highlike

localStyle (Marlena Novak & Jay Alan Yim) in collaboration with Malcolm MacIver

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

Christina Kubisch

Cloud
Cloud, produced on-site at the museum using thousands of feet of red electrical wire, hosts a fourteen-channel composition that visitors listen to by wearing customized headphones. These devices, developed by the artist, contain magnetic coils that receive the magnetic fields circulating in the cable loops and make them audible. As visitors move around the installation, they look at the chaotic electrical wiring suspended in the gallery but hear the prerecorded sounds programmed into different segments of the sculpture.

NIKOLA TESLA

نيكولا تيسلا
尼古拉•特斯拉
ניקולה טסלה
ニコラ·テスラ
니콜라 테슬라
Никола Тесла

Tesla is often described as an important scientist and inventor of modernity, a man who “shed light on the face of the Earth”.] He is best known for his many revolutionary contributions in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. . Tesla’s patents and his theoretical work form the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electrical power systems, including polyphasic energy distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped in the introduction of the Second Industrial Revolution.