Project Archive

The work below is from another lifetime. I’m just now untangling the threads between art, design, technology, the body, and the natural world.

F.L.E.M.A

F.L.E.M.A. (Fluid, Language, Experience, Manifest, Attributes) consists of five stations with soft flesh-like cast vinyl sculptures that are manipulated by the audience. The amorphous platforms holding the sculptures are low to the floor where the audience lounges on plush carpet or cushions. As the viewer interacts with the sculptures, a simultaneous video projection of the interaction is viewed larger than life on the facing wall. The piece accesses the aesthetic, sensual knowledge of the body while investigating how technology affects the viewer. I imagine the small handheld objects kick-start perception. The video projection combines the initial sensory experience with a representational layer of the same moment. The dynamic created between the mediated and unmediated moments allows the audience to question and renew awareness of the biological and digital body. F.L.E.M.A. creates an environment in which sensual play activates ‘unlanguaged’ body perception.

Read the show review from Sculpture Magazine.

SimWorks

From 2004 - 2006, Dr. Katherine Isbister and I developed a series of artworks utilizing the online multiple-player Sims Game. SimWorks leveraged various iterations of the best-selling game franchise—to explore issues of identity and popular culture. We twisted the embedded properties of the game—avatar creation and hacking, bricolage construction of habitats and furnishings, the twisted survival logic of the underlying simulation engine itself—to address pressing questions… What can art be within a virtual setting? How does the voyeuristic nature of games and simulations impact our notions of ourselves and others? What does it mean to ‘import’ one’s likeness into a game environment as the surface of an autonomous cyber-being? Core to the series is the fundamentally disembodying and dislocating act of identifying with a virtual body in a simulated world.

The various SimWorks installations actively juxtapose conflicting impulses of visitors, who are simultaneously art appreciators and players. Modes of consumption inherent in these roles become a crucial part of experiencing the work—visitors both game the piece by pushing boundaries and apply a critical aesthetic perspective to what they are viewing that would not necessarily be a part of consuming these games in the everyday context. SimWorks brings the exuberant playfulness of the gaming world and the more pointed and intellectualized play of the contemporary art world together to provoke thoughtful exploration of the paradigms and suppositions of both realms, and to inspire discussion among those who experience the works from either or both perspectives.

The project series was shown in the U.S., Europe, and Canada where it was a New Voices winner at Digifest. The investigations included:

The SIMGallery Project was part of the 2004 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts show, Bang the Machine. The project brought an urban art museum and the online game-world of the Sims together to create a collision between high art and gaming culture. We built a virtual version of Yerba Buena Center in-game and curated a show and performance series within the virtual environment. Additionally, the project mapped the Sims aesthetics and gameplay back into the galleries at the Yerba Buena Center through a series of real-life sculptural interventions.

SimBee was first shown in 2004 at the Gen Arts, New Fangle show. The installation functioned on several levels. It parodied the work of Vanessa Beecroft, and explored artistic practice that utilizes off-the-shelf game software as its medium. SimBee encouraged the viewer to consider how the gaze, the nature of autonomy, and issues of exploitation and voyeurism are shifted when filtered through the lens of simulation.

SIMVeillance premiered at ISEA 2006 at the San Jose Museum of Art in California. For this work, we first captured video footage of real people passing through the square outside the museum before building them into the gallery simulation. The work elicited the viewer’s consideration of a normally fleeting urban phenomenon: the passage of strangers through a public space. Who are these people and where are they going? How does their traversal affect one’s perception of the vitality and nature of a place? This project sought to make the viewer more aware of this phenomenon, as transmogrified when viewed through the lens of a computer game.