Series of prints. 3D model of a human figure scanned with the front-facing TrueDepth camera on an iPhone, ordinarily used for facial recognition.

The stability of the process and of the subject affect the accuracy of the scan. These scans take several minutes to capture and distortions arise from movement in the subject, as well as from variations in the pace and distance of the hand operating the scanner as it moves over its target. These particular scans combine meshes with textures, but tend to confuse materials during transitions.

Despite the echo of a form, an interior and an exterior, a 3D model has no substance and is never an object. Its walls are too thin to be rightly called a skin, but that is the term we use. It has the shape of something that exists, but none of its substance, none of its physicality, none of its reality.

For Leibniz every language exists between two poles. At one extreme you have the language of the gods and angels, where every quantum of creation has a unique and true name. Every blade of grass, every grain of sand. At the other you have binary, where the entire universe and all of experience can be described by a combination of two digits. One and zero. On and off. The universe is encoded now. Our new home, bitmapped. An endless chain of binary pulses constitutes our latest cosmos, and charts for us a brave new world where the algorithm has bled into the data, and binary has become the language of the gods and angels.

Variety of work that began with an attempt to look out into the universe in all directions at once.

Planet Elsewhere: 7 Days

Sky-cam images from approximate antipodes stitched together into a binocular video that redirects its focus every 7 days. A day is mapped approximately to a minute of video.

The skycams are only approximately at antipodes, so 7 Days suffers from astigmatism. This in addition to the periodic myopia / hyperopia of all Planet Elsewhere work.

Planet Elsewhere: 7 Days is an Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission.

• 02.21 HIPERLINK - a new image of the world and man, National Museum Szczecin, Szczecin.
• 09.13 Another Way of Seeing, European Planetary Science Congress, London.
• 10.12 Restructured, Bloomsbury Festival, St.George's Church, London.
• 11.11 Planet Elsewhere, Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter.

Variety of work that began with an attempt to look out into the universe in all directions at once.

Planet Elsewhere: Cyclops

Internet work that collects the latest images from all-sky cameras from across the world and composites them into a single view. Updated every 10 minutes.

• 02.21 HIPERLINK - a new image of the world and man, National Museum Szczecin, Szczecin.
• 09.13 Another Way of Seeing, European Planetary Science Congress, London.
• 10.12 Restructured, Bloomsbury Festival, St.George's Church, London.
• 11.11 Planet Elsewhere, Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter.

Portrait.

It was dark. Way off, beyond the wasteland on the other side of the factory, a dog was barking. A fluorescent light flickered on an outside wall. The video was meant to document an object, instead it became part of a collection. Shots, scenes and locations. Echoes, impressions and atmospheres. Small things.

Zodiac randomly selects 3 clips from this collection and plays them sequentially. Before reseting and repeating. Eventually there will be 99 clips in its corpus, and a possible 941,094 possible combinations.

One camera points up, another points down, a third tracks the moon.

Kinetic object. 3 cameras embedded inside the head of a 3 meter high aluminium tripod. The head rotates and swivels to keep track of the moon.

Sound object. Hysteria listens to internet audio and parses it with the open-source CMU Sphinx2 speech recognition engine. It then plays those sounds it has identified as laughter.

Transcript: Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Grid of shoe-box sized wooden boxes mounted on French cleats. Each box has an aperture, through which you can look into another world.

Variety of work that began with an attempt to look out into the universe in all directions at once.

Planet Elsewhere: Cyclops

Internet work that collects the latest images from all-sky cameras from across the world and composites them into a single view. Updated every 10 minutes.

Planet Elsewhere: 7 Days

Sky-cam images from approximate antipodes stitched together into a binocular video that redirects its focus every 7 days. A day is mapped approximately to a minute of video.

The skycams are only approximately at antipodes, so 7 Days suffers from astigmatism. This in addition to the periodic myopia / hyperopia of all Planet Elsewhere work.

Planet Elsewhere: 7 Days is an Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission.

• 02.21 HIPERLINK - a new image of the world and man, National Museum Szczecin, Szczecin.
• 09.13 Another Way of Seeing, European Planetary Science Congress, London.
• 10.12 Restructured, Bloomsbury Festival, St.George's Church, London.
• 11.11 Planet Elsewhere, Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter.

Do not know much about Leviathan. Do know that it's a large black kinetic object, with uneven rings for ribs that slowly rotate.

Pencil on paper. Plots of the brightest points in the night sky. The computer takes photographs of the night sky and examines each pixel for its luminance level. It then joins the brightest points to make asterisms which it sends out to the plotter.

• 02.22 MASA KRYTYCZNA, Galeria Działań, Warsaw.
• 03.16 Where’s Wally? Or How to Capture a Constellation, Goodenough College, London.

The Atrocity Machine searches through and speaks DNA sequences. Within the range of 4 bases to 5 billion bases the machine accesses and spells out the organic structure of any living creature.

• 11.12: PostDigital Art, Computer Arts Congress 3, 104, Université Paris 8, Paris.
• 11.11: Planet Elsewhere, Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter.

Series of digital prints. Self portraits with the pixels arranged more logically. That is, according to their hue, saturation and luminance levels.

The portraits have recently started taking on titles.

Missing segment in book or manuscript. Cavity or depression, especially in bone. 3D anatomical models. Screen prints.

Random 3D model downloaded and reduced to a single vector. That reduction is undone one vector at a time until a form begins to take shape. A wireframe is then extracted from the model, and passed to a Grasshopper definition that automatically calculates and models the nodes.

The nodes are fabricated with a 3d printer. The vectors are measured and aluminium pipe is cut to those dimensions. The pipe and their respective nodes are fitted together.

Nobody ever knows what the model is or where it comes from, myself included.

Sound object. 3 public announcement speakers attached to ceiling. Chorus continuously reinterprets and sings through the structure of a specific text.

Using the phonetic structure of that text as a template, the computer assigns a random consonant to each consonant position, and a random vowel to each vowel position. Spaces between words and at the end of sentences are preserved.

Assigning each of the three speakers a separate channel and a separate note – F, C# and G – the computer then sings it’s new construction of consonants and vowels. After which it then loops back to generate another interpretation through the same template. The process is continuous and endless.

My thanks to the soprano, Lucetta Johnson.

• 08.08: Slow Art, SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, USA.

Computer program and terminal. Left to itself for an infinity the script would say everything. Everything that has been said. Everything that will be said. Everything that could be said.

Scrolling up the screen of the monitor is the output from a Perl script. This script works its way through the English alphabet, combining each letter with every other letter in all possible ways. In addition it runs spaces through each combination. This composes all the possible words in that combination, and consequently all it’s possible sentences. The program is open-ended. Working up from single letters it lengthens the sentence one letter at a time

• 03.08 Emerging Forms of Computer Art: Making the Digital Sense, Computer Art Congress 2, Museo de Arte Moderno, Toluca City.
• 10.04 Young Artists at CERN, CERN, Geneva.
• 09.04 Young Artists at CERN, Institute of Education, London.

Ongoing series of photogrammes, each 325mm x 325mm.

Plots of the darkest points in the night sky. The computer takes photographs of the night sky and examines each pixel for its luminance level. It then joins the darkest points to make constellations. The results are plotted with a green laser on black and white photographic paper in the dark room.

• 03.22: Seeing Stars, The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds.
• 07.22: Masa Krytyczna / Critical Mass, Galeria Działań, Warsaw.
• 03.16: Where’s Wally? Or How to Capture a Constellation, Goodenough College, London.

Full title: I Still Have the Greatest Enthusiasm and Confidence in the Mission.

The Mission takes images from a live video feed of the sky through a 6-inch refractor telescope, and uses them as a score for a seven channel theremin sound composition.

• 11.11: Planet Elsewhere, Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter.
• 10.11: Before the Crash – Art and Science Collide, The Exeter Castle, Exeter.

In the initial analysis phase Voice examines English texts and calculates the overall probability of each phonetic being spoken. It also analyses – for each phonetic – which of the other phonetics are more likely to precede and follow it.

In the articulation phase – during exhibitions – it applies the overall probability table to bias a random generator and constructs a seed sentence. It speaks this sentence through a bank of 44 speakers. Each speaker being associated with one particular phonetic.

Using the proximity probability tables, it then rearranges the phonetics in that sentence into more comfortable positions. It speaks the sentence again. It does this until it gets bored and then generates a completely new seed sentence.

My thanks to Ania Babiek for her voice.

• 04.08: soundOBJECTS, Digital Media festival, Valencia.
• 11.07: Piksel07, 3.14 Gallery, Bergen.
• 12.06: 151206, Oko/Ucho Galeria, Poznań.

A specific moment, location and direction as an object.

Photograph taken at sunset. Pixels rearranged according to hue. Image then proportionally down-sampled to 12 colours. Object constructed according to those proportions.

Computer controlled bank of signal generators that speaks by modulating sine waves to match the frequencies of a human voice.

The dials on each box rotate back and forth and at different rates, the boxes emitting the characteristic whooping sound of a signal generator as the dials turn to their designated frequencies. Human voices can clearly be heard saying something in the middle of it all.

The computer takes a recording of spoken text and constructs a table of frequencies for every few milliseconds. Each row in this list has a time-stamp and 4 frequencies split according to range. The first band contains the lowest frequencies up to 127Hz, the second 128 to 169Hz, the third 170 to 211Hz and the fourth from 212Hz up. This table is used like a musical score for one set of signal generators.

Each "voice" consists of a set of 4 generators. Each generator produces waves within its own band of frequencies. The box on the far left handles the lowest band of frequencies (up to 127Hz), the box on the far right the highest (212Hz and above). The boxes in the middle sharing the frequencies in between.

The 16 boxes constitute 4 separate voices.

The dials turn as the signal generators attempt to emit their frequencies at the designated time, something they cannot always achieve. This results in the sound going in and out of phase, of elongated frequencies pulling voices in and out of recognition and sense.

Although the last iteration ended in a regular pulsating sound, a vague burning smell and smoke.

• 04.24: Under Erasure, Galeria Łęctwo, Poznań.
• 10.11: Before the Crash – Art and Science Collide, The Exeter Castle, Exeter.

2009 – ongoing. Series of digital inkjet prints mounted on aluminium. 1000mm x 1000mm.

Photographs of urban architecture rearranged according to the HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminance) values of the individual pixels.

• 02.21 HIPERLINK - a new image of the world and man, National Museum Szczecin, Szczecin.
• 10.16: Digital Art: Archiving and Questioning Immateriality, Computer Arts Congress 5, Paris.
• 03.16 Where’s Wally? Or How to Capture a Constellation, Goodenough College, London.
• 06.10 No Explanation, Galeria Arsenal, Poznań.
• 07.09 URBAN (R)EVOLUTIONS #2: URBAN STILLS, Festival Miden, Kalamata.

Variety of work that begun with Lost in Space: Robby and is moving toward an opera.

Lost in Space: Robby consists of 4 tape recorders. Each machine plays a single word of Robby the robot’s catchphrase – that does not compute – from the Sci-Fi series Lost in Space. The pauses between each repetition are regular but different for each word, causing the words to fall in and out of sync.

• 11.11: Planet Elsewhere, Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter.

Computer program and wide-screen monitor. Left to itself for a very long but finite period, the screen would generate every possible image at increasingly better resolution. Photographs from every dream and nightmare, from all pasts and futures – actual, possible and inconceivable.

The whole screen starts as one pixel. The program goes through all possible combinations of RGB for this single pixel. That is to say, every combination of the 256 reds, 256 greens and 256 blues that can make up a pixel. It then splits the screen horizontally and vertically, and combines each pixel with every other pixel on the screen in all possible configurations – and in all of each pixels own possible RGB combinations. The program keeps splitting the screen until it reaches the size of an actual pixel.

• 09.12: Media-Scape Biennale, Zagreb.
• 12.10: Triple Conjunction: Magic, Myths and Mutations, PixxelPoint Festival, Nova Gorica.

18 fluorescent strip lights, 18 timers and 18 relays. 3 or 4 dogs.

• 05.04: Reading Spaces, Galeria Plastyfikatory, Lubon.

The computer downloads random audio streams from the internet. It feeds those streams into Sphinx II, which - regardless of the source - transcribes them into an English text.

Concurrently The Monolith constructs a voice by splicing the audio streams themselves into individual phonetic sounds, which it sorts into folders.

It then speaks its English text by pasting together sound files randomly drawn from the appropriate folders. As soon as a phonetic file is used it is erased.

The whole process is continuous and endless.

Just a bunch of lockers... and electric motors hooked up to a car battery.

• 02.02: Critical Curtain, Bloomsbury Theatre, London.