Statement – Miri Segal
During the past ten years, I have been working as an artist creating new media
installations. At the same time, I have been drawing upon my mathematics background (I have a PhD from the Hebrew University in mathematics) to collaborate with scientists in a wide variety of cross-disciplinary research projects.
In my installations I use video projections in a sculptural manner. The video acts in the surrounding space to disrupt sensory suppositions about the relationship between the observer and observed, thus the viewer becomes attentive to his/her position which is simultaneously participatory and voyeuristic. A brief description of two of my works – Place de la Bonne Heure and Co-Operation – will give you an indication of the sort of work that I am doing and my artistic directions.
In "Place de la Bonne Heure 2005/6" the viewer, a single viewer sits on a chair at the center of the space which serves as a viewing platform. Once the viewer sits, the chair starts revolving. On the back of the chair, adjacent to the viewer's line of vision, a projector screens a video, which moves across the walls. As the chair rotates the viewer voyages between two public squares: the Place de la Bonne Heure in Tel Aviv and the Kalandiya checkpoint (situated between Jerusalem and Ramallah). Sitting there, the viewer undertakes a double journey, like the earth, a simultaneous rotation and revolution. This journey goes to the heart of a complex reality which is political and social but also topographical, seen through a double viewpoint, that of a child (who is part of the video) and that of the viewer.
"Co-Operation 2006" attempts to address the mind-body problem as well as the politics of role-playing by service agents in contemporary society. In this work, a human actor personifying an avatar moves around a public exhibition space offering himself to the control of a viewer who sits in a remote and secluded cabin. The viewer can command the actor where to go, what to say, and can see in real-time through the actor's eyes, speak through his mouth and listen through his ears. The mind of the viewer is cumbersomely projected onto the actor; creating all sorts of misunderstandings in the attempt to establish communication between the viewer and his new body. (I made a documentary film about the subject of avatars, “BRB, 2006-2007”. It was shot entirely in "Second Life").
My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in public institutions including PS1 in New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Israel Museum, as well as in private galleries such as the Lisson Gallery in London, Kamel Mennour Gallery in Paris and Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv.
In addition to my work in new media installations, I continue to explore the relationship between art and science by collaborating with scientists and other artists. My research relates both to science and to art. I attempt to bridge between the "two cultures" by creating a hybrid form of cross-disciplinary collaboration where some of the scientific questions are raised by myself. In 2004/5 I directed a physical computing lab at the Israeli Center for Digital Art. At the lab I worked on using electro-cardiogram signals to manipulate sound. Later on, I collaborated with Prof. Nathan Intrator, a mathematician at Tel Aviv University, in a project dealing with the sonification of bio and medical signals. We also gave a graduate seminar on this subject at Tel Aviv University. I am continuing to develop this project together with Profs. Offer Barnea and Roni Shapira from Tel Aviv University. The project, called "Music for the Heart", involves creating the interface and hardware for musical compositions that change in response to the heart beats of the listener. This project, which has several technological implications, especially in the fields of fitness and sport, creates a new platform for musical experimentation.
Currently I am collaborating with a cinematographer and a leading professor of
computing and future studies from Nottingham University (UK). We are examining
radical changes in "the way human beings are" due to technological and scientific
developments. It is analogous to Kurzweil's singularity but it doesn't focus on the full
scope of the singularity. It rather deals with a much more modest imaginative
development. In this project, we are imagining a new technology which is almost feasible today. It involves a non-invasive brain computer interface (BCI) which can be used regularly for daily life. We would like to examine the social and psychological
implications of this on the human soul in particular our relationship with our most
intimate memories. This examination will be presented in the form in a multi-media
installation, partially interactive, that will be exhibited in 2010 in Tel Aviv and later on in Paris. It is supported by the Israeli Film Foundation.
Miri Segal, 2009
Interpretation, 2022
T.S. Eliot wrote the poem, The Waste Land, one of the most influential and discussed poetic works of the 20th century, exactly one hundred years ago in 1922. The poem, written in the wake of World War II, deals with the ruin and collapse of humanity and the life that emerges from death.
The first part of the song is called The Burial of the Dead and it consists of 29 sentences. Miri Segal fed each of these sentences into an AI program called Disco Diffusion, Segal studied the parameters of the program. For each sentence, several images were created, from which she chose one image.