implicit art

The talk yesterday afternoon was informal and cool. It was great to see some Wits Fine Arts undergrads, theatre peops, and a few outsiders, in addition to our usual crew of Digi-Arts grad students and faculty.

I promised I’d put links to some of the works and artists I talked about online, so here we go….

Myron Krueger doesn’t have a web site, but there is a great interview with him here (CTHEORY), some stuff about his early work is here, and his book I showed is called Artificial Reality 2, now in its second edition, and available from amazon (tho I prefer you to order it from loot.co.za – it’ll take longer for them to get, but they are proudly South African!).

Next up, we watched video of Camille Utterback’s beautiful untitled 5 and discussed text rain; these can be found here: camilleutterback.com

Here’s the very smart and savvy David Rokeby, who produced Very Nervous System. We also looked at his Taken and Sorting Daemon – Rokeby’s web site has all that, and then some; highly recommended.

Then there was Scott Snibbe, with his Boundary Functions and You are Here.

We looked at several interactive performance works by Golan Levin and Zach Lieberman (including the opera, Mesa di Voce), all of which have extensive online documentation at flong.com.

We saw the Tangible Media Group’s (led by Hiroshi Ishii) PP+ (Ping Pong plus), which used the sound of a bouncing ping pong ball to triangulate position and project feedback on a play-table in realtime.

We oooohed and aaaaahed at Jonah Brucker-Cohen, but there’s tons more where he comes from, given that his best work is less in the Interactive Video realm, and more based in deconstructing networks….

Finally, we showed Danny Rozin’s wooden mirror, and then looked – on request – at some of my own interactive work.

The two big schools we talked about, that were/are a hotbed of innovation, are ITP (Tom Igoe and Dan O’Sullivan) and MIT’s media lab. The former is more artists playing with science, the latter is more scientists playing with art.

Oh, and our WSOA Digital Artist in Residence, coming this June (a specialist and expert in the most cutting edge Interactive Video development environments), is Josh Goldberg (tho his website does not reflect how brilliant he is).

I think that’s pretty much the nutshell of our discussion. I hope to see more of you involved with WSOA Digital Arts and Art & Technology, Johannesburg!