shift v2: relief projection installation

shift v.2, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

I decided to give my current series of relief projections a name, shift: moving from one place to another, changing the emphasis, direction or focus of something. It also has a loose relation to the idea of shapeshifting.
As mentioned in my previous posts about my relief projection projects, shift combines multichannel sequencing, audio generated from video (soundtransducer inside every box, the sound you hear is directly related to the video projected on that particular box), with masking/mapping a projection to fit physical objects. This creates a dynamic audiovisual landscape, a spatial light painting.
The software to create the installation has developed over almost two years and some workshops, and I have shown documentation of the development, but never exhibited it as a final work.
It is only this autumn that I have found the right opportunity to show it in an exhibition. I was invited to participate in the Total Aktion exhibition at Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde, Denmark. I had the opportunity to exhibit there in 2005 as part of Get Real, a exhibition with real-time art as the focus (which was also shown at Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland). It also resulted in the book where I wrote the essay “Within the space of a moment”.

Shift became a sort of drone installation, with slow light/colour changes of volume, sometimes cut off by sharp white planes. The video documentation is a cut version showing some of the different scenes. Here is a slide show of still images.

(youtube link to the same video, if someone prefers that)

The software used is an expansion of the videoprojectiontool available here.

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Defining space with light

sonumbra by loop.ph

This week I went to a presentation with loop.ph, an artist research duo consisting of Rachel Wingfield & Mathias Gmachl.
Loop.ph combine biology,technology,textiles and structural elements into a wide range of projects, often collaborating with experts within their field. The last few years they have concentrated on constructing lightweight relatively large-scale structures (synetic structures which is supposed to be an improvement over Buckminister Fuller´s geodesic structures),  combined with light and solar cells (they are collaborating with a danish company making printable solar cells).
The result is quite fascinating: large dynamic volumes but with hardly any mass. Especially in their Sonumbra project the light patterns in the structure is defining a changing volume in space: Each thread is a line of light, which can be animated. Check out the video from the first animation test.

sidenote: It took me a while to realise that Mattias was the same guy I  knew from Farmers Manual from back in the 242.pilots days.

The wind-up birds continued

la forêt de Nouzhat Ibn Sima, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

The wind-up birds didn´t settle in the forest of Lillehammer.
Some of them went to the airport in Oslo, some of them to a park in Rabat, Morocco.
Two very different contexts in many ways:

Oslo Airport Gardermoen is celebrating its 10 year anniversary, and I was invited as one of two projects from the UT21 exhibition to be part of this anniversary.
The work was to be placed outside, in a passage between the parking area and the terminal building, a very busy pathway.

It was freezing, windy and wet the weekend it was installed. Of course everything at an airport involves heavy security, so I had a special permission card which I wore to avoid frightening passengers (bearded man climbing trees with electronics,wires and batteries). Actually I got a lot of strange questions, people wondering what these devices were against or for, was it to chase off the woodpeckers? When I explained that they were mechanical woodpeckers I got a lot of blank stares.
More images from the airport.

A week later I was off to Morocco, 25 degrees and sunny in Rabat, the capitol. There is a small art space there called l´appartement 22, run by Abdellah Karroum, which had been invited to present work at the first Brussels biennale. Abdellah decided to invite Anne Szefer Karlsen from HKS in Norway to curate some projects in Morocco, so she again invited Pedro Gomez Enza and myself to do projects in the frame of the Brussels Biennale, but in Morocco. It gets weirder.
Unlike the very organised airport project, things were a bit looser here. First we needed to find a location, and after some scouting I fell in love with a beautiful and strange park, on the outskirts of the center, la forêt de Nouzhat Ibn Sima( also known as le parc sportif), with lots of eucalyptus trees, cute fuzzy pine trees, mint tea houses and people exercising in the strangest ways.
Public art in Morocco isnt common and there had been quite a lot of discussion before my arrival as of what to do with permissions etc.
We ended up doing it without permissions, and therefore without a ladder to not draw attention on ourselves, and it turned into a strange undercover operation trying to set up woodpeckers in trees while pretending to do other things. We even drove around in a car while I was programming in the back seat.

I built a special version of the wind-up birds for this actionist installation. Basically I replaced the radio modems with a parasite brain (a timer and a light sensor), this made the birds more independent and maybe slightly more intelligent.
This actually corresponds quite well with the natural woodpeckers, some enjoy the company of its fellow creatures, while others insist on being alone.

more images from the wind-up birds in morocco, and some other images from morocco as well.

There are several types of natural woodpeckers in Morocco, but I unfortunately didn´t get a chance to see one.

colour psychology

tannerie, old medina in Fes, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

Last week I went to an inspiring lecture with professor Byron Mikellides from Oxford Brookes University about colour psychology.
Mikellides is together with Tom Porter editor of a new edition of Colour of Architecture Today which comes out in December this year. This book is a completely revised edition of the first one which came out in the seventies.

He spoke about colour related to our environment, about NCS (Natural Colour system), about the relation between the perception of time, volume, weight, size to colour.
He looked at different examples of combinations of colours in architecture, mentioning Josef Albers “Interaction of Color” as a great source for practical colour theory. Mikellides made a point of not only looking for relations in a space, but over time (diachronic), so looking at how colours change in the course of a day, over the seasons etc.

Since my primary interest in the topic comes from working with light and projection it was interesting to hear other people talking about painting with light, and he showed several interesting examples of use of light in architecture, particularly the architects Speirs & Major who have made a study of light with the website and book. (It doesn´t quite compare with the monster book from ZKM: “Light Art. Artificial Light (Emanating)).

lights out?

Park, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

I am not the most efficient blogger I have to admit, but its been a very busy period the last 2 months. Here is a short summary of my activities, I will elaborate on some of them in later posts:

After the opening of the wind-up birds in end of august I organised the seminar Conversations with spaces at Bergen Kunsthall Landmark, which was a success. I will most likely get the chance to see the work of two of the speakers, Lawrence Malstaf and Kirsten Dehlholm in november in Holland.

Straight after the seminar I went to New York, mainly to follow the conflux festival, but also to catch up with some people. I went to Kurt Ralske´s closing day of his show at the MFA Computer Art Gallery, I was at the opening of Luc deBois´ exhibition at bitforms, I saw Olafur Eliassons huge rotating mirror at PS1 and his waterfalls, the Buckministerfuller show at moma.
I hung out with Keiko Uenishi (oblaat) at conflux and share, Eric Redlinger showed me the mrmr application, Carrie Dashow explained her concept of live video editing for multiple cameras.
I had planned to get in touch with Eyebeam, but after two months of not answering my emails I gave up. 

The next two weeks I spent in a monastery cell of the grey brothers in Roskilde, Denmark, preparing for my installation Shift at Museet for Samtidskunst. It is part of a show called Total Aktion (on until christmas).

On my way back from Denmark I met the wind-up birds who had settled down at the airport in Oslo, celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the airport.

Right after that some of them flew to Morocco, which is where I spent the last week as well. This was part of the Brussels biennale.