Communication defines us.  It decorates our lives in every possible way: informing our relationships, shaping our minds, enabling civilization, and catalyzing uncivilized behaviors.  Meaning tries with varied success to ride it bareback in the mad leap from mind to mind. Truth finds light or hiding in its presence.  Without it, what would we be?  But what is it, really?

This site-specific installation of Communicado was created in response to the thematic call Mine/Yours posed by the exhibition curators at Gallery Project in Ann Arbor, MI. The piece presents a dialog between me and you, him and her, H.G. Wells and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and all combinations of their interpolated and extrapolated personae.

Communicado is a single channel three projector piece driven by a computer with custom program.  Words and phrases drawn from many sources create a constant exchange that evokes dialogue, enlightenment, and conflict throughout the always changing performance.  Two animated personae swerve alternately between roles as comrades, clowns, contestants, and combatants.

Now Available: High resolution archival inkjet prints of this evolving piece.

This site-specific installation of The Emergence Project was created in response to the thematic call Imaging the Future posed by the exhibition curators at Gallery Project in Ann Arbor, MI. The piece imagines the future through the evolution of ideas seeded by currently issued patents mined over the course of the exhibition.  Contemporary notions are captured and introduced into the piece as new patents are added to the corpus of intellectual property that will shape technologies to come, and through them the society that will emerge from our present.

We investigate how complex patterns arise out of a series of simple interactions without apparent direction or plan. Patents injected daily into this living ecology of ideas are represented by the language that encodes them. They are analyzed continually and processed into visualizations that dynamically evolve from minute to minute. The generative artwork uses simple morphological rules to animate word clusters based on linguistic proximity, similarity, and difference.

In the work, hundreds of organic digital creatures embody the patents and their derived offspring. The digital creatures, or idea clusters, continuously interact with each other, evaluating qualitative proximity in regards to their meaning and frequency. Thousands of local interactions between the creatures, as well as autonomous creation of new creatures, generate patterns that represent the evolution of current ideas into future actualizations. As the piece continues to evolve over time it reflects the evolution process in form of graphical patterns, statistics and maps. At intervals the lens applied to the representation of the ecology of ideas is suddenly switched to reveal a different aspect of this evolving future.  At one time the visualization highlights the weighted linguistic components of the ideas.  At another the interconnected relationships between the ideas becomes the focus. And later, the sweep of ideas through time as they comingle and breed dominates.

The Emergence Project builds on one of the liveliest areas of research in philosophy and science. Examples of apparent emergent phenomena range from colonies of ants to the popularity of a particular hairstyle, and life itself. The Emergence Project: Imaging the Future extrapolates our present to our future by adapting emergent behavior simulations to the evolution of ideas.

threewallsSALON: Art in the Age of Infinite Reproducibility, 2010

Tuesday April 20th, 7:00 pm

threewalls
119 n. peoria #2d
Chicago, IL 60607

http://www.three-walls.org/calendar/2010/04/threewallssalon-art-in-age-of-infinite-reproducibility.php

Galápagos++ is a 40-foot by 40-foot translucent computer-generated artwork installed at the Theory and Computing Sciences building of Argonne National Laboratory. It covers the TCS building library’s south window. The piece intermingles visual elements inspired by biology, physics, and mathematics to create an organic cosmology evocative of the sea of ideas into which science dips.

The image itself is generated by a stochastic, context-free grammar. The grammar is a set of rules that defines and confines the spatial and spectral relationships between the graphical elements of the image. Writing and tuning this grammar is part of the work of “painting” the image. From this grammar, a large number of expressive instances are possible; each a kind of sentence allowed by the grammar. Galápagos++ is one such sentence.

Galápagos++ owes aspects of its look and feel to the relationship TCS has to Waterfall Glen. The Glen as proxy for all of nature is filtered through the scientific body of thought embodied in the workings of the facility and projected onto the screen of the library window. The name Galápagos++, pronounced “Galápagos plus plus”, refers to the famed islands which served as the inspiration for Darwin’s sweeping theory of evolution. The small appendage to the name invokes the postfix increment operator common to many computer-programming languages and indicates an incremental step forward.

Acknowledgments:
Galápagos++ was created by Mark Hereld and Michael E. Papka. Credit for the idea of creating a “stained glass” fractal and the impetus for the project goes to Rick L. Stevens and Joseph Lambke. The artists acknowledge the developers of Context Free — the interpreter that generated the image from the grammar — and Pete Beckman for bringing Context Free to their attention.

The Emergence Project is a software art installation exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center’s digital facade gallery from October 11 until December 31, 2008. The piece investigates how complex patterns arise out of a series of simple interactions, without apparent direction or plan. Rising from the actual as-it’s-happening discourse emanating out of the Chicago Humanities Festival, the presentations, performances, and panel discussions are captured, analyzed, and processed into visualizations that dynamically evolve from minute to minute. The generative artwork uses simple morphological rules to animate word clusters, based on linguistic proximity, similarity, and difference.

Links: The Emergence Project, Hyde Park Art Center

1280 x 1024 real-time digital output; single channel; high resolution video camera monitoring movement and light on the ballroom floor at oblique angle; continuous computer vision program analysis of video input used to generate live interactive projected imagery. Commissioned piece for the civic dinner welcoming incoming President Robert Zimmer to the University of Chicago and to the city of Chicago.

7680 × 1024 resolution continuous real-time digital output; single channel, 10-projection screens; weather transmitter with temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction instrumentation; and 7 channel sound.

This large scale digital projection uses live weather information taken from a weathervane fixed to the front of the Art Center to determine the motion and pattern of the composition. Random Sky is a digital program that generates random calculations in real-time. Its performance maintains a degree of unpredictability informed by external data culled from the weather instruments located on the exterior of the art center. Projected as oscillating vertical blue and white bands across the center’s glass façade Random Sky results in tendencies rather than wholly predetermined narratives. The project is a semi-permanent installation literally wired in the building’s physical as well as digital infrastructure. It is meant to reside within and without the architecture of the center and to be called upon at any moment.

http://www.hydeparkart.org/exhibitions/2006/04/random_sky.php

Press and Mentions
A Portrait of Chicago MOMA.org Inside/Out, September 26, 2010
Report from Chicago:Window of Opportunity, Susan Snodgrass, Art In America, January 2007 (p. 80-85)
Everything is illuminated, Ruth Lopez, TimeOut Chicago, April 27-May 4, 2006(p. 24-25)