It’s Miller Time

Brad Miller initially developed augment_me during a research residency at Artspace in 2004. As part of that research, he interviewed a number of young people about identity and materialism, leading to further research on the self in relation to additions or supplements. It seems that the self must be augmented, must be adorned and the reason the self must be augmented is that it is seen as inadequate for the tasks at hand. Thus began the process of materialising a critique of desire and augmentation using his own self as the locus of concern.

augment_me is comprised of a responsive database of images, sound and videos, accumulated over the past 8 years. Forming sequences in response to audience movement and position, these data ‘moments’ are animated by the augment_me software according to a set of rules applied to a live video camera feed, and then sequentially embedded into a strip of images presented horizontally. These ‘moments’ and their aggregation track relationships with people, places and moments of the everyday, intrinsically measuring change or transformation to produce a kind of memory machine — an attempt at resisting external ideas of what might be augmented.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.