Taking slides of various microscopic stills and turns them into art.

• Water lily leaf with sea-like constructions
• Water surfaces
• Rust formations
• Spore cells

Using scientific work as a template/foundation for her own work.

Carol went to another lab that specializes in taxidermy-like work.  Took make pictures and scans.

Plastination – chemical process of replacing the fat with plastic

Incorporating various animal parts into artwork; overlaying different images, colors, and mediums.

This is a neat presentation, but seems sort of out of place at iDMAa.

Gordon Moore in 1965; projected development of integrated circuit.  Moore’s Law: doubling computer capacity and speed every 2 years, while cost goes down (this has proven true, and has held true for 40 years).

Resulting for the high pace of tech evolution, what is the role of the artist?

Intermedia – described interdisciplinary art activity prevalent in 1960’s.  Everywhere today.  Fusing of ideas, theories and materials are ubiquitous.  Video art, concrete poetry, installation, etc.

Platypus is a great example in nature of intermedia; it’s DNA contains everything from amphibian to strangely human-like.  Acoel Flatworm – part plant, part animal

“Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”

Even the human body is a self-contained eco-system – 12 lb of bodyweight is other organisms.

Will the artist be absorbed into other areas of creative inquiry thus making the utpoian phrase “everyone is an artist” a reality?

A little bit of an introduction….

Philip Beesley Architect in Toronto (Beesley’s own architecture firm).  He’s also associated with University of Waterloo (isn’t Waterloo, Canada where the Blackberry is from?).  ”A true renaissance man.”

8:52 – Beesley takes the stage.  ”Responsive architecture” and post-humanist discourse.

Building that follows and absorbs energy from the sun, outputting twice as much energy as it takes in (why is this technology not everywhere?)

Thinking of objects as an anchor; transitional objects & transitional fields.  Babies have security blankets before we understand what it is.  We treat them as a part of us.  These things are with us as we become ourselves; helps separate us from others (does this come from our intense individuality?  Is it that ingrained in our culture?).

Hylozoism – from Lucretius – life comes out of material; it’s not transcendent, but from material qualities.

Chthonian Projects – the deep underground; “the underworld.”  In Canada, the ice has scrapped away the crust and the mantle is exposed.  Presents a unique architectural opportunities.

9:03 – Haystack Veil – Deer Isle, Maine; 1997 – created a “second skin” over the earth; a sort of lattice work over the ground to shelter new growth in a forest.

Orpheus Filter – this is hard to describe… but essentially an artificial lung made of synthetic material; rhomboids connected together in a semi-periodical pattern.  Literally breathes.

Cybele – somewhat similar.  These individual pieces of this and the Orpheus Filter are connected enough to hold themselves up and give themselves structure, but loose enough to allow a lot of movement.

9:09 – Endothelium – robotic geo-textile – individual hooks and barbs set up on tripods (these tripods “cover the Earth”) – driven by tiny motors (like cell phone vibrator tiny).  It then spreads through the field of tripods and grows.

These are funky art projects, and I don’t think my descriptions are doing any sort of justice to this presentation.  And I don’t think Mr. Beesley’s presentation is doing any justice for his actual art exhibitions.  From the looks of things, you really need to see these art installations in person.

9:16 – Carbonate formation in a proto-cell; compares this process to a 1525 painting of a knight transcending into Christ who then transcends into the ether.  In the Carbonate formation, the cells look to be feeding off each other; Beesley anthropomorphizes them.  This anthropomorphization is then further compared to the relationship between Frankenstein’s Monster and the little girl with flowers.  This gets to the idea that we should not hold natural life over engineered life; it’s all life.

9:20 – Implant matrix (another exhibition; from 2006).  Very similar to the Orpheus Filter; however it’s more complex in its “lung” functions.  Utilizes shape-memory alloy wire.  Tracks your position and it sort of “breathes” in waves relative to your position.

Epithelium – displayed in quite a few places (Ball State being one) – tracks your motion and delivers an “emotional” response.  Crowd behaviors.  One part responds and then, like ripples in a pond, it spreads throughout the rest of the installation.

9:27 – Hylozoic Soil – combines many of the systems described so far – “symphonic immersive system” – probe-like fronds listen then respond, and this response, like Epithelium, spreads.  Through weak actions chained together, we get quite coherent motion.  It’s quite beautiful to see the videos.  Very ephemeral.  ”soft, intimate”  It does not do one’s bidding; it will respond to you, but perhaps not the way you intended.  ”…lingering sense of being consumed while at the same time being served…”  Compares the whole thing to a coral reef.

9:34 – summing up – architecture through self-generating systems that appear to be living.  responsive architecture.

Q&A…

Mimicking the deeply inter-woven systems of the human body – a good way to describe his responsive architecture.  Instead of just putting a building in an environment, and having a very disconnected relationship; buildings should be interconnected with their environments.  A mutual relationship.

9:45 – power generation and self-replication.  power inside and outside are a fundamental Q along with how does the environment affect it (and vice-versa).  Even the Osmiotic (sp?) Filter is a basic example; you’re bringing in turbulence which then affects the system

During the Q&A session, I had the epiphany.  The spark of realization of what this technology could really do.  Mr. Beesley is using this tech in art installations to get the initial idea out there, however, I suspect that he has great things in mind for how this could be used more in the future in actual buildings and housing once the tech is more developed.

Final thoughts… Again, I don’t think my blog post does any true justice to Beesley’s work.  Check this out to get an idea of Mr. Beesley’s artwork.

Adam Brown (AB) – Michigan State – intermedia artist; human-computer interaction

Patrick Lichty (PL) – Columbia College, Chicago

Adam Nash (AN) – RMIT University, Australia – works in a variety of virtual worlds

John Filwalk (JF) – Ball State

AB – working in “hybrid ways.”  Trying to link arts with science and technology

• started getting interested in Wilhelm Reich
• built a system of autonomous unit that simulates the lifeforce (like chi or the force or bion [?])
• you walk into this field of dangling nodes (they kind of look like GameCube controllers) and they react to your presence.
• started getting interested in gesture and how it conveys emotional states
• how to make machines imitate consciousness.
• “is it alive?” is too big of a question, so he asked “what are the characteristics of being alive?”

JF – fiddling with Second Life (SL)…

• has created a sort of virtual instrument in SL.  you play the instrument in SL and it plays an instrument in the physical world.
• linking the virtual and the physical
• “participatory art”
• later tonight, people will be able to play the virtual instrument and it will play on the bell tower here on campus
• has created an immersive art installation – looks through Flickr and can display pictures, it then puts it on an array.  very cool.  allowing one to interfacing with different types of info.
• working on a similar piece for YouTube

PL – social relations and how we relate to/with technology

• recreated Warhol’s factory in SL – andyrembrandt.com
• many doing performance in SL; Patrick thought this was odd because performance centers on the body and SL removes the body
• recreated the Last Supper; called it the Second Supper
• in a gallery, has what looks like bar codes – “quick-response codes” – representations of avatars
• looks at these “bar codes” through his mobile device (with the proper software), it pulls up a portrait of the avatar that the QR-code represents
• PL compares this to a locket; a sense of intimacy while we are increasingly inter-mediating our interpersonal relationships

AN – Adam is cutting in and out as he tries to speak.

• Autoscopia – exploring the idea of portraits in the digital age
• you make a search query, and in SL, a virtual sculpture is created based on the search results
• a corresponding webpage is also created
• “one way of looking at the Internet is as an alchemy machine that turns bullshit into truth” – haha, I very much like this.  Screw turning lead into gold; turning fiction into fact is the new alchemy

Q&A

AB’s robots seemed to be “alive” or at least he says so.  How did he figure that out?  He says think about movies and cognitive psychology that humans want to think that something is alive. ”Willful suspension” of reality. He doesn’t claim to create life, but rather to simulate it.

Final thoughts….   The biggest thing that keeps coming up is “Sorry for the clunkiness of the interface.”  I think if virtual worlds, like SL, are going to make major inroads into everyday life, the interface needs to be greatly improved.  Gets back to the wet-nap interface from Tom Kelley’s presentation.