FLUX EVENTS: ART IN FLUX

FLUX Events presents ART IN FLUX at EVENT TWO

Curated by Aphra Shemza, Oliver Gingrich and Maria Almena

ART IN FLUX, features an array of creative practices including computation, digital media and new technologies such as VR, AI, EEG technologies, real-time data visualisation and live body-mapping. FLUX Events will feature some of the most revolutionary new media artists working today, with the themes covered including data and privacy, well-being, ecology, misogyny, complex systems and biology. This discourse brings into focus historical questions on the development of technology and computer art, and contextualises some of the themes in The CAS50 Collection and Event One through the prism of contemporary practices.

Full programme notes are available here.

Analema Group

Analema Group invites the audience to explore the power of their voices together, to discover harmonies between them, thus fostering social connectedness and mental wellbeing. 'HEartS' project (Health, Economic, and Social Impact of the ARTs) was launched by an interdisciplinary team of performance scientists at the Centre for Performance Science (Royal College of Music and Imperial College London), public health researchers, health economist and various artistic organisations to explore the patterns of, and reasons for, artistic and cultural engagement in the UK and its health, economic and social benefits.

• analemagroup.com

Andy Lomas

An exploration of patterns of emergent activity using computationally created neurons. This work uses 'spiking' neurons: a model of neural activity more closely based on biology than those conventionally used in artificial neural networks. The network receives regular pulses of simulation from a large neuron that connects to many others. At low levels of sensitivity activity quickly dies out. At high levels of sensitivity chaotic cascades of activation flood through the network. At a threshold of sensitivity between the two, the border of chaos, complex patterns of rich behaviour can emerge.

• www.andylomas.com

Artist also in The CAS50 Collection

Aphra Shemza & Mowgli

Polychromy is the first collaboration between the artists Aphra Shemza and Mowgli. It was commissioned by KALLIDA for their festival in June 2018 and exhibited for the first time in Baskerville Hall.

Spontaneously created in their new home/studio, Polychromy is the duo's first joint exploration into colour, form, geometry and light. The piece illustrates a lively and dynamic process responding to the world we find ourselves in.

• www.aphrashemza.co.uk/Works/polychromy

Aphra Shemza

Composition X is part of the Composition series. It demonstrates a sphere within a pyramid within a cube, alluding to Kepler's Platonic Universe, a Platonic solid model of the solar-centred system, found in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596).

The ultrasonic sensors of Composition X, measure the visitors' distance from the work. According to their location in the space, the LEDs change colour. When collaborating with one another the viewers are able to mix the colours of the LEDs by moving around the piece, this is to instil a community feeling between the participants. As a result of this movement, the viewer is drawn into the centre of the work, which provides a doorway into a three-dimensional infinite illusion seen through mirrored reflection. The viewers' physical interactivity turns them into active, connected participants and this not only further develops the work but creates it: the closer they get, the more they see. Composition X embraces notions of performativity, dialogue and interchange.

• ​www.aphrashemza.co.uk/Works/composition-x/

Current Climate is a real-time data visualization piece. Each light represents four different countries in the world; Red = USA, Blue = UK, Orange = India and Turquoise = Denmark, chosen either for the effects that climate change is already having on that country or as a wealthy nation who could be doing more to legislate around the climate crisis. The lights are connected to four news sources from each country and each time climate change is mentioned in the news the lights change accordingly. The piece serves as a reminder that urgent action needs to take place but we are not talking about the issues enough.

Programming by Tim Murray-Browne.

• ​www.aphrashemza.co.uk/Works/current-climate/

Sky Form I emulates the colours of the natural world and combines them in a geometric form, creating a striking and dynamic light work. The coloured forms appear and disappear as though clouds passing in the sky. The lights are programmed using a randomised sequence that will change and grow over time, creating a unique pattern from moment to moment. The work is an abstract representation of the sky and is intended to create a space for contemplation. The composition is calming and meditative.

• ​www.aphrashemza.co.uk/Works/sky-form-i/

Cecilia Falkenstrom

ARTificial intelligence FRANK is a contemporary oracle. You can ask it about existential dilemmas and personal concerns. Listen carefully to FRANK's responses - there might be hidden rationality in what seems to be a highly ambiguous response. Do not despair if FRANK's answers leave you quite disoriented - it is for your own good! And don't be afraid to approach FRANK. It will be expecting you!

The artwork examines how artificial intelligence challenges our human self-understanding. It is an investigation into the nature of being human, the nature of intelligence, the limits of machines and our human limits as artefact makers.

• www.ceciliefalkenstrom.com

Ernest Edmonds

Shaping Now is like a living image, moving and changing of its own accord but maturing and developing as a result of the movement of the audience: people in its vicinity. It is an abstract interactive generative artwork that takes data from a camera, pointing into space in front of the image, and continuously calculates the amount of activity in the space. This data is used to modify a set of rules that are continuously updating the pattern of colors displayed, so that the work develops and changes over long periods of time.

• ernestedmonds.com

Artist also in The CAS50 Collection

Jon Weinel

Cyberdream VR is a virtual hallucination taking you on a journey through the broken techno-utopias of cyberspace. Blast through the pixels of your screen and enter a psychedelic world of surrealistic rave visuals and vaporwave music in virtual reality. The project draws on VJ culture and Douglas Rushkoff's concept (via William Gibson) of the Internet as a mass hallucination, imagining a dream about the utopian and dystopian possibilities of cyberspace. The capitalist irrationality of cyberspace is revealed, yet in the broken and fragmented forms of this dream lies the euphoric possibility to reconfigure and reboot. The future is lost, crash the system, back to the tribes.

Video trailer: https://youtu.be/1i0WnLgsG9o

Kimatica Studio

An interactive digital installation encouraging movement and play to take you in a journey through the states of relaxation and release by the interaction with live reactive visuals. Aiming to enhance the connection with the emotional and magical aspects of the human body in motion.
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Using motion sensor technology to track the body's movement in real time, the coded visuals are designed to react in a different way depending on the participant's movements. The experience will reward their interactivity – the more people interacting the bigger the visual reward they will have.

The visual outcome of the piece will, therefore, be entirely created by the audience; they will directly participate in making the art piece. Every audience is different and each one will create something truly unique.

View a video of the work here.

• www.kimatica.net

Mark Fahrid

To coincide with the final reading of the UK Investigatory Power Bill (Oct 2016), Poisonous Antidote was an online and physical exhibition exploring just how intimately you are able to comprehend a person - their humour, temperament and rationale - through only their digital footprint. From the 1st - 30th September 2016, www.poisonous-antidote.com was a live newsfeed of artist Mark Farid's real-time digital footprint. This included all of his personal and professional emails, text messages, phone calls, Facebook Messenger, web browsing, locations, Twitter and Instagram posts, as well as any photographs or videos, Mark captured. Regardless of the time, duration, or intimacy of the content Mark amassed, there was no restriction on the content publicised. Viewers are invited to interact with the website to listen, read, and watch all of Mark's communication over the month.

​Poisonous Antidote was commissioned by Gazelli Art House, London, and supported by CPH:LAB and the Strasbourg Biennale of Contemporary Art.

• poisonous-antidote.com
• www.markfarid.com

Nicola Plant

This exploratory artwork invites the audience to use their own embodied and inherent expressivity as the research matter of a work that assiduously examines how it can be possible to translate the visceral experience of our inner flux of emotions and sensation into a communicative form of movement? Parallax is a movement-based interactive VR artwork. The audience communicates with one another by intuitively performing hand expressions and gestures that sculpt a shared malleable object existing in the virtual space between them. Although possessing its own base rhythm, the form entrains to the movements within these expressions. By materialising the embodied dynamics of human expression onto a virtual entity, the piece aims to uncover the characteristic rhythms and qualities within each audience members movements that allow for expression to cross the boundary from an inner private world to a human connection.

• www.nicolaplant.co.uk

Oliver Gingrich

The Crack is an EEG controlled projection piece that invites the audience to create cracks in concrete structures through concentration. Cement is one of the top pollutants in the world, yet by cracking up concrete structures we allow its surface to absorb sulfur toxins in the air, thereby turning it into a material that helps to absorb air pollution. The audience is actively invited to use their concentration to create cracks in the concrete structure that surrounds them.

• olivergingrich.com

Paul Friedlander

The light sculpture arose from a wish to create a compact artwork that could be shown in a seminar room. The stimulus was an invitation to take part in an exhibition at The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University. The institute organised a series of workshops on Growth, Form and Self-organisation in 2017 and invited 10 artists to participate. Each artist exhibited a work and gave a talk. The artist's sessions were presented alongside talks by mathematicians all of whom were involved in related work. Unlike the better-known work going on in mathematics which is involved with pure mathematics and cosmology, the INI focuses on other creative fields within mathematics.

​For me, it was a particularly curious experience as I had grown up in Cambridge where my father was a mathematician in the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. It was interesting to realise how the subject has evolved over the years and people are now working on problems that would once have been considered impossible or perhaps frivolous. There is no mathematical theory that accounts for the complex wave patterns I have discovered on a spinning string, the problem remains an unsolved wonder to contemplate.

• www.paulfriedlander.com

Rachel Ara

Using witness accounts, meteorological, astronomical, and other collated data, this CAD drawing is a precise recreation of the death scene of Ana Mendieta on 8th September 1985 07:30 (local time).

Ana Mendieta "fell" 34 floors to her death at around 05:30, her body was removed at around 06:30. The drawing recreates the light and shadow marking the spot one hour after the removal of her body. The scene was never documented.

This event created a schism in the NY art world that questioned its morality and artists loyalties.

• www.2ra.co/doam.html

Stuart F Batchelor

Inspired by the vivid and otherworldly colours that occur at dawn and dusk in the skies, the Celestial Horizons triptych charts this surreal gamut from the scarlet red "Nova" through the sunburst yellow "Sunken Sun" to the oceanic blue of "Evening Star". The abstract designs are composed, living phenomena; complex effects that emerge through simple interactions, reminiscent of gargantuan nebulae and subtle ripples of water, inviting the viewer to both, wonder, playfully about the visible world and speculate on the nature of the invisible one. Created using proprietary real-time graphics software and the artist's own hand-painted strokes, time and behaviour are added to the painter's palette - enriching the painting tradition while pulling it in a new direction.

• www.sfbatchelor.com/gallery/video/Nova

William Latham

Resembling life forms from an alternative or even alien evolution, 'Mutator' was originally developed in the late eighties by William Latham and Stephen Todd and this work has been extended and translated to VR, immersing the viewer in a super-surreal world of interactive evolving forms.

Starting with a simple cornucopia form, the Mutator code introduces random 'per-mutations' in order to generate increasingly complex three-dimensional entities that resemble fantastical, futuristic organisms. The works refer us to Giger-esque ancient fossils, molecular structures, heavy metal architecture and Escher-like space-conundrums. Latham describes this process as "evolution by aesthetics". This the newest Mutator VR places the viewer in a Mutator world where their smallest body movement mutates and changes their organic world around them creating a direct synergy between the viewer and the world they are in.

• ​http://latham-mutator.com/

Artist also in The CAS50 Collection