Stapleton’s Central Park Recreation Center

Walczak & Heiss are delighted to be selected for the Central Park Recreation Center in Stapleton, Colorado. Two new interactive public artworks ‘thought balloons’ and ‘field’ will open to the public in January 2011.

Rethinking everyday things

We take many things for granted in order to move through the world quickly. From what things weigh to how things work, we are creatures of assumption and habit. Although necessary at times, taking things for granted has its drawbacks and can lead to a rather boring outlook on the world. Marek and I get bored easily.

Back in the early 2000’s I developed a research project called ‘transvision’ that explores assumptions and relationships with consumer products. The television is a good example of an under considered product and through the project I developed over 20 conceptually driven, fully functional, prototypes. These transvisions challenge, subvert, and interrogate the normal function of a TV.

For example, ‘lazy’ is a TV that remains on only as long as you are physically active in front of it. To keep it going requires the opposite activity a typical couch potato. ‘Oscillator’ on the other hand grafts a LCD TV onto a vintage fan which visually and functionally merges the two devices together. As the TV moves from side to side the channel automatically switches, persistently teasing with only seconds of a desired program.

Continuing with this theme Marek and I work with objects, systems, materials and technologies that are easily overlooked. In exploring their unique potentials we want to play with assumptions and develop ideas that make ordinary things exciting and new.

Shadow & Light, Walczak & Heiss

Marek Walczak and Wes Heiss will both be participating in Shadow & Light, an upcoming exhibition in Lovestad, Sweden curated by Marek Walczak. 29 artists from the US, Sweden, Denmark and England will take part, with performances and workshops throughout the summer.

Collaborations

Art is a collaboration between the viewer and the artist. But there are many types of collaborations. We have collaborated with clients, with designers, architects, programmers and engineers, with the public and with the weather. Some pieces are to be viewed, others require the spectator to participate and complete the work.

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Interaction between a museum’s collection and the public

The UMMA Dialogtable is a dynamic interactive storytelling and social learning tool at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. We worked closely with the museum staff to find ways to link the museum’s collection with other works in the museum and with the public. Typically, curators have a particular expertize, our intention here was to try to penetrate that by showing relationships between very different types of art. With the large body of students and faculty in Ann Arbor, we could draw on this expertise to create different readings of the artwork, so creating a series of narratives that weave the museum’s collection with the visitor’s experience.

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Art created with the participant

Apartment was an early interactive work shown in a number of museums and galleries in the US and Europe. It’s unique in that it relies on the visitor to type sentences. These texts then create plans of apartments. The piece acts like a type of poetry, it analyses both the grammar and syntax of people’s sentences and constructs dynamic word-collages based on its interpretations.

Although we tested and tried the piece in various settings and numerous trials, the outcome of the piece is not predictable, and it many cases we found totally new uses and meanings created by the participants.

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Interactions with public collections

Noplace uses the Internet to locate photo and audio streams of opposing utopias and plays these side-by-side. The text descriptions of the content is used to synchronize divergent paradises into  a narrative flow.

The piece relies on people at Flickr.com to tag their photos. Flickr is a social website to upload photos, and people ‘tag’ their images with words to describe them. We use these words to control the animation of the piece so that there is a thematic relationship between various projection screens. So if all the screens are showing the tag ‘snow’ then the next most popular shared word between the screens may be ‘white’, etc.

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Interaction with the weather

The Shimmer Wall is located in the link between the two buildings of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. A place of contemplation, the wall projects the subtle shimmering light as the sun plays with the Hudson River.

A camera constantly tracks the movement of the sun and its projection in the river just outside the museum. The software then analyses the image looking for ‘shimmer’, that is, areas of spotty contrast. In the evening the camera switches to the shimmer created from buildings along the riverfront lit by artificial light. The piece doesn’t interact with people but with the vissitudes of  the light outside.

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Workshops to create situated forms

[here][now] is a continuing project that explores the perception and phenomena of space and the ‘unseen’, how physical infrastructure, social and network culture interplay within a local community.

The project begins by going into a particular community and asking people to draw or describe the spaces that they inhabit. Organizing them into groups, we ask them to abstract the various qualities of different subjective experiences, establishing ‘elements’ that they all share. Finally, we use these ‘elements’ to create installations that others can enter and experience.

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By nature, the collaborative process has been instrumental to create situated works that are rooted in a particular society or culture. The various types of interaction, with people, groups or phenomena are bridges to create a liminal artwork that stays fresh and particular to its context.

Public Art Finalists: Stapleton, Colorado

Marek Walczak and Wes Heiss are delighted to be one of 4 artists selected as finalists for the Stapleton Central Park Recreation Center public art commission. We will be presenting two proposals on April 6th 2010.