Generative Art

Outside Event: Kal Spelletich

I went to UC berkeley's Art and Technology series which featured robot builder, Kal Spelletich. Kal's work involves hydralic robots and sculptures that he encourages audience members to experiment with. Combined with fire, these sculptures border on dangerous. His work explores the space of robot human interaction in a very performance based way. Other themes include playing with fear and interaction. Kal's work is also very influenced by the punk scene, the above piece for example takes on the issue of drinking in the scene. His work was pretty inspiring to see, as i am very interested in build similar robots. Its really nice to see someone else exploring robots in an artistic way.

Outside Event: Houdini: Art and Magic

I recently went to the Jewish contemporary museum to see the Houdini exhibit. I've always had a bit of a facination with magic and therefore knew of Houdini, but this exhibit gave me a full picture of the kind of person he was. Houdini was not just a magician, he was an artist. His canvas was his body and the situations he would get his body into. The true art form was the way he got out of them. The idea of body as art is not unfamiliar, artists all the time use themselves in their art to express feelings of internal conflict, etc. Houdini's work is extremely valuable to the idea of the body as art, and the theatrics their-in. I admired his use of essentially wiggling to a fine craft.

Outside Event: Marc Horowitz

I went to a talk at UC Berkeley for their Art and Technology series. The featured artist was Mark Horowitz, a new media artist working mostly in video. Below is an example of his antics.


Marc works alot with the internet and how the internet and new media is changing our relations. Most of his project interact with the idea of how to connect with people over these networks. One project, called Talk Show 24/7 used streaming media and chat rooms to have a 24/7 talk show for 3 months. Marc was basicly on call for the duration of this time, constantly being asked to perform.
Another project dealing with a similar concept a website called "The Advice Of Strangers" dealt with for a whole month, Marc would ask an online community a question of what he should do. Below is the result of one day's adventure.


Lastly another project that was intriguing was the "Signature Series" where Marc wrote his name on a map of the united states:

and traveled along his name, doing nice things for cities along the way.

I liked this talk not only for the silliness, but the way Marc takes on the idea of making situations. It seems he is going in an almost dadaist method of interacting with others, the ultimate goal being to excite a reaction out of the process, either through allowing others to control his life, or breaking regular people out of their comfort zones.

Monument Idea

My idea is to do a monument for the Pacific Garbage Patch. Below is a quick sketch of my idea, that would feature seagulls, garbage, plastic bags and plastic bottles, all larger than life.

Cross border collab project

Myself and my partner joe decided to do something related to the occupy movements in SF and Vancouver and connect them in a way that was accessible. We decided to show these two projects by displaying the signage of the movements and putting them up in the areas where the occupations were. We managed ourselves mostly through skype, but the idea was a little rushed, due to the time constraints. There was clearly a disagreement in goals, as our collaborators wanted to make them more "arty" and take away the message. We of course thought this was a bit silly, and wanted to display the political nature of this protest. It was interesting to work remotely, but it was frustrating to work out details and i would have spent more time on that for sure. I think what would have helped is a mash-up of the groups based on interest rather than randomness. Overall i got a good project out of it and it wasn't too daunting.