Scratching The Surface - final exhibition by Creative Arts Practice MA students

Congratulations to the Culture Lab students who have created an interesting and innovative exhibition using new media and interactive technology. The show consists of work by a variety of artists, designers and musicians who have come to the end of their one year Creative Arts Practice MA course at Newcastle University. They "explore new media to challenge the role of electronic arts, disrupting the relationships between artwork, audience and interaction."

Exhibiting artists: Barti Sena, Clive Wright, Cuong Dao, Edmund Nesveda, Meteor Liang, Qingchan Li, Tan Zou, Wenya Chen and Yousif Abdulghani unveil an exciting exhibition consisting of audio-visual interactive installations, live hacked CCTV, performances and interactive objects.

Bartira Sena

In a burgeoning momentum of excessive technological consumerism and electronic mediation, Bartira Sena's work attempts to juxtapose notions of nature, spirituality and technology. Her installations create situations in which we experience alternative cultural representations. For this show she presents ‘Ceremonial Hardware’ the result of a collaborative session where participants responded to the imaginary scenario ‘ Spiritual e-tools from the future, excavated in our present time’. The engulfing device imprints multi-touch gestural frustration while multi-mouthing attempts a surrogate to multi- touching interaction.

Clive Wright looks at disrupting the notion of mass surveillance presenting us with an installation that provokes and questions our current beliefs.
‘Surveillance Discourse’ presents us with an eclectic mix of live hacked CCTV footage from around the world, from dystopian looking landscapes to places of worship, we glimpse a first hand view of who and what is being looked at through these faceless pieces of technology.

Clive Wright

By underlining the characteristic of Studio Ghibli fans, Cuong Dao’s work describes the essential role played by a fan-made fiction. Ghibliary, an approach to fan art, will be presented as a closer analysis, which will investigate how a fan uses natural constitutions and spiritual themes from original movies as metaphors to expose cultural values to people and society.

Edmund Nesveda's interactive video installation explores the relationship between the public and the private in the context of surveillance in contemporary society. It plays on the ambiguous role of technology in the process, and underlines the tensions emerging from the blurring of lines between public and private lives. In the UK alone there are more than 6 million CCTV cameras, forming a huge surveillance network, many are unsecured, leaving a window open into people's lives. Someone might be watching, indeed someone might be watching right now.

Qingchan Li explores the possibilities of a totally open and free environment in interactive narratives by producing multiply alternative life of Adolf Hitler in a game style. This project mainly consists of historical images, text, along with impressive sound effect, providing various options and branches in every stage in Adolf Hitler’s life for audience to choose, leading to more than five different endings.

Tan Zou

“To-be” Garden is Tan’s interactive installation design, which consists of “Music Garden” and “Weather Garden”. “Music Garden” is a multisensory interactive installation controlled by infrared sensors.“Weather Garden” is a creative design based on weather change. Tan's work aims at providing a multisensory and emotional digital world for participants.

Bencharmony – Yousif Abdulghani
The bench is an everyday functional and familiar object. It satisfies variable needs and provides a platform for human communication. Although it can accommodate multiple occupants with a close proximity, it has been observed that they rarely connect to each other in the public spaces. This piece was created to investigate the ability of collaborative music making to demolish barriers, and stimulate connectivity between strangers in the public spaces. With its minimalist and accessible interface design, it allows occupants to explore and create musical patterns and textures collaboratively, which results in various levels of human connections with unpredictable outputs and interactions.

http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/usifaghani/

http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/view-event/25724/2015-09-22/19

http://narcmagazine.com/news-scratching-the-surface-culture-lab-newcastle/



The exhibition is open 22nd - 25th September 9am - 5pm

Culture Lab Space 4/5
King's Road,
Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU

Cyane Tornatzky at ISIS Arts

Cyane Tornatzky has been artist in residence at ISIS Arts for a month, and she concluded her stay by giving a short presentation about her work.

'Cyane Tornatzky is an artist using digital mediums for creation, documention and output of her artwork. Tornatzky is a currently based in Colorado as Associate Professor of Electronic Art at Colorado State University.'




Before arriving in Newcastle, Cyane had planned to

"create a series of site-specific installations that incorporate performance. Inspired by her previous research on Robert Owen’s New Lanark Mill in South Lanarkshire, Tornatzky will examine the lives and working conditions of historical and contemporary women textile workers. She will also be looking for present-day corollaries to the disenfranchised of the historic Luddite movement. The historical/contemporary duality of the subject matter will be underscored through the use of old and new medias in construction of the installations. Examples of old technologies can include: camera obscura; stereoscopes; mutoscoptes, new technologies include digital fabrication techniques coupled with video projection."

http://www.isisarts.org.uk/our-programme/research-residencies/upcoming:+cyane+tornatzky/99

She spoke honestly about how her experience of being in a different culture had a major impact on the work that she made whilst on the residency. She felt a desire to move away from her background of New Media, and get into some physical making using 'stuff' as opposed to pixels. I can relate to this feeling greatly as I feel as though we spend lots of time working on computers and digital equipment, and so when it comes to making art, I want to play with actual physical material.

She adapted to the slower pace of life, and enjoyed spending time getting to know lots of interesting people. She was given a photograph of a textile worker and used this as inspiration to make some small macquettes of toy-like figures with moving joints who were doing forms of manual labour. Her work had a sense of wonder and playfulness, but also commented on important social issues.

For more information about Cyane visit http://cyanetornatzky.com/index.html