Dr. John Antoine Labadie selected digital artworks: 2006-2010

John Antoine Labadie Artworks: 2006 - 2010

Dr. John Antoine Labadie holds the rank of Professor in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, USA. He is the founder of the Digital Arts program there. Labadie is the co-founder and Director of the UNC Pembroke Digital Academy (DA), a multi-departmental, cross-disciplinary, collaborative group focused on research in new media and which also offers new media courses. The DA is also involved with a wide range of creative projects and digital media services. Dr. Labadie was a 2005-2006 Fulbright Senior Scholar in digital art for the Center for Creativity and Innovation Studies at National Chengchi University and also at the Taipei National University of the Arts in Taipei,Taiwan. Labadie has served as artist-in-residence/visiting artist nationally with the United States National Park Service in Del Rio, Texas (2002); the University of North Carolina Greensboro in Greensboro North Carolina (2004); and Troy University in Troy, Alabama (2005); and internationally at Nanjing Normal University in Nanjing, China (2006); the Beijing Film Academy in Beijing, China (2006); the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India (2007); Banasthali University in Jaipur, India (2007); and National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan (2008). Labadie’s artwork is most often focused on contemporary research in the sciences and mathematics. His artwork has been exhibited in more than 300 national and international exhibitions and is held in numerous private and museum collections nationally and internationally. Labadie has published more than 150 refereed/juried articles on a wide range of subjects including: digital art, digital resources management, digital art-making processes, digital printmaking, Native American rock art, and high performance American automobiles of the 1960’s.

Geomorphology is the science that describes and classifies the topographic features (precise places or regions) of the Earth. There are numerous systems of classifying landforms. Some group topographic features according to the processes that shaped or modified them. Other systems take myriad factors into consideration (examples: character of the surface rocks, and climatic variations) and also include the various stages of geologic time. In this work I am considering the variety of the possible answers to how our planet came to be as it is in the time we live on it. I have defined possible explanations in terms of multi-dimensional forms that are frozen in time, waiting to be examined and understood. I see this work as a map of maps of our understanding of our physical world and that landforms that make it up. As with the landforms themselves, our explanations for the history of our world vary as our knowledge grows through the development and employment of new tools and methods of analysis. This artwork was used as cover for the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers journal “Computer Graphics, Imaging & Visualization” published in 2008.

“Geomorphology v.12”

Our senses are what they are for each of us: sharp, clear, muddled, challenged, or whatever they may be. What if one were try employ visual art as a means of describing a challenged sensoryexperience? This piece deals with the problematic situation faced by my wife Margie Labadie (my collaborator in this work) as she coped with a serious medical situation with her vocal chords, and her inability to speak. This piece, “Hearing Now” is record of our healing focused collaboration. In our artwork we have utilized visual, aesthetic means to describe and interpret Margie’s medical situation, accurate diagnosis, radical surgery, voice therapy, and successful recovery from a serious disease. We present the viewer with the complexity and the nuances of this process though the use of data gleaned from the digital instruments utilized by the medical team at the University of North Carolina hospitals over a period of nearly three years. This artwork was last exhibited in the “Sguardi Sonori: Arte Contemporanea di Intenazionale 2008” International Juried Exhibition at the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum Naples, Italy.

“Hearing Now”

Every day we see vibrant colors, hear often unidentifiable sounds and feel hundreds of textures. Our senses daily present us with a rich array of perceptual information as we pass through the hours by which we measure each day. As we have realized from our childhood, it seems that some aspects of the world are revealed to us only through a particular sense. Certain sensations, such as shapes, may be perceived through a pairing or combining of senses. Perceptual psychology can tell us much about how such things work. But what about the passage of time? Through what sense or senses do we perceive time? It is certainly does not seem associated with any particular sense. Maybe we possess a certain ability, different from the five known (physical) senses, for detecting the passage of time. Attempting to clarify our perception of time offers many puzzles, including what exactly it means to say we can perceive time. Perhaps it is useful to attempt to artistically portray our senses in terms of the cycles by which we measure time. Perhaps we might denote each sense as a color, or as a shape and make sense of experiencing the passage of time as a composition. Whatever the result of such an experiment, this is exactly what I have attempted to do in the work “The Passage of Time.” This artwork was last exhibited in the “Galeria Arteira 2009” in the Amsterdam, Netherlands.

“The Passage of Time”

The color (or term) “red” is associated with numerous phenomena, everything from physics, to human behavior, and pigments to astronomy. Let us take this use of the word from a discussion about astrophysics: “Sooner or later, a main sequence star's core starts to run out of hydrogen. This makes the star expand to perhaps 1000 times the volume of the Sun. Indeed, in another five billion years, the Sun itself will expand and consume both Mercury and Venus and maybe even the Earth. Being bigger but with fewer core reactions means that that star's surface cools to about 3000 kelvin and therefore turns to a deep red color. The star also produces silicon, oxygen, carbon and iron. The main sequence star has become a red giant.” That is a lot to take in. After reading more about how “big” such an event would be, relative to human kind anyway, I began work on the piece that became “Big Red.” Here I have developed a kind of system, like our solar system; one with an understandable set of relationships. In the work as it is presented here we are about to experience that critical moment when the “sooner or later” becomes the “now.” The work “Big Red” is about the end of everything we know ... and the beginning of something else.This artwork was last exhibited in “Carpe Diem 2009” in the Contemporary Art Museum of Zulia Maczul in Maricaibo, Venezuela in 2009.

“Big Red”

Hearing is about many things. Certainly it has a physical domain and the sense that allows us to understand the sounds in our environment, primarily via our ears. The opposite of hearing is deafness. We hear literally when we are aware of a siren, music, or someone shouting our name. We might hear metaphorically in the sense that we can “understand” a plea, a metaphor, or an inference conveyed through spoken or visual language. Research has proven that not all sounds are normally audible to all species of animals. Each animal species that hears has a range of normal hearing for both loudness and pitch. Many animals use sounds to communicate. In many species hearing is particularly important for survival and for reproduction. Up until the introduction of writing human species had, for millennia, used sound as the primary means of communication. With the introduction of electronic media, the role of sound may have been forever altered. This artwork is one of a series of six works focused on human senses. This piece was most recently exhibited in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at the “Invited Artists Exhibition” series in 2009.

“It’s About Hearing”

How do manufactured chemicals change the world around us in unforeseen ways? Take hexanes for example. Hexanes are chiefly obtained through refining crude oil. In industry, hexanes are used in the formulation of glues for many products including shoes and roofing materials. Hexanes are significant constituents of gasoline. They are all colorless liquids at room temperature, with relatively low boiling points and with gasoline-like odor. They are widely used as cheap, relatively safe, solvents. However, long term inhalation of high concentrations of hexane produces first a state of mild euphoria, followed by drowsiness often combined with the onset of headaches and often nausea. Chronic abuse of hexane has been observed in solvent abusers and in workers in the shoe manufacturing, furniture and automobile construction industries. Hexane poisoning has been observed in situations where individuals have had relatively long term contact with hexane fumes or liquid hexane. In many industrial settings where safety regulations are lax (or nonexistent) many cases of hexane poisoning and some deaths have been observed. This artwork was most recently exhibited by the “2010 Digital Fringe” international project in Melbourne, Australia.

“Hexane Lenses 2010”

At the most literal level the term “stardust” denotes “dust composed of particles from space ... places beyond the earth.” Even more than that the word denotes many types of things of human construction: music, films, books, television, comics, artworks, architecture, design, play production, National Atmospheric and Space Administration missions, an album by David Bowie, and a popular name for more business ventures than could ever be counted. Another, more scientific, definition suggests the following: “Stardust is the really the heavy elements that comprise the Earth-such as iron, silicon, oxygen, and carbon-originally formed in distant stars that exploded, sending their heavy elements into space. The Earth and all life on it are, in fact, recycled stellar debris.” No matter which definition one accepts as apt it would appear that the term “stardust” is indicative of something of great, perhaps seminal, importance as it is used in the English language. This artwork is about such essentials, about the basics of our existence, and about the ideas, patterns and possibilities that are a part of us all. This artwork was most recently exhibited at the “Peace Project” in Culver City, California USA in 2010.

“Stardust”

The term “time study” is borrowed from the discipline of industrial engineering. A time study is a work measurement technique, generally accomplished using a timing device to record the actual elapsed time for performance of a task, which is adjusted for any observed variance from normal effort or pace, any unavoidable or machine delays, any rest periods, and any personal needs. The term “time study” can also be used to define and construct a metaphor encompassing one’s views of a period of time, a set of activities, or an event of defined limitations. In this artwork I have attempted to visually define a time study of several conversations about the use of computers in the making of creative works. In this work I have included numerous words, sentences and terms that were a part of an actual conversation on this subject at a conference in Monterey, California in 2008. The conversation was captured as an audio file and then converted to a text file. It is my hope that this conversation, in all its colors, nuances, and shades has been captured in this visual work. This artwork was most recently published in the national, refereed journal “Sanctuary 2009 – 2010.” “Sanctuary” is a publication for the Southern Regional Honors Council at the University of Alabama Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama USA.

“Time Study”

We live in a world filled with “sets” and “subsets”. (A set is a finite or infinite collection of objects in which order has no significance, and multiplicity is generally also ignored. Members of a set are often referred to as elements. A set that contains no elements is called a null set or an empty set. The study of sets and their properties is the object of set theory. A subset is a portion of a set.) Humans define and redefine myriad sets ourselves each day. Through the use of electronic device scientists and other professionals in the world at large are daily defining sets and subsets at a dizzying pace. No single person can absorb the massive amounts of new data defined each day. Even so, without such data and the definitions derived from them we might well be lost in the world altogether. Much of the work and theory about about sets and subsets is also a part of the discipline of mathematics. It is the area of “set theory” in mathematics that is the focus of this piece. In particular I am visually investigating some of the ways in which set theory has been used to study structures at the molecular level in biology. This artwork was most recently exhibited at the “FutureEverything 2010 International Artist Exhibition” in Manchester, England at the FutureEverything Urban Festival of Art, Music & Ideas and the Social Technologies Summit.

“Set Theory”

Each new work begins with a certain set of ideas, conditions and possibilities. We necessarily work with certain sets of assumptions about what a work is, what it might be, how it might be accomplished and what can be done to successfully bring it into a form that can be experienced by others. This piece is one of a series where I have attempted to carefully examine my own working processes with respect to my chosen way of working: with a digital toolset. More specifically, “A Set of Assumptions” considers the phenomena of space, shape, and color within the framework of certain contemporary digital tools. Each of the more than 30 works in this series examines another set of assumptions about how I might go about beginning, managing and completing a work to the point where it can be shared with others. I have found this method of investigating my own ways of working very useful in helping to evolve works in very systematic and structured ways. This artwork was most recently exhibited at the “The 2010 Gozo International Contemporary Arts Festival” in the Republic of Malta.

“A Set of Assumptions”

“Big Blue 2010” These two images are stills from a time based work entitled “Big Blue” ... an experimental video that examines the idea of aesthetically recording the processes involved in making an artwork while an artwork is in the process of being made. Running time for the video is 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

Dr. John Antoine Labadie 2006 - 2010www.steppingstonearts.net

johnantoinelabadie@gmail.com