prototyping of 'Critters' in full swing

I've been busily jamming stuff together in the FabLab,  first with #littlebits but now working out how these Critters will look and act.

 

from #TeamLab: Distilling Senses: A Journey through Art and Technology in Asian Contemporary Art

This from Collacubed Individual balls floating within an enclosed space communicate to each other via wireless connection. They change color and emit different sounds when touched by visitors or bump into each other or other objects. The balls send color information to other balls which in turn spread the information to other balls, changing all the balls to the same color. The piece is a metaphor for the internet and globalization in general. People act as intermediaries for information which so quickly travels via the internet globally, transforming the world in an instant and unifying at the same time.

Reading Dorothea von Hantelmann's essay on Carsten Holler: in Test Site (2007). the work seduces us to act upon ourselves.

The Valerio phenomenon cultivates this potential as a kind of everyday technique. The slides however introduce it into the museum. Being the place where our most differentiated ways of relating to objects and their symbolical meaning are displayed and cultivated, the slides bring in a moment that is all about ones relation to oneself.
In Hollers work the object becomes a tool, a device to produce these moments. Sliding down Holler's structures, one does not communicate with the sensitivity or the specific subjectivity of the artist- as we might do when we contemplate other artworks such as e.g. drawing- but with oneself. Or rather one communicates with a different side of oneself. The fact that we do this, is of course, his idea. But in the experience of the work, we are confronted with ourselves, and especially with our physical selves, more than with the artist. The sculptural object, in other words, becomes a tool to explore and experiment with ourselves. It not only serves the perception of one's self, but engenders transformation of one's self.  
 This operational dimension is crucial: the work seduces us to act upon ourselves. (p23)


Carsten Holler: Test Site (Unilever Series) , 2007 by Jessica Morgan. ISBN-10: 1854377124ISBN-13: 978-1854377128 


so if the works seduces us to act upon ourselves- can it also encourge this to happen collaborative, or with others? reports from Test Site suggest that there was a sense of group excitement at the top and bottom of the slides - a 'transformational energy 

and from the Tate http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-carsten-holler-test-site 

"What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend". 

History of light via blouin artinfo

HISTORY OF LIGHT: The Pioneers, From Robert Irwin to Anthony McCall

HISTORY OF LIGHT: Heirs, From Olafur Eliasson to Ann Veronica Janssens

HISTORY OF LIGHT: Rising Stars, From Ivan Navarro to Katie Paterson

HISTORY OF LIGHT ART: The Market (Part 1)

HISTORY OF LIGHT ART: The Market (Part 2)

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/912040/week-in-review-from-turrell-to-turkey-our-top-visual-art

"An orchestrator of experience"_James Turrell

"I am interested in this new landscape without horizon. If you go into the Ganzfeld pieces it is a little bit like the landscape that you can find when flying around through cloud or fog. You can also find it in 'whiteout conditions' when you go skiing and get into snowfall, it can happen that you are not really sure anymore which way is up or down. This occurs in diving, too. We are moving into the territory of horizonless space that you can also experience in outer space without gravity." 
- James Turrell
from https://www.facebook.com/JamesTurrellArt

Chuck Close once described his fellow artist James Turrell as "an orchestrator of experience, not a creator of cheap effects. And every artist knows how cheap an effect is, and how revolutionary an experience.”

 

 

 

 

The Ganzfeld effect.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect

 The Ganzfeld effect occurs naturally in situations like snow storms (white out), thick fog, and conditions of total darkness, where our field of vision is uninterrupted by any information (visible contours, changes in texture, light reflections, edges) that would otherwise help us to construct a coherent three dimensional interpretation.




George Poonkhin Khut on James Turrell.

The spatial ambiguities created by Turrell's perceptually focused experiences produce an intense sense of other-worldliness. Our perceived presence within such situations gives rise to an equally transformed, otherworldly experience of self and it’s sense of being in the world, invoking the mysterious edges of our own personal journey between birth and death at the thresholds of perceptual becoming and unbecoming. While light and luminosity have long been associated with mystical or transcendent experiences, the intensely suggestive power of Turrell's perceptual works resides more in the way it alters our perception of space and our sense of self-location within it.

Khut, G. (2006). Development and Evaluation of Participant-Centred Biofeedback Artworks. PhD,
University of Western Sydney, School of Communication Arts, Sydney.

Eno