Artworks Data Table

The Amidah is a central part of a prayer performed three times daily, standing in silence. The prayer consists of 18 steps, including a slight bowing movement, meant to indicate respect and reverence, that occurs when certain references in the prayer are privately recited.
I trained the actors in the choreography of this embodiment of reverence, while they were both costumed as a prayer quorum of religious Jews and in various states of undress. I then photographed the group in long exposure with a large-format camera. The result is a triptych of large-format prints named after morning, afternoon, and evening renditions of the Amidah. The figures ignore the nudity in their group, fixed as they are on their task. This Javascript animation includes the central panel of the triptych, Mincha, the afternoon prayer, which is perhaps the most difficult, because it requires an interruption of the workday in order to remove oneself from the banal and enter a modality of sacred contemplation.
Beneath the clothes, perhaps the prayer-body is more audible. The vocal accompaniment employs Jewish metatext and a “Queering” of sung text. The audio is a recording of me singing the shecheckyanu prayer backwards. Shechekyanu is a prayer recited at the recovery of an illness, the conclusion of a fast, or the end of a voyage. The inversion is performed as a new supratext.
I was taught that the movements and structure of the Amidah are meant as a physical nemesis to evoke Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai. Much of the underpinning of my work is informed by my multilingual experience of inhabiting two worlds at the same time: engaging a feminist, post-queer, post-Zionist politic while revering the sacred and ancestral.

Four hundred square meters of the brick façade on a winery were digitally designed and fabricated to serve as a prototype for this process. The masonry façade functions both as a temperature buffer and as protection from direct sunlight. The robotic construction technology, developed at the ETH Zürich by Gramazio & Kohler, Architecture and Digital Fabrication, lays individual bricks according to programmed parameters, precisely at the desired angle and at exact prescribed intervals. With this new digital production method, each wall was constructed to the desired light and air permeability specifi-cations, while creating a pattern of individually rotated bricks.

The façade is made up of 20,000 bricks. Each individual brick reflects light differently, depending on the angle at which it is set, and thus has different light-diffusion characteristics. Much like pixels on a computer screen, the bricks form a pattern on the façade. In contrast to a two-dimensional screen, however, there is a dramatic play among plasticity, depth, and color, depending on the viewer’s position and the angle of the sun.

At closer view – in contrast to its pictorial effect at a distance – the sensual, textile softness of the walls dissolves into the materiality of the stonework. The observer is surprised that the soft, round forms are actually composed of individual, hard bricks. The façade appears as a solidified dynamic form.

In the interior, the daylight creates a mild, yet luminous atmosphere. The image of the landscape glimmers through the open gaps between the bricks.

To create the façade, the team designed a generative process using the animation software Maya and its embedded scripting language, MEL. The existing concrete-frame construction was interpreted as a basket and filled with abstract balls (representing grapes) that varied in diameter. By digitally simulating gravity, the process simulated balls falling into a virtual container. The digital basket was then viewed from all four sides, and the digital image data were automatically transferred as a rotation of the individual bricks. The joints were left open to create transparency.

In the built result, the visitor sees gigantic, synthetic grapes, as if they were inside the vineyard building. The wall elements were manufactured as part of a pilot project at the robot research facilities at the ETH Zürich, transported by lorry to the construction site, and installed with a crane.

The Gramazio & Kohler team wrote a script for direct postprocessing of the generated design data into robot control language. The robot is directly activated by the design data, and there was no need to produce additional implementation drawings. As a result, the team was able to continue working on the façade up to the very last minute before starting production.

Entanglement consists of two objects. Each is, on the one hand, a unique, handmade, traditionally crafted object — a glass-blown vessel, cut in two parts. Each, on the other, is a replicable, 3D-printed object based on 3D scanning the glass void space. They are entangled imitations of each other without being a copy.

The work articulates the notion of a digital craftsmanship as an operational synthesis between digital and physical materials and tools as poetic (Poïesis) and technical (Technê) expressions, opposing a traditional dualistic separation of digital workflows and analogue making and material understanding.

Extended Summary:

In quantum physics, quantum entanglement is a phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles is generated in such a way that the quantum state of each individual particle cannot be described independently from the other. The work Entanglement constructs a similar state in which neither of the digital or analog parts could be read individually and where neither could be described independently from the other. Entanglement is part of a series of six glass blown vessels, created during my Artist in Residency at the Pilchuck Glass School. The shapes of these volumes and their creation follow loosely the notion of primordial mitosis—the splitting of a single cell into two—the beginning of complex forms of life. After their creation at Pilchuck, the blown glass volumes were cut, creating a straight division between the upper and lower parts in the objects. The complete volumes were not 3D scanned before the act of cutting but were arranged and 3D scanned, held by a series of jigs. This created a situation of disruption between the digital and the analog, in which the digital augments the actual, not through methods of common overlay such as projection mapping, but through digital construction of their Gestalt, adding a void in the form.

The void is invisible and performative to challenge the relationship between the digital practice and the craft workshop – between techne and poiesis. It investigates the possibility of collaborative making from the glass workshop to the digital environment of my practice and introduces the notion of performance into the amalgamation between glass and 3D printed polymer. The aim of the investigation is to create a larger, organism-like construct in which the cut glass volumes that can only exist in a 3D scan/3D print; a state of digital and actual, thus allowing simulation and simulacrum to take place at the same time. This work consists of the physical separation of the cellular glass volumes from one another and the 3D printed form interacting with these single objects to form an ecosystem between the glass volumes The elements are held together by digitally modelled, tendril-like structures, analogous to the biological cell growth when forming multi-cellular higher order organisms. Entanglement is an amalgamate of methods, skills and materials, a hybrid phase matter state, where both sublimation (the scanning of a physical object; the transformation of physical to digital) and reification (the reverse: 3D printed data solidification) form a new organism. Thus, Entanglement is an interplay between glass making, 3D scanning and 3D printing as a choreography in which the scanning of the glass would is performance, constructing a form that otherwise would not be possible, either in the digital or in the physical alone. The work extends the discourse on the emerging qualities of Digital Craftsmanship as a new discipline where material knowledge, digital tooling, and traditional skills are amalgamated and intertwined to form a new understanding and dialogue between practices of making and crafting.

This short video portrait of a quiet town in rural Middle America is also a study of how the durational medium of the moving image can articulate the relationship between space and time. Formally experimental, playing with framing and long takes, the video addresses the way in which place and public space in this small town can be defined temporally, as well as spatially and socially, and the role of the camera in that process. The artists are currently adapting Royal, Nebraska along with additional footage and interview material from the town, for a multi-channel installation, using the physical space of the installation itself to think about the
relationships among history, memory, social space, and the passage of time.

(Neurosarcoidosis is Todd Childers)

This is an artbook about my treatment and struggles with neurosarcoidosis. The book’s secondary theme concerns becoming a number in a hospital bureaucracy and maintaining government support for medical bills. It uses MRI images to acknowledge the positive use of computers.

“Indiscriminate” is used to describe something that is chaotic and random in nature. “Vision” is defined as the physical act of seeing. It also refers to a dream, trance, thought, or mystical appearance, or an idea, an object or the imagination. Indiscriminate Visions is a virtual environment that presents personal visions in a format designed to promote cross-cultural dream sharing.

Using video animation and editing, common dream elements are extracted from different dream­ers: people with diverse cultural, economic, and religious back­grounds. The act of dreaming becomes transformed from a per­sonal and private ritual to a shared experience, framed as a part of a greater collective sub­conscious.

The interactive video piece is installed as a virtual space that insulates the viewer from all exte­rior distractions. The room is similar in design to a photo booth or a church confessional. Inside, there are two video monitors: one nine-inch black and white monitor and one 12-inch color monitor, mounted side by side. The black and white monitor dis­plays dreamers recounting their visions, while the color monitor plays back the video collages.

Unlike typical interactive pro­grams that include viewer choices and branching capability, this sys­tem is random. The video has been transferred to a video disc controlled by a computer that randomizes the playback of the video each time a new viewer activates a sensing switch by entering the space. By exposing viewers to random collections of images and text, Indiscriminate Visions reintroduces people to their dreams and gives them a connection between an external media- and information-based material world and the internal visionary subconscious.

The interactive poetic garden is literally a fountain of words. Water flows briskly down a series of cascades into a glowing pool. A tangle of words projected on the surface of the pool floats like leaves in a stream. The computer drives a video projector, creating the illusion of text floating on the surface of the water as it flows through the garden. A person sitting on the wooden bench that faces the garden can stop the word flow, push and pull words, block or stir them up, change the content of the words themselves, and cause them to grow and divide into new words that are eventually pulled into the drain then pumped back to the head of the stream, only to tumble down again.

This project attempts to bring the computer into the garden in harmony with stone, water, and plant materials. It is one of the experiments underway in the MIT Media Lab’s Aesthetics and Computation Group, which is sculpting computational media into new expressive forms.

Summary

BOX is a gumball machine augmented by artificial intelligence that locks or unlocks its delivery candy system depending on the interactor’s ethnicity. It highlights potential ethical tensions that arise with the introduction of AI-powered objects.

Abstract

BOX is an interactive installation, consisting on an everyday object augmented by artificial intelligence. The piece reflects on the power asymmetries that technology instantiates, aiming at providing with a reflection on the aesthetics of our relationship with it. The artwork also aims to showcasing the advancements and limitations in computer vision and artificial intelligence, allowing the public to experience in person its power as well as its inherent biases.

Recent advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, have allowed the creation of systems able to infer (predict) information on a person from camera data, including facial recognition, facial expressions, ethnicity, among others. Nowadays, several companies provide image processing services that include these predictions, among several others.

In spite of potential benefits that face recognition proposes, its widespread application entails several risks, from privacy breaches to systematic discrimination in areas such as hiring, policing, benefits assignment, marketing, and other purposes BOX consists of a gumball machine that, using computer vision and machine learning, predicts its user’s ethnicity, delivering free candy only to white users.

The artwork showcases a possible use of computer vision making explicit the fact that every technological implantation crystallises a political worldview, allowing the general public to experience in person the power of these new technologies, while simultaneously providing a tool for participatory observation, as well as ethnographic and technographic research.

Our project aims to raise awareness on discrimination, ethics, and accountability in AI among practitioners and the general public.

Memoirs of the Blind is an interactive installation consisting of a screen showing a black-and-white picture of a face with its eyes closed. This image at first remains still, however, when the interactor blinks, the installation detects it and takes a photo at the exact time of the blinking. Once the new face is obtained, it is processed (cropped, desaturated, and adjusted) and then it substitutes the displayed face.

The artwork becomes a testimony of its visitors, interacting with it, but not seeing it: a moment where the visitor becomes at the same time subject and object.

The piece reflects on the power asymmetries that technology crystallises, providing a contemplative reflection on the aesthetics of our relationship with it, while simultaneously showcasing the advancements in computer vision that allow for supra-human abilities.

The title of the piece is inspired on Derrida’s book “Memoirs of the blind: the self-portrait and other ruins”. Derrida extends the framework of the symbolic and disrupt the relationship and meaning of the objects. Perhaps similarly, the piece appropriates this principle, proposing a poetic dimension of the power choreography in interaction.

Finally, the piece reflects on the differences between machine time and human time, what Paul Virilio once called ‘speed pollution’.

In Memoirs of the Blind, an inapprehensible moment, the blink of an eye, is resignified in machine time as a relevant event. If Virilio’s words are to come true when he says that “the capacity of interactivity is go-ing to reduce the world to nearly nothing. In fact, there is already a speed pollution, which reduces the world to nothing. In the near future, people will feel enclosed in a small environment”; we owe our future selves explorations like the ones that this piece proposes.

The Gaza strip is a self-governing Palestinian territory on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, that borders Egypt on the southwest and Israel on the east and north. Gaza and the West Bank are claimed by the State of Palestine.

The 2014 50-day war between Israel and Hamas claimed the lives of more than 2,150 Palestinians, wounded more than 10,000 and displaced an estimated 300,000 people. On the Israeli side, at least 64 soldiers were killed and six civilians died. Since then, only one third of the 11000 homes destroyed have been rebuilt.

Western cultural relationship with war often frames it from a fascinated alien perspective–war as entertainment. Simultaneously engaging in processes that do not alleviate the structural power inequalities that originate the conflict.

Smile, is a mixed-media installation consisting of a screen situated in a black box, mounted on the wall. The screen is black. However, when an interactor smiles at the installation, drone-footage of the ruins of Gaza, digitally slowed-down by the artist, fades in. If the interactor stops smiling, the videos stops. It only plays when the interactor widely smiles at it.

The installation reflects on the construction of a spectacle from otherwise dramatic news, as well as reflecting on the otherness and dehumanization of war.

The piece also explores on the power asymmetries that technology crystallises where spectators are forced to surrender to the imposed narratives. The piece aims to provide with a reflection on the aesthetics of our relationship with it, while simultaneously showcasing the advancements in computer vision and human-computer interaction.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” ― George Orwell, 1984

This work is an attempt to show that, besides being able to produce quality graphic slides for business, the GENIGRAPHICS System can be used to create colorful, high quality work in a creative and illustrative way.

This work is 3D, geometric, and procedural. It explores the boundaries (where interesting things happen) of visual space (chaos and order, structure and deconstruction, spatial and flat).

Technology has been integral to the design and construction of my work since the early 1970s. A motive for making these constructions is that they are exciting to look at. They are not memorable in the sense that much of the iconic work of the 20th century is, nor can they be described in the way that conceptual art can be. They need to be experienced. They are visually stimulating in the way that optical devices such as telescopes or 3D glasses help us to see things differently, but in this case the art is both the device and the content. It has a strong spatial identity.

The organization of the elements in my work is procedural, though that may not be obvious. Symmetry and recursion provide visual clues to the genesis of the work for those who want to explore.

The title RENGA (Linked Images) is a wordplay on RENGA (Linked Verse), a Japanese traditional poetical genre. The first ideogram, REN, means to link or associate. The second ideogram, GA, means poem. A different ideogram, also pronounced GA, means image. Substitution of GA (image) for GA (poem) creates a new word: RENGA (Linked Images).

The introduction to “Kokinshu (a collection of ancient Japanese poetry)” compiled in the early 10th century contains the following passage: “Waka Japanese poetry) moves Heaven and Earth without the use of physical force.” In modern times, literature is believed to develop in a metaphorical space outside of the physical space we inhabit. We all know that TV dramas are fiction and that fiction never interferes with reality. But in earlier times, metaphorical space and physical space were connected. Poetry was thought to mitigate a prevailing epidemic and occasionally served as a tool to lead a national project to success. Ancient people had a sense of awe and were moved by the mysterious power of words, which could affect an object without exerting any physical force.

This richness of words is lacking in modern society. The expres­sion “could effect an object with­out exerting any physical force” could be applied to the electronic media around us. Today, it is digi­tal technology that fuses physical and metaphorical space. Information network systems melt the long-frozen richness of the metaphorical space and restore its abundance to us. They also show us that an archetype of our new experiences in electronic media can be found in the expres­sion of ancient people.

The ancient people’s most impor­tant suggestion might be the achievement of creative corre­spondence between one another. It is commonly believed that painting or composing poetry is an extremely solitary creative process. This is often true. But creation is sometimes a collective process, occurring within a “net­work of influences.” Such influ­ences can be anything from inspiring hints, to subconscious stylistic appropriation, to responding to an existing theme. Most artwork is generally more the result of a dialogue than its creator consciously recognizes.

RENGA (Linked Images) was triggered by a workshop on com­puter painting held in the winter of 1991. A work by Rieko Nakamura was loaded into the painting system in front of me. Although the painting was digital data that could be reproduced an infinite number of times, I was reluctant to modify another per­son’s completed work. But I dared to add some touches to it, and then “undid” the change. I repeated this process several times. This casual operation gave me a pleasant surprise. After awhile, I forgot about undoing it and further modified the work in my style until it became a sort of hybrid of my style with remnants of Nakamura’s.

In April of 1992, I suggested to Nakamura a creative method to make this scintillating play an organized activity. Taking an image received in electronic mail, an artist would import it into a painting system, deform it, recon­textualize it within another image, even print it out and physically draw on it, to rescan it. By repeating this process, a series of works just like a picture scroll would be created.

Each resulting image is something which is at once unquestionably one’s own artwork, while at the same time something which could never arise from one’s own artis­tic monologue. So far, we have tried two sessions of RENGA. We learned how to appropriate images from the other artist’s work, as well as to be appropriat­ed. Just as learning another language leads to the discovery of a new self image, each of us has discovered another self through RENGA.

Perhaps the invention of RENGA (poetry) was a formalization of the natural interaction between oneself and the community, before the establishment of the contemporary sense of self as a tool. Digital media and network communications have the power to bring the fixed boundary of personality back to its innocent state. Cyberspace is often men­tioned in terms of the gradual loss of our senses of time and distance. It may cause a loss of identity, but it could also serve as an opportunity to encounter our more natural and familiar self-­image. RENGA (Linked Images), is an experiment in the acceleration of these possibilities within digital technology.

In making this work, I started by observing real plants to under­stand their form and structure. The shape of the virtual plants in the CODE_LINE series was created by writing a computer program based on the regularity of natural plants.

The objects in CODE_LINE were expressed using glass-like textures to express the plant’s delicacy, which collapses if only slight pressure is applied. Though all living things have a strong vitality for survival, they also ultimately contain the potential to collapse. When there is perfect balance between these states, it is like the moment the strained thread snaps, life displays its most beautiful appearance. This work expresses that moment.

In making this work, I started by observing real plants to under­stand their form and structure. The shape of the virtual plants in the CODE_LINE series was created by writing a computer program based on the regularity of natural plants.

The objects in CODE_LINE were expressed using glass-like textures to express the plant’s delicacy, which collapses if only slight pressure is applied. Though all living things have a strong vitality for survival, they also ultimately contain the potential to collapse. When there is perfect balance between these states, it is like the moment the strained thread snaps, life displays its most beautiful appearance. This work expresses that moment.

In making this work, I started by observing real plants to under­stand their form and structure. The shape of the virtual plants in the CODE_LINE series was created by writing a computer program based on the regularity of natural plants.

The objects in CODE_LINE were expressed using glass-like textures to express the plant’s delicacy, which collapses if only slight pressure is applied. Though all living things have a strong vitality for survival, they also ultimately contain the potential to collapse. When there is perfect balance between these states, it is like the moment the strained thread snaps, life displays its most beautiful appearance. This work expresses that moment.

In making this work, I started by observing real plants to under­stand their form and structure. The shape of the virtual plants in the CODE_LINE series was created by writing a computer program based on the regularity of natural plants.

The objects in CODE_LINE were expressed using glass-like textures to express the plant’s delicacy, which collapses if only slight pressure is applied. Though all living things have a strong vitality for survival, they also ultimately contain the potential to collapse. When there is perfect balance between these states, it is like the moment the strained thread snaps, life displays its most beautiful appearance. This work expresses that moment.

We undertake a physical mixed reality project in which we deal with digital existence and its physical counterpart using mixed reality technologies and tangible interfaces in real space. The digital entity can be a digitized or synthesized object, mathematical formula, computational algorithm, or simulated artificial life. We provide a physical interface to interact with the digital substance in a natural manner. Users can now naturally immerse themselves in virtual, digital, or conceptual things in a physical manner while they are conscious in real field. Moreover, they can expand their experience using the physical mixed reality devices, with which they can physically touch, feel, and share the digital entity in the real world. With this project, people can imagine and design virtual lifeforms, make their own artificial life, and test algorithms physically in a seamlessly merged physical and digital environment. Users can also learn about the life cycle of virtual lifeforms or virtual ecosystems in a created world on the device. Additionally, the simulated behavior of the artificial life occasionally presents chaotic and aesthetic scenery. We expect these devices to be used as a creative tool to stimulate and motivate users to learn, think, and dream about future of nature and humans.

Composition on the Table is a series of artwork which represent the concept of Mixed Reality. Four white tables have various user interfaces such as switches, dials, turn-tables and sliding boards that a player can touch. Projectors suspended from the ceiling project computer generated images onto the tables and interfaces. Projected images change in real time as if they were physically attached to the interfaces when players operate them. Also sounds are produced in relation to the movement of images. Since the interfaces have close relation to the reaction of images, players can operate images and sounds in the same way when he/she operates ordinary interfaces and gradually feels these illusions as equivalent as the actual objects.

The aim of these works is to allow players and audiences to share the world of Mixed Reality thus produced and collaborate to create images and sounds interactively.

Iconic elements are the basic building blocks of a world literally made of language. These elements are the core of an artificial-life model that runs the world, and the behavior of the lifeforms and objects within it. Described as the elemental forces of “reality,” “identity,” “information,” “abstraction,” the “subconscious,” and the “metaphysical,” they each relate to unique pictorial styles and soundscapes used to represent the world. The result is a fusion of plastic knowbots, surreal iconography, electronic abstraction, and real-world dirt.

The work has the capacity to evolve, change, and mutate through human interaction and its own evolutionary process. Visitors to the world can create, construct, and manipulate objects, influence the evolution of societies, and discover new language elements. Communication with the resident lifeforms occurs via the iconic language on which the world is based. The multiplicity of Iconica is experienced through this interaction – simultaneously a cyberspace, a mindspace, an abstract world, and a stylized reality.

Cultures, languages, and ways of being may be invented within game worlds. Ludea is a world in which three tribes subscribing to conflicting ideologies define their territories along lines of communi­cation. Each tribe gathers resources and tags in colour-neo-material­ist orange, post-symbolic green and post-human blue. Victory goes to the clan that achieves the widest domain.

The Ludeans come from a generation that has grown up with games, abstract machines, and digital processes. It has become second nature for them to make abstractions of reality in terms of models, systems, processes, and flows. The world of Ludea explores the post-human condition and unstable nature of contemporary existence via three contrasting experiences of place. This occurs through signs and symbols that are mapped onto real-world loca­tions to create meaningful connections and experiences across three different public spaces: virtual, networked and physical.

Ludeans subscribe to one of three different ideologies: neo-ma­terialism, the post-symbolic, and the post-human. Each ideology represents a position of distrust with a particular mode of communi­cation and has developed an alternative language to avoid using this particular mode. By way of example, the post-linguistic has come to distrust written and spoken words, and they have embraced com­munication that consists solely of gestures and synaesthetic icons.

The work also draws on theories of “possible worlds” generated by the combination of artificial intelligence (Al), digital games, and the idea of “world building” through invented language and culture. On a more metaphorical level, the work creates interactive spaces and systems that manifest experiences of a world characterized by uncertainty, multiplicity, complexity, and connectivity. Thus, it makes us aware of the changing nature of reality.

Optical Tone is an installation that proposes and proves a technique for interactive and temporo-spacio colour composition in accordance with human perception of colour consistency.

What happens to order when three city traffic lights lose control of their reds and greens? Light signals change without warning. Cars crash in rhythm and Traffic Jam quickly becomes an out-of-control urban opera. A synergized stop-and-go rhythm is orchestrated using peculiar objects such as drills, scissors, and bike pumps. Dodging flying wreckage and debris, the lights show their versatility and ingenuity as they become incoming projectile “instruments.” Sitting through a traffic jam has never been so much fun.

The Bridge is a 2D logic puzzle game that forces the player to reevaluate their preconceptions of physics and perspective. It is Isaac Newton meets M. C. Escher. Manipulate gravity to redefine the ceiling as the floor while venturing through impossible architectures. Explore increasingly difficult worlds, each uniquely detailed and designed to leave the player with a pronounced sense of intellectual accomplishment. The Bridge exemplifies games as an art form, with beautifully hand-drawn art in the style of a black-and-white lithograph.

Deephorizon is based on images from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Areal images of the oil spill (helicopters, airplanes, satellites) are manipulated and then mapped onto a sphere as a relief map. The darker parts are valleys and the brighter parts of the images become elevations hence creating a 3D structure on top of the sphere. A tracking shot moves slowly around this beautiful world comprised of these images of death, pain and destruction. The final product is distorted by a glitch (Version 1: http://vimeo.com/12264646). The sweet score elevates this tension between highly aestheticized images and sound and the horrible occurrence out in the gulf of Mexico. It is a dynamic oil painting on a 80.000 square miles ocean canvas with 800 million liters of oil – a unique piece of art representing the “Verkuenstlichung” of nature and the “Vernatuerlichung” of art.

Inspired by the coincidental suicides in 1890 of Elephant Man Joseph Merrick and the Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, Still I Rise fuses two events by presenting a fantasy visualization of Merrick’s last dream in an animated Impressionist style.

The entire production was animated and rendered on Windows 2000 workstations. The final renders were recorded on 35mm film.

In my practice, I often take on the role of a “web spider”: checking pages for links and weaving networks with them (Website Wigs), scanning through HTML or XML and cross-referencing movements to it (html_butoh and the html-movement-library), composing sound-tracks based on HTML (Singing Website Wallpaper and Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited), and using code as choreography for performances (Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited).
Website Impersonations: The Next Generation is a new installation and live performance series that utilizes web code as layout and choreography. For SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, the installation hosts the “hidden mechanisms” of several web sites. A dancer, the audience, and I shape the course of each performance, which will take place within a “web-driven” environment. The web sites to be performed are yahoo.co.jp, fc2.com, and google.co.jp, which are listed as the three most used sites in Japan (Alexa.org’s web-ranking).
The source code of a website ( HTML tags) is interpreted live on stage into new dance movements, which are immediately translated into text-based descriptions and then stored online in the html-movement library. This information is re-used on stage as new instruction material. As the data performance progresses, more html movements are developed, stored, and altered by the participants. The user (the audience) takes an active role in the performances of yahoo, google, etc.
The html-movement library is a repository of often butoh-inspired movements based on the functionality of HTML tags in a web browser. The original idea to combine html and movements stems from the similarities between working with butoh, where a dancer “becomes” an image, and how a web browser displays content.

Summary

LightTank is an interactive Extended Reality(XR) installation that explores hybrid design strategies through the fusion of digital information and physical constructions. Designed for a public setting, the project expands the principles of contemporary augmented reality (AR) devices from a single person viewing experience, towards a communal multi-viewer event.

Abstract

The installation LightWing II was developed at the arc/sec Lab for Cross-Reality Architecture and Interactive Systems at the University of Auckland. Giving equal attention to both design aspects, the physical and the digital, the Lab explores user responsive constructions, where dynamic properties of the virtual world are an integral part of the built environment. Embedded in the School of Architecture, the Lab`s vision is to re-connect the intangible computer world to the multisensory qualities of architecture and urban spaces. With a focus on intuitive forms of user interaction, the arc/sec lab uses large-scale prototypes, installations and performances as the driving research method for both, the development and the demonstration of new hybrid design principles. The experiments at the Lab are aiming to make data “touchable”. The aim is to offer a cross-reality experience, which is rendered in real-time, interactive and designed to accommodate large audience numbers.

LightWing II aligns with recent arc/sec projects such as LightTank (1.), LightScale II (2.) and Singularity (3.). It takes the audience into a dream like environment of awe and delight, (re)imagining spatial design and speculating on the future behaviour of buildings and cities.

This installation of miniature clay worlds and digital video projections combines organic shape and digital imagery to examine the intersection between the heavily mediated construct of mass communication and the physical world. It is part of an exploration of how these realities, imagined and actual, redefine our sense of and direct relationship to community, place, and identity with the environment.

The image obtained by a painter using a computer stops being an accumulation of unknown badly defined forms and colours. It becomes instead a pattern of thousands of distinct, intermittent, and quantified points. The position in space, the colourimetric values of these thousands of points, are perfectly defined and numerically accountable. In this way, the painter controls each one of these points. At any moment, the artist is able to modify the value of one or several points, or even the total number of them. As a result, innumerable successive approaches (many sketches, to use the accepted history-of-art term) can be shown on the screen. Proceeding by small steps, the painter is in a position to delicately pinpoint the image of dreams. Without the aid of a computer, it would not possible to materialize quite so faithfully an image that previously existed only in the artist’s mind. This may sound paradoxical, but the machine, which is thought to be cold and inhuman, can help to realize what is most subjective, unattainable, and profound in a human being.

The image obtained by a painter using a computer stops being an accumulation of unknown badly defined forms and colours. It becomes instead a pattern of thousands of distinct, intermittent, and quantified points. The position in space, the colourimetric values of these thousands of points, are perfectly defined and numerically accountable. In this way, the painter controls each one of these points. At any moment, the artist is able to modify the value of one or several points, or even the total number of them. As a result, innumerable successive approaches (many sketches, to use the accepted history-of-art term) can be shown on the screen. Proceeding by small steps, the painter is in a position to delicately pinpoint the image of dreams. Without the aid of a computer, it would not possible to materialize quite so faithfully an image that previously existed only in the artist’s mind. This may sound paradoxical, but the machine, which is thought to be cold and inhuman, can help to realize what is most subjective, unattainable, and profound in a human being.

TRANSDUCERS is an experimental installation composed of several transparent glass tubes hanging at different heights through the space. Hair samples that have been collected from different individuals have been implanted into the custom-made laboratory glass tubes.

A single human hair can be merely debris, but once its information is decoded through DNA analysis it reveals itself to be the repository of our biological blueprint. TRANSDUCERS explores this phenomenon by providing an alternative means of decoding and classification. Enhanced with electronics, these vessels bring the inanimate biological matter to life again: the object under investigation—the human hair—is triggered by the machinery and is stimulated to react. This reaction is registered, amplified, and transduced into an audible output that encodes the hair’s physiological constitution. Each of the devices generates a unique sound based on the donors’ individual hair samples. TRANSDUCERS seeks to question the dominance of science in describing and classifying life and its basic units. Every audible result provides a technological interpretation of identity, produced by an arrangement that points beyond itself to a future reference system yet to be developed, freely oscillating between life and laboratory work.

The main intent of my print work is to explore the structure of space by re-visioning (photo)graphical data pulled from everyday life. Toward this goal, I build geometric space frames or objects using 30 software and then composite these synthetic structures into the artifactual space of each (photo)graph of interest.

Apart from intuitively generated virtual or cyberspace objects, the use of particular space frames (geometrical matrices – networks of triangulated or semispherical polyhedra) and the graphical tension achieved by (digitally) juxtaposing them with photographic mappings of visual data becomes an opportunity to represent spatial-field phenomena in a way that is non-cubical and non-cubist. Moreover, the use of digital imaging tools supports the facile use of photographic realism with its native and varied perspectival embodiment, even as it is subject to a profound digitalic flux of an acutely abstract and metaphorical shape-shifting mixology, if you will.

I am fond of saying: “There is no such thing as empty space:’ Among other things, “empty” space is filled with atoms and their dynamic interactions. Not only is space not empty, it has shape. In my pictures, I conceptualize space as a field. I render figures and their environments and connect them pictorially because they actually are connected in reality. At the same time, the connective networks or objectifications that I use (I would like to think) articulate the inherent structure of the so called empty space ‘tween the figure and ground.

Apart from direct sensorial contact with nature, my key modern and contemporary influences have been the artists Cezanne, Picasso, Salvador Dali, and M.C. Escher; design-scientist-engineer-geometer R. Buckminster Fuller; and East-West scientists-philosophers Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber.

The main intent of my print work is to explore the structure of space by re-visioning (photo)graphical data pulled from everyday life. Toward this goal, I build geometric space frames or objects using 30 software and then composite these synthetic structures into the artifactual space of each (photo)graph of interest.

Apart from intuitively generated virtual or cyberspace objects, the use of particular space frames (geometrical matrices – networks of triangulated or semispherical polyhedra) and the graphical tension achieved by (digitally) juxtaposing them with photographic mappings of visual data becomes an opportunity to represent spatial-field phenomena in a way that is non-cubical and non-cubist. Moreover, the use of digital imaging tools supports the facile use of photographic realism with its native and varied perspectival embodiment, even as it is subject to a profound digitalic flux of an acutely abstract and metaphorical shape-shifting mixology, if you will.

I am fond of saying: “There is no such thing as empty space:’ Among other things, “empty” space is filled with atoms and their dynamic interactions. Not only is space not empty, it has shape. In my pictures, I conceptualize space as a field. I render figures and their environments and connect them pictorially because they actually are connected in reality. At the same time, the connective networks or objectifications that I use (I would like to think) articulate the inherent structure of the so called empty space ‘tween the figure and ground.

Apart from direct sensorial contact with nature, my key modern and contemporary influences have been the artists Cezanne, Picasso, Salvador Dali, and M.C. Escher; design-scientist-engineer-geometer R. Buckminster Fuller; and East-West scientists-philosophers Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber.

The Lacemaker is an homage to the famous same-titled 17th Century painting by Johannes Vermeer. The original photograph, taken on New Year’s Eve 1995, was not consciously posed. Acevedo caught his subject emulating the posture of the Lacemaker simply by happenstance. This synchronicity underscores his interest in everyday life as seen, recorded, and then digitally revisioned into a kind of metaphysical photographic archive.

This is a figurative image about turning up the non-anthropomorphic channel. As to metaphor: energetic flux outside the polarities of comple­mentary opposites. In effect depicting a subject’s local electromagnetic, structurally resonant field. This depiction also doubles as a device that subdivides and interpenetrates the traditional photographic space with non-cubist spatial arrays. The corresponding ray-traced vertexial spheres provide an additional non-­Euclidean mapping of the pseudo­-molecular-model aggregate. This pictorial artifact facilitates the act of seeing in the present combined with flashback phenomena – remnants apprehended in an act of coding constellations of sensorial data. Nothingness in the interstitial space between figure and ground is effect given structure.

In the continuing Space Field series, the artist adds metal and gold leaf to Polaroid images then manipulates and transforms the images through digital scanning and printing with the Iris and Encad printers.

The Katrina Project: NO-LA involves collaborators from art, design, behavioral science, journalism, and community outreach. A database-driven, activist web site explores the psychological and social effects of the storm and its aftermath through interviews with, and works by various artists in New Orleans and Los Angeles.

The Katrina Project was initiated immediately after the Katrina disaster by Kenneth Wells, professor-in-residence of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies environmental effects on mental health. He approached Victoria Vesna, then chair of UCLA Design | Media Arts to help devise a communication system that would prepare victims for the psychological impact of the storm. She turned to Henri Lucas, an activist designer who teaches in the department and led a class of student researchers for this project. After a few permutations, the project reoriented to look at the connection between Lousiana and Los Angeles, with a focus on the creative community that works on raising consciousness around issues raised by this tragedy.

The team was joined by Claess Andersson, a reporter for NPR who conducted a series of interviews with filmmakers, artists, dancers, musicians, architects, and cooks, including filmmaker Wendy Gary Berman, film director Laura Beesley, and Sam Durant, artist and co-founder of Transforma, who worked with local organizations in New Orleans. The web site extends beyond Los Angeles to become a database of works by moviemakers, photographers, and others in the creative community. It is designed by media artist Jay Jiacong.

The ecological crisis is a human crisis. Oceans must not be considered as flat blue surfaces which serve as dropping holes where we can let vanish all our anthropogenic remains. There are vast amounts of organisms that live down there and some suffer pain from our waste and noise. Many are aware of mammals such as whales and dolphins and there have been discussions about the chemical and waste pollution. But – often ignored is the invisible and the inaudible environment to us that is deeply secluded. Therefore, in this installation, we have created 3D enlarged plankton to be like whales. In addition, we amplify the noise as participants move closer to the animations to simulate how these organisms might experience and perceive this anthropogenic noise. This is a highly interdisciplinary artist led effort with biologists, chemists, nano-toxicologists and an animator all working together towards a common goal – to raise consciousness.

Plankton serve as one of the primary basis of the marine food chain and are as a result a crucial component of the Earth‘s ecosystem. Scientists believe that phytoplankton contribute between 50 to 85 percent of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.

Current literature and studies have demonstrated how different noise sources influence large marine life with striking examples such as images of stranded whales and dolphins. However, little or almost nothing is known about the possible impact on marvelous microscopic organisms such as plankton and with the entanglement of micro-plastics, the ecological balance is further compromised.

Noise Aquarium utilizes 3D-scans of these micro creatures obtained with unique scientific imaging techniques and immerses the audience in the 3D ‘aquarium’ of diverse planktons projected as large as whales. With their presence alone, participants create destructive visual and audio noises, demonstrating how we are all implicated by our inaction. Noise Aquarium spotlights animated 3D-models obtained with scientific imaging techniques of the extremely diverse plankton spectrum.

“In palms ever appearing youthful; in palms I am revived,” – Carl Friedrich Philipp, von Martius, 1816

Palms furnish food, shelter, clothing, oils, waxes, timber, fuel, building materials, fibers, starch, wines, soap, brooms, mats, hats, sugar, wine, vinegar, baskets …

The look, the color, texture and even the fragrances are maintained. The process replaces natural plant fluid with a preservative. The trunk of the preserved palm tree is hollow. The result is a realistic plant environment constructed to specified measurements.

Watering, pest control, auxiliary lighting, skylights, replacement due to plant mortality or due to outgrowing of space, special planters … are no longer necessary. Architects and designers can now plan the palm trees in the projected environment and design the height, shape, and type of tree that will be used. Three preserved palm trees with integrated monitors. The first palm plays a continuous loop of a video. We see the architectural surface of Orange County and hear the story of Vi Vuong, a Ph.D. student at UC Irvine.

“Another Day in Paradise” is the motto of the city of Irvine in Orange County, California. Incorporated in 1971, it is renowned as one of the largest, most successful planned communities in the nation. Here, we can glimpse into the future living environments—an ideal represented. Our Town, circa, 1993. An hour’s drive south of Los Angeles, past Disneyland, the Nixon Library, and John Wayne airport, the American Dream personified. Inspired by Disneyland, this model city is carefully studied by developers and architects from around the world.

Only ten minutes away are the nation’s preeminent shopping malls—Fashion Island and South Coast Plaza and it is a major magnet for international business, the prototype of the new multinational city. The chairman of the Irvine Company who practically owns the town, calls the Irvine property his “raw canvas” and plans to devote the rest of his life to its development. A spectacular 100-square-mile canvas just waiting to be filled with the familiar landmarks of the late 20th century commercial civilization-—office parks, housing tracts, and shopping malls, crisscrossed by highways.

Vi Vuong fled with a group of other 14-year-olds on a boat at the urging of their mothers who didn’t want them to grow up to die to finally land at John Wayne Airport. An estimated of 600,000 of ” boat people” have drowned trying the similar route of escape. Oddly, the largest Vietnamese community settled in Orange County next door to the Nixon library.

1993 marks 20 years since the “end” of war with Vietnam. Since then it has been a subject of thousands of books, articles, and scores of motion pictures and documentaries. And yet, this country has still not come to grips with the idea that it has actually lost the first techno-war.

The second palm has hidden surveillance cameras in the fronds and the monitors mirror the viewer and the immediate surroundings. It is silent.

The third tree is interactive with an integrated computer that allows the viewer to “scratch” below the surface. This palm houses a collaborative effort with excerpts of “Monkeybone Take Me Home” and The Sacred and the Toxic” by Sean Kilcoyne and footage from the daily life in Vietnam by Kathy Brew. The media emblems of the Vietnam war are challenged by images of people who are trying to pick up the pieces and go on with their lives. The preservation process of palms is the bed on which these images and stories unfold.

Bodies© INCorporated., a pub­lic space on the Web, occasion­ally emerges as a physical envi­ronment. In the summer of 1996, it appears simultaneously at the San Francisco Art Institute, SIGGRAPH 96, and the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. The work is com­prised of three main public sites, where different sets of activities and emotional dynamics occur. The first is “Limbo,” a gray, frustrating, rather static and non-descript zone, where information can be accessed about bodies that have been put on hold by own­ers who have abandoned or neglected them. The second is the “Necropolis,” a richly tex­tured, baroque setting that produces feelings of anxiety, fear, and exhilaration, where owners choose from a seem­ingly endless list of disturbing possibilities for how they wish their bodies to die. The third is the “Exhibition/ Body Building” space, a “gallery” domain where bodies are displayed and visitors can actively re­assemble their “virtual others.”

Events in each of the three territories ignite a range of emotional responses and raise a variety of interesting issues related to online community dynamics. For example, when the body is “killed,” it is announced to the collection of “body owners” via email and made into a public spectacle. The implications of the actual person being identified in the public space have the potential to radically change the com­munity dynamic. When bodies are exhibited over the Internet, quite obviously, they reach a much larger audience than in a public space like a museum. But once they are in a physical space, the owners tend to take their exhibition much more seriously and any kind of public event much more personally.

There is an odd sense of complexity in the murder of a thought-creation made public. How does the graphic repre­sentation of the body amplify our relationship to it? What sort of psychological commitment and attachment do owners exhibit toward their “virtual” bodies? What happens when you discover that your body has been publicly altered in some way, without your knowl­edge or participation? How does the body become a source of pleasure and anxiety as it moves through changes and permutations that are out­side the owner’s control? What sort of emotional dynamics result from bodies being dis­played as a public spectacle? These are just a few questions being raised in Bodies© INCorporated. Perhaps you will have a few of your own.

overview and detail

Although Viktor Jan’s Flower may seem like an interloper among the many data sculptures and media representations appearing in this exhibition, it provides a contrast from the other works by focusing on how data can spur the creation and loss of natural entities. Inspired by the poem “Flower,” by one of South Korea’s leading poets of the late 20th century (Kim Ch’un-Su), the flower “blooms” or comes to life in a dark environment, when visitors whisper into its microphone, or when it senses data streams on local networks. Unlike a natural flower, Jan’s flower awakens in the evening and will never come to life unless someone calls its name. Flower reacts to the idea of “the gaze” in digital space, where people online are always vying for more views, likes, and mentions.

Until I spoke his name,

he had been

no more than a mere gesture.

When I spoke his name,

he came to me

and became a flower.

Now speak my name,

one fitting this colour and odour of mine,

as I spoke his name,

so that I may go to him

and become his flower.

We all wish

to become something.

You to me and I to you

wish to become an unforgettable gaze [4].

The work operates in a similar fashion to internet chat rooms, which are often most active in the evening hours when people are up late at night or home from a busy day at work and can finally contribute to the global online discussions. Flower, in effect, directly correlates to the variety of activities that take place online and out of sight. Flower only comes to life when people interact with it, which is similar to the phenomenon of Web 2.0, where databases and interfaces for cataloguing large amounts of data are created, and then wait for the general public to populate them with everything from personal photos to endless chatter. Maybe it is precisely this seemingly endless amount of data that either encourages us to be more creative or inspires us to challenge its use and purpose.

Traditional war memorials have adhered to a strict code of remembrance: commemorate the dead by distancing death and achieve public consensus through application of a conservative aesthetic. If truth is the casualty in these classic depictions, a greater good remains permanently enshrined: consolation for the bereaved and elevation of the fallen to cult status. Society needs to rally youth to fight future wars, and these monumental odes to martyrdom provide the necessary inspiration.

Damsels in Armor is a civics lesson of another order: 24 unsanctioned monuments testifying to war’s truly brutal cost. Rising above the detritus of battle, these damsels bear witness to the inevitable price of engagement; no suit of armor can shield them from the acid scars of battle, now permanently etched on their once-beautiful faces. Triumph’s glory has proved to be transient. Corrosion defaces, distorts, reveals. This gallery of figures forces us to acknowledge a reality understandably edited for commissioned monuments: every victory is Pyrrhic.

A fusion of sculptural elements, weapons, and armor, these “victory” compositions have historical roots in works like “Nike of Samothrace” and Delacroix’s celebrated painting “Liberty Leading the People.” Elements and details were juxtaposed digitally for a seamless, almost painterly finish, traditional in its look, if unorthodox in content. The damsels’ faces were selected from 1940s and 1950s commercial photography, another era when truth was glamorized for mass consumption. Original photography of armaments was done at the Arms and Armor Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York City Police Museum, and the War Museum of Greece.

Dark Peculiar Toys is an assembly experiment in which philosophies of what a toy is and is supposed to do differ and collide. These collisions deface, break, or de-construct the toys into piles of raw materials waiting to be re-constructed in alternative ways, without instructions or any memory of their origins and function, and with no consideration of the original creator’s intentions. Curiously, they break down not only to their essential parts, but also to details of character and spirit (if they ever possessed any). They only retain colors, shapes, and the scars inflicted by their previous owners – scars that separate them from their assembly-line identical multiples and make them one of a kind.

These tragic action figures are stuck between their new condition and the reality of their past. They link older and contemporary pro­totypes of heroism or role playing by combining traditional symbols in unorthodox ways. Their appeal lies solely in the tendency children (of any age) have to cannibalize existing objects in order to fuse their own. These creations are at odds with their carefully planned origins, and they break gender and age molds by defying experts on children, focus groups, and sales projections. The newly assembled toys, though somewhat dramatic and traumatic due to their dark­ness, evoke our emotions and form a connection with us, by taking a place in our personal memories. Not in a “lost childhood blah, blah, blah” way, but as images that communicate nostalgia and joy, or the nostalgia of joy.

These emotions also dominated the process of putting them togeth­er. I photographed toys and objects that I’ve collected through the years and my travels, some of them part of my personal childhood, and then mixed and matched them for hours. While this was a different form of play, the magic was the same.

Dark Peculiar Toys is an assembly experiment in which philosophies of what a toy is and is supposed to do differ and collide. These collisions deface, break, or de-construct the toys into piles of raw materials waiting to be re-constructed in alternative ways, without instructions or any memory of their origins and function, and with no consideration of the original creator’s intentions. Curiously, they break down not only to their essential parts, but also to details of character and spirit (if they ever possessed any). They only retain colors, shapes, and the scars inflicted by their previous owners – scars that separate them from their assembly-line identical multiples and make them one of a kind.

These tragic action figures are stuck between their new condition and the reality of their past. They link older and contemporary pro­totypes of heroism or role playing by combining traditional symbols in unorthodox ways. Their appeal lies solely in the tendency children (of any age) have to cannibalize existing objects in order to fuse their own. These creations are at odds with their carefully planned origins, and they break gender and age molds by defying experts on children, focus groups, and sales projections. The newly assembled toys, though somewhat dramatic and traumatic due to their dark­ness, evoke our emotions and form a connection with us, by taking a place in our personal memories. Not in a “lost childhood blah, blah, blah” way, but as images that communicate nostalgia and joy, or the nostalgia of joy.

These emotions also dominated the process of putting them togeth­er. I photographed toys and objects that I’ve collected through the years and my travels, some of them part of my personal childhood, and then mixed and matched them for hours. While this was a different form of play, the magic was the same.

Dark Peculiar Toys is an assembly experiment in which philosophies of what a toy is and is supposed to do differ and collide. These collisions deface, break, or de-construct the toys into piles of raw materials waiting to be re-constructed in alternative ways, without instructions or any memory of their origins and function, and with no consideration of the original creator’s intentions. Curiously, they break down not only to their essential parts, but also to details of character and spirit (if they ever possessed any). They only retain colors, shapes, and the scars inflicted by their previous owners – scars that separate them from their assembly-line identical multiples and make them one of a kind.

These tragic action figures are stuck between their new condition and the reality of their past. They link older and contemporary pro­totypes of heroism or role playing by combining traditional symbols in unorthodox ways. Their appeal lies solely in the tendency children (of any age) have to cannibalize existing objects in order to fuse their own. These creations are at odds with their carefully planned origins, and they break gender and age molds by defying experts on children, focus groups, and sales projections. The newly assembled toys, though somewhat dramatic and traumatic due to their dark­ness, evoke our emotions and form a connection with us, by taking a place in our personal memories. Not in a “lost childhood blah, blah, blah” way, but as images that communicate nostalgia and joy, or the nostalgia of joy.

These emotions also dominated the process of putting them togeth­er. I photographed toys and objects that I’ve collected through the years and my travels, some of them part of my personal childhood, and then mixed and matched them for hours. While this was a different form of play, the magic was the same.

Dark Peculiar Toys is an assembly experiment in which philosophies of what a toy is and is supposed to do differ and collide. These collisions deface, break, or de-construct the toys into piles of raw materials waiting to be re-constructed in alternative ways, without instructions or any memory of their origins and function, and with no consideration of the original creator’s intentions. Curiously, they break down not only to their essential parts, but also to details of character and spirit (if they ever possessed any). They only retain colors, shapes, and the scars inflicted by their previous owners – scars that separate them from their assembly-line identical multiples and make them one of a kind.

These tragic action figures are stuck between their new condition and the reality of their past. They link older and contemporary pro­totypes of heroism or role playing by combining traditional symbols in unorthodox ways. Their appeal lies solely in the tendency children (of any age) have to cannibalize existing objects in order to fuse their own. These creations are at odds with their carefully planned origins, and they break gender and age molds by defying experts on children, focus groups, and sales projections. The newly assembled toys, though somewhat dramatic and traumatic due to their dark­ness, evoke our emotions and form a connection with us, by taking a place in our personal memories. Not in a “lost childhood blah, blah, blah” way, but as images that communicate nostalgia and joy, or the nostalgia of joy.

These emotions also dominated the process of putting them togeth­er. I photographed toys and objects that I’ve collected through the years and my travels, some of them part of my personal childhood, and then mixed and matched them for hours. While this was a different form of play, the magic was the same.

The overall concept of Transmigrations: Cases of Corporate Reincarnation combines theories and research on social insects, traditional and contemporary corporate structures, job descriptions, and reincarnation scriptures. A variety of conceptual layers enhances the basic idea with depth and an intricate point of view. While the layers require study of a substantial amount of bibliography, they provide the project with a spine, by acting as a solid point of departure. Transmigrations showcases 24 portraits of senior executives who return to life as insects. The characters personify symbols and weapons of their trades on a number of levels, some instantly visible and others hidden.

The term “transmigration” refers to successive embodiments, mainly in the sense of rebirth in lower life forms. This theory was first asserted by Pythagoras, the most important early Hellenic thinker and the father of controversial teachings on reincarnation of souls. He taught that those whose lives had been filled with evil deeds and destructive emotions, were unworthy to reincarnate immediately in human form. Such souls, therefore, obsessed the bodies of animals and attempted to function through these inferior vehicles until eventual re-elevation to a human host. Insect societies, strife, and competition prevail. The colony features a system of castes and labor roles featuring aggression among competitive social insects. Individuals who achieved dominance over the rest are given preference in access to food and breeding cells. The chosen ones (even within the same colony) recognize each other as rivals and display open hostility to each other. Organizational details evolve through an evolutionary optimization process, a precise replica of the methods used in the marketplace to develop successful business models. Similarly, dynamic and competitive markets dictate aggressive corporate behavior patterns and environments in which the option of moral, human, or fair conduct is almost an impossibility. The race toward market domination has underscored the need for structures that define clear, uncrossed lines of authority and communication. Thus arose a breed of business executives who have to practice cold, analytical, often impersonal tactics in order to generate maximum return on investment for their enterprises.

Transmigrations describes a caste of bureaucrats with punished souls, consigned to the lowest life form, where upward mobility is nearly impossible. These concoctions of flesh and metal do not appear to be individuals who made mistakes and wish to repent. They were willing adapters of a predatory modus operandi, and now, in their subhuman condition, their instincts apply. Here their essence is physical and exposed, just like the names, which to some degree, mirror the signature trait of the insect with which they were fused. Comfortable in their new suits, they size up their enemies. They have no friends. They never did.

Vanity Studies is a series of still-life images based on the 17thcentury Vanitas paintings, depicting compositions of objects that symbolised the vanity of worldly things and the brevity of life. After initial research on the Vanitas theme, I turned my attention to compositional and aesthetic challenges, since the conceptual strength was established and would be consistent through the series, without specific ideas for each picture. This allowed for a more expressive process, since images were not dictated by their carefully selected title but from the spontaneous visual chemistry between objects that take on unconventional meanings and the need for different versions of images that had to be explored. Components of the traditional compositions were mixed with contemporary and technologyinspired elements, in order to graduate the symbolic value of the
imagery to the present. For an artist infatuated with technology, its shapes, and its surfaces, this series has been an opportunity to approach organic subjects. It helped me discover or, better, rediscover nature’s relevance as the foundation to all. This sharp thematic turn was possible in part because the Vanitas still-life was characterised by a prominently
displayed skull, a motif I consider visually stunning and symbolically potent. Vanity Studies refers not so much to the futility of seeking what does not last, but the surprising aesthetic qualities of the ordinary.

Witness is a series of 12 prints addressing issues of civil and personal responsibility as they develop due to the rapid proliferation of digital media. This proliferation has allowed independent organizations of any size and individuals from around the world who were previously unable to communicate with a wide audience to do just that. This has not only allowed each one of us to express opinions or present facts, but also allowed us to witness more current, past, and future events in a broader arena than ever before. This new-found ability comes with a slew of benefits but also a heavy burden. When we can so easily search and find, we assume responsibilities that were unknown just a few years ago. The Witness series combines photographs chosen for their graphic symbolic quality. Their darkness reflects the issues confronting the “witness.” Their one eye sees it all but unfortunately rarely acts or reacts, like the cyclops that can see but has blind spots that limit his vision. The digital veil covering the entire length of the images serves as a separator between reality and perception. It also brands and deforms the witness in an attempt to show the immediate personal effects of what happens elsewhere, no matter how distant. The fact that the witnesses have no names, only numbers, makes them objective but also objectifies them, just like exhibits submitted in court. They review and contemplate our traumatic past as a species but also the present that seems sometimes as bleak as our past. They “testify” on environmental issues, technology, and politics. They also criticize traditional media outlets in all of their shapes and forms.

A virtual ballet in zero gravity, Freefall Cyberball is a melding of virtual sports, dance, acrobatics, and video games in a single-user, audience-impact experience. This form of Mandala World analyzes three-dimensional space information through two cameras. It also features 3D, rendered computer graphics.

Way to Go is an interactive experience for human beings between 5 and 105 years old. Maybe it lasts six minutes; maybe it lasts forever. Way to Go is ready for your web browser and willing to go VR, if you’re Rift-y. It is like a gray squirrel balanced on a branch, fearless. Made by Vincent Morisset, Caroline Robert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit and the studio AATOAA, visionary creators of BLA BLA and Arcade Fire’s award-winning Just A Reflektor. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, co-produced by France Televisions, with a mesmerizing soundtrack by Philippe Lambert, it is a game and a solace and an alarm, a wake-up call to the hazards of today. At a moment when we have access to so much, and see so little, Way to Go will remind you of all that lies before you, within you, in the luscious, sudden pleasure of discovery.

The paradigm shifts currently at play in contemporary art, architecture, and design are fundamental and inevitable, displacing many of the well-established conventions. Models of art and design capable of consistent, continual, and dynamic transformation are replacing the static norms of conventional processes. The predictable relationships between design and representation are abandoned in favor of computationally generated complexities.

Project: Snake represents an incessant fluid process of mutation, deformation, and delirium, a dynamically changing form that is both surface and cavity, expressing the limitless in relative terms. The metaphor of the snake investigates experimental art and contemporary design inquiries that would explore the possibilities offered by digital processes akin to surfaces coupled with a variety of conditional experiences such as skin structure, enclosure, representation, ornamentation, perception, gender, and performance.

As we continue to reduce the space of slippage between the plastic solidity of material and the ephemeral liquidity of light, imagination and matter begin to speak the same language.

Black lines extend, curl, and twirl to the silky notes of a trumpet. They grow, expand, and dance to the rhythm and melody of a sound track. As time passes, so does the black that turns to red, blue, green, and yellow. On the right notes, lines disappear one by one
and reveal the painting beneath.

The gestures of a cello player with his bow on the belly of a cello are described as line strokes in this animation. All the lines are synchronized
to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suite No. 2 in D minor. The lines grow and move to the rhythm and create visual metaphors for the melody. What makes this animation a treat for the eyes and ears is the impeccable timing of the abstract elements with the music. In the end, what remains on the screen is the idea of a cello with four strings.

This is a love story about a lonely port crane and a cute giraffe. 2D digital animation, 100-percent hand-made. Dedicated to Spanish writer Gomez de la Serna’s greguerias.

Sierra’s current body of work is heavily influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints from the 1800s and by Spanish modernista architecture, which is prevalent in the city of Barcelona. Still Life #2 is one such works that mixes the serenity of the ukiyo-e art form with the lively, dynamic elegance of modernista mosaics. Although this piece appears to be strictly abstract in design, it is in fact a loose rendition of a still-life featuring a close arrangement of pottery pieces. This composition has the unusual characteristic that it shows the least amount of information toward the center where the eye is naturally drawn. However, as the eye moves radially outward, more and more detail is revealed. The effect ends up mimicking a kind of inverted depth focus in which the eye receives the most information around the periphery as opposed to the central focus. The circular “brushstrokes” and choice of bright colors give this image a playful quality that keeps the composition in a perpetual state of motion. The process which Vladimir has developed to create this type of painting is called “ukiyotile”, a word which he has coined based on the aforementioned influences from which he draws inspiration.

These images represent a fresh view of the human face, obtained through various algorithmic transformations created by digital manipulation of individual pixels or pixel groups of a photograph of a human face. Viewers can imagine that they are standing in front of a curious mirror that shows various views of their own faces. In the digital era, the human face can be viewed in a way that was never before possible, due to both digital technologies and the ability of the algorithmic approach to dealing with image elements. Algorithmic manipulation of human facial elements enables one to see the face in a new way, due to the fact that the very same pixels that form the image are transformed or regrouped in unexpected ways. Since we are sensitive to even minor variations in human faces, we can sometimes feel uneasy about these algorithmic manipulations; however, even then we understand that we are discovering something completely new in something so familiar. One more aspect of algorithmic image manipulation is worth mentioning: the fact that one can make a transition from a figurative expression in the photograph to a completely abstract view of the human face. However, the presence of the very same color palette from the original photo makes it difficult for us to believe that new images that arise after manipulation have nothing to do with the original photo.

Topography of the Unseen offers a unique perspective on the Parramatta Girls Home, a former state-controlled child welfare institution situated adjacent to the convict-era Parramatta Female Factory in Sydney, Australia. Up until the early 1980s, ‘children at risk’ were held and subjected to unwarranted punishment and abuse. The film offers a reconstructed reality in its unique representational format. Photographic veracity is partly suspended in an uncertain and dissolute world of recollections. With one trend in CGI to generate ever more realistic depictions, this project takes a deliberate step back and makes use of a primitive reconstructed reality, the point cloud representation. It is to achieve a unique look, which in my view, is compatible with how human memory operates. It is mutable, reconstructed and fragmented.

In the weird and wonderful world of quantum mechanics, dimensional transmutation describes a phenomena which changes the state of a parameter by adding dimensions to its dimensionless condition. This experimental film applies this principle to visualize the complex interactions between atmosphere and climate. It utilizes a six-dimensional framework, comprised of regular space-time augmented with climate data collected between 1993 and 2011.

Changes in global tropospheric temperature, mean sea level, and atmospherical co2 concentration are mapped onto the color palette, shape, and stereoscopic depth of a video clip, depicting a low-lying shoreline in Indonesia, threatened by rising sea levels.

The film begins ‘flat’, but over time, with increasing co2 concentration in the atmosphere, its stereoscopic depth expands, and the landscape opens up to the observer, while temperature and sea-level changes modify color and shape.

Whether I’m working as a designer or an artist, the essence of my work is interpretation. My goal as an interaction designer is to give visual form to the ideas of my clients. As an artist I try to do the same for beautiful hidden phenomena, in the hope that once seen they’ll be remembered even when my work is gone. Seeing things through the eyes of experts-people who have studied the intricacies of some process for years-has always fascinated me.

I interview experts and make little sketches to keep the new ideas clear in my mind, and to check that what I hear is what they’re saying. When they begin to recognize their own ideas in my sketches, my next step is clear: animate my sketches to replace the cumbersome, standard, table-field-toolbar-menu-button interfaces they typically use. The resulting “illustrative interfaces” take their shape from the minds of the people who use them.

As an artist I’m still building interpretations. We need an interpretative filter to see some of the most beautiful phenomena: think of the fluid arabesques created in the air by any simple gesture-invisible until we add tiny particles of smoke. I choose colors, shapes, and motions to reveal my subjects, to let them express themselves as clearly as possible. But the colors are not the subject, so I try to let the viewer know they exist while keeping them as simple as possible. I want my work to say “look how plain the filter is; the beauty must be in the subject.”

Spatial Hyper/ink, a telecommunications art installation, explores an ideal social interaction. The work encourages viewers’ awareness of others’ psychological states via speaking boxes through which images and sounds can be transmitted over unknown distances. Devices installed in different places become a giant communication network. Users are able to influence remote doors by opening their own. With each opening, the people and the scenes behind the doors become visible to people in other locations around the world.

Each door opening creates a unique experience, a personal assemblage made up of sounds and images created by interactions with the piece. In addition, the sounds of knocking and the user voices are anchored in space and attract passersby to come near and respond. Communications across remote distances are precipitated and accelerated when people happen upon the installation in action, creating a Spatial Hyperlink. The linking process itself consists not only of accumulating sounds and images, but also the users’ exploratory behavior. Users can talk, smile, transmit a kiss, or just ignore the opportunity. In this way, a new kind of social interactive mode emerges the moment a knock on the door is answered.

Forces in Equilibrium explores how equilibrium is formed out of chaos. The installation is comprised of two components. In the first component, a sensor is mounted under the top of a pedestal. When magnets are moved on the pedestal, images and sound on a nearby display become wild and unstable, as if the magnet has unusual powers. The second component is a seesaw controlled by a servomotor. When laser light lands on the seesaw, it tilts accordingly, as if the light has weight. The art works show both magnetic force and laser light as not merely ethereal but as entities capable of affecting images, sounds and movements.

The Sympathist is an exploration of scenery as imagined by our brains. In the digital age, we spend most of our time in cyberspace exchanging information and knowledge; we are more familiar with tools connecting us to cyberspace than to the real environment. Our five senses, originally meant to accept natural frequencies, have been altered by uncoordinated artificial frequencies, so that we are forgetting our original feelings. This work links the brain wave detector to virtual scenes and brain landscapes.

The viewers embark on a journey the moment they put on the device, as detected brain data is immediately reflected on the virtual scene. With input from the audience, the device gradually delves into the deepest layer of consciousness. When consciousness loses itself in a trance, it quickly returns to a starting point of rationality. The brain wave detector enables us to let go of rationality and meander around our instincts and deepest memories.

Summary

Cangjie provides a data-driven interactive spatial visualization in semantic human-machine reality. The visualization is generated by an intelligent system in real-time through perceiving the real-world via a camera (located in the exhibition space).

Abstract

Humans and machines are in constant conversations. Humans start the dialogue by using programming languages that will be compiled to binary digits that machines can interpret. However, Intelligent machines today are not only observers of the world, but they also make their own decisions.

If A.I imitates human beings to create a symbolic system to communicate based on their own understandings of the universe and start to actively interact with us, how will this recontextualize and redefine our coexistence in this intertwined reality? To what degree can the machine enchant us in curiosity and enhance our expectations of a semantic meaning- making process?

Cangjie provides a data-driven interactive spatial visualization in semantic human-machine reality. The visualization is generated by an intelligent system in real-time through perceiving the real-world via a camera (located in the exhibition space). Inspired by Cangjie, an ancient Chinese legendary historian (c.2650 BCE), who invented Chinese characters based on the characteristics of everything on the earth, we trained a neural network, we have named Cangjie, to learn the constructions and principles of all the Chinese characters. It transforms what it perceives into a collage of unique symbols made of Chinese strokes. The symbols produced through the lens of Cangjie, tangled with the imagery captured by the camera, are visualized algorithmically as abstracted, pixelated semiotics, continuously evolving and composing an ever- changing poetic virtual reality.

Cangjie is not only a conceptual response to the tension and fragility in the coexistence of humans and machines but also an artistic imagined expression of a future language that reflects on ancient truths in this artificial intelligence era. The interactivity of this intelligent visualization prioritizes ambiguity and tension that exist between the actual and the virtual, machinic vision and human perception, and past and future.

This building was proposed for a site in Century City, Los Angeles. Computer generated perspectives simulate a fly-around of the site, and illustrate relationships to neighboring buildings and the street pattern.

This highrise office building proposed for a site in Bunker Hill, an area of downtown Los Angeles that is being developed intensively. The computer-generated site massing study shows its relationships to significant neighboring buildings, both existing and proposed.

Summary

Chameleon change the color of skin according to the surrounding environment for hiding the body. This is a pixel chameleon generated by AI. Artificial intelligence one day can be like a chameleon hide himself with pixel camouflage? How will be the relation between Artificial intelligence and the nature?

Abstract

Chameleon change the color of skin according to the surrounding environment for hiding the body, can not only avoid predators, and also confuse their prey. I use against neural network, I input a lot of images of chameleon various parts to the machine learning algorithm, the neural network generated the color-changing chameleon skin based on these pictures. Artificial-intelligence one day can be like a chameleon hide himself with pixel camouflage? Work is divided into two versions, image and image + interaction: in the interactive version, the color of the chameleon can change color according to the color of the catch by the electron trap.

This still comes from an animation sequence made for the PBS “Nova” series. Without the use of computers, it would have been very difficult to create.

The animation began in a conventional manner with a designer drawing the sequence out on a storyboard. It then went to a technical director who decided how to design and model each element and coordinate them with one another for the animation.

Two-dimensional techniques were used to make “flat” images and to perform zooms and pans. In those instances where three-dimensional images were required, the objects were described mathematically in the computer. To give an illusion of continuous motion, the computer rendered the objects from a fractionally different perspective for each frame of animation.

The Nova opening is only 15 seconds long, but through it, the viewer takes a voyage from the atomic to the cosmic scale. This is a voyage that clearly, no traveler could ever take, but which is represented here for the viewer by graphics.

Pivvot is a thrilling game of strategic avoidance that will consistently test and challenge your ability to make quick, impulsive decisions. As the game progresses, you will have to rely on your instincts and problem-solving skills to navigate down the winding path for survival. With its intensity, minimalistic design, and puzzling logic, Pivvot is sure to keep you guessing at every turn.

By looking at past technologies, we are able to better understand our current technology-driven pace of life. The TimeFrames image series is created from a purely digital emulation of the long-extinct Magic Lantern slide format of the late 1800s. This older photographic technology made use of slow collodion chemistry, which, in contrast to contemporary CCD-based digital cameras, often took minutes to capture an image. The slow image-capture process often eliminates the fast motion of humanity and machines from the very landscape a photographer hopes to document. This can encourage the viewer to reflect on the condition of our very lives. And yet this aesthetic anomaly is rarely achievable with the fast-capture digital cameras of today. As high-speed digital photography supplanted the older chemical-based technologies, the long-exposure image and its aesthetic was left to history.

The TimeFrames digital lantern slides were created using a process borrowed from astronomical photography. The process starts with a digital video camera capturing hundreds to thousands of individual fast frames, and then algorithmically compressing them to a single image frame. This creates a perceived single exposure of many minutes, far beyond the capabilities of a single-image digital camera. The resulting image is digitally printed to toner and transferred to glass via a heat process. This transfer process causes a premature aging of the image, giving the overall image an antiquated look

I chose to use a computer, and one whose graphic displays were in low resolution, … because of the way in which the process of digitizing an image with a video camera emphasized the shapes composing the landscape. A complex, realistic image could be altered to a more abstract image of blocky shapes, defined by the five step grey scale of the software …. Another important reason for using the computer was the ability it gave me to manipulate the image, once digitized, with paint software.

As a member of Generation X, I found myself confronted once again with the question: “Where is Generation X going?” I quickly returned with: “Where did Generation X come from?” I applied this question to myself and found that I did not have a clear understanding of my past.

I did not understand the sacri­fices made by my family. I could not see the dreams for their children and their grand­children to one day stand tall enough to grab the illusive gold ring. How could I expect to balance myself and reach up toward that ring when I had nothing to stand upon?

In order for me to move for­ward in my life, I found myself searching my past. I had to bridge the gap that time had forged between my ancestors and me. Within a few days, I realized that I can never completely stand on my own, because I will always stand on my family.

After exposing myself to the past, I felt naked and mentally exhausted. I looked at my hands and knew many of the people who went before me. Two words remained with me: dignity and respect. My ancestors held their dignity high. For many that was all that remained. They deserve my respect. I believe that, in the end, we leave this world with little more than our dignity and the respect of our children.

As this series of computer-generated images of the Villa Rotonda shows, we can take a building apart in many different ways to demonstrate important volumetric relationships.