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The projects presented on this page are a snapshot of the research activity currently being conducted by faculty and students at dxarts. Please follow the links on this page to fully explore the breadth of each artist's research. |
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Created for the 2004 art exhibition "Hyper-Runt" at Philadelphia's National Products Building, the Altamira project is a neuro-prosthetic that triggers phosphenes by subcutaneous stimulation of the retina with radio waves recorded from pulsar's at the edge of the Universe. The project provides a totally unique method for exploring the deep poetry encoded in celestial objects, and creates a cosmologically scaled experimental work of art in the "mind's eye" of the viewer. The exhibition included leaders in the field, Ken Goldberg - UC Berkeley, Natalie Jeremijenko - Yale, Mark Napier - Columbia University, and was curated by renowned artist and 2005 Rankin Distinguished Lecturer at Drexel University, Ebon Fisher. Phosphenes are a mesmerizing visual phenomenon common to all mankind. They are the patterns of colored light we often experience when we close our eyes tightly, or when we adapt to a dark room. Electrophosphenes are a method of electrically reproducing the same visual effect as phosphenes, but with a greater range of patterns, color subtlety and precision. Electrophosphenes are created by placing a miniature set of electrodes on the temples and applying a tiny voltage (one volt at one milliampere current) that is pulse modulated by pulsars at frequencies typically between 5-100 Hz. |
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Pulsars are rapidly rotating cores of collapsed stars. These tiny dense stars are ringed by massive magnetic fields that generate strong magnetic poles that emit focused beams of radio waves. As the pulsar quickly rotates, its radio beacons sweep space like a lighthouse. Each time the beams passes Earth or a satellite, it produces an electromagnetic pulse that can be repurposed. The pulse period of these unusual stars is extremely precise, but the pulse signatures are highly unique to each star. Altamira deftly fuses two distinct and seemingly unrelated research areas into a new and visceral experimental art experience. It is physically connected to the heart of our evolutionary neurobiology, and engages intimately with our beginnings in the stars. More than a high-tech stimulation of psychedelic colors and patterns inside a viewer's head, Altamira explores the uncanny connections that seem to exist between our biology and the universe from which we have emerged. |
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Melia Watras performing at Meany Hall |
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Aperture, composed in 2006, is one of a series of my works exploring the extension of musical instruments and performance through live computer enhancement and processing. In addition to the real-time processing of the sound of the viola, this work further integrates the performer with the computer through the use of an accelerometer worn on wrist of the bow arm of the violist. The device tracks the speed and direction of movement of the arm and sends data to the computer where algorithms process the information to determine the nature of the interaction between performer and computer. For example, small changes in the violist’s bow arm speed can create nuanced effects of timbre and dynamics while sudden changes in speed or direction of the violist’s arm or just the wrist can trigger immediate and dramatic reactions from the computer. Aperture also continues my recent departure from composing and giving direction to performers though a written (notated) score. There is no musical score for most of Aperture. The composition was worked out over an extended time of collaborative exploration and practice with violist Melia Watras, for whom the work was composed. The final version of the work is not improvised nor aleatoric in the sense those terms are often used for music, although improvisation did play an important role during the developmental stages of the work. |
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While this kind of experientially developed music has existed in many cultures, I am specifically experimenting with the kinds of techniques used by several film directors for character and script development in which the actors create their characters through organic and rigorous series of directed improvisations and reiterations through rehearsal. Video documentation showing how to perform the work will take the place of a musical score so that the integrity of the work can be maintained over time and the work can be performed by other violists as well as Ms. Watras in the future. In addition to Melia Watras’ role in the development of viola material for Aperture, my research team for the development of the hardware and software for the piece included DXARTS Research Associate Joshua Parmenter who developed much of the key underlying code for the control of sound processing and interaction with the accelerometer in Supercollider. DXARTS PhD student James Coupe also worked on design and implementation of the analog electronics circuits for the accelerometer. Thanks also to Blake Hannaford, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the UW for reminding us about the effects of gravity! Aperture was commissioned by Melia Watras with support from the Royalty Research Fund and DXARTS at the University of Washington. |
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Entanglement draws a symbolic acoustic line between two distant locations, SOIL and 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle. A hyper- directional sound beam linearizes the acoustics of the two galleries creating the illusion of a single, infinite line of sound into which both sites get trapped. This fragile acoustic construction can be physically disturbed by the participants at each location. Using their body, participants can interfere with the acoustic waveguide, spilling over particles of the linear sound field into the room as they block their transit to the other site. |
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The piece not only provokes the "entanglement" of the participants with their own sonic perception locally but also remotely, as the acoustic shadow of their bodies gets cast onto the other space. In this way, Entanglement explores the concept of "tele-absense" (rather than tele-presence), using a virtual acoustic channel to telematically project the disembodied presence of participants interacting with the acoustic waveguide. |
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Dissolution is a series of suspended 3D lenticular prints, carefully arranged spatially above a seven by ten foot platform. What is unique in this project is the way these 3D illusions are arranged compositionally in conjunction with the real space of the physical sculpture. This introduces a whole new forum for aesthetic and conceptual investigation, where spatial relationships are multiplexed. The triptych is loosely organized into three guiding principles: Energy, Architecture, and Dissolution. These ideas are approached in the form of the sculptures and the array of images embedded in each. Energy embodies the abstracted physical form of an approaching Tsunami wave, the images reflecting this reality but awash with dynamic activity. Architecture mirrors the form of a simple sand structure that a child might build, but the surfaces will also contain images of more sophisticated structures, similar to those washed away in the Tsunami disaster. The height of this central element is key to the whole piece, as I want the sandcastle to be oversized, as if the adult viewer had been shortened to the height of a young child. Dissolution shows the wreckage and silence after the interaction of the previous two elements, sculpturally constructed as layers of receding waveforms with images of isolation and a dissolving relationship to form. These principles are not strictly defined, but rather serve as ideas around which the flow of the experience gathers. The surfaces of the forms swim with alternating perspectives, cycling through images that pull the viewer into disparate understandings of the experience. Yet within this complex form certain themes rise to the surface. Innocence of childhood experiences, how they forever frame your conception of reality, and the impossibility of truly knowing the truth of an experience at a distance. This is achieved through the creative use of the 3 and 1/2 dimension compositional space, where real images and digital compositing are arranged together in a aesthetic that fluidly combines the photorealistic with computer graphics to create a psychologically charged landscape. |
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I developed numerous technical achievements in the project that enable continued innovative exploration: * Design and construction of 3D camera rig using duel professional SLR still cameras to capture high-resolution stereoscopic images. * Digital 3D high resolution workflow over multiple software and hardware platforms to calibrate and maximize image quality. * Methods for designing and constructing in multidimensional space in a virtual environment (an illusionary depth appearing on the surface of a physical installation). Another way in which the project grew was to incorporate CNC machining into the creation of the forms. All of the final pieces are carefully cut to match the curves designed in the 3D modeling program, and translated to the machining device. This allows creation of complex silhouettes in the sculptural planes that flow from panel to panel to create continuous contours. The original working title, Then, has been changed to the permanent title Dissolution, in part to reflect this transformation. All research has been completed, involving the creation of several new methods of working with photographic images in a 3D context. The final sculpture is currently under production. A version of the work in progress (Study for Then) was exhibited in Reykjavik, Iceland for the SensAble Technologies conference and art exhibition in May of 2006. |
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Commissioned 2007 by The Junction and Arts Council England
Exhibited 2007, Cambridge, UK
(re)collector is a public art installation that involves ten custom-built camera units positioned around a city. The camera units are configured to capture specific vistas, each of which operates as a location in an algorithmically generated film. The cameras are programmed to recognize particular human behaviors that occur within their vista, and to record moments in which such behaviors take place. At the end of each day, the footage captured by each camera is automatically analyzed and reorganized into a complete film, composed from the actions that take place in each location. The films consist of sequences of activity that together form a narrative, initially based upon master narrative templates from classic films such as Vertigo, Alphaville and Blow Up. The films generated by the (re)collector system are then played back in the city center on a large projection screen, broadcast back into the city and starring the general public as its protagonists and antagonists. The simultaneous perspective of the city that the cameras provide permits the system to exert a directorial control over the fragmentary daily stories that touch people’s lives during their everyday activities. The insertion of the screen into the city itself allows people to watch themselves making decisions and understand how those decisions fit into a collective whole. At the same time, the (re)collector system makes decisions of its own - what to include, what to cut, what to linger upon, what to juxtapose. The work occupies public space, attempting to reveal to us aspects of ourselves that we cannot perceive without its omniscient perspective.
http://www.recollector.net |
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As computer science, this is perhaps the largest scale implementation ever of space-time behavior correlation, a radical and novel computer vision method for recognizing human behaviors. It has a database of cinematic ‘templates’, composed of 2 second clips from classic movies, and it seeks out matches for these across the videos that the cameras capture. Essentially, rather than simply looking for color or shape pattern matches within a single frame of video (2 dimensions), this
system seeks out intensity patterns over time, thereby removing the need for the people it observes to be the same shape, size or color as the people in the cinematic templates. This is a massive computational exercise, sponsored in kind by the High Performance Computing Facility at Cambridge University, who provided access to their supercomputer, currently rated the 20th fastest computer in the world. |
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Extra-Sensory Wave DeviceThis installation consists of a science fiction-like apparatus that continuously rocks a novelty "wave machine" suspended in a gimbaled satellite dish. The live closed-circuit video projection of the wave tank is subtly modified by viewers movements in the space. Geophones mounted in the base and infrasonic microphones in the dish fluctuate light levels and disrupt the integrity of the video signal. The floor is covered in patterns of salt residue. |
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The idea that we are products of a dynamic coupling with our surroundings drives this work. The possibility that we may be influenced or affected in subtle, even imperceptible, conditions by our ambient environments would require reassessing the boundaries of internal and external experience. In this piece the viewer is immersed in a timeless (science) fiction with explicit references to a natural environment mediated and/or interpreted by the technological. By transposing stimuli that we are not consciously aware of into the visual experience, these connections are explored through time, place, technology and consciousness. |
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Projector loquens is an interactive installation representing a situation in which a new species, Projector loquens, attempts to communicate with a different species, Homo sapiens. Projector is regarded as a new genus coequal with hominid and the specific epithet, loquens indicates its communicative character and anxiety for communication. Projector loquens consists of a projector turntable system, a human detection system, a projection system and movies. Projector loquens speaks in the form of movies in response to participant's position and speed. The participant's body shape, cloth colors and distance from Projector loquens alter moving images projected on their body. Their way of looking at movies on their chest or abdomen reflects how people project their own perspective onto interlocutors in the face-to-face human communication. |
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* Click image to see more images and movies. * Click here to see more details at official website for Projector loquens project. ------------------------------------------- * Click here to see a chronological list of art-works
at Eunsu Kang's Website: http://www.kangeunsu.com
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The field of miniature self organizing sensor networks has been accelerated by new research from Intel and Berkley Labs. It is theorized that in the near future thousands, if not millions of small wireless networked sensor nodes, such as bluetooth cellular telephones, will be permiating consumer products as well as being embedded into our everyday environments. The possibilities afforded by these new technologies creates a vast reservaur of potential for art creation. Most notably art designed for physical locations outside of the traditional museum or gallery environment. Additionaly it opens up the possibility for temporal, performative works to be integrated into, ever pervasive, computer networking systems and allow for more interconnectedness between a time based work of art and the timeless world of cyberspace. |
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This project is a collaborative effort between DxArts and Computer Science and Engineering graduate students to develop custom hardware and software tools for the performing arts. As a first step in this research and development project, I will be investigating two aspects critical to it's completion: The physical hardware components that are relevant to this application as well as the needs, desires and dreams of the creative communities that could create with this new pallete of technical tools. I'll be interviewing several professionals from the fields of Electroacoustic music, Dance, Theater, Electical Engineering, Computer Science and the Fine Arts. |
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Hemisphere(s) is a proposed fully immersive spherical environment that interacts with its participants via 3D imagery and sound based on a “consciousness” formed by past memories. Only one Hemisphere actually exists; the other is a mirror image. Inside the Hemisphere(s) installation, participants are seen in both infrared and visible light by multiple cameras from different viewpoints. The computers produce imagery based on models created from both present and past stimuli from the cameras. The computer render imagery for multiple projectors to produce overlapping images on the holographic surface from various directions, enabling the perception of 3D images of present and past participants. An analogous process produces sound based on input from a microphone array. Stray diffracted light diffracted from the surface of the hemisphere is seen by the participants as ever-changing colorful abstract patterns on the surface of the sphere. |
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These patterns will both appear to be evidence of Hemisphere(s)' "thought" and will provide some randomness in the feedback to the system. The role of "consciousness" is played by a separate Master computer, which calls upon various members of the array of sensory computers to remember past events and can transfer these events from one array member to the other. The Master is connected to the Internet, where anyone can try to influence its decisions without having any idea what the real effects are (since they only get a 2D web cam view). This can be considered analogous to prayer. The system is comprised of loosely connected individual subsystems, some of which exist in the computer and others in the input/output loop, constrained by physical, perceptual and engineering limitations. The system is shaped by and shapes its environment. The system changes state in an unpredictable manner. The participants will presumably do the same. |
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Click above image to see a slideshow of images from the show. |
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This system uses a computer controlled four-axis positioning table to "print" intricate bio-architectural constructions out of live plant cells. Suspended in a clear gel growth medium, these cells continue to divide and flourish, gradually filling in the construction. The algorithmically-generated patterns drawn by the system are based on the Eden growth model and leverage mathematical representations of both urban growth and cellular growth, thereby connecting the concept of city with the concept of the organism. This project is working to make concrete the idea of dynamic and fluid computer space altering the expression and formation of a living and growing biological material, via its collaboration with an engineering mechanism. The project was presented in New Orleans from December 7 - 14, 2007 for DesCours, a public art event sponsored by the AIA and curated by Melissa Urcan. Special thanks to: Dr. Delene J. Oldenburg of UW Biology and Dr. David J. Longstreth of LSU Biology for support, consultation and biological resources Ryan Wolfe for linear actuation design and implementation Mitchell Whitelaw for providing Processing code of the Eden growth model Links: Make, Organism, Times-Picayune Review (Pre-Opening), Times-Picayune Review (Post-Opening) |
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The Eden growth model is a surface fractal that has been used to describe bacterial growth. As stated by Philip Ball in The Self-Made Tapestry; "Watching a bacterial colony grow is like watching a city expand into urban sprawl, except that it happen in days rather than decades. The inhabitants of the colony multiply and what drives this multiplication and growth is a supply of food." This association has also been made by applied mathematicians and urban designers. Nikos A. Salingaros states in his essay Connecting the Fractal City; "Living cities have intrinsically fractal properties, in common with all living systems". This project uses undifferentiated plant cells, with the purpose in mind of structuring tissue formation and placement via a mechanical arm first placing the cells and then depositing the substances that allow the cells to differentiate. The first step in this process is to develop callus tissue with the undifferentiated cells, which was the goal of this first instantiation. However due to issues with sterility, this did not occur as hoped. The cells being used in this iteration were Alligator Weed. Once sterility issues are managed differently, the landscape will start to describe a city and an organism in multiple dimensions. |
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The Cat and The OwlThe Cat and The Owl is a short film currently in post production. It tells the simple story of a brief reconnection between to separated lovers. The film was shot on HDV at 60fps, and then handcranked during playback to give each shot a unique time-signature. The presented clip has been handcranked subtly in such a way as to vary the time-signature between 24fps and 36fps. |
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Handcranked Digital VideoOver the last year I have developed a suite of techniques, short of constructing a camera, to achieve hand-cranked digital video. These techniques include software emulations and hardware development. The clip shown here was captured using a true hardware handcrank connected to an industrial CCD camera. |
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futuRasa is a dance/technology media installation and performance work that explores archetypes of the future through a poetic synthesis of physical embodiment, motion-captured movement, experiential metaphor, sound, light, color, and dematerialized architecture. It is the first segment in an iterative series of works that examine the idea of the future through the lens of the futurist movement centennial, the present historical moment, quantum perception, Hindu cosmology, synthesized global future visions, and an immersive multisensory new media performance language. Cumulatively, futuRasa offers new metaphors, evolutionary perceptual experiences, and a multi-dimensional allegorical matrix in which to contemplate the future. |
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The name futuRasa is the product of several ingredients. futur references both the form and content of the work, as described above. Rasa is a term derived from Hindu aesthetics that defies precise translation, but can be described as “juice”, “flavor”, “emotion”, “essence.” In Hindu aesthetics, it is connected to the form of the raga - a traditional melodic formula of Hindu music. The structure of the raga seeks to evoke and unleash the elusive, sacred experience of rasa. futuRasa is presently a work-in-progress. It will premiere as an installation in On the Boards' 2007 Northwest New Works Festival June 9-10, 2007. |
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2007 - plasma display, polyethylene, aluminum, video 42 by 25 by 12 inches Click on thumbnail for images and video. |
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“The German tongue. Fleshy, warped, spit-spraying, purplish and cruel”
Purplish and Cruel is the first of a series of semiotic exercises intended to explore abstracted relationships between language and images. In this case, a passage from Don DeLillo’s White Noise is used to search for web-images with similar descriptions, thus translating his linguistic tropes through the mediating agency of the Internet. As these images are collected and arrayed on screen, they are further removed from their original sources and embedded in a visual language composed of color, motion, and form.
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The research of improvisatory paradigms is my main research. This long-term research is complemented with the development of improvisatory systems. The main goal is the creation of a multimedia improvisatory framework. Current research Development of the core software. Implementation of high-levels methods of gestural analysis. Implementation of audiovisual methods. Implementation of AI methods. Previous research Understanding Collective Gestural Improvisation. web DEA at the Music Technology Group, Pompeu Fabra University. Improvisatory Music and Painting Interface. web Master's thesis at the MIT Media Lab. GAB, system for automatic reinterpretation of piano improvisations. web Undergrad's thesis at the National School of Music Mexico City UNAM. |
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Arturo Tamayo conducting .invis.
at Expo XXI, Warsaw |
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[things lost invisible] for ambisonic space and orchestra 2007 Work commissioned by the 50th International Festival of Contemporary Music Warsaw Autumn. Premiere: September 22, 2007, XXI International Expocentre, Warsaw, Poland Conductors: Arturo Tamayo, Szymon Bywalec K.Szymanowski Academic Symphony Orchestra, Katowice, Poland
.invis. is a hybrid work combining features of a large orchestral form with a spatial sound installation, exploring periphony. It involves an extended symphony orchestra divided into groups and a 3-dimentional speaker system (2 layers of 6 speakers, in ambisonics). |
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The work is a large-scale acoustic experiment, where the entire sound environment is being treated as a body of a one complex instrument (the audience is located inside “the resonance box” of that instrument). The initial sound material was recorded during an on-site session in one of the most unique underground spaces: the Cistern, Fort Worden, WA. This legendary space is characterized through a 45-second reverberation time and its architecture results in bizarre trajectories on which sound travels in it. Recordings have been realized with a Soundfield ST-250 ambisonic microphone with instrumentalists: Josiah Boothby, horn, Toby Penk - trumpet, Colby Wiley- trombone. The special stress during this recording was placed on the elevation factor: a vertical movement of sound (in this case absolutely crucial, due to the acoustic features of that space). Orchestral parts and the final shape of the entire work have been derived from those recordings, so the spatial features of the Cistern became the major formative principle. |
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CATCH22 (work in progress/2004)Catch 22 is a sound art project created in collaboration with composer Juan Pampín in 2004. It develops the idea of the speaker not as an object that reproduces sound but as an object that generates it. Therefore, feedback becomes the only material a speaker can generate for itself. For Catch 22, each speaker has a unique voice. In this way, any speaker is useful for the project, despite their size, design, specifications and trademark. The generated feedback is transform in real time, digitally and acoustically. The project takes a new form every time, regarding the acoustics, size, history and symbolic burden of the specific site. Catch 22 goes underground (2005)In collaboration with composer Juan Pampín and visual artist Daniel Trama, was the second iteration of the project. 8 small speakers and 8 dynamic microphones were installed facing each other from the walls of a 50 meters long pedestrian tunnel. Movement sensors were placed in both entrances, triggering changes in a computer that would transform the feedback sound flux in real time according to the activity within it. In the middle of the tunnel, a video installation built a visual analogy of the feedbacking sound in real time. Pedestrians would also add instability to the system as they alternatively interrupt with their bodies each of the feedback loops as they walked through the tunnel. The architectural space became sensitive to human presence and also to any the traffic going along the avenue above it. The tunnel would become sometimes a roaring engine, others a vocal tract or a wind storm. |
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Considerations on Autonomy by Gabriel CastilloWhy Catch 22 goes underground can be consider an entity? Because it shares what constitutes any entity as such: a relative autonomy. In opposition to a tunnel of echoes or mirrors, we can’t control this tunnel. An echo or a visual reflex do not interact with us, it obeys us. If we move a hand, our reflex moves his, without delay nor option. That instantaneous and loyal response builds between our reflex and ourselves a perfect and inevitable symmetry. The relation we are engage in with any other animated being or with this tunnel is not of symmetry: the tunnel, like us, has its relative autonomy when reacting to our interventions. That turns it into (or completely emulates) a sonic entity. Asymmetrical interaction: such is the premise of any entity, of anything with a relative autonomy. |
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Tre Marie is an interactive audio-visual dance improvised performance. The system in progress is an innovation of RF-ID (radio-frequency identification) technology for dance performance, which improvise live visuals on stage. The performance is a reconstructed architecture of spaces, encodes the spatial aesthetics of the interaction between human, theatrical space and cinematic space. A RF-ID reader device and tags are attached to dancers on stage and when RF-ID reader detects the tags by the actions the dancers take on stage. The RF-ID tags are being placed around the stage as well as dancers’ bodies. The movement of the dancers, as well as the locomotion on stage are being carefully mapped into the parameters of the live generated virtual sculpture. The identification data contained inside the RF-ID tags will be forwarded to the system that control the parameters of live visuals by means of bluetooth wireless technology, which contains a lively helix sculpture, generated by OpenGL. |
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In collaboration with Hiroki Nishino from DXARTS & Pamela Pietro, Department of Dance, University of Washington Tre Marie premiered at DXARTS concert and have been performed in ACM Conference 2006, UCSB, Santa Barbara. |
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