[ISEA2014] Paper: Brad Miller – Expanded photography; Interactive media art, contingency, crowd‑sourced distributed pictures and Big Biology Data

Abstract

This paper set out to examine the creative practice of Australian media artist Brad Miller and his collaborations Ian McArthur, Adam Hinshaw, Tega Brain and Ian Andrews who together have created and exhibited a series of interactive expanded photographic/Image data visualisations. Specifically this paper will examine Miller’s installations augment_me, mediated_moments, le_temps, #capillary; all work have been publicly presented using what Miller describes as the Interactive Media Platform (IMP). These installations used very similar approaches to interrogating and visualising data and will be considered in relationship to a number of installations leading up and proceeding is exhibition.These installations in a series engage with folksonomies and visual patterns via social media image repository Flickr and the resulting installation is a multi‑channel visual and audio installation, which renders a large quantity of digital images that depict information systems, communications and transport and urban built environment are activated in a somatically engaging and interactive way. I have described these installations, in the past, as a memory machine of sorts. It tracks our relationships with people,     things, places and scenarios via the use of streaming photographs and an algorithm, developed with programmer Adam Hinshaw and sound Artist and academic Ian McArthur which is used to structure the flow of thousands of photographs unfurling in horizontal film‑like strips, sometimes in different directions, triggered by the movement of a viewer, under sensors, in the exhibition space. We live in an era defined by unprecedented quantities of available information (big data) and the mediated memories. Films or photos are not ‘memory’; they are mediated building blocks that we mold in the process of remembering .

  • Brad Miller, University of New South Wales, AU