"182 interacting squares for Anni and Josef" is an interactive-3D printed, LED sculpture that enables Anni and Josef Albers to communicate posthumously. As viewers engage with its colorful cubes - representative of Anni and Josef's critical explorations in color and theory - the works' two-cubic sculptures communicate through the language of light and color. The choice of 182 cubes addresses their long lives together, and the combined age at which each passed away.
Augmented reality, interactive art, Cinema 4D and Unity, 2020-21.
In Development Now
Exhibitions Scheduled:
Loveland Art Museum | Loveland, CO | 2020-21
Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound | Tacoma, WA | 2021
Whitney Center for the Arts | Sheridan College | Sheridan, WY | 2021
The ways that we treat each other are informed by our learned lessons, experiences, and the world often witnessed through the press/media, social media, and many other digital lenses. Sadly, we live in a zero-sum world of inequality and inequity. How are lessons of morality, faith, tradition, and identity taught to children? How do children learn and understand notions of morality and inequality? Are they understood, or do some principles just fly over a child’s head, left unexplored?
I hope that Resonant Blu will help me – and participants – decipher the roles that families play in a child’s understanding of such lessons as morality, faith, tradition, and identity; and how adults ultimately behave. This understanding and behaviors are gained through lessons, conversations, watching, and experiencing on both individual and communal levels. Ultimately such lessons often help (or hinder) our views on such topics as we grow.
When a child is read a book or told a story, does he or she interpret the story’s message differently from the older reader? I imagine that a child’s understanding is less complex than that of an adult. Resonant Blu seeks to interpret how a story’s lessons resonate differently - with a child and an adult, an individual, and across a community of people - and is seen through two parts, representative of two people’s shared experience of storytelling.
As a two-part, Augmented Reality (AR) experience, Resonant Blu, will take form as a series of wall-mounted posters, that when seen through the camera of a digital device (mobile phone, tablet) will reveal immersive-scenes inspired by fairytales and stories.
Video installation, visual programming, 1:20 loop, 2020.
It’ll Just Be A Minute, is a recorded animation. The scene is constantly regenerated and never repeated the same way twice. The scene was designed in TouchDesigner, a visual programming software, and references my feelings of loneliness and disparity, and waiting during this pandemic. The speed, transparency, color, darkness, and perspective speak to my feeling of driving-full speed directly into life, currently.
Group Exhibition catalog: Digital Aesthetic, 2022
Virtual Reality, motion graphics, 2019.
Velocity is an immersive, interactive experience that encourages users/audiences to think critically about their presence across virtual and augmented spaces. Unaware, wearers are tracked, informing the visual system they are experiencing. Velocity uses motion-tracking sensors to monitor a VR headset wearers’ movement, creating an immersive and self-contained, closed loop-particle system experience.
This work pulls people out of the experience and consciousness of being observed — referencing notions of the “Other”, human and digital surveillance, and omnipotence — without knowing their own movements inform their experience. Users are immersed in a beautiful, generative particle system and gain a sense of greatness compared to their individuality and size.
I recently designed this work, in part to elucidate to my students how an immersive but simple design can engage audiences to explore a variety of critical topics. We discussed that beautiful-creative work is irrelevant if you cannot reach art participants without clear, conceptual ideas. The value of discussion and impact takes precedence over-idealized “prettiness” or art.
Live, interactive installation, motion tracking, generative audio composition, video, 2017.
Harnessing the emotionally genuine paradigm of GLBTQ activist art, Fiery Skies seeks to interrupt the mindset of viewers, as it forces them into an experimental sonic and visual world. Devoted to the lives of those who have perished, and those who continue to survive living with HIV/AIDS, Fiery Skies channels the unifying spirit of the GLBTQ activist movement. Centered on a laser cut and etched black-acrylic cube, the essence of Fiery Skies touches upon the juxtaposition of being socially marginalized by society while breaking out of same social shackles.
A projection of David Wojnarowicz’s “Fire in My Belly” radiates from the fiery cube; symbolic of the insatiable burning that erupts from the “belly”. The cube itself is etched and adorned with ornate patterns resonant of the differences and diversity amongst GLBTQ citizens. The fiery cube remains a cube; like the conservative argument that GLBTQ citizens do not deserve support, liberties and rights but sugarcoat arguments with niceties about how no harm is meant to those who identify as GLBTQ.
Fiery Skies’ audio interaction - developed in Max MSP 6.1, using a PlayStation Kinects motion tracking infrared (IR) technology – is a live-generative soundscape. This soundscape changes with every instance of audience participation. Generating a live mix, splicing the audio from the Fire in My Belly film, with a Missouri legislative testimony recording in opposition of gay rights. This audio splicing juxtaposes the visual projection of Wojnarowicz’s “Fire in My Belly” film to accentuate the turbulent experiences forced upon LGBTQA+ individuals.
Mindful of the more than 120 vertices present on an Icosahedron (geometric sphere), ‘hear+now’ listens to live sound data to reimagine, reshape and project active waveforms as protrusions, quite literally giving the icosahedron a ‘facelift.’ Approximately every 50 seconds a new shape is generated and may be captured for 3D printing, but consistent with this project’s live nature, each newly generated shape is temporal.
