We all love a bit of colour in our lives, right? It’s the spice that can turn the drabbest of life experience into a wealth of vivid wonder, taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. Carlos Cruz-Diez has been exploring the kinetic movement of colour in his celebrated works, creating interactive manufactured chambers that lures visitors to rethink their perceptions of colour in their everyday lives.
The installation works in a very personal way, altering the colour of your skin, clothing and anything you so happen to be carrying on your person. It culminates to create an experience that adapts depending on what chamber you emerse yourself within, drawing attention to the individual experience of processing colour through a disruption in the way that light is received and understood.
These wonderful installations have been developed over many years, and can be explored at the Musée en Herbe en in paris and the Museo universitario arte in Mexico. But if you can’t make it to these, feast on some images and live your life through a spectrum of colours that can only add a richness to your imagination and a smile to your face.
Researchers exploit the strange properties of a liquid metamaterial to watch Minkowski spacetimes leap in out and of existence.
Metamaterials are synthetic substances with nanoscale structures that manipulate light. This ability to steer photons makes them the enabling technology behind invisibility cloaks and has generated intense interest from researchers.
The ability to guide light has more profound consequences, however. Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about.
Indeed, a couple of years ago we looked at a suggestion by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland in College Park that it ought to be possible to use metamaterials to create a multiversein which different regions of the material corresponded to universes with different properties.
Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.
“These regions behave as transient 2+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetimes which temporarily appear and disappear inside a larger metamaterial “multiverse”,” they say.
The experiment is relatively straightforward. Metamaterials are usually hard to engineer because they are based on nanoscale structures. However, Smolyaninov and pals have instead exploited the self-assembling nature of cobalt nanoparticles suspended in kerosene.
Cobalt is ferromagnetic so the nanoparticles tend to become aligned in a magnetic field. In fact, if the density of nanoparticles is high enough, the field causes them to line up in columns. When this happens, the nanocolumns form a metamaterial which is mathematically equivalent to a 2+1 Minkowski spacetime.
So light passing through behaves as if this region has one dimension of time, aligned with the nanocolumns, and two dimensions of space, perpendicular to the nanocolumns.
That creates a single Minkowski universe. The trick that Smolyaninov and pals have pulled off is to create a multiverse containing many Minkowski spacetimes .
The secret here is to keep the density of nanoparticles just below the threshold required to form nanocolums. That’s just over 8 per cent of the fluid by volume in this case. When that happens, natural variations in the density cause nanocolumns to form in small regions of the liquid. In effect, tiny universes are leaping in and out of existence. Smolyaninov and co can even “see” these universes by their effect on polarised light passing through the fluid.
That’s a fascinating result that demonstrates the potential of self-organisation to create metamaterials.
Smolyaninov has also suggested in the past that this kind work might give physicists a way to study new kinds of optical devices since photons can be made to behave like massive or massless particles, depending on the properties of their “universe”.
Clearly there’s more fun to be had here.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1301.6055: Experimental Demonstration Of Metamaterial “Multiverse” In A Ferrofluid.
LA-based artist Julian Hoeber created his installation (for a gallery in West Chelsea) which make visitors deliberately uncomfortable by distorting their sense of balance. Without the use of strobe lights or fake skeletons, Demon Hill 2 can make visitors queasy.
An interesting work by Adam Harvey about camouflage from computer vision (even though if the piuctures below look like photoshop demo). Which could lead to new type of haircut and makup when Facebook's identifying (surevillance) camera will be displayed all over the place, in shopping areas and franchised spaces.
See more of it on the project's website, with additionnal picture: CV Dazzle.
Fascinating project by Alvin Lucier. We know his work for a while (thanks to friends Francis Baudevin and Philippe Decrauzat who made us discover his work) and wanted to post about it here. It's now done!
Please enjoy (conceptual) sound art work "I'm sitting in a room" (1969), a meditative spatial experience by american composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier:
Optogenetics allows researchers to explore a growing range of behavior.
By Emily Singer
Three new experiments highlight the power of optogenetics—a type of genetic engineering that allows scientists to control brain cells with light.
Karl Deisseroth and colleagues at Stanford University used light to trigger and then alleviate social deficits in mice that resemble those seen in autism. Researchers targeted a highly evolved part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is well connected to other brain regions and involved in planning, execution, personality and social behavior. They engineered cells to become either hyperactive or underactive in response to specific wavelengths of light.
The experimental mice exhibited no difference from the normal mice in tests of their anxiety levels, their tendency to move around or their curiosity about new objects. But, the team observed, the animals in whose medial prefrontal cortex excitability had been optogenetically stimulated lost virtually all interest in engaging with other mice to whom they were exposed. (The normal mice were much more curious about one another.)
The findings support one of the theories behind the neurodevelopmental deficits of autism and schizophrenia; that in these disorders, the brain is wired in a way that makes it hyperactive, or overly susceptible to overstimulation. That may explain why many autistic children are very sensitive to loud noises or other environmental stimuli.
"Boosting their excitatory nerve cells largely abolished their social behavior," said Deisseroth, [associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of bioengineering and the study's senior author]. In addition, these mice's brains showed the same gamma-oscillation pattern that is observed among many autistic and schizophrenic patients. "When you raise the firing likelihood of excitatory cells in the medial prefrontal cortex, you see an increased gamma oscillation right away, just as one would predict it would if this change in the excitatory/inhibitory balance were in fact relevant."
In a second study, from Japan, researchers used optogenetics to make mice fall asleep by engineering a specific type of neuron in the hypothalamus, part of the brain that regulates sleep. Shining light on these neurons inhibited their activity, sending the mice into dreamless (or non-REM) sleep. The research, published this month in the Journal of Neuroscience, might shed light on narcolepsy, a disorder of sudden sleep attacks.
Rather than making mice fall asleep, a third group of researchers used optogenetics disrupt sleep in mice, which in turn affected their memory. Previous research has shown that sleep is important for consolidating, or storing, memories, and that diseases characterized by sleep deficits, such as sleep apnea, often have memory deficits as well. But it has been difficult to analyze the effect of more subtle disruptions to sleep.
The new study shows that "regardless of the total amount of sleep, a minimal unit of uninterrupted sleep is crucial for memory consolidation," the authors write in the study published online July 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They genetically engineered a group of neurons involved in switching between sleep and wake to be sensitive to light. Stimulating these cells with 10-second bursts of light fragmented the animals' sleep without affecting total sleep time or quality and composition of sleep.
After manipulating the mice's sleep, the researchers had the animals undergo a task during which they were placed in a box with two objects: one to which they had previously been exposed, and another that was new to them. Rodents' natural tendency is to explore novel objects, so if they spent more time with the new object, it would indicate that they remembered the other, now familiar object. In this case, the researchers found that the mice with fragmented sleep didn't explore the novel object longer than the familiar one — as the control mice did — showing that their memory was affected.
The findings, "point to a specific characteristic of sleep — continuity — as being critical for memory," said [H. Craig Heller, professor of biology at Stanford and one of the authors of the study.]
Psilocybin. It's the psychoactive substance in those "sacred mushrooms" that causes hallucinations and other novel mental experiences. The effects of those mushrooms have been explored and appreciated by members of the ancient Capsian culture in North Africa, Aztec shamans, and modern college students. But they're now the subject of serious study by scientists.
A team from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine recently published results from a roughly year-long experiment. The researchers worked with 18 volunteers who were given pure psilocybin to measure how it affected people and how different dosages changed the experience. The subjects were screened for psychological health and given the drug in a pleasant environment, after preparatory guidance. They even had a soundtrack consisting of "classical and world music chosen to complement the arc of the psilocybin action, from onset, through the peak of the effects, and subsiding back to baseline."
The results? At high dosages people occasionally experienced fear, anxiety, or delusions. But the negative effects of those "bad trips" were easily mitigated by the reassuring researchers and didn't outlast the session. At more moderate doses, the results were almost unambiguously positive. Moreover, people didn't just appreciate the experience as fun; they found it spiritually meaningful, with lasting benefits.
Looking back over a year later, most of the experiment’s 18 volunteers (94 percent) rated a psilocybin session as among the top five most or as the topmost spiritually significant experience of his or her life. [...] Most volunteers (89 percent) also reported positive changes in their behaviors, and those reports were corroborated by family members or others, the researchers say. The behavior changes most frequently cited were improved relationships with family and others, increased physical and psychological self-care, and increased devotion to spiritual practice.
Reading the volunteers' first-hand reports of how the experiences affected them is a testament to their value. "More and more, sensuality and compassion and gratitude continue to unfold around me." "I try to judge less and forgive more." "I feel that I relate better in my marriage. There is more empathy." "I need less food to make me full. My alcohol use has diminished dramatically."
I'm not saying we should all start doing mushrooms. These were carefully measured doses, taken in a setting designed to be comfortable and supportive. There are certainly situations in which it would be dangerous or irresponsible to take psilocybin.
But these results illustrate the artificial dichotomy between medicine and recreational drugs in America. Stateside, Prozac is regarded as medicine, but psilocybin is a schedule 1 controlled substance like heroin. Americans assume that if some substance is made by nature instead of Eli Lilly, it can't be medicine. But if psilocybin has true psychiatric and emotional benefits, what's the difference? Sure, you can have a bad experience with psilocibin, but antidepressents like Prozac have been linked to suicidal thoughts, and it's hard to imagine a worse side effect than that. We also think that if a drug is used for fun, there must be something bad about it. But Vicodin and OxyContin are all still on the market. There are plenty of FDA-approved drugs that get used (and abused) recreationally.
We should aim to evaluate any drug objectively, whether it's made by an enormous pharmaceutical company or grows in the forest. If an engineered antidepressant generated reports like those from the volunteers in this study, it would be regarded as a breakthrough in psychiatric medicine.
Olafur Eliasson a réalisé cette installation offrant une vue à 360° sur la ville danoise d’Århus. Cette oeuvre circulaire use des couleurs de l’arc-en-ciel pour donner une ambiance originale, et permet d’accentuer le panorama. Plus de visuels de cette installation dans la suite.
Editor's Note: Artengine and Vague Terrain are pleased to announce Jaenine Parkinson as our new Critical Blogging Resident. Jaenine will start her year long residence with Artengine and Vague Terrain with a trip to the cutting edge Elektra Festival in Montréal. Over the course of the year Jaenine will be using the Artengine and Vague Terrain blogs as creative spaces for critical discourse around the media arts and creative technological expression.
Jaenine is a writer and curator from New Zealand. Prior to moving to Ottawa in January, she was the Director of an experimental art project space in the lower South Island of New Zealand. Her art history masters thesis examined interactivity in digital art and became the basis of an undergraduate university course she taught at the University of Auckland. If you want to get in touch please feel free to email her at critical@artengine.ca.
The Elektra 12 festival, presented in Montreal from 4 to 8 May 2011, followed a similar pattern to previous years. During the day was the “international marketplace”: a series of short presentations by artists and administrative types talking about their work. In the late afternoon were openings of exhibitions dotted around town. Then from 9pm there were performances at the theatre Usine C. I want to unpack the screen-based AV performances in a later post, but for now I am going to focus on two works that perform beyond the projecton screen and the speaker.
The best thing that Elektra had to offer was Kurt Hentschlager’s FEED—and they know it. It ran almost every night, sometimes twice in one night, and has been shown at five previous Elektra festivals. It is a work in two halves and the second half completely overshadows the first. So much so that until I came to write this I had almost forgotten about the first part: a projection of a featureless computer generated male body floating and replicating in a black void. Except for serving as a warning of how we might soon feel, I saw no real connection between this projection and what followed. And what followed was awesome.
I will never capture the experience in words. Every person I spoke to had a different impression. Before going in we all had to sign waiver forms acknowledging that we had read the warnings about how overwhelming the experience could be. No wonder the projection was so forgettable, we were all sitting there waiting for the pandemonium to begin. It was well worth the wait.
Theatrical fog flooded the room. I immediately began to assume that we are going to see something akin to a 1960‘s Expanded Cinema event, maybe with lasers if we were lucky. But the fog got so thick that the possibility of seeing anything was quickly ruled out. I couldn’t see my hand when it was right in front of my face nor could I tell if my eyes were open or closed. A strobe started up with accompanying pulsating sounds, and then the magic began. Rainbow colored vortexes and shimmering diagonal grids appeared, not in-front but inside my eyes. It was like an sober psychedelic experience. The scientists call these visions phosphenes. They are formed between the retina, as it is bombarded by light, and the visual cortex, as it strains to see something in the fog. You can approximate the FEED experience by pressing on your eyes or, of course, by taking hallucinogenics. Although it is more like the latter because you can always stop pressing your eyes at any moment and release yourself from the sensation. You can’t escape Feed. It is engulfing and can become quite claustrophobic.
[Typical phosphene forms]
At a few stages I had the urge to get up and move around, to feel untethered from three dimensional space like the faceless man in the prelude. Undoubtedly, that would be a heath and safety disaster. The bureaucratic mindset that had us signing liability release forms wouldn’t want us crashing into, vomiting over, or passing out on each other.
When the strobes began I was quite relaxed; the rhythm created through light and sound was temperate. With hindsight, Hentschlager was just easing us into it. The intensity heightened. He is obviously aware of, and manipulating, a correlation between the frequencies he could generate and naturally occurring frequencies in the human body like heart beats and brain waves. Hentschalger was playing our senses like they were dials on a synthesizer.
Previous discussions of FEED, which has been shown around the world, talk about it as fusing the human and machine providing a vision of our cyborg future. I can’t help but channel Lev Manovich and Donna Harraway here and argue that Feed also provides a vision of our cyborg past and present. Renaissance perspectival machines harnessed and manipulated the properties of binocular vision. Cinema (and its various Victorian fairground precursors) works because our brains see movement when shown rapidly succeeding images. To be quite literal about it, all technology is just that – an extension and enhancement of human capabilities. We have been and always will be cyborgs.
Another Elektra work that operates on sensory deprivation and manipulation was Just Noticeable Difference (JND) by Chris Slater. Only one person can experience it at a time and I was one of the fortunate few. You crawl into a pitch black cube and lie down, as instructed, on your back. In the beginning I couldn’t work out if the faint buzzing in my ears was just tinnitus, induced by the night’s performances, or the work. I waited patiently. Then my stomach grumbled – or at least it felt like it did. Then my foot began to twitch and my breathing became bronchial. In sensory deprivation chambers it is common to become more aware of the sounds and movements of your body, so I wasn’t sure of the origin of these sensations.
Although, quickly the just noticeable difference became a very noticeable difference. I almost screamed. There was a tapping on my shoulder from underneath me and the ceiling of the space lit up with flashes of red. The space began to feel more like a coffin. Then came the thunder and lightning – a deep rumble with flashes of light from above. As the storm subsided I was turned into a human drum. The floor had morphed into something like a robotic massage chair switched to the ‘karate chop’ setting. The effect was no longer subtle. In the end it was more like being on a carnival ride.
My comparison with fairground experiences is not flippant. Fairgrounds and amusement parks were the sites where modern technologies of grand scale and spectacle were made available for the public to physically experience. They were theaters of machines; both generating technological wonders and reflecting the pervasive techno-culture. Their decline has left a gap. Where do we go now experience technologies beyond the cinematic? Where do we go to confront, externalize, escape and make sense of our media dominated habitat? I am not the first to suggest that contemporary art, museums, international art biennials and fairs have slipped into this terrain and become increasingly spectacular.
In the face of this, contemporary art criticism is scathing of the spectacular. Any display of impressive and enjoyable technology is seen as dangerous, homogenizing, distracting, isolating and pacifying. Critics invoke Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Baudrillard’s Simulacrum and Simulation to express a suspicion of sensational affects. Any artwork using spectacular means and any viewer enjoying it are framed as critically unaware, or worse still complicit.
I am weary of criticism that assumes I and other viewers are easy dupes. Just because we sit passively, willingly absorbing, does not mean that our minds are not active. As Jacques Rancière argues “spectatorship is not a passivity that must be turned into activity. It is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know, as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamed.” Through our interpretations we all actively construct meaning and knowledge. Then by communication with others we can transform the way a work of art is seen. Feed and JND definitely give us plenty to interpret. They offer experiences that we couldn’t otherwise know; an aestheticisation of senses and modes of perception beyond the dominant modes.
However, these works cannot elude the valid criticisms that, despite their content, spectacular works are in themselves spectacles of capital investment. They require a luxury of time, resources, funding and space to produce them. In their desirability and marketability they also marginalize less spectacular works, consuming everything from sponsorship to attention. Still highly contested, delving into these works is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows.
Here is a video that tries to capture Feed – but the camera doesn’t have a retina or visual cortex, so can’t really convey the experience: http://vimeo.com/403872
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
