Inaugural SensiLab Group Show immerses guests in ‘The Fragile Present’
On 24 November 2022, Monash University’s SensiLab put on its first Group Show. Drawing from the theme ‘The Fragile Present’, attendees experienced immersive projects at the intersection of art, science, technology and culture.
Augmenting the Lab’s annual Open House, which presents projects at different stages of development, the Group Show focused on finished works and how they might evolve in the future.
‘We chose [‘The Fragile Present’] because often exhibitions that involve technology tend to be future focused, about what things will be like sometime in the distant future. We really wanted to focus on the current time that we’re in and how it’s very transitory. Decisions that we make today are going to affect us quite deeply and powerfully in the future,’ said SensiLab Director Professor Jon McCormack.
"We've just come through a debilitating pandemic, we’ve got the incredible impacts of climate change that are happening at the moment and there’s huge geopolitical uncertainty with events like the war in Ukraine. So the works engage with the present moment. They're not utopian technological visions of the future, they're about now.’
Researchers explored projects and performances created during 2022 that delve into complex issues ranging from understanding human consciousness to human-animal interaction.
The show floor’s cohesive layout allowed guests to engage their senses, speak one-on-one with each artist and be immersed in a playground of science, technology, art, music and innovation.
A glimpse into the Group Show
Image: Experiencing art in a low-vision world by Stephen Krol and Dr Maria Teresa Llano
Visitors to the show could peruse an art gallery without pictures, instead using AI-generated music derived from the absent visual artworks. Designed as a new kind of experience for the blind and low-vision community, the music evokes the emotion of painting rather than being a direct depiction of its visual image.
Image: ‘This is Not Your Breaking Point’ by Dr Nina Rajcic
Another exhibit was an AI system trained on human handwriting, which controlled a physical pen to write a series of poetic aphorisms on a continuous roll of paper. Throughout the evening pages spilled to the floor as the system parameters were corrupted, akin to the AI system ‘losing its mind’ – causing the handwriting to transition into illegible scribble.
Image: ‘Dream Machines by Professor Jon McCormack
Some showcases were deeply interactive, like ‘Dream Machine’ which recreates Brion Gysin’s machine for inducing altered states of consciousness and hallucination through flashing light and a soundscape composed to encourage this.
Image: Transhuman Ansambl by Lucija Ivšić
Similarly interactive was Lucija Ivsic’s live vocal performance with an autonomous virtual choir. 16 presence-sensitive machines circularly distributed around the room harmonised to her singing and the audience’s movements within the ring, creating a truly unique performance between creator, audience and creation.
Others explored ‘The Fragile Present’ through performance and internal interaction. Dr Alon Ilsar and his dog Razzly strived to answer the question ‘How Musical is Dog?’ through their electronic musical duet in a feat of human-canine creative collaboration.
Image: ‘cosiness::cosinus’ by Dr Monika Schwarz and Professor Jon McCormack.
And we were shown a different side to mathematics through Dr Monika Schwarz and Professor McCormack’s piece titled ‘cosiness::cosinus’, a look at how even the harsh rigidity of mathematics can create something soft and cosy. The two have developed a generative design system based on mathematical models of noise as the source of 20 patterns embroidered onto a quilt by a machine.
‘What a quilt does is it comforts you, it gives you warmth. And in the fragile present, where we all crave something that makes us feel good, this [quilt] is something that would do that,’ said Dr Schwarz.
About SensiLab
SensiLab is Monash’s creative technologies research laboratory, a collaboration between Monash Faculty of IT and Monash Art, Design and Architecture.
Through transdisciplinary research, the Lab’s researchers and PhD students explore the creative applications and undiscovered opportunities of technology, working with diverse techniques and materials to approach with curiosity and learn through creating.