Proxy Kabinet: Raamweg 47
[Site-specific multimedia installation]
created for A Modern Body Festival
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
This project began with a conversation about how we experience space through the mediating agency of digital networks. With each artist occupying a distinctly separate geographic space (Seattle, Buenos Aires, The Hague) we became interested in remotely exploring each other’s locations by sharing digital media: images, video, sound, and maps. As the project increasingly focused on Raamweg 47, the building’s architecture and its previous function as Europol headquarters became the physical and psychic anchor point for our telematic collaboration. The building’s control room typifies the intersection of our individual desire to explore spaces we don’t physically occupy, and the politics of control and surveillance that digital networks provide. In it, we’ve created a digitally mediated ‘cabinet of curiosities’ (‘rariteitenkabinet / wunderkammer’), where the building-as-artifact is re-synthesized in video, sound, and sculpture. A wifi radar system animates parts of this Kabinet in reaction to movement though the space – entangling one’s immediate physical presence with the unseen, ubiquitous networks that surround us.
The Traveling / Virtual Body
A central driving force behind reassessing the notion of ‘body’ is virtualization technology. We live in a world where we can communicate, in real time, with friends and family across the globe, even look into each other’s eyes, while conversing through the internet. In this piece, three artists and friends, PhD candidates from the University of Washington, will develop and produce an archive of proxy objects / artifacts together, while never coming together. Multi-layered and complex, the implications of the artifacts generated through this piece, as well as the piece itself, serve to highlight our abstracted and often disjointed existence in modern society.
BIOS
Nico Varchausky (AR) has a Degree in Electro-Acoustic Music Composition at the University of Quilmes (Argentina), where he works as an assistant professor. His research focuses on the musical relations between space, sound, speech and memory within technological environments. His artistic production includes electronic and instrumental music compositions, interdisciplinary projects in public spaces, sound art performances and interactive art installations. Recent awards include an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2013 in the Sound Art & and Digital Musics category. He is currently a PhD candidate at DXARTS (Center for the Digital Arts and Experimental Media, University of Washington, Seattle, USA).
www.varchausky.com.ar
Tivon Rice’s (US) work seeks to create intersections between digital media and sculpture in order to explore the increasing complexities between virtual and immediate physical experiences. His projects often begin with site research, allowing him to learn as much as possible about a specific place: its history, its function, and the materials, and people that occupy it. This research, in turn, evolves into archives of media that are organized and presented through installations, video, performance, and collaboration. Rice was a 2012 Fulbright researcher in South Korea, and is currently a PhD Candidate at the Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS).
www.tivonrice.com
Stelios Manousakis (GR/NL) is a composer, performer, researcher and sound artist. He operates in the convergence zones between art and science, composition, performance and installation, Western art music and ‘digital folk’ idioms. He applies complexity science, cybernetic and biology-inspired models to generate novel musical systems and sound synthesis methods, often merging algorithmic finesse with the expressivity of improvisation or the immediacy of audience participation. His work has been shown in various venues & festivals in Europe and the Americas. He received his Masters from the Institute of Sonology in The Hague and is currently a PhD Candidate at the Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS).
www.modularbrains.net