The enduring telematic vision of a coexistent third space

I have been continually producing telematic telepresent artworks since the 1990s but in recent years I am occasionally asked if my audiences respond differently today because of the ubiquity of Zoom. The short answer is no! These telepresent installations are everything that video chat is not. My telematic artworks have been and continue to be intimate phenomenological encounters between the self as other and another participant in a coexistent third space. Zoom, conversely, has condemned us to boxes of talking heads. Amongst others, my Telematic Vision (1993) installation is not merely concerned with networked communication, it is often produced between two adjacent rooms, as was recently the case for Topologies of the Real: Techne Shenzhen 2023. In this instance, the specular television image is the portal to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘extension of bodily synthesis’ and has more in common with Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha than it ever will with Zoom

In situ analysis of CO during chemisorption and oxidation on graphite: Supported Pt by FTIR-microspectrometry

For chemisorption and oxidation on Pt/HOPG (highly-orientated pyrolytic) graphite, reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR)-microspectrometry reveals a variable state and reactivity for CO. Even for model surface science systems, where surface heterogeneity is minimal, surface diffusion may be too slow relative to the reaction rate to avoid segregation of reactants into surface islands under steady-state conditions. Thus in CO oxidation on Pt (where the relevant surface diffusion coefficients are such that D sub O less than D sub CO) then reactant CO islands exists at the perimeters of which the surface reaction is thought to occur. Furthermore CO can chemisorb on metals in linear and bridge forms to extents which vary with precise faces predominantly exposed coverage, etc. Infrared has long been used to probe the nature of adsorbed CO on model film and heterogeneous surfaces, but it may now be that FTIR-microspectrometry will allow the state of this adsorbate and reactant to be investigated with a spatial resolution of 4.4 microns on model (and real) catalytic surfaces

Bio-encounters

Presented in an exhibition of shortlisted proposals for a new public art work at the Huxley Building, University of Brighton, for Brighton Digital Festival, 14th to 23rd September 2017. This new project proposal for the Huxley Building Public Art Commission is a development on two previous telematic public art installations by Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould: Screen Machine in 2016 and Peoples Screen from 2015, originally commissioned by Public Art Lab Berlin for the Connecting Cities network of urban screen projects. In this new project entitled ‘Bio-encounters’ Sermon and Gould have considered the technical and conceptual aspects of the former works to develop and propose an original site-specific interactive telematic art installation, linking live audience groups between indoor and outdoor entrance areas at the Huxley building. This new installation pushes the playful, social and public engagement aspects of their work into new arts and science realms in an attempt to address the pharmacy and biomolecular themes of the commission. The proposed project picks up on the need for a shared visual language and experience that allows a diverse public audience to physically engage with the current research and taught subjects in the Huxley Building through improvised performative interaction as their means of visual dialogue. Using a tried and tested telematic concept and technique, the installation takes live oblique camera shots from above the screens of two separate audience groups connected over a networked video link. Both groups are located on retro-reflective green-screen steps, and are then combined via a chroma-key video switcher in a single composited image displayed simultaneously on each screen. As the merged audiences start to explore this collaborative, shared telepresent space they discover the ground beneath them, as it appears on screen as a digital backdrop, locates them in a variety of surprising and intriguing anamorphic biomolecular environments. These backgrounds directly reference their scientific and social settings, containing converged scenes from these communities in a three dimensional ludic landscape