autograf screening in DreamWorlds, an exhibition of Australian moving image in public space curated by Melinda Rackham. VIP Official Opening of DreamWorlds on 6.30pm Saturday September 4th in Sanlitun Village, Beijing, China. There is more information including a lovely essay from Melinda at the dreamworlds website.

autograf is an asemic writing system that generates tags by recombining marks and gestures used in graffiti tagging. The languages generated by this process are both familiar and alien; its tags look like letters but remain indecipherable.

It is constantly and rapidly reinscribing itself as if being generated by a gang of autonomous mecha-graf artists. The tags consume and erase one another and those that survive reproduce with one another to create stylistic hybrids. The processes behind this interaction are modeled on an experimental ecosytem made of language—tags have energy, they live and die, replicate, and may steal or give energy to their neighbours. This ecosystem is sonified; the generated soundtrack reflects the ebb and flow of energy in the system.

The Urban Codemakers project I have been involved in launched on Wednesday night of this week. This a collective of guilds situated in the Guildford Lane Complex in Melbourne set to rezone the city through play. More info at their site.

Opening comments from yours truly:

Good evening everyone. Thankyou for coming out on this cold, dark night.

I will speak briefly about the history of this project. Personally, I have issues with words so I am reading a prepared speech.

Whilst undertaking a residency in this gallery during December last year I was approached by a group called the Urban Codemakers to assist in their submission for the City of Melbourne’s Laneways Commission program. Apparently, they had a project in mind that would put to use the iconographic languages that have manifested in my various digital media and public art works over the years.

The Urban Codemakers originate in the Micronation of Ludea.

If you have played a game then you have been to Ludea. It is that space you go to when you are ‘in-game’, in the zone, or otherwise immersed in play.

For the Ludeans, this state is the basis of their culture, their language, their way of life. Patterns and logic of the game become their way of seeing the entire world. The ontology of the game world is the ontology of their reality. Reality is game.

I also have a personal connection with the Micronation of Ludea. Indulge me in a moment of personal reflection. I spent most of the 90s immersed in a virtual world of digital icons, plastic knowbots and artificial life. During September of 2001, while exhibiting a work entitled Mixed Reality, I rediscovered reality. Four years later in 2005, I became involved with the Ludeans. They helped me at a difficult time in my life as I made the shift across to reality. Whilst still a ‘reality newbie’ I can get where they are coming from – spend a significant amount of time ‘in-game’ and the real world is coloured by the that experience. It is encoded in your way of being.

So, the Ludeans have come to City of Melbourne. They are here to apply their logic to our city. Tonight is an opportunity to join them in this project.

The Guildford Lane complex has been remapped via the appearance of eight guild signs installed only late last week.

Workers in orange overalls and white boots are active tonight in acts of urban codemaking. You have seen an example of this activity outside the gallery this evening.

However, the Urban Codemakers tell me that this is only the beginning.

Over the next ten weeks the Urban Codemakers are preparing a game that will be played on the streets of Melbourne. You can join the fieldwork operations leading up to this citywide act of play tonight on one of the computers installed here for that purpose.

On behalf of the Urban Codemakers, I invite you to rezone the city through play!

Tokyo Wonder Site
TWS Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan
April 6 – 29

The focus of the residency is research into urban art environments and locative media projects that respond to the urban spaces of Tokyo. This will relate to an ongoing project to establish the Micronation of Ludea, a crossmedia fictional world made of play. The urban fabric of Tokyo may be seen as a set of media ecologies made of networks of systems and rules that are social, institutional, spatial, commercial and cultural. The Micronation of Ludea wishes to play in these ecologies!

Design After Nature (image: Jon McCormack)

Guildford Lane Gallery
20-24 Guildford Lane, Melbourne
December 3 – 20

Ollie Bown, Joel Collins, Alan Dorin, Alice Eldridge, Mark Guglielmetti, Indae Hwang, Troy Innocent, Jon McCormack, Gordon Monro, Ben Porter

Design after Nature features research into biologically inspired computational models to develop new methods for computer creativity. The works use advanced techniques for computer graphics modelling that are applied to problems in the design and construction of rich, interactive visual environments. In these simulated ecosystems, three-dimensional entities develop and respond to their environment. The production of these virtual spaces has hitherto been difficult with existing technology. The works have been developed with a software tool capable of a broader range of expression than previous systems, and one that can be mastered by designers working with digital media.

The exhibition consists of sound works, interactive installation, generative systems, alife models, screen-based works and kinetic art. It demonstrates the outcomes of a three-year ARC Discovery project undertaken at Monash University’s Centre for Electronic Media Art.

autograf (dual-screen version) at biotope

Frankston Arts Centre : Cube 37
37 Davey St, Frankston
July 14 – August 9

Ollie Bown, Joel Collins, Alan Dorin, Alice Eldridge, Mark Guglielmetti, Indae Hwang, Troy Innocent, Jon McCormack, Gordon Monro, Ben Porter

biotope is a collection of experimental ecosystems created as part of a international research project undertaken at the Center for Electronic Media Art, Monash University. The works were developed as part of an ongoing investigation into a systemic approach to electronic media art.

urban art environment

Colony
Troy Innocent 2008
weathering steel, acrylic, computer-controlled light, 12-channel sound, interactive installation, iPhone web app

Colony consists of a network of fourty-two totems made of weathering steel and translucent acrylic that reside around and within Life.lab, a dual office/residential building situated in Digital Harbour, Docklands Melbourne. The colony consists of media creatures living close to one another in a public garden, for mutual benefit. There are three subspecies – orange, blue or green – signified by the colour of their light and timbre of their sound.

This colony needs people, the more the better. The community that resides in Life.lab become a part of it via a symbiotic relationship–the colony receives energy from people, they receive an aesthetic experience in return. This encourages more contemplative forms of interaction; unpredictable zones of interaction that comprise a balance between environments that are responsive and consistent but rather change or alter their behaviour.

The term ‘colony’ has multiple meanings: a settlement of people, a family of organisms, a group of animals or, a probationary geographical area. Likewise, there are multiple levels of activity within this urban art environment: firstly, the autonomous network of interactions that the totems have with themselves; secondly, the stimulus received from human presence; and thirdly, via direct play from an iPhone. This third form of interaction allows the performance of individual totems as audiovisual instruments; triggering light and sound events, and in turn feeding energy into the system. Thirty-six people with thirty-six iPhones play the colony as an electronic light and sound orchestra.

Each totem is inscribed with glyphs from a constructed language inspired by prelinguistic communication, digital game iconography, and asemic writing, a wordless open semantic form of writing. It is an alien language; both familiar and unfamiliar. It is the language used by the media creatures to communicate with one another – it maps onto the ontology of their artificial world.

participatory art project

Perspective Glitch
Troy Innocent 2009/2010
lasercut paper, wood and acrylic; chalk, discourse and generative system; site-specific installation, photography and online media

A game of Lexicon generated via a crossmedia ecology.

A diplomatic envoy from the Micronation of Ludea invites visitors to construct their own icons and tag the environment around them. Players then document their experience online at ludea.net thereby contributing to the formation of an alternate reality.

A citizen of Ludea is situated simultaneously in the Micronation of Ludea and Melbourne and invites visitors to play with systems of human-computer expression to cultivate a crossmedia ecology. Players are invited to collaborate with the Ludean citizen in remapping urban space via a constructed language and its relationship to a fictional world. Meaning is negotiated by glitches; the shifts in perspective generated by the idiosyncratic nature of each collaborators individual reality.

This project inspires participation and play with the urban environment itself by shifting its meaning through remediation. It manifests a view of urban spaces are negotiable, reconfigurable, mutable; they are fields of play. Rather than destroy, rebuild and reconstruct via ‘hard’ processes it manifests ’soft’ media processes that play with reality.

It is situated in the emerging world of Ludea—a micronation where language and culture are generated via play. Cultures, languages, and ways of being may be invented within game worlds. Ludea is a world in which three tribes subscribing to conflicting ideologies define their territories along lines of communication.

Urban spaces are negotiable, reconfigurable, mutable; they are fields of play. The activity of play crosses over into many domains and its language permeates our activities across the domains of work, business, social activities and recreation. Perspective Glitch invites you into the Micronation of Ludea to play with the urban spaces all around you. Play with reality!

installation

Hugo Michell Gallery
260 Portrush Rd, Beulah Park, Adelaide
October 23 – November 28

Seven AR tags from a Ludean system called the World Machine situated in Melbourne laneways. Document types in archive: Digital C-Type prints, sculpture & video.

The World Machine originates in Ludea. Its function is to transmutate the city streets to provide a suitable habitat for Ludean lifeforms. At its core are seven tags that appear in scenes that are at once familiar and alien; simultaneously read by humans and machines; augmenting and mutating urban space.

asemic writing system

autograf
Troy Innocent 2009
generative drawing software

autograf is a generative asemic writing system written as part of research into experimental ecosystems. It generates tags by recombining gestures from a collection of marks used to form letters in graffiti tags. The languages that are generated by this process are both familiar and alien; its tags look like letters but remain indecipherable.

It is constantly and rapidly reinscribing itself as being generated by a gang of autonomous mecha-graf artists. The tags consume and erase one another with those that are most successful at holding onto territory within the moving image reproducing with one another and generating stylistic hybrids. The processes behind this interaction are modeled on an ecosytem made of language—tags have energy, they live and die, replicate, and may steal or give energy to their neighbours. This ecosystem is sonified; the generated soundtrack reflects the ebb and flow of energy in the system.

This system belongs to the Ludean family of languages. The first of these appeared in the colonization of the City of Melbourne by the Micronation of Ludea in 2005. In ‘Scenes from Ludea’ familiar laneways were reinscribed by tags in orange, green and blue; representing the three major factions of Ludea. The next iteration of these forms was hardened into a material expression as urban art environments in ‘Field of Play’ in 2007. A year later the language emerged as sound and light in the glyphs of ‘Colony’ that flicker and click in communication with one another.

All languages in this family share similar rules of interaction and use. There are dynamics in the interactions of the coloured tags: orange beats green, green beats blue, blue beats orange. Each system shares similar digital DNA, interpreted in different ways using formal rules common to signs and symbols such those that govern symmetry, geometry and intersection. autograf is an iteration of a larger project that explores parallels in processes of biological and linguistic evolution.

!Killbot! FukAll type

Kick Gallery
239 High Street Northcote
July 29 – August 15

The four artists in Rock, Paper, Lasers – Troy Innocent, Jeff Janet, Trinh Vu & Joel Zika – have used the latest digital laser technology to create paper artworks and sculptures;  some of the works mimic industrial design objects while others are representative of mere folly and experimentation.   One of the intentions of the artists in this exhibition is to deride the mass production of iconography, such as that which is so often seen in ‘home wares’ or ‘lifestyle’ shops, to make a series of more unique works. Other works in the show are intended to exemplify the possibilities of these tools for the creation of contemporary art works. While these artists cast a light on the facelessness of the prefabricated object, at the same time, they choose to revel in the machine’s benefits for more unique creative purposes rather than running from them.   Each of the artists in Rock, Paper, Lasers lecture in Art and Design at Monash University and as a part of their own on-going practice set themselves the task to create this exhibition of two & three dimensional artworks collaboratively.

Rock, Paper, Lasers has been supported by the Monash University Art & Design Faculty.