BENTLEY JARVIS, REENA KATZ and GEOFFREY SHEA Pitch_Patch_Pulse. McCaul between Dundas and Grange.
One common misconception about technologies is that they are neutral tools, logically designed and therefore free of human politics. To playfully complicate this assumption, the three installations that make up OCADU’s Pitch_Patch_Pulse creatively reconfigure digital media to reveal hidden possibilities and limitations embedded in everyday electronic devices.
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Geoffrey Shea, one of two OCADU professors involved, takes on digital billboards with his interactive music projection piece TRIO. Revellers will be confronted by large projections of three folk musicians jamming, while corresponding audio tracks mix together to create a song. Viewers can dial a number on their mobile devices to change musicians in the trio – there’s a pool of nine, each with a different instrument – and create a new audio mix in the process.
Shea says he chose to showcase folk music because of its politics of participation and inclusion. “Folk was started by people who felt like they had something to say, who wanted to get involved. As a genre, it puts less emphasis on technique, and makes music more accessible.”
While it might seem contradictory to link folk music and high technology, Shea explains that the connection is all about art and democracy. “Everyone is getting creative with digital media these days, so I see media art as the new folk art.”
Shea hopes that groups of people dialing in to create the perfect trio onscreen will be drawn into a conversation about advertising, individual agency and mobile devices.
“We’re increasingly surrounded by large public screens, and I’m hoping that not all of these will be advertising. People should have access to them, be able to play with them and inject their own content. I want people to leave feeling empowered, and that they might want to try something like this on their own.”
Nearby, recent OCADU grad Reena Katz hosts a digital protest piece, Empathic Maneuver (dimensions not to scale), a political rally she’ll conduct via tele-presence. Here, participants are remotely led in chants objecting to segregating fences in both North America and the Middle East, reimagining digital networks as tools of crisis, criticism and opposition.
OCADU professor Bentley Jarvis unveils Temporal Loop, a project long in the works that confronts the accelerating pace of human-machine interactions by offering slowly unfolding visual projections accompanied by sedate, Brian Eno-like soundscapes.
Jarvis’s work uses software to convert mathematical sequences into loops of geometric structures that shift and change at a glacial pace.
“I get irritated by fast jump cuts,” he says, “so I’m happy to take up and offer people the other extreme.”
However, for those with shorter attention spans, Jarvis provides six projections, each at a different stage of the transformation.
“I’ve always been fascinated by what’s underneath,” he says about visually representing the kinds of mathematical sequences that undergird digital technologies.
“It’s a narrative unfolding. It’s numbers telling a story, but it’s not a verbal or literal story. It conveys the feeling of an unfolding, but it’s as if it were in a language you can’t understand.”
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