The h2o project was initially driven by a desire to experiment with the mutability of digital photography and a fascination for how scientific technologies could be used to visualise otherwise invisible phenomena. I was interested in how the aesthetic qualities of air and water could give agency in distinctive communicative contexts. The dataset of digitally captured image files in the local hard drives of the digital archive was used as raw material in numerous cycles of digital practice. The experiments include traditional static media types and speculative immersive and interactive image installations. h2o finally emerged as a public art Installation–Forecasting (2016) – a tangible outcome for embodied experience of the image at the Spring Hill Baths.Exhibitions
How can the hyper-latent image be grounded in physical space to create an embodied experience, while simultaneously retaining ephemeral qualities?
Forecasting’s approach to image presentation represents an early move towards public art that employs dimensions of placemaking, where people-to-people relations occurred away from digital networks in a place harmonious with a local community’s needs. The social and cultural significance of the site was considered a means for shaping the phenomenological perceptions of water through interaction and corporeal experience of actual space, motion, and gravity as a post-digital spatial experience that resists reason and literal meanings attributed to the commodity sphere of the online digital world.
Forecasting was limited to experimenting heuristically and intuitively in a very relaxed and informal way within a culturally significant place that is meaningful to the community. This approach emerged from questioning how the artefacts and practice might be further transformed and move away from standardised technological devices and externalised artificial methods for immersion and interactivity, which come at the expense of internalised phenomenological experiences. The act of going to an exhibition becomes an integral part of the experience, the apprehension of entering an intimate space made public, the social interaction, the ebb and flow of the work itself. Stepping outside of ideas of where and what contemporary art should be (Brisbane Artist Run Initiatives Festival 2016, 3).
Forecasting changed the direction of the research in this thesis. . The projects that followed it involved the exploration of embedding imagery into three-dimensional public spaces as resistance to standardised proprietary platforms.
Above: From inside the installation as experienced from the audience point of view. The experience could be described as an immersive, shared, float tank with a responsive musical improvisation.
Above: Video documentation of the collaborative installation with >3 and cello improvisation by Linda Hwang. This wide shot, of the 10:41 piece looped over 2 hours, shows the location and intermittent audience interactivity.
Above: Extract from the BARI Festival Program 2016. Full program download. This collaborative immersive installation and performance at the Spring Hill Baths curated by the BARI16 Festival (Brisbane Artist Run Initiatives), October 22, 2016. the BARI16 Festival (Brisbane Artist Run Initiatives 2016).
How can the hyper-latent image be used to frame a digital practice?
The h2o dataset was used to produce video imagery use in Forecasting (above). It was also used to produce the moving image exhibited in Precious (2015) and the speculative data visualisation that was proposed to The Cube (2015).
A Photron FASTCAM SA-Z was used to capture ultra-high-speed macro image sequences of the rising bubbles. This scientific imaging instrument can capture frame rates up to 120,000 frames per second. The 34,119 raw images were captured at 16,000 frames per second over just two seconds, which produced a lengthy twenty-two-minute and forty-five-second moving image when played back at the video standard of twenty-five frames per second. The video rendering above is a relatively fast variation of the original sequence. The imagery was temporally remapped in Adobe After Effects software to modulate the compression of time and space and render the details perceptible. The digital video renderings forensically expose the constantly changing forces of physics acting upon water and air to form a slow and contemplative visualisation of water and air under pressure.
Above: A 2:25 moving image captured at 16,000 frames/second. (Electronic music in this file courtesy FASE).
A single breath of carbon dioxide expelled from my lungs through a rubber tube inserted into the bottom of a glass tank caused a two-second burst of bubbles ranging from approximately 2mm to 30mm in diameter. The bubbles increased in size as they approached the tank's surface due to Boyle's law, in which the volume of a gas at a constant temperature varies inversely with the pressure exerted on it. As the bubbles rose, the variable pressures inside and outside their surfaces caused rapid volcanic-like eruptions.
Above: This diagram, made with SketchUp, illustrates the studio set-up, including the positions of the light, one of the high-speed cameras used, the tank, and the air intake and their relative scale.
Above: This diagram shows a variation of the set-up with three air outlets. This scenario intended to produce more bubbles with differing scales and speeds to create greater scene depth and dimension due to the camera motion's parallax effect relative to the bubbles' positions as the camera circled the tank at high speed.
These still photographs were recorded with a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera and specialised high-speed stroboscopic flash equipment that emitted a pulse of light at 1/19,000th of a second to render the rapidly moving bubbles with a high degree of clarity. These inert sculptural forms reveal the glass-like structures of the bubbles suspended in time and space. Despite the aesthetic similarity of the image surface and its repetition across the still and moving image artefacts, their differences are in the experience of time and its subjective contemplation. Rather than attempting to understand the nature of air and water physics through one means of spatiotemporal representation over another, these differences offer a unique audience experience in each instance. While the moving image offers a rational and scientific representation of physics and spatial change over time, the stasis of the still image defies it.
Above left: A single framed digital giclée print of this image was exhibited in Plenty at the Brisbane Powerhouse from September 27 to October 23, 2016.
Above: These images were aquired by Condé Nast Traveller for Spirited Away–a promotional print publication in the March 2016 (UK Edition), with a circulation of 80,000 copies worldwide (see below).
Spirited Away was an advertorial for the Healing Holiday’s travel promotion for the Vana well-being retreat at the Vana Malsi Estate near Dehradun in Northern India. This publication, both in print and online, reflects both ontological aspects of the hyper-latent image and in their most straightforward form.
Reflexively questioning the virtualisation and commodification of space and human interaction led to the post-digital turn, which became fundamental to the transformation of practice. This period was motivated by a rejection of the mass media, which shifted the research to focus on human presence and interaction in physical spaces of cultural significance.
Above: Spirited Away, 2016. Condé Nast Traveller (UK Edition) Advertorial print publication. Circulation 80 000 copies worldwide.
The h2o still files from the digital archive were composited in a 3D workspace in Adobe After Effects by arranging them spatially, one in front of the next, in Z-space–the virtual third dimension often referred to as 2.5D–and a virtual camera was used to create the motion as it tracked forwards through the static ultra-high definition DSLR files. However, this prototype was a failure due to the limitations of how the technology could produce the type of embodied experience I was pursuing.
Above: Prototype video imagery for a virtual reality fly-through constructed in After Effects from still photographs. This monocular video was created by compositing the still files in a 3D workspace in Adobe After Effects. The 1080p video file was exported as a left and right stereo pair for viewing inside the head-mounted display. This approach combined the frozen aesthetic of the still imagery’s inert sculptural forms with the forward motion typically associated with VR ‘flythroughs’.
A proposal for h2o was made for The Cube’s interactive touch screens to visualise the quantity of water required for consumer products by connecting it to the Water Footprint Network.
This proposal for a large-scale interactive visualisation screen was made for the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which offers ongoing residencies for artists and designers to produce content and interactive concepts for The Cube, which according to QUT is: ‘One of the world's largest digital interactive learning and display spaces consisting of 48 multi-touch screens and soaring across two storeys in QUT's Science and Engineering Centre. The Cube delivers unique interactive digital learning experiences which communicate science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) concepts and bring research to the public’ (Queensland University of Technology 2023).
The design proposal contextualised h2o as an interactive data visualisation that aimed to promote awareness of increasing water scarcity by communicating the quantities of water used to produce and consume everyday products and services. It used open-source data of water footprints, a concept for 'the calculation of water needs for consumer products [...] defined as the total annual volume of fresh water used to produce goods and services for consumption' (Gerbens-Leenes, Hoekstra and van der Meer 2009). The Cube’s interactive touch screens would visualise the quantity of water required for consumer products by connecting the Water Footprint Network data for products to specific bubbles from the h2o imagery as they traversed The Cubes touch screen surfaces. User interactions with the bubbles would trigger textual data revealing the water consumption of specific products.
Above: This image is of a slide from the pitch deck for an interactive data visualisation of h2o proposed for The Cube, QUT (Queensland University of Technology). The 48 touch panels are distributed across four zones along the bottom of the two-storey high-definition screens with coverage of 170 square metres. It was proposed that the textual water consumption data be revealed at the bottom of these screens as visitors ‘popped’ the bubbles.
An interactive video made with Wirewax as a low-fidelity prototype to test and communicate the design approach in simple terms, without the need for The Cube’s infrastructure. Wirewax is a proprietary online software-as-service that can enable users to interact with video content through prompts to clickable elements such as hotspots, overlays and branching between two or more videos.
Above: The interactive prototype for a water consumption data visualisation made from the h2o still images. Touching the concentric circles or using a mouse to click on the bubbles reveals The Water Footprint Network data sources and the quantity of water used to produce specific products i.e. 15400 litres of water are required to produce 1 kilogram of beef.
This video was made as a communicative tool in support of the pitch to The Cube. It demonstrates the various approaches to using the image data using different techniques and approaches. This video is paced slowly and was made for discussion purposes and as a didactic in an exhibition context.
Above: Video Documentation (2015) of the iterative design process for discussion purposes with QUT. Electronic Music in rendered video short by FASE.
The exhibition, curated by Associate Professor Marian Drew, aimed to activate an audience’s sense of wonder for the ecosystems in which we live by raising questions about human interconnectedness and interdependence on the natural world as inseparable to human well-being.
Above: Screenshot of Exhibition Details extracted from the Brisbane Powerhouse Website
Above: The Brisbane Powerhouse Facebook page promoting Plenty in 2016. Source: Brisbane Powerhouse, 2016. "Plenty Visual Art Exhibition Brisbane Powerhouse." Facebook, September 27, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/events/brisbane-powerhouse/plenty-visual-art-exhbition-brisbane-powerhouse/1814789532088977/.
Above: Exhibition Details promoted by Griffith Center for Artistic Research (GCAR). Extracted from the GCAR website, which is no longer active.
The first public reception of h2o was in 2015 as a contribution to Precious: The Lure of Skill, a group exhibition curated by Professor Ross Woodrow and Lynden Stone for the Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research (GCAR) exhibition and shown at the Bosz Gallery in Brisbane, Australia from the 19th of August to the 12th of September 2015. The work exhibited was a simple eight-minute forty-five-second looping video file on a wall-mounted iPad touchscreen. The limited agency in this context, as a relatively standard form of pre-recorded media in a standard gallery space with an interior design and display method that resembles retail shops, led to the desire to expand the possibilities for experiencing the ephemerality of the immaterial data as embodied corporeal phenomenon using computer-mediated environments, which led to Forecasting (2016). The aim was to test the notions of immersion and interactivity in virtual space rather than limiting it to the neutral space of art gallery walls where touching artwork is generally discouraged.
Above: Screenshot, Griffith Center for Artistic Research (GCAR). Extracted from the GCAR website, which is no longer active.
Above: Brisbane Art Guide, 2015. "Precious: The Lure of Skill" Website, accessed December 18, 2016. https://bneart.com/precious-the-lure-of-skill/