Complex Behaviors and Transmodalities
Exhibit: February 12, 2009 – March 12, 2009
Opening Reception: February 12, 6:30 – 9:30 pm
Hours of Exhibition: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, M-T and Th-F
Ruth West, ATLAS in silico: Scalable Meta-Shape Grammar Objects (2007-09)
Atlas in Silico is an interactive virtual environment / installation and an ongoing art-science collaboration (18 team members and additional consultants) that provides an aesthetic encounter with metagenomics data, and contextual metadata, from the largest known protein sequence dataset, the Global Ocean Survey (GOS)—a ground-breaking snapshot of biodiversity in the world's oceans. In this work, context is the driving force animating the virtual world—much like natural ocean currents—revealing internal structure within the data and metadata and bridging out from the nano-scale to the global and back again. In the process, a multi-scale, multi-modal multi-resolution experience is created.
Within ATLAS in silico's virtual environment users explore GOS data in combination with contextual metadata at various levels of scale and resolution through interaction with multiple data-driven abstract visual and auditory patterns. A custom meta-shape grammar was designed to construct the scalable visual representations that—combined with scalable auditory data signatures, also developed for the installation—generate the virtual world. Participants experience an environment constructed as a highly abstract visual and auditory pattern that is at once dynamic and coherently structured, yet reveals its characteristics only as participants disturb the pattern through their interaction. Several of these scalable meta-shape grammar objects will be on display during the Scalable Relations exhibition.
Bio: Ruth West is an artist with a background as molecular genetics researcher. She is the director of Interactive Technologies for CENS (Center for Embedded Networked Sensing) on the UCLA campus and, concurrently, an Artist-Research Associate at the UCSD Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, where she was the first CALIT2 New Media Artist to cross over to the Digitally Enabled Genomic Medicine Layer. Prior affiliations include artist-in-residence and director of Visual Analytics and Interactive Technologies for the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research. Her work has been presented at venues such as SIGGRAPH, CAA and the UCLA Fowler Museum; has been featured on NPR's The Connection, in the New York Times, the Genome News Network, a-minima and Artweek, and has been published in various journals, including the American Journal of Human Genetics, Genomics, Leonardo, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Atlas in Silico project team bios
Marcos Novak, Turbulent Topologies (2009)
Turbulent Topologies is an ongoing project initially commissioned by the Garanti Galeri of Istanbul. It was first shown in Istanbul in the summer of 2008, and subsequently traveled to Venice on occasion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Preparations are currently underway for the project to travel to several other countries.
The project morphs as it travels, certain elements remaining the same, others adapting to local circumstances. The version shown here, while much simplified compared to the versions shown in Istanbul and Venice, retains the "invisible sculpture / architecture" that is the central organizing element of all the installations. A set of motion tracking cameras is used to create an "interactivated field" containing invisible but highly specific forms. While these forms cannot be seen, they nonetheless permit the user to "touch" them and discover their precise contours by sound and projection.
From time to time, data of user interaction with the invisible sculpture are captured, processed, and elaborated into tangible physical sculptures fabricated using various computer controlled techniques. The project thus spans the full "transmodal continuum," consciously employing actual, virtual, and interactive space, sound, image, sensing and fabrication, and more.
Bio: Marcos Novak is a global nomad, and an artist, theorist, and transarchitect. In 2008, "Transmitting Architecture", the title of his seminal 1995 essay, became the theme of the XXIII World Congress of the UIA (Union Internationale Des Architectes), the largest architectural organization in the world.
His projects, theoretical essays, and interviews have been translated into over twenty languages and have appeared in over 70 countries, and he lectures, teaches, and exhibits worldwide. Drawing upon architecture, music, and computation, and introducing numerous additional influences from art, science, and technology, his work intentionally defies categorization. He is universally recognized as the pioneer of architecture in cyberspace, of the critical consideration of virtual space as architectural and urban place, and of the use of generative computational composition in architecture and design. He originated several widely recognized concepts, such as "transvergence," "transarchitectures," "transmodernity," "liquid architectures," "navigable music," "habitable cinema," "archimusic," "eversion," "allogenesis," and others, anticipating many of the developments in digitally derived art, architecture, and music, and in virtual, augmented, mixed, and alternative reality research. His seminal essay "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace," already translated into the world's major languages, is now included in several anthologies of critical documents of the digital era, along writings of key figures such as Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Marshall McLuhan, and others. His pioneering work "Dancing With The Virtual Dervish: Worlds in Progress," developed at the Banff Center between 1991-1994 as part of the "Art and Virtual Environments Project," included the world's first 4-dimensional immersive environments, exploring and allowing navigation through spaces using four spatial dimensions, with time being fifth. His current research involves nano~ and bio~ technologies, and explores the hypothesis that we are in a cultural phase characterized by "the Production of the Alien," paralleling the Renaissance "Production of Man".
Marcos Novak has participated in many international exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, including the 9th Mostra Internazionale di Architettura di Biennale di Venezia in 2004, and the 7th Mostra Internazionale di Architettura di Biennale di Venezia, in 2000, where he represented Greece. In honor of the pivotal role he has played and is continuing to play in the acceptance, integration, and development of the digital in advanced architecture, and as part of "Digital Real", a major international architecture exhibition hosted by DAM (Deutsches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt, Germany), he was invited to write "Liquid, Trans~, Invisible: The Ascent and Speciation of the Digital in Architecture. A Story"—a combined history/biographical chronology of the ascent of the digital in architecture and his part in it.
He is a Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is affiliated with CNSI (the California NanoSystems Institute), MAT (Media Art and Technology), and Art. He named the UCSB AlloSphere (the three-story high sphere for the creation of immersive virtual environments, the largest such facility in the world originally proposed by Dr. Kuchera-Morin) and created its first project, the AlloBrain using fMRI scans of his own brain. He is the Director of the transLAB at UCSB. In 2004, he was honored to become a Fellow of the World Technology Network.