Matter
2007
Strangely Familiar, SASA Gallery, Adelaide, Australia, May 2007

Matter 001 is part of a series of augmented artefacts that I have been developing over the last few years. These artefacts are imbued with basic sensory capacities and programmed behaviours. Whilst a long way from being ‘intelligent’ they respond to human presence in strange and unpredictable ways. The work examines the possibilities of imbuing our artefacts with synthetic senses: modes of understanding the world that are not typically afforded to humans. The piece also questions what our relationship with our technologies will be like in the future. Increasingly our cars, fridges and washing machines have the capacity to communicate remotely with us; self diagnose and make rudimentary decisions based on programmed logic structures. Through the incorporation of sensors and microcontrollers into artefacts and artworks they start to develop repertoires of behaviours. Within domestic artefacts these behaviours are predictable and controllable yet within artworks designers and artists have freer reign to program stranger and more unsociable behaviours into works.

Matter 001, as exhibited as part of the Strangely Familiar exhibition combined photography with a responsive crystalline artefact that lurked pensively beneath a shelf in the gallery. The location of the work, whilst chosen for its lack of illumination, concealed the artefact from passing view. Instead it became something that the curious sought out by accident or small children discovered while exploring the space on opening night. The form of the artefact resembles an opaque crystal is based on the strangely familiar concept, often represented in movies, of mysterious ‘meteor showers’ that deliver unpredictable forces to earth. It responds to human presence through variable light pulsation which increases its sense of parallel alien-ness and familiarity. It seems to throb as one approaches, perhaps it is radioactive?

Artefact: 200x200mm ‘dust prints’, electronic components, Arduino Microprocessor, LEDs
Print: 1020x760mm Chromira print