OSLO LUX

CINIMOD STUDIOS 

Dominic Harris (UK) is the founder and creative director of Cinimod Studios. He qualified as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, where he was awarded a distinction for his work in interactive design in architecture. His interest in integrating technology and interaction within architecture has been evident through much of his professional work, and now forms the basis of the design studio he formed several years ago. Dominic has a fascination with lighting and electronics, which is evident in the highly innovative lighting schemes that he brings to each of his projects.

Most recently, Cinimod Studio scooped two top prizes at the 2012 Lighting Design Awards.

• KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Evan ROTH

In Open Source and Public Space, Evan Roth (US) will discuss the influence of the open source development model when creating public space projects and the subsequent impact of releasing those projects freely. Using a hacker philosophy and Torvold’s “Lazy Like a Fox” as his ethos, Roth will focus on light based pieces such as LED Throwies, Laser Tag, Graffiti Analysis and the Eyewriter.

Evan Roth is an American artist based in Paris who applies a hacker philosophy to an art practice that visualizes transient moments in public space, online and in popular culture. In 2012, Roth was awarded the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

• KEYNOTE SPEAKER

CUPPETELLI and MENDOZA

Annica Cuppetelli (USA) and Cristobal Mendoza (VE) are artists and collaborators focusing on the creation of site-specific, multimedia installations that address issues of space, interaction, and materiality. Their collaborative work has been exhibited since 2010 in festivals such as FILE (BRA), FAD (BRA), video_dumbo (NYC, USA), ISEA and Currents (Santa Fe, NM), among others. Cuppetelli obtained her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008. Mendoza obtained his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University. They are based in Detroit, MI.

Notional Field is part of a series of works that investigate ideas of phenomenology and perception, focused through an exploration of the relationships between the physical and the virtual. Aesthetically and conceptually the work borrows from the Light and Space movement of the 1960’s, as well as from Kinetic Art (and specifically Venezuelan Constructivism), which we attempt to fuse with ideas and materials borne out of digital technologies. The piece also revolves around the idea of interface, which is interpreted as the point of contact between two different entities, and is displayed in the work in several ways.

• SPEAKER
• EXHIBITED WORK : NOTIONAL FIELD

HC GILJE

HC Gilje (NO) works with installations, live performance, set design and single-channel video. Gilje has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues, theatres and cinemas, galleries, festivals, outdoors and through several international DVD releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave.

He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of dance company kreutzerkompani.

For the last five years Gilje has focused on animated light/shadows, projected light objects and projected light spaces.

• SPEAKER

Ruairi GLYNN

Ruairi Glynn (UK) is an artist who builds interactive kinetic installations that reveal the primacy of movement above and beyond colour, form and texture in human visual perception. His work draws on a rich heritage of cybernetics, puppetry, dance and architecture to achieve this. He has exhibited his work inter-nationally, most recently at the Centre Pompidou Paris, the National Art Museum Beijing, Seoul’s Olympic Museum of Art, Sao Paulo’s Itau Cultural, Beall Center Los Angeles, the Madrid Art Fair, the Kunsthaus Graz and London Design Festival. In August 2012 he exhibited his largest and most ambitious art work to date titled “Fearful Symmetry” at the Tate Modern in London.

Mixing animatronics, with domestic home furniture, The Lamp & The Glowworm is an interactive installation in the tradition of surrealist intervention. It explores the human capacity to suspend disbelief, projecting life into things that in all rational terms are devoid of life and the emotional connections that can form through interaction. Credits: Ruairi Glynn, Robin Skytte Jensen & Mie Dinesen, with Richard Roberts, Ollie Palmer, Johan Hindal Grimsæth, Victoria Hovland, Anna Theresa Lyst Rubin and Lena Gade

• SPEAKER
• EXHIBITED WORK : THE LAMP AND THE GLOWWORK

Ilan KATIN

Ilan Katin (US) has worked in a wide variety of disciplines including graphic design, illustration, comics, installations and animation. His illustrations, logos and character designs have been featured in a variety of online and print publications. In 2003 he began working in the field of live video. He has performed individually and collaboratively, for intimate art events and theatre pieces to countless, large scale VJ sets in a variety of locations in the Americas and -Europe. His work is deceptively simple and iconographic, distinctive for laboriously rehearsed projects or performances with meticulously produced animation sequences or simple, live drawing improvisations.

Ana X is a site specific installation that utilizes projections and sound to form a dialog between us and the presence of those who may have once occupied the space, and perhaps still do. Being aware of the historical significance of the space, we will use light and sound as a method for touching the walls and columns of the room. Given the nature of sound, we imagine it as bouncing off surfaces, with projection acting as a visual stimulation or interpretation, sometimes connected to the sound directly, other times not, so as to both defy and correspond with nature.

• SPEAKER
• EXHIBITED WORK : ANA X

KIMCHI and CHIPS Elliot Woods

Kimchi and Chips is a Seoul based art and design studio founded by Elliot Woods (UK) and Mimi Son (KR). They are known for discovering novel interactions involving people and media materials, discovering new technical and artistic paradigms. They formed in 2009 to combine the disciplines of code, form, material, concept and mechanism, and since then have created installations and dialogues which have been exhibited on four continents. They create an emulsion of imagined reality within our physical world, in order to develop natural interactions between people, nature and the possibilities of the digital network.

Elliot will present Kimchi and Chips’ provocations towards possible visual futures, a brief discussion on sight perception, and the influence of intermediation for visual art projects.

• SPEAKER

Einar Sneve MARTINUSSEN

Einar Sneve Martinussen (NO) is an interaction designer and researcher working with technology, cities and everyday life. He is a part of a team at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design working with exploring and visualising invisible technological structures in cities, such as wireless networks, data-streams and satellite signals. Einar and his colleagues Timo Arnall and Jørn Knutsen are best known for visualising wireless networks in the film ‘Immaterials: Light painting WiFi’, that was first presented at Oslo LUX in 2011.

Einar will present and exhibit Satellite Lamps, an ongoing project about exploring and visualising how GPS takes place in urban environments. Einar and the team have looked at the relationships between urban space, time and satellite geometry, and design and develop instruments and techniques for visualising the presence and the fluctuations of satellite signals.

• SPEAKER
• EXHIBITED WORK : SATELITE LAMPS

SEMICONDUCTOR  Joe Gerhardt

Semiconductor (UK) is artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Through moving image works they explore the material nature of our world and how we experience it, questioning our place in the physical universe. Their unique approach has won them many awards and prestigious fellowships, most recently the ‘Samsung Art + Prize’ 2012 for new media, the ‘Golden Gate Award for New Visions’ at San Francisco International Film Festival USA 2012 and the ‘Art and Science Award’ at Ann Arbor Film Festival USA.

Heliocentric uses time-lapse photography and astronomical tracking to plot the sun’s trajectory across a series of landscapes. The entire environment feels to pan past the camera whilst the sun stays in the centre of each frame, enabling us to gauge the earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun. As the sun’s light becomes disrupted by passing weather conditions and the environment through which we encounter it, it audibly plays them as if it were a stylus.

• SPEAKER
• EXHIBITED WORK : HELIOCENTRIC

SQUIDSOUP Anthony Rowe

Squidsoup (UK/NO/NZ) is an international group of artists, researchers and designers working with digital and interactive media experiences. Their work combines sound, physical space and virtual worlds to produce immersive and emotive headspaces where participants can take active control of their experience. Anthony Rowe is a founder of Squidsoup, and also a Research Fellow at Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

Submergence transforms physical space into a Mixed Reality environment where virtual and real worlds coincide. The result is an immersive walkthrough experience that uses light to alter our perceptions of space and presence. The experience is akin to walking through an abstract virtual environment, where pixels on a screen are replaced by thousands of points of light floating in space. These points of light create evocations and atmospheres, presence and movement, in physical space.

• SPEAKER
• EXHIBITED WORK : SUBMERGENCE

Stahl STENSLIE

Stahl Stenslie (NO) is a visual artist, curator and media researcher specializing in experimental art and design.  He has been exhibiting and lecturing at major international events (ISEA, DEAF, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH), represented Norway at the 5th biennial in Istanbul and won awards like the Grand Prize of the Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs for new media and traditional artistic expression. He has been a professor both the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany and at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), and is currently Obel Professor of Art and Technology at Aalborg University, Denmark.

• SPEAKER

Marius WATZ

Marius Watz (NO) is an artist working with visual abstraction through generative software processes. His work focuses on the synthesis of form as the product of parametric behaviors. He is known for hard-edged geometrical forms and vivid colors, with outputs ranging from pure software works to public projections and physical objects produced with digital fabrication technology.

Watz has exhibited extensively and internationally. He is a lecturer in Interaction Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and is currently based in New York and Oslo.

Prime Hex B (2013) is a time-based light installation in which fluorescent tubes mounted in a hexagonal grid structure are switched on and off according to individually assigned time. All assigned intervals are unique prime numbers, giving the installation its name, and significantly affecting the behavior of the installation. If given enough time the system is mathematically guaranteed to iterate through every possible permutation of on/off grid elements.

The origin of the Prime series was the 2010 public art commission for the Bybanen light rail in Bergen. The prime number logic was chosen to reduce repetition and eliminate the inevitable bias of pre-programmed content.

• SPEAKER
• EXHIBITED WORK : PRIME HEX B

INTERACTIVE SPACES Liselott STENFELDT

Liselott Stenfeldt (SE) works at Interactive Spaces, part of the Alexandra Institute, in Aarhus, Denmark. The Interactive Spaces works with projects focusing on IT integrated into physical surroundings (such as rooms and buildings in which we live and work, the landscapes and the public- and urban spaces in which we move). In all projects the aim is to push boundaries of research, design, architecture, engineering and software – existing form and functions, to create something new.

The focus of Liselott’s talk will be on the public installation SwingScape and the design issues in the development of interactive installations like this, featuring kinesthetic interaction and immersive music experiences.

• SPEAKER

Meghan REYNARD

Blending analog and digital technologies, Meghan Reynard (US) makes works of sculpture, installation, photography and video that utilize light to explore perceptions of natural and spatial phenomena. Developing from practices in art, architecture and design, and research into perceptual psychology, optics, and the environment, Meghan’s work addresses and responds to unease in the relationship between humans and their physical environments.

Thicket is a project developing from a series of research questions on the interaction between daylight and the environment. The research aims to speculate on how we “read” or interpret daylight and the passage of time depending on interactions between daylight and surrounding physical and built environments.

The project explores tension and potential between immaterial light and physical matter, introducing questions on the significance of physical structure versus non-physical phenomena in the production of the work. The work itself blurs the boundaries between tangible and intangible. In viewing the work, the static structure appears to alternate between physical and non-physical, at times appearing solid, and at other times blending in with its surroundings, as moving shadows push forward and appear as tangible, physical form.

• SPEAKER
• EXHIBITED WORK : THICKET

Andy Graydon

Andy Graydon (US) is a multidisciplinary sound, film, and installation artist.  As part of Oslo Lux 2013, Graydon will install a variation of his work Band Pass, in which a single white line of video light moves slowly over a pile of stones and debris. It is unclear to the viewer whether the pile is made from the raw materials for future building, or if it is the remains of a demolition or a structure’s decay. Whether pre- or post-construction, the pile represents a position near the bottom of the arc of becoming: an entropic assembly of material either to be composed or decomposing. Across this, the white line of light cuts a kind of index mark, a way of traversing the material’s topography in time. The line of light operates dually, at once “playing” the rough material texture and form that it glides across, while simultaneously being deformed by that very material texture and form.

• EXHIBITED WORK : BAND PASS

PRETTY CONCRETE

A collaboration between Svein Inge Bjorkhaug (NO) and Nick Stevens (NZ). The pair have produced artwork together since graduating from the Oslo School of Architecture at Design (AHO) with Masters degrees in Interaction Design. Pretty Concrete aims to explore the possibilities that projectors offer, especially in bringing interactive artworks into the urban environment where the general public can be surprised while observing and interacting with the pieces. Nick teaches Interaction Design at AHO while Svein is part of a UBC research project at AHO redesigning the control centre of ships’ bridges.

While at first the piece seems a simple projection of vertical lines on a screen, when users touch or deform the flexible screen these lines immediately respond by forming contours encircling that point of touch. This instant and perfectly mapped response is quite beguiling, enticing the user to explore the artwork further and encouraging friends to experience it with them. The projected images and lines almost appear holographic, floating above the surface.

This artwork was made with the help of Norsk Kulturråd and AHO.

• EXHIBITED WORK : AURORA NEBULA

One Stunt a Month

One Stunt a Month is a collaboration between designers Edith Isdal (NO) and Nick Stevens (NZ), who started working together after completing their Masters degrees at Oslo School of Architecture and Design in 2011.

With the intention of creating one piece a month, Edith and Nick pull stunts which are location-specific, ephemeral installations exploring diverse media, methods and expressions. The pieces are short-lived, sometimes only lasting a few hours before being dismantled or stolen; others are not even seen by the general public.

Plasma is a tangible installation inviting the public to engage, explore and play, transforming the courtyard of ROM into an interactive playground. Large glowing spheres can be rolled, kicked and bounced like adult moon hoppers creating a rapidly changing visual effect as the glowing liquid inside traces its way around the rolling spheres. In keeping with the temporal nature of their previous artworks, once illuminated, the spheres will immediately start to decay and fade out over a few hours.

• EXHIBITED WORK : PLASMA

AARSETH and NESHEIM

Nuun, a project designed by Kristian Aarseth (NO) and Martin Nesheim (NO), effectively harvests daylight to provide indoor daylighting, heating and ventilation.  The project aims to optimize indoor climate for enhanced well-being, using cost effective and environmentally friendly solar energy.  The system is designed to operate on the roof of buildings, where sunlight is utilized to transmit natural light and thermal heating into the building interior.  The system can adapt to existing buildings in order to meet the demands of the future.

• EXHIBITED WORK : NUUN