Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece: Abraham’s Kapitän Biopunk combines the aesthetics of a mad chemist’s lab with Dionysian song and (literal) spirit. Though the work uses a simple mediation (putting microphones on the fermenting jars), the resulting cacophony of bubbling sounds, a by-product of the fermentation process, is both amazing and amusing to hear.

90° South
Alejandro Borsani, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Alejandro Borsani’s 90° South provides a contemplative point of view that allows the viewer to witness and be immersed in the constant evolution of a growing landscape. The work utilizes an irrigation system in conjunction with a highly absorbent material (sodium polyacrylate) to produce a slowly emerging landscape. A thin layer of the white material is placed on top of a round surface. When water reaches the surface, the sodium polyacrylate expands 300 times, producing subtle undulations. The profiles of these miniature mountains are projected onto the walls of the gallery using a flashlight attached to a rotating mechanism.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece: Like Calvino’s fictional cities, Borsani’s 90° South presents an imagined landscape, replacing Calvino’s urban constructs of the Antarctic. As real as any dream and as much a fiction as any photograph, 90° South rekindles—especially in this heavy mediated and imaged world—the wonderment and magic found in the idea of imaginary places.

SymbiosisS
Kärt Ojavee, Eesti Kunstiakadeemia; Eszter Ozsvald, New York University

SymbiosisS is part of a collection of textile interfaces, SymbiosisO (“O” for objects), which behave as organic displays and react to definable impulses by showing pre-defined patterns that animate slowly over the surface. It welcomes viewers to sit and rest on soft-folded material that displays an active, slowly shifting pattern. When excited, the pattern starts forming, in a playful, curious way, around the place where the textile was touched. Once the disturbance is abated, the pattern continues its peaceful expansion. This vivacious interaction of a vibrant pattern is a demonstration of the potential for tangible textile interfaces. Ubiquitous computation—an active, programmable secondary skin to surround everyday objects—is an ambient, “noiseless,” and thus vigorous way to visualize information and form space.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece: In letting users leave traces of their hands and bodies via heat sensitive thermochromatic dyes, SymbiosisS mediates and amplifies the conditions of its own use. Echoing our impulse to leave our mark, the handprints found at the Lascaux caves comes to mind, and in its network of conducting thread, a nod to social networking, interacting with SymbiosisS subtly aestheticizes unique temporal moments of individual and social interactions.

The HeartBeats Watch
Julie Legault, V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, Royal College of Art

Stretching or shrinking hours at the beat of your heart, The HeartBeats Watch is a timepiece in which the duration of time is paced not by seconds but according to the wearer's heartbeat. Through a heightened awareness of self, The HeartsBeats Watch brings together art and science to reveal emotional complexity of time and the human body. A poetic investigation of the physiology of emotions, health, immortality, and control, the watch bridges the gap between society and medical science, invoking a broader cultural perception of life.