Artworks Data Table

The (art)n work presented at SIGGRAPH 2000 is entitled Townhouse Revisited, 1999. This PHSCologram and interactive audio sculpture addresses issues of the body, public space, and touch in the architecture of virtual reality. The work was created in response to such questions as: If hard matter and gravity offer no impediment in virtual reality, what then will meeting, working, and playing spaces look like there? How might form, substance, and light evolve as we navigate through virtual structures? Would the body’s passage behind a monitor’s glass raise any layered echoes of sound? How would sound behave in a virtual space with no true surfaces to bounce off of – only image planes? Would sound bouncing off image planes be affected spatially by the digital code that makes up the structure of the image?

Congratulations. The October labor lottery is complete. Your name was pulled. For immediate placement, report to the The Ministry of Admission at Grestin Border Checkpoint. An apartment will be provided for you and your family in East Grestin. Expect a Class-8 dwelling. Glory to Arstotzka.

The communist state of Arstotzka has just ended a 6-year war with neighboring Kolechia and reclaimed its rightful half of the border town, Grestin. Your job as immigration inspector is to control the flow of people entering the Arstotzkan side of Grestin from Kolechia. Among the throngs of immigrants and visitors looking for work are hidden smugglers, spies, and terrorists. Using only the documents provided by travelers and the Ministry of Admission’s primitive inspect, search, and fingerprint systems you must decide who can enter Arstotzka and who will be turned away or arrested.

The story of hypermedia, in which the Web is a recent chapter, begins with a vision of transforming the brain’s associative connections into media (media that can be infinitely duplicated and easily shared), creating pathways of thought in a form that will not fade with memory. In recent years, hypermedia has begun to permeate our lives. But it is not as we dreamed: constantly growing, with nothing lost, only showing what we wish to see. Instead, “Not Found” is a nearly daily message. The story of software agents begins with the idea of a “soft robot” capable of carrying out goal-oriented tasks while requesting and receiving advice in human terms. In recent years, a much narrower marketing fantasy of the agent has emerged (with a relationship to actual agent technologies as tenuous as Robbie the Robot’s relationship to factory robots), and it grows despite failures such as Microsoft Bob. Now we often see agents as anthropomorphized, self-customizing virtual servants designed for a single task: to be a pleasing interface to a world of information that does not please us.

The Web disappoints us with its too-perfect reflection of our ambivalent relationships with impermanence and openness: dynamic and unstable, diverse and overwhelming. In response, some Web businesses are marketing fantasies of agents that will find for us only the information we desire and shelter us from chance encounters with unpleasant content and broken links.

The Impermanence Agent is a different response. It interacts with users as a Web-browser window. The Agent tells a personal story, a story of impermanence. The Agent is meant to be experienced peripherally, over time, not “visited.” It tracks the user’s Web browsing, makes copies of the texts and images the user views, and then customizes its story by incorporating this material. The Agent customizes until none of its original story is left.

Data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration processed to create animations of flight traffic patterns and density.
This work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the project Celestial Mechanics by colleagues Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Conceived by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin and produced by Tate Modern and Google, This Exquisite Forest was inspired by the surrealist game “exquisite corpse” and its idea of collaborative creation. The project lets users create short animations that build off one another as they explore specific themes. The result is a collection of branching narratives resembling trees to which anyone may contribute. The project lives online and as a physical installation at the Tate Modern (through June 2013). At the museum, visitors can explore the project as a life-sized projection and contribute animations using high-end digital drawing tablets.

Our work is about exploring the line between a pre-determined experience and an open one. We’re interested in thinking about how much freedom the viewer should have within the artwork. For example, in This Exquisite Forest, we give artists an open canvas to create any animation they like, but also the power to moderate and set rules for how that animation may evolve. Likewise, with The johnny Cash Project, participants are given a single frame as a template, but then they are free to interpret that frame in any way they choose.

We have tried a similar approach with interactive film. In The Wilderness Downtown, we let viewers change the experience by focusing it around their childhood homes using Google Maps and Street View. And with our fourth project, Three Dreams of Black, viewers can control the camera and create 3D sculptures that persist in the film for everyone to see.

New advances in web-browser technology have been at the core of each project. The web is intrinsically a great example of the SIGGRAPH 2013 Art Gallery theme. This Exquisite Forest is built around scale; it requires the participation of thousands of people to fulfill its goal of creating an evolving forest of animations.

SEEDIS has an enormous database containing population and geographical statistics that are combined in answer to specific queries. This output, or outerface, is often most logically expressed by graphs, maps, charts or other diagrams.

Designers worked in collaboration with computer programmers to create prototypical solutions to the problem of presenting these graphic outerfaces. The problem required designers to find ways to control the semi-automatic generation of information. The problem also required that the solutions be aesthetically pleasing, that the system’s capabilities be fully used, and that the designs meet the communication needs of the typical user.

The purpose of The Mischief of Created Things is to create an interactive environmental narrative dealing with new images of West Africa and philosophies of game design. The content is based on my two years as a development worker in Mali. The imagery is intended to inspire players to find the magic in the mundane, and it references a hybrid of traditional Malian and Western culture overlapping between magic and technology.

My process involved creation of a three-dimensional environment in Flash, which the player can explore non-linearly. The environment includes characters, with whom players converse; the conversations are based on a fluid navigation system similar to the environment’s exterior navigation. Stories are based on my diary entries and letters home, and were chosen for their personal, surprising, and multi-layered nature.

Rather than use traditional game-design methods, I chose to start with narrative and imagery and create the game structure from them. During play, the user discovers narratives that build on one another throughout the course of the experience. The player uses these to form a meaningful picture of the environment as a whole. The order of events changes each player’s interpretation, since the experience of certain events directly influences the sequence of subsequent events. The surprising and non-sequitur nature of the narrative makes the game characters and environment seem more real.

In The River, sound samples recorded along the Singapore River are interpreted and visualized into the form of light by a custom made program. With the use of light representing life along the Singapore River, this artwork provides a new perspective of form and space. Digital and synthetic elements of light and acrylic echoes the organic elements of sounds and human activities within the environment of the river.

The Sancho Plan creates real-time audio/visual experiences for modern audiences. Through our live shows and installations, we explore custom-built, interactive technologies that fuse film and animation, sound and music, interaction design and gaming, and live performance into unified works of immersive public entertainment. Visually and sonically, Spacequatica takes us on a descent through a musical ocean. Beginning near the surface, where phasing xylophones interact with schools of small exotic creatures, the animation explores deeper waters populated by robotic sharks, and the depths, where all that can be observed is a self-illuminating species occasionally blinking out of the darkness.

Saturation is an installation that highlights the abundance of wireless signals occupying the electromagnetic spectrum. The work indexes the FM radio spectrum to reveal the density of the invisible communications infrastructure saturating the environment and our bodies.

The visual and musical journey takes the audience to places such as Karachi, Ivory Coast, Saigon, Tahiti, and San Francisco, capturing the romantic innocence of the world at a time when traveling with a home movie camera was still highly unusual. The performance gives a rare glimpse into the beginnings of a world that we all now take for granted, where recording of images and international travel are common place.

Interwoven with stylized interviews with pilot Raymond Lamy, the original footage is re-worked with graphics to a new and original soundtrack by Addictive TV, which features live guitar from French artist Alejandro de Valera, who specializes in composing for and playing his rare, custom-built fretless guitars.

The Eye of the Pilot was supported by the Paris arts board Arcadi as part of their experimental multimedia grants. It has been performed at several venues, including the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the National Theatre in London, and The Cologne Museum of Applied Arts.

Data from measurements of brain waves are transformed into a wallpaper pattern and a three-dimensional sculpture. The sensory organs that are stimulated and inspired by looking at art and associated cerebral events are performing as artwork themselves. The sum of senses plus awareness equals the true sense. This would be defined as “synesthetik.” Wallpaper: The wallpaper project literally uses the “neuronal pattern” as a pair of terms and transforms them in a visualized context (perception). A viewer was asked to look at the famous painting “Who is afraid of red, blue and yellow” by Barnett Newmann in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany, and the viewer’s cerebral
responses (wave patterns) were transformed into paper wall strips. Brain sculpture: For the “brain sculpture,” the wave patterns were milled in a precise landscape-like sculpture of wood or plastic. Concept: Electroencephalography (EEG) allows measurement of brain activities in real time. Cerebral activities are defined as neuronal patterns and interpreted as perception. In general, more activity is found in the right hemisphere when the subject is being creative. And cerebral activity increases during perception. In this work, EEG measurements allow the observer to perceive brain activity during perception of an aesthetic event. Summary: EEG technology can reveal perceptive activities within the brain of the artist as well as in the brain of the recipient. Thus mental processes that are triggered during artistic events are not limited to the brain’s interior, but may also be reflected in a two-dimensional “picture” or “in” a three-dimensional sculpture.

FACES is an interactive video installation that explores the otherness contained in each one of us. The Other, so often an anonymous and distant being, is carried inside me in a way. Differences between humans are merely a product of chance. Too easily, we distance ourselves from the suffering of people, ignoring the tragedies of mankind, ears deaf to the pain of the Other. We forget that the sufferers could be “us” or someone we know, someone with a face. Levinas said that being in a face-to-face relationship with the Other makes it impossible to kill him. He also considered that his relationship with the Other as neighbor gave meaning to his relations with all the others. A neighbor relationship requires one to know the Other’s face. Every day, we look in a mirror and it’s always the same face, the “Self.” This installation tries to briefly change that everyday experience. When looking into the mirror, the viewer discovers other faces watching him, faces that get mixed-up between them and the viewer’s reflected image. The Self encounters itself face-to-face with the Other, previously a stranger. Inside the viewer’s own reflected image lies a small, ever-changing sample of the Infinite Otherness.

“SOLACE AND PERPETUITY, a life story,” is an algorithmically rendered autobiography of the artist. Like a medieval Book of Hours, many genres are represented: diary entries, dreams, academic papers, fictive prose, poetry, plays, and video and installation scripts. These were numbered and fragmented into their indigenous paragraphs, which were subjected to a scrambling algorithm. Scrambling provides a kaleidoscopic reading of potentially 100’s of 1000’s of possibilities. The artist’s character seeps through a text where every paragraph is a subtext. Published by Weil Books in 2015. Collector’s edition available through the artist, individual copies at Lulu.com.

Individual components or subsystems usually are defined at different “layers” of the database, so the designer can view any number of them at once. The different colors of this drawing of a high-speed computer printer represent different layers. Because the lid was defined on a separate layer, the designer was able to move it though its range of motion to ensure that no components interfered with its movement. For clarity, the lid was drawn in a different color for each position in the sequence shown.

Inspired by the 15th century painting by Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly (Delights) is a screen-based, interactive installation focused on ideas related to the television medium and the place it occupies in modern Western culture. Central to the piece is the “Garden” animation, whose symbolic characters represent various modern passions and delights, embodied in the television programs.  The piece is conceived as a comment on and paraphrase of television.  Like TV it is meant to inconspicuously control the users’ choices, imposing on them specific decisions.  By selecting respective symbols from one of various “Garden” animations, the users metaphorically fall prey to the flaws of human nature, as manifested in Bosch’s work.  Seduced by the “delights,” the users become victims of the mediamatic illusion of reality.

The phantasmagoric creatures depicted in the Bosch’s painting are entangled in surreal affairs with each other and with their own demons, conjured out of the fantasies and beliefs howling in the minds of the artist’s contemporaries.  Here, they are replaced by Western demons, whose faces flash through the television channels.  In the modern world TV has filled the space vacated by religion, which in 15th century Europe served to link and unify many aspects of social life.  Like Bosch’s figures, we are now cringing under the burden of hellish visions brought forth by television daily news and horror movies, instead of Rambos and preachers.  Messages of violence smoothly intersected by omnipresent commercials and pandering advertisements saturate the viewers’ minds.  The sarcasm and surrealism of Bosch’s painting reflect in the sleek surface of the TV screen. Deployed in from to a favorite chair or couch, TV embodies our beliefs and fears, and yet serves them with restrained dramatism–after all it is just the screen…Commodity advertisements, type-casting, food commercials–all of these strive to fill that void in viewers’ consciousness that craves for indulgence.  These are modern representations of greed and vanity.

Just as at home, sitting comforting in front of the TV, the users of The Garden of Earthly Delights find themselves poised between the reality of an old armchair, flanked by the “Vanity Panel” and the computer screen.  The panel, covered with familiar wallpaper patterns, conceals the equipment; all the users see is the screen, the keyboard, and the mouse–the three elements that make the interaction possible.  The repetitive, teasing and numbing sound, present throughout the piece but changing with each new selection, parallels the character of television channels.  While the stills and animations that appear in response to the users’ selections are suggestive of TV, their palette subdued yet always slightly different with each entry, the messages and menus take the form of gothic-style notes characteristic of Bosch’s time and, in some cases, quoting from the artist’s writings.

The participants’ past and current responses are analyzed and stored in the seven concurrent databases.  The flow of the action is based on the users’ choices and is different for each participant, depending upon the performance.  The underlying database allows alteration of the available imagery and sound in the run time, while the participants are traversing through the “Garden’s” paths, thus creating the possibility of numerous selections–of animations, stills and sounds–and adaptations to individual explorations.

Gangnam Makeover is an online participatory augmented reality (AR) intervention at the Sinsa subway station in the Gangnam district in Seoul, South Korea. The project collects ideas about beauty from women in Korea through a central website. The collected messages are then displayed over the numerous cosmetic surgery advertisements in the Sinsa subway station through a mobile AR application. The project is meant to makeover a problematic public space that propagates a restrictive standard of beauty into a space of imagination and solidarity for women. The project explores the potential for AR to augment society by envisioning alternative realities.

To provide some background, body-shaming is still very common in South Korea, and more so for women. The Apgujeong/Sinsa neighborhood is the South Korean hub for cosmetic surgery. The subway stations there contain mostly cosmetic surgery ads depicting women with large double-lidded eyes, high noses, V-line chins, “water-gloss” skin, and slim hourglass figures. Gangnam Makeover challenges this standard by enabling Korean women to define alternative visions of beauty in Korea.

Gangnam Makeover builds on the lineage of protest AR interventions by including user-created content. This model of online participation coupled with site-specific augmentation becomes a midpoint between internet activism and physical activism, which allows for spatial intervention free of physical borders. Gangnam Makeover does not limit participation to local Korean women and is open to participation from Korean women abroad who are still affected by the Korean beauty standards. The project will continue until the end of 2020.

This work emphasizes aspects of virtuality, such as telepresence and disembodiment/re-embodiment of the senses. Handsight also affects a transverse relation between the virtual and the real by correlating a specific physical object with respect to its virtual representation. This is done within the circumference of a visual environment where the imagery becomes a spherical anamorphoses that embodies an augmented field of view- an ‘endoscopic eye.’ The thematic structure of this work is implied as an exteriorized phenomenological projection of psychological and symbolic spaces.

All elements coherently merge in one environment that is constituted by three main apparatuses, accompanied by a ready-made object: 1) a large circular projection screen onto which real-time computer graphic imagery is projected; 2) an interactive interface that the viewer holds in his/her hand. This looks like a large eye-ball, containing a sensing device that accurately measures its spatial position and orientation; and 3) a large transparent Plexiglas sphere with a hole in its center, into which the viewer can insert the eyeball interface and then move it about inside. This sphere provides the viewer with an ‘endo-spatial’ enclosure that manual exploration maps directly into the representation of the virtual domain.

The eye-ball thus becomes a disembodied object- a virtual camera moving freely in space. The subject of observation in this real space is the transparent sphere, which when ‘looked at’ by the eye-ball, is itself seen to be represented as a virtual eye on the projection screen.

When actually entering the transparent sphere with his/her hand, the viewer also enters this virtual eye through its iris, and then confronts an image tableau that is located within this virtual space. Exploring the inner space of the transparent sphere, the viewer also explores the scenography of this virtual image tableau that is spatially located within the sphere. This conjunction of a virtual and physical space is achieved because the eyeball interface communicates to the computer the exact coordinates of its point of view with reference to the physical sphere, and the computer then generates a representation of the virtual scenography onto the round projection screen in front of the viewer.

The physical sphere establishes a boundary in the virtual world between the exterior representation of an eye and an interior representation of an image tableau that is implicitly contained within this eye. Outside the actual sphere the hand held eye-ball ‘perceives’ the virtual eye as an object (macrocosmos) that is conventionally represented in a traditional perspective view.

This inside universe represents, as a computer-generated model, the iconography of a specific type of Hungarian folk art. That tradition created miniature religious scenes in glass bottles, and one example of such a bottle is also shown in the Handsight installation, illuminated in a box behind the viewer. The choice of this contextual reference was felt to be appropriate because such a bottle tableau also expresses a sign for mental (virtual) spaces enclosed in the world of physical forms.

Handsight is an interactive computer graphic environment by Agnes Hegedus, first presented at the Ars Electronica in Linz, 1992.  Application software by Gideon May and Richard Holloway. Produced with the cooperation of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe.

Pattern : Code reactivates the innate connections between weaving and computing, and examines the interrelationships between technology, craft, and women’s labor. In order to create a comparison of modes of technological production by women in factories and offices, archival footage is edited together from industrial weaving and computer operations overlaid with weaving and punch card patterns. Computing and weaving are inextricably connected. The word “technology” comes from the Greek “techne,” meaning “art” or “craft.” The first computers derived from the same technology that runs Jacquard-weaving looms. Weaving is binary, either a warp or a weft thread is on the surface, essentially a zero or one. However, weaving and computing differ in their gender associations and the value of labor. Women were instrumental in the development of computing, writing the first computer programs and filling the ranks of programming jobs in the early years. Currently, the technology industry is dominated by men earning significantly more than their female co-workers do. Textile production drove technological advances from prehistory through the industrial revolution. Yet, the history of textile production is also a history of how women and those without power were exploited for economic gain. Conceptually both computing and weaving are based on patterns. The discrepancy between the relative values of computing and weaving labor are also the result of a history of thought, behavioral, and societal patterns over time.

Summary

Holarchy is an online installation that eliminates the arbitrariness of the artist, creating a new audio-visual work by comparing in the same space the feature of the music and the feature of a number of images selected by the artist beforehand and selecting them automatically.

Abstract

This work is an online installation that creates a new audio-visual using automatic video selection with deep learning. Video expression in the audio-visual and DJ+VJ, where sound and images coexist together, has been based on sampling methods by combining clips that already exist, generative methods that are computed in real time by computer, and the use of the sound of the phenomenon and the situation itself.Its visual effects have extended music and given it new meanings. However, in all of these methods, the selection of the video and the program itself was premised on the artist’s arbitrary decision to match the music. This work is an online installation that eliminates the arbitrariness of the artist, creating a new audio-visual work by comparing in the same space the feature of the music and the feature of a number of images selected by the artist beforehand and selecting them automatically. In this work, the sounds of the youtube video selected by the viewer are separated every few seconds, and the closest video is selected by comparing these features with the features of countless short clips of movies and videos prepared in advance in the same space. This video selection method reconstructs the mapping relationship that artists have constructed so far between video and sound using deep learning, and suggests the possibility of possible correspondences. In addition, unconnected scenes from different films and images that have never been connected before become a single image, and emerge as a whole, and the viewer finds a story in the relationship between them. With this work, audio-visual and DJ+VJ expression is freed from the arbitrary decision, and a new perspective is given to the artists.

The creative acts of artworks, their production and performance have been limited by the intentions of the creators of the artworks and the production environment (software). Particularly in interactive art, despite the name “interactive,” the experience is only possible within the rules set by the artist, and is unidirectional and passive. The author utilizes deep learning to create the rules themselves to address these issues, seeking ways to deviate from the rules and algorithmic mappings created by the creators, and to allow the audience and users of the software to become more active and creative.

This documentary video/film is about the 25th anniversary of the lesbian group ŠKUC-LL (1987-2012) and the lesbian movement in former Yugoslavia. Its authors are Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, and Zvonka T Simčič. It is a project that visualizes, and defines the context for the movement and of the LGBTQ community within and with relation to politics, economics, culture, arts and legal institutional structures; this contextualization works on two layers: first from the decaying socialism to neoliberal capitalism, and then in the time of the 1990s it depicts the transition to a present, bloody neoliberal global capitalism. The video/film includes analysis of the movement in the EU after 2004 when Slovenia became a member of the EU and includes discussions and analysis of the “climate” that followed the discussions and rejection of a new family code in Slovenia in 2012. The family code was rejected by a referendum in March 2012, the majority decided negatively on basic human rights for same-sex unions and their children. A special place is given in the film to the Pride Parades in the ex-Yugoslavian territory.

Relations presents a variety of processes of marginalization and the struggle for rights of the lesbian and LGBT community in Slovenia and wider in ex- Yugoslavia. It is a struggle for visibility, but also a testimony of the incredible power of the lesbian movement, its artistic and cultural potential, critical discourses, and emancipatory politics. The film consists of interviews, documents, art projects, nightlife, political appearances, and critical discourse. The film also talks about Europe, global world capitalism and the status of lesbians today. Other topics that are covered are alliances, history, the relations and alliances with feminism, gay, transgender and queer, AIDS and the diction of homosexuality. It gives a harsh critique of discrimination, racism, fascism in Europe today. This is a NO budget film as it is made without a single cent of investment by government or NGOs.

The design of One and Two Hudson Place is informed by the unique challenges and opportunities of the site. The curving footprints of the towers align with the train shed below, while monumental steel buttresses bridge the active rails. This fluid massing is combined through the height of the tower, projecting the site’s unique role in the Manhattan skyline. The building envelopes are transparent scrims of glass etched with graduated densities of ceramic frit, further accentuating the transforming geometry of the towers. The pattern and density of the layered frit glass maximizes natural daylighting and energy efficiency, while minimizing glare and reflecting the shimmering colors of New York City.

Lotte Super Tower is a super-tall, mixed-use building including retail, offices, hotel, and an observation deck in southeastern Seoul. The tower’s design, in which the building transforms smoothly from a square base to a circle at 1,640 feet (555 meters), is inspired by an organizational strategy based on an ancient Korean observatory.

In the largest historic transfer of land from public to private ownership, the city of Seoul has established a master plan for a new International Business District in the heart of the city. The centerpiece of the district will be a new landmark tower that will become the symbolic figure of Korea’s place in the global economy today and in the future.

This piece comments on the urban environment and quality of life, which can often change suddenly and unpredictably, without our being fully aware of the changes. We are flooded with information, which we consume and then discard like so much junk. The accumulation of the unconsciousness information is potentially hazardous to human relationships and environmental systems. This work expresses a warning to the urban community of the paralyzing power of information overload.

The representation of the human face is an endless motif for art. It continues to attract artists working on traditional paintings and sculptures, and those using today’s digital technologies. The existing sophisticated skills for face representation can bring us a lot of suggestive information. Noh masks, wooden sculptures used in Japanese traditional Noh drama, can be considered as one example.

The masks used in Noh drama show diverse types of faces. However, a common impression given by Noh masks seems to be a “curious reality” – the coexistence of abstraction and deformation. This kind of realism could have never been achieved without an understanding of the anatomical essence of face shapes. Indeed, the observation of fine old masks, carved around the 14th century for example, suggests that the masters might well have understood the facial bone and muscle structures of the human face. Viewers are therefore able to project their memories of human faces onto the masks.

This digital image was created under the observation of a Noh mask’s shape. The Noh mask appearing in the upper center of the image is a Ko-ornate mask used for young female roles. In the middle, there is an image of the mask with facial muscles, which are imagined to be beneath the Ko-omote face. The imagined skull of the Ko-ornate mask lies in the lower part. These three states, i.e., face, muscles, and bone, are arranged vertically, suggesting the aesthetic principles of traditional Japanese arts: TEN (Heaven-Space); CHI (Earth-Time); JIN (Man) also expressed in terms of SHIN (Formality); GYO (Semi-formality); and SO (Informality). The image also suggests the transition between life and death, or past and present, which are often described in Noh stories.

The Ko-omote mask was created using a 3D computer graphics technique.’ The modeling process introduced a method of replicating a wooden Noh mask. Here, paper templates were created by measuring a wooden Ko-ornate mask and then digitized as guide curves for NURBS surface modeling. The use of a 3D scanner was therefore unnecessary. The surface texture of the mask was created using paint-draw software. Curves of facial muscle fibers were traced from anatomical data and projected onto the mask’s surface. The shape of the skull was modified to fit the Ko-ornate mask.

To examine how computers can attain the expression of Yugen (profound beauty) found in Japanese traditional Noh drama, a computer animation based on the Noh drama “Yuki” was created.’ The concept behind the creation was: the entire design should rely on the story; the movements of the Noh mask should be similar to the movements on an actual stage; and the animation sequences should be harmonized to bring out the most appropriate expressions from the Noh mask. By making these considerations, audiences could be expected to have diverse imaginative experiences even at a very subtle level, as in Noh drama.

“Yuki” is a short story about an encounter one night with “The Spirit of the Snow” by a traveling priest. For “The Spirit of the Snow,” the Noh mask called Ko-omote was created as described in “What Noh Masks Whisper to Us.” As the modeling was done with reference only to a carved wooden mask, the mask’s shape retained the 3D-controlled asymmetry of the real mask, as well as a fluent carved surface and detailed edges. These shape characteristics were responsible for generating subtle changes in the mask’s expression.

To move the Ko-omote mask, a head part and a skeleton of a body were created. Key frames were added to control all of the movements, which are in well-timed combinations with music and sound effects. In the dance part, the 3D models of a fan, a dance robe, and a wig band were bound to the skeleton. The character simulates basic movements of a Noh dance, and at the end, leaves towards the left side of the stage, in the same manner as in a real Noh play.

n some situations, parts of the character’s body become invisible. However, this seems to succeed in creating a more effective expression than a full appearance of details. Such visual effects are inspired by Noh drama, where the effects depend not on the direct representation of objects but on the audience’s imagination.

Luminescent Tentacles is an interactive installation inspired by waving tentacles of sea anemones in the depths of the ocean. Comprised of 256 shape-memory alloy actuators, the elongated forms move in response to hand movements. Further accentuating the movement, the tip of each actuator softly glows like a bioluminescent organism. Each actuator, or tentacle, is activated by three shape-memory alloy wires, giving the tentacle the flexibility to bend in six directions through the combination of three currents. Employing principles of fluid dynamics, the control application replicates the movement of water ripples.

Luminescent Tentacles also includes sounds, prompting the viewer to create music while using hand movements to stimulate the movement of the tentacles, thereby offering an experience similar to interacting with sea anemones.

Tentacle Flora is a robotic sculpture inspired by a vision of a colony of the sea anemone growing on the coral. A shape-memory alloy actuator is used as tentacles and is composed of a BioMetal Fiber such that it can bend in three directions. The top of the actuator glows softly mimicking a bioluminescent organism using a full colored LED. The Tentacle Flora induces the beauty, wonder, and existence of living sea anemones in the depths of the ocean.

Furnished Fluid is a visualization that utilizes the air flow that we are practically unaware of in our daily lives. This installation, which integrates design miniatures and real-time images, enables us to use the power of science to make visible the appealing and valuable aspects of 20th century industrial design. W. W. Stool (1990) by Philippe Starck, Hill House 1 (1902) by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and the Big Easy (1991) by Ron Arad were selected in tribute to these great designers.

Computers let us imagine new ways to draw pictures or to make paintings. With computers, we can create our own brushes (with virtual meshes), and we can use them to create new impressions. In European design and graphic arts, we start the thinking process by making a pencil sketch, but now I can do things that I am unable to do with a pencil.

I was very impressed by the giant calligraphies at the National Museum in Tokyo, Japan and the Japanese calligraphy demonstra­tion at CEEJA in Colmar, France. These works conveyed a lot of mystery and secrets. That’s why I started the Brush Traces series in July 2005. It is a good transition between the Movement series (2003-2005) and the digital-calligraphy series I plan to work on next.

In Brush Traces, I revisit Asian brush painting and add another dimension, a visual-musical (or mathematical) partition-vibration trace that refers to music, oscillation, and traces of time or some sort of language. Is time becoming solid? Or is music becoming solid?

In my composition, I juxtapose light against shadow, movement against stasis, order against disorder, visual music against visual imagery, waves against flatness, and physics against quantum physics in a virtual time-space generated by computer. I created this work with an out-of-time aesthetic, between the two infinites, which places this work conceptually between European and Asian art.

Piet Mondrian was the first artist who discovered the two infinites. He expressed them with horizontal and vertical lines after research­ing the infinite territory between the shape and the non-shape. Roman Verostko is the first artist who used technology to make Asian brush painting. The Brush Traces series is a true fusion between those two visions of art.

In this expression of the energy of a virtual dancer, we can see the vibration of his virtual movements in the universe. My work is about my impression of Asian wisdom and gods.

For me, 30 programs are a means to experiment. I build universes composed of industrial materials that can be altered or degraded. In those worlds, every being or object is generated from these materials. Sceneries and objects are modeled as mesh sculptures generated in the computer. These assemblies of points and polygons are later clad with textures. The next step in the conception is choosing the lighting sources: either spotlights or luminescent surfaces. Finally, a picture is taken with a virtual camera. This picture is entirely generated “in silica.” The computer becomes a camera able to take photos of objects devoid of physical reality. The virtual lens captures a moving virtual world, which allows it to take time-lapse shots to create new objects. Indeed, one can record the movement of an object in a given timeframe, and the combination of these positions generates a new virtual 3D object, which can in turn have its own movement and trajectory. In the footsteps of futurists, I pursue my studies in a domain close to abstraction, in territory opened by new technologies. The sy nthetic images I generate are parametered mathematically and can be modified according to duration. Far from these constraints, I try to convey a journey, a self study, a poetic vision, or a form of spirituality.

I draw my inspiration from cinematographic sources, like Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and the masterpieces of Miyasaki, celebrated for his poetic visions. I am also inspired by fashion designers’ creations such as lssey Miyake’s sculptural garments.

For me, 30 programs are a means to experiment. I build universes composed of industrial materials that can be altered or degraded. In those worlds, every being or object is generated from these materials.

Sceneries and objects are modeled as mesh sculptures generated in the computer. These assemblies of points and polygons are later clad with textures. The next step in the conception is choosing the lighting sources: either spotlights or luminescent surfaces. Finally, a picture is taken with a virtual camera. This picture is entirely generated “in silica.” The computer becomes a camera able to take photos of objects devoid of physical reality. The virtual lens captures a moving virtual world, which allows it to take time-lapse shots to create new objects. Indeed, one can record the movement of an object in a given timeframe, and the combination of these positions generates a new virtual 3D object, which can in turn have its own movement and trajectory. In the footsteps of futurists, I pursue my studies in a domain close to abstraction, in territory opened by new technologies. The sy nthetic images I generate are parametered mathematically and can be modified according to duration. Far from these constraints, I try to convey a journey, a self study, a poetic vision, or a form of spirituality.

I draw my inspiration from cinematographic sources, like Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and the masterpieces of Miyasaki, celebrated for his poetic visions. I am also inspired by fashion designers’ creations such as lssey Miyake’s sculptural garments.

Hiroshima. On the morning of 6 August 1945, a bright light invaded the edge of the floating world. A man remembers. The shock, a violent blast. Bodies that stretched out in pain, the dreams of the past in the present, the visions of the future in the past. The child who he was, before. Before the flash struck. Before the world was disturbed.

Art is often a question of representation. And representation of life is at the heart of artistic creation. If one dives into very small size scales (beyond the famous Planck constant), we can work on the representation of life at the atomic scale.

As everyone knows, at this scale , it is not the principles of classical physics that apply, but those of quantum mechanics. If one is interested in living in this type of dimension, he is faced with a population of protons, photons, electrons, and other particles, which form a strange ecosystem, and whose quantum behavior is difficult to understand. Behavior of elementary particles of our life defies our usual sense of space and time.

Also, these particles form a living world in a higher number of dimensions. There are at least four dimensions, and probably more. As a digital and generative artist, it is quite exciting to be interested in this type of representation, and the use of computer helps us in this way. A quantum computer is not yet available, but many simulation tools exist, and allow us to make quantum calculations, no longer based on the classic use of bits, but rather qubits.

The quantum theory is an important tool to enable travel in what is often called the fourth dimension, which is time. It is especially an important part of the functioning of wormholes, which can help build bridges in space-time.

Exploring the possibilities of quantum mechanics for artistic creation opens new paths to a variety of creative ways. The use of quantum instead of classical calculations is just beginning.

Many new artistic explorations are at the corner of our future!

“Onyrisk” is a word play in French: «ony» comes from the term «onirisme», which refers to the dream state; «risk» was added to qualify the unknown involved in the interactive experience.

Onyrisk offers interactive surrogate travel through allegorical representations of dreamlike sequences. It is an experimental work that develops tools for a new interactive art form, which explores the limits of interactivity as applied to time-based material. The eerie texture of the visual, combined with an equivalent soundtrack, were chosen to enable greater connectibility among the different components; the global interactivity of our work is enriched by its combined potential.

In our normal state of consciousness, we are continually assailed by images surrounding us; we store those that are personally meaningful. By the time they settle in our memory, and eventually our unconscious, these images have been transformed by the filters of our personal perceptions. According to our differences and previous experiences, we create associations, arrange them in hierarchies of meaning, and give them emotional qualities.

During the sleeping state, the unconscious draws on this large repertoire of images and plays with them, juxtaposing, superimposing, and giving them an ambient and a symbolic quality. Onyrisk reproduces this process, but unlike dreams that remain essentially private, it exteriorizes the process and creates a communal and interactive experience.

Onyrisk is an attempt to implement true computer interactivity in the deep layers of the audiovisual, tracking and taking each of the viewers’ decisions into account before moving on to the next sequence. Its interface is both fluid and full of the unexpected: it offers diverse images and sounds to the user in a fashion of ordered randomness.

Each user assists the computer in the creation of a unique path reflecting his/her own aesthetic and emotional patterns. In the process, s/he performs a sort of public dream. The experience is again analogous to the dream state in that only significant fragments are remembered. And these images will in turn perhaps become the source of new unconscious recombinations and transformations in future dreams.

Onyrisk is both a work in progress and a continually evolving project. It is the tangible expression of our theoretical work on interactivity, art, symbolism, and the conceptualization of hypermedia applications.

Empire of Sleep is an interactive virtual environment installation viewed in stereoscopic 3D on a large rear projection screen. Participants interact using a hand-held camera to take photographs of the scene, triggering the virtual camera to move to new points of interest. A group of surreallooking figures, clothed in early 20th century bathing suits, are scattered about on several isolated sand bars somewhere on an open and calm body of water. They first appear as if there for recreation, but there is a pensive mood, as if some unusual event is taking place unknown to the viewer.

Alan Price’s interest is in creating new forms of interactive and virtual cinema, in which the viewer’s experience is informed by alternate methods of both display and user input, creating an intuitive and visceral sensation for the viewer in extending his or her reach into the space in which the story or event unfolds, creating virtual worlds that have awareness and responsiveness to the presence of the observer. It is not about user intervention or control of the story, but rather the symbiotic relationship between the observer and the narrative event. Price is interested in designing physical user interfaces that are thematically interpretive of the subject matter represented in the work and, more importantly, that allow the viewer to feel as if physically extended into the virtual space, giving a sense of embodiment and immersion that dissolves the separation between the two. This is not limited to methods for engaging multiple senses or surrounding the viewer to make him or her feel physically immersed, but investigating ways in which actions and their familiarity, such as taking a photograph, provide a sense of playing a role and of being integral to the representation of events taking place.

Our work is an illustrated hypertext about a seagoing city called Bentlow Stairs. Bentlow Stairs is like all cities, a never finished, giant machine where people live, work, and dream. Unlike other cities, Bentlow Stairs is adrift – it is a massive floating steel lattice, free to roam the world’s oceans. The book listens in on the inhabitants of the city as they consider themselves and the place they are building. Bentlow Stairs is about the culture and character of these people, and about the philosophy behind the making of all cities – even fantastic ones that float on the sea.

The story is told via electronically composited images and text that are presented as frames in the KMS hypertext system. The direction and flow of the book are controlled by the viewer using a mouse to select links. The illustrated fiction of the book consists of bit-mapped images overlaid with invisible link fields. These fields are made visible only when the cursor touches them; each frame contains from one to as many as six links. By scanning the screen with a mouse, the viewer can determine which elements are associated with a link and then choose whether or not to follow the link to pursue a particular story line. Some links are associated with words, others are associated with visual elements such as buildings or characters. Bentlow Stairs consists of more than 250 frames. Since the hypertext is a collaboration among several artists, a system was needed that supported multiple authorship; with KMS we could all work on the same set of frames simultaneously from multiple workstations.

Bentlow Stairs is presented within the context of an installation. The installation consists of large printouts of drawings, text, and characters from the book mounted on eight-foot panels. These panels are cut into different shapes and arranged around a small white wooden table and three chairs. On the table, there is a three-button optical mouse and mouse pad. Suspended in front of the table is a large screen where the frames are projected. The installation provides an environment within which viewers can interact with the book in a way that is more engaging than is possible with a desktop display. Everything seen and heard – including the other participants in the space – is a part of the mimesis. As such, the installation is an architectural connection between the viewer and the virtual city.

Bentlow Stairs’ matrix of interconnected frames mirrors its structure and the relationships of its people. It invites the viewer to move through the metaphor of the city through a series of invisible doors. Each person who navigates through the hypertext assembles a different concept of the city, much like driving the streets of a strange town. Each person who reads the book can have a different experience. This “hyperspace” creates the sensation of moving through the piece, following trails that slowly build a large illustrated poem. It is this crafting and navigation of browsable trails through visual information that is central to the hypertext phenomenon. The structure of the hypertext is the heart of Bentlow Stairs; the individual images are the hinges in its web.

Our initial awareness of “working with a computer” has faded. As a tool, it is more familiar to us now than our old ways of making art. We take for granted that this device can do what it can do, and we are restless to make things with it. Bentlow Stairs is one result of that impulse, and it has been the one that has challenged us the most. By focusing on the phenomenology of hypertext, we work with only a small part of the art – making potential of computers. However, in using this rather simple information handling concept, we have had to think as painters, filmmakers, poets, and story tellers.We have attempted to build interactive narratives that can semantically flex and be retold by the viewer as he or she navigates the hypertext.

We are in the middle of the space technology revolution. In the next few years, we will have the opportunity of enabling our civilization live on others planets. It is time to research and experience its potential cultural implications and debate the future of humanity.

The Zero-Gravity Band” (ZGB) is a disruptive project at the intersection of art and science to explore the concept of art outside planet Earth. Specifically, it examines how both the production and perception of art changes when we are not restricted to the physical laws and framework that planet Earth’s gravity imposes to us. To overcome to terrestrial gravity, we are intending to take part on a parabolic flight with the aim to produce the first artwork designed and motivated to be experienced and perceived in microgravity.

The aim of the ZGB project is to explore with a rigorous scientific approach how gravity affects aesthetic preferences and design an artistic performance based on the truly innovative and novel research on how gravity itself shapes our perceptual and aesthetic experiences.

The result of this research would be a 360º lighting and audiovisual experience that the audience can experience in an immersive installation.

Word, intention, will, action, power. Some instinctive, primary human speech stops the flood of reality. It’s Art. Sometimes people say NO: political and artistic action. Work of art: ideogram: explosion of meanings.

Into the Air’s Memory is a two-channel computer animation about an elusive acquaintance between a sound seeker who listens to memories of the dead and a woman who wanders aimlessly with an empty wheelchair.

In 90° South, Borsani attempts to create the experience of a constantly changing landscape by building a system with an unpredictable emergent topography. For Borsani, “all the knowledge of the world is gained from our own particular points of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. In order to find new possibilities, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which words are the second-order expression. Wonderment is critical, since it allows for continued curiosity to this basic experience and thus creates the possibility for change.

Borsani’s work is an active exploration of the nature of perception and media representation in the form of sculptures, installations, and environments. With non-spectacular technologies he creates ambiguous moments between the event and the effect so the viewer may experience an instant where rational reflection, bodily experimentation, and emotional contemplation become indivisible. He is fascinated by the idea of using physical phenomena as the main materials for his installations. Borsani’s most recent work uses gravity, heat, cold, and chemical reactions to investigate how human beings deal with the inorganic, wordless nature of their environments.

This web site highlights alternative networks that connect creative people around the world, including native and indigenous communities that use digital media to bring their voices, memories, and cultures to each other and a wider public, transcending political boundaries.

Haven is a place of security and tranquility. Reminiscent of a mother’s womb, it recalls our origins, where it all begins. The installation allows guests to leave their phones and all other technology at the door so they can be fully present without any of the prevailing modern distractions. They go in, spend some time, find themselves and maybe come out and start their day again. Fresh. A new beginning.

Each time someone reads a text at Rhizome.org, a dim star appears on a black Web page. When a text is read again, the corresponding star gets a bit brighter. Over time, the Web page comes to resemble a starry night sky, with bright stars corresponding to the most popular texts and dim stars corresponding to less-popular ones. Clicking on a star triggers a special pop-up menu. The first menu option allows you to read the text that corresponds to the star. The second menu option allows you to select a keyword associated with that text. After selecting a keyword, Starrynight draws a unique constellation of stars whose texts share that keyword. You can use these constellations to find other related texts, and in doing so, follow your interests through the vast array of ideas and information in the Rhizome.org archive.

Fractals, Particles, Photons, & Microwaves is a single-channel 3D animation evoking the language of physics, mathematics, and quantum mechanics. Procedurally animated, the piece conveys concepts found in ‘The Little Book of String Theory’ by Steven S. Gubser. The flow of particles represent electrons & positrons (E) and photons (Y). Particles are animated visualizing what happens when an electron splits into anti-electrons during a cascade event (an electromagnetic particle shower).

In quantum mechanical theory, a particle shower is a predictable event and suggests that an electron all by itself may have infinite charge and infinite mass, but once split, its charge and mass becomes finite. A common example of particle showers would be when cosmic rays hit earth’s atmosphere. There is a commonality between the behavior of structures in the subatomic & cosmic scales – the unseen behavior of particles follows the mathematical pattern of recursion, and is metaphorically related to the fractal structure of cosmic background radiation.

We’ve created an Artificial Intelligence that can identify yawns. It’s able to recognize them during, or even before the yawn strikes! As yawns are contagious for humans (and actually many animals), our AI can trigger chain reactions of yawns by capturing and releasing yawns.

Sit, lay, relax and listen to our AI sing melodies constructed purely out of the yawns of guests.

As our festival progresses, the computer will learn more and more how to identify yawns. It will become smarter in predicting and also evoking them. While our AI captures more yawns, it is actually capturing more “instruments” for its orchestra. Watch as our AI musician moves from a 1 computer band, to a thousand strong orchestra of yawns.

The Spheres of Influence (SOI) project is an interactive digital art and information exhibit that visualizes the content and distribution of online world news. News, in the form of narratives and images describing current events, is a vital class of information, which is produced and consumed continuously in time and space. People from all parts of the world rely on news outlets to present relevant reporting on issues that are important to them. However, the topics that are important to one class of people often differ significantly from on another. To illuminate this difference in perspective, the SOI project measures, compares, and visualizes the importance different countries, geographic regions, and language groups place on news stories, based on volumes of reports and the locations of the organizations disseminating them. The main objective is to present the general public with an immersive space that allows for exploration of global news coverage within the temporal, spatial, and semantic properties of the reports. Traditional media sources are often rooted in ethnocentric points of view, but when viewers can visually and spatially interact with the distribution of global news, they may gain a better understanding of the topics important to different cultures. Finally, the news data obtained from this ongoing operation of the installation are captured and maintained as a valuable data source of global information flow. Our goals reflect the interests of seven student researchers from the fields of statistics, geography, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, psychology, and art in addressing the content of web news reporting and the interactive installation (navigation by means of users’ movement in the exhibit space).

On 13 August 2014, between 11:25 pm and 11:45 pm, BBC Three showed the episode of Family Guy involving Robin Williams and his failed suicide attempt. Shortly afterwards, at 11:56 pm, Reuters news agency confirmed the suicide of Robin Williams. It is an uncanny coincidence, but what does it mean for the tragic irony of the cartoon? In an inverted form of irony, the audience has an advance in knowledge from the fictional world towards the real world. Can we still speak of irony?

In a virtual journey through the Twitter network we might perceive a narrative obituary, that was created by related twitter users. Inductively, the opinions spread in just a few minutes. Consequently, a wave of empathy traveled across the network. The broadcast brought people together, in a bizarre and eerie way, who were trying to figure out a way to response to the incident.

As a graphic designer, I work with themes and concepts. There’s always a struggle between the balance of clarity and personal ex­pression. However, when I draw, the best of me arrives when I manage to simply detach from this balance. As all my “artistic” training becomes inert, the iridescent chaos of the mind lights up the space for a quiescent dialogue between the subject (my drawing) and me. When working with other media, technical issues, quite often interrupt the flow of my expression. Trials and failures eventually discourage the process and distance me from the impetus to create. Surprisingly, this obstacle is removed when I work primarily with digital media, especially when I draw with a digital apparatus such as a Wacom tablet.

Even though most of my works are non-representational in nature, within the drawings one can find words and other indications of the sources that have indirectly influenced the process of creation. Axiomatic Wisdom is a piece that was done while I was having a conversation online with a friend from Russia and listening to a live report on the disappointing 2004 election results. Our conversa­tion revolved around the topic of unilateral and axiomatic thinking in American society. However, there were other levels of the story going on in my mind, overlapping with the conversation and subconsciously illustrated in the composition.

I believe my work introduces a different dimension to both digital art­ists and artists in “traditional” media simply because the expression manages to transcend the medium. A lot of digital artists are very medium-driven. My works simply illustrate the dialogue between the subject matter and myself.

This work represents a mural painting in which many people are taking part. Human beings had done visual representations in a cave or skeletons of an animal before civilization. For instance, the prehistoric Lascaux cave mural in France, which is estimated to be around 22,000 BC, is a prime example; thus, mural painting can be regarded as the oldest form of a painting. Mural painting generates an effect of dividing and contrasting the architectural parts visually, and is also utilized as a decorative element of a wall. This work aims to make sure that many people will be able to participate in a mural painting work as an architectural form as including the interactive and fluidic elements using a smartphone as a tool, which is the product of the modern digital development.

Wonder (2011) is an interactive, kinetic sculpture. The work is essentially a living drawing, a residuum of movement that is brought to life by the movement of others. From a distance, the white dots appear to be a constellation, and the work remains static. As a person approaches, the motors suddenly come to life and the dots slowly coalesce to spell the word ‘wonder’. However, much like a pointillist painting, the word is illegible when viewed up close. Because of that, it ideally requires two or more people to participate. The person approaching or ‘wondering’ becomes the artist/performer, physically bringing the work to fruition with their movements. Onlookers are given the ability to see the ‘wonder’ in the making, both literally and metaphorically. The typically passive act of looking becomes a physically active performance, and people in the vicinity are able to watch and be entertained by the spectacle of it. It is the sculpture’s playful nature that really interests me. Whether or not viewers ever discover the word ‘wonder’ within the work is not important. Meaning is constructed and elaborated collectively, through a shared and hopefully memorable experience.

incorrigibles is a transmedia project that tells the stories of ‘incorrigible’ girls in the United States over the last 100 years—beginning with New York State. We draw on the personal narratives of young women in “the system” to investigate the history and present state of youth justice and social services for girls. The project centers on gleaning information from archival documents relating to young women’s incarceration, starting with those from the New York State Training School for Girls (1904-1975). We are expanding our research to include other youth detention centers in the United States; recording and sharing accounts of women alive today who were confined in these institutions, and organizing community engagement events with young women and the public to encourage critical analysis around youth detention and behavioral intervention. This history holds significant meaning for contemporary debates around penal reform, child welfare, juvenile justice, use of solitary confinement, and the role that race, gender, income and immigrant status play in determining what is a crime and appropriate punishment. The project title relates to a term encountered again and again in various source documents, including records from the New York State Archives and The New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York—the project’s’ pilot site of study: ‘Incorrigible’. The term was used to describe and categorize the girls (ages 12-16) who were incarcerated there. The term expressed how they were perceived and labeled by the people around them as “unable to be corrected or reformed.” Digging through documents and historical images spanning the period between 1904 and 1975, we discovered letters that the young women at the Training School wrote to their families, detailed reports of doctor’s examinations, legal decisions made by the court that led to their incarceration, and letters written by parents to the institution. One of the young women deemed ‘incorrigible’ and incarcerated at the Training School during the 1930s was the legendary jazz singer, Ella Fitzgerald.

The Book of Hours is a non-narrative interactive multimedia piece named after the famous “Book of Hours” popular as a book of devotion in the Dark Ages.

An assemblage of original paintings, photographs, sounds and video clips, the nine “scenes” evoke a feeling of melancholy at the passage of time, loss, the bittersweet of memories, and the realization of personal mortality. The nine scenes develop at the viewer’s pace, with hints of discovery and revelation, culminating in an interactive maze. The maze was an important symbol of the Middle Ages, representing life’s journey, and was often painted on the floor of cathedrals. Completing the maze in this piece closes the circuit; the viewer ends up back at the “beginning”.

The original Book of Hours was a source of prayers and meditations, to be executed by the devotee at certain hours and in certain seasons. My Book of Hours is meant to be likewise cyclical, feminine in form, non-linear and meditative.

I frame grabbed an image of myself and a book illustration, photographed the screen in black and white, enlarged the photo onto several sheets of high contrast film in different exposures, and printed these in color onto a sheet of white vinyl …

This computing environment has been nicknamed “NOOBIE” (short for “New Beast”) because of its huggable exterior that includes fur, feathers, and iridescent fish skin.

The diptych Manicured Field consists of two photographic montages of an initial and end state of the artist’s work “Growth Pattern”. In “Growth Pattern”, a living natural system takes on the form of a manufactured pattern. Tobacco leaves are die-cut from a digital file into a bilaterally symmetrical pattern and suspended in tiling square petri dishes that contain the nutrients necessary to promote new leaf growth. Since the tiles are self-contained ecosystems, several precautions were taken to make sure that, when the leaves were placed into the tiles, they were thoroughly decontaminated and sterilized. However, as with any experiment, it is possible for contamination to occur. In some, the tissue dies; in others, parasites take over and grow faster than the new leaves. In some tiles, aseptic conditions are achieved and new shoots begin to sprout from the original pattern.

Over time, this work creates a generative image and in time-lapse creates an animation. However, it is a very “analogue” animation. Each “pixel” is a petri dish and the movement and change happening in each tile is occurring because of the algorithms in the cells of the tissue and surrounding micro-organisms rather than the simulative algorithms one might program onto a digital animation. The image it generates changes and though the range of possible states of each tile is abstractly known, the final outcome of the work is always open to indeterminate variability. The manipulation of the leaves causes potential for parasitic growth, the sterilization process can also kill the tissue, and in the end all of the tiles eventually decay as their nutrient supplies diminish.

In the digital photographic montages, we see a post-processed photograph of 64-tiles at beginning and end state of their life cycle. These montages were created from documentation of the living installation when it was presented at Laboral in Gijon, Spain for the show “When Process Becomes Paradigm” curated by Susanne Jaschko and Lucas Evers.

Linkages combines a topological exercise in dividing the picture plane with half and quarter circles with a play of geometric proportions and colors based on the Fibonacci series and the related Lucas series. Within the armature
of arcs and planes are embedded images from a variety of sources: the Visible Human project of the US National Institute of Health, images from the Hubble Space Telescope,
high-resolution images of earth from various NASA space flights, and digitized photographs by Alma de la Serra. Algorithmically produced texts add another layer. Fictitious artist Alma de la Serra, invented by the flesh-and-blood artist Paul Hertz, is a former high school math teacher turned photographer and a member of the Ignostudio, an artists’ cooperative home to three other fictitious artists: dysfunctional fortune-teller Juan Teodosio Pescador, also known as “Ignotus the Mage”; painter Darrell Luce; and digital media artist Paul Hertz. These fictitious artists
offer Hertz an opportunity to critique and parody the experiences of artists marketing their art and struggling to survive, and to develop “product lines” very different from his own. While de la Serra has not yet provided a full
explanation of her imagery, it is not out of place to suggest that she is looking for a way to engage social issues while placing her point of departure in a formal idiom. She states of her work: “My premises are simple: the world is deeper than our knowledge, and everything in it belongs to life. I have learned to understand this through number, measure, and reason, and to my astonishment have found that these tools, rightly understood, can speak to the breadth and depth of our experience.”

Over five million people ride the subway in New York City every day. Crammed shoulder to shoulder, face to face, and every position in between, subway rides are seemingly “interactive experiences.” Despite the close quarters, riding the subway is often an isolating experience; one of the last frontiers where phone service is largely absent, leaving its inhabitants to their own thoughts, conversations, music, etc. Like a horizontal elevator, passengers anxiously wait for their stop, acutely aware of their temporary neighbors. Subway Stories looks to reconcile this isolation through the power of storytelling. The project is rooted in hand-drawn illustrations of real people commuting in and around the city. Moving from drawings to an interactive storytelling environment, our artistic translation of the everyday subway ride is not meant to create an entirely new reality. Instead, our task with Subway Stories is to bring a familiar experience— listening and imagining and creating stories for commuting neighbors—to the audience for explicit consideration. Interactive technology provides the tools for translation. Combining physical controls with audio/visual feedback creates an immersive, alternative subway environment that audiences can enter and exit at any point. The project bypasses the socially unacceptable act of voyeurism (i.e., staring at/eavesdropping on a stranger) in public space. This subversion allows the audience to explore the inner lives of these passengers without consequence or hesitation.

Human performance is usually dictated by the environment and our ability to adapt to its conditions. Understanding the multiple aspects of disability is a hard task for designers. Unfortunately, most of the design efforts for the disabled or handicapped to date have resulted in little more than wheelchair-accessible buildings.

The objective of this research is to help designers to create products that can serve an extended range of people, especially those with disabilities. A computer graphics model designed to control, constrain and simulate special motions in a three-dimensional system is described. With the help of a model like this, professionals could ease the problems of dealing with the special client. Handicapping and disabling factors relevant to the design process can be explored through the comparison of normal and abnormal simulated motion conditions.

Summary

“Serial Paintings” are displays that alternatively reveal and destroy images by just pushing a fixed sequence of coloured beads through a more or less complex guiding structure – a spiral, a space filling fractal or even an arbitrarily complex labyrinth.

Abstract

“Serial paintings” are a series of works highlighting the role of the canvas – or more generally the support of the painting – in the construction of the final form. “Back and Forth – Pneumatic Anadrome“ is the first work in the series. In it, a string of coloured beads is pushed back and forth between two spiralling “canvases” using compressed air. Without rearranging the order of the beads, the string is forced to coil alternatively into one or the other spiral: this folding and unfolding reveals in turn images or text with opposing meanings or connotations. Each image has to be destroyed in order to create the other; this cyclic process of creation and destruction is purposefully revealed and triggered by the curiosity of the public.

The canvas of a traditional painting is relegated to the role of a pigment-supporting structure. The “canvases” of our Serial Paintings are instead labyrinths of convoluted plumbing covering that surface, guiding linear sequences of coloured beads. They are capable of displaying several images in the process (our display behaves true to the original meaning of the word, which is to “unfold, spread out, unfurl “, from old French desploiir, modern deployer and from Latin displicare).

Without rearranging the order of the beads, the string is forced into the particular shape of the guide; this process decrypts the sequence as a two-dimensional image. Since the sequence is fixed, the display can only contain a limited number of images. They cannot be seen at the same time but can be retrieved by pushing the beads an exact amount of distance. This is in contrast with ordinary ways of creating images, including displays or printers, that require a mechanism to arbitrarily position a “writing head” in two-dimensional space (regardless of the way of addressing – be it raster scan or vector). It is this “random access” to the surface that render them capable of producing arbitrary images.

The present work consist of two acrylic spirals that act as the matter guiding medium. This allows for a unique (but straightforward) encoding, equivalent to the linguistic anadrome: “spelling” the image backwards (the sequence is reversed when moving from one spiral to another) reveals a new image with a different meaning – perhaps even its opposite.

scoreLight is a musical instrument capable of generating sound from the lines of doodles as well as the contours of three-dimen¬sional objects (hands, silhouettes, architectural details). There is no camera or projector: a laser spot explores the shape just as a pick-up head searches for sound over the surface of a vinyl record, with the significant difference that the groove is generated by the contours of the drawing itself.

The preferred mode of operation is contour following. Each con¬nected component of the image functions as a sound sequencer. Sound can be generated in the following ways:

• Pitch is controlled by the inclination of the lines, which generates a melody. Rotating the drawing transposes the melody to a higher or lower pitch. Tempo is determined by the length of the contour.
• Pitch is continuously modulated as a function of curvature of the lines. This mode of operation enables one to hear the “roughness” of the drawing.
• Bumps: extreme curvature indicates corners of the drawing. They trigger specific sounds (percussion, glitches, etc).

Other modes of operation include bouncing on the lines with and without “gravity.” Sequences can be recorded and reused in the form of drawings (on stickers, for instance). The purity of the laser light and the fluidity of the motion make for a unique interactive experience that cannot be reproduced by the classic camera-projector setup.

Mathematics is the language of science, of investigation. Ideas which are described by it can be manipulated and synthesized to create new ideas. Mathematical models can be generated which correspond to objects familiar to us because of our experience in the real world. When this is done, we often discover that we have tread serendipitously into the realm of art.

With new technologies emerging that will impose new thought patterns on our culture, one could easily imagine a situation where cameras using pattern recognition become decision makers for a lot of what we do. Without a human built database full of childhood (and adult) memories and ideas, a camera can only make so many associations on an absolute level.

This work utilizes pattern-recognition technology to interpret the physical world. Key characters from an image representing a memory are replaced by images the computer has recognized as being those characters. If saved as part of an empty database, as in this situation, the abstract results impose new possibilities for what that memory might now be. When the program recognizes certain shapes as sad, happy, or arrogant, these abstract shapes take on an entirely new meaning.

Exaggeration of these ideas becomes a ridiculous parody of human interpretation. However, it’s not such an outrageous stretch when compared to our own approach to categorizing and evaluating a given situation and its elements.

The system used to create this work was attached to a computer capable of accessing much more information than human recollection and much more immediately via the internet or any other database. The experience of proof is lost through this process, and the computer has only the absolute word of its programmers to shape its understanding.

Silly Faces is an interactive video installation in which the viewers create their own 5 second movie. The video uploads immediately to a grid on the wall, an animated mosaic of faces. Everyone is a star. The video mural shows the 65 most recent videos, moving portraits of the audience looping back and forth. Silly Faces was commissioned for the show Yinz Play by the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. The interaction of pressing a button on an arcade to record the video makes a fun, social and potentially intimate relationship between the audience playing and the video technology. When a new video is recorded it “bumps” the previous video to the left. The movies are saved into a database in the computer. Custom software enables a collaboration between myself and the audience, creating an evolving animated mural, blurring the line between artist, performer, and spectator. Silly Faces will act as a visualization of the temporary community that comes together at SIGGRAPH. The mural is composed from the audience’s faces and bodies, creating a family or class portrait of the visitors. The playfulness of making a silly face is a unifying gesture that people of all ages and cultures can enjoy.

Botanicula is a point’n’click exploration game created by the makers of award-winning Machinarium – studio Amanita Design and Czech band DVA. Five friends, little tree creatures, set out on a journey to save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites.

Key features:

-relaxed game perfect for hardcore gamers, their partners, families and seniors;
-more than 150 detailed locations to explore;
-hundreds of funny animations;
-incredible amount of hidden bonuses;
-fantastic music and sound effects by alternative band DVA;
-not one but five main characters with various skills and personalities;
-no text or lengthy dialogs to bore you;
-bonuses for vigilant players at the end of the game.

Mount Qaf is an audiovisual performance installation and a spatial/temporal structure which expresses the aesthetic dimensions of Sufism and electronic music culture. The experience combines generative digital art based on animating Persian patterns with eastern architectural motifs including Muqarnas, in syncopation with an ethnic electronic soundscape encountered through multi-channel acoustics. By re-imagining the traditional aesthetics of Sufism through the lens of electronic art and digital culture, the visual music journey of Mount Qaf sacralizes a nostalgia for the ancient past as well as reverence for an expectant technological future.
As children of parents who immigrated from Iran, the artists are therefore participating in a space reminiscent of their spiritual heritage while remaining clothed in the fabric of their technological upbringing. In the culture of Persian Sufism, the sense of place which emerges from visual and acoustic aesthetics reflects the alam-i-mithal, or the transcendent Imaginal Realm. To this end, spiritual cultures have always fashioned tools and instruments intended to sacralize space and affect a sense of identity and belonging. Today, electronic and digital media constitute an emerging palette with which the notion of sacred space can be explored. In this way, this multimedia performance installation invites viewers to experience a novel cultural space and consider the mystery surrounding the transcendent sense of home.

Sonic Wire Sculptor allows users to draw three-dimensional wire sculptures that produce audio in surround sound. By using a pen on a screen, users experience tangible audio/visual events as they explore new connections between the two media.

June 8th 2018 (Take 2) is an improvised film recorded in real-time by Amy Alexander and Curt Miller. Amy Alexander performs using PIGS (Percussion Image Gestural System), her system for improvising real-time animation from pre-recorded video by drawing gestures and striking drums. Curt Miller performs with his system, The Farm (clarinet, talk box, and custom software.

The video content of June 8th 2018 (Take 2) was composed from over one hundred YouTube vlogs and other videos uploaded by the public that day (June 8th, 2018). The videos were selected by an “AlgoCurator” algorithm, written by Amy Alexander. The AlgoCurator implements a non-cynical search algorithm to seek out the Internet’s lost Utopia by thwarting social media popularity algorithms to reveal the videos of the moment nobody gets to see. Over one hundred YouTube vlogs and other videos are selected from among all public uploads to YouTube in the hours before the recording. The AlgoCurator uses computer vision and other strategies to select some of the least popular, least slickly produced, primarily personal, videos of the day.

Commercial social media algorithms seek to tell us what’s “relevant,” but often simply amplify and popularize the sensational and profitable. The AlgoCurator attempts to push against these popularity algorithms to reveal quieter, overlooked voices. The videos selected by the AlgoCurator ultimately represent a range of presentations and points of view from various parts of the globe: adults and children, commercial and confessional, polite and offensive. A generation into the hyperbolic reality-TV era, restraint — and even blandness — can seem like acts of resistance. Search rankings ultimately skew our view of our social media counterparts, exacerbate tensions, and create a potentially self-fulfilling image of contemporary reality in which society is reduced to intractable social and political divisions. The AlgoCurator, in seeking videos with very low view counts, actively works against popularity algorithms to uncover YouTube’s quieter realities.

Loosely provoked by Stan VanDerBeek’s idea of the “Culture Intercom” — a proposed global video network in which people from around the world would come to understand each other by sharing videos — the initial implementation of the AlgoCurator, Utopian Algorithm #1, raises comparisons between YouTube and the utopian video network of global unity envisioned by VanDerBeek. While VanDerBeek’s 1960s proposition focused on content and transmission, the evolution of contemporary online “big data” networks reveals the search algorithm to be as critical to our experience of the network as the content.

We paired world-class game makers with Alaska Native storytellers and elders to create a game that delves deeply into the traditional lore of the Iñupiat people to present an experience like no other. Never Alone is our first title in an exciting new genre of “World Games,” which draws fully upon the richness of unique cultures to create complex and fascinating game worlds for a global audience.

I create situations that make visible – and palpable – the connections between the human and non-human. Immersed within participatory artworks, or in networks that include machines, plants or animals, the human experiences self as a mutually dependent being, intermeshing and intermingling with the non-human parts.

In HandShake, I performed a three-hour handshake on live broadcast webcam as a way to acknowledge composting worms as important ecological partners. Worms are difficult to see, as they hide from visible light, which is harmful to them. This handshake was staged inside a dark box illuminated by an infra-red light which was invisible to my eye and to the light detectors of the worms, but sensed by the camera documenting the event. This extrasensory, technological agent allows us to see beyond our biological senses and it provides a view into the interconnected system that we participate in. The networked camera revealed the event as it unfolded in a three-hour timespan, but the span of human attention does not easily match this scale. I chose to time-lapse and color-enhance the documentation as a way to shift it towards human perception. I endeavor to employ technology in this way; as a means of highlighting the interdependent systems that include all of us – worms, people, dirt, cameras and ecosystems. These worms are the continuation of a colony of worms that have been with me for twenty years. We have shared many meals. They have transformed my waste products into fertilizer that I have fed to my plants. Once in awhile, when I bite into the juiciest strawberry, I remember to thank the worms for their part.

Technology is often touted as the solution to a host of problems, not least our over-reliance on fossil fuels and the spectre of global warming. But what will it be like to live with the emergent technologies that are being devised to combat these threats? It seems the proposed solutions, and especially the more experimental and speculative, have the potential to alter our relationships with technology (sometimes radically). Take, for example, some of the efforts to rethink the production and consumption of power. These proposals not only move us away from consuming oil, coal, gas, and the like. They also allude to machines that will operate at a very different pace and rhythm because of their energy-production cycles. This installation encourages audiences to consider one such alternative to power production, namely microbial fuel cells (MFCs) and, in doing so, encourage reflection on a broader class of so-called “energy autonomous” technologies.

MFCs rely on the breakdown of organic material by a microbial substrate and production of an electrical charge via this process. The organic material might be a simple compound (for example, sugar or something more complex such as fruit, vegetables, or even insects). The substrate can consist of sludge similar to that found in the common pond.

Our installation presents a range of artifacts and media designed to encourage questions and debate around the developments in energy autonomous systems and their use. One collection of artifacts consists of three electricity-producing objects designed to be fueled using sugar (Fig. 1). These sugar-based objects provoke questions about our relationship with power sources that contain living microbes, but that have a fixed life span.

Another of our designs considers the production of electricity by incorporating the cells into a radio appliance (Fig. 2). Unlike the sugar-based cells, the radio is designed to run on cells that will last indefinitely, so long as they are supplied with organic material. This promised longevity of power supply is one of the distinctive features of MFCs. Our radio is designed to use a microbial substrate that will break down most organic material, including complex materials. Through this process, the microbial substrate is conditioned over time to operate most efficiently with particular sources of energy. This conditioning is related, in part, to the history of the materials the cells are supplied with. Thus the radio’s life cycle and performance interleaves with its usage patterns and the timeframe of use, both expanding well beyond the immediate interactions one has with the radio.

The Dream Machine is an award-winning point & click adventure in six chapters made out of clay and cardboard. You play as Victor Neff, the husband in a young couple who’ve just moved into a new apartment. While trying to settle in they discover that all is not as it seems in the quiet, unassuming building.

– World: Explore a creepy apartment complex and uncover the mysteries within;
– Story: Delve into the minds of strangers and loved ones as you’re trying to save them from The Dream Machine;
– Graphics: Wander around beautifully detailed environments built using physical clay models and hand-crafted sets;
– Puzzles: In order to progress you have to solve puzzles, ranging from simple pushovers to fiendish brainteasers;
– Music: A haunting original soundtrack weaves through the narrative, emphasizing the surreal atmosphere of the game;

“What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein The North Pole. 90 degrees north. A point where the spinning of the Earth slows to zero, where every direction points South, and the sun rises and sets just one time each year. The North Pole is a symbol of the fusion of opposites, combining natural beauty and brutality, “the last imaginary place on Earth.” N., by examining the North Pole in real time, expresses the isolation and environmental extremes of this remote region and addresses the importance of the region to the global ecosystem. N. is an ongoing, evolving composition. Because it is directly tied to the turbulent weather of the Pole, the composition is ever changing, transforming in completely unexpected ways. N. unfolds and evolves on a climatological temporal scale, far beyond an individual human lifetime. N. was made possible, in part, by a 2005 Lovebytes Festival Commission, Sheffield, UK. It was selected from over 2,600 entries for the renowned VIPER International Awards and was featured at the VIPER International Festival for Film and New Media in Basel, Switzerland. It was also featured in The Drop, an exhibition of works addressing global water supply at ExitArt, New York, and in an exhibition of Polli’s works at the Beall Center for Art + Technology.

“Intuitive Ocusonics” is the five-year effort of Andrea Polli (www.andreapolli.com), an experimental programmer, sound artist, and technologist who takes social implications of new technology to the extreme. She is a neo-concretist, merging and re-framing ideas of concrete art, music, and poetry. “Intuitive Ocusonics” melds visual and aural information through high end data transfer and tracking technology first developed by the US military. “Intuitive Ocusonics” is a continuing experiment into visual and tactile perception, motion, and response.

“Rapid Fire” is an improvisational collaborative sound performance focusing on the exploration and implementation of “Intuitive Ocusonics,” a process in which voluntary and involuntary eye movements create a visual and aural landscape. “Rapid Fire” turns the voyeuristic lens back on itself by tracking the observer – a “virtual fire.”

Seeing is active. Vision itself cannot occur without finely tuned movements of the eye, taking in patterns of light and color on the retina which the mind must then translate into a coherent world. In all cultures, the eyes are used to convey a wide variety of messages. Currently, technological means of communication often lack the speed to communicate the subtleties of these movements or don’t employ them at all. “Intuitive Ocusonics” attempts to return the power of active seeing.

There is a considerable body of research on eye movements. Such movements have two major functions: fixation, to position target objects to the center of vision; and tracking, to keep fixated objects in the center of vision despite movements of the object or the observer. Eye movements can further be divided into three distinct types that can be under voluntary control: convergence, smooth pursuit, and saccades.

Saccadic movements, used primarily in the performance, are rapid jumps of the eye used to shift gaze to a chosen object. Saccadic movements are very fast, typically taking only 30 milliseconds to complete, and reaching speeds of 900 degrees per second. An increase in the speed of saccades can be learned or trained with daily practice, and many researchers indicate that saccades are planned, controllable activities.

Fixation occurs in the intervals between saccades. Intervals between saccades can be as long as several seconds during steady fixation; and in reading, about three times each second. Even when fixating, the eyes continue to move. They tend to drift and flick involuntarily and to oscillate back and forth continuously, although these movements are extremely small. The “Intuitive Ocusonic” system also utilizes these intervals by employing a timed gaze as the manner of interaction.

Are all eye movements voluntary? There is not a clear demarcation between voluntary and involuntary eye movements. It is known that the mechanism for eye movement is different than the mechanism for known voluntary movements of the body, and many steps in the pathways for eye movements are still unknown. When interacting with media, humans blink less, displaying a fixed stare not unlike gazing at an object of love or adoration.

The Queensbridge Wind Power project presents a vision of a future when meeting energy production needs can actually enhance the beauty of a city. It investigates how clean, renewable wind power might be integrated into the landmark architecture of the Queensboro Bridge, New York City. The project is designed to engage the community in a dialogue about the potential of wind and other alternative energies in an urban setting.

The Fly’s Eye (2002) creates an animated document of both space and time, and draws inspiration from the structure, function, and significance of the eye of the fly and other processes of vision. The history of a film or a live video feed is built in layers of position and image.

Digital prints created have included:

1. A lighting analysis of Fellini’s “8 1/2” in which the print is divided into a grid of 28 squares, each documenting a 10-minute section of the film layered over the previous 10 minutes.

2. A lighting analysis of Bunuel’s “Un Chien Andalou,” in which the print is divided into three rectangles, each documenting a 5-10 minute section of the film.

“Analogue becomes the new Digital” in Andrea Zapp’s experiments in textile media narratives. Her work explores digital media and the mapping of collective space through fabric print, image patterns, embroidery techniques, and ocher formats of physical object and embellishment. Third Skin captures imagery of our social, digital, and urban neighborhoods and interiors and transfers chem to fabric and dress design. Zapp plays with Marshall McLuhan’s idea of “clothing being an extension of skin, the way that media are an extension of the body.” In these pieces, photography, surveillance, and online footage become the sources for hand-manufactured dresses as media narratives. They map the collective and shared (images, digital and physical scenarios, and objects) onto the domestic: a one-off garment as individual statement and choice. Skin is explored as a media surface and as a metaphor for mapping and merging physical and digital realities. Zapp’s goal here is to establish a stronger emotional link between audience and media artwork. The virtual space is framed as the other place of memory and home by capturing it in analogue paraphernalia, modeled on and manufactured from the digital. Craft and media design objects and artifacts render the digital space domestic and decorative, but with the intention of provoking a surreal and paradoxical sense of longing and belonging to a parallel world. As Zapp suggests, “the idea of a digital habitat, a shared environment, is the main driving narrative in my installations, down to the actual physical architecture in many of my earlier works resembling physical living spaces, hotels, houses, and private webcam scenarios to create related metaphors.”

This modular light system reacts to the sound of its environment. Each custom-built module consists of an electro-luminescent light wire linked to a piezoelectric sensor and a microcontroller. Its modular setup makes it easily adaptable to various urban spaces.
The sensors are used to measure vibrations of architectural solids in a range of low frequencies. These oscillations are triggered by surrounding ambient noise, for example traffic sounds. The sensor data control the light wires, which are tensed to a spatial net structure. Light flashes are generated according to the values of the measurement. With increasing vibrations, the time between flashes becomes shorter and shorter. In the end, the stability of this nervous system collapses and restarts. The result is a dynamic light space that creates visual feedback of the aural activity around the installation.

Megacorp. is a corporate conglomerate inspired by its equally powerful counterparts in science fiction. The artwork is based on a collection of fake websites scraped from internet by the artist duo KairUs. These companies exist only virtually and are used by cyber criminals for phishing attacks or to support scam stories. The Megacorp. exists therefore as an umbrella company for subsidiary companies that are 100% dummy cooperations. Megacorp. operates on a global scale and is constantly growing with firms represented in almost every branch of industry. The strategic objectives according to the Megacorp. Mission statement is to: “offer complete services from one source which can serve the entire market”. Accordingly the subsidiary companies cover domestic and international export, real estate agents, insurance companies, law firms, security companies, banks, educational institutions, hospitals, online commerce, economic communities and ministries.The functions of Megacorp. are presented in the form of an interim report and company visuals. By examining the fake websites the artwork reflects both the imaginary and the real world ‘megacorps’, questioning centralization of power.

Faceless is an augmented reality installation questioning the trust we put in online representations and computer mediated communications. The artwork showcases fake bank checks and a series of photographs, through which one can access an augmented reality layer. The virtual layer exposes fragments of online traces in form of video and audio. A fraudster‘s identity is often based on either identity theft or a confusing mix of several existing individuals, giving them the opportunity to remain faceless and anonymous. The images in the augmented layer are the result of an online search in an attempt to confirm or invalidate the authenticity of the scammers’ online representations. For this project we created the fictional character‚ Anna Masquer, representative of an average contemporary artist that only exists as an online identity. Her photo series Faceless is a collection of faded and worn down images from abandoned graves – another kind of faceless; past away and forgotten, yet an identity to use and abuse. This collection is presented online and offered to art scammers, who, posing as gallerists or wealthy art buyers show their interest in the artwork. The gathered checks are physical evidence of fraudsters sending overpaid checks, tricking the artist into money laundering and advance fee fraud. Art trade as well as any other online commerce requires trust between the actors. This trust is often built upon virtual representations that allow an international market, yet leaves us vulnerable for abuse. The opportunities to sell products or services online makes us targets for online fraudsters, who use the anonymity of the internet to trick the victim into their story worlds.

“Samalu” finds inspiration in old folk believes and shaman rituals, but brings the meaning of mountain myths and worship into today’s contemporary Austria and Korea. A non-linear story around this theme explores how we in our highly modern societies are attached to the nature through the mountains. The natural interface constructed of a number of stones refers to stone piles found on hiking trails around the world, each stone concealing an unique story. By lifting one or several of the real fist-size stones the visitor can experience various myths from both countries and explore different mountain landscapes.

Solargrafica records the paths of the sun by using a lens-less camera with exposure times up to five months. With this process, the invisible movements of the sun can be made visible as landscapes. A soundscape processed with granular synthesis samples creates a time-space relationship between light and sound. The visitor can interact with the sound by moving within the installation and focusing on the different camera modules.

MYRIOI – Shared Immersive VR Experience: Intuitive, Intrinsic, Instinctive
“MYRIOI” is an interactive, immersive, shared narrative that drives the further evolution of our AlloPortal/AlloSphere instrument/environment for artistic/scientific content exploration. It is a new, time-based, interactive composition using our real-time simulation of the quantum probabilities of an electron in a hydrogen-like atom.

Extended Summary:

What would it be like to have a shared VR experience and to be present, to really feel presence together in immersive worlds unimagined, from the atomic to the cosmic. AlloPortal is an immersive instrument/installation that we will construct based on our research in designing the AlloSphere instrument and AlloLib software. We will implement a cubical version of the AlloSphere instrument and demonstrate our narrative, MYRIOI – “innumerable” (“myriad particles”) to share the experience of being immersed and interacting with myriads of particles that create currents, becoming waveforms, to understand and to really experience viscerally, the quantum, sharing and interacting with this narrative. A shared experience that will allow a group of users to see themselves and each other and to passively experience or interact with the world of the quantum: waveforms, light, the pure essence of form and shape. To facilitate this immersive shared experience, a version of AlloPortal will be constructed to deliver a highly immersive visual to a group of users. In order to convince the users that they are “present” the same world, FOV must be expanded to cover peripheral vision, which requires a distributed projection system that spans multiple walls. The distributed system allows the same world to be provided through an HMD system for an alternative experience. Users will be able to explore form and shape from a very intricate and close view, different but derived from the one the group is experiencing. This will serve as the intersection of the flow of dynamic form and dynamically moving virtual sculpture with the fabrication of the prominent theme in material form.

We present our studies in composing elementary wavefunctions of a hydrogen-like atom and identify several relationships between physical phenomena and musical composition that helped guide the process. The hydrogen-like atom accurately describes some of the fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena of nature and supplies the composer with a set of well-defined mathematical constraints that can create a wide variety of complex spatiotemporal patterns. We explore the visual appearance of time-dependent combinations of two and three eigenfunctions of an electron with spin in a hydrogen-like atom, highlighting the resulting symmetries and changes. MYRIOI takes these wave function combinations to the highest level of counterpoint, myriads or particles forming waves of light interactively and immersively visualized and experienced by a shared community who are present and active in a world that they could only experience in an instrument/environment built solely for unencumbered group-user experience in a Virtual World.

While artists visualize concepts, the works of art are structured by the characteristic nature of various media and materials that artists utilize. The astonishing visualizing power of the computer, on the other hand, has offered new aesthetic opportunities to many artists and designers by providing extensive sets of visual possibilities. It has suggested new notions of how to create, see, understand, and appreciate a work of art.

More than anything, computer technologies allow me to explore the visual concepts as if I can actually interact with each part of the images. Many of my works are the results of countless mixtures and variations of images that are coming from various sources. The technology constantly pushes me to challenge the new ideas and deeper engagements. Most of all, computer graphics technology provides me endless possibilities of regenerating new developments and thus provokes new sets of visual concepts.

Loft is a webVR narrative experience. It consists of a self contained environment that plays out for the viewer based on its own logic. With limited agency granted to them, the viewer’s role will initially feel like one of pure observations, but as the world unfolds around them, they will find that their point of observation, and how they choose to navigate the space, will make critical differences to how they experience the narrative and logic of this world.

As well as investigating ways of presenting fragmented and abstract narratives within virtual reality, Loft explores an unusual aspect of virtual reality technology in its ability to be both immersive and distancing at the same time. It intentionally highlights the disembodied “head in a jar” feeling, while at the same time providing an abstract environment that invites exploration, immersion and the potential for a more visceral reaction to the space.

Loft uses gaze based navigation. Use the pink cursor to look and select the ‘start’ icon, then use the same technique to gaze at the translucent pink diamonds that will appear and navigate through the space.

On initiating the work, a number of virtual seeds are randomly spread around the environment, and begin to grow. At the same time an entity begins to fly through the space, exploring its own new environment. As the seeds mature they will flower, attracting the entity which will deliver fragments of spatialized audio narrative to each flower as it visits them. This flowers will eventually die and with them the fragments of audio. Over a period of approximately 6 to 7 minutes the world will come to life and then return to a state of quiet. The viewer can explore the resulting audio environment and in doing so mix the spatialized audio that surrounds them into their own unique narrative.

Credits and Attribution: <http://miscellanea.com/artworks/loft>

Religious and societal imprints are Cziraki’s main interest for creating works. Both have shaped our modern psyche and natural world, transforming them, evolving them and sometimes destroying them. His goal is to use the power of expression to create new associations between society, religion, and nature. Mesopotamia is labeled as one of the cradles of civilization. The evolutions of society and civilization have left their imprint on the environments that surround them. Euphrates Rising is a work constructed using water samples from the Hudson River located near Manhattan. The water was processed in order to isolate and culture bacteria present within said sample on nutrient agar plates. Various antibiotics were administered to growing cultures, such that natural resistance could be inferred.

Art and computer science converge in the investigation of emer­gence and self-organization through the field of sensor networks. This is realized in Bion, an interactive installation that explores the relationship between humans and a simulated orgone-inspired experience. Bion makes reference to an individual element of primordial biological energy identified as an “orgone” by the scientist Wilhelm Reich.

Viewers witness a dynamic array of 1,000 mass-produced, three-dimensional glowing and chirping forms, collectively producing polyphonic sound and blue light emanating in cloud-like patterns from all parts of the room. Each bion, a small synthetic “life-form” fitted with custom electronics and sensors, has the ability to communicate with other bions and with humans who enter the space. An example of this communication occurs when one of the bions is alerted to the presence of a stranger; a bion quickly communicates this information to the group. One by one, in rapid succession, the bions signal other bions to the presence of a stranger and, in a wave-like pattern, become silent. Eventually, the bions become attracted to the visitor, and they express their interest with more intense glowing and increased polyphonic rhythms.