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AQUAPHONEIA
2016 Aquaphoneia is an alchemical installation centred around the poiesis of time and transmutation of voice into matter.A large horn floating mid space echoes the ghosts of Edison, Bell, and Berliner’s machines. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released: The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.In one corner, voices bubbling inside a sphere of fire are brought to entropy and transmuted into a timeless concentration of spectral mist and phonetic vapour. An ouroboros chamber twists fermented vowels into distilled consonants to release a thin blade of prosody. This viscous alchemical matter lowers itself to the terra beneath where matter dances to its own affective tonality. Another module separates speech into vital elements a drop at a time: words into phonemes, into phono particles, and the invisible quanta of silence. |
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Einstein's Dreams 2013 Einstein's Dream proposes to build time conditioning installations & techniques that create palpable alternatives to the everyday time that’s governed by calendars, universal clocks, and Internet services that never sleep. We’ll do this by building physical zones in which objects and fields of lighting, sound, and video change in concert with the inhabitants’ movement to create powerfully alternative senses of time, rhythm and pattern. We will thus develop a new architecture of kinetic material and digital media in which time becomes an elastic medium of expression, learning, and invention - a new art of time for the 21c. The floor of the space was covered with 13 metric tons of sand in order to provide an organic surface with which the body could interact. The ability to play with the material that one walks on and the ability to change the spaces architecture by moulding the sand provided a unique opportunity to interact with reality and its technologically augmented cousin at the same time. |
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PLay as Inquiry
2013 Play as Inquiry asks how artists and scholars might construe their practices as play. This three-day practicum hosted by the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry features distinct and experimental approaches to research and production in various fields including game design, trans-media installation, public health, music composition, choreography, political science, experimental writing, and anthropology. The installation depicted in the photographs was a sound and time condition exhibit. A visitor would speak into the long black tube and his or her voice would be embedded in the glasswork of the chemistry set. Water flowed from one flask to an other marking time and affectively adding to the soundscape. The sound of individual drops of water were electronically altered and passed through a transducer mounted to the underside of a metal container full of water. Each drop produced a vibration and each vibration imprinted its waveform on the surface of the water in the bowl. A camera mounted at the front of the exhibit looked at the brightness and movement of the candles flame. The data from the camera was collected and fed through a patch in MAX MSP and was sent to a set of dimmers that controlled the hanging lights above the chemistry set. The data produced by the candle was also used to effect the dynamic quality of the vocals embedded in the glass. |
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Initial design of staging and installation
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The Project
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Alexander Wang - Fashion Night out New York - Alkemie Interactive Installation -2011 The three windows of the store were covered with framed screens of layered white and black projection material. A small camera was mounted on the centre screen focused on the activity outside. Three 20K lumen projectors were mounted on pillars inside the store and focused onto the screens in the windows. As people moved outside, their movement would created openings in the screen revealing electronically altered images of what was happening inside the store or time shifted reflections of themselves . |
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WunderKammer
Alkemie - in process - prototype under construction The installation stands about 60 x 150 x 45 centimeters high, about the size of an old steamer trunk. It refracts the geometries and materials of the age of iron and crystal, and combines the mechanical tropes of Victorian science, 19c theatre techniques (such as Pepper’s Ghost superposition) with 21c live computational video and sound processing. Upon approach, you see a miniature stage in an ornate box made of crystal, wood, and metal. You see yourself projected inside the WunderKammer stage, a mixture of real and projected objects, present people and historical personages, material and immaterial textures, all in concerted movement. Unlike its mechanical forebears, the action in this responsive time crucible changes according to a specific composition as well as the contingent movement of the visitors. It is a particular kind of time machine that travels from place to place, carrying doppelgangers, imprints, palimpsests, and ghosts of the people it meets. The WunderKammer is designed to serve as an apparatus within which we can explore some of the same themes of multiple senses of time, elastic and poetic modulations of people’s senses of rhythm, repetition, and corporeal memory, integrating five years of the Topological Media Lab’s media techniques and theatrical methods in the format of a miniature portable theatre. |