A Phage is a réseau d’art, not an objet but a network, a “behaviourable and a futurible”1. As a speculative device, inspired by the membrane-penetrating abilities of bacteriophage viruses, they are collaborative instruments that allow the manipulation of virtual objects. Something between a game controller and a planchette from a Séance, each phage integrates microcontrollers and biometric and environmental sensors and operates as a networked device, allowing several phage to work together for collaborative control of virtual artefacts.
Like the planchette, the phage allows communication with entities from the beyond. Thomas Edison reflected building an early Phage, some kind of “valve”, later to become the ‘spirit phone’ or ‘necrophone’.”I have been thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could be operated by personalities which have passed on to another existence or sphere.”2
To date Phage applications have included: audience control of AI driven flocking “boids”; the incorporation of biometric sensors to access users’ bodily states whilst interacting with virtual objects; and the use of sentiment analysis to incorporate emotional qualities. As well as being an instrument for audience engagement beyond the gallery they have had a catalytic impact on Fulldome projection environments. Formerly known as the Planetarium, the Fulldome has been undergoing a disciplinary metamorphosis, it awoke one morning from uneasy astronomical dreams and found itself transformed from a planetarium into an ‘omniarium’- no longer just planets but a spherical perspective that provide immersive, performative, and polysensory experiences. The Phage is an instrument to breach the Fulldome membrane.
The Phage, 2023: Reworked montage of images captured from the E/M/D/L – European Mobile Dome Lab Murmuration performances from 2015 at the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal, incorporating newly constructed AI-generated artefacts and audience members using phage – collaborative physical instruments that enable the manipulation of virtual objects. Published in: Phillips, M. Digital Ectoplasm and the Infinite Architecture of the Fulldome. Ghost Stories: Architecture and the Intangible. Edited by Baldwin, P. Volume94, Issue4, July/August 2024, Pages 110-117.
This Phage is fitted with an RS-232 port which remembers efforts whilst at the Slade School of Art, UCL in 1984, to facilitate a networking infrastructure for some of Roy Ascott’s telematic activities, such as Aspects of Gaia (1989). Built around access to UCL’s terminals our efforts to instal an RS-232 socket in the Slade were scuppered by the then Slade Professor, who simply could not understand why we couldn’t ‘just meet people and have a cup of coffee with them’.
Content on the video stream on this Phage is sourced from original 3D objects, constructed in Aldus Super 3D, and transmitted over these early networks. Many disappeared into the ether and were never recovered. This Phage imagines their existence beyond the networks membrane, somewhere still circulating as code. It wasn’t just the immateriality of code that dissolved the hardware of the Objet d’art: it was the ability for its transubstantiation through electronic networks that transformed the Objet into a behaviour and unleashed the futurible. Asynchronous liberation through the network shattered and redistributed the Objet still further, for where two or three were gathered on a modem link, there we were among them, but not necessarily all at the same time.
The random latency in the networks generated a new kind of space framed by the chirping machine sounds of modems and the soft screeching of dot matrix printers, accessing this networked terrain created a tangible feeling of a vast domain of potential.
1: Ascott, R. (1968). Behaviourables and Futurables. Control, London, 1970, Nº 5.
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