LONDONFIELDWORKS

Syzygy took place on the remote and uninhabited Scottish island of Sanda in summer 1999. The tiny island is high green rock in an expanse of sea, at the edge of the Atlantic. A team of artists, writers, musicians, computer programmers and kite flyers spent several days on the island.....They took with them a range of computer, communication, atmospheric diagnostic and biofeedback technologies and kites. Between them they attempted to corner their notoriously elusive quarries, consciousness and weather, with a range of different techniques.....The kites, flown up to 1000 feet by international stunt kite team AirKraft, carried sensors that measured light, temperature, wind speed and orientation.

The kite flyers wore Electroencephalogram (EEG) monitors recording their brain activity. On first consideration, that taut, nylon line holding a kite seems like a very fine conduit to carry the proposition of a link between mind and weather. The thin lines of the kites were more than simply an image of a connection between consciousness and the environment - they were a responsive conjunction between the two. Both atmospheric and EEG monitoring equipment materialised these immaterial processes. Simultaneous weather and brain data was metaphorically correlated, by its transmission and manifestation in a 'smart' sculpture 700 miles away at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. This sculpture was a glass bowl suspended on a steel spine, encrusted with light emitting diodes and housed in an electro-reactive glass tank. The glass bowl looked like a large cranium, being a little larger than head size.

It contained an electro-rheological fluid that responded to the transmitted brainwave data by pulsing and freezing, the electrical current transmuting the fluid's viscosity. Sometimes the changes in the sculpture were lethargic, reflecting the human and environmental conditions on Sanda. The interaction between the mind and the weather data affected the viewer's relationship to the sculpture. At times the visibility of its inner workings was obscured when light data renderd the glass opaque. Occasionally the fluid appeared as shadows, frozen in time against the glass, illuminated by an internal light. There was often no way of knowing whether it was the weather or the mind data that was causing the mutations within the sculpture or whether it had become a cauldron in which a new combined brew was in action.

Extract from, Tuning In, by Tracey Warr, London Fieldworks Syzygy/Polaria.