Delighted to be included in Visions In The Nunnery at Bow Arts and so good to be at the opening with live performances. Robert Luzar with Timo Kube Tracing Someone Else’s Skin and Libby Heaney presenting Top of the Bots karaoke where audience members embody pop idols via AI technology. Bodies touching and people singing seemed illicit and extra joyful. Visions in the Nunnery is Bow Arts’ biennial showcase of international moving image and performance art.

Lead artist for Programme 2 is Nye Thompson. Creating new data-generating artist software systems she explores the hidden impact of new technologies. For Visions she premieres /artefact, an immersive work building a colossal border wall on Mars through satellite and google earth imagery accompanied by a throaty space-filled soundtrack.

For the first time, all Visions 2020 works will also be available online for international audiences and those shielding. The themes of programme 2 include digital mediation, digital infrastructure, the remote gaze, CCTV, borders and separation, other worlds and alternate geographies.

In At a Distance solitary figures using semaphore flags sign ‘We Are One’ out across the ocean. Filmed on 29th March 2019, the first date the UK was supposed to leave the EU.

As in quantum entanglement theory where two paired electrons mirror each other at a distance it is hoped the message will be echoed back. This mysterious twinning of electrons where particles link in a way that they instantly affect each other, even over vast distances is what Einstein famously called ‘spooky action at a distance’.  The 4m video includes mirrored footage of the iconic Lizard Point Lighthouse and covers the time it takes for the lamp to power up. The video is back projected onto a Fresnel lens, similar to that found in lighthouses to increase luminosity of the lamps beam.

Exhibition and launch images below by Rob Harris courtesy of The Nunnery Gallery.

Updated my website Finding Paradise project pages with Paradise(suspended).

Making (slow) progress on new moving image work Seeker, Seer, Scientist.

We each have a personal distance to the horizon based on our specific height of eye from the ground and the local elevation from sea level at which we stand. It is a place we can never reach as it always recedes as we approach.

Walking East at dawn.

In my enthusiasm I may’ve set off a little too early and some footage has turned out to be rather dark, though passing the Sewage Treatment Works at this hour was an uncanny futuristic experience. It was the hummmm.

Grappling with abstract space as I research for the audio track. Revisiting a lecture I attended at UCL on the 7th dimension by Jason D. Lotay

As you go up in dimensions there are more symmetries that you cannot see. There are special symmetries that only happen in the 7th dimension, this holonomy set of transformations is called G2.

There are 7 new numbers known as Octonians. The symmetry of the Octonians is precisely G2.

M theory unites the various different string theories into one master theory but in order to do this there must be 11 dimensions. These 11 dimensions are the 4 we know (3 dimensions + time) + 7 new dimensions (related to G2) (which I think allows for the multiverse to exist)

The 7th dimension is closely related to soap films and soap bubbles in that these try to minimise their surface area. Seventh dimensional things with holonomy G2 also try to minimise a kind of energy or area.

I am continuing to film soap film as light is spectacularly reflected from the surface. The colours depend on the thickness of the water sandwiched between the soap and as the membrane becomes so thin just before breaking the colours fade away.

Trying a new soap bubble recipe with lots more glycerin and a different brand of washing-up liquid. I also have a larger frame for the soap film so I don’t know which factor has effected the results most but I’m getting falling rainbow stripes morphing to grey and black swirls.

Finally ventured back into the Print Studio to clean my screens ready for potential new work. It’s the first time I had been back for months. I’m working on images of glacial water which has been trapped for 80,000 years.

Everything we can see, everything we know exists, makes up just five percent of the matter and energy in the universe.

I watched the live stream Dark Matter Day event live from Sanford Underground Research Facility and Boulby Underground Laboratory and was struck by the use of the word shielding, it’s all about shielding which of course is something we hear a lot about now amid the pandemic. In the case of dark matter detection experiments it is about shielding from cosmic rays. On the surface of the earth 2/3 Muons pass through your hand every second, in the underground labs this is reduced by a factor of 10,000,000 to about once a month.

I also learnt that gravity travels at the speed of light.

Some wonderful online discussions are being had by The Diagram Research Group (DRG), a collaboration between artists David Burrows, John Cussans, Dean Kenning and Mary Yacoob. Each collaborator conducts an illustrated discussion that explores their interest in diagrams in relation to Flat Time and Latham’s ideas concerning the unification of scientific and artistic bodies of knowledge and the primacy of time and event (rather than space and matter).

As part of the National Parks Virtual Dark Skies Week 2020 there were a series of online events available such as a talk on The Search For Dark Energy from Dr Luke Tyas. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will measure the effect of dark energy on the expansion of the universe. It will obtain optical spectra for tens of millions of galaxies and quasars, constructing a 3D map spanning the nearby universe to 11 billion light years. 

Looking at new ways to experience dimensions, Laure Provoust explores her approach to installations as living works, with sculptural elements and films that function in 3-D, invoking the viewer’s senses of taste and touch. In an online talk hosted by Yorkshire Sculpture Park she introduces us to her installation at Lisson Gallery where we are invited to learn a new language, new ways of connecting and associating.

It reminds me of the Carsten Höller perception-altering device I experienced back in 2015 that fed each eye with a different woodland perspective. I found it very unsettling. Like my brain was splitting. 

This year I had to experience the London Film Festival at home with streamed content but was able to visit the BFI Blue room for the Expanded programme The Expanse, a gallery of immersive 360 videos and interactive virtual reality experiences. This was all free with lots of Covid safe help on hand to enjoy the VR.

Icarus – ‘don’t think of my fall, think of me soaring to the sun.’

THE END Heather Phillipson’s sculpture of excess on the Fourth Plinth transmits a live feed of Trafalgar Square picked up by the drone’s camera and visible on a dedicated website www.theend.today giving a sculpture’s eye perspective.

Fascinating work by Trevor Paglen at Pace Gallery uncovers the hidden agendas and bias present in systems which now govern many aspects of our lives.

The works in this exhibition seek to provide a small glimpse into the workings of platforms that track faces, nature and human behaviour, and into the underlying data that structures how machines ‘perceive’ humans and landscapes.

You can visit virtually through a live web portal connected to cameras placed in the gallery, observe gallery visitors experiencing the work in real time and can even be “present” in the space by streaming your own webcam onto monitors displayed within the exhibition. Or you can visit in person as I did where I was assessed and evaluated by ‘ImageNet Roulette’ an interactive artwork that classifies people’s digitally-captured portraits according to one of the most widely-used datasets used for training and evaluating computer vision systems.

My classification oscillated between ‘dosser’ and ‘char’.

‘Bloom’, a series of large-scale photographs that depict flower formations conceptualized by various computer vision algorithms created to analyse the constituent parts of real-life photographs. The colours and shapes in the images represent similar areas that the AI has detected in learning from other images of flowers. They do not represent real-to-life colours so much as what the AI thinks the different parts of the images are.

‘The Standard Head’ is a large-scale reconstruction of the 1960’s mathematical model of a “standard head” by the pioneering researcher funded by the CIA, Woody Bledsoe. Conceived from the average measurements of the faces Bledsoe experimented with, Paglen reconstructed the “standard head” from rare information left behind in Bledsoe’s archives at the University of Texas. Artificial intelligence algorithms are designed and trained to look for faces, unique key points, lines, circles, and areas of interest as they attempt to deconstruct the underlying reality into a more simplified series of sections or shapes.

‘The Model (Personality)’, a plated bronze phrenology skull derived from the current categories that are used in predictive policing and sentencing algorithms that intend to gauge someone’s level of criminality by measuring their psychological attributes and behaviours.

‘Distracted Drivers’ and ‘Classifications of Gait’ showcase grids composed of thousands of smaller images used to evaluate people’s behaviours for commercial purposes.

The dataset for ‘Distracted Drivers’, for example, is a collection of images used to recognise if someone is distracted while driving by an AI system. This dataset was created by State Farm insurance to adjust their insurance premiums in real-time, based on that information.

The group exhibition Washing Line curated by Neil Zakiewicz and Patrick Morrissey at Thames-side Gallery took work away from the gallery walls and strung it across space. This made for a dynamic viewing experience negotiating a route to new perspectives. Two dimensional work hanging out in the world of three dimensions.

Robert Good’s stream(ers) of questions from Google News Feed rams home not only the overwhelming assault of media but the constant interrogation we are subject to. Another form of surveillance.

Elizabeth Price raising the ghosts of a lost era in Slow Dans an Artangel presentation at The Assembly Rooms on Borough Road. This was a haunting and fascinating evocation of lost landscapes and what is quite recent but rapidly disappearing social history. Mineshafts, ink-wells, the human throat connect a geological past with a technological present.