This is the sub-category for Interactive Installation posts. Any posts within this sub-category will be displayed under the Interactive Installation header on the Arts page.
Wishing Well (许愿池) by media artist John Fillwalk and IDIA Lab, is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) installation that was invited into the 5th Arts and Science International Exhibition and Symposium (TASIES 2019) at the National Museum of China in Beijing located on Tiananmen Square. The exhibition curated the work of international artists engaged in the pioneering use of AI in the creation of art-making. The Wishing Well installation creates an interactive environment where visitors’ spoken wishes shape the substance, meaning and character of the artwork – mediated through artificial intelligence.
Wishing Well ( 许愿池 ) engages both private and public spatial interactions in the creation of a simultaneously intimate and collective social experience. The tone of the wishes aggregated by the system is processed anonymously and delivered into this social sculpture via synthesized whispered voices, spoken in Mandarin. The pool of water in the bowl, or wishing well, is vibrated by a speaker placed underneath – creating a three-dimensional dynamic sound wave representation shaped by the sound of the actual wish. Virtual colored shapes are emitted based on the tonal analysis of each wish and are aggregated into an historical representation of previous wishes – launching skyward to become part of the larger collection of dreams.
John Fillwalk and the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA Lab) at Ball State University were commissioned to design and build a virtual museum artworks for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI. The physical Museum, was designed by architect Zaha Hadid and opened to the public in Fall 2012. Museum Director, Michael Rush commissioned Fillwalk and IDIA Lab to envision and create a dynamic program of artworks for the Virtual Broad Art Museum project (VBAM). Fillwalk and his collaborators created an immersive multi-user environment and four commissioned artworks using Unity 3D – experienced entirely within a web browser.
“Engaging visitors with innovators at the leading edge of art and technology, both here at MSU and around the globe, is key to the Broad Art Museum’s mission,” said founding director Michael Rush. “With the Virtual Broad Art Museum, we have an opportunity to embrace the tremendous creative and connective possibilities that exist in the digital world.”
The mixed world reception took place on Thursday, March 15th 2012 from 6:00 – 8:00 pm EST simultaneously on the campus of Michigan State University and in the VBAM virtual worlds.
Participants in con|FLUENCEcan create pathways based on reactions to both social and spatial relationships. There is a virtual response and persistence to interactions, as the routes are drawn and sculpted in the three-dimensional environment – forming nodes that are created via visitors’ proximity.
con|FLUENCE. John Fillwalk. 2012.
Survey for VBAM is an immersive landscape simulation using real time weather data from the location of the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, Michigan. Representations of surveyor’s tape, flags, light, sky color, time of day, wind speed and even cloud density are driven by the actual physical weather forces – informing the virtual landscape.
Survey. John Fillwalk. 2012.
dis|PLACEis an interactive gesture-based performance that will be exhibited at the VBAM reception on the 15th of March. This installation links virtual space to physical reality in an exploration of agency and gesture. Employing a participant’s movement, the work can both navigate 3D space – as well as control direct interactions with the digital performers via a Microsoft Kinect™ sensor.
dis|PLACE. John Fillwalk. 2012.
Proxy is a performative, interactive and site-specific virtual installation where participants shape the evolution of a sculptural and sonic composition as a response to the Museum. Interactions are painted, sculpted and sonified within this collaborative and evolving environment. The work progresses to construct in itself relation to the Museum – eventually transforming as integrated structure – reflecting and becoming its environment.
Proxy. John Fillwalk. 2012.
Flickr™ Gettr for VBAM connects the social image web service of Flickr™ to the virtual Museum environment, allowing visitors to create a dynamic cloud of spatial imagery by entering a search term of their choice – providing tagged images from Flickr™ into the Museum environment. The search term is spoken by the software and tags from image cloud are revealed allowing for subsequent user transformations of the spatial imagery.
Flickr Gettr. John Fillwalk. 2012.
Credits
Proxy. John Fillwalk with Neil Zehr, Michael James Olson 2012
Survey for VBAM John Fillwalk with Neil Zehr, Keith Kothman, Charles Estell 2012
Flickr Gettr for VBAM John Fillwalk with Jesse Allison, Neil Zehr, Charles Estell 2012
con|FLUENCE John Fillwalk with Neil Zehr 2012
dis|PLACE (exhibited at the reception on the 15th of March as a live performance only) John Fillwalk with Neil Zehr, Jonathan Strong 2012
Michael Rush, Director of the Broad Museum of Art, MSU Adam Brown, Professor Intermedia and Electronic Art, MSU John Fillwalk, Director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts [IDIA Lab], BSU Neil Zehr, IDIA Lab, BSU Charles Estell, IDIA Lab, BSU Michael James Olson, IDIA Lab, BSU Ina-Marie Henning, IDIA Lab, BSU Jonathan Strong, IDIA Lab, BSU Jesse Allison, LSU Keith Kothman, BSU Jonathan Ross, BSU Blake Boucher, BSU Michael Davidson, MSU Jayne Goedekke, MSU Kyle Gomboy, Reaction Grid Chris Hart, Reaction Grid
The IDIA Lab is designing a series of extended reality artworks that will be installed in the atrium of the College of Architecture and Planning. The installation allows passers-by to interact using various modes including motion, voice, and gesture to shape the compositions. The works employ sensors, sound art, artificial intelligence, and other programming to create dynamic experiences.
A virtual social installation by John Fillwalk, IDIA Lab and Jody Naderi, CAP
This work, designed specifically for Nuit Blanche Toronto activates a locative field in which participants engage in dynamic social experience. Individual users of the app interact with a dynamic feedback system allowing them to find the cadence of a contemplative walk. Participants can view other app users on a live map – locating them spatially to join in a unique group or virtual room – forming a dynamic choir of collaborative synchronous light and music.
Final Wisdom I is an interactive installation engaging viewers in a sensory exploration of temporal and spatialized poetry. Participants manipulate imagery, sound and language through their gesture, touch and proximity. The work is engaged through a framework of cameras and sensors that react to heat, position, and capacitance – presenting a shifting environment of reactive media and haptics. Final Wisdom I is the work of artists Hans Breder and John Fillwalk, poetry by critic Donald Kuspit, music by composers Carlos Cuellar Brown and Jesse Allison. This project is produced through the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts at Ball State University in collaboration with the Institute for Digital Fabrication. Final Wisdom I was exhibited at the art gallery of SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles, CA. Special thanks to IDF/CAP students Matthew Wolak, Christopher Baile and Claire Matucheski, and Assistant Professor of Architecture Joshua Vermillion. http://www.i-m-a-d-e.org/
As an intermedia artist, John Fillwalk actively investigates emerging technologies that inform his work in a variety of media, including video installation, virtual art, and interactive forms. His perspective is rooted in the traditions of painting, cinematography, and sculpture, with a particular interest in spatialized works that can immerse and engage a viewer within an experi- ence. Fillwalk positions his work to act as both a threshold and mediator between tangible and implied space, creating a conduit for the transformative extension of experience, and to pursue the realization of forms, sounds and images that afford interaction at its most fundamental level. In working with technology, he values the synergy of collaboration and regularly works with other artists and scientists on projects that could not be realized otherwise. Electronic media extend the range of traditional processes by establishing a palette of time, motion, interactivity, and extensions of presence. The ephemeral qualities of electronic and intermedia works, by their very nature, are inherently transformative, and the significance of the tangible becomes fleeting, shifting emphasis away from the object and toward the experience.
John Fillwalk is Director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA Lab) at Ball State University, an interdisciplinary and collaborative hybrid studio. An intermedia artist and Associate Professor of Electronic Art, Fillwalk investigates media in video installation, hybrid reality and interactive forms. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in Intermedia and Video Art, and has since received numerous grants, awards, commissions and fellowships.
Donald Kuspit is an art critic, author and professor of art history and philosophy at State University of New York at Stony Brook and lends his editorial expertise to several journals, including Art Criticism, Artforum, New Art Examiner, Sculpture and Centennial Review. Hans Breder was born in Herford, Germany, and trained as a painter in Hamburg, Germany. Attract- ed to the University of Iowa’s School of Art and Art History in 1966, Breder established the Intermedia Program. Carlos Cuellar Brown, a.k.a ccbrown, is a composer, instrumentalist and music producer. Formally trained as a classical pianist, Cuellar specialized in experimental music and intermedia with the late American maverick composer Kenneth Gaburo. Jesse Allison is the Virtual Worlds Research Specialist, IDIA, Assistant Professor of Music Technology, Ball State University. He is also President of Hardware Engineering with Electrotap, LLC, an innovative human-computer interface firm.
Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology article published by The MIT Press. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/leonardo/summary/v043/43.4.fillwalk.html
The interplay of art and science—a concept at least as old as Leonardo da Vinci—is the focus of “Engaging Technology II,” an exhibition at Ball State University’s David Owsley Museum of Art which ran September 28, 2017 through December 22, 2017. Museum patrons experienced a selection of work from internationally renowned artists whose explorations on the topic include installations, code art (artwork generated by computer programming), art/science, augmented reality and human-computer interaction.
The exhibition was curated by Ball State’s John Fillwalk, director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA Lab) in the College of Architecture and Planning and is both a sequel and a new concept, according to Robert La France, the museum’s director. This exhibit builds on the success of a prior exhibition curated by Fillwalk, that examined the emergence of the genre of Intermedia Art, with a particular focus on the intersection of technology and artmaking. The new show shifts the curatorial emphasis on STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.
This exhibition continues to position Ball State as an international center of STEAM innovation. A goal of Engaging Technology II was to invite artists exploring the edges of art and science into discourse within our community—advancing our University’s conversation regarding interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. This collection of artists examines various aspects of the physical and life sciences, from code and biology to chemistry and physics.
Among those individuals whose work is featured in the exhibition is Adam Brown, an associate professor at Michigan State University. His live biochemical installation, The Great Work of the Metal Lover is a work that sits at the intersection of art, science and alchemy. “It uses microbiology as a technique to solve the mystery of the philosopher’s stone,” said Brown, who described the centuries-old “stone” as a legendary substance sought by alchemists who believed it capable of turning metals like mercury into gold and silver.
His installation uses custom lab equipment to introduce a “highly specialized” bacterium into an engineered atmosphere, turning toxic gold chloride into usable 24K gold over time during the course of the show. “By the end of the exhibition, the process will produce enough gold to put in the palm of your hand,” Brown said.
Other innovative contributors to “Engaging Technology II” include code artist Casey Raes; composer and visual artist Tristian Perich; and Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, European-Russian artists who create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices.
“10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid” is Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s live, audiovisual performance which was presented on the fulldome projection screen of Ball State’s Charles W. Brown Planetarium. The artwork uses a penetrating laser beam to scan the surface of soap bubbles, the behavior of which model the unique properties of cell membranes.
Throughout the run of Engaging Technology II, a series of invited performances, lectures and workshops were scheduled on campus and in the Muncie community to enhance the exhibition’s reach. Classes, workshops, lectures and family events were offered for local and regional audiences.
Engaging Technology II: Art + Science premiered at the David Owsley Museum of Art on September 28th, 2017. The exhibition was curated by John Fillwalk, Director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Art at Ball State University. The opening reception was followed by a special performance by two of the featured artists – Evelina Domnitch and Dimitry Gelfand at the Charles W. Brown Planetarium.
About the performance, from the artists: “In 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid we use laser light to scan the surfaces of nucleating and dissipating soap bubble clusters. Unlike ordinary light, the laser’s focused beam is capable of crawling through the micro and nano structures within a bubble’s skin. When aimed at specific angles, this penetrating light generates a large-scale projection of molecular interactions as well as the phenomena of non-linear optics. Bubble behaviors viewed in such proximity evoke the dynamics of living cells (the lipid membranes of which, are direct chemical descendants of soap films).”
IDIA Lab has created a virtual gallery design system in partnership with virtual world creator Sinespace. Sinespace, a multi-user virtual world platform based in the UK, contacted IDIA to design this system for their new virtual environment. The Gallery Designer isan easy to use system to dynamically create gallery and museum exhibitions on the fly with any web hosted images – creating an exhibition with any images that can be connected to from the internet. Users can easily pick gallery styles (classical/modern), exterior settings, frame style, lighting, floosr, wall color and ceiling treatments – customizing an experience that is complementary to the exhibition theme. The gallery can then be easily published and host a virtual reception with visitors from around the globe.
IDIA Lab was invited to exhibit their virtual and hybrid artworks at the Third Art and Science International Exhibition at the China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing, China.
Displaced Resonance v2 is an interactive installation consisting of sixteen reactive forms that are networked in a grid of light and sound. Interaction within the sculptural field is based on a participant’s presence and proximity to each sculpture. The Displaced Resonance installation is connected to a mirrored instance of the field in a virtual environment – bridging both physical and virtual visitors within a shared hybrid space. Visitors to the virtual space are represented by avatars and through their proximity affect the light and sound of each sculpture. Each participant is aware of the other in each space and uniting both instances within a singular hybrid environment.
A computer system using an thermal camera tracks the movement of visitors and responds by controlling the distribution of sound and dynamic RGB data to the LED lights within the sculptural forms. The installation utilizes custom live processing software to transform these sources through the participants’ interaction – displacing the interaction from both their physical and virtual contexts to the processed framework of physical and virtual resonances. The two environments are linked to send and receive active responses from both sides of the installation via messaging, sensors, hardware and scripting.
In prototyping this work, the process included both physical and virtual models to design and build the form and the interaction. The physical prototypes were interpreted in a virtual simulation environment, investigating the spatial interaction of the structure. The interactive functionality was tested through scripting before the form was brought into the sensored camera-based version. After several virtual iterations, the form was re-interpreted and fabricated.
John Fillwalk
with Michael Pounds, David Rodriguez, Neil Zehr, Chris Harrison, Blake Boucher, Matthew Wolak, and Jesse Allison.
Third Art and Science International Exhibition
China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing
http://www.tasie.org.cn/index.asp
TASIE Press release
http://www.tasie.org.cn/content_e.asp?id=84
Ball State artists create “forest” of light on display in China and Internet
Muncie, Ind. — Ball State University electronic artists have created a “forest” of light and sound that will be on exhibit in Beijing, China through November, yet also accessible to visitors from Indiana or anywhere else in the world.
That’s possible because “Displaced Resonance,” as the interactive art exhibit is known, has both real-life and virtual components.
The physical portion has been installed in a gallery of the China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing. There, in-person visitors can negotiate a thicket of 16 interactive sculptures spaced 1.5 meters apart that will change colors and emit music as they approach.
A digital replica of the layout, meanwhile, resides on the Internet, accessible through the museum’s website. Online visitors can wander the virtual exhibit using an avatar, and the digital pillars will change colors and produce sounds, just like their physical counterparts.
But that’s not all — the two pieces interact with each other, says John Fillwalk, director of Ball State’s Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA) and Hybrid Design Technologies (HDT), which created the work in collaboration with IDIA staff, students and composer Michael Pounds, BSU.
When an online avatar approaches a virtual pillar, the corresponding real-life column also will change colors, and vice versa. In-person and virtual visitors will produce different colors, however, allowing them to track each other through the exhibit.
“It’s what we call hybrid art,” says Fillwalk. “It’s negotiating between the physical world and the virtual. So it’s both sets of realities, and there’s a connection between the two.”
The physical pillars are two meters (or more than 6 feet, 6 inches) tall. They consist of a wooden base containing a sound system; a translucent pillar made of white corrugated plastic and computer-controlled lighting.
A thermal camera mounted on the museum’s ceiling keeps track of visitors and feeds its data to a computer program that directs the columns to change color and broadcast sounds when someone draws near.
“It’s a sensory forest that you can navigate,” Fillwalk says.
A video screen mounted on a wall overlooking the exhibit allows museum visitors to watch avatars move around the virtual version, while Internet patrons can affect the physical counterpart.
“Displaced Resonance” is the centerpiece of Ball State’s contributions to the Beijing museum’s 3rd Art and Science International Exhibition and Symposium, a month-long celebration of technology and the arts. Ball State was invited to participate because museum curators discovered some of IDIA’s work and liked what they saw, Fillwalk said.
In addition to “Displaced Resonance,” IDIA contributed four other pieces of digital art that museum visitors can view at a kiosk.
Those pieces are:
· “Proxy”, in which visitors create, color and sculpt with floating 3D pixels.
· “Flickr Gettr,” in which visitors can surround themselves with photos from the Flickr web service that correspond to search terms they submit.
· “Confluence,” in which users create virtual sculptures by moving around the screen and leaving a path in their wake.
· “Survey for Beijing,” in which real time weather data from Beijing is dynamically visualized in a virtual environment.
(Note to editors: For more information, contact John Fillwalk, director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts, at765-285-1045 or jfillwalk@bsu.edu; or Vic Caleca, media relations manager, at 765-285-5948, or vjcaleca@bsu.edu. For more stories, visit the Ball State University News Center at www.bsu.edu/news).
The Twitter Cloud is a visualization of real time Tweets (messages) posted on Twitter.com. The system automatically scans specified user feeds, and visualizes new messages as they arrive. This piece was programmed in Java using the Processing API.
This project was also linked with the Tweet Station so users could be identified with RFID and allowed to post their own messages through a touchscreen kiosk. In the context below, conference attendees entered their Twitter feeds to be tracked so that others could read about their experiences as they posted from their laptops and phones. The Twitter Cloud visualizer has also been used within virtual worlds – both as a live event Tweet tracker, and to track and visualize avatars as they traveled to various locations within the world.
“Eco-Net” is an attempt to connect wireless network data with nature by visualizing that data with plant-like structures and organic motion. Each plant represents a computer connected to the network and each IP address is displayed above the corresponding plant. Collective network activity is displayed as websites are browsed and emails are sent. This piece represents our constantly connected state, simulated through plant and root structures, and the constant barrage of data that flows through the air all around us every day. This piece was created completely in Java, using the Processing API.
ENGAGING TECHNOLOGY
A HISTORY AND FUTURE OF INTERMEDIA
BALL STATE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
NOVEMBER 17, 2006 THROUGH MARCH 11, 2007
https://idialab.org/engagingtechnology/
Engaging Technology traces a range of both pioneering and contemp-orary works exploring the intersections of electronic media and various modes of art-making. The artists selected for this exhibition – Richard Bloes, Hans Breder, Adam Brown, Dick Higgins, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, Golan Levin, Nam June Paik, and Alan Rath have contributed works encompassing a broad array of forms including video, sculpture, sound, music, electronic installation and interactive environments.
The opening of this exhibition happens to coincide with the coining of the term intermedia forty years ago by the fluxus artist, Dick Higgins. Below, Higgins addresses a societal question central to artists working within technological media.
Higgins asks:
…For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media… Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the intermedia [which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by formal, even abstract means], the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for?
Dick Higgins
Statement on Intermedia
New York
August 3, 1966
Intermedial investigation is generally interdisciplinary and often collaborative in its exploration of center spaces between genres, media and established boundaries. These expanded intermedial approaches can find their center in potentially any discipline including visual art, music, engineering, performing arts, architecture, social theory and the sciences. Although intermedia art is not always necessarily technologically based, the artists represented in this exhibition explore electronic intermedia art in its various manifestations. Intermedia artists are often interested in the relationship between a viewer and a work of art. In encountering that threshold of engagement, the viewer is invited to enter into a partnership in shaping the direction of the work. The engagement and experience of the viewer is therefore essential to the completion of the work’s meaning.
Engaging Technology is supported by the Ball State University Museum of Art, the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts and Animation, the Center for Media Design and Lilly Foundation, Inc. I would like to thank Peter Blume and Tania Said at the BSU Museum of Art for their support in organizing this exhibition and my mentor and friend, Hans Breder for his continued guidance and insight throughout the years.
John Fillwalk, Curator
Director
Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts
Ball State University
