Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) made their debut as the collaborative duo in 2011 with the solo exhibit “the optimal value for y” at Microscope Gallery. They use digital and analog technologies that are further developed or redirected utilizing the artists’ original software to consider the culture of informatics and the thresholds of image recognition and perception across various mediums. Their work has been featured in institutional shows in the US and abroad including the solo exhibition “Cryptophasia” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and in the group shows “Processed: To Each Their Own Image”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; “Day In Day Out” at GEH8 Kunstraum und Ateliers, Dresden, Germany, “Altarations”, Schmidt Center Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, and “Dialogics”, Rowan University Art Gallery, New Jersey among others. Their 6-channel video “Breakout” was commissioned by The Parrish Museum for New York City Center.
Gryphon Rue is an artist, composer, and musician. Rue’s music, constructed of complex patterns derived from singing saw, harmonium, and custom synthesizers, discloses a fascination with electroacoustic mimetic potential — the ability to suggest biological actions, molecular events, possession, nourishment — and is above all, made with people’s pleasure in mind. A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers, released on Not Not Fun Records, features ten videos made by eight intergenerational collaborators. Rue performs in the light and sound duo Rue Bainbridge (see Vector Hack 2020), and hosts Earmark, a program of long form conversations with composers and sound artists on Montez Press Radio.
Eros
EXPERIMENTAL FILM
Eros is the result of a collaboration between Lisa Gwilliam and Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) and Gryphon Rue, who approached DataSpaceTime to create a new work in response to music from the album A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers.
Formed of electric organ voices quivering in subtly dissonant overlapping patterns, Eros carries a sense of longing or even loss, as the individual parts fail to maintain harmonic synchrony, the beginning or ending of each phrase falling ceaselessly from mutual consonance. These qualities manifest visually as perspectives are continually shifting between micro or macro worlds. Negative space obscures the viewer’s field of vision, yet the shadowy presence of implied shapes suggests a tactile awareness.
DataSpaceTime’s visual work for Eros responded to Rue’s music through several distinct mediums. First, as the artists incorporated Oscilloscope graphics into the work, they created their own audio to embody a rhythmic counterpoint to Rue’s music. This audio, which is absent from the final work, is translated by the oscilloscope into the morphing oscillons and abstracted biological forms that would phase in and out of time with Rue’s phrasings. When captured to 4K video and placed into the 3D environment, the phosphorescence of the oscilloscope serves as an initial light source piercing into the virtual space. That analog light blends with virtual light sources and refracts throughout the space over multiple surfaces.
Building on over 20 years of working with modular synthesizers and oscilloscopes, DataSpaceTime has combined their audio-visual analog vector work into their more recent browser-based 3D digital graphics software. For Eros, video recordings of audio-derived Lissajous patterns are laid onto 3D geometries and placed into digital scenes amongst reflective objects and automated fields of cubes and wireframes. The artists then navigate through multiple scenes in real-time using game controllers to capture a final, composed moving image work.