s w a r m presents individuals with an evolving audio visual environment in which the audience themselves are drawn in as fragments in an ever changing mediascape.

The work focuses on the dynamics of the live surrounding environment as a basis for subsequent acquisition and manipulation of data. Individuals are tracked as they move within the space and are subsequently sucked into the image plane.

The behaviour of the increasing database of phantoms shifts from swarms of activity to lingering solitary movements. Sounds swell and recede in unison with the ebb and flow of the imagescape.

Although individuals only inhabit the physical space for a transient period, their presence echos temporally as they re-appear in the environment as neurotic shifting fragments in space.

As an individual enters the gallery space they are captured via video and tracked within the environment. If an individual is identified as being present in the space they are captured on video. As the video database grows random fragments are recompiled and rendered in the image plane. Fleeting glimpses are revealed by a shifting window that drifts across the image plane. As this window scans across the length of the projection surface the sound sweeps in unison, syncronised to the image, spatialising and triggering different fragments of audio depending on the revealed location. The dynamically changing width of the window fluidly alters the subtle character of the audio by filtering the sound and manipulating the duration of the audio fragments triggered.

Mike Leggett comments regarding the work at the Interaction: Systems, Practice and Theory Symposium 2004

'Presence, Interaction and ‘data space’

In Swarm (Alex Davies 2003) the projection system unrolls across a wide screen format (6 : 1) a series of vertical frames that mix images of figures with images of space, a representation of the space in which you stand. They flicker as the vertical frames are replaced, as if from some scanning mechanism, replacing what was here with what is there, now – yourself, your companions, replaced again, in different frames, by strangers, whose images were probably captured and stored on some earlier visit. The visual rhythms are heard and change in pitch and volume as the greytone densities vary to the pulse of the picture as it sweeps across the wall from left to right. You, the visitor, move towards and away from the spectres on the wall, looking as you do, for the precise location of the tiny lens poking through the screen. This camera can form images where light is scarce, such as in the darkened space of this provisional cinema. They trade your image for your inclusion in the mystic writing pad of the palimpsest into which you have entered. The data space is constantly provisional, always in flux, your presence now absent, a previous presence now present. The space becomes charge with time.

To download a .pdf data sheet on the work click <here>