Geoffrey Drake-Brockman
Artist
| Optic Alley |
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Optic Alley is an interactive laser
installation consisting of sixteen pivoting green lasers mounted along a
twelve metre stretch of narrow laneway. Optic Alley
incorporates four motion detectors and a computer control system so that pedestrians
approaching the installation trigger a cascading sequences of laser
deflections to create waves that progress down the alleyway until they
dissipate. Optic Alley sets up the potential for a dance-like performance to
emerge, as pedestrians move and sway in response to the lasers and Optic
Alley responds in turn to the movement of pedestrians. Optic Alley is the result
of a Research and Development grant from the Perth
Institute of Contemporary Art and Cultural Sponsorship from the City of Perth |
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| Floribots |
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Floribots consists of
128
computer-controlled robot origami flowers arranged in an 8-by-16 grid
spread over
35 square metres of floor space. Each robot flower is able to extend
telescopically from a rest condition to grow one metre vertically, then
suddenly invert its origami “flower” into an open “bloom” state. The
unit can
also re-contract back down into its latent condition and refold its
origami bloom
back into a “bud”. |
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Essentialiser
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Essentialiser is an interactive appliance incorporating 60 small industrial red lasers, installed along three axial mounts. Each laser produces a fan beam that creates a perfect plane of red light. The effect is that anything or anyone inside Essentialiser is embedded in a matrix of 6,859 ten-centimetre wide cubes of red laser light inside a two-and-a-half metre cubic enclosure. The enclosure is darkened internally and screened from outside light. Audience participants are able to pass through a door and enter the space where the 60 beams trace lines onto their bodies. The visible effect of the incident beams is be picked up via an infra-red video camera and displayed, on a feedback monitor inside the Essentialiser, as well as an large outside monitor, for the gallery audience to see. Collaboration with Rickie Kuhaupt. Essentialiser has been exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and at Collaborative Concepts Gallery in New York USA. |
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| Transfiction |
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Transfiction uses a
laser projection to redefine the surface of a built
object - |
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Bubblesort
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Bubblesort is a
famous software sorting algorithm. This sculpture actualises the
virtual bubblesort construct and credits it with agency and interactive
potential. Exhibited
Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi and Cottesloe. |
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LaserWrap
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Laserwrap is a
permanently installed animated laser sculpture that illuminates the ACT
Health Building for three hours each night. Twenty green lasers
literally wrap the building in a gently undulating matrix of light
cubes. Laserwrap has had a transformational impact on the quality of
the built environment in the nightlife precinct at the heart of
Canberra. A new and unexpected addition has been made to the solid
presence of a 1970s public building - in the evening it comes to life,
transformed like the pumpkin before midnight into an otherworld vision.
A functioning building is transposed to a plastic, performing, chimera.
The artist's vision entailed embedding an existing built object into an
active laser sculpture. They wanted to take the classic mathematical
system of Cartesian 3-D co-ordinates - consisting of x,y, and z axes -
and use it as a metaphor for a virtualising, postindustrial worldview.
They wanted to apply this metaphor on a massive scale - the huge
step-pyramid presence of the ACT Health Building provided the prefect
platform for this experiment. Collaboration with Rickie Kuhaupt. This
work was recognised as an Exemplar
of the Year of the Built Environment 2004. |
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Torso
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Torso is a life size
human figure derived from a body cast of one of the artists. The outer
parts of Torso are made from mirror-polished stainless steel, while the
central section is made from a resin-bonded composite that consists of
75% powdered white marble. The effect of the figure so rendered is that
the trunk and extremities are separated visually, while remaining
physically contiguous. The central torso makes reference to
archaeological remnants of heroic figures from Greek antiquity. The
marble used as the material for this part of the work also plays to
this classical reference. The outer parts of the figure are encased in
'gloves' of reflective metal that evoke the hi-tech / sci-fi 'chrome'
signifier. Collaboration
with Rickie Kuhaupt. Finalist,
Helen Lempriere Sculpture Prize. |
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Quadrascope
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Quadrascope is an omidirectional interface device that displays a large-scale animated version of Chromeskin on each side of a telephone box-sized rectangular prism. The device displays images derived from the Chromeskin laserscan data, processed against the current visual field around it. Observers are able to walk up to and around Quadrascope and approach its surfaces closely. On each face a representation of mirror surfaced Chromeskin is displayed, with the figure reflecting and reacting to the movements of the viewer in realtime. The device is a kind of 'fishtank' giving the impression of a chrome body floating within a rectangular volume. The machine uses four networked computers, four video cameras, and four 130cm plasma flat panel displays. Quadrascope is driven by synchronised 3-D rendering software written especially for the artists by headus (metamorphosis). Quadrascope forms
part of the Chromeskin project. Quadrascope was created in collaboration with Richie Kuhaupt.
Finalist and Highly Commended Award, National Sculpture Prize,
National Gallery of Australia 2001. |
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Emission
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| Emission is an exported cyberterritorian (item/being/process). Here crystallised is the cyborg intermarriage of amorphous, sticky, organic potentials, wetly embracing the rigour of regularly expressed delineated systems. Emission is a denizen of the digital realm that has been swept from its native virtual context into the world of mundane tangibility and deposited here on the shores of our reality. | ||
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Erasorhead
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Maria
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and auto lacquer on stainless steel. Maria was the robot/girl herione
of the Fritz Lang film masterpeice "Metropolis" |
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| Chromeskin is the result of a three year collaborative project between Geoffrey Drake-Brockman and Richie Kuhaupt. Chromeskin was a finalist in the 2001 inaugural National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition, and was on exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra from November 30 2001 to March 10 2002. The work was awarded the distinction of Highly Commended by the National Sculpture Prize judges. | ||
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Neural Network
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Neural Network
consists of 18 nodes, regularly distributed over a mirror reflective
matrix-form. As the viewer changes orientation the nodes appear to
intermittently make and break connections with adjacent nodes. Chrome
surface produced by electrofoming over fibreglass. Winner, Princess
Margaret Search for Genius Award.
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Geoffrey
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The key process of the Geoffrey artwork is a single-point ocular gridding of the installation space. An ideal perceptual checkerboard that is suggestive of networked and delineating technologies, as well as linear and ordered mental systems. Of course, the act of observation always influences the observed phenomena, but in the case of Geoffrey a transient act of observation has been crystallised as an observable system in itself. In a sense, Geoffrey depicts a sensorium, an inner space or Cartesian theatre where mental processes are played out. In here, Geoffrey is both actor and audience, caught in the cycle of his own awareness. Geoffrey: information technologist, man-who-would-be-robot, logician. Under the perfect ordering principle Geoffrey is rendered monodimentional. Outside the system there are glimpses of another Geoffrey: fat man, artist, person. Geoffrey was created in collaboration with Richie Kuhaupt. |
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Pangenesis
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Jacobs Ladder
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Pangenesis is a
theory of inheritance where genetic information is derived from all
parts of an organism. Pangenesis has been discredited in the organic
context, but may be a viable schema for reproduction of virtual
lifeforms. In this work a virtual being has just reproduced via
fission - producing three new offspring. Under pangenesis each
offspring has a complete genetic record. Jacobs Ladder is the ladderr leading to heaven as seen by Jacob in his dream, alternatively it is a device for generating a series of high voltage plasma arcs that ascend twin diverging conductors before dissipating into atmosphere. |
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Lasercube
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Lasercube is a programme exploring the application of planar beams of laser light to describe surfaces, objects and landscapes. The core Lasercube technology involves 60 industrial lasers with hemicylindrical lenses. These are mounted on armatures arranged along the x, y, and z spatial axes. The project encompasses the capture of laser effects via video and still photography and the digital manipulation and presentation of these images. The project crosses boundaries between photography, dance, video, performance, and installation artforms. Lasercube is a collaboration between Drake-Brockman and Kuhaupt and, in its dance/performance realisation, the Skadada performance troupe.. Laser beams are coherent, absolute agents that will be used in this project to introduce gridding and dividing systems applied to realworld objects. This will be done in order to conveniently reduce the object under investigation to its bare spatial necessity. Lasercube is a collaborative project with Richie Kuhaupt. Images shown are of a performance piece (Lasercube II) developed in collaboration with Skadada, dancers; Jon Burtt and Lucy Taylor. |
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Phasespace Tunneler
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| Phasespace is a mathematical abstraction - an infinite-dimensional space in which each point fully specifies the total spacetime of an alternate universe. Phasespace encompasses all possible universes - by extrapolation, phasespace hints at the potential embryonic in 'cyberspace'. | ||
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| Memebot Cluster | ||
| A 'meme' is an idea or behaviour that exhibits some 'lifelike' characteristics as it is adopted by groups and individuals. Memes may spread throughout populations osmotically, mutate, flourish, or dissipate. They are generally independent of individual 'carriers' and may be likened to (computer) viruses that 'run' in a human consciousness 'virtual machine'. 'Bot' is a contraction of 'robot' denoting a software system with a degree of autonomy that undertakes a particular task or manages a specific issue. A cluster is generally a collection of like things, a 'bunch' - but in systems terms is a closely interlinked group of processors that effectively become a single aggregate machine - in some ways 'greater than the sum of its parts'. | ||
Geoffrey Drake-Brockman
was born in Woomera, South Australia in 1964. In 1985 he was awarded a
BSc in Computer Science from the University of Western Australia, and
in 1994 an MA (Visual Arts) from the Curtin University School of Art.
He has been exhibiting since 1986 with a major solo exhibition 'The
Identity Appliance' at Goddard de Fiddes in 1997. In 2001 he exhibited
at 'Sculpture by the Sea' in Sydney. He was awarded the Sir Charles
Gardiner Annual Art Award in 1993, and the 1997 AIIA Telstra AFR
National Award for Excellence in Information Technology. In collaboration with
Richie Kuhaupt he installed the work 'Geoffrey' at The Verge, Perth
and the work Chromeskin at the National Gallery of Australia, the
latter work winning the 'highly commended award' in the 2001 National
Sculpture Prize. In 2005 his robotic work Floribots was a finalist at
the National Sculpture Prize at the National Gallery of Australia and
won the People's Choice Award.
Contact: geoffrey@drake-brockman.com.au