variant vs Patterns of Pathology

variant:flare is an audiovisual artwork that creates beautiful, ever-changing music and imagery. The app combines user input and built-in randomness to create images and music that will continually change, grow and evolve, offering a new and different experience every time. For users of all ages, variant:flare is a chance to explore and experience a unique work of generative art. To interact with variant:flare, tap the screen with one finger; each tap will start a new track of the music. After six tracks have been loaded, each tap will reset one track and load a new random selection. By gradually resetting different elements of the composition, you control the flow and evolution of the music. The visuals are in turn controlled by the sound, so by changing the music, you will influence the development of the visuals. You can view the indeterminate audio engine by tapping the dot in the lower right. The display shows the different elements of the musical composition as they are loaded by the engine through a combination of chance and user input. The center button opens a menu of settings for the app, and the button to the right allows you to take screenshots of the visuals, automatically saving them to your photo library. The Variant apps are a new series of generative audiovisual artworks from Interval Studios featuring visuals by Joshue Ott and music by Kenneth Kirschner. Each Variant features a unique visual composition by Ott based on his superDraw visual performance software, as well as a new indeterminate musical composition by Kirschner. Each Variant app also offers a different set of interactive controls for the user, ranging from the ability to subtly influence the development of the piece to total interactive control over both visuals and sound. All of the Variants are generative artworks: through a varying combination of built-in randomness and user input, each Variant will continually grow and evolve over time without ever directly repeating itself either visually or musically, offering the user an ever-changing, ever-evolving audiovisual experience.

This Augmented Reality (AR) work is based on an exchange between artist-researcher Marlene Bart and science and culture historian Flora Lysen. Together, they examine pattern recognition in EEG recordings, taking data originally recorded in the 1940s as their starting point. The pair discussed the initial hope at the inception of the technology that EEG could distinguish between "normal" and "abnormal" brain activity. However, it quickly became evident that human biases heavily influenced these diagnoses. Contemporary goals, such as implementing artificial intelligence to automate this diagnostic process and - ideally - thereby make it objective, revealed that even these automated systems continued to perpetuate human biases of their creators. This AR work employs artistically derived algorithmic operations that utilize seven EEG datasets from women in the same age range as Bart and Lysen. These datasets are sourced from the Atlas of Electroencephalography by Frederic and Erna Gibbs, an extensive collection of EEG data compiled in 1941. The exchange between Bart and Lysen which underpins this body of work began in 2023 and was initiated as part of a project with the Max Planck Research Group "Biomedical Sciences."