While his playful explorations of the knowable and experienceable can take the form of installations he focusses mainly on performances, workshops, and interventions, using their performative nature for further enquiry into collaboration, co-creation, and collective learning.

He has exhibited, performed, presented, or held his collaborative and solo work in Austria, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom.

Collaborations
http://www.transmit-interfere.com
http://www.deepmediaresearch.org

Other
He is active member of the working group 21st Century Art and Digital Culture of the Koalition der Freien Szene which aims to strengthen the Berlin based community of artists, designers, scientists, and activists that critically engage with technology and its effect on nature, society, and culture.
http://www.koalition-der-freien-szene-berlin.de

Between 2009 and 2011 he co-directed TINT Arts, a local artists-led organisation fostering media arts in London.
http://tintarts.org

Our co-exploration of making as a means to learn about and represent our environment has gained many insights of which I’d like to share our very brief description of the outcomes:

After an introduction to the Polynesian stick-charts and related techniques we gave participants the task of exploring the things and flows that compose the National Museum of Scotland. We asked them to observe, listen, touch, smell and taste the environment, log their experiences and thoughts on paper, and prototype on site with some materials. Participants were then given time to work on their artefacts and present their outcomes to the group.

The stick-chart technique was used as a didactic device, and each artefact became a new expression of this technique while also reflecting the experiences, background, and interests of each participant. Discussing the importance of the maps for the Polynesian communities motivated participants to embark on their own explorations of the myriad of patterns available in the site, as well as to engage in the process of making an artefact that represented those explorations.

Using a restricted palette of materials (e.g. wool, foam-board, pins, cardboard, plasticine) to build the artefacts lowered the threshold for engagement and reduced friction during the making process. However, the expressive richness remained in the tensions between materials and makers, and within the materials themselves.

The capacity of the materials to convey the experience of being on the site was often discovered in the iterative process of playfully adding, removing, or replacing parts; the artefact and the representation of the observations (the model) co-created each other.

To summarize, we found that the stick-chart method proved to be a motivating framework to engage participants in discussions relating to mapping, and that by making material sketches of their observations they could refine their observations (sensing the environment) and express them in a nonverbal way. Furthermore, the tangibility and presence of the hand-made artefacts facilitated the communication of their observations and contributed to a shared understanding.

In collaboration with Rocio von Jungenfeld I’m conducting an experimental workshop series that explores how century old low-tech techniques can be adapted to gain deeper understanding of the complex environments today’s design problems are embedded in.

For our first workshops we have chosen stick chart maps that have been used for millennia by the Polynesian seafarer as one of the guiding tools to cross the vast emptiness between the Micronesian Islands. We will take this simple, albeit over time refined, tool as starting point for an exploration into another sea. The one of flows, relationships, and resonances that constitute our multi-layered techno-natural-cultural environment.

We are going to use new SEO techniques to increase traffic on our website in order to get more people to see our event, with help from a useful source we can improve our webpage.

Large Stick Cart (which was not taken to sea)

With the stick charts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands_stick_chart – a mapping technique that uses simple materials such as sticks, threads, and shells – the Polynesians did not necessarily represent the geospatial surrounding but the phenomena which can only be perceived by the trained eye: the complex interactions of wind, waves, and islands. Each map was unique, representing the personal perceptions of the maker, the frictions between materials and what was to be represented, and was often closely guarded by the owner to protect the knowledge.

The stick charts are representing various phenomena that can be observed in the Micronesian Pacific

• Predominant and very regular swells. Over the large open sea the wind’s force creates clearly distinguishable swells that flow in regular intervals from the same direction.
• Diffraction patterns. Land mass diffracts these swells to create a rhomboid pattern, which after some training can help to even see an island behind the horizon.
• Currents below the surface, which can be detected via deflections of the steering oar

Formation of diffraction patterns

Satellite image of diffraction patterns around islands

Our workshop will explore this low-tech mapping techniques can reveal the complexity of flows that constitute our environment and make these flows accessible to interested parties. In this context, we do not aim to focus on the (visual) representation of quantifiable data (e.g. traffic, rain, geo-location) but on the often invisible and highly subjective representation of existing flows, relationships, or processes that constitute the environment.

Based on exemplary techniques, we will discuss and test how simple technologies can be used in the pre-design phase to gain tacit knowledge of the flows in the environment. It is our assumption that once brought to the surface, by means of our workshop methodology, the knowledge about the flows of humans, objects/matter, energy, or information will enable participants to make informed decisions about how these flows are used and how they can be re-channelled, altered or reinforced to design flows in a way in which they, the involved, want them to flow.

During the workshops we aim not only to teach a mapping technology but also to discuss underlying motivations, such as that in an increasingly complex world of design and designers we might need novel approaches to gain, not only quantitative but also qualitative understandings of the environments we inhabit. Furthermore, we examine aspects of making physical objects, its advantages and disadvantages, and how the manipulation of matter (the building materials of the stick charts), with its physical properties and constraints, can actually aid the process of learning about an environment. Here, we especially do consider the necessity and advantages of gaining a visceral non-lingual/symbolic understanding of the interrelations constituting the context in which design processes take place. Lastly, we investigate, the co-creation and presentation of such physical maps aid the development of mutual understanding and the connections between a group and its participants.

As artists and designers we feel that our environment as a whole is more than quantifiable data, it is a techno-natural-cultural entanglement in constant flux, a sea of flows and interrelations, navigated by its inhabitants and based on decisions coming from subjective experiences. One of the prerequisites of being able to design for the future is to be able to understand this environment in its complexity, and this might mean simplifying by abstraction in order to unpack the different levels of complexity.

Workshops

UPCOMING:
20.08.17: 1 day workshop as part of the Balance-Unbalance 2017 conference in Plymouth, UK
We’re very pleased that we are invited to explore making/mapping/knowledge/understanding in the beauty of Devon’s country side. Join us to explore the conferences notion of Sense of Place.
More infos: http://balance-unbalance2017.org

PAST:
21.03.17: 1 day workshop as part of the Research through Design (RDT2017) conference in Edinburgh

25.6.16 – 26.6.16: 2 day research workshop, with M.A. students, at the University of Edinburgh, School of Design.

We are proud to announce that our installation is since yesterday on show in Vienna. More pictures and videos will be posted soon on our project’s website.

If you can, please stop by at the Angewandte Innovation Laboratory. The show is open daily from 10am to 6pm until the 7th of April 2016.

We are working on our project and can now give more details about our piece that will be on show in March 2016 by providing you with the now finished catalogue description.

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The artists explore the creative potential within light as both the creator and transmitter of sound and actively move away from creating visualisations of sound towards an audiovisual experience based on resonance and feedback loops between light, sound and object. Using performances, workshops, and installations they attempt to learn about information, disturbance, noise, glitch, communication, as well as the ephemeral relationships that emerge from both theirs and the audience’s engagement. The artists aim to reveal the complexity of these fleeting experiences that occur in the moment, those glitches that happen somewhere between physical sensors and mental representation, that can’t be recorded, repeated, or simulated.

TRANSMITTER > MULTI-MODAL CROSSOVER > RECEIVER

Consisting of three parts the interactive installation investigates the potential for using digital devices to create a synesthetic communication system. The installation draws on the different experiences of synesthetes and uses this to explore a messy and playful way of communication. Using digital protocols of ASCII, MIDI and frequency conversion letters are encoded into a combination of a light colour and a sound frequency (e.g. “A” is transmitted as yellow light and a 50 Hz sine wave) allowing a simulated synesthete to decode the text that has been transmitted through space. However, to reach closer to a synesthetic communication process the classic Transmitter -> Receiver pattern must be interrupted by a multi-modal crossover that mimics a synesthetes’ unique experience of light and sound. The visitor is able to adjust the multi-modal crossover to gain further understanding of a synesthetes unique experience whilst interfering with a potentially flawless communication flow.

By expanding the communication system across three distinct sections, the installation develops defined territories or zones where information (noise and signal) flows over and through. Although these sections of the system appear as physical material in the space the artists are actively exploring the spaces between the physical parts. It is here where we encounter the resonance within the system; where neighbouring sections meet through the interference of external noise (light and sound) and through which new meaning potentially begins to emerge. The system encourages a nomadic movement of information across a technological plateau that is initially understood as linear, allowing for the spreading, leaking and disruption of information across undefined routes.

What if one could utilize someone’s unique sensing ability? Would this be an effective tool to securely communicate? After all, one could covertly send hidden messages in plain sight that only an intended receiver could decode (steganography). Such a system for transmission could, in the odd event, be learned and understood by someone able to perceive the blurring of these senses and, with practice, the user could claim our proposal as their own efficient, albeit abstract, working communication tool.

Furthermore, the installation is a cybernetic experiment tapping into the unknowable and becoming. The physical installation is also an enquiry into practice in its own right and aims to raise questions about our relationships with technology, our co-evolution, and the blurry lines that our minds try to define as borders between the self, the body and other technological systems.

Rocio von Jungenfeld, David Strang and I will be giving a small 1 day workshop and urban intervention as part of this years Mediacity 05 conference in Plymouth. We are looking forward to team up with our participants to explore the smart cities’ urban fabric in a very analogue way.

More information http://mediacity.i-dat.org/the-urban-interface/

I am really pleased that David and I have been selected to contribute to the group exhibition Digital Synesthesia.

For this we have taken transmission+interference and its core concepts to propose a gallery based installation exploring ideas around sound, light, text, transmission and interference.

You can find the initial proposal on our project’s website: http://www.transmit-interfere.com/2015/02/18/digital-synesthesia/

As second part of Athens visit we had the opportunity to perform and explore the creative use of our instruments further.

Here is a video of the second performance:

And here is the audio from that same performance:

T+I has been invited to give another double pack. We held a 2 day workshop to build with the participants noise tools based on our research. At the end of the second day we performed with the group.

Please find more information on the project’s website: http://www.transmit-interfere.com/2013/04/26/workshop-frown-tails-athens-2013/

On the 24th of February 2012 Transmission+Interference had our first public performance. We’ve been able to capture it fully (albeit not in perfect recording clarity). To create the sounds we have been using our basic transmitter&receiver, the tools developed throughout the workshops, laser pointer, lots of solar cells, fans, rubber bands, music boxes, a record player, a tv, coils, pick up microphones, rotating mirrors and other stuff. All of it has been improvised and while sometimes rough around the edges we’re happy with the result. Please make sure to listen into the quiet and loud moments.