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 PST: Art + Science Collide Series, a Getty Museum initiative.
for Future Tense: Art, Complexity and Uncertainty
at Beall Center for Art + Technology
Irvine, CA
August 24, 2024 – January 4, 2025
Documentation of "Baroque Bodies (Sway)" in "Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty", Commissioned by the Beall Center for Art + Technology Black Box Projects for Getty PST, a Getty Museum initiative
“Baroque Bodies (Sway)”. 2024. Laura Splan. Interactive installation with motion tracking, sound, AI generated imagery. Video by Will Tee Yang. Courtesy Beall Center for Art+Technology.
“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.
Documentation of "Baroque Bodies (Sway)" in "Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty", Commissioned by the Beall Center for Art + Technology Black Box Projects for Getty PST, a Getty Museum initiative
“Baroque Bodies (Sway)”. 2024. Laura Splan. Interactive installation with motion tracking, sound, AI generated imagery. Video by Will Tee Yang. Courtesy Beall Center for Art+Technology.
“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, Carolina Caycedo & David De Rozas with Juan Mancias, The Harrison Studio, Forrest Kirkland, Cesar & Lois, Chico MacMurtrie, Julie Mehretu, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Clare Rojas, Theresa Schubert, Laura Splan, Hege Tapio, Gail Wight, Pinar Yoldas
Curator: David Familian
Curatorial Assistant: Gabriel H Tolson
Associate Director: Fatima Manalili
...Baroque Bodies (Sway) by Laura Splan ’95, plays with the complexity of epigenetics. She developed the project in collaboration with several scientists including Hannah Lui Park, Ph.D., UC Irvine associate professor in residence of epidemiology and pathology. Epigenetics complicates a basic truth that many of us grew up learning in science class: that our DNA is our destiny. In fact, the environment can change the expression of genes, so that anything from the air we breathe to the stress we experienced in the womb can influence how DNA plays out. Splan explores this with a large 3-D video projection of an animated scientific model of a nucleosome — a molecular structure involved in epigenetic expression — that she ensconces in sci-fi elements. The surfaces of the structures reflect AI-generated images of environments that might influence gene expression: idyllic scenes that might be kept lush with pesticides. Splan generated the landscapes by feeding the AI excerpts from Park’s peer-reviewed research papers...
"...Moving into the liminal room, the viewer is immediately confronted with Laura Splan’s 3D model of a nucleosome (a DNA cluster) that rapidly advances and recedes depending on where you might be standing in the room; this action leaves the viewer with a momentary sense of disorientation. Splan’s Baroque Bodies (Sway) is an interactive installation that represents the impact of the environment on gene expression. Visitors’ movements influence the views of the nucleosome mirroring how the environment, diet, social factors, and lifestyle, create epigenetic changes. Visitors are invited to engage with the delicate balance between our genetic makeup and the world around us, making the work not just an exploration of DNA and proteins, but a compelling reminder of our agency in shaping our own lives..."
...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
