I’ll have a new inter­ac­tive video instal­la­tion titled “You’re In” at the Provocative Objects art show tomor­row evening (Friday, one night only) at MassArt.

This will not be a nor­mal art show, with wine and cheese and refined cit­i­zenry. Expect to be pro­voked (for both good and ill). It will be chal­leng­ing and hilar­i­ous and weird and uncom­fort­able, and I think it will also be awesome.

Details here!

Hope you can make it!

Practice, my MFA the­sis project, will be set up for you to explore this Friday in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Practice is both a work of inter­ac­tive video art and a design research project.

Unlike most other works of this medium, it does not reward bod­ily motion and exag­ger­ated ges­tures, but encour­ages patience and self-reflection. In so doing, it explores the ten­sion between emo­tional engage­ment and the uncom­fort­able ambi­gu­ity of not know­ing what will hap­pen next.

Friday, February 12

About 9:00 – 11:00pm

16th St. and Guerrero St., NE cor­ner (Map)

In the event of rain, the piece will be installed the next night, Saturday, 2/13.

I recently had the good for­tune to visit the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA. It’s on exhibit until May 12, and I rec­om­mend that every­one inter­ested in dynamic media and emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies go see it. If you are read­ing this blog, that means you. (The image above is Jim Lambie’s instal­la­tion on the first floor of the museum -- lit­er­ally, on the floor -- and is not part of the design exhibit.)

I found out about the exhibit in a round­about way. I was doing some research on the Make Controller Kit, an open-source hard­ware device that I’m con­sid­er­ing for future projects. That site points to a num­ber of great projects made with the kit, my favorite of which is Lightweeds by Simon Heijdens. Heijdens’ site men­tioned that his work was on dis­play at MoMA, so I went to the museum sim­ply to view his project, with no idea that I’d also see a num­ber of other phe­nom­e­nal projects.

Lightweeds is a bril­liant con­cept: Project life­like “weeds” onto inte­rior walls of a space, or what Heijdens calls the “arti­fi­cial” space of a gallery. Collect live data from the envi­ron­ment out­side the build­ing (tem­per­ate, sun­light, wind veloc­ity), and make the pro­jected weeds grow and behave in response to that data, thereby estab­lish­ing a con­nec­tion between the nat­ural and built envi­ron­ments. Here’s a close-up of one “weed” blow­ing in the “wind”:

Another high­light is the piece I Want You To Want Me, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, who I rec­og­nized imme­di­ately as the same folks who brought us We Feel Fine.

I Want You To Want Me mines the Internet, look­ing for peo­ple who them­selves are look­ing for some­one else: a date, a part­ner, a spouse. The touch-screen inter­face rep­re­sents each indi­vid­ual as a bal­loon which can be tapped to reveal some­thing about who that per­son is (e.g. Mike, age 29, in Philadephia) and what he’s look­ing for (e.g. “a hot babe” or “a man my age I can really set­tle down with”).

The project is extremely engag­ing. Users’ innate voyeuris­tic instincts make the con­tent inter­est­ing and relat­able, and the bal­loons (data) can be manip­u­lated through mul­ti­ple views and fil­ters, which enables the dis­cov­ery of peo­ple who may want each other in real life. Both of these char­ac­ter­is­tics were inher­ited from the We Feel Fine project, but I Want You To Want Me employs far-superior graph­ics and a touch inter­face. (As an instal­la­tion, it doesn’t have to strug­gle with the lim­i­ta­tions of a web-based dis­tri­b­u­tion platform.)

The absolute high­light of the exhibit, though, is Shadow Monsters, an instal­la­tion by Philip Worthington. You enter a small room with a very bright light on the wall behind you, and your “shadow” is “cast” on the oppo­site wall. The shadow, how­ever, is aug­mented in real-time to sug­gest how it would be seen in the mind of a child who’s been told to sleep, but can’t stop wor­ry­ing about mon­sters under the bed. While your pro­jected shadow grows horns, teeth, scary eye­balls and shaggy hair, the space is acti­vated with growl­ing, grunt­ing, and gar­gling -- the sounds of hun­gry mon­sters prepar­ing to devour lit­tle chil­dren. My favorite moment was when I made an alligator-like shadow pup­pet with my arms, and it grew large teeth and spat in dis­gust toward the oppo­site wall. (There was audio for the spit­ting, too.)

Not to brag, but that last bit of com­pu­ta­tion­ally enhanced per­for­mance art drew a brief stand­ing ova­tion from a crowd of onlook­ers. You see, with Shadow Monsters, there are the shad­ows, and there are the peo­ple cast­ing the shad­ows, both of which could be con­sid­ered per­form­ers, since they both con­tribute some­thing to the space. And then there are the peo­ple out­side the space look­ing in, watch­ing the performance.

But, in real­ity, the onlook­ers are part of the per­for­mance, too. They unwit­tingly play the part of the lit­tle child, peek­ing out from under the cov­ers, afraid and con­fused, unable to explain what’s real and what’s not, and unwill­ing to get out of bed (and into the space) until they can fig­ure out what’s really going on. My the­ory is that I drew a few claps because I wasn’t afraid to “get out from under the cov­ers” and really explore the sys­tem. (I was fairly con­fi­dent that it would not actu­ally eat me.) I raised my arms, stuck out my legs, made enclosed shadow-spaces (which is how to trig­ger eye­balls, I dis­cov­ered), and did a num­ber of other phys­i­cal actions that would have got­ten me kicked out of the museum, had I not been within that instal­la­tion space. But I didn’t care, because I wanted to know how the algo­rithm worked, and besides, my atten­tion was on the large pro­jec­tion in front of me, so I wasn’t think­ing about how silly I looked until peo­ple started clapping.

I will end with the begin­ning. Most vis­i­tors to the exhibit won’t even notice the first piece, Genomic Cartography by Ben Fry. It’s a sequence of human DNA, visu­al­ized as extremely small, pink and gray let­ters, printed on a white wall. But the exhibit title and intro­duc­tion are set on top of the piece, so it looks like just an inter­est­ing background.

I took away three pro­found insights from this exhibit:

1. The fact that the Museum of Modern Art, a ven­er­a­ble insti­tu­tion, staged this exhibit com­pletely val­i­dated my deci­sion to study dynamic media. This is absolutely the future, and absolutely what I want to do.

2. About half of the dynamic instal­la­tions, includ­ing Shadow Monsters, were built using Processing. Awesome. Again, I feel like I am totally going in the right direc­tion here, and I am inspired by the high qual­ity of work that can be done with the Processing environment.

3. Most of the exhib­ited artists and design­ers are within a few years of my age. And they have stuff in MoMA. That gives me hope and also scares me. I bet­ter get crackin’.

I can­not rec­om­mend a visit to this exhibit highly enough. If you can’t make it to New York, the exhibit’s web­site is a night­mare to nav­i­gate, but at least you can read about all of the projects there.