Artists Statement
Hacnum Exhibition. various locations, May 16 – 21
Cymatic Ground (Alvaro Cassinelli & Tobias Klein 2022) is an interactive audio-visual installation and the “Second Garden” in Klein’s larger Three Gardens exhibition (Tobias Klein, 2022). Located within the buildings of Oi! (Oil Street Art Space in Hong Kong), the second garden is a hybrid between an architectural representation and a sonic scultpture. It is an interactive model – an installation in which the audience can explore the relationship between shape, geometry, resonance and energy. This garden takes reference from the dry stone garden concept, where the absence of water is made visible through carefully composed arrangements of rocks and gravel that is raked to represent ripples and waves. The second garden is an industrial garden made from laser-cut and acid etched steel plates. It is a resonating, ephemeral garden where sand is carried as liquid flowing in reverberating patterns. Combining Art and Science in interdisciplinary collaboration, we created a sonic extension of the landscape as a liquid shapeless continuum, made visible through vibrations. The work articulates the invisible frequencies within each material and shape, where energies brought into harmonies create overlaying vibration, agitation and movement. These natural frequencies show the interplay between geometry and sound. Like the coastal lines are slowly shaped by the energies carried by the waves of the ocean, the vibrations in the Cymatic Ground uncover the invisible patterns of energies flowing through the landscape.
The artwork is able to exhibit very complex Chladni patterns thanks to a micro-controller based audio feedback loop that injects energy into the system thus enabling for the complete formation of the sand pattern. Hidden electronics under the table analyse mechanical vibrations (through accelerometers and microphones) and estimate the fundamental from the series of harmonics. Energy is then injected on the corresponding plate using electromagnetically actuated “bass shakers”.
https://alvarocassinelli.com/cymatic-ground-2022
Three Gardens
Created by Tobias Klein, Three Gardens presents virtual and actual rock installations designed under the notions of Chinese landscape architecture and brings in new features to Oi!. The first garden exists within the entire Oi!, where elements of architecture, water, plants and rocks pervade the existing and new spaces. The second garden is an interactive installation collaborated with Alvaro Cassinelli that creates sensory experiences for visitors using sound and vibrations. The third garden is a digital garden, which links the audience’s on-the-spot experience with a mobile app to broaden their viewing experience. https://www.apo.hk/en/web/apo/three_gardens.html
The third garden is neither here nor there – it sits in between. It is based on physical elements yet itself is immaterial. It is playful and explorative, minimal and mathematical, digital and analogue, site-specific and independent. It is a technological garden – a simulation and at the same time a transformation. It is a software landscape in the form of an app that allows the audience to collect experiences from the previous gardens to create their own landscape. We walk through the first garden and scan the space narrated through the Meta-morphs; we feel the vibrations of the Cymatic Ground and record the frequencies of the instrument. All input is transformed into vectors and attractors, virtual rocks and pebbles. Our experiences become invisible forces and their relation to each other in a system. They become the artificial mountains in an artificial garden (假山). The third garden is an arrangement of simulated force attractors that allows the visitor to create an infinite amount of reactive landscape systems. In some ways, the disillusion of the landscape being real and physical, is similar to the painting of it, where water and ink construct like pixels as ground for contemplation and reflection about one’s own position in such a constructed landscape. https://www.scm.cityu.edu.hk/events/three-gardens-sanjiashan
- Alvaro Cassinelli (UY/HK) Associate Professor, School of Creative Media (HK), Director Augmented Materiality Laboratory, HK (AML, https://augmentedmaterialitylab.org), Past leader MetaPerception Group, Ishikawa Laboratory, University of Tokyo. Alvaro Cassinelli was born in Montevideo (Uruguay) in 1972. In 1990 he earns both a French and Uruguayan B.Sc., and a grant to pursue his studies in France. He obtains a Graduate Engineering diploma in 1996 from the Télécom ParisTech (a French Ivy League), completing the same year a Doctoral Qualifying Degree (DEA/Master) in Physics (Laser & Matter Interaction) from the University of Paris-XI, Télécom and Ecole Polytechnique. In 2000 he receives a PhD degree from the University of Paris-XI Orsay. From 2001 to 2015 he works as a Research Fellow, Research Assistant and then Assistant Professor at the Ishikawa-Watanabe Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, where he co-founds and leads the Meta-Perception group, a multidisciplinary research unit exploring new paradigms and custom hardware interfaces enlarging the vocabulary of HCI and the Media Arts. He co-founded the “Devices that Alter Perception” international workshop (from 2008-2011), and the first “Taller de Arte y Computación Física” in Uruguay (2008). Until 2017 he worked as CTO at SinergiaTech, the first certified FABLAB in Uruguay, and a technology incubator. Presently, he is Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media (SCM) in Hong Kong, co-founder of the Extended Reality Laboratory (XRL), and presently director of the Augmented Materiality Lab (AM). https://alvarocassinelli.com https://www.scm.cityu.edu.hk/people/cassinelli-alvaro
- Prof. Tobias Klein is Associate Professor, School of Creative Media, City University, HK. Tobias Klein is an architect and interdisciplinary artist/designer. He generates a syncretism of contemporary CAD/CAM technologies with site and culturally specific design narratives, intuitive non-linear design processes, and historical cultural references. His most recent work, a fully 3D printed dress titled Incunabula was filmed by SHOWstudio London, and exhibited in the 14th Architectural Biennale (2014). The dress is in the permanent collection of the MoMu in Antwerp. At the same time, his work Inversive Embodiment, a 3D printed 4D rotation of St. Paul’s Cathedral wrapping embodied data sets in the form of Magnetic Resonance Image Data, was shown in the Science Museum in London; and a second work Soft Immortality is on show in the Museum for Science and Industry in Manchester. In parallel to the sculptural work, his continuous developing cycle of installation work titled Virtual Sunset was first shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2011), travelled to the Industry Gallery in Washington DC (2012) and finally was exhibited at the Microwave Festival 2013 at the Hong Kong City Hall. Klein has lectured and given workshops internationally (Cambridge, UPenn, Oxford, UCL) and is the director of the Architectural Association’s Visiting School, Post-Industrial Landscapes. In 2010-12 he was an appointed Guest Professor at the TU Innsbruck Studio 3, institute for experimental architecture. His work is published in AD – Neoplasmatic Design (edited by Marcos Cruz), Digital Architecture Now (by Neil Spiller) and Drawings (by Sir Peter Cook). His current research uses advanced medical visualisation techniques to explore the human body as a new ecology of densities in which the dissolution of its anatomical boundaries allows the rethinking and recreating of it as a new physical/representational territory in constant flux and change. https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/persons/tobias-klein(47d9b010-8a21-4f3d-aea5-05cab6302a3e).html