2. John Antoine Labadie
Artworks: 2006 - 2010
Dr. John Antoine Labadie holds the rank of Professor in the Art Department at the University of
North Carolina at Pembroke, USA. He is the founder of the Digital Arts program there. Labadie is the
co-founder and Director of the UNC Pembroke Digital Academy (DA), a multi-departmental, cross-
disciplinary, collaborative group focused on research in new media and which also offers new media
courses. The DA is also involved with a wide range of creative projects and digital media services.
Dr. Labadie was a 2005-2006 Fulbright Senior Scholar in digital art for the Center for Creativity
and Innovation Studies at National Chengchi University and also at the Taipei National University of
the Arts in Taipei,Taiwan. Labadie has served as artist-in-residence/visiting artist nationally with the
United States National Park Service in Del Rio, Texas (2002); the University of North Carolina
Greensboro in Greensboro North Carolina (2004); and Troy University in Troy, Alabama (2005); and
internationally at Nanjing Normal University in Nanjing, China (2006); the Beijing Film Academy in
Beijing, China (2006); the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India (2007); Banasthali
University in Jaipur, India (2007); and National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan (2008).
Labadie’s artwork is most often focused on contemporary research in the sciences and
mathematics. His artwork has been exhibited in more than 300 national and international exhibitions
and is held in numerous private and museum collections nationally and internationally. Labadie has
published more than 150 refereed/juried articles on a wide range of subjects including: digital art,
digital resources management, digital art-making processes, digital printmaking, Native American
rock art, and high performance American automobiles of the 1960’s.
3.
4. “Geomorphology v.12”
Geomorphology is the science that describes
and classifies the topographic features (precise
places or regions) of the Earth. There are
numerous systems of classifying landforms.
Some group topographic features according to
the processes that shaped or modified them.
Other systems take myriad factors into
consideration (examples: character of the
surface rocks, and climatic variations) and also
include the various stages of geologic time. In
this work I am considering the variety of the
possible answers to how our planet came to be
as it is in the time we live on it. I have defined
possible explanations in terms of multi-
dimensional forms that are frozen in time, waiting
to be examined and understood. I see this work
as a map of maps of our understanding of our
physical world and that landforms that make it
up. As with the landforms themselves, our
explanations for the history of our world vary as
our knowledge grows through the development
and employment of new tools and methods of
analysis. This artwork was used as cover for
the Institute of Electrical & Electronics
Engineers journal “Computer Graphics,
Imaging & Visualization” published in 2008.
5. “Hearing Now”
Our senses are what they are for each of us:
sharp, clear, muddled, challenged, or
whatever they may be. What if one were try
employ visual art as a means of describing a
challenged sensoryexperience? This piece
deals with the problematic situation faced by
my wife Margie Labadie (my collaborator in
this work) as she coped with a serious
medical situation with her vocal chords, and
her inability to speak. This piece, “Hearing
Now” is record of our healing focused
collaboration. In our artwork we have utilized
visual, aesthetic means to describe and
interpret Margie’s medical situation, accurate
diagnosis, radical surgery, voice therapy,
and successful recovery from a serious
disease. We present the viewer with the
complexity and the nuances of this process
though the use of data gleaned from the
digital instruments utilized by the medical
team at the University of North Carolina
hospitals over a period of nearly three years.
This artwork was last exhibited in the
“Sguardi Sonori: Arte Contemporanea di
Intenazionale 2008” International Juried
Exhibition at the Casoria Contemporary Art
Museum Naples, Italy.
6.
7. “The Passage of Time”
Every day we see vibrant colors, hear often
unidentifiable sounds and feel hundreds of
textures. Our senses daily present us with a rich
array of perceptual information as we pass
through the hours by which we measure each
day. As we have realized from our childhood, it
seems that some aspects of the world are
revealed to us only through a particular sense.
Certain sensations, such as shapes, may be
perceived through a pairing or combining of
senses. Perceptual psychology can tell us much
about how such things work. But what about the
passage of time? Through what sense or senses
do we perceive time? It is certainly does not
seem associated with any particular sense.
Maybe we possess a certain ability, different from
the five known (physical) senses, for detecting
the passage of time. Attempting to clarify our
perception of time offers many puzzles, including
what exactly it means to say we can perceive
time. Perhaps it is useful to attempt to artistically
portray our senses in terms of the cycles by
which we measure time. Perhaps we might
denote each sense as a color, or as a shape and
make sense of experiencing the passage of time
as a composition. Whatever the result of such an
experiment, this is exactly what I have attempted
to do in the work “The Passage of Time.” This
artwork was last exhibited in the “Galeria Arteira
2009” in the Amsterdam, Netherlands.
8.
9. “Big Red”
The color (or term) “red” is associated with
numerous phenomena, everything from physics,
to human behavior, and pigments to astronomy.
Let us take this use of the word from a discussion
about astrophysics: “Sooner or later, a main
sequence star's core starts to run out of
hydrogen. This makes the star expand to
perhaps 1000 times the volume of the Sun.
Indeed, in another five billion years, the Sun itself
will expand and consume both Mercury and
Venus and maybe even the Earth. Being bigger
but with fewer core reactions means that that
star's surface cools to about 3000 kelvin and
therefore turns to a deep red color. The star also
produces silicon, oxygen, carbon and iron. The
main sequence star has become a red giant.”
That is a lot to take in. After reading more about
how “big” such an event would be, relative to
human kind anyway, I began work on the piece
that became “Big Red.” Here I have developed a
kind of system, like our solar system; one with an
understandable set of relationships. In the work
as it is presented here we are about to
experience that critical moment when the
“sooner or later” becomes the “now.” The work
“Big Red” is about the end of everything we
know ... and the beginning of something
else.This artwork was last exhibited in “Carpe
Diem 2009” in the Contemporary Art Museum of
Zulia Maczul in Maricaibo, Venezuela in 2009.
10.
11.
12. “It’s About Hearing”
Hearing is about many things. Certainly it has a
physical domain and the sense that allows us to
understand the sounds in our environment,
primarily via our ears. The opposite of hearing is
deafness. We hear literally when we are aware
of a siren, music, or someone shouting our
name. We might hear metaphorically in the
sense that we can “understand” a plea, a
metaphor, or an inference conveyed through
spoken or visual language. Research has
proven that not all sounds are normally audible
to all species of animals. Each animal species
that hears has a range of normal hearing for both
loudness and pitch. Many animals use sounds to
communicate. In many species hearing is
particularly important for survival and for
reproduction. Up until the introduction of writing
human species had, for millennia, used sound as
the primary means of communication. With the
introduction of electronic media, the role of
sound may have been forever altered. This
artwork is one of a series of six works
focused on human senses. This piece was
most recently exhibited in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina at the “Invited Artists Exhibition”
series in 2009.
13.
14. “Hexane Lenses 2010”
How do manufactured chemicals change the
world around us in unforeseen ways? Take
hexanes for example. Hexanes are chiefly
obtained through refining crude oil. In industry,
hexanes are used in the formulation of glues for
many products including shoes and roofing
materials. Hexanes are significant constituents of
gasoline. They are all colorless liquids at room
temperature, with relatively low boiling points
and with gasoline-like odor. They are widely
used as cheap, relatively safe, solvents.
However, long term inhalation of high
concentrations of hexane produces first a state of
mild euphoria, followed by drowsiness often
combined with the onset of headaches and often
nausea. Chronic abuse of hexane has been
observed in solvent abusers and in workers in
the shoe manufacturing, furniture and
automobile construction industries. Hexane
poisoning has been observed in situations
where individuals have had relatively long term
contact with hexane fumes or liquid hexane. In
many industrial settings where safety regulations
are lax (or nonexistent) many cases of hexane
poisoning and some deaths have been
observed. This artwork was most recently
exhibited by the “2010 Digital Fringe”
international project in Melbourne, Australia.
15. “Stardust”
At the most literal level the term “stardust”
denotes “dust composed of particles from
space ... places beyond the earth.” Even more
than that the word denotes many types of things
of human construction: music, films, books,
television, comics, artworks, architecture, design,
play production, National Atmospheric and
Space Administration missions, an album by
David Bowie, and a popular name for more
business ventures than could ever be counted.
Another, more scientific, definition suggests the
following: “Stardust is the really the heavy
elements that comprise the Earth-such as iron,
silicon, oxygen, and carbon-originally formed in
distant stars that exploded, sending their heavy
elements into space. The Earth and all life on it
are, in fact, recycled stellar debris.” No matter
which definition one accepts as apt it would
appear that the term “stardust” is indicative of
something of great, perhaps seminal, importance
as it is used in the English language. This
artwork is about such essentials, about the
basics of our existence, and about the ideas,
patterns and possibilities that are a part of us all.
This artwork was most recently exhibited at
the “Peace Project” in Culver City, California
USA in 2010.
16.
17.
18. “Time Study”
The term “time study” is borrowed from the
discipline of industrial engineering. A time study
is a work measurement technique, generally
accomplished using a timing device to record the
actual elapsed time for performance of a task,
which is adjusted for any observed variance from
normal effort or pace, any unavoidable or
machine delays, any rest periods, and any
personal needs. The term “time study” can also
be used to define and construct a metaphor
encompassing one’s views of a period of time, a
set of activities, or an event of defined limitations.
In this artwork I have attempted to visually define
a time study of several conversations about the
use of computers in the making of creative works.
In this work I have included numerous words,
sentences and terms that were a part of an actual
conversation on this subject at a conference in
Monterey, California in 2008. The conversation
was captured as an audio file and then
converted to a text file. It is my hope that this
conversation, in all its colors, nuances, and
shades has been captured in this visual work.
This artwork was most recently published in
the national, refereed journal “Sanctuary 2009
– 2010.” “Sanctuary” is a publication for the
Southern Regional Honors Council at the
University of Alabama Birmingham in
Birmingham, Alabama USA.
19.
20. “Set Theory”
We live in a world filled with “sets” and “subsets”.
(A set is a finite or infinite collection of objects in
which order has no significance, and multiplicity
is generally also ignored. Members of a set are
often referred to as elements. A set that contains
no elements is called a null set or an empty set.
The study of sets and their properties is the
object of set theory. A subset is a portion of a
set.) Humans define and redefine myriad sets
ourselves each day. Through the use of
electronic device scientists and other
professionals in the world at large are daily
defining sets and subsets at a dizzying pace. No
single person can absorb the massive amounts
of new data defined each day. Even so, without
such data and the definitions derived from them
we might well be lost in the world altogether.
Much of the work and theory about about sets
and subsets is also a part of the discipline of
mathematics. It is the area of “set theory” in
mathematics that is the focus of this piece. In
particular I am visually investigating some of the
ways in which set theory has been used to study
structures at the molecular level in biology. This
artwork was most recently exhibited at the
“FutureEverything 2010 International Artist
Exhibition” in Manchester, England at the
FutureEverything Urban Festival of Art, Music &
Ideas and the Social Technologies Summit.
21.
22. “A Set of Assumptions”
Each new work begins with a certain set of
ideas, conditions and possibilities. We
necessarily work with certain sets of
assumptions about what a work is, what it
might be, how it might be accomplished and
what can be done to successfully bring it into
a form that can be experienced by others.
This piece is one of a series where I have
attempted to carefully examine my own
working processes with respect to my
chosen way of working: with a digital toolset.
More specifically, “A Set of Assumptions”
considers the phenomena of space, shape,
and color within the framework of certain
contemporary digital tools. Each of the more
than 30 works in this series examines
another set of assumptions about how I
might go about beginning, managing and
completing a work to the point where it can
be shared with others. I have found this
method of investigating my own ways of
working very useful in helping to evolve
works in very systematic and structured
ways. This artwork was most recently
exhibited at the “The 2010 Gozo International
Contemporary Arts Festival” in the Republic of
Malta.
23. “Big Blue 2010” These two images are stills from a time based work entitled “Big Blue” ... an experimental video
that examines the idea of aesthetically recording the processes involved in making an artwork while an artwork
is in the process of being made. Running time for the video is 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
24. Dr. John Antoine Labadie 2006 - 2010
www.steppingstonearts.net
johnantoinelabadie@gmail.com
