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.
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.
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.
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.