About the work:

“Signals” was an installation that combined fiber optics with custom lighting and audio technology to reference aspects of neural physiology.  Translucent plastic bulbs on fiber optic cables created luminescent forms that lit up in reaction to looping audio that could be heard in the space.  As patterns of sound were translated and expressed as glowing and flashing pulses, this exchange metaphorically demonstrated the biological/physical basis of communication.

Statement:

“Information and computation reside in patterns…that are independent of the physical medium that carries them.”
- Steven Pinker

When I tell you something, that is, share information with you, a physical occurrence in my brain causes a similar one in yours.  In order to accomplish this a message embarks on an intricate journey through the outside world as it travels between my mind and yours.  In the case of a phone conversation, the information survives even as it physically changes its form, from a pattern of neural activity, to a series of muscle contractions in the lungs, throat, and mouth, to vibrating air, to electricity in a wire, to charges in silicon, to flickering light in a fiber optic cable, to electromagnetic waves, and then back again in reverse order to your eardrum.  Evidence suggests that the origins of simple human speech could date as far back as far as 500,000B.C.  Today we have extended the activity across generations through printed text and over great distances through our vast network of wires, radio waves, satellites, and computers. Yet, if we strip away all of our technology form the picture, all the stuff in the middle, the core feature of the process remains quintessentially the same—one group of cells extends its identity to another through a physical process we call communication.

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© Untitled [ArtSpace]

Untitled [ArtSpace]
1 NE 3rd, Oklahoma City, OK 73104

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