Interium (2018)

Interium is both a video installation and an integrated virtual reality experience. The project utilizes real-time animation and generative sound to immerse the viewer-participant in a detailed other worldly expanse populated by morphogenic visual forms. These emergent artificial life forms invite the viewer in a play-like dance of give and take, at times evading the human explorer and at other times enveloping the participant in a scintillating vibratory embrace. This exploration of empathy and interconnection emerges in gestural dialogues and novel relationships that unfold between the synthetic life forms and the human viewer. Interium is rendered in a hybrid visual language that seamlessly fuses supple pattern formations inspired by the flora and fauna of the natural world with kinetic sculptural structures reminiscent of man-made artifacts and architectures. On entering Interium we encounter both the visceral presence of alien life and our own innate physically responsive emotive being.

Vesica Pisces (2017)

Cory Metcalf & David Stout with guest artist, Reilly Donovan

VesicaP_Mariannah.jpg

Vesica Pisces is a hybrid virtual reality and multi-channel projected video installation that exists as a speculative glimpse into an inter-dimensional state where the viewer-participant enters a world nested within a world.  The artist team utilize generative techniques in realtime algorithmic image, sound and music synthesis to create a tangible experience of traversing liminal boundaries.  This reexamination of landscape explores the classical figure ground relationship within a simulated artificially intelligent virtual environment that allows for powerfully visceral experiences including extreme fluctuations of scale revealing seemingly infinite heights and horizontal expanses. This vast scale is contrasted by moments of intimate interaction with impossibly small objects that are able to retract into, or emerge out of, a single point within the apparent fabric of reality. In this medium, the VR headset and trackers are the devices that probe, prod or drive the properties of the simulation. Vesica Pisces reimagines this notion of control to provide a radical departure from the well worn “first person shooter” approach to game design. In Vesica Pisces the viewer-participant becomes an integral part of the aesthetic ecosystem, which enables a receptive freedom for each observer to wander and thus co-create a unique sonic-visual-somatic experience much like a visitor entering an extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional domain of ambiguous scale and dimension.  The algorithmic forms suggest geologic, architectonic and biomorphic structures that appear to have their own sentient response to the viewer. The system unfolds or evolves as the viewers walk, wander and contemplate their place within a place that exists in a perpetual state of becoming.

The Observer Effect (2016)

OE_R_wide_at_work.jpg
9e2 VR dual Screen.jpg

The Observer Effect is a virtual reality installation by, Cory Metcalf, and David Stout with guest artist, Reilly Donovan. The Virtual Reality experience takes place within the physical space of a second projected video installation titled, MELT. Viewers enter this “world within a world” encountering an abstract field or landscape populated by fluid geometric forms that generate their own sounds. Physics defines, the “observer effect” as an occurrence where changes are made to a phenomenon as a result of the act of observation.  From a rational materialist perspective this result is seen largely as an effect of the instruments employed in observation and not the mind of a conscious observer; however, the mind does play a powerful role in witnessing how tools influence what is under observation. Taken from a different cultural perspective that embraces an animistic worldview, the consciousness of the observer can and does influence other tangible energetic structures. In this work, the VR headset and trackers are the devices impacting the properties of the simulation. The VR apparatus frees each observer to wander and unfold a unique sonic-visual-somatic experience much like a visitor entering an extraterrestrial domain of ambiguous scale and dimension.

Emblems of Ascension (2015)

EoA 72dpi.jpg

Emblems of Ascension is a a multi-screen generative image and sound installation. The project explores the interplay between inertia, noise and force of attraction within the digital simulation of spinning particle fields. The artists have engaged in an ongoing expedition through these virtual fields to discover latent images, sounds and musical potentials that give rise to often arcane and archetypal emblematic forms. The work consists of large-scale immersive projections that simulate an array of macrocosmic and microcosmic forces. The real-time particle animations simultaneously generate a synchronous multi-channel surround sound environment providing a contemplative space for the viewer-participant to experience the materialization and dematerialization of emergent audio-visual forms. This continuum of iconic yet ephemeral images oscillates between states of growth and decay, at times suggesting dynamic cellular evolution, accumulated sedimentary geographies, spinning nebula, and celestial maps evoking the fragmentary recollection of lost artifacts, languages and architectures.

MELT (2013)

Cory Metcalf and David Stout (NoiseFold) continue their exploration of dynamic digital processes to generate a hybrid synthesis of visual and sonic form. 

MELT is a realtime, multi-screen video and sound installation. The work depicts a world in flux, where pure formal abstraction exists as a state of continuous fluid upheaval. The viewer-participant is drawn into an elemental vista of sculpted rifts, plunging crevices, eroding plains, crags and caverns. These topological extrusions, resulting from the interplay of diverse digital techniques, are the artifacts of a generative system oscillating between moments of frozen stasis and swiftly accelerating change. This evocative audio-visual environment, suspended in slow glacial retreat, inevitably gives way to unpredictable climactic events. The work can be viewed as a kind of multi-sensory clock, marking heraldic events and providing the viewer a speculative glimpse into deep time.

 

El Umbral (2011)

Umbral is derived from the Latin umbra, which means shadow and also "threshold" in Spanish. In El Umbral, two ten-foot video towers are placed in close proximity to imply a portal or gateway. This structure, conceived as a union of opposites, is at once a nexus between the masculine and feminine, past and future, fear and its absolution. Shrouded atmospheric formations, architectural remnants and shattered structures caught in a perpetual exploding decay exist together in a continuous oscillating state of veiling and revealing. Disembodied eyes flock through the debris, dart furtively or rise and fall like mechanistic clockwork observing any and everyone who passes.

While El Umbral pays homage to twentieth century surrealism, the work primarily exists as a psychological anti-monument to the deepening surveillance state and the shadows of events past that cloud our way forward.  The layered visual vocabulary, combining both photographic figurative elements and a variety of synthetic digital imaging techniques, draws freely from both eastern and western traditions. The work utilizes a networked digital system to generate both sound and image in real-time. This enables the viewers to influence the structuring and behavior of both the audio and visual composition as they pass to and fro between the monitor towers or “gate-posts”.

NADA (2009)

This track is taken from a 3-screen video installation created by NoiseFold. The work explores the use of mathematic visualization as a means to sonify multiple data streams. The image (attached artwork) is a still frame taken from one of the three screens.

i I i (2008)

i I i  is a three screen networked video installation exploring 3D data feedback and delay techniques to fold, crumple, and blend simple planes and spheres.  The resulting images, resembling complex objects made of paper or fabric, are further revealed through the use of video skins that cut away both inner and outer surfaces.  Organized in the form of a triptych, the center screen controls the image generation of the outer satellite screens.  The work recycles approximately every 60 minutes, though never repeating in exactly the same manner.

Three Tortures: Babel, Iriscan, Death by Image: a Sonic Execution (2007)

The Gauntlet

Babel is one of three interactive installations created by Metcalf and Stout in collaboration with students from the Installation, Performance & Interactivity project at the College of Santa Fe.  All three installations are based on biometric profiling techniques currently being used for security purposes in the US and abroad.  In Babel, Cory has programmed a software based 3D scanner utilizing an infrared video camera to capture a wire-mesh mask of the subject.  The resulting portraits self-assemble in a virtual floating ziggurat that allows the operator to access an navigate the topology of any given portrait scan taken over days, weeks, months, or years.

In essence, Babel is a visual database rendered in a mythic architectural form.  The image above is a wide shot of "The Gauntlet" exhibit where Babel was housed.  The Gauntlet was conceived as an architectural mashup among a nightclub, a strip club, and a church, imagined as being run by the Department of Homeland Security.  The portrait images included here use a similar technique using a standard video camera as the capture device.  In these examples the 3D coordinates are determined by the luminance of the image; thus light levels can be used to make exquisite distortions in the models.  This realtime 3D video technique is the basis of work underway on both public art installations and animation projects.

 

Blue Plot (2004)

Blue_Plot Composite Image.png

Blue Plot is a video/sound installation and radio broadcast.  Stout and Metcalf composed eight live camera streams, mixing architectural, figurative, and environmental scenes captured throughout the SFAI grounds.  The images centered around intersecting architectural fragments and the wide open New Mexican sky on a hot, listless summer afternoon.  These video images were then transcoded into electronic sound and broadcast as a composite radio signal.  Created with the artist-producers of free103point9 transmission arts for Tune(In))) Santa Fe, NM and Brooklyn, NY.