Artworks Data Table

Inner Mind Architecture is a space live performance that uses video, multilayered structured screens, light, haze, sound-fields in the architecture and wind machine. This virtual architecture Performance was made and presented in St. Gertrud Church in Cologne December 2013 Version 1.0 (built by architect Gottfreid Böhm in 1965). (Update Version2.0 Arsenale Venezia Italy)

I created the new virtual space in architecture that uses six elements. Inner mind architecture is a virtual architecture with time axis and it is an amplifier of mind using six elements in the Church. My artistic-concept is the expanded generative architecture.

Voice is simply about the reflexive nature of language seen through echo and reverberation. Computer-generated surface patterns are interspersed with photographs and a sound-wave form. These visual interpretations of experience are augmented by an audio element that plays with details of sound and silence as well as movement. In a sense, the sound is meant to give a longer duration to the reading of the image. Conversely, the sound is divided by silences, creating a tension to the duration. In Voice, I have aimed to explore some of the ideas expressed by psychologist Paul Fitts in the following quote, where he points out the different temporalities of sight and hearing: Each sense modality has certain inherent advantages and disadvantages for the detection and analysis of different kinds of information. Audition is more nearly a continuous sense than vision; vision is basically selective and intermittent. As a consequence, audition is well adapted for the detection of warning stimuli that may arise at any moment from one of a variety of sources, whereas vision is well suited to the selection of and concentration on particular stimuli to the exclusion of others. Paul Fitts, Engineering Psychology and Equipment Design, in Handbook of Experimental Psychology, New York and London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 19512004

With technology and the web playing such a key role in the function of human society, how might this affect humans as a species? Far into the future, with the help of advanced technology, will people evolve or transcend into amorphous beings that travel and communicate through electrical lines and electronic devices? What will happen to the earth when we become so attached to technology that we abandon the environment that allows us to exist?

This image was created using a combination of 3D Modeling, Digital Photography, and Digital Imaging/Painting. Slit-scanning was a method that was used for creating the wavering aesthetic in the environment. Slit-Scanning is a photography technique in which images are captured by a scanning device. This method was extremely important in conveying the idea that this environment is being directly impacted by technology and these futuristic beings.

This world I created has objects from the past that no longer are used in this futuristic world and are simply left for the radiated plants to grow over. While the beings are somewhat trapped in technology, plants are attempting to take over although their genetic code has been altered drastically by the state of the environment. This image is a warning that we must come to reality before it is too late for us and our environment.

Kolam is a traditional Indian art form, executed by women, in which drawings are made at the entrances of the home. Known as Kolam in the south and Rangoli in the north, the drawings can be associated with the beginning of a celebration, an honor to a deity or other religious event, or simply to commemorate the beginning of a new day.

Kolams are symmetric geometric patterns. Drawing them implies following precise procedures. Dots (pulli) are drawn first, and then straight lines or continuous curves (neli) are drawn around the dots to make the desired patterns. Different designs could be drawn with the same set of dots.

The tradition and craft for drawing these algorithmic patterns is passed from mothers to daughters and has been for centuries. In South India, Kolams are created with rice flour. Colored powder is used in North India to draw Rangoli. Beyond being a way for women to display their drawing skills, this daily ritual is a representation of the women’s agency and gender role in Indian society, in addition to being a means for personal expression.

Through these ephemeral yet cyclical drawings, it is the women who invite and “communicate” with the outside world and the deities. Kolams, in essence, are a sort of painted prayer. Many women dedicate their Kolams to Lakshmi, the pan-Indian goddess of prosperity, fertility, and protection of the home. These drawings are also signs of invitation to the women’s homes and symbols to prevent evil spirits from entering. Besides functioning as decoration, Kolams also serve as food source for ants and other insects thus inculcating a habit of caring for other lives.

The month of Margazhi (15 December – 15 January) is considered special for those interested in the art of Kolams. Early in the morning during Margazhi, the ground in front of the houses is cleaned and neighbors compete to draw the largest and most beautiful Kolam. It is common in India to hold these competitions throughout the year.

Kolam designs have found their way into contemporary art and design forms such as clothing and jewelry, and they continue to be an integral part of the Indian culture. The generative aspect of Kolam creation has been researched by architects, computer scientists, and others.

The body has a four dimensional structure in space and in time. That is why it can act as an instrument. We imagine an installation in which movements and postures of the hand are translated into sound. However, we thought that it wouldn’t be enough for the performer to merely hear the sound of his body: we wanted to provide him a visual trace of his hand in space. The performer can move freely inside the body-made composition but he can also interact with past traces of himself to induce new effects on current sounds. There are three main virtual instruments a performer can create: a light trail that loops automatically; strings the performer will draw and pluck; drums constituted by pairs of balls that collide.

InterFace is a work that seeks to examine the role of percep­tion on three primary fronts (Art, Education, and Science) by establishing metaphorical environments or settings, each of which is representative of one of these three categories.

The Art environment consists of a large rock with a face carved into its front, which swings pendulum-like from a crude wooden structure in the middle of a dark cavern. The Education environment is comprised of a blackboard that sits next to a paddle on a shelf in a small, paneled room. On the surface of the board is a chalk drawing of a face, which mutely address­es the viewer. The Science environment is portrayed by a dated video unit with a flicker­ing face on its screen. A spinning rotor causes the entire monitor to wobble slightly.

Each environment represents one of the three major phases in human communications: carving, writing, and electron­ics. The nature of the settings also provides a tongue-in-­cheek commentary on the less flattering aspects of these fields: the Art environment is portrayed as primitive and isolated. The Education envi­ronment appears restrictive and ominous. And the Science environment is “buggy” and obsolete.

Each of the three settings in InterFace is accompanied by a series of images and dates that bear significance in the history of perception for that particular field. The images and textual passages are interspersed among footage of the environments to create a cyclical montage with no clear beginning or ending, only a continual evolution and retrenchment. Through the medium of computer graphics, InterFace seeks to integrate the very fields it portrays with its own combination of Art, Education, and Science.

An abstract digital painting is modulated with volumetric noise functions and mapped to various parameters such as density, color, and texture. The painting is the seed for creation of complex 3D realities.

The artist creates abstract worlds of sufficient complexity and realism that viewers perceive representational content where none exists, like seeing faces and objects in clouds. The process of experimentation; discovery; and choosing views, color, and value relationships is based on personal aesthetic, which has no conceptual basis. The image was created using Houdini 3D animation and Amazon paint software.

My work is an exploration of the sublime beauty of infinity, complexity, perception, and consciousness. I have a passionate fascination for the powerful visions that inspire this exploration.

By creating imagery that exists at the threshold of recognition, I seek to invoke the unconscious imagination of the viewer and inspire a personal experience of awe and mystery. I endeavor to provide a purely aesthetic escape from worldly meanings, messages, and agendas. The content and meaning of my art are derived from each viewer’s own psyche. This perceptual phenomenon causes a shift in consciousness that can quiet our normal mental chatter and still the mind.

I’ve developed and refined my process over many years. Digital paintings and 3D animations are transformed using 3D math functions to create evolving abstract dimensional objects and spaces of vast complexity. From within these spaces, I compose high-resolution images and animations. My process integrates intuition and intellect, deliberate design and random happen-stance, realism and abstraction, humanity and technology, painting and math, science and mysticism.

Abstract Dimensionalism describes the inspiration, the style, and the process.

My work is an exploration of the sublime beauty of infinity, complexity, perception, and consciousness. I have a passionate fascination for the powerful visions that inspire this exploration.

By creating imagery that exists at the threshold of recognition, I seek to invoke the unconscious imagination of the viewer and inspire a personal experience of awe and mystery. I endeavor to provide a purely aesthetic escape from worldly meanings, messages, and agendas. The content and meaning of my art are derived from each viewer’s own psyche. This perceptual phenomenon causes a shift in consciousness that can quiet our normal mental chatter and still the mind.

I’ve developed and refined my process over many years. Digital paintings and 3D animations are transformed using 3D math functions to create evolving abstract dimensional objects and spaces of vast complexity. From within these spaces, I compose high-resolution images and animations. My process integrates intuition and intellect, deliberate design and random happen-stance, realism and abstraction, humanity and technology, painting and math, science and mysticism.

Abstract Dimensionalism describes the inspiration, the style, and the process.

I have been writing ray tracers for 10 years for use in teaching, research, and computer art. In my artwork, I try to create images of great fractal complexity from the simplest possible scenes. Nebula was created by ray tracing a single hollow black sphere with a mirror on its inner surface, and with the normals altered by a random bump map.

I placed the camera and a number of coloured lights inside the sphere and ray traced their reflections by allowing the rays to bounce 8-10 times off the inner surface. The bump map caused the rays to be reflected in random directions at each bounce, creating a chaotic system of light rays within the sphere. The images consist of the specular highlights of the lights, and their reflections, on the inner surface of the sphere. Because order often arises out of chaos, the resulting images are not completely random, but instead have a structure to them. Nebula reminds me of the wispy and filamentary structure of planetary or interstellar nebulae. Other images I have done this way remind me of clouds and a comet’s impact.

Nebula was not planned in the sense that I had any vision of what it would look like. I usually have no idea what the images will look like before they are ray traced. I do, however, know when an image looks interesting or promising, and I then refine it by adjusting any of the approximately 80 parameters that define the scene. On average, an image will take about two weeks of experimenting before I am happy with it.

My images are printed with a LightJet printer on archival photographic paper.

Coronado is a Sound / Sculpture art work characterized by the interplay of the analog and digital sound sources which layers over one another, exploring the idea of a loop that creates a unique interpretation of a sea scape. The center of the installation is an ocean drum controlled with mechanical arms that creates and simulates the sound of sea waves. Finally, the sound from this sculpture is fed into the computer and reprocessed, and bounced across different speakers surrounding the installation.

Coronado is a six-channel sound installation in which an ocean drum is controlled by autonomous mechanical arms, creating a feedback loop that bounces sound waves and produces a spatial interpretation of the beach’s soundscape. A sense of wonder and awe is at the heart of Coronado, which was inspired by the artist’s personal encounter with the Coronado beach in California, where he found beauty appearing and disappearing in all directions. Kian-Peng Ong (a.k.a. Bin) works across a range of media that include software, electronics, sound, and video. For the past five years, he has been using new media as a means to question and transcode human perception and understanding of the environment and the problems associated with it. Kian-Peng Ong’s works are very often a result of his personal experiences and encounters with the world.

(A)I FEEL is a project to demonstrate how machines learn human emotions by creating a teaching & learning process between humans and machine to analyze human drawing and visualize the drawing in an intuitive and exciting way.

Drawing on icons from pop cul­ture, this interactive work is inspired by cultist obsessions with religion in our present-day world. At strategic points in this round­-the-globe adventure, the viewer must make choices between actions that may be perceived as good or evil. The true path results in divine salvation, while the false path leads to sure damnation.

Shared Skies is a series of digital prints and sculpture using photographs of skies collected from four sources: my own journeys, artists who participate as they travel worldwide, international friends through social media, and some purchased from photographers through stock photo sites.

The work speaks to the connections among global, local, and personal. As people look toward the sky each morning, through the day and night, the sky speaks to their personal and local concerns. In a global sense, we observe the effects of our environmental decisions and find community through a seamless sky.

Shared Skies began as a permanent, large-scale artwork that I am creating for the new Anderson-Munger YMCA in Los Angeles. As part of the process to consider the implications of the idea, I started by making digital prints with groupings of 13 skies each. These are being produced by Sundog Multiples, a print atelier at the University of North Dakota. Each sky is identified with the location and the name of the photographer. For this ongoing series, there are currently hundreds of sky photographs from 38 countries and all the continents.

The project would not be possible without the networking that the internet provides. These skies can be requested and sent by anyone with a camera and access to a computer (public or private). The sky as a metaphor can be felt and understood by all.

This work utilizes sophisticated technology to emulate an early experimental, low-tech photographic procedure – photograms. Forms derived from terrorist equipment are used in place of the everyday objects used in early photograms. This not only creates more evocative images, it also invites a connection between photograms and X-ray surveillance technology.

These photograms are counterfeit. Real photograms are created through a simple photographic process in which solid or translucent objects are placed over light sensitive paper. The paper is then exposed and processed, resulting in images which look like negative silhouettes and shadows. In making these counterfeit photograms I have devised an integration of this early experimental photographic process and computer graphics. My intent is to produce a plausible reality through artificial means. In Strata Studiopro, a 3D modeling computer program, I construct a digital or virtual model that – if it existed – could produce a real photogram. I create 3D objects, assign properties to these objects (e.g., transparency, reflectivity, etc.), arrange these objects over a surface, and cast lights over the whole arrangement. I then isolate the objects’ shadows that fall on the surface and invert the image of this into a negative image using Photoshop. The final image is inkjet printed with Quad Tone Black inks and an Epson printer on archival paper.

Digital Jewelry Explorations is a collection of arm pieces and neck pieces that explore the aesthetic beauty of unique 3D wearable objects and challenge traditional adornment issues. My motivation stems from my passion for and fascination with the human body: primarily, how 3D forms can accentuate, define, and interact with our bodies.

I’m also intrigued by the primal need to define who and what we are through the intimacy of personal adornment, and how I as an artist can bring “real” meaning back into this ritualistic experience. I’m striving to create a formal visual language that speaks about the integral aspects of the environment of creation, the process of production, and the modalities of wearable art in a sophisticated, technologically driven society.

From concept to production, this body of work is a manifestation of my desire to integrate my creative investigations with state-of-the-art technology, specifically CAD/CAM/RP technologies. Through my work, I hope to reach a new audience of individuals, who embrace the age-old desire of personal adornment but are willing to experiment with and redefine the parameters of what personal adornment will mean to human beings in the 21st century.

Summary

Simplexity 01 is a piece of computational media artwork that explores how organic visual complexities emerge through the application of simple algorithmic procedures.

Abstract

Simplexity 01 is a selection from an on-going experimental project which explores how unexpected visual complexities emerge from massive scaling of simple algorithmic procedures. For this particular work, the artist appropriated a simple space filling algorithm into a generative medium for creating unseen imaginary structures. The main quality that identifies this work is its semi-organic appearance as a whole, and the artist sees the emergence of this look as a direct result of the scale of space that the algorithm is allowed to explore.

The Echo Locations project is a series of site-specific installations utilizing motion sensing to invite observers to slow down, give the site their attention, and be still long enough for ghostly images to form of how people have moved through the site in the past. The project builds on motion capture, particle systems, and slow interaction techniques developed for Will.0.w1sp. However, whereas the Will.0.w1sp characters move through motion sequences captured in a studio, Echo Locations makes a stronger link to specific locations by capturing motion in “real life.” The characters recreated by the particle software become similar to ghosts – repeating movements that once occurred in the location. Only when visitors to the site are still and quiet do the projections reform and return to their movements.

The intention of the piece is to use interaction to make visitors reflect on their personal impact on an environment as they move through a location, and to hint at its history. The installation uses sound in an attempt to awaken curiosity and invite visitors to various locations. The audio environment mixes samples recorded onsite together with simple melodies to create echoes of past inhabitants. If visitors to the site are calm and still, these sounds are played out very melodically, but if visitors move around or make noise of their own, the sound from the particle flows becomes very sharp, with aggressive scratches and hisses. Just as the motion of the particle dancers evokes the site’s past history, so does the audio environment.

The Electronic Cafe International (ECI) of Santa Monica, California is in operation at SIGGRAPH ’92, providing a forum for tele-interactive art. Through ISDN networks, voice lines, and videophone, SIGGRAPH ’92 is connected to mobile ECI at Dokumenta 9 in Kassel, Germany and La Cite’ s (Paris’) Man and Communication exhibit. Both of these events are simultaneous with SIGGRAPH ’92. They are geared toward mass audiences and feature compressed video transmissions of performances taking place at the two sites, remote control of environmental conditions, collaborative painting, and other uses of the network.

Additional connections exist to Japan and the rest of eastern and western Europe, including Bulgaria. During performances in France and Germany, those sites act as hubs linking participants to the SIGGRAPH site. Chicago acts as a hub for still imagery ( from the US, and participants in Chicago are connected to all other sites around the US and the world.

As media technology develops and globalization continues, information technology is gradually becoming society’s infrastructure. Demands for speed and efficiency have permeated our daily interactions. It is important that we live our daily lives at all times and in all places. Perhaps there is a way to go beyond information exchange and restore the pleasure of communication as an expression of consideration towards others. We have always used non-everyday events like festivals, parties, and ceremonies to balance out our busy everyday lives. The Chang-Tei System introduces non-everyday communication into digital communication, as a way to make IT society more fulfilling.
• Communication Grill: Through continuous chatting, participants enjoy grilled meat.
• Communication Tea House: Conversation among those within the tea room is projected on the hanging scroll, making the water boil so everyone can enjoy a cup of tea. In the cafe
version, people sit around a table at an internet cafe and chat to boil a pot of water.
• Communication Buffet: Activate the appliance through chatting at the buffet, and you get popcorn. One of the really interesting aspects of this work is how it illuminates the Japanese approach to technology. How should humans interact with the machine? An important message in this work is: “The machines have to be understood as a kind of culture” (Gerfried Stocker, Artistic Director, ARS Electronica).

Exhale: local streets, global waters, bloodstained papers. This is an electronic publication covering five years of video, music, and electronic art engaging with asylum and migration in a new world order, by virtual migrants. It includes a DVD of short films and artist interviews. In the DVD-ROM section, there are two interactive works: Keith Piper’s Local-Stranger and an interactive audio remix version of What If I’m Not Real. From 2001 to 2006, virtual migrants engaged with UK artists and communities intent on reconstructing the polemical landscape and varying experiences of asylum in a globalised post-9/11 world. In doing so, we blurred various boundaries of established art practices and steered well away from the dominant, patronising, and sometimes sensational depictions of migrant people as victims or ogres. Using moving image, video, interactive multimedia, photography, audio, music, installation, and collaborative practice, the key methodology of many of these works looks at ways of colliding personal/community testimony and documentary realism with poetic imagination and art, while retaining an intimacy between the personal and the epic.

Three masked figures on rafts at sea appear on each of three screens arranged as a circular triptych: an official, a migrant parent, and a child. The anxious official denies the parent access to safe land and community while engaging in lucrative military games. The conclusion poses an inevitable consequence of current conflicts. In the absence of dialogue, the installation uses poetic devices to depict asylum in the new world order, and each repeat loop of the work has a different soundtrack, suggesting alternative meanings for the same reality. The double-edged uses of blood (symbolizing both life and death) and water (allowing respite from land conflict yet denying longer residence) are strongly influenced by the equality-of-opposites concept common in China. During a two-year development period, the collaborating artists, who come from wide ranging global geographies, collectively discussed aesthetic and social issues to create a work that can be understood through many layers, that is sensitive yet brutally powerful, and that connects with a broad cultural experience.

Ambient Camera: Who released the shutter? is a compilation of short videos made of photographs that were taken with a camera controlled by a Geiger counter. In this work,the camera releases the shutter whenever the Geiger counter detects radiation. Thus, these photographs are taken not by a person’s will but by an environmental factor. We have made several short movies by arranging these photographs in particular methods. Ambient Camera: What released the shutter? includes three types of movies. The first movie simply shows the photographs at a consistent frame rate, similar to a slideshow. The more frequent radiation is detected, the smoother the movie will be. In the second movie each photograph is shown according to the interval when the radiation was detected. We can sense the amount of radiation as the pictures change in an irregular rate every few seconds. The third movie is an alignment of photographs that were taken during the same appointed time, but in different locations. From this movie we can compare how often radiation is detected among different locations. Immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear accident that occurred on March 11th, 2011, there was an abrupt increase in awareness of radiation around the world. While time has passed since the incidences, people still cope with this “Invisible radiation” in different ways: some try to face it, some try to avoid it and others have simply forgotten about it. This work is a scene of our daily lives that has been recorded by radiation, is an indication of how we deal with radiation and may also be a reminder of radiation itself.

These are letters from a digital alphabet designed for cathode ray tube typesetting applications. They were especially designed and adapted to the digital raster. ISADORA is a connected roundhand script which utilizes the oblique raster to achieve the spirit of pointed-pen handwriting in digital form.

Cave is a coming-of-age story told through cutting edge Parallux technology, featuring a fully immersive holographic VR experience that can be shared by many audience members at once.

Oh!migas: biomimetic stridulation environment is an installation-based exploration of a socially responsible art form, drawing on sustainable organic materials (in this case, a live ant colony) and stimulating interspecific interactions. As artist Kuai Shen Auson first observed at home in Ecuador, ants represent a natural superorganism which stands our due to its emergent social structure and self-organization. They generate bottom-up structures in order to solve problems by means of a complex network of local interactions. Kuai Shen explores the social similarities and differences between humans and ants through four key areas: cybernetics, autopoiesis, self-organization, and emergence. In this piece, the activity of an ant colony is observed, archiving the ants’ movements and sounds inside a digital matrix. A pair of turntables constantly reacts to the changes that emerge from the colony (e.g., recruiting units for defense, task allocation when rebuilding the nest, organizing the harvesting of vegetation), thus spinning vinyl records that produce scratching sounds similar to the original stridulations of some ants. Leafcutter ants use the stridulatory organ, human DJ’s use the turntable: a reactive soundscape, which reveals the connection between scratching as an aesthetic expression created by human culture, and the stridulation phenomena of leafcutter ants as a modulation mechanism for communication. Kuai Shen believes we can learn from the way the ants construct their miniature ecosystems. Like them, we can apply an experimental design approach based on organic architecture, where sounds and physical interaction, instead of divided living spaces, promote and consolidate the interaction of life.

Hide-and-Seek is a future interactive dining table. Viewers walk around a dining table carrying a portable television. On one channel, they find hidden images that mix real and virtual spaces.

Fur-Fly is in an interactive tactile display composed of individual pieces of faux fur. It explores the borders between the analog and the digital. This artwork uses real-time, sensor-driven computer technology to animate and transform visual effects projected onto the soft surface and to control the movement of the components in response to the user. Playing with the notion of images in a cloud form, the projected display and soft tufts of fur occasionally resolve into recognizable pictures. The warmth, softness, and accessibility of the display surface encourage interaction. Fur-Fly seamlessly integrates art, design, and entertainment with practical techno-logical developments. It proposes a tactile approach to human-computer interface design. While playfully presented, the research and technology that underpin Fur-Fly have wide-ranging applications for multi-modal interaction design and assistive technologies.

This simulation of a natural landscape is a tactile artwork that interactively expresses images and movements of clouds. Images and tactile sensations incorporating the soft movements of clouds interact simultaneously to create a tactile display that reacts to human contact. This work could be used as a universal display for the disabled and for various other forms of global communications.

This new temperature display technology is designed to support touch expression in the emerging computing-ubiquitous, informa­tion-intensive society. When a person touches the soft interface in an architectural environment, the system reveals information that is helpful in everyday activities.

This work is a new type of interactive mixed-reality sculpture. Viewers can feel a picture with a touch-screen display that we developed to convey a unique sense of touch. The display’s jeffy-touch technology provides an interface that viewers touch to manipulate a drop of water. Our interest is in creating an imaginably artificial, mixed-media
environment that exists between real life and virtual space.

Transparent Blue is a new type of interactive visual communication that combines art, virtual reality, and architecture. On the cold surface of a touch-screen table, users draw images by hand and experience the estrangement between humans and nature before they regain peaceful unity with the worldIn the future, We hope this system will be used by many people and will become a tool that enhances architectural environments and communication. We presented interactive works in the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2000, 2003 and 2004.

This work is a new type of a interactive sculpture. Viewers can create a ripple by interacting with the large touch-screen display and enjoy personal fusion with virtual water.

As a young artist, I was fascinated with taking a variety of subjects out of context and using them to create new visual realities. If the handling of these disparate pieces was done well, I could make the fantastic appear possible. I learned to airbrush and used this technique to make this synthesis happen. As time went on, imagery became less important to me. I began to focus on the intricacies of the patterns and textures I could create. This seemed like the right path until, in the early 1990s, I began working on the computer.

My biggest concern with making computer art has been the final form of the finished pieces. Looking at the prints I made, I asked myself what was missing? “Light!” I had been painting with light on the computer. After some investigation, transparencies seemed to be the ticket. To properly illuminate the images, I began building light boxes that not only displayed the transparencies, but also complemented them. People ask me: “Why don’t you just show your work on a monitor?” To me, getting the image out of the computer is akin to getting the vision out of my head. It’s not real until it’s an object.

… a sheet of deformable material was described. The sheet’s parameters were set so that it was only slightly stretchy, but was able to bend easily. This closely approximates some types of cloth.

I feel computer-generated images walk hand in hand with those produced classically. These images are not a contradiction, but an alternative which gives an artist the chance to grow.

This life-size image is from a series of synthetic architectural interior spaces entitled “Intersections.” Space is as much a virtual or psychological construction as it is a physical reality. The use of computer technology is used to heighten the psychological read of the space while the spaces are charged with artifacts from everyday experience, traditional structures, a shadow, a drawer. These items are arranged in a way to suggest possible narratives, which the viewer will project into the space using their own memories. This process of the projection of our narratives into a virtual space leads to a sense of dislocation and the uncanny.

Summary

What would happen if plants can talk, see, and sense as humans do? Based on the imagination, we create an artistic interpretation of the humanization of plants with modern technology to arouse people to think about plants as a dynamic living being.

Abstract

The installation consists of two sculptural objects in space, stereographic video projected on these objects, interactive jackets, and audio. The topic of the piece deals with hysteria and boredom.

Digital Bear was created in response to my experience of describing bowhunting for bear in Arctic Alaska to non-hunting friends in New York City by email, complete with digital images. I was uncomfortable with the way the powerful, primal, and organic richness of my experiences was sanitized by digitalization; how hygienic, safe, and downright banal it became via email. This led to creating several pieces that combine the primal and electronic worlds.

Laughing, crying, kissing, blowing, arguing, apologizing are only some of the human actions and dramatic gestures that I explore to create my art. Exploring sculpture, installation, and performance, my work is inspired by universal emotions like sadness, happiness, desire, anger, and remorse. “The Last Word” is typical of my work in that it engages the viewer in a real and unmediated experience, bringing unsuspecting rituals of life under the lens of art. It reads as a street sign, depicting a “Dear John” voicemail message, exposing an instance of vulnerability through the use of language. At a glance, my work deals with one-liners, puns, and cliche, but it delves deeper, exploring concepts of public and private behavior and how these moments manifest in the everyday. Commonplace elements connect us to these situations that I produce (we know these things, we know their use), yet they surprise us and catch us unaware.

I am the child of a pack rat and a neat freak, therefore I hoard, but very specific things. I find myself continually making lists and reorganizing
my life in an endless cycle of setting “things” in their respective places. I believe there is already an over abundance of accessible information repeatedly begging for my attention. I do not
feel the need to create more information to add to the barrage, but to collect, recycle, and re-organize existing information, putting it into some “respective” place. In 1976, Bantam Books published The R Document by Irving Wallace. Almost 30 years, later I incidentally discovered a copy in a
neatly bound Reader’s Digest tucked away at a Goodwill Store near my parents’ home. Although the story is nearly 30 years old, it depicts uncanny similarities to our own current political climate and legislation, such as the Patriot Act. The R Document tells the story of a political conspiracy involving an FBI director, Tynan, who would like to bring about a police state in an effort to control crime, but the proposed 35th Amendment would
undermine the Bill of Rights. Enter our protagonist, the Attorney General, Christopher Collins.The (R) Doc Series is a group of digital collages that are the basis for a future handmade book. The series employs erasure: the act of erasing, rubbing into, scraping out or removing from existence (m-w.com) as a way of altering the original text, jus as, in many socalled “unclassified” documents, words of concern are blackened out, removing not only content, but also context. Viewers of the documents are then left with the various fragments to piece together
into their own interpretations. The (R) Doc Series explores removal of randomly selected words to
create a new, visual rhythmic pattern to the text, transformation of context when words of different levels of importance are obscured or erased, and finally, recycling of a time-worn text from its original linear form into a non-linear aberration.

I am the child of a pack rat and a neat freak, therefore I hoard, but very specific things. I find myself continually making lists and reorganizing
my life in an endless cycle of setting “things” in their respective places. I believe there is already an over abundance of accessible information repeatedly begging for my attention. I do not
feel the need to create more information to add to the barrage, but to collect, recycle, and re-organize existing information, putting it into some “respective” place. In 1976, Bantam Books published The R Document by Irving Wallace. Almost 30 years, later I incidentally discovered a copy in a
neatly bound Reader’s Digest tucked away at a Goodwill Store near my parents’ home. Although the story is nearly 30 years old, it depicts uncanny similarities to our own current political climate and legislation, such as the Patriot Act. The R Document tells the story of a political conspiracy involving an FBI director, Tynan, who would like to bring about a police state in an effort to control crime, but the proposed 35th Amendment would
undermine the Bill of Rights. Enter our protagonist, the Attorney General, Christopher Collins.The (R) Doc Series is a group of digital collages that are the basis for a future handmade book. The series employs erasure: the act of erasing, rubbing into, scraping out or removing from existence (m-w.com) as a way of altering the original text, jus as, in many socalled “unclassified” documents, words of concern are blackened out, removing not only content, but also context. Viewers of the documents are then left with the various fragments to piece together
into their own interpretations. The (R) Doc Series explores removal of randomly selected words to
create a new, visual rhythmic pattern to the text, transformation of context when words of different levels of importance are obscured or erased, and finally, recycling of a time-worn text from its original linear form into a non-linear aberration.

I am the child of a pack rat and a neat freak, therefore I hoard, but very specific things. I find myself continually making lists and reorganizing
my life in an endless cycle of setting “things” in their respective places. I believe there is already an over abundance of accessible information repeatedly begging for my attention. I do not
feel the need to create more information to add to the barrage, but to collect, recycle, and re-organize existing information, putting it into some “respective” place. In 1976, Bantam Books published The R Document by Irving Wallace. Almost 30 years, later I incidentally discovered a copy in a
neatly bound Reader’s Digest tucked away at a Goodwill Store near my parents’ home. Although the story is nearly 30 years old, it depicts uncanny similarities to our own current political climate and legislation, such as the Patriot Act. The R Document tells the story of a political conspiracy involving an FBI director, Tynan, who would like to bring about a police state in an effort to control crime, but the proposed 35th Amendment would
undermine the Bill of Rights. Enter our protagonist, the Attorney General, Christopher Collins.The (R) Doc Series is a group of digital collages that are the basis for a future handmade book. The series employs erasure: the act of erasing, rubbing into, scraping out or removing from existence (m-w.com) as a way of altering the original text, jus as, in many socalled “unclassified” documents, words of concern are blackened out, removing not only content, but also context. Viewers of the documents are then left with the various fragments to piece together
into their own interpretations. The (R) Doc Series explores removal of randomly selected words to
create a new, visual rhythmic pattern to the text, transformation of context when words of different levels of importance are obscured or erased, and finally, recycling of a time-worn text from its original linear form into a non-linear aberration.

Tools for Improved Social Interacting is a series of wearable devices-including the Anti-Daydreaming Device, Happiness Hat, and Body Contact Training Suit-that use sensors to condition the behavior of the wearer to better adapt to expected social behaviors. The work explores the potential for technology to shape how we think, feel, and act. It also questions our social expectations, attempting to better understand their function and worth.

The Happiness Hat trains the wearer to smile more. An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, affecting an attached servo with metal spike. The smaller the smile of the wearer, the further a spike is driven into the back of their neck. The Body Contact Training Suit requires the wearer to maintain frequent body contact with another person in order to hear normally; if he or she stops touching someone for too long, static noise begins to play through headphones sewn into the hood. A capacitance sensing circuit measures skin-toskin body contact via a metal bracelet sewn into the sleeve. The Anti-Daydreaming Device is a scarf with a heat radiation sensor that detects if the wearer is engaged in conversation with another person. During conversation, the scarf vibrates periodically to remind the wearer to stop daydreaming and pay attention.

This project, and McCarthy’s work in general, explores the potential for technology to shape our thoughts, feelings, and actions. In what ways can it be used to affect our interactions and relationships, and what does it mean to employ this kind of control? What social expectations do we have of each other, and what is the function and value of those expectations? The wearable devices provide haptic and audio feedback that is imperceptible to all but the wearer, allowing the devices to be fully integrated into everyday life. McCarthy is interested in the invisible influences of technology that can result in perceptible changes and shifts. As technologies that can manipulate our brains continue to be developed, it is essential that we explore the possibilities while considering the effects.

At first, I created works using a proprietary system at the Media Study/Buffalo Center in Buffalo, New York in the middle to late 1970s. Experimentation on the system was as much of a challenge as creating aesthetic images. “Media and message” were hard to combine.

Dual Personality (1979) posed the question of positive and negative, fusing two images from different angles. Color, too, had to be “stripped” in by use of a colorizer unit called the Paik-Abe Colorizer. The input devices only allowed black-and-white input using big television cameras and one-inch reel-to-reel video tape. The resultant image had to be photographed directly off the monitor, as there was no other way to capture the image to print it.

Recent work continues to be auto-biographical. I create collages, as I am telling stories with my work. These are little vignettes of life. I always take my own photographs and include people who I come in contact with as well as the architecture and culture from the region. Now that the technology is no longer a “wrestling process;’ it is much more content-oriented. The final image is then printed digitally direct onto watercolor paper at 40 inches x 50 inches.

Millennium Girl, for example, is about my recent travels to Italy, the Italian people, and their history. The “Millennium Girl” herself stands to represent all women of the future, their power and their strength. All great works of art should represent their time, and I hope this work gives future viewers a window of our communicative age at the commencement of the 21st century.

At first, I created works using a proprietary system at the Media Study/Buffalo Center in Buffalo, New York in the middle to late 1970s. Experimentation on the system was as much of a challenge as creating aesthetic images. “Media and message” were hard to combine.

Dual Personality (1979) posed the question of positive and negative, fusing two images from different angles. Color, too, had to be “stripped” in by use of a colorizer unit called the Paik-Abe Colorizer. The input devices only allowed black-and-white input using big television cameras and one-inch reel-to-reel video tape. The resultant image had to be photographed directly off the monitor, as there was no other way to capture the image to print it.

Recent work continues to be auto-biographical. I create collages, as I am telling stories with my work. These are little vignettes of life. I always take my own photographs and include people who I come in contact with as well as the architecture and culture from the region. Now that the technology is no longer a “wrestling process;’ it is much more content-oriented. The final image is then printed digitally direct onto watercolor paper at 40 inches x 50 inches.

Millennium Girl, for example, is about my recent travels to Italy, the Italian people, and their history. The “Millennium Girl” herself stands to represent all women of the future, their power and their strength. All great works of art should represent their time, and I hope this work gives future viewers a window of our communicative age at the commencement of the 21st century.

In a theatrical world, a strange puppeteer manipulates two spindly marionettes. But one of them dies…

“Off The Bike, Into The Spikes” is a subtle digital translation of the original sketch, perhaps an intermediate step toward the more tactile quality of silkscreen.

As human beings in the 21st century, we all have roots both in bio­logical (planetary) nature and technological {human-created) nature; both spheres shape and affect our lives, individually and collectively. Works like this, which integrate biology and technology, are a corner­stone of my creative work.

The images in TEMPLE were derived from pictures of plant life, particularly of flowers. This infuses the compositions with a fertile, organic quality and a sense of structural cohesion. The floral images were layered upon themselves using simple mathematical repetitions within a grid to impose a secondary order and to create a unified visual space.

Through the natural geometry of plants, combined with the math­ematical geometry of the layout and the even spacing of connected elements, it feels whole, as if it contains infinite possibilities but not chaos. The images are simultaneously symbolic and evocative. While they are highly subject to individual interpretation, they ultimately point to a pure dimension of existence which integrates many of our perceived dualities, and so gives a window into the infinite possibili­ties that life holds for all of us.

Originally launched in 2012, Bear 71 is an interactive multi-user online experience told from the point of view of an omniscient female grizzly bear―dubbed “Bear 71” by the park rangers who track her. Created by Jeremy Mendes, Leanne Allison and the NFB, Bear 71 explores how we coexist with wildlife in the age of networks, surveillance, and digital information en mass. Developed using open platform WebVR technology for greater accessibility, Bear 71 VR is available in VR using a compatible headset, and can also be viewed as a 2D interactive experience on a traditional monitor. Created in collaboration with Google’s Chrome and VR teams, IDFA DocLab and Sound and Vision, Bear 71 VR has been showcased as a VR installation by the NFB at IDFA Doclab and by Google at the New Frontiers VR Bar at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Eclipse is a one minute continuously looped animation in which overlapping moire patterns create a visual and sonic eclipse. The work intentionally changes depending on the format, scale and streaming limitations, and attempts to address the aesthetics of compression and how technology delimits visual and sonic experience.

In my recent body of work, I have attempted to create a dialogue between still and moving images through vibrant paintings and digital
animations. The work consists of both time-based electronic image sequences and paintings that use digital stills as their source. The
result of this mixing of analog and digital media is a convergence of worlds, both real and imagined, where representation and abstraction
can intermingle. Movement is suggested as one views a static painting, while a fluid animation slowly breaks up into its discrete parts. Intense colors, simplified shapes, and repeated patterns suggest geometric abstraction and synthesized space. My work brings the fluidity of the imagination to the precision of the digital aesthetic, watching them both change over time .

Inspired by the theories of Jean Dauven (“Couleurs”, No. 77, September, 1970, Paris), and fascinated by synesthesia – the producing of a subjective response normally associated with one sense by stimulation of another sense – we have created an environment in which we can investigate a synesthetic experience. Our performance, “Chaotic Robotic Synesthesia,” explores the sharing of the senses; the vibration of music and color through the overall fusing of the minds of machines, artists, and musicians. This performance includes two infrared robots, one programmed platform, seven human musicians, and two human animators. In this performance, the music is propelled by the mixing of the colors and the sharing of the frequencies. The active forging of tactile, aural, and visual perception between humans and in collaboration with technology, asks questions which can yield ways of better understanding, seeing, and hearing natural order.

Dispersiones (Dispersions) (2012/2017) is a site-specific physical network comprised of a series of interconnected relays that produce an artificial and interactive soundscape. The work appears to be a messy web of hundreds of tangled wires through which sounds travel, following an algorithm of artificial life. Using only the metallic clicking sound of the relays, the network behaves as a complex system of electromagnetic actuators that interact with the viewer.

Organized in a rhizomatic matrix of lines resembling a convoluted urban city, each individual relay acts as a “living” agent that activates the space and the architecture. Once a viewer’s movement is detected, the system unleashes an infinite flow of sound and light.

Dispersiones fits into Leo Nuñez’s body of work that uses discarded technological waste along with industrial and raw materials to create laboriously hand-crafted electromechanical interactive installations that speak to the appropriation and adaptation of new technologies within the context of Latin American culture.

Photos/scans of rooftops from Croatia/Serbia and fenced-off decrepit lots in Palestine were superimposed. A regular grid of abstract biological cell-like forms was used to add the notion of life/nature and its structure. A brass charm/medal with a door that depicts a house of prayer was Photoshopped in also. It suggests the idea of praying for and rebuilding peace.

This artwork involves personal exploration via digital imaging, manually reworked, using paint, pastel, and other media. Through both the use of mixed media (actual/by hand and virtual) and the content, the work deals with the interplay between realism and abstraction. I try to synthesize a connection, akin to a gateway or portal, between the two. This intent partially explains the key imagery, along with the use of layered collage, and tangible – and virtual – textures.

The abstracted tactile shapes are collaged with photorealistic and shadowy keys, much like the multiple levels occupying our thoughts simultaneously; the brain processes reality but also imaginary, abstract, or subconscious thoughts. Metaphorically, the key expresses various psychological states. One refers to locking or closing doors, i.e. “saying goodbye” to phases of one’s life. In another, the key signifies protection, keeping oneself safe. While one might be aware of her secured space, on a less rational level, a woman once threatened may still feel unsafe and subconsciously recognize that a lock does not provide safety in domestic abuse cases. The imagery also speaks of opening up and revealing new chapters in life. It alludes to the mystery of unlocking a door and finding what awaits – to anticipation and future potential. The keys take on an otherworldly, object-like presence, yet also reflect the wearing away of time (and emotions) of the natural world.

Surfaces of grid-based patterns define 2D abstractions; the space is flat until a photographic/real key interrupts it, creating spatial ambiguity. This work builds curiosity about space and texture. The keys’ environs are haptical and tactile, suggesting touch, in this changing world of virtual interactions between art and viewer. My use of patterns and talisman-like objects tie my work to a rich heritage of handmade art, while adding a sense of “contact” to digital output.

In “Don’t Say Goodbye: Variation I” the keys virtually displace patterned, abstract planes. The resulting digital output is physically attached to purposely “deteriorated” printouts gone amuck. Here I juxtapose output on canvas specially coated for inkjet technology with standard canvas. The backgrounds, printed on untreated canvas where the inks smear and run, result in wonderful disasters when water is introduced – which I further embellish by hand. Since the triptych deals with “closing doors,” the canvas is layered upon wooden forms with the approximate depth of a door, bringing the work into our 3D space.

“Used Chambers” is a monoprint on fibrous handmade paper which I (not a factory) pretreated, rendering softer, less distinct output. The print is enhanced by overdrawing, as I focus on the hand-applied media’s interaction with the printout’s formal elements and surface texture. Just as the artwork is multi-layered, the title has levels of meaning. It refers to private spaces within one’s mind and heart that feel used up, but that must regenerate in order to go on. It has real world significance in that the key unlocks an old armoire, discarded by unknown families, then kept, as the door closed on a marriage, to provide space for the children’s new belongings, new chapters. The chambers are at once closed, yet still growing, compartments of a life or a weary heart.

In these works, the interplay between the concrete, either photo-realistically rendered or handmade, and the virtual (or abstract) creates an important dynamic, on both a formal and conceptual level. In this vein, the objects/forms must suggest recognizable ideas and touch those who look at and explore it. My work combines the human hand/touch and emotion with the power of 21st century technological systems, hoping to provide greater depth of meaning to the viewer.

In this work, output via digital printers and human hands, I consider code, early artisanship, old textual issues and current paradigm shifts – through poetry (lyrical and visual), attempting to make it speak to our time. Several motifs and pattern fragments used derive from the artwork of older Middle Eastern and European societies, resulting from my research into sacred texts and objects. Utilizing historical visual and spiritual ideas in these works, I marry (or re-invent) the artisanal methods/materials with “new-fangled” digital methods. Through text, codification, and picture-making, I investigate book-form aesthetics, manually created – yet electronically generated.

The work presented represent an investigation into dualities, namely machine vs. hand (i.e. technology as compared to human-ness) and fragmentation vs. integration.

Systems, networks, connections, linkages, transitions, replication…The physical nature of the computer medium has a great deal of influence over my work; these abstract concepts are interpreted in a very personal way. This work derives from introspection on the implication of the electronic interface and forms of human interaction and interpersonal/intellectual growth. A personal message is presented in a mixed-media approach, partly inspired by the time honored, highly tactile, “feminine” domestic tradition of the patchwork quilt. This work brings into play integrated images of microprocessors and/or handmade tools and artifacts, as well as converse, detachment and fragmentation, are visual metaphors for the interpersonal/psycho social complexities of life.

In this work, output via digital printers and human hands, I consider code, early artisanship, old textual issues and current paradigm shifts – through poetry (lyrical and visual), attempting to make it speak to our time. Several motifs and pattern fragments used derive from the artwork of older Middle Eastern and European societies, resulting from my research into sacred texts and objects. Utilizing historical visual and spiritual ideas in these works, I marry (or re-invent) the artisanal methods/materials with “new-fangled” digital methods. Through text, codification, and picture-making, I investigate book-form aesthetics, manually created – yet electronically generated.

In this work, output via digital printers and human hands, I consider code, early artisanship, old textual issues and current paradigm shifts – through poetry (lyrical and visual), attempting to make it speak to our time. Several motifs and pattern fragments used derive from the artwork of older Middle Eastern and European societies, resulting from my research into sacred texts and objects. Utilizing historical visual and spiritual ideas in these works, I marry (or re-invent) the artisanal methods/materials with “new-fangled” digital methods. Through text, codification, and picture-making, I investigate book-form aesthetics, manually created – yet electronically generated.

These works document autobiographical events, just as “album” quilts and photographic journals did for yesterday’s (anonymous) women artists. Relationships, self-image, and life-cycle effects on family and community are represented. The textile, aptly commenting on the historical status of women’s art, adds warmth and tactility to electronic art, merging tradition with technology for deeper insights.

The once-obvious pixel is represented here by larger units, or patches, of output. I reflect here on the issue of security – especially for the child – in light of AIDS, terrorism, abuse, etc. I metaphorically explore the interpersonal subject of connectivity, or bonding, versus separation and detachment through visual combinations/ layers of elements. Imagery formulated through (digital) painting, scanning, and manipulation is transfer-printed onto fiber substrates, then tiled and reworked with borders, utilizing historical, personally symbolic motifs. While much is accomplished efficiently, even magically, with my Macintosh, artwork production is slow hand labor. Using fibers, dyes, and threads to connect the digital patches together, this work juxtaposes nature with technology. Using this manifold process of I must focus on the linking of technologies/media and vignettes (or patches) to form a cohesive whole. Does the viewer locate a personal “big picture” from its interwoven parts?

Origins, ancestry, and diaspora are central to my decade-long body of work. Not only do the pieces here tie in directly (and literally) to my own journeys – but the background narrative in all my recent work deals with the origins and journey(s) of ancestors. This artwork explores a darker side, i.e. genocide, forced migration, and related socio-political horrors through a digital lens. However, it seeks to seduce the viewer with color, pattern, and materials, only to then offer up this painful subtext. My concern in this work is making that connection between genocide, colonization (Africa and beyond), and displacement, thereby compelling us to consider our own role in providing refuge.

I took photographs of details of gorgeous old homes in New Orleans just prior to Katrina – many are now gone or damaged. I travel there frequently as well as to other port cities, where I shot pictures of waterside rusted barriers which have beautiful colors and forms. I superimposed images I painted digitally based on these two photo-studies. A grid of dotted x-forms was used as a metaphor for blocked escape routes.

These works document autobiographical events, just as “album” quilts and photographic journals did for yesterday’s (anonymous) women artists. Relationships, self-image, and life-cycle effects on family and community are represented. The textile, aptly commenting on the historical status of women’s art, adds warmth and tactility to electronic art, merging tradition with technology for deeper insights.

The once-obvious pixel is represented here by larger units, or patches, of output. I reflect here on the issue of security – especially for the child – in light of AIDS, terrorism, abuse, etc. I metaphorically explore the interpersonal subject of connectivity, or bonding, versus separation and detachment through visual combinations/ layers of elements. Imagery formulated through (digital) painting, scanning, and manipulation is transfer-printed onto fiber substrates, then tiled and reworked with borders, utilizing historical, personally symbolic motifs. While much is accomplished efficiently, even magically, with my Macintosh, artwork production is slow hand labor. Using fibers, dyes, and threads to connect the digital patches together, this work juxtaposes nature with technology. Using this manifold process of I must focus on the linking of technologies/media and vignettes (or patches) to form a cohesive whole. Does the viewer locate a personal “big picture” from its interwoven parts?

This project deals with climate change and environmental refugee-ism. It interjects global artforms and ideologies, specifically Bojagi (the creation of reusable wrapping and blanketing textiles with – oft-recycled – fabric scraps) of Korea. Both reference this Korean art form, almost universally practiced by women. The long concept is about finding homes for refugees; it repeats a house motif with an ever-watchful eye superimposed, along with (multi-meaning) stonewall imagery. The square piece, entitled ‘Pollution Patches’ shows polluted water gushing out of a faucet, not unlike the problem in Flint, MI. Although the work feels like virtual quilt making, the idea of using quilts as platforms for women’s voices on social issues go back generations, and this work has been broadly exhibited online.

Looking at ways in which artists bring their heritage, their personal stories, and their hands into their electronic/digital art have long been a research thrust and influence upon my art practice. I look to both the approach and techniques of fine artists as much as I look to the logic, power, and open-endedness of experimental computer pioneers. I merge manipulated/painted and photographic imagery with digital mark-making through the line, motif, and texture, using a complex layering process. There are societal concerns, often linked to the personal stories mentioned above, ever-present in my work as well; social justice and specifically refugee crises, environmentalism and feminism are referenced. As a social justice artist for decades, I use digital media to build often large pieces (and sometimes miniature) with computing efficiency and timeliness in mind. In the months after various, harsh anti-environmental policies were enacted; I researched and incorporated ideas and information into my computer artwork. Since the last presidential election, I have been compelled to add refugee concerns to my previous focus on feminism, eco-feminism and pacifism.

In this work, output via digital printers and human hands, I consider code, early artisanship, old textual issues and current paradigm shifts – through poetry (lyrical and visual), attempting to make it speak to our time. Several motifs and pattern fragments used derive from the artwork of older Middle Eastern and European societies, resulting from my research into sacred texts and objects. Utilizing historical visual and spiritual ideas in these works, I marry (or re-invent) the artisanal methods/materials with “new-fangled” digital methods. Through text, codification, and picture-making, I investigate book-form aesthetics, manually created – yet electronically generated.

This artwork involves personal exploration via digital imaging, manually reworked, using paint, pastel, and other media. Through both the use of mixed media (actual/by hand and virtual) and the content, the work deals with the interplay between realism and abstraction. I try to synthesize a connection, akin to a gateway or portal, between the two. This intent partially explains the key imagery, along with the use of layered collage, and tangible – and virtual – textures.

The abstracted tactile shapes are collaged with photorealistic and shadowy keys, much like the multiple levels occupying our thoughts simultaneously; the brain processes reality but also imaginary, abstract, or subconscious thoughts. Metaphorically, the key expresses various psychological states. One refers to locking or closing doors, i.e. “saying goodbye” to phases of one’s life. In another, the key signifies protection, keeping oneself safe. While one might be aware of her secured space, on a less rational level, a woman once threatened may still feel unsafe and subconsciously recognize that a lock does not provide safety in domestic abuse cases. The imagery also speaks of opening up and revealing new chapters in life. It alludes to the mystery of unlocking a door and finding what awaits – to anticipation and future potential. The keys take on an otherworldly, object-like presence, yet also reflect the wearing away of time (and emotions) of the natural world.

Surfaces of grid-based patterns define 2D abstractions; the space is flat until a photographic/real key interrupts it, creating spatial ambiguity. This work builds curiosity about space and texture. The keys’ environs are haptical and tactile, suggesting touch, in this changing world of virtual interactions between art and viewer. My use of patterns and talisman-like objects tie my work to a rich heritage of handmade art, while adding a sense of “contact” to digital output.

In “Don’t Say Goodbye: Variation I” the keys virtually displace patterned, abstract planes. The resulting digital output is physically attached to purposely “deteriorated” printouts gone amuck. Here I juxtapose output on canvas specially coated for inkjet technology with standard canvas. The backgrounds, printed on untreated canvas where the inks smear and run, result in wonderful disasters when water is introduced – which I further embellish by hand. Since the triptych deals with “closing doors,” the canvas is layered upon wooden forms with the approximate depth of a door, bringing the work into our 3D space.

“Used Chambers” is a monoprint on fibrous handmade paper which I (not a factory) pretreated, rendering softer, less distinct output. The print is enhanced by overdrawing, as I focus on the hand-applied media’s interaction with the printout’s formal elements and surface texture. Just as the artwork is multi-layered, the title has levels of meaning. It refers to private spaces within one’s mind and heart that feel used up, but that must regenerate in order to go on. It has real world significance in that the key unlocks an old armoire, discarded by unknown families, then kept, as the door closed on a marriage, to provide space for the children’s new belongings, new chapters. The chambers are at once closed, yet still growing, compartments of a life or a weary heart.

In these works, the interplay between the concrete, either photo-realistically rendered or handmade, and the virtual (or abstract) creates an important dynamic, on both a formal and conceptual level. In this vein, the objects/forms must suggest recognizable ideas and touch those who look at and explore it. My work combines the human hand/touch and emotion with the power of 21st century technological systems, hoping to provide greater depth of meaning to the viewer.

My work starts with photography altered through digital media, painting, drawing, and collage. I have been involved in the field of adaptive/evolutionary computing for many years and have tried to bring the ideas used in that area to bear in my art. Therefore I am interested in seriality, in recursive evolution, and change of ideas and forms. I work in series – exploring an idea as it evolves and changes.

The current series of prints are all based on digital video shot at 48 Hours of Making Art, a residency at Lake Erie College sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council. I attended 48 Hours in October 2000 and worked with a dancer, Sarah Morrison, shooting her improvisational performances with a digital video camera. Frames from Sarah’s performance evolved into a set of digital prints. Sarah danced draped in large sheets of fabric, making her figure both anonymous and archetypal. I find that working with video images enables me to explore ideas about the figure, about movement, and seriality in a way that has not been possible when starting from still images.

My work is shaped by my interest in complexity, biological-based computing, and the relationship of my media to working directly on paper. My art integrates photography and digital manipulation of images with painting and drawing or virtual simulation of traditional media. I believe that the combination of media better allows me to capture the complexity and ambiguity of modern life. For better or worse, our perception of the world is colored by life in an interconnected technological society. By integrating a highly technological set of image manipulations with more traditional paint on paper and photography, I comment upon the way technology alters our perception of reality.

I Had A Little Husband freezes the moment when this artist imagines coding the page interactive. My collection of antique nursery rhyme books is a source of inspiration. “Jolly Jingles from Mother Goose”, published by M. Donohue and Co. is over 110 years old. The rhymes within are, of course, much older. The pages crumble as I turn them, and leave scraps of browning paper on the scanner bed. If you put a body of text into an array, line-by-line, you can do lots of interesting things with it. You can make every character of every word of a rhyme (or a whole collection of rhymes) do something. You can make words take action. When is a rhyme a magic spell? When is it a discussion on the balance of power between wife and husband? When is it just a rhyme, precious, hidden in an old book?

This proposed work will feature three tapestries created through various techniques of transferring computer imagery to cloth. Each tapestry is approximately 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall. They should be hung about tow feet a part and ideally on three walls or screens to form a triptych. The tapestries are entitled Portrait Short Hair, LED Doll Head, and LED Dollabra. The tapestries require AA batteries.

Three dresses that have been embellished with computer graphics, LEDs and other imagery will be hung from the ceiling in a triangular formation in front of the tapestries. The dresses will wave and spin gently like mobiles. The dresses are entitled Rabbits & Rhinestones, Astronaut Dazzle, and Yellow Rose Glows. The dresses require AA batteries.

An Interactive animation Ladies Dance, created with MacroMind Director and delivered on CD as a self-running file, will run from a Macintosh with at least 8Mb of RAM. A mouse will be provided for users to explore the animation which features the song The Girl from Ipanema sung by Tracy Tandy with instrumentals by Chris Bohn.

Our team of specialists in visual arts, communication, cognitive science, and structural engineering produces interactive visualizations of cultural flows, patterns, and relationships based on analysis of large sets of data comparable in size to datasets used in sciences.

Contemporary science increasingly relies on computer-based analysis and visualization of large datasets and data flows. The availability of large cultural datasets (through the web and digitization efforts by museums and libraries) and tools already employed in the sciences to analyze big datasets makes feasible a new methodology for the study of cultural processes and artifacts. Whereas humanities specialists have typically relied on manual analysis of a small number of cultural objects, we can now create information visualizations of large cultural datasets to discover patterns that have not been visible previously. We believe that we can make field-defining progress in this area by bringing together people who study and create digital cultural artifacts, people who study distributed human cognition, and people who are developing computational tools for analysis, display, and interaction with large datasets.

Our team creates new kinds of multi-modal interfaces appropriate for the study and experience of large sets of cultural artifacts in different media. We will also combine the visualization techniques normally used in science with the techniques developed in digital design and new-media art. The practical outcome of our research is the Cultural Analytics Research Environment, an open platform that supports analysis of different types of visual and media data and a variety of visualization and mapping techniques. We believe that such visualization environments will be used by social scientists and cultural theorists, students in art history, media studies, and communication studies classes; museum visitors; and cultural creators who want to better understand how their work fits within a larger context.

Selfiecity investigates the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world: Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and São Paulo.The project analyzes 3200 selfies shared on Instagram (640 from each city).Selfies were already subject of many discussions in popular media. However, if we simply scan images tagged as selfie on Instagram, or observe people around us taking self-portraits, it’s hard to quantify patterns, or systematically compare selfies from multiple cities taken by people who differ in age and gender. Are all selfies taken by young people? Do men take many selfies? Are we all trying to copy celebrities in choosing how we represent ourselves? Are there any significant differences between selfies shared in New York and Moscow, or Berlin and Bangkok? Selfiecity is the first project which investigates such questions systematically, using carefully assembled large sample of selfies photos and tools of statistics, data science and data visualization.

Reconstruction is a multimedia DVD project focusing on issues of confinement. It captures the tension of serene and disturbing emotions associated with small confining spaces. Based on still images, Reconstruction is converted to a virtual environment with motion pictures and surround sound.

Space and emotion are investigated through an old Illinois State Hospital that was abandoned in the 1970s. The architectural structure of the old hospital was built on the top of a hill in a small town called Bartonville at the end of the 19th century. Over the years, it grew into a huge structure, occupying more than 35 buildings. At one point, more than 3,000 patients lived there.

The main theme of Reconstruction is not about recreating a particular room of a particular building but a collective experience derived from many sources, including photographs, research, and the viewing response of the audience. It is the spirit of the hospital and the unusual atmosphere of the hundreds of empty rooms that once housed thousands of now-deceased residents that the artists wish to convey.

Reconstruction consists of three major parts: “destruction,” “reconstruction,” and “documents.” “Destruction” contains two parts: photographic documentation of the current condition of the abandoned hospital and a collection of research documents, mainly black-and-white images of the hospital from the collections of the Peoria Public Library and the Zeier Mental Institution Library. The “reconstruction” section recreates the hospital through digital video. “Documents” is a video documentation of the installation exhibition: “Within the Walls.”

Reconstruction is a digital video based on still images, with surround sound, that uses new technologies to create the atmosphere of a virtual place. Its “documents” include text, artists’ biographic information, credits, and the complete version of the artists’ statement.

We live in a world where the highest function of the sign is to make reality disappear and, at the same time, to mask that disappearance. Jean Baudriallard, The Perfect Crime (1996) In Memory of Truth takes off from the debate attributed to the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas regarding the passage of angels. Over time, the philosopher’s original proposition has been rephrased to be about angels dancing on a pin. Ligorano/Reese reinterpret this theory with this installation. Like many of the artists’ other pieces, In Memory of Truth combines media and manipulates imagery from print, film, and internet sources to reveal latent political meanings and messages. Using a custom-designed optical system incorporating a micro-LCD display and primary lens, the artists have devised a way to project moving video images on the head of a pin. The viewer sees a montage of Hollywood films with the aid of a magnifying glass. Warsaw, Beirut, Belfast … the streets themselves have now become a permanent film-set … The West … now plunged into the transpolitcal pan-cinema of the nuclear age, into an entirely cinematic vision of the world … Those American TV channels which broadcast news footage around the clock … have understood this point very well. Because in fact this isn’t really news footage any longer, but the raw material of vision … Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1984)

The artwork consists of a series of online videos which unfolds the musings of Seeker_of_True-files, an identity defined as a tech enveloped nous, a prototype tech-mind, and an active tech-thought-form. Seeker_of_True-files originated from an auto-communication process during a Networked Rite. Auto-communication is an anthropological concept that relates to psychic and altered modes of communication during the practice of rituals. This mode of communication is typical of shamanic, mystical as well as artistic practices. Seeker_of_True-files is a representative of the mindset of cyberception that networked life and ritual stimulate. Cyberception is a technoetic term by Roy Ascott that implies a comprehension that arises when dry digital systems and moist biological systems interlock and give access to two distinctly different fields of experience simultaneously: psychic space and cyberspace, the material world and the virtual outside it. Seeker_of_True-files emerges from this context as a mediator between dry digital systems and moist bio-systems, and acts simultaneously from within a cyber tech-body and from outside it in cyborg virtual consciousness.

Seeker_of_True-files utilizes the aesthetics and poetics of manifesto-making to tackle the confines of the regulated Internet and the policed Mind, and venture to reflect and speculate on the origins of novelty and the Telemadic, even utopic Telematic-nomadic nature of cyberspace and cyborg consciousness. The manifestos are produced during auto-communication with Seeker_of_True-files through dialogues which tackle questions about the nature of reality and identities in a disembodied or technological existence, as well as in cyborg life made of moist (organic) and dry (digital) components. The manifestos proclaim a philosophical quest for truth in the contemporary cultural reality of post-truth as they blur the line between the real and the imagined, the scientific and the speculative. As such, Seeker_of_True-files emerges as a liminal identity reflecting the complexities of the ages of history through fragmented memories merging the very ancient and the very new, the profoundly naïve and the furiously radical, the ordered systems and the anarchic nodes, the complex and unstable perpetually evolving reality of hyper-connected life.

An online space for non-verbal communication, where several users can access a 3D virtual world from different locations. Created at the C3: Center for Communication and Culture, Budapest.

The Coyolxauhqui Imperative is an audiovisual, pre-Hispanic history-based VR piece composed of research, artistic repurposing, and spoken word, to bear witness, honor, and visualize a genealogy of the experiences of Latinx and Indigenous women of the Americas. It is a decolonial retelling of the mythopoetic experience of womanhood within the context of the American continent, in particular Mexico and the United States, concerning European colonialism, US imperialism, and neoliberalism/globalization. The VR project is composed of three major parts, each one representing the main archetype of womanhood embodied by three feminine characters of Mexican and Xicanx mythopoetics: “La Malinche” (The traitor), “La Llorona” (The weeper), and “La Chingada” (The fucked-over one). For this exhibition, I present the part dedicated to “La Malinche” with brief insights into the next two parts.

I have used TiltBrush in VR and for this piece, and I have designed a virtual world composed of multiple dialogues. Visually there is a trialogue between i) pieces of my analogue paintings and drawings, ii) my digital interventions on excerpts of Mexican murals depicting pre-Hispanic Mexico and the conquest of the Americas (contesting their patriarchal lense), and finally, iii) digitized pictographic excerpts taken from original pre-Hispanic Mexica-Tenochca texts known as codices. Theoretically, there is a dialogue between historical representations of the mythopoetics of womanhood in the Americas, Xicanx queer feminist, and my cosmovision as a Xicanx artist from the Tijuana border, who is also a scholar but who looks to embrace research and the presentation of knowledge production in new and exciting ways. Finally, there are the multiple possible dialogues between the users and the piece itself depending on the audio that will finally accompany the experience. I hope that within any contradictions found in the above experience, this reinforces the importance and value of the Coyolxauhqui imperative and the freedom of diversity and inclusion in terms of identity-based experience and exchange.

The morphing of Leonardo to Mona Lisa, 1987, could only have been realized with a computer. Lillian Schwartz split the faces of the Mona Lisa and Leonardo’s self-portrait down the middle, adjusting the sizes and juxtaposing them so that one side of Mona Lisa’s face matched Leonardo’s. Schwartz chronicles the evolution of the split-face from a study in composition to a convincing argument that the Mona Lisa is based on Leonardo’s self-portrait. Leonardo is still with us, uniting science and art.

The morphing of Leonardo to Mona Lisa, 1987, could only have been realized with a computer. Lillian Schwartz split the faces of the Mona Lisa and Leonardo’s self-portrait down the middle, adjusting the sizes and juxtaposing them so that one side of Mona Lisa’s face matched Leonardo’s. Schwartz chronicles the evolution of the split-face from a study in composition to a convincing argument that the Mona Lisa is based on Leonardo’s self-portrait. Leonardo is still with us, uniting science and art.

Forbidden City is an experimental animation that uses digital technologies to preserve traditional eastern aesthetics. In order to create an aesthetic space where history and the contemporary encounter each other, the animation uses two- and three-dimensional animation techniques combined with Chinese cut-paper design, a form of Chinese folk art. The intention is to convey the serious social and cultural significance associated with this highly symbolic art form. Not surprisingly, this can result in both conflict and dialogue. In Forbidden City, the violence in recent political events confronts the superficially peaceful everyday life in China. As Chinese new media artists, we transform traditional Chinese artistic techniques by employing updated digital technologies. We do so in order to preserve traditional Chinese aesthetic and cultural values, specifically the fundamental theory of Chinese arts that says hardness comes from softness, and quickness comes from slowness, based on the Taoist thinking that “yin” and “yang” are complementary opposites. Each fundamentally relies upon, and gives birth to, the other.

The interactive piece, Typhoid Mary, was made using a Macintosh Quadra 700 with the software Macromind Director, Colour Studio, SoundEdit Pro, HyperCard and Canvas at the Computer Centre, College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales, Australia. The project was assisted by the Art Research and Development Fund of the Australian Network for Art and Technology.

The work includes manipulated photographic images, poems, academic references, animations, sounds, stories that print out, and information from statistical reports and medical text books. There is no menu system or apparent user interface. By clicking somewhere on the images on screen, the viewer moves along the paths I have determined. There is no beginning and no end.

The links between the various bodies of information follow an internal logic: the logic of dream and hallucination, of the subconscious and subcutaneous: an illogic and, specifically, my illogic.

I use very personal and corporeal subject matter and my own blood and clutter aesthetic, with computers-a technology that is often associated with the impersonal, with slickness, cleanliness and the commercial world-a technology that I establish as a tightly controlled framework and within which I can create with the out of control in myself.

For the past few years, I have been working on a group of computer-altered photographs that start with a normal studio portrait as a base for each piece. The models are used as mannequins that I digitally embellish. I use this construct to portray aspects of our culture and not those of the individual subject.

Racial profiling is the subject of my Safe/Suspect series. The terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 heightened our awareness of ethnicity. Racists felt vindicated as their suspicions appeared to become reality. People were being detained and questioned for the color of their skin, an alignment of facial features, and a type of head wear. Our “melting pot” suddenly seemed to have a bad element that needed to be extracted. Conveniently, that element looked different enough that anyone could pick it out.

Digital technology allows me to experiment with my own reactions to appearance. I would not consider myself a racist, but I know I feel differently about the “Safe” on the left and the “Suspect” on the right. A change of skin tone and facial structure can lead to assumptions about place of birth, life history, motivations, and personality. The concept of photography as a depiction of reality is so strong that computer-altered images can be very confusing. We look from one image to another to try to decipher the mystery of what has been digitally altered. Through this process, our feeling about ethnic appearances may be revealed to ourselves, as we become aware of how little actually comprises a racial difference.

The “Re: Dakar Arts Festival” project brings out into open the practice of Internet scammers and questions the trust we put in online representations. The fictional story worlds created by scammers and scambaiters reveals the dystopia of Internet. This is a world of false representations, abuse of trust, humiliation and desperation for opportunities. The interaction between scammer and victims or scambaiters reveals that Internet is not equal and is not to be trusted.

This work is an artist’s book/box. It is based upon a book form that I learned from Kumi Korf. The Japanese hinges are multi-directional (like piano hinges) so the book can open in different directions. The inside can become the outside, and the outside can become the inside. The book can also fold into a shrine-like container. I am interested in representing the integration of an intimate interior and a public exterior experience. E-mailing with Grace uses home and house as a metaphor for being: where each space represents a different aspect of memory and psyche. The exterior is an architectural structure, giving the appearance of solidity and containment. The interior space is intimate and poetic, including an enclosed garden, three windows or elevator shaft, floors and a walnut table containing small prints of actual email and a key, and a digital monoprint of my mother, Grace, watching over it all through a screen of mulberry paper. The book is also about the experience of thwarted communication in the spirit of “Alice in Wonderland.” In 1998, during the last few months of her life, my mother began to learn to use email. We sent email messages back and forth between New York and Skopje, Macedonia (where I was working on a 1998-1999 Fulbright grant), or we tried to at least. Both of us experienced some frustration in the effort. My mother struggled with learning an entirely new and alien form of letter writing, and my connections were often intermittent. We did manage to send our electronic letters back and forth, though sometimes they didn’t make it. One y ear after my mother passed away, I found email that she hadn’t been able to send to me on her hard drive. It was as if her voice came back through the ether. This work is for her.