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.