2024
interactive audiovisual installation, motion tracking, 3D animation, sound, AI-generated imagery
16’ H x 20’ W x 25’ D (for Future Tense exhibition) / Dimensions variable
Technology Collaborators: Danielle McPhatter (Lead Collaborator), Steven Dalton, Joseph Bradascio, Domhnaill Hernon
Science Collaborators: Hannah Lui Park, Adam Lamson
Commissioned by the Beall Center for Art + Technology Black Box Projects for Getty PST, a Getty Museum initiative
Additional Support: EY Metaverse Lab, NEW INC at the New Museum, Onassis ONX, Simons Foundation
Premiering in "Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty"
August 24 – December 14, 2024
Opening Reception at Beall Center on Saturday, August 24, 4-6pm
Presented by the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology for Getty PST: Art x Science Initiative
Curated by David Familian
at Beall Center for Art + Technology & the University Art Gallery
University of California, Irvine, CA
Laura Splan will be included in Future Tense: Art, Complexity and Uncertainty at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology as part of the 2024 Getty PST: Art + Science Collide Series.
“Baroque Bodies (Sway)” is an interactive audio-visual installation that uses visitors’ movements to influence 3D animation, AI-generated imagery, and data-driven sound. The multisensory encounter explores entanglements between molecular bodies and the built environment by connecting research from epigenetics and computational biology with seemingly familiar landscapes and intuitive movement. Signifiers of both micro and macro worlds invite embodied explorations of the "natural" world that are situated in a liminal space that is at once biological and technological, autonomous and interconnected. “Baroque Bodies (Sway)” engages audiences with concepts of complexity and predictability through sensory experiences that are seemingly simple and accessible. As visitors are compelled to inspect landscapes reflected on 3D protein surfaces, their movements throughout the installation manipulate the camera's perspective on molecular models. Each entry into the space triggers an additional sound element that is added to an accumulating ethereal soundscape. The work positions emerging epigenetics research as creative, technological, and scientific underpinnings through which to explore our posthuman relationship to the natural world while repurposing the technologies with which we imagine it.
Laura Splan created elements for “Baroque Bodies (Sway)” while working in collaboration with scientists and technologists. To create the sound, Splan worked with theoretical biophysicist Adam Lamson, a Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology. The installation’s soundscape includes sonifications created by Lamson using data from his chromatin simulations. Splan then created MIDI conversions and instrumentalizations of the sonifications for the installation’s cumulative soundscape. To design the interactivity, Splan work with creative technologist Danielle McPhatter and the EY Metaverse Lab. Together they developed rules for interaction that explore notions of power and influence as they relate to game theory, emergence, and complexity. To create the landscape imagery, Splan collaborated with Hannah Lui Park at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. Together they selected excerpts from Park’s epigenetics research related to pesticide exposure and gene expression. Splan used the texts in an AI generator to create the otherworldly imagery reflected in the surfaces of 3D models in the installation’s animation.
Evolutionary biology, meteorology, ecology, neuroscience, and robotics are just a few examples of the complex systems that artists engage with in the exhibition Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty. Complex systems are dynamic, uncertain, and unpredictable. They are characterized by chaos, feed-back loops, self-organization, and emergent behavior. Future Tense features both emerging and established contemporary artists who utilize the concepts of complex systems in traditional media and new technologies such as computer modeling, robotics and data visualizations. This includes existing work by Ralf Baecker, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Julie Mehretu, Clare Rojas and Theresa Schubert, as well as new works by Newton Harrison, Chico MacMurtrie, Lucy HG Solomon & Cesar Baio collective, Laura Splan, and Gail Wight, commissioned for this exhibition by the Beall Center’s Black Box Projects artist residency program. Organized around different categories of work––computational, environmental, biological, social, and visual––the exhibition explores complex systems at various levels, from microscopic organisms to the totalizing implications of global warming on a planetary scale. The goal of Future Tense is for audiences to understand how complexity functions within individual works of art, but also to experience and appreciate the beauty, intricacy, and wonder of each complex system.
Ralf Baecker
Cesar & Lois
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Chico MacMurtrie
Julie Mehretu
Fernando Palma Rodríguez
Clare Rojas
Theresa Schubert
Laura Splan
Harrison Studio
Hege Tapio
Gail Wight
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas
Laura Splan will be included in Future Tense: Art, Complexity and Uncertainty at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology as part of the 2024 Getty PST: Art + Science Collide Series.
“Baroque Bodies (Sway)” is an interactive audio-visual installation that uses visitors’ movements to influence 3D animation, AI-generated imagery, and data-driven sound. The multisensory encounter explores entanglements between molecular bodies and the built environment by connecting research from epigenetics and computational biology with seemingly familiar landscapes and intuitive movement. Signifiers of both micro and macro worlds invite embodied explorations of the "natural" world that are situated in a liminal space that is at once biological and technological, autonomous and interconnected. “Baroque Bodies (Sway)” engages audiences with concepts of complexity and predictability through sensory experiences that are seemingly simple and accessible. As visitors are compelled to inspect landscapes reflected on 3D protein surfaces, their movements throughout the installation manipulate the camera's perspective on molecular models. Each entry into the space triggers an additional sound element that is added to an accumulating ethereal soundscape. The work positions emerging epigenetics research as creative, technological, and scientific underpinnings through which to explore our posthuman relationship to the natural world while repurposing the technologies with which we imagine it.
Laura Splan created elements for “Baroque Bodies (Sway)” while working in collaboration with scientists and technologists. To create the sound, Splan worked with theoretical biophysicist Adam Lamson, a Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology. The installation’s soundscape includes sonifications created by Lamson using data from his chromatin simulations. Splan then created MIDI conversions and instrumentalizations of the sonifications for the installation’s cumulative soundscape. To design the interactivity, Splan work with creative technologist Danielle McPhatter and the EY Metaverse Lab. Together they developed rules for interaction that explore notions of power and influence as they relate to game theory, emergence, and complexity. To create the landscape imagery, Splan collaborated with Hannah Lui Park at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. Together they selected excerpts from Park’s epigenetics research related to pesticide exposure and gene expression. Splan used the texts in an AI generator to create the otherworldly imagery reflected in the surfaces of 3D models in the installation’s animation.
Evolutionary biology, meteorology, ecology, neuroscience, and robotics are just a few examples of the complex systems that artists engage with in the exhibition Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty. Complex systems are dynamic, uncertain, and unpredictable. They are characterized by chaos, feed-back loops, self-organization, and emergent behavior. Future Tense features both emerging and established contemporary artists who utilize the concepts of complex systems in traditional media and new technologies such as computer modeling, robotics and data visualizations. This includes existing work by Ralf Baecker, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Julie Mehretu, Clare Rojas and Theresa Schubert, as well as new works by Newton Harrison, Chico MacMurtrie, Lucy HG Solomon & Cesar Baio collective, Laura Splan, and Gail Wight, commissioned for this exhibition by the Beall Center’s Black Box Projects artist residency program. Organized around different categories of work––computational, environmental, biological, social, and visual––the exhibition explores complex systems at various levels, from microscopic organisms to the totalizing implications of global warming on a planetary scale. The goal of Future Tense is for audiences to understand how complexity functions within individual works of art, but also to experience and appreciate the beauty, intricacy, and wonder of each complex system.
Ralf Baecker
Cesar & Lois
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Chico MacMurtrie
Julie Mehretu
Fernando Palma Rodríguez
Clare Rojas
Theresa Schubert
Laura Splan
Harrison Studio
Hege Tapio
Gail Wight
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas
...biophysicist Adam Lamson is collaborating with artist Laura Splan in a project the two of them call ‘Sticky Settings’...From giant tapestries that present maps of DNA in colorful, tactile formats, to otherworldly animations set to music, their art invites a non-scientific audience to literally walk into the processes our own cells are undergoing every day...
...Interdisciplinarity is the foundation on which artist Laura Splan conceives her work...Through her practice, science is moved out of the laboratories while keeping its axioms and experiments present...A number of its mechanisms are paralleled with the cultural dynamics that inhabit our everyday lives, putting a magnifying glass on the interconnections that exist between diverse fields of knowledge...
Commissioned by the Beall Center for Art + Technology Black Box Projects for Getty PST, a Getty Museum initiative.
Additional Support Provided by EY Metaverse Lab, NEW INC at the New Museum, Onassis ONX
This work was also made possible by the Simons Foundation. Created in collaboration with Adam Lamson, Science Collaborator and theoretical biophysicist at Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation.
Technology Collaborators: Danielle McPhatter (Lead Collaborator), Steven Dalton, Joseph Bradascio, Domhnaill Hernon
Science Collaborators: Hannah Lui Park, Adam Lamson
