|
Cinco De Dorkbot: Back To Our Roots
Wednesday, May 5th, 2004 at 7.30 pm
Center on Contemporary
Art, Seattle, WA
Ellen Ziegler, “Chemistry Is The Emotion
Of Matter”: Whether working as an artist, collaborating
on a public art project or bossing corporate CEOs as a graphic
designer, chemistry (literal and metaphorical) has been
vital to the work of Seattle-based artist Ellen Ziegler
(http://www.ellenziegler.com).
Her work is shown locally and nationally, and includes installations
incorporating water as a subject and medium, large works
on paper using chemically-altered light-sensitive media,
and public artworks, among them fountains and water features.
Ellen will talk about her “new and used” works
and the processes she has evolved to create them. In her
own words, “When I place objects on light-sensitive
surfaces in the sun, I never know how the image will turn
out. Or whether it will. Processing the materials with a
garden hose, I watch the objects appear as transformed ghosts.
When I draw on the images with household chemicals or power
tools, unexpected reactions occur. Chemistry is the emotion
of matter. With these processes, form filters through the
semi-permeable membrane of imagination.”
Shawn Brixey, “Too Many To List Here”:
Associate Professor, Associate Director, extreme brush-hog
wrangler and founder of the University of Washington’s
newly-established research center and PhD program in Digital
Arts and Experimental Media, Shawn Brixey, will talk about
his extraordinary range of research projects, all of which
marry art and technology in new and fascinating ways. Shawn
has exhibited these works nationally and internationally,
from Documenta to Karlsruhe, Germany, to the Chicago Art
Institute, has been widely reviewed and was a recipient
of a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for New Media.
Past and present works include “Eon”, which uses
the mysterious phenomenon of sonoluminescence - the process
by which sound in water can be converted directly into light
- and the Internet, extending his current artistic research
in the fields of telepresence and telepistemology, and "Secret
Agents", a collaborative, commissioned, networked e-opera.
http://www.washington.edu/dxarts/faculty_home.php?who=brixey
tells you more.
Toby Paddock, Laura MacCary and Kevin Hilbiber (and
possibly more), “Sensing People, Part 1 (AKA
Non-Contact People-Sensing)”: Local artists, technophiles
and returning dorkbot-sea favourites Toby Paddock (http://www.seanet.com/~tpaddock/),
Laura MacCary (http://www.maccary.com)
and Kevin Hilbiber (http://www.houseofscience.com)
will take you on a mystical journey through the techniques
that allow you to use electricity to tell if people are
nearby without actually touching them, and the artistic
possibilities that these techniques have sparked in their
own practices. They’ll discuss the Yin of Capacitance
and Yang of Inductance, and manifestations of these phenomena
from S. Lyn Goeringer and Otis Fodder’s theremins to
Laura’s amazing, interactive, woven sculptures to the
works-in-progress and completed projects in Toby’s
workshop and Ballard’s magnificent House of Science.
The microphone is yours! Instead of our usual performance,
we’re handing the floor over to you, to talk
about whatever you’d like. Some example topics:
· Work in progress
· Request for collaborators (artists and/or
technologists) for a new or existing project
· Problem needing solving
· Point of contention about electronic art
· Show ‘n’ tell
· Upcoming events
· New discoveries
· ...!
Ellen Ziegler: “When I place objects on light-sensitive
surfaces in the sun, I never know how the image will turn
out. Or whether it will. Processing the materials with a
garden hose, I watch the objects appear as transformed ghosts.
When I draw on the images with household chemicals or power
tools, unexpected reactions occur. Chemistry is the emotion
of matter. With these processes, form filters through the
semi-permeable membrane of imagination. Making these images
has yielded a new vocabulary for work on an intimate scale,
as well as in installations that wrap the viewer in his
or her own transformed peripheral vision.“ Ellen Ziegler
is an artist working in Seattle, WA. Her work includes installations
incorporating water as a subject and medium, large works
on paper using chemically altered light-sensitive media,
and public artworks, among them fountains and water features.
http://www.ellenziegler.com.
Shawn Brixey is Associate Director of the University
of Washington's newly established research center and PhD.
program in Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Previously,
he was founder of the Digital Media Program at the University
of California Berkeley, and Director of their Center for
Digital Art and New Media Research. A graduate of MIT's,
CAVS/Media Lab, Brixey has exhibited art and technology
works internationally, including Documenta, the Deutscher
Kunstlerbund, Karlsruhe, The Cranbrook Art Museum, The MIT
Museum, The Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, The Chicago
Art Institute, The 1998 Winter Olympics, The first American
Design and Architecture Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt National
Design Museum, The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington,
and the Berkeley Art Museum. He has received all levels
of major grants and awards to support his research including:
The Boxlight Corporation, The National Institute of Health,
The Intel Corporation, Silicon Graphics, Newport/Klinger
Research Corporation, Apple Computer, IBM GmbH, The National
Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
Leica and Hughes Aircraft. In 2003 he was honored with a
Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for New Media, past fellows
include Bill Viola and Gary Hill. He lectures widely in
the U.S and Europe on new and emerging media art forms.
Critical writing and reviews of his work have been featured
in diverse sources, including The New York Times, The Seattle
Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Stranger, Wired
Magazine, Surface Magazine, The Cincinnati Inquirer, The
Boston Globe, Art News, WolkenKratzer Magazine (Germany),
Smithsonian World Television, and KQED/MSNBC Radio. Significant
review of his work is included in Thames and Hudson's 1992
book release, Art of the Electronic Age, Leonardo/The Journal
of Art, Science and Technology 2001, and a major new book
release from MIT Press, Information Arts, the Intersection
of Art, Science and Technology by Dr. Stephen Wilson 2002.
http://www.washington.edu/dxarts/faculty_home.php?who=brixey
Toby Paddock is "just some guy that thinks
hall effect sensors are kind of neat and that everyone should
know about them". He also likes to listen to audio
frequency magnetic fields using homemade pickup coils, but
that's a different thing altogether. Tinkers with sound,
electronics, and field recording, but mostly speculates
about projects that never get started. Is trying to develop
the "Shut Up And Solder" method of actually getting
something built. He works for an aerospace electronics company
in the environmental test labs and lives in Everett, WA
with his wife, 2 kids, 1 fish, 2 cats, 1 dog, and a hamster.
They appreciate his enthusiasm for his hobbies, however,
not sharing his unique admiration of sound often send him
to the garage. http://www.seanet.com/~tpaddock/
Laura MacCary is a weaver who has also been studying
electronics for the last few years. Laura is interested
in the idea of weaving as a ubiquitous but little-noticed
technology, unvalued while still essential to human survival.
Electronics is another technology that is becoming so omnipresent
and so integrated with our lives that we will soon cease
to notice it. However, electronics is sure to cross the
boundary of our skin, and enter our bodies. Its fields already
do. It is this intimate interface between people and technology
that Laura examines in this series of works. Each piece
in the series consists of an electronic component woven
of conductive or resistive materials cast-off by industry,
and a circuit designed around it. By interacting with the
weaving the viewer physically enters the circuit, and the
circuit passes through the viewer, blurring the boundary
between them. The title of the series, Dialectric, is taken
from the words dialectic, meaning the juxtaposition or interaction
of two conflicting ideas or forces, and dielectric, an insulating
substance or one in which an electric field can be maintained
with a minimum loss of power. Laura sees these as metaphors
for the participants in an interaction, and the space between
them. This series is also an opportunity to collaborate
with her father, longtime electronics experimenter and sculptor
Lawrence MacCary, and she see the works as metaphors for
aspects of their relationship, and relationships in general.
http://www.maccary.com
Kevin Hilbiber: Kevin's first show was at the 1968
Ghiradelli Square International Childrens' Art Center, where
he displayed 'wire sketches', funny cars and shopping carts,
figures from Saul Steinberg and Charles Scultz - "kid
stuff" created from leftover scraps of leadwire taken
from components he soldered into pc boards for his father
when he was 12. Other career highlights include an interactive
sound and light sculpture show called Softscience in 1985
at silkscreen collective Survival Graphics (Madison, WI),
which was the first ever non-print based show held at that
venue. A year later, Softscience became the name of Kevin's
Amp Tech shop, which ran for the next 10 years. Kevin is
a founder of Ballard's House of Science, holds an ATA degree
in electronics and lives "a hazy, slacker's life otherwise".
http://www.houseofscience.com;
http://www.mysweetgirls.com.
|
