PIERRE PROSKE “CYCLES PER SECOND”

PIERRE PROSKE - CYCLES PER SECOND

Opening Tuesday December 6th 2011 6-8pm at New Low, Goodtime Studios. Basement 746 Swanston St Melbourne VIC. Enter via Lynch St laneway for the opening. Open 12-6pm from the 7th to the 9th December 2011, or by appointment call 0415152067.

Frequency is a concept that binds natural and artificial worlds. The steady beat of a heart, the measurable wavelengths of light, the recurring call of an insect, and the ubiquitous pulsating Megahertz of our machines. Our earthly lives have cycles of their own, with troughs and peaks of emotion, and unshakeable cycles of addiction and habit. Cycles per Second is an abstract investigation into the oscillations present in our lives and our relations to them. It an effort to raise our awareness of our interconnectedness with cycles and their pervasiveness.

Works:
- Brickets
The Brickets are an ecology of devices that communicate wirelessly creating a field of distributed and synchronised audio-visual pings. They are an investigation into the dynamics of coupled- oscillator synchronisation, the latter being a technical term for the types of synchronisation found in nature, such as flashing fire-flies, synchronised frog calls, synchronisation of pace-maker cells in the heart, circadian rhythms and so on.

- StutterSpot
Part reactive lamp, part immersive experience, this piece is an experiment in making sound tangible. The installation responds to an approaching body by pulsating at a rate that fluctuates based on distance to the centre of the light. The frequency of the lamp becomes a physical experience.

- Duty Cycle
The duty cycle of a machine or system is the time that it spends in an active state as a fraction of the total time under consideration. This video piece is a portrait of six people playing a networked version of the Call of Duty first-person shooter video game. While participating in the shared cycle of death and re-spawning, they experience never ending victory and defeat in physical isolation.

PIERRE PROSKE
Pierre Proske is an Australian artist intrigued by the pervasiveness of technology in science and culture and its relationship to nature. After years of juggling parallel interests in technology and the arts, Pierre tired of the schizophrenia and finally discovered that it was socially acceptable, in fact highly desirable, to merge the two. Consequently he has taken on the ambitious task of rendering computers accountable to our sometimes misplaced but inevitable humanity. Proske’s work involves exposing the unspoken relationships we have with technology and harnessing machines into exploring new aesthetics. Both resisting and exploiting modern techno-utopian trends, Proske employs humour and the absurd as weapons against the invasion of computer augmented realities. Alongside electronic art projects he also works as a sound designer/electronic musician and is co-director of Media Lab Melbourne, a lab for experimentation in technology, arts and design. Having studied Electrical Engineering and Liberal Arts at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Pierre then spent three and a half years in Sweden where he developed a body of work and obtained a Master of Art and Technology from Chalmers University, Gothenburg.

New Low