Keyword: projection

Transfer

Transfer

Transfer is an experimental photographic study using tableware and direct sunlight. This study was undertaken as an exploration of signal transference, mediation, and pattern recognition. The components used recall the elements of a traditional still-life construction, but the results bear no resemblance. The images produced and presented have not been manipulated for effect, but are simply a record of the informational transactions between the sun, the object, and the camera — or in terms of communication, the transmitter, the filter, and the receiver.

These images, as with all still-life images, exist in the continuum between formalism and semiotics. The history and tradition of still-life is nearly as long as that of human image making, but are these images a study of pure light and form or are they a study of symbolic objects and their situational rhetorical vocabularies? At what point in our communications stream do we grant the attribute of meaning to what is otherwise simply data?

Transfer is on exhibit at the IMRC Center of University of Maine from November 27 to December 1. More info….

I Am Sitting... II 8

I Am Sitting… II

“I Am Sitting…” is an experimental performance installation which explores the potential of the mind to manifest itself in direct terms without mediation by physical gestures. Champlin has been developing it since early 2016 and has presented multiple iterations of the project, and has recently completed a residency at Hangar Interactive Labs in Barcelona to develop new instrumentation.

In this piece, EEG and ECG sensors capture passive bioactivity. A chain of simple translators in the form of custom hardware and software introduces the bio signals into primitive audio and video feedback loops, amplifying them to allow subtle changes in Champlin’s physical experience to percolate up as broad variances in the perceivable environment. Nothing seen or heard is prerecorded.

In partial homage to work by Alvin Lucier in the late 1960s, “I Am Sitting…” draws inspiration from two key points of interest. Firstly, and literally, work attempts to comment on the notion of bypassing the choreography of artmaking – moving outside the traditional notion of composition – such that the art is in the composition of the process itself. Secondly, the project’s roots came from an attraction to research by others such as Ernst Chladni and Hans Jenny regarding the transference of signals from one medium to another through the reductive mechanism of their underlying frequencies.

Within these contexts, this work attempts to demonstrate one method of removing the external gestures of performance and using internal control structures, such as information-coded biofeedback, in their place to effect an external change in the viewer’s perceptive field.

From a 2017 performance in Barcelona, featuring the new 8-node EEG
A 3D printed wireless EEG scanner with 8 nodes, built in 2017 at Hangar Labs in Barcelona.
Data visualizations and sonification with OpenBCI and custom MaxMSP synthesizers
An early iteration of the piece, “I Am Sitting,” performed at the Black Mountain College {RE}Happening biennial, 2017. Photo: Amy O. Pierce
A snapshot in the studio
An example of EEG data in an open source visualization tool

As the project has developed, Champlin has focused increasingly on the nature of networked communications systems and the implications they have for neutrality and mediation in language. The feedback loop’s responsiveness to minute fluctuations in EEG signals demonstrates the clear inability of the artist (as a component in a system) to be truly neutral.

Bearing the Light 17

Bearing the Light

In May, 2017, Champlin participated in a collaborative installation event at Fort Knox in Prospect, Maine. The collaboration involved 9 artists over 2 days, in a format that allowed a one-time 24 hour window to design and install a transformative experience within the depths of the Fort. The results took the form of a sort of pilgrimage of light and sound, leading an audience through a series of vignettes that responded to the visual and acoustic topology of the existing structure, playing with light and shadow, reflection and reverberation.

Susan Smith, coordinator of the event, spoke of the effort as a way to “come together – as artists and collaborators – to work with this site, and communicate to a need, especially now, to reflect upon our relationship to self and others, and to the world. We invite participants to experience this place, get lost in it, and unsettle our notions of where and who we are.”

Participating artists: Alicia Champlin, Eleanor Kipping, Stasiu Levitsky, Jim Winters, David Allen, Nathan Dumis, Michelle Bezik, Derek Smith, and Susan Smith.

Collaborators exploring the space at Fort Knox in Prospect, Maine. Photo credit: Jim Winters