Artist Studios – Page 23 – VITAL CAPACITIES

The virtual site of Cattle Depot Artist Village in Minecraft

Photograph showing the entrance to Cattle Depot in Hong Kong. The entrance is an archway inside a red brick building on two storeys, with two smaller outbuildings either side. The roofs of the buildings are covered in a dark rough tile, which is in parts covered in a red moss. Behind the buildings are tenement buildings, each approximately 10 storeys high; the one on the left is pale blue and grey, the central one is cream with orange stripes running beneath the windows, and the one on the right is pale salmon-orange/pink. The sky is overcast, pale grey-blue. — The physical space of Cattle Depot Artist Village in Hong Kong

Cattle Depot Artist Village was originally used as a slaughterhouse from 1908 to 1999. It was renovated and developed into an artist village in 2001. It is now home to around 20 art groups including the media art organisation Videotage.

For its first digital residency program, Videotage recreated in one-to-one scale the virtual site of Cattle Depot in the sandbox game Minecraft.

Screenshot of the virtual site of Cattle Depot in Minecraft. Buildings in digital red brick showing the Cattle Depot, with grey roof tiles and trees in the courtyard at the centre.
Behind the Cattle Depot is a small park with trees. And to the left of Cattle Depot is another red brick building with a dark green roof. Buildings a re a mixture of one and two storeys in height.
A grid structure was built in the sky above the site by the previous resident artist. This forms a matrix against the blue sky. — Screenshot of the virtual site of Cattle Depot in Minecraft

I downloaded Minecraft today and got into the realm of Cattle Depot. What you see here is the aerial view of the site. The glass grid structure was build by the previous resident artist. I basically wandered around, tried to get familiar with all the keyboard commands, broke a gate by accident but managed to find a very hidden passageway that led me to the top of the grid.

Cosmic Call

by Angela Su

For this residency, I want to create a series of symbols from the Dutil-Dumas message as an intervention in a virtual art space. The work will reference a previous work Cosmic Call. (An audio description of the visuals in the trailer is available)

One minute trailer of Cosmic Call

Audio description of the images in the trailer

Installation view of Cosmic Call with a flatscreena and two cube monitors. The seats are designed based on a code from the Dutil-Dumas Message — Installation view of *Cosmic Call* at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong

Cosmic Call is a work commissioned by Wellcome Collection in 2018

The main video weaves together facts and fiction to create an alternative understanding of epidemics. Cosmic Call resists the dominant narrative of a disease outbreak – a formulaic plot of a detective story about disease emergence and eventually the triumph of western medical science – and suggests multiple belief systems in which science is only one of many ways to understand communicable diseases. It points to the danger of reducing all knowledge to scientific terms while addressing issues that are pertinent to Hong Kong, which is characterised by its high population density and mobility – conditions that make Hong Kong extremely vulnerable to disease outbreaks.

In the video, an interstellar message (the Dutil-Dumas message) was sent by extra-terrestrial life forms that warned human beings of epidemics caused by passing comets. Information about the Dutil-Dumas message can be found on the RESEARCH section of the website.

What On Earth am I doing?

by Clifford Sage

Well for starters it’s going to be made within a computer program (CAD)!
Continuing of my past projects shared Universe of ‘Tuner’ and ‘ProDancer’ we may find our selves in an off world sorting office re-distribute saved animals from past realms and sending them off adequately!

Hope to conclude as a downloadable executable both VR and Monitor based! As a wide narrative I’ve often related works on signalling and ever find it captivating in a virtual sense, here are some past worlds I may extend their essence into this currently unnamed one.

disabled becon from Buddha Geomatry child

“He maybe did” or “He may be dead”?

by Damien Robinson

2020 has been a year of information distortion for many people in many ways. Being deaf means my focus has been around digital and physical access – or lack of access – to information, something I’ll be exploring during the residency. Originally, I had been viewing my planned areas of research – typography and dummy text, AI transcription, and sound effect captioning – as distinct, albeit with some loose links. Maybe these areas have more in common than I envisaged?

I’ve begun looking at Dr Rachael Tatman’s research around conversational AI and linguistics and have been struck by the similarities between the areas of error in AI, conventional listening, and lipreading. These are often mirrored in typographic and compositing errors.

The images in this post are taken from

Lipreading – A Guide for Beginners
Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type
An AI voice transcription programme

The header text on this post is taken from a research paper written by Dr Tatman in 2017.

Black text on white background discussing hyphenated works. The example given is "camellia" This word is split across two lines so that the word initially reads "camel-".

Dark blue text on white background from AI transcription programme. The text does not make sense showing the translation is distorted

Welcome to my studio

by Jaene Castrillon

My name is Jaene F. Castrillon and I am an interdisciplinary Film based artist residing in Toronto, Canada. By story-telling through art I express what is an internal journey of exploring the spiritual, social, political and cultural issues concerning social justice, advocacy, poverty, marginalization and equality.

I examine the relationship I have to these different structures organically and present it to the audience through an experiential journey. My goal is to shift the paradigm from “marginalization” to acceptance and understanding that people like me are part of the fabric of humanity.

My work, Mourning Song, explores my relationship to the world through my blood memory as an Indigenous person of Chinese descent.

Please feel welcome to look around my studio, at the work I’ve posted up – there are images, videos and text. You are welcome to leave a comment or questions for me in the comments section.

Hope you enjoy your visit,

Jaene

Welcome to my studio

by Clifford Sage

Hi, my name’s Clifford Sage, welcome to my studio. I’m a CGI artist working in animation and world building. Although I often find technology entrancing, I’ve always appreciated the power and vastness of nature and wilderness- which fuels my interest and curiosity in the potential of virtual worlds.

Audio and visuals have always gone hand in hand for me, I started my visual practice in 2001 alongside my audio project “Recsund.” I’ve used the medium of sound as a diary throughout my adolescence but later discovered the intertwined nature of audio in my visual work. I am curious to use sound in interactive and generative ways through game-play and puzzle solving, exploring new ways of storytelling and immersion.

I am looking forward to taking part in this residency to develop some ideas that I have started to form throughout the last few years, but never had the chance to indulge. I find this opportunity very inspiring but am also overwhelmed with the potential of what can be done within the relatively new area of interactive game design I’m going to be exploring. I hope that I’m able to create an immersive piece throughout the next few weeks, while exploring and experimenting with ever-changing narratives.

Please feel welcome to look around my studio, and feel free to leave a comment or questions for me in the comments section, hope you enjoy!

Studio Sticky

Welcome to my studio

by Damien Robinson

Hand holding a white card up to the camera. Text on the card is superimposed over an orange helix. It reads "Collaboration over competition". — From “A Snapshot of Southend as a Cultural Environment for Womxn”. Damien Robinson/Ruth Kathryn Jones, 2019. Image credit: Anna Lukala

My name is Damien Robinson. I’m a visual artist who works with a range of digital and ‘actual’ media, frequently mixing things up to see what happens. As a deaf person, I’ve had limited access to learning and training, and what began as experiments to figure out how to do something has become a strategy I use in my work. Repurposing and misusing processes can be a way of discovering new processes and outcomes. Or sometimes just having fun with an idea. I’ll be experimenting with AI transcription, looking at subtitling of ambient sound, and maybe even some print-making.

Please enjoy looking around my studio, at the work I’ve posted up – there are images, videos and text. You are welcome to leave a comment or questions for me in the comments section.

INTRO

by Angela Su

This is a video still of my work 'The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers', in which my animated self with red hair and red glasses falls into the spiral of a virtual space. — Video still of ‘The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers’, 14 min 35 sec, 2017

Hi, I’m Angela Su, welcome to my studio.

As an artist from Hong Kong, having an artist studio is a luxury. The virtual studio space is really exciting as I have a chance to showcase not only the finished work but also the research process.

For this residency I will explore the sandbox video game Minecraft as a creative tool that blurs the boundary between the digital and physical worlds. In the Research tab, you will find posts about how the protests in Hong Kong and gaming interact, influence and shape each other — on one hand, street protests borrowed strategies from video games, and on the other hand, banners and slogans appeared on games such as Minecraft and Animal Crossing. I will explore the different ways to engage in digital activism by posting a series of case studies.

Angela