fuse*
Installations by fuse* Studio
ARTIFICIAL BOTANY
REALTIME A/V INSTALLATION
The plant is a symbol of nature’s creative power. Artificial Botany is an ongoing project which uses machine learning algorithms to explore this creativity and the latent expressive capacity of botanical illustrations historically used by physicists, botanical scientists, and pharmacists. While botanical illustration, which was used before the advent of photography for identification, analysis, and classification, bears no scientific use today, they remain a stunning homage to life and nature.
Artificial Botany draws from public domain archives of work by the greatest artists of the genre and has made them the learning material for GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), a machine learning system which is able to recreate new artificial images with morphological elements. With training, the elements created by GAN without supervision are almost identical to the input but with a re-elaboration that captures information and artistic qualities of both man and nature — bridging the old to the new, so audiences can enjoy these early manifestations of art and science intertwined.
The subsequent realtime A/V installation enables audiences to immerse in the dynamics of machine learning and the exquisite balance & detail of nature while confronting two opposing forces in tension: the fluidity of passing and changing, and the tenacious power to persist.
Artificial Botany was the recipient of the 2020 Digital Design Award.
FALIN MYND
GENERATIVE DATA INSTALLATION
An installation dedicated to the city of Milan which can be created for any metropolitan area, Falin Mynd confronts physical space again following the 2020 pandemic lockdown by meeting audiences in the liminal space of Milan’s Malpensa Airport. It celebrates the unbreakable bond between individual and community, highlighting how these two entities influence one another and perceived realities composed of places, people, color, and sensation.
In photography, the concept of the latent image is best described as an invisible imprint left by light on film, revealed only after it is developed. Falin Mynd is conceptually inspired by latent images: the installation captures movement of people in the city of Milan and generates data to produce abstract digital landscapes, leaving traces in realtime and revealing an image of the city that is otherwise invisible to the human eye.
For Falin Mynd, algorithms are based on the self-organized structures in some biological systems (such as ants) to generate a constantly evolving city map. Movement data from people are then extracted via social media. Drawing from Twitter, Falin Mynd assigns this mined data a geotag and an emotional value, organizing analyzed tweets into clusters on the generated map. GDELT (a worldwide news media monitoring service), provides data for the installation to filter the news and archive its emotional values, creating a visual “background noise” which distorts and modifies the generation of audio and visual elements. The audio draws from musical cryptography, encoding text into a binary format whose rhythmic pulses trigger musical notes which intertwine to create polyphonic flows in continuous formation.
Falin Mynd premiered July 2020 at Milan’s Malpensa Airport as part of the “Nice to MEET You” project curated by MEET Digital Culture Center with support from SEA.
treu
realtime a/v installation
Treu explores the range of meanings and implications rolled into the concept of trust. On a high level, it observes how historical events have influenced trust’s evolution and how this may progress into the future; close-up it examines how its presence or absence has the power to shape our individual reality.
The context of this work is historical, focusing on analysis of the Treuhandanstalt. In Germany from 1990 to 1994, the Treuhandanstalt agency transferred state-owned assets of the former German Democratic Republic to private property. Its expedited implementation, in tandem with the agency’s blind faith in the market and the subsequent socioeconomic consequences, solidified the agency’s place in history as the most controversial legacy of the reunification of the two Germanys. Treu uses the IFO Business Climate Index to articulate how historic events and economic phases have impacted collective trust. The IFO index is a key economic indicator for the European and American economies.
Economic data from other vibrant financial markets, including from indexes such as the Hang Seng, Nikkei, or Dow Jones can be introduced into Treu to broaden this three-dimensional understanding outside its original geographic parameters. Using the same regression algorithm to correspond with the IFO index, Treu is adaptable to demonstrate trust in cultural constructs on a localized level for audiences.
Treu premiered at the Pochen Biennale 2020 in Chenmitz, Germany.
MIMESIS
REALTIME A/V installation
A large scale video installation, Mimesis is inspired by the biological evolution of life on Earth while investigating the effects of anthropic action, or the existence of human life, on it. While exploring a positive vision toward what can be successfully preserved, improved, or changed in our ecosystem, Mimesis also considers the consequences mankind’s actions have on different habitats.
Throughout history, humans have attempted to imitate and reproduce aspects of reality in the hopes of creating a more meaningful representation of the surrounding environment. How can the future planet be best represented?
This work attempts to reveal how the future will be influenced by mankind’s interaction with the environment. Mimesis is produced by a generative system designed to collect and process atmospheric data from the installation’s local environment in real time, creating a constantly evolving audiovisual forecast of mankind’s future environment. Constructed around the concept of primary ecological succession (the process of new land formation which occurs following a major ecological event such as an eruption or flood) and addressed through digital reinterpretation, Mimesis reveals unprecedented knowledge of nature that typically escapes human detection and increases awareness of mankind’s effects on the environment.
ABOUT FUSE*
fuse* is a studio and production company at the intersection of art and science, exploring the expressive potential by the creative use of emerging technologies.
Since inception, the studio’s research has focused primarily on the production of installations and live media performances which instill wonder and motivate audiences to challenge what is possible. As the studio evolved, creation of new projects became more holistic and placed increasingly higher value on pure experimentation. The objective of fuse* is to push past accepted limits, spur empathy, and seek out new interplay between light, space, sound, and movement.
fuse* maintains close ties to its community, by developing, supporting, and promoting projects with the intent of propagating culture and knowledge. In this vein, fuse* has co-produced NODE, an electronic music and digital arts festival, since 2016. Over the years, fuse* has exhibited and performed internationally at art institutions and festivals including Mutek, TodaysArt, Sónar Istanbul, Artechouse, Milan Fashion Week, STRP Biennial, RomaEuropa, Kikk, Scopitone and the National Centre for the Performing Arts of China.