Spectral Subjects
2024
Spectral Subjects is a thermal observatory, showing a constantly updating map of the room’s temperature on surround projections. Using thermographic cameras, the project detects heat and cold in the environment, including the building’s air circulation and ventilation, visitors’ body heat, and inanimate objects. The piece automatically mixes live feeds with recordings from the recent past, creating thermal echoes in the atmosphere, an evolving portrait of uncanny spectral traces that make the atmosphere tangible.
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Dark Ride
2024
Dark Ride was a sound-art performance originally conceived for Laumeier Sculpture Park in St-Louis. The piece was intended as a “social sculpture” to remedy the lack of public transport that could bring visitors from segregated and disadvantaged areas of metropolitan St Louis, Ferguson for example, to Laumeier Park, situated in the city’s affluent suburbs. During the free ride, passengers in the darkened bus would listen to a geolocated and performed soundtrack that changed for every trip.
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Climate Parliament
2024
“Climate Parliament” is an interactive sound and light installation featuring thousands of audio channels playing on small, custom-made loudspeakers, suspended under the ceiling of a semi-outdoor passageway at Rice University. The speakers are hung out of reach of passers-by in a regular, but staggered formation that creates semi-circular archways with a six-foot radius.
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Transparency Display
2024
Transparency Display is an interactive glass triptych that reveals and conceals portraiture in real-time using the transparency and translucency of liquid crystal pixels embedded in glass panels. The piece automatically creates low-definition portraits of the viewers, which can be seen from either side of the triptych, regardless of the lighting conditions or time of day. Through these fleeting portraits a visitor on one side can see visitors on the other side, creating an uncanny and ever changing portal between them. Inspired by Dan Graham's reflective and refractive glass pavilions, Sharon Grace's digital pictures in picture, and Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz's "Hole in the Wall" performance, the work converts an architectural subdivision into a connective switchboard for eye contact, shadow play, and sous- and sur-veillance.
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Arkansas Text Stream
Text Stream 9, 2022
Arkansas Text Stream consists of brief texts sourced from Northwest Arkansas community members presented in a slow stream of letters that transform into phrases as the presence of people is detected. Commissioned by Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville.
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Speaking Willow
2020
“Speaking Willow” is a sound sculpture in the shape of a weeping willow tree, between 16 and 20 feet high, which adorns the entrance of the Planet Word Museum. The tree sculpture is fabricated in aluminum and is hollow, except the trunk and branches carry inside data cables that emerge from the structure and hang vertically, slowly swaying with the wind. The tree is covered by living vine, Ivy or other evergreen climbing plants that warm-up the design.
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Border Tuner / Sintonizador Fronterizo
Relational Architecture 23, 2019
"Border Tuner" is a large-scale, participatory art installation designed to interconnect the cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Powerful searchlights make “bridges of light” that open live sound channels for communication across the US-Mexico border. The piece creates a fluid canopy of light that can be modified by visitors to six interactive stations, three placed in El Paso and three in Juárez.
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Colorimètre
2017
The interactive installation, “Colorimètre” is a feature wall adorned with over 500 colour panels, arranged in a vertical grid orientation, showcasing a constantly-changing gamut of colours. These colour cells are activated by the colours captured by a camera in the grand hall and its surroundings.
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Friendfracker
2013
“Friendfracker” is a service that automatically deletes a set of friends from your Facebook account. Upon authenticating your data on the website, the service deletes 1 to 10 friends at random. The project was developed with Harper Reed for Rhizome's 7 on 7 conference.
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Voz Alta
Relational Architecture 15, 2008
"Voz Alta" (Loud Voice)(Relational Architecture 15) is a memorial commissioned for the 40th anniversary of the student massacre in Tlatelolco. Participants who speak into a megaphone automatically control the brightness of four searchlights that relay their voice over Mexico City as quiet light flashes; tuning into 96.1FM radio allows people anywhere in the city to listen in live to what the lights are saying.
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Sitestepper
Relational Architecture 10, 2004
"Sitestepper" (Relational Architecture 10) is an Internet program that shows a 3D view of an apparently "neutral" living room. This space can be transformed automatically by scanning a website to extract its images, texts, colours and sounds. The system analyzes the contents of the submitted webpage and uses them to furnish and decorate the room, "branding" the space with a layer of live media. This project was commissioned for LA MOCA's digital gallery.
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1000 Platitudes
2003
"1000 Platitudes" is a large-scale photographic intervention project. It is comprised of photomontages and a video with 1,000 words or expressions commonly used to promote globalized cities to potential investors, such as "open", "modern", "clean", "multicultural" and "cosmopolitan". To make these images, a powerful projector (110,000 ANSI lumens of intensity for images of up to 70 by 70 metres) was placed on a 12-ton truck with a generator, then toured across the city of Linz, Austria.
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Amodal Suspension
Relational Architecture 8, 2003
“Amodal Suspension" (Relational Architecture 8) is a large-scale interactive installation in which people send short text messages to each other using a cell phone or web browser. However, rather than being sent directly, the messages are encoded as unique sequences of flashes with twenty robotically-controlled searchlights, not unlike the patterns that make up Morse code. Messages "bounce" around from searchlight to searchlight, turning the sky into a giant switchboard.
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Two Origins
Relational Architecture 7, 2002
“Two Origins” (Relational Architecture 7) is an intervention in which the emblematic Place du Capitole in Toulouse was transformed by a projection of The Book of Two Origins, a 13th-century heretical manuscript compiling the theological beliefs of the dualist cathars. Once a vibrant community in several regions of Europe, the believers in the two origins of the Universe were virtually annihilated by the brutal crusades that gave birth to the Inquisition and France's expansion. The texts are illegible since they are projected overlapping each other on the same façade from two distant projectors; only when passers-by block one text with their bodies is it possible to read the other text inside their shadow.
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Re:Positioning Fear
Relational Architecture 3, 1997
"Re:Positioning Fear" (Relational Architecture 3) was a large-scale installation on the Landeszeughaus military arsenal with a "teleabsence" interface of projected shadows of passers-by. Using tracking systems, the shadows were automatically focused and generated sounds. A real-time IRC discussion about the transformation of the concept of "fear" was projected inside the shadows; the chat involved 30 artists and theorists from 17 countries.
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Displaced Emperors
Relational Architecture 2, 1997
"Displaced Emperors" (Relational Architecture 2) was an interactive installation that used an "architact" —architecture meets haptics— interface to transform the facade of the Habsburg Castle in Linz, Austria. Wireless 3D sensors calculated where participants pointed to on the façade and a large animated projection of a hand was projected at that location. As people on the street "caressed" the building, they could reveal the interiors of the Habsburg residence in Mexico City, Castillo de Chapultepec.
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