Artworks Data Table

With Urban Spirits, Judith Darmont creates both digital street art and an interactive tool for citizens and urbanists. Digital street art is taking spontaneous art expression like graffiti into a new dimension. Using pico-LED or Laser projectors, screenings can happen anytime, any place. With HD Cam, Internet and social networks, you can easily find tracks from Urban Spirits. In many cities, Urban Spirits can be viewed with augmented reality by video artworks.
Augmented reality is not dealing with 2D or 3D pictures but with real video. Also, for the city hall itself, it’s an innovative way to stream digital art and spirits from its own city, with a virtual interface. At the same time, Urban Spirits showcases how the digital world could be synonymous with zero pollution and environmental impact.

Artists in Chicago and at remote sites interact through ISDN technology in a number of cooperative experiments in real time, in the interactive telecommunicational space represented on a video wall at the conference site.

The Rosetta Stone is an interactive telecommunications “white board” which enables artists from different locations to draw and create together as if they were in the same room working on the same canvas. Artists can send and receive text, graphics, drawings, video, and voice. This interactive space/image is alive, a medium of constantly evolving communication and collaboration. By breaking through the usual boundaries of language and geography, artists can share their histories, their art, and their personalities.

Artists and programs from San Jose State University CADRE Institute (Computers in Art, Design, Research, and Education): Dr. Kathleen Cohen, Pat Coleman, Brian A. Kromrey, Hassan Ebrohimi Nuyken, Joel Slayton.

Technical assistance, software, and hardware from Adobe Systems, Compression Labs Incorporated, fractal Design, 115 Technologies (a division of Bell Canada), Macromedia, Network Express Incorporated, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Pacific Bell Market Application Development Group, Pioneer, RosterOps, RGB Spectrum, Anthony Templer, Wacom Technology Corporation, Leonardo, the Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.

My work explores life in this age of Court TV. It examines the blurred boundaries between news and entertainment, as well as our culture’s engagement with celebrity and scandal. It investigates the relationship of spectacle and voyeurism and the ways in which women are represented in the media. In this work I am concerned with cameras in the courtroom – with court trails as a form of popular entertainment in our culture.

In the “Leona Helmsley Series” I examined the media coverage of the tax trail of Leona Helmsley, the self-styled queen of the Helmsley hotel chain. The work also examined my relationship to this spectacle as an artist/participant with a Super 8 camera.

The “Leona Helmsley Series,” as my other recent projects, explores relationships between static and moving images, between traditional media and modern technologies. It includes digital photographs, artist books, and installations that combine video, animation, painting, digital prints, and sound.

Webmachine is the concept of an alternative new media machine, a piece that translates a binary text to visual code using the technology of punch card tablet weaving. Imaginary archaeology of the computer invented by female cultural tradition to replace ‘male machines’ that merges the logic of punch cards, weaving patterns and computing. To create the artwork, used a table loom as a starting point and modified its production method. Webmachine is concerned with the history of industrialized female labor, early computers and weaving. My main research questions revolved around the undercurrents of computer history, and the possibility to manifest them in the form of an interactive installation, namely, a reversed analog weaving computer. My doctoral dissertation, currently being prepared for publishing in English and Hungarian, briefly highlights the problem of gender stereotyping in the history of computing and hacker cultures, in a chapter titled ‘the boys and their toys’. Sadie Plant describes the continuity of low-wage repetitive labor to be assigned to women from weaving to computing. Weaving is nature coded by culture into a visual interface, where the methodology of coding is inherently cultural, not natural. The case is the same with computers, and culture reinforces stereotypes by the method of coding. My work aims to decode and recode cultural stereotyping by disassembling the machine interfaces that reinforce these codes, to speculate on possible parallel machine archaeology.

Kapitän Biopunk: Fermentation Madness is an artistic research project manifested via a series of workshops and an acoustic and performative installation. The project developed in response to the high number of poisonings and deaths of alcohol consumers after an increased excise tax was placed on alcoholic products in Indonesia. The project, using do-it-yourself and open-source technologies, strives to educate individuals on fermentation processes to produce safe and affordable alcoholic products, and a means to democratize the laboratory and liberate knowledge for a wider society.

Birth and Decay invites the audience to explore a time-sliced anatomy of landscape as it cycles through the inevitable rhythm of change. The vista is hidden, but the proximity and exploded imagery give us an intimate relationship with the environment. The birth-life-decay-death cycle is an inevitable performance that drives the movement of time on this planet. The images offer 25 instances of the same subject, the eye decoding multiplicity and diversity. My work orients itself around an examination of the visual world that surrounds us and the use of imaging technologies to explore our perceptions. I draw attention to the processes, textures, and rhythms that we take for granted and often overlook. Each work represents a personal journey either through physical space or a closer examination of the world that surrounds me. The composition of the raw material that I gather on field trips (video, stills, or sound samples) involves an evocation of an ambience, a reconstruction of the world. With a sense of simplicity and directness, I use my tools to visually re-create what I see with my eyes. Through montaging this raw material in video, interactive environments, and print, the elements of the image gain a new and distinctive meaning. The process involves working with an initial conceptual idea and then allowing the happenstance of image creation to define the content. The visual qualities of the image are paramount; the quality of light and tonal range become key factors in deciding when to press the shutter. When subject to the vagaries of weather, the works inevitably become driven by a subjective immersion within an environment. Whether creating work within walking distance of my studio, revisiting the same places throughout the seasons, or travelling across the globe, these lens-based observations are encounters with the unpredictable.

VJ Fleet [redux] is informed by interactive media from popular culture (specifically custom car and club sub-cultures) and performance art, experimental music, video projection, and interactive installations. By combining the mobility of the car with audio, video and interac­tive components, that which is private (the interior space of the car) becomes public and a tool for visual commentary about the city and its use. Aspects of the host city’s specific car culture are highlighted through the choice of cars for the fleet, and by custom “styling” (vinyl labeling) on the car exteriors.

The fleet drives through the city, recording, manipulating, and projecting video imagery of the route, which is loosely determined by local participants and drivers who have knowledge of the city’s highlights. The cars are set up with sensors and software that allow interaction between the car and driver to create live effects on the videos, which are projected on panoramic screens in the cars and made visible to people in the street.

Audio aspects of the city, and from the engine and passenger areas of the cars, are recorded for use when the cars stop at determined locations. Here, the cars are arranged to display the video archive of the drive, and the audio is manipulated by software into a new musical soundscape that is played on the cars’ audio systems. In this performance, cars can be perceived as recalling the drive to the location through the narrative of the videos and the expression of the sound. Other cars in the immediate vicinity receive the broadcast on their stereos. The cars’ projected videos are synced into a new panoramic response to the music. The effect is a live vehicular performance of remixed audio and visualizations of the city and its publics, and the private (now social) spaces of the cars.

The human-companion species relationship is the starting point for the critique explored in Wait. Wait is part of the larger Animal Lover body of work, which is situated within a developing area of artistic practice referred to as “interspecies collaboration.” Contemporary cultures for the most part consider animals in terms of consumption: as food source, experimental subject, ecological resource, entertainment, etc. Critical to Animal Lover are questions and critiques addressing human relations with non-humans, particularly companion species. These works reconsider the animal as conscious, expressive, and creative, with complex states of being different from, but potentially as rich as, those of humans.

In Wait, human and canine communication methods are brought to bear within an interactive video installation. The piece uses interactive technologies that track the physical presence and movement of visitors to the work, allowing for direct contribution to the creation of meaning. Taking cues from the movements of the visitor, the dog (as imaged in the video) points to the relationship of control. The dog appears to be waiting for direction – looking directly at the visitor, implying a state of suspended urgency. Visitors are compelled to ask questions about their relationship to the dog. In this way, the piece depicts the complex relationship between humans and companion species who share the domestic space. For the most part, companions such as dogs, cats, and birds are subject to conditions of human dwelling (home) and the systems and codes of power, space, and communication associated with it. Wait was produced in partnership with Banff New Media Institute, The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada.

A Selfless Society prompts us to think about the role of gender and gender expectations in society. In an era when population increase, climate change, and the ideal of the nuclear family are putting pressure on the environment, on the affordability of everyday life, and human well-being, do we need to actively evolve our social structures? Naked mole-rats are altruistic eusocial and are mammals with an arguably utopian lifestyle. Like other eusocial organisms such as honeybees or ants, naked mole-rats’ society is structured around a single breeding female. Other community members help to raise the young, provide food and protect the home. A Selfless Society is an abstract animation influenced by real-time data from a live naked mole-rat colony. It uses data as an art material–exploring how we can take a quantified measurement and turn it into an experience, a moment of contemplation. Creating work with real-time data from living systems can stimulate a connection to nature in unpredictable ways. The technologies open a communication channel from the animal to us so that what we hear, see and feel is dynamically agitated by these non-human agents. Technology is not neutral in this process, it is designed, sculpted and scripted; the data translated by the artists’ hand. However tightly controlled the process, there is a gap–space for the animals to fill and a place that cannot be synthesized. It is this gap that the naked mole-rats featured in A Selfless Society gnaw on to create a work with an edge of vulnerability. As we observe the colony’s activity patterns, we are invited to consider what we might stand to gain or lose were we to restructure human society in this way. We may question whether we, like naked mole-rats, could become eusocial, and consider how this would alter the expectations of our own gender identities, actions, or motivations.

The work is a part of a collaborative project called Rodent Activity Transmission systems (http://RAT.systems), with Dr. Chris Faulkes, Marcin Ignac (variable.io), and Matt Jarvis.

Stretching or shrinking hours at the beat of your heart, The HeartBeats Watch is a timepiece in which the duration of time is paced not by seconds but according to the wearer’s heartbeat. Through a heightened awareness of self, The HeartsBeats Watch brings together art and science to reveal emotional complexity of time and the human body. A poetic investigation of the physiology of emotions, health, immortality and control, the watch bridges the gap between society and medical science, invoking a broader cultural perception of life. Through the premise of accessories and jewelry as providers of “superpowers” and the idea of objects of comfort, Julie Legault explores the possible futures of accessories through technology, function, and fantasy, using the premise of technology as magic to combine materials and circuitry, creating wearable wonders. Her current research concerns the relationships that mentally and emotionally disabled individuals have with objects and accessories. Working from the outside in, she hopes not only to understand and improve these relationships and their impact on the individual’s social presence, but also to distill the essence of these relationships to benefit a wider audience, adding some missing magic along the way. To avoid the impending “under the skin” aspect of hybridization, Legault’s work also explores the ethics and obsolescence of consumer culture by providing insights and tools for self-awareness and wonder.

My art is based on ideas of existence, who we are and what makes us different to the next person, and how our characters and identities are formed and change over time. Construction of small contour drawings have evolved from the negative forms of 10 individuals’ navel casts. The delicate lines carefully follow the individuals’ birth chord, creating an image from this part of the body, which, from its cutting at birth, marks the beginning of a new individual taking its first breath and from this developing its self and identity. In this sense, these drawings can be seen to correspond to birthplaces, birthrights, and, more obviously, land mass. The images are digitally created and produced in a medium that can be seen as very cold and impersonal, immediately depersonalizing the viewer from the very intimate area of the body that is the subject of the drawings. The area is explored as transparent layers building up a three-dimensional form, using tones that would correspond to an ordnance survey ink used on maps. These marks are as individual as fingerprints yet have the potential to change over time, so they are quite fluid in structure.

My art is based on ideas of existence, who we are and what makes us different to the next person, and how our characters and identities are formed and change over time. Construction of small contour drawings have evolved from the negative forms of 10 individuals’ navel casts. The delicate lines carefully follow the individuals’ birth chord, creating an image from this part of the body, which, from its cutting at birth, marks the beginning of a new individual taking its first breath and from this developing its self and identity. In this sense, these drawings can be seen to correspond to birthplaces, birthrights, and, more obviously, land mass. The images are digitally created and produced in a medium that can be seen as very cold and impersonal, immediately depersonalizing the viewer from the very intimate area of the body that is the subject of the drawings. The area is explored as transparent layers building up a three-dimensional form, using tones that would correspond to an ordnance survey ink used on maps. These marks are as individual as fingerprints yet have the potential to change over time, so they are quite fluid in structure.

First of all, I need to make a distinction between computer art and art that is made by a computer. I’m going to call the latter digital art as opposed to the former, which I will call computer art. Computer art is focused on the digital process and the digital origins of the work. It separates body and soul by dissecting the process and the product. This is in contrast to the thoughts of multimedia and video artist Marina Abramovic. According to her, in art you must “keep body and soul together = remain alive.” I am introducing more of the human hand, more body and soul, into my art pieces. This “post-human” combination joins the process with the product, quite literally, the body and the soul. This will allow the references to nature and the body to come together in a literal, yet subtle, manner. I am creating cybornetic art. Although it may have binary beginnings, it has multiplicitous ends. The scale of the print gives it a relationship to the human. These creations contain the metaphor of the cyborg on paper. My pieces are about combining a machine and a body. The actual images are executed in a fashion that will mirror the concept of the work. I do this quite literally by scanning parts of my body and combining them with examples from nature using digital means in the computer. By taking scans of my body and nature, I am converting them into digital data. The computer is not used as a cut-and-paste collage tool. Effects that could not be obtained through methods of collage or non-digital printing techniques are used. This is a digital image that takes advantage of its medium. Other physical items I scan include textures from nature, such as bark and leaves. This provides the images with a true organic quality that could not be obtained otherwise. I also scan watercolor washes for a more relatable quality to the images.

When I started creating what can be called computer art, my product was very much focused on the digital process and digital origins of the work. Now I am trying to introduce more of the human hand, more of the real into the art pieces. I want to create the metaphor of the cyborg on paper. My pieces are about combining a machine and a body. I have done this quite literally by scanning parts of my body and combining them in the computer. I am creating cybornetic art. Although it may have binary beginnings, it has multiplicitous ends. I am doing this by researching the human body and its contours and how that works into composition. These are ideas I want to challenge and question through digital prints.

This artwork is an interactive art website. The given link is no longer active.

Altar-ations is a wedding planner gone awry. It questions who is really in control of a woman’s self-image and gender construction, while it also brings into focus illusions of choice and control that are commonly rendered through the internet interface itself. Choose your engagement ring, spin for your spouse, build a better baby, and manage your virginity-these options are all just a click away, or so it seems. The cybertales become “fractured” (deconstructed) as we navigate the satirical interface and trigger excerpts from serious interviews with young people who are contemplating sexuality, marriage, commercialism, and reproductive technologies.

Each section of Altar-ations is based on feminist theory and political dialectics circulating around specific gender and ethnicity issues such as gay marriage, genetic engineering, and sexual consent. The project was designed to generate student dialogue about these issues as they engaged in the interviews and helped to produce the project. Students came from a wide range of back­grounds. For example, two students were from the Middle East, one of my students is from Sierra Leone (where the blood-diamond trade threatens the lives and limbs of villagers), one is a Catholic Italian-American, and another is gay and Christian. They brought invaluable perspectives to the project.

Our impression of a scene changes depending on the aspect. theRelativity is an interactive art work that seamlessly reflects a third-person view of a structure into a first-person view.

An etheroid is a device that mediates an invisible “something” to exist in space. Each etheroid propagates this behavior to one of the surrounding etheroids repeatedly. From the movements of a whole etheroids, an invisible and movable “something” appears.

Optical illusions, which are not possible in the real world, are often used in still images and animation. With computers, I transform a static optical illusion into an interactive optical illusion and allow the character in the image to perform “impossible” movements in a virtual 3D world. The character moves automatically on the block and the stairs. Not only can the character move according to physical laws in the virtual 3D world, but he can also pass between separate blocks that seem to be connected. When the object is behind the falling character, he lands on the object even if the object is behind him in the 3D world. When a hole is not visible, the character ignores the hole as if it does not exist. When the character jumps, he is always in front of the objects. I hope that this work will release viewers from the preconceptions that surround us.

This work is, precisely, a “picture to touch!” The print, which uses expressions of principal color constituents, is installed in a frame with sensors. When a person touches the print, the sensors perceive which location has been touched; make elements vibrate through data available on the hue, chroma, and value of the related elements; and give information to the fingertip of the person. The actual roughness of the unrefined paper and the vibration of the image data are mixed with the fingertip data, and the viewer experiences a remarkable fusion of sense through sight and sense of reality.

In virtual space, shape primitives are produced and combined to create complex forms that can be broken up and returned to shape primitives. A virtual brush randomly generates shape primitives in virtual space. Brush pressure and paths are controlled by the artist.

This work was created for Direct Manipulation Scene Creation in 30: Estimating Hand Postures from Multiple-Camera Images (SIGGRAPH 97 Electric Garden) by ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Labs.

Non-Material Construction combines artistic technique and colors that are not obtainable from traditional materials and gives birth to new forms and space that consists of individual forms. When computers create virtual worlds with unpredictable images and rearranged complex structures, and then affix these non-materials to paper, they take on new meaning and value as real-world materials.

This work was created with a high-level coating technology. Important objectives were to achieve sufficient water-resistance, light-resistance, and coloring, and to obtain the multiplicative effect that is equivalent to that for the ground material. The work achieves an original representation that consists of not only the image but also integration of the real material and sensations of materials created by computers.

The theme of this work is the relationship between layers of abstracted and accumulated memories, and shapes that are actually represented. This is the basic concept of the works I produce with computers, where abstracted memories and the individual (myself) influence each other, and represented memories and the society influence each other. I think artists should step forward and propose technologies that satisfy these conditions.

The mystery and precious memory of viewing a simple “magic show” when we were young has been forgotten. The magic show was always an exciting event that captured our curiosity even though we suspected that it might not be real. Children were encouraged to stretch their imaginations and dream about how they could do magic in their own way.

Based on these experiences, we present a magic show that makes it possible for anybody to participate. This project, rather than be­ing performed by a trained magician, uses performers randomly selected from the audience. For example, children could participate with simple movements such as snapping their fingers to illuminate a magical interactive world.

Essentially, a performer shows various magic gestures, and, through motion capture and video tracking, the heightened visual effects are projected to produce an experience that could not normally be presented by a magician alone.

The family tree is a unique theme of study in information visualization. Korean family trees
are collections of books that focus on theblood relation on the father’s side, records of the family status, and private records on ancestors’ behaviors, achievements, and epitaphs, a history book for the clan. Like traditional Chinese family trees, Korean family trees are not simple charts like those seen ordinarily in the West. The names of hundreds of thousands (sometimes several million) of people are recorded in the family trees, so in addition to their original purpose of promotion of family bonds and respect for ancestors, they are used as precious materials in examining history over several hundred years. This artwork presents the visual image of a family tree. It enables an intuitive glance at a mammoth dataset and presents a unique visual experience of the history of several hundred years during which the progenitor was multiplied to hundreds of thousands of descendants, who were again split into several branches. The innumerable names that I encountered while visualizing my origins gave
me an opportunity to reflect on my existence. The people whose names do not appear in this family tree (for example, SIGGRAPH 2007 attendees) have similar family-tree patterns in
their ancestries. I believe they will live more serious lives if they recognize this fact.

Summary

Through the act of playing Go, you can see the nebula and stars as they are born and lose, and glimpse the secrets in the universe. Also, whenever an actor releases a stone through an act, events occur, which create a microcosm and undergo a process of change.

Abstract

시각 [si:gak]
1. 視覺, the sense of sight; vision
2. 視角, one’s viewpoint, a way of looking
3. 始覺, through experience we escape ignorance and attain awareness (a Buddhist word)
This project was inspired by the challenge of finding the meaning of extending human senses in the area of new media art. By utilizing the interactivity of digital media, it presents a new way to understand how the visually disabled perceive the world. This series is an art experiment that was created at the point where the boundaries that divide art from science and design disappear, due to technological development. We tried to go beyond traditional methods
of visual information processing with a technique called physical computing. And we hope that the experiment extends beyond technology to present an aesthetically engaging experience.

Summary

In this work, AI has a conversation with audiences. As the conversation is repeated, the expressions used by AI are gradually developed into those using emotional words resembling humans’ expressions.

Abstract

This novel interface superimposes tactile information onto the images displayed on a computer monitor (see also Ando et al., SIGGRAPH 2002 Emerging Technologies). A small vibrator is attached to a user’s fingernail, and when a vibration is presented during a finger movement, the vibration can be perceived as the stimulus from a finger pad, instead of a stimulus from the nail. This illusory percept of tactile information is the basis of this interface technology.

The vibrator is attached to user’s nail with double sticky tape. The timing and magnitude of the vibration are controlled based on the position of the finger measured with the touch sensor of an LCD panel. When the user rubs an image, tactile feedbacks is presented. With this interface technology, any kind of visual image can be displayed with real-time tactile feedback. We used it to produce an artwork on the subject of how humans perceive the real and digital worlds through the sense of touch.

In Touch the Invisibles, invisible Lilliputians are muddling on the computer monitor. When the user’s finger encounters the invisible Lilliputians, vibrations are presented to the nail, and tactile information indicating an encounter is generated. The user cannot see the invisible Lilliputians but can touch them. On the other hand, the user cannot touch visible Lilliputians. The Lilliputians live in the area where modalities of human senses are partly separated. This artwork enables users to feel the association and dissociation of the two modalities, and demonstrates an application of haptic interfaces to art and entertainment.

In this two-minute motion-graphic video, signs are floating over Tokyo. They are yelling at each other silently and entering your brain unconsciously. The ending asks: “How much truth have you found?” Because signs often lie.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

For more than 15 years, I have explored the phenomenon of time through an interdisciplinary body of works. We experience time on various levels, but we always perceive and imagine time as a change of form and shape, and the appearance of layers. We don’t perceive time as a phenomenon by itself, because we haven’t a distinct sense for it. In my view, we construct time, as we construct “what is out there” and which we call reality. The difference between a constructed image of the world and the construction of time is obvious for me. The construction of change, which is interwoven with the concept of time, requires a more intense level of presence. It requires that I am not only aware of the construction of the image, but also that I have to be aware of the construction of the change of the image. In space, time appears in layers, which we can see in the growth and decay of living substance or in the various layers of media. The surface carries the image; the light mediates the image; our vision sense mediates the image; and our brain mediates the retinal image. The various layers makes it clearer: a medium always contains another.

I use a variety of material, images, digital stills, animation, video, space design, and installation work to communicate my ideas. The idea and concept drive the exploration of the media I apply, and my artwork starts where I need images to complete a circle, where I realize that scientific descriptions miss the point. The new communication technologies allow me to create a body of work that already includes the altered perception mediated through new media. The recent body of work (digital prints) is a tightrope walk between the abstract and the concrete. What appears as a 20th-century drawing is a digital print of a photographic image of a wall. The walls show aging aspects, a collection of incidental scratches, marks, rabbles, spots, stains, and objects we identify as drawings, as long as we don’t know the history and the context.

I entered virgin territory, with new tools and embarked on an adventure of discovery.

CrossTalk playfully mediates language and communication for two or more simultaneous users and their audience. Its two interlaced, over-sized keyboards, one made of mahogany keys, and one of maple, force users to negotiate shared space. As they type, the keys whisper words that appear to cascade onto a shared screen.

A new subconscious feeling is born when people drinking coffee at a table in a cafe see the visible aqua symbol representing the interval of sequence in their body language. A cup placed on the table leaves simulated circular water waves. At the same time, a small shadow fish appears and swims toward the other cups or, if it is alone, around the table and back. The movement of the shadow fish is affected by the number of participants and their activities. Up to four participants can experience both worlds, conscious and subconscious, simultaneously in the interactive installation.

This interactive sound and visual space allows navigation and interaction with a distorted wireframe structure by filling in planes that can be animated to generate different sounds, which creates a sound body.

The video explores medical students’ drawings of the female reproductive system, employing the anatomical drawings created by 63 first-year medical students in the Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. It considers the drawings as part of a ritual of becoming a doctor, taboo-like topic related to sex, as well as self-portraits of the female students creating the images. The images are “diagnosed” in the voice-over from two different perspectives. The drawings are discussed with a medical doctor and an art historian. In these dialogues, the images gain an ambivalent status as a medical, cultural, or personal representation. Furthermore, the piece thus stages this (audiovisual) cultural-emotional analysis of the students’ drawings. In actuality, next to the drawings the video investigates the students behind them.

With Perception of Consequence Nawratil places two evolving forms in a reversible entropic system and simulates them to resemble evolving human states and emotions. The system itself evolves from organic form into chaos – an entropic equilibrium, but its cyclical nature pushes the system towards rebirth. Exploiting both your visual, auditory and touch sensory systems, Perception of Consequence will guide you through the experience of transformation and evolution.

For the past two decades, I have been exploring and developing a drawing style that could not be executed without the assistance of a computer. The main body of my work consists of portrait drawings. Each portrait is in reality an extended series of over a hundred drawings that are immensely complex but held together by a unique line style that fits the subjects and their personalities. The lines form an image that expresses one’s soul, the energy beyond the exterior mask, making the portraits both abstract and representational.

My work thrives on duality; it is both expressive and conceptual. It includes cross pollination of traditional art media with the computer. While containing classical and futuristic elements, it is neither about the past nor the future, but a bridge between the two. The portrait series depicts cultural icons who have struggled with their own duality, reflecting the realities of our time.

I wanted to invent a stark and vaguely alien landscape.

The images begin with elements of reality which are set into new contexts:

Meanings change.
Time and space collapse.
Mysteries arise.
The obvious is obscured.
The obscure is clarified.

The work develops through the integration of familiar organic forms with distinct geometric structures.

In the dichotomy within, I look for inspiration.
In the synergy arising, I capture energy.
In the tension between, I create an uneasy balance.

The common becomes unfamiliar, the mundane becomes consequential, the Essence is given form.

The diptych Influence is based upon drawings inspired by seeing bullwhip-shaped kelp affect strong tidal currents at Deception Pass near Seattle. This diptych attempts to present a reflection of the human experience of nature while capturing the fleeting essence of the interaction between natural forces.

The act of creating a simple line drawing, pencil on paper, is still the most satisfying experience to me. Working digitally, I am able to enhance drawings to create a greater sense of drama. Adding form, colors, and textures opens a wide expressive vocabulary. In Mayne, simply rendered natural forms are further abstracted through the addition of color. The use of the somber golds and browns give this diptych its iconic feel. It is meant to raise the ordinary, everyday forms into a focus for contemplation and meditation.

Experiencing nature provides a visual meditation on pattern and form that nourishes the mind and body. It provides the opportunity for contemplation of a vast array of intricate forms and an even wider assortment of complex visual relationships.

Creating a microcosm of those forms and relationships is central to much of my art. The focus of the work is the grandeur in the small, the extraordinary in the common. It delves into relationships of form and pattern rather than realism. This expressive approach to the subject matter creates art that serves as a focal point for reflection. Like nature, the work invites contemplation as viewers overlay their own experiences in the interpretation of forms that border on the abstract.

I begin with photographs and drawings of patterns and forms made on frequent hikes, road trips, and other travel. These source images focus on pattern and form rather than vista. This work is from a series, Reflections of Flow, which was initiated by an observation of the way in which the interaction between global, universal forces and local forms create intricate and beautiful patterns.

The multiplicity of views inherent in the five-panel presentation of Sound Waves simultaneously draws parallels and contrasts. The rhythms and movements are a constant, while relationships and forms differ. The delicate and subtle variations resonate in discrete patterns to create five individual worlds. Yet the synergy of form and movement of the five views combined suggest a larger splendor and draw the viewer more forcefully into their grasp.

Water holds a special attraction. Who can resist spending time at a shoreline with light reflecting off the surface, form in a continual state of flux, and rhythms that lull. The hypnotizing movement of light on water and the shifting relationships of waves are the inspirations for Sound Waves. The five square panels in the piece utilize lenticular technology to capture movement, transformation, and depth.

Viewing this work is like watching waves roll onto the beach: mesmerizing, relaxing, captivating. The shapes used are primarily abstract. It is their placement within the three-dimensional space of the lenticular print, and their relationship to other forms there, that suggest context and meaning. Bright reflections of light appear momentarily as the viewer passes by, just as wave movements create hypnotizing flashes of sunlit sparkles at the beach.

“Tidal Pool” endeavors to bring the viewer into an intimate experience of nature. Subtle textures and patterns are interwoven in a complex manner that is reminiscent of the natural world. The sense of discovery when coming upon a tidal pool is recreated by the dimensional shift encased in the lenticular center panel. Suddenly, the view beneath the surface is exposed for exploration. The illusion of real depth invites viewers to linger and explore, as their movements in front of the image effect their view of the image. The audience employs their own perspective in resolving the elements presented. In this way the work becomes a focus of contemplation and meditation, mirroring the role of nature in our lives.

Miroir is an artistic installation using augmented reality technology. The visual decor and sound has been designed to immerse the viewer in a strange universe. The mirror is an object often linked to illusion. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the mirror symbolizes the portal between the real world and a world that is strange. As a star attraction at carnivals, the hall of mirrors allows viewers to see images of themselves as multiplied and distorted. A curved mirror is also necessary to achieve the visual trompe l’oeil as anamorphosis. So it’s no coincidence that the mirror is at the heart of the installation – it is the open window to another world. The extraordinary feature here is the transformation of the face of the viewer into an animal face. The aesthetics are a blend of naturalistic paintings and Japanese print. The literary references associated with the anthropomorphic are many, ancient myths, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Les Fables of La Fontaine, and Japanese Mythology. Anthropomorphism is a method used by cartoonists to denounce the atrocities of people by giving them the head of the animal to which it grants negative qualities. In addition to being caricaturist, Grandville is also known to have illustrated the first edition of Les Fables of La Fontaine. Once he has looked in the mirror, the viewer can interact with its double anthropomorphic, an augmented reality that allows the viewer to merge with the supernatural.

SymbiosisS is part of a collection of textile interfaces, SymbiosisO (“O” for objects), which behave as organic displays and react to definable impulses by showing pre-defined patterns that animate slowly over the surface. It welcomes viewers to sit and rest on soft-folded material that displays an active, slowly shifting pattern. When excited, the pattern starts forming, in a playful, curious way, around the place where the textile was touched. Once the disturbance is abated, the pattern continues its peaceful expansion. This vivacious interaction of a vibrant pattern is a demonstration of the potential for tangible textile interfaces. Ubiquitous computation –an active, programmable secondary skin to surround everyday objects – is an ambient, “noiseless,” and thus vigorous way to visualize information and form space. Production of SymbiosisS involves both handicraft and specialized digital fabrication. Electronics that activate a heat-sensitive coating layer are embedded in the soft structure. The substrate is felt, which has exceptional material properties (sound isolation, heat preservation, biodegradable, etc.). The geometry of the patterns is derived from Voronoi tessellation algorithms, which, in this case, intuitively suggest folding the material into a three-dimensional landscape. The general concept of the work is a tribute to the ultimate power of evolution, where not only human civilization affects the environment, but nature itself also reacts and adapts to these changes. Instead of criticizing civilization’s impact on the environment, the emphasis focuses on exploration of new types of mutant living beings.

My sculptures represent motion in static form. Using digital tools, the shapes are derived from various animations of a figure, with the arc of a body’s motion defining each form. Though the work may be compared to early Modernist paintings by Duchamp and Balla, they depict time as a continuum, rather than as a collection of discrete points. Falling Down was created with video, 3D animation software, rapid prototyping technology, and meticulous hand-finishing. I began by filming reference video of a woman falling down. With the reference footage, I rotoscoped (animated over video) a 3D-animated character of the woman. Next, I modeled a mesh over the trajectory of the character’s motion, filling the entire space of the action. The digital mesh was then output into physical form using a rapid prototyping machine (fused deposition modeling) and hand-finished with bronze resin and patina.While one might argue that this piece may have been created entirely by hand, the technology used was essential in visualizing the boundary of a woman falling through space, with many subtle fluctuations in shape. Animating the actions in 3D provided me with a much deeper level of analysis to create the work than I would have gotten from observing the action from a single vantage point.

Between Thoughts is a multi-layered stream-of-consciousness exploration of the myriad of impressions that can course through us in the creative moment. While working in collaboration with celebrated Los Angeles choreographer Loretta Livingston, I became fascinated with the impulses and movements of dancers working in an improvisatory style. Watching them and their rapid movements created in an instant and then immediately evolving into other physical expressions and rhythms, I began to see relationships in time, the nature of what really thinks and creates, and how our mind constantly weaves glimpses of past, present, and future visions, dreams, fears, losses, whispers, and echoes while simultaneously wrapped in a present occupation. What resulted is a visual poem on art making that traces through sensual, natural landscapes, elements, disembodied movements, and surreal imagery keyed to a hypnotic pulse.

I have always been deeply interested in ideas about perception and states of mind and have explored them through the marriage of nature and technology. In this work, I wanted to create textual layering, a meditation in which neural pathways fire before the mind realizes, and yet the metaphors in the imagery are slowed to the pace of a deep memory. The cycle of creation therefore begins before I first thought ends.

My practice addresses the cultural effects that technology has on society by examining the influence of the machine and digital technologies. My work ranges from interactive electronic installations, computer animations, digital photography, and collaborative projects to canvas-based work and textiles. My current interest is in the status of craft objects in an age of electronic consumerist culture. I identify crossovers between computer graphics and craft techniques, and explore them by making tangible art objects. My latest projects suggest an emotive, quirky, humorous aspect of functional computer graphics and electronic devices by drawing parallels between their form and function, and the techniques and meanings embraced in traditional needle crafts. For example, I have recently completed a project that allows wallpaper designs to be sent to mobile phones via W AP technology. The designs can also be downloaded as patterns for cross-stitch samplers. I concern myself with the visual appeal of machines and electronics. I am interested in how they are considered as objects of desire, in terms of their fabrication and capabilities, and the status they give the individuals who own them. The catalogue section of endfile.com includes visual and written references to my individual projects. Tracert is an examination of how traditional craft ideas translate into the modern multimedia networked world. The sampler has been cross-stitched from a transposed graphic of a tracert DOS command. Tracert can be seen as a modern metaphor for the crafted tradition of creating cross-stitch samplers. Essentially samplers were a method of learning to stitch, and they were also used to express important details of your life in a pattern of simple icons and symbols that represented what you had accomplished, or endured. Samplers included icons for how many children you had and where you lived. and included symbols that suggested emotional events (for example marital infidelity – a duck – and luck – a horseshoe). The tracert DOS command is the command users enter into a DOS window to trace the network points that join them with another computer on the internet. Typing “tracert www.endfile.com” into DOS will print a numerical display of where a small packet of data travels between the computer where the command was entered and the computer that is www.endfile.com. In tracert, the IP address relates firstly to my computer in the UK, then the internal network in my house, then the local telecom exchange down my road, then the larger exchange, and so on until it reaches the www.endf i l e.com computer in America. As each point is reached, its time is relayed in milliseconds. These points have significance to me, as they contain personal, locative data in the journey to find my web site. These events, written in numbers that account for a journey through a network, are contrasted with the idea of traditional narrative samplers.

The Breathing Wall tells the story of a girl, Lana, communicating with her boyfriend, Michael, through the wall of his prison cell. She is dead; he’s been falsely convicted of her murder. The story is told in parts, alternating between daydreams (which
reside in Flash movies) and night dreams. The night dreams reside within the Hyper Trance Fiction Matrix (HTF), experimental software that allows the story to respond to the listener’s rate of breathing.To experience the piece (which resides on a CD, PC only), users need a headset that includes earphones and a microphone. When the microphone is positioned under the nose, the HTF sections respond to users’ breathing. The goal of these sections is to induce
a hypnotic or meditative state so that users enter the dream. The Breathing Wall was funded by Arts Council England.

The work Ambiguity: identity in the virtual space represents an artistic research into the phenomenon of virtual identity.

The appearance of digital technologies led to the development of virtual social relationships thanks to the popularity of communication via social networking websites. This work investigate the influence it makes on the individual’s personality: where lies the line between real “me” and virtual “me”? And is it there at all? We can safely say that today the Internet has become a essential social laboratory for experimenting with the human personality, its reconstruction and development. According to research by Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book “Life on the screen: identity in the Age of Internet”, the personality of contemporary man is formed by interaction with the machine, transformed by its personal language. Inside virtual reality, identity is characterized through the concepts as “multiple”, “fragmentation”, “flexibility” and some others. Thus, the task of this work is to present visually some of the above concepts. Its main intention is to create a series of an artworks under the digital photography, 3D graphics, 3D printing and animation.

The purpose of design is to broaden the channels of sensation and communication to experience our realities more holistically, and to make us more receptive to the various sensual experiences. While we live in a world that has “virtual spaces” that are only based on sight and sound, we need to make sure that we do not lose “touch” with our realities. Synaesthesia teaches us that reality has no particular form, but does have content that can be experienced in many different ways. Multisensorial awareness has been lost from the consciousness of many people. Synaesthetes are consciously aware of their transmodal perceptions. My project is aimed to explore the possibilities of multisensorial perception in design – to give people the gift of synaesthesia. How does inner-multisensorial perception influence the outer shape? Your personal space is an expression of your identity. It is your personal interpretation of living. What do space and living environment mean for synesthetic people? Is the interaction of senses relevant for the perception of visual shapes? How do smell, taste, and sound influence form and design? As yet, research mostly has been two-dimensional. Synaesthetic people often paint their three-dimensional visions. But what can be learned about space while there is a difference between the written,the spoken and the three-dimensional representation of the word “table?” What happens in the kitchen, where the senses melt together? What is the sound of a pan like? Observed by several synaesthetic and non-synaesthetic volunteers, I explored the perception of frying, stories, associations, sounds, tastes, and feelings. The research resulted in a series of different customised pans with what I would call alienating and surreal features. The products’ use is not changed, only its common characteristic. The action of frying can be irritated by a slight change in the attributes of the product. Sit down and perceive your perception!

Exclusion Zone is an interactive installation that explores the concept of toxic subjectivity. Three lab tables with microscopes reside on a map representing radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion.

The map is printed on a 17-foot x 12-foot laminated rubber floor surface. Each table contains a tray of glass, specimen slides containing miniature narratives about the artist’s thyroid cancer, and radiation treatments to be read through the microscopes.

This project was realized by using a computer in three different ways. The first was an image generated totally using the computer. Second, by using a paint program … , I was able to modify the image to better fit the design criteria. Third, … to do 2-D mock-ups of packages and layouts.

The World of Plankton is an interactive virtual three-dimensional art and science world designed to viscerally engage the participant at the micro-scale of unseen phytoplankton and zooplankton in order to gain first-hand experience about the drama of underwater life and its potentials for environmental impact. One is given choices to envision what this aquatic world might look like if conditions were to change — coming face to face with an animated spiny water flea devouring beneficial zooplankton, or experiencing the unfolding events of a large algae bloom – all in a multidimensional world that enables a person to virtually snorkel through freshwater plankton. By using simulation technology to invert tiny plankton to human scale The World of Plankton experience connects “us” to “them” in formulating a sense of the freshwater world that is not an “it” that is “outside” us, but a vital part of us all.

Starting with a flyover of a simulated model of Lake George created from bathymetric data, we then splashdown into the littoral area entering interactive underwater scenes where one can explore, experience and learn. The world view is scalable to fish, zooplankton and phytoplankton sizes. Our specially designed and programmed “examine cam” enables one to learn about and even experience what it may be like to be plankton. This project arises from my on-going scholarly and artistic research in creating interactive 3D simulation artworks that enable one to experience the world from multiple perspectives and explore capacities for empathy. Source materials include original lab and fieldwork observations that were recorded jointly with our science team of biologists and freshwater ecologists as well as original data. The project was programmed in C# in Unity 3D with AI, behaviors, underwater lighting and physics. 3D models created and rigged in Maya. Original music, Evan Gonzalez.

Seven Sisters is a cross-cultural, photographically based piece dedicated to Quan Yin (she who hears the cries of the world), Goddess of compassion and a guiding spirit in my life. She is often found in my work as I continue to explore the connections between spirituality and creativity. In these seven transformations, I have merged various organic and spiritual elements across a template created by Chinese art students, creating mystical, multi-dimensional environments for the goddess, suggesting her many levels of existence and understanding. Like the great thangkas (deity paintings) of the Buddhist traditions, I hope these seven transformations, Seven Sisters, will awaken compassion in viewers’ hearts. Reverend Dr. Katherine O’Connell had this to say about my work: “The work of Kathy Beal is inspired in the true sense of the word. Her understanding of light and the magic that travels within its shafts and molecules is true celestial physics. This work is co-creative, groundbreaking, without boundaries, and multiplies exponentially in power and effect over time.”

The direct physical expression of drawing and painting is still the most pure form for conveying the subconscious or dream world. I started to animate my images because I wanted to affect the senses of the viewer more strongly with the combination of image, movement, and sound.

In this work, I am exploring symbols and landscapes in nature and linking these to the psychological hopes, fears, and desires that exist in every culture. My approach to 3D work is greatly influenced by Renaissance and French Romantic painting. Artists of these periods created magnificent oil paintings that alluded to the 3D world through light, perspective, the study of the physical world of nature, and a desire for movement (animation).

Working with 3D software has allowed me to collapse, reconstruct, and journey through a landscape of symbolic narrative. This is similar to painting, where symbolic narrative is not represented in a linear cause and effect mode. The images are seen, passed by, and arrived at. It is the thought process that creates a static work, yet it incorporates the additional sense of sound with image movement and metamorphosis.

The advent of digital technology has generated the “Renaissance” of animation internationally, and the information technology age greatly parallels what happened during the earlier Renaissance: the sense of discovery and perception of our world via new exciting media and science.

Indefinable Moods was created using 2D oil-painted sequences mapped onto multiple planes and 3D forms. These were then further animated using Alias|Wavefront Maya. Additional software included Adobe Photoshop, Composer, and Chalice. Computer hardware was donated by Intel. Facilities and software generously provided by the Division of Animation & Digital Arts, School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California. Musical sound FX composed and performed by Chris D. Halliwell. Soundtrack edited and mixed by Counterpoint Sound Sydney. Production Supervisor at USC: Mar Elepano.

Hettinga has long been interested in putting text and image together, from published photobooks to artist’s books. Hettinga states, “My love affair with the pixel is longstanding. 4 3 2 CRY brings together—satellite mapping, oil/gas mapping, digital photography, Wacom drawing, design, hand binding, and more to create the structural whole—an artist’s book.” 4 3 2 CRY mediates parallel narratives of personal and environmental loss, exposing the effects of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas upon families, land, air and water. It is a lament and a goodbye for the material/physical place that Hettinga dearly loved in Northern Colorado.

Media: Aluminum compliance sign riveted to cover; Arrestox cloth covered book boards; Cialux cloth covered spine; Archival ink on Mohawk Superfine, eggshell, 70 lb. text. Fonts: Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, and Arbitrary. Digital mapping, photography, scanning and drawing; Adobe Creative Cloud.

I am interested in the mergence of the narrative and scientific imaging. Art creates the connection, the relationship of how story finds itself in a larger mapped landscape, such as seen in the diptych, Dairy Farm 1980 and 2014. Dairy Farm 1980 and 2014 use Google Maps dating back 30 years prior to the time of a tragic death on a Colorado dairy farm in Weld County. Aesthetic considerations along with Google’s computerization of date and time-of-day take the viewers back to a 5:30am sunrise just before the death of a young dairyman. The second large print, 4×5 ft., looks at the same location with recent mapping showing the now defunct dairy farm with roofless sheds and dried manure piled into cocoon mounds. The mapping is essential to depicting place. The artist transforms the mapping into specific human meaning, recreating an event in time, and bending the map into right angles to create a shallow stage. In the 2014 artwork, 3D mapping creates abstract shapes strewn across the ground—ghosts of the great B&W Holstein cows. This visual/literary artwork, mapping merged with story, creates a place where signs and symbols of ordinary life contain and point to larger truths. Clearly the two: narrative art and scientific imaging are stronger together than alone.

In these sensuous images, I embrace the body with curiosity as nightmarish visions, physical recollections, and fantasies inform the perception of myself. In close-up, my body emerges as mysterious and alien, yet familiar and intimate. Horror and pleasure, the fruits of my imagination, incessantly merge and dissolve.

This series examines the possibilities and the uncomfortable qualities of female sexuality. The individual titles for the images emerged from names of cosmetic products such as lipstick and rouge, which publicly manifest our desire to be desired.

Embrasure is an architectural term for the recess of an opening in a door or a window and refers to this space in-between. Much like the orifices in the human body, these vulnerable spaces represent neither the inside nor the outside. They are both public and private, as they simultaneously reveal and conceal.

In these sensuous images, I embrace the body with curiosity as nightmarish visions, physical recollections, and fantasies inform the perception of myself. In close-up, my body emerges as mysterious and alien, yet familiar and intimate. Horror and pleasure, the fruits of my imagination, incessantly merge and dissolve.

This series examines the possibilities and the uncomfortable qualities of female sexuality. The individual titles for the images emerged from names of cosmetic products such as lipstick and rouge, which publicly manifest our desire to be desired.

Embrasure is an architectural term for the recess of an opening in a door or a window and refers to this space in-between. Much like the orifices in the human body, these vulnerable spaces represent neither the inside nor the outside. They are both public and private, as they simultaneously reveal and conceal.

Working in several different media with a number of collaborators around the world, New York-based Swiss artist Katja Loher explores language and visual form together in an assemblage of technologies and dramatic sculptures. She creates a powerful visual platform that pulls viewers out of their current perspectives and reveals a broader view of existential questions and present concerns in the world.
Miniverse2 presents a bird’s-eye view of people in minimalist uniforms performing a structured choreography. The ball displays scenes in which workers become part of a synchronized movement as they perform tasks that must be done 24 hours a day to keep nature balanced and to allow humanity to survive on our planet in our current numbers. For example, one group of workers attends the work of bees to ensure that they pollinate the flowers.

The collaboration between Alessandro Capozzo and Katja Noppes is based on the possibilities of merging different experiences in different media: coding as an expressive medium and painting as an analogue process. Exuvia is the first result of their method.

The installation suggests a narrative flow, starting from a meta­morphosis – referring to an empty chrysalis (exuvia) as the printed memory of an absent object – until the spreading wings climax: vital, delicate and ephemeral as software could be. Interaction between an analogue medium and a digital one forms a synthesis of the properties of these two elements, transcending mere software objectification and material dynamization.

In Last Seen… I set out to document a period of my life for which no record exists. Although the work utilizes my personal history, it is not about nostalgia or an effort to retrieve memories. Rather, it explores the elusive nature of memory itself.

The portraits are composites, created with the computer program, Faces, developed for forensic sketch artists. They were pieced together feature by feature, much as are the faces of criminal suspects from eyewitness accounts. The faithfulness of each portrait to its subject varies according to the limits of the program, the clarity of each particular memory, and the creative, often uncanny, ability of memory itself to play with “truth.”

The photographs are the result of my recent revisitation of sites associated with the people depicted in the portraits: homes where we lived, or places we frequented. Again, due to changes in the physical landscape over time or the haziness of memory, some photos are visually “truer” than others: I found some buildings essentially unchanged, while some photographs use stand-ins in order to more accurately reflect my remembered “reality.” In others, I substituted what currently stands on the spot, although it might bear only a slight resemblance to its counterpart in the past.

Thus, Last Seen… forays into territory where the present and the past impinge on one another, creating a curious mixture of the factual and fictive, the real and surreal, the realm of the memory.

An original photograph is an ordinary everyday scene. With a
computer, I created a surreal world based on an original. Using this new imaging technique and digital technology, I want to widen the possibility of photographic expression.

Most of the built structures that populate our contemporary urban landscapes are concatenations of pre-fab parts and standardized dimensions. This film plays with different skeletal arrangements of those parts to create images reflective of contemporary building blocks.

Kazuma Morino has received many awards in international competitions including SIGGRAPH and Ars Electronica. In his Build, exhibited in the SIGGRAPH 2003 Art Gallery, many of the built structures in our contemporary urban landscapes are concatenations of pre-fab parts and standardized dimensions.

This film plays with different skeletal arrangements of those parts to create images reflective of contemporary building blocks. In Runners, figures (dolls) made up of geometric shapes rush around, intertwining with other objects. The work expresses the beauty of interacting objects over the course of time.

Currently, he is collaborating with musicians such as Ken Ishii and Yosui Inoue on their music videos. He has also played an important role as a producer of the first floor of the SETO NIPPON KAN pavilion in EXPO 2005 in Aichi, Japan. For SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, he is a contributing artist for the Art Gallery and Emerging Technologies trailer.

This film takes the bold yet graceful line of classical Japanese patterns and puts it into motion. Much of the rapid progression of intersections, warps, and rotations was left to a modeling program to decide; intentional human controls were purposefully kept to a minimum. The pseudocoincidences generated by the software create a serendipitous aesthetic similar to the cracks etched in Japanese ceramics by the firing kiln.

Ijiros are robot brothers which express emotions reacting a user’s actions. They are not able to move itself because they don’t have any actuators. They, however, express emotions with face in the display and voices from the speaker like a baby. They have been made base on the concept to make the friendship with users. Today, we can see many robots in not only industrial factory but also our various dailylife situation. These are getting more quick and correct responses back recently. However robots which support us in daily-life has been required to make a natural relationship with us, because they need to work with us directly such as elderly care situation. To make a natural relationship, it is important for us to be able to recognize robots as artifacts which have mind. Therefore, we tried to realize ”emotional communication” between robots and human beings to think and share their feeling each other beyond simple responses of commands and signals.

As you can see, emotional communication between man and machines is the key of these works. In our case, we refers to ”vitality affect” in infant developmental psychology. Such as a hugged baby communicates his/her mother laughing or irritating, Ijiros also express emotions with faces and voices reacting from strength, kind, frequency, direction of user’s actions.

Thus, Ijiros have been developed to entertain people to keep it like physical pets. We hope you all enjoy touching them.

This is a virtual space system to chat. Participants can talk each other anytime, anywhere as particles. Yet, after disconnecting, particles leave and move independently based on their behavior. Finally, they will make kaleidoscope images like “clustering fireflies.” This is a project to explore “beauty.”

Summary

By combining interaction and visual expression with food, this work supplies changing image mapping content as users eat, expressing nature and the seasons which support Japanese cuisine, as well as the traditions which influence it.

Abstract

Japanese food was registered as a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage in 2013, praised as an embodiment of Japanese people’s respect for nature and social customs. However, actual meals are limited to ingredients, tableware, and plating information, so thoroughly understanding the distinctive features of Japanese food is difficult. To express Japanese food culture, this piece combines interaction with video expression and actual meals. As users eat, a projector is used for mapping images to the table to depict changes in the natural environment and the garnishes of the four seasons, creating a system that builds understanding of tradition. Garnishes refers to vegetables and flowers used as an accent to improve the appearance of dishes. The Japanese foods presented are one soup and three side dishes. One soup and three side dishes are said to be the foundation of Japanese cuisine, with meals often consisting of a staple food, soup, two side dishes, and a main dish. Their arrangement on the table is also predetermined. A few users were allowed to try out the system, and the concept of Japanese cuisine being supported by nature and seasons and affected by traditions was expressed to these users. In addition, by seeing the act of eating in a new light, users were able to reconfirm aspects of Japanese cuisine such as gratitude for the blessings of the natural world. At the art gallery, models are used to perform demonstrations.

Small, subtle differences modify interpretation. These works are an intuitive attempt to capture the graceful gestures of body language. Refining and reducing the primary elements of form communicates the complexity of body language with elegant simplicity. Beginning with original sketches, I explore the interplay of carbon-paper drawings with found images and textures. This creates a synthesis of disparate elements in unique collages that, in the process of evolution, marry the virtual and the real worlds. Their final forms comprise a series of giclee prints, using archival inks and museum-quality paper.

Small, subtle differences modify interpretation. These works are an intuitive attempt to capture the graceful gestures of body language. Refining and reducing the primary elements of form communicates the complexity of body language with elegant simplicity. Beginning with original sketches, I explore the interplay of carbon-paper drawings with found images and textures. This creates a synthesis of disparate elements in unique collages that, in the process of evolution, marry the virtual and the real worlds. Their final forms comprise a series of giclee prints, using archival inks and museum-quality paper.

In my creative process, I begin with a numerical formula as a universal language and then develop it into various media. As a result, I spend a great deal of time constituting the system. However, at this stage, there is hardly anything visual apart from small graphs.

I can only imagine the visual result, and I have to depend on my own sense of the fluctuating structure when I constitute the system. Once I get to the stage of making a collection of graphs into an artwork, I try to take such factors as human physicality and memory into the work, which makes it more than just a visual image.

I believe that art is not intended to be a gateway to understanding the artist’s system, but a method of activating the viewers’ psychological-motion systems (memory and physical sensation). These should be triggered by looking at the artwork. When viewers can realise their own feelings and memories, the artwork is truly completed. The systems activated in the mind of the viewer can be different, depending on the medium of the work. Even if the artist has created only one system in the computer, the image generated has to be properly selected.

This series is supported by the Aihara Complexity Modeling Project at JST ERATO, and the artist is a member of the project.

Diorama Table explores a new way to merge interactive images into daily life. The invisible technology in the diorama adds humor, makes us comfortable, and stimulates the imagination of those who experience the piece. Interaction with the Diorama Table occurs in public, so it helps bridge gaps between people of different generations and encourages them to have fun together. It merges fine art into daily life and suggests a formerly unexplored method of interaction that ordinary people can enjoy. When participants place common objects such as cups, ropes, or candies on the table, paintings of houses, trees, or trains appear. These objects can be arranged as a town, which can grow and change as objects are added or removed. In this unique experience, physical objects and fantastic images interact.

The possibilities for computer-generated sculpture are obviously immense. As the computer gradually takes its place in the tool chest of the contemporary practitioner, we are inevitably seeing changes that challenge our traditional views and preconceptions about how sculpture is conceived, produced, and experienced. The computer and related technologies, for many, including myself, have become much more than simply a new set of design and production tools. They have presented us with completely new media to explore, and no doubt there will be many more to follow. If there is one single influence that will separate the art of this millennium from that of the past and constitute a paradigm shift of aesthetic and conceptual advancement, of equivalent cultural significance to the first “hand paintings” made in the caves of Paleolithic man, then my calculated guess is that it’s going to be, if it is not already, computer technology.

My work embraces a wide range of digital activities, both virtual and actual. My main concern is with “real virtuality” or “cyber-realism” rather than “virtual reality,” reversing the order between the cyber and the real. These works present sculptural forms and images that could not be realized except in the digital and cyber environments, thus producing a new order of object, which is made physically manifest in 2D and 3D media. Using the computer in a direct way as the medium, my work is conceived while interacting with the cyber-modeling environment. The work includes 2D and 3D printing techniques.

GEO_01 was designed in 3ds max and output via a 3D Systems thermojet wax printer and then cast into bronze using the lost-wax technique. The burnished finish produces surface reflections that give the form a certain ambiguity, or elusive physical properties, that reflect and deform the environment it is placed in.

The possibilities for computer-generated sculpture are obviously immense. As the computer gradually takes its place in the tool chest of the contemporary practitioner, we are inevitably seeing changes that challenge our traditional views and preconceptions about how sculpture is conceived, produced, and experienced. The computer and related technologies, for many, including myself, have become much more than simply a new set of design and production tools. They have presented us with completely new media to explore, and no doubt there will be many more to follow. If there is one single influence that will separate the art of this millennium from that of the past, and constitute a paradigm shift of aesthetic and conceptual advancement, of equivalent cultural significance to the first “hand paintings” made in the caves of Paleolithic man, then my calculated guess is that it’s going to be, if it is not already, computer technology.

My sculptures are born out of the direct, spontaneous, manipulation of geometry in a multi‐dimensional cyber space where material, as we understand it, does not exist. In the cyber environment 3D entities may be encouraged to behave in ways not achievable through physical means. These virtual sculptures, made manifest through 3D printing, act as a vehicle which transports us to this strange and wonderful “other place” — to an environment where physics, materiality and gravity, play no part, freeing form from material constraints, and transcending our given understanding of how objects behave in the world, presenting us with truly new aesthetic experiences.

My work embraces a wide range of digital activities, both virtual and actual. My main concern is with “real virtuality” or “cyberealism” rather than “virtual reality,” reversing the order between the cyber and the real. These works present sculptural forms and images that could otherwise not be realized except in the digital and cyber environments, thus producing a new order of object, which is made physically manifest in 20 and 30 media.2

The computer is a necessary and essential aspect of my working process and is indispensable to the conception, content, and quality of the sculpture.

The sculpture is conceived “directly” whilst interacting with generic primitives in the cyber environment. Deformations are applied to them, which affect the whole of the object and its constituent parts in such a way as to develop specific relationships between the interrelated elements. The new forms that are generated in the cyber medium could not be conceived of, or produced, by other means.

The surface of the sculpture results from the articulation of complex internal geometries, which in turn generate emergent elements that emanate from the interior of the object, making visible, through form, the dynamics of the system that generated them. The extremities of the sculpture are established as a direct result of the internal workings of the mechanisms that produce them and are completely dependent upon the cyber environment where they were created.

This unites and fuses the form of the sculpture. The medium becomes subject and is in fact inseparable from it. The subtle qualities and relationships between the elements within the sculpture could not be achieved with conventional materials and techniques. The result is a new order of object.

Participants use a computer interface to interact with Litt’l havoc by physically moving the shopping cart that contains it. Pushing the shopping cart propels the semi-nude artist as he pushes his own cart through absurd environments of old postcards, NASA space imagery, and historic street scenes of Florida.

Interacting with Litt’l havoc, participants symbolically become the artist, transgressing cheesy landscapes of abandoned and fragmented memory. Constructed of found, borrowed, abandoned, and confiscated components, Litt’l havoc is a pathetic new breed of hack/junk/found interactive art.

“VR Keith 2.0” explores the interface between interaction, performance, and avatars. Using comedy, irony, and cheesy quotes from cultural theorists, etc., “VR Keith” interacts with the gallery audience in a direct fashion. “VR Keith” argues how much better virtual and robotic humans are than real ones.

Los Hermanos de Destruccion Numero 6, from the series collectively titled Los Hermanos de Destruccion, provides a pop-art take on the mythology of nature, using media to explore ancient themes of humanity’s relationship to nature’s destructive forces.

Who is this mysterious figure, this menacing Paul Bunyan? She is influenced by Pecos Bill and other American folklore characters, spaghetti Western movies, and Jose Guadalupe Posada’s Day of the Dead cartoons, as well as recent news reports of various natural disasters.

These giants suggest a 19th century version of the mythical Titans, unleashed in a 20th century apocalypse such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The giants of the old myths had to fall to create our present universe, but they’ve always been with us. The earth was created from the body of Ymir in Norse mythology. Adam Kadmon of the Kabbala supposedly contained heaven and earth within his limbs. Prometheus was martyred by Zeus for giving Man fire. There are all these powerful earth forces. I’m sure every culture has some variation on the Titan story. This is my personal variation.

All the artwork was created digitally, combining scanned images, images captured with a digital camera, and objects created with 3D modeling software.

This interactive digital installation, in which human-machine interaction is aligned to ‘Agency’, ‘Situation’ and ‘Embodiment’. The control of the virtual world via body-joint movement, and tracked position, velocity, gestures are directly linked to archi-tectonic forms, distortion of space and perspective. It challenges unconscious associations with familiar, embodied habitual experiences of Cartesian-space. The expected reading and interpretation of body-movement, is translated into a reflexive aesthetic language that causes the participant to reanalyze their position and gesture in space.

This installation explores the relationship between maps and technology. Maps are a product of civilization; their changing boundaries trace the lines of history and of the future. What is the role of information technology in bringing us closer together while defending and extending these conceptual lines?

To emphasize the ethereal nature of the lines drawn and redrawn through history, we use on instrument of modern technology—the industrial robot arm—drawing on a translucent paper. The combination of computer technology with traditional media creates a contrast of structural elements. In the background of this time­-processed theater, computer-manipulated images of birds and everyday objects are projected to represent the futility of lines drawn over nature. Robot courtesy of ABB Robotics.

“Why there is any aesthetic difference between a deceptive forgery and an original work challenges a basic premise on which the very functions of collector, museum, and art historian depend.”

Nelson Goodman,
Art and Authenticity,
Languages of Art, 1976

As Goodman notes, authenti­city is central to the experience of art and intimately linked to monetary value. One example is the ongoing controversy over attribution of Rembrandt’s paintings. In turn, our denota­tions for monetary value, ban­knotes, are linked to the issue of authenticity through the his­tory of the counterfeit.

New technologies of reproduc­tion introduce new questions about authenticity. For exam­ple, photography’s mechanical reproduction of images illumi­nated the subtle distinction between the reproduced image of the painting and the authentic, “original” painting that is unique in time and space (cf.Walter Benjamin, 1936). And the technology of xerography allows even the unskilled to participate in the counterfeiting of money.

As the technologies of repro­duction evolve into the digital realm, the distinction between authentic and replica effect­ively vanishes (cf. William Mitchell, 1992). Yet human viewers and museum curators still crave evidence of authen­ticity in the corporeal experi­ence of original artifacts. The newest technology of reproduction, the Internet, combines digital representation with almost instantaneous remote access and raises new ques­tions about authenticity.

Consider the dozens of Internet-accessible remote cameras that, upon request, generate a live image of a free­way, fishtank, or toilet stall. These “installations” go beyond prestored digital images because the viewer, by clicking on the WWW interface, com­mands the taking of a live snapshot co-located with something that is unique in time and space. Although this addresses the issue of authen­ticity, since the original object is required for each snapshot, it creates a new question: is the installation authentic (live) or is it merely a prestored frame from a videotape? Indeed, sev­eral purportedly “live” cameras on the Internet have been exposed as forgeries.

WWW installations that allow the user to aim a tele-robotic camera and thereby direct the gaze are harder to counterfeit but not impossible: the effect can be achieved by indexing into an array of prestored images. Tele-robotic WWW installations that go one step further and allow users to view and manipulate a remote envi­ronment provoke users to apply basic corporeal instincts about physics and materials to validate the authenticity of the remote apparatus. Still, users can be fooled: the Rome Air Force Base offers a forgery that continues to masquerade as a tele-robotic site.

Thus the process of deciding authenticity of a tele-robotic WWW site engages the corpo­real instincts of the human viewer. We choose to focus on the issue of authenticity at sev­eral levels by presenting the WWW installation titled: Legal Tender.

Legal Tender incorporates tele­-robotic technology to allow viewers to remotely inspect two banknotes, labeled A and B (cf. the Turing Test). One is a genuine US $20 bill. The other is artificial: a counterfeit. Users can position the camera remotely to examine each bank note in detail and can perform active experiments. Afterward, observations can be posted to a public online log.

In addition to the question of which note is genuine, the installation raises doubts as to whether or not the remote images are in fact live or pre­stored. Is the installation itself authentic? And if it is, since the physical presence of a counter­feit banknote is illegal, the installation may not be legal. Indeed, the authenticity of the installation hinges on the inau­thenticity of its contents.

References
J.S.G. Boggs
Turing Test
Nelson Goodman’s Text
Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt at the Met
The Rembrandt Project
U.S Air Force Rome Lab
“Snowball” Camera
Paper Money Collections online
History of Money
Other Related Sites

“In all the arts there is a physical component.” – Paul Valery, Aesthetics, 1934

“Reach out and touch someone.” -American Telegraph and Telephone, 1985

The physical component has been almost totally neglected in “computer art,”which uses lasers, pen-plotters, and photo-offset techniques to produce purely 2D images lacking tactile quality. Cut off from the body, there is no trace of the “hand of the artist.” Hence, it is especially difficult to assess the value of an art object produced in this manner.

There is a parallel void in digital communications: we can transmit and receive voice and coarse images, but we cannot reach out and touch anything. The current interest in virtual reality suggests that we can overcome this limitation through new technology. As these technical barriers begin to fall, more subtle barriers will emerge. The Data Mitt suggests one such barrier.

The Data Mitt offers an elementary means of telecommunication. The user is invited to place their hand into an electromechanical device containing a binary sensor (a squeeze ball that allows the user to transmit one bit of information), and a binary actuator (a primitive direct-drive motor that allows the user to receive one bit of information). This information is transmitted via digital modem to a symmetric arrangement at the other end of an ordinary telephone line. In this way we introduce a physical component into digital telecommunication: two users can hold hands at a distance.

The Data Mitt is a low-bandwidth version of the Data Glove. The Data Glove has become a virtual reality icon, which strives to incorporate the user’s body into the computer interface.With precursors like the Hawaiian Shirt and the Exoskeleton from the early days of tele-operation, to the Air Force’s Heads Up display from the 1980s, this effort has a long history. Getting the computer to provide realistic feedback in the form of pressure or tactile stimuli has proven elusive, partly due to the technical problem of time delays. Yet as technology closes the gap, we must ask, “What is at stake when a person wears such a device?”

Historically, devices that require the insertion of the body have not, for the most part, been used to provide pleasure. Fictional examples include the apparatus in Kafka’s The Penal Colony and the Gorn Jabbar in Frank Herbert’s Dune. In Rome’s Piazza Bocca della Verita, there is a church built by Pope Hadrian in 772 A.D. In an alcove, the stone mask of a local, pagan river god is affixed to the mouth of a water conduit. According to legend, if a person lies and inserts his hand into the Bocca della Verita, the Bocca will bite off the offender’s hand.

This legend suggests Freud’s Vagina Dentata. Rather than unpack nuances of this reference, we borrowed the Latin term for mask, persona, for our subtitle. In the contemporary world of computer-based art and telecommunications, this may be the last refuge for the hand of the artist.

Much of my childhood was spent with my grandparents in the New Mexico and southern Colorado region, so much of my work has been about the struggles and difficulties encountered by Latino and Native peoples. Generally speaking, I create mixed-media installations mimicking the ethnographic museums. Unlike a traditional museum of natural history, my installations attempt to offer positive and complex representations of my culture and beliefs.

Bone-Gross Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River is a literary trope of the frontier novel of the late 19th century. These novels often depicted Native and Latino inhabitants as ridiculous personages encountered on an otherwise naturalized conquest of the West. Bone-Grass Boy is their nemesis.

Begun as a series of stories told to me by my grandfather, Bone-­Grass Boy has evolved from family genealogy, regional his­tories, and some historical material related to the Native American berdache tradition. The berdache (or transgen­dered spirit) dates back to pre­conquest America (North and South) and remains a prob­lematized position within the Latino/Chicano culture.

The Bone-Grass story is set dur­ing the Mexican/American war (1846-48), a period that saw bitter struggles between cul­tures. American industrialism caused the economic collapse of the pre-industrial Southwest. Berdachism, greatly diminished under Spanish Christianity, fared even poorer under U. S. assimilationism. As a project, Bone-Grass Boy parallels the effects of industrialism with the effects of digital technology today, raising questions about cultural preservation and rein­vention, while strategizing a position within technologies of the future.

My work frequently makes use of elaborate tableaux com­prised of painted backdrops, props, and realistic cast figures, and are presented along with digital photographs depicting the characters. The digital pho­tographs, printed as c-prints, also incorporate painted back­drops, props, and historical images.

As for the characters, there is Ramoncita, the Native/Latina berdache (based on a true story) who is forced to kill the rancher to whom she has been sold, and Nepomacento, the New Mexican soldier who fights for Mexico, only to have to sneak back to his homeland, now America.

I play all of the characters in each image, disguised, digitally modified, cast, carved, or paint­ed. The strategy draws in part on Donna Haraway’s essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in which she heralds the coming of a hybrid of organism and machine. For Haraway, the cyborg represents a kind of idealized postgender positionality, but Bone-Grass Boy, with its inherent racial and cultural hybridization, adds a level of complexity to Haraway’s model. This, combined with the trappings of an ethnographic museum, allows us to consider Homi K. Bhabhas’ three-part strategy for the empowerment of the colonial subject, which demands a recoding of aborigi­nal or native cultures and begins to suggest something beyond Haraway’s utopic cyborg vision.

It should be noted that while the work references a specific history, my goal is not simply to find these forgotten histo­ries and present them. It is to make their absence the subject, so that we can begin to look at some of the real issues in the debates surrounding the notion of cultural and racial representation. Like any good storyteller, Bone-Grass Boy raises difficult questions, and if we consider Judith Butler’s notion of a “pure dialectic,” then the tale begins to suggest the recuperative potential of technology, not simply by dis­rupting the status quo (the dark side of Modernism) but by strategically challenging how (and by whom) technology will be used in the future.

“The Museum of Broken Identities” takes Goya’s “Black Paintings” as a point of departure. The idea is to draw attention to the fact that artists have always been engaged within a social discourse, and it is only with the emergence of a global society that the artist’s role becomes increasingly unstable. This exhibition seeks to suggest a new potential for artists located within digital technology.

The themes of the work are taken from specific paintings by Goya and reference his skepticism of the social and political milieu of his day. Using digital technologies, this fictitious museum directly addresses issues concerning the artist’s role in society, as well as in new technologies, and as such, enters into contemporary debates surrounding the historical instability of identity per se – an instability accentuated by the presumed “reality” of digital manipulation. Other manipulations included transformations of race and gender and occur as themes only through specific historical paintings. A fundamental subversion of this project can be found in the fact that I play all of the characters in all of the pieces. While they are not necessarily obvious at first glance, the viewer will become increasingly aware of the manipulations, which, once discovered, offer easy access into the playfulness and the historical implications of the imagery itself.

All of the images are taken with a 4×5 large-format camera; scanned into the computer; combined with other photographic elements, digital scans, and digital images; output as 4×5 color negatives; and printed as C-prints.

“The Museum of Broken Identities” takes Goya’s “Black Paintings” as a point of departure. The idea is to draw attention to the fact that artists have always been engaged within a social discourse, and it is only with the emergence of a global society that the artist’s role becomes increasingly unstable. This exhibition seeks to suggest a new potential for artists located within digital technology.

The themes of the work are taken from specific paintings by Goya and reference his skepticism of the social and political milieu of his day. Using digital technologies, this fictitious museum directly addresses issues concerning the artist’s role in society, as well as in new technologies, and as such, enters into contemporary debates surrounding the historical instability of identity per se – an instability accentuated by the presumed “reality” of digital manipulation. Other manipulations included transformations of race and gender and occur as themes only through specific historical paintings. A fundamental subversion of this project can be found in the fact that I play all of the characters in all of the pieces. While they are not necessarily obvious at first glance, the viewer will become increasingly aware of the manipulations, which, once discovered, offer easy access into the playfulness and the historical implications of the imagery itself.

All of the images are taken with a 4×5 large-format camera; scanned into the computer; combined with other photographic elements, digital scans, and digital images; output as 4×5 color negatives; and printed as C-prints.

In 1978, I began to work with computers with David Foster, then head of the University of Oregon Art department. In 1980, Larry Cuba expanded my introduction to the new technology with his two-week workshop in Eugene. Gene Bressler and I organized and directed the 1st Pacific NW Computer Graphics Conference, and we were off and running.

My animation and ceramics background helped me understand the process nature of the computer. Terry Beyer and I made Chips in Space in 1984, and since then computers have been a solid part of our fine arts program at the University of Oregon.

The challenge for me has always been to explore ideas and concepts that can best be presented or explored through interactive computer graphics. I am working internationally on a number of multimedia projects and hope to make a contribution in this area. One of the products I helped developed is ALPHAPLANET, which is on sale in Japan.

In 1978, I began to work with computers with David Foster, then head of the University of Oregon Art department. In 1980, Larry Cuba expanded my introduction to the new technology with his two-week workshop in Eugene. Gene Bressler and I organized and directed the 1st Pacific NW Computer Graphics Conference, and we were off and running.

My animation and ceramics background helped me understand the process nature of the computer. Terry Beyer and I made Chips in Space in 1984, and since then computers have been a solid part of our fine arts program at the University of Oregon.

The challenge for me has always been to explore ideas and concepts that can best be presented or explored through interactive computer graphics. I am working internationally on a number of multimedia projects and hope to make a contribution in this area. One of the products I helped developed is ALPHAPLANET, which is on sale in Japan.

The artists’response to the ongoing nuclear calamity. The nuclear accident is still contaminating the ocean and the soil. Online photographs from the international press related to Fukushima accident and the unfolding events to contain the radiation are accompanied by a soundtrack. But this is not ordinary soundtrack. The music is actually a compilation of musical sequences produced by the images themselves. The original art work is an artist programmed software. It downloads internet images from the international press sites and converts RGB (Red, Green and Blue) value of a photograph to a music. The program reads RGB value of pixels from the top left to the bottom right of an image. One pixel makes a harmony of three note of RGB value, and the length of note is determined by brightness of the pixel. RGB value 120 or 121 is the middle C, and RGB value 122 or 123 is added a half steps of the scale that is C#. Pure black that is R=0, G=0, B=0 is no sounds. It is not an impression of an image of a musical variation, and not an arbitrary process of artist’s feeling. It composes a score from an image directly.

Inspired by the random, yet structured beauty and minute details of nature (flora, fauna, and mineral), it is common for my images to include many objects which are similar in form, yet always unique in their structural and surface details. Contrasts also are an important part of my work. For example, organic forms are often implemented using inorganic materials or the rigid structure of a grid may be contrasted with chaotic elements.

In “2000.12a” and “2000.12b,” inversions are used to create much of the contrast. These inversions go well beyond the obvious use of color within each image and between the pair of images. The pointed objects come out of alternate sets of holes and point in opposite directions. Also, the length of the objects is inverted – where the objects are long in one image, they are short in the other.

The iridescence of a beetle; the twisting surfaces of a wilting leaf; the spiral forms and sutures of a fossilized mollusk shell; fissures growing in drying mud; the arches, loops, and whorls of a fingerprint – all are examples of the natural forms and patterns that inspire my images. I am intrigued with combining ideas from a number of sources and the contrast and ambiguity arising from those combinations.

Often include many objects in my images – all similar in form, yet each unique in its details. Those details of color and texture mimic the level of physical detail fund m the natural world and create an illusion of reality even while the viewer is confronted with the practical knowledge that the objects illustrated do not exist.

Recently met a scientist who is investigating the micro-structures formed by controlled sintering of ceramic powders. Sintering involves heating, but not melting, of materials to form a coherent mass. Electron micrographs of his research served as the initial inspiration for a series that incorporates numerous small plates, either entirely representing a surface or coating portions of a surface, while at the same time conforming to the contours of the surface.

The major form in 2002.7 is based on an idealized mathematical knot. The gold forms were constructed using a custom tool that builds the forms, or plates, directly on a given surface. This image was completed during a working-artist residency at SIGGRAPH 2002.