Inter-Arts Connections Residency

In the second half of 2009, SauqreTangle were awarded a Connections Residency by the Australia Council Inter-Arts Office. We will be Artists In Residence at Hidden Cove Solutions in Melbourne, Australia from July-December 2009. Here is the official proposal as to what we will be doing during this residency. Check the blog for the latest news from the residency.

John McCormick and Adam Nash are internationally recognised as two of the most innovative Australian artists using technologies such as realtime 3D, Multi-User Virtual Environments and motion capture in the creation of dance, sound-art, installation art, virtual art and media arts practices. In recent years these technologies have gained more mainstream mindshare in the arts and commercial technology sectors. Given this, John and Adam have been working with Hidden Cove Solutions (HCS), a successful Melbourne-based technology services company with A-list clients, to explore the potential synergies between the commercial and artistic applications of such technology. The initial explorations have been very fruitful, and both parties are now keen to formalise a working relationship by way of a residency. The Connections residencies program is an ideal fit for this relationship for a variety of reasons. Both HCS and the artists see the potential for a long term relationship that benefits the commercial and artistic activities of both parties, as well as the wider community.

The aim of the 6-month residency is to develop a reliable technical framework for creating live ‘mixed reality’ performances and installations. HCS will sponsor the artists with a 10-metre portable dome, Optitrak motion capture system and required software. Using this and other equipment/software provided by the artists, the artists will work with an HCS programmer to implement a system that facilitates live, realtime manipulation of data from sources such as live motion capture data and data transmitted via the Internet, into audiovisual data suitable for live performance and installation. As an initial proof of concept, we will stage a performance event as an official part of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing celebrations in late July 2009. Based on this milestone, we will then iteratively design and refine a reliable system for future performances. Ultimately, this will be a distributed, network-aware system for the realtime manipulation of arbitrary data into audiovisual data suitable for live performances and installations, both physical and virtual. Ideally, the system will not be tied to particular hardware, but rather be generic and relevant to a wide range of media artists working with all forms of ‘mixed reality’ performance and media art.

The desired residency outcome is a reliable technical framework that allows for the future development and staging of a compelling ‘mixed reality’ performance/installation work. This work will use the Optitrak system and portable dome, and be taken on a major tour of Australian regional centres. The artists are very interested in the nature and meaning of telematic technologies to the populations of regional Australia. As such, the show we plan to tour will not be a simplistic or patronising exercise, but rather will involve genuinely collaborative work between the artists and representatives from regional centres. As the developed system will be fundamentally internet-aware, we envisage a performance, installation and residency in each centre that is the focal point of an ongoing process of internet-based collaborative art-making that starts long before the physical arrival of the dome and continues after the dome has moved on.

It is important to note that the aim of the residency is NOT to devise or mount the show as outlined in the previous paragraph. Rather, the aim of the residency itself is to establish a framework that will allow for such performances in the future. Based on initial experiments and conversations with HCS, we are very confident that we will achieve this aim. Once this is done, we will be in a position to establish a much longer-term relationship with HCS since many of the solutions developed during the residency will have significant utility for both the commercial purposes of HCS and the artistic purposes of McCormick and Nash.

The residency will build on the techniques John and Adam developed in their ‘mixed reality’ installation “Ways To Wave” at the 01SJ Biennial of Global Art on the Edge in San Jose, USA in 2008. Ways To Wave took the data generated from the live audience manipulation of a sculpture installed in the San Jose Museum of Art, and transmitted it in real-time to a virtual audiovisual immersive installation in Second Life. Furthermore, HCS has a wealth of experience in the mobile communications industry, an area both parties are keen to explore with a view to developing mobile applications for both artistic and commercial purposes. To this end, the residency will also involve the investigation of a range of mobile platforms for artwork development, in particular applications for iPhone and Smartphones. This may be in the form of stand-alone applications or in the use of the applications to interface with live events including interactive installations and performance works.

This will necessarily involve the investigation of content development platforms. We will require a content development workflow that is usable for both artistic and commercial applications, and are particularly interested in a 3D environment solution for sound and vision that can potentially scale across the range of different development platforms we wish to investigate. The solution should be adaptable to the different display environments with minimum alteration to the underlying technology. This will result in a kind of “black box” system that potentially represents a significant commercial benefit for HCS, but can also be used by artists interested in working with different forms of data without having to learn programming or understand the constituent technologies. To this end, we plan on mounting a series of workshops and “master classes” for Australian artists interested in different forms of motion capture, data visualisation/sonification and other forms of local or net-based data manipulation.