Leo Villareal

Leo Villareal used light as the primary medium to create enticing carvings rather than just projections. I think it was Dan Flavin who led the way for light carvings by using florescent tubes to achieve his minimalism style or even James Turell with his mood altering neon environment. But this artist Leo took it a whole step further then them all, I’m pretty sure that he was inspired by Dan Flavin because of the echoes of their similar styles, but Leo’s work still left me with a wow factor for much longer than Flavin’s work did.

Leo Villareal - Diamond Sea

I think my favourite series created by Leo would have to be the Diamond Sea series. The way he combines the led’s with foreign objects like steel back plates behind them to achieve a never ending reflection, and what’s best of all is he only use the basic led colours and manipulates them with code and ‘voila’. I know I’ve seen this form of lighting in a lot of modern music video and I’m sure that some inspiration for it came from the work of this artist.


Bibliography

Diamond Sea:
www.occasionalphotographer.blogspot.com

Video

Diamond Sea (2009):
http://www.geringlopez.com/artists/leo-villareal/video/diamond-sea-7x7/

Scott Smibbe

The first thing I noticed about this artist is that he uses projections to project his art and not only that but they are also interactive. He usually projects his art on to the floor or the ceiling and the projection then changes in response to people moving across its surface. The first full size piece of interactive art created by Snibbe was called Boundary Functions (1998); this projection was on the floor. This piece was 4*4 meter and what happened was when people walked over it Boundary Functions used a computer, a camera and a projector to draw connecting lines between all of the people on the floor.

People interacting with Snibbe’s Boundary Functions installation. You can see the voronoi shapes on the ground representing their personal space

When all of the lines are connected they form a Voronoi Diagram, at first the lines may not make any sense (I had no idea what the lines represented when I looked at it first), but if you take a minute to try and understand the work you may notice that the lines surrounding the peoples bodies each represent the individuals personal space – the area of space closer to that individual than anyone else in that room. Quote by Snibbe himself states that this work “shows that personal space, though we call it our own, is defined by others and changes without our control”. As simple as it may sound, this is very true.Snibbe has an undergraduate and masters degree in fine art and computer science from Brown University.

Snibbe also went on to study abstract film at the School of Design in Rhode Island with Amy Kravitz. He made many short animated films using hand drawn images, and I guess it was this which finally made him settle in to interactive art as his final artistic medium.

This is what voronoi shapes are, they are like fractal images of crystals. These are the type of shapes that surround the people when they interact with Snibbe’s Boundary Functions

Snibbe’s work has been exhibited in galleries world wide; it has been shown at the NTT Intercommunication Centre (Tokyo, Japan), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, United Kingdom) and the Kitchen (New York, USA) – and this is just to name a few.

Amazingly his work is not only restricted to art galleries, his work has also been collected and shown in science museums such as Paheno Science Centre (Germany), Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (Paris, France) and Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA) – this is just name a few.There was also this piece by Snibbe called Three Drops (2006) which caught my eye. As you can see from the image below, the projection of water with air bubbles rising to the top. Now here’s the fun bit, the viewer can actually interact (using their shadw) with the simulated water and the bubbles. Snibbe started and finished this while he was working with Sonar Research.

Someones shadows interacting with the water

To create this he wrote up his own custom C++ code, he used OpenGL for the 3d graphics, OpenCV for computer vision and some of their in-house and commercial physics simulation engines.

This installation was on view at the Expolatorium in San Francisco in 2006 and was really popular with the people. It was also featured in one of the newsletters of Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network.

His work has touched people so deeply that it has gone far enough to allow him to receive grants from the likes of the Rockafeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts; he has also received awards at the Prix Ars Electronica Festival, the Black Mariah Film Festival and even the Stuttgart Trickfilm-Festival.

Snibbe has also taught media art students at the UC Berkley and the San Francisco Art Institute. And he didn’t just stop there, he worked as a computer scientist at the Adobe Systems from 1994-1996, where he also contributed to the making of Adobe After Effects (whatever contributions he may have made he did a good job of it, that software is fantastic). He also worked at Interval Research from 1996-2000 where he worked on Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Haptics research projects. Snibbe currently resides in San Francisco, California where he has settled down with a job and his own personal studio to work in.

The Artist himself

He has made a lot of contributions to a lot of places and things I have previously used and looked at, but I’m surprised I didn’t come across his name. I think he deserves a little bit more credit for all that he does. Some of the things that he has done is what inspires younger people to mould their career around. I think he should take a personal student under his wing and become his mentor; it would be a shame to lose an artist as diverse as this.


Bibliography

Boundary Functions:
http://www.superpink.com/interface/imagens/snibbe_boundary.jpg

Varoni shapes:
http://www.amath.washington.edu/~dnlennon/voronoi/

Water:
http://www.mangtronix.com/wiki/projects:three_drops

Scott Snibbe’s portrait:
http://dm.risd.edu/assets/imgs/lectures/2006-scott-snibbe.jpg


Links:

Personal Website:
http://snibbe.com/

Some of Snibbe’s installations:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/nise-resources/

Info on his work:
http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/snibbe.shtml


Books:

Collection of his best works, all documented
Visceral Cinema: Chien
ASIN: B000BFHTOE


DVD:
Scott Snibbe: Selected Interactive Works 1995-2005
ASIN: B000B5SLUU

Ian Davenport

I wanted to move away from looking at digital experimental art for awhile and look at some traditional digital art. This would be a nice change and I thought this way I would have something to compare and contrast the digital work with as well. I came across numerous works by artists but none interested me more than Ian Davenports drip paint style.

Daven is a British artist born in Kent (Sidcup) 1966. He first began to study art at the Northwich College of Art and Design in Cheshire before going to Goldsmiths College from which he graduated in 1988. In the same year of his graduation he featured an exhibition at the Damien Hurst Freeze Exhibition, his appearence in this exhibition brought together many of the members of the Young British Artists group. Davenport never really did a solo exhibition until the year of 1990, in the same year his work was also included in the British Art Show. Then in 1991 he was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Every colour here compliments one another – regardless of the contrast between them

I really like the technique Davenport uses to create his pieces, I think it is what attracted me to his work - the way a moth is to a light. Davenport creates his work by pouring paint on to a tilted surface and then letting gravity spread the paint in its own will over the surface. Davenport after a while began working on medium density fibre board rather than canvas - I guess the fibre board will allow the paint to travel further and faster than the canvas without being absorbed. Davenport also began using household gloss paint more often than any other type of paint, this meant that the viewer would be able to see their reflection in his work - almost as if they were a key element of his work where they bring life to the lifeless paint strips.

The choice of two complimentary colours with varying line values makes this look like a subtle fable

Other than many of the singular surface works by Davenport's, there are many diptychs (an object with two flat surfaces joined together at a hinge) and even triptychs (same as dictychs except this time three seperate flat surfaces joined and two seperate hinges).

In 2003 Davenport made a thirteen metre high wall painted piece for The Days Like These Tate Exhitbition which he made by dripping different coloured paints down the wall from a syringe (hint of Pollock). But then in the September of 2006 he revealed his largest piece to date. It was 48m long and 3m high, it just isn't possible to take the whole thing in one look - no matter how far back you stand. To fully appreciate this piece you had to stand up close to the painting at one end and then walk along it, slowly absorbing the glossiness, the thextures and the contrasting and harmonic colours that have been dripped down from three metres above. This piece was called 'Poured Lines: Southwark' and is currently available to view beneath the railway bridge close to the Tate Gallery.

'Poured Lines: Southwark' (his biggest piece yet)

After looking through many of Davenport's paintings, I have come to believe that he does not just pick up any random colour and drip it down before moving on to another random colour and doing the same - like many have said. I believe that he stops after every line of colour and takes a step back to view his work and decide which colour would compliment the current line of colour - whether it be a similar or contrasting tone depends all on which way on the colour wheel he wants to travel. As you begin to follow he colours down from the top you almost get a sense that the colours are shimmering, and since the paint is still wet you also get the birth of a third colour from the two coloured stripes when they mix in to each other on their way down.

I like this style and I think it’s a something fresh and a feasible which we can work in ourselves. It’s also good to know that his work is available to view locally in order to find some inspiration – and also the fact that he is British and is still creating something like this means all hope for the Brit’s is not lost.


Bibliography

Red/Blue/Yellow:
http://saltbridges.bioch.ox.ac.uk/iandavenportcv.html

Yellow/Blue:
http://saltbridges.bioch.ox.ac.uk/westendwall.html

Poured Lines - Southwark:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5315186.stm



Links:

Damien Hurst (first exhibition appearance):
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hirst.html

Young British Artists (he helped give birth to):
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=320

Poured Lines: Southwark (second largest piece created):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5315186.stm


Video:

Davenport's Everything piece in University of Warwick (his largest piece ever created):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uHVnslH331o

Week 6

This week we spoke about passive and active viewers and what I would like to elaborate on here is the latter. I went to the Metropolitan University to view a piece of work named ‘Wall Ball’; it was a very large installation and was created by Alexander Wendt, Elaine Thomaszi-Freitas and Luke Hastilow. It was a playful piece which attempted to incorporate cultural identity and position in to one piece.

The way the viewers would interact with the piece would be to throw a ball(s) on to the canvas projected piece. On the canvas would be a 4*4 grid with different parts of the face from people of different backgrounds, and when the ball would hit a square the skin would change to another. Most of the photographed subjects were neither born nor bred in London – it is the journey of migration that unites them here creating a collective of friends originally from European, Asian and African backgrounds.

Metropolitan University - Wall Ball

The whole piece was created using Max MSP and Jitter along with various pieces of hardware. I thought it was a very powerful message being sent out while at the same time being playful, maybe by making it playful the participants didn’t realise how powerful it is until later when they thought about it.


Bibliography

Metropolitan Wall Ball:
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/news/latest-news/april-2009/wall-ball-bounces-from-london-to-new-york.cfm


Also look up:
Ghosting by Roshini Kempadoo

Project Update

I have been thinking this week and here’s what I have settled on.

I shall be using the Arduino software to program the Arduino micro processor. I have also programmed in Processor but I believe it will be more steadfast for me to work in the Arduino language simply because I have been using it for the last few weeks and am feeling more comfortable with it.

Yes or no to a gui? Well I know for a fact that I shall be continuing to develop this project after I hand this in so for the time being I have decided not toad a gui in Flash MX. Primarily I was going to use Flash MX to give a graphical representation of the dots and dashes on screen to move the whole thing to being digital but I have yet to learn how to integrate Arduino with Flash and believe it will be too taxing on time and I will end up not completing it. So just the led for now, a gui later.

Finally a led or a piezo speaker, or both? Well since they have begun using the Morse code system kit has always either been printed on paper or been done by sound but rarely with light. Therefore I decided to make it using light. But I will definitely be thinking about integrating a piezo speaker in to it that works in combination with the sound.

I’ve also been looking at midi shields this week to see how they are to work. I was thinking of replacing the beeps with something a bit more modern, probably a sound effect that’s not very common.


To do:

Begin research for the Morse code language and start on the programming.

Project Update

We introduced our ideas today for our individual projects. After assessing the feedback which funnily enough corroborated with the feedback I received online from numerous people I decided to go with the morse code concept. This is because it seemed simple enough and wasn’t over ambitious.

I am please that I have chosen to follow this route since secretly over the last few days I have been slowly biased towards this concept rather than the binary clock one. I think it will also be fun since it requires one person to enter a phrase to be encoded while other will be required to decipher it.


Next step:

- Shall I use Arduino or Processing
- Shall I consider using Flash MX and give it a GUI
- Shall I use a piezo speaker to sound out the dot’s and dashes


These are the things I will be pondering over the next few days to see which of these will be time feasible.

Orbiter

Sound Installations

During this weeks workshop we were introduced to a few sound environment installations. In the public art sector, this sound installation can be seen as being the equivalent of a sculpture or something similar.


The Orbiter Installation

With this installation, the spectator lies down and relaxes, fixing their eyes on to the extended plane before them. Then using their fingers and pointing upwards they are able to give birth to new stars in to the orbit with musical and distinguishing visual interaction. The pitch of the sound depends on the placement of your star within the orbit and the bigger the star grows the louder the music plays.

The Orbiter - Vera-Maria Glahn & Marcus Wendt

“THE “ORBITER” DRAWS THE VISITOR IN AND TAKES OVER ALL OF HIS SENSES. IT IS A PLACE FOR VISITORS TO LAY DOWN AND RELAX, WATCHING THE FIRMAMENT ABOVE THEM. THE VISITOR CAN CONGER UP NEW RINGING BODIES WITH A GESTURE AND PUT THEM INTO ORBIT. AS IF HE WERE SITTING IN THE BELLY OF THE INSTRUMENT, THE PLAYER IS ENVELOPED BY THE MUSIC, AS ARE THE EARS, BODY AND SPACE”

This installation of theirs is based on custom built software by the artists themselves. It performs a real time analysis of a camera image and even generates a 6channel audio/video signals. The synthesized sounds use in this project has a very late and contrasting 1960-ish feel to it.


Bibliography

The Orbiter:
http://www.microarchitecture.eu/ORBITER.html

Vera-Maria Glahn:
http://www.veraglahn.de/orbiter.html

Video of the installation :
http://www.vimeo.com/303105