Germaine Koh & Gordon Hicks, There | Here
Germaine Koh & Gordon Hicks
Germaine Koh and Gordon Hicks joined ISIS Arts in 2007 for a 3-week research residency. The residency was the first time the pair, both from Canada, have collaborated. It involved a research phase into a new project involving controlling the position and movement of objects at a distance over the internet.
'There/Here' connects two doors over the internet to create a wordless communication system using touch, pressure, movement and position. The connection is two-way and simultaneous so that moving either door causes the other to move in unison. Each door acts as both controller and controlled - there is no user interface in the conventional sense, simply the doors themselves. Constructed from hacked door operator mechanisms, custom microcontrollers and a real-time internet data stream, the system provides the sensation here of a physical event happening there. Positioning, movement, speed, rhythm, and pressure emerge as tools for communication.
"The sense of doubled things, spaces and people, it is argued, is integral to modern life. To be tele-present, so contemporary philosophers tell us, is to be in two spaces at the same time through technological communication. Artists Germaine Koh and Gordon Hicks are interested how, in our age of everyday telepresence, manifested by constant mobile phone and portable computer use, relationships between time and space are being altered in significant ways. In Koh and Hicks’ new work There/Here (2011), multiple doorways link space and time through the sensation of touch. Using an internet data stream, the actions performed on one object are duplicated on the other. In this spatial diptych of co-relation the act of entering is simultaneously a form of uncanny exiting." - Surrey Art Gallery
You can find out more about Germaine Koh from his website here.
'There/Here' connects two doors over the internet to create a wordless communication system using touch, pressure, movement and position. The connection is two-way and simultaneous so that moving either door causes the other to move in unison. Each door acts as both controller and controlled - there is no user interface in the conventional sense, simply the doors themselves. Constructed from hacked door operator mechanisms, custom microcontrollers and a real-time internet data stream, the system provides the sensation here of a physical event happening there. Positioning, movement, speed, rhythm, and pressure emerge as tools for communication.
"The sense of doubled things, spaces and people, it is argued, is integral to modern life. To be tele-present, so contemporary philosophers tell us, is to be in two spaces at the same time through technological communication. Artists Germaine Koh and Gordon Hicks are interested how, in our age of everyday telepresence, manifested by constant mobile phone and portable computer use, relationships between time and space are being altered in significant ways. In Koh and Hicks’ new work There/Here (2011), multiple doorways link space and time through the sensation of touch. Using an internet data stream, the actions performed on one object are duplicated on the other. In this spatial diptych of co-relation the act of entering is simultaneously a form of uncanny exiting." - Surrey Art Gallery
You can find out more about Germaine Koh from his website here.