AVATAR :: X-Y Ray
by Melissa Ramos and Rhys Turner
an interactive installation using sound and an interactive game where you become a skeleton avatar in a pixel art environment built with processing.org and the JMyron library
About
X/Y-Ray vision is an interactive installation, using technology as a interpretive mirror of the real world. By wearing specially crafted headsets you will be able to interact with the images on the screen. As the viewer moves around the gallery space, their onscreen avatar negotiates the screen space, encountering obstacles and triggering sounds. Hidden in the gallery are sonic 'easter eggs' which viewers must find in order to reveal the full extent of the work.
The title, X/Y Ray vision plays on the idea of the X-Ray being an interpretation of reality, and on the X/Y coordinates that are the fundamental mathematical principle that underscores all screen based interactive work. In this game, the roles of the player and the avatar become inverted as the screen image dictates to the gallery visitor how and where they must move.
Artists
Rhys Turner
Recently completing a Masters of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts in Media Arts and winning an Australian Postgraduate Award for the degree, Rhys Turner has been exploring new media modes since exhibiting in the students section of 2001: A space Odyssey: Sensation and Immersion, NSW Art Gallery 2001. His work moves through different new media forms form web (www.digital-dirt.com.au) to DVD (Industrial 3x3), CDROM and interactive sound programs (Synaesthesia 1).
Turner’s most recent work Video Stereo and Tracer is a part of his current body of work Etherscapes. Video Stereo uses a 1200 Technics turntable, a computer system and a modified 1960s stereo unit to allow the audience to physically interact with video and sound. Tracer takes another step and uses a web camera to track audience movement in the space and then triggers different video clips. Both these pieces explores how the influence Media effects society and attempts to reverse that process by giving control of the Image to the audience. Other themes of his work develop the idea of non-linear, chaos and ‘micro’ narratives as well as alternative interfaces and the digital aesthetic. Turners work challenges traditional modes of perception in hope of promoting thought and ideas of current social trends and ‘Image’. Websites: www.rtek.com.au www.digital-dirt.com.au
Melissa Ramos
Melissa Ramos is an emerging new media artist. Graduating in Electronic Arts at the University of Western Sydney, School of Contemporary Arts in 2003. She frequently uses, as the setting for her projects, places marked emotionally and sensitive in some specific way, conducting multi-layered realities on nature, culture and technology issues. Producing a body of experiments from video, sound, installation, site specific, performance and web base artworks.
Melissa Ramos has exhibited in Sydney, Performance Space, Gallery 4A, First Draft, Casula Powerhouse, Fairfield Art Centre, Blacktown Art Centre, Scott Donovan Gallery, Art Gallery of NSW and internationally, Kuala Lumpur National Gallery, Manila Metropolitan Museum, and Bangkok National Gallery.
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