Cosmic Call

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?

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”?

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

Plastic Tat

Colour photo of a pink resin figure in clear plastic bag with a black, red and pink title card insert and illustrated cardboard label depicted the square headed figure.
Resin figure in clear plastic bag with title card insert and illustrated cardboard label.
Colour image depicting the reserve of the resin figure in clear plastic bag with title card insert and illustrated cardboard label. The following words are written in pink against a black ground on the title card: "Pure Electricity, Pure Data! A Message to Another World! A Traveller Through the Bleak Emptiness of Space! A Traveller Through Time! A Lover of Small Animals! Content with Their Own Company! Witnesser to the Awful Wonder of the UNIVERSE!"
Resin figure in clear plastic bag with title card insert and illustrated cardboard label.

I’ve made a short run of 15 resin Inaction figures based on my character Aracibo. These figurines are objects of power through which you can look back across vast swathes of time and space. Each figure is handmade and individually numbered, get ’em while they are hot.

Colour photograph of 9 pink resin figures arranged in a triangle, 4 at the back, 3 in the middle and 2 at the front.

Lightboxes

Working with collage, internet scavenged images and constructed symbolism these lightboxes show a myriad of forms present within the natural world. Bodies of animals, fauna and scientific photographs are entangled together to represent the different ways in which humans percieve, understand and order lifeforms.