[ISEA2016] Artist Statement: Dennis Del Favero — Atmoscape

Artist Statement

Interactive artificially intelligent experimental film, 2016
Adapted from Lenz by Georg Buchner

Atmoscape is an experimental cinematic adaptation of the 1835 novella Lenz by George Buchner. Atmoscape interactively accompanies the protagonist as he traverses a spectrum of interconnected dream worlds generated through an Artificially Intelligent particle visualisation system, ranging from worlds composed by the microscopic particles of his body, through to worlds created by the macroscopic particles of the atmosphere as he floats 30,000 kilometres above the earth.

Buchner, best known for his revolutionary drama Woyzeck, was also a biologist and one of the first scientists to argue that all things are interconnected, constituted as they are by the same primary matter, namely particles.

Atmoscape interactively accompanies the protagonist as he traverses a spectrum of interconnected dream worlds generated through an Artificially Intelligent particle visualisation system, ranging from worlds composed by the microscopic particles of his body, through to worlds created by the macroscopic particles of the atmosphere as he floats 30,000 kilometres above the earth. Each world a door that opens unexpectedly onto the next.

Experimental Study component of Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant
ARC Discovery Grant Investigators: Dennis Del Favero, Jill Bennett, Neil Brown, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, Ursula Frohne, Johnny Chan with Som Guan, Volker Kuchelmeister, Rob Lawther, Alex Ong, Steven Sherwood.

 

  • Dennis Del Favero is an Australian artist and academic. He has been awarded numerous Artist-in-Residencies and Fellowships, including an Artist-in-Residence at Neue Galerie Graz and an Australian Research Council Australian Professorial Fellowship (2011–2015). He is a Scientia Professor and Chair Professor of Digital Innovation at the University of New South Wales and Executive Director of its iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research and was co-Director of its Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre; Visiting Professorial Fellow at ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Visiting Professor at IUAV, Venice; and Member of the editorial board of Studio Corpi’s Quodlibet, Rome; and former Executive Director of the Australian Research Council | Humanities and Creative Arts (2015–2016). [source: Wikipedia]
  • Collaborators: Stephen Sewell, Jeffrey Shaw, Elwira Titan & Peter Weibel