Artworks Data Table

An animation about beauty and hysteria in relation to food as unsat­isfied pleasure. With original music by the director, it explores con­temporary love, in a lovely post-modern triangle. Nobody is satisfied.

Summary

The artwork explores the potential of creating hybrid and processual representations of dynamic virtual environments with procedurally-generated aesthetics and cinematography that transgresses the established conventions of visual media such as synthetic photorealism, offering a glimpse into the future media based on programmable and machine-generated visuals and media genres.

Abstract

The Synthetic Cameraman is an installation using a high-definition screen connected to a computer workstation. The setup is running a full-screen, real-time, 3D graphics simulation that critically challenges the notions of remediation, processuality, linearity, and creative agency in computer-generated virtual environments. The application is rendering a virtual scene depicting a volcanic mountain landscape. The central element of a fairly flat and barren caldera surface is a violently erupting volcanic cone with pyroclastic flow and rocks of different sizes being expelled as molten lava rivers are traveling down the slope forming a lava lake at the foot of the cone. The visual aspect of the phenomenon is enhanced by deep sounds of rumbling earth and rocks hitting the bottom of the caldera, falling down the slope, and the sounds of howling wind. The control over individual elements in the scene has been given over to the algorithms. The weather conditions, eruption, and the virtual camera settings – its dynamic framing and movement – are procedurally generated in real-time. Every few seconds, a new virtual camera is created with settings chosen from a wide variety of values. The range of possible values is beyond the capabilities of physical cameras, which makes every virtual camera a hypermediated representational apparatus, producing partially abstract and fluid visuals. The algorithms are also controlling the parameters of various post-processing effects that are procedurally applied to the camera feed. All of these processes are taking place in real-time, therefore every second of the experience is conceived through a unique entanglement of settings and parameters directing both the eruption and its representation. Each second of the simulation as perceived by the viewer is a one-time event, that constitutes this ever-lasting visual spectacle.

The main goal behind creating the artwork was to challenge the pervasiveness of carefully recreated (remediated) lens- based aesthetics and photorealism used as a conventional representational style used in several media types that use today’s computer graphics, e.g. video games, CG animations, etc. As a result, a deconstructive and speculative approach has been taken towards synthetic photorealism. The Synthetic Cameraman is expanding the representational spectrum of photorealistic, real-time computer graphics by generating a hypermediated and dynamic camera-based visual representation of the scene in real-time. The volcanic environment was chosen as a subject for the simulation in order to emphasize the structural and ontological unpredictability of both the phenomenon and the models of its representation as they unfold – an already dynamic and uncontrollable volcanic eruption is visualized by an equally dynamic and procedural camera system. The results of algorithmic agency in The Synthetic Cameraman reveal the creative potential of real-time computer graphics and today’s real-time content creation tools (e.g. general-purpose game engines), that allow us to design new types of visual content based on various aesthetic and formal styles and conventions. This trend will only accelerate thanks to advancements in machine learning techniques with systems like GANs and CANs that can produce images situated within a broad representational spectrum of computer graphics – from producing new types of image hybrids and aesthetics to mimicking historical artistic styles, generating perfect copies of paintings that have been fundamental for Western culture. Importantly, the artwork, by offering a unique visual experience virtually every second, illustrates how programmable real-time computer graphics bring us closer to processual and variable media culture based on untitled and particularly untied, ever-evolving media hybrids, bringing new visual experiences and allowing for new means of creative expression.

In a reflection on data materialism in the digital age, “Ornamental” creates an emergent system of generative visualizations from live EEG brain data scanned in the gallery. This work was produced during an artist residency with the Victoria and Albert Museum and Goldsmiths, Department of Computing.

Extended Summary:

In 1948, Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Information laid the groundwork for the digital age. It defined the term information, introduced the unit bit, and revolutionized how we communicate. Shannon’s work gives us physical parameters to define an often perceivably abstract entity: information. It’s a seemingly strange and wonderful truth in the digital age that information is physical- where you are often lead to believe that information lives in the ether of clouds. In a reflection on data materialism in the digital age, Ornamental creates an emergent system of generative visualizations from live EEG brain data scanned in the gallery. The brain scanning EEG reader serves as a symbolic data-extracting channel from one’s mind. More specifically, the extraction of an idea in it most raw and often incomplete form on a noisy information channel. The idea takes the form of binary trees or L-systems that are the fundamental data structure of mapping analog signals to digital encodings. The scanned ideas mutate the binary trees as initial seed data for a thought that is in a constant state of mutation and flux. It is easy to classify an idea as a finalized stagnant thing, but Ornamental plays with the possibility of seeing cognitive ideas as temporal physical living entities, transferring form from brain to keystroke to pixel to paper to iris to brain, from host to host to host. This work was produced during an artist residency with the Victoria & Albert Museum and Goldsmiths, Department of Computing.

Through the use of silversmithing techniques I translate scientific and philosophical ideas into delicate and intricate forms. By carving and manipulating wax I transfer the dynamic processes observed in nature at the macro and micro scale into precious metal. Further experimentation in surface colouration and stone setting techniques allows me to bring these objects to life. Through this approach, my works experiment with the phenomena of biophillia to generate immediate connection with the viewer whilst simultaneously encouraging reflection on what lies below the surface of our beings.

Informed by neuroscientific discoveries in the areas of consciousness and perception, my work seeks to connect these new ideas with themes of spirituality. We exist in an era where advanced imaging technology is providing a window to directly observe the neuronal activity which creates our sense of consciousness. These advancements, and their implications, serve as a key area of exploration in my artistic practice. As with my work in biomedical imaging, the objects I create are intended to make the invisible visible, both in anatomical form and the broader concepts they represent.

The works presented in this submission are handmade silver sculptures of neural form set with precious stones including sapphires, rubies, topaz and amethyst. Made for the exhibition In This Unfolding, they explore the philosophical concept of ‘coming out of the world’ as opposed to ‘coming into the world’. Mirrored forms from the micro to macro are used to convey the repetition of this story across scale and time and illustrate the changing states of consciousness from birth to death.

The “Gestures” series represents the balance between opposites. Through the use of the traditional feminine art of body painting, the strong gestural hand motions, and modern technology, this diptych speaks to the male and the female, the yin and the yang of our own expressions.

“Gestures IV” and “Gestures V” embody a message of hope that each indigenous culture may enter the increasingly homogenized 21st century with its unique cultural blueprint in tact. In the race towards economic and technological advancement and the quest for globalization, we run the risk of sacrificing cultural diversity. These pieces reflect my wish that technology be used as a means to preserve and celebrate cultural diversity rather than destroy it. My art reflects my desire to preserve the gentle balance between honoring cultural traditions, and embracing the future and all that it brings.

In my art, I begin by traveling throughout the world, where I find intrigue in the human cultural elements encountered. The simple, unsophisticated and organic details catch my attention. Each place and culture reveals its beauty to me in its everyday traditions. Capturing the unexpected interplay between color, texture, and imagery is at the heart of my work. By blending art, culture, and technology, I aspire to honor and show reverence for traditional cultures while dancing in step with modern technology.

The “Gestures” series represents the balance between opposites. Through the use of the traditional feminine art of body painting, the strong gestural hand motions, and modern technology, this diptych speaks to the male and the female, the yin and the yang of our own expressions.

“Gestures IV” and “Gestures V” embody a message of hope that each indigenous culture may enter the increasingly homogenized 21st century with its unique cultural blueprint in tact. In the race towards economic and technological advancement and the quest for globalization, we run the risk of sacrificing cultural diversity. These pieces reflect my wish that technology be used as a means to preserve and celebrate cultural diversity rather than destroy it. My art reflects my desire to preserve the gentle balance between honoring cultural traditions, and embracing the future and all that it brings.

In my art, I begin by traveling throughout the world, where I find intrigue in the human cultural elements encountered. The simple, unsophisticated and organic details catch my attention. Each place and culture reveals its beauty to me in its everyday traditions. Capturing the unexpected interplay between color, texture, and imagery is at the heart of my work. By blending art, culture, and technology, I aspire to honor and show reverence for traditional cultures while dancing in step with modern technology.

If Dreams Could Talk is a collaborative project that looks at the concepts of dreams and specifically the dissociated images and impressions that quickly fade upon waking.The journey is the integral inspiration that propels my art. Traveling throughout the world, I look for the simple, unsophisticated, and organic details that define the beauty of human culture. I am always intrigued by the differing human elements and visual stimulation that I encounter. Often the creative process is singular and individual, but when the work becomes collaborative, the resulting imagery becomes more than the sum of its parts. The artistic journey begins with a feeling or thought that is communicated between the collaborators until the work takes on its own personality. Finding the unexpected interplay between imagery, cultural similarities/differences, and personality is what drives me in this process. I continue to learn and explore the diversity of each element, letting the muse take me further on the creative journey. As we race toward economic and technological advancement in our quest for globalization, we run the risk of sacrificing cultural diversity. My art reflects my desire to preserve the gentle balance between honoring cultural traditions and embracing the future and all that it brings. By combining art, culture, and technology in this way, I weave images and experiences into work that speaks to the diversity in the world. Making art grants access to worlds that may be sacred, forbidden, enchanting, or threatening. It allows us to see worlds that we may never fully engage otherwise.

Spinning spools of colors and thread, flowing ribbons of fabric and people, frantic movement of garment workers and machines, fearful searching of rescue workers and family members, set to Ritsu Katsumata’s haunting score, create a sound and image indictment the global textile industry’s violations of human rights. In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (in New York City) claimed the lives of 146 garment workers and shocked the nation. Over a hundred years later, the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh claimed the lives of 1,129 people, injured 2,515 and shocked the world. American corporations, including Walmart, The Gap, Target and Macy’s, continue to refuse to sign a legally binding accord (signed by 70+ European companies) to pay for safety improvements in the factories in Bangladesh where their clothing is produced.

For over three decades, in performance, photography, installations, artificial intelligence agents, artifacts, web presences, and movies, Lynn Hershman’s work has dealt with what it is to live in a world of mediated, surveilled, documented, translated, manipulated, transformed identities, corporealities, and presences. Ninety boxes of the remains of much of this work now lie in an archive at Stanford University: papers, photographs, tapes, movies, sound recordings. Their relationship, as documents, to Lynn’s body of work is in question. Life Squared is an experience in an online world, a prosthetic world of avatars, their buildings and goods. It raises all sorts of questions about contemporary experience – real, synthetic, mediated, technology assisted. What is it to recollect in this contemporary world of mediated and multiple presences? What about the prospect of even greater (bio-info-technological) intervention in our sense of self? Will your clone know you? Will your downloaded memories convey the experience of what was? Indeed, with our identities today distributed through all manner of records and documents, our sense of self maintained by all manner of goods, technologies, and media, did you ever know who you were?

Room of One’s Own is a computer-based installation in which the viewer initiates operation simply by “looking inside.” The viewer voyeur’s eye movements trigger the video and computer action. Constructed to reference early “peep shows” as well as feminist concerns about the construction of female identity, the viewer/voyeur is required to peer into a small specially constructed bedroom scene. A tiny video camera digitizes the eye movements and sends the signal to the computer, which causes the videodisk to access proper segments.

This piece is not only about voyeurism but also about how one responds to being looked at. Several objects are situated in the tiny bedroom, including a bed, telephone, table, and television. Modular video segments are accessed as each is looked at. A Room of One’s Own is also designed to respond to the viewer’s physical presence via audio sensors placed beneath the mat upon which the viewer stands. Sound and words enter the environment and, like sirens, invite response. The image of the viewer’s eyes are inserted into a small television set in the tiny room, making the viewer/voyeur a ‘virtual’ part of the scene being viewed.

Throughout life, we build, we save, we destroy and we let go. As we live an as we look towards the future, we are often not conscious of that which we leave behind. Linger: Things Left Behind is a series of monotypes that explores the things that get left behind during life’s process. The imagery presents an intimate look at things which have gotten left behind, ranging from a 17th century Spanish castillo to the toys and dreams of childhood. The series began with a collection of photographs which were digitized and then modified to emphasize their emotional content. The images were printed directly onto plates and then transferred to paper.

Pages From a Diary is a series of digital monotypes that explores personal thoughts in the form of a visual diary. The imagery presents an intimate look at the places and events that create a person. The juxtaposition of visual elements conveys the emotional content of our everyday lives, expressing an interpretation of the way things were.

The series began with a collection of photographs, drawings, and objects, which were digitized and then digitally modified and reconstructed to emphasize their emotional content. The images were printed directly onto plates and then transferred to paper; the transfer process was done entirely by hand. The ink was pressed into the paper by “touching” the printing plate.

The resulting images are soft, beckoning one to touch their surface. Hands, a reoccurring theme throughout the series, are used to reinforce the touch of the process, the touch of the surface, and the expressiveness of touch.

Designed for both public and private spaces, Windowseat Lounge is a comfortable refuge from the hustle and bustle of lobbies, airports, or busy home environments. The wrap-around design creates a sub-architectural room-withina-room. A swiveling base provides full control over the framed perspective, allowing you to pan 360 degrees to take in the environment or block it out.

I am extremely interested in the role of new technology in shaping our cultural environment. The computer is both the means and indirectly the content of many of my pieces. If Dick and Jane are still out there, they would be quite shaken by the information society that we are creating. I struggle with the social issues raised by all of this but at the same time am fascinated by the new possibilities. As artists before us have been buffeted by fin de siècle psychology, we are certainly tasting the fin de millennium.

Most of these pieces involve a scanned object that has been enhanced and then greatly enlarged. Despite their hyperreal texture, the black and white fictionalizes them. Most are printed on mylar, which is transparent or frosted and then displayed over wood veneer, formica, aluminum foil, and other materials. Hardware is repurposed from the local scrap metal yard, and the framing material is custom made by a furnace contractor. There is on intended slurring of the real and artificial, of the digital and tactile.

“Artist’s Garden” captures a bar-coded leaf in an oversized specimen box with wheels and tail lights. The piece, which is meant to hang crookedly on the wall, deals with the uneasy relationship of humans to the natural environment.

I am extremely interested in the role of new technology in shaping our cultural environment. The computer is both the means and indirectly the content of many of my pieces. If Dick and Jane are still out there, they would be quite shaken by the information society that we are creating. I struggle with the social issues raised by all of this but at the same time am fascinated by the new possibilities. As artists before us have been buffeted by fin de siècle psychology, we are certainly tasting the fin de millennium.

Most of these pieces involve a scanned object that has been enhanced and then greatly enlarged. Despite their hyperreal texture, the black and white fictionalizes them. Most are printed on mylar, which is transparent or frosted and then displayed over wood veneer, formica, aluminum foil, and other materials. Hardware is repurposed from the local scrap metal yard, and the framing material is custom made by a furnace contractor. There is on intended slurring of the real and artificial, of the digital and tactile.

In “Endangered Species,” real leaves are displayed in glassine envelopes, each sequentially bar coded. All of the plants are common­-place, suggesting that everything is endangered.

I am extremely interested in the role of new technology in shaping our cultural environment. The computer is both the means and indirectly the content of many of my pieces. If Dick and Jane are still out there, they would be quite shaken by the information society that we are creating. I struggle with the social issues raised by all of this but at the same time am fascinated by the new possibilities. As artists before us have been buffeted by fin de siècle psychology, we are certainly tasting the fin de millennium.

Most of these pieces involve a scanned object that has been enhanced and then greatly enlarged. Despite their hyperreal texture, the black and white fictionalizes them. Most are printed on mylar, which is transparent or frosted and then displayed over wood veneer, formica, aluminum foil, and other materials. Hardware is repurposed from the local scrap metal yard, and the framing material is custom made by a furnace contractor. There is on intended slurring of the real and artificial, of the digital and tactile.

“Golden Parachute” is also about money, power, and the environment.

I am extremely interested in the role of new technology in shaping our cultural environment. The computer is both the means and indirectly the content of many of my pieces. If Dick and Jane are still out there, they would be quite shaken by the information society that we are creating. I struggle with the social issues raised by all of this but at the same time am fascinated by the new possibilities. As artists before us have been buffeted by fin de siècle psychology, we are certainly tasting the fin de millennium.

Most of these pieces involve a scanned object that has been enhanced and then greatly enlarged. Despite their hyperreal texture, the black and white fictionalizes them. Most are printed on mylar, which is transparent or frosted and then displayed over wood veneer, formica, aluminum foil, and other materials. Hardware is repurposed from the local scrap metal yard, and the framing material is custom made by a furnace contractor. There is on intended slurring of the real and artificial, of the digital and tactile.

“High Flyer” is imprinted with a tracking bar code, implying an exchange between sender and receiver, and also suggesting the potential scarcity of the commonplace. This piece is environmental in theme.

I am extremely interested in the role of new technology in shaping our cultural environment. The computer is both the means and indirectly the content of many of my pieces. If Dick and Jane are still out there, they would be quite shaken by the information society that we are creating. I struggle with the social issues raised by all of this but at the same time am fascinated by the new possibilities. As artists before us have been buffeted by fin de siècle psychology, we are certainly tasting the fin de millennium.

Most of these pieces involve a scanned object that has been enhanced and then greatly enlarged. Despite their hyperreal texture, the black and white fictionalizes them. Most are printed on mylar, which is transparent or frosted and then displayed over wood veneer, formica, aluminum foil, and other materials. Hardware is repurposed from the local scrap metal yard, and the framing material is custom made by a furnace contractor. There is on intended slurring of the real and artificial, of the digital and tactile.

“Mirror, Mirror” is about letting go of privacy, one seemingly innocent question at a time.

Replica is a spoof on the notion of authenticity in the digital environment. In this work, the contemporary still life of edible and fake pears nested in a plastic bag is directly captured in larger-than-life detail by the scanner. The humble plastic pear, which is one of the “sitters” for the piece, is almost forgotten as an intruder in the picture plane of the smallest frame. In the printed output, both edible and plastic pears are strikingly similar in visual appeal, and both are branded with stickers. Two modified eye-like quotation marks are used to add the artist’s brand to the still life and thereby to claim and append the content and history of still life to the piece. Lights mounted to the top of the larger image mock a form of museum display associated with value. They also reinforce the microscopic examination of subject. The smaller image is symbolically dependent on the larger for its illumination, just as all three elements are physically linked by hardware.

I am extremely interested in the role of new technology in shaping our cultural environment. The computer is both the means and indirectly the content of many of my pieces. If Dick and Jane are still out there, they would be quite shaken by the information society that we are creating. I struggle with the social issues raised by all of this but at the same time am fascinated by the new possibilities. As artists before us have been buffeted by fin de siècle psychology, we are certainly tasting the fin de millennium.

Most of these pieces involve a scanned object that has been enhanced and then greatly enlarged. Despite their hyperreal texture, the black and white fictionalizes them. Most are printed on mylar, which is transparent or frosted and then displayed over wood veneer, formica, aluminum foil, and other materials. Hardware is repurposed from the local scrap metal yard, and the framing material is custom made by a furnace contractor. There is on intended slurring of the real and artificial, of the digital and tactile.

“Road Warrior” uses a motorcycle metaphor, including tail reflectors and a mud flap. The maple spinners are going nowhere unless someone gives them a lift. The meaning and value are, of course, altered by the predicament.

This piece is from a series of works created around the theme of open source as applied to nature and culture. In this piece, the copyright symbol is prominently displayed on the surrogate leaf. The title draws a connection to cattle branding; the copyright brand in a similar way constrains the free movement of the leaf and defines the basis of its valuation.

The series examines the associated ideas of ownership, authorship, and branding of nature using botanical subject matter as surrogates to investigate human intervention in nature. It supposes a legal sys­tem built around protecting and promoting privatization of our natural endowment in its many meanings. The work is presented with a pseudo-scientific voice, in specimen-box frames showcasing images with falsely objective microscopic detail. The viewer is pushed into the role of principle investigator.

The work is fake nature branded with the signs and symbols of com­mercially recognized systems of valuation. Subtexts of the work are authenticity and privacy. The work investigates the myriad questions surrounding the notion of what should belong to the “commons” and what should not; it might be seen as a variant on the issues raised by the “creative commons” movement.

The Musical Jacket is the first “wearable” hyper-instrument developed at the MIT Media Lab under the direction of composer Tod Machover. As an interactive instrument, it allows players with very little musical experience to play not only different individual notes, but also to manipulate and control entire rhythmic tunes. As a computational object, it demonstrates how familiar objects can be transformed through microprocessor technology and new electronic materials. It also demonstrates how the function of such objects, both socially and practically, can be transformed through such technology.

The jacket incorporates an original, embroidered fabric keypad, a sewn conducting fabric bus, a battery pack, a pair of commercial speakers and an original miniature MIDI synthesizer pin. The entirely new keypad is embroidered from a resistive thread and uses a capacitive sensing technique to recognize touch. When the fabric keypad is touched, it communicates through the fabric bus to the MIDI synthesizer, which generates notes. The synthesizer sends audio to the speakers over the fabric bus. The embroidered keypad and fabric bus allow elimination of most of the wires, connectors, and plastic insets that would make the jacket stiff, heavy and uncomfortable.

Creators of computational art are beginning to dream of changing not only the software inside computers, but also of changing the physical form and place of computers in the world. Such artistic practice has usually been limited to reshaping a plastic shell, or perhaps covering it with wood or fur. But for computers to truly transform from mundane office machines, creators of computational objects must (as architects do with buildings) control, understand, and influence the electronic materials from which such devices are constructed.

The Firefly Dress uses unusual electronic materials to radically change the form and image of computational devices. The dress and necklace use conductive fabric, beads, and Velcro to distribute power throughout the dress. As the wearer moves, LED’s attached to fuzzy conductive pads, (the electrical contacts) brush lightly against the conductive fabric layers, creating a dynamic lighting effect. The necklace (having no power supply of its own) creates dynamic light effects in multicolored LEDs when its conducting beads and tassels brush against the surface of the dress. These brush-like connections distribute power without hard connectors and wires, allowing the dress to flow and move with the motions of the wearer.

Autopoiesis is a work that imagines realities and is, in part, a humorous document of the discussions between the two authors about the beginning of the universe. It tackles the idea of existing in more than one place at a single time and coping with a duplicate of oneself. It is also an exploration of degrees of and limits to comprehending relationships between cause and effect, mass and vacuum, and is played out in a dialogue between a physical figure and its virtual (projected) manifestation, in which both of them constantly move and change without evolving. One can see the lines projected on the screen as the reality created by force and matter acting on stage, which in itself is an illusion orchestrated by the performers. Autopoiesis is followed and complemented by Mimesis, a more serious exploration of the ancient tension between imperfect reality and ideal form as furthered by art’s mimicry. Two-dimensional representation is challenged in a quest both rational and irrational to tap into the essence of the eternal. In contrast to Autopoiesis, which is performed in complete darkness, Mimesis is enacted in full light, to make palpable the physical challenge of the material.

In this new-style music box, users experience dynamic 3D scenes as well as music. Dancing dolls make sounds when they touch the floating triangle objects (“music pieces”). The music pieces and dolls correspond to the pins and teeth of the music box.

In my artistic development, I did not have the typical constructivist background. I was an action painter and jazz musician. Through a development of consciousness, I detached myself from spontaneous expressions and turned in the mid 1960s, to a more systematic and, therefore, geometric expression. It was mainly the writings of the German philosopher Max Bense and the French composer Pierre Barbaud that radically changed my thinking, pointing to a rational construction of art.

Since 1973, I have been concentrating on fracturing the symmetry of a cube (including since 1978, n-dimensional hypercubes), using the structure of the cube as a “system” and “alphabet”. The disturbance or disintegration of symmetry is the basic generator of new constructions and relationships. The computer became a physical and intellectual extension in the process of creating my art. I write computer algorithms: rules that calculate and then generate the work, which could not be realized in any other way. It is not necessarily the system or the logic I want to present in my work, but the visual invention that results from it. My artistic goal is reached when a finished work can visually dissociate itself from its logical content and convincingly stand as an independent abstract entity.

Over the past two decades I have had many solo and group shows in galleries and museums worldwide. In 1994, the first comprehensive monograph on my work was published by Waser-Verlag (ISBN 3-908080-39-8) in Zuumlrich.

In my artistic development, I did not have the typical constructivist background. I was an action painter and jazz musician. Through a development of consciousness, I detached myself from spontaneous expressions and turned in the mid 1960s, to a more systematic and, therefore, geometric expression. It was mainly the writings of the German philosopher Max Bense and the French composer Pierre Barbaud that radically changed my thinking, pointing to a rational construction of art.

Since 1973, I have been concentrating on fracturing the symmetry of a cube (including since 1978, n-dimensional hypercubes), using the structure of the cube as a “system” and “alphabet”. The disturbance or disintegration of symmetry is the basic generator of new constructions and relationships. The computer became a physical and intellectual extension in the process of creating my art. I write computer algorithms: rules that calculate and then generate the work, which could not be realized in any other way. It is not necessarily the system or the logic I want to present in my work, but the visual invention that results from it. My artistic goal is reached when a finished work can visually dissociate itself from its logical content and convincingly stand as an independent abstract entity.

Over the past two decades I have had many solo and group shows in galleries and museums worldwide. In 1994, the first comprehensive monograph on my work was published by Waser-Verlag (ISBN 3-908080-39-8) in Zuumlrich.

The video Predictive Cities emerged out of a period of workshops, papers, and online tools published here http://predictive.cityabc.xyz The shaping of the urban space – most recently implemented in the form of “smart city” technologies – has been and still is the domain of men – bringing with them a narrow set of priorities such as acceleration, predictability and profitability. My work renders a different image of this latest urban transformation – one of a hollow city, vulnerable and calling for agency. For the creation of the urban scans, we mapped neighborhoods of Dakar, Senegal, with a 4K cam mounted on a drone. I wanted to develop a visual metaphor, that could support the work’s exploration of the loss of autonomy in a hyper-networked and surveilled world (or smart city), where transparency is not necessarily the base for accountability but the vulnerability experienced by glass citizens. Hence, the choice to work with point clouds, composed of uncountable points – data points – but much harder to post-produce than 3D mesh models. We used Perl to create a code that would allow me to affect the point clouds, as a further metaphor for the data-driven manipulation of public urban space.

As a female artist and filmmaker working in the intersection of art, data politics and surveillance, my work has continuously contributed a critical voice to the rapid developments in the name of technology-led progress. We live in an age of unprecedented quantification – never before have cities, and our lives, been subject to so much probing, measurement, and analysis, enabling a shift towards automation and machine learning. Multi-sensory, hyperconnected, algorithmic systems are bringing sweeping changes to the urban fabric, and all our daily lives. Recognizing the urgent need for a new visual language to represent the contemporary, data-driven ‘predictive city’, I have developed a hybrid method using photogrammetry, volumetric filmmaking, and code-based manipulation. Through its auratic and poetic use of computational imaging technologies, the moving image piece questions the limitations and errors of algorithmic representations.

The Universal Whistling Machine (UWM) is an installation that ponders the phenomenon of whistling as a universal mode of communication, common to digital machines, humans, and many animals. It senses the presence of living, moving creatures in its vicinity and attracts them with a signature whistle. Given a response whistle, UWM counters with its own composition, based on a time-frequency analysis of the original. UWM is an inquiry into automation of an underexposed area of lowbandwidth expression, whistling; direct and immediate; code and content in one. Whistling is admiration, secret code, and protest. Emmet Till, a young man of color, was lynched in 1955 after “wolfwhistling” in the presence of a white woman. Intuitively understood, whistling is transcultural communication below the radar of social etiquette. So much can be expressed by minute alterations of airflow in the mouth. Tongue, throat, lips, and cheeks funnel air into a pressured cocktail of sound energies we use to argue, debate, and sing. But the richness of human language has proven exceedingly difficult to analyze and synthesize, and spoken languages with large vocabularies and multiple speakers still defy the very best speech-recognition systems. A humble machine, UWM deals with a subset of the language problem. Whistling is a communication primitive in most human languages. It is a kind of time travel to a less-articulated state. Inhabitants of Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, use a whistling language, el Silbo Gomera, to communicate from hilltop to hilltop. Their high-power whistles carry farther than the spoken word. We share whistling and song with many animals. Mammals and birds also carry the means for whistling. Just as we carry physical remnants of our bodily evolution in us, we carry the capacity for whistling also. UWM is a statement of affection for the machine, but it is also a critique of the directions we have embarked on. The grand goals of artificial intelligence remain elusive. Maybe we can find peace with machines on more subtle levels. Details are available at: www.buffalo.edu/-mrbohlen/uwm.html

This digital portrait of Merce Cunningham is derived from a recording of Loops, his solo dance for hands and fingers. The motion-captured joints have become nodes in a network that sets them into fluctuating relationships with one another, at times suggesting the hands underlying them, but more often depicting complex cat’s-cradle variations. Driven by fragments of Cunningham’s motion, the piece seeks to develop a portrait around the uncanny absence of its subject.

The motion of the hands is rebuilt by a colony of synthetic creatures modeled using techniques from artificial intelligence. This visual network is rendered in a series of related styles, reminiscent of hand-drawing, but all with a motion and odd attentiveness quite different from drawing, evoking primitive biological or atomic worlds. These visual worlds are combined with an unsynchronized looping narrative by Cunningham (reading from his diary) and music by Takehisa Kosugi. The piece unfolds across a number of time scales. Things change with almost every frame of animation and moments that occur perhaps only once a day.

This work shows three pieces from an investigation into “intelligent form.” For a number of years now, I have been looking at the problem of creating autonomous virtual creatures that interact, move, and learn in real time. Central to these problems are a number of conceptual difficulties in how such simple artificial intelligences represent their “bodies” and the movements that they can perform. This work takes investigations on body representations far away from typical computer graphics techniques, and very different from the now traditional and reassuringly familiar representations of triangles, meshes, skeletons, and key-frames.

In this work, we use simple forms: a square, a single curve, and a family of curves. The representations in this work encode learned knowledge about form against which other forms can be evaluated, animated, perturbed, and grown. These knowledge structures are deliberately incomplete, and the potential for mistakes in such representations is clear and important. We are not concerned here with the optimality of a result, or the robustness of an algorithm, but with the expressive power of a process, its mistakes, its adaptations.

The presented artworks collect a number of images from three of these experiments. Each panel explores a representation that connects generation and analysis, and each collection is laid out to suggest its journey or an unfolding process.

This interactive installation consists of musical creatures – autonomous, virtually embodied characters living within a sonic environment. The movement of their graphical bodies produces music and reflects their understanding of the sounds that they hear. In this installation, computer animation and music are synthesized through the creatures’ animal-inspired artificial intelligences.

I’ve been working with computer technology and industrial types of processes with traditional art methods and materials since the mid-1980s. In this piece, the basic forms were drawn with the aid of a computer and various software applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, and Maya) and then output and used as guides for cutting various-sized clay slabs. The 20 surfaces were derived from photographic images that were digitized, manipulated, and then screen-printed onto the slabs, using a ceramic slip (similar in composition to printers’ acrylic inks). The textural or relief surfaces were created with the aid of a laser engraver that uses images for burning into rubber and polymer sheets. These sheets were then pressed into the wet clay slabs.

10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different deals with urbanization and globalization in the digital age. The user moves through visual worlds posted publicly by others on social networks such as YouTube, Flickr or Twitter. Here these personal impressions are streamed in real time like windows to our changing world. The viewer participates in the social movements of our time and makes a virtual journey into a constantly new image and sound collages in which one experiences local, cultural and linguistic differences and similarities. In virtual space, this information is visualized on cubes that rise at different heights to become a kind of skyline. The work deals with how our cities are continuously changing and increasingly resemble one. This results in more and more non-places/places of lost places in the sense of Marc Augé’s book and essay Non-Places, which could exist all over the world without any true local identity (mostly anonymous transition zones such as motorways, hotel rooms or airports).

Credits: Marc Lee in collaboration with the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratory (ISAS) and the ZAK | Centre for Cultural and General Studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. The telepresence system used is a result of the interdisciplinary project e-Installation for the virtualization of media art.

Milpa Polímera (Polymer Cornfield) (2013) is a 3D open-source printer modified to function as a tractor that plows seeds made out of polylactic acid (PLA), a thermoplastic biopolymer made from corn. The printer-tractor is fixed by an axis to a closed cycle in which the machine is only able to perform a single repetitive and absurd task: print artificial corn seeds and sow them into the soil.

Like the never-ending loop in which this tractor-printer operates, the work is a manifestation of a series of contradictory relations between the natural and the artificial, as well as other conflicting narratives of patents, open-source technologies, and free knowledge.

The machine was constructed using the first generation of MakerBot, an open-code 3D printer developed by a community of enthusiasts who selflessly supported the advancement of this technology. Nevertheless, soon after it achieved enormous success, MakerBot Industries terminated its open-code printer production and entered the patent market. At the same time, the PLA used as the machine’s main production material is a thermoplastic obtained from cornstarch, processed by a genetically modified bacteria. The corn used to produce this polymer is itself transgenic patented, which paradoxically contradicts the very origins of corn: a seed domesticated about 10,000 years ago by a collective civilization whose cosmogony and culture saw it as a shared source of life.

The Milpa Polímera tractor is trapped inside a perverse cycle whose logic is strictly economic and market-driven, planting infertile seeds that are unable to germinate. Thus it exposes the system behind the control of life and knowledge, which radically negates the origins of corn and the original milpa crop-growing system.

Combining photography with computer-rendered images, Falling Apart wants to challenge people’s trust in their own perceptions. Photography has traditionally been seen as the most accurate medium of representing reality. Computer rendering of images is now the most perfect medium to simulate reality. By mixing representation and simulation, this film creates contrasting levels of illusion in order to raise questions about the truthfulness or falseness of what is being shown. Falling Apart wants to show how much our perception can be manipulated.

Mobile Heart Health, an exploratory research project, applies biosensing and mobile feedback to preventive cardiology. Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S., demands innovative approaches to prevention. This project targets psychological risk factors such as stress and conflict with mobile feedback. Practices that facilitate self regulation – such as cognitive behavioral therapy, biofeedback, mindfulness, and yoga – are transferred from rarefied clinical and teaching settings into the flow of daily life. The mobile therapies appear when they are most needed, as determined by individuals’ physiological and subjective stress signals. A key design challenge was translating interpersonal healing practices, such as psychotherapy dialogues, into brief experiential interactions with a mobile device. Ethnography, participatory design, and secondary research inspired a visual language, framework, and portfolio of mobile therapies. Heating and cooling dynamics emerged as central visual metaphors for autonomic imbalance and the subjective experience of anger. A spectrum of fire stages, from an unlit match to forest-fire aftermath, represent the user’s immediate state and tailor the therapeutic intervention accordingly. The intent is to help people “catch the flicker before the flame” – that is, to recognize early signs of stress and modulate their emotional and physical reactions. The visual appeal of these elements may allow people to acknowledge their attraction to states and behaviors that are damaging over time. The fire-and-water-based imagery was also selected for its crosscultural resonance. This system integrates typically disparate healing practices: psychotherapeutic techniques, individualized coping strategies, and complementary approaches of mindfulness meditation, yoga, and Ayurvedic medicine. Mobile-therapy concepts range from animated breathing exercises and cognitive reappraisal tools to mood-determined music and imagery selections. Concept feedback has been gathered in the US and India. The full platform of monitoring and therapeutic feedback is in development for trials.

Within Liquid Meditation, an immersant encounters abstract water reflections in a unique architecture that expresses a narrative philosophy. As the immersant journeys through the structure, meditative experiences within the reflections foretell the upcoming revelation. Conclusion of the narrative is based on individual navigational choices within the virtual experience.

As a philosophical narrative, this virtual experience is representative of growth in life. Various elements in the narrative structure express a scenario symbolic of attaining awareness. In virtual reality, abstract concepts can be visualized and reality can be re-experienced from a first-hand perspective. Through experience with these concepts in a virtual world, immersants could potentially achieve renewed awareness of their existence in reality.

My print Permutations III was inspired by my interest in sea and cloud forms. It grew out of a series I began two years ago called: See the Beautiful Sea where I experimented with different ways of viewing the reality of the same seascape. In one experiment, I reconstructed the image using dot patterns in various ways. I am fascinated with opportunities to take apart reality, to explore its abstract underlying patterns, and to reconstruct these abstractions into a real scene. All of this has led me to further explore computer-generated images of the earth seen from weather satellites. Each of the symbols used by the computer represents information about different heights and depths of rain clouds over certain areas of the earth. These patterns are an amusing reality because in abstract printouts they reveal information about the real world which lies beneath.

Permutations III is one of a series of three prints which show a progression of shifting weather satellite computer shapes and colors slowly metamorphosing. The brilliant color rectangles are the moving lights of human places for below the radio patterns of clouds – as though they are seen from a great distance. The mood is lyrical to evoke a sense of memory and mystery.

Plant Sense is a project focused in research about how we can create a body interface that allows us to feel the plants in our whole body. We propose to build a wearable device that allows us to connect ourselves with plants, and allow us to forge new bonds human-plant. A new way to feel plants, through our skin, a much more intimate an emotional way.

During the last years we have been focused in environmental and plants approach in our art works. We have been developing a sensor to measure electrical changes in plants. And thanks to an algorithm we realise that we can measure this changes.

However we only visualized the state of the plant in our previous projects. Now we would like to go ahead and develop a new stage. We would like to develop a second skin able to communicate plant-human. A second skin that allows us to feel the plants senses in our own body.

Dust is an immersive, virtual reality experience that aims to transform the way people see and experience contemporary dance. It is an innovative project exploring new forms of engaging the audience and creating the narratives through the creative partnership between performing arts and new media. The piece is inspired the fact that every element on Earth was formed at the heart of a stardust, so our bodies were. Drawing inspiration from these eternal particles being part of our bodies just for incredibly short moment, as well as the motif of the unthinkable world expressed by book of philosophy In the Dust Of This Planet by Eugene Thacker, Dust seeks to re-imagine our perception of body, space and time with the use of digital technologies.

It immerses the audience in a virtual reality environment created by volumetric capturing. The audience uses virtual reality (VR) headsets to place themselves in the immediate presence of the dancer and within a unique visual and aural scenario. The resulting effect is exhilarating, allowing the audience to experience the work from different perspectives and within the space where the dance is happening. Dust is an installation for room-scale VR accompanied by an interactive WebVR website. The website version of the experience was made with Three.js and our custom tool-sets for recording and converting the volumetric video stream.

The dancers in Dust are Soňa Ferienčíková and Roman Zotov. Dust has been produced by Carmen Salas with the support of the Arts Council of England and Slovak Arts Council.

Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced is an interactive screen-based work developed by The Ohio State University’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and the Department of Dance in collaboration with renowned choreographer William Forsythe. Pivoting on Forsythe’s masterwork of visual complexity, One Flat Thing, reproduced (OFTr), the Synchronous Objects project seeks to enrich cross-disciplinary investigation and creativity by revealing deep structures of choreographic thinking through a vivid collection of information objects in the form of 3D computer animation, annotation, and interactive graphics.

Though dance is notoriously difficult to capture and document, Forsythe challenged our research group to develop a new kind of generative dance “literature” to stimulate the exchange of ideas and innovation in a wide range of disciplines. His choreography in OFTr is particularly exciting to analyze, due to the challenges it poses for visualizing a high density of interdependent relationships distributed across a network of 17 dancers navigating a landscape of a 20-table grid and resulting in a contrapuntal dance composition.

Co-creative directors Maria Palazzi and Norah Zuniga Shaw gathered a multidisciplinary team of researchers from architecture, cognitive science, computer science, dance, design, geography, philosophy, and statistics to apply and cross-pollinate their disciplinary visualization methodologies in examining Forsythe’s strategies. The research involved extensive work with The Forsythe Company to systematically analyze the material and systems of exchange that make up OFTr. As we parsed the dance into its hundreds of component parts, we were challenged to determine means of quantifying these data, using them to drive concrete and abstract interpretations, transformations, derivations, and interactive creative tools.

This work underscores the profound possibilities in collaborations between major artists and interdisciplinary research teams using innovative and interpretive information-visualization methods in making meaningful visual literatures that have relevance in contemporary society.

e*scapes is a live audio/visual performance that reflects on an electronic vision of nature. Taking live cinema to a new level, the Cádiz/Clelland/Lelong trio performs live electronic music to live remixed footage and vice versa. Kent Clelland (aka LapCore) combines contemporary dance music structures and sounds with traditional electro-acoustic music techniques to create a recombinant computer music journey that is dynamic, ever-evolving, and potentially fragile. Mariela Cádiz and Denis Lelong use excerpts from nature documentaries and take the images out of their scientific and pedagogical context to process and remix them in a real-time, musically inspired flow. By deconstructing the common use of nature documentary footage and exploring its cinematic qualities, their live mixing thrives on mesmerizing, forceful, and unexpected relationships. Since both music and video are being performed live in conjunction with one another, it is no longer possible to tell if the music is inspiring the video or the video is inspiring the music. The result is a feedback-driven, multi-sensorial exploration into future-stained natural habitats.

Developed by the Artes Electrónicas group at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina, directed by Mariela Yeregui, Octópodos Sisíficos (Sisyphean Octopods) (2010) is an installation comprised of six mobile robots that carry LCD screens displaying endoscopic videos with images that resemble internal body organs.

The robots move erratically, without any purpose but to reveal their own technological animality; they display a corporeal behavior that is both artificial and organic, material and phenomenological, exposing their own absurd existence as “living” artificial objects. Forced to repeatedly carry their own physical and virtual bodies, the robots’ task might be considered a useless effort; or, on the contrary, in transporting themselves, perhaps their labor grants the machines an ontological dimension by humanizing them. Like Sisyphus, condemned to perform a laborious and futile task ad eternum, these mytho-technological beings were created to carry an image of themselves and, with that, to define their own fate and identity.

The series U.S. Naval Signal Flag Narratives consists of 26 editions of serigraphs. Imagery consists of photographs and handmade and computer-aided drawings and paintings, working with Photoshop, Illustrator, and FreeHand. The confluence of computer processes with serigraphy provides a contrast between digital and analog media. The use of digital technologies in my work allows manipulation of photographs and precise drawing of diagrams. It allows me to print color separations of photo-based work, which are then translated directly to the screen. The physical working process of screen printing, although difficult, is important to me. I hand pull all of my prints, one color at a time. My prints may have as few as eight colors, or as many as 17. My meticulous attention to craftsmanship at the computer and with my printmaking is an integral part of the content of each print.

Maritime flags are used to communicate while maintaining radio silence, transmitting messages by hoisting an alphabet flag on a halyard. When hoisted alone, each flag voices an individual message. Each print in this series contains the image of one flag and its written meaning. Included are my interpretations of the flag’s message. My narrative intent is not to render concepts through realism, nor is it to literally illustrate each flag’s definition. What’s important to me are the patterns of effects that sustain a cohesive connection of my stories and create metaphoric associations with the viewer.

Memories seem to be more lyrical than literal. The process of revisiting one’s history is natural and allows one to adapt to possibilities in the future. When I began this series, I thought the imagery to be only about family relationships and personal memories of growing up within the culture of the Navy. I soon realized that, in addition, my concepts represent experiences shared by thousands of service families. The military constitutes a separate and distinctly different subculture from civilian America. The government develops, maintains, and staffs its own resources to support the member families as they attempt to cope with the stresses and demands of the military lifestyle. These care-taking resources create a closely knit community that exercises a powerful shaping influence on the children. These prints examine a wide scope of influences and connect my memories to my present.

Using digital processes, I re-present objects associated with the domestic sphere in the context of the electronic age. My images combine tools and personal objects that are found in the home, and in some cases belong in a laboratory. With the aid of digital technology, I aim to remove the hierarchical distinctions associated with higher and lower forms of technology. I attempt to muddy the separation between women’s work, especially menial labor, and the rest of cultural achievement. Menial, unseen, uncompensated work is often central to daily life, and is performed in the home (cleaning, cooking, and care-giving). By extension, there is a culture connected to women’s activities that is also denied importance. The history of the witch, including tales of subversions of domestic activity, has provided a point of departure. The myths of the witch parallel those of Dedaelus and Icarus, through references to science, magic, immortality, and defiance of the laws of nature. I am drawn to stories of attempts to overcome human physical limitations. With the advent of the laboratory research of the 21st century, controversies of our time often circle around decisions over sustaining or terminating human life, which encourage reflection on myths of immortality.

Still life often references the messiness of our humanity, through a documentation of domestic activities such as eating and drinking what Norman Bryson calls “the small-scale, trivial, forgettable acts of bodily survival and self maintenance.”1 The rendering of intimate close spaces reinforces this connection back to the physical presence of the viewer, placing the body at the center. Still life has the potential to acknowledge the anonymity of daily life while also providing a vehicle for the allegories generated by the vanitas, a tradition approach to still life that references human mortality and rejection of worldly possessions. The products of a diverse range of our collective activities can now be stored as digital code. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the cultural aspects of physical labor and personal ritual. At times, we may express a longing for abandoned rituals practiced in the recent past. Embedded in my working methods lies my ambivalence about shifting technologies as I exchange one set of processes for another. intimate images hold the viewer close and encourage reflection :r commonplace rituals. We rarely question our selection of the daily electronic tasks we now embrace or consider those manual processes we have discarded.2005

Using digital processes, I re-present objects associated with the domestic sphere in the context of the electronic age. My images combine tools and personal objects that are found in the home, and in some cases belong in a laboratory. With the aid of digital technology, I aim to remove the hierarchical distinctions associated with higher and lower forms of technology. I attempt to muddy the separation between women’s work, especially menial labor, and the rest of cultural achievement. Menial, unseen, uncompensated work is often central to daily life, and is performed in the home (cleaning, cooking, and care-giving). By extension, there is a culture connected to women’s activities that is also denied importance. The history of the witch, including tales of subversions of domestic activity, has provided a point of departure. The myths of the witch parallel those of Dedaelus and Icarus, through references to science, magic, immortality, and defiance of the laws of nature. I am drawn to stories of attempts to overcome human physical limitations. With the advent of the laboratory research of the 21st century, controversies of our time often circle around decisions over sustaining or terminating human life, which encourage reflection on myths of immortality.

Still life often references the messiness of our humanity, through a documentation of domestic activities such as eating and drinking what Norman Bryson calls “the small-scale, trivial, forgettable acts of bodily survival and self maintenance.”1 The rendering of intimate close spaces reinforces this connection back to the physical presence of the viewer, placing the body at the center. Still life has the potential to acknowledge the anonymity of daily life while also providing a vehicle for the allegories generated by the vanitas, a tradition approach to still life that references human mortality and rejection of worldly possessions. The products of a diverse range of our collective activities can now be stored as digital code. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the cultural aspects of physical labor and personal ritual. At times, we may express a longing for abandoned rituals practiced in the recent past. Embedded in my working methods lies my ambivalence about shifting technologies as I exchange one set of processes for another. intimate images hold the viewer close and encourage reflection :r commonplace rituals. We rarely question our selection of the daily electronic tasks we now embrace or consider those manual processes we have discarded.

Using digital processes, I re-present objects associated with the domestic sphere in the context of the electronic age. My images combine tools and personal objects that are found in the home, and in some cases belong in a laboratory. With the aid of digital technology, I aim to remove the hierarchical distinctions associated with higher and lower forms of technology. I attempt to muddy the separation between women’s work, especially menial labor, and the rest of cultural achievement. Menial, unseen, uncompensated work is often central to daily life, and is performed in the home (cleaning, cooking, and care-giving). By extension, there is a culture connected to women’s activities that is also denied importance. The history of the witch, including tales of subversions of domestic activity, has provided a point of departure. The myths of the witch parallel those of Dedaelus and Icarus, through references to science, magic, immortality, and defiance of the laws of nature. I am drawn to stories of attempts to overcome human physical limitations. With the advent of the laboratory research of the 21st century, controversies of our time often circle around decisions over sustaining or terminating human life, which encourage reflection on myths of immortality.

Still life often references the messiness of our humanity, through a documentation of domestic activities such as eating and drinking what Norman Bryson calls “the small-scale, trivial, forgettable acts of bodily survival and self maintenance.”1 The rendering of intimate close spaces reinforces this connection back to the physical presence of the viewer, placing the body at the center. Still life has the potential to acknowledge the anonymity of daily life while also providing a vehicle for the allegories generated by the vanitas, a tradition approach to still life that references human mortality and rejection of worldly possessions. The products of a diverse range of our collective activities can now be stored as digital code. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the cultural aspects of physical labor and personal ritual. At times, we may express a longing for abandoned rituals practiced in the recent past. Embedded in my working methods lies my ambivalence about shifting technologies as I exchange one set of processes for another. intimate images hold the viewer close and encourage reflection :r commonplace rituals. We rarely question our selection of the daily electronic tasks we now embrace or consider those manual processes we have discarded.2005

Slurb, a word that collapses “slum” and “suburb”, encapsulates a dreamy ode to the rise of slime, a watery future in which jellyfish have dominion. The animated, carnivalesque tailgate party loops and stutters like a vinyl record stuck in a groove.
There is a long history of satirical illustration, epitomized by J.J. Grandville in the 19th century, in which animal-headed humans are deployed in troubling social narratives. Slurb is that kind of cartoon. Facts related to the ocean’s radical changes in acidity and oxygen levels form the backbone of the animation. Overfishing, dumping, and warming ocean currents have already triggered a reversion toward a primordial sea in areas larger than the state of Texas.
Slurb’s surface is inspired by fictions, like J.G. Ballard’s prescient 1962 novel Drowned World, in which inhabitants of a flooded world feel the tug of the sun and dream of a return to their amniotic past.

In the Adorations series, computer-generated 3D female humanoids explore the pictorial space of classical painting, seeking their origins as representational and Euclidean visual constructs. As basic homunculi with their own inherent fractal and procedural dermal pigmentation, they return our mesmerism of screen-based artificial realities with adorations of their own evolutionary origins in machines and cultural artifacts that defined our shift towards Post Humanism.

In Adoration of Gas Tank, the tank is loosely based on the gas tank of a 1967 Triumph Bonneville motorcycle, one of my favorite bikes. It sat on my lap, and occasionally on the table, as I modeled it on the computer. When I finished, I held the gas tank in my arms. It felt comfortable and nice to embrace. Another post-humanist, machine-based extension of our bodies, the digital entity finds and adores … Faster Pussycat…

The print-based images are entirely computer-generated and make no use of scanned elements. The scenes consist of computer-generated 30 virtual environments, with high-density geometry, that are rendered at high resolutions for output to archival digital C-prints (200MB per image). The entities and their associative “space” are mapped with high-resolution fractals and procedurals that define the self-similar patterns of their non-material informatics realm. The digital C-prints are cold-press mounted on anodized aluminum, matted, and framed with acid free materials and plexiglass.

Adoration of Telephone: Speak To Me is from the Digital Entities series, a collection of computer-generated print and time-based-media fine arts projects by New York City-based digital artist Marjan Moghaddam. The series explores visual forms for non-material and non-corporeal identities. In the Adorations, computer-generated 3D females are reconfigured into the pictorial space of classical painting, seeking their origins as representational and Euclidean visual constructs.

The digital entities are paired with the technologies they originated out of as part of a constructed futurist mythology. As female parthenogenetic entities, or non-material maternal entities, they are modeled as basic and primitive humuncli with their own inherent fractal dermal pigmentation. They return our mesmerism of screen-based artificial realities with adorations of their own evolutionary origins in machines and technological cultural artifacts that defined our shift towards post humanism.

For much of the 20th century, the telephone came to extend the reach of the human voice and ear across great expanses. As an early post-humanist extension of the body, the telephone continues to present the “space” of remote conversa­tion, an alternate space as valid and essential as physical space. Today this “space” extends to cover remote conversation with individuals and data as part of ubiquitous computing. Remarkably, the true test of AI sentience in our world also consists of a remote conversation in the Turing test. In the constructed mythology of this series, the digital entity invites us to a conversation.

These works explore some of the rough edges of relationships in which such issues as control, fear, self-determination, and identity collide. Beneath the surface decorum, darker forces are at play. The controlled environment may be a trap; the beast is within. “Water” also concerns the struggle with beastly forces. Conflicting needs and desires, fears and wishes, roles and identities, and the testing of boundaries threaten to unbalance the relationship of mother and child.

These works explore some of the rough edges of relationships in which such issues as control, fear, self-determination, and identity collide. Beneath the surface decorum, darker forces are at play. The controlled environment may be a trap; the beast is within. “Water” also concerns the struggle with beastly forces. Conflicting needs and desires, fears and wishes, roles and identities, and the testing of boundaries threaten to unbalance the relationship of mother and child.

As art becomes less elitist and more cybernetic in its behavior and cultural performance, it takes on rhetoric’s early role as persuasive critique of everyday life. As a result of this movement out of art elitism and back into everyday life, art itself becomes integrated into the workings of everyday life by situating itself in corporations, universities, governments and, more importantly, the fluid vistas of the vast electrosphere where all of these “cultures” collide and mix.

By trying to fully immerse ourselves in these colliding “cultures,” we hope to explore the interrelationship between digital narrative and rhetoric using what has become the in-progress language of the World Wide Web and its strategic positioning in the new media economy.

This artwork is an interactive art website.  Please follow the provided link to view.

Using the m.o. “surf, sample, manipulate,” PHON:E:ME remixes sounds and texts to create an original composition that blurs the borders among spoken, written, and sculpted artistic forms. It is part oral narrative, part experimental sound collage, and part written hypertext.

The music I most admire embodies mythos as the Greeks meant it. Contrary to our current parlance, in which the word “myth” means “something untrue,” mythos seeks to tap into powerful truths about our world.

Singularity grew out of extended reflection that came to me after reading Stephen Hawking’s descriptions of black holes. I was taken with his descriptions of how they absorb and recycle the universe’s matter and I started comparing black holes to mythical traditions that explore the nature of birth, death, and rebirth; added to the mix was the tension inherent in the human character between the need for peace and freedom on the one hand, and the need for structure and companionship on the other. The piece attempts to come to a mythic understanding of how these forces may interact. The use of live audio processing is meant to take the sounds of a virtuoso flute performance and broaden it, suggesting a broader perceptual scope than the immediately tangible, a presence in the context of a reality that contains the physical/earth plus much more.

Biophilia enables participants to interact with and generate organic forms based on distortion of their shadows. Coined in 1984 by sociobiologist Edward 0. Wilson, “biophilia” refers to the need of living things to connect with others, even those of different species. Biophilia attempts to absorb and synthesize users and their contexts, producing unpredictable patterns of propagation and hybridity.

A number of myths and metaphors are used to describe the origin of picture making, most of which involve shadows. Plato’s cave allegory describes how our understanding of the world through vision is not necessarily the same as what is physically visible. Within Biophilia, participants and their shadows are synthesized into a larger cultural picture of self and place yet reduced to a derivative echo containing both “resemblance and menace.” The shadow resembles the participant, a virtual manifestation of the relationship the user has with the screen, at once reduced to a two-dimensional image that menacingly begins to merge with other organisms in the same screen space without consent nor care for the sovereignty of the user’s concept of self and space.

Within Biophilia, the relationships between inside and outside can also be expressed between computer code and interiority, known and unknown. Code sits beneath the surface and can be auto-poetic and capable of self-organization, producing scary unknown emergent properties. The coding process produces these self-organizing properties in the darkness of the machine, eluding attempts to construct clean boundaries between known and unknown.

Likewise, Biophilia creates hybrid forms, which emerge through the complex interaction between theory and practice, matter and representation, where what matters is not necessarily human.

My work relies heavily on science and technology to explore the intersection of the seemingly-opposing paradigms of physical and virtual worlds, of fluid and solid, matter and information, and life and algorithm. The complex, intertwined relationships among these are clearly exposed when attempting to teach a digital computer how to recreate physical phenomena. Inherent to this task is the development of numerical methods which solve the equations of physics with a minimum of arithmetic while not allowing the ever-present minuscule errors from ruining the whole effort. If a specific method has been validated against real, physical phenomena, then is becomes a very useful tool for peering into the undetectable. The ephemeral can then be made timeless, the fluid solid, matter represented as information, and a physical moment exposed to virtual exploration.

Chaotic Escape is a series of images of a specific fluid phenomenon called a Rayleigh-Taylor Instability. This arises when two fluids of differing densities find themselves separated vertically in a gravitational field, with the lower-density fluid beneath the higher-density fluid. In these computer simulations, a front-tracking vortex method of my own design is used to evolve an initially-spherical interface between two fluids under the influence of radial gravity. The fluid in the middle attempts to escape the burden of its enveloping matrix, and does so by exploiting tiny, random perturbations along the interface, giving rise to large-scale motions (much like the numerical error we seek to control), which then dominate the evolution of the system. Changing the simulation’s initial parameters generates the family of delicate forms seen in this series.

Citation: M. Stock (2006). A Regularized Inviscid Vortex Sheet Method for Three Dimensional Flows With Density Interfaces (dissertation). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

What attributes come to mind when you think of a tree, a mountain, a river, a cloud, or the sun? It is likely that your thoughts are the same as those of your ancestors, or of cultures living beyond the reach of modern technology. The shapes of natural things such as these compose a language of symbols that is less reliant on cultural context than the written or spoken word. We recognize these shapes because we are immersed in a world that obeys physical laws, each of which manifests in predictable ways, and in doing so recreates familiar objects and patterns. The applicability of physical law to every place humans have lived makes these experiences common, allowing the symbolic language to bridge culture and geography. One of my goals for Dynamo was to use computational science to depict a dynamism that is pervasive and uncontrollable yet confined. The research code that created the shapes in Dynamo works very much like a flocking algorithm, in which every particle is constantly affected by every other particle, though with physically motivated interaction rules. The combined action of magnetism, temperature, and convection (which, conveniently, are all amenable to the same computational methods) creates within the sun the dynamo effect. These intertwined forces result in amazingly complex fluid behavior. This image pays homage to the chaotic and powerful mass of hydrogen and helium at the center of our solar system that has historically provided enough predictability and mystery to both soothe and stimulate humankind’s desire for knowledge.

Four Mountains consists of tiny, rapid-prototyped models of four tall stratovolcanoes in the US Pacific Northwest, each isolated, framed, and arranged on the gallery wall to scale, viewed from above, from the point of view of a god (or an astronaut). It draws attention to not only the mountains’ detailed, crisp forms, but also to the empty spaces in between.

Contrast the attention given to the peaks with the empty spaces between them. The featureless gallery walls are a placeholder for ordinary landscape. This plane has no characteristic scale save that imposed by the mountains. The frames make a prison-like separation between the zones that reinforces their unequal standing. Sculpture is being reinvented by rapid-prototyping (30 printers) and alternative manufacturing techniques. The accurate mountain models in this work would not have been possible without several key pieces of computational geometry and image-processing technology, including LiOAR-acquired data from the US Geological Survey, 30 printing systems, and a number of pieces of custom and open-source software.

This project is a departure from my usual work, but does not stray far from my roots of using computational authorship to investigate natural phenomena from vantage points freed from the constraints of our beings. Much of my work leverages computational-physics software to generate alternate spatiotemporal realities, generally featuring fluid dynamics. But unlike physical fluid flows, the structure of which is normally observed indirectly, mountains are so massive and seemingly timeless that their visual forms are etched indelibly into our minds, and to see them any other way requires us to do something extraordinary. The act of miniaturization short-circuits this relationship. What was far away and dramatically steep is now just a corrugated sheet of laser-sintered nylon. What was once unattainable now fits in a pocket. By transforming the subject from its physical reality into the digital realm, we are able to manipulate it, free of the limitations of mass and energy, and thus break our traditional relationship with it.

MESO is a realtime, ultra-high definition video installation. It randomly cycles through thousands of images of digital landscape data covering the majority of North America. Each image is a direct translation of digital elevation data into map form, where white represents the highest surface elevation in the area, and black the lowest. No other information is included or implied. In removing all of the usual context from these images of the Earth’s landscape, we reveal patterns and forms inherent in the land, but normally hidden from view.

The title “MESO” stands for “meso-scale”, or “in between scales.” The data in this work are in between two scales that viewers find familiar: the global scale, such as the shapes of continents and nations; and the local, micro-scale, such as a person’s town or neighborhood. The time scales involved their formation, as well, are short compared to global tectonics, but long compared to landslides and construction. The middle scales had been too far removed and too many in number to be part of a common language of landscape. But the recent technological emergence of powerful sensors, supercomputers, large-scale data storage, and global networking finally allows exploration of these meso-scales, not just in geomorphology, but in all areas of science. This work aims to methodically reveal the myriad shapes and patterns of the Earth’s surface at these intermediate scales.

This work uses 1-arcsecond digital elevation data from the US Geologic Survey, processed by the open-source packages GDAL and NetPBM and the artist’s own scripts.

Smoke Water Fire is a digital animation of a deforming blob of fluid that has been slowed down and stripped of environmental context in order to explore the shape of ephemeral media. The animation addresses several interrelated themes: context and speed, commonality of the equations of physics, and ephemerality of fluid media. It does this through its use of scale-free computational fluid physics, abstract digital representations, and projected moving pictures. Because of its purely computational nature, Smoke Water Fire removes any context of material or physical scale and leaves the viewer with little more than the dynamics of the shape itself.

The universe is rich with competing forces whose confluence creates the spatial and temporal patterns and shapes that we, as humans, experience every day. Any given force or effect (gravity, erosion, viscosity) operates over many scales of time and space, but is typically dominant over a smaller range. The bounds of this range are where alternative forces’ influences become considerable. The characteristics of the pattern or behavior resulting from each dominant force are different, and at the length and time scales where two dominant forces overlap, new patterns will emerge.

I use computer simulation of natural and artificial phenomena to visualize patterns created from either the isolation of a particular dominant force or the interplay between co-dominant forces. An advantage of working with computer models for these physical systems is the availability of data for any component of the system: effectors or inerts can be made visible and temporal, spatial dimensions can be swapped, and non-physical projections of the data can be created. New patterns can be explored by nearly any combination of forces or projections. The aim of my work is creative exploration of this space.

A paradox of real and unreal natures exists in Mesh #3 Iso. The image is a photometrically accurate computer rendering of a specific scene. The scene is composed of cylinders assembled into a structure that could not possibly support itself if manufactured. Each visually solid cylinder represents the mathematical “vortex core” of a small packet of air. The arrangement of these vortex cores is the result of a computational fluid-dynamic simulation of the self-evolution of vortexes in free space. The initial conditions that resulted in this shape were completely arbitrary and unrealistic. The superposition of these real and unreal elements pulls the viewer’s perceptions in opposite directions.

In the future, when personal entertainment relies on fooling a viewer with scenes of natural and constructed objects and behavior, the lines between nature’s actual behavior and a computer’s simulation will be gone. The laws of physics used to calculate visually realistic images will be mutable, even irrelevant.

I enjoy using computer simulations of natural and artificial phenomena to visualize patterns created from either the isolation of a particular dominant force or the interplay between co-dominant forces. An advantage of working with computer models for these physical systems is the availability of data for any component of the system: effectors or inerts can be made visible, temporal; spatial dimensions can be swapped; and non-physical projections of data can be created. New patterns can be explored by nearly any combination of forces or projections. The aim of my work is the creative exploration of this space.

In these pieces, I attempt to illustrate the unseen depth and complexity of fluid turbulence and the difficulty in recreating its effects on a computer. Though it is an essential physical phenomenon, humans are surprisingly ill-equipped to visualize the structure or grasp the sheer ubiquity of turbulence. My choice to instantiate the transient vortex cores as solid cylinders is an attempt to understand their structure as well as to conceptualize their depth. Creating a feeling of depth and realism requires not only a computationally intensive inter-reflection calculation, but also extreme detail, using not textures, but real geometry.

In these simulations, turbulence is represented by segments of a long line, each segment representing the mathematical “vortex core” of a local packet of fluid. In this way, a turbulent flow can be represented more compactly by its vorticity, and not its velocity. The motions that evolve these vortex lines are a product of computer simulations of vorticity dynamics. In vorticity dynamics, each segment of each vortex line induces motion in every other segment in the simulation. The schemes designed to make this sort of calculation computationally tractable are called vortex methods.

Ultimately, each image is a photometrically accurate computer rendering of a tangle of these vortex lines. Special oversampling and filtering operations are performed in order to create the most detailed image possible. This image is then output to a Lightjet digital printer, which exposes photographic paper with a laser after internally upsampling the image to 4,000 dpi.

This stop-action animation is an experiment with the fundamental techniques of stop-action. Instead of capturing real objects with a camera, a single scan into Adobe Photoshop 4.0 was separated so that all objects were on unique layers, where they could be moved, enhanced, and distorted independently. Using “high tech” to perform “low tech” animation has many advantages, including: a constant light and image source, motion blur filtering, and the ability to move objects together or independently at will. The score was captured and edited on Studio Vision Pro 3.5. Post-production tool: Adobe Premiere 4.0.

With each piece that I create, I go through a healing process and grow further in health and happiness. With greater happiness, I have greater passion, and with greater passion that fire inside of me glows brighter.

Employing tactical media, I work to create situations where the viewer is unknowingly shifted from observer to participant. Inclusion of individuals and assimilation of the audience are meant to create both a personal and group experience where distance between art and audience is physically as well as metaphorically diminished. Additionally, viewer immersion is meant to affect perspective and desta­bilize preconceived expectations of social mores, political structure, and power. Using media ranging from photography to sound, film and video, sculpture, and installation, my work envelops the viewer into an experiential space where interaction becomes unavoidable. The result often removes participants’ control. They are forced to make choices: the people in the know are put in positions of power and forced to choose among helping others, doing nothing, or taking advantage of their positions. Content often incorporates concepts of world events in combination with aspects of human interaction rang­ing from family, politics, and religion to simple daily activities such as eating, working, and playing. By incorporating time-based media, sound, and performance, I examine the nuances of human reaction, communication, experience, and memory.

This series is intended to create both a voluntary and involuntary interaction on the part of the viewer. The voluntary aspect usually takes the form of swaying, bobbing, and walking back and forth in front of the piece in attempts to animate it, while the involuntary aspect of the interaction becomes, for example, capturing a viewer’s yawn.

Situated at the edge of the Vatnajökull National Park lies one of Icelands most breathtaking natural landscapes, an ice lagoon formed by melting neighbouring glaciers as they gradually recede under global warming. During the winter months the lagoon freezes beneath the glaciers forming immense cave systems that capture and refract light within as the glaciers tower overhead. The constant monumental forces within the glaciers mean the caves are always in motion, collapsing and expanding, creating a dynamic and ever changing environment.

Vættir is an ongoing project to explore the dynamic spaces of the natural and built environment. Using photogrammetry and scan data we create abstractions of physical spaces, placing users within a surreal representation that highlights the intrinsic properties of the space.

These works are about artifice, about making places that are imagined or invented. Ambiguity of scale can be unsettling. These landscapes are really innerscapes, where the viewer senses a world that is enticing yet uncomfortable. The images reflect turmoil, yet the turmoil attracts attention.

These works are about artifice, about making places that are imagined or invented. Ambiguity of scale can be unsettling. These landscapes are really innerscapes, where the viewer senses a world that is enticing yet uncomfortable. The images reflect turmoil, yet the turmoil attracts attention.