Artworks Data Table

In 1963, I used an analog computer to make transformations on my line drawings. It could represent directly measurable quantities, and the results could be replicated. I discovered digital computer graphics in 1964, and my world was changed, forever.

Thirty-four years later, I find the problem of art is still the same, which is to create a meaningful structure to reveal aesthetic content. However, I have been affected by computer processes and procedures. I came from a traditional background as an artist, with a relatively simplistic viewpoint about structure and nature. My conception of nature and an object has been expanded by science and computer graphics. I better understand how computer procedures can affect one’s definition of an object. An object is not simply a geometry. My object has built-in procedures that affect its behavior. Also, when I touch it, my object can make sounds or change its form. It can send messages to other objects.

I see and feel a single object from many points of view. When I make copies of an object, they become captured instances of time representing inner agents and different psychological states. Symbolically, it represents past, present, and future states and becomes a character within a virtual space. The surrounding atmosphere is symbolic of distance and a time past. Shadows are like an echo of what was once another reality. I try to define a mythological space to express a range of feelings, inner problems, and mysteries.

Computer art based on mathematical definitions of objects and strategies force the artist towards a deadly and plastic concept of reality. How does an artist using this process avoid the cold and sterile and achieve a semblance of spontaneity? I have found that one needs to develop a sense of the ridiculous to overcome such perfection. If you truly play in parameter space or do it wrong, the results are usually more interesting.

Pan the Greek God of Mischief lives in my computer, which I named Stupid. My interest in using a computer’s capability to exploit new notions about creativity are very intriguing to Pan. At the same time, he takes great pleasure in tormenting me and causing mistakes so that I become confused and question my involvement with a computer. We have an interesting relationship: he deliberately corrupts my parameters and presents me with what he thinks are horri­ble pictures. Most of the time this is true, but occasionally Pan makes a mistake and I get back an amazing image. It is something I would never have predicted, and then I claim it as my own personal work. When this happens, he becomes furious, and his evil side comes out and shuts down the computer. Eventually, Pan will relent because he really enjoys playing this game with me. After all, he wins most of the time. And I have to admit that I do love Pan’s playful attitude about art and computers.

I must constantly remind myself that as an artist my role is to build psychological bridges linking together feelings and shared human experiences. My use of frag­mentation is symbolic of chaos or of partial objects and blunted feelings. These bridges must support my effort to express my inner thoughts and feelings about the human spirit. The goal is to achieve a balance between technology and an esthetic domain to make a meaningful artistic statement.

As I write these words of wisdom, I notice that Pan is yawning. He is very bored with the notion of art and computers. He has learned all of this before from so many artists. Apparently there are certain key phrases that simply put him to sleep. However, when I succeed in crossing one of my bridges, Pan becomes confused and forgets to be my nemesis.

Computer art based on mathematical definitions of objects and strategies force the artist towards a deadly and plastic concept of reality. How does an artist using this process avoid the cold and sterile and achieve a semblance of spontaneity? I have found that one needs to develop a sense of the ridiculous to overcome such perfection. If you truly play in parameter space or do it wrong, the results are usually more interesting.

Pan the Greek God of Mischief lives in my computer, which I named Stupid. My interest in using a computer’s capability to exploit new notions about creativity are very intriguing to Pan. At the same time, he takes great pleasure in tormenting me and causing mistakes so that I become confused and question my involvement with a computer. We have an interesting relationship: he deliberately corrupts my parameters and presents me with what he thinks are horri­ble pictures. Most of the time this is true, but occasionally Pan makes a mistake and I get back an amazing image. It is something I would never have predicted, and then I claim it as my own personal work. When this happens, he becomes furious, and his evil side comes out and shuts down the computer. Eventually, Pan will relent because he really enjoys playing this game with me. After all, he wins most of the time. And I have to admit that I do love Pan’s playful attitude about art and computers.

I must constantly remind myself that as an artist my role is to build psychological bridges linking together feelings and shared human experiences. My use of frag­mentation is symbolic of chaos or of partial objects and blunted feelings. These bridges must support my effort to express my inner thoughts and feelings about the human spirit. The goal is to achieve a balance between technology and an esthetic domain to make a meaningful artistic statement.

As I write these words of wisdom, I notice that Pan is yawning. He is very bored with the notion of art and computers. He has learned all of this before from so many artists. Apparently there are certain key phrases that simply put him to sleep. However, when I succeed in crossing one of my bridges, Pan becomes confused and forgets to be my nemesis.

In 1963, I used an analog computer to make transformations on my line drawings. It could represent directly measurable quantities, and the results could be replicated. I discovered digital computer graphics in 1964, and my world was changed, forever.

Thirty-four years later, I find the problem of art is still the same, which is to create a meaningful structure to reveal aesthetic content. However, I have been affected by computer processes and procedures. I came from a traditional background as an artist, with a relatively simplistic viewpoint about structure and nature. My conception of nature and an object has been expanded by science and computer graphics. I better understand how computer procedures can affect one’s definition of an object. An object is not simply a geometry. My object has built-in procedures that affect its behavior. Also, when I touch it, my object can make sounds or change its form. It can send messages to other objects.

I see and feel a single object from many points of view. When I make copies of an object, they become captured instances of time representing inner agents and different psychological states. Symbolically, it represents past, present, and future states and becomes a character within a virtual space. The surrounding atmosphere is symbolic of distance and a time past. Shadows are like an echo of what was once another reality. I try to define a mythological space to express a range of feelings, inner problems, and mysteries.

Proportion is always an important issue in architectural composition. In the past, architects have explored variants in proportion by making sketches and study models, but this is a slow and cumbersome process. Now it is possible to carry out these explorations very fluidly and rapidly by entering values for dimensioning variables at a graphics workstation. Here we see some variants on a colonnade, that were produced in this way.

In this project, the proportions are not only of aesthetic importance, but also of technical significance, since the doorway is intended to function as a sun-control device. The software used to generate the variants allowed manipulation of about fifty dimensioning variables.

A cyber entity intertwines with an international feminist network and questions the future of the internet.

Feminism is a Browser introduces us to the history and thoughts of great female media pioneers. Some of them received acknowledgment for their work, others did not. The project highlights their important projects at the beginning of Internet technology (and after) and opens a bridge between generations.

Yeva is a fictional cyber entity and bored in the vastness of their webspace. They were created in the 90s by the first generation of FACES, an international network of media pioneers founded by Diana McCarty, Valie Djordjevic and Kathy Rae Huffman. These women have been communicating for more than 20 years through an email list to support each other in the tech world. They are hackers, net activists, media artists, cyberpunks and web researchers. Yeva has access to the mail archive and raises many questions towards their so-called ‘mothers‘: Why did they create Yeva, who or what embodies the Internet and how do the images and utopias of cyberspace transform? As the server freezes, Yeva decides to leave the webspace Rosegarden and meet their mothers in the physical world. An essayistic documentary journey begins, a feminist revision of the Internet.

Utopia as a place out of existence, offers an immense space to dream. The video collage OU TOPOS introduces us to different ideas about new worlds, using public footage from the internet.
By arranging the snippets, Eifler questions the approach to the utopian constructions. Can the future overcome ideas of colonization, slavery, sexism?

“Explosion” is a funny little bit of my imagination. It took birth on a morning when I decided that utopia ends and freaks explode…or was it the lousy breakfast that inspired me? My idea led me into a small exploration of video, and later, processed video. What more can I say? After all, a video is worth a thousand words.

We are in fact already cyborgs, replicating ourselves as avatar forms online. Our cellphones and computers act as extensions of our own neural networks, imparting a boundless knowledge of facts and figures. B/W MIND is an experiential piece designed to manifest the interconnection humans have with technology.

I once came across an interesting store selling animal models. It felt like I was in a zoo. As if in a trance, I experienced my most simple and happiest days again. But people who pass this store never notice this interesting zoo. At that moment, I knew there were too many people in this world crazy about business, never savoring time, and making worthless dreams. Maybe my creation can create an unusual world for you.

This work invites viewers to see the world through a machine’s perspective. People are accustomed to seeing the world through an anthropocentric viewpoint and create things accordingly. What will it be like if machines are creating things through their perspective? Created by the Mechanical Creator, what are the challenges this group of mechanical life forms is facing for survival? How do they live within and adapt to the environment? We know that hermit crabs are using human trash as their shells. What would the mechanical life forms do when they are interacting with their living environment?

African Kuba Textiles: Structural Inference and Contemporary Design Using Shape Grammars

While many cultures create designs with geometric patterns, each has distinct motifs and symmetries. The textiles by the Kuba ethnic groups in southeastern Congo are unique in their iterations and transformations of basic geometric shapes. These textiles, woven from the fiber of the raphia palm, reveal a sophisticated vocabulary of geometric patterns. This project illustrates application of a generative model to interpret the geometric structure inherent in Kuba textiles by ascribing a shape grammar, to create contemporary design variations through grammar variations, and finally to fabricate the new designs on a computerized loom.

Kuba textile designs can be described as compositions of simultaneous diversity. Women artisans incorporate spontaneity and improvisation in their designs to achieve uniqueness and individuality – part of their cultural aesthetics. The designs are most often characterized by semi-symmetry, achieved by the juxtaposition of distinct geometric motifs, and by controlled variations in texture, scale, shape, orientation, and/or color. As the knowledge and skills of elder generations die out, analysis of these art forms generates considerable interest in the contemporary design and arts community.

Shape grammars provide a powerful paradigm both for representing the structural complexity in existing designs, like Kuba, and for creating contemporary variations. They also provide a structured mechanism to express the recursion inherent in the artwork. Arrangements are formally captured as a finite sequence of Euclidean transformations (translation, rotation, scale, and reflection). Coloring techniques in the artwork are expressed as properties of basic shapes. Texturing, blending, and fading are employed as the primary coloring techniques.

By traversing the grammar’s language or reworking grammars, artists, designers, and historians can wander freely in the “neighborhood” of an existing design, exploring variations and discovering elements that define the character of an existing pattern. By modifying a pattern to replicate another existing design, the artist or researcher can get a hands-on feel for the similarities and differences between them. The end product of such work may be new patterns or simply a better understanding of the ones under examination.

It is possible to generate interesting families of artworks by simple variations in their grammar rules. A child grammar may even retain the exact pictorial specification, but modifying coloring rules may yield a new design through different blending, line traits, or color assignments.

Once new designs are specified using modified shape grammars, pictorial specifications can be used to drive a computerized Jacquard loom and fabricate new designs.

Optical Handlers – eeyee is an optical device that dissects embodied visual experience with a simple tool set: LCDs and cameras. It literally splits users’ vision into two and relocates it onto their hands separately. The extended vision, along with the mobility of the hands, makes it possible for users to observe the world from a different perspective: through the limbs.

Instead of splitting vision into just left and right, eeyee treats each split stereoscopically, so users experience a double mobile real-time stereoscopic vision, which has a redundant reality that raises an interesting question: “Aren’t we living in a 3D world already?
Or are we?”

When users wear this device, their experience is completely alienated. They have to manipulate their bodies and invent new ways to cope with their surroundings. Two peeking holes in the face of the goggles allow bystanders to see what eeyee is looking at.
As eeyee awkwardly moves around and learns about its environment, it draws a tremendous amount of attention and curiosity. Eventually, it bursts the social bubble with its friendly and funny alien look. Once someone is encouraged to come closer and peek into eeyee’s eyes, laughter follows. Essentially, eeyee blinds the users and heightens their senses to create a tension between the user and other human beings.

As a result of the ever-expanding information technologies, “pluralism” becomes a common phenomenon in our lives. For me, reality is many individual components rather than one interconnected thing. I intentionally put fragmented pieces of motifs, memories, different color schemes, some hints of related inner structure, together to make a diptych that can be viewed separately or as a whole to express my attitude toward the ever-transforming surroundings and cultures. For me, “Art” is a way of promoting the healing, growth, and wholeness of individuals. All my works are my self portraits: they reflect the inner part of me and give me access to examine my feelings, my thoughts, my experience, my conditions – my life. I strive to overcome fears and embrace discoveries and changes. The purpose of this exploration is to make the unconscious conscious and eventually make a more integrated self. With technological invention comes an expanding and altering of consciousness. This phenomenon leads to the making of a new, postmodern self – one with many personae but no unifying center. It sounds like a contradiction, yet to some degree this is true. We are all contradictions, divided against ourselves. But such temptations for distraction and fragmentation will eventually seduce us to look more closely at ourselves and invite us to discover within ourselves a higher power of wholeness and integrity. Human beings are an exploring species. Searching for ways to understand the relationship between the world and themselves, and to make a more integrated self, seems to be built into the genetic code of most people. That is my goal in making art

Milano is a grey, industrial city, with alarming pollution levels. This project concerns a wooded area surrounding the city: a green belt, punctuated by clearings with farms, abbeys, rivers, playgrounds, and educational and social spaces, but also a place to enjoy leisure, a
place of silence, contemplation, and full immersion in an individual and collective memory of our region. This is not a nostalgic project. To look at a city from the viewpoint of open spaces means to invert the perspective of a polycentric and functional practice of building, and direct one’s attention toward social relations and the vital flows of a metropolis. Boscometro is an interactive installation that creates places of discussion and reflection around the project and its deeper meanings. On a screen, viewers see aerial views of Milano, Turin, and other cities. At first, the chosen city looks grey and covered with smog. Viewers choose trees from a side menu and drop them in the Boscometro area. As the trees multiply, the city looks cleaner and brighter. This installation has profound social and ecological value, and it is a joyous way of involving people in a very serious project.

As Picasso said “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” So is my work and since I love and live among thousands of books, of course they’re my inspiration, my way of translating them on images frequently is at the origin of my works. Since I love calligraphy, words are often part of my works, no matter what language and alphabet, with different colors and shape, following the meaning of the books from which I stole them.

An homage to Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Giorgio Strehler:

When to the moment I shall say,
“Linger awhile’ so fair thou art!”….

This double-sided painting on canvas and silk is inspired by Goethe’s poem, but especially by the theater staging that Giorgio Strehler, the greatest Italian director, produced in Milano in 1991-92. It was magic and the last major performance he offered before he died in 1997. Theater is an essential part of my life as an artist, and I had the chance to work with Strehler. Theater is also a special art that only lasts during the time it is presented. No recordings will ever reproduce its peculiar atmosphere. I know this well, since recently Strehler’s Piccolo Teatro asked me to make a special edition of Faust from their video archives, reducing it from seven hours to two, for the European Theater Festival. It was a success, but I felt frustrated. So I decided to make this artwork to convey, if possible, the same magic I felt when I saw “Faust Fragments” in 1991.

Computers are very important to my way of painting, and I make extensive use of them, from layout to the almost final image. In this case, I mostly worked with a Quante Graphic Paint Box to create images, and with a Mac for inputs and outputs.

I digitized many elements, textures that I made in a traditional way, calligraphic drawings. Then I created 35 separate pieces: two quite big (3.30 metres x 3.30 metres) to be printed on canvas, the others of different sizes to be printed on silk, with a large, professional-quality printer specially designed for fabrics.

A significant scenographic element of Strehler’s staging was a spiral, which symbolized Faust’s life and his striving to move ahead. It was my starting point. Around it, I wrote some verses of the poem. Then on one side I separately painted 33 significant dramatic moments (to be printed on silk, then sewn onto the canvas), and on the other side I wrote and painted more verses, in German, English, and Italian. I put all the pieces together and finished the artwork by painting over it with oil and acrylic. To be seen on both sides, the artwork hangs from a special support, robust and light, very easy to mount and transport.

As Picasso said “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” So is my work and since I love and live among thousands of books, of course they’re my inspiration, my way of translating them on images frequently is at the origin of my works. Since I love calligraphy, words are often part of my works, no matter what language and alphabet, with different colors and shape, following the meaning of the books from which I stole them.

As Picasso said “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” So is my work and since I love and live among thousands of books, of course they’re my inspiration, my way of translating them on images frequently is at the origin of my works. Since I love calligraphy, words are often part of my works, no matter what language and alphabet, with different colors and shape, following the meaning of the books from which I stole them.

The sun was beginning to beat upon the fields, fresh risen into the vault of heaven from the slow still currents of deep Oceanus, when the two armies met. They could hardly recognise their dead, but they washed the clotted gore from off them, shed tears over them, and lifted them upon their waggons. Priam had forbidden the Trojans to wail aloud, so they heaped their dead sadly and silently upon the pyre, and having burned them went back to the city of llus. The Achaeans in like manner heaped their dead sadly and silently on the pyre, and having burned them went back to their ships. Homer, Iliad, Book VII These words appear, in Italian and in English in my work, expressing my deepest feelings about all wars. Last year was extremely trying for me. I got quite ill, and death became a very serious thought. I believe that in such moments one either closes oneself in grief or fights and works a lot, to try to win. Then again, I looked around me and felt all the world’s tragedies in a manner even stronger than usual and thought of myself as a very lucky person. I often spend my summer in Greece, travelling in quite deserted places. During those trips, I have noticed some very colourful little iron boxes shaped like little houses, sitting on short poles on the side of roads, especially of narrow mountain roads. Greeks place them wherever someone dies in a car accident. They remember the dead and remind the living. They’re not beautiful, but in a strange sort of way, merry. Inside the boxes are several objects: a lighter, a bottle of coke or water, a candle, sometimes an icon, and a silver goblet. They always moved me. The thought of all the wars that are going on forced upon me the completion of an old image that to me symbolizes all wars: a lonely wall still standing, smoke, the shadow of the Twin Towers, some planes passing by: sadness, desolation. And all the little Greek iron houses seemed to have to be there. Millions should be painted. To remember and remind.

As Picasso said “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” So is my work and since I love and live among thousands of books, of course they’re my inspiration, my way of translating them on images frequently is at the origin of my works. Since I love calligraphy, words are often part of my works, no matter what language and alphabet, with different colors and shape, following the meaning of the books from which I stole them.

My work has been inspired by the Tabula Peutingeriana, from the first century A.O. It is an early road map of the imperial highways of the
Roman world, roughly covering the area from the southeast of England to present day Sri Lanka. It is not a “map” in the present sense of the word, but a cartogram. No copies of the original have survived, but a copy of it was made in 1265 by a monk at Colmar. The entire map was originally a long, narrow parchment roll, and in its present state measures 22 feet, 1. 75 inches long by 13.25 inches wide. In 1508, the humanist Konrad Celtes of Vienna left the Colmar manuscript to Konrad Peutinger. It was first published in 1591, and since 1618, it has generally been known as the Tabula Peutingeriana. What is life but a sort of cartogram? Some people write autobiograpies, others write diaries, but being a painter, my life story is best described as a cartogram. So, last year I started to build my own Tabula, which I called Fantastica, because life itself is a fantastic and beautiful experience. It is made of signs, colours, and words in any possible language. It does not intend to tell a story, but to make the reader feel a new experience. Rolling the Tabula back and forth on its leather case is something unusual. The case is built to hold, just beneath the parchment roll, a DVD player with a flat screen on top of it. I made a video that perfectly integrates the still images of the cartogram and, through the transparency of the parchment. 20 and 30 animation live video. So reading the Tabula requires manual activity, but viewers can also see and hear the Tabula itself. This piece is a never-ending work in progress.

The Goodnight belongs to Jorge Luis Borges’ universe, and mine. It is the object I would love to outlive me. Giving a message of orderly disorder, colors and shades, geometry and casual strokes, despair and love, darkness and light, and all which lies in between.

The piece was created for an exhibit in Italy entitled Amate Cose (Beloved Objects). The exhibit theme was inspired by a Borges’ poem, “Las Cosas” (Things), which talks about objects around us that we perceive and feel and remember. They stare at us and at our lives. They are objects beloved and beloved moments of life. So, my object is this patchwork. I thought of it as a white cover when, very tired one night, I fell asleep, dreaming strange and colorful dreams, which all flew on it, composing The Goodnight.

I use a downloaded 3-D software to scan diary spaces with my mobile phone, producing fragmentary and blurry images by moving the lens arbitrarily when in the capturing process. I put the images of different environments scanned in different times in a new, virtual, Artificial space coordination, therefore, “that space and this space” becomes “here an now” and appears in the same virtual time-space. My mother’s family immigrated from Myanmar to Taiwan to pursuit an ideal life, she often contact my relatives who have immigrated to United States through Internet video chat, I learned them how to produce panorama scan with mobile phone, they scanned their living environment, and sent the images to me through the Internet; therefore, I can juxtapose them with our living space in Taiwan.

The voice in VR video is the dialogue between my mother who have immigrated from Myanmar to Taiwan and my aunt who have immigrated to United States, They chatted in Burmese. They have not seen each others for a decade of years, they keep in touch with hi-tech product every weekend, the daily conversations between them are shifting in different spaces in the VR world, “there” and “here “Is closer to each other yet are still far away, and the fragmentary and blurry images after scanning represent the real appearance of sense and memory, and try to explore in the age of accelerated development of information technology, we seems grasped more, but become more incomplete.

Over The Waves is to get over human hardships. Fish group is man group man group. It is shape of human society, that beautiful figure on lapped fishes.

Raw Quinoa juxtaposes various depictions of crisis and growth to evoke a sense of uncertain, organic infinity. It is composed of several sources of found and original audio-visual materials. These include high-end architectural visualizations, Washington D.C., emergency preparedness manuals, vegetation.

“My work maps the logic and material manifestations of the collective imagination. I’m particularly interested in tracing the unexpected contortions and epistemological mutations of networked culture. I use a variety of forms to play with misbegotten media species and their rapidly expanding cosmocologies.”

Winner of multiple awards including “Game of the Year” at Games for Change 2012, WAY pairs two anonymous players who must learn to communicate without words in order to overcome the obstacles that divide them.

With this installation, I was interested in developing alternative “soft” computer interfaces based on natural media. These devices, compared to traditional interfaces, are imprecise and vague, capturing only the gestural essences of the user’s interactions. Air and water, with their innately ethereal properties, suit the thematic exploration of the installation’s content, where the viewer creates, via real-time image processing software, a dialectic between the icons of societal identities – architecture – and the fleeting first-person experiences contained within these structures. Through the non-linear dynamics of these two fluid media, viewers can only provide impulses, via stirring water in the tub or blowing air onto the monitor, to a complex natural system that propagates beyond their control. The futility of the human intervention is compounded by the fact that there are neither goals nor states in the system; the viewer’s presence is as transient as the visual content and interface media. A final irony: not only do we perturb the system, the work leaves traces of itself: wet hands and shortness of breath.

Edge of the Observable is an audiovisual artwork which explores the limits of materiality and knowledge, through an experimental manifestation of data taken from experiments at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The work seeks to manifest the sublime and dynamic parameters of collision events, enhancing the infinitesimal material and energetic qualities of particle physics in a way that utilizes the science, but manifests it as an expressive event – as new-materialist philosopher Manuel DeLanda states, “even humble atoms can interact with light and energy in a way that literally expresses their identity”.

The visual data from one of billions of collisions is the source material for the artwork – this “event” is visually re-manifested through a material experimental setup. In parallel to the basic form of a physics experiment, the data is emitted as light from an energy source; it is then amplified and filtered through an optical lens-like device; and is then captured and recorded by a camera detector. The artwork plays with the extremely small spatial and temporal scales involved in such experiments, as well as the concept of the ‘golden event’, a term used in particle physics to describe a perfectly recorded image of a rare or important particle interaction. The dark void-like space in the middle of the video manifests both conceptually and experimentally the edge of observability, as the region within this space cannot be detected, and, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, is ultimately unknowable.

The soundtrack accompanying the video is literally a recording of the accelerator “tune”, the transverse electromagnetic vibration within the particle beam, which is pitch-shifted and equalized to enhance its expressive qualities. The final artwork is in ultra-high definition and presented as a six minute looping audio-visual sequence.

cNote is an exuberant creative synthesis of picture and sound, ani­mation and music. Filmmaker Chris Hinton stretches his formidable animation skills in this work, where the dynamic movement of his visual art dances in syncopation with the bold musical strokes of an original composition. This music was created expressly for cNote, as a creative counterweight for Hinton to work against and with. In this animated pas de deux, Hinton and Montreal-based composer Michael Oesterle leap back and forth between picture and sound, building, tearing down, and rebuilding until the film exists only as an integrated and unified “one.” A film without words.

The wreck of the HMS Royal Oak lies on the sea bed in Scapa Flow, Orkney. This image was produced from 3D point-cloud data gathered using high-resolution multi-beam sonar during a survey of the wreck in 2006 by ADUS. Historic shipwrecks on the sea bed are of significant interest for a number of reasons. They may contain toxic or explosive cargo or may leak corrosive substances that can adversely affect the local marine environment. However, due to the fact that many of these shipwrecks around the world are not visible to the general public, their environmental and historic significance is often ignored. My work attempts to raise awareness of their potential impact on the environment as well as their place in history, often as tragic memorials to loss of human life, by representing them as monuments, often serenely beautiful, as the sea slowly deconstructs them. This image is intended to be reproduced as a limited-edition, commemorative print to raise funds for the Royal Oak Survivors’ Association and the Royal British Legion, organisations that provide support for exservicemen in the UK. The multi-beam survey by ADUS was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence (UK) Marine Salvage department, which is managing extraction of oil and munitions from the wreck. The 3D visualisation is a result
of my research at the School of Media Arts and Imaging at the University of Dundee, Scotland. The ADUS team consists of: Chris Rowland, Martin Dean, and Mark Lawrence

There was a lifeguard. Given the lives of hundreds of children, but too young to vote or drink, the lifeguard was searching for his/her identity, where it belonged in the world. His/her soul was held out like a decorated cake constructed from the basic elements of life. The lifeguard continues on a journey not knowing what it will encounter next. Symbols of society bombard the lifeguard, and stories are told.

My images use a modern saint: the lifeguard. Through the journeys of the lifeguard, the images discuss the intricate connections holding our lives together. There are things that surround us, and contradictions abound in our society. Today, we no longer pray to a god, but to computers. They have become our new religion. We rely on the machines for the lifeblood of our society. Why is it that we are so fascinated by the computer?

I use computer art to not only question our society, but to question the viewer’s belief in the art object. Computer art exists not on any known natural plane. An image is reached by entering a maze of directories. I find this similar to cave painters who searched their way back to the sacred images. Once there, the image is almost alive.

Today, the computer stores a 3D rendering, a multimedia piece, an installation, a movie special effect, a scientific picture of an organism, and two-dimensional images until the moment when it is given life. It may exist only for a brief moment on the screen, or sometimes longer when printed. Computer images appear on the screen, on celluloid, and in printed form.

My work embodies a zealous devotion to computer imaging. Each piece brings a new discovery. Duratrans in lightboxes project light toward the viewer, recreating the journey from the monitor to the eye. Light engulfs the room, leaving a powerful and beautiful effect on the viewer.

I was interested in art long before I can remember; my interest in computers began in the fourth grade. That year, I programmed squares and lines to create images not unlike an etch-a-sketch. On a Tuesday in 1984, we got a Macintosh 128k computer and MacDraw. My interest in computers and art continued into college. I took printmaking, painting, sculpture, and photography. In 1991, I began using Fractal Design Painter and the WACOM tablet to create my images. They closely simulated the feeling that I was used to.

My images and discourse matured during two years of graduate work at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I create images that incorporate metal, wood, fabric, and on eclectic mix of output options. Now, in teaching digital art at Northern Arizona University, I constantly challenge myself and my students to embrace this new medium to the fullest.

There was a lifeguard. Given the lives of hundreds of children, but too young to vote or drink, the lifeguard was searching for his/her identity, where it belonged in the world. His/her soul was held out like a decorated cake constructed from the basic elements of life. The lifeguard continues on a journey not knowing what it will encounter next. Symbols of society bombard the lifeguard, and stories are told.

My images use a modern saint: the lifeguard. Through the journeys of the lifeguard, the images discuss the intricate connections holding our lives together. There are things that surround us, and contradictions abound in our society. Today, we no longer pray to a god, but to computers. They have become our new religion. We rely on the machines for the lifeblood of our society. Why is it that we are so fascinated by the computer?

I use computer art to not only question our society, but to question the viewer’s belief in the art object. Computer art exists not on any known natural plane. An image is reached by entering a maze of directories. I find this similar to cave painters who searched their way back to the sacred images. Once there, the image is almost alive.

Today, the computer stores a 3D rendering, a multimedia piece, an installation, a movie special effect, a scientific picture of an organism, and two-dimensional images until the moment when it is given life. It may exist only for a brief moment on the screen, or sometimes longer when printed. Computer images appear on the screen, on celluloid, and in printed form.

My work embodies a zealous devotion to computer imaging. Each piece brings a new discovery. Duratrans in lightboxes project light toward the viewer, recreating the journey from the monitor to the eye. Light engulfs the room, leaving a powerful and beautiful effect on the viewer.

I was interested in art long before I can remember; my interest in computers began in the fourth grade. That year, I programmed squares and lines to create images not unlike an etch-a-sketch. On a Tuesday in 1984, we got a Macintosh 128k computer and MacDraw. My interest in computers and art continued into college. I took printmaking, painting, sculpture, and photography. In 1991, I began using Fractal Design Painter and the WACOM tablet to create my images. They closely simulated the feeling that I was used to.

My images and discourse matured during two years of graduate work at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I create images that incorporate metal, wood, fabric, and on eclectic mix of output options. Now, in teaching digital art at Northern Arizona University, I constantly challenge myself and my students to embrace this new medium to the fullest.

Art is only a representation of an original that we will never see or understand. Viewers perceive minute details of the processes and the influences on the artist and their work. As with Duchamp’s work we get a glimpse of another dimension. A person in today’s Technological / Information society counts on the computer, e-mail, telephone, the cash machine and many other things to be there. How many though, understand the complex processes that go on behind these machines. The computer has become my sketch book, drawing board and gives me the finished product. The computer a creative environment with a flexibility unavailable image processor. All my creative energies are expended and preserved as an electronic file (mathematical formulation) only to be viewed when called upon.

The original will never be touched by human hands it exits without space or time.

A painter asked me the other day, “Couldn’t you paint this?” I said, “No!” Then I offend him when in return I asked, “Why do you use canvas and oil paint?”

My current work looks at patterns. In society, ornamentation, color, and life repeat in many different ways. Technology has added to the repetition by reducing the knowledge down to 1s and 0s.

Additional information may be found at www.csj2.com

We are all affected by our immediate context and its political, environmental, cultural, and temporal influences. Climate Shifts juxtaposes various locations around the globe and their points of view through local news headlines and weather data. Differences in concerns and perspectives emerge, sometimes about the same world events, allowing a glimpse into the collective psyche of each place.

How do news sources in different regions interpret an election? What are the primary concerns in Beirut versus Jerusalem? What events in Asia echo in Latin America? When financial or health crises strike, what patterns of response are similar or different across the globe?
A large umbrella acts as an overhead screen upon which animations shift through various destinations, with the top of the umbrella pole acting as a locator. Climate news, weather, and time are gathered from real-time RSS feeds and layered over an illuminated light-pollution satellite image of the globe. Similarly layered, time is reflected by clock hands that spin and adjust according to the time zone of the current location.

A-Volve is an interactive environ­ment where visitors interact with virtual organisms in the real space of a water-filled glass pool. Using a sensor pencil, they draw the profile and shape of any possible form onto a monitor screen and create three-dimensional organisms. The organisms are simulta­neously transferred and displayed as three-dimensional creatures in the water of the pool, where they are immediately “alive.” They move and swim, and they can be modified in real time.

These virtual creatures are prod­ucts of the rules of evolution and are influenced by human creation and decisions. They are sensitive to hand movements in the water, and they react to human behaviour. Visitors can catch them, modify their forms, and communi­cate with them in real time. When it is “touched,” a creature will avoid the hand and try to flee. Sometimes, it will come back to “play”. Each creature moves, reacts, and evolves according to its original design, so it creates unpredictable and always new life-like behaviour. Since the organisms capture the slightest movements of hands in the water, their form and behaviour change constantly.

Specific algorithms developed by Mignonneau and Sommerer ensure that the virtual creatures move very smoothly and animal-­like. None of the forms is pre-­calculated; they are all “born” in real time by visitor design, and they achieve their behaviour by moving in the real-water environ­ment. If nobody is creating any forms or interacting with them, the creatures die and disappear.

These living, reacting organisms also interact with other organ­isms created by other visitors. Two forms can merge and create a new form, which combines the genetic codes of its parents. Visitors can promote the “birth” of a new organism. With their hand movements in the water, they can “join” two organisms by trying to bring them near to each other. When they succeed, a new organism is born. The new crea­ture, which carries significant characteristics of both parents, lives in the pool, where it inter­acts with its environment and other forms.

The drawing device, which cre­ates new forms, can be used by only one person at a time, but several other visitors can interact with the creatures in the pool as new creatures are created. At the same time, visitors interact with each other through the various virtual organisms.

In this virtual environment, the visitor is part of the evolutionary system, a partner of the virtual organisms, and a creator and pro­moter of “artificial life.” Following the laws of evolution and creation, A-Volve is open to all possible modifications and selections. It reduces the borders between real and unreal, by connecting reality to “non-reality.” Water, the medium for this artificial life “pool,” is the metaphor for birth and basic evolution.

A-Volve is part of a continuing investigation of natural interfaces and complex interactivity. Similar to “Interactive Plant Growing” (© 1992, Sommerer & Mignonneau), where visitors could interact with real plants and influence and control the growth of virtual three-dimensional plants, A-Volve deals with the definition of “life” and the con­nection between “reality” and
“non-reality”.

Both installations reveal human perception of reality by interpo­lating between both constitutions of environments (“real” and “non-real”). Complex natural interfaces (like plants or water) ensure a new approach to per­ception by asking: “What is Life?”. In both installations, complex systems like “human and plants” and “human and animal-like creatures” are connected through living interfaces, producing a com­plex “artificial biotope” that rep­resents the interaction between visitors and their environment.

Another important aspect of this work is the issue of “individuality” as a main constitution of life. A­-Volve connects the individuality of the visitors to the individuality of the artificial creatures, creating a pool of artificial individuals in a complex system of interactions. The individuality of the virtual creatures is, so to speak, a direct interpretation of the relationship between visitors and their per­ception of artificial reality. The creatures will always be different, depending on how visitors create them and play with them. Direct and simultaneous communication between creatures and visitors creates a pool that could itself be considered a “living system.”

By closely connecting the real natural space of the water to the unreal virtual space of the creatures, A-Volve minimizes the borders between “real” and “non-real,” creating a further step (after “Interactive Plant Growing”) in the search for “natural inter­faces” and “real-time interaction.”

“The rate of growth deserves to be studied as a necessary preliminary to the theoretical study of form, and organic form itself is found, mathematically speaking, to be a function of time.We might call the form of an organism an event in space-time, and not merely a configuration in space.”
– D’Arcy Thompson, “On Growth and Form,” Cambridge University Press, 1942

Interactive Plant Growing is an installation that deals with the principle of the growth of virtual plant organisms and their change and modification in real time in 3D virtual space. These modifications of pre-defined “artificially living plant organisms” are mainly based on the principle of development and evolution in time. The artificial growing of program-based plants expresses the desire to discover the principle of life as defined by the transformations and morphogenesis of certain organisms. Interactive Plant Growing connects the real-time growing of virtual plants in the 3D space of the computer to real living plants, which can be touched or approached by human viewers.

By touching real plants or moving their hands toward them human viewers can influence and control in real time the virtual growth of 25 and more program-based plants, which are simultaneously displayed on a video screen in front of the viewers. By producing a sensitive interaction with the real plants, the viewers too become part of the installation.

The various distance modulations of the viewer’s hands directly effect the appearance of the virtual plants, as they are ferns, mosses, trees, vines, and a cleaning plant. By sending different data values to the interface (which connects the plants and the growing program), the appearance of the virtual plants can be modified and varied. The viewers can control the size of the virtual plants, direct the rotation, modify the appearance, change the colors and control new positions for the same type of plant.

Each virtual plant species has at least six different variations, but generally there are more possibilities than just 25 variations of five plants, since the size, color, and translation can be modified for each single plant as well. All variations ultimately depend on the viewers sensibility to find the different levels of approximation distances.

In Interactive Plant Growing, artificial plants grow in a virtual 3D space, programmed by Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer on a 4D -VGX 320 Silicon Graphics Computer. This virtual growing is based on specially developed algorithms, according to the different morphological characteristics of real plant differentiation. Virtual growing is not based on the same principles as real growing, rather the appearance of movement and differentiation and determination during this evolutionary process can be considered to be optically similar.

In the program a new method of differentiation was developed that can be compared to the L-Systems of Aristid Lindenmayer, but using special randomizing parameters, which are seen as “artificial growth and differentiation regulators.” These randomizing parameters determine the morphology of the organisms by controlling their variations of forms. Each step in the construction of the plant forms is randomized in the greatest possible extent within prefixed minimum and maximum limits; like this the potential variations are as great as possible.

This leads us to different botanical growth forms. Plants like ferns, vines, or mosses change their appearance depending on the randomizing defined variables for size, length, rotation, translation, angle, and color. This idea of advanced randomizing could be compared with the term “walking randomizing.” The limits of randomizing could be considered as determination, whereas the randomizing itself can be representative for the differentiation.

The electrical potential of the real plants gets measured by special sensors, which are attached to the plant roots. This electrical potential is then compared with the electrical potential of the viewer. This voltage difference varies depending on the hand-plant distance. The sensitivity of the plant ranges from 0 to about 70 cm in space. These electrical signals are amplified, filtered, and sent to the converter.

Each plant is attached to an independent amplifier. A converter transforms the analog-amplified and filtered signals into digital data values. All five amplifiers send their signals to the converter; a multiplexer selects the signals to be converted. These values are then sent to the parallel port of the 4D VGX 320 Silicon Graphics computer. A special protocol (interface program) between computer and converter makes sure that each data value coming from each plant is interpreted in synchronization and in real time by means of the growing program during the drawing of the virtual plants.

Free access to virtual space needs to be improved and facilitated by enabling real­time integration of human participants into a 3D environ­ment. With this in mind, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau designed MIC Exploration Space, a virtual environment that allows users to enter into two different rooms and virtually interact with each other in real time. The place functions as a new form of integration; develop­ment pictures, artificial life, and artistic features cr eate an evolving environment, one that reflects the participants’ personalities and their inter­actions with one another.

MIC also emphasizes com­munication between remotely located participants who share the same virtual environment. Real-time feedback and unen­cumbered interaction are essential when designing such a space. Mignonneau’s 3D Key System allows the participants to interact freely, with no devices attached to their bodies. A camera detection system tracks visitors’ gestures and motion and interprets them in real time as character­istic features in the evolving environment. This enables each visitor to create a unique environment that interprets his or her actions with the other user. Evolutionary graphic processes create an open-­ended environment that is not predetermined but able to evolve over time.

Future Perfect is an interactive audio/video installation that contemplates the proposed Atlantic Yards development in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. If it is built, this astonishingly large-scale development will include 17 high-rise buildings and a sports arena, and it will be constructed in a neighborhood that consists primarily of low-rise, residential buildings and local businesses. The architectural shape of the neighborhood will be drastically altered. The Atlantic Yards development is currently a controversial issue in Brooklyn. Walking around the neighborhood, it is difficult to envision the enormity of the proposed architecture and to construct an informed opinion about the suitability of the proposal. The only images available of this suggested future are the architect’s renderings, which are necessarily drawn from a partisan perspective that presents the designs in a positive light. With a desire to fill this information gap, we created an installation that visualizes the developers’ plans from many angles, allowing people to interactively compare the proposed future with the present reality. Feeling the lack of community voices, we posted fliers all over the area surrounding the site, asking residents to phone in with personal opinions about the development, and about how they would ideally like to see their neighborhood developed. Recordings of the many calls that we received create the audio soundtrack to the piece. We also invited local schoolchildren (the people who will have to live with this architecture) to visually imagine how these streets would look if they had the power to shape this future. The installation is interactive in that both these “futures” are only revealed by someone’s physical presence. When viewers step into the installation, a video layer of an architectural future is interactively revealed in front of them and follows them as they move through the room. By exploring the width as well as the depth of the installation space, viewers can dynamically compare and contrast these different futures with the architecture of the present. In this way, the installation serves as a critical document of this moment in Brooklyn’s history.

A fragment of a resin made digital through 3d scanning is seen interacting with virtual airflows and particles. The imagery generates a symbiotic landscape of real matter and virtual space, incorporating both artificial and natural elements.

Close-up photograph of the installation ‘Chemical Garden’.

A sample of moss is seen encased by curing skins within a highly concentrated body of salt water. The ‘chemical sculpture’ of moss and alginate, an extract from seaweed, form over time, before they drop to the bottom of the tank.

This installation began as a special project for the Mozart Museum in the Figaro House in Vienna. For most of the visitors to the Mozart Museum’s stand­ing exhibition, the sketches for scores, although they are originals, tend to be less interesting than the letters and notes Mozart penned, for the simple reason that the contents of the musical scores remain inaccessible to people who cannot read them. This installation helps museum visitors move beyond simply viewing Mozart’s notes to a full experience of his music.

The work consists of a pedestal with an analog-capacitive glass surface. Behind the glass, an original musical score for Piano Fugue, Opus 154, is exhibited in the usual picture frame. When a visitor touches a note on the sketched musical score, a sequencer specially developed for this installation generates the corresponding musical note.

In this manner, visitors are able to follow the musical score with their fingers and play the piece of music. The speed at which their fingers move across the score determines the speed at which the music is reproduced.

This installation, the product of a collaboration with the Italian scholar Maurizio Seracini, focuses on visualizing the different layers of Ritratto di Gentiluomo. Through X-ray and infrared technology, the otherwise invisible sketches and grounding behind the surface of the painting are made visible.

The visualization system used in the SIGGRAPH 96 art show relies on an enormous touch screen specially developed for this purpose. As far as we know, the system, developed in England, is the largest analog ­resistive touch screen available worldwide.

Using a high-resolution data projector, Ritratto di Gentiluomo is back-project ed onto the touch screen at its original size, so visitors see it as a virtual replica of the original. By touching the screen, visitors can erase one layer of painting after another. They can proceed backward in time through the layers of the painting or “paint back in” some of the areas in the paint­ing that have been “erased”.

Viewers navigate their way through the third dimension of the picture and create a seam­less and unique pictorial collage of a major work of 16th-century art, without ad­ding anything to it that was not already present in the original.

The tactile becomes visible, the visible becomes audible, and the acoustic visible. Interactive architecture “conveys” impressions in another sense dimension: what is cast into question and becomes an object of playful development is the medium in which things appear to us.

The Virtual Cage is an installation intended to describe an architectonic space by means of a computer-controlled multi-channel audio system.

A glass platform that the viewer can walk across is located at the center of the installation. The platform is 2.5 by 2.5 meters in surface area. The glass components are mounted on a mobile, hydraulically cushioned steel structure. Two optical angle decoders, mechanically translated into the installation’s two horizontal axes, transmit the platform’s respective position to an IRIS Indigo workstation- it is continually tilted back and forth by the viewer’s movements. The platform is surrounded by a five-channel audio-system, with four loudspeakers positioned in the installation’s corners and one suspended directly over the middle o f the platform. If one imagines there to be lines connecting the speakers and the floor of the installation then one is essentially imagining a wire model in the form of a cube: the “Virtual Cage.”

This cage is filled with a swarm of individual dots that obey the laws of gravity and move around in space according to the tilted angle of the platform. The swarm-like being that gives diversified in it’s complex structure in the moment of maximum closeness to the viewer. This effect is made up by fading a second sample sequence into the sound. Via a midi-mixer the computer steers the sound in space. The viewer thus experiences acoustically the dimensions and the limits of the space surrounding him or her and which is otherwise invisible and therefore not accessible to perception.

drumCircle[ ] (2015) is an autonomous percussion and light instrument composed of an ensemble of eight connected den-den drums mounted to LED spotlights that create a temporal and spatial network of interactions between these machines and the viewer. Arranged in a circle pointing inward toward the center of the installation, these modules project light and sound patterns bidirectionally, creating an immersive and ritualistic technological experience that brings to light connections between technology, corporeality, and time.

Technically, drumCircle[ ] is an eight-step light and drum sequencer machine that “transduces” mechanical and electrical energy into shadows, lights, and sounds. Informed by the ideas of philosopher Gilbert Simondon, drumCircle[ ] understands transduction as not only the transformation and translation of one kind of signal into another, but also as a process that extends to our daily relationships with technological tools as techno-political schemes that give rise to our experience of life.

drumCircle[ ] seeks to make explicit how our notions of space and time are shaped by technology, creating relationships of dominance and meaning between subjects and objects, modifying our cognitive processes and the symbolic relationships we create with our environment.

We use the visible differences between individuals to make quick judgements and group assignments: he is blond, she is Asian, they are short, etc. What we can’t see is what causes the differences – the genetic makeup of each person, and the differences between one genome and another.

For this project, I wanted find a concise form that makes genomic data visible and shows identifiable differences between genomic signatures, without getting hung up on details. In order to reduce the complexity and size of the datasets, I chose to explore if a coarse summary of genetic data reducing a million points of difference down to twenty totals per chromosome would still preserve the individuality of each genome. As it turns out, the answer is yes.

The starting point are raw data files from the genetic service 23andMe, extracted from my own DNA and that of a couple of friends. Each file contains almost a million two-letter genomic position readouts. For each chromosome, counts of the observed letter combinations are translated to overlapping shapes of corresponding size, orientation, and color. The resulting artwork is different for each person.

This ambient “video scroll” presents two poems of the famous poet Han Shan as a reflection on Western mountaineers’ fight against nature as they ascend and descend the highest peaks, counterpointing the Chinese attempt of spiritual harmony. Proceeding from Chinese thought and aesthetics, the traditional concept of landscape painting, Shan-Shui-Hua, is recreated in digital visualization. The concept of multiple vanishing points (San-e-Ho) and the endless scroll are explored through digital filmmaking.

Pretty Good Privacy is an instal­lation in which a computer and a video camera are installed in an empty room. Outside the room, a monitor displays a virtual reproduction of the room where the visitor is standing, but the room on the monitor’s screen is not empty; it is filled with things from the artist’s private life: furniture, pictures, shoes, and other intimate miscellany. The artist virtually moves into the exhibi­tion space for the duration of the show.

To experience the installation, the visitor points the camera and looks through the viewfinder. The camera captures the spot in the room that the person is pointing to, but the image in the viewfinder is a computer-gener­ated rendition. The visitor is invited to explore the artist’s private life by poking, prying, and snooping around via the camera’s viewfinder.

The “video” taken by the camera is transferred to the monitor outside the room, where it can be watched by a larger audience. The artist’s private life is being broadcast, echoing so-called “Reality TV”.

Mistaken Identities is an inter­active CD-ROM inspired by the lives and work of 10 famous women: Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine the Great, Colette, Marie Curie, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, Frida Kahlo, Margaret Mead, and Gertrude Stein. It dis­covers bridges that link the lives of these women, using the CD-ROM format’s branching structure to create parallels and overlaps among their stories. The 10 women were chosen for their emblematic status as female role models; however, the CD-ROM examines them as complex figures whose identities are not essential or fixed, but contingent and mutable. Their identities are configured in the negotiated space between self and other, a negotiation that continues in my relation to them as narrator.

Each of these women derived her power from her ability to continually reinvent herself in response to the pressures and contradictions presented by her situation. Each woman also made a substantial contribution to culture and society in fields that were not particularly open to her participation. Mistaken Identities constructs a genealogy around these women, observing the overlaps and parallels between their histories without undermining the specificities of each person’s particular accommodation to the dilemma of how to be a woman.

The project has six sections: the Portrait Gallery, the Timeline, the Scrapbook, TV Movies, Morphologies, and the Puzzle. A variety of rhetorical tropes are utilized to present text, sound, graphics, and QuickTime movies interactively. The Portrait Gallery incorporates archival photo­graphs in a montage format that presents the self as a series of personae assumed and dis­carded with the passage of time. The same photographs recur in Morphologies, but my image is morphed into the images of the other women in a virtual filmstrip format. An inventory of the generic poses utilized by painters and photographers emerges; when represented according to these conventional strategies, everyone looks similar and fictions of coherent identi­ties are produced.

The Puzzle engages viewers as active participants by presenting them with the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to be assembled. Each time a piece clicks into place, a QuickTime movie plays. These movies present performance tableaus, organized around the manipulation of fetishes such as lipstick, cigarettes, mirrors, kisses, playing cards, and pens. The sensuality often lacking in virtual media is reinscribed through these surrogate objects.

The boundaries between fact, fiction, and interpretation are intentionally blurred in the project. TV movies consists of clips from documentaries and Hollywood movies based on the women’s lives. The viewer can channel-surf to watch these cul­tural artifacts that iconize their female subjects to be emulated.

In the Scrapbook, quotations from the women’s autobio­graphical writings are juxtaposed with snapshots that convey a sense of their daily lives. A gap opens between the images and the text, complemented by authorial intervention achieved through the insertion of sound effects. These sound effects rein­force or dispel the ambiance cre­ated by the images and text to enhance polyphonic dissonances.

The multiple channels available in the CD-ROM format are also explored in the Timeline. Clip-art drawings that encapsulate mile­stones in the women’s lives are grouped as a timeline resem­bling a charm bracelet. These milestone markers open up to reveal explanatory texts juxta­posed with QuickTime movies that provide commentary on the texts. The texts encompass gen­der blending, anachronisms, abrupt elisions in point of view, egregarious exotica, theoretical interlocutions, lyrical interludes, personal vendettas, artificial embellishments, paradoxical pastiches, and salacious lacunae. Pharmacological adventures/ addictions, fashions, jewelry, perfumes, gardens, tragic accidents, nervous breakdowns, violent skirmishes, obsessive compulsions, legal transgres­sions, masquerades, seductions, psychic cannibalism, hysteria, bizarre domestic arrangements, lavish expenditures, eccentric eating habits, and sentimental deathbed scenes are perversely eroticized.

A hundred white balloons in a totally dark room are floating in space like the atoms of a molecule. They are moving up and down slowly and gracefully. The balloons appear as floating spheres, forming three-dimensional pixels arranged in a 10×10 grid. The pixels combine together to make a larger form. The weightless objects are representing three-dimensional digital data sets in a dynamic display sculpture composed of physical particles.

The interactive balloon ballet is built out of synchronized movement and lighting. A screen-based interface telecommands the balloon ballet in sync to a chosen musical piece. The user can control the movement and lighting of each balloon independently. Morphing 3D shapes and patterns are blended with an overlay of supporting or counteracting light animations. The electric moons installation is probably the world’s largest physical 3D display.

An experimental work depicting a dark, surreal vision of a child’s world. A set of wooden sliding doors is the portal of an aged and decaying facade. Beyond these doors the viewer is allowed a voyeuristic glimpse of the interior space of a traumatic experience.

This work incorporates live action film footage with computer graphics and stop motion animation. The visual interface of sliding doors was modeled and rendered using Maya software. The live action, stop motion, and still imagery were digitally altered and composited using both Softimage DS and Adobe After Effects.

A bird whose questionable knowledge of physics finds himself in a difficult situation and confronts an unusual opportunity.

The previous generation lived in what could be called the “television culture,” and the next generation will live in a “computer culture.” My generation lives in an era between the two. Television and computer media are among the most significant inventions of what could be called the modern information system; however, we are often unaware of the effects these media have on our consciousness. Afterimages raises questions about the influences and effects of television and the computer on the cultures they create.

The sculpture consists of five stacked monitors: four monitors showing digital body animation and the top monitor acting as the body’s eyes and mind, projecting their point of view under the influence of the television and computer cultures. My intent is to represent the influence of these cultures on the audience’s bodies and brains through the electronic body in the monitor screens and the video images in the top monitor.

The intent is to suggest the loss of our natural minds to technologies and machines. New technologies influence our minds slowly; we often cannot detect the effects. Afterimages captures the idea that we do not easily realize the loss of our minds.

Afterimages is concerned with the matter of creativity, which has been regarded as the main permanent power of artists since the Stone Age. However, technology is affecting the natural human brain and creativity, and future artists may lose their natural creativity. The sculpture is a caution to all people, including artists who use technology carelessly.

The present generation is confused because we are living between television culture and computer culture, but only the present generation can recognize the problems associated with the technology. Afterimages suggests the invisible effects of digital technology and television technology, effects that presently have no name.

People in our society need to build a stronger relationship with nature. People are born in “natural mind” but, as we grow up on the earth, many people lose this. Our loss is caused by digital machines, artificial gray buildings, and so on. While much of our time is spent immersed in computer-chip cities and concrete jungles, much more of our time is spent day-dreaming of relaxing in nature. In this work, I depict a man who lives in a city. He is of the current generation, and lives in in the present time. Often, he misses the world of nature, as he works to earn his living.

I suggest that keeping our “natural mind” is important as we live within a digital culture. We can succeed as a digital generation, if we do not lose our natural ideas and thoughts.

I study epiphragms. Epiphragms are dried mucus or calcium-carbonate structures covering the apertures or openings of snails. They protect snails from dryness and sometimes, digestion from their bird predators. I study these structures to examine and question the dependencies humans have with other non-humans. More importantly, I study them to survive. I have observed and shadowed several snails; from the keong emas (Golden Snail) or Apple Snail along the struggling rice fields of Yogyakarta to the Helix pomatia that have been terribly misunderstood as a French delicacy. I have felt, sensed, watched and listened to these slimy companions in my installations. Similar to Anna Tsing (2015), I believe in a kind of collaborative survival, and a survival which pays attention to non-humans’ intricate adaptations and effect we have on one another.

In my recent work – human epiphragm prototype ver 1.0, I followed three species of snails across Paris. These snails taught me to probe futures where extremities become consistent. As chances of snail-and-I encounters became frequent, I decided to make sculptural versions of human epiphragms based on images collected from a do-it-yourself (DIY) webcam microscope. I design these 3D-printed human epipghrams to render visible the experiences of non-humans surviving with the harshest. To live amongst the cataclysmic destruction engendered by human capitalists, snails might know best.

“visceral zones” demonstrates that to create visceral scientific experiences is to first, acknowledge the potential futures DIYbiology hardware practice offers and second, to practise design with an anthropomorphic sensibility. I will continue this work with other snail companions in Detroit and Yogyakarta, two cities confronted by rapid and sometimes, unwarranted revitalization efforts and urbanization that makes science-making an even more alienating experience.

Considering the artists interest and long term collaboration involving data visualization strategies, AR and VR and 3D modeling, the work invites to reflect on the dramatic definition of ‘geo related’ political borders during 2018 elections in Brazil and the relation to the structural dichotomy of the social media’s domains. The work considers the importance of including political debate in technology-based artistic practices. Combining algorithmic modeling strategies for data visualization with digital fabrication, the work includes the generative design of a series of geometrically intricate crystals-like 3D models using as raw data Twitter APIs having as the search phrase hashtags related to Brazilian 2018 presidential elections twitted from defined geolocations. The choice for the installation was to select the largest cities of the country by region considering having a representative sample of Twitter’s users behavior concerning Tweets that include opposite hashtags (#nothim and #yeshim) emphatically depicting the bipolarity observed in the election results. Raw data is converted using a sequence of components from characters to numbers lists to points in x, y and z axes – building the spatial network from which an intricate and interlaced continuous surface is generated, and converted into a mesh. A smoothened representation of the mesh is calculated, not increasing the face count and allowing volume enhance specifications. The resultant geometry is baked and saved in .stl for 3D printing. The work navigates research fields such as Computer Graphics, Socio-Technical Systems, Data Science, Complex Network, Data Visualization and Analysis and Computational Aesthetics in a transversal move that incorporates Digital Fabrication and Altered Reality strategies for its ultimate materialization as an artwork

This performance is about the materialization of the performer’s thoughts and feelings on the stage.
In the performance, imagination becomes spatial. The stage is a place for the appearance of the invisible. Yasu Ohashi says: “The actors aim at our senses, our body, and our unconscious and not at our intellect. Their gestures try to envision the invisible world.”
A large projected image, with surround sound, creates an immersive space. The image and sound projected in the space interact with the performer through an EEG (electroencephalogram) interface, which measures the performer’s brain activity. These values are transmitted to a computer, which creates new sounds and images from the brain’s data.
This project was realized through a fellowship (artist in residency) at the Kunst und Medienwissenschaften Department of the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln.

“my language” is a group of Web-based flash animations of densely layered, colorful words plus audio of the same words, with buttons allowing the person playing the animation to control the layers of words and corresponding audio.

What makes “my language” a language is that it uses words and offers people the ability to control its flow while they experience it. They cannot contribute words or sounds directly over the Web so the language remains mine; “my language” is a projective device providing virtual conversation.

All artworks may be understood as projective devices: objects and experiences in which audiences find themselves mirrored more or less specifically. Projective devices invoke peoples’ histories with color, human faces, or words, for example. The power of a projective device for art, learning, entertainment, or therapy is in its feeling real enough to its audience that members relate to and interact with it emotionally, intellectually, and/or spiritually. The Web, in addition to carrying rich media and allowing user interactions, holds projective power in its availability – whenever people choose to connect, wherever they may be, with an Internet connected browser. “my language” takes advantage of the Web and other projective expedients – common words used without confining narratives, and a recorded voice. With the ability to interrupt, select, and interpret my words, audience members are empowered to treat “my language” as their instrument. I hope you will experience a connection to and even ownership of the words, which become visible and are spoken in response to your actions. The sense of relationship to an author/creator may not disappear, but I hope you will experience the authorial presence as amorphous, unstable, or dissolved in your own presence.

Myriad virtual communications over the Web and elsewhere lay claim to us, from advertisements and political messages of all kinds, to interchanges with family members, friends, associates, and various strangers. “my language” has qualities in common with these, in addition to its own unique qualities and one important difference. Its title announces ownership, and no matter how enticing “my language” proves to be or how intently audience members project themselves into it, my voice resumes and rambles, in sound and image, often insistently. Working within and revealing limits of virtual communication (on the Web), “my language” provides a framework for interaction between the absent author and authorial audience. It is a massage with the message that shared language remains strictly personal.

Climate change is a defining issue of our time. The geological provides a glimpse of deep-time as a supra-dimensional force – a four-dimensional perspective that subsumes both past and future and whose scope far exceeds human perception. The immersive cine-installation Ice-Time examines our culture’s altering perceptions of space and time, the deep-time of Earth’s environment, by using polar ice as a unique window onto issues of climate change.

Ice-Time is a singular cinematic portrait of ice, ranging from vast glaciers to individual crystals, created in response to the accelerating changes we are observing in Earth’s ecosystem. The stark iconography of ice used in Ice-Time serves as a distinct access point into the overwhelming complexity of climate change and its ramifications. It elicits the poetics of frozen water revealed by current geological research. The artwork documents this moment in glacial space-time, expressing the beauty and the rationality of polar ice at odds with the devastating chaos its disappearance portends.

Embodied immersion in the realm of ice, the direct experience of the cryosphere, plays an essential role in the process of creating and exhibiting the Ice-Time project. Filmed during a two-woman expedition to Western Greenland in 2016, the images and sounds of Ice-Time present hyper-realistic, amplified facets of ice taken at all scales, from the microscopic to the planetary. Our methodologies in the field and in the laboratory demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary art-science research and collaboration. The artwork Ice-Time distills contemporary culture’s psychic moment of a data-driven reality.

The movements of ice in the film are perceived as the effect of time on matter. Within each frame, the scales of time expand and contract, enfolding the viewer in variations of speed and distance. Six large projections and a 9.1-channel, three-dimensional ambisonic soundscape create a room-sized environment. The immersive environment is structured as a crystalline, cinematic tesseract. This hexagonal architecture echoes the structure of water crystals and hypercube shadows in three-space. Through a vivid, material presence of image, sound, data, and time, the immersive film establishes a physical interaction of form and content. The cine-installation creates an embodied, cinematic experience whose spatial poetics is deciphered by the somatic perambulations of the beholder. Ice-Time imbues the spectator with an embodied awareness of the environmental and cultural implications of polar ice, and the essential role ice plays in anthropogenic climate change.

Nothing Broke but the Heart is a physical poem, a concrete interpretation of the metaphoric language we use to verbalize love and emotions.

Modern, cold, invasive… none-the-less, state-of-the-art electronic medical technologies; X-ray beams, huge electromagnets, computers, film, and video, have been used to create very literal invocations of metaphors that have existed since the age of the Troubadours.

The installation contrasts the subjective expression of emotional injury with the objective analysis of physical injury. One can search for broken bones using X-rays. It is straightforward for a doctor to heal them. But, even with the most advanced medical imaging technology, the high-speed EPI scan, it is not possible to find the “break” in a heart. One cannot see the source of the pain.

In these images, Waite’s heart, present in the set of scans when taken in their entirety, is seen fragmented, sliced, “in pieces”, physically “broken” apart – as it felt at the time these scans were made. The heart is combined and contrasted with X-rays of bones and a video loop of computer animated hearts, compulsively, hypnotically running through distorted icons of “love”, heart always “center screen”. A chaos of color and light, individual frames flash like memories. These hearts hearts of stone, burning hearts, wooden hearts, “mutated” hearts, hearts that are only words are punctuated throughout by medical images of the body’s real heart – breathing, pumping, catching in its rhythm.

Viewers can enter the space – the body – examining the incredibly fine details of the bones, searching for the break in the fragments of the heart. Traversing the layers of veil-like images, the viewers reach the video, a mesmerizing light. The crossing of the room is like a striptease to the soul. Finally, they become entranced by strobing color and light, by the symbols of romance – perhaps by the illusions of love and image?

This poem uses the hardness, the rationality of electronic technology and its processes the antithesis of emotion as the language with which to express emotion. It is a modern vocabulary for a poetry of our age.

The coactive aesthetic is one that focuses on the interaction between the observer and the observed. The aesthetic is in the interaction between these two entities and is not manifested entirely in either. Furthermore, for the interaction to be considered coactive there must be qualities of this interaction that go beyond simple deterministic responses by the object to the viewer.

We seek to achieve behavior in the object that permits the viewer to perceive his or her influence on the object and the object’s inherent behavior without understanding the
nature of that influence. This means the object must have a certain level of autonomy in its behavior and the behavior must not be totally or trivially determined by environmental (sensory) inputs. We achieve this coupling of viewer and object with computers, sensors, and various computer-controlled devices.
The real power of the computer as an artistic medium rests in its ability to respond in real-time to events in the world. Other uses of the computer may enhance different media but they do not constitute fundamentally new ways for aesthetic expression. Thus we are not proponents of electronic or computer art that highlights the technology for its own sake. We attempt to down-play the technology used to bring our pieces to life.

The coactive aesthetic exploits a secondary aspect of computers their ability to perform complex The Fence control tasks. This ability creates interactive environments or entities that exhibit intentions or desires in the viewer’s eyes. Humans are able to perceive intentionality of other entities only through interacting with them under a variety of conditions. ls an interactive art piece exhibiting the intentionality of the artist or of itself?
Other questions such as “what makes a particular behavior intelligent or interesting (or beautiful)?” are also a guiding focus for the systems we create. By considering aesthetic in addition to scientific issues we are allowed a certain freedom in exploring all viewpoints and gaining unique insights. Our personal intuition is that the question of what makes a behavior intelligent will turn out to be largely a question of perception, and is thus closely related to aesthetics.

As interactive art matures, a language of interaction will emerge. This language of interaction will reflect a deeper understanding of the dynamics of interaction between systems (e.g., art object and viewer). Furthermore, this language will necessarily tie together aspects of intelligent, intentional systems and issues of perception.

“A boundary .. .i s a product of the interaction of an observer with the world and cannot be held to unconditionally exist.” -S. Salthe, in “Evolving Hierarchical Systems”

The Fence is an actual picket fence approximately three feet high and 12 feet long. It is divided into hinged sections that enable it to move and undulate in response to people in the room. On one side the fence is pristine white while on the other it is covered with graffiti.

At face value The Fence represents a boundary between two very different worlds. When the interactive aspects of The Fence are added it enables the viewer to experience concepts in a way that can only be alluded to (if at all) in other non-interactive mediums.

A fence is a stationary entity. It represents an immutable boundary. Indeed the concept of boundary, that is, where does the “thing” end and the “other stuff” begin, is itself changing (e.g., entification is a central issue in theories of complex systems), making our age one of mutable boundaries. Boundaries in all aspects of our world are changing at an ever-increasing rate. The Fence is a representation of that reality.

The Fence exhibits different behavior repertoires depending on with which side the viewer is interacting. This depicts in a dynamic way the dichotomy that exists on the two sides of a boundary.

The Fence also can express complex relational and intentional notions such as”aggression” and “playfulness” simply through the physical behaviors exhibited in response to viewers’ actions. For example, The Fence singling out a viewer and moving to encircle him/her can be seen to express the notion of aggression or control (or safekeeping?). The Shy Fence moves away when the viewer approaches.

We have been thinking about composition for many years. In the context of picture making, ‘composition’ refers to the placement of a figure in the picture space. The type of picture or drawing makes no difference to the problem – ‘where shall the first mark go?’ Artists, even those working without benefit of computer, know that the very first mark is the key to what the work will become. Computer artists cannot just lay down the first brush stroke on a canvas wherever their intuition tells them. Some part of the program, some variable values, or some block of code represents the decision to place the first market a particular place. That part of the program must be thought out ahead of time.

The placement of the first mark and the control of a drawing’s white spaces are essential elements of the series of programs called GRASS.

To help us solve our placement problem we used one of the standard ideas of recent computer graphics – divide and conquer, which also goes under the name ‘subdivision’. This strategy can be stated very simply – if the problem which faces you looks too hard, split it into two parts, store one of the parts, and work on the other. Chance are, the part of the problem you are now working will be easier to solve. If not, split this part into two, store one, and work on the other. Later, if necessary, you can figure out how to put the parts back together.

‘Divide and conquer’ works, when it works, because of limited resolution. If you start splitting a picture into pieces, you will finally get to a part of the picture which is the same size as the pen stroke.

Going back to the original question of where to place the first mark in a drawing, we just admit that we don’t know where it should go. The drawing rectangle is divided into two parts. Now we have two rectangles. Each of these is smaller than the first one. Put one of these rectangles aside and consider where to put the first mark in the other. This process is continued until we are working with a rectangle which is fairly small. Then we just draw a simple line and start looking at the rectangles which were put aside. There are other decisions – how to split the rectangles in two and where to draw in the smallest – which we have not discussed, but this is the basic idea.

The programs in the GRASS series have gone through an evolutionary process. The drawings you see were run on an Intertec SuperBrain, using a Watanabe plotter. The program is written in Microsoft BASIC.

The Garden That Was: Garden Letters

The subject of all this work is landscape. The mode is a conversation about seeing and pictures. Colette paints pictures every day. Jeff writes algorithms. Over many years, the discussion has grown to encompass computers, software, plotters, and printers. Living with the Midwest landscape as our center, nature becomes a whole experience. Colette’s painting series, The Garden That Was, is the source for new computer art.

Although the images function as stationary, they are part of our computer art feedback loop, which extends and transforms what drawings can be. Each element is important: algorithmic ideas, handmade picture, computer-processed images, as well as a friend who sees and read the letters.

The Garden That Was: Garden Letters

The subject of all this work is landscape. The mode is a conversation about seeing and pictures. Colette paints pictures every day. Jeff writes algorithms. Over many years, the discussion has grown to encompass computers, software, plotters, and printers. Living with the Midwest landscape as our center, nature becomes a whole experience. Colette’s painting series, The Garden That Was, is the source for new computer art.

Although the images function as stationary, they are part of our computer art feedback loop, which extends and transforms what drawings can be. Each element is important: algorithmic ideas, handmade picture, computer-processed images, as well as a friend who sees and read the letters.

Monkey girl meets Alligator Boy digitally superimposes real genetic and societal perceived abnormalities on a family in a seemingly “normal” wedding photo album book. The book alludes to the story of King Kong as a persistent cultural myth that embodies fears of race (species) mixing. 

Tropism is a biological phenomenon that descibes the movement of a plant or flower in response to a stimulus. Here, Tropism is a collaborative project that bridges the techniques and visions of two digitally oriented art and design studios: Commonwealth and Joshua Davis. Commonwealth’s language of form, generated within animation software, became the genesis of the Tropism porcelain vases. Output as SLA rapid-prototyped models,

Commonwealth’s design was directly translated from digital idea to material object. These rapid-prototyped prints were taken to Boehm Porcelain, a traditional fine-bone porcelain maker, and cast into a series of digitally driven porcelain vases.

Graphic compositions, created by freezing rule-based, animated programs written by Joshua Davis, were digitally output as sheets of ceramic paint and fired into the porcelain surface of the vase. Davis’ graphics, inspired by Arthur Harry Church’s “Types of Floral Mechanics,” are algorithmic compositions of colors and forms produced by rule-driven systems. The printed sheets of graphic paint were fused into the figurative surfaces of Commonwealth’s porcelain. The kiln-fired result is a series of unique objects demonstrating a kind of creative exchange facilitated by digital-design techniques and tools.

Joshua Davis’ giclée watercolor prints were produced using the same generative techniques as those used to produce the graphic paint sets that were fired into the porcelain vases. This created a fluid relationship between print and object, and between planar graphic and porcelain form.

In all senses of the term, tropism describes an exposure to stimulus. Commonwealth, known for their experimental products and form, and Joshua Davis, known for his generative graphics, collaborated to create a work that expresses multiple tendencies within art and computational design.

Program Visualization will allow computer programmers to create, experiment with, debug, and document their programs by graphic programming means. The researchers say Program Visualization will “open the side of the machine”, allowing both the user and the programmer to form an accurate model of a running program.

In Program Visualization, symbols will be invested with data that, once triggered, can prompt things to happen. To explain it, consider the difference between flipping a light switch and getting light, and flipping a light switch and getting a menu of computer options. Programming Visualization would be the one, in our hypothetical construct, that would give light, not menus. In other words, the effect of an action would be literal, not encoded in another layer of symbols. It is this visual directness that would allow users to “open the side of the machine” to see and understand a running program.

Programming Visualization would enable programmers to form clear, accurate mental images of the structure and construction of programs, and to select the most appropriate mode for a programming task.

To designers this means that graphics will be used not only to represent information statically, as is typical: instead, graphics will be used to control information and to manipulate information processes dynamically.

Smooth shaded renderings of this sabre saw make it easy to perceive various components.

Subassemblies can be separated from the whole and viewed from any direction.

Filleting and blending capabilities allow the designer to interactively combine and smooth several major surfaces into the desired design envelope. Since the rendering software simulates the effects of light on an actual surface, even subtle imperfections show up as they would on an actual object. Note, for example, the unintended “wrinkle” in the vertical portion of the housing.

Image Processing and frame accurate editing allow us to alter/recreate an existing reality – time, form, color and structure become very plastic, very malleable when developed with these tools. We are interested in aural, visual and time rhythms and work towards developing complex rhythmical structures in our pieces.

Spook… is a distributed net.art project that explores issues of surveillance, tracking, and covert activity on the Web in an interactive Web site based on the conventions of computer games.

On 1 June 1999, an unusual pattern of hits from military servers was noticed on the Stunned ArtZine site. A high level of activity was noticed from one server in particular. In an attempt to find out the reason for this, we decided to find out where else this server had been and who else they were looking at. It was time to watch the watchers…

A server trace was initiated using the Stunned Spook-Bot, which tracked the military server’s path through the net, mapping and logging its activities. The resulting data form the basis of Spook …

Spook… goes behind or underneath the Web to use as its raw material the traces of movement through the Web. It discovers paths and tracks

Twenty-five years ago, ACM SIGGRAPH sponsored its first juried public exhibition of experimental two-dimensional, three-dimensional, interactive, and time-based works by artists and scientists experimenting with computer graphics technologies. Prior to the 1982 Art Show, several informal art shows had taken place in the late 1970s, and in 1981, Darcy Gerbarg curated the 1981 SIGGRAPH Art Show. The popularity of the previous shows convinced the SIGGRAPH organization to fund the 1982 open competition. As chair of the SIGGRAPH 82 Art Show, Copper Giloth archived the documents, slides, and videotapes from this exhibition. In the fall of 2007, five senior art students in her information design course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (Zinj Guo, Dana Ramponi, Jen Zolga, Lindsay Weber, and Vesna Vrankovic) reviewed these materials. The students’ task was to inventory and organize them, and devise a strategy for making them available to the community. Using this information, they designed and constructed a web site documenting the exhibition. In the 25 years since this exhibition, both the vocabulary for describing the technology and the tools used to make most of the works from the show have changed dramatically. Thus the very process of making the site confirmed the need to document the history of computer art. Work on the site is ongoing. As we reach back to the innovations of 1982, we continue to add new information to the site and revise the existing content to make it a more complete resource.

In the summer of 1979, a Bally Arcade Home Video game, converted to Zgrass Home Computer, moved into my tiny Chicago apartment. No longer was I making art in the computer lab in the engineering building. Instead, I was at home in my eight-by-six-foot studio pounding on a keyboard. On this little computer, which used audio tape as its storage medium, I wrote programs that made pictures and animations. From the excitement of being home and alone with my computer came the comical autobiographical computer animation Skippy Peanut Butter Jars – my life in 320-by-200 resolution at two bits per pixel.

Over the years, many other computers and their peripherals moved in and then out of my house or up to my attic. From these ever-changing configurations of technology, stories have emerged as computer animations, video installations, artist books, plotter drawings, and Web sites. In 1995, the arrival of a Mac Powerbook, digital camera, scanner and ink jet printer enabled me to make Thirdperson: A Computer Life in Which She Poses. The story is structured around a word/architectural motif stolen from Frank Lloyd Wrights’s Larkin building. It takes the physical form of an accordion-style artist book, rambling and revealing that period of my life when computers visually punctuated daily existence.

“What interests the historian of everyday life is
the invisible.” I strive to make that invisible visible in my
images. I see nature though our everyday technologies. Rolled strings of electric lights become bird nests. In the afternoon, I watch as people move through the shadows of trees while adding the shadows of their cell phones to the landscape. These composite images capture the poetic juxtaposition of nature with digital technologies in daily life. “Everyday life is what we are given every day,
what presses us, even oppresses us, because there does not exist an oppression of the present. Every morning, on awakening, we feel the weight of life, the difficulty of living, or of living in a certain condition, with a particular weakness or desire. Everyday life is what holds us
intimately, from the inside. It is history at the halfway point of ourselves, almost in a recess, sometimes veiled.”
My formal structure is the grid. These grids are as influenced by the data in an Excel spreadsheet as by the thread of fabrics and tapestries and the data contained in a quilt. The rhythm of the activities I capture is simulated
using the grid to allow the narrative sequences to appear on paper. This structure enhances the simultaneous abstract and
narrative aspects of the images. At a distance, the images appear to be a repeating pattern, a series of landscape elements or a tapestry, but as one gets closer a narrative emerges, and finally one sees the details of the story.

In the summer of 1979, a Bally Arcade Home Video game, converted to Zgrass Home Computer, moved into my tiny Chicago apartment. No longer was I making art in the computer lab in the engineering building. Instead, I was at home in my eight-by-six-foot studio pounding on a keyboard. On this little computer, which used audio tape as its storage medium, I wrote programs that made pictures and animations. From the excitement of being home and alone with my computer came the comical autobiographical computer animation Skippy Peanut Butter Jars – my life in 320-by-200 resolution at two bits per pixel.

Over the years, many other computers and their peripherals moved in and then out of my house or up to my attic. From these ever-changing configurations of technology, stories have emerged as computer animations, video installations, artist books, plotter drawings, and Web sites. In 1995, the arrival of a Mac Powerbook, digital camera, scanner and ink jet printer enabled me to make Thirdperson: A Computer Life in Which She Poses. The story is structured around a word/architectural motif stolen from Frank Lloyd Wrights’s Larkin building. It takes the physical form of an accordion-style artist book, rambling and revealing that period of my life when computers visually punctuated daily existence.

This App allows the user, with multiple options for mode and device, to experience a 3D virtual reality walk through the Labyrinthe de Versailles now approximately 250 years since the Labyrinthe was destroyed. With a GPS-enabled and gyroscopic device the user may physically walk the Bosquet de la Reine while viewing the Labyrinthe and the fountains in 3D. Alternatively, a stationary user can experience the Labyrinthe using touch and swipe controls to navigate from fountain to fountain.

BATTERED

By a fist, a weapon, a cruel threat.
Beaten down in body.
Shattered in spirit.

Just as a boxer’s fists are considered lethal weapons outside of the ring,
so the superior physical strength of men should be acknowledged and reined in.

Any man, anywhere, who threatens a woman or child with physical violence should be guilty of a crime.

Any man, anywhere, who uses his physical strength against a woman or child should be guilty of a crime.

No code to crack.
No politicospeak to decipher.
No excuses. Ever.
HURT A WOMAN. HURT A CHILD. GO TO PRISON.

No need for spin control, or independent counsels.
Just a law, so simple that it cannot be misconstrued.

HURT A WOMAN. HURT A CHILD. GO TO JAIL.

So that no woman, ever again, will ever be …

Battered.

Corinne Whitaker, 1998

“Touch-Me-Not”

There is a space inside the human heart that cannot be touched, that holds itself aloof and deigns to be seen. Perhaps it is the space where I stop and you begin, where the boundaries of being stand firm, the soft sculpture of our souls. In that inviolate place, we hide our terrors and our tears, close the door to inquiry, and touch only a deep sense of isolation. Somewhere in that inner space jungle lies the essence of being human, and that is the quest that these images undertake. Out of the formless void, Nature’s paintbrush yielded us. Something from nothing, beings differentiated from infinite space by boundaries of skin and bone, hair and nails. And set apart from each other by centuries of polite convention.

The soul in its insanity crouches in that wild terrain. It is the artist who dares to embark on a perilous journey into the Amazon of identity, daring to touch what we would forever hide.

Corinne Whitaker 1998

BATTERED

By a fist, a weapon, a cruel threat.
Beaten down in body.
Shattered in spirit.

Just as a boxer’s fists are considered lethal weapons outside of the ring,
so the superior physical strength of men should be acknowledged and reined in.

Any man, anywhere, who threatens a woman or child with physical violence should be guilty of a crime.

Any man, anywhere, who uses his physical strength against a woman or child should be guilty of a crime.

No code to crack.
No politicospeak to decipher.
No excuses. Ever.
HURT A WOMAN. HURT A CHILD. GO TO PRISON.

No need for spin control, or independent counsels.
Just a law, so simple that it cannot be misconstrued.

HURT A WOMAN. HURT A CHILD. GO TO JAIL.

So that no woman, ever again, will ever be …

Battered.

Corinne Whitaker, 1998

“Touch-Me-Not”

There is a space inside the human heart that cannot be touched, that holds itself aloof and deigns to be seen. Perhaps it is the space where I stop and you begin, where the boundaries of being stand firm, the soft sculpture of our souls. In that inviolate place, we hide our terrors and our tears, close the door to inquiry, and touch only a deep sense of isolation. Somewhere in that inner space jungle lies the essence of being human, and that is the quest that these images undertake. Out of the formless void, Nature’s paintbrush yielded us. Something from nothing, beings differentiated from infinite space by boundaries of skin and bone, hair and nails. And set apart from each other by centuries of polite convention.

The soul in its insanity crouches in that wild terrain. It is the artist who dares to embark on a perilous journey into the Amazon of identity, daring to touch what we would forever hide.

Corinne Whitaker 1998

BATTERED

By a fist, a weapon, a cruel threat.
Beaten down in body.
Shattered in spirit.

Just as a boxer’s fists are considered lethal weapons outside of the ring,
so the superior physical strength of men should be acknowledged and reined in.

Any man, anywhere, who threatens a woman or child with physical violence should be guilty of a crime.

Any man, anywhere, who uses his physical strength against a woman or child should be guilty of a crime.

No code to crack.
No politicospeak to decipher.
No excuses. Ever.
HURT A WOMAN. HURT A CHILD. GO TO PRISON.

No need for spin control, or independent counsels.
Just a law, so simple that it cannot be misconstrued.

HURT A WOMAN. HURT A CHILD. GO TO JAIL.

So that no woman, ever again, will ever be …

Battered.

Corinne Whitaker, 1998

“Touch-Me-Not”

There is a space inside the human heart that cannot be touched, that holds itself aloof and deigns to be seen. Perhaps it is the space where I stop and you begin, where the boundaries of being stand firm, the soft sculpture of our souls. In that inviolate place, we hide our terrors and our tears, close the door to inquiry, and touch only a deep sense of isolation. Somewhere in that inner space jungle lies the essence of being human, and that is the quest that these images undertake. Out of the formless void, Nature’s paintbrush yielded us. Something from nothing, beings differentiated from infinite space by boundaries of skin and bone, hair and nails. And set apart from each other by centuries of polite convention.

The soul in its insanity crouches in that wild terrain. It is the artist who dares to embark on a perilous journey into the Amazon of identity, daring to touch what we would forever hide.

Corinne Whitaker 1998

Truth is stranger than fiction. This interactive touchscreen work includes visuals and explanations of some of the more peculiar aspects of light and vision phenomena that have fascinated me since I was a child. I think everyone has spent time rubbing their eyelids and staring at the resulting phosphene patterns.

The original idea for this piece came from seeing startling inverse parallels in Aboriginal and Native American cave painting. A rock outcropping in Arizona has an imprint of a hand on it in pigment, while a cliff face in the outback of Australia has the outline of a hand surrounded by pigment. This observation seems obvious and elementary at first, as the human hand is the seminal tool we first use to make sense of and manipulate the world, but in a larger sense it speaks of the interconnectedness of all things.

In The Sky is Always Blue, a hand is used as the main interface metaphor, and in conjunction with the touchscreen monitor, it gives the user a more direct and personal experience than a mouse-driven interface. With this piece, I am experimenting with new ways of conveying interrelated memories, explanations, and experiences to others.