ASU2

Where is Love? Finalist for Future Places Festival 2009 in Porto, Portugal

dfodel — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:03:44 -0800

Where is Love? is a playful locative media project that utilizes digital mapping technologies and psychogeographical strategies to encourage participants to explore their local environment, emotionally and physically.

Participants engage with the work using a standard web-browser, to input brief stories and to upload photos of someplace where they have experienced “love”; physical, emotional or otherwise.

The active project website is located here.

The artwork employs special software to collect and store this basic information, and to help guide participants through actual physical locations, via the emotional overlay created by their input and the input of other users.

Using a web-enabled cell phone, or any standard laptop computer users can plot personal trajectories through the “love-density” of the city. Users become physically aware of intimate encounters that others have experienced in their immediate physical surroundings. It becomes yet another layer of engagement in the topology of urban space.

The project playfully conjures memory, as it is embedded in physical space, using digital technology as social lubricant. The anonymous nature of the participation works to distance the acts, even as it renews the latent emotional content of the memory.

The physical acts recalled by users are less important than the emotional state. What is important is that we all contribute to an emotional map of our physical territory, and this project creates tangible traces of something always already there.

We all understand how vulnerable using these technologies makes us, and yet we share our most intimate stories and secrets using various social networking sites and photo-sharing sites. This project bridges the idea of intimacy, with this notion of technological vulnerability, using shared emotions as social currency.

To reinforce the playful nature of the project, specially packaged condoms with the project URL printed on them will be distributed at bars, nightclubs, and other festival locations around the local area. The condom serves to signify the physical act of love, connecting the ephemeral, emotional nature of internal experience to that of the external experience of the body navigating physical space.

jamBox: Audio Sculpture at the FAC Modern Gallery

dfodel — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:54:14 -0700

In the jamBox I wanted to explore the idea of an expressive audio instrument in a sculptural form, that uses spatiallity as a key component in its operation. The jamBox responds to the physically enclosing space to set its initial "sound floor" and is then modulated by one or many participants or viewers.

An array of sensors detect proximity in several directions and the mutiple voices of the audio are changed by the activities surrounding the enclosing space of the installation.

The materials used in the physical sculpture have a crafty sensibility, utilizing bamboo, and hand-sewn felt and are designed to visually invite closer inspection. The sounds on the other hand increase in volume as participants move closer, creating tension in the surrounding space.

The work is playful and encourages group participation and interaction while deciphering its puzzle-like quality.

The jamBox has been shown at the FAC Modern Gallery in Colorado Springs Colorado

Wind on Wind / Water on Water - Denver Botanic Gardens: Digital Nature

dfodel — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:39:27 -0700

The Digital Nature show sought to showcase the work of artists working in digital media, incorporating elements from the natural world via process, subject, aesthetics, or interactivity. Curated by Rachel Murray of the Denver Botanic Gardens and housed in the York Street Pavillion, the show incorporated interactive installation art, and live performances.
I had two interactive works selected, Wind on Wind and Water on Water. Each of the pieces were explorations of the metaphor of natural movement as subtle form of interspecies communication.
Sensors were suspended from tree branches and submerged under a waterfall, translating the motion of wind and water into malleable data which served to modulate video imagery projected in real time back onto the tree branches and waterfall.
More photos here. Wind on Wind statement here. Water on Water statement here.