I first met Experential Electricae at the Liminal Screens residency at the banff new media institute in Canada. They had built Pixy in the constraints of a basement in banff. The problems of finding space and hanging in banff lead the screen to be more volumetric. Natacha, presented Pixy as “conceived for both it’s own use and collaboration with other video artists who would create other content for the object or even live performance”. This intrigued me. A lot of artist and technologists are creating ‘tools’ for other artists to then appropriate. Does this really work? I was both interested in the screen and also interested in this nature of collaboration. In April I first contacted Experential Electricae about becoming involved with the chameleon Project. We then met briefly in Vienna where I was delivering a talk about the Chameleon Project.
While trying to understand where we have come to with Pixy, I have looked back on the dialogue we have had together about Chameleon and Pixy coming together. This is an extract of the first email ever sent to Natacha regarding Pixy, and how it may work with the Chameleon Project. I looked at the screen yesterday and thought about how it had developed for the Chameleon Project.
“Interestingly I don’t think the low resolution would affect the emotional reading of the piece. Neuroscientific research has done tests on how much information you can take from an image of a face, and still read the emotional tone of the face. Its amazing how much tonal range you can take away.
I proposed to create a screen that hangs from the middle of the room. You can see four different faces – one to the north. south, east, west. Their is mind reading technology that interacts with the viewer. The face in the video responds to the emotional expression of the viewer and tries to begin a dialogue with them. If you walk through the screens (into the mind of the work), the screen will react as well. Maybe getting annoyed or something.
A lot of what i am trying to say in this work is about the delicate nature of our inner and outer world, and how we are constantly adjusting to what is around us. I like the delicate nature of your screens- and the fact that you don’t know where the sort of begin and end. They are not ‘contained’, much like our emotions – always a bit leaky and prone to infection. The lovely messy bits that make us human, and that technology loves to deny.
It would be a great collaboration, and interesting for the space. It would probably require a grant to be written to develop the screen a bit more to work in four dimensions and to install it. Who is developing this work? Is it Michel or you? I remember you mentioning you were working with another artist as well.
what do you think? I think it would be great’.
