I had the wonderful privelidge of being involved with an amazing art show at top London Gallery Tate Briatin, in a collaboartion with the amazing Martin Sextin. In March 2006 Martin Sexton presented New Gothic which combines music, digital art and performance. Featuring  ‘Heraldic Unicorn Lion Grace System’ by Truth Machine, described variously as ‘the high-concept band to end all high-concept bands’ and as a cult religious group by others.

The varying members of this arts collective reportedly all work to a set of instructions cut from the text of books that vary from hermetic works, theological mediations to pulp fiction, erotica and maps. Steve Severin conducts and provides the sonic soundscape.

Ride up with the Magical Lock-down Dark Pegasus: a Harley-Davidson XL53 custom motorcycle resplendent with blue-black Scottish crow wings and ‘pimped’ with a DVD monitor as tail-plate, that echoes TE Lawrence’s quote that “A motorcycle with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocations, to excess.”

Rattus Norvegicus

Meanwhile, I was working with Korash Sanjideh, Andy Early and Mike Cobb to create new visual experiences. We unleashed  chthonic forces with atechnological multimedia film noir Rattus Norvegicus as part of New Gothic at Tate Britain.

Rattus Norvegicus is a dark digital artwork shown for the first time at “Late at Tate Britain” as part of the “Gothic Nightmares” exhibition.

Hyperfabric is one of my all time favourite inventions. I created it as a beautiful art installation that would allow people to go beyond the screen, with a new tactile interface. I came up with the name “Hyperfabric” because I wanted to suggest that new things could be combined in interesting ways. Hyperfabric  is a touchable, pushable, movable, malleable interface that uses a very thin film to simulate an immersive user interface.

You can press, grab, twist, punch and play with the screen. It can even support your full bodyweight. The Hyperfabric screen is specially designed to communicate with a computer to generate interactive computer graphics, in realtime.

Pushing through the image

I created digital images that are projected onto the film that react to touch and pushing, so it feels like you’re actually pushing through the image.

I created a 7 foot high Hyperfabric installation for the Artytechs parlour this summer at the Port Eliot literature festival. Taking place in a hidden dungeon underneath the stately home, where visitors had the chance to come face to face with the magical and mysterious interactions.

How does Hyperfabric work?

The design of hyperfabric is actually very clever. The strong rubbery surface is stretched over a doorway that leads to a hidden room, in fact an underground dungeon of sorts. Hidden in the room is a projector, for the images, and a specially modified camera. Infra-red light is shone across the surface of the hyperfabric, so that the camera can see exactly what parts of the hyperfabric are being touched, and how hard they are being pressed. By measuring how the light is reflected, special computer software that I wrote can instantly detect peoples presence.

This hyperfabric of course has “multi touch” capability, but it also has a magic power to it as well.

Hyperfabric works with aura?

During the installation, guests would be invited down to the underground dungeon, and would place their hands on the hyperfabric surface. One girl touched it, and yellow sparks shot out from her fingers. She then told me that she “charged up her aura” and the next time she touched it, red and blue sparkles dripped from her fingers instead.

I love it that Hyperfabric is able to create a totally new way of interacting. There is no keyboard and no mouse, no instructions, just emotions. Currently we change graphics by clicking a mouse, but here, guests were able to change graphics by charging their aura!