Artworks Data Table

When originally conceiving the translation of low-resolution digital photography to a physical form, I wanted to consider the historical precedents to the Cartesian image grid. The most logical of these is the Byzantine mosaic, which is a close ancestor of the digital bitmap. Although not rectilinear in the case of the Byzantine, the use of colored ready-made pieces of media to create a larger whole has a rich artistic tradition and is seen in arts and crafts from collage to needlepoint. This technique is a perfect match for low-resolution imaging and physical representations. However, the images in question were allowed to abstract themselves to a resolution of 8×8 pixels, where only the most basic elements of composition and form would remain. In this way, these seminal works in ceramic digital imaging would explore the aesthetics of translation from the digital to the physical and reassign the role of the portraiture to an abstracted composition.

Equal parts puzzle game, physics toy, and living picture-book, Windosill invites you to explore a dream-like world of eleven beautifully-constructed environments.

The Trained Particles Circus proposes an improbable, precarious and potentially dangerous meeting place caged between the real and the virtual. It’s embodied in the relationship between a synthetic biomechanics and an automaton, recreating the figure of the circus artist, the puppet with its own life or the fantastic animal. And it places us as spectators to a contemporary spectacle of hybrid and augmented subjects that weaves light and shadow, fake and magic, virtual and physical reality, machine and organism.

Inside a cage there is something that needs to be locked up, because of its danger, its weirdness. -or maybe it’s better to say that something would like to protect himself from our threat. The particles are linked through a complex synthetic web which appears to have a life -or a non-life, insofar we refer to it as an autonomous synthetic creature or as a digital puppet. As an organism that develops adaptively in a medium governed by its own physical and generative laws, it turns out to be disturbingly organic. But its digital genesis places it in a world not restricted to a natural environment, but to native digital evolutions or even to speculative theoretical approaches.

The particles unfold dissected by software as particles-light and as particles-shadow. Separately, they have no shadow and the shadow has nothing that produces it. If nothing without shadow is real, what has it would be welcomed into the realm of the real. Even if it’s inside a cage. Just as an experiment arranges its elements to trigger a certain reaction, the Circus disposes its scene-sets to generate its magic: a light-object floating over its own shadow.

The particles constitute a precious object, subtle and fragile, mutant and ephemeral. Its image and movement respond to the ideality of the bodiless bits in the perfect abstraction of the code, where there is no friction, no noise, no wear. It’s the non-place of a Pepper´s ghost and the no-time of the machine. However, this virtual space-time co-inhabits with an automaton whose mechanical essence reveals it related to another different physics. It is the physics of engine noise, the friction of its articulated mechanisms, the wear of time, the exhaustion of work and the possibility of error and collapse. Its movement accompanies the elegant particles, scratching them without touching them, seeming to sew and undo the tangle of the synthetic fabric from its mechanical nature. And although both systems are fed with the same data and share the illusion of a real encounter, they are separated by an invisible border.

Their dialogue is the work.

Bumper stickers have always been one of my favorite forms of public art. Perhaps sensing that the road to the mall may be all that is left of our public space, Americans choose to respond to the endless commercial messages we receive with our own messages to the public. And we hold nothing back. Whether collecting the most toys, getting to heaven, or fighting for the child, the choice, the life, or the power, we are putting our personal gospel on the road. The pet peeves, politics, humor, and humorlessness stuck to our bumpers provide a view into our collective uncon­scious, exposing anxieties about class and race and a longing for transcendence in an environment that often offers nothing but end­less vistas of advertising and con­sumerism.

Which is not to claim that bumper stickers often live up to their poten­tial. Consumers express themselves primarily in the selection of prepackaged statements of blind­ing obviousness. Individuality, paradoxically, becomes an act of choosing someone else’s words, and often, words that are already cliché. The act of sticking a currently popular quotation on one’s auto­mobile simultaneously asserts individuality and claims member­ship in a smaller group. This same analysis, of course, applies to any consumer product and should not be lost on new car buyers, many of whom, I notice, loathe bumper stickers.

I have chosen as my project the anagramatic decoding of the phrase “Information Super­highway.” It seems appropriate to try to merge the current mythology of the information superhighway onto the real superhighway, an artifact of an earlier era also invested with techno-utopian expectations. The interstate highway system now seems both more popular and more benign than contemporaneous artifacts like nuclear power, the cold war, and television. Residents of cities, however, can attest to the inter­state’s role in dividing communi­ties, facilitating social control, fuel­ing suburban sprawl and environ­mental degradation.

Creating anagrams illustrates some essential differences in the ways humans and computers handle computational tasks. On one hand, the phrases in my bumper stickers may be seen as absolutely mean­ingless, having been produced by a computer that rearranges letters and searches lists at blinding speed but without any understanding of nouns, verbs, or adjectives. Humans, on the other hand, can­not match the precision or speed of the computer’s search, yet they easily negotiate a complex matrix of ambiguous and indefinite meanings that function simultaneously on many levels.

The actual procedure involves let­ting the computer quickly (or autonomously) produce huge files of anagrams and then manually attempting to parse likely combina­tions of words in what is analogous to writing poetry in a very cramped space. Writing may be the wrong term here, because the combina­tions already exist and one really only “discovers” them. I like to think that the forces responsible for promoting the phrase “Information Superhighway” were also respond­ing, only subliminally, to alternate readings like “pure highway fort somnia” and “why aspirin if mega­ton hour.” I take a perverse enjoy­ment in this search for esonant phrases, although it is often mind numbing, inhuman activity. This leads me to empathize, I hope, with workers in white-collar sweatshops who enter and process the mean­ingless data that control flows of money, goods, and power, and with the real code breakers at the National Security Agency whose top-secret/black-budget snooping on just about everyone shows no sign of abating anytime soon.¹

There is also a delight in considering the recontextualization of the messages as they travel from the algorithmic, math-rich environ­ment at SIGGRAPH to the salt- and rust-covered bumpers of the Midwest; the multilingual bumpers of San Diego, San Antonio, and Miami; or the fully depreciated bumpers of temporary workers ply­ing the streets of soulless silicon gold rush burbs in tech town USA.

¹ For a discussion of the use of anagrams in cryptography see David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing, New York: MacMillan, 1967. For a dated but still fascinating account of what is reputed to be the largest computer center on earth, see James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

4^16 continues a program of work that I began in the 1960s. Around that time, under the influence of the European Systems Art movement, I began to think of the artwork as a generative process (for example, a series of instructions) that manifested it self in some tangible form. In 1968, I discovered computers and programming, and since 1974 these have been my primary working methodologies.

Most of my time-based work over this period has used cellular automata to drive a permutative system based on tiling symmetry. These works often have vast internal spaces (4A16 is capable of generating 4,294,967,296 images), and the cellular automaton provides a mechanism for exploring this variety in a non-linear and non-repetitive way.

The work also explores aspects of human cognition and, in particular, the ability to perceive and then interpret patterns in both structured and random visual data.

My Gasket is one of the latest in a series of prints that combines an interest in cellular automata and their relationship to tiling and symmetry systems with the exceptional quality of printing that can be obtained with high-resolution ink jet printers. Each tile is permutated according to some simple system of rules to create a vector (line) graphic image that is imported into a raster graphics package for further image processing.

Rather than being constructed or designed, these works “evolve.” They envision a time when computational processes will create artworks without the need for human intervention.

Swimming Pool was created from simple tiling elements that are permutated together. Each tile is a cell in an automaton which develops over time according to some simple rules. The resulting image was a vector graphic, or line artwork, that was subjected to a number of continuous tone raster graphics filters to create the coloured and textured surface that composes the final print.

Rather than being constructed or designed, these works “evolve.” I look forward to a future where computational processes like the ones I build will themselves make artworks without the need for human intervention. The creation of such processes is something that has always fascinated me. Swimming Pool is just one route marker from the journey so far.

I create sculptures in glass, bronze, and aluminum. While visiting a friend, I noticed a strange machine humming away in the middle of his office. I had never seen anything like this before. It was a rapid prototyper “printing” a 3D model. I was captivated and fascinated. Before my eyes, the image on a computer screen was being made into a solid. While my friend was using the machine for a prototype automotive part, I instantly saw a place in the art world for this technology. I researched, then purchased solid modeling software and took a course in 3D modeling.

The theme of this untitled piece is that of an eye seeing fire and water interact. fire is represented by a flame (the ends), and water is represented by a wave (the top). The eye is represented by eyelids looking upward (the base). After drawing sketches on paper, I drew the shapes on my computer. After all the elements were drawn in wireframe, I changed the splines and curves into a solid. I was fascinated to see how the computer seamlessly blended the three elements together. Where the wave rolled down, the flame became compressed, and where the eyelids widened so did the flame. It was magical!

The “solid” was exported to an STL (stereolithography) file, and the sculpture took form when it was made into an ABS piece. Once the prototype was made, I used wax and plaster to make molds for casting. I have produced this sculpture in glass, bronze, and aluminum.

This form of artwork is a fusion of old and new. Created with technology, it is a mesh of thousands of odd triangles on the screen (an art form unto itself), yet it utilizes the age-old method of lost wax and plaster to become a reality.

The result is an organic sculpture that magnetically beckons those who pass by to reach out and touch it.

The Sky Oracle on the University of Florida’s Second China Island in Second Life applies an interactive, immersive aesthetic to the representation ofstructured information in the form of a control-flow diagram (a representation of both information and software). The diagram captures two different time periods in the history of Tibetan annexation, with a two-way branch flow indicating two different perspectives labeled Chinese vs. US. An example of aesthetic computing, this “walk-through” flowchart presents a novel approach for interacting with behavioral information by combining a sense of audio, and visual presence to explore the concept of cognitive dissonance.

What are the effects of interacting with software in this way? Can flow charts be effective in presentation of complex news stories or public affairs issues? We are in the planning stages of a human-subject experiment along the lines of a channel study where modes of information delivery are compared and contrasted to see what benefits emerge from each form of representation.

alt’ai is an agent-based simulation inspired by aesthetics, culture and environmental conditions of Altai mountain region on borders between Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia.

It is set into scenario of remote automated landscape populated by AI-powered sentient machines, where biological species, technologies and environments interact to produce unforeseeable visual outputs.

alt’ai deals with a question of designing future machine-to-machine authentication protocols, that are based on use of images encoding agent behaviour.

Ignotus the Mage combines and extends a series of earlier works in which samples of digitized faces and spoken names provide the raw material for an interactive installation. It brings together various processes that have long informed my work: induction of the audience into the creative process, pattern-making games,intermedia composition, remixing as a metaphor for memory, and collaborative interaction.

In Ignotus the Mage, a performance serves to gather the raw material for an interactive multimedia installation. The artist performs as the Mage, a dysfunctional fortuneteller who sits at a table and interprets the patterns that participants create with his homemade binary punch cards. In exchange for his services, he records the face and spoken name of each participant. The names, faces and patterns inhabit the interactive installation, a table with embedded sensors that control projected video and spatialized sound.

A topological transformation of the Mage’s patterns yields graphs that can be interpreted as generative structures for musical or multimedia events. Here they control the selection and remixing of vowel, consonant, or syllabic sounds from the spoken names and the collaging of different faces. The captured material from each successive installation becomes a jumbled but evocative “collective portrait” of the group that participated. The faces and voices fragment and recombine, yet we may still detect individual qualities and the traces of a specific time and place. Left alone, the installation quietly sifts through its material. When visitors arrive, it wakes up and triggers rhythmically collaged sounds and images in response to their interaction. With a little patience, they can learn to make whole faces and names emerge from the fragmentary display: rising from the waters of memory, for a fleeting moment of union, a face joins a name.

Orai/Kalos (from the Japanese orai – comings and goings, traffic, communication and the Greek kalos – fair, beautiful) presents images and audio in an interactive computer-driven installation that continually varies its content and composition. Orai/Kalos is an intermedia work, where sound and image events are driven by the same under­lying structures, and an interactive work, where each visitor generates new configurations. The installation uses a circular table as a projection surface to display a computer-generated image. The table is equipped with embedded sensors. Visitors wave wands over the sensors to control the installation. Sound is emitted from stereo speakers beneath the table. Visual events consist of samples of natural and synthetic patterns. The patterns shift size, position, and rotation in overlapping layers, sometimes revealing hidden images. Sound events consist of natural and synthetic sounds. The sounds shift duration, pitch, and timbre using granular synthesis, a technique that uses overlapping layers
of short samples to produce a “cloud” of sound. Orai/Kalos is not “synesthetic art,” where specific visual and audio events correspond. Rather, its sound and image events are generated by encoded structures that are “transcoded” from one sensory modality to another. As an interactive work, Orai/Kalos requires social interaction to reveal
some of its hidden aspects: one person alone cannot reach all the sensors, and some events can only be triggered by three wands. In the installation, images and sounds of nature mix with images and sounds of human cities and technology. Reduced to patterns, natural and synthetic sounds and images blend hypnotically; however, when visitors begin to interact with the display, images and sounds sampled from communications media emerge. Topical and possibly distressing content displaces the soothing kaleidoscopic display, but participants may take compensatory pleasure in their apparent power to control events. Orai/Kalos attempts to examine how communications technologies are mixing geographical locations and persons together into new constellations. It is easy to be hypnotized by the speed and momentum of these changes, by the transformation of the world into patterns of information. Fortunately, our state of technological distraction is continually interrupted by events, large and small. Will our dearest
desire be to return to distraction, or will we waken enough to construct a more just world?

“Prairie” comes from a recent series of compositions developed from algorithmically generated tiling patterns. In their surface appearance, the compositions imitate traditional arts such as quilting, weaving, and ceramics. Through careful choice of compositional rules, the artist creates pattern modules that recall natural patterns such as the dispersion of plant species across a meadow.

The artist began working with these tiling patterns over 20 years ago in Spain, where he developed the theoretical basis for the current series through an abstract, mathematical shorthand for representing the patterns and the rules that govern them. The patterns were used for paintings, theatrical games, and parametric spaces for musical compositions. Using a computer to manage the possibilities for image production and intermedia composition which would have been practically impossible to explore manually.

The series title, Recordatori (Catalonian for “memorial”), suggests that patterns act as memory cues, preserving and regenerating experience. Although in a sense the generative process itself is the artwork, the artist also attempts to evoke the role of traditional arts in carrying memory forward and the simple satisfaction we experience in the play of pattern and color.

Two ideas underpin the work I have done over the last 20 years: the simultaneous composition of visual and sound events, and the participation of other people in my creative process, In my precyber days, I worked with theatrical performers and musicians, Now computers and networks let me control streams of sounds and images, and involve other people in the process of creating art. Not so long ago, I found a third concern: the rupture of purely formal art by elements that expose cultural conflicts, Some of my early computer work focused directly on issues of censorship and colonialism, In my “Deadpan” series of 1996-97, I began to bring this socially critical impulse into the formal realm of my earlier work by developing compositional techniques that turn abstract elements into frames for representational or symbolic elements. Considering that the geometric tiling patterns I use in many of my compositions originated as abstracted frames (a rectangular hole inside a rectangle), this seems oddly appropriate.

The work which I am presenting in SIGGRAPH 2001, “Time Cycle,” is based on the geometric tiling patterns which I have been working on for many years, It presents one of the basic “pattern modules” which make up my larger compositions, I call these modules “ignosquares,” Each ignosquare is a 4 x 4 array of rectangular tiles, where each tile is composed of five different geometric shapes in four different configurations, The same configuration is never repeated in any row, column, or quadrant of the module.

Early on, I invented various games with cards that allowed other people to generate “ignosquares” and receive something in return – for example, a fortune told by a dysfunctional mage, or the opportunity to post their opinions to a graffiti board, The “ignosquares” would be incorporated into my paintings, Later I developed a suite of computer applications for producing large graphical compositions from “ignosquares,” The latest applications implement elements of artificial life programming, Rectangular arrays of many modules such as the one used for “Time Cycle” combine into larger compositions, with rules for coloration and creation of new shapes by merging polygons, New forms emerge as a result of this generative process, The properties of the new forms can then be used to determine the fitness of modules to survive or reproduce.

The tiling patterns and the isomorphic graphs that can be derived from them have also emerged as a compositional system for producing visual and auditory art from a common set of structures – an “intermedia art,” to use Dick Higgins’s term, “Time Cycle,” shows how coloration and texture rules can affect a single module, and shows part of the derived graph for the module, “Time Cycle” was used as the basis for a lecture I delivered at the Intersens conference in Marseille, France, in November 2000, and will be used again as the basis for a different presentation in a panel on “Digital lntermedia Art” at SIGGRAPH 2001. At Intersens, the four colors used in the composition corresponded to four different topics, and the graph traced the order in which I skipped from topic to topic, shuffling topics together in a way in which I hoped would allow ideas to rub up against one another and produce some interesting frictions, A hypertext version online provides more complex navigational possibilities.

The icons used in “Time Cycle” represent yet another layer of composition within the modules, There are twelve different icons, In the parametric spaces I use for musical compositions derived from the “ignosquares”; these correspond to the twelve tones of Western avant-garde music Here they potentially represent different aspects of society – commerce, war, crime, education, etc. Or maybe they don’t mean anything at all. In many respects, my work is less about a concrete suite of symbolic functions than it is about the impulse to create symbolic systems (polymorphous, dense, and overdetermined) as a fundamental aspect of being human,

The formation of our cultural perceptions in the West in the last several centuries has been the product of a growing adoration of and reliance on science and technology. From the mechanical clock to the steam engine to the silicon chip, our culture has employed its dominant technologies as the fundamental, if not transcendental, laws of nature, laws that are, in a word, mechanistic. This perception has limitations, which become apparent when we attempt to reproduce portions of nature, particularly in cultural production of the hyper-real.

My conceptual interest is in the interaction of technology, nature, and culture, and how we as a society use tangible technological explanations to describe the natural world. My work is informed and inspired by extensive research in the history of technology, the history of natural history, and the cultural studies tying these subjects together.

The subject of translation is present in these works; they are conceptually about translation from the natural world to mechanical simulation, finally to electronic simulation. The Apparition artworks are based around ideas of natural processes envisioned as elaborate machines. These constructed devices were meant to build natural systems using technological metaphors, a didactic display of industry and natural history. They translate unseen and intangible events and actions into a quantified counting, which is displayed on a mechanical counter in the base of the sculptures.

These sculptures use a combination of analog and digital electronic components; all are built around a programmed microcontroller connected to either a mechanical or video system. The low-level technology used is meant to reflect the simple organisms depicted in the upper dioramas of the sculptures.

Chorus continuously reinterprets and sings through the structure of the first passage of St. John’s Gospel. Using the phonetic structure of this text as a template, the program assigns a random consonant to each consonant position and a random vowel to each vowel position. Pauses between words and at the end of sentences are preserved. Assigning each of the three speakers a separate channel and a separate note – F, C#, and G – the computer then sings its new construction of consonants and vowels. Once finished, it loops back to the beginning of the code and starts the whole process again.

My thanks to the soprano, Lucetta Johnson.

The Andean Pavilion (2015/2017) is a video installation composed of a series of fictional videos and 3D-printed sculptures, which are the material outcome of the seismic activity in four active volcanoes in the highlands of Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands. This project is part of an experimental inquiry speculating on the possibility of emergent relations between the environment, humans, and technology in settings that are heavily defined by natural phenomena.

By means of vibration sensors, volcanic activity was recorded with sound devices and converted into computational 3D models using custom software. The result is a series of hybrid objects created at the intersection of different worlds: geologically inspired artifacts that not only complicate the relations between life and matter, but also expand the notion of in-situ intervention and translation of natural forces into physical matter.

In the Andean highlands of Ecuador, three active volcanoes have been registered: the Cotopaxi, during its first eruption after 138 years of inactivity; the Tungurahua, which has been continually ejecting ash for 17 years; and the Cayambe, recently active after 230 dormant years. In the Galápagos Islands, the Sierra Negra volcano on Isabela Island was recorded at the site of a fumarolic sulfur mine. The Andean Pavilion is, therefore, the reenactment of a momentary encounter between a volcano, a human, and a machine—an encounter that seeks to open up possibilities of interaction and understanding of our surroundings by exposing situations where the human-environmental dynamics are constantly redefined.

Unheimlich is a performance installation for multiple users, linking and visually compositing audience members with live performers in the United Kingdom.

It’s 1 am in London, but two enigmatic sisters have stayed up late to see you, and to (telematically) greet you with a kiss as you step into their space, in real time, thousands of miles away. Stand back in the darkness and watch the events unfold, or step onto the illuminated blue carpet to meet and talk to the two siblings, and participate in their eccentric games, secret rituals, and compelling conversations.

Spanning a six-hour time difference, audience participants in Boston are invited into the virtual world of two actors in London. Once on the blue mat, you are visually merged with them on the screens around the space, where you can talk to them, dance with them, ask them questions, or just “hold hands.” Metamorphosing graphical back­grounds surround you, from fantastical computer-game landscapes to mundane English sitting rooms, depending on whether the sisters decide to take you on cliff-hanging adventures, or to offer you some tea.

Two identical blue sofas are located in remote locations. In front of each sofa stands a video monitor and camera. The camera images are relayed between the sites via an ISDN line, chroma-keyed together, and displayed on monitors in front of each sofa simultaneously. Viewers in both locations assume the function of the installation and sit down to watch television, to experience a live image of themselves sitting on a sofa next to a telepresent person. They start to explore the space and understand they are now in complete physical control of a telepresent body that can interact with the other user. The more intimate and sophisticated the interaction becomes, the further they enter into the telematic space. The division between the remote telepresent body and the actual physical body disappears, leaving only one body that exists in and between both locations.

Assisted by the semiology of the sofa and the scenario of the television, consciousness is extended and resides within the interaction of the user. Telematic Vision is a vacant space of potentiality. It is nothing without the presence of the users who create their own television program by becoming voyeurs of their own spectacle.

Telematic Vision was originally produced at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe, whilst Paul Sermon worked as an artist in residence at the ZKM Institute for Visual Media under the Directorship of Jeffrey Shaw. Telematic Vision premiered at the ZKM Multimediale 3 in October 1993 in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Special thanks to the ZKM Institute for Visual Media for supporting the presentation of this project.

Vicky Isley and Paul Smith, collaborating as boredomresearch, build observable phenomena of intrigue and beauty, using techniques similar to those used by scientists to understand the natural world. In their systems, the sensation or illusion of life is their key interest rather than a desire to recreate life itself.

The biome works were developed after extensive research into com­putational models used in the study of artificial life. The artists’ desire is to implement these techniques in a way that explores properties present in natural systems. They are interested in the diversity of form and pattern that appear in natural systems, and how a similar diversity can be produced using simple rules.

In the biome works, the bodies that inhabit their space appear as both machine and organism. boredomresearch often think of these artifacts as biological timepieces built with the production values of early watchmakers whose skills were translated to the creation of automata (mechanical life like forms driven by cogs). Here these intricacies of engineering are translated to the computer with the tiny cogs and chains replaced by computational mechanisms.

Since 2003, boredomresearch have been developing the relationship between their computational work and the viewer. The biomes are presented in the form of an object where the screen is visible through a circular lens that has a foreshortening effect, bringing the image surface level with the surrounding frame to subtlely but profoundly change the viewing experience. In this form, the work is experienced intimately because only a few people can view a biome at one time.

The randomSeed works were developed after extensive research into computational models used in the study of artificial life. In part, this was undertaken during boredomresearch’s residency at Artsway in the New Forest, United Kingdom (2002-2003). During this time, the artists deconstructed the process of building computational pro­gram-dependent artworks. Reversing the normal trend of translating physical properties into electronic form, boredomresearch de-digi­tised their artistic practice, converting programmed works into a paper-based form. This led to an interest in computational models that predated electronic computing. In particular, the artists were fascinated by cellular automata. Despite the fact that it is now pre­dominantly being created on computers, this technique for modelling artificial life was originally executed on graph paper and allegedly conceived using broken plates on the tiled floor of its inventor’s (John Conway) kitchen. This drew the artists’ attention to the high level of visual complexity that can be achieved from the repeated execution of very simple rules, and they developed an extensive range of cel­lular automata-based rules and systems before finally arriving at the ones implemented in randomSeed.

It is all too easy to simply think of space as the stuff we move around in and time as duration. For boredomresearch, the interesting quality of cellular automata is the incredibly intricate patterns revealed as a product of their space-time continuum. Viewed as a static image, time is no longer the perception of change but something more beautiful. In randomSeed, the image represents a record of the machine’s movements and can also be thought of in this way.

boredomresearch are interested in how they can’t predict the images created as the machines respond to their environment. The main attraction in building this work is observing the different outcomes of the innumerable permutations that are outside of the artists’ aes­thetic control.

Items 1-2,000 is an interactive multimedia installation with a performative component. The work collapses Western medicine’s fracturing of the body with industrial itemization techniques into a strange rationalization apparatus. A live human specimen is half submerged in a block of wax in a manner reminiscent of how biological specimens are fixed in a “microtome” (a machine that cuts specimens into thin slices). A sheet of glass hangs several inches above the figure. Bar codes affixed to this glass correspond to internal organ locations of the figure underneath.

Participants interact with the coded form as anatomy students would a cadaver. A stainless steel bar code scanner is employed much like a scalpel, slicing horizontally across the figure to reveal the body’s interior on video monitors in the installation space. However, the more familiar uses of bar codes and scanning procedures, for example, groceries and books, are not lost, and this surgical role blurs with that of the cashier, commodifying and extracting value through denial of the body as whole. Certain scans access recollections of my own experience as a student in the anatomy morgue. These interleaved video clips, in their attempt to discover a point of empathy with the subject, address the de-humanization of the corpse as it is de-constructed and subsequently re-configured through dissection.

For many years I have been working toward enabling dialogue between real and holographic (virtual) people. In this work, I’m interested in bringing together elements of the way science fiction films have represented holographic characters and some ancient artistic means of depicting legends and stories of people made from, or surrounded by light, such as ghosts and angels who talk to and influence real people. Consequently, the figures in my hologram are not intended to look like real people. They are designed to look like real holograms! It seems to me that thanks to imaginative directors, script writers, and talented special-effects and CG artists in the film industry, the visual language of luminous transparency of holographic characters is now synonymous with the “real” holographic, autonomous presence of another person. Though my holographic characters are static, animation of light and darkness lends a highly
charged sense of communication similar to that described in The Dawn by Richard Jefferies.

Musical performance usually takes place in a static, unchanging space. The acoustics of the
space are coupled with the instruments and/or voices to create the sound of the music, which
has always posed a challenge regardless of genre. For example, the right balance of reverberation is needed to ensure both clarity of the performance and perceptual fusion of the musical instruments. This project explores the relationships within an acoustic and electronic performing ensemble for improvised music in virtual environments with deliberately varying characteristics. Variations in acoustics provide a new dynamic parameter of music in addition to harmony, melody, and rhythm. The performance is enhanced by dynamic visual elements with interwoven artistic images and views of the performers in a shared virtual space. In implementating a live, co-located music-performance space, a central question is: How can we capture the aura of a remote environment and bring it back to life during a concert? Although our work incorporates reproduction of recorded spaces as well as real-time creation of virtual spaces, the concept of reanimating previously experienced venues goes well beyond the physical reproduction of the space and enforces creation of an abstract but functional audio/visual environment.

In the process of designing the automobile wheel shown in this sequence of illustrations, the designer used lines and areas as primitive forms to construct solid elements. These elements were combined to create more complex solids. Negative solids were created as “tools” for fashioning holes. Note also, that lines that would be hidden from view in a solid object are removed, a relatively easy thing for solid modeling software to do. These hidden lines can be visible if the user wishes.

Modeling Performance
Weight, strength, and other material properties can be associated with a geometric model of an object so that performance characteristics can be predicted. Finite-element modeling and analysis are used to simulate the performance of mechanical components under load, and to indicate how they would deform or fail. Designs can be optimized much more efficiently in this manner, before prototypes are built.

ZoneZero, a web site dedicated to photography, is one of the most visited photography sites on the internet, with more than 114 million page views in the last three years. During the more than 10 years that it has been online, it has generated a community of photographers, art critics, and people throughout the world who are interested in photography as a cultural and artistic manifestation. Its name attempts to be a metaphor for the adventure it is to make images that go from analog to digital. Altogether, ZoneZero hosts the work of more than 250 photographers in the Gallery section and more than 1,500 in the Portfolio section. It has become an important reference in educational institutions that teach photography, and it has played a crucial role in the de-centralization of photography, creating a showcase for the work of talented photographers outside traditional cultural centers such as New York, Paris, and London. ZoneZero exhibitions are in a sense a library, a collection of stories, available at all times since the work stays permanently online and always finds a new audience. The images tell stories of loss (of a loved one, of land for which we fought, of ideals or of the world as we once knew it). They also tell stories of love, of everyday and family life, disease and pain, and great joy and empowerment.

I am a concept-comics artist who moved recently to the Bay Area. Presently, I have a series of images that incorporate both traditional methods and digital, based on poems by different authors. My work revolves around the relationships between human archetypes and their interaction with organic and onirical spaces, organized by numerical structures. I graduated from Central St. Martins College of Art & Design, London, UK with MA in scenography. My work has been represented in several international competitions and shows in Italy, the United States, Spain, and Portugal.

A subconscious eye looks at pendulum-like measurements. Texture brushes, made of scanned, found objects such as a rock and a piece of steel create the image, and the print’s texture evolves from disparate images that combine until they are unrecognizable. The whole image repeats in the iris of the eye.

Digital tools allow the artist to transcend, integrate different levels of awareness, and reflect ideas of existence as a continuum.

Conflicts and dualities created between culture and the free-flowing spirit are the forces that drive my artwork. On one level, I am referring to life patterns I create under the influence of technology. On a deeper level, I am referring to a transcendence. David Salle said in a 1997 issue of Art In America, “one of the impulses in new art is the desire to get outside the self and the desire to transcend one’s place.” I use the computer to transcend, to portray different levels of awareness: the interior spiritual, natural, and the exterior cultural. What can bring such complexities to the table can also be very calming because it can also be ultra-focused.

Using the computer is a fluid way of expressing these dualities. My landscapes and still-lifes are created using common textures: the sole of a gym shoe, a window, or cement. I integrate my current artwork with many works I’ve done in the past. Using the computer to work backward and forward, I juxtapose disparate elements, creating an impossible coherence. Interestingly, what separates the elements also joins them.

Each time we begin to install a new piece of software, a familiar window pops up. It contains an interminable text, densely packed with
legalese and jargon. Its meaning is arcane, very nearly unintelligible, but that doesn’t matter; few of us will ever actually read one of these texts. The End User License Agreement, or EULA, functions as a kind of ritual; ostensibly we are being given a choice to “Accept” or
“Decline,” but in fact we have no choice at all. We’ve already purchased the software, and our only choice is to submit to whatever regime is contained in the EULA, or forego installing our already-paid for software and come to terms with the fact that we’ve wasted our hard-earned cash. In the arena of intellectual property, the EULA makes sure that we all know who holds the whip hand: any rights we thought we might have had melt away under its relentless bombast. EULAs often contain proscriptions against criticizing, customizing, or even removing the software once installed; they give vendors free reign to alter and reconfigure your computer; and they demand acquiescence to any and all possible future addendums and changes. EULAs are at heart megalomaniac, corrupt, and drunk with their own power. But the bad faith in which I click “Accept,” agreeing to things I would never otherwise agree to, has no bearing under the law. In fact, EULAs serve their multiple masters well; the vendor retains all rights, but the end user avoids any inconvenience that the act of giving up these rights might otherwise entail. Just one click, and it’s over. Not a bad racket. But why should software vendors have all the fun? The concept of enforced preemptive agreement can easily be extended to other realms of cultural production. We no longer need to take chances with unconstrained aesthetic experience. Art Under Contract is the first artwork that requires its viewers to accept a stringent EULA before they can view the work. This EULA, while more succinct than most, is no less reasonable a document. And, although it is difficult to quantify aesthetic experience, this EULA proves that it is indeed possible. The artwork itself is contained within a secure metal box mounted on the wall next to the EULA. Once a viewer has indicated acceptance of the EULA by pressing the “Accept” button on the provided touch screen, a small automated viewing aperture opens, allowing the artwork to be seen by a single, contractually bound viewer. An ultrasound sensor ensures that, if the contractually bound viewer leaves before time is up, the aperture will snap shut, preventing any contract-free aesthetic experience. The artwork itself cannot even be described without breaking the terms of the EULA, incidently restoring an element of mystery to the art experience. We look forward to the day when all experience is subject to convenient, instantaneous agreements that preemptively clear up any and all ambiguities in our daily lives. Art Under Contract is a first small step toward this world .

In Faraday’s Garden, participants walk through a landscape of innumerable household and office appliances, power tools, projectors, radios, phonographs, and various other personal comfort devices. The floor of the room is carpeted with switch matting, a pressure-sensitive covering designed for home security systems.

The machines wait silently, ready to be activated at any moment by the footfalls of the public. When stepped upon, the switch matting triggers the various machines and appliances, creating a kind of force field of noise and activity around each viewer. Participants can control the machines’ performance by their path through the room. As the number of participants increases, the general level of cacophony rises, creating a wildly complex symphony of machines of machines, sounds and projections.

The switch matting is broken up into a path of 96 separate input patches, with each being fed to a computer, which determines which of 96 relays (each controlling one or more appliances) are affected. Through software, the dynamics of the piece can be modified based on factors ranging from the number of participants to the time of day. The behavior of the machines can change to reflect the participants’ presence, speed, or movement.

Faraday’s Garden is conceived as a kind of technology garden. It is named after Michael Faraday, the great 19th century scientist, who was (among other things) the inventor of the first electric motor.

The machines and accessories (such as tapes, films, slides, and records) are collected primarily from thrift stores and flea markets. Since they span most of the 20th century (ranging from the Great Depression to the ultra-contemporary), movement  around the room also functions as a kind of time travel.

Household appliances are coveted and exploited when new, then discarded and forgotten when obsolete. We maintain a kind of amnesia about these machines, as each is replaced by newer, more efficient models. So Faraday’s Garden is an unruly, untended place, forgotten and overgrown. All wires and switches are left exposed, creating an intense environment of electrical current.

Interaction in Faraday’s Garden fluctuates between a sense of complete and effortless control of technology (since you don’t even have to lift a finger), to the lingering and disturbing feeling that these machines are somehow … alive, sensing and responding to your presence.

The series My Life in Spam consists of various attempts to creatively visualize the ever-increasing onslaught of unsolicited email messages
commonly known as spam. Since I began archiving my own spam in 1998, I have amassed a collection of more than 50,000 useless, often offensive messages. T he rate of spam has been increasing at a faster rate than computer processing power (defined by Moore’s Law as doubling every 18 months), at least tripling (on average) each year. I now receive more spam in a hour than I received in a month in 1998, and at the current rate of increase, I expect to be receiving about a thousand a day by the end of 2006. While each individual spam message is essentially anonymous and impersonal, the aggregate functions as some kind of degraded, degenerate depiction of me, and thus these works are some species of self-portrait: the artist as a sex-obsessed, Viagra-craving, mortgage-hungry cretin who can’t spell. The prints in My Life in Spam consist of superimposed images of every spam messge that I have received over a given period of time. Depending on the dates and the length of time represented in each print (usually a day, week, or month), the images range from faint lines of partially legible text to intricate washes of intense color. If the volume of spam is low, the result is a kind of recombinant cutup of multiple sales pitches. As the rate of spam increases, the individual messages melt together into dense gradients of color. Thus, each print functions as a visualization, but also as an attempt to transform an utterly debased form of communication into something attractive, even beautiful. Other works in the series include projections in which each message is projected for one thirtieth of a second (too fast to read but nonetheless more time than any of the messages deserve), audio works (in which multiple spams are simultaneously read aloud using text-to-speech software) and sculptures, in which the volume of the object reflects the total volume of spam received .

The series My Life in Spam consists of various attempts to creatively visualize the ever-increasing onslaught of unsolicited email messages
commonly known as spam. Since I began archiving my own spam in 1998, I have amassed a collection of more than 50,000 useless, often offensive messages. T he rate of spam has been increasing at a faster rate than computer processing power (defined by Moore’s Law as doubling every 18 months), at least tripling (on average) each year. I now receive more spam in a hour than I received in a month in 1998, and at the current rate of increase, I expect to be receiving about a thousand a day by the end of 2006. While each individual spam message is essentially anonymous and impersonal, the aggregate functions as some kind of degraded, degenerate depiction of me, and thus these works are some species of self-portrait: the artist as a sex-obsessed, Viagra-craving, mortgage-hungry cretin who can’t spell. The prints in My Life in Spam consist of superimposed images of every spam messge that I have received over a given period of time. Depending on the dates and the length of time represented in each print (usually a day, week, or month), the images range from faint lines of partially legible text to intricate washes of intense color. If the volume of spam is low, the result is a kind of recombinant cutup of multiple sales pitches. As the rate of spam increases, the individual messages melt together into dense gradients of color. Thus, each print functions as a visualization, but also as an attempt to transform an utterly debased form of communication into something attractive, even beautiful. Other works in the series include projections in which each message is projected for one thirtieth of a second (too fast to read but nonetheless more time than any of the messages deserve), audio works (in which multiple spams are simultaneously read aloud using text-to-speech software) and sculptures, in which the volume of the object reflects the total volume of spam received .

The Cat and the Coup is a documentary videogame in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. During the summer of 1953, the CIA engineered a coup to bring about his downfall. As a player, you coax Mossadegh back through significant events of his life by knocking objects off of shelves, scattering his papers, jumping on his lap and scratching him.

A real-world living room setting, complete with sofa, coffee table, potted palm, and fishing magazines, features a virtual aquarium populated with two species of artificial life forms. An object-based behavior system controls reproduction, predation, and a host of other unexpected activities.

A real-world living room setting, complete with sofa, coffee table, potted palm, and fishing magazines, features a virtual aquarium populated with two species of artificial life forms. An object-based behavior system controls reproduction, predation, and a host of other unexpected activities.

A_B_peace & terror etc. The computational aesthetics of love & hate blends world politics with the aesthetics of computational data to create a powerful, pertinent, and spellbinding view of the modern world. As an intriguing collection of data, A_B_peace & terror etc. reveals the quantitative contribution each of the 192 member states of the United Nations has made toward peace and terror in the world. It is a functional information-design piece that uses computational aesthetic principles to compare complex and socially relevant data derived from researchers working in the field of geopolitics. The dual-sided overlay of the two graphs allow for a direct visual comparison of the peace and terror measures. The functional nature of the poster becomes poignantly relevant when one makes detailed comparison among nations. Many of the results are quite surprising and stand in contrast to prevailing norms of collective national perception.

Peter’s work often focuses on the use of scientific technologies in novel ways to reveal hidden phenomena and processes. Coupled with the appropriation of technological hardware, projects are also dependent on statistical analysis to reveal dependencies and intimate relationships in nature.

What Need Angel is a synesthetic transcription of the brainwave response of a five year old boy while listening to music. The project aims to develop a systematic methodology that allows for primal biological experiences to be visualized to facilitate the understanding of the emotional responses to stimuli.

The computational video uses dynamic particle animation segments that are woven together to form a seamless, though at times jarring, reflection of the music listening experience. Particle behaviors such as size, speed, colour and direction of movement are all determined by the user’s passive brainwave responses to music stimuli.

The project was accomplished using a commercially available electroencephalograph headset that measures qualitative and quantitative changes in neural activity when a stimulus is experienced. The first session involved the recording of EEG responses to music in a darkened room (with no visuals). In a second session entirely devoid of music, the boy was exposed to a continuous array of visual stimuli such as solid colors, gradient colors and variably animated geometric shapes – with increasing complexity in order to build the components of a visualization system that elicit the same neural response as that to music. The neural responses to the visual arrays that matched the EEG audio responses were used to devise an architecture for the visual transcription of the music listening experience. The key to the piece was devising a visual system who’s form and compositional dynamics matched the response to music.

The prevailing aesthetic in 3-D computer graphics involves expression through geometry and formula. One of the goals of the presented work is to break away from these constraints. 2-D hand-drawn curves are used to describe 3-D models. This results in more expressive and less symmetrical forms. Realism is a tool, not a goal.

This work is based on a visual reaction to waterfalls. The intent is to realise the sensations evoked by fast-moving white water enclosed within a dark environment of rock and trees: the movement and intertwining patterns of water, the water’s shape, and the passage defined by the underlying rock structure. The image is primarily monochrome, reflecting the lack of any strong colours within the water. The play of light reaching the water is weak and changeable. The environment of rock and trees was a secondary influence compared with the water and has been negated in the image, because the waterfall defines the underlying structure. The focus is on the interaction of the water movement and pattern and the light and dark of the scene. This series of images is evolving from the initial reactive studies of the falls to developing the structure of the image, the vertical line, the black and white, the textural variations, and the strong abstract statements the images are beginning to make.

These works are based on a visual investigation of the sensation of light and reflection on water, consisting of short, computer-animated sequences. These have been designed to be shown on plasma screens as slowly moving artworks. The primary intent is in realising the sensations evoked by the play of light on water. The colours and shapes generated by the movement of waves and ripples, the changing surface of reflections, the light bouncing off the water surface. The sensation of light on water generated by specific rivers and seas at different times of the year. The work explores the area between realism, exploring the tools now available in a 30 computer-animation system for these purposes, and abstraction, looking at the aspects of colour, form, and movement. The view is presented straight on to produce a flat perspective in line with the picture surface. The work is influenced by a number of artists, primarily Monet and Bridget Riley.

The work is based on a visual reaction to waterfalls in Ingleton, Yorkshire, England. The sensation is essentially that of fast moving white water enclosed within a dark environment of rock and trees. Attributes of interest are the movement and intertwining patterns of water, and the water’s shape and passage defined by the underlying rock structure, seen or unseen.

The images are primarily monochrome, reflecting the lack of any strong colours within the water, other than a yellowish peat staining. The play of light reaching the water is weak and changeable. The en­vironment of rocks and trees was a secondary influence compared with the water and has been negated in the image, the waterfall defining the underlying structure.

The camera pans up the waterfall in the left side of the image and down the waterfall on the right side of the image. The focus is on the interaction of the water movement and the pattern and spaces between.

The work is one from a series based on a visual investigation of the sensation of light and reflection on water. The series consists of computer, generated prints and computer, animated sequences. The primary intent is in realising the sensations evoked by the play of light on water. The colours and shapes generated by the movement of waves and ripples, the changing surface of reflections, the light bouncing of the water surface. The sensation of light on water generated by, specific rivers and seas at differing times of the year. The work explores the area between realism, exploring the tools now available in a 30 computer animation system for these purposes, and abstraction , looking at the aspects of colour, form and movement. The view is presented straight on to produce a flat perspective in line with the picture surface. The work is influenced by a number of ar.tists, primarily Monet and Bridget Riley.

Formally, I see myself as a participant and investigator in the realm of new media art as it exists on the web. In its binary aspect , the web mirrors the process of choice-making by which we navigate our environments, making it an ideal medium to discuss issues relating to the realm of subjective experience. Conceptually, my work derives from and revolves around my unchanging curiosity about the nature of
identity and consciousness. To me, identity is related to and generated by what belongs to the spectrum of one’s history: subjective or objective, microscopic or macroscopic, private, familial, and sociopolitical. Through my work, I attempt to address the difference between conscious and subconscious identity and drives. In the frontier world of web technology I have found a medium that encompasses and expands the lush, pluralistic, and multi-layered qualities of my previous Dada-inspired photomontage work. Freed from the restricting two-dimensional context by technological advances, I engage in fragmented narratives and sub-narratives that form and reform as multiple windows open and close. I orchestrate layers of history, including journal entries, sketches, written records, video, photographs, music, voice, and general sound loops, resulting in a atmospheric investigation into states of being.Intervals explores a series of characters whose investigation of self and identity unfold and elide through a sequence of cinematic interludes. Hovering through an amorphous landscape, we begin by observing the mirror images of four animated figures. At once seductive and elusive, these portraits successively expose their most intimate selves through accounts of lost innocence, fear of the unknown, masculine ritual, and the mystery of love. Here identify is subject to slippages, distortions, and filmic alter egos that mimic and echo their subjects’ memory.

In our haste to claim the future, we deny the present moment only to find its tattered remnants later emerging from the shadows in a series of endless loops of endings and beginnings scrawled onto the walls of primitive caves encoded into the structures of digital files’ alphas and omegas and the artist within each of us locked in the eternal struggle to draw meaningful connections between ourselves and the Great Mystery beckoning to us just beyond the edges of the paint.

In our haste to claim the future, we deny the present moment only to find its tattered remnants later emerging from the shadows in a series of endless loops of endings and beginnings scrawled onto the walls of primitive caves encoded into the structures of digital files’ alphas and omegas and the artist within each of us locked in the eternal struggle to draw meaningful connections between ourselves and the Great Mystery beckoning to us just beyond the edges of the paint.

In the first version of ItSpace (2007), artist Peter Traub subverted the convention of the online social network by creating nine profile pages on the web site MySpace that featured everyday objects from his house. Each page had a photo of an object, a description, and, most importantly, a one-minute piece of music composed of recordings of the object being struck and resonated in various ways. The objects were “friends” with each other, and visitors to the site were invited to create new ItSpace pages to friend the existing ones. In the physical version of ItSpace, the original nine objects are brought partly back into the physical world through photographs affixed to backing boards. Each photo board has a push-button embedded in the featured object. When a visitor presses the button, it triggers a one- to two-minute remix of the object’s sounds in real time. No two remixes are the same, and visitors may press multiple buttons and combine objects to create a collage. From an interface perspective, the interactive possibilities are limited by the push-button switches – similar to how interaction and control on a site like Facebook or MySpace is limited within the tightly controlled confines of the commercial social network. In both the online and physical versions of ItSpace, Traub says, “I want visitors to learn something about me that could not fit into the limiting format of a personal profile. Instead, they encounter a collection of objects from where I live and listen to how I treat those objects musically and aesthetically. ItSpace traces connections, imagined and real, between me and these objects in my home, telling the viewer/listener about the space in which I live in a way that language cannot convey.”

I have appropriated big data processing tools to turn my electronic footprint into abstract, poetic noise. I use statistics from my online conversations to drive procedurally generated stones. I offer these Data Stones as reflections on mass data collection, as well as sites of projection and speculation on random noise.

Thwak! When a proto-human struck a stone against another to fashion a tool 2.5 million years ago, our physical, cultural, and technical evolutions were fused forever. Today’s technology functions as it does because of who we are, and, ultimately, our culture becomes its operating system. The recontextualized current and prehistoric images and symbols in the series Instinctive Technology explore the relationship between our cultural and technological heritage. This work is a direct reference to the human experience of becoming a part of a visual history, much like the ancients returning to a single place to add imagery to that of their ancestors.

Thwak! When a proto-human struck a stone against another to fashion a tool 2.5 million years ago, our physical, cultural, and technical evolutions were fused forever. Today’s technology functions as it does because of who we are, and, ultimately, our culture becomes its operating system. The recontextualized current and prehistoric images and symbols in the series Instinctive Technology explore the relationship between our cultural and technological heritage. This work is a direct reference to the human experience of becoming a part of a visual history, much like the ancients returning to a single place to add imagery to that of their ancestors.

A Desert Network: Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake uses the hydrologic cycle of the Great Basin to consider the critical influence of water on all landscapes. Specifically, the work focuses on the water way of Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake, through the Truckee River. I see this hydrologic cycle as a metaphorical local network that supports all native life, regardless of time or species. The water serves as the data stream that supports the local network. I’m using the metaphor of a local network and a hydrologic cycle to represent the interconnected nature of water to all life.

Conglomerate Distortions is a series of immersive, stereoscopic animations that utilize collaged omnidirectional photography and sound to explore how we recalibrate ourselves to globalized, conglomerate realities, and how the notion of “immediate surroundings” is changing in the age of augmented reality and locative media.

This project’s presentation at SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 is supported in part by the School of Art and Design, Indiana University Bloomington and the Department of Art and Design, Indiana State University.

Wandering World is an interactive installation that utilizes responsive sound, stereoscopic and multichannel projection mapping, three-dimensional, 360-degree animation and helium balloons with whirling images of flowers in suspended states of bloom, representing a desperate and self-defeating attempt at obliterating our perpetual states of distraction.

Post Global Warming Survival Kit is a low-light, infrared installation set in a post-apocalyptic world where a nuclear winter condition has been created as a radical solution to the problems of global warming and climate catastrophe. Viewers are initially confronted with a space seemingly empty except for a lone dwelling. Only after using the night vision devices provided are viewers able to perceive the desolate coastal landscape displayed as an infrared video projection. In this world, the sun’s life-giving rays are unable to reach the surface of the Earth, resulting in permanent twilight. Without the aid of technological augmentation, we would be blind. In the dwelling, viewers are charged with watching the sea. Survival aids and communications technology have been provided. The suggestion is that this coastal outpost is one of many.

This image is based on an explosion of rolling heads and growing sea anemones.

Randomness made a universe, a sense of beauty, and an awareness of time.

This image is created with a 3D software program. Nothing has been scanned, no photography captured from our world has been used. The light and depth of this image are important elements to give this computer-generated work the weight and the vibrating warmth of the classic art forms in an otherwise cold and synthetic media.

Uzume (“whirling”) is named after a Japanese Shinto goddess who lured the sun goddess Amaterasu out of the cave where she was hiding. The interplay between Uzume‘s immediate response and willful behavior shapes the relationship between the visitor’s self and the virtual “other.” Yet the dialogue with the strange, whirling opposite also shows its ambiguous nature. Uzume thus explores issues of identification, reflection, and control in relation to immersive computer-controlled systems.

In Uzume, a sensitively responsive, dynamic environment surrounds and immerses visitors, unfolding the communicative nature of an abstract virtual entity. Because visitors are not able to control their surroundings, they need to develop a playful dialogue in order to get acquainted with the opposite. The interface becomes more or less opaque. Engaging and exploring, visitors repeatedly cross the otherwise transparent borderline between their play and the underlying control system.

Uzume bridges past and present as the abstract structure grows in relation to time and space, and is drawn purely by sequences of spatial transitions. Its unpredictable gestures evolve based on spatial representations of the temporal behavior of nonlinear chaotic systems, so called “strange attractors.” Moving within the physical projection space and gesturing with their arms, visitors are able to traverse and explore the various states of the system. All of these configurations develop irreversibly and shape an individually actualized, unique moment. Both, the visitor and the whirling opposite are embedded in a viscous fluid-like force field that becomes subtly transformed by the physical presence of the visitor. Uzume‘s sonic response, shaped by spatially moving sounds, develops individually modulated, tenuous passages along the traces of the visitor’s movements.

Uzume‘s world is bound to its physical projection space; there is no navigation. As visitors move physically around the projection, they affect Uzume‘s current state. There’s an almost tangible quality to this projected virtual world, in that the underlying, invisible fluid-like “medium” sensitively responds to every movement and viscously transforms the visible surroundings.

The technological possibilities and limitations of the immersive, real-time stereo projection system of the CAVE, as well as its effect on human perception become an integral component of Uzume‘s realization. The most interesting quality of this system is the integration of its inhabitant in the evolving progress. The “observing” (tracking and processing) capability of the computer-controlled system permits the viewer to be “present” and involved. Due to the system’s attentive and responsive qualities, the dialogue between the visitor and the environment inherently evolves in a state of mutual influence.

Hylozoic Soil is a visually arresting and complex installation. Quivering to life as viewers enter into its midst, this beguiling piece is made up of a network of micro-controllers, proximity sensors and shape-memory alloy actuators. Hylozoic Soil offers layers of intriguing individual and group behaviors. Building upon simple motions embedded within individual elements, turbu-lent wave-like reactions are produced. Using its tendrils, fronds and bladders to lure visitors into its seemingly fragile web of laser-cut acrylic matrices, this work blurs the distinctions between organism and environment. Inspired by the physical behaviors and mechanisms of coral reefs, this artificial assembly evokes natural forces to simulate life. As the title suggests, matter and life are deemed inseparable in this work, which plays on the botanical and philosophical implica-tions of rhizomatic structures. Operating at the intersections of architecture, design, electronics, engineering, informatics and art, Hylozoic Soil is a visceral experience exploring the nuanced relationship between the biological and the artificial.

I consider the computer print to be one of the great technological advancements in the long history of traditional printmaking. Many of my prints, such as She Who Rides The Lion, start out as part of my “daily diary”‘ a simple pencil drawing done each night on a 4-inch-by-6-inch index card. Most of them include a red creature called Wrathhuesos, which represents my wife, and a Bear figure that represents myself. There are an additional eight to 10 characters that make up my “family.” The best of them are scanned into the computer, and the artistic development and decision making takes place within the context of Painter and Photoshop, and the opportunities and serendipity of the digital world. I use a Wacom drawing tablet to “paint” and develop them, and print on an Epson 1520 color inkjet printer.

I consider the computer print to be one of the great technological advancements in the long history of traditional printmaking. Many of my prints, such as She Who Rides The Lion, start out as part of my “daily diary”‘ a simple pencil drawing done each night on a 4-inch-by-6-inch index card. Most of them include a red creature called Wrathhuesos, which represents my wife, and a Bear figure that represents myself. There are an additional eight to 10 characters that make up my “family.” The best of them are scanned into the computer, and the artistic development and decision making takes place within the context of Painter and Photoshop, and the opportunities and serendipity of the digital world. I use a Wacom drawing tablet to “paint” and develop them, and print on an Epson 1520 color inkjet printer.

I consider the computer print to be one of the great technological advancements in the long history of traditional printmaking. Many of my prints, such as She Who Rides The Lion, start out as part of my “daily diary”‘ a simple pencil drawing done each night on a 4-inch-by-6-inch index card. Most of them include a red creature called Wrathhuesos, which represents my wife, and a Bear figure that represents myself. There are an additional eight to 10 characters that make up my “family.” The best of them are scanned into the computer, and the artistic development and decision making takes place within the context of Painter and Photoshop, and the opportunities and serendipity of the digital world. I use a Wacom drawing tablet to “paint” and develop them, and print on an Epson 1520 color inkjet printer.

I consider the computer print to be one of the great technological advancements in the long history of traditional printmaking. Many of my prints, such as She Who Rides The Lion, start out as part of my “daily diary” a simple pencil drawing done each night on a 4-inch-by-6-inch index card. Most of them include a red creature called Wrathhuesos, which represents my wife, and a Bear figure that represents myself. There are an additional eight to 10 characters that make up my “family”. The best of them are scanned into the computer, and the artistic development and decision making takes place within the context of Painter and Photoshop, and the opportunities and serendipity of the digital world. I use a Wacom drawing tablet to “paint” and develop them, and print on an Epson 1520 color inkjet printer.

IN THE SWEET BYE & BYE SL (a Second Life installation) is a fusion of visual art, literature, and digital media that composes an immersive memoir. It is a dialogue between traditional and contemporary creative and cultural practice, themes, and threads derived from personal and family anecdotes, African-American/Diaspora lore, and allegories that reside deep in the human psyche. It is a continuation of my four decades of art-making and research, and my creative collaborations with poet/novelist Dorothy Mallory Jones, my mother. IN THE SWEET BYE & BYE SL illuminates a process of migration, transformation, and convergence of concepts and designs through technologies and temporal terrains. It is part of a larger project that also includes a real-life gallery installation and a limited-edition portfolio book.
Developing IN THE SWEET BYE & BYE as an immersive environment in Second Life marks a paradigm shift in vision. It begins my investigation of narrative compositions that are to be read in three dimensions: the XZ plane (normal text reading), the Y plane (reading layers in depth), and the time plane (memory). My process is intentional and intuitive. It derives from the shared language of family and cultural heritage, and the retained secrets of ritual practice. My work is intended to serve the function of the ritual mask, as the membrane interface of the seen and unseen worlds. It is alchemy, a catalyst of transformation, releasing hidden qualities in the mundane.

LISSEN HERE! is an evocation of African-American life and culture. It is a hymn of nuanced harmonies and discords, a blending of voices, some sweet, strong, and leading the way, others rough, off-key, and wandering. “This book began life as a meld of black history and a celebration of black womanhood. It is factual, anecdotal, autobiographical. It is born of remembered snatches of my own, and anybody else’s family lore; of provocative family nicknames; of the knotted, worked-out hands of my grandmother, folded so patiently in her lap. It is the fruit of a lifetime of standing back and watching the relentless energies of a race of stricken people, steadily galvanizing toward liberation. It is listening, always listening, to the cadence, the flow, the pungent getting-to-the-heart of it, that is our speech.” — Dorothy Mallory Jones LISSEN HERE! was composed with several audiences in mind. The first is ourselves, our conversation, a play of words and images that resonate in each of our cores. Our intention was to speak clearly, simply, and without equivocation, to the truths we know. This we could do because of our shared language, experience, and perspective. Though separated by a generation, gender, and the particularities of our lives, we are both of the South Side, and the extended neighborhood that reaches into the Mississippi Delta, Kentucky, the Carolinas, rural Ohio… If we can truly express our selves, then we can also speak to the other audience, those for whom these are not retellings of family lore, heard while eavesdropping on the grownups talking in the kitchen.

This panorama series explores culture and consciousness, especially the relationship between preconception, perception, and meaning. These are photographic/painted constructions composed of interrelated images, an extension of painting into four dimensions. They present a dialogue between an individual viewer and external realities, juxtaposing actual-seeming places and things with conceptual, archaeological, and painterly images. Although some parts of the panoramas seem to present a photographic realism, everything has been constructed or revised digitally, with the revisionary process an explicit aspect of the overall process. Meanings are developed in conjunction with viewers’ expectations and responses, creating a resonant framework in which the artist mediates between the external world and the artwork, and the artwork mediates between the artist and the viewer.

Traditionally, paintings are built up layer by layer, each successive layer superseding and covering what came before. There is a regret for what is lost, an interest in the dynamic permutations of the process, the archaeology of a painting. New technologies enable work that utilizes collage, montage, and vision in motion. With digital image creation, an artist can save multiple stages of the work and composite them together. Extending this temporal process along a spatial axis gives a viewer the ability to explore and recreate this process of creation via a temporal/spatial record of the work.

HT/TB:(ATCWED): Home Theater/Tower of Babel: (After Tatlin Crick and Watson Étant Donnés): these images are from a series of linked interactive QuickTime VR panoramas projected into a constructed house/sculpture that contains a series of semi-transparent sculptural screens. Viewers can interact with the panorama using a mouse at the front of the house. The screens display and reflect the original images with increasingly abstract results as they reach farther into the sculpture. There are multiple access points to view and interact with the images – a front window and two side windows allow multiple views, and a walkway through the back of the construction enables viewers to actually enter into and participate physically with the images.

HT/TB:(ATCWED) is an interactive installation of processed digital imaging projected onto sculptural screens situated in a construction/house with windows and a walkway. It explores digital and analog interactivity; interactivity as visual choice and interactivity as personal participation and exploration. It is a physical analog of digital interaction and a look at our constructions of ourselves. The piece investigates the idea of an artwork as an assemblage of data, which has multiple ways/routes/methods to access, organize, and observe that collection of information. HT/TB is also an attempt to open up the quantum box, the white room, the idea of a picture as a frame that opens onto reality, so that we can step inside instead of trying to observe it objectively from the outside. It references multiple analog and digital art works, including Tatlin’s “Monument” and Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés”. For example, the central screen echoes the spiral construction of Tatlin’s building, and the light seen directly echoes the illuminated gas, while the reflections and back screens are analogous to the waterfall.

The Hyperaesthesia and PostHyperaesthesia panoramas explore the relationship among perception, preconception, and meaning. They are constructions of interrelated virtual worlds, individual panoramas that extend painting into four dimensions. These two series present a dialogue between an individual’s internal views and physical or social realities. They juxtapose actual-seeming places and objects with conceptual, archaeological, and painterly images. Although the Hyperaesthesia panoramas seem to present a photographic realism, everything has been constructed or revised with digital techniques; the PostHyperaesthesia series explicitly works with this revisionary process. Extending this temporal process along a spatial axis gives a viewer the ability to explore and recreate the process of creation. The idea is to create a metaphor that acts as a resonant framework that mediates among the external world, the artist, and the viewer.

Polloi is a series of modular prints taken from Koi, an interactive p anoramic painting that investigates the relationship among the perceptual, phenomenal, and conceptual worlds. The panorama is a digital sy nthesis of realistic and abstract imaging from digital painting, video, and photography. It draws on art references as diverse as abstract expressionism, color-field painting, sumi ink painting, magic realism, and surrealism. It is partly derived from a series of digital photos and video taken at the Jacques Marchais Tibetan Museum. The process I used to create each individual image was first to create the OTVR panorama, Koi, and then to use a Quick Time viewer to interactively determine the zoom factor, tilt, and pan of each composition. These individual compositions taken from the original Koi panorama were then saved as individual files and printed using an archival inkjet printer. The Polloi series is modular and scalable. Each installation is selected from a series of compositions chosen in a process that mirrors the way a viewer would explore the original OTVR panorama. The number and size of the individual prints and the arrangement of the grid of prints is variable, dependent upon the specific site chosen and its aesthetic and environmental requirements. I find it aesthetically and conceptually pleasing that the process of composing an installation of prints echoes the process of creating the original panorama. Both processes are digital, although with widely varying resolutions and different, yet modular, picture elements

Interactive media are the most recent in a long series of technologies affecting culture and art. Artistic expression, communication, and technology have mutually influenced each other’s development since the rise of modern human culture about 30,000 years ago. From prehistoric times until now, artists have used their workshops to develop connections between the production of art, current technology, and cultural communication.

Studio is a networked interactive piece that combines digital media including Quick Time VR panoramas, digital video, audio, and stills. It is a meditation on relationships among art, culture, and technology that lets viewers interactively explore associations connected with a studio. The piece incorporates a wide range of technology, from painting, construction, and photography through networked virtual spaces. Studio contains references to different types of artistic and technical work, such as rock art, various eras of painting, Dada, Surrealism, and Cubism, as well as contemporary workflows.

Viewers can navigate QuickTime media from the main system or remote networked computers. These interactions are displayed simultaneously on all logged-in systems. Viewers can pan 360 degrees around a panoramic view, look up and down, and zoom in or out, and follow links to other digital media. The software negotiates differing levels of control between viewers at the primary computer and viewers who are connected across the network.

Tengami is an atmospheric point & touch adventure game set inside a Japanese pop-up book. Flip, fold, slide and pull parts of the pop-up book world to solve puzzles and discover secrets.

Explore the Japan of ancient dark fairy tales in this first of its kind pop-up book adventure.

I had been making traditional prints for 30 years when I was introduced to digital imaging. My attitude toward images and image making has been dramatically changed. The possibilities are infinite …

The concept for the animation stems from Artus’ reflections on the processes of exponential evolutionary acceleration in different periodic ages, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the manner in which environment influences our own communication and behavior.

Philipp Engelhardt’s Hildapromenade 4 installation visualizes the magical “in-between” of a set of photographs from a photo album he found on the street. The piece combines 3D technology and animations with the eight original Polaroid images to allow the spectator to enter the world of the woman shown in the pictures, narrating her story in a new context. Engelhardt uses his own graphical material in combination with the existing images to create his effects. In this way, the images are combined, reconstructed, and repeated so they can be seen in a new context on their own. To the observer, the visible alterations in the pictures are not immediately apparent; the manipulation is seen as the reality which the interface superposes. Engelhardt describes the piece’s impact: “Hildapromenade 4 reflects upon the value of the memories brought together in a photo album. At a time when photographs are increasingly stored on hard drives, and thus seem ever more elusive and intangible, it raises the question of which stories are able to be discovered in such often-unstructured visual material.”

Three people talk around a restaurant table, and what appears to be a static drawing on the table comes alive and begins to sing. Although the animated characters are simple line drawings, they express emotion and help convey the meaning of the song. Á tort ou á raison uses a combination of live action and 2D animation.

Mnemonic Notations explores the process of mem­ory inherent in all humans. It responds to the presence of a visitor by altering the form and structure of the environment – in effect creating an entirely new image. The visitor’s choic­es are remembered by the machine, and images travel to a new layer as the participant navigates through the pro­gram. So while the visitor remains in the Mnemonic Notations environment, the interaction between computer and human memory gradually generates new layers.

The interactive structure of Mnemonic Notations reflects the relationship between man and the land. The overall struc­ture of the routes through the work is based on the early Buddhist doctrine of creation by causes, which describes the circular or spiralling process of birth, growth, death, decay, regeneration, and rebirth. The images in the interactive work are no longer separate, individ­ual works, but links in an end­less circular or spiralling chain. Four of these chains are positioned parallel to each other, and the participant’s spiralling route through the work is determined by the choices made in navigating through the 12 layers of graphics and animations that are linked by the interactive chains. Each layer has been deconstructed into at least eight node-groups, which are separate destina­tions within a layer represented by different interfaces, graph­ics, and animations. While node-groups may look like a single graphic, they are in fact deconstructed into up to 24 individual nodes, each of which is a clickable interactive “hot­spot”. Selecting a node triggers an animation, transformation, or relocation to another.

The routes through these maze-like node-groups of graphics and animations are structured so as to mimic and explore the processes of mem­ory. Details of a layer are seen clearly, but the image of a whole layer is so reduced in size as to be unclear. Details of future and past layers are clear­ly seen, but the totality of the evolution and devolution of the work is an image that is only fully developed in the participant’s memory. There are distractions, unasked-for intrusions, flashes of new perception as images invert or blend into their future and past forms, curiosity about what details will be revealed, frustra­tion as animations and graph­ics that are meaningful to a participant cannot be revisited without risking moving on to another layer, and a gradual understanding and acceptance of the totality of the work.

The work is paced to reflect genesis, growth, decay, mem­ory, and imagination rather than technology. It is designed to calm and illuminate rather than excite.

TEXT BY GEORGE ALEXANDER

MEMORY

Can you remember what memory was? When your head was your hardware. A writhing sea of neurons kept constantly busy inventing what happened. You kept the past alive-images and words in your brain, on a island called In the Beginning or Once Upon a Time. On it you kept track of everything that existed. You knew maybe a hundred names of family and friends and the powerful. Beyond the island was wilderness no telling what creatures lived there, between reality and imagination. Fascinating and terrifying. Now the faces in the memory bank are public personalities, familiar strangers: people in Reebok ads, veejays and deejays, game-show hosts, the sons and daughters of game-show hosts. On talk shows people talk about others on other talk shows. People hold up placards for applause and you wish you could be there laughing along with them all on the Steve Vizard show. Nostalgia for the present in a culture of permanent playback. There is no there there.

HISTORY

Dragged along by the current of time what a hullabaloo of history what shrieks, blood, kettledrums: homes flattened, statues toppled and empty ornaments curling in intense heat, melted telephones, the charred stumps of date palms, ledger pages flapping in the wind. The weightless narratives and heavy weapons that make up history, our history. Pages swirl into heaps there’s Paul the tentmaker of Tarsus spreading Christendom, and before that Pax Romana, and before that on that Meditteranean littoral, the cutting edge of the Fertile.

Crescent, Saladin the Kurd met the Crusaders, who were thrown back on Famagusta in Cyprus and later had swarthy Othello for governor. When any educated European would study Maimonides, Ibn Arabi, or Averroes. When Baghdad was Rome. Ottoman and Venetian architectures overlay the traces of Macedonian Greek and Caliphate Arab. Phoenicia, Petra, Baalbek, Gaza, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Damascus, Aleppo the birthplaces of primitive schismatic Christianity.

Before that the Palace of Knossos, and before that animal muzzles rowing impassively beneath a sea of peat. In the beginning there was no word. Two thousand million years to form lips, to give me these stubby, grubby fingers with which to write: HOMO (soi disant) SAPIENS.

Then writing: stelae, cuneiform rolls, papyri, books. Then maps, diagrams, architectural blueprints, geometric formulas.

Cultures-Celtic, Greek, Tantric working overtime for millenia to sustain by ritual and rote a collection of data that would have fit comfortably on a couple of CD-ROM discs.

TOTAL RECALL

Today the tools of global integration the satellite media net, the multinational corporation have created a genre of art style called technological sublime. It brings together wireheads, lit profs, psychologists, visual artists, slippery post-structuralists, SF writers, liquid architects, creative types on military payrolls, and cyberslackers. The mystic urge for total awareness and information control is as old as the Memory Theatres of Ramon Lull and Giordano Bruno. These were charts, systematized wheels of all available knowledge, celestial and terrestrial, run by mathematics. Now this urge is being actualized in Internet that sprawling octopus of millions of computers swapping documents, providing data services, sharing bulletin boards; also MUDS (Multi-user dimensions) where role playing Daggers and Dungeons are as allegorical as Dante’s Divine Comedy (1300), and allow users to explore as pace with a specific and expandable cartography: caverns, forests, sleazy bars.

The most recent work in this series explores the idea of memory floating in a constructed tide of mnemonic icons. The memories dis­solve and reappear as synaptic links are formed and fade with time.

Mnemonic notations, as those with long memories have noted, has been evolving for years. The artist has continuously reworked and modified this single computer file, fixing it from time to time for exhi­bition at the annual SIGGRAPH conference and various art exhibi­tions around the world.

Moving Towards the Event Horizon is a continuum. This work, like its ancestors, has evolved in an organic manner. The work has moved, mutated, cloned, and condensed the works that have come before.

Issues referenced within the work highlight several concepts: the universe containing reversible and irreversible processes, biological/geological structure, the corporeal, diverse belief systems, and self-generating matter that is inherently dynamic, active, and relational. Together, these concepts can be viewed as manifestations of potential environmental scenarios in relation to theoretical new physics.

The work plays with multiple views of the subject. The mutated fish have slightly different perspectives and lighting conditions – Cubism meets quantum mechanics. Each fish is seen as a gateway into another dimension/space. It should be noted that this image and its subjects also exist as a nonlinear interactive CD-ROM.

Doubling or cloning is seen as the final stage in the history of the modeling of the body – the body destined to serial propagation, a cybernetic prosthesis altering the whole and eventually replacing it What was, what is the original has transformed, and the image is seen as just another point in time.

Poetics of Migration is derived from a theoretical framework based around the notion of the porous coastline. This metaphor was seen to act like a film plane in a camera, but a film plane that is operating in slow-motion image capture, recording evidence of what has passed by, sponge-like, absorbing and documenting the record of past histories and then displaying them within the landscape. The landscape was established as a recorder of a history. It was, in a way, the antithesis to the nature of photography, of photography’s instant method of recording the ephemeral moment – that decisive moment. The decisive moment was abandoned for the slow-motion sedimentary accumulation, disintegration, and rearticulation into the tidal fossil records, which made up the evidence within the documentation of the site. The ephemeral moment became tattooed into the rock instead of an inscription on paper. The instant became handmade. Here in this metaphorical space, the coastal aperture is seen as a porous membrane that fluctuates, and mediates incoming and outgoing ideas and influences as powerfully and as irrepressibly as the coastal tide. The porous coastal plane is seen to be a time traveller. It sits still. Our human-scaled idea of passing may be called time, but time, in this space, stays where it is. We are the ones who pass by. It is the landscape that records us.

The space is an antipodean space where, instead of the land becoming the subject of the document, the land documents us. Poetics of Migration then attempts to excavate palimpsest like a document from this archaeological meditation, adding layers to translation, adding complexity and richness to language and culture. Poetics of Migration address parallel concerns of contemporary image making but also the cultural geo-political hegemony of our time. In response to these concerns, Poetics of Migration attempts to understand movements in other cultures and civilisations and tries to understand them in their own terms, in relation to their own histories, their own traditions and inspirations.

Mnemonic Notations 1990-1997

The original “Mnemonic Notations” series of images was developed from one computer file that has been continuously modified in an intuitive manner. At various stages, the computer file has been down-loaded and displayed as an artifact for the spectator.

The ongoing process that constitutes this work emerges from a reflection on the correspondences between mind, memory, our experience of the land, and the social constructions of religions and philosophies that have a major impact on humanity’s perceptions of the world and consequently on the way that it is remembered.

I am currently working on a body of work that includes the use of seahorses. This work has developed from the “Mnemonic” suite of images. I am interested in the ambiguity and the outright strangeness of these creatures, in that the male becomes pregnant and carries the young in a brood pouch. Seahorses also mate for life, and when one is caught without the other, the captured one will not breed.

These images can be interpreted in many ways, but one that amuses me is that they represent the ultimate in political correctness – pregnant males! Here in these images, the Yogini with serpentine female energy manifests from the stomach of the male seahorse: a Tantric manifestation of many possible worlds embodied in the one time and incarnation. The works can be seen as artifacts secured from an imposing archaeological site of the future: a form of mutant androgynous specimen evolving out of memory into a theoretical future. They come with their baggage in tow.

This new work is seen as running in “Tangent” to the older “Mnemonic Notations” body of works, but in the new work, the parallel processing that is under way at the time of writing is underlined by the process of the practice. The images are created and produced as two-dimensional images on canvas, and at the same time are moved into a QuickTime VR interactive environment for use in immersive environmental works.

Mnemonic Notations 1990-1997

The original “Mnemonic Notations” series of images was developed from one computer file that has been continuously modified in an intuitive manner. At various stages, the computer file has been down-loaded and displayed as an artifact for the spectator.

The ongoing process that constitutes this work emerges from a reflection on the correspondences between mind, memory, our experience of the land, and the social constructions of religions and philosophies that have a major impact on humanity’s perceptions of the world and consequently on the way that it is remembered.

I am currently working on a body of work that includes the use of seahorses. This work has developed from the “Mnemonic” suite of images. I am interested in the ambiguity and the outright strangeness of these creatures, in that the male becomes pregnant and carries the young in a brood pouch. Seahorses also mate for life, and when one is caught without the other, the captured one will not breed.

These images can be interpreted in many ways, but one that amuses me is that they represent the ultimate in political correctness – pregnant males! Here in these images, the Yogini with serpentine female energy manifests from the stomach of the male seahorse: a Tantric manifestation of many possible worlds embodied in the one time and incarnation. The works can be seen as artifacts secured from an imposing archaeological site of the future: a form of mutant androgynous specimen evolving out of memory into a theoretical future. They come with their baggage in tow.

This new work is seen as running in “Tangent” to the older “Mnemonic Notations” body of works, but in the new work, the parallel processing that is under way at the time of writing is underlined by the process of the practice. The images are created and produced as two-dimensional images on canvas, and at the same time are moved into a QuickTime VR interactive environment for use in immersive environmental works.

The “Waterworks” image exhibited in this years SIGGRAPH “N Space” Art show is from a file started in 1990. There have been several descendants of the file previously exhibited at SIGGRAPH art shows. They have taken many forms, including installations, interactive installations, and various types of prints:

“Touch ware” SIGGRAPH 98 Art show, Orlando Florida – work title “Towards the Event Horizon”; “Ongoings” retrospective SIGGRAPH 97 Art show, Los Angeles – work title “Tangent @23”; “The Bridge” SIGGRAPH 96 Art Show, New Orleans – work title “Mnemonicon 4”; “Art Show” SIGGRAPH 95 Los Angeles – work title “Mnemonic Notations” interactive CD-ROM; and SIGGRAPH Art Show McCormick Place, Chicago – work title “Headland Mnemonic Notations.”

This ongoing format of file modification has served to frame particular interests of mine pertinent to the time of modifying the file/image: the visual diary.

The “Waterworks” image draws upon a developing interest in the fluidity of memory. And the water-like quality of memory in “Waterworks.” The mnemonic detritus washes up towards the top side of the image bobbing around, some detritus rising to the surface and some sinking out of vision and memory. Forming a dam at the top of the image are the roof tops of the Forbidden City, captured from Tiennamin Square New Years Eve 2000, another addition to the diary.

An apparition appears on the rocks of a coastline. The coastline images literally take the idea of the mind’s double take. On the rocks, icons appear, washed up either in the distant past or perhaps just for a moment in the present; only just discernible on the rocks leading us to question the reality of what we might see, or in-fact if we have seen; validating the reality of the image surface are questioned.

There are layers of influence and layered ways of perception at work within the image. Notions of the digital as fiction arise, documentation as illusion, illusion as document, and ultimately illusion as history. Is illusion the future of history in a digital age? Or has history always been an illusion?

Other issues surface, from within the work: Australia as a majority coastal society, living on the edge of a vast, hot and largely empty space. The edge of the Australian continent is seen to act like a sponge absorbing the latest arrivals. Flung upon the beach, wave after wave, tide upon tide, visitors find a foothold, collect themselves, leave a marking, and blend into the grains of the coastline, icons and artifacts left embedded into the rock, monuments to a passing.

These pasts push other histories through the coastline mutating past to present. Time as sedimentation is documented and sedimentation of time documented.

This work arrives from out of the south pacific it is work geographically placed at the intersection of land and water in an area of transition. Here the water is navigated with just the same familiarity as land, there a pathways sign posts steams within streams all fluidly interacting. The interface of vision, the multiple methodologies of mapping the world are under investigation here. What is it that we use to reliably negotiate a fluid space?

The “Waterworks” image exhibited in this years SIGGRAPH “N Space” Art show is from a file started in 1990. There have been several descendants of the file previously exhibited at SIGGRAPH art shows. They have taken many forms, including installations, interactive installations, and various types of prints:

“Touch ware” SIGGRAPH 98 Art show, Orlando Florida – work title “Towards the Event Horizon”; “Ongoings” retrospective SIGGRAPH 97 Art show, Los Angeles – work title “Tangent @23”; “The Bridge” SIGGRAPH 96 Art Show, New Orleans – work title “Mnemonicon 4”; “Art Show” SIGGRAPH 95 Los Angeles – work title “Mnemonic Notations” interactive CD-ROM; and SIGGRAPH Art Show McCormick Place, Chicago – work title “Headland Mnemonic Notations.”

This ongoing format of file modification has served to frame particular interests of mine pertinent to the time of modifying the file/image: the visual diary.

The “Waterworks” image draws upon a developing interest in the fluidity of memory. And the water-like quality of memory in “Waterworks.” The mnemonic detritus washes up towards the top side of the image bobbing around, some detritus rising to the surface and some sinking out of vision and memory. Forming a dam at the top of the image are the roof tops of the Forbidden City, captured from Tiennamin Square New Years Eve 2000, another addition to the diary.

An apparition appears on the rocks of a coastline. The coastline images literally take the idea of the mind’s double take. On the rocks, icons appear, washed up either in the distant past or perhaps just for a moment in the present; only just discernible on the rocks leading us to question the reality of what we might see, or in-fact if we have seen; validating the reality of the image surface are questioned.

There are layers of influence and layered ways of perception at work within the image. Notions of the digital as fiction arise, documentation as illusion, illusion as document, and ultimately illusion as history. Is illusion the future of history in a digital age? Or has history always been an illusion?

Other issues surface, from within the work: Australia as a majority coastal society, living on the edge of a vast, hot and largely empty space. The edge of the Australian continent is seen to act like a sponge absorbing the latest arrivals. Flung upon the beach, wave after wave, tide upon tide, visitors find a foothold, collect themselves, leave a marking, and blend into the grains of the coastline, icons and artifacts left embedded into the rock, monuments to a passing.

These pasts push other histories through the coastline mutating past to present. Time as sedimentation is documented and sedimentation of time documented.

This work arrives from out of the south pacific it is work geographically placed at the intersection of land and water in an area of transition. Here the water is navigated with just the same familiarity as land, there a pathways sign posts steams within streams all fluidly interacting. The interface of vision, the multiple methodologies of mapping the world are under investigation here. What is it that we use to reliably negotiate a fluid space?

“The artist’s regret of his youthful folly.”

I work to bring dreams to life.

“A cruel tyrant’s demented delusion.”

I work to bring dreams to life.

Die Zeitstucke explores the idea of human experience as the pivotal point in our perception of time. In this body of work, the user is invited not only to experience time in different ways, but to engage in its manipulation. This tampering with time occurs in a variety of manners: from unintentional loss of a few seconds here, to deliberate and absolute halt of the flow for minutes there, from attentive search for meaning in passing time to violent hurtling up and down the visible timeline, from desperate attempts to work against the relentlessness of time to quiet acceptance of the shifting physical manifestations of it.

Our understanding of “objective” time takes place largely due to our acceptance of time-measuring devices and the recognition of these objects as nearly synonymous to the idea of time itself. In Die ZeitstUcke, the concept of time functions as a device to reflect on (and quantify?) such elusive themes as memory, faith, knowledge, and mortality.

Each component of Die ZeitstUcke slowly but methodically evolves, creating a sense of continuous texture that is only fragmentarily experienced by the user. Soft, organic images of the human body combined with sharp grids and the mechanics of numeric display further emphasize the tensions between the subjectivity and the science of time.

The work combines all three dimensions of memory. As a device, it “remembers” every mousedown that users input during the display and allows retrieval of those records. Unearthing these moments in time creates the illusion of a “journey into the past” and, at the same time, becomes a form of “intelligence” collection, a surveillance procedure.

Die Zeitstücke explores the idea of human experience as the pivotal point in our perception of time. In this body of work, the user is invited not only to experience time in different ways, but to engage in its manipulation. This tampering with time occurs in a variety of manners: from unintentional loss of a few seconds here, to deliberate and absolute halt of the flow for minutes there, from attentive search for meaning in passing time to violent hurtling up and down the visible timeline, from desperate attempts to work against the relentlessness of time to quiet acceptance of the shifting physical manifestations of it.

Our understanding of “objective” time takes place largely due to our acceptance of time-measuring devices and the recognition of these objects as nearly synonymous to the idea of time itself. In Die Zeitstücke, the concept of time functions as a device to reflect on (and quantify?) such elusive themes as memory, faith, knowledge, and mortality.

Each component of Die Zeitstücke slowly but methodically evolves, creating a sense of continuous texture that is only fragmentarily experienced by the user. Soft, organic images of the human body combined with sharp grids and the mechanics of numeric display further emphasize the tensions between the subjectivity and the science of time.

The work combines all three dimensions of memory. As a device, it “remembers” every mousedown that users input during the display and allows retrieval of those records. Unearthing these moments in time creates the illusion of a “journey into the past” and, at the same time, becomes a form of “intelligence” collection, a surveillance procedure.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Horrible Death In An Air Wreck! See if your fingers are fast enough to save yourself from the many grisly deaths available in the world of air travel. And learn something in the process! Like typing! And how to not die!

Are games art? This one definitely is! The Artist is Present is a Sierra-style recreation of the famed performance piece of the same name by artist Marina Abramovic at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Have the experience only a lucky few have ever had! Stare into Marina Abramovic’s eyes! Make of it what you will! Just like art!

The Artist Is Present was written in ActionScript 3 using Adobe’s FlashBuilder 4.5 and the excellent Flixel library. The font in The Artist Is Present is Commodore 64 Pixelized by Devin Cook. The game has appeared in the exhibitions The Name of the Game at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, It’s Art in the Game at Museum Hilversum, Space Invaders at Nikolaj Kunsthal, Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start at SPACES, and Pause: Computer Games and Cultural Contingencies at Temporary Gallery.

In this artificial life environment, individuals, represented by graphic filaments, are endowed with their own intelligence and character. They can interact, exchange information, and reproduce. Through genetic mutations, the population evolves and progressively develops adaptation. The emerging behavior is rendered as continuously new shapes and graphical patterns.

The installation consists of one rear-projected screen that represents the artificial life environment. Observers interact with the artwork itself, transmitting “energy and life” to specific zones of the environment. A video camera detects the positions of the observers, and these loca· lions become zones of life germination. Each filament contains a sound message, which is sent to a sound synthesizer. The global result is an environment of parallel sonorities that progressively create coherent sound architectures.

The main objective of the artwork is to build a metaphor of communication dynamics and “collective messages.” The work is inspired by complexity theory as a new area of interference between art and science. In this paradigm, complex systems of multiple individuals develop global behavioral properties through local chaotic interactions (self-organization).

The results characterize the expressive elements of “Relazioni Emergenti” as emergent behavior in the sense of aesthetic shapes, either in terms of emergent relations between the artist, the artwork, and the observers, or in terms of concepts that emerge as the artificial-world metaphor produces hypotheses for the real world.

Uncertain of his sister’s fate, a boy enters LIMBO…

Moxn (pronounced Moon) is a surrealistic art film about the transformation of body, identity and gender. The title refers to the spelling of WOMXN that is a more inclusive, progressive term that sheds light on prejudice and discrimination and institutional barriers womxn face but also includes Trans women and women of color. The video features performances by Candice Nembhard and Janay Stephenson, and the spoken words are the poem “Moxn” written by Azadê Pesmen.

Gomez is a 2D creature living in a 2D world. Or is he? When the existence of a mysterious 3rd dimension is revealed to him, Gomez is sent out on a journey that will take him to the very end of time and space. Use your ability to navigate 3D structures from 4 distinct classic 2D perspectives. Explore a serene and beautiful open-ended world full of secrets, puzzles and hidden treasures. Unearth the mysteries of the past and discover the truth about reality and perception, in this phenomenal puzzle-platformer!

• Explore a magical 3D world without conflict or enemies, rich with ambiance, a pleasant place to spend time in
• Go anywhere you please as there is no one path, no right or wrong way to play
• Rotate your perspective to navigate the complex environments, solve puzzles, and find secrets!

Summary

Botorikko is conceptualized as a philosophical discussion between Machiavelli and Sun Tzu artificial intelligent philosophers clones. We are liberating artificial intelligence creative patterns toward autonomous robot’s aesthetical expression. The narrative generated by intelligent agents is “metaphysics of the machines” with unknown meta context, which incontinently augments Human-AI hybrid society.

Abstract

The recent development in the machine learning field encounters interesting robots’ creative responses and becoming a challenging artistic medium. They are two possible directions in the future development of robots’ creativity, replicating the human mental processes, or liberating machine creativity itself. At the SIGGRAPH Asia, we would like to present the artwork Botorikko, Machine Created State conceptualized with the intention to point on Post-Algorithmic Society where we are going to lose control over technology by been obsessed with the idea of using it to serves humanity. In our aesthetical approach, we incline to the 21st-century avant-garde conceptual tradition. We intend to draw parallels between Dadaism and machine-made content and encompass technological singularity and Dadaism into one, Singularity Dadaism, as a humanless paradigm of uncontrollable creative practice closely related to AI aesthetic and machine abstraction phenomena.

Creativity and the act of creating art are some of the greatest challenges the new generation of artificial intelligence models are exposed. Nevertheless, by creating AI agents to achieve and exceed the performances of humans, we need to accept the evolution of their creativity too. Hence, there are two possible directions toward the future development of robots’ creativity, either to replicate the mental processes characteristic for humans or liberate machine creativity and leave them to evolve their own creative practices.

In the artistic origination of the artwork Botorikko, Machine Created State, the appearance and generated dialogues between Machiavelli and Sun Tzu artificial intelligence clones resembles Aristotle’s Mimesis as human’s natural love of imitation and the pleasure in recognizing likenesses and Dadaistic ideas linked to strong social criticism against anti- progressive thinking. We are trying to shift AI as a creative medium beyond traditional artistic approaches and interpretations, and possibly to accept it as co-creative rather than only assistive in the age of AI and Post-Algorithmic Society.

The artworks Botorikko, Machine Created State does not have any pretensions to be classified as artwork but rather “anti-art” as it tends to challenge artificial intelligence creativity, contemporary aesthetic, cultural and social changes as a result of mutual interaction between people and technology. In our artistic approach, we are liberating and explore artificial intelligence creative patterns and expression by using a combination of neural networks, robot – robot interactions, and sentiment analysis. By making artificial intelligence agents autonomous, we are shifting AI as a creative medium beyond traditional artistic approaches and interpretations. The medium as such is not anymore in complete control of an artist. It is divided between humans and robots and their mutual contribution to final creation, like in a technological singularity vision of the future society. The narrative generated by machines in the artworks is something or nothing as the context is unknown. Furthermore, if the grammar is the “metaphysics of the people” (Nietzsche) than with the discussions generated by the AI clones in the Botorikko installation are “metaphysics of the machines.” Machines are liberating language by deconstructing semantics and human logic. The created sentences and words are a result of calculations and algorithms as well as a still unknown level of achieved abstraction by machines and can be addressed to genuine AI aesthetic and be compared in certain instances with the Dadaistic or absurd poetry creative practice.

In our artwork, we are trying to point on the future of Post-Algorithmic Society (SIGGRAPH Asia Gallery Call) where we are going to lose control over technology by been obsessed with the idea of using it to serves humanity. The society where some of the fundamental questions related to ethics, morals, culture, empathy, and human abstraction will be given to machines for free interpretation, unpredictable feedbacks, and meta meanings.

In the project Robosophy Philosophy (Meeting Points: Übermensch and Magnanimous) robot are mixing words of Aristotle and Nietzsche (and their words are everybody words) based on calculations and algorithms. If grammar is the “metaphysics of the people,” as Nietzsche claimed, then discussions in the installation is “metaphysics of the machines” and as such ant-words or anarchistic grammar. It is a vision of transfer of knowledge in the future and present criticism of society and technoculture which is allowing brutal destruction of human context replaced with artificial and superficial. Key technical novelty presented in Installation Robosophy Philosophy is the combination of chatbot technologies and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models that will enable reinforcement learning in order to create artificial conversational agents who will achieve human level performance. The fact, that things can communicate with each other and with the humans enables unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning and knowledge multiplying opportunities.

NEWYORKEXITNEWYORK is an ideal version of a “city,” infinitely extending and ever growing. It is a true and unpredictable surfing experience for a not-too-far-in-the-future Internet. It creates a personal space-and-time relationship, different and original for each participant. Each will be able to say: “I’ve been there, really…and I’m going back!”

After living in New York, we wished to create a piece that would retrieve memories of our personal experience while at the same time allowing participants to create their own experiences, and revisit their own forgotten memories.

The word “virtual” has been so overused that it is difficult to use the term without flinching, and yet, despite its rise to the status of premier buzzword of the nineties, it continues to suggest a certain relationship between conscious­ness and electronic space that is rich and descriptive. Just beneath the thin, slick, corporate gloss of the term’s trendiness is a volatile zone of fractures containing a leaky matrix of nested meanings including, but not limited to: artificiality, simulation, representa­tion, mimesis, prosthesis, multi­dimensionality, multiplicity, hyper­ness, velocity, otherness, the mechanical, the machinic, high technology, and, by extension, digitalization, fractal scaling, trans­positionality, and networking.

A close reading of this complex sys­tem of semiotic leakages reveals a thoroughly mapped but unstable fault where the realms of the human and the machine are continually collapsing into each other. It is precisely along this fault line, on the “new edge” of the cultural domain, that a stepped-up conflation of separate consciousnesses is occurring that is becoming an ever more sexed, violent, hallucinogenic, media-dependent, shared mindscape. This evolving collective consciousness is characterized by a radical obsession with the reflected traces of the trans­formation of the human into the cy­borg; the transformation’s inscription as recycled mythologies animates a ka­leidoscope of transient tattoos constantly re-writing shifting patterns (with neon intensity as the latest true color), hypermedia updates to the textual/cultural body. These are a new suit(e) of tribal scarrings worn in real­time and written in mutable signs on an electronic skin whose surface is an active projection screen for drifting, montaged morphs.

It could be argued that humans have always been cyborgs, and that it is only the naming of the awareness of this condition that is new. Humans have always co-developed with the tools of technology creating a feedback loop that, perhaps from the very begin­ning, was erasing the difference be­tween humans and machines through increasingly sophisticated machine­body-metaphors, and later machine­mind-metaphors. The tool, as such, has a long history as an add-on, a bodily peripheral, a prosthesis—and, with the invention of writing, as an internal­ized machine/apparatus.

As this process continues, it is most easily evidenced in recent develop­ments of devices constructed as attach­ments to the body, and redesigned to be incorporated via implantation or nerve/machine integration (e.g., arti­ficial hearts, prosthetic limbs, hearing aids, etc.) The history of human depen­dence on mechanical devices for sur­vival and maintenance of the indi­vidual body exemplifies the more gen­eral dependency of society on technol­ogy. Given the direction of technologies of the future such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence,artificial life, bio­chips, and synthetic neurons, the body’s rate of absorption of the ma­chine will only quicken.

How will the cyborg organize relative to the “virtual”? Can the idea of virtual organization be read fractally as a scaled phenomenon representative of new cultural formations within e-space?

The interactive work presented by Public Domain, Inc. frames these ques­tions by deconstructing its own prin­ciples of institutional formation, and attempting to design effective meta­phors that simultaneously describe, il­lustrate, and demonstrate a model of interpretation of virtuality. The recog­nition of the centrality of the phenom­enon of collapse to the never-ending reconstruction of meaning is taken as license for the use of a collaged fluxus of poetic images, texts, and sounds that askew conclusiveness in favor of dreams and dada. Implicit in this ap­proach is a high valuation of noise, chaos, anarchy, nonhierarchalization, improvisation, conflict, discontinuity, experimentation, invention, and wild speculation uninhibited by any need to make sense. Ironically, it probably will anyway. If not now, then later.

Public Domain, Inc. (PD) is a 501 (c)3 non-profit organization whose stated mission is to explore the interface be­tween art, technology, and theory. To that end, Public Domain is presently engaged in five projects with complementary agendas that supplement each other to create a system of interdependent activi­ties. They are: 1) Perforations, 2) Working Papers, 3) The Kiosk Project, 4) Video Pro­duction, and 5) Networking.

1) Perforations is a quarterly jour­nal/media kit. Each issue develops dif­ferent themes of contemporary life as they relate to technology. Topics are generally broadly defined in order to accommodate approaches to the mate­rial that are experimental, creative, and informed by multiple perspectives.

2) Working Papers is a series of pre­sentations devoted to the various crises of legitimation, representation, and communication that constitute the con­temporary scene of modernity and post­modernity. Participants come from a wide variety of disciplines, cross-disci­plines and multi-disciplines including art, philosophy, literature, poetry, literary criticism, computer science, architecture, video art, film, and music.

3) Upon completion, the Kiosk Project will be a series of interactive, hypermedia stations situated in pub­lic areas that will provide artists work­ing in electronic media with an exhi­bition venue other than the traditional gallery or museum.

4) Video Production: Public Do­main is actively planning to videotape and broadcast Working Papers on pub­lic access cable television.

5) With the recent donation of a Sun server to Public Domain, the group is able to provide Internet access to both its own members as well as des­ignated representatives of other non­profit arts organizations. PD’s existence as an Internet node has greatly facili­tated interaction between members, provided a means of contact with par­ticipants in Working Papers, and al­lowed artists and theorists from around the world to contribute to Per­forations, and to remain in communi­cation with PD. The Internet has be­come the infrastructure necessary for Public Domain’s on-going design as a virtual organization.

Trained as a traditional Chinese painter, I have adopted the principle of “expressing the spirit through form.” Along with painting, I have studied Chinese philosophy and researched Buddhist art. During the past few years, I have traveled to Dunhuang and Tibet to study their art and attempt to understand their spirit, both visually and philosophically. These themes in art and lyrical composition have served as the foundation for my work as a new-media artist. My artworks explore the conceptual resonance between contemporary and ancient mythologies of energy. Digital images create an environment that suggests, metaphorically, that the medium can reach beyond the physical world into a realm where matter slips effortlessly into energy, reproducing a world in which breathing is synonymous with peace and beauty.

Trained as a traditional Chinese painter, I have adopted the principle of “expressing the spirit through form.” Along with painting, I have studied Chinese philosophy and researched Buddhist art. During the past few years, I have traveled to Dunhuang and Tibet to study their art and attempt to understand their spirit, both visually and philosophically. These themes in art and lyrical composition have served as the foundation for my work as a new-media artist. My artworks explore the conceptual resonance between contemporary and ancient mythologies of energy. Digital images create an environment that suggests, metaphorically, that the medium can reach beyond the physical world into a realm where matter slips effortlessly into energy, reproducing a world in which breathing is synonymous with peace and beauty.

This video, inspired by a dream, is the life story of two humanized dots discovering love and hardship in today’s society. The piece intends to evoke personal memories that are emotionally tied to the viewer’s own experiences. The visuals are strongly influenced by traditional Chinese brush painting. The rising and falling life of the dots is synchronized with the music, with the intent that they empower one another. The piece mixes classical music with cutting-edge technology to create a deeply unique experience.

Trained as a traditional Chinese painter, I have adopted the principle of “expressing the spirit through form.” Along with painting, I have studied Chinese philosophy and researched Buddhist art. During the past few years, I have traveled to Dunhuang and Tibet to study their art and attempt to understand their spirit, both visually and philosophically. These themes in art and lyrical composition have served as the foundation for my work as a new media artist.

This work was inspired by the traditional Japanese Yukimi Syoji screen commonly used in rural houses. Yukimi means watching a snow scene, and Syoji means paper door. On a Yukimi Syoji, paper is replaced by transparent glass so people can view snow scenes. I am deeply impressed with this enjoyable way of spending time. When I started producing this installation, the first thing I did was make a covering box like a Yukimi Shoji to hide computer devices. Next, I created three types of snow scenes by programming with OpenGL and C++. I created snowflakes in four-dimensional hexagons, letting them move and rotate in four-dimensional space, and projected the snow scene to three-dimensions. Second, I created a scene of snowflakes in the form of alphabets. I set a slow falling speed so that people could read the alphabets and even solve a word puzzle. Third, I made a snow scene in which everything (for example, snowflakes, trees, and houses) was shown in wireframe. These floating wireframe snowflakes present a novel and particular sense. In addition, I created a virtual cloudy glass and put it in front of the snow scene. When people touch the panel and move their fingers, a transparent stroke appears on the virtual glass. Through the stroke, people can see the falling snowflakes. With time, the stroke disappears, and the glass becomes cloudy again.