Fabricated Rhythm

custom software, inkjet prints, video, installation
Mind Matters: Mapping the Human Mind Through Neuroscience
Sandler Neuroscience Center, UCSF, San Francisco, CA, March 2014
Honorable Mention in the Art of Neuroscience competition from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.

This project resulted from a year-long collaboration with neuroscientist Gautam Agarwal in which we explored connections between electrical rhythms arising in the brain and other rhythms observed in the material world. Specifically, how does our understanding of these rhythms relate to the generative processes from which they arise, and to the ways that we choose to depict them?

The prints and videos on display explore how similar wave phenomena are found at vastly different scales arising from unique mechanisms, making speculative links between our own brain activity and the rhythms of the world. A flag flying in the wind and brain wave data mapped onto a 3-D model are juxtaposed in these two prints:

Technical notes: In this piece, we compare rhythms from two different substrates. (Top) Electrical activity recorded using a multi-electrode array implanted in the hippocampus of a rat walking along a track (recorded by Berenyi Antal and Gyorgy Buzsaki, NYU). The local field potentials (LFPs) recorded in areas CA1 and DG, as well as the spiking activity of 4 neurons in these areas, were used to drive the flapping of 6 virtual flags. (Bottom) Several flags recorded on a windy day using a video camera, at a pier in San Francisco. In each case, we took a vertical slice of the resulting videos and collated successive frames, creating a ‘slitscan’ effect (where the vertical axis represents space and the horizontal axis represents time).

 

Edit Road Movie

installation in collaboration with Katie Hargrave and Daniel Luedtke
Transient Gallery, West Des Moines, IA, May 2015 (pictured here)
ACRE Projects, Chicago, IL, September 2014

 

The 14 Negotiators

installation with Real Time & Space
Many Places at Once, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA, April-July 2014

 

Knot Talk

installation, custom software and electronics, japanese knotweed
collaboration with Michael Huggins
zero station, Portland, ME, July 2013

The two artists have filled the gallery with Japanese Knotweed, a fast growing invasive weed harvested from the surrounding area. The plants, together with visitors’ bodies, modulate a complex sound installation as electric signals connect the plants, humans, and electronics. Did you know that plants communicate with each other using sound waves? Come in and talk to to some plants that are taking over the northeast.

To modulate the soundscape, gently grasp a plant’s stalk and hold on!

 

soft edges

drawings, inkjet prints, video, paintings
The Plaines Project, Chicago, IL, March 2013

soft edges is a solo show of prints, drawings, and videos based on a single mathematical pattern.

The project began with drawings that represent my faithful attempts to draw a precise mathematical pattern by hand based on a simple set of rules, analogous to a computer algorithm. Tiny imperfections reverberated across the page as the length and placement of each line affected all of its neighbors, a testament to the imprecision of my hand. The imperfections produced interesting perceptual effects; playing with them quickly became the focus of the work. I then wrote a computer program that mimics the hand drawn pattern by creating intentional algorithmic imperfections in the drawing of the pattern. I have since been going back and forth between the two: computer imitating hand, hand imitating computer ad infinitum.

 

 

a spatial history of computing

guided bike tours
ZERO1 Biennial, Seeking Silicon Valley, San Jose, CA
September 14th and 15th, 2012

A guided bike ride through Silicon Valley. We looked at the birth of computing and the internet, the history of LSD and hackers, traces of what used to be and what replaced it, metaphors of computing and the social spaces they emerged from, office parks and nature preserves, and the material infrastructures in the birthplace of personal computing.

www.zero1biennial.org/nick-lally
Thanks to Liv Ames and Aaron Caley for the photos:

 

 

secret spatial histories of santa cruz

participatory installation
collaboration with Kyle McKinley / the building collective
Work In Progress, The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History December 2012 – March 2013

The building collective is interested in exploring and transforming spaces. For Work in Progress, we transformed the space of the museum by filling it with secret histories excavated from everyday spaces throughout Santa Cruz. Every other week, we invited amateur historians, story makers, accidental geographers, and other participants to the museum to drink coffee, eats snacks, and create shared spatial histories by sharing stories in a shared space. These shared histories became a giant concept map drawn on the walls that served as a record of these meetings and explored connections between the social and material practices that continually recreate the spaces we inhabit.

Like most building projects, the most important part of the project resists documentation: the conversations that emerged from the many people who visited the space and met each other. As one participant observed: “It was remarkably lacking in the kind of ‘you’re-in-a workshop’ and ‘look,-you’re-participating’ intensity I think we sometimes feel we need to cultivate. A different kind of intensity emerged over time and in the depth of the conversations that sometimes started to happen. It was interesting to note that any idea of deliberative or dialogic moments simply popped up when they popped up. They weren’t forced but when they did they were gently cultivated.”