These installations will be facilitated by Gallery Assistants who will assist patrons with engaging with the technology.
Media installation Samenwerking Station by Leeane Berger and Jeff Morton is a neon twilight environment of circuit-bent electronics and generative video controlled by the participation of the public. Exploring buttons and dials on an assemblage of recomposed toy musical objects activates handcrafted Pure Data video software to fill the room with bright colours and shapes that move in synchronization with the live soundscape. Facile tones and broken melodies are recomposed through design and affect and through participant discovery and improvisation. The inventive nature of the video as it is controlled by interaction presents a resourceful salad of hackable consumer electronics and make-able software. In Samenwerking Station visitors are invited to explore and create a visually tangible range of sound.
JULY ONLY
This work is an installation where EEG brainwave signals are used as biofeedback controllers for a video mixer built in Max/MSP/Jitter software. The participant is seated on a comfortable seat in an intimate environment, facing a television set. The Gallery Assistant fits the participant with the EEG sensor headband, which then reads their changing brainwaves and sends that data as integers over a wireless Bluetooth connection to the hidden laptop computer, controlling the aspects of the video playback system. When the participant’s brain waves change, the video changes in realtime, creating a biofeedback loop. The trick for participants is to learn how to train their brainwaves to respond to the graphic imagery seen on the screen in order to see all of the videos. One has to control the mind's reaction to the imagery on different levels in order to see it all and control the organic sequence of videos. The videos revolve around themes of consumption, war, greed, glamour, environmental damage, and other perils of contemporary late capitalist culture, investigating relationships of passive consumption in gallery-based new media art and the world at large.