eyedrum presents the first installment of it's
"submission series" a bi-yearly effort to showcase
some of the talented artist's who've submitted thier
work to eyedrum, but for whatever reason didn't fit
into our regular schedule of more specifically
"themed" shows. this first-of-it's-kind (@ eyedrum
anyways) event specifically focuses on painters, these
artist's include; samantha barnum, laurel hausler,
tindelmichi and michael thrush. 'Til April 15th.
regular gallery hours
March 8, 2006 12:00PM - 5:00PM
regular gallery hours
March 10, 2006 12:00PM - 5:00PM
regular gallery hours
March 11, 2006 12:00PM - 5:00PM
Opening reception: Juul Sadee
March 11, 2006 7:00PM - 10:00PM Price: free
Opening reception.
In the back gallery:
A Song for Atlanta:
the first United States exhibition by
Dutch artist Juul Sadee.
Till April 15th.
"It is an eerie concatenation of organ music, ambient noises and snippets of conversation that come out of innumerable little speakers drooping from the ceiling. Several abject sculptures add to the awkward mood. Brand Atlanta would not approve." --Catherine Fox, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A Song for Atlanta
Crossing the ocean for my first visit to America, I am preoccupied with my ideas about Atlanta. I have heard about the city and visited it by internet and talked with some people about the social structures there.
My preparations for Eyedrum deal with the perhaps unrealistic idea I have about Atlanta. Let's say that I developed a sound for Atlanta in which I will give Atlanta a song which I dreamed in Holland. This "dream song for Atlanta” is mixed with the audio-explorations I have done there.
”A Song for Atlanta” is a multi-media installation made in situ, which develops a "cross-fade" situation in which real sounds are mixed with virtual and ambient sounds. The whole audio piece is based on ideas about "cross-fade perception." It is my belief that we can perceive many different pieces of information at the same moment. But it asks effort of the perceiver to concentrate simultaneously on "wide" and "narrow" perception. It is a kind of "brain-gymnastics." It is also my belief that when we succeed in "cross-fade perception" we experience the world more openly and develop our humanity. It makes us experience our life intensively and as a whole.
The installation includes a large number of small audio speakers. All over the space you will hear sounds, creating an "audio wave." The "dream song for Atlanta" is mixed with interviews with Atlanta inhabitants and sounds recorded in the city. The interviews deal with the dreams, wishes and expectations people have about their lives and the place they live, and more specifically the social context in which they live. The recorded sounds from the city are the context in which the several layers of life (the dream song and the interviews) are mixed at the Eyedrum space.
Another part of the audio is a text I have written which is inspired by the people I have met here and some of the music in Atlanta. The text is performed by MC Wyzsztyk of the Atlanta hip-hop group Psyche Origami.
The installation also contains some objects which I made here, inspired by my visits to people’s homes and to the city. Domestic and urban situations as parts of the whole, they can't exist without each other.
Situations, a new artists’ book, is presented here alongside A Song for Atlanta. Situations is a visual and textual entity which covers a region of research and experiences. Several authors took part in the project. Their texts are combined with photos of multi-media installations, objects, video-stills, paintings and drawings.
Juul Sadée,
March 2006
JUUL SADEE is an installation artist working with sculpture, sound, and video. She works in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Tongeres, Belgium. She has exhibited throughout the Netherlands, Belgium and Europe, and recently in Tokyo. A Song for Atlanta is her first exhibition in the United States.
regular gallery hours
March 15, 2006 12:00PM - 5:00PM
MEART - The Semi-Living Artist
March 16, 2006 6:00PM - 10:00PM
Guy Ben-Ary
Artist in Residence
SymbioticA - the Art & Science Collaborative Research Lab
School of Anatomy & Human Biology
University of Western Australia
MEART - The Semi Living Artist is a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic research and development project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of new biological technologies.
It is an installation distributed between two (or more) locations in the world. Its ‘brain’ consists of cultured nerve cells that grow and live in a neuro-engineering lab, in Atlanta (Dr. Steve Potter’s lab). Its ‘body’ is a robotic drawing arm that is capable of producing two-dimensional drawings. The ‘brain’ and the ‘body’ will communicate in real time with each other for the duration of the festival.
MEART is assembled from:
‘Wetware’ - neurons from embryonic rat cortex grown over a Multi Electrode Array.
‘Hardware’ - the robotic drawing arm
‘Software’ - that interfaces between the wetware and the hardware.
The Internet is used to mediate between its components and overcome its geographical detachment.
MEART is suggesting future scenarios where humans will create/grow/manufacture intuitive and creative ‘thinking entities’ that could be intelligent and unpredictable beings. They may be created by humans for anthropocentric use, but as they will be creative and unpredictable they might not necessarily stay the way they were originally intended.
We refer to the wetware/software/hardware hybrid we created as a Semi-Living artist as it is made of both living and artificial components; partly grown ñ partly constructed. While the artistic values of the outcomes of the process (the marks on paper left by the drawing arm) are still in the eye of the beholder, the questions regarding the possibilities are real. What will happen when such a system starts to express qualities that are considered uniquely human aptitudes such as art? Its identity extends beyond our cultural comprehension of living systems. Made from living biological matter, mechanics and electronics simultaneously, it questions the viewer’s perceptions of the concept of sentience.
MEART has a technologically created identity. It is an identity created as a result of the progression and combination of various technologies. Its ‘brain’ is growing in Atlanta and its ‘body’ (or multi bodies) could be anywhere in the world thus highlighting the ubiquitous nature of its existence and identity.
This work explores questions such as: What is creativity? What creates value in art? One way of looking at these issues might be by thinking about creativity along a spectrum, from a reductionist mechanical device, to an artistic genius. What is it that makes a person a genius? Perhaps it is the ability to link together diverse inputs. We hope that our cultured neurons will have the potential to show signs of very basic ‘learning’ or ‘creativity’.
MEART has the ability to sense the outside world through a camera that acts as its eyes. It has the ability to process what it sees through the neurons that act as its brain. It has the ability to react accordingly through the robotic drawing arm that acts as its body. The Internet functions as its nervous system. MEART is a geographically detached entity ubiquitous on many levels.
We will set up living neural cultures (‘MEART’s Brain’) in Dr. Steve Potter’s lab at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. Potter is one of the leading neuroscientists in the field of Learning in Vitro and is developing a new paradigm for neurobiology research. He is applying different technologies to study dissociated cultures of hundreds or thousands of mammalian neurons.
An experiment will be performed in order to explore the relationships between the input/stimulation to the neuronal culture and the output/drawings.
A web cam will capture portraits of viewers within the gallery space. These images will be then converted into a stimulation map and will be used to stimulate the neurons (this is the beginning of a drawing process). A multi channel electrophysiological recording from a neuronal culture (ìMEARTS brainî) will be performed in Potterís lab. The resulting data sets will be processed in two locations ñ the lab & the gallery. The processed outcome will be used to control and move the drawing arm. The progress of the drawing will be monitored and compared with the original portrait. The difference between the original portrait and the progressing drawing will be then sent back to the lab as another stimulation map to complete the feedback loop and this whole process will continue until a threshold of marks on paper will be passed. This will be the end of a drawing (See appendix number 1 for a visual explanation of ‘how it works’)
This piece traces its influences from an array of artistic, scientific and technological streams. Areas such as interactive art, cybernetics, kinetic and robotic art, artificial life/intelligence and biology are all linked to the project. Other influences are the different representations and use of animals in contemporary arts, from the use of elephants to produce ‘art’ to the use of living and recently living animals/bodies (or parts of the body) as art works.
From an historical context, artists have always been concerned with imitating life and with giving life/animating qualities to non-living entities. Technology has also joined forces with art forms to create more sophisticated types of artificial life systems and ‘intelligent’ machines. The uniqueness of MEART is the attempt to create an intelligent artificial/biological artist that has in itself the capability or potential to be creative. We are focusing on creating the artist rather than the artwork. MEART proposes to embody the fusion of biology and the machine - creativity emerging from a semi-living entity.
MEART evolved from Fish & Chips (presented in Ars Electronica 2001) and has been exhibited twice before in the ‘BioFeel Exhibition’, Perth, Australia and ‘ArtBots exhibition’ in NYC, USA. As it is an on-going R&D project, itís constantly evolving, changing and progressing technologically and conceptually. ‘MEART - The Semi Living Artist’
SymbioticA Research Group
SymbioticA - The Art & Science Collaborative Research Lab
School of Anatomy & Human Biology
University of Western Australia
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