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Cloud Display
Cloud Display
2019
“Cloud Display” is a vertical water fountain consisting of 1,600 ultrasonic atomizers, controlled by a machine-learning voice recognition system. When a participant speaks into an intercom, the piece writes any words or sentences spoken using wisps of pure water vapour. The project can work in most languages, and recognizes different accents.
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Pareidolium
Pareidolium
2018
“Pareidolium” is a circular fountain that creates portraits of onlookers in mid-air with clouds of vapor that ascend from the water basin. As a visitor looks into the water, a facial-detection system extracts their image and creates an ephemeral likeness in cold vapour. The portrait becomes tangible, almost breathable, only briefly, then disappears in turbulence.
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Call on Water
Call on Water
2016
Call on Water is a fountain that writes words in mid-air with plumes of cold vapour that ascend from a water basin. Dozens of poems by Mexican writer Octavio Paz are presented which describe readable air, the moment when the written word is spoken and becomes the atmosphere itself. The poems’ content becomes tangible briefly, almost breathable, then disappears in turbulence.
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Babbage Nanopamphlets
Babbage Nanopamphlets
2015
Two million pamphlets were printed in elemental gold, higher in purity than 24-karat gold, using nanotechnology techniques. Around 250,000 copies were released in the exhibition room so they remain floating around in the air, potentially inhaled by the public. These pamphlets are 150 atoms thick and are biologically inert so pose no health risk. The rest of the pamphlets are shown suspended in water together with images taken by an electron microscope. The text engraved onto the gold leaflets is an excerpt from the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) by Charles Babbage. The text posits that the atmosphere is a vast repository of everything that has ever been said and that we could potentially "rewind" the movement of every molecule of air to recreate the voices of everyone who has spoken in the past.
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Airborne Series
Airborne Series
Shadow Box 11, 2015
“Airborne Series” (Shadow Box 11) is a set of interactive installations designed to animate literary, scientific and philosophical texts on the subjects of entropy, complexity, chance and non-linear dynamics. As a viewer stands in front of the work a sensor creates a "heat map" of his or her body and evaporates letters of the text that scroll on screen and which become "airborne", generating turbulent movements. As the participant moves away the letters cool down and precipitate. The interaction fills the screen slowly, showing tens of thousands of letters, at which point the text fades out, and begins to scroll again from the beginning. Among the texts animated are "New Experiments with the Vacuum" by Blaise Pascal, "Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes" by Ilya Prigogine, "Ars Magna" by Ramon Llull and "The Labyrinth of Fortune" by Juan de Mena.
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Airborne Newscasts
Airborne Newscasts
Relational Architecture 20, 2013
"Airborne Newscasts" (Relational Architecture 20) is an interactive installation originally commissioned by the Chrysler Museum of Art to transform Norfolk, Virginia’s public space into a poetic shadow play. By blocking the light of two projectors, participants cast their shadows onto a 900-square-metre wall, and these shadows are tracked by computerized surveillance systems. Out of the shadows emanate billowing smoke which is mapped onto the wall, slowly accumulating within it. Turbulent clouds of live newscasts evaporate from the “heat” of the tracked bodies.
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Nave Solar
Nave Solar
2011
“Nave Solar” is an interactive installation featuring a fake Sun that is activated by the pendular motion of the public as they hang from a rope and swing along the nave of a 16th Century catholic inquisition church. Using tracking systems, the installation detects the motion of participants and generates smoke that accumulates on the ceiling of the apse as well as activates the Sun's flares, surface turbulence and sun spots.
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The Year's Midnight
The Year's Midnight
2011
"The Year's Midnight" is an interactive installation that shows the viewers' image on screen, unprocessed, except for plumes of white or black smoke that emanate from their eye sockets until the whole display is filled with a dense smog. Live and recorded eyeballs extracted from the video accumulate on the bottom of the display, similar to traditional representations of St. Lucy. The project's name is the beginning of John Donne's "A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day", a mournful poem which inspires this work.
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Navier-Stokes
Navier-Stokes
2009
"Navier-Stokes" is a series of computer-controlled lightboxes that show satellite pictures of border regions that have a vector of economic disparity, a history of military conflict or heavy migratory traffic. Instead of using regular white fluorescent light tubes to illuminate the print, the pieces have over one hundred thousand light emitting diodes (LEDs), which can highlight tiny features within the image. The first piece shows the Tijuana-San Diego border with Mexico illuminated red by default while the US is dark.
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Apostasis
Apostasis
2008
An interactive installation featuring powerful robotic searchlights that create static columns of light in a dark room. When someone tries to walk into a light beam, a computer automatically moves the searchlight so that the beam is pointed somewhere else on the room. A video tracking system observes the room and makes sure that the lights are always illuminating empty spaces where there is no one. People may continually attempt to enter the spotlight but the system will adapt to ensure this can never be achieved.
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The Trace
The Trace
1995
"The Trace" is a telepresence installation that invites two participants in remote sites to share the same telematic space. The piece consists of light vectors, sounds and graphics that respond to the movement of the participants. Two interactive stations are needed for the piece; these are interconnected with a normal ISDN digital line so they can be in the same exhibition hall, on either side of a city or in different cities.
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