Origination Point: Art, science, technology and nature converge
Collaborating Team: Agnes Chavez (artist/concept), Marcel Schwittlick (visual artist/coder), Robert Schirmer (interactive sound)
Origination Point is a generative sound responsive projection installation originally exhibited at the 12th Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba as part of the collective exhibit Entre, Dentro, Fuera/Between, Inside, Outside and at The Harwood Museum, Taos, New Mexico.
As part of Agnes Chavez’s Projecting Particles series and inspired by her research stay at ATLAS@CERN in Geneva Switzerland, this work explores new concepts about space, our origins in the universe and how matter was created after the big bang through the newly discovered Higgs field. In Origination Point, Chavez contemplates humanity’s shared subatomic origins in relation to her Cuban-American origins to express that we are more than the physical bodies and socio-cultural identities we construct.
Through a collaboration with artist Marcel Schwittlick, who programmed the code, Origination Point features images of self-generating ‘rocks’ that are transformed in real time exploring the evolution of matter and our wave/particle duality. The images are projected onto a wall of hanging fabric strips creating mesmerizing movements in rhythm with an interactive soundtrack. The interactive composition designed and programmed by sound designer Robert Schirmer includes sounds from NASA’s field recordings of outer space accompanied by terrestrial nature sounds. Through an interactive sensor the visitor moves rocks in and out of a circle on the ground. This process adds layers of water, space and earth sounds designed to shift one’s perception and emotional response to the projected visuals.
Special thanks to UNM College of Fine Art for making possible a special course that allowed graduate students to participate as assistants for the Havana Biennial 2015.: Abbey Hepner, Christine Posner, Julianne Aguilar, Adrian Pijoan.
(x)trees: Dynamically generating forest of trees created by SMS and Tweets from the audience
Collaborators: V1: Jared Tarbell, V2: Joe Roth and Jeff Milton V3: Alessandro Saccoia, V4: Kamen Dimitrov
(x)trees is projected in real time on to buildings and large spaces, exploring messaging and mobile devices as a way to create a participatory experience around the theme of protecting our natural resources, and our relationship to communication technology. By integrating data mining from social networks and text messaging, people participate in the creation of the branches to create a virtual interactive forest of dynamically generating trees. The audience sends a tweet or text message and sees their message appear on the wall with a branch. The key word is chosen in relation to the event i.e. climate change.
