Here you find projects under the "Ecology Urbanitas" theme. Previously being two sections, now are compiled into one: the upper part is "Signal Ecology", and below - "Urbanitas Paradigm":
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Projects on media ecology paradigm exploring deep time through electromagnetic substance:
Media Inclusus
Construction scaffoldings for the restoration of the sacred space of St. Bernardine Church and Monastery in Vilnius, Lithuania, stand like antibodies and influence not only religious life but also attract the energies that are opposite to the surroundings. The artist is connecting electromagnetic extremely low frequency (ELF) receiver to the scaffoldings and transforms it into an antenna.
Suitable frequencies attract not only common waves (10-100 Hz), but are shut down by stronger waves of propaganda and Russian speaking radio station, the extremely opposite worldview for the religious milieu. Christian faith is forced by Russian slogans and greater neighbour's discussions on local issues found a warm shelter. Soviet ideology and Russian propaganda adversely penetrate into a sacramental environment of antagonistic and resistant post-soviet republic space. Psychogeophysics and media ecology come together to resolve the clearance of semantic pathetics.
Inclusive artefacts invoke metal construction as antennae for rendering a message and hearing inaudible and invisible. The site-specific media art project is asking the question of where precisely the hidden executes.
Officially, there is no commercial or military communication around the ELF frequency – but in this range, you also can find signals similar to sferics and emissions produced by natural processes in the atmosphere – especially at periods of sunspots and polar lights. At this site (St. Bernardine Church) radio pollution is too strong to hear any environmental sonics. Local spectral ecologies are fed up with political content influences.
About circuit: The circuit detects and amplifies ELF electromagnetic emissions with some low pass filtering for audio frequency output.
Mobile module: EM sniffer, handy camcorder, and headphones.
/ Psychogeography can be defined as an examination of the total effects of geography and place on the individual.
/ Psychogeophysics expands this artistic research to embrace geophysics, defined as the quantitative observation of the earth's physical properties, and its interaction with local signal ecologies.
Psychogeophysics proposes a series of interdisciplinary public experiments excavating the spectral city and examining the precise effects of geophysical/spectral ecologies on the individual through pseudo-scientific measurement and mapping, algorithmic walking and the construction of situations.
- Media Inclusus in St. Bernardine Church, 2011. Some variations of the project appeared in other public spaces of Vilnius, Lithuania.
- Media Inclusus video documentation film exhibited at Propaganda in Kulturhuset / Culture House in Stockholm, Sweden. 2 min 42 sec, loop, 2012.
1. Scaffoldings in St. Bernardine Church in Vilnius, Lithuania.
2. Media Inclusus video in Kulturhuset / Culture House in Stockholm, Sweden.
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Maxwell City
- sonic artwork, 19 min. 50 sec. A compilation of electromagnetic sounds recorded during the Maxwell City workshop at Atelier Nord. Using different antennaes and coils the participants attempted to document the electromagnetic soundtrack of various parts of Oslo. Collaboration and contributions by Vygandas Simbelis, HC Gilje, Amanda Steggell, Martin Howse, Erich Berger, Atle Barcley, Sneha Solanki, Lindsay Brown.
Artwork broadcasted in 2007-2008 at Ctrl_Alt_Del Sound Art Festival. Radio broadcasting worldwide in New York (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre), Athens (1st Athens Biennial), Montreal, Ghent, Berlin, Zagreb, Basel, Graz, Zurich, Istanbul (10th International Istanbul Biennial).
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Signal Map
The ubiquitous presence of the signal spectrum defines conditions of everyday life and has extensive environmental, epistemic, economic, aesthetic, political, and social consequences. This discourse determines practices within media ecology and brings natural phenomena to be explored within various artistic expressions.
In the Signal Map project Vegas has been examining the city of Vilnius as a field for electromagnetic-sound field-recordings and site-specific mapping explorations. A more defined site of focus was the territory of the conjunct ensemble of Vilnius Academy of Arts and St. Bernardine Church and Monastery in Vilnius, Lithuania. Sound field recordings and mapping of the area were released as a sound art collection, artistic maps, and visual image artworks. The project produced in the period of 2006-2009, Vilnius.
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Media Rosary
The Rosary (from Latin rosarium, meaning "rose garden") or "garland of roses" is a popular and traditional Catholic devotion. The term denotes both a set of prayer beads and the devotional prayer itself, which combines vocal or silent prayer and meditation.
Artwork Media Rosary is designed from a set of different format connectors and crossovers smoothly connected to each other into a closed circuit. It seems to become a technological devotion for media artists. Media Rosary is accompanied by the sound artwork Window-oriented Ontology, where the window provides certain parameters for the antennae. The electromagnetic sniffer receives waves in the gallery with the direct antennae made out of metal-foil-tape stuck around the window frame.
Media Rosary, Net'as - thematic exhibition of works by artistic researchers in art practice, curated by Vygandas Simbelis, gallery Academy, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2008.
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Window-oriented Ontology
The sound artwork Window-oriented Ontology examines new material aesthetics through signal substance and a realistic view on street life.
Signal substance explored through conditions of media ecology and experienced via electromagnetic frequency and sounds exposes the hidden and its relations to the real world. New materiality enters with an amorphous solid and its vibrations. The created sound is a mixture of amplified electromagnetic frequency, vibrant glass and urban street noise with transpassing vehicles.
The size of the window is used to provide certain parameters for shaping the antennae, the electromagnetic sniffer receives waves in the gallery with the direct antennae made out of metal-foil-tape glued on the window glass around the window frame. The window and its frame provide measures and design the antennae. The materiality of glass sends vibrations and together with the electromagnetic signals creates a soundscape for the street view which is present and framed by the window antennae.
Window-oriented Ontology; ELF sniffer, headphones, antennae, window; shown at Net thematic exhibition of works created by artistic researchers, the exhibition brings Networks as an actual turn point in our contemporary society, curated by Vygandas Simbelis, gallery Academy, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2008.
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Beta Band Interface
It is an electromagnetic apparatus transmitting frequency around beta band onto human brain. Some scientists have suggested that this level of waves may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost and 19 Hz might be responsible for some ghost sightings. According to scientist appeared in media archaeology from 18 century - Emanuel Swedenborg - he discovered soul and living ghosts in the same frequency.
Electromagnetic induction made by directly inducing the voltage in human brains through the spinning of a copper wrapped bicycle wheels across the earth's magnetic dipole.
For example, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technique used to induce a short-term interruption of normal activity in a relatively restricted area of the brain by rapidly changing a strong magnetic field near the area of interest.
The project was presented at the Piksel festival, Bergen, Norway. It is a collaborative work with British artist Jonathan Kemp and Berlin-based Martin Howse.
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Field_Notes
Explorations of sonic wilderness in the wild in Northern areas of Polar Circle in Finland, Sweden and Norway. Natural interventions in natural resorts, collaborative sonifications of nature, amplification of spectral fields, sonic performances in mountains, field recordings, sonics for ecology, shout outs at waterfall, concerts in rock fields. Symposiums, seminars, workshops, interventions by BioArt Society 2011-2019. Mentions in various articles and in the book "Art as We Don't Know It" by by Erich Berger, Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka, Kira O’Reilly, and Helena Sederholm.
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Oslo Sound
The project Oslo Sound is backed-up in 1864 by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell with his revolutionaries and equations. It takes practice in Oslo (Norway) city and its surroundings and is proposing an artistic investigation into electromagnetic substance: media ecological spectrum of urban space.
The real world and electromagnetic sound play choreography in the video (2 channel video projection) and the observer is involved in the interactive play of media art installation.
Interactive installation: 2 video projections, gambling machine, 2 EM ELF sniffers, 10 kW sound system. Exhibited in the Intro art centre, Vilnius, Lithuania.
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Sonic Oslo
The project Sonic Oslo is an artistic investigation into electromagnetic substance in Oslo, Norway. ELF (extremely low frequency) sniffer catches pulses of the hidden and invisible urban world where electromagnetically polluted environment screams about the unseen danger. The project explains simple techniques within Media Ecology and warns about social policy concerning our daily habits and lovely widgets.
The real world and electromagnetic sound play choreography in media art installation (two-channel video projection) and a video are involved in an interactive play between 2 screens where the length of videos is different and live montage between projections creates never endless mix in sound and video.
The material was captured in Oslo city, Norway.
Video length 34'24'’ & 33’10’’, loop. Exhibited at Site-Sensitive Acts exhibition in Mejan gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
"Vygandas Simbelis idiosyncratically marks a zone – only in an urban environment and devoid of human protagonists; in Sonic Oslo an antenna-like device plays the lead. The device, whose little head registers radiation, is taken for a walk around the Norwegian capital and speaks up whenever it meets electromagnetic impulses in cash machines or cell phones, and a robotic conversation takes place as they speak each other’s tongue of whimpering, tapping and clicking. Again, places have been charged, but in a literal way.
It was the radical Lettrist and Situationist International groups who initiated the practice later known as psychogeography, ”re-mapping” cities in an act of anti-capitalist, consumer-conscious criticism. Before them was Baudelaire’s flâneur, also subtly attempting to redefine an existing urban landscape by placing themselves in it, walking it, inhabiting it, in determined new ways. Many have followed, carrying out pedestrian explorations in city settings; or in rural equivalents where the occult plays a part, searching for latent alternative geographies drawn for example in ley lines."
Johanne Nordby Wernø, ”Your place or mine?”, on ”Site-Sensitive Acts”.
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The second part is for Mediated Urbanity projects:
Social Skin
The history of the Järvafield as a former training site for military operations, socio-cultural activities in the are and a personal positioning in social and physical space is the starting point for the art project for digging trenches in the field.
Site-specific art project with warfare structures, trenches dug, in a peaceful time in a field of Kista-Rinkeby area in Stockholm, Sweden. "Space and Spectacle" exhibition and project in public space, 2012.
Digging trenches involves people to act and communicate on controversial local topics while invoking societal debates in public. Warfare trenches appear without a context of war but from the historical perspective of the area. The former military training field proposes a site-specific approach to the local discussions on social politics.
Entrenchment proposes a new look at the site, viewers’ ground position provides a frog view (low point of view) and lowered perspective, which for some players might be sufficiently healthy.
Symbolic comparison of the ground as the main representative subject of the debate on local social issues to the skin as a private surface of the body. Private internals metaphorically compared to public properties.
Representations of the body inspired a generation of anthropologists and cultural theorists to explore the human body as a text that can be read to reveal a great deal of cultural information. This symbolic function of the body applies not only to the taboos and rituals, but to parts of the body, to representations of the human body and to decorations and modifications of the flesh as ornaments, cosmetics, costuming, tattooing, piercing, and scarification, muscular development, cosmetic surgery, etc. However extreme or seemingly whimsical the practice, it always has meaning, always is shaped by the socio-cultural context in and through which people act.
In one year after the exhibition, in the summer of 2013, the area got ruined by local riots, cars were put on fire, people injured and the exhibition site - Husby art centre was burned down.
The excavator is digging the artwork Social Skin, Husby art centre.
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Social Seed
The project Social Seed is the continuation of the project Social Skin and is an intervention into the up-following exhibition project Performing the Common (2012) was executed at the same site of Social Skin project (continuation of the project) and Space and Spectacle (2012) exhibition project (extension of the exhibition) near Husby Konsthall, Stockholm. Social Skin went in peace with the environment and selection of random flower seeds were planted on the pattern of levelled trenches - warfare structures. Taking a departure from a computational and cryptographic random seed, sharing the secret key within seeded visual algorithms. The project Social Seed reminds about historical memory on military training field around the site and gives the path and shared keys to oblivion local social problems.
Visitors planting the flowers, Social Seed project, Husby art centre.
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Digital Zoom Spying
The work tackles mass surveillance and data collection.
Penetrations into innermost places are welcome and open for everyone. There are no rules in public space to protect naïve and innocent. No tracing techniques are necessary to capture hidden strategy footage. All data in public space is explicit, open for manipulations. Surveillance video material is accessible to everyone and is potentially broadcasted worldwide. All data is open. Share your privacy! Explicit your source! Your personal data is open to anyone you’ve never seen before. Your public portrait and intimate places are exposed in the exhibition, just for a showing beautiful picture or explaining simple tactics: private is no more private in a public space.
Would you accept a proposal to expose your privatescape to anyone's else purpose, anywhere and anytime? Mediated sitescapes with a pixelated view captured by ordinary handy-cam using digital zoom provides with a veil of secrecy which easily could be redefined into a quality image for smb’s back and black purposes.
The observer of the project is identified with a kind of deviant: the deviant Mr. Infinity for a new paradigm of our daily creative and daily technological environment with an indulgence in a perverted aesthetic sickness.
Questioning privacy in the digital age enters the technological means as a technique to manipulate or even to control people, so the art in the age of surveillance is a type of field with its own political consequences.
The project asks important questions from the technological point of view about why such technology as digital zoom is implemented in consumer-level cameras? No one will use such technology just for zooming in and receiving pixelated image… Or maybe someone is using it just to hack some private bodily images of a stranger? But in general, pixelated image is a type of abstraction which in most cases brings more artistic values and opens imagination than provides solutions for and satisfies simple consumer needs. In this case, digital zoom becomes an artistic tool on a consumer level and everyone can enjoy its usage. But another question is how long such weird technology will stay in the market?
Video material captured in Paris, 2010, edited in Stockholm, 2011.
33'33'', loop.
Exhibited at Site-Sensitive Acts in Mejan gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
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Drone Orchestra
Sonic art performance at Piksel 09, Bergen, Norway, electronic media art festival dedicated to technological freedom and arts. Participating artists Peter Edwards (US), Diego de Leon (ES), Servando Barreiro (DE), Haavar Eggereide (NO) and Vygandas Simbelis. DIY drone synthesizers, rhythm boxes & effects processors used generating rich, textured soundscapes, hypnotic drones, and complex rhythmic sequences.
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Deep Town and Megacity Show
Documentation of children with masks on the streets of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, while the smoke of burning peat around the city was spreading and polluting the environment in 2002. The comparably small town turned into a megacity with its urban consequences of the surrounding pollution and natural emission of burned geological resources. It is twofold, the natural processes and cycles of geological time urbanizing a small town - Deep Town documentary protographs and performative transformations of Megacity Show.
Photography series Deep Town is taken of schoolchildren at the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art. Photographs exhibited at the INTRO art centre, the exhibition was combined with an event and performance Megacity Show of participants wearing respiratory protective masks.
Link to photographs Deep Town.
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V.D.A.
The aim of the artistic research project is to investigate particular time and space through the lens of game strategies. Taking the determined territory of the conjunct ensemble of Vilnius Academy of Arts and St. Bernardine Church and Monastery in Vilnius in consideration: the history of two distinct institutions, relatively similar objectives, sacramental and spiritual worlds, the phenomenology of faith and creation, metaphysics and transcendent experience, feeling of eternity and transiency in the chosen period are target points for Vygandas' expanded project. The buildings' complex separated by Soviet judgments came together in a unit of V.D.A. project through comparison of animate and inanimate, body and building. Audio-visual installation with predominant circulation strategies and documentary prospects of chosen time and space are significant aspects of the expression of the artwork.
The aim of artistic research is an academic work on artistic practice within a site-specific approach in the urban milieu. Investigations within urban issues of the spatial and social structures are creatively combined with the body strategies. The perception of the urban site is achieved applying paradigms of the body and living organisms. Simply explaining the urban site appears as skin, corridors as blood vessels, library as heart, and so. But all those practices are impossible without the dynamism of the site, processes inside, interaction and communication. An important characteristic of the research is retrieving and collecting urban data for artistic purposes.
The urban site is a constantly changing structure, pulsating and growing, depending on environmental factors, both internal and external, while the body reacts likewise. The sharing of the same codes opens wide perspectives. The similarity of the interface is a key principle of the research project and the study of space. As the body and the site are using the same strategies, methods and techniques while time and space are researched through aesthetic values.
Documentary images are a common method to measure and reflect on the monumental scale of change occurring in contemporary society. These images are also highly aestheticised, making beauty even of images of the most desolate slum or industrialised landscape. As a crossover point between art and journalism, the documentary image also allows us to question the veracity of world events from multiple viewpoints, often offering multiple uncomfortable realities instead of a single, easily-digestible worldview. In an era of massive data onslaught that individuals struggle to cope with, the documentary image continues to offer us a human face on information, sometimes elegantly summarising a complex situation.
Three-channel video projection installation, photography series and released limited-edition art DVD is a result of several years’ artistic research.
More on V.D.A.: on the institutional critique projects and academic work in Art Academy. V.D.A. photography series and its part Academia Nature Morte project.
v.d.a., multichannel installation: view.
v.d.a., art dvd and package.
v.d.a., photography series.