Donna Legault is an experimental artist based in Ottawa, Canada. Her work explores opportunities afforded by technology to acknowledge human/non-human relations through gesture and resonance. Her research is disseminated through modalities of motion and sound via electronic installation, sculpture, drawing, and performance.
3D printed plastic discs, vintage Fisher Price music player, book
Intelligence is a strange output based on a radical imagining of human-computer interaction. This piece asks what form the portrait of a person might take from the perspective of an intelligence where perception, memory, recall and access to information is so radically different from human experience.
This work began with a series of drawings that map the data of individual people as they would be stored in the memory of an Iris Recognition Analysis System (IRA).
The final work is an interpretation of the data portraits as 3D printed plastic disks that can be played on a Fisher Price Music Player. A short fiction with cumulative dataset drawings contextualizes this participatory piece.
Custom electronics, microphones, solonoids.
As an early prototype of the MIMID boards, each of these electronic devices isolates sound data from an onboard surveillance microphone and taps out the rythmic information of the ambient soundscape through a solenoid.
A cluster of these devices will make imperceptible sound data audible by tapping on available surfaces and objects in the same manner as woodpeckers when practicing their unique communication behaviour of drumming.
Three pieces exhibited together under the title Transmissions: Subtle Territory, Resonant Variations and a new experimental piece Sonic Horizon. This last installation is based on a popular but dangerous Maker hack of an old Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TV. The Maker modification is typically used as a desktop oscilloscope but in this version, a surveillance microphone picks up and visualizes ambient sound.
High In the corner of the space, a contemporary surveillance camera attentively watches the formally obsolete TV and projects its images over a bank of monitors that are arranged to surround the participant in a visual horizon of live sound.
Working with Ray Gould and Ivan Paisley on an installation that sonically characterizes participants activities as they are analyzed by a video surveillance system.
Prototype experiments and video with Michael Grant.
I had the opportunity to work for a few days with Andrew Pelling from the Laboratory of Biophysical Manipulation at the University of Ottawa. We came up with an experiment for the interaction of living cells with local pressure waves. Although we didn't arrive at any experimental outcomes, the effects of infrasonic frequencies in water were quite compelling. The frequencies are produced by a Pd oscillator and visualized through a projector when light is reflected off the waters undulating surface.
The result was, Darkfield a collaborative experiment on a way to affect the growth patterns of cell colonies with infrasonic architectures. Some of the waveforms that the team has uncovered are projected live in the installation space. These waveforms can be disrupted by their experimental field conditions through sonic input from participants. This work considers the dynamic influence of sound on living organisms in our surroundings.
