Cardboard Dreamachines, turntables, light bulbs, soundtrack.

Created by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville in the early sixties, the Dreamachine is a device that creates an alternate state of consciousness and triggers an intense psychedelic visual experience.

A simple pierced cylinder revolving around a light source produces a flicker effect that alters the electric activity of the brain, provoking colored visions that appear behind the closed eyelids of the subject. The Dreamachine is the first object ever designed to be experienced with closed eyes.

Passport covers to prevent unwanted RFID reading.

Pimp My Passport examines DIY and hacking prospects as well as control and privacy issues of the RFID (Radio frequency identification) passports currently being rolled out throughout the European Union. It also plays around with the notion of nationality and its symbols - seeking new ways to signal identity by "pimping" personal travel documents.

Experimental documentary, 5 video capsules DVD, NTSC, stereo, 39 min

Sparks is a modular video series comprised of 5 video capsules which finds its inspiration in the life of visionary inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) mixing documentary facts with shifting perspectives that include interviews, autobiographical texts, animations, archives, metaphorical interpretations, and original sound design.

Interactive light and sound installation

The installation Tunnel Vision is inspired by Nicolas Tesla, Serbian inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer, also known as "the patron saint of modern electricity". The shape of the work is based upon an abstaction of the 100Hz buzz tone produced by electrical generators. This effect is known as magnetostriction; a property of ferromagnetic materials that causes them to change their shape when subjected to a magnetic field. When you put your hand in the opening of the installation, you dramatically alternate the sound and animated light paterns.

Two channel video projection and stereo sound, 28 min

The Earth is naturally surrounded by a powerful magnetic field known as the magnetosphere. Today VLF (Very Low Frequencies) are almost unclouded by man-made telecommunications transmissions. Eventually, VLF waves will be completely drowned out by the signals of various telecommunication systems. A VLF receiver captures the perturbations created by natural phenomena in magnetosphere, and the sounds of those signals are called the Natural Radio.

Reactive-kinetic installation

SARoskop is composed as an interactive sculpture visualizing electromagnetic waves and reacting sensitively to data of its immediate surroundings that can be triggered by certain wave length activities, e.g. by cell phones.

Participants influence movement and intensity of the reacting objects by application, e. g. use of their mobile phones and in this way they become confronted with the otherwise invisible surrounding data.

5.1 surround spatial audio animation, 6 min

The piece is an immersive environment, where points of light - that are uniquely interpreted by each viewer - are the only visual guide.

9 backlit transparencies, 18 cm x 12.5 cm

Bodies of Light is an ongoing series of experiments with the light fields that surround plants.

Forward Compatible is a parasitic object that can be deployed on any Wi-Fi or fixed network router system. The device monitors network traffic and converts to audio sent packets in the form of a modem dialing up and connecting. The focus of the project is to historically inform the way we think about network connectivity in public spaces by disrupting the supposed serenity of modern technology with a reminder of the past.

Video, 16 min

The video Mirrors of the Cosmos surveys the light fields of five different plants and minerals . Configurations vary from one plant species to another - from plectranthus to female fern. Explosions, bursts of light literally blowing out of matter and black holes show up in their light corona as a mirror image of the cosmic universe. Curiously, this parabolic effect manifests at the cross-roads of analog and digital photography. The light field of the plant is initially captured on a black-and-white negative. Observed through the naked eye or printed on paper, the details are not apparent. However, once scanned, the same photo negative yields new information stored in the silver layer of the negative.

RGB LEDs, custom electronics

A Fire, a Freeway and a Walk screen faces the wall and all the viewer sees is the light spilling over the edge reflected onto the wall. The only way the viewers know that they are looking at is by the associations to the title.

Audio/video installation, 3:50 min

The “talking heads” in the media are talking to you for 24 hours per day. Information is flowing at you non-stop, and the psyche of the human is not (yet) adapted to it. If you aren't careful, you get overwhelmed by so many stimulate and it is very easy to begin to feel numb. For this type of information processing by humans, the term Terror Management can be used. The image of mixed faces is projected on a reflective foil and the resulting reflection is seen on the opposite wall.

White LEDs, custom electronics

Divide displays a low resolution image of ocean waves with a piece of diffusing leaning on a panel of LEDs such that the image is very diffused at the bottom and discrete or pixilated on the top. The waves go from representational to abstract as they travel vertically up the screen.

Glass table, copper taffeta electromagnetic shielding fabric, two female attendants, dimensions variable

Shroud/Chrysalis I is an emblem of our new technological environment: two women wrap a spectator in copper fabric, a total immersion in a wireless circuit. But instead of plugging him/her in, which is the conventional notion of wireless, this copper wrapping unplugs the subject from cell phones, radio, television and other signals that habitually submerge us. Since this work protectively unplugs the spectator, it contradicts ‘wearable' computing which aims to further electrify the body.

Computer-based video installation, 12 min

Wilbert Smith directed Project Magnet, the Canadian government's official investigation of flying saucers. The project ran from 1950–1954 and took place at the center of a flying saucer observatory near Ottawa which housed equipment for detecting magnetic fluctuations in the atmosphere. August 8 th , 1954, Smith's instruments displayed signals that led him to believe that he had detected a flying saucer.

“[t]he deflection in the line [drawn by an electronically operated pen] was greater and more pronounced than we have seen even when a large aircraft has passed overhead. I ran outside to see what might be in the sky. The overcast was down to a thousand feet, so that whatever it was that caused the sharp variation was concealed behind the clouds. We must now ask ourselves what it could have been.” (Wilbert B. Smith)

Video, transferred to DVD, 40 min., colour, stereo, English, 2007–2008

Skrunda Signal is an artistic research project delving into the mythical past of a Soviet early-warning Radio Location Station (RLS) operating from 1967 to 1998 near Skrunda, Latvia. Internationally known as ‘henhouse’ radars, these powerful transmitters – emitting impulse type signals, similar to those detected in the West as ‘woodpecker’ – were allegedly responsible in the nineteen-seventies for shutting down radio transmissions on at least two occasions for up to seven minutes. A metaphysical investigation into spectral ecology, cold war politics and electromagnetic myths.

Sound installation. CD player, moveable dual loudspeakers, trolley with a parabolic acoustic mirror.

Seismograms of 21 earthquake stations recording seismic events across the world on the very same day (14.12.1997) from various perspectives are audified – i.e. by accelerating the normally inaudible earthquake waves by a factor of 2,200, they were rendered audible to the human ear, consecutively stored as soundtracks and commentated on.

Here one can listen to earth's movements from one arbitrarily selected day, and starting with Berlin acoustically circumnavigate the globe. As visitors can re-position the movable loudspeakers and the parabolic mirror anywhere in the room at any time, they can influence the acoustic features of Surf.

Intervention / Performance

'Constraint City / the pain of everyday life' is a critical performance in urban environments. A chest strap (corset) with high torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as fetish object. The motors tighten the straps when an enclosed wireless network is detected: the better the WIFI signal, the tighter the jacket becomes.

Multi-channel radio installation

The radio of the future as imagined by the past was filled with the promise of access to realms of the uncanny, where the radio would provide a connection with the dead or other ethereal spirits. Rather than dream again of the radio transmitting messages from those who have passed away, what communication from those still living around us we might be missing? You are far from us is realized as a multi-channel array of FM receivers and micro-watt transmitters, that constructs an immersive, dynamic sonic environment. The composition is built on the sounds of breath and other bodily exclamations typically absent from regular radio broadcasts.

Interactive audiovisual environment (3-D projection and surround sound)

The interactive installation “SpectroScapes: Anisotropic rooms” invites the visitor to a poetic visualisation and sonification of several interrelated concepts from the realm of contemporary physics. Physicists use the term anisotropy to describe direction-dependent properties of materials. Cosmologists use the term to describe the uneven temperature distribution of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Visitors can navigate the artwork with a touch screen and two gamepads, choosing several entry modes to real-time-generated (never repeating) scenes participate in imaginary “surgery on space”.

Single channel video, DVD. 3:30 min. Printed documentation: 594 mm x 420 mm.

BLINDSPOT is a video documentation of a performance utilising the gestures and language of military 'fieldcraft' skills to detect and record radar blindspots in the immediate landscape. Based on the notion of the visual blindspot, this short piece comments on our ability to render the visible non-visible through psychology and fear.

Plakāti

ENKI allows electric fish and humans to commune on the same level - electrical fields and brain waves - avoiding the use of language; instead stimulating a shared empathy through an actual physical connection. Using the bioelectric communication signals from live Electrogenic Fish that controls an immersive sensory environment for humans, the human can communicate back to the fish.

An audio 'jukebox' with a screen interface to choose tracks. Currently there are 15 tracks between 1 – 5 minutes in length

Field Recordings 'M.O.D Jukebox' is an aural installation of electromagnetic fields’ recordings from military sites in various geographical locations. This work tours to functioning and speculatively ‘closed’ military locations. Without entering into the physical boundaries of the sites, Field Recordings investigates, detects, and records the unseen and unheard, emitted from these sites in the form of radiation – radio, radar, and high frequency line of site transmissions. ‘Field Recordings’ translates this terrain of electromagnetic activity into an aural reading.

Custom made hardware and software system, lenticular prints.

In the age of Enlightenment "visible light" formed our most familiar medium. Today, however, we find that we are creating and responding more and more to non-visual electromagnetic fields: those emanating from our devices and environments. Wi-Fi Camera is a camera we have built to capture and form images from "Wi-Fi" waves rather than "light" waves. It reveals the invisible electromagnetic space generated by our Wi-Fi (wireless) networks that are increasingly found in coffee shops, offices and homes throughout cities of the world.

Video installation, 130 min. or 2channel 51min. loop (2008), based on the a chamber opera sonArc::ion – PROLOGUE (live at the TESLA, Berlin 2005).

Audio-visual installation (radar)

“Mobile Unit for the Detection of Unknown Entities” is an audio-visual installation using radar technology as a source for images. The radar scans a space in an attempt to detect phenomena unseen or inaudible – ghosts, aliens, viruses, etc. The installation is set up as a pseudo-scientific workspace.

Installation

For this installation sonArc::ema – TELEFUNKEN#2 a spark-gap sender will be used to morse wireless coded signals, several radio-receivers, a theremin-controlled radiosynthesizer and two open high voltage plasma/sonArs to transform the formed radio fields in the space back into air-pressure-waves/sound without any electromagnetic loudspeaker. TELEFUNKEN is a pure radio installation, formed/coded electromagnetic fields = PLASMA.

Sensory environment

The visible light is only a small part of the electromagnetic radiation observed in nature and the most part of the spectrum remains hidden to human senses. In the installation Iris tiny water droplets (ca. 50 microns) are influenced by a sonic field that induces resonance and sets the particles into motion. Streams of droplets are illuminated by precise emissions of short pulses of light which is then perceived as colour by the human eye.

Analogue installation, written and drawn work

The Bubble Flora takes the shape of a traditional encyclopedia, and in addition to old fashioned illustrations is a collection of patterns designed to either indicate or warn against the presence of the selected electromagnetic fields. They are intended for application to any physical environment where radio magnetic visibility is desired, for the sake of warning or usefulness in an unobtrusive, decorative manner. The Bubbles of Radio project is not a scientifically accurate account of the invisible landscape that our ubiquitous use of technologies create, but rather an attempt to make it more tangible, easier to relate to and perhaps less threatening and mysterious.

Copper wire, iron wire, cast iron, EMF detector, headphones.

The object is based on the drawing of an atom by Edwin D. Babbitt in 1878. The simple electronics of the piece is just one small opening to the invisible world that affects us. The spiraling coils pick up the surrounding electromagnetic fields. Maybe the work can serve as a reminder of human sensitivity that is slowly fading away in the cumulative noise of information society.

Interactive software installation

The Atlas of Electromagnetic Space is an interactive visualization of the Radio Spectrum, and a database of artistic and social interventions that have been developed in the last decades that employ radio technologies. Projects are catalogued according to the frequencies they occupy.

The most important objective of the Atlas is to create an archive of all the different interventions in Hertzian Space conceived and executed by artists, designers, social movements, activists, hackers, and other members of civil society. This is especially important because it demonstrates alternative readings and perspectives on these technologies, and how the policies regulating them can enrich their social and cultural potential beyond their designated uses.