West Space Application Questions in greater detail
Tell us about your practice. In your response, include a description of a project or an idea you are currently working on.
The medium I will be exploring for this application is generative interactive art that directly influences human interaction and collaboration. The topics outlined are about creating an interactive sensory environment using multiple generative art elements and collaborations with other artists.
An idea is to create an environment where the user is directly influencing the visual art medium. I would like to build an outdoor scene indoors at West Space with gravel and leaves on the floor as well as sticks and branches and different types of outdoor elements that have unique, familiar sounds when you interact with them, and once the user walks through this space, they activate the visual art by the sound they make as they encounter those various outdoor elements.
The noise of footsteps on gravel and the crunch of a leaf on the ground or the snap of a twig and the rustling of leaves as you brush past creates a sound that a visual will then react to, and as a result, the user is creating the art unintentionally. The visual art evolves due to the sensory experience a user has from their interaction with those elements physically.
An important factor is about the input a user makes that is unique because an expertise or predetermined set of actions is not the prerequisite in guiding and creating these visuals but rather, is done in a way that any sensory input can trigger it. Anything can create its own art essentially, it doesn't have to be orchestrated in a particular manner for it to exist and in that sense all of it is the art.
What would be your typical pattern of studio use and your intentions for the six month period you are allotted?
I would be at the studio from Monday through to Thursday, and I would use the space to experiment with or make generative art. I would also be setting up scenes for exploring different types of interactivity and collaboration with different types of artists from Collingwood Yards and abroad.
Having a space set up to create visual art through a collaboration with other artists’ disciplines and ideas could be quite an immersive experience. To be in that kind of space and environment with these kinds of sensory-driven generative art media is crucial to unlocking hidden ideas and potential.
The space is equally as important as the ideas that form, as without the right environment, the ideas could lack the necessary grounding to be realised. I would also be able to use the space to create mini impromptu exhibitions with fellow artists, showcasing certain ideas that are being explored.
How will being mentored by West Space benefit your practice? (Consider the organisation and the residents in place at Collingwood Yards.)
I believe that being mentored by West Space will give me the opportunity to unlock a deeper understanding of human connection, which is essential to the expanse of human consciousness that is achieved directly through the collaboration with the other artists.
With guidance, the vision is to collaborate with a diverse range of artists from various disciplines complementary to each other, such as DJs, painters, sculptors, dancers, writers, etc. This collaboration will enable us to experiment with different types of visual and auditory interactivity. By collaborating with different types of artists, we can unlock different and diverse kinds of sensory interactions, and as a result, leading to the creation of different types of artworks that are entirely new and unique to a rarely explored art space.
As an artist in this space, I think about awareness and observation a lot. I think about interactivity and how the senses interact with each other to give us a sensory experience of our reality. All of these sensory-based visual art projects are about connectivity, not just individually, inwardly, but also as a means to communicate our experiences outwardly, socially, and collaboratively with others.
The individual generative art elements I’ve created are components of a bigger sensory experience. These elements are meant to be used in conjunction with motion interaction, sound interaction, and visual interaction, creating a rich immersive art medium wherein the collaborative users’ interaction with those individual elements forms the bigger artwork, which is completely unique to each user’s input.
About
What is INTERACTIVE ART?
Interactive art is art that reacts to different types of stimuli input. Ive created different types of animations that interact with movement and sound and visual stimulus. They are based on different types of gestural stimulation using the movement of our hands or body or even the sound we make to trigger the animation to interact with that input, for example the position and rotation of your hand or your body in a specific manner creates a unique reaction in the animation.
One example is a particle simulator with 100, 000 3D particles that have been programmed to move in a 3d space along with the stimulus input that it has detected, only instead of reacting to instructions given by the user through code, it is reacting live through a motion sensor directly to the input created by the user which in this particular case is movement of the hands or body.
Another example is a sphere made up of a few thousand particles that disperse and contract based on gestural motion of a hand, using a different type of motion sensor and programming I’ve created a translation between the movement of a hand to changes in the status of the sphere. Based on these gestures the sphere particles implode should it encounter the input of a hand being close and to explode if it encounters the input of a hand that is further away. It also rotates the sphere particles at any given distance the hand input is at the time of use by turning the hand sideways, essentially giving the user the ability to freeze the particle sphere explosion and rotate it in real time, live.
What is GENERATIVE ART?
Generative art is a specific set process of making art that is created by an artists parameters in an algorithm using computer code or another specific process that implies that the art cannot be created through different ways of improvisation.
While there is experimentation within generative art it is bound to the specific rules it is set to by the artist and the art is then created autonomously by these sets of rules. While the system is dependant on the parameters set by the artist there are possibilities of unpredictable outcomes and abstract interpretations of the parameters which leads to a kind of unique collaborative experience with a machine.
What is Projection Mapping and why use it?
Projection mapping is a technique whereby an artist can overlay artworks or animations onto irregular 3d objects. This can be achieved by creating (mapping) segmented areas of 3d objects to be independent of each other or together as a whole that can be used to display artworks or animations.
This can be done on a small scale from flat 3d objects like a picture on a wall or an entire building. The projection mapped visual art can also be reactive and controlled by music which can create a multi-sensory experience for the audience.
Why make generative interactive art?
The idea is to create an interactive art hub where these separate elements can be combined. This is driven by the desire to foster human connection and connectivity that is driven by our senses. I believe we are moving rapidly towards a future that prioritises computer-based interaction over physical collaboration. However, instead of just being virtual in a virtual space, it’s in the physical world. I think there are many applications for this interactivity in the physical world and by using these different examples to experiment with, we can interact with technology and human beings in novel ways.
I think it's very important to have tangibility, it is essential to the connection of our senses to have tangible connections to physical things and to interactions with people. It has to be tangible if you want to be able to feel and touch something that is not just in a virtual space, and that is an incredibly important part of human connection in this reality. I think that being able to translate different types of sensory perceptions across technology is a great connection point for humans.