PROJECTS

Culture and Environment Media Archive Toolset

Culture and Environment Media Archive Toolset (CEMAT) Understanding how place, the environment, and community inform one another is valuable for reflecting on how decisions we make today impact the environment. The complexity in the combination of the soundscape, peoples' experience, and image make it challenging to analyze and communicate relationships between experiences, memory and the world as it is. New tools using artificial intelligence based on facilitating search and analysis of data can reveal patterns that help in understanding these relationships for community building and art-making process.

The overall objective for this research is to develop a database revolving around an ontology - a flexible data-structure expressed as an associative network that allows reasoning about the relationships of concepts in a domain. This ontology and the subsequent database is media agnostic and is applied to sound, image, mapping and historical data to assist in revealing resources for uncovering connections to assist in communication and media art creation. As a research tool, the database is used by artists, indigenous practitioners, and environmental scientists for archival, location-specific resources, and artistic creation.

Audio Metaphor

Audio Metaphor is an interactive system that presents itself as a search engine in which the audience is invited to enter an expression or a sentence that will serve as a request to an automatic soundscape generation system. Enter "The waterfalls inundate the city" or "The marshmallows explode in the campfire" and it will sound like it in quadraphonic! This interactive audio installation is questioning the ubiquity of information, be it real or fake, actual or synthetic. Using state of the art algorithms for sound retrieval, segmentation, background and foreground classification, automatic mixing and automatic soundscape affect recognition. Audio Metaphor is a powerful system that generates believable soundscape at interactive rate. The piece points at issues around big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technoscientific advances, and their impact on our perception and experience of the world.

Wandrscape

Wandrscape is a locative media platform for authoring and experiencing places in the environment. While Wandrscape can be used to display text, video, and sound of places in general, we are using it to display the UBCO expanding collection of artworks throughout the growing campus. The location of these works is mainly invisible except for the day to day commuting. We are designing and developing a locative media app for connecting visitors to UBCO to the campus public art collection. The app shows a stylized map of the UBCO campus with a visitor's location denoted by a marker. As the visitor moves around the university, the marker will update accordingly. When they become in a set range of artwork, they will recieve audio/visual notification that they are close.

Water Ways

Water Ways, a four-year community-based research project that will culminate in an interactive media exhibition on reimagining human-water relationships in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. The original community-based artwork will encapsulate the diverse meanings that water holds for many communities, cultures and interest groups in the valley, including Indigenous Okanagan (Syilx) communities, environmentalists, artists, civic governments, agricultural, forest and tourist industries. The project synthesizes diverse water knowledge of the past and present and employs community-engaged research to envision multiple sustainable water futures in the Okanagan Valley.

Aeon

The work engages with topics surrounding the waters of Okanagan Creek systems in BC Canada. This sensitive A/V performance speaks to the body of water as a carrier of environmental and cultural significance. The ephemeral beauty of this space is disrupted through disparities in the visual space and soundscape produced by menacing industrial agriculture and business practices.

Through performing of video and audio documentation of the creek using generative soundscape and visual abstraction art practices, Aeon brings the enchantment of the water to the foreground. The listener makes contact with an unfolding of an immersive inner-world drawing upon the interface of the forest and flow of water. As a care for the creek the work moves to revealing disappearing landscapes made manifest in the contrast between nature and development.

Journey of a Pod

In this interactive and immersive installation, artists Aleksandra Dulic and Miles Thorogood invite visitors to engage with the wandering of a seed pod within Okanagan creek systems. Expressed through the interplay of image, sound, and object, the journey of the pod is guided by the cycle of seasons.

This communal experience of passage through waterways is rooted in these artists' love for nature and represents the fundamental relationship between humans and the ecosystem. The experience opens the ephemeral aperture between the tangible and intangible, earth and sky, while balancing the female and male present in Mother Earth and Father Sky, fused together as the pod.

Journey of a Pod is a state-of-the-art union of objects from the creek, digital media, and encoded environment that connects the audience with an ecological cycle and highlights our reciprocal relationship with the earth.

Celestial Bodies: Stories of the Night Sky

Celestial Bodies: Stories of the Night Sky is a key component of the major exhibition Decolonizing the night sky: celestial stories and art to be hosted and developed in partnership with the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver beginning May 2019. The exhibition Decolonizing the Night Sky is curated by Dr. Nicola Levell, Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, UBC Vancouver and we are developing central media installation for this comprehensive exhibition.

Kokanee Ways Bay

Kokanee Ways is an interactive 3D touch screen environment where players experience being a kokanee salmon travelling from Mission Creek into Lake Okanagan in Kelowna and learn about salmon habitats and the disturbances that put salmon survival at risk. The environment calls attention to the importance of wetland areas along the lakeshore, and restoration efforts at Mission Creek. Kokanee Ways is conceptually part of ongoing communication to bring public awareness to the need for protected ecological corridors in the Okanagan. The strategy is that an educated, aware and affected public will support policy formation for designated ecological corridors to be included in community planning. The touch screen is housed in a portable stand and can be displayed in civic and academic spaces as well as exhibition and museum spaces.