SWAP

On October 22, 2009, an installation event called SWAP, by the New Genre Arts 280 class at Whitman College, opened its doors to the local community. Superficially, SWAP was not much more than a simple clothing exchange that took place inside the Fouts Art Gallery on campus, but the event also provided the strange experience of an exchange, inside a clean white walled art gallery. The flexible space of the gallery was designed to mimic a retail store--specifically one targeting those aesthetically conscious and style-savvy customers--complete with dressing rooms, clothing racks, mirrors, couches, stylish furniture, a gargantuan SWAP logo painted on the wall, an LCD flat screen television, hip background music, and high and low end art. These elements helped transform the space into everything one might expect to encounter inside a hip commercial boutique. In the midst of all the ambience and décor were used and unwanted clothes, all of which had either been picked up for free at the end of garage sales, or purchased at the Goodwill clothing bins in Portland, Oregon, for pennies on the dollar.

Ad A Friend

The exhibit “ad a friend” is a playful way to make make known the fact (see copied terms of use below) that facebook actually owns and can use - for most any purpose- an individual’s pictures once they' re uploaded to the site.

In compiling the images for “ad a friend,” the Art 280 class took on the hypothetical role of a Facebook advertiser, sifting through thousands of images of Facebook friends to find those that could be used for effective product endorsement. Much of the work had already been done for us, for the posted images of oneself and one’s friends in many ways already resemble advertisements, revealing a widespread effort of users to presents themselves in an appealing light. By adding recognizable corporate logos and invented taglines, we merely highlighted the pre-existing “ad-like” aspect of these pictures.

To invite viewers to the exhibition, we printed our pictures of our Facebook friends and sent them directly to the depicted person via campus mail. By creating physical copies of images meant solely for the Internet, we brought into the world tangible evidence of these online identities and challenged the assumption that digital information is ephemeral.

Lastly, it's worth noting how the pixilated quality of these large print ads (which are blown up to sizes that aren’t supported by their online resolution) serve as a poignant reminder of the pictures’ non-commercial origins. The visibly low resolution stands in tension with the promotional look of the image, charging it as the only thing which keeps the images from being read as actual ads.

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1000 Crickets, Do Not Open

1000 Crickets, Do Not Open was s a two channel live video feed installation in which wireless security cameras, monitors, mechanical insects and 1000 live crickets were placed inside two clear vitrines for viewing. A viewer at one end saw what the security camera was trained on just around the corner, and vice versa. The contrasts here, between real physical space, and a representation thereof, highlight a tension between nearness and distance, biological life and technology, freedom and confinement. Our idea is to create a sense of ambiguity, or slippage, between virtual and real space here. When we look down at the screen and see the image of a bug both in the video feed as well as on top (literally) of the screen’s surface, we're reminded of the thinning barriers between types of space in our modern technological culture. Alternatively, when we see the artificial backdrop of a manicured palatial garden presented in close combination with live plants, or realize ourselves in a box not so dissimilar from the one holding the crickets (being viewed themselves by other viewers), it forces us to question what kinds of new spaces are opening up with the advent of technology.

Machine Being Machine

The large drawings in this room were created by a LEGO Mindstorms robot. The robot was programmed to turn left randomly when sensing changes from dark to light on the paper. By attaching pens or brushes with pivotal arms, we were able to engineer a certain amount of "play" in the robots marks, resulting in works which are a combination of machine-like repetition, fragile pen lines, and paint strokes either dragged by brush or made when the robots' wheels ran through wet paint. In some of the painted works, we set out lightweight cups for the robot to knock over and spread on its course. The resulting images are a striking balance between two critical tensions: randomness and repetition, order and chaos. The two videos mounted on the wall show the robot making a drawing from two views: one from a distance as we might view it from our eye, and one from the robot's eye view made with a wireless security camera.

You May Walk Through the Breezeway

From October 22 - November 4, 2007, a high-traffic corridor connecting the arts and humanities at Whitman College was transformed into a hypo-/hyper-sensory interactive environment. Thirty percent of the hall was papered with heavy black stock, emptying it of light. The remaining seventy percent of the breezeway interior was enveloped in bright, handmade wallpaper, aerated with the scent of cotton-candy, and adorned with dynamic light objects, such as a whirling disco ball and a plate of lightning that pulsed colorful bolts in response to sounds in the room. A bubble-maker and rotating fan added extra texture and kinesis. On one wall, flat screen covered in red fur looped Interstella 5555, a set of Japanese Anime videos set to music by the popular French Music group, Daft Punk. Hairspray bottles were set on lamé-draped tables for creative use by visitors, while cans of grapette soda and fruit punch were stacked for the taking. Finally, balloons and balls, jacks and playing cards, and an array of vibrant novelty toys were strewn throughout to multiply elements of color, texture, form and play.

Facebooking

In this performance, students from my new genre arts class set up an 8' x 8' projection screen on the side of Penrose Library on the campus of Whitman College, where they projected a live voyeuristic websurf across parts of the popular social networking site, Facebook. Only their real-time voices could be herd over a PA system, as they were hiding around the corner in some bushes on a laptop computer using wireless. They commented casually and humorously on the pages as though they were in their dorm rooms at personal computers, except that anyone could see what they were looking at and talking about. We referred to the activity as a public Facebook sports-cast.

Rubix

For RUBIX, we animated two synchronized sides of a Rubik's cube using Bryce 3-d animation software. The two animations were then projected onto two 8' x 8' square white panels that were inlaid at 90 degrees into an exterior wall corner of Olin Hall. 4 differing sets of sound effects (coordinated precisely to the movements of the cube)were attached to the animations and played in rotation as the illusion of the giant turning cube appeared to solve and unsolve itself.