[ISEA2017] Artist Statement: Claudia Robles-Angel — Web-Mindscape

Artist Statement

Web-Mindscape is an interactive installation joining diverse aspects, such as social network, sound, brainwaves and visual elements. It creates an immersive audiovisual environment, which is site-specific, where sound is diffused in surround, and the visual elements consist of light produced via electroluminescent wires (EL wires). Visitors are invited to interact with the audiovisual environment (light and sound) by using an EEG interface, which reads their brain activity. Thereby, they are confronted to messages from a social network (in this case, Twitter). The tweet messages are turned into audible sound, and the computer measures thereafter the cerebral activity of the visitors, and analyses their emotional reactions to both the environment and the tweets, transforming this data into visual and audible signals, which reproduce how the inner of the subject is influenced by the outer environment and at the same time, having an impact on the installation’s audiovisual environment.

  • Claudia Robles-Angel is an interdisciplinary artist living in Cologne, Germany, whose work and research cover different aspects of visual and sonic art, extending from audiovisual fixed-media compositions to performances interacting with bio-data via the usage of interfaces such as EEG (electroencephalogram) and EMG (electromyography). She was artist-in-residence at ZKM in Karlsruhe (2004-2007) and at the KHM in Cologne (2008 -2009). Her work is constantly featured in not only media and sound-based festivals/conferences but also in group and solo exhibitions around the globe, for example the ZKM Karlsruhe, the ICMC 2007 in Copenhagen, ICMC 2009 in Montréal and 2016 in Utrecht, Festival Internacional de la Imagen 2009/2010/2013, the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in Yokohama, the NYCEMF 2010 and 2013-2016 in New York, the Re-New Festival 2011 in Copenhagen and the NIME 2011 in Oslo, Salon Suisse – Prohelvetia 55th Venice Biennale 2013, at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center New York City (2014 / 2017), MAC Bogotá (2011/2015), MADATAC Festival Madrid (2016) and more recently at Die Digitale Düsseldorf. She is the creator of NOMÁDES… an international concert series of electroacoustic and audiovisual compositions. claudearobles.de