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Events

ecoarttech

November 16, 2010; 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
MIT Media Lab [E14], 6th Floor, Room 633, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA

ecoarttech_headshots2[Media Lab Map] Cary Peppermint and Leila Nadir cofounded ecoarttech in 2005 to explore convergent media, technology, and environments. Cary and Leila work interdisciplinarily, drawing on ideas and methodologies from digital studies, philosophy, literature, ecological science, critical/cultural studies, and art. For ecoarttech, the term “environment” does not refer only to nature or geographic spaces but rather to interwoven networks of biological, cultural, mental, and digital spaces. The health of each is indistinguishable from the health of others. As Gregory Bateson writes, the planet is part of humans’ “eco-mental system”: “if Lake Erie is driven insane [by pollution], its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.”
ecoarttech_IHEcoarttech’s latest work, Indeterminate Hikes, is an Android app that guides users through the “wilderness” of urban spaces. The IH trail database directs hikers to a series of Scenic Vistas, where they have the opportunity to contemplate nature or wildness in a globalized, urban space and the overlapping terrains of psychological and environmental ecologies. Through the experience of taking a walk and slowing down in the city, Indeterminate Hikes seeks to cultivate the imagination of ecological and cultural sustainability in modern, networked environments.
ecoarttech_whitneyIn 2009, ecoarttech completed two internet-based works: Untitled Landscape #5, a commission for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which disrupted the digital “landscape” of the Museum’s homepage with fluctuating orbs of light created through online visitation data; and Eclipse, a New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. commission for Turbulence.org, which explores simultaneously the U.S. myth of wilderness, the politics of ecological pollution, and the information “pollution” generated by social networking sites.
ecoarttech_erarLeila earned her Ph.D. in literature from Columbia University in 2009 and is currently Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Wellesley College. She has published scholarly essays on digital art, environmental studies, and American literature. Cary holds an M.F.A. from Syracuse University and is an assistant professor at Colgate University where he teaches courses in the theory and practice of digital art.

RECORDING OF THIS TALK:

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Events

Jane Prophet

October 26, 2010; 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
MIT Media Lab [E14], 6th Floor, Room 633, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA

jane_prophet_portait_chris_webb[Media Lab Map] Jane Prophet, a renowned British visual artist, uses traditional and new media and materials to produce surprising and beautiful objects. Site-specific installations include Conductor, a flooded power station lit with 120 electro luminescent cables. Decoy and The Landscape Room combine images of real and simulated landscapes, and Model Landscapes uses rapid prototyping to make miniature trees from mathematical data. Prophet is the driving force in a number of internationally acclaimed projects that break new ground in art, technology and science. Her collaborations with stem cell researchers, mathematicians and heart surgeons radically re-envisage the human body. In 2005 she won a National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts Fellowship to develop interdisciplinary artworks like Net Work (comprising hundreds of illuminated buoys) and Big Plastic Tree (an artwork built by robots). She has worked with digital media for two decades and currently focuses on the physicalisation of data: making real 3D objects. She is Professor of Art, Interdisciplinary Computing at Goldsmiths, London.

“Most of my art works, in whatever media, are influenced by my concerns with the physical structure of objects (the growth structure of trees, the shape of the human heart, the particular spatial qualities of a building). I’m equally interested in the way that these familiar objects and places feature in our social and economic landscape: how we use them as symbols (the oak tree becomes shorthand for “Englishness”; the heart symbolises “Love”; landmark buildings both past and present are presented as signs of affluence, regeneration and “Progress”). The third underlying element in most of my works is a curiosity about new materials, new technologies and new engineering processes.

jane_prophet_silver hearts_row

In the past, drawing on the interests outlined, I have made works such as The Landscape Room, and Decoy, both of which analyse and re-present the structure of the English oak, and of the English landscape. Both these works utilise bespoke computer programming and fractal mathematics from which I ‘grow’ virtual trees and change the appearance of hitherto familiar National Trust parklands.

Model Landscapes, extends this theme by moving from two-dimensional still images and animations, to produce a series of vignettes. The Model Landscape vignettes are “model” in terms of being “ideal” and at the same time, “scaled-down”. To make these works, I used a combination of old and new media, combining rapid prototyping techniques, whereby I took my own three-dimensional computer data and made small trees from the fractal mathematics, to hand-cut books, where tree structures popped up from the pages.

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Souvenir of England references our Englishness and the nostalgia we sometimes feel for the loss of native flora and fauna due to changes in agricultural policy and practices and climate change.”

Events

Dorkbot Co-Hosts its Founder, Douglas Irving Repetto

August 17, 2009; 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
Microsoft NERD, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA

douglasNEW VENUE: Microsoft NERD, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA.

In our first joint event, Upgrade! Boston and dorkbot-boston are thrilled to co-host Douglas Irving Repetto. Douglas is an artist and teacher. His work, including sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Douglas is Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and lives in New York City with his wife, writer Amy Benson; two cute/bad cats, Pokey and Sneezy; and many plants.

bondingIn 2007, Douglas and his collaborator LoVid created Bonding Energy for Turbulence.org. Bonding Energy consists of a set of Sunsmile devices that collect and measure solar energy from seven geographically distributed sites around New York State: Columbia University, NYC; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy; University of Buffalo; Colgate University, Hamilton; free103point9’s Wave Farm, Acra; Experimental Television Center, Owego; and The Redhouse Arts Center, Syracuse.

sunsmile0The light energy reaching the Sunsmiles’ solar panels fuels a collaborative real-time data visualization on Turbulence. Part of the larger Cross Current Resonance Transducer (CCRT) project in which the artists are developing systems for monitoring, manipulating, and interpreting natural signals such as tidal patterns and wind, Bonding Energy is focused on solar energy. Bonding Energy is a model for distributed microenergy generation, inspired by SETI@home — which harnesses the collective power of personal computers distributed worldwide — and microcredit, a loan system that supports poor or unemployed people in underdeveloped countries. Small contributions from many individuals can produce significant results.

csa2Circular Spectrum Analyzer is part of the ongoing Cross Current Resonance Transducer collaboration with LoVid. It is a solar energy to sound and movement transducer. Two solar panels directly power a shortwave radio and two motors. One of the motors continuously tunes the radio across the 19MHz spectrum while the other slowly turns seven wooden discs. The shape and engraving of the discs was determined by data collected from the seven Sunsmile devices in Bonding Energy. The same data was used to engrave intricate patterns on the aluminum body of the sculpture.

Wired voted Douglas one of 2005’s 10 Sexiest Geeks. In a 2006 interview Wired News asked “Tell us how dorkbot came about. Where did the idea for it stem from and what was the first meeting like?. Douglas replied:

dorkbotqa1_fThe specific way dorkbot came about was I moved to New York City and I was leaving a place — I ‘d been working up at Dartmouth College, which is in a pretty isolated place, for a few years. It was really wonderful and I had some great friends there but it was also an extremely small community; virtually no one doing the kinds of things I was doing or was involved in.

So when I came to New York I really wanted to get involved with people. I really wanted to expand socially and collaboratively…. And so I … had this idea that it would be fun to just sort of send out a blanket call to say, “Hey, if you’re doing neat stuff, I’d like to, you know, hang out with you.” So the idea was an adult show-and-tell, more or less. You can read the whole interview here.

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