It’s been proven that we’re increasingly addicted to social media in that our brain rewards us by releasing dopamine, an internal feel-good substance, whenever we get notifications and updates.
Like Me is a series of glass head sculptures filled with a liquid that reacts to online social media engagement. Visitors can 'like' the artwork on their dedicated Facebook pages and they react within seconds.
Much like Frankenstein's horrid creation, Monster is an artwork patched together using parts from different people, in this case the most powerful people on the planet; the leaders of the G20.
Inspired by Dadaism, there are 160,000 possible combinations picked at random. Whenever the button is pushed, the system is reset and a new political gamble takes place. The face of a global coalition is formed, always yielding a similar abominable outcome, reflective of our public distrust, justified or not, in the current political system.
The worryball is an interactive sculpture, living partly online, that consists of more than 6000 individual Guatemalan worry dolls, woven into a spherical shape. According to Guatemalan folklore, if you whisper your worries to a worrydoll before going to sleep and place it under your pillow, the worries would have gone away by the morning.
When exhibited, the worryball broadcasts real recorded worries from various participants from around the world through an internal speaker. Participants can share their worries on the worryball website, where they can also experience a virtual version of the sculpture.
The MicroCinescope is an interactive artwork. A small high-res screen (five times higher than an iPhone retina) is magnified through the lens of an antique brass microscope, and streams a live feed of a camera mounted in the ceiling, showing a top-down view of the microscope itself and the visitors scattered around it.
The microscope itself was constructed in 1853 and was used in London to examine microbes and bacteria. Through the lens of the MicroCinescope, we've taken the place of the bacteria and are offered up for examination as we turn our gaze onto ourselves in the age where self-voyeurism is common practice.
THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL DOWSING STICK Interactive Artwork
The search for water has been essential throughout human history. Whether digging for wells or searching for alien life, the pursuit of H2O, that elusive molecule so closely linked with life, often takes on an almost mystical aspect.
The extra-terrestrial dowsing stick is an interactive artwork that divines water beyond our planet. Suspended by strings, the stick changes direction every 30 seconds and fixes on planets where we thing H2O might exist, such as Mars or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, as well as a number of exoplanets outside our solar system.
The motors are controlled by an Arduino chip which can calculate the exact position of the planets in real-time relative to time and position of the arwork itself (longitude, latitude).
Headlines is an interactive project displaying live newspapers collected from around the world. It allows visitors to browse through an array of front pages arranged after country and the newspaper’s political alignment.
The editorial and journalistic process of any newspaper is to various degrees informed by the newspaper's nationality and political views. A succession of quick snapshots of today's headlines visualises the cultural and ideological disparity of news... or perhaps also the lack thereof.
Interference is an artwork that reacts to actual cell phone signals in the gallery space. A suspended lightbulb is responding to nearby mobile traffic by flickering and omitting subtle distorted noises, reminiscent of recorded phone conversations.
After having been perfected by Thomas Edison and revolutionising the way people lived, the incandescent lightbulb often called for artistic exploration, such as in Francis Bacon's eerie videos, Robert Rauschenberg's bizarre sculptures or in Man Ray’s black and white photographic explorations. Interference is exploring the meeting point between the historically and artistically charged lightbulb with the omnipresent but invisible micro-signals that are now such an integral part of our everyday lives, symptomatic to the age of communication.
The Panopticon Dreams series is looking at our fascination with new technology. More and more gadgets seem to find their way into our daily lives with the promise of connections, information and endless avenues of self-expression. But with this onslaught of technology comes the possibility of unwanted tracking and control; a self-initiated Panopticon of modern surveillance.
With the aid of oversized mirror glasses the portraits seem to break their 2-dimensional confinement and gaze in awe into the gallery space. Through the use of motion sensors controlling lights behind the mirrors, the glasses seem to constantly be checking the presence of the visitor.
Reflections is an interactive portrait series that lets viewers interact with the photographs in different ways. The webcam is used to to create a "reflection" image in the eyes of the portraits, similar to how you sometimes see the traces of the photographer in the eyes of the photographed. Additionally, viewers can "tip" the portraits over by covering their finger over the webcam (and the forehead) and thereby inducing sleep or death to the portraits.
The artwork was originally shown at the Science Gallery in Dublin as part of the Future of Water/Surface Tension exhibition. It is showing a beating, melting heart made of ice, alluding to 'the fragile existence and vitality of ice in a world where the polar ice caps are slowly diminishing through a cyclical process'.
