Petra Gemeinboeck*
 short CV  @ College of Fine Arts UNSW Sydney
     

selection of artworks

 

 

Zwischenräume

 

robotic installation

Zwischenräume embeds a group of autonomous robots into the walls of a gallery. they punch holes into the walls to inspect what’s outside, signal each other, and conspire. The work develops a political relationship between the stealthy invasion of digital surveillance and urban combat tactics in which soldiers are instructed to literally walk through private walls. The relationship manifests itself in the form of an autonomous sculptural process that marks and wounds our environment. A collaboration with Rob Saunders.

On Track

 

performative installation

ON TRACK is a performative installation involving a pendulous mechanical system, trapped robotic brushes and spilling viscous fluids. The work looks at human endeavour, its overly complicated mechanisms and procedures, and their vulnerability to a slipperiness already built in. A disaster-prone scenario unfolds as the protagonists, apparently set to clean, spill, interrupt and hinder each other, creating an ever more slippery mess in intricately choreographed ways. By In Serial, a collaboration with Linda Dement, PRINZGAU/podgorschek and Marion Traenkle.

Impossible Geographies 02:

Urban Fiction

 

mobile, location-aware, and installation

Urban Fiction uses customized mobile phones to trace participants’ movements and encounters. It sees in them a filigree of imaginary spaces spun by our everyday lives. The project is concerned with the multiplicities, subjectivities and hybridities that our traditional maps are blind to. Inside the gallery, these captured imaginary spaces drive the fabrication of an alternative urban fabric: Tiny movements produce threads, whorls and stitches, similar to the embroidering pulses of a heart rate monitor. A collaboration with Rob Saunders.

Net_Dérive

location-aware mobile work

Net_Dérive deploys advanced mobile phones, and represents a kind of musical instrument, interpreting the city-as-instrument. The concept of this work was inspired by the Situationist dérive, calling upon techniques from interactive music applied to a mobile context. A collective narrative emerges as participants walk around the cityscape, they hear voice instructions that suggest paths to follow or turns to make. Collaboration with Atau Tanaka at Sony CSL Paris.

Impossible Geographies 01: Memory

 

sensor-based interactive installation

Memory invokes the memory space of a gallery. Always flowing and neither clearly one nor the other, it manifests itself as a leakage between time and space. The gallery space is threaded with a network of laser beams, coated with video projections and equipped with cameras, its ‘eyes’. The work explores the thin line between surveillance and voyeurism. As visitors cross the beams of light, they trigger recordings, together with fractures in the projection surface through which the virtual seeps into the physical present.

Maya–Veil of Illusion

 

tele-immersive installation ocations/dates here

Maya connects two remote sites, creating a dynamic virtual passage in-between. The work addresses the mirror space that apparently allows participants to ‘step through the looking glass’ and to be present on the ‘other side’. Maya’s ‘veil of illusion’ becomes a two-way mirror, whose two sides are split apart to shape an elastic and only apparently transparent looking glass on each site. Entangled inside the passage, the participants’ traces increasingly intertwine and eventually evolve interdependently.

Uzume

  • virtual CAVE environment

Uzume means ‘whirling’ in Japanese; and immersed in this virtual environment, an abstract and sensitively responsive space surrounds the visitor. Interacting with a chaotic system, the virtual entity appears untamable. To communicate with Uzume is thus similar to pursuing a dialogue without knowing the language of the other. It is the visitor’s reading of Uzume's ‘intent’ and ‘disposition’ that propels the dialogue between the two. Realized in collaboration with cyberneticist Roland Blach and composer Nicolaj Kirisits.