Curtains for the Albertian Window ~ Digital Alchemy for the Scale Electric.
The presentation playfully explores the shifting frames of reference that occur as the result of our immersion in digitally augmented environments. From mobile phones, GPS devices, RFID tags, data feeds and video streams our understanding of our place within the world has never been more complicated.
With the ‘thingification’ of the Internet an invisible ‘Hertzian’ landscape has been made accessible through instruments that can measure, record and broadcast our deepest fears and desires. Seeping out of our computers, infesting our white goods, our cars all shouting advice and our ornaments remembering things we would rather forget, the ‘virtual’ is converging with the physical and their mutant offspring are shaping our future.
The focus will be on a number of technologies and creative strategies developed by i-DAT and its collaborators. Collectively described as ‘Operating Systems’ these digital tools are designed to lift the veil on this invisible and temporal world.
Underpinning these Operating Systems is the understanding that the material for manifesting things that lie outside of the normal frame of reference is ‘data’ – things so far away, so close, so massive, and so small and so ad infinitum. These digital practices use alchemical processes that enable a series of transformations: from data to code to experience to behaviour.
Some times 3 dimensions are just not enough.