Tiny Hearts and Other Intimate Machines
Bringing together experimental art, biomedical research and machine learning
to create living miniature hearts, synchronised each to the other,
and to our own.
Cardiac Organoids were first successfully grown in May 2021
Above: Video from Hofbauer, P., et al (2021) ‘Cardioids reveal self-organizing principles of human cardiogenesis‘
(colourized by the artist)
Residency at SymbioticA
Previous Artistic Works
Flying Falling Floating
The first of several works exploring banality and the sublime through physical and algorithmic choreography.
Using just three basic floor movements, each dancer interprets and communicates their experience of gravity. In so doing, they provoke questions about repetition – how does it comfort and restrict us?
The work has been presented multiple times – usually mapped to complex architecture and/or within live dance performances.
Bus Projects (Melbourne, 2007), Carriageworks (Sydney, 2008), Art and Performance Festival (Malaysia, 2009), Eulogy for the Living with Tony Yapp, Yumi Umiumare (Ballarat, 2011) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Taipei, 2012).
Longing & Forgetting / Never Alone
Focusing on generative choreographies, this work explores the ways in which machines are ascribed intelligence, while humans are increasingly treated like machines.
Made in collaboration with Dr Philippe Pasquier, a world leading expert in machine learning for ‘metacreation’, and Dr Thecla Schiphort, a pioneer of digital choreography who created Lifeforms, the choreographic computer system used by Merce Cunningham.
Surrey Urban Screen (Vancouver, 2013), Generations (Vancouver, 2015) and Scores + Traces (New York, 2016) and an academic paper and performance for CHI 2017 (Denver), the premier international conference for the field of Human-Computer Interaction.
Filament Orkestra
Constructed from simple electronics – wires, light bulbs, relays and speakers – a complex physical and behavioral system emerges as this ‘inside-out’ machine attempts to watch, repeat and perform it’s own audiovisual compositions.
Much like the social networks it mimics, the machine is trapped in it’s own information bubble, endlessly failing in a beautiful network of whispers.
Commissioned by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts for the exhibition What I See When I Look at Sound (2014).
Phase Orkestra
Part shamanistic alien construction, and part scientific perceptual experiment, the work is is at once fascinating, disorienting, elusive and soothing – a complex machine organism comprised of wire, electronics, lights and speakers.
Phase Orkestra arises out of in-depth research into ‘psychophysics’ – the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and bodily sensation – and explores the ambivalent roles of technology in contemporary societies.
Commisioned by Werkleitz Gesellschaft as part of the European Media Artists Residency and Exchange Program for the Move.On.Festival (Halle an der Saale, Germany 2015).