EPIPHYTE (borrowed from a botanical term) is a bi-pedal powered, interactive video installation that seeks to explore notions of sustainability and infosthetics by revealing the hidden history of products. Basically, its what happens when you take a stationary exercise bicycle and hook it up to Max/MSP & Jitter software to manipulate video playback of a product’s mini-narrative. The user is helping to spin a narrative infographic – such that(for instance) a iPod map backwards from Boulder-to-Cupertino-to-Taiwan and India, as it follows the production chain back to its beginnings – the path extrapolates to visualize the many outsourced or subcontracted geospatial components. The end result (hopefully) allows for reflection as the EPIPHYTE installation reveals the hidden social & environmental impact and the often counter-intuitive costs of our everyday consumption on a global scale.
Epiphyte was at the ATLAS Institute for Art, Media and Performance at CU Boulder during the month of April. The interactive installation is now at the Object+Thought gallery, 3559 Larimer Street, downtown Denver for the month of May. Epiphyte is a joint project of the Sustainable Media Lab, comprised of Sarah Chung, Robert Fitzgerald, Paul Gerhardt and Marko Manriquez.
CUBO (Cube) – is an interactive sound sculpture comprised of reclaimed materials and exploring notions of social architecture via a site-specific, locative sound track. Its literally a giant cube with a set a speakers and motion sensors on each of its 5 sides. CUBO’s outside layer is made from live, edible micro-greens. The interior houses a multi-channel, surround sound, speaker system. The sculpture is motion activated: using Max/MSP/Jitter software. The samples are programmed to play indepentent of each other using Max/MSP to play the samles – on/off/random/louder/softer -on each its 4 audio channels. User movement around physical hotspots triggers CUBO to play from over 1600 audio samples taken from around the Boulder area. The locative samples were provided by TheSilence.org, out of CU Boulder, which is a very cool mobile sonic mapping of the Boulder area. I’d like to thank Elisa and Marco and everyone else over at the Silence for their generous contribution of these audio samples. I also encourage everyone to check out TheSilence.org and even contribute their own samples using their mobile phone to make an audio field recording and uploading it to their website soundscape.
CUBO has been exhibited in Tijuana- Mexico, San Diego, Los Angeles and now Boulder on its evolving journey. After a short stint at BMoCA, CUBO is now on display at Object+Thought Gallery, 3559 Larimer Street, Downtown Denver until the end of May. CUBO is a joint project of the Sustainable Media Lab, comprised of Sarah Chung, Robert Fitzgerald and Marko Manriquez.
More info on TheSilence.org
The Silence of the Lands enables participants to map and annotate the soundscape of urban and natural environments. Participants can record and collect ambient sounds, create and share acoustic cartographies, and use them as conversation pieces of a social dialogue about the places and communities in which they live. The result is an affective geography that changes over time according to participants’ perceptions and interpretations of their environmental settings.
Immersive. Botanical. Meditative. Aleatoric. Awe-inspiring. I keep effusing these odd combination of terms in describing SKOLTZ_KOLGEN, the endearing and impressive collective-of-two from Montreal, Canada. They performed ASKAA for a marathon 5 hours at the CMKY festival, described as an interactive ecosystem inspired by vegetation. JPGs of course, don’t to the experience justice – the visuals hovered, danced and grew throughout my time there, but not in the artificial, randomly animated way some sonified graphics are done. And not being content to just press play on some video loops and walk away, SKOLTZ_KOLGEN actually performs a live soundtrack to accompany the A/V installation. Inside of CU ATLAS’s state of the art Black Box, ASKAA was powered by 3 10,000 lumens projectors, multiple laptops running MAYA rendered video and topped off with contact mic’ed bells, crystals, and wooden boxes routed through NI Reaktor. But technology aside, the space they created allowed one to reflect on the silences in between breaths of a truly living installation. Pillows were scattered around the floor, inviting people to lay back and drift off into the piece. I felt like I was floating underwater and in inner-galactic space simultaneously.
More photos of ASKAA here.
Our inaugural run of Laser Graffiti was a success and such good, clean fun! Graffiti Research Lab originally developed the LASER tagging system that allows people to paint images on entire building facades using a green laser. It even emulates dripping paint! The possibilities of interesting canvasses to project on are endless. I wonder what it would look like on snow.
I’m presenting at the Boulder Tech Meetup this Tuesday, 3/4 at CU’s Wolf Law!
Along with Kate Lesta and Lauren Higgins, we will talk about the various aspects of organizing the Communikey (CMKY) Festival of Electronic Arts. The zero waste event is a sustainable digital arts festival featuring djs and electronic musicians, digital artists, interactive installations, green panel discussions and software workshops at various venues around Boulder during Earth Day weekend. I’m exhibiting and/or collaborating on 4 interactive installations that examine different notions of sustainability as more than just a buzz word.
