At the recent Converge 05 conference in Christchurch four collaborative art projects were presented from the HITLabNZ (Human Interface Technology Laboratory) fellowships awarded earlier this year. Over the year the projects have been developed through a workshop programme and were exhibited at Converge 05 for the first time.

Image: Still from Animalia by Angela Main and Caroline McCaw (artists). Designed for four people, full size, full body projections 'play' within a 'hotwired' and immersive space and evolve through a progression of environments, requiring teamwork and timing, on their way to Nirvana.At the recent Converge 05 conference in Christchurch four collaborative art projects were presented from the HITLabNZ (Human Interface Technology Laboratory) fellowships awarded earlier this year. Over the year the projects have been developed through a workshop programme and were exhibited at Converge 05 for the first time.

Image: Still from Animalia by Angela Main and Caroline McCaw (artists). Designed for four people, full size, full body projections 'play' within a 'hotwired' and immersive space and evolve through a progression of environments, requiring teamwork and timing, on their way to Nirvana.Whereas most multimedia and installation art is still presented in the traditional format of wall works or sculpture, the four artist projects for Converge 05 literally guide the viewer and art work to a convergence. The result is not about the technology, which is used here as a tool, but is more concerned with the way people can interface with art, and how art can break from its gallery-bound conventions.

On working with the HITLab Caroline McCaw says, "the staff and students were fantastic to work with. I think that the philosophy of the lab is one that is very collaborative, open to many forms of human interaction. At times the students and artists may have struggled to communicate - coding and creative processes are quite different - but it helped to take time and translate for each other. Coding is a very creative problem-solving process too! I thought the final artworks were each quite different and offer something new in terms of their position of the audience. I am still really excited about the works and now want to more people to see them."

The artists are hoping to secure funding to tour the show around New Zealand.

For editable txt of tall thin flyers go to:
www.hitlabnz.org

Angela Main says " It was a great learning and creative opportunity working with HITlabNz students and staff. It was illuminating to discover that at times we got excited about the same things and at others we seemed to speak a different languages. Despite at times having to rely on pure faith, the results were really excellent and a tribute to the professionalism and dedication of all involved."

Below is the breakdown of each project:

Animalia
Angela Main and Caroline McCaw (artists)
Joerg Hauber, Julian Looser, Eric Woods (HITLabNZ)
Sound: Marc Chesterman - audible 3
Touchscreen: Martin Kean and Eric Woods

From Tinguely's auto-destructive art assemblages to Philip K Dick/Ridley Scott's (Blade Runner) animal replicants, artists question what is 'made'. Animals have a place in the history of performance, both tamed and trained, and in their role as placeholders of what it is to be 'natural'. Donna Haraway positions our cyborg selves as creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. It is in this pantheon of human, animal and machine that Animalia positions us.

Animalia proposes a masquerade as a means to augment social interaction. Drawing references from Western and Vedic zoomorphic mythologies, part game, part installation the work layers themes of the digital chimera, convergent evolution and Haraway's cyborg, beginning with a simple collection of personal details. Designed for four people, full size, full body projections 'play' within a 'hotwired' and immersive space. Movement, gesture, collaboration and interaction are proposed between groups of people who do not necessarily know each other.

Convergence and evolution are processes we engage in. Darwinian evolution forms the Western model, and refers to life as responsive to environments, both formative and threatening. An Eastern model of evolution in contrast, sees the gross physical elements devolve through unlayering the sheaths of life, a shedding of life back into its natural state. The artists sourced readymade body parts, sounds and images, and with a team of digital magicians, remixed and relocated them in local, oversized video contexts for us to try on, literally as well as figuratively. In Animalia players evolve through a progression of environments, each requiring teamwork and timing. These contemporary creatures are infinitely more adaptable than their creators. Digital mutation is instant and painless: cut & paste.

Animalia proposes an experiment in collaboration that is both engaging and compelling: a combination of 'art' and Augmented Reality generates a responsive real-time environment where we encounter an unexpected reflection of ourselves, provoking a sense of play and curiosty. This simulates the aims of the work's patron, Converge 05. By bringing different species together these remarkable hybrids may be imagined and embodied.

Animalia the plural form of the Latin word animal, is derived ultimately from anima, meaning vital breath or soul.

Islands

Janine Randerson (artist)
Oakley Buchmann and Claudia Nelles (HITLab)
Sound: Jason Johnston

McKenzie Wark once wrote that as twentyfirst century antipodeans 'we no longer have roots only aerials.' Yet many narratives connect microcosmic cells of the earth to the macrocosm of space. The smallest particle in our bodies has been linked to the workings of the galaxy in astronomy, astrology, fantasy, philosophy and indigenous culture. Islands combines interactive animation, sound and sensor arrays to create an open system. Two circular screens hover horizontally from the ceiling and allow projected light to permeate their surface. Each floating 'island' lies dormant until someone triggers moving images and sounds by the movement of their body in space.

Audio is used geographically to allow multiple participants to compose sounds collaboratively across the distance between screens. By signalling between 'islands' several people can use semaphore to communicate to each other. The 'viewer' is now active investigator of a new territory that forms and re-forms in response to their movements. Sounds and colours also run in parallel. The metaphor of synesthesia has often been used to describe sensory fusion as an idea (generally of colour and sound) although it is also a medical condition. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) is an inspiration for this project. He expressed his own condition of synesthesia through an invention called a clavier a lumieres, an organ which controlled the play of coloured light in the form of beams, clouds, and other shapes. In his 1910 symphony for an orchestra and piano, Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, he flooded a concert hall with light and images with his new instrument. The Islands project pays homage to this early form of immersive entertainment.
A representation of place is gained remotely through the assisted vision of satellites, the 'aerials' that form the basis of our connection with other parts of the world, while microscopes reveal our inner secrets. Islands offers an alternative spatial schema to the cartographic image or medical chart; an interactive, antipodean space.

Branch on branch v3.1
Ian Clothier (artist)
Jung Shin and Raphael Grasset (HITLabNZ)
Sound: Ian Clothier and Steve Robinson

branch on branch v3.1 is an audience initiated augmented reality poem. The poem addresses interconnections between human anatomy, fluid dynamics, turbulence, rivers, bifurcating structures, trees and geology.

Reality and virtuality augment each other - branching imagery is inserted into the silhouette of the audience, and audience movement creates swarms of atmospheric particles that rise in dynamic waves. A further level of participation involves rotating interactive cubes where the exploration of text and image is linear or nonlinear respectively.

Context
This project maps a complexity onto an augmented reality artwork. Virtual reality and four dimensional reality are not treated as separate and distinct but as sectors in a multiplicity. A bridge between the audience plane and the virtual plane of the artwork is constructed using video silhouettes of the audience. These are supplemented by projected and installed components that are informative, documentary, poetic and imagistic. Each part of the art work is discrete, and there are overlaps, gaps, in-between spaces and intersections.

While the theme of the art work is arborial, and concerns branching structures, the incorporation of randomness and nonlinearity is aimed at creating an integrated whole that ceaselessly traverses modes. Nonlinearity in one sense can be read as unpredictability, delivered here partly by the audience. Predicting the time and length of audience interaction is not possible.

If there is no audience, there is no poem – this is the default state. At the next level of interaction, audience presence is detected. As well as inserting imagery into viewer silhouettes, particles rise as a result of discrete movements. At this plateau, live video is played in the background of the audience.

The third stage of interaction involves rotating interactive cubes. At this level, the audience is located inside the artwork. The exploration of images is random (another sense of nonlinear) and allows for open research, while the reading of the poem is linear and conclusive: a decoding occurs.
If there is no audience, there is no poem – this is the default state. At the next level of interaction, audience presence is detected. As well as inserting imagery into viewer silhouettes, particles rise as a result of discrete movements. At this plateau, live video is played in the background of the audience.

The third stage of interaction involves rotating interactive cubes. At this level, the audience is located inside the artwork. The exploration of images is random (another sense of nonlinear) and allows for open research, while the reading of the poem is linear and conclusive: a decoding occurs.

Let our hearts bleed exactly like the river branching in the tree of the land

The Crown Affair
Lonnie Hutchinson (artist)
Billy Chang, Eric Woods (HITLab)
Sound: Rory McKinahan
Text: Nova Paul

Melanie Daniel's world is terrorised by birds. To the protagonist in Alfred Hitchcock's film any feathered thing becomes a menace. The birds in The Crown Affair wreak havoc in the characters' lives, but they appear to do so only because these lives are already in chaos. They manifest as symptoms of psychic and sexual disturbance, symbolic of the fact that the order of things has been messed with.

Lonnie Hutchinson's The Crown Affair animates motifs familiar from her installation and multimedia work, and gives flight to them in a virtual environment. Christchurch town hall is rendered in a sketch, as though an architectural building for what is yet to be built (and so perhaps could be unbuilt). Above the pencilled in building a crown is placed, peaked like a crepe paper party hat. Circling and swooping around this turret, birds fill the night sky. Watching as if from a viewing platform, our virtual reality headset becomes binoculars for bird watching.

The simple interplay between a virtual and actual space tells a story of disruption. The erasure of institutional architecture is topped off with a symbol of what it represents, the Crown. Do the birds come to us? Protect us? Or reveal to us that this space is out of kilter? If we think about where we are here, we may begin to ask what was this space before it was all this, as the whir of the purerehua and native birdcalls underscore an invisible presence.