ACVA is pleased to announce our participation in the 2011 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Istanbul, Turkey.

We'll be launching the Journal of Virtual Art on September 14. The journal is a bi-annual, fully-refereed online discussion featuring commissioned articles and open public debates.

- - - 

The following works will be shown 14-21 September 2011, with full symposium details available via the ISEA2011 site. 

neomaflux
Troy Innocent + Indae Hwang

noemaflux describes an act of shifting perception. In this work it is centered on the experience of an augmented reality to enable new experiences of urban space and different ways of seeing the city. This experience is constructed via a network of relationships that connect AR markers, urban space, generative writing systems and abstract virtual spaces.

Players use mobile devices explore streets and laneways and find nine signs integrated into the urban environment. They act both as navigational signage in urban space and as gateways into the artificial world. The signs have dual meaning as both elements of an invented language (that of an artificial world) and a machine-readable language (as AR markers). Players discover worlds through these markers and being in these worlds triggers the growth of abstract writing systems. As they move about the city they carry digital seeds that pollinate each site with glyphs from the previous site creating a crossmedia ecology connecting people, urban spaces, signs and digital systems.

In noemaflux, familiar urban spaces are reinvented and inscribed with new meaning via a mixed reality. Firstly, established technologies of augmented reality such as AR markers are given a new aesthetic via their integration into sculpture, street signage and banners. Secondly, the city is reinvented through the creation of a new space in which streets and laneways overlap with abstract virtual worlds. Via these dual processes of interaction players become interconnected with the artificial world of the work and the urban landscape in which it is situated.

This project was originally developed as part of the Artist in Residence program at IAMAS in Ogaki, Japan in 2010.

http://iconica.org/noemaflux/

Rainbow X Apocalypse
Anita Fontaine & Geoffrey LillemonAccording to popular esoteric and pseudo scientific theories, the ancient Mayan calendar, fundamentalists, and believers, 2012 may be the final year of human existence. Rainbow X Apocalypse is a series of videos and a video installation inspired by this doomsday prophesy. 

With the threat of mother nature raging, recent tragedies in Japan, the looming eruption of Yellowstone and revolutions in third world countries – the once outrageous claim that the apocalypse is near is less science fiction, and more science fact. It’s a question of when... not how. Is escape into a digital reality the only way forward for the human conscience? Are we building a virtual escape around us through technology? In the face of this looming dystopia, what do we choose? Absolute death or virtual reality? Rainbow X Apocalypse challenges viewers to explore the possibility of metaverse, an afterlife for avatars, a continually shifting space for our souls to live on for eternity.

Rainbow X Apocalypse is a digital tapestry of mediums and style, weaving together 3D and Videogame graphics, photography, film, sound, sculpture and fusing it – abusing contemporary culture’s literacy of highly hybridised media communication. Drawing from the barrage of seductive advertisements, images and perverse telesales of our everyday existence, Rainbow X Apocalypse extends these portents and offers viewers a digital utopia. The final “out” from this world going down in flames, a videogame-esque fantasy above and beyond virtual worlds as we know them.

anitafontaine.com
champagnevalentine.com

The Institute For Advanced Augmentiform Development and Release
Dr Andrew Burrell & Warren Armstrong

Virtual and augmented realities that are dynamically linked through live interactions and data exchange. The project nurtures a unique eco system that exists in parallel to our own, but that ultimately depends upon the landscape and inhabitants of the physical world for its own survival. 

Based upon a poetic and playful – yet ultimately conceptually enlightening – interpretation of Platonic cosmology the artists provide the raw material and initial conditions for Augmentiform life to come into existence within the multi user virtual environment. Viewers from our own physical environment are invited to interact with these raw materials and become a vector of selection in bringing together various forms within a crucible of life, where logic based upon the Augmentiforms own virtual existence comes into play.

A route out of the virtual into the in-between space of the augmented is then provided and again physical viewers are invited to follow and nurture the creatures they have helped bring to life, until they are strong enough to survive alone. The creatures make their own way through the streets of Istanbul seeking out a site suited to their own individual qualities, and it is only then that they evolve to their ultimate life stage and will feed raw materials back to the virtual crucible of life.


 

Meandering
Aroha Groves

Meandering is just that. The user is taken, seemingly randomly, through the work, yet reminded there is a ‘grand design’. The work intends to ‘meander’ through varying ideas, emotions, environs, levels and forms of consciousness, and styles, to take the viewer on a journey of the soul. This journey hopes to plumb the depths, climb the heights of elation and take the viewer through many of the ‘places’ in between. The work is a commentary on most aspects of life as a blakfulla: the highs and the lows, the beauties and the ugliness’s. Meandering is about what happened, what is and what may be seen as an almost utopian hope for the future.

Meandering considers the future with a positive outcome. No modernist white cubes, no steam punk (where we are forced to revert to older unsustainable technologies), no post-apocalyptic ruins, no mechanical, robotic view of the future. Rather, it is one which still features the natural where we have preserved the beauties of natural things/environs around us. Or perhaps it is a future of memory, a recreation of what may have been lost, imagined and re-imagined.

arohagroves.com

Keep an eye out for Melinda Rackham – ACVA’s ambassador at ISEA.