Technoetic Arts - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2014

Fathom is a sound installation by Jane Grant and John Matthias, which was commissioned by the River Tamar Project and was premiered at the Factory Cooperage Building in Royal William Yard, Plymouth, UK in September 2013. Visitors entering the installation were able to hear live and edited sound recorded underwater in Plymouth Sound, a large estuarine body of water from which the Plym, Tamar and Hamaoze Rivers flow into the sea. Six-step ladders in the centre of the installation space surrounded by several additional speakers enabled visitors to climb out of the underwater sonic environment, above the fathom, and hear live acoustic sound relayed by microphones above the water. The artists worked with a team including production manager, Simon Honywill and Martin Audio to create a sonic ‘surface’ 6ft above the ground to enable this to happen. This article will describe how Fathom was created and, in particular, will focus on how the creation of the sonic surface affected the way in which the visiting public interacted with the work.

The results of artistic experimentation with data sets from the natural sciences differ considerably with respect to quality and consistency. The British artist duo Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) counts among those setting the standard. In its animations and videos, it explores, in an equally multifaceted and concise manner, how scientists affect our world-view with their respective pictorial languages and visualization strategies. Especially in domains that elude our natural sense of space and time, the researchers’ representations are inevitably creative. Semiconductor combines everyday experiences and complex imaging techniques in manifold ways. Thus, they offer unseen and sometimes unorthodox interpretations of a world in constant flux while retaining a high degree of complexity in their subtly crafted works. Semiconductor’s works provide opportunities for reflection on the extensive procedures in the sciences on various levels and in doing so they create poetic pieces that shift and recombine in various ways. With these means, sensualized data – like sounds and images – take on a strong role in their time-based works. As operative entities they not only represent but they seem to act.

Communication with other life forms in our universe has been an ongoing effort most notably conducted by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Project (SETI). Whereas SETI uses a network of radio telescopes to search for frequencies that may indicate intelligent design, there are also attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials by using different ways to listen for messages as well as send messages. This article outlines a phenomenological approach that includes changes in cognition due to the creation of electronic sounds mixed with stellar acoustics, radio frequencies, and natural and manmade sounds as a way of experiencing changes in cognitive states. These cognitive states may be related to a conscious contact with other life forms not from our world. In this sense it is a galactic approach to interspecies communication.

The skin can be described as a niche structured by semiotic artefacts (tattoos) that work as symbolic–indexical devices (dicisigns). New biocompatible technologies responsive to organic and environmental variations change the role of the skin as a semiotic niche. New devices are transforming the skin into a niche of interactive interfaces. In this article we introduce a variety of techno-scientific artefacts, which are readily available, and their main characteristics. We are interested in the recent proliferation of devices based on biotechnologies that can be coupled to the body, especially epithelial (superficial or invasive), and how they change what we know as ‘embodied communication’.

Fiction is an important tool in an artist/designer/developer’s vocabulary, but its usage is polyvalent. Speculative research in this article introduces the ‘rudiment’ to embrace the undeveloped and the improvisory phases of research practice. Fiction is used to reflect on the ways practicing designers and developers might already engage in misanthropic thinking – involving automated technologies. Tracing the misanthropic agencies in relation to automated technologies contributes to expanding the ways designers and developers reflect on the technical potential of their designs, with whom they are designing (and for) and the way they understand their reflexive self. Bringing together Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist (1999) and its account of an elevator crash, their design and maintenance, with a narrative account of software agents enables an investigation into the promises made through a design-for-the-prevention-of-failure imperative. These examples highlight the relation between physical and non-physical failures such as failures to connect or to create intimacy. Those who contribute to designing in this article get caught up in configuring misanthropic agencies involving themselves, the designed artefact and the spaces they both inhabit be that an elevator in a housing block, or a sexbot in an online chat room. I will argue that the misanthropic agencies of automated technologies can have a confining impact on our emergent modes of design. Automated software operating in virtual spaces are confining in as much as they attempt to connect things to exploit the de-personalized aspects of automated, misanthropic agency.

Focusing, in part, on the influence of Jurassic-era seas on the philosophical beliefs of the Hopi and Zuni cultures of the American Southwest, the article investigates the fluid cognitive processes of the human mind and methodically investigates the presence of historical content in works from oracy-based peoples. Formal analyses of the embedded data encoded in historical oral narratives are provided and are based on Barber and Barber’s mytho-linguistic framework. The application of Roger C. Echo-Hawk’s methodology for the assessment of narrative works that can contribute to cultural affiliation in consultations relating to the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act is considered as a possible model for similar change in the areas of assessing the relevance of material culture. The necessity of creating a similar critical framework for evaluations of the visual arts of ancient pre-historic era in the United States in keeping with the trend in narrative studies is discussed in support of the development of ‘period eye’ perspectives on which future objective studies may be based. The valid contexts an approximated period eye perspective can provide for more authentic replications of complex metaphorical relationships and cosmographies on the visual plane is demonstrated in the article’s final drawings.

The aquatic, the virtual and the zero-gravity medium share some similarities in the way they are experienced by human beings. Present-day realities are uncertain and fluid. As the term ‘Aquaponics’ refers to agriculture and suggest a very static process, I would advance that the metaphors of travel and movement should be more appropriate to describe today’s challenges regarding the exploration and understanding of those medium. I have included in this article a personal interview with Dr Sarah Jane Pell, a researcher, Artist and professional diver, in order to gain some perspectives on the testimonies of Kitsou Dubois, a French Choreographer who conducted zero-gravity performances. Based on their statements, I give further in the text an insight on my personal practice of Aikido, a Japanese martial art and mind–body harmonization technique. Using references from popular Culture, my own experiences and the testimonies of Kitsou Dubois and Dr Sarah Jane Pell, as well as examples taken from ancestral spiritual traditions from around the world, I try to draw a map of contemporary and multi-scalar realities with a critical approach to the concept of aquaponics.