Animate Projects Observer

PAVEMENT # 6: PUREFLOW by Katy Connor

Situated in the Permanent Gallery window, Katy Connor’s new work Pure Flow 2.0 is a large-scale projection and a smartphone app. It generates live, moving imagery and sound from the data flows running between a Global Positioning System device [GPS] and the multiple satellites which triangulate its position at any one time; revealing a way of perceiving streams of ordinarily invisible data.

Fluctuations in this data reveal the noise in the signal, the system’s instability and a poetic fragility of these signals in space. The visual aesthetic – shifting layers of smoky black and white – lend an analogue, tactile texture to an otherwise digital scene. The work acknowledges the common use, in surveying and navigational tools, of sophisticated technologies, initially developed for military purposes. Pure Flow 2.0 will run from 2 – 28 September.

As an APP for iPhone and iPad, Pure Flow 2.0, mobile edition, allows audiences to experience the work in miniature: enabling the user to directly touch these signals, creating visual and sonic patterns that respond to the users environment and agile movement in space. The Pure Flow app launches at Permanent for the Brighton Digital Festival 2011, a month-long celebration of digital culture taking place 1 – 30 September 2011.

Katy Connor is an artist working with film, video and installation who often works in collaboration with other artists. Currently based at Spike Island, Bristol, Katy Connor has screened and exhibited her work in galleries and festivals in the UK, Europe and Japan. Following this exhibition at Permanent Gallery Pure Flow 2.0 will tour to Plymouth Arts Centre, for a solo exhibition in October 2011.

PUREFLOW was originally commissioned through the Exeter Phoenix Digital Media Bursary. Made in collaboration with Dr Duncan Rowland, Reader of Cultural Computing at the University of Lincoln, Pure Flow 2.0 mobile edition is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.