[ISEA2015] Artist Statement: Patrick Harrop – VORTICAL FILAMENT

Artist Statement

Motors, Fishing Line (2012 – ongoing)

Vortical Filament is an electronic installation inspired by the photographic series Geometrie Experimental. The early scientific photographer, Etienne Jules Marey and Franz Melde’s famed experimental device demonstrates standing waves on a string. The work evokes the lost tradition of the Baroque Tornitori (the craft of turning). Through the phenomenon of persistence of vision and the natural oscillation of rotational fields, the piece seeks to create a field condition of immaterial and ghostly waveforms in constant search for equilibrium within a seemingly unstable system.

  • Patrick Harrop is an artist, architect, researcher and academic based in Montreal and Winnipeg. His artistic practice engages questions of augmented materiality, the modulation of the immaterial phenomena of light and sound through material agency. His practical and theoretical research is in the philosophy of technology with a particular emphasis in electromechanical hacking, digital fabrication and contemporary theory. His work has been shown in Montreal, Shanghai, Berlin and Winnipeg.

Text with images (PDF)  p. 22