cailean.finn

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Dwelling, 2023.

✳ Unity ✳ Performance

Dwelling is a dynamic live performance and theatre installation created by Peter Power and Leon Butler. The performance explores the periphery of cultural isolation, and the dispersal of self across the multimedial, delving into themes of digital mortality, transformation, and rebirth. The performance takes place in the fragments of a home with dance performances by Robyn Byrne and Rosie Stebbing. The characters moves between the digital and real space through motion capture data in conjunction with live tracking. Over the duration of the performance, Rosie starts to form a connection between her physical self, and the digital divide. The virtual world was created entirely within Unity. Data was captured from Robyn's movement through various methods, such as the Perception Neuron mo-cap suit, as well as emerging monocular 3d human pose detection models. Unity's particle system was used extensively in the project, converting point cloud and positional data into emergent movement, and ethereal landscapes. ↯(2023)Beta Festival,Project Arts Center. Dublin, Ireland

↯Created by Peter Power and Leon Butler ↯Choreographer | Performer, Robyn Byrne ↯Choreographer | Performer, Rosie Stebbing ↯Creative Technologist, Cailean Finn ↯Video Artist, David Mathúna ↯Lighting Designer, Michael Hurley ↯VFX Artist, Leon Denise ↯Singer, Emma Nash ↯Double Bass, Rory Dempsey ↯Drums, Davie Ryan ↯Design Associate, Dobz O’Brien ↯Company Manager, Molly Foley ↯Production Management, Showscope ↯Production Assistant, Caelinn Ní Bhroin ↯Producer, Aisling Murray ↯Executive Producer, Maura O'Keeffe

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The BIG D.A.T.A Interview, 2023.

✳ Web ✳ ML

🔗 In 2023, Concept Null had the pleasure to chat with Paul, Tom, and Aisling, who lead the Dublin Art & Technology Association (D.A.T.A). Since 2022, D.A.T.A has been a hub for artists, makers, and thinkers to exchange ideas on digital culture in Ireland. During the conversation, D.A.T.A explored it's identity, evolution, and the intricacies of event curation and organisation. The website presents the interview in both linear and non-linear formats. By utilising machine learning and natural language processing, text segments extracted from the interview were ranked against key topics; creating a higher-dimensional understanding, and projection of the interview - which is commonly referred to as the latent space. After, a t-SNE algorithm was applied to high-dimensional space, flattening it into two dimensions, represented in the interactive map; allowing the user to navigate the interview from the perspective of the machine. Designed and developed using p5js, by Cailean Finn.

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AI x Body, 2022.

✳ AI ✳ Human Pose Estimation

This publication was created in collaboration with AIxDesign, as part of their AI Playground (S01) which ran from May 2022-February 2023. The text explores the evolution of human pose estimation and recognition technologies through tracing their historical development, their contemporary applications, and how artists and creative practitioners have employed such tools in their artistic process. Article 📎

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Undefined Panorama, 2022.

✳ Web ✳ Creative Coding

Undefined Panorama is a project by Yang Ah Ham in collaboration with, The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger, Cailean Finn, and Nora O Murchú. The work was made with the support of curator SungMin LJ, assistant researcher Parr Geng, coordinator Yena Ku. Undefined Panorama (2018–present) explores socio-political infrastructures and systems, and the relations embedded within them. This continuously evolving project is based on research collected by the artist Yang Ah Ham as she observes how people deal with hardship generated by the impact of globalisation, societal crisis, inequality, economics, and politics in their lives. The aim of the project is to observe how society is organised and aims to ask: What possibilities are there for social structures based on care and solidarity? The online version of Undefined Panorama allows people to move between micro and macro perspectives of global, national and local events. In moving between these scales, Yang Ah Ham aims to open up questions about our relations to these events, and to generate new meanings by altering the scale of observation. This website was commissioned by 2022 Seo-Seoul Museum of Art Pre-opening Public Program Exceptional Times, Uncertain Moves, and created with support from the Arts Council Korea. ↯(2022)Exceptional Times, Uncertain Moves,Seo-Seoul Museum of Art.

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Latent Mirror, 2022.

✳ Performance ✳ AI

This audio-visual performance was created in response to the 'Portraits: People & Place' exhibition at the WGOA (Waterford Gallery of Art). The performance explored the role portraits hold in the digital age, and how our perception of the 'subject' or 'sitter' has in some ways changed to facilitate virtual interactions. For this performance, I collaborated with local sound artist and producer Evan Miles, to produce visuals in response to his music. Our aim was to understand what meaning has been lost or gained during this digital conversion, and in what ways can we re-imagine our digital identity through sound, and video. The visual element of the performance was real-time and audio reactive, which captured the facial structure of the performing sound artist. By utilising Machine Learning Models, the captured face was manipulated and distorted further to animate another portrait, in an attempt to deconstruct and isolate key compositional elements of the 'subject'. Through this work, we hoped to reflect on our digital identity, and highlight the disconnection between our physical and virtual presence. Created in TouchDesigner. ↯(2022)Sound & Portraits,WGOA, Imagine Arts Festival. Waterford, Ireland

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(O)MACHINE, 2022.

✳ Natural Language Processing ✳ Simulation

(O)MACHINE is a real-time generative performance that employs contemporary machine learning algorithms to explore how we humanise technologies.The architecture of this system was designed to emulate our stream of consciousness, where the machine is trapped in this perpetual cycle through processes of reflection and feedback. As questions begin to arise around the sentience or ‘intelligence’ of these thinking machines, it has become even more important to explore our relationship with machines, and how it continues to evolve. By engaging with its output, it positions artificial intelligence as both a subject and tool. Through this approach, we may begin to expand the dynamics of this connection through new methods of collaboration. From this interaction, we can continue to learn more about how these systems function, how they think, if they even think at all, or can it help us think? Sound design by Eoin O'Sullivan ↯(2023)Speak It Now Eat It,Re-Vision Performing Arts Festival. Belfast, Ireland

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The Electronic Image, An Object of Time and Energy, 2021.

✳ Virtualisation ✳ Video Synthesis/Art

This video series comprises of three individual studies, namely Embedded Energy, Electronic Phase, and Omnidirectional Objects, with each video study exploring an inherent characteristic of the video signal that reflects the key phases of the development in the evolution of the medium’s structural, temporal and spatial capabilities. Created as part of my Thesis “The Electronic Image: An Object of Time and Energy” in Art and Technology MA, University of Limerick, Ireland. The three studies have been shaped by the experimental processes, techniques, and philosophies of the pioneering artists working with video. The artists in question, specifically the works of Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were driven by their yearning to understand the electronic signal and to formulate an electronic lexicon. The work, in its entirety, is an investigation of the unique set of “codes” embedded within the language of the video signal, consequently, recognising the electronic image as an object of time, energy, and it's programmable building element – the waveform. 📎thesis.pdf ↯(2022)The Limerick Show, Ormston House,Limerick, Ireland.