Installation and Concept Art

While I find personal satisfaction in both drawing and photography, I find my point of view is typically best expressed through conceptual and installation art combining aspects of technology and fine art. Specifically, I find myself focusing on (sometimes indirectly) on many of the same core themes I do as in information security professional:

The mutability of identity and location
The unstable, artificial definitions and labels we put on the world around us
The lack of substantive lines within many of our models of how the world works despite our convenient assumptions otherwise

I’m not always (yet) successful in articulating this point of view, but it definitely underpins my thought processes. Some examples of my work in these and other areas includes:

Interactive Multimedia Installation at Artomatic 2009

Live Performance Drawing, Photography, Computer Code, Webcam Input, and Sound

I’m not really sure what to say about this piece yet. It’s complicated and my vision for it was, by its very nature, difficult to put into words (isn’t that why we have visual art in the first place?). En lieu of a full introduction, I’ll just give you some insight into some of what I was thinking about when building this piece:

my deep, driving need to mesh my various interests in technology, drawings, and photography into a single seamless whole
art that doesn’t exist seperately from how it displayed
combining fine art, technology, and multiple individual pieces of art where the pieces and the whole are inseperable
art which, like mathematics, justifies itself without any material content or purpose
the relationship of the visceral process of creation and the cold, inhuman display of the result
Creation as an act of art and material results being simply throwaway byproducts

With these in mind, my installation this year at Artomatic was created. Hopefully some of these concepts are visible in the final product.

The piece I chose to do consists of a dynamic, computer generated background projected onto a homemade, trapezoidal framed 8×6′ screen on a wall. On top of the screen, three picture frames are hung. In the picture frames, I project B&W photographs that I have taken onto blank white paper. Onto the paper, I use pastels and charcoal to enhance the black and white photographs with color drawings. The two combine to create a glowing, ethereal mixed-media creation of the original subject. The interplay of light from the projected photograph, the paper, and the pastels is more than the sum of the individual parts. The computer generated background – which I wrote myself in Apple’s Quartz Composer programming language – is written to take video from a webcam pointed at viewers of the art and turn it into abstract moving images which respond directly (movement, color, speed, and size) to any music or audio in the background. For the purposes of the show, I have music playing constantly to drive the movement and color of the piece.

Finally, to emphasize the temporary, transitory nature of the whole thing – as well as the importance of the ACT of drawing to me personally – I, throughout the show, replace the photos with new ones – typically of other artists at the show – and create new drawings of the photos in front of the audience. The resulting pieces typically take 30 minutes or less to draw and intentionally use the time constraints to affect the creative process – color selection, drawing style, and interplay with the base photograph.

Below find a video of the final piece – with the third set of drawings – and then a stop-motion video of me creating a new drawing to place an older one:

View on Vimeo.

Computer Code written to generate Large (6′x6′) Self-Portrait Mosaic:

Leading up to Artomatic 2008, my job in security had recently involved a lot of speculation as to the nature of identity and the fact that, when it comes down to it, it’s a pretty difficult concept to pin down. For one, we’re all composed of many different facets of behavior and thought. Second, everyone sees different perspectives of the same identity and so comes to different conclusions about it. Last, are we the sum total of everything we’ve done, or are we fuzzier than that – does our identity include what we’re probably going to or are prone to do in the future? To explore this in art, I wrote a computer program which was specifically, and only, designed to create a large 6′x6′ photo self portrait of myself. The photo in question was of one aspects of my many human moods – anger. The program, however, created this as a mosaic of over 8100 copies of a smaller, happier self portrait of myself. When put together, if you stood at a distance, viewers would see the large angry face. If they came closer, they would see that if you only took a narrow view, you would just see thousands of happy faces and never notice the anger.
Eventually, I open sourced the program and wrote it so anyone could generate a similar mosaic out of two images. (Interestingly, in doing this, I found that you could generate a mosaic that looked black and white from a distance but was really composed of thousands of color pictures! But, I digress). Since I first made the code available to the public, it has been downloaded over 5,000 times.

Click Picture to See Detail:

SintixErr: Second Life Gallery for Washington DC Artists:

The SintixErr Gallery was a virtual gallery in Second Life designed to present a cutting edge, unusual space for local emerging artists to present their work to a wider audience. It also served as a launching pad for many “mixed reality” events. Second Life would be projected on a wall while a live video and audio stream from the local venue would be projected “into” the virtual world. At these events, visitors could attend either virtually or “in real life” and, in many ways, experience the event as if they were in the same place. Some of the events included live virtual sculpture contests, interactive live panel discussions, band (real and virtual) performances, etc. Most interesting, though, was the use of the virtual world to bring the foreign directors who were juried into the first international Flik Film Festival live to an audience screening their films at the festival in DC.

In these projects,I was fascinated by the implications for our sense of self, location, and the intersection between the two. I was also interested in the burdgeoning evolution of virtual worlds as an artistic medium in their own right.

Data and Security Visualization:

For awhile in 2004-2006, my job involved dealing with massive amounts of data. By “dealing with”, I mean that 2 human analysts had to figure out how to process 65,000,000 distinct “things” a day and say something smart about them. Obviously, that’s impossible without some help. Computers, though, are really bad at making the kind of fuzzy jugement calls that humans make. How is this solved? By taking information out of a “text” form which is low resolution and takes a lot of higher level thinking to process and putting into visualizations utilizing color, shape, line, form to take advantage of the brains inherent talents at pattern recognition.

What does this have to do with art? I began to realize that the same techniques and relationships that made data easily digestable to the analysts were very similar to the ones that people appreciated aesthetically. Since then, I’ve taken a number of those security data visualizations, tweaked them a little bit withough changing their underlying truth, and used them as art in shows (a number of them have been since sold). Recently, I’ve also turned the entire United States Stimulus Bill (now law) into artistic visualizations. I’ll let you be the judge as to whether or not it’s art here (more descriptions of these to follow soon):

“Any Way to Say Hello”: Collaborative Photography/Video project for Ofrenda show:

Less ambitious than the Second Life Gallery, “Any Way to Say Hello” was a collaborative “Day of the Dead” installation created by myself, Paivi Salonen, and Angela Kleis. All three of us were photographers, but wanted to create something more immersive for this show. We ended up staging a “wake” in Rock Creek Park in DC. Inspired by Camus’ The Stranger, the wake was outdoors with viewers seated around the body. One seat, however (conceptually representing Meursault’s metaphorical emotional absense from his mother’s wake), was conspicuously empty. The three of us took hundreds of photos of this scene and I turned them into a short video intended to run as a loop. This video was then projected onto a “ghostly” looking screen (composed of tissue paper raised 1/4″ above a baseboard and framed behind glass) at the show. An ofrenda shrine was build around the framed, moving image.

Ofrenda Photos

Texturing Life with Light:

Using projection as the basis for photographs and a background for mixed media installations. More on this later – I’m currently developing an installation of this for Artomatic 2009. For now, some test cases and a video: