Infínity

Infínity (2017) is a generative audiovisual app/artwork for iPad. It should be noted that Apple has no Art category on the app store, highlighting the originality of the app as an exemplar of app art. The production and testing of the app was meant to interrogate how users would respond to an app that attempts to balance aesthetics with contemplative practice (i.e. meditation). As such, it continued the line of exploration initiated with the artist’s previous app/artwork, Dancing Wu Wei (2013), as well as the music of his solo CD Music for Being (2012). Secondary questions pursued in the research included how the principal aesthetic and contemplative objectives would be affected by the use of a mobile device as a medium (or ‘space’), and how a user-centred design process might be fruitfully incorporated into the work’s creation.

The research was carried out with the support of B3 Media's TalentLab program, an artist residency program co-managed by B3 and the University of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab. MRL researcher Sean McGrath helped Herrema incorporate the User-Centred Design process in the creation of the app. A series of 12 user observations and interviews were carried out at MRL, in London, and electronically. From the qualitative data gathered from this process, one particularly significant outcome reached was the notion of the app as a kind of ‘cigarette break’ - i.e. the idea that the app functioned neither as an object of aesthetic contemplation nor of studied meditation, but rather as a casual and fleeting moment of contemplative relaxation. It further raised the question of whether the mobile platform creates new modes of human experience rather than merely transplanting a mode of experience from one medium to another.

• http://www.semanticaudio.ac.uk/blog/exte...
• https://vimeo.com/171653087