CMKY festival Installations+Interventions page

The Sustainable Media Lab for Applied Chaos and Phenomena

Acknowledging that we live in an era of paradoxes, SML embraces the conceptual fodder of these tropes jubilantly: leveraging the “tools of the system” to dismantle, parody and ultimately rebuild itself, whether these tools are cultural, economic or mechanical. Embedded in our aesthetic practice, one may find the use of data aggregation & data visualization, freeganism, Augmented Reality, Max/MSP/Jitter patches, and old school stitchery coexisting happily together. The Sustainable Media Lab seeks to extrapolate on the spirit of innovation, intervention and intended misappropriation to redefine the intersections of sustainability, interactivity and activism as we approach the boundaries of the Art Coefficient, the Long Tail and the Triple Bottom Line equally.

These four installations & interventions are being presented for and by the Communikey Festival of Electronic Arts, April 18-20th.

downloadable hi rez image here

downloadable hi rez image here

downloadable project blueprint PDF here

EPIPHYTE \ noun \ one organism living within or upon another without causing harm or infection.

Epiphyte spins a cinematic cartography extrapolating upon science fiction and science fact - exploring the many tangents in-between.

EPIPHYTE is a pedal powered, interactive video installation that seeks to explore notions of sustainability and infosthetics as it reveals the "hidden history" of products through product data aggregation & data visualization. Its what happens when you take a stationary exercise bicycle and hook it up to Max/MSP & Jitter software to manipulate video playback. As the bike is pedaled forward, the video playback goes backward – reverse tracing a product’s global trail. The user's pedaling creates a visual abstract of the product(and its components) impact along each stage of product development as it goes from factory to consumer. EPIPHYTE essentially spins a narrative infographic - the path extrapolates to visualize the many outsourced or subcontracted geospatial components. The end result allows for reflection as the installation reveals the hidden social & environmental impact and the often counter-intuitive costs of our everyday consumption on a global scale.

This installation is being hosted by ATLAS Center for Arts, Media & Performance, on CU's campus.

downloadable hi rez image here

downloadable project blueprint PDF here

Exchange/Alteration

On site clothing alterations to upcycle your old clothes.

Exchange/Alteration is a playful reaction to the inundation of disposable culture of "fast fashion" imposed by the clothing industry today. According to sociologist Juliet Schor, “as clothing has gotten cheaper… we are buying more of it”, almost twice as much as 15 years ago - resulting in disposable fashion objects we momentarily covet only to toss aside for the next trend. E/A breaks that viscous fashion cycle by recycling former fashions in an unconventional manner. E/A invites participants to have their clothing altered on the spot from the bits-and-pieces of other participants’ clothes and from fabrics collected beforehand. New life can be cut, stitched and sewn into any piece of forgotten clothing found in the back of the closet: shirts, pants, skirts, jackets, hats, even the tee shirt off one’s back (participants are lent pre-altered clothes to wear while waiting for their alteration) – resulting in a cut-&-paste mélange. Sewing as arts activism reappropriates traditional crafts as tools for social interaction, upcycling and breathing new life to old cloths.

Mélanie Badalato and Camilo Ontiveros will be setting up their sewing station in front of the ATLAS Center for the CMKY Festival. Marko Manriquez will have a special video display of the E/A intervention for onlookers to view their clothing alterations at time-lapse, fast forward speed.

http://www.exchangealteration.blogspot.com/

downloadable hi rez image here

CUBO (Cube)
Interactive sound sculpture comprised of reclaimed materials and exploring notions of social architecture via a site-specific, locative sound track. Its basically a giant cube with a set a speakers and motion sensors on each of its sides. CUBO’s outside layer is made from live moss. The interior houses a multi-channel, surround sound, speaker system. The sculpture is motion activated, using Max/MSP and Jitter software – User movement around physical hotspots triggers CUBO to play audio samples taken from around the Boulder area. The samples are programmed to play indepentent of eachether - Max/MSP is used to control the samples - on/off/random/louder/softer – on each its audio channels. Collectively, a portion of the audio samples are tuned to Just Intonnation. The effect of this is that if all of the speakers are triggered on, Cubo would sound like a tonal forest, or an orchestra playing one long Ohm note. The unique aspect of Cubo is that no two user experiences are alike. This is because each user activates the speakers in a different way, and triggers a different database of rotating samples on each of its independent channels.

CUBO explores notions of social architecture through a transportable sound sculpture whose sound track responds to site-specific locations. Constructed of discarded material –a sonorous intervention in the noise of the city, a specific-social cartography that projects to the public, between the public, towards the public. CUBO is a sound art archive, which displays a wide range of participants and atmospheres. These range from; sonorous environments of different cities. CUBO has been exhibited in Tijuana- Mexico, San Diego, Los Angeles and now Boulder on its evolving journey.

This archive will be transmitted from the interior of a recycled sound sculpture that will be displayed at BMOCA

Laser Graffiti

Self-explanatory from the picture, Laser Graffiti uses open source software (courtesy of the heros at Graffiti Research Lab) and a setup consisting of a projector, video camera and 5mw laser, the software tracks the laser which the projector can see via the video camera to then “draws/tags/paints” on building in a non-destructive manner. The result is good clean fun that doesn’t leave a mess and is a great way to activate/lite up a public space. The software emulates different brushes and even does a realistic job creating drips of paint as you tag something up.

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