Pia van Gelder: Psychic Synth

Overview

Psychic Synth is Pia van Gelder's newest work, presented by Performance Space at Carriageworks as part of their Score season of music, movement, noise and technology. In a dark room housing an immense multi-sensory interactive installation, viewers are connected (via headset) to van Gelder's machine. They then watch as it proceeds to react to their actual mental energy, creating correspondingly vivid and psychedelic sounds and visuals, and generally doing weird and wacky futuristic stuff, unique for each person.

Van Gelder, the artist behind last year's Tetrasynth, makes installation art from custom-built technologies or commonplace devices she hacks and gets to act in new and surprising ways. She's also been known to curate festivals and exhibitions, and is a member of Sydney collective Dorkbot, the eclectically creative folk doing strange things with electricity once a month out of COFA.

The weird futuristic environment of Psychic Synth explores our relationship with machines (something van Gelder calls 'machinic affinity'), and will be available to make psychedelic art out of your brainwaves for most of the month of August.

Image from Tetrasynth by Pia van Gelder.