Australia awards AU$30,000 to Nonnatus Korhonen and Nuerone Schism to combine art with neuroscience and make virtual bees

Avatar Nonnatus Korhonen and real bees hover over the honey in Nuerone Schism's hand

It must be said... Australia continues to trailblaze ahead of most first-world nations in its funding and fostering of novel programs that explore the arts in the virtual realm. The Australia Council for the Arts has just announced the winners of its collaborative massive multi-user virtual environment (MMUVE) arts project, MMUVE IT!, and this is the second consecutive year that a NPIRLer wins.

Our own Nonnatus Korhonen (aka Andrew Burrell), together with Nuerone Schism (aka Trish Adams), are the recipients of the Council's AU$30,000 grant, which they will use to collaborate on Mellifera, a mixed-realities artwork exploring cognitive processes and body movement, and their relationship to virtual environments in both Second Life® and the recently launched Australian virtual platform, Vastpark.

Last year's winner was Babelswarm - an interactive sculpture based on the mythical Tower of Babel - conceived and created by NPIRLer Adam Ramona (aka Adam Nash), Mashup Islander (aka Christopher Dodds), and Justin Clemens, (teleport directly from here).

Andrew Burrell (Nonnatus Korhonen) is a Sydney-based visual artist and writer, best known to us as the man who created the mysterious and elusive birds at the Garden of NPIRL Delights...


This photo by Kean Kelly

... as well as Oracle, an installation that investigates perception and interpretation of language and representation of form (teleport directly from here).



Brisbane-based arts/science practitioner and researcher Trish Adams (Nuerone Schism) has a Doctorate in Visual Arts, and her thesis explored the impact on expressions and representations of corporeality of experimental techniques in biomedical engineering and involved a cross-disciplinary collaboration with a biomedical scientist at The University of Queensland.

The artists will collaborate with Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, head of visual and sensory neuroscience at the University of Queensland's Brain Institute - where Trish Adams is currently an artist in residence - to create artifically intelligent bee-like creatures that will be native to their virtual environment. Said Andrew,"They'll feed and have predators like ordinary creatures, but their behaviour will be determined by the rules of the environment."

Professor Srinivasan was the recipient of the 2007 Premier of Queensland Smart State Fellowship Award for his leading research into cognition and navigation systems in small brains such as the honey bee.

The myth of Babel comes alive: Babelswarm

In September of 2007, the Australia Council for the Arts announced the winners of its $20,000 (Aus Dollars) - then the equivalent of $4 million Lindens - Second Life arts residency.

Now, Adam Ramona (aka Adam Nash), Mashup Islander (aka Christopher Dodds), and Justin Clemens (a senior lecturer at the School of Culture and Communications, Melbourne University) have just unveiled the fruit of that grant: BabelSwarm.

I contacted Adam, whom I've written about before, and asked him to explain the concepts and workings behind this new effort.

Adam Ramona: Babelswarm is an interactive audiovisual installation based on the myth of Babel and the principles of swarming. It is a mixed reality installation, with a Real Life installation at the Lismore Regional Gallery, New South Wales, Australia...



...and a Second Life installation at the ACVA sim - Australian Centre for Virtual Art, (teleport directly from here).



Adam Ramona: All chat in the sim is monitored and stored to an online database. Voice triggers in the Real Life gallery, or interaction within the Second Life sim, trigger the sky to rain down phrases from the database. These phrases fall apart upon spawning, and the individual letters are programmed to try to reform the word they came from. Unfortunately for them, all they know is their original position in their word. They don't know what the word is or what letters they are. An emergent tower of letters forms, constantly recombining upon interaction with avatars and other letterforms. It is an emergent audiovisual interactive sculpture constructed dynamically by the users themselves.



Adam Ramona: Each letter chooses one of a range of sounds upon birth. These sounds are sourced from many different Real Life people saying the phrase "And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech," the first line of the Biblical story of Babel (Genesis 11), in their native language, including Cantonese, Greek, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Malay, Romanian, Singhalese and English. These sounds are harmonically effected using my rational scale. Each letter has two states: hibernation and seeking. When seeking, it is actively looking for other letters to reform its word with. When touched by an avatar in this state, the letter will die. When hibernating, it sits still waiting to be reactivated into a seeking state by either a touch/collision from an avatar or collision with a seeking letterform.



Now that BabelSwarm exists in both real and virtual form, the possibility of setting up that installation in other Real Life galleries and museums is entirely plausible. More information is available here.