Doubt
[video src=https://vimeo.com/161752738]In Doubt, artist Carsten Höller challenges our perceptions of reality through coded sequences of light and spatio-temporal illusions. His goal was to blur the lines between spectator and performer within a work of art, while instilling a deep feeling of doubt inside us. The installation begins as a single hallway of light, which subsequently divides itself into two paths, each of which is individually illuminated by either yellow or green lights. Once a spectator chooses a path, they are presented with a multi-level maze of sorts, which combines different sequences of light projection with moments of darkness to challenge our perceptual framework.
In April 2015, Nike released its revolutionary kinetic digital art project, Force of Nature, for the Nike Innovation Summit at Truman Brewery in London. The work was created in collaboration with Field, a London-based design studio. By stepping onto a treadmill and beginning to create movement, the participating runner is presented with a fluctuating shower of stunning, multicolored sparks, similar to an energy “mirror” of themselves, created by the movement put forth by him or her on the treadmill. The flux of lights is meant to imitate the runner’s motion and turn the human body into a digital art piece. [1]. The work recalls earlier artworks, including Nancy Paterson's Bicycle TV (1989) and Jeffery Shaw's Legible City (1989-91), both of which used a bicycle as the interface by which the user's activity generates an animated video environment.
“Sonic Water,” by artists Sven Meyer and Kim Pörksen, is an interactive cymatic installation that explores the visualization of sound though water. The audience can walk up to a container of water, which is set atop speakers, and introduce their own input sound: voice, a song recording, or another sound source. The result of these sound vibrations is unique patterns in the water that are photographed from above. This exhibit is an interesting example of how feedback can create and alter a physical medium to visualize something so invisible as sound.
Miya Masaoka's LED Kimono Project is an installation based, performance piece in which 444 hand-sewn LED light sensors respond to musical and physical conditions. The artist's website, http://www.ledkimono.com/ describes how the instrument/garment is used and offers insights to her mission: "The LED Kimono Project represents an extension of and an expansion upon the large body of work that I have developed in the last decade addressing interactivity with insects, plants, and the human brain."
Balint Bolygo’s Mappings is a 2005 kinetic sculpture which utilizes the core aspects of the Bolygo’s ethos as an artist. In the sculpture/installation two pens rigged to outlying pendulums transcribe the motions taken by the pendulums onto a rotating sphere, or blank globe. Viewers can interact with the pendulums, pushing them to behave more erratically, or calming them to induce smoother lines. The resulting process essentially becomes the earth mapping its own forces onto a replica of itself, a truly interesting portrayal of mapmaking that encourages the viewer to consider the mass our planet, whose gravitational pull directs the motion of the pendulum and creates the drawings.
