Sizzling Babes at Arterial Gallery Sydney

My latest video work Sizzling babes is being screened at the Arterial Gallery, Rozelle.  

Denzien at Belfast Exposed

Come to the Denizen show, upstairs at the Exchange Gallery at Belfast Exposed, to see my new video work Sizzling Babes and to experience some wonderful works by Sean Campbell, Olivia Devlin and Conan McIvor. Sizzling Babes is a video work that introduces two very special young females from a perspective that challenges common expectations about their sentient capacities, to considers the exploitation and commodification of the female reproductive system.

Exhibition opens 6th March from 7 - 9 pm. Exhibition runs from 6th - 14th March. Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 4pm.

Heartfelt Shadowplay at Outburst

The Heartfelt Shadowplay is a biosensing kissing booth which has been created for the Outburst Arts Festival 2013 at the Black Box, Belfast. Participants are invited into the booth where a small pulse sensor is attached to their ear. It wireless transmits changes in their heart behaviour to a laptop which triggers a heart beat sample mimicking their heartbeat and a video feed manipulated to create a shadowy version of their smooching.

FABRIC exhibition, Platform Arts

Fabric brings together work by six artists, all currently resident at the Digital Arts Studios, Belfast. Presenting a range of media and approaches, Fabric considers how the structures of and in our cities affect our perspectives and how technology mediates or sifts our experiences of place, environment and history. Presenting new work from Stephen Bleakney, Janine Davidson, Grace Kim, Julie McGowan, Katrina Sheena Smyth and a new work by me (see image below).

Platform Arts, 1 Queen Street, Belfast 3 – 10 October 2013

8th October from 5.30pm // Artists’ Talks

Hosted by Platform Arts // Curated by Digital Arts Studios

OZ / Pounding Wall at CNB13

Documentation of OZ/Pounding Wall: Chapel Lane, Culture Night Belfast 2013.

Culture Night Belfast

I've been asked to show some of my biosensing interactive installations at this year's Culture Night Belfast. I'm going to be showing a new work, a large scale outdoor projection called OZ, at Chapel Lane from 9 - 11 pm. As the brochure says: Come hear the city pulse to your beat. This bio-sensing interactive installation transforms the rhythm of your heart into sound and video.

Come on down!

TOKEN exhibition, PS2 gallery

Token is an exhibition of new work by the current artists in residence at the Digital Arts Studios.

My work B-B got your beat gets it's first outing along with great new work by Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell and Sam Ruscica; tokens of memory, expression and foreboding.

The exhibition will run from the 28th of May to the 1st of June 2013 at Ps2 Project Space, 18 Donegall Street, Belfast. There will be a mid-exhibition reception on Thursday the 30th May from 6-8pm. All are welcome.

Eulerian video magnification magic

The clever fellows over at MIT have used Matlab eulerian video magnification coding to create a no contact pulse measurement system AND they've posted the code... something I'm working on for an upcoming artwork. The concept is nicely explained below.

Holophonic fun

I've been experimenting with binaural recordings - a way of convincingly reproducing the spatial dimensions of recorded sound - and have come across this excellent illustration of this technology by the Arkamy's team.* listen with headphones to achieve the desired effect Arkamys: Holophonic Ball Experiment

Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interface Conference 2013

I just got back from beautiful Barcelona where I presented a paper at the the seventh Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interface conference. I took part of the Graduate student Consortium stream where twelve of us presented our work to Tom Moher, Yvonne Rogers, Mike Horn and Leah Buechley. We spent the day below ground in the I presented some preliminary findings from the prototype of the artwork Inspiroscope when it was exhibited in Dublin, Ireland and Brighton, England. Inspiroscope: Understanding Participant Experience.pdf

Hearing about the work of other researchers together with their responses to my work provoked more questions in me than were answered, the sign of a successful day.

The Narcisystem

The Narcisystem is an ambitious art project by Eric Gradman that uses a heart-rate monitor, an ECG sensor, a Breathanalyzer, a compass and an accelerometer to affect his environment. He admits the performance documented below was less than a success. I'm mostly interested in the title of the work. I've heard accusations of biosensing artworks fueling narcissistic tendencies. I wonder what it is about these ways of realising our internal bodily data that conjures up allegations of excessive and unhealthy self preoccupation. Interestingly these sorts of commentaries on self obsessive tendencies appear to be less common in relation to interactive artworks driven by gesture, movement or haptic technology.

Inspiroscope at Brighton Maker Faire

Inspiroscope visited Brighton's second ever Maker Faire last week. From underneath the giant paper mache seagull's watchful eye many stopped for a breath or two and much conversation ensued about the sounds that were created, the lights that sparkled and how the way you breath can change the way you feel. I learnt lots about people's relationship with their breath, from the professional singer to the ICU nurse pictured in the slideshow below. Unsurprisingly children provided the most insightful ways of changing breathing behaviour while in the belt, from tickling to dancing, to hyperventilating and breath holding.

Te Tuhi gallery exhibition, What do you mean, we?

The boat-people Muffled Protest video work was shown in the Te Tuhi gallery in Auckland, New Zealand, as part of the What do you mean, we? exhibition. Also this critical essay has been published about our work by Melissa Laing: Under a Flag

Inspiroscope at Dublin Maker Faire

Last week I headed off to the Science Gallery at Trinity college for Dublin's inaugural Maker Faire. It was a busy busy day, a great success with over 5,000 attendees.I showed the artwork Inspiroscope, a breath responsive belt that feedbacks changes in breathing behaviour using light and sound. The Maker Faire offered a social space to get a sense of each participant's experience of wearing the corset.

RECOVERY

Shannon Yee's sonic installation, Recovery, sold out at this year's Pick and Mix festival at the MAC Belfast. Part radio-drama, part visceral trip, ‘performed’ for a single audience member at a time, via headphones. In 2008, Shannon nearly died from a rare brain infection. The 12-minute segment of Recovery begins her journey of ‘being disassembled and put back together, slightly askew’. Using sonic arts technology, drama, movement and sound, Recovery creates a new genre of performance to communicate a personal story of brain trauma.My role was that of nurse, setting participants up for the experience on the hospital bed, where I interviewed them about their experience of brain injuries, initiated the experience and captured their reactions at the end of the 'procedure'. All were highly affected by what they had experienced.

International Arts in Health Conference 2012

The 21st Arts Care Conference 2012 was held in the lyric theatre in Belfast last week and I presented a paper entitled Biosensed Interactive Artworks in Health Education. Here is the abstract: This paper will explore the valuable role that the interactive art discipline can play in health education and healthcare provision. It focuses on interactive, participatory artworks that use biosensors that support embodied enquiry and reflection. The quality and behaviour of these artworks is entirely reliant on the bodily processes of the subject. Such works encourage participants to consciously change their psycho-physiological processes by providing realtime feedback of their physiological activity. The artworks use pneumographs, or respiratory strain gauges, to tune into participant breathing patterns. They extend the subject's perception by amplifying their internal responses using audio and visual representations.

The artworks are designed to distance the participant from more clinical uses of biofeedback in order to minimise any feelings of being judged and to strengthen the participant's sense of agency within the installation. In doing this they provide a creative environment to explore breathing literacy and enable critical enquiry through play.

The nature of this artform supports the capture of both quantitative data from the biosensors and qualitative data from participant interviews allowing for cross examination of results. A phenomenological methodology is applied in the capture and presentation of participant experiences. Participants are offered the option of sharing these experiences with others to facilitate an ongoing dialogue.

The participatory form of biosensed interactive art, offers the work to the entire hospital community to engage with, patients, visitors and staff. The paper concludes with a brief discussion on how such works have successfully been exhibited in St Vincent's hospital in Sydney, Australia.

Poodolls

Mischievous poodles, from the Saara market of downtown Rio, go walkies... By far the most popular pooch in Rio de janiero is the white fluffy, in particular the poodle, or poo-doll as the cariocas call them. Inspired by the love of these creatures I rummaged through the Saara market to find the fishnets, tulle, chain and fleshy underwear to transform us into two legged versions. Result: Poodoll love all around...

Plasticfantastic

With a couple of hours spare and not a stitch to wear to the Outburst prom I managed to dive out and pick up some bin liners before the shops closed. I wanted black but could only get this striking shade of blue, a lucky turn me thinks.

Settling in to make a start on the dress I noticed my mother hovering, albeit hunched over and wacked from her medication. My mum used to love to sew but now suffering advanced Parkinson's disease she sadly had to let that talent, along with many more creative pursuits, slip.

However, as I laid out the plastic bags a very interesting thing happened. Mum transformed from this crippled old lady to the commanding dress designer extraordinaire of old. Take away the sewing machine, fabric and pins, replace them with sticky tape, scissors and an assistant, my partner Pip, and Mai Hughes is a force.

This most wonderful of collaborations I've experienced also reminded me how utterly spoilt a child I was to have her as my personal seamstress. The only issue, Mum wasn't pleased that her hair hadn't been set for the shoot.

Documented by the talented Anya Van Lit anyavanlit.com/ who could also be seen making some modesty prevailing repairs throughout the night.

ENTITY

Entity, Wayne McGregor and Random Dance, provided a hot rush to counter the city's chill on the opening week of the Belfast Festival. Together with the music of Joby Talbot, of the Divine Comedy fame, we left feeling like we'd had a hard night dancing ourselves, without the exhaustion, sweat and connections made with new folk on the dance floor. In fact the shrouded string quartet and electronic soundscape set a haunting tone for the otherworldly visuals which really did separate audience from performer. The dancers' extreme moves evoked voyeuristic feelings in me, their hot contortionist bodies pulling moves reminiscent of spasticity. It is the taboos around watching people who move outside of the norm that made it all the more compelling.

The awesome strength and endurance of the dancers allowed them to dance on the knuckles of their feet - that's a big ouch that I've experienced thanks to yoga teacher Idit's (from Samadhi yoga in Newtown) toe torture pose which she justifies as a tool for pain management.

REFUGEE CAMP IN YOUR WORLD

To support the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) event Refugee Camp in Your City event I designed and developed the concept and content for the interactive tool REFUGEE CAMP IN YOUR WORLD (RCIYW).RCIYW is an educational tool that allows you to walk in the shoes of MSF field workers. It uses a gaming format to motivate young people to complete the experience and be rewarded with videos of MSF field workers sharing their personal experiences of life in a refugee camp. The player chooses a profession and encounters a series of scenarios typical for an MSF field worker. During my time at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), members of the public often wondered how they would cope as an MSF field worker? What would you do if confronted with a cholera or measles epidemic, or an influx of 10,000 refugees fleeing conflict? The CAMP provides an opportunity to experience some of the dilemmas faced by field workers on the frontline.