Skyler and Bliss

Hong Kong remains the backdrop to the science fiction movies of my youth. The city reminds me of my former training in the financial sector. It is a city in which I could have succeeded in finance, but as far as art goes it is a young city, and I am a young artist. A frustration emerges; much like the mould, the artist also had to develop new skills by killing off his former desires and manipulating technology. My new series entitled HONG KONG surface project shows a new direction in my artistic research in which my technique becomes ever simpler, reducing the traces of pixelation until objects appear almost as they were found and photographed. Skyler and Bliss presents tectonic plates based on satellite images of the Arctic. Working in a hot and humid Hong Kong where mushrooms grow ferociously, a city artificially refrigerated by climate control, this series provides a conceptual image of a imaginary typographic map for survival. (Laurent Segretier

Mount Tom Self-Transformation Retreat: Designing Experiential Architecture to Provoke Stimulatory, Expressive and Sensory Self-Exploration

The environment evolved five human senses; through these receptors the majority of us experience life. Or do we? The a vast majority of our daily landscape resides enclosed, shut off from the exterior; separating people from the elements, organizing and distributing the multitude of functions that affect how we live and feel. The mental state of society is poor, the “daily dis-ease” of we wrestle with; stress, emotions, fatigue, exhaustion, disconnection suck the life out of the moments we live to barely even see. These interactions and experiences we encounter in, on, under and around the architectural forms we travel between are often so boring and ordinary we don’t even label them as experience. I challenge architecture can be more. The tangibles (senses) can be invigorated and spaces can be driven and designed by the senses, by the body and by the mind. The creation of unique experiences involves not only the measureable (light, smell, touch, taste & sound etc.) but also immeasurable effects on the body (memory, unity, serenity, etc.) The core of this project aims to cultivate an architecture that provides an array of nurturing and invigorating experiential and exploratory moments harmoniously placed throughout the natural landscape. Through this reintroduction to experience, the individuals attending the retreat will be engulfed in experiencing the moment and living each breath of sensation. For meditation is the existence in contemplation, relaxation and mental hygiene that provides the platform, the vessel for self-exploration and internal growth. Here the architecture becomes the marbles in the landscape, nestled into the site located in Mountain Park in Holyoke, Ma. “Come experience life, and energize your body and mind

Re-Territorializing Park-Monument of The Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship

The silhouettes of colossal Soviet monuments in Bulgaria shaped the landscape of the nation, both physically, and metaphorically. Many remain abandoned, some have been removed, a few modified, but their controversy remains forever in history. One of them, now abandoned, landed on a hill and with obstinate assurance still stands — The Park-Monument of The Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship in Varna. A ghostly iron fist, hidden in its shadow, continues to haunt the nation. Its existence in Bulgaria, as with other monuments around the world, tied to past ideologies, is highly contested. The relevance of existing monuments and their relationship to an oppressive regime remains controversial. I confront the Friendship Monument by confronting my personal past. This subjective story, as it relates to this particular monument, also relates to a larger issue: A dominating power exist, both inside and outside the human body and psyche. I challenge power; the power of the dominator over the dominated. I investigate this power by engaging the monument, by collecting drawings and images, and by making artefacts. I make models, casts, collages, in a mode of serious play, I experiment with my relations to power through what the monument awakens in me. I open it up and expose what is hidden and locked away, so that I can bring into light the darkest moments of my past. The Friendship Monument must continue to jog the memory, to stimulate a reoccurring and rhythmic re-evaluation of the past to inform the future. The territory that comes with a socialist past is anchored in my present, through the legacy of the Soviet Union embodied in this monument, and it is not a territory that I want to continue to accept. The power over the people, the totalitarianism, the domination of an era manifested through this particular monument, is something I will confront repeatedly. Through this archive of drawings, photographs, and memories, I make an assemblage of parts that interact and inform each other in the hope of creating a new territory. I can also, in the future, come back to and replenish a memoir from a new territorial perspective

EXPLORING MATERIALITY BY CONSTRUCTING THE VISUAL THROUGH SOUND

This thesis provides an autoethnographic account of my exploration into sound and its capacity to shape the experience of materiality in audiovisual media. I demonstrate through film and installation works how different sound and image combinations facilitate ways of viewing that blur the boundary between seeing and hearing to form imaginative and engaging sensory experiences. The project expands on phenomenological frameworks examining the connection between embodiment and cinematic experiences, by positing how sound materiality is capable of manipulating the processes through which experience is formed. I argue that synchronous sound heightens or skews the experience a viewer has of visual objects, depending on the level of congruence observed between their respective materialities. The project has implications for the development of sound in video and artistic virtual reality works, where scoring techniques are sought to enhance immersion and expressive embodied experience. This project will be of particular interest to creative coders in the Processing and Csound community who seek to incorporate sound or visuals into their art works

EXPLORING MATERIALITY BY CONSTRUCTING THE VISUAL THROUGH SOUND

This thesis provides an autoethnographic account of my exploration into sound and its capacity to shape the experience of materiality in audiovisual media. I demonstrate through film and installation works how different sound and image combinations facilitate ways of viewing that blur the boundary between seeing and hearing to form imaginative and engaging sensory experiences. The project expands on phenomenological frameworks examining the connection between embodiment and cinematic experiences, by positing how sound materiality is capable of manipulating the processes through which experience is formed. I argue that synchronous sound heightens or skews the experience a viewer has of visual objects, depending on the level of congruence observed between their respective materialities. The project has implications for the development of sound in video and artistic virtual reality works, where scoring techniques are sought to enhance immersion and expressive embodied experience. This project will be of particular interest to creative coders in the Processing and Csound community who seek to incorporate sound or visuals into their art works

Viatopias: Exploring the experience of urban travel space

The title of this research is constructed from: `via' - route and töp(os) -a place. Viatopias are urban spaces of continual travel or flux that incorporate multiple forms of perception and inscriptions of meaning. My aim has been to define and describe the increasingly important fluid perceptual spaces that have developed between static nineteenth century destinations. Viatopias such as passageways, underground tunnels, train tracks, and the North Circular escape a sense of destination, operating as ever-changing experiences or events. The practice has sought to produce digital representations of these urban travel spaces that exist in constant flux, to communicate the experience of Viatopias. The research explores themes such as: The North Circular as a Deleuzian Route exploring driving as performance; Plica, Replica, Explica an unfolding of experience through digital media; The Making of Baroque Videos, using Baroque architectures of viewing; Mobilizing Perception treating human vision as an artifact; Mirrors For Un-Recognition disassembling nineteenth century controlled vision; Sound as an Urban Compass considering urban audio experience; Narrative Practice in New Media Space analysing contemporary approaches in digital media; and Convergent Languages, Digital Poiesis investigating the dislocation of representation in different digital languages. These conceptual frameworks developed in symbiosis with the practice. The visual practice presents a collection of digital videos that extend and complicate these concepts through experimental visual and audio techniques such as layering, repetition, anamorphic distortion, and mirroring to produce visual immersion and the fracturing of space. The concluding digital works incorporate video with audio and text resulting in integrated visual statements that attempt to stretch the viewer's perception, in the process offering a glimpse of a new experience within urban space

Musical Haptics

Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc