Intersections - Nguyen Dang Binh

Mark Cypher
Biophilia
10 feet x 15 feet x 20 feet
Art installation, camera tracking with game engine
ARTIST STATEMENT
Biophilia enables participants to interact with and generate organic
forms based on distortion of their shadows. Coined in 1984 by
sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, “biophilia” refers to the need of
living things to connect with others, even those of different species.
Biophilia attempts to absorb and synthesize users and their contexts,
producing unpredictable patterns of propagation and hybridity.
A number of myths and metaphors are used to describe the origin of
picture making, most of which involve shadows. Plato’s cave allegory
describes how our understanding of the world through vision is not
necessarily the same as what is physically visible. Within Biophilia,
participants and their shadows are synthesized into a larger cultural
picture of self and place yet reduced to a derivative echo containing
both “resemblance and menace.” The shadow resembles the
participant, a virtual manifestation of the relationship the user has
with the screen, at once reduced to a two-dimensional image that
menacingly begins to merge with other organisms in the same
screen space without consent nor care for the sovereignty of the
user’s concept of self and space.
Electronic Art and Animation Catalog Art Gallery Artworks
CONTACT
Mark Cypher
Murdoch University
10 Fifth Avenue
Beaconsfieldperth 6162 Australia
m.cypher@murdoch.edu.au
wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/multimedia/mark/biophil/biophil.html
Within Biophilia, the relationships between inside and outside
can also be expressed between computer code and interiority,
known and unknown. Code sits beneath the surface and can be
autopoetic and capable of self-organization, producing scary
unknown emergent properties. The coding process produces
these self-organising properties in the darkness of the machine,
eluding attempts to construct clean boundaries between known
and unknown.
likewise, Biophilia creates hybrid forms, which emerge through
the complex interaction between theory and practice, matter and
representation, where what matters is not necessarily human.
TECHNICAl STATEMENT
When users walk into the screen space, they generate a shadow.
A video camera in conjunction with a computer running custombuilt
computer-vision drivers processes the image so that shapes
can be tracked and converted to a three-dimensional virtual space.
Three-dimensional plant forms are generated within the shadows
being tracked via the camera. When another person enters the
same space, the plant forms growing from the second shadow try to
merge and combine, thus connecting the two users via the screen.