Phillip Stearns

Bio: 
Phillip Stearns is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist and electronics art educator. His work lies at the intersection of art, philosophy, and science, drawing upon a variety of disciplines including installation, audio-video work, circuit sculpture, writing, performance art and musical composition. His work deals primarily with the topic technology, at times approaching electronic technologies as complex artificial living systems, organisms existing within interconnected economies and ecosystems. The core of his creative process lies in creating generative systems using electronics, crowds, or plants to explore the expressiveness within the act of allowing a system to come to its own conclusions. What are the implications of applying contemporary technological thinking to more primitive techniques and technologies as new starting points for re-conceptualizing the present and re-imagining the future? 

Artist Statement: 
The DCP Series of Digital Images are direct visualizations of data generated by a digital camera as it takes a picture. Electronic processes associated with the normal operations of the camera, which are usually taken for granted, are revealed through an act of intervention. The camera is turned inside-out through complexes of short-circuits, selected by the artist, transforming the camera from a picture taking device to a capturing device that renders raw data (electronic signals) as images. In essence, these images are snap-shots of electronic signals dancing through the camera's circuits, manually rerouted, written directly to the on-board memory device. Rather than seeing images of the world through a lens, we catch a glimpse of what the camera sees when it is forced to peer inside its own mind. 

Brett Balogh

ARITST STATEMENT: 

NOOSPHERIUM 

Since the inception of radio as a broadcast medium, the earth has been covered by an increasingly dense network of airborne communications.  AM, FM, SW and other portions of the radio spectrum represent a medium through which a re-imaging of space is possible.  This hertzian space is not defined by surveyed boundaries or geographic constraints but, rather, by field strengths, mass-media service areas, and consumer markets.  The overlapping spaces defined by these broadcasts can be collectively referred to as an envelope of thought around the world, or Noosphere.

Noospherium aims to render this sphere of human thought as an immersive sonic environment, providing a pansonic, panoptic view of simultaneous broadcasts.  The space of the installation can then be thought of as as a phrenologic observatory to this sphere of human thought where a real-time composition puts as many signals as possible into conversation within the space, allowing one to characterize the nature of our collective thoughts through chance occurrences, spurious juxtapositions, and the dynamic spatialization of sound.

BIO: 

Brett received his MFA in Studio from the Department of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his B.A. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, teaching courses in architecture, computer-aided design and manufacturing, do-it-yourself broadcasting and acoustics. He is a founding member of the experimental sound performance collective, Clairaudient and performs with the Chicago Phonographers. Brett is also a Free 103.9FM transmission artist, a member of the World Listening Project and the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. 

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