Test_Lab: Multi_modal
date: 21 Feb 2008 – 20:00
location: V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media
Groundfloor, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam (NL).
admission: free
Featuring: Arjen Mulder (NL), Sissel Tolaas (N), Tom Froese (UK), Graham Smith (CDN), Ulf Langheinrich (A), and Sietske Klooster (NL).

[The event will be STREAMED LIVE (requires RealPlayer)]

Although technological innovation in art and media has greatly enhanced the ways in which artworks can stimulate our senses, this innovation predominantly concerns the same few sensory modalities, and only rarely aims at supporting the integration between them. Recent artistic Research and Development (aRt&D) has, however, made great progress in developing methods for multimodal art; enhancing the sensorial richness of art and media experiences in integrated ways.

Test_Lab: Multimodal will demonstrate and discuss new methods and technologies to stimulate senses that are not commonly incorporated in artistic concepts, and will introduce innovative ways to integrate sensory experiences in art and media. In doing so, Test_Lab: Multimodal reveals the obstacles faced, and achievements made, in contemporary aRt&D that aims to enhance the sensorial richness of art and media experiences in (technologically) integrated ways.

Test_Lab: Multimodal will feature the latest achievements in stimulating the senses; such as smelly art, live sensory-substitution, the sound of touching one another, sensory-enhanced film, and very loud visuals.

** Arjen Mulder (NL) is a widely published essayist, and will open Test_Lab: Multimodal with a talk on multimodality from a media theoretical perspective.

** Sissel Tolaas (N), founder of International Flavors and Fragrances re_searchLab Berlin, will present and demonstrate the smell of FEAR, bringing samples of body odors of men in fear, which she distilled for her project the FEAR of smell – the smell of FEAR exhibited at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

** Tom Froese (UK), researcher at the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex, will demonstrate the Enactive Torch, a perceptual supplementation device that transforms visual into haptic information, and which has recently received funding for the development of a next generation of enactive torches.

** Graham Smith (CDN), artist and inventor of robotic, virtual reality, photographic, and tele-presence installations and devices, will premiere one of his latest collaborate projects: Alternative Sensory Information Display, a.k.a. the Emotional Chair. The project, developed with Ryerson University in Toronto and students from the HKU in Utrecht, enhances film with vibration, light, wind, and smell for the hearing-impaired.

** Ulf Langheinrich (D) of artist duo Granular Synthesis will introduce and demonstrate Granular Synthesis’ masterpiece Modell 5; a 10m by 3,5m (!) projection showing the face of Japanese performance artist Akemi Takeya being twisted and manipulated like a Francis Bacon painting supported by a wall of sublow sound.

** Sietske Klooster (NL) and her students from the Industrial Design department of the Technical University Eindhoven will present an innovative social interaction project called TouchMeDare that motivates people to touch each other by creating sounds as a reward for physical interaction.