Curator

Joel Slayton teaches Digital Media Art at San Jose State University and was Executive Director of ZERO1 The Art and Technology Network in San Jose, California, between 2008 and 2016. Previously he was the founding director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University, the second oldest academic media arts center in the USA.

Cere Davis:Water Organ

Water Organ is a moving sculpture plays an emergent musical composition through the subtle interplay of water, copper electromagnetic inductors and floating magnetic resonators. A participant initiated process generates five independent changing electronic tones which are amplified and sent into copper coils placed under water. Magnets attached underneath floating vessels transform upcycled steel “tin” lids into audible speakers, each resonating with their own unique timbral character. This complex composition emerges from a constant imbalance of forces chaotically propelling floating vessels through a shallow pool of water being pulled and pushed over speaker coils. Water Organ behaves like a many-bodied “strange attractor” whose chaotic motion emerges through mutual magnetic repulsion between vessels combined with the changing magnetic polarity of copper inductive coils. Viewers are transfixed by its calming natural meditative “Koi pond” like behavior as if it were embodied with the agency of a living organism, inviting us to reframe a common understanding of ‘living’ qualia.

Website

Eric Parren: Breeder

Breeder is a website designed to let people playfully explore the principle of artificial evolution. The software is based on the concept of “the Biomorph” as proposed by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker. Variables such as the colors, patterns, and movements of abstract visual elements are encoded into an artificial DNA. The visitor can crossbreed the genetic codes of these elements by selecting two of them to produce a new generation. The new generation inherits different genetic traits from both selected parents. Each childÎéÎ÷s genetic code is also slightly mutated in order for new genetic traits to arise over the course of multiple generations. This leads to an endless stream of rhythmically pulsating shapes that highlight the poetic beauty of the evolutionary process.
Breeder lives at http://www.breeder.life/

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Garret Beleu: VidAudio

VidAudio creates an interface for exploring a city locale and its inhabitants as sonic, audio textures. The artwork features a live webcam feed which users can manually reposition while the video’s color data is converted into digital audio. A monitor and touchpad interface will allow users to manipulate parameters of the video to audio conversion. By translating video feed into audio, users will be able to explore and experience their visual surrounds in a novel manner.

Website

Gary Boodhoo: Deep Dream Vision Quest

Deep Dream Vision Quest is a neural image synthesizer that creates multiplayer hallucinations and turns dreaming into a shared experience. The video installation shows the world to a neural network machine through a live camera. The machine reconstructs what it sees. We project that image back into the installation space. Until the machine detects motion, it dreams about the last thing it has seen. With each uninterrupted dream cycle the transformation of this memory becomes more extreme. Strange creatures emerge from alien landscapes. Only in stillness are they visible. They fade away when you move. This reflective “hurry up and wait” quality provides the basis for emergent gameplay.

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Jeffrey Yip: Shift

Shift is a wall relief sculpture that is augmented by projection mapping. The sculpture is made up of 3 rows and 5 columns of wooden truncated pyramids. The truncated pyramid plays an interesting role; it can create the illusion of a reverse, one point perspective. This concept is borrowed from Patrick Hughes, the creator of “reverspective”, an optical illusion on a three dimensional surface where the parts of the picture that seem farthest away are actually physically the nearest. Shift’s surface is projection mapped with motion graphics, using imagery that further extends this illusion. Instead of a static painting, movement is added to this concept creating a more dynamic experience. In conjunction with the visuals is the addition with synchronized audio. Binaural beats are used to further augment the space creating fluctuation in the sound. What the audience experiences auditorily is highly dependant on their location relative to the piece. Shift is an investigation into the perception of audiovisual through the use of spatial location.

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Jennifer Berry: B Code

B Code is a living, biological 3D printer that employs honeybees to create sculptural forms in beeswax. Honeybees developed the worldÎéÎ÷s first additive manufacturing over millennia of evolution, and Jennifer Berry harnesses their technology to create hive systems that enhance the natural tendencies of bees. Together they produce sculptural forms never before possible by human technology or nature alone. The technology bees have developed as 3D printers uses the strength of the hexagon in combination with natural plastics to create living structures, and in highlighting this technology, Berry inspires designers, engineers, and artists to rethink how we build our own environments.

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Kim Anno: In the Hour of Butterflies

In the Hour of Butterflies is an interactive sculpture installation, created by the collaborative team of artist Ricardo Rivera, artist Kim Anno, and composer Kristina Dutton, with additional sound design and composition by Nathan Clevenger, and in collaboration with Dr. Arnaud Martin, professor and researcher at George Washington University’s Department of Biological Sciences. This work presents the staccato fluttering and slow movements of butterflies in scientific observation. Film footage captures butterflies in captivity and in the process of release. They feed on sugar infused sponges, and release themselves from slumber. Butterflies such as the painted lady/thistle butterfly are prolific in the U.S., and commonly studied in research laboratories, yet, while seemingly ubiquitous, they are fragile creatures, metamorphosed into adults for only a fleeting matter of weeks. Sound and music is composed as interactive elements commanded by the gesture of the viewer, magnifying the sense of intimacy, wonder, curiosity and fragility. The temporal life of the butterfly is presented as an ephemeral sculpture using two transparent screens developed by Samsung for research and development, then repurposed as art. The wonder and intimate spectacle of the animal life of a butterfly is experienced as a viewer interacts by gesturing in proximity to the translucent screens.

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Kostas Daflos: Cipo_program

The Cipo_ vehicles are based on an interactive DIY hybrid toolkit that composes different separated cases allowing different functions between them. These units are linked to each other; adapted with different ways. The project is oriented on the one hand to the concept of the Lego tools partition, and on the other hand, from the literature, to the partition of Kafka’s novel (1919) named “În der Strafkolonie”. Intended for temporary interventions in city life events, they also appropriate concepts from the function, typology and melodies of the old automated mechanical handmade musical boxes or instruments organs from the 19th century and the gift machines from the 20th century, as well as the concept of the mobile barrel organ.

Website (Liat Berdugo)

Jiayi Young: Shoptalk – Field Tools for Peace

Shoptalk: Field Tools for Peace calls to the festival participants and the local community of San Jose, to bring and make items, artifacts, and tools that activate actions for Peace. This workshop explores methods for community problem solving including the creative acts of listening, shared narratives, object making, and collective/shared visioning of possible futures. The workshop looks beyond solo authorship towards collaborative making, including: identifying new objects and methods for peace and protest; engaging digital communities for new forms of participation; creating practices of identity and obfuscation in precarious situations; and creatively exploring practical and theoretical relationships with peace. The workshop will give participants the opportunity to collaborate and build their own tool submissions for the Field Tools for Peace online exhibition and gallery at fieldtools4peace.com, and explore new approaches to engage participants to practice methods of thinking and making to promote social resiliency, art for social change, and participatory action for peace. Workshop leaders will start with short presentations about community arts practices and case study overviews. Workshop participants will then have the opportunity to introduce themselves, tell their personal and/or community stories, then brainstorm topics and mediums to prototype projects through collaborative problem solving and rapid prototyping methods. Free Workshop Registration.

Jiayi Young is Assistant Professor of Design at UC Davis. Her work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA); Hall of Science, New York; the United Nations Fourth Conference on Women, Beijing, China; the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; and Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne, Germany. Beth Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Design at UC Davis. Sara Dean is Assistant Professor of Graduate Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Glenda Drew is Professor of Design at UC Davis.

Pantea Karimi: Shelf Garden

The Shelf Garden installation is composed of medieval plants planted in vases on pharmacy pusher-kit shelves and a lighting system for horticulture of these plants. The plants are those found in the 12th-century Herbal of al-Ghafiqi manuscript on medicinal plants. The shelf Garden addresses an indirect criticism of today’s commercial pharmaceutical practices and the current human condition in relation to commercial drugs as well as our own growing disconnect with nature. This installation not only highlights these “medieval plants” and their healing benefits, but also offers an approach to healthy Placemaking and public engagement with natural elements and their conversion process in an urban life setting.

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Purin Phanichpat: Connect Our Efforts

Connect Our Efforts is an interactive art exhibit on the topic of climate change. It aims to help participants realize that efforts by many is much more powerful than effort by one. The projected graphic shows the global average temperature that is slowly increasing (which is impossible to see without the 5th or 6th digit). In front of the audience are simple input “crank boxes” ÎíÎñ by turning a crank box, one can slow down or even lower the global average temperature. If more than one audience turn the crank boxes, the effect is multiplied (up to six people can play together at the same time), thus implying that if we put in efforts together to battle climate change, we can make significant impact.

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Scott Tooby: Sonic Mirror

The Sonic Mirror is an audio-reactive electronic instrument that automatically generates musical soundscapes from the sounds of its environment. Through the combination of generative audio software, machine listening and embeddable computing, the work explores how these technologies can be repurposed to help augment auditory perception and foster a deeper connection to the world through sound. When confgured as a sound installation, the Sonic Mirror instrument creates a generative soundscape refective of sounds made by participants and the immediate surroundings. The instrument performs real-time digital audio recording, analysis, and synthesis. Machine listening algorithms extract features from detected sounds (e.g. loudness, pitch, duration, timbre), and based on the analysis, the system dynamically renders a soundscape from recorded sounds using a variety of audio synthesis techniques (e.g. pitch shifting, time stretching, convolution, granular and concatenative synthesis). Additional audio processing techniques informed by audifcation practices from the felds of seismology and neurology are performed to render a temporal distillation of an environmentÎéÎ÷s soundscape. The Sonic Mirror software has been designed to operate on embeddable single-board computers (like the Raspberry Pi) to function as a self-contained hardware instrument, but in practice the instrument can manifest in an open-ended variety of confgurations as long as a computer running the software is connected to a microphone and speaker system. The name and functionality behind this project is inspired by a concept for a cybernetic environmental sound installation initially conceived of by composer and bioacoustic researcher David Dunn.

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Steve Durie: Socio-Graph

Socio-Graph is a kinetic installation that entails a series of drawing machines that can be controlled by a variety of interfaces. The drawing machines are able to leave multiple marks over the surface of a large sheet of paper slowly being un-rolled to provide an endless canvas over time. Each drawing machine is controlled by a different interface, with a variety of controls and feedback mechanisms. In addition, the look and labeling of each interface and the corresponding drawing machine is designated to represent a different local cultural issue and point of engagement. This designation then invites participants the ability to interact and ‘draw’ marks and imagery on the scrolling paper, as a symbol of interest and attention. Resembling a large graphical trace of various data streams like a polygraph of cultural indicators, this piece invites the audience to express some choice and participation which might reflect preferences of different and competing issues involving the City of San Jose.

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Tim Thompson: Space Palette

The Space Palette is a musical and graphical instrument that lets you play music and paint visuals simultaneously by waving your hands in the holes of a wood frame. No pre-recorded media, sequences, or loops are used – everything is generated in realtime by your hands. The wood frame is a reference for the player, while the Microsoft Kinect is used to detect the position of whatever hands (or objects) appear in the holes of the frame. The depth of your hands matters as much as their left/right/up/down position – it’s like having multiple three-dimensional mouse pads in mid-air. Any number of hands can be used. Musically, the large holes are like piano keyboards (left-to-right) on which you play individual notes, and hand depth controls things like vibrato and filters. Visually, the large holes allow you to paint with graphical shapes (heavily processed by visual effects), and hand depth controls their size. The 12 small holes in the corners of the Space Palette are used to select different sets of sounds and graphics. Each of the 4 large holes plays a different sound and paints a different graphic, simultaneously.

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Vanessa Peneyra: Out of the box

Out of the Box is a laser cut record. The artist collaborated with a programmer, a musician, and a graphic designer to create our own record that can create music on a record player. The art of this project is not necessarily the final product itself, but the process that was behind it. By using Python and processing, a .wav file can transform into grooves that can be engraved with a laser cutter. This project not only lead us to create music in its physical form but it also got us working backwards, using high tech to create a low-tech product.