Art & Performance

INTER/her

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> INTER/her past exhibitions

INTER/her with the RCA School of Communication Showcase with students and staff called Digital UnderCommons in the Campus Exhibition at Ars Electronica as part of the festival theme “Who Owns the Truth?” September 6th-10th, 2023, in Linz, Austria

Info online at

https://ars.electronica.art/who-owns-the-truth/en/digital-undercommons/

https://ars.electronica.art/who-owns-the-truth/en/inter-her/

> INTER/her at South by South West 2023 Austin, Texas

UK House, March 8-13th

I went to the big music, film and interactive festival in Austin with the School of Communication of the Royal College of Art (where I now work since October 2022), and we brought a selection of work of staff and students. I had a short film of INTER/her on display with a headset and the garment for people to try in our area at UK House a partner venue of the SXSW Festival.

Link here https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/meet-the-rca-in-uk-house-sxsw23/

A visitor at UK House SXSW Austin March 2023 – School of Communication, Royal College of Art Showcase
Creative Computing Festival, February 2-5th, 2023

Details online https://www.peckhamdigital.org/artists/2023/camille_baker/

> INTER/her at Peckham Digital

Video introduction on instragram can be found here https://www.instagram.com/peckham_digital/reel/

Art in Flux – Radical Embodiment (15): Carolee Schneemann Film Series Thu 10 Nov 2022, 18:45, Barbican Cinema 3

Details online https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/carolee-schneemann-art-in-flux-radical-embodiment

> INTER/her Barbican Film

INTER/her Mini-Documentary

This is mini-doc about INTER/her created for a showing at the Barbican Arts Centre Cinema on November 11, 2022 as part of the Art in Flux – Radical Embodiment: Carolee Schneemann Film Series

> INTER/her was showcased as part fo the Extended Senses Symposium, in a collaboration between the University for the Creative Arts and the University of Greenwich September 8th, 9th and 10th at University of Greenwich’s Stephen Lawrence Gallery

See info here https://www.extendedsenses22.co.uk/team-4-2

In the TV studio at University of Greenwich

> INTER/her past exhibitions

INTER/her Project at ArtSci Salon | Camille Baker PhD
A Hub for the Arts & Science communities in Toronto and Beyond

Who Cares? Technologies and /of /with Care – speakers series and exhibitions, Exhibition Opening Thursday, April 7th until April 28th, 2022, Ivey Library, New College, 20 Willcox Street, Toronto, Canada

Details https://artscisalon.com/who-cares/camille-baker/

See also the speaker series recorded talk from 25 Mar 2022 on Youtube below

NeOn Festival, November 10th-14th, 2021, Overgate Mall, Dundee, online https://neondigitalarts.com/event/inter-her/

> INTER/her NEon /

Video Interviews with the Dundee Courier can be found online at https://jwp.io/s/8TUzZ913 and https://jwp.io/s/pERhVeOw

See also Scottish TV clip here https://www.facebook.com/799233017/videos/886188128736399/

Brighton Digital Festival, November 3rd-7th, 2021, Locked In Gallery, Hove

Details online https://brightondigitalfestival.org.uk/events/inter-her

> INTER/her Brighton Gallery

> INTER/her longlisted in August and then shortlisted in September 2021 for the Lumen Prize 2021 – 3D/Interactive category

https://www.lumenprize.com/2021-3d/interactive-shortlist

> Gallery from exhibition in Sheffield September 15th – October 8th, 2021

> And from exhibition at the Brewery Tap Project Space Gallery, Folkestone from June 23rd-July 6th, 2021

> INTER/her website

The new website for the INTER/her project was launched on 3rd April 2021. Big thanks to Centre Neptune for the design & build. All future information regarding the project can be found there, including installation locations, dates and visiting times. Hope to see you there.

INTER/her Project | Camille Baker Ph.D

> Online Exhibition / Promotion

INTER/her is participating in a group virtual exhibition called Art in Flux: Reclaimed, celebrating some of the most radical and innovative media artists of our times. Online from March 30th to April 30th, 2021

online at http://www.artinfluxlondon.com/reclaimed-exhibition.html

Also see the project profile on the crowd funding site Artizen here

> Videos

Draft version of the vaginal canal with Endometriosis by collaborator Sarah Büttner (October 2020)

A talk by collaborator Maf’j Alverez (July 2020) on the prototyping of the early exploration and research phase of the project.

> Gallery

Sketch by Sarah Büttner for the visual design process Oct 2020
prototype reproductive system in 3D /VR by Maf’j Alverez April 2020
Haptic Corset sketch by Camille Baker March 2020
reference image inside the mouth March 2020

> Timeline

2019 – 2021

> Collaborators

  • Camille Baker – Artist/Artistic Director
  • Maf’j Alverez – Unity Interaction Designer & 3D Artist
  • Kat Austen – Sound Designer
  • Sarah Büttner – Tiltbrush / 3D Object Artist
  • Andy Baker – extra Unity programming advice
  • Paul Hayes – additional electronics construction & finishing for haptic corset

> Abstract

INTER/her is an intimate, immersive and VR installation that explores of the inner world of over 40’s women’s bodies and the reproductive diseases they suffer: endometriosis, fibroids, polyps, Ovarian and other cysts, cervical, ovarian, uterine and endometrial cancers and the lack of clear medical information/ support they face.

INTER/her is explored through a feminist lens, as personal exploration, public education, and community building, positioning the physical body as a site to explore psychological issues of womanhood, identity and the sense of self, exploring the body. 

> Partners

  • Arts Council England
  • UCA / University for the Creative Arts
  • Access Space Sheffield

> Budget / Funding

  • £15,000 ACE Aug 2020-May 2021
  • £2,485 / UCA, 2019/20 (Round 1) UCA
  • £2,000 / UCA, 2020/21 (Round 2) UCA

> Outcomes / Impact

  1. Prototype phase completed December 2019-Auust 2020
  2. Phase two – production and exhibition September 2020 – May 2021

> Further Information

Supported by Arts Council England

Hacking The Body 2.0 / Performance

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> Stutter Flutter & Feel Me / e-textiles IoT Performances

Hacking The Body 2.0: Residency To Performance

Hacking The Body / HTB 2.0 is a collaboration between Dr Kate Sicchio and myself, which evolved since 2011 until 2018 and started by examining rhetoric within the online computing community around concepts of code, hacking, networks, the quantified self, and data, as a new approach to examining inner and outer states and sensations of the human body, using sensing devices within performance. 

> Videos

> Feel Me / Garment Hack

> Flutter Stutter / Garment Design

> Rehearsals / November 2015

> Sheffield Rehearsal & Performance / February 2016

> Watermans Art Centre / February 2016

> Timeline

April 2015 – February 2016

> Collaborators

  • Dr Camille Baker / Dr Kate Sicchio – Artistic Direction, Concept, Interaction Design
  • Dr Kate Sicchio  – Choreography
  • Dr Rebecca Stewart – Electronics Design, Development, Garment Integration
  • Ms Tara Baoth-Mooney  – Garment Design, Electronics Integration; Voice & Music
  • Rick Loynes – Sound Design
  • Dr Camille Baker  – Sound Editing
  • Tara Baker / Phoebe Brown – Dance Performance
  • Peter Todd –  iPad Mobile App Design

> Abstract

Exploring the concept of hacking data to re-purpose and re-imagine biofeedback from the body. It used states of the body and hacked that data to make new artworks, such as performance and costumes. Through performance the aim was to communicate to the public new ways dancers engage with their bodies and technology, through intimacy and sensation embedded in wearables. It was as much performance investigation into body as creative material as a conceptual research endeavour data as identity and ethics of data ownership. 

From April 2015 to June 2016, this instantiation the collaboration started as a residency at UCA in April 2015, with rehearsals and testing In November 2015, culminating in three performance stagings in Sheffield and London between February 16-18, 2016 and a further performance staging in June 2016 in Brighton. The instantiations of the project helped to develop our hands-on skills in making and using DIY electronics, soft-circuits and smart textiles, as well as to unearth greater unethical data collection activities. 

Flutter Stutter was an improvisational dance piece that used soft circuit sensors to trigger sound and haptic actuators in the form of a small motor that tickles the performers. Dancers embodied the flutter of the motor and respond with their own movement that reflected this feeling. The sensors and actuators were bespoke designs by Becky Stewart and Tara Baoth Mooney that interacted, influenced and interrupted the flow of the dance, hack the body signals.

Feel Me worked with hacked commercial biosensing technology and structured improvisation dance. This piece used breath sensing technology from reworked fitness wearable tech garments and a custom-made app (made by artist Peter Todd, with permission of the fitness company OM Signal), that accessed the company’s development tools, and was used to communicate from the garment’s sensor to its actuator (a vibration motor), which buzzed when the dancers exhaled, causing them to respond within in a structured improvisation.

All the technology was developed over a several months, then integrated into the final garments and performances during an intensive three-week period running up to the performances in February. 

> Partners

  • Arts Council England
  • UCA / University for the Creative Arts
  • New Malden Studios

> Budget / Funding

  • £13,977 / Arts Council England, Feb – Oct 2016 (Creation & Performance Staging)
  • £6,750 / UCA, Apr 2015 (Artist Residency), Oct 2016 (Technical Development)

> Outcomes / Impact

October 5, 2018–February 8, 2019 Attempts, Failures, Trials and Errors exhibition of our video documentation of the live performances of Flutter /Stutter and Feel Me, curated by Hillevi Munthe and Tincuta Heinzel called OSEBNO / PERSONAL: international interdisciplinary exhibition at KIBLA PORTAL, Maribor, Slovenia. Webpage http://personal.kiblaportal.org/en_US/2018/10/01/kate-sicchio-zda-camille-baker-kanada-zk/ and other artists in the exhibition http://personal.kiblaportal.org/en_US/. Also featured on Slovenian TV and in an article by the curators Tincuta Heinzel and Ioana Popescu for Zeppelin Journal in Bucharest at https://e-zeppelin.ro/zeppelin-151/ More details here: http://www.kibla.org/en/news/news/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=5417&tx_ttnews[backPid]=1&cHash=aa50326f33 To see pictures from the opening https://www.flickr.com/photos/heinzelmenschen/albums/72157702077721485

Feb 21- April 1, 2018 Attempts, Failures, Trials and Errors exhibition with video of the live performances of Flutter /Stutter and Feel Me, curated by Hillevi Munthe and Tincuta Heinzel in Bucharest at the “Salon de Proiecte”. Online at http://salonuldeproiecte.ro/exhibitions/attempts-failures-trials-and-errors/ and Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1786684551415496/ images at https://www.flickr.com/photos/heinzelmenschen/sets/72157666073147048

Nov 16-Dec 9, 2017 Attempts, Failures, Trials and Errors exhibition of video for live performances of Flutter /Stutter and Feel Me, curated by Hillevi Munthe and Tincuta Heinzel, at Piksel art gallery, Bergen, Norway. Online at http://17.piksel.no/?p=432 and http://trials-and-errors.com/projects The exhibition “looks at the various stages of projects’ developments and attempts and perspectives and less mediatised wearable technologies and e-textiles projects.”

March 5th, 2017 Refest2.0 ITP NYU, New York City, a telematic performance via the Internet of Things protocol of X-OSc of Feel Me dance and wearables piece, created for February 2016 performances below, between one dancer in New York City and one in London, UK – documented briefly on our blog https://hackingthebody.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/performance-at-refest2-0-at-nyu-itp/

June 30-July 2, 2016 International Conference on Live Interfac es, Brighton, UK, performance of our Flutter /Stutter dance and wearables piece, created for February 2016 performances below www.liveinterfaces.org/ – conference proceedings https://thormagnusson.github.io/liveinterfaces/proceedings2016.html and video of live performance https://youtu.be/wDD1tQEJNJk

July–November 2015 Hacking the Body at 2015 Wear_NEXT Exhibition, Brisbane, Gallery artisan & touring Australia and Asia https://www.weekendnotes.com/wear-next-exhibition-gallery-artisan/ and online catalogue https://issuu.com/beckdavisgriffithuniversity/docs/wearnext_catalogue. A radio review of the show: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2015/09/bst_20150903_0843.mp3 and a video made during R&D residency at UCA and Siobhan Davies https://hackingthebody.wordpress.com/ or https://vimeo.com/133353621 featured in the exhibition

> Further Information

The Life Project

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> The Life Project

Robots and Emotion

2011-2012

Robots, Avatars, Open Source, Twitter, QR Code, Emergence, Virtual Lifeform, Craft, Design, Workshop.

> Gallery

Process and Final Exhibition Space Studios, Mare Street London 2012

> Timeline

Started April 2011, Public Exhibition, October 2011, Presented at the EVA Conference 2012

> Collaborators

  • Evan Raskob – Team Leader, Techical & Creative
  • Camille Baker – Artist & Creative Concepts
  • Nick Rothwell – Coder & Artist
  • Fiona French – Artist & Coder
  • with Andrew Crowe, Giorgio Demarco, Steven Fortune, Gustavo Guerrero, Lori Ho, Simon Katan, Chris Lowell, Manuel Mazzotti, David McLellan, Francesca Perona, Darren Perry, Elvia Vasconcelos and support from SPACE Studios

> Abstract

The Life Project explored issues of psychological projection into technology by diving into the convoluted relationship between practical purpose and emotional attachment, through both the creative act of designing and making robot entities with artificial emotions, and the social act of engaging with them. This process explores the concept of body representation through a multi- identity in virtual and physical blended space. In a lesser sense, it also suggests a future world of collaboration between physical and virtual forms, enabled by new forms of representation in blended worlds.

> Outcomes / Impact

The Life Project was originally conceived by Openlab Workshops as a collaborative workshop series for a diverse group of artists, designers, makers and musicians, developed as part of the Permacultures exhibitions at SP ACE Studios (SPACE 2012). The aim of the workshops was to explore the boundary between the virtual and the real by examining our complex, mutually dependent relationship with technology. This aim was to be achieved by designing and building an “ecosystem” of small digital Creatures (or robots) that would mutually interact and influence each other, and also interact with human participants who could choose to feed them and/or alter their environmental parameters in meaningful ways.

Inspiration was taken from a variety of sources including generative systems such as Conway’s Game of Life as an investigation of emergent behaviour, ecological and environmental concerns, digital pet toys such as Tamagotchi, video games and AI, as well as current research into modeling emotional intelligence systems.

The Life Project has successfully met its original aim of exploring embodiment and identity through the collaborative process of creating an “ecosystem” of little machines that live, grow, communicate and die with one another, all in the presence of humanity.

The major challenges can be summarised as follows:

(i.)  Creative Collaboration: Facilitating a large, diverse group of creative people to work and collaborate effectively together is a daunting task, since The Life Project provided a rare opportunity for designers, crafters, artists, programmers and engineers to develop ideas together on a shared brief, problem-solving and negotiating milestones from concept to finished artefact.

(ii.)  Developing an Emotional Intelligence – The Life Project explored how software and hardware could be used to represent and communicate changing emotional states. Experiments used software probability tables, animated lights, sounds, and tweets – a wide range of outputs, each with their own complexity.

(iii.)Communication and Interaction – The Life Project investigated modes of communication between software and hardware agents and people. Using Infra- red LEDs (light emitting diodes) as transmitter/receiver between Creatures and Environment; using Twitter to respond to people via Social Networks; using QR Codes to enable creature husbandry from the public – again with their unique requirements to interconnect with the rest, adding another layer of complexity (and chaos).(iv.)  Look and feel – The Life Project provided an opportunity for community involvement in the later stages of project, which required some of the complexity to be made more readily understandable and accessible for simple engagement and interactivity.

(v.)  FLOSS Integration – The FLOSS community and technology was essential to this project. Without the Arduino community, and their companion JeeNodes, the team would have had to purchase expensive proprietary systems or spend much more time developing core technology. The team reciprocated by distributing all code, diagrams, and blogging about the development process.

The team intended to maintain the project as a communal art installation, organising future workshops and inviting members of the public to contribute their own creative designs to and interact with a slice of digital ecology (but this didn’t happen). The aim was to provide future teams the opportunity to study the interaction and the effectiveness of the concepts and intended user interaction, in order to draw conclusions about our complex and interdependent relationship with technology and the “natural” world.

> Further Information