peter d'Agostino

Research and video interviews for this
work-in-progress were conducted at:
CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research;
SLAC, Stanford Linear Accelerator; Berkeley Lab;
UCLA Art I Sci + Lab; and MARCEL. [ link ]

Based on the ancient art of string figures, popularly known
as cat's cradles, STRING CYCLES is an allegory for the
transmission of knowledge in the Internet age.
It is a weave of traditional storytelling themes - from African
folktales and the Homeric epics to the visual poetics of Mallarme
- juxtaposed with 'superstring' theories in physics and
the Buddhist story of Indra's Net, which tells of an endless
series of threads connecting the universe.

A metaphorical history of the electronic age through a series
of impressions, tableaux, and monologues of informed
commentary, TransmissionS moves back & forth in time
from the 'big bang' to seminal figures of the electronic era -
Edison, Tesla, and Marconi. Based on the true story of a young
boy who falls into a well, the installation explores a number
of universal themes: myths of Icarus falling and Orpheus
in the underworld; stories of Mother Earth,
emergence, rebirth and resurrection.

The focus of this work is the acquisition of language,
juxtaposed with an underlying theme derived from physics.
The structure is based on the four forces - light, gravity, strong
and weak - that cause all physical interactions in the universe.
Through analogy and metaphor, these concepts parallel four
periods of early language development: light/birth,
gravity/words, strong force/sentences, weak force/songs.

The structure of this work is based on a 30-second interval,
the most common time unit for TV commercials.
Three layers of information - sound/image/written texts -
are presented within a series of juxtapositions that give new
meaning to the term 'quark'. ( Originally created by
James Joyce to mean a 'croak' or 'trifle' in Finnegans Wake,
Murray Gell-Mann applied this term to describe his
concept of elementary subatomic particles. )

Peter d’Agostino CAVS Special Collection online
Interactive video installations, 1981- 90
The Center for Advanced Visual Studies was
founded in 1967 by Professor Gyorgy Kepes
to bring artists from around the world
to collaborate with MIT’s community of
scientists and engineers, to produce works
using new directions in technological
approach that would rise to interaction with
the broader community at the urban or civic scale.