First, we have "Shadow Fugue", an installation piece from the VIDA: Art and Artificial Life International Awards, produced by Sion Jeong. The piece is a series of plexi-glass rods attached by wire to small motors on the wall of the exhibit. With these motors, once a person softly touches the system, the surface begins a "breathing movement", producing along with its movement an elegant light and sound accompanyment. With its quasi-breathing movement, the rods create shadows on themselves, that appear and recede, furthering the illusion of a wall breathing in front of you, making subtle tinklng sounds and chanting voices through the motors on the wall. As for a purpose, Sion Jeong saw this simple mechanism as one started by interaction, but then becoming an autonomous sculpture that self-regulates its movement beyond the initial touch, reaching multiple senses of the audience to intrigue them.
Next we have an installation piece that utilizes Twitter feeds to produce vibrant LED displays, "Datagrove". The piece uses luminescent "responsive" fibers, text-to-speech modules to read out Twitter posts, and sensors for detecting human presence, producing a soft undulating sound to react, as well as systems to collect the Twitter data being used. The "social media whispering wall" was conceived by Future Cities Lab in San Francisco, as an installation to integrate social interaction and sensing human presence in the structure. It's purpose is to stimulate public discourse, by providing trending Twitter feeds and displaying and reading them out for those around to hear, while also reacting to the breeze through the responsive fibers, giving it the illusion of being an intelligent organism.
The last piece I will look at is also from the VIDA Awards, named "Hylozoic Soil", by Philip Beesley, an experimental architect. This installation, using the philosophic doctrine called Hylozoism (idea that matter is inseperable from life as a property of matter), uses a lattice of transparent acrylic tiles, and a sensor network to control the lattice to react to nearby movement and move towards the audience members who venture into the piece. The entire system thus emulates a similar behavior as seen in coral reefs, with opening clamping, and an organic sense about its activity in response to its surroundings, making it not only an interesting installation work, but an example of artificial life, being an inorganic structure giving the illusion of true natural behavior, as intended by the artist.
All together, these pieces are 3 examples of the vast varieties of installation artworks present today as the medium continues to take in other mediums and grow in popularity in exhibits and as temporary or permanent structures wherever they are commissioned. Thanks for Reading!
~~~~Nathaniel Hendrix~~~~
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