MTF Labs Aveiro 2021
Participant profile: Mark-David Hosale
Still from the body in\verse (2021)
Alan Macy, Mark-David Hosale, Alysia Michelle James
Mark-David Hosale is a computational artist and composer. He is an Associate Professor and Chair of Computational Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design, at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has given lectures and taught internationally at institutions in Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Canada, and the United States. His solo and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally at such venues as the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery (2005), International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2006), BlikOpener Festival, Delft, The Netherlands (2010), the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF2012), Biennale of Sidney (2012), Toronto’s Nuit Blanche (2012), Art Souterrain, Montréal (2013), and a Collateral event at the Venice Biennale (2015), Currents New Media (2017), among others. He is co-editor of the anthology, Worldmaking as Techné: Participatory Art, Music, and Architecture (Riverside Press, 2018).
Mark-David’s work explores the boundaries between the virtual and the physical world. His practice is varied, spanning from performance (music and theatre) to public and gallery-based art. His interdisciplinary practice is often built on collaborations with architects, scientists, and other artists. Prominent ongoing collaborations exist with the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory with Rob Allison and Jim Madsen; and in Performance, Art and Cyber-Interoceptive Systems (PACIS), with Erika Batdorf, Kate Digby, and Alan Macy.
Mark-David and Alan Macy will bring to MTF Aveiro the technology and approach of their recent project, body in\verse - an online, interactive performance that combines biophysical sensing, emotive state sonification and visualisation, and generative poetry to create the scene. The performance provides a deep dive from the world outside of ourselves, that is dissociated by mediated technology, into the interoceptive abyss of our emotive sea. Audience members are invited to participate in a focussed conversation that becomes the basis for the activity that follows. Questions will be on the rise of a technological culture, and how it has left us wanting, consciously or not, for identification and awareness of “essential rhythm”, that we continue to lose track of now that we live mostly in cities as the aboriginal environment recedes from view. The performance environment provides the ability to control the presentation of stimuli and monitor the physical reaction based on the interpretation of nuanced emotional state, blurring the line between auditory and visual real-time content and physical experience.
A biophysical sensing system measures the emotional affect of the performer, and then uses that data to drive the sound, abstract imagery, and a generative poetry algorithm. Emotional affect of the performer is assessed through arousal and valence measures derived from correlation of the performer’s heart rate and heart rate variability. An algorithm generates poetry using conversations that take place with the audience as source material. The poetry source material is then algorithmically organised according to its sentiment (positive to negative), and mapped to the emotional affect of the performer driven by the emotional affect assessment from the biophysical measures as described above.
Mark-David is the founder of the nD::StudioLab, an adaptable space for research-creation based theoretical discourse, methodological development, and the production of works in the areas of ArtScience, Computational Art, and Interactive Architecture. His research work emphasizes methodological development in the integration of hardware, software and digital fabrication with the goal of creating eversive works that blur the divide between the virtual and the real. He is also invested in a parallel theoretical practice that has been focused on a concept called worldmaking. Works that focus on worldmaking challenge the World and how it could be through a kind of future-making, and/or other worldmaking, by creating alternate realties as artworks that are simultaneously ontological propositions.
The connecting tissue in his work lies in an interest in knowing. How do we come to know something? How do we know we know? And, how do we express what we know to each other? Through immersive art we are able to create new experiences that saturate perception, expressing concepts that are beyond language and only genuinely knowable through the senses.
Mark-David Hosale joins a global community of artists, scientists, experts and innovators at MTF Aveiro, October 11th - 16th, 2021.
For more information, and to apply to join us there: https://www.aveirotechcity.pt/pt/atividades/mtflabs
