Golan’s work focuses on our relationship with machines and the way that we interact with each other. His vast online archive at Flong.com documents and showcases much of his work.
He uses a wide variety of forms, including performance and installation, where interaction and the subversion of technology is often a key theme. Much of his work involves the creation of online artefacts which provide an ideal means to explore some of his interactive work. These pieces can be surprisingly intimate and human, particularly given the complex technical and statistical tools being used to create them.
The Secret Lives of Numbers used a variety of research tools to work out the relative popularity of different integers – the resulting data visualisation demonstrates a wide variety of patterns that reflect our mental handling of numbers as well as their place in our culture. The Dumpster is a visualisation trawls social media and blogs to pull out postings that are related to failed relationships in which one person has “dumped” another. The interface allows you to “surf” break-ups which, combined with the abstract visual design, provides a bizarre counterpoint to the often deeply personal messages that emerge.
His work can often be whimsical, but it is always though-provoking. His 2001 performance piece Dialtones (a Telesymphony) is a good case in point. This was a large-scale concert where the sounds were produced through the choreographed ringing of the audience’s mobile phones. The technical challenge of this brings me out in a cold sweat – getting the audience to register their mobile phones, uploading new ring-tones to them, and ringing them at precise moments. However, the concert is an interesting way of exploring our collective use of mobile phones and the etiquette associated with them.
Much of his recent work has concentrated on interactive robotics and the idea of the gaze as the primary means of communicating with a machine. His opto-isolator installation is one of his better-known installations and will be a part of the forthcoming Decode exhibition at the V&A museum in London. It’s composed of a single, human-scale mechanical eye that follows you around the room. It responds to the gaze of the viewer and attempts to establish eye contact with them. It looks away coyly if it has been staring at somebody for too long, and blinks precisely one second after you do. The idea is to explore our relationship with machines by asking what would happen if a machine could be aware of us and the result can be pretty unnerving.