portfolio

Quotes and Pictures

"Quotes and Pictures" is a crankie about seeing, and was performed in 2019 at the Black Cherry Puppet Theater in Baltimore, Maryland. I am still working on the documentation, but you can still visit the Quotes and Pictures documentation for the script and pictures.

Palpable City

Palpable City is a large-scale, mobile, tactile installation. The everyday experience of space is augmented with an invisible tactile landscape, where one navigates less by vision and more by feel. Participants wear a vest outfitted with a GPS, custom hardware and software, and an array of vibrotactile actuators (vibrating pager motors) that are sewn in across the chest and back. As they walk, they encounter varying vibrotactile patterns—changes in rhythm, location or intensity—dependent upon their location. Visit the project page for more documentation.

bark rubbings: city as forest

In bark rubbing I would like to think of the city as a forest of textures. A forest in nature can be seen an experience of living architecture. It is a medium that connects earth-human-sky. A walk through a forest has a texture of densities of vegetation, and within that varying densities of species, each with their own texture.

The city can be imagined in a similar way, certain areas are more or less dense with buildings and people. The buildings' canopy is higher or lower depending upon use or neighborhood. When you look to individual buildings, each facade has its own texture. The idea is that the visual textures and energies of the living and built structures project out into the spaces that surround them. By wearing the vest and walking through the spaces, one can experience them. The textures range from smooth rolling waves up and down the body, to stochastic full body bursts. Timing and intensity of the vibrations vary depending on the participants movement, much like how the sensation and impression changes when you vary the speed and pressure of charcoal while making a rubbing over a texture. Please visit the project page for documentation.

information animals

Proposal :: What denotes evolutionary fitness in the information age? As participants take Information Animals for a walk, their imagery, sound and behavior transform, combining local conditions with a narrative of fictional evolutionary adaptations. Embodied by a 25"x50" LED display woven into deer fencing, and mobilized by a push golf cart, Information Animals engage their environment through a suite of common environmental and network sensors that nourish their imaginary biologies, defining their lifeworld in the information landscape. LED animation concept video [vimeo]

Kinaesthetic Double Double

Riding the train, one's body participates in a choreography of movements instigated by the twists and turns of the tracks. Largely ignored, this jostling constitutes a communal everyday kinaesthetic experience. However, we share this experience with more than our fellow travelers---this choreography includes non-human actors as well. kinaesthetic double-double is a "performing object"---in this case, a discarded coffee cup that replays the quotidian jostling brought about by the twists, turns, stops and starts of the subway. Please visit the project page for documentation.

A Tactilist Theatre

The "mother of all senses"-touch is the sense which became differentiated into the others. The skin is the most ancient and largest sense organ of the body, yet few arts engage it directly. In his 1921 The Manifesto of Tactilism, Futurist Filippo T. Marinetti outlined a radical new "Art of Touch". It is in this spirit that I propose to bring "poems told by touch" to Bumpkin Island via the construction of a small tactilist theatre. Visit the project page for documentation.

reading a wave

"The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances; and though Mr. Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions applies to him. Finally, it is not 'the waves' that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object." – Italo Calvino project page for mor information about the installation.

gestural light

This research functions as material studies for creating responsive environments, using light that is shaped by movement and gesture. Ambient lighting and projected video are explored. In the case of projected video, in general, the video is not to be viewed as a framed image object, but as illumination. Visit the project page for more information about these works and experiments.

troglodyte

Troglodyte stems from the collaborative efforts of three members of the Topological Media Lab: Erik Conrad, Josée–Anne Drolet and Justyna Latek. The project consists of an ongoing series of experiments/interventions that investigate the relationship between a phenomenal understanding of the body and the experience and understanding of space... Visit the project page for more information about the collaboration/installation.

æther

æther is an experiment in how new technologies of representation affect human perception. It acts as a haptic surface for computer mediated visualinformation to enable tangible experiences common to painting and sculpture, but rare in digital media. By immersing the experience of reading into a haptic visual space, different ways of seeing are allowed to dynamically combine and separate, giving rise to new forms of visual expression and reception. Visit the project page for more about the interface.