Craig Fahner is an artist who lives between Pittsburgh and Calgary. A student of Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Fine Arts program, Craig is interested in reconstituting technology to create work that engages physical space, enabling kinesthesis and exploration as modes of critical interpretation.

CV

Montreal's 1976 Summer Olympics saw the city gesturing, often haphazardly, towards modernity. One particular stride towards innovation was captured in the ceremonial torch relay. Rather than being transported on foot as per tradition, the Olympic Flame was electronically transmitted via satellite from Athens to Ottawa by means of an electronic pulse derived from the eternal flame. In Ottawa, the signal was transformed into a laser, which then ingnited a torch that was carried by hand to Montreal.

We propose to transport a flame from the site of the first nuclear reactor built for commercial use in the United States in Shippingport, PA to an exhibition at the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal, QC. Rather than simply restaging the 1976 relay, our collaboration seeks to collapse the distances between the context of the Montreal Olympics and this artifact of the atomic age as a way to reinterpret their inherent utopian ideologies and access their entropic potential.

Produced in collaboration with Steve Gurysh

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Pop songs recorded by very crude means in my studio in Pittsburgh, usually in the middle of the night.

En este disco primerizo se presentó algo que gusta mucho a personas preferentes hacia el garage pop: guitarras estridentes, baterías sólidas, pero una voz que se iguala a la potencia de todo el ajetreo de cuerdas, además de marcar la diferencia entre el azotar la cabeza o dejarla contonearse con cierta gracia mientras se baila. El noise se nos presenta como una perfecta fotografía con grano incluido; permitiendo distinguir objetos con facilidad pero sin quitarle el sentimiento de una buena toma análoga. Feel Alright es la clase de ruido que esperas escuchar cuando vas a una tocada al centro de la ciudad.

- Fernando Victoria

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This work is a performative distillation of energy. Using homemade devices that convert vibration into electrical current, I have stored various durational performative gestures into batteries. Each battery contains a different visceral procedure, as indicated by the labels on the batteries themselves.

The amount of electricity that these gestures create is relatively small. It is my hope, however, that these objects will in some way contain the spirit of the actions that produced them, and that the use of this energy will facilitate some transferrance of that spirit.

Two performers press into an empty exhibition space, their vision compromised by enclosures made of fabric. Sound is generated from each performer's position in space, forcing them to interact entirely based on their sense of hearing. Over the course of three hours the performers will investigate these parameters, attempting to develop a relationship in movement within this system.

Produced in collaboration with Nina Sarnelle

This project uses a biofeedback technology called EEG, or electroencephalography. An EEG headset facilitates a direct relationship between the mind and the instrument. Notes on an electric organ are activated as the EEG monitors the participant's level of cognitive awareness. The generated tones increase in complexity as the participant's level of awareness drops.

Rather than enabling a hyperawareness of things, as many of our media do, this project allows an interaction with technology that encourages a transcendence of awareness to engage in a creative act - just as the pianist transcends the conventions of his instrument, allowing an energy to flow directly through his body and his instrument and into the air.

A filmtrack to a sound.

A trio of musicians were given three pairs of dissonant notes and the phrase 'Catching a mouse in the dark' as guidelines to record an improvised piece of music to serve as a soundtrack for an as-yet unmade film.

Upon the soundtrack's completion, I shot and edited together this film to correspond with the provided music.

This project invites participants to interact with the resonant properties of matter. A vibrating plate visualizes resonant phenomena in salt. Users leave their fingerprints on the piece, generating visualizations based on touch.

Produced in collaboration with Neal Moignard.

This installation is an investigation into the interactive potential of electromagnetic fields. Theremins - musical instruments played by placing one's body within the electric field surrounding an antenna - are used here to create a week long indeterminate sound recording.

Three theremins are placed in an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circular drum. The tones emitted by the theremins are determined by the presence of visitors in the space, changes in electromagnetic activity, and other environmental factors such as temperature. Without human interaction the tones of each instrument drift slowly, sympathetically. The three theremins, initially tuned to the same note, will configure themselves into various consonances and dissonances throughout the run of the exhibition.

The sounds created are visualized through a tom drum, whose skin is sealed to hold a small amount of water. A speaker is placed below the drum, and the wave patterns that are emitted through the speaker are visualized on the pool of water on top of the drum. The skin is tuned to resonate with certain frequencies, and at these points the skin vibrates the water forming circular shapes that expand and contract in relation to pitch.

Viewers are invited to interact with the sculpture, as their gestures will affect the soundscape and visualizations produced.

Produced in collaboration with Neal Moignard and Dr. Jean-Rene Leblanc at the Sensorium Lab at the University of Calgary

#garden is a piece that investigates the social media impulse. Several potted plants are set up in the exhibition space, rigged with electronic sensors and a water pump. Based on sensor data, the #garden will communicate its mood nightly via Twitter, a social media "microblogging" platform. Twitter users can give the #garden water by responding to its posts.

Over 50,000 Twitter messages are posted per hour. These messages may include political statements, eyewitness journalism, or mindless expressions of boredom — all on the same page. Cast-off thoughts of movie stars, and reminders from family members appear side by side. Twitter achieves this kind of democracy only by limiting its users: each post must be no longer than 140 characters. This limit of expression is the great equalizer.

#garden disrupts the limiting nature of social media by bringing it off of the screen. Interactions with the #garden, rather than being lost in a sea of fleeting transmissions, cause a physical response by contributing to a tangible community garden. Participants can communally support the garden, or via the impulsiveness of social media, drown and destroy it.

hrtdrm is another iteration of the Du Coeur project - now a participatory artwork. A finger-clip style heart rate sensor amplifies the participant's heart beat onto a bass drum. hrtdrm creates a simple relationship between object and interactor, entirely based on non-cognitive/physiological control.

In this performance, the artist's mind is locked in a feedback loop with his body. The artist's intention is forced to interact directly with his physiology: he performs a song, whose rhythm is an amplification of his heart beat.

The performer relies on his own anxiety - his racing heart - to maintain a driving rhythm. As a measure to maintain a tension between his mind and his body, the performer improvises music and words, on the theme of a slowing heart.

By forever postponing the song's proposition, the rock song's unfaltering masculinity is reduced to desperation. Its repeated plea leaves us yearning for the resolution, only to realize that it was never going to come in the first place.

Palimpsest Plaza is the assertion that the city is a map overwritten by its evolving social technologies. It is a project of two parts - one performative and one static - that aims to create a discourse between the pedestrian and his urban environment.

This discourse is initiated by the pedestrian. A response is transmitted by the city in the form of traffic signals. A binary message of red or green - stop or go - is left for the pedestrian's interpretation.

This piece interprets Guy Debord's Theory of the Dérive in a media-proliferated urban environment. I assert that a traversal of the history of social technologies is essential to the act of urban maneuvering.

This piece intervenes on the ordinary functioning of a radio. Gestures and movements summon transmissions - fragments arranged by the participant's engagement.

Pizza Beats is an absurdist exercise in indeterminate music. A turntable has been modified to interpret the placement of pepperoni slices on pizza as drum rhythms.

Pizzas are ordered to the performance space from various shops around town. Music is improvised to accompany the pizza rhythms.

This performance seeks to illuminate and satirize the ways in which pop-culture signifiers mediate our consumption.

Reversing the television viewing paradigm, Sleeper places the viewer in an anxious relationship with the image. The television's antenna - a theremin - tracks the viewer's presence and action, resulting in the torment of the figure on the screen.

Layering representations of sex upon themselves, Skin Loops situates sexuality within a media-proliferated gaze. The promiscuity of images obscures the projection, resulting in a representation that is predominantly mechanical.

Outlining the disparity between product and origin, these photographs superimpose symbols of consumption on tools of production. Pelt stretchers frame a sheet of latex, upon which the images are printed with oil. Gradually, the oil breaks down the latex, destroying the images within a matter of a few weeks.