Gold!
The University of Michigan Museum of Art’s Dialogtable won the GOLD for the 2010 Muse Awards for Interactive Kiosks. Wes built the table and Marek worked with the museum to create the interface.
Printing Objects
In the fall of 2009 Lehigh University purchased a Z-Corp 650 rapid prototyping machine. This machine is capable of incredible detail at an impressive speed and is extremely versatile in what it can produce in finished product.
The technology is impressive and surprising. The machine functions very much like an ink jet printer with a print head zipping back and forth over a 10” x 15” area. Parts are made from gypsum powder (the same stuff in sheetrock walls) and held together with an adhesive binder. The printed parts are infiltrated with instant glue, making them durable. Unlike other prototyping technologies this machine prints in full color and produces a strong and potentially functional object.
We use this technology to create scale models for our proposals. This saves time and money by accurately developing a form consistent between the design in the computer and the final execution. The lower cost of this printing system allows us to print molds for parts and at times print the actual components. With this process, making 50 unique objects costs 50 times the cost of making one. That doesn’t seem like a great deal however in comparison to casting, where the majority of the expense is in making the mold, 50 unique molds would be astronomically expensive. This gives us the flexibility to make unique parts far more inexpensively than traditional methods.
Public Art Finalists: City of Denver 14th Street Corridor
Along with 4 other artist, Walczak & Heiss were selected as finalists for a public art commission by the City of Denver. In the next few months we will be generating a proposal for presentation in mid-July.
Creating Dialog
The DialogTable at the University of Michigan Museum of Art exempifies a complex dialog between the audience and our work.
Working with the museum’s staff we developed a range of interactions between the table and the art in the museum, between the audience and the table, and between the museum and the University’s knowledge base.
On the table people can select any of the artworks on view in the museum. If two people choose two different artworks, the table attempts to show relationships between those. This is done primarily through tags in the database.
The tags that control the relationship of works are a combination of tags entered by the staff, and increasing over time, by the students entering tags themselves. This creates an accessible language through which to understand the museum’s collection.
Many of the art pieces have short movies made about them. These movies involve the knowledge base of the University itself, whether its a dancer talking about the relationship between a work of art and their performance, or a geologist describing the stone used to carve a certain Indian statue.
[here][now] is an installation piece that takes workshops with a specific group of individuals as it’s starting point. We ask the group to draw their subjective experience of a place. Working together, we find shared threads between the various, seemingly disparate, perceptions until we find common elements that provide a set of identities for the piece.
Finally, the common elements are translated into a set of generative algorithms to create 3D forms that populate a shared reality. In this way, we combine both the real and the virtual into an installation to be viewed by the group and others.
A new version, called VirtualUrban, will be workshopped as part of Interactivos?’10 this June. Organized by MediaLab Prado in Madrid, this version’s installation is a mobile apparatus placed in the streets of Madrid itself.
ThoughtBalloons is a new commission by Walczak & Heiss for Central Park Recreation Center in Stapleton, Colorado. As people sit on a bench surrounded by a black enclosure, ‘thought balloons’ magically appear behind them. As two people sit, a dialog starts up between them.
In a new town like Stapleton, ThoughtBalloons acts as a catalyst to bring people together. Not only by starting conversations in front of the piece, but also by creating a working group that contributes language to the piece itself.
The thoughts are kept fresh in a number of ways – a repartee that introduces events, new thoughts of the contributing working group, and by programmatically playing with grammer and semantics to subtly change the meanings of the ThoughtBalloon dialogs.