Carbon Series

source: setiorg

Gallery Project presents First Contact, a multimedia exhibit in which 33 regional, national, and international artists explore our desire to encounter extraterrestrials, our preparedness for such an event, the event itself, and its possible consequences.

Technological development has brought us to the precipice of first contact, but has humanity kept pace? Is our search for extraterrestrial life simply a search for answers to our own existence? What makes us believe that we are prepared for a relationship with other worlds when we have difficulties on our own planet? Is it our innate curiosity or primal fear that motivates us? ‘Artists,” wrote Ezra Pound, “are the antennae of the race.” Media analyst Marshall McLuhan expanded on that idea when he wrote, “Art as radar acts as an ‘early alarm system,’ as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.” If art is an ‘early warning system,’ then what does art about First Contact foretell?

Contributors include Seder Burns, Thomas Carey, Ross Carlisle, John Causland, Debra Davis, Lynda Davis, Rocco DePietro, Zeek Earl, H.R. Giger, Brad Gieske, Clifton Harvey, Mayumi Haryoto, Dan Hernandez, Nicholas Kahn, Tanya Kavakoza, Charles Lindsay, Kevin Margo, Ian Moersen, Gloria Pritschet, Simon Ray, Michael Rea, Kris Rudolph, Richard Selesnick, Sara Schleicher, Douglas Scobel, Brian Spolans, Derek Stenning, Po-Wei Su, Mike Tarr, Jacob Tebbe, Brana Vojnovic, Lynn Whitney, and Barry Whittaker.

The exhibit is curated by Seder Burns, Lecturer of New Media, University of Toledo, and Gallery Project collaborator.
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source: nasagov

Charles Lindsay was selected by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute to serve as an Artist in Residence. His artistic vision has sought to communicate a fascination with scientific inquiry, space exploration and the limits of human perception. Lindsay’s audiovisual installations create a multi-sensory experience; these other-worldly realms seem somehow familiar, yet completely unknown.

Lindsay began his career as an exploration geologist and documentary photographer. After earning a degree in Exploration Geology from the University of Western Ontario, Lindsay used his photographic skills to document his research in the arctic. Capturing the harsh polar climate on film helped to plant the seed for a growing body of work that expresses Lindsay’s evolving vision of communication, symbols and space exploration through still images, videos and music.

Lindsay’s recent shows include interactive sculptures constructed from salvaged and repurposed scientific materials. One such sculpture is his 2012 work, “Rocket Brain” (see image, top right). Many of these pieces employ sensors and custom circuitry to alter the audio and visual cues depending on the viewer’s proximity. Exploration and experiment become part of the viewers’ experience of the artwork as the sights and sounds change with their movements.

One of Lindsay’s most innovative works is the installation CARBON, which is supported by a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. The CARBON environments are designed around the original camera-less imaging technique that Lindsay invented. The original negatives are scanned and animated, forging the backbone of the installations that seek to immerse the viewer in Lindsay’s constructed world. His hyper-resolved yet subtly-toned images have evolved over the years to include vibrant colors, and now they seem to take on a life of their own as giant still photographs and video projections merge with in-depth sound design.

Charles Lindsay has considered the use of retired NASA equipment to catalyze a new artistic perspective on the excitement and inspiration of space exploration. His intent is to include materials in his installations that have flown above the earth’s atmosphere. The completed artwork will provide the earthbound viewer with a direct connection to extraterrestrial space, giving Lindsay’s audience a personal experience of the reality of travel beyond our world.

About the SETI Institute’s Artist in Residence Program
The mission of The SETI Institute’s Artist in Residence Program is to encourage cross-disciplinary artistic expression in order to explore and illuminate the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.

This program seeks to foster a cross pollination of ideas between artists and scientists, where these disciplines may influence each other through personal interaction and the shared adoption of new technologies. This initiative also aspires to encourage youth to explore the possibilities emerging at the nexus of art, technology and the sciences.
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source: sinembargomx

Desde hace dos años Charles Lindsay y científicos del Instituto para la Búsqueda de Inteligencia Extraterrestre (SETI por sus siglas en inglés) han estado colaborando, encontrando nuevas formas de mezclar ate y ciencia en un esfuerzo para ayudar a aproximar a las personas y cambiar su percepción sobre las posibilidades del mundo y el universo a nuestro alrededor.

Luego de ganar la beca de la fundación Guggenheim, Lindsay de 41 años se convirtió en el primer artista residente en el Instituto SETI, en donde trabajó en su último proyecto llamado CARBON, en cuya exposición muestra fotografías gigantes de hasta 18 metros.

Las imágenes causan incertidumbre y el espectador no alcanza a identificar si lo que ve es produto de un microscopio o de un potente telescopio.

“Una fotografía normalmente sugiere realidad o su lectura inicial es laaproximación a algo real”, dice Lindsay.”Pero en estas fotos hay mucha ambigüedad y esta es una de las cosas a las que yo respondo fuertemente en el arte; es una necesidad.”

Las imágenes son creadas a través de un proceso especial inventado por el mismo Lindsay que consiste en esparcir una emulsión basada en Carbono sobre los negativos de las imágenes, lo que da como resultado a las imágenes que luego son escaneadas digitalmente e impresas de distintas maneras.

Lindsay menciona que su propósito es que su trabajo provoque cuestionamientos antes que respuestas. “Disasociar es una palabra que viene a mi mente”, dice. “En cierta forma estoy tratando de sacarte de un mundo para llevarte a otro.”
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source: wired

Charles Lindsay’s gigantic, sometimes 60-foot-long, black-and-white and color prints from his CARBON photo series are enigmatically provocative. Are they high-resolution scans from an electron microscope? Manipulated images of far-off planets captured by the Hubble telescope?

The photos are actually created through a special process Lindsay invented that involves spreading a carbon-based emulsion onto plastic negatives. The resulting images are then digitally scanned and printed in several ways.

It’s an approach that has yielded unusual results and struck a strong chord with audiences, earning him not only a Guggenheim fellowship, but also the first-ever spot as an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute.

“A photograph normally suggests reality, our initial read is that its protracting something real,” says Lindsay. “But in these photos there is a lot of ambiguity and that’s one of the things that I respond to strongly in art; it’s a necessity.”

For two years now Charles Lindsay and scientists at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have been collaborating and finding new ways to mix art and science in an effort to help stretch the public’s mind about the possibilities of the world and space around us.

“Here at the SETI Institute we are trying to get people to put themselves in a different frame of reference, to step back,” says astronomer Dr. Jill Tarter, who holds the Bernard M. Oliver chair at the Institute. “And Charlie’s art encourages us to think in those terms.”

For nearly three decades the SETI Institute (Tarter points out that SETI is a verb, the SETI Institute is a noun) has been exploring the cosmos in search of other life forms. As part of their work they’ve had to ask a lot of big questions and have proposed some radically new ways of thinking about life. In the process they’ve had to try and translate that approach to a sometimes skeptical public and Tarter sees Lindsay’s work as one more way to help deliver the message.

For example, she says, even though Hollywood has created thousands of alien prototypes, probability and evolution point to the fact that they’ve only skimmed the surface of what an extraterrestrial being might actually look like.

“So far we haven’t gone very far afield,” she says. “Mostly what we’ve been doing is just projecting ourselves and our fears [onto our alien creations] and the real thing is likely to be significantly different.”

In Lindsay’s photography, Tarter says she sees a playfulness between reality and imagination that breaks out of these narrow barriers and allows us to think more freely about the nearly infinite shapes aliens might take on.

“He didn’t set out to portray alien beings but he is providing us with images that are sort of familiar but kind of not, and I think that tension is a helpful exercise in conceiving of something that is utterly different,” she says.

Lindsay says he purposely wants his work to pose questions instead of provide answers.

“Disassociate is a word that comes to mind,” he says. “In certain ways I’m trying to take you out of one world and into another.”

The ambiguous scale in Lindsay’s work also parallels space exploration’s tension between the very small and the very large. When viewers stand in front of his photographs they are often unsure of whether they are looking at something microscopic or enormous. This re-thinking of scale is important for the SETI Institute because their canvas is the universe, an unimaginably large expanse that necessitates some creativity to put into perspective.

Based on statistical equations, for example, Tarter says it is going to be difficult for our technology to detect another society. Space is so big that it makes the odds relatively small. But, on the chance that a signal is indeed detected, she says, that proves that whoever, or whatever, sent the signal had enough staying power to send it for a long enough period that it beat the odds and founds its way into our detectors.

“Unless technological societies have staying power, they are never going to be two technological civilizations close enough in space and lined up in time so that they overlap,” she says.

Tarter says she hopes these same odds might motivate us to find a way to make our technology, and our social relations, more sustainable. At the current pace she says human civilization might disappear — be it from war, ecological disaster or some kind of other global problem — before our signals and our receptors have been on long enough to have a fighting chance within the equations that currently define our view of the universe.

She hopes just the possibility of contacting another civilization — even if it doesn’t happen for another thousand years — will help us figure out a better way to live with and harness the advances we’ve already made.

“If we detect a signal it would provide us with the knowledge that there is a solution because someone else did it,” she says. “And even in the absence of the signal we want the world to get involved with the SETI Institute because it helps us internalize this cosmic perspective.”

For Lindsay, that perspective has become important during his time at the SETI Institute and in many ways represents a kind of full-circle in the evolution of his art. During his career he’s spent time in some of the most remote places on the globe, including a 10-year period where he spent several months of each year living with a stone-age tribe in Indonesia. Now, with the SETI Institute he does things like broadcasting the sounds of a Costa Rican rain forest through a NASA wind tunnel to observe its effect.

In addition to the CARBON prints, Lindsay has gone on to create entire multimedia installations that bring in sound and sculpture. The point, he says, is to enhance the experience of disassociation and exploration that he’s become known for.

At the SETI Institute he’s had the opportunity to partner with scientists, who like Tarter, are trying to push conceptual boundaries and he’s taken full advantage of the environment that the institute creates.

“All the scientist at the SETI Institute are engaging unique forms of exploration and it’s been wonderful to be under the same roof with them because exploration will always be at the heart of what I do,” he says.

Charles Lindsay will be speaking and performing in San Francisco on Sept. 18 at Swissnex as part of the ZERO1 ‘Seeking Silicon Valley’ arts biennial. Lindsay will also debut CARBON-X, a new dome formatted surround audio visual work, Sept. 22 and 25 at Getting off the Planet and ISEA2012 in New Mexico.