Artistic presentations in conjunction with the proceedings include collaborative works of art by undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty.
By Nick Lally and Nik Hanselmann
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
Everydatum, Iteration II is a collaborative project by Nick Lally and Nik Hanselmann. The prints feature visualizations of large amounts of environmental data (sound and light levels) collected over a week in the gallery space. Lally and Hanselmann built custom sensors to collect the data and broadcasted it to an online database. The seemingly mundane data is then visualized in unexpected, complex and beautiful ways. The project is an investigation into the possibility for digital media to represent the mundane in new ways, unlocking new potentials for the performance of large amounts of data over time. The visualizations break from the traditional model of graphing data along a time axis; time and space is warped in the pieces. Rather than the movement of time instigating the movement of the data, light levels determine its trajectory and path. The work shows the creative potential of the seemingly mundane that digital media makes possible. It encourages the viewer to understand the everyday in a new way, through its defamiliarization.
NICK LALLY'S BIO
Nick Lally creates multimedia work that explores citizens' experiences living in a society ruled by the logic of the informational network. He is interested in the ways informational technologies have affected people's everyday lives. His work encourages viewers to think about the ways that those changes are manifested and to explore new possibilities for subjective experiences afforded by those technologies. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California Santa Cruz.
NIK HANSELMANN'S BIO
Nik Hanselmann is a computer artist concerned with reflexive software practices. His work centers on the creation of software that challenges computational convention, explores new modes of engagement with computational logics, and investigates incongruities between informational and material concerns. He is currently an MFA student in the Digital Arts and New Media program at the University of California Santa Cruz.
By Barney Haynes & Jennifer Parker
DANM Mechatronic Collaborators: Lyes Belhocine (MFA Student DANM), Elizabeth Travelslight (MFA Student DANM), and Andre Marquetti (PhD Student Music)
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
sonicSENSE is a collaborative interactive platform for artists to develop and exhibit information through the sonification and visualization of data. Each exhibition of the platform has been a new iteration consisting of a series of mechanical sound sculptures that are driven by data mined from the internet and biometrics gleaned from the audience. Live video is transposed into audio and played through the speaker film on the sculptures and transducers that resonate through the floor. Artists have been invited to write software and create new hardware components to leverage the unique qualities of this extensible platform.
By Lyès Belhocine and Kyle McKinley
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
Turning the Tables begins with the premise that the production and reception of digital media is always profoundly reliant on our analog experiences of being in our bodies. Phonographs and bicycle parts, the building blocks of this sculptural collaboration, are analog technologies that our bodies have come to understand at a muscular level: 33 and 1/3 rpms is a rotational cadence inscribed into the very fiber of a DeeJay's body. Most body types reach maximal efficiency on a bicycle at a cadence of two rotations per second. This has necessarily meant that the human organism has reshaped itself around and through these technologies. Turning the Tables invites viewer participants to cooperate and explore unusual junctures of the analog and the digital in an attempt to ask how the human organism will be reshaped by the technologies and interfaces that we construct today.
KYLE MCKINLEY'S BIO
Kyle McKinley is a student in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz. His twin backgrounds in sculpture and literary theory have been radically informed in recent years by his involvement with bicycle education non-profit organizations and “free-school” community education projects. These seemingly divergent interests coalesce in Kyle’s work around questions of appropriate technologies and the politics of space and place.
LYES BELHOCINE
Lyes Belhocine is a traveler and a jack-of-all-trades. Given his curiosity and taste for adventure, he ended up falling in arts. Electronic music composition brought him to make different multiple experiences in multi-media. Captivated with expanding the horizons of the audio-visual domain using a new range of interactions between humans and computers, he enrolled in a Bachelor's Degree in Interactive Media at Université du Québec À Montréal, Canada. The seemingly endless artistic, educational, and recreational possibilities of interactive multimedia fueled his motivation to expand his knowledge in this area and he enrolled in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program in University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) to pursue this goal.
By Abram Stern
(May 2002 - Nov 2005 | Oct 2009 - Present)
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
IP Collage is a collaborative web image in which the numbers of each visitor's IP address are added to an image. The four 8-bit numbers that make up the address are transposed into html5 canvas functions in the order they are required: x,y,w,h (x,y coordinate pair & width/height) as well as color: r,g,b,a (red, green, blue, alpha) to create a rectangle of a specific color (& transparency) at a specific location. Viewing the piece changes it permanently. Once loaded, the image updates to show new visitors' shapes until the window is closed.
Every time a user visits a page on the web, the browser transmits information - an IP address, information about the browser and referrer information (what was clicked on to get to the current page). This conversation between browser and server is usually discreet; IP Collage engages this conversation and uses it as the basis for a productive relationship. The images produced are released to the public domain.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Abram Stern (aka aphid) is a net artist and garden pest. His work primarily engages issues of participation, authorship, transparency, appropriation and archival. He received an MFA from the Digital Arts New Media program at UC Santa Cruz and a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. He is currently a principal participant and archivist with Metavid.org, an open archive of congressional video.
Digitizing memories, souvenirs and nostalgia
By Antoine Abou Jaoude and Lyès Belhocine
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
The point of Project Digital Nostalgia is to revive old (new) media that was considered new at the time and now reached obsolescence, such as, the Atari Joystick. Conversely, the Joystick’s function nowadays, has shifted from the functional, to the emotional and thus it has become nothing more then nostalgic. As a result, this project aims to give back obsolete media a function. In this case, the function that the Atari joystick gained back is being turned into a USB input device and hooked up to a digital open source programming software called Processing. Thus, digitizing the joystick and all that revolves around it, such as, memories, souvenirs, and nostalgia.
Antoine Abou Jaoude’s BIO
Antoine Abou Jaoude is an interdisciplinary artist interested in writing about the inter-connectedness of new-media and colonialism, in addition, to the embodiment of memories through media and entertainment systems. He studied Fine Arts And communication Media at the Lebanese American University in Beirut Lebanon and worked in advertising and commercial media later on. He is currently an MFA student in the Digital Arts and New Media program at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Lyes Belhosine’s BIO
Lyes Belhocine is a traveler and a jack-of-all-trades. Given his curiosity and taste for adventure, he ended up falling in arts. Electronic music composition brought him to make different multiple experiences in multi-media. Captivated with expanding the horizons of the audio-visual domain using a new range of interactions between humans and computers, he enrolled in a Bachelor's Degree in Interactive Media at Université du Québec À Montréal, Canada. The seemingly endless artistic, educational, and recreational possibilities of interactive multimedia fueled his motivation to expand his knowledge in this area and he enrolled in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program in University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) to pursue this goal.
http://www.sonicsense.net