Structural Patterns

Yesterday, I had a studio visit with folks from Museo del Barrio which gave me an opportunity to assemble current work and talk about it. My focus over the last few months has been a combination of hand-drawn animations and wooden sculptures which will come together in a new media sculpture series titled “Mediated Idols.”

About “Mediated Idols”
The editors of DE-WESTERNIZING MEDIA STUDIES, Curran and Park ask the following questions in the book’s introduction:
1. How do the media relate to the power structure of society?
2. What influences the media and where does control over the media lie?
3. How has the media influenced society?
4. What effect has media and new media had on the media system and society?

In considering these questions, my initial response is cannibalization. Historically, the cannibalization of one civilization by an emerging civilization. In contemporary reality, the transformation of highly mediated popular culture by either youth subcultures or ethnic specific cannibalizations that transform globalized pop culture in unexpected manners.

In creating the “Mediated Idols,” I am studying artifacts from the pre-Aztec city Teotihuacan that had far reaching influence geographically and through time. As I look at these Mesoamerican artifacts, I am as well studying contemporary popular cultural icons that fade only to reappear in new formats. “Mediated Idols” will combine the physicality of past artifacts with virtual representation and data of contemporary life. As stand alone sculptures, “Mediated Idols” will present greater attention to material and form than the “Undocumented Drones.” The animations will also have greater coherence with the sculptures.

Other images from the studio visit…

Arts Across the Curriculum and the Integrated Media Arts MFA Program at Hunter College will host a performance by Martin Howse on Friday April 4th at 7pm in the Black Box – Hunter North 543.

Martin Howse is a unique new media artist who builds his own electronics and writes his own programs for performance. Berlin-based researcher, artist, inventor and performer Martin Howse traverses the electromagnetic spectrum as a space for exploration that may be manipulated to generate sound and visual. Martin Howse leads “micro_research,” a mobile research platform exploring psychogeophysics and asking the questions of where precisely the plague known as software executes.

Recently the Czech cultural center Školská 28 described Martin Howse performance as

“heavily improvised, playing with the collapse of massed, barely functional salvaged equipment and software systems made manifest in sound/noise and image, Howse presents a complex, process-driven constructivist performance; the symphonic rise of the attempt to piece together fugal systematics is played out against the noise of collapse and machine crash at the deserted border of control.”

Through the BOMBLOG, I just launched a series of compositions titled “Helsinki Web Sketches” that combine photos that I took during a residency at HIAP with WebGL code using three.js, rotoscope animations and video. Interact with the pages and click through them to see the various sketches.

The Helsinki Web Sketches are designed for modern desktop browsers that support WebGL.

Artist and IMA MFA candidate Grayson Earle has just launched the NSA Haiku Generator. Set against a GIF-style rainbow sky background is a haiku composed of NSA watch words. The use of any of these 845 words or character combinations over internet communications can land one on the NSA’s terrorist watch list. Grayson Earle edited the list down to some 300 terms to construct haikus that poke fun at what seems like a ridiculously sweeping effort to construct a flawed terrorist watch list. As the artist states:

This web app uses the NSA’s database of terms which can land you as a suspected terrorist if you use them in electronic communication. Rather than being all ‘doom and gloom,’ I decided to make a game out of it. I’ve assigned each phrase a syllable count which enables you to create random haikus out of hundreds of words.

Click the haiku text to generate new haikus and then share them over various social media, to make the NSA list even more pointless.

The information page to the site also presents links to organizations that are taken a serious stance against the NSA monitoring of our electronic communications:
Fight For The Future
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Stop Watching.Us and the October 26th Rally in DC

Last week, our friend and artist Minna Langstrom introduced Brooke and I to Ulla Taipale who is coordinating BiofiliA – a bio-art lab at Aalto University in Helsinki. Ulla was so generous as to give us a tour of the lab which consists of an electronics area, a wet lab and biology lab. It was amazing to see a university dedicating the funding and facilities to a relatively avant-garde practice of combining biology and art. Pictured above is Ulla to the right and the lab manager a recent bio graduate of the university.

As the BiofiliA site states, the project is “a biological art unit was launched under the Aalto ARTS in 2012. It offers a platform and infrastructure for trans-disciplinary research and education that aim at creating cultural discussion and innovation around the topics related to the manipulation of life and biological processes at a practical and theoretical level, including philosophical and ethical dimensions…”

Artists that have worked collaboratively with scientists at BiofeliA include Oron Catts of SymbioticA, Christina Stadblauer, Kiran Gangadharan, Agnes Meyer-Brandis and they hope to bring Paul Vanouse for 2014. Art and biology students may take courses at BiofiliA and work along side of resident artists.

One of the ongoing projects exists outside the labs – Hexa-Hive Village an experiment with urban bee keeping. The hives were designed by Christina Stadlbauer and Kiran Gangadharan. And beyond producing honey, Till Bovermann of Media Lab Helsinki has installed contact microphones in one of the hives for “project hive listening.”

As part of Upgrade! San Francisco, I will be doing an artist talk this Thursday, May 30th from 7-9pm at ATA, 992 Valencia St, http://www.atasite.org/
And a two-day rotoscoping workshop Saturday, June 1, 2013 at 11AM – 4PM and Sunday, June 2, 11AM – 4PM. To sign up go to:
http://physicaltraces.eventbrite.com/

Last Saturday, I met with Keith Estiler and Edgar De La Vega of OBTRUSIV MAG to discuss art. They’ve put the interview on their Art & Culture column, the article is titled – Pricking the Public. Here’s the video:

A Macaulay College student, Tyler Alterman that once took a class of mine (Intro to 2D Animation) is working on his senior project – a cognitive science lab in a truck. Watch the video, it’s the type of project that I can’t help but to support due to it’s good energy and idealism. It would be great to see an ice cream type truck with a giant brain buzzing around New York City!

Following the opening of Mexican artist Ivan Puig’s solo show at MagnanMetz gallery in New York City, Iggy and I visited with Puig and caught up regarding the SEFT-1 project (SEFT is an acronym for Sonda de Exploración Ferroviaria Tripulada or Manned Railway Exploration Probe). I first learned about the project in 2006 when Puig was just getting started on the concept of exploring abandoned railroads through out Mexico using a vehicle designed to travel the on the railroad tracks as well as car roads when necessary. Ivan was interested in seeing first hand what had happened to the communities that were built along the tracks and largely subsisted from the trains running throughout Mexico. Many of these communities are small rural populations that depended on the trains for various needs.

Puig spend a year traversing the abandoned railroad system with his half-brother Andrés Padilla Domene. As described on the exhibitions press release “The two set off from the National Museum of Art in Mexico City to begin their investigation of abandoned railways throughout Mexico and Ecuador, collecting evidence of their travels through photo, video and audio. Puig and Padilla Domene recorded contemporary landscapes, infrastructure and details of the everyday life of inhabitants to create a futuristic exploration of the countries’ pasts. Their progress has been consistently updated on the project’s website, www.seft1.com, where the public can follow the trajectory of the vehicle, view images of artifacts collected and listen to interviews with those they have met along the way.”

It appears that the SEFT-1 will be traveling to the UK to explore abandoned railways throughout the British countryside sometime in the next year. By doing so, the artist will expand the archive of stories regarding locomotive technology and the communities surrounding the technology.

This the final weekend of the exhibition ReGeneration at the NY Hall of Science in Corona Park. Various events and workshops will be occurring today. Catch the show before it comes down! Click here for more information on ReGeneration

The exhibition features my own “a geography of being : una geografia de ser” – an interactive art installation that reflects upon the dynamics of the undocumented immigrant population in the United States, specifically in relation to undocumented youth. The installation consists of wooden kinetic sculptures with animated displays titled “Undocumented Drones” and a video game that places the player in the role of an undocumented youth that must face several challenges in the search for self-determination beyond the imposed constraints of citizenry. View Documentation of the Installation. Or play the game online.