All day the people pass along the streets, filling out their duties with anonymous reserve. But at night, ensconced in constructed carapaces, they dream beautiful and terrible things—dreams of the city that spill out of their rooms.
The spare, abstract surface of a San Franciso of the mind is rendered in ink on paper and animated with the unseen and ordinarily sublimated psyche of the City. Sometimes I dream the City reveals the dense multiplicity of overlapping, hidden emotional lives and dreams and spins narrative vignettes from strands of nightmares and wisps of moonshine.

Sometimes I dream the City will be installed at The Lab as part of “Head of the Table” an art show of former students and collaborators of the late Steve Wilson, one of my teachers at SF State’s Conceptual and Information Arts program.

http://www.thelab.org/schedule/events/577-headofthetable.html

Special thanks to Benjamin, Brent, Josh, Marilyn, Nevada, Nicole, Reagan, and Robert.

Sometimes…

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Sketch 2: Diffuse //

Sketch 1: Autogenesis // TouchDesigner – particles & feedback

Overview:

This workshop will teach you how to use TouchDesigner to create real-time interactive video and how to map it onto unconventional projection surfaces.

TouchDesigner is a high-level real-time video programming environment, with hardware-accelerated 3d and 2d graphics generation and manipulation tools, flexible data handling, and a plethora of I/O options. It is a powerful tool that lends itself to data visualization, interactive graphics and art pieces, custom VJ software building and projection mapping. Projection mapping is the art of manipulating video such that when it is projected onto a surface it does not appear distorted, and instead fits the planes and form of the surface.

Syllabus

Day 1: Using TouchDesigner

Lecture:
-Showcase: projects using TouchDesigner.
-Anatomy of a .toe file: in pseudo code and in operators.
-Operators: Different operators are for different data types, with some operators converting between data types.
-Basics: Navigating, modular components, good coding practice.
-I/O: Using input from the mouse, network protocols, MIDI and video cameras.
-Brief intro to advanced topics: instancing, scripting, materials, generative techniques, integration with other software such as Ableton, Processing, MaxMSP/Jitter.
-Resources: reference, help files, wiki and forum.

Project: build an interactive real-time 3-D scene

Day 2: Projection Mapping

Lecture:
-Showcase: examples of projection mapping, particularly as artistic medium.
-Overview of the theory of projection mapping, with examples in TouchDesigner.
Topics include: perspective, image distortion, UV mapping, virtual cameras, combining multiple video outputs on projection-mapped surfaces, and calibration strategies.

Project:
-Projection map a simple box sculpture with the 3-D scene you made Day 1.

Course Materials:

All course materials will be provided, but bring your own computer with TouchDesigner FTE installed. TouchDesigner is currently only supported on Windows operating systems, but support for Mac OS X is in the works. Please see the system requirements: http://www.touch077.com/Downloads/

Permutae examines the impact of a shifting technological-biological horizon on both the individual and the larger social body, and how it allows us to change our bodies as it also works to control and classify our bodies. The performance paints a fantasy of what we want our bodies to be, balanced with our physical realities, limitations and the stresses imposed by an increasingly commodified cultural sphere. It is an exploration of how to continually re-focus the boundaries of queer embodiment and representation towards greater agency and manifestation of desire.
How are we caught up in the technological machine, perpetuating and propagating it, fascinated with it to an end still hidden from our mind’s eye? Technology has become an extension, and a re-creator, of our physical bodies and their significance.

Permutae was performed at CounterPULSE August 12th and 13th, 2011.

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Finley and I co-art directed this layered piece. I created a technical framework for the projection of Finely’s drawn chimeral bodies and video and audio-scapes to contain and parallel the choreography.
Inspired by electron microscope images, which are a topography of the unseen, I developed the video’s cellular imagery through procedural techniques to evoke biotechnology and the relationship of the individual to society.

The audio is collected sounds of textures and movement: of a train moving through a tunnel, power tools excavating metal, a modem modulating data, humans in conversations. The mundane accompanies us through our infinite destructions, transformations and creations. Found sound is layered with synthetic sounds and remixes of artist Agraph’s “Light Particle Surface” and “While Going Down the Stairs I.”

Permutae at CounterPULSE (full length):

 

By: Joey Baker | Jeff Easter | Abe Epton | Mary Franck | Matthew Gerring | Sarah Hirsch | Jim Hovell | Jake Levitas | Wendy Norris | Zac Witte

The Tenderloin’s notorious reputation leads outsiders to underestimate potential commonalities with Tenderloin residents. The aim of We All Need is to celebrate the shared human experiences between Bay Area residents and those living in the Tenderloin – a neighborhood highly susceptible to one-sided media reporting and dire data sets that perpetuate negative stereotypes.

To that end, We All Need is a data set that humanizes the Tenderloin: a vivid portrait of the Tenderloin neighborhood composed of the thoughts and needs of people interviewed on its streets.

weallneed.net

Video, ceiling projection and cable nest.

Hyphae are tubular filaments grown by mycelium to metabolize. Their iterative structures inspired this interactive video floor that grows a mycelium system at one’s feet, connecting to other systems.

Shown at Alchemy, May 1, 2010 at GAFFTA.

“Gaze” explores new possibilities of the gaze through digital technology: the work is viewing the viewer, suspending the subject/object dichotomy. The effect is a juxtaposition of intimacy and surveillance and evokes a specter of technological consciousness. It is a metaphor for our era’s trend of panoptic technological surveillance infiltrating personal and once private social spaces as greater and greater volumes of our human interactions are documented in the form of email and social networks.

“Gaze” installed at the Artist Television Access Film Festival, San Francisco, October 21st – 23rd 2009, and at the TV of Tomorrow Show 2010, a conference on television technologies.

Photo by Rubin Starset

Premiered at DancePlace in Washington, D.C. January 2010 with subsequent performances at Joyce Soho, New York and Z Space, San Francisco.

“Using web cameras that captured movement in real time, sound, video projections, lighting, and audience participation, the richly textured piece shifted from group effort to solo act, intimacy to loneliness, private moment to an exposed one.  Gripping performances by Levy and Aline Wachsmuth were accompanied by an audience that willingly engaged with them.  Together, the dancers and audience created an environment pulsing with energy and emotional depth, and the superficiality that can interfere with it.” – Dancing Perfectly Free