For transmedia telepresence artist Shawn Brixey, art imitates life. Or more appropriately, art is life.
The latest work by Brixey, a University of Washington professor, is an ice crystal installation created for the 1998 Winter Olympics Ice Art Festival in Karuizawa, Japan. Ice carvings usually conjure up the image of giant swans or cleverly arranged stalagmites. But not this time.
Located inside a University of Washington laboratory, Alchymeia is a genetically engineered online ice installation where hormones taken from the urine of Olympic athletes guide the growth of ice crystals. The exhibit employs a digital video-microscopy system to multicast the Technicolor kaleidoscope of biological processes onto the Net, complete with streaming video.
"The crystals are like a snowflake, which is nothing more than a photograph of its lifetime done atom by atom," Brixey says. "A snowflake records its entire environment as it falls to the ground. So the idea for Alchymeia came from looking at the notion that 'no two snowflakes are alike' and trying to figure out if I could make my own [ice crystals] that carry their own stories."
Indeed, Alchymeia is true generative art - a real-world work encouraged to "grow" itself based on the physical laws of nature, rather than a computer simulation of those laws.
Subzero temperature is not the only requirement for water to freeze, Brixey explains. The growth of ice crystals must be triggered by contaminating particles, such as minerals or organic matter. In Alchymeia, these contaminants are naturally occurring steroids found in the urine samples taken from one male and one female Olympic athlete, introduced to the "ultra-pure/ultra-cold" water before freezing occurs. In effect, the crystals that form are frozen mirrors mimicking the human material that spawned them. High-tech yet home-grown, just like Alchymeia's creator.
"I grew up in Missouri, but my parents were TV producers," Brixey explains. "So I had this strange juxtaposition of being around the most advanced media technology at that time while hanging out in a farming community watching the seasons change."
