Goldsmiths at Kinetica Art Fair

This year’s event sees some of Goldsmiths’ most innovative staff, students and recent graduates from across the Departments of Computing, Art and Music exhibit their most exciting work.

The annual Kinetica Art Fair (9-12 February 2012), produced by Kinetica Museum, brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology.

Patrick Tresset, Research Student (Department of Computing)

Patrick, and members of TenderPixel Gallery, presents ‘Intuition and Ingenuity - For Alan Turing Year’: an exhibition in celebration of the life of Alan Turing. 

This exhibition takes its name from Turing’s own writing on the subject of mathematical reasoning. It brings together a number of important artists, from digital art pioneers to emerging contemporaries, to investigate Turing’s enduring influence on art and contemporary culture. Patrick will also be joined by Paul the robot (who is somewhat of a celebrity in this space).

Dr Mick Grierson, Co-Director Creative Computing (Department of Computing) 

Mick and 'Monomatic' present ‘Whitney Evolved’, an audio-visual installation attributed to John Whitney Sr., who is considered by many to be the godfather of modern motion graphics. This exhibition presents a series of real-time, code-based audio-visual works inspired by, interpreting and extending Whitney’s animated films. 

Carol MacGillivray, PhD Arts and Computing (Department of Computing), and Bruno Mathez, MA Fine Art (Department of Art)

Carol MacGillivray and Bruno Mathez present ‘Gestalt circle and chamber’, designed to explore notions of directed attention in an audience unmediated by screen. The Circle is an architectural extension of Gestalt founder, Max Wertheimer’s experiments in Phi and Beta movement, and demonstrates a new embodied media experience that suppresses cultural and contextual content in favour of pure movement.  

Bruno Mathez also exhibits ‘The Exquisite Medium’, the first of a series that investigates the fields of visual music in space and generative art, using projection mapping techniques and sound design. In The Exquisite Medium, the participant is activating a mysterious character who will recite randomly generated surrealist sentences and translate them into a symbolic and visual language by illuminating the corresponding objects around him with a pair of light torches.

Professor Andrew Shoben, Public Art (Department of Computing)

Andrew, the founder of greyworld, presents ‘greyworld’s Tail’. At 62cm long, plus a tufty end, the Tail comes in Panther (black), Snow Leopard (black and white), Lioness (beige) and Bond Villain Cat (white) and has a remote control keyfob and charger. Clipping on to your belt or waistband, the Tail has four modes, selected by pressing a button on the tiny remote control. Mode one is slow moves (eg. slow wags, trembles), mode two is fast moves, mode three is a selection of all the moves, and the fourth mode is for dancing - tap the button in time to the music and watch your tail dance!

Daniel Jones, Research Student (Department of Computing), and James Bulley, PhD Music (Department of Music)

Daniel and James present ‘Maelstrom’, a sound installation that draws on audio uploaded to the internet in real-time, constructing shifting walls of sound from thousands of audio fragments. Maelstrom builds a tornado of tonal cluster chords around its spiral speaker system, engulfing the listener in the swirling mass of information that is now an integral part of our day-to-day lives.

Patricia Afari, MSc Computing (Department of Computing)

Patricia forms part of the Analema Group - Eugenia Emets & Mohammad Taha, presenting 'Khaos', an interactive visual and sound performance, in which a dancer creates a fractal landscape in real-time. It is aimed to explore the notion of space as a field full of potentiality that can reveal itself through a succession of movements in a dance.

Ronin Cho, MFA in Computational Studio Arts (recent graduate from the Department of Computing) 

Ronin Cho presents ‘Weight of Unseen’, one of 2012’s Feature Exhibitions. This interactive kinetic sculpture joins two very divergent realms of understanding: the material physical world and the immaterial digital world. Comprised of a large, steel, seven-segment display unit, seven servomotors, a manual chain hoist and a proximity sensor, this sculpture concisely defines our day-to-day invisible interactions.