FIBER Festival

Zooming into the liquid crystal-display screen (LCD),  Origin: Sustained creates a continuous feedback loop between the screen and camera. In real time, the LCD crystals generate the very images that they display, with each screen displaying its own unique patterns. These organic fluid images expose the materiality of the apparatus through which we view the digital world.

Mischa Daams’s project Origin sets out audiovisual expeditions into the organic universe that results from a feedback loop between an LCD screen and a video camera. In this continuous process of copying and ‘translating’ some of the information is lost; this results in the mutation and transformation of the image. In real time a visual environment of abstract patterns unfolds before the eyes of the beholder, taking the viewer on a hypnotizing voyage through the invisible architecture of the devices themselves. The patterns resemble the shapes and behaviours from a world one does not immediately associate with computer chips: biological life.

Daams has come to regard this mathematical process as a living stream giving rise to an organic universe. To explore this virtual space, he designs technical tools in order to set out expeditions. Daams makes use of cybernetic methods to plan, control, and respond to the unpredictable outcomes of the growth process. In this new work Origin: Sustained (2017), Daams applies algorithmic perception as a means to give agency to the machine. The machine as steersman becomes responsible for the unfolding and survival of the life cycle.

Origin: Sustained has been realised in collaboration with Marcus Graf (programming) and Jim Zweerts (sound design).

Origin: Sustained is commissioned by FIBER with the support of the Mondriaan Fund NL

The first part of the Origin project ‘Origin:Cycle #1’ was realized as part of the Summer Sessions network in a co-production of Art Center Nabi and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, with support of the Creative Industries Fund NL.

Mischa Daams (1986) is inspired by the all-encompassing rhythms and feedback loops that give direction to universal forms and behaviours all around us and in us: Living and nonliving forms of nature, our biological bodies, our conscious brain and the technologies that adapt better everyday, are governed by similar rules.