BIRDSONG DIAMOND MIMIC @ARTIUM SPECULUM FESTIVAL

Art | Sci
Festival
Installation
Interactive

BIRDSONG DIAMOND MIMIC @ARTIUM SPECULUM FESTIVAL

Victoria Vesna + Charles Taylor + Hiroo Iwata + Reiji Suzuki + John Brumley

INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION
14 Sep 2017 - 9:00am to 16 Sep 2017 - 6:00pm

Collaborative interactive installation by Victoria Vesna (US), Charles Taylor (US), Hiroo Iwata (JP), Reiji Suzuki (JP), John Brumley (US)

Artium Speculum Festival, Trbovlje, Slovenia
THURSDAY, 14. 9. 2017 | 9.00–21.00
FRIDAY, 15. 9. 2017 | 9.00–20.00
SATURDAY, 16. 9. 2017 | 9.00–18.00

Bird Song Diamond Mimic is an interactive installation that allows the audience to practice bird songs and experience its complexity as if learning a new language. The project is habitat specific and for Speculum Artium, the bird song the audience is asked to learn and mimic is of a canary in the coal mine. When the participants hear the song and are prompted to imitate the canary, a computer grades the accuracy of their mimic. The work is part of a larger virtual reality installation that is an outgrowth of a research project “Mapping the Acoustic Network of Birds” directed by an evolutionary biologist Charles Taylor. Through this work, the artist and the scientist attempt to remind and alert the public of how birds and their acoustic richness have disappeared from our daily experiences.

Victoria Vesna
http://victoriavesna.com
Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts, Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). With her installations she explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. She has exhibited in 20+ solo exhibitions, 70+ group shows, published 20+ papers and two edited volumes.

Charles Taylor
Research Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA. PhD, Ecology and Evolution at SUNY, Stony Brook. His work has addressed evolution of Artificial Life as software and robots, and recently with adaptive sensor arrays. The Taylor lab is currently using sensor arrays understand the grammar and meaning of bird songs.

Hiroo Iwata
Professor, Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems at the University of Tsukuba and President of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan (2016, 2017). His research is focused on developing projects with virtual reality and robotics. Launched Device Art project in 2004 and exhibited work at the Emerging Technologies at SIGGRAPH every year from 1994 to 2007. Iwata developed and directs PhD Program in Empowerment Informatics (EMP) in 2013.

Reiji Suzuki
Associate Professor at the Department of Complex Systems Science, Nagoya University. He is investigating interactions between evolutionary and ecological processes using artificial life approaches. He is also interested in understanding acoustic interactions among songbirds as complex systems.

John Brumley
John Brumley was born in California, US //1985 and is living in Los Angeles, CA. He is a graduate of UC Davis with a BA in Music Composition and received his MFA from the Design Media Arts program at UCLA.