Boston

February 24, 2009; 7:00 – 9:00 pm [map] Follow the signs posted on the outside of the Tower Building (black glass)[Green Line Train "E"]

This evening will focus on net art or real-time art. From Jeff Crouse’s thesis, Real-Time Art: Emerging technologies have made it possible for artists to use a wide range of live, external data sources to give their work relevance and impact. Works that use these live data sources share certain strategies, values, and influences. Not only does this type of art have much artistic potential, but it can help the Web by encouraging the development of machine-understandable, Semantic data formats. What kind of tools would give some coherence to real-time art and facilitate its creation?

Jeff Crouse creates software and installations that highlight the absurdity of technology in culture. Along with Andrew Mahon and Steve Lambert, he recently launched ABSML- A Bullshit Markup Language (commissioned by Turbulence.org). ABSML is a new markup language that enables the creation of complex sentence formulas for 21st century automatic writing. Jeff’s previous work includes YouThreebe, a YouTube triptych creator; Invisible Threads, a virtual jeans factory in Second Life; and James Chimpton, a robotic monkey that interviewed the artists of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He is currently developing BoozBot, a bar tending robot / puppet; and DeleteCity, a Wordpress plug-in that finds and republishes content that has been taken down from sites such as Flickr and YouTube. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Futuresonic festival in Manchester, UK, the DC FilmFest, and the Come Out and Play Festival in Amsterdam.

Jeff received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam as a production fellow in 2007. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, an adjunct professor at the IMA program at Hunter College, and a freelance programmer. Someday, he plans to add “novelist” or “short story author” to that list.

Mark Skwarek and Joseph Hocking will present Children of Arcadia, a real-time virtual ecosystem which undergoes the stress test of apocalypse to expose the moral fibers of its inhabitants and the flaws in their idealized utopia. Virtual reality and augmented reality are used to combine the physical world of downtown Manhattan with a virtual environment called Arcadia. The work gathers real-time information from the Internet related to the American economy and society and translates this data into either a utopia or apocalypse. These changes create a living 17th-century Baroque painting that shifts between a representation of apocalyptic ruin and one of an idealized utopia.

Mark Skwarek is a new media artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Mark recently received his MFA from RISD’s Digital Media department. His art is heavily influenced by videogame culture and current events that face American Society. Mark’s art work is made by modifying current video game technology. This manipulation has been primarily done by Joseph Hocking who Mark has been collaborating with for the last several years. Mark’s role in the creative process falls under concept and fabrication of the virtual experience. Mark’s recent focus has been on a large scale augmented reality called the Children of Arcadia. The project may also be viewed from a personal computer. The piece runs on information gathered from the internet and that transforms Wall St. into either a Arcadia or Apocalypse. The piece contextualizes American societies condition in real time living painting. Outside of his art practice Mark teaches 3-D graphics for video games at NYU Polytech, 3-D graphics for architects at New York City College of Technology, and 3d graphics for artists at Brooklyn College. Mark is also involved in research projects with NYU Polytech and New York City College of Technology that are exploring large-scale real-world multiuser onlines.

Joseph Hocking is a digital artist whose work is devoted to exploring the artistic potential of 3D graphics. Working closely in collaboration with Mark Skwarek, Joseph is a key member of the team behind the immersive 3D artwork Children of Arcadia. Shown most recently at the inaugural exhibition of the Sunshine Museum in Beijing, Children of Arcadia is a virtual environment built to project the financial district of NYC into a 17th century Baroque painting. Although he has a significant background in and knowledge of 3D animation, Joseph’s artmaking activities chiefly revolve around programming, as his work with real-time 3D demands custom software for virtually every project. In addition to creating real-time 3D artwork, he teaches classes about both 3D animation and programming in an artistic context at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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