Artworks Data Table

boredomresearch’s work is informed by principles of scientific modeling, inspired by the mechanisms and behaviors of natural systems. Central to their work is the aesthetic expression of intriguing patterns, motions and forms, expressed in real-time over extended durations, using technologies usually associated with computer games.

In Dreams of Mice: Ron, 19 October 2014 at 2:48am boredomresearch investigate the ethereal space of dreams, considering the increased control, management and disruption of sleep behavior in humans. Collaborating with Dr Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, a neuroscientist from the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, capturing and recording the dreams of laboratory mice, boredomresearch reveal the intriguing invisible beauty of slumber in this real-time artwork driven by the firing neurons of dreaming mice. The impulses of a recorded dream provide the input signal for a visual and acoustic expression of dream activity, evocative both of firing neurons and a subterranean sleeping chamber in which we view the intimate and private fluttering of slumber.

Exploring a changed understanding of sleep in a contemporary world of instant messaging and 24/7 connectivity, where we are encouraged to remain permanently available, boredomresearch question the importance of the non productive third of our lives we spend asleep. When we go to sleep we disconnect from our social networks and perpetual status updates, entering the last remaining sanctuary from the demands of a permanently networked society. But is the space of dreams at risk from the relentless encroachment of connective technologies?

This film was created from screen capture taken from boredomresearch’s real-time software of an infection scenario running in a game engine; the artists edited the captured footage to show the accumulation of the scenario over time.

Vicky Isley and Paul Smith have been collaborating as boredomresearch for four years. boredomresearch are interested in building computational works inspired by simple rules found in natural systems. They are interested in a range of topics that include the aesthetics of emergence, synthesised ecological systems, networked communities, perceptive cognition of computational abstractions, A-life, and belief systems. Currently, they are exploring processes of computer modeling for creation of new and interesting observable phenomena, and investigating the creative potential of genetic algorithms and notions of ownership of digital space. “The research of Smith and Isley is far from a bore. What they suggest is instead a play strategy in relation to computers, a sensual experiencing of potentials that develop over time. Furthermore, in their refusal to accept prefabricated images of computation, their work offers a critical perspective and a possibility to rethink virtual space outside the restrictions of rational organisation and simple representation.” Anna Kindvall and Lars Gustav Midboe, Electrohype boredomresearch have produced a number of interactive sound applications, online projects, and computational soundscapes that have been shown at events such as FILE04 in Brazil, the Electrohype festival in Sweden, the Garage festival in Germany, Data:base in Dublin, and in online exhibitions such as soundtoys.net, e-2.org, and mobilegaze.com. Since 2001, they have produced several computational soundscapes utilising artificial-life algorithms that have been mainly projected within galleries and festivals. boredomresearch are interested in developing the relationship between the work and the viewer. Ornamental Bug Garden 001 ‘s viewable area is sealed within a small glass front, which creates an intimate portal that the audience can peer into. The computer is also incorporated into the object, becoming part of the work. In this way, the work is built around the idea of closed systems like the commercially available biospheres that contain a small population of brine shrimp. These systems are the result of research conducted by NASA into closed viable systems and are sold as gifts all around the world. Ornamental Bug Garden 001 is the first of a series of wall-hanging, digital, self-contained systems built by boredomresearch in 2004. This system combines gaming techniques and artificial-life modelling to explore relationships between scientific modelling techniques and ornamental gardens. The individual elements of OBG001 have been generated algorithmically using software created by boredomresearch, before being carefully composed in their final form. In building the garden, boredomresearch become the designers of closed ecosystems. In addition to considering the shape, colour and form of the elements used within the garden, they consider their effect on the overall ecology of the system. The complexities of the overall sound composition are the result of emergence within the system. As OBG001 ‘s colonies of objects catapult around a garden containing bubble-pumping lifts and algorithmically composed plant life, collisions with its elements trigger sounds and compose an incidental audio piece. OBG001 has been awarded honorary mention in Transmediale.05; the International Media Arts Festival, Berlin; and VIDA 7.0, International A-Life Electronic Arts Competition, Madrid 2004.

RSM, a research project developed by Vicky Isley and Paul smith (aka boredomresearch), is the world’s first use of live snails to carry electronic messages across physical space. boredomresearch aim to premiere the world’s first web-mail service to use live snails for carrying electronic messages across physical space. Visitors to the Slow Art exhibition can access the realsnailmail.net web site and send email messages. Each message travels at the speed of light to the realsnailmail.net server, where it enters a queue. It waits there until a real snail in the tank at Bournemouth University wanders within range of a hot spot. The hot spot is the dispatch centre in the form of an RFID reader. This reader identifies the snail from the RFID chip attached to its shell and checks that it has not already been assigned a message to carry.

If the snail is available, it is assigned the message at the top of the list, then slips away into the technological wasteland. Located at the other end of the tank is the drop-off point. When, or if, the snail ever makes it there, it is identified by another reader, which then forwards the relevant message to the recipient’s email address, once again at the speed of light. At each stage of the message’s transit, the sender is updated with its progress, and when it finally arrives at its destination, it is appended with details of its carrier and a log of its journey. The realsnailmail.net web site encourages users to consider the efforts of a diminutive mollusc lugging their messages across a tank, and for this reason urges them to send a message of value. During SIGGRAPH 2008, a SnailCam shows live video of the snails in action.

VisualPoetry generates poetic and abstract visual representations of poetry. It is unique. Few other design projects embrace the concepts of generative design over such a long period of time. The representations are used for graphic design of the literature festival Poetry on the Road in Bremen, Germany, where VisualPoetry has become an integral part of the festival itself.

The highly interdisciplinary approach and the strong link between the input (poems) and the output (visuals) is unusual. as it bridges the disciplines of design, computer science, and literature. While the basic concept of VisualPoetry is always the same, the visual strategies change every year. The 2003 version was based on the concept of a drawing machine controlled by the sequence of the letters in the poem. In 2005, text was used to generate organic, treelike structures. In 2006, the visual resembled an information visualization.

In the context of the design discipline, the achievement of VisualPoetry is that a specific idea is the center of the corporate identity and not a specific form.

Summary

The World of Freedom is an immersive virtual space. It provides possibilities for people to empathetically imagine a “free” living sociology at the post-pandemic Anthropocene. Technologies support people to live in their identical personal spaces, meanwhile access shared information and areas with neighbors, even those with different faith and beliefs.

Abstract

Indeed, people spend more time on deep thinking since 2020. The questions which ask mainly by the sociologists, now become the topics on the dining table. The debates on social and moral dilemmas are happening intensively 24 hours on the internet. We started to think more about who we are, where we are going, and how we will value the information we have received. Do we have freedom? Shall we believe absolute freedom? Sometimes people directly transform the idea of liberty into democracy. However, shall we also equal freedom to democracy? Since we are all inside this one pandemic bubble, after most people stay at home for a couple of months, we start emerging a global-size collective memory, which makes people more empathetically understand others’ situations. Meanwhile, more and more people have to learn and take experience virtually. The attention of empathy and the new work-from-home mode evokes the initial idea of this virtual reality experience. We start to ask how people could learn and think more effectively in this brand new virtual age? Unity program makes this innovation possible. The innovative architecture modeling could permit a large group of people to experience personal space and sharing areas simultaneously. The sound design is specially designed for the various space sound and the audience’s interactivities. We use this program to build up an immersive and empathetic space that embodies a hypothetical argument of a social dilemma into a virtual manifestation. People might be able to figure out the most meaningful answer by wearing the same shoes. The social distance could also be virtually controlled in this program by counting if the number of participates overload spaces.

Autarkeia Aggregatum is an integrated sound-and-image composi­tion emphasizing continuous flow and transformation. There are no cuts or splices in the visual aspect of the work; it unfolds instead as a constantly evolving, massed animation of a set of over 11,000 individual points.

When seeking a title for the piece, I turned to the Monadology, the philosopher Leibniz’s theory of fundamental particles of reality (monads). I appropriated two words from that work: autarkeia (Greek) for self-sufficiency, and aggregatum (Latin) meaning joined, aggre­gated. The terms together appropriately suggest an aggregation of the activities of autonomous entities. More subtly, a resonance with Classicism draws me to the words. The resonance is one of an inner fullness of being expressed outwardly in elegant, self-sufficient restraint.

The animation technique involves various rotational algorithms, con­strained Brownian motion, and time blurring. I initially developed the visual effects method in Processing, the Java programming environ­ment. I then translated the algorithm into a plug-in for Apple’s Motion 2 video effects software.

I produced the sound with the help of the synthesis languages Common Lisp Music and Common Music and my own Pitch Curve Analysis and Composition toolkit.

Sefaria is a free culture project devoted to bringing the textual tradition of Jewish learning into a new, flexible, open form in order to make texts and learning more accessible to more people. Modeling values in the tradition itself, the architecture of Sefaria emphasizes interconnections between texts and a polyvocal willingness to co-present multiple texts at once. As of November 2017, Sefaria’s library includes 135 million words of texts and 1.5 million interconnections between texts in the library. Sefaria’s library is designed to hold multiple versions and translations of every text, and ensures segmentation and structure allow for alignment between texts and translations.

Sefaria’s approach to structuring texts and connections as data allows it to power various visualizations and applications. Sefaria exports its data with Creative Commons licenses which allow for reuse, allows developers to download a dump of their databases, and offers free APIs to support novel applications related to Torah texts that can be developed independently of Sefaria. Sefaria actively scans new texts and fundraises to pay publishers to release their copyrighted translations with CC licenses. The largest project of this kind to date is the release of the newest complete translation of the Babylonian Talmud (the Steinsaltz translation into English and modern Hebrew) with a CC license, the first time a complete English Talmud had been made available for free. Sefaria also offers tools for users to engage with and create from texts in their library, primarily via their Source Sheet Builder. A source sheet is a staple of the Jewish educational method in which an educator creates a document with selections from various primary sources relevant to the topic the educator is teaching. The first application built on top of Sefaria’s API, Sefaria’s Source Sheet Builder makes the process of building source sheets easier for educators. It has been used to create more than 100K source sheets to date. Sheets on Sefaria can also include user-generated text, sources outside the Sefaria library, images and videos. In addition to offering a platform for publishing and sharing sheets, there is a second structured dataset which captures human curated data about the relationship of texts to one another and to the tags that users assign. This dataset allows Sefaria to create a ranked index of all topics currently of interest to Jewish educators, as well as offering data-driven answer to questions like, “Which source in our library is most relevant to X?”.

This work comprises a video sequence shot from my sixth-floor apartment window to the sidewalk below and composed inside a digital-game environment. The intention is to empty the video of narrative, reduce it to an image string. Exploring the space, flying over and through the image sequence, the effect turns unsettling and a new narrative emerges.

In the current discourses of art, the animal is seen as a representation, a symbol of our cultural projections and anthropomorphisms
surrounding our ideas of nature. One goal of my work is to question the boundaries between contemporary culture and the construct of nature, and to explore how elements of artificiality and technology compound and distort these relationships. My current artistic investigation, Hominid, is a series of digitally constructed images composited as radiographs of humanoid anatomies. The images address the “hominids” with scientific lucidity, yet maintain an emotion of vulnerability as the figures betray the contradictions of their physicality. It is my intention to confront the viewer with images and objects that reside on the uncomfortable line between the natural and the technological, the living and the automaton. To achieve these ends, I recontextualize taxidermied animals, as well as their environments, via the photography, film, and video. The Bambi series recreates visual tableaux from the popular film in order to illuminate and undermine the cultural narratives invested in our ideas of nature. The images are rendered photo-realistically, to infuse the viewer in the tableaux; yet maintain a preternatural sense of untruthfulness, highlighting their internal fictions. Humanity Diptych induces the viewer into this mire of ontology. In two larger-than-life portraits, taxidermied primates are captured posing for the camera. Viewers are enticed to empathize with the emotionally human expressions, but they are betrayed by an uncanny undercurrent of the chimpanzees’ physical animality and the technological artifice of their glass eyes. As Steve Baker writes, “It is the animal which more than anything else prompts a rethinking of what it is to be a human ‘subject,’ and which points to the shortcomings of earlier philosophical accounts of the human.”1 In exploring the representation of the animal, my images seek to inform the indeterminate ground between nature, humanity, and the technological.

In the current discourses of art, the animal is seen as a representation, a symbol of our cultural projections and anthropomorphisms
surrounding our ideas of nature. One goal of my work is to question the boundaries between contemporary culture and the construct of nature, and to explore how elements of artificiality and technology compound and distort these relationships. My current artistic investigation, Hominid, is a series of digitally constructed images composited as radiographs of humanoid anatomies. The images address the “hominids” with scientific lucidity, yet maintain an emotion of vulnerability as the figures betray the contradictions of their physicality. It is my intention to confront the viewer with images and objects that reside on the uncomfortable line between the natural and the technological, the living and the automaton. To achieve these ends, I recontextualize taxidermied animals, as well as their environments, via the photography, film, and video. The Bambi series recreates visual tableaux from the popular film in order to illuminate and undermine the cultural narratives invested in our ideas of nature. The images are rendered photo-realistically, to infuse the viewer in the tableaux; yet maintain a preternatural sense of untruthfulness, highlighting their internal fictions. Humanity Diptych induces the viewer into this mire of ontology. In two larger-than-life portraits, taxidermied primates are captured posing for the camera. Viewers are enticed to empathize with the emotionally human expressions, but they are betrayed by an uncanny undercurrent of the chimpanzees’ physical animality and the technological artifice of their glass eyes. As Steve Baker writes, “It is the animal which more than anything else prompts a rethinking of what it is to be a human ‘subject,’ and which points to the shortcomings of earlier philosophical accounts of the human.” In exploring the representation of the animal, my images seek to inform the indeterminate ground between nature, humanity, and the technological.

Omaha is an immersive WebVR piece that strings together worlds of nostalgia – a universe from which there appears to be no way out. The experience is a series of very simple scenes or chapters, each referencing a piece of media that was at one point so inescapable as to invoke fond memories of that media in spite of or even because of its flaws. Omaha is intended as an experiment in rapid iteration of small, shareable meme-like moments in the tradition of animated gifs or Vine.

Re-remembered, digital palimpsests is a visual exploration of recorded history and subjective memory. Using the palimpsest as a model for this exploration, each canvas presents a layering of imagery and video to represent mixed memory, a merging of historical and personal perspectives whose partial erasure and rediscovery recedes and re-emerges within a media-saturated environment. The original material manipulated in each piece is a combination of historical and personal footage and photographs. Digital artifacts and effects represent time, obstacles, and our inability to erase what has taken place. The video set within the fixed image is the essence of memory played and replayed. The overall landscape of re-rememberances depicts our ability to re-present ourselves and the world with our notion of what is actual. Each day, an array of meaningful and arbitrary images is constructed and deconstructed within our minds and all around us. These works act to question the stability of what we call history and memory, what is remembered and re-remembered, fleeting and enduring, troubling and endearing, written and re-written.

Slice an animation through the time dimension, and you can see how a scanline evolves over time. This slice is then sonified to create the music to accompany the animation. We can hear the colors as we see the visual music. I create time slices to create music. The slice is an interesting image, but it also can be the score to the animation from which it comes. It’s a simple technique for creating coherence between image and audio. What we see is the graphic score. We listen with our eyes.

Everything reduces to data mapping and information design. The only hard question is why we do either. I never got past a fascination with numbers, a desire to write songs, a desire to make pictures. All is number in the computer. I take numeric models and see what songs and pictures they will make. How can I map numbers to the senses, turn numbers into a tangible experience? Then I wonder how the senses map to each other. I map the maps. Sound to image: a visualization. Image to sound: a sonification. In mapping numbers into sensory experience, aesthetic decisions are made. What palette of colors to use? What set of pitches? How long? How big? The artist chooses. In a digital world, the mapping itself is a choice. Beyond arithmetic there are no rules. I make simple rules. You have to start somewhere. One loop (now it’s a narrative). Two minutes (don’ t blink). The sound should be seen, the image should be audible. Other than that, make music. It’s jazz in 40. Hear the colors, listen with your eyes .

This piece is a graphic musical score, a visual rendition of a classic sonata allegro form. It is music for the eyes, in search of a performer. A sonata has several sections. This piece shows five sections: exposition, development, retransition, recapitulation, and coda. The thematic variation and development is seen rather than heard. The piece is developed as a graphic score in two musical systems, reading left to right and top to bottom. It can be interpreted sonically in a variety of ways. It is a digital image (patterns of numbers that can drive a synthesizer or catalyze a human performance) or you can silently listen with your eyes.

Organic shapes grow, shrink, split, and join across five projected panels, drifting slowly from right to left and traveling from one panel to the next. When a shape drifts off the left edge of the leftmost panel, it reenters into the rightmost panel. The system is a closed loop, and the shapes never repeat. Each panel imposes a different set of rules governing movement and growth, and as a shape crosses a panel boundary, its look and behavior change. Although the panels look very different, the growth on each is based on the same set of chemical models, with simple changes in the parameters of these models causing large changes in behavior.This work is one of a number exploring complexity-out-of simplicity and infinite-out-of-finite. The works are embedded in architectural spaces (walls, columns}, bringing the spaces to life.

Organic shapes grow, shrink, split, and join across five projected panels, drifting slowly from right to left and traveling from one panel to the next. When a shape drifts off the left edge of the leftmost panel, it reenters into the rightmost panel. The system is a closed loop, and the shapes never repeat. Each panel imposes a different set of rules governing movement and growth, and as a shape crosses a panel boundary, its look and behavior change. Although the panels look very different, the growth on each is based on the same set of chemical models, with simple changes in the parameters of these models causing large changes in behavior.This work is one of a number exploring complexity-out-of simplicity and infinite-out-of-finite. The works are embedded in architectural spaces (walls, columns}, bringing the spaces to life.

Organic shapes grow, shrink, split, and join across five projected panels, drifting slowly from right to left and traveling from one panel to the next. When a shape drifts off the left edge of the leftmost panel, it reenters into the rightmost panel. The system is a closed loop, and the shapes never repeat. Each panel imposes a different set of rules governing movement and growth, and as a shape crosses a panel boundary, its look and behavior change. Although the panels look very different, the growth on each is based on the same set of chemical models, with simple changes in the parameters of these models causing large changes in behavior.This work is one of a number exploring complexity-out-of simplicity and infinite-out-of-finite. The works are embedded in architectural spaces (walls, columns}, bringing the spaces to life.

This interactive networked installation projects a personal, virtual mirror image onto the screen by combining the viewer’s face with data collected simultaneously from the internet. The image behaves like the physical presence of a real mirror image. It changes its position, dimensions, and features according to the movement of the viewer. The common mirror representations of individual viewers also interact with each other, and their audio/visual representation is perceivable as within the “mirror space.” The mirror image is active and alterable as long as the visitor remains in the data-space of the installation. When the visitor departs, the image remains and continues to move together
with other representations. The mirror images of previous viewers disappear when the images of new visitors appear on the screen. Viewers are invited to identify with a virtual mirror image that reflects their internal state (through mood analysis) and their external affiliations (through information streams from the internet). The person is viewed as a node that is networked with the whole of existence. Effects that can be grasped by our perception are presented in this system as dynamic data and converted into three-dimensional objects. This process also involves compiling a virtual image, but the filter is a computer calculation , which not only processes our extended characteristics but also data gathered simultaneously from the outside world.

Pachinko Machine is a vertical pinball machine (or pachinko) played by large number of people in Japan. This digital version is a self-learning pachinko displayed on a screen with a highly detailed kinetic graphics simulation. The machine plays the game by itself in an automated setup. Through machine learning algorithms the pachinko will become increasingly accurate in achieving the winning result. During the period of the exhibition the machine optimises its own performance and improves its results hour after hour. The only obstruction to fulfil the complete learning cycle is beyond the machines’ control; there is a second intelligence embedded within the machine that aims to obstruct and obfuscate.

The work aims to represent the walk of life and although we may be able to control some part it, there is always an element of chance that may destruct and encourages us to stray from our original path.

Yield Displaced is one of several digitally produced sculptures that I completed as a working artist at SIGGRAPH 2002 in San Antonio. This sculpture is a paper LOM (Layered Object Manufactured object) rapid prototype. The LOM process builds an object (called a “part”) by laying down individual layers (22 inches wide) of sticky paper (similar to masking tape). Each cross section of the part is then cut by a laser. The laser only cuts through one layer of paper at a time. Each piece of paper sticks to each previous layer, eventually building a complete rapid prototype made up of hundreds of paper layers. The final “part, ” which resembles a block of wood, is then “de-cubed”. At this stage, the waste sections of the material are easily removed in cube-like pieces.

The 3D LOM in Yield Displaced was made by sending the 30 STL file to Select Manufacturing Services, Grand Rapids, Michigan, as an email attachment. The LOM was then returned to San Antonio, where I “de-cubed” it by removing the waste material, and finally finished by sanding and coating the surface with polyurethane.

At the initial design stage, I utilized the “displaced map modifier” in Autodesk’s 3D Studio VIZ (a sister program to 3ds max). This modifier functions by virtually “pushing” a dense wireframe mesh. The dark areas of the photo bitmap of the “hazard” road sign (from New Zealand) “push” the mesh in the light areas of the image, while “pulling” the dark areas. This action creates a relief of the image in the wire mesh 3D virtual object, sometimes producing objects with interesting and strange results, depending on the settings of the modifier.

Following the logic of Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” the original image (used as the bitmap in the displaced modifier) is also included as part of the work as a mounted 20 print on aluminum underneath the 3D distorted object.

Hazard Displaced was also created at SIGGRAPH 2002. This work is a CNC object carved from hard foam on a machine that is directed by software. The software “reads” a 3D file representing the object and sends signals to the machine that then cuts the material according to the topography of the 3D STL file.

Although I originally used digital imaging as an element of the design process for public sculpture and installations in the early 1990s, I now use the computer primarily for creation of virtual sculpture and installation. With the recent introduction of 3D prints (rapid prototyping and CNC technology, as pioneered by a number of artists in the late 1990s), the “virtual” has returned to the “actual” by creating physical models from digital files. It is my intention to locate a common ground between the virtual 3D still and moving images, and 3D physical prototypes.

I find 3D digital media especially conducive to illustrating disturbing social/political perspectives of neoliberal “globalised” modern life. The vicissitudes of neoliberal globalism is one of several reoccurring themes in recent years, represented by (clenched and outstretched) hand symbols, speakers, the abstract schematic letters of logic and math (e.g. “x”, “y”, “z”), the globe, television, diffused transnational corporate symbols, cartoon characters as corporate metaphors, and other iconic symbols of the modern world.

My computer currently functions not only as an aid in visualizing and designing large-scale sculptures or installations, but now it essentially functions as a tool to depict objects that would not or could not be built: impossible images. With an affinity to staged photography, these images attempt through ambiguity of scale, material, reflection, and perspective to blur the line between images of virtual and actual objects. The computer prints and videos often capture a virtual image in a believable but slightly skewed setting that is both convincing and unsettling. In this context, the virtual sculptures and monuments are props in a virtual “installation” that are separated from the real by the edge of the print or video field.

Most recently, I have begun creating sculptures directly from virtual 3D files using new rapid-prototyping (RP) techniques from digital files sent via email, often to remote sites (in the tradition of the various electronic “art correspondence production” by Moholy-Nagy and Donald Judd). The RP techniques have been LOM and Z-Corp. 402 printer processes.

I have long been fascinated by the etymology of “Santa Claus,” a mythical figure with roots in ancient European and Middle Eastern folklore. The current Santa Claus caricature was based on St. Nicholas of Lycia, a 4th-century bishop of Asia Minor known for giving gifts to the poor (according to legend, by dropping gold down their chimneys). During the Middle Ages in Europe, St. Nicholas evolved into “Sank! Nikolaus” in Germany, and “Sanct Herr Nicholaas” or “Sinterklaas” in Holland. In these countries, Nicholas was sometimes said to ride through the sky on a horse delivering gifts. He wore a bishop’s robes, and was at times accompanied by Black Peter, an elf whose job was to whip naughty children.”¹ By the 18th century, this character was replaced by the more modernized “Dutch figure, SinterKlaas, which settlers brought with them to Nieuw Amsterdam (now New York) and who inspired the American transformation of the figure and even gave him his name.” It was in this future commercial and military capital of the world where our modern notion of a jolly fat Santa Claus emerged in the 19th century. The original “Santa Claus,” St. Nicholas, a resident of what is now Turkey, likely appeared far more Middle Eastern in appearance than our current American caricature of a jolly, ruddy fat man in red invented by artist Thomas Nast of Harper’s Magazine in 1868. One should remember that this saint’s life story symbolized love, caring, and generosity.

The soundtrack music is by the Canadian group Set Fire to Flames (an adjunct band to the Canadian group Godspeed! You Black Emperor). The software used to create this 59-second video was made with Autodesk VIZ 4 and Adobe Premier utilizing a RPC (Real People Content) moving-image plug-in of Santa Claus by Archvison.)

1. Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2003.

Sheep Jet Head is a series of interrelated artworks created with 3D software that incorporates a displacement map of an iconic jet plane on a 3D model of a sheep within a rural landscape. In these three works, an element of the same 3D files is output in different media in this case as a 2D print, a 3D print (LOM rapid prototype), and a component of a video composited with actual footage. For me, the same digital entities (manifested in different forms) provide interesting examples of the ontological questions:

What constitutes the identity of an object? Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists? What are an object’s properties or relations and how are they related to the object itself?

Such questions have been the subject of inquiry by artists for decades (most notably Magritte and Kosuth) and now have taken on a new significance with the relatively recent introduction of tech­nologically sophisticated digital illusions.

This series of artworks use flora and fauna commonly found in New Zealand and modifies them digitally in order to implicitly infer psychological, environmental, and social dislocations. My environment has clearly played an important role in the creation of this work. I moved from New York City in 1995, to rural New Zealand (where I live surrounded by sheep paddocks).

With an affinity to staged photography, these current images attempt through ambiguity of scale, material, reflection, and perspective to blur the line between images of virtual objects and actual objects in a believable but slightly skewed setting that is both convincing and unsettling.

Yield Displaced is one of several digitally produced sculptures that I completed as a working artist at SIGGRAPH 2002 in San Antonio. This sculpture is a paper LOM (Layered Object Manufactured object) rapid prototype. The LOM process builds an object (called a “part”) by laying down individual layers (22 inches wide) of sticky paper (similar to masking tape). Each cross section of the part is then cut by a laser. The laser only cuts through one layer of paper at a time. Each piece of paper sticks to each previous layer, eventually building a complete rapid prototype made up of hundreds of paper layers. The final “part, ” which resembles a block of wood, is then “de-cubed”. At this stage, the waste sections of the material are easily removed in cube-like pieces.

The 3D LOM in Yield Displaced was made by sending the 30 STL file to Select Manufacturing Services, Grand Rapids, Michigan, as an email attachment. The LOM was then returned to San Antonio, where I “de-cubed” it by removing the waste material, and finally finished by sanding and coating the surface with polyurethane.

At the initial design stage, I utilized the “displaced map modifier” in Autodesk’s 3D Studio VIZ (a sister program to 3ds max). This modifier functions by virtually “pushing” a dense wireframe mesh. The dark areas of the photo bitmap of the “hazard” road sign (from New Zealand) “push” the mesh in the light areas of the image, while “pulling” the dark areas. This action creates a relief of the image in the wire mesh 3D virtual object, sometimes producing objects with interesting and strange results, depending on the settings of the modifier.

Following the logic of Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” the original image (used as the bitmap in the displaced modifier) is also included as part of the work as a mounted 20 print on aluminum underneath the 3D distorted object.

Hazard Displaced was also created at SIGGRAPH 2002. This work is a CNC object carved from hard foam on a machine that is directed by software. The software “reads” a 3D file representing the object and sends signals to the machine that then cuts the material according to the topography of the 3D STL file.

Self-Portrait version 2.0 (SPv2) is an online application available at www.spv2.net. SPv2 explores how identity can be constructed and perceived through data collection in cyberspace. Some data in cyberspace we consciously create to represent ourselves (emails and Websites, for instance). Other bits of data accumulate without our efforts-and many times without our knowledge-tracing certain elements of our interactions both in the physical and virtual worlds. Because of this data that we do not willingly disperse, our cyber image is not always in our control nor ever fully knowable to us. SPv2 explores to what extent we are accessible online and what we may look like through mining Internet data.

When you enter SPv2, you can choose to activate data from three categories: DataMine, DataWake and Join Me! As a user makes their selections, SPv2 grabs data from the chosen source, translates the data into a visual representation and displays it to the user. One may layer the various visual depictions to eventually achieve data chaos.

SPv2 updates the genre of portraiture for the information age. In the history of Western art, portraiture traditionally fulfilled the purpose of reinforcing wealth and power. SPv2 is an inversion of this power structure; it results in a reconstruction of the self after it has been digitized, analyzed, shared, and sold.

Under normal circumstances, it is not possible for 60 students in one class to receive individual attention. Yet individual attention is provided to 60 students in a computer-based experimental classroom at Brown University.

Brown is experimenting with the concept of a “wired university”, and has created as a first step, a “wired classroom”. Students in the classroom each have a workstation with interactive capabilities that permit: students to see animated demonstrations showing precisely what is being done on the instructor’s screen; monitored instruction, with the instructor and assistants observing student work as the student works; and interactive graphics using moving, dynamic graphics to communicate abstract concepts, or to generalize and explore problems.

Rather than using a blackboard to explain a concept, instructors are able to use dynamic graphic presentations. Concepts are typically introduced with each student’s computer mimicking the instructor’s. Then, students are given an opportunity to execute, at their own pace, what was observed, or work on a related problem.

The Electronic Classroom is currently being used to teach computer science, mathematics, neural science, and as shown in the series of images here, color theory.

BUCOLIC is a series of exercises in color theory used by art students. Among the chief advantages in teaching color theory with this system is the student’s ability to experiment. Typically, students of color theory can complete only a few exercises before the course is over because of the time taken for painting. Using BUCOLIC, design and implementation are not separated; students can explore design ideas freely without committing many hours to the painting.

This computer-operated maintenance manual is being developed as an instructive, interactive “book” that allows its users to work their way through a complex network of information as they choose, pursuing points of information, or bypassing entire blocks of information.

Using a “Document Layout System” that prescribes page formats, users can also become “authors” who create their own instruction manuals on the system. The manual is organized into “documents” with individual “chapters” and “pages”. As with books, the user can return to earlier pages, scroll forward to later pages, and follow any desired order. “Pages” consist of text, images, or animations, that may branch to new pages, or cause other programs to be run.

The center page is surrounded by miniatures of its predecessors (on the left) and successors (on the right), each of which is nested in a box representing its chapter. Arrows emanate from the center page and from its predecessors and terminate on High-density image storage devices such as video disk, provide the capability to archive, access and traverse massive amounts of graphic and textual information. With these and other tools in place, the design of information for dynamic, two-way communication between a user and computer can result.

The exploration of these three-dimensional forms on the computer and plotter often lead us in unexpected directions with unpredictable results. We use the plotter to make drawings and templates with which we fabricate the sculptures.

This image is an abstract impression of the earth. The initial sense of familiarity that has developed from our many years of looking at the earth from afar is brought into question by the unreal landscape. The idea for the image came from realizing that the word “art” is contained within the word “earth.”

I started by experimenting with traditional 2D imagery and then moved to 3D using Alias|Wavefront Maya. My plan was to make a globe that had aesthetic value, was somewhat recognizable as the earth, but was also very different. It was developed from a visual and compositional approach, rather than from a geographical one. The intention is to draw viewers in through the obvious association with the earth, and then to engage them though the details contained within the globe: the surfaces, textures, and colors. Since we are all so familiar with this view of the earth, our eye naturally searches for recognizable patterns where none are to be found, much like the game we used to play as children making shapes and animals out of the changing patterns of clouds.

This image was part of the International Exhibition that was held at the National Museum of Fine Art in Beijing, China 31 May – 18 June, 2001. It was also included in ASCI DIGITAL 01: Our Sci-Tech World Exhibition in which “artists and scientists focus on print images that reflect the world of science and technology” and was on exhibit 29 September – 25 November, 2001 at the Technology Gallery, New York Hall of Science and 7 December – 25 January, 2002 at the Silicon Gallery in Philadelphia.

I am now working on a series of globe images that is based on several different nations around the world. I will use different national statistics, such as the percentage of water versus land, the various elevations of the country, economic data, and population density, as parameters to define the different surface properties. Additional source material will be the national colors of the country and satellite photographs. The viewpoint will be from outer space looking directly down at the country. Once the data have been input, I will then modify the globes from an aesthetic viewpoint. The final images will reflect the diversity that exists in the various countries of the world, along with the similarities that they all share as members of our planet.

Variations 703 is an interactive music installation that engages viewers by allowing them to control the music they hear by playing with the sculpture. The music is written for multiple channels and composed in such a way that it can be listened to with any combination of the channels. The music that is heard at any moment in time is infinitely variable by moving the balls on or off the tubes to control the volume of each channel. An outer group of speakers provides the 3D sonic environment for the piece, and an inner group of speakers built into the tubes of the sculpture are for people to interact with. The music is played back through synchronized DVD players. The image above is a 3D visualization of the installation at the Stedeliik Museum het Toreke in Tienen, Belgium, April-June 2001.

GPS and time data were used to provide the foundation for the music. The source of the GPS data varied from everyday journeys to historical events. The principle behind the music composition process is based on the temporal nature of music and our daily lives. As we move about every day, we create a three-dimensional path with an inherent time element. One interesting factor about the historical events is the opening of a “window in time”. Other than the trappings of modern civilization, the sounds of a forest, sea shore, or historical building (cathedral, for example) do not change significantly over time and are relatively the same as they were hundreds of years ago.

The GPS and time data from the chosen events were translated into a three-dimensional music playback system. The time stamp of the points was scaled to fit the length of the music, and the three-dimensional GPS data were fed through multiple music channels to generate a specific sonic location. Artistic license plays a major part in turning these data into a piece of music. Using the GPS and time data as the basis for the composition, several channels of music were then layered over this sonic structure to create the final piece. Future options include live performances in the gallery space and incorporating video into the installation.

Completed in Valenciennes (in the north of France) from the 22nd to the 24th of November during the 2000 European Gathering of Yound Digital Creation, and produced and conceived by…WAVE, “Let’s do the Zigopattes!” is the video of the chain animation made by 34 students from an original picture created by the French artist Beriou. Fourteen student teams made ten seconds of computer graphics animations beginning and ending with this same imposed image, which made it possible to link them all at the end in a four minute creation with an animated introduction and conclusion offered by Beriou. A musical soundtrack was composed and produced by the “S.i.n.” group to bring rhythm and life to this experimental collective computer graphics video work.

Graphic experimentation: a tiger in the town…

Don’t Know Where To Point employs a science fiction attitude and a conspiratorial logic in relation to a case of vertigo I experienced. In the video, vertigo serves as a metonym for the conundrum of processing information in the contemporary world. It elucidates our participation in the pathologizing of our own behavior. We cede our most intimate data to WebMD and other websites/apps without thought to how this affects our own conceptions of the limits of our being. My goal is to connect the personal neurosis of online diagnosis with a wider process of how people make meaning in the world with constant technological input and output. We are in constant feedback loops with everything around us. We are hypersensitive to data.

As a multimedia artist, I work primarily in interactive audio/visual installation and performance. Through my research and creative practice, I develop new social communication systems. My artwork explores the lives of people who are marginalized by society due to social and physical challenges, which have debilitated them in some
way. Since I arrived in the United States in 2003 from Korea for further research, I have been able to personally address this alienation in terms of interpersonal communication. Miscommunication deals with the language barriers commonly experienced by non-native speakers. To communicate with each other, most of us use sound as well as physical gestures. Even though sounds have specific meanings in their particular contexts and uses, we often experience communication barriers. This raises some
important questions: How can we fully understand each other, and what is the alternative of language? By exploring the connection between movement and sound, meaning, and perception, this piece confronts viewers with an unintended communication barrier. Through this work, I am also attempting to explore possible methods of sound communication. Participants use data gloves to control the output of a sound device. As they speak into the device while altering the sound with the gloves, they can hear their multiple-layered voices being irregularly manipulated. Echoes are controlled by the sensors in the gloves. When they hear their duplicated voices though this device, they may feel the confusion of many simultaneous sounds in the space. The distracting effect is similar to trying to calculate a math problem in your head while friends shout random numbers. Miscommunication allows participants to indirectly experience the complexities of the communication barrier through chaotic sound and language.

Telematic Drum Circle is an interdisciplinary art project combining telecommunications, robotics, human-computer interaction, and improvisational music. The project allows online users around the world to create a live collective sound improvisation by controlling 16 robotic percussion instruments via the internet. By tapping the computer keyboard while viewing the web site, online users can remotely play the robotic instruments together while watching a live streaming webcast of their ensemble.

Fingerprints are unique biometric patterns on human and primate bodies. They are clearly recognizable patterns that can be manipulated and saved into large databases. Due to their distinct and unique visual patterns, they have been useful for personal identification and security. In this digital era, many computing machines and digital interfaces use fingerprints as secure keys to identify and access personal information.

We believe fingerprints are the most intuitive and powerful source of data that represent an individual’s pure voice and identity. There is no trick or filter on the fingerprint patterns. Only the simple, spiral pattern displays the truth of human birth, genes, and growth. Thus, fingerprints are a powerful resource not only for revealing societal identities, but also for exploring our bodies’ inner, unconscious, and pure voices.

Digiti Sonus is an interactive audio/visual art installation based on fingerprint sonification. Transforming fingerprints’ unique patterns into sonic results allows the audience to experience the discovery of sensory identities. The sonification of data produces a real-time music composition as a representation of integrated human identities. The distinct visual features of fingerprints as an open musical score are executed in diverse ways and converted into three-dimensional animated images. By varying the starting point of animated visuals, the musical notes are reorganized in different orders and duration, and they resonate in listeners’ bodies and minds.

In this artwork, sonification can serve as an effective technique for representing complex information like human body patterns, due to the auditory system’s ability to perceive a broad range of stimuli. Transforming fingerprints’ unique patterns into sonic results allows listeners to discover sensory identities. The data is transformed into different XYZN scales and magnified into an immersive audio/ visual representation. Listeners can “perform” musical sounds, providing input that results in dynamic audio/visual output.

This work is the result of DaVinci Media art project 2012, which is supported by Seoul Art Space and Geumcheon art space.

“Diligent Typist” has a simple but powerful narrative by masking a MacBook backlit keyboard image. In a small office where there is a MacBook, a laptop desk, a chair, 4-channel speakers and a projected screen, the screen loops a simple keys’ march on a MacBook keyboard from left to right. The computer commands viewers to press a letter on the keyboard in alphabetical order. When they press the same key that the computer commands, viewers contribute to making the big letter image with busy typing sounds. Each key sacrifices its own entity to show a big letter like Mass Performance.

We want to express digital communication with a human touch. So we pay attention to the properties of a door because it links one place to another. We think the linking of different places and sharing of places is one of the substantial qualities of network technology. Another reason that we focus on a door is because it bears great meanings. For example, a door is the first spot for a meeting with someone or for kissing someone goodbye. It could be your children, spouse, or your friends. These days, we talk and say hello to friends by Messenger or mobiles. Accustomed to digital devices which neglect time or space, we expect that the devices can carry our emotions to others. However, these have limits in expression. We want to show through our work “The Door” that network technology should have a little more humanity and love in the near future.

A visualisation of tremors that affect an Asian building symbolises a rapidly changing people’s social cognition and a contracting social structure. Max/MSP, Jitter, and Arduino are used to capture the image of the miniature building, for image processing, for detecting the number of viewers, and to operate vibrating motors.

‘AT Field_Paralyzed Sense’ is an installation art work that participants can experience such a fascinating but threatening digital media communication in a shield of laser light.

Let’s assume that you were a bird just born inside an egg. Are you sure that you could imagine the world outside the egg? No! You may not even recognize the fact that there is a barrier between the world and you. The concept of barrier is not formulated until the subsequent existence of the outside world. Thus, you cannot imagine or postulate the existence of an egg since it does not show you any information about the outside world. The existence is the farthest enclosure of your world. At this point, your existence itself is to impose a constraint on yourself. You have a freed mind. However, your mind always conceives the unreachable world that you are not able to imagine. In this work, a small mirror continuously follows up and blocks your hand creating an invisible wall. At this moment, look at the hand blocked and reflected by the mirror. Ask yourself, which object is blocking you? Is it the wall created by a complex robotic device or just yourself?

These designer chocolates illustrate the inventive protein structure of the hepatitis C virus. A model of the virus was printed as a rapid prototype from a 3D illustration of the virus, from which the chocolates were cast. These delicious truffles do not carry hepatitis C. Each one was lovingly handmade from 72-percent Belgian roasted cocoa in an attempt to befriend the virus. The desire to eat the enticing chocolates is mixed with a repulsion for the infectious virus. This unnerving dialectic has proved to be an exciting and approachable way to ignite discussion and create awareness about an extremely prevalent and under-reported disease. Over 200 million people worldwide are living with hepatitis C. This work is part of a series: Sentimental Objects in Attempts to Befriend a Virus. Living with a chronic, virtually incurable virus can lead to a certain identity crisis in which one’s occupied body is seen simultaneously as enemy and victim, friend and abuser. Weary of the rhetoric of war and fighting used to describe the illness, I wanted to domesticate my untamed virus by offering it comfort, bread and circus. Instead of starvation, I offer it delicacies. Instead of deprivation, I offer it handmade garments. Instead of exile, I offer it whimsical shelter. These domestic objects are created in its image, based formally on the virus’s protein structure. Perhaps the virus will be seduced by its own vanity? Or perhaps we can construct our own survival out of its image?

When the object is extremely small or complex, as in the case of this design of a computer microchip, the designer can magnify the detail by “zooming in” for a closer, clearer look. Theoretically, there is no limit to how detailed the design can be, nor to how close the designer can zoom in. (This image shows approximately 5% of the surface of a microchip.) If necessary, the object could be designed at the molecular, even the atomic, level. Components are also color-coded to avoid confusion.

Paper-Thin is a series of curated virtual reality spaces hosting interactive artist installations. Each month Daniel Smith and his collaborator, Cameron Buckley, work with an emerging artist on an installation which contributes to the virtual architecture. When the architecture of Paper-Thin is completely filled, they create new architecture for new art, rather than de-installing older artworks. In this way, Paper-Thin has evolved into a growing archive of virtual artworks. Each virtual architecture and its constituent artist installations thereby become one “volume” of the archive. Contributing artists to Volume 1 include Alan Resnick, Hunter Jonakin, Daniel Baird, Haseeb Ahmed, Rachael Archibald, Hugo Arcier, and Andy Lomas. Volume 2 is currently in production, and will include contributions from Shane Mecklenburger, Adam Ferriss, Martina Menegon, Brenna Murphy, Mark Dorf, and Zachary Norman.

Because digital art has no material, and the involved technology is ever-changing, we can’t simply archive virtual art on a flash drive or “restore” artworks as one might restore a painting. Hard drives, flash drives, tape decks, and nearly all digital storage devices inevitably corrupt over time. As far as preservation, computer technology is so complex and interdependent, that one must preserve not only the artwork, but the operating system and technological hardware a given artwork requires.

Our archival approach is to collect virtual artworks into a singular format, so that the collection itself becomes a precious “object” that is worthy of protection. In theory this consolidated digital “object” is easier to maintain, because of its singular format, it creates a greater imperative for preservation. Part of the difficulty with digital preservation is the typically fragmentary nature of disparate works. Paper-Thin attempts to alleviate this problem without compromising artists–we don’t sell artwork like a gallery.

In addition to creating the imperative for preservation, Paper-Thin indefinitely hosts all art installations as downloadable executables and equivalent desktop standalone programs for Mac, Linux, and Windows. These executables are more stable formats than online 3D renderers–which we also support. In other words, anyone who wishes to can download all the artworks for free. This means that copies of the art are effectively distributed to an indefinite number of global users, and this wide distribution and user-base functions as part of the preservation of Paper-Thin.

Look at yourself in our mirror, and you might see a paper fox behind you. Strange hands might open your stomach, or you could find a cat asleep in your bag.Happy Wear inserts a little magic into an unexpected medium: fashion design.

The installation set-up is nearly invisible; technological references disappear to make the user feel even more surprised by the virtual universe. No tags, no sensors, no wires, only simple cloth and a projected mirror. We designed this universe without technical constraints, imagining how a t-shirt or a bag could come to life. We wanted users to feel that they are part of a video clip, but in real time!The system automatically superimposes animations on t-shirts and projects the resulting image on a screen. To achieve this effect in real time, the system first registers a deformable 2D mesh with the view of the t-shirt. Then it evaluates illumination to reproduce it on the virtual elements. It also segments possible occlusions, to augment only areas where the t-shirts are really visible. A fast wide-baseline feature-matching algorithm, a non-rigid deformation model, and an expectation-maximization segmentation algorithm provide the state-of-the-art technical basis for this artwork.

Text Rain is a playful interactive installation that blurs the boundary between the familiar and the magical. Participants use the familiar instrument of their bodies to do what seems magical: lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist.

To interact with the installation, participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen, they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white combined with a color animation of falling text. Like rain or snow, the text appears to land on participants’ heads and arms. The text responds to the participants’ motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The falling text “lands” on anything darker than a certain threshold and “falls” whenever that obstacle is removed.

If participants accumulate enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can sometimes catch an entire word, or even a phrase. The falling letters are not random, but lines of a poem about bodies and language. As letters from one line of the poem fall toward the ground, they begin to fade, and differently colored letters from the next line replace them from above. “Reading” the poem in the Text Rain installation, if participants can do so at all, becomes a physical as well as a cerebral endeavor.

Supported by Interval Research Corporation, The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and The Greenwall Foundation.

Untitled 5 is the fifth interactive installation in the External Measures Series, which Camille Utterback has been developing since 2001. The goal of these works is to create an aesthetic system that responds fluidly and intriguingly to physical movement in the exhibit space. The installations respond to their environment via input from an overhead video camera. Custom video tracking and drawing software output a changing wall projection in response to the activities in the space. The existence, positions, and behaviors of various parts of the projected image depend entirely on people’s presence and movement in the exhibit area. Untitled 5 creates imagery that is painterly, organic, and evocative while still being completely algorithmic. To create this work, Utterback first develops sets of animated marks whose parameters and behaviors are controlled by people’s movements. Then, out of a working “palette” of these animated marks, she composes an overall composition. The composition balances responses whose logic is immediately clear with responses that feel connected to viewer’s movements, but whose logic remains complex and mysterious. Integral to the piece are the animated marks’ cumulative interaction with each other over time. As a person moves through the space, a network of gray lines flickers around the person’s body and immediately indicates his or her presence. A colored line maps the person’s trajectory across the projection screen, creating a temporal history of the movement. When a person leaves the installation, the trajectory line is transformed by an overlay of tiny organic marks. These marks can now be pushed from their location by other people’s movement in the space. Displaced trajectory marks attempt to return to their original location, creating smears and streaks of color as they move. The resulting painterly swaths of color occur at the intersections between current and previous motion in the space, elegantly connecting different moments of time. Untitled 5 reacts to stillness as well as motion, creating delicate sprays of dots where someone has stood still. While people’s presence generates marks, it also slowly erases earlier marks. While the specific rules of the system are never explicitly revealed to participants, the internal structure and composition of the piece can be discovered through a process of kinesthetic exploration. Engaging with this work creates a visceral sense of unfolding or revelation, but also a feeling of immediacy and loss. The experience of this work is the experience of embodied existence itself: a continual flow of unique and fleeting moments. The effect is at once sensual and contemplative.

Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it. Gameplay is inspired by point-and-click adventure games (like the classic Monkey Island or King’s Quest series, or more recently Telltale’s Walking Dead series), but focused on characterization, atmosphere and storytelling rather than clever puzzles or challenges of skill.

The game is developed by Cardboard Computer (Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy). The game’s soundtrack features an original electronic score by Ben Babbitt along with a suite of old hymns & bluegrass standards recorded by The Bedquilt Ramblers.

The promise of virtual reality has captured our imagination; networks will render it accessible. There can be little doubt that networked immersion environments or virtual reality will evolve into one of the greatest ventures ever imagined. It will draw from and affect the entire spectrum of science, commerce, and culture-including education, entertainment, and the creative arts. It will be multinational, and introduce new hybrids of experience for which adjectives do not exist.

For my SIGGRAPH 93 installation, I have built a Fun House. While making metaphorical reference to the “fun house” found throughout traditional amusement parks, the application is an investigation of interaction and perception employing networked, immersion-based virtual reality. It was the world that was utilized during the first long-range demonstration conducted between Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Munich, Germany, in September 1992. And a more recent demonstration, featuring yet another virtual world, was conducted between CMU and Tokyo, sponsored by the International Conference on Artificial Reality and Tele-existence, Japan.

The Fun House metaphor is particularly applicable to the container for virtual experience. Upon entering a fun house, one is acutely aware of being cast into a different world. One’s senses are amusingly assaulted by a number of devices- trick mirrors, fantasy characters, gravity manipulation, spatial disorientation, mazes, and sound. In the virtual Fun House, various traditional devices are adapted and some new ones are offered.

Key attributes to be found in the Fun House include:
1) Objectification of “self ” within an immersion environment. Users can select their image from a library including Frankenstein, Dracula, and a doctor, among others. The Cookie Man has proven to be a favorite. When entering the Fun House, users can see their image reflected in real time in a mirror. They can also see the images of other users. Users can extend their hands and wave at each other.

2) Interaction with a client (or agent) that has an “artificial intelligence.” When entering the Fun House, you are greeted and spoken to by a client. It has a polite behavior and is programmed to face you, follow at a certain distance, and to stay out of your way. After a while, it stops following and says goodbye. Smart objects are also incorporated; touching them calls up events within the program.

3) Interaction with multiple users in real time. Networked telecommunications allow for the simultaneous support of multiple users within the Fun House. For the demonstration between CMU and Munich, the users selected the Dracula and Cookie Man personas from the library. Each user could see the other, had an independent point of view, and could move objects.

4) Users can attach themselves to a moving object. The Fun House features a Merry-go-round; users can grab hold and catch a ride while music plays.

5) Objects can attach themselves to users. The Fun House features a Flying Saucer ride, where users are transported up into the space craft, and they
can pilot its flight.

6) Objects can be assigned attributes of physics. The Fun House features a Ball Game, where users pick up a ball and throw it at targets. The ball falls, bounces, and loses velocity. Thus gravity, velocity, and friction are articulated. The motion of the ball is sound intensive.

Since high school, I have been fascinated by geometry. I enjoyed constructing the more complicated Platonic solids with ruler and compasses, as well as reading about the fourth dimension. I went on to study physics at the University of Basel, and in 1970 started working at Bell Telephone Laboratories on the design of charge-coupled imaging devices. There, I was introduced to the field of computer graphics in courses given by Ken Knowlton and Lilian Schwartz.

In 1977, I joined the faculty of the computer science division at the University of California, Berkeley. Inspired by a talk by artist Frank Smullin, I started to develop the Berkeley UniGrafix rendering system, so that I could depict objects such as the “Skeleton of a Klein Bottle” or the “Granny-Knot Lattice.” Since then, the focus of my work has been on computer-aided design. First, I developed programs to support circuit designers, later architects and mechanical engineers, and recently even artists.

In 1995, I started a close collaboration with Brent Collins, who had been sculpting abstract geometric art for two decades. With my students, I developed a procedural “sculpture generator” program, to help Collins prototype potential future work in virtual form. Later programs generalized the original concepts and eventually expanded the design space through new paradigms. In this work, I see myself as a composer in the realm of pure geometry. Totem_2 is the latest creation from a recent modification of the “Sculpture Generator I,” which allows me to create these elongated forms. It was created on a Fused Deposition Modeling machine.

The design of the geometry of Cohesion dates back about three years, but was only cast in bronze in 2002 by Steve Reinmuth.

Hilbert Cube emerged from the challenge of taking the famous two-dimensional Hilbert Curve and exploring what can be done with this pattern in three dimensions. The resulting intriguing “brain-like” structure is based on a recursive procedure that repeatedly splits the cube, and the resulting parts, into two equal, mirror-image parts. At each level, the two halves are only very loosely connected; at the highest level there are only two connectors – again reminiscent of the human brain.

The motivation behind Hilbert Cube and similar works lies in the drive to find procedural formulations that extract the inherent symmetries and constructive elegance that lie beneath the best sculptures by highly skilled artists, but which also can be found in many natural artifacts and even in the physical laws of our universe.

There were many challenges in realizing the initial vague concept. Many combinations of splitting, twisting, and assembly of the indi­vidual recursive modules had to be tried out to meet all mathemati­cal and aesthetic requirements. This would not have been possible without the help of computer-aided tools. The speed with which many such variations can be explored provides great stimulation, and the computer thus becomes an amplifier for an artist’s creativity.

The virtual design space, unencumbered by physical limitations such as gravity, allows the artist to become a composer in the realm of pure geometry.

Since high school, I have been fascinated by geometry. I enjoyed constructing the more complicated Platonic solids with ruler and compasses, as well as reading about the fourth dimension. I went on to study physics at the University of Basel, and in 1970 started working at Bell Telephone Laboratories on the design of charge-coupled imaging devices. There, I was introduced to the field of computer graphics in courses given by Ken Knowlton and Lilian Schwartz.

In 1977, I joined the faculty of the computer science division at the University of California, Berkeley. Inspired by a talk by artist Frank Smullin, I started to develop the Berkeley UniGrafix rendering system, so that I could depict objects such as the “Skeleton of a Klein Bottle” or the “Granny-Knot Lattice.” Since then, the focus of my work has been on computer-aided design. First, I developed programs to support circuit designers, later architects and mechanical engineers, and recently even artists.

In 1995, I started a close collaboration with Brent Collins, who had been sculpting abstract geometric art for two decades. With my students, I developed a procedural “sculpture generator” program, to help Collins prototype potential future work in virtual form. Later programs generalized the original concepts and eventually expanded the design space through new paradigms. In this work, I see myself as a composer in the realm of pure geometry. Totem_2 is the latest creation from a recent modification of the “Sculpture Generator I,” which allows me to create these elongated forms. It was created on a Fused Deposition Modeling machine.

Volution refers to a series of shell-like modular sculptural elements. Each is a constrained minimal surface embedded in a cube. The three bronze casts all have similar edge patterns on the faces of a unit cube, consisting of two quarter-circles around opposite corners, with radii equal to half the edge length of the cube. On the inside of that bounding cube, the surfaces exhibit an increasing number of saddles and tunnels, thus evolving the genus of this surface. The simplest shape, Volution_O, is topologically equivalent to a disk. The 12 quarter-circles on the surface of the cube form a continuous, closed edge that defines the rim of this highly warped disk. Fitting the disk to this contorted edge loop results in a dramatic saddle surface with twisted canyons on either side. The bronze cast uses two subtly different patinas to make the two-sided nature of this object more apparent. In the next evolutionary step, represented by Volution_ 1, two central tunnels were added, lying side by side and forming a short-cut connection between pairs of ear-shaped flanges with the same surface color. In adding those tunnels, care was taken to maintain the strict D2 symmetry that is inherent to all three sculptures. Objects belonging to this symmetry group have three mutually perpendicular axes of two-fold rotational symmetry. Finally, in Volution_5, four more tunnels were added to the second shape, enhancing the genus of this surface to a value of 5. If the rim of this surface were extended and closed into a big spherical dome, the resulting surface would be topologically equivalent to a donut with five holes (or equivalently, a sphere with five handles stuck on). Again, 02 symmetry was maintained while these tunnels were added. Each sculptural element on its own displays a remarkable variety of silhouettes, as it is laid down on different edges or stood on three of its protruding tips. The three elements together form a cohesive hyper-sculpture that gains an additional dynamic element from the increasing number of saddles and tunnels in this evolutionary sequence.

The architecture of Antoni Gaudí is commonly associated with the Art Nouveau movement of late 19th-century Europe. Perhaps this association is due to the exuberance of the forms and their capricious appearance, or maybe it can be attributed to the use of picturesque and natural motifs in combination with vernacular solutions. Some experts even regard Gaudí’s work as the precursor of Catalonian modernism. Nevertheless, behind the seemingly erratic appearance of complex forms and spaces, Gaudí’s work epitomizes the synthesis of plain shapes and simple geometrical operations.

The interior and exterior of his buildings offer a collection of unique spatial experiences. His innovative architectural language is the result of a unique combination of geometrical operations most evident in his work on the Expiatory Temple of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The Sagrada Familia, still under construction, started as a small parochial church of neo-Gothic style in 1862. The original architect resigned only a year after being commissioned and Gaudí was hired to complete the project and oversee its construction in 1863.

Gaudí, known to have been a critic of the Gothic style, took a bold, ambitious approach, changing both the style and scale of the project. The Sagrada Familia became a project that consumed Gaudí for the next 43 years until his accidental death in 1926. He spent the final 12 years of his life declining other commissions and remained exclusively devoted to the completion of the Sagrada Familia.

Most of the work was done in plaster models that still survive and provide documentation of the architect’s original vision. For the columns of the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí initially proposed a single helicoidal shape. However, he became concerned that the single twist was visually inappropriate, since it produced a column that looked weak and could be squashed or deformed when loaded to compression.

The visual imperfection of the single twisted column bothered Gaudí for a number of years and inspired a search for an alternative solution. After years of experimentation, he applied two simultaneously opposite rotations. This approach, which has no known precedents in architecture, was the result of eight years of work and experimentation. Gaudí’s inspiration for the helicoidal growth can be found in plants; it is believed that he studied the growth of abelia, a plant abundant in Barcelona. The double-twisted column was based on a single rotation of a basic shape and the corresponding counter-rotation of the same shape. When the two shapes were superimposed and intersected, the resulting shape created a new emergent form.

All the columns on the Sagrada Familia nave follow this process. The only variations can be found in the degree of rotation, the height of the columns, and the initial shape used to generate the columns. A hierarchical arrangement of the columns is present throughout the temple. The columns of the central nave use an octagonal shape; the columns of the crossing area are two pentagons forming a 10-sided polygon. The central columns on the crossing are three squares forming a 12-sided polygon and the columns of the lateral nave are made of two triangles to form a hexagon.

With today’s computer-modeling systems, it is fairly easy to reproduce Gaudí’s original columns and to explore possible new designs using variations of the initial shape and degree of twist, as well as the use of irregular forms and non-symmetrical shapes.

3D printing of the models for this curated project was made possible through a generous donation from Z Corporation. Contact: Olimpio DeMarco (odemarco@zcorp.com)

Biopoiesis is a series of experiments exploring the relationships between structure, matter, and self-organization. The project features the construction of analog computation and control systems that harness electrochemical reactions and form what can be described as a computational “primordial soup.” Information (an electrical signal) is passed through electrodes to a tank filled with a metallic salt solution (e.g. stannous chloride). The resultant electrochemical reaction grows into dendritic metallic threads – ultimately leading to the
formation of a continuously shifting signal network that can be used to develop a complex, self-organizing media system.

Although they are complementary, these six ink-jet prints on canvas mounted on metal plates behind bars and a touch screen monitor (also framed by a rusted metal plate with bars) are independent. The printed part and the interactive part can be exhibited separately. Visitors can interact with several “inmates” that react to the touch of fingers on the screen.

The “inmates” are distorted self-portraits of the artist. The distortions, as well as some of the inmate’s “thoughts”, can be viewed and to some extent controlled by the visitors. The set, with rusted bars, poor lighting, and industrial noises, helps to create an insane ambiance. Some of the interactive animation sequences are so realistic that touching them can be quite repulsive. But the more the visitors do it, the deeper they get into the twisted psyches of the “inmates.”

The Metamorphosis Log Books are an ongoing series of generative art based media installations and virtually published interactive media book works based on early 1800s Metamorphosis, movable panel “turn up” books. The series’ visually and sonically explore notions of “transformations” using meteorological logged data and media captured on site. Each book is a unique object with a specific data set and media archive that is used to derive the vignettes that are projected onto the translucent book surface.

Step and Repeat – Unsettled Series

The Unsettled Series are short video, motion or animated works derived from discrete exploratory site-specific disruptions. The video work is non narrative and purposefully cyclical in nature exploring the possibilities of sound, sequence and patterns set in motion by a simple action or gesture.

Step and Repeat – Unsettled Series

The Unsettled Series are short video, motion or animated works derived from discrete exploratory site-specific disruptions. The video work is non-narrative and purposefully cyclical in nature exploring the possibilities of sound, sequence, and patterns set in motion by a simple action or gesture.

We carpet the landscape in herds, swarms, flocks, and schools, shaping air currents and vibrating to different rhythms. Our paths are a kaleidoscopic fabric. Only humans need veiling, separation from other living things, elements, each other. We pattern our veils with designs from nature and language.

These fragilities are memories of who we’ve known and who we’ve been: a baby’s blanket, dresses a father bought for his daughters. On them play shadows of trees, saturated patterns, flocks of birds, creatures of earth and sea-escaping canvas, monitor, and screen, curving over fold, moving to whispers and wind.

Being sent to hang clothes to dry was a dreaded chore. The heat of the Texas sun was mirrored by its white-hot glare on billowing linens. I felt a closeness to my father pinning up his handkerchiefs and socks. The indifference to my sister could be intensely felt and go unwitnessed, as I was careful not to stretch her elastic waistbands.

rippled colors / draw my passing / retold for yours / upon this veil that separates / always / trapped within / that skin in / which i was within / this veil on which / shadows / and / your dreams appear / your hard swift arrow / smooth and straight / for all that bound / in blood red bleed / are kin to me / we / cannot / be / set free

Inspired by NASA images of heat zones of electromagnetic field of the sun

I enjoy the opportunity to remind viewers of the sensitivity of the global (and extraterrestrial) environment which we all hold in trust, and our responsibility for the health of the earth and its future inhabitants.

An interactive installation combining ENTER 3-D stereoscopic, video laserdisc, and codec technology with Mandala second person virtual reality on an Amigo computer. The live chromakeyed participant becomes part of a 3-D, stereoscopic, motion video environment. The participant experiences a curious and compelling transformation upon entering the photorealistic, interactive, virtual space seen on a life-sized screen. Initial research by Michigan State University shows that participants feel as if they are entering a different world. People report a strong desire to interact.

Ever since I purchased a digital camera a year ago, I have been obsessed with capturing images of myself in order to piece together how I appear to others. However, with the power to discard the less appealing photos, my collection quickly became slanted less toward the truth and more toward presenting a very composed and glamorous image. This piece was the result of taking the more “honest” self-portraits, combining shots from multiple sessions with scans of articles from my make-up bag. The resulting image seeks to personify the vanity that feels inherent in creating the original self-portraits, a necessary evil in my path to finding myself.

Microlmage explores the phenomenon of emergence through the medium of software. It is a microworld where thousands of autonomous software organisms and a minimal environment create a software ecosystem. As the environment changes, the organisms aggregate and disperse according to their programmed behavior. They are tightly coupled to the environment, and slight changes in the environment create macroscopic changes in the ecosystem. A field of undulating form emerges from the interactions between the environment and the organisms. The visual qualities of Microlmage were selected to make the dynamic structure highly visible. The code specifies the behavior of each organism by defining the rules for how it responds to its simulated environment. Each organism was given the most minimal visual form: a point. To differentiate the various categories of organisms, each type was assigned a distinct color. Aggressive organisms were assigned warm colors, and passive organisms were assigned cool colors. As a further refinement, the values of the colors were modified to change in relation to the speed of the organism. When the organism is moving at its maximum speed, it is represented with its pure hue, but as it slows down, the hue changes along a gradient until it reaches black. Each organism is displayed as a line connecting its current position and its previous 20 positions. Through this visualization, the movement of each organism is seen in both static images and kinematic representations. The linear notation allows the viewer to discern the past and present motion of the organism.

A chameleon flunks out of camouflage school. Created as a group project by students in the University of Washington’s 1998 computer animation program.

New media is an ubiquitous electromagnetic system, wired
and wireless. We are always plugged into an increasingly
dense sea of signals. We now have no choice. Global connection means that this is as true in urban centers as it is for “remote” margins. What is it like to plug in our own body? In a darkened room are two stainless-steel tables, human scale. On the tables are objects that appear to be specimens: two glass brains in glass tubes. These are not inert. The spectator is sensed, the brains excite. Electrons become agitated, and plasma gases flare up in the tubes. The spectator can touch a tube, and the plasma’s energy stream follows the hand, straining for contact. Finally, the light begins a beat, as if signaling. The empty space between the tubes becomes highly charged as the signals compete for attention. The electronic pulse is based on patterns claimed to be the timing of neurons firing in certain areas of the human brain. The firing patterns used here correspond to states of haunting or abject fear for one tube and benign
enlightenment or rapture for the other. These emotions can be
understood as two sides of the same coin, feeling inhabited
by something else. The brain (the body’s computer!) may be
affected quite directly, through a process called “entraining.” It was the slippage between electromagnetics, physiology, and emotion that fascinated me. Emotions can be “seen” in the patterns of the brain’s firing. I was scared to death / I could have died of joy is a simultaneous seduction between two extremes: rapture and fear.

Gesture Down (I Don’t Sing) is a highly personal interpretation of the poem “Gesture Down to Guatemala” by the late Blackfeet/Gros Ventre writer James Welch. It was one of seven short films commissioned by celebrated author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie as part of a weekend-long tribute to James Welch held at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Washington. The poem was taken from Mr. Welch’s sole book of poetry, Riding the Earthboy 40. It is a stark, beautiful, first-person rumination on place, longing, and identity. These are themes of deep resonance for me, as I am both a descendent of and estranged from the La Huerta Indian community of northern Baja California, México. This is my grandfather’s home and the place where Gesture Down (I Don’t Sing) was shot.

Celeste Joy Greer (Southern California), Mark Yamamoto (Utah), and Nicole Ruby (Connecticut) come from diverse cultural backgrounds, yet they were united in this effort by their commitment to express the pain of self-loathing that is created through survival: a bitter irony, a cycle of self-abuse.

I Statements was written by Celeste Joy Greer as a 30-minute “stream of consciousness” that uses “I” to focus on revealing the individual emotions.

Celeste: “To live is not necessarily to be alive. I find I create pain in my life, so I will not think about how much I am suffering.” Celeste experienced a plethora of death in her adolescence: car accidents, suicides, and murders. “As a teenager, I never really had a chance to mourn, or to feel at all. The pain was so removed. I’d learn about the deaths through third parties, or in the newspaper. My parents did not approve of a boy I dated, and I had never met his parents. When I read of his death in the paper, what could I do? I couldn’t talk to my parents because they didn’t like him. And I couldn’t call his mother. I didn’t even know her name, and if I had called what would I have said? ‘I loved your son more than breathing, and he was a God damn selfish bastard for dying.'”

Over the course of numerous still and video shoots, the team found they were expressing latent pain, making their commitment to the project that much more intense and personal. Celeste: “It was like therapy. One of us would have an idea and would say that we should try this camera angle or that. Or: Let’s have you doing this action because it reminds me of … And then we would say things to each other to try and express the intentions behind the words. Things you don’t tell anybody, not even your therapist.”

The team went through several “looks” and discarded hours of footage that they felt would have been demeaning to the words. Mark said: “We had this initial idea to use pictures of all the products (Pinesol, Glad Bags, etc.) but that was too ‘kitsch,’ too much like advertisement.” Celeste said that some of the shots dealt with really personal feelings that she felt she could not do in front of Mark and Nicole, like the plastic bag. “I was really scared because the pain was personal. Mark offered to do it, but it just didn’t work. So I put a camera on a tripod and filmed myself’ Nicole recalls: “Celeste brought me the video camera and said: ‘Here. Look at this.’ And then she left the room. The shots were so completely scary.” Mark said: “That stuff was so creepy, I put it in the way it was. But it just didn’t work. It stopped being about the words and was all about shock value. And that wasn’t what we wanted. So I tamed it down, made it more obscure, with double exposures and motion blur. I think Celeste was relieved. But she still closes her eyes during that sequence.”

Ondine is an interactive photographic installation mixing photographs, synthesized images and sound. The theme of the installation questions the concept of fluid image and the link that the photographic image, the synthesized image, and sound have with water. I used a prototype digital camera to generate a synthesised 30 volume from a single shot. This camera is, in my opinion, another way of perceiving photography as a volume-image. It generates a kind of floating, weightless, virtual mold in three dimensions, which one can visualise from every angle. The artistic richness is born from this hybridization. It leads the image toward another aesthetic: that of trouble and doubt. Photography would be in “trans-situation,” a kind of enveloping membrane, an organism of its simulation in its reversible transfer from 20 to 30, like a skin .

Ondine is an interactive photographic installation mixing photographs, synthesized images and sound. The theme of the installation questions the concept of fluid image and the link that the photographic image, the synthesized image, and sound have with water. I used a prototype digital camera to generate a synthesised 30 volume from a single shot. This camera is, in my opinion, another way of perceiving photography as a volume-image. It generates a kind of floating, weightless, virtual mold in three dimensions, which one can visualise from every angle. The artistic richness is born from this hybridization. It leads the image toward another aesthetic: that of trouble and doubt. Photography would be in “trans-situation,” a kind of enveloping membrane, an organism of its simulation in its reversible transfer from 20 to 30, like a skin .

Ondine is an interactive photographic installation mixing photographs, synthesized images and sound. The theme of the installation questions the concept of fluid image and the link that the photographic image, the synthesized image, and sound have with water. I used a prototype digital camera to generate a synthesized 30 volume from a single shot. This camera is, in my opinion, another way of perceiving photography as a volume-image. It generates a kind of floating, weightless, virtual mold in three dimensions, which one can visualize from every angle. The artistic richness is born from this hybridization. It leads the image toward another aesthetic: that of trouble and doubt. Photography would be in “trans-situation,” a kind of enveloping membrane, an organism of its simulation in its reversible transfer from 20 to 30, like a skin.

Degenerative Cultures is a composite nature-based and AI-driven experiment that allows fungal organisms and their digital counterparts to corrupt texts on humanity’s project to dominate nature. The multimedia installation consists of a living fungus alongside a digital fungus and their degeneration of predatory texts. The microbiological culture consumes the text of a physical book that describes the human impulse to control and reshape nature. The living organism’s growth is followed by a digital fungus whose growth is based on cellular automata and natural language analysis. This AI “organism” searches the Internet and decomposes texts with similar predatory approaches to nature. The fungal readings are tweeted by the twitter handle @HelloFungus, which responds to twitter users with new digitally degenerated texts.

A hybrid of artificial and biological intelligences drive the logic of the installation. Physical books documenting the compulsion of people to direct nature are used as the substrates for fungi. The text is destroyed in a physical sense, and this destruction is visible through the redaction or disappearance of legible text on the surface of the pages by the biological agent. Just as the physical book is consumed by the microbiological culture, the digital database is corrupted by the degenerative algorithm. In the “bhiobrid” network, the bio-digital fungi respond to Internet users’ mentions, engaging others in the spreading of “digital spores.”

In Degenerative Cultures, living microorganisms, digital networks and artificial intelligence work together. Replicating the logic of so-called intelligent microorganisms (Physarum polycephalum) and blurring the limits between biological and artificial intelligence, the artists build a “bhiobrid” agent. By mapping and corrupting the predatory knowledge frameworks that have consistently driven how humanity deals with nature, the artists’ goal is to learn from the bio-hybrid interactions across biological, social and technical networks. The resulting system makes visible those entropic patterns in human culture that have carried us into the Anthropocene.

Painting, traditionally, is a way for an artist to communicate their perspectives, feelings about, or ways of understanding a subject. Your Memory, Connected challenges this definition of painting by allowing artists to gather and paint with tens of thousands of other perspectives, feelings, and understandings through our artificially intelligent “art-bot” system.

This system can read an art subject and automatically generate a collaged artwork that fuses together individual memory responses. It uses natural-language processing, concept reasoning, and textual ­affect sensing techniques to collect all the related memories from people who have stored images on Flickr. The system’s computational “memory retrieval” procedure simulates the evocation process when human brains are triggered. The machine then generates a collage based on all the images and text it finds online. Instead of a montage assembled to create a visual image, this generates montages that materialize concepts, statements, and memories.

Through this work, we intend to create a collaborative and generative painting process using advanced artificial-intelligence techniques. We want to emphasize the facts that Flickr (or any of the other image web sites) is itself an enormous pool of memories of people around the world, and the act of browsing such a site is an act of accessing (peeping?) those memories. We designed this interaction to allow people to discuss the role of authors and viewers of artwork and col­laborative creation of artwork across time and space.

Six Pages from the Artist’s Sketchbook

These sketchbook drawings were made when Csuri first started using the computer. They demonstrate ideas and issues that he was struggling with in the context of a drum plotter, a slow computer and punch cards. Csuri asked himself, “What can I do with this process or approach that would be different from my traditional work?” According to Csuri, it was a time of great speculation, and the drawings illustrate that he was thinking in terms of three-dimensional space, with some notion of stereo pairs and flying through a drawing. In the sketchbook, he comments about a three-dimensional path for an object, sine waves, and various transformations.

3D Path and Transformations

“Here, I explore a drawing in a three-dimensional space and the idea of three-dimensional paths. Leslie Miller, a Professor of Mathematics, introduced me to a broader viewpoint about transformations—transformations on the original drawing that would make the overall shape look abstracted or like a star.”
— Charles A. Csuri

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the patriarch of portraitists, dominated Germany in the late fifteenth century. Prior to him, artists generally did not paint independent self-portraits, which expressed the personality behind the canvas’s production. In After Albrecht Dürer, Csuri recalls Dürer’s Self-Portrait with a Bandage of 1491–92, a pen on paper sketch in which Dürer emphasizes the agency of his own hand. Csuri eliminates references to depth and space by removing shading, reducing Dürer’s sketch to its most basic elements. The adjacent pantograph is flipped and slightly compressed as Csuri considers it from another perspective. He returns to the original orientation for the final replication, skewing the drawing along both its x and y axes, further emphasizing the presence of Dürer’s hand and, by extension, reminding the viewer of the latent capabilities within it.

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

The intellectual climate of early twentieth century Paris generated schools of art such as Cubism and Fauvism, movements that sought to rebuke the photographic, mechanical reproduction of the tangible world. Their investigations into essential expressions of color and line drove artistic innovation. Here, Csuri reevaluates two of the artists who played significant roles in this milieu, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and André Derain (1880–1954).

While not as well known as many others of his time, André Derain painted captivating portraits in the company of Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, among others. Derain was noted for his infusion of Mannerism, recalling the famous Spaniard El Greco of the late 16th-early 17th century. In After André Derain, Csuri has condensed Derain’s bold brushwork, reducing it to only the most expressive elements. One of the two figures has been elongated along its x-axis, forming the visual base to support a more conventionally proportioned figure in the center.

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

The intellectual climate of early twentieth century Paris generated schools of art such as Cubism and Fauvism, movements that sought to rebuke the photographic, mechanical reproduction of the tangible world. Their investigations into essential expressions of color and line drove artistic innovation. Here, Csuri reevaluates two of the artists who played significant roles in this milieu, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and André Derain (1880–1954).

In After Paul Cézanne, Csuri pays homage to Cézanne’s significant contributions to the art world, particularly his innovations as the forefather of Cubism, a style in which space is broken into planes outside traditional modes of representation. Csuri was well aware of Cézanne’s prominent role in art history and had a personal affinity for his work, having spent long hours in museums and galleries closely studying the works of Cézanne and other master artists. In a personal symbolism of geometric forms, Csuri uses concentric circles and progressively larger squares that emanate from the center of Cézanne’s eyes. Read from left to right, the circles and squares express Cézanne’s unique vision and the modes through which he translated physical space onto two-dimensional canvas. When asked about the symbolism, Csuri stated, simply and with a smile, “He was the father of modern art, having the vision for Cubism…I couldn’t resist playing with it.”

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

After the Artist Series

“This [technology] allowed me to systematically alter the original geometry of my drawing. One end of the pantograph device traced the drawing and the other end was simultaneously making transformations. I was intrigued with the idea of using devices and strategies to create art. I questioned the notion there had to be a tactile kinesthetic process to create a drawing or painting.”
— Charles A. Csuri

Over the centuries, many artists have sought to believably translate our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Csuri, like his early contemporaries who also worked as painters, defies a concern for strict realism and instead embraces the two-dimensional surface, challenging its limitations in his earliest endeavors with computer art. There were no mass-produced operating systems when Csuri began creating art in the early 1960s, necessitating that he create his own computer programs to challenge the limits of this new technology. Further, computers at this time were unable to assign values to account for mass, although the perception of spaces and their relatedness to mass will become a hallmark of Csuri’s art created in a three-dimensional world space.

In his After the Artist series, the first analogue computer art created by Charles Csuri from 1963 to 1964, Csuri recalls and recreates classic works by historically significant and personally compelling artists. In all, he created nine analogue drawings, referencing works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. In this series, Csuri creatively distills selected masterpieces into their vital components, thus placing the works by these artists into a new role he has assigned to them.

Then, using his analogue process, Csuri masterfully repeats, stretches, skews, and inverts the elements. These works translate traditional art by harnessing a vehicle originally created for the scientific applications. The result is a new artistic paradigm, in which Csuri appropriates scientific elements and injects unpredictability, dynamism and controlled artistic chaos. By stripping the works of Cézanne, Derain and Dürer of their z-axis, Csuri removes that aspect which confers depth and volume, working instead with “relationships between objects as transformations involving position, rotation and scale.” These ‘transformations’ result from the distillation of well-known works into their simplified forms, and their subsequent manipulation results in tension between dimensions.

Within the process of image creation, the artist can delegate to the computer decisions that are at a lower level of the control hierarchy. He defines the elements and rules, which the computer has to follow. The elements might be flies and the rule chosen might be an equation that deals with conformal mapping. In one of his early works, Flies on the Miller Transformation (1967), Csuri had the computer generate a large number of flies. With a pseudorandom number generator, they were distributed and positioned in the region of a triangle. The flies then were mapped into the region of a half-circle. Another example is the morphing of a young woman into an elderly woman in the Aging Process (1967).

The drawings were broken down into line pieces, representing the elements to be manipulated. The rule then defined certain parameters of the dissolution of the young woman and the emergence of the old woman. All these procedures contained a certain aspect of surprise, although all events in the computer are strictly deterministic. Today, Charles Csuri says that these pro­cedures have changed his “conception of control” and creativity:

“When I did a traditional painting, I was thinking in terms of start, beginning, and some end point–a painting, a drawing. Today I don’t have the expectation in the same way. I explore the computer as a search engine for art. I am hoping that when I set up that environment, there will be something I cannot think of.”

Already, while he was using the pantograph, Csuri started playing with the notion that he could not anticipate or imagine the result of the rules be had set up. In one of his first articles on computers and art, he stresses that the computer can help to overcome certain “set producing tendencies;” certain patterns of thinking. The artist “usually gets only slight variations on a basic structural theme. A mathematical orientation toward visual problem solving can enable the artist both to break down his biases and to express another range of solutions.”

The question of artistic control emerged once again, when Csuri examined interactive systems within the research for real-time film animation beginning in 1969. Different objects, such as origami swallows, goldfish, butterflies, turtles, violins, and helicopters could be generated, turned and moved via a three-dimensional data table, a light pen, dials, a joystick, function switches, and the alphanumeric display terminal. In a major exhibition project, Csuri again transcended different media in order to promote an idea.

In cooperation with fourteen departments he organized the show Interactive Systems: Computer Animated Film. Electronic Sound. Video. Light. Electromyogram. Environmental Collage at OSU. The exhibition opened April 1, 1970, the same year that Jack Burnham curated the now famous Software. Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art at the Jewish Museum in New York, pleading for “responsive systems” in art. In the introduction to the catalogue of Interactive Systems, Csuri wrote:

The spectator will be permitted to participate
in esthetic decision making. An effort has been
made to create esthetic situations or environments
in which the spectator can become involved.
This is expected to be accomplished through
a controlled electronic environment, in
which a user can make decisions by electronic
means to invent or modify images or sound
systems.

The catalogue bears witness to an impressive exhibition showing not only a selection of the films produced by Csuri and his students, but also, several interactive installations realized in the diverse media indicated in the exhibition’s subtitle. Csuri even managed to install a complete computer graphics system, a PDP 11/45 computer line drawing display, to demonstrate the interactive process for animated film. Art students were scheduled to demonstrate to the public techniques for art graphics and film animation. There is no documentation of the exhibition besides the catalogue, because after only five days, the entire campus was shut down when serious conflicts emerged in connection with
the civil rights movement.

Created in 1964, Contemplation acknowledges Csuri’s dual sources of artistic inspiration and experimentation, his fine arts training and the potential of technology. During the advent of applied computer science, there was only one computer available for the entire Ohio State University campus. As a result, Csuri found himself in dialogue with scientists more frequently than with fellow artists. Part of a series of works experimenting with imagery and technology, Contemplation delineates Csuri’s break from art constrained by paint and canvas.

Contemplation’s skewed lines were inspired, rather than created, by the pantograph device’s capabilities and denote the incursion of the computer into the realm of Csuri’s artistic sensibilities. What follows this experimentation was decidedly different. In essence, the dramatic shift in artistic tool sets, furnished by science, acted as the impetus for a new understanding of surface representation.

In Contemplation, Csuri first sketched a pencil line drawing on the stretched and gessoed canvas. Next, he used oil paint and created the defining lines by hand. The proportions of the man are subjected to transformations inconceivable in nature. A depiction of the same male figure, to the right of transformed renderings, is also rendered in Csuri’s original media of paint. In stark contrast to the pantograph-derived figures in the After the Artist series, however, Csuri’s thickly applied pigments give the male figure depth and form, allowing it to penetrate the third dimension.

This work, made concurrently with the After the Artist series, marks a significant transitional period in Csuri’s artistic career. It demonstrates that he was beginning to conceive of the transformative possibilities that the computer offered. Although they are similar in their formal properties, Contemplation is distinct from the works contained in the After the Artist series, insofar as the subject matter does not allude to master works in the history of art. Rather, we see a seemingly ordinary man situated in the modern era, as indicated by his collared shirt and tie. Here, Csuri does not invoke the works of past masters, or the limitations of brush and palette. With Contemplation, Csuri shifts into a new phase of artistic development. Although he continues to be influenced by the history of art, from this point forward, Csuri will use the computer to revolutionize the ways in which artists negotiate representation of their world.