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Troiage Aesthetics. As the world around us is transformed into digitally
enabled forms and processes, aesthetic strategies are
necessitated that can serve to articulate the multiple layers
of complexity involved. I have developed an approach to
this through a number of projects that engage a formal and
conceptual vocabulary derived from collage, montage and
assemblage. This triple “age” (I’ll call it troiage), renders
surprising zones which articulate more then just the edges
of a formal transformation of culture, but reveal aspects of
social structure itself. One approach to put these
mechanisms of articulation into play is by looking at binary
relationships such as nature/culture, personal/public,
U.S./Mexico, freedom/coercion, mediation/experience.
This aesthetic approach is connected to, and develops from,
a number of disparate areas of art and cultural history. |
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The Scalable City. The Scalable City is a set of projects that explore the
externalization of algorithmic approaches to urbanization that
intersect with geographic, political, economic and aesthetic zones
of conflict. Version 0.7a of the Scalable City is a multi-media
exhibition consisting of various manifestations of landscape
demarcation, personal embodiment and domicile transformations.
Procedures governing the arrangement and operations of these
discrete areas, are interchanged across domains – moving them
from a more familiar basis to distorted and exaggerated extremes
of patterns and juxtapositions. Through these processes, which
reveal the procedural basis of the development of cultural forms,
the mechanistic processes of social formation are highlighted.
The forum for this version of the work is the US/Mexican border
where collisions of cultural forms, political structures, economies
and landscape are distinctly overt. |
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ersatz. The developments of digital technology provide opportunities for artists to radically rethink the
notion of mediums as entities that are containers to be filled with the content of their artwork. Digital
technologies provide the capability for artists to create their own functional mediums along with a particular
artwork. However, this technological creativity can create daunting development tasks that obscure the types of
creative processes that are inherently a part of many artmaking strategies. Over the past decade, the author has
developed a number of large-scale, complex, public art projects that utilize such capabilities as high resolution
interactive 3D graphics, multi-site networking, multi-user engagement, computer vision and haptic interfaces in
novel architectural frameworks. In creating these works, the author has strived to take advantage of the best in
available technological approaches, synthesized into a toolset that allows for cultural and aesthetic innovation
facilitated by technological innovation. In doing so, a continuous balance between disciplined software
development methodologies and the emergent processes of aesthetic discovery is negotiated. The ersatz
framework of tools is a continually extensible approach that balances the opportunities created through
discovery based processes and the need to create robust software frameworks to maximize resource capabilities. |
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Real Art and Virtual Reality. Virtual reality is irrupting all around us. It is coming from a number of directions: popular culture, the military, scientific visualization, entertainment systems, digital cinema, computer networking, fast computers and the economies of technological consumption. So what of art? How should artists respond to virtual reality and how are the developments of virtual reality (VR) responsive to art?
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Accelerating The Scalable City. Scalable City consists of 5 major components - landscape, roads, lots, architecture and vehicles. The process of developing each of these begins with data captured from networked real-world applications. This raw data, drawn from a real world referent, is transformed by an algorithm that creates a characteristic imprint of its own. In the case of the landscape, the captured data comes from satellite imaging. This visual representation of the landscape is transformed by a simple process of duplication, rotation, copying and pasting; the process creates a new landscape which retains naturalism in its details, but with a high level of algorithmic decoratism in its large scale structure.
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Why-Fi? The 4K cinema format is another moment in the ongoing negotiation between the realms of the fictive and the real, its lack of apparent pictorial artifact removing another veil of mediation. However, it operates within a culture that has a well-developed history of cinematic perception. This work recognizes that there is enough of a transformation of the image in this configuration that it causes the viewer to re-negotiate their own spectatorship, to re-calibrate the cinematic stance.
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"A Scalable Me For Scalable Times" by Geoff Ryman. Like all games, Scalable City practices aspects of life and gets us to ask questions. How, really, do we end up devouring landscape? How really do we want cities to grow? If this process, as automatic as the real process of building suburbia, results in things we don.t like, the program invites us to consider others. Would we like a process that built upwards? Or that once a saturation point had been achieved, jumped to a new setting and started building there? If this is in fact how things change, only speeded up, what role do I play, how do I change, in this ever re-scalable world?
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"Cutting across somewhere beween in the scalable city" by Bruce Sterling. Sheldon Brown's creative activities are well-considered, and elegant. They're also quite hard to describe in today's language. The streets of his scalable city have no names. The nicknames we might too-hastily give to them - harsh technical acronyms that repel the reader's eye - or that brassy host of prefixes: "neo" this, "hyper" that, super, ultra, virtual, mega, poly, meta, cyber & nano. Do they help us understand? They're jammed onto older terminology as if to knock the dust off it. Those formulas rather badly serve today.s artistic public. Now, Sheldon.s works are very much what they are. Yet, they're not cinema. Nor animation. They're not computer games, or simulated architecture, or urban maps, or even sculpture. They do partake of those things. They are a form of expression that "cuts across somewhere between."
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