represented by the six robotic chimes.

Micro bursts of emotional sentiment are amplified by the robots, providing an intimate and abstract soundtrack for this “emotional movie”. These mechanistic, physiological effects of emotion drive the robotics, illustrating the physicality and automation of human emotion. By displaying both of these perspectives on human emotion simultaneously, I am interested in how the rhythmic pulsing of the robotic bodies confirm or deny the visibility and performativity of the face. Does emotion therefore lie within the visibility of facial expression, or in the patterns of bodily sensation in her body? Is the actor sincere in her performance if the emotion is felt as opposed to displayed?

Custom open-source biosensors that collect heartrate and signal amplitude, respiration amplitude and rate, and galvanic skin response (sweat) have been in development by Gee since 2012.  Click here to access her GitHub page if you would like to try the technology for yourself, or contribute to the research.

Credits

Thank you to the following for your contributions:

In loving memory of Martin Peach (my robot teacher) – Sébastien Roy (lighting circuitry) – Peter van Haaften (tools for algorithmic composition in Max/MSP) – Grégory Perrin (Electronics Assistant)

Jason Leith, Vivian Li, Mark Lowe, Simone Pitot, Matt Risk, and Tristan Stevans for their dedicated help in the studio

Concordia University, the MARCS Institute at the University of Western Sydney, Innovations en Concert Montréal, Conseil des Arts de Montréal, Thought Technology, and AD Instruments for their support.

Videos

Swarming Emotional Pianos (2012-2014)
Machine demonstration March 2014 – Eastern Bloc Lab Residency, Montréal

Swarming Emotional Pianos (2012-2014)
Machine demonstration March 2014 – Eastern Bloc Lab Residency, Montréal

Gallery

Swarming Emotional Pianos