Mark Cypher

Biogram is a net-art work that generates real-time topological visual and aural models based on the sentiment analysis of tweets that reference ‘experience.’

The artwork contends that rather than being a singular subjective event, the space of experience is entangled with multiple networks of human and nonhuman objects that help us perform what we might express as ‘experience’. To tweet is to perform a prescribed script that, in turn, orders our actions with and through devices. In Brian Massumi’s words, these tweets are Biograms, event-perceptions irretrievably entangled with combinations of senses, times, networks, and software; in constant flux. Likewise in the artwork, the generated images, animations, and sounds are intimate signatures of this networked and partially ephemeral activity.

The river is everywhere at once, is a net-art work that generates animated topographical compositions and sounds derived from the text in tweets that include the keyword landscape. The Twitter tweet refers to a point in time that takes on a new form and meaning when viewed in different contexts. When seen in this way, a tweet contributes to an expanded sense of place as a composite of space and time, network and process, or in Michel Serres’s terms, a topology. The emergence of new topologies and their connotations in a tweet’s re-translation in new contexts is revealed in the asynchronous, overlapping, and cyclical flow of our connections in different networks. The net-art work “The river is everywhere at once” references how tweets move us to a point in time quickly made composite, ambiguous, and unanticipated through the ever-changing nature of our relations in a network.

A house, for all intense purposes, looks like a static object. But a house is actually in constant movement, made up of and indeed constantly altered by many intersecting and dynamic interests from both within and without. In this way, a house is seen as a navigation through a negotiated data scape, and a contested gathering of many conflicting demands. This work attempts to show how various trajectories of data that surround and intersect with a house render it as a moving project.

The installation "Darwin" attempts to chart the real-time evolution of the ‘Darwinism’ meme. The work is generated from the activity of neo-Darwinist and Intelligent Design blogs. Computer software harvests semantic information gathered from these internet sites and then transforms this data into a virtual three-dimensional construction. Effectively spotlighting the traffic of these internet sites, Darwin is a graphic portrayal of real-time internet activity. Appropriating technologies designed for gaming software and internet data harvesting, Cypher has created a work that offers the viewer/participant a glimpse of the internet in action. From the foundation of a virtual still point of reference – the head of Charles Darwin - the activity seems to visibly grow as it interacts with the rendered portrait. The forms and patterns that result are snapshots in time of the mutating “memory-in-the-system” that was once Charles Darwin and Darwinism.

CRITICAL MASSES is a multidisciplinary pilot project that seeks to graphically represent and mediate the histories, spaces and narratives informing former nuclear installations within central Australia. These include the abandoned British atomic test sites at Emu Field and Maralinga, the ICBM/IRBM rocket launchers at Woomera, and the decommissioned US National Security Agency early-warning satellite base at Nurrungar. Significantly, each of these Cold War sites are situated in either hazardous, remote, secure and/or culturally sensitive areas and require sophisticated analysis and negotiation in order to best render their complexity for both online access and on-site tourism. A multi-tiered approach (re)creating these locations is being modeled across platforms for diverse audiences. Digital materials are being authored and designed for stand-alone DVDs, online interactive sites and archives, an immersive/simulated space for interpretation centres, and augmented/enhanced reality interfaces via GPS and mobile/handheld devices in-situ at key sites. In this presentation Murdoch University team members will demonstrate strategies for presenting audio-visual archives, remote topographies and oral histories for both virtual and physical tourists accessing these 'compromised' locales.

The installation Concrescence enables participants to accumulate virtual objects onto their shadow, generating hybrid compositions of subjects, objects and sounds Concrescence is a term used in biology and refers to the growing together of related parts or growth by the increase of the addition of particles. Similarly the term is also employed by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to designate the growing together of diverse elements into a newly evolving entity, that never fully congeals.

Likewise, the installation Concrescence is a metaphor for the hybrid combinations of object and subject that are formed through a lifetime of intimate relations with objects: where do we start and where do they begin?. Marx defined human social relations as constructed through relationships we have with commodities. Likewise, the collective force of social, economic and personal interaction with these "economic cell forms" (commodities) changes the identity and meaning of both objects and subjects. Concrescence suggests that the relationships that we have with objects are far more mutable and intricate, inevitably involving many more materials, ideas and agencies than current definitions of subjects or objects can explain.

Biophilia enables participants to interact with and generate organic forms based on distortion of their shadows. Coined in 1984 by sociobiologist Edward 0. Wilson, “biophilia” refers to the need of living things to connect with others, even those of different species. Biophilia attempts to absorb and synthesize users and their contexts, producing unpredictable patterns of propagation and hybridity.

A number of myths and metaphors are used to describe the origin of picture making, most of which involve shadows. Plato’s cave allegory describes how our understanding of the world through vision is not necessarily the same as what is physically visible. Within Biophilia, participants and their shadows are synthesized into a larger cultural picture of self and place yet reduced to a derivative echo containing both “resemblance and menace.” The shadow resembles the participant, a virtual manifestation of the relationship the user has with the screen, at once reduced to a two-dimensional image that menacingly begins to merge with other organisms in the same screen space without consent nor care for the sovereignty of the user’s concept of self and space.

Within Biophilia, the relationships between inside and outside can also be expressed between computer code and interiority, known and unknown. Code sits beneath the surface and can be auto-poetic and capable of self-organization, producing scary unknown emergent properties. The coding process produces these self-organizing properties in the darkness of the machine, eluding attempts to construct clean boundaries between known and unknown.

Likewise, Biophilia creates hybrid forms, which emerge through the complex interaction between theory and practice, matter and representation, where what matters is not necessarily human.

The practice and making of artificial life is a metaphor for neo Darwinist ideas about nature and the evolution of organisms. There are numerous convincing arguments for and against Darwin ’s theories. Indeed the ideas hidden within Darwin ’s narratives depend as much upon who is telling the story, when it is being told and by whom, without forgetting the organic species themselves. In fact one could easily discuss the evolution of the ‘story’ of the evolution of a species. Similarly the artwork, “Gardenus” allows the user to change one of Darwin’s evolutionary tales and as such participate in the endless reproductive possibility of the signification of an organism.