On June 2, Professor Golan Levin premiered his performance “The Interfered Microscopy Plot” on Feral File, a major exhibition venue for art on the blockchain.
The project reimagines everyday objects as pareidolic landscapes, producing pen-and-ink drawings in a cybernetic process that melds micro vision, computer vision, and human interference. In the performance, the live feed of a digital microscope spurs the machine hallucinations of a semiautonomous drawing algorithm, whose interpretations are both coaxed and culled by the artist. Amid Levin’s interventions, the system’s digital forms are returned to the macroscopic physical world through the raucous twittering of a relic plotting machine. Extending from his audiovisual performance “Scribble” (2000), “The Interfered Microscopy Plot” continues a thread of Levin’s software arts research that complicates gestural drawing through abstraction, computation, and real-time interaction.