The UC State of the Arts just posted a video of our still building installation from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts’ “Future Tense” conference last fall:

I’ll be hanging out on the street showing sound reactive software which gathers ambient street noise (footsteps, traffic, conversations, etc) and renders them as 3D particle systems in real time. For more info, see the GAFFTA website.

I’ve been playing with sound reactive 3-D particle systems in Processing using OpenGL. Above is one of sketches I’ve been working on (which has way too much information for online video compression formats, hence the fuzziness). Different colored particles react to different frequency bands (audio track not included here) and orbit at different radii around the center.

Kyle and I are bringing building to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo Event Center on May 21st and 22nd. We will be part of a project called “SpaceCamp” which will focus on hacking/making and creating community spaces. The space will include a bunch of groups from around the country doing exciting projects along those lines. Our project is called building: a how to which will include a lot of our previous software projects, hands-on workshops on how we made them, and, of course, some surprises.

My friend Brian just started a project called Occupation-Preoccupation, which looks great:

“The United States has over 700 military bases on foreign soil in sovereign countries, where we have no declaration of war. This project seeks to gather covers by American musicians of songs that are associated by origin with each of these places.”

This spring, I’m going to try to remember how to play music and put something together for this.

Then this summer, in addition to riding my bicycle all over the place, I’ll be teaching a class called “Hacking for Artists” at UC Santa Cruz. We’ll be making digital media art projects by hacking code together from various places. It will be something of a crash course in programming for artists who want to do crazy things with computers but who don’t want to study computer science.

video installation
collaboration with Ted Passon
Instructions: Come inside. Kneel. Light a candle. Say a Prayer. Place your lit candle in the prayer cupboard.
Matinee, St. Cecilia’s Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, February 5-6, 2011

Reviewed on artnet.com

More video and photo documentation coming soon.

The Fun-a-Day in the Bay show opened on Friday night at Rock Paper Scissors (Oakland) and will be up for the whole month of February. There was a great crowd, music by Jonathan Mann (who has been writing a song-a-day for over two years!) and the Rock Cookie Bottoms, a bunch of Art Murmur fun, and whole lot of art. One of my painting was stolen a little over an hour into the show after an earlier botched attempt.

My work, from artjokes.tumblr.com

For more Fun-a-Day photos, check out my flickr stream.

Some videos from the performance I worked on for the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland have found their way to the internet:

There are a couple more excerpts on youtube.

Ted and I made some art for a show in an old convent in Brooklyn now known as St. Cecilia’s Gallery. It involved lighting prayer candles and watching videos of celebrities, before they were famous, talking about how they wanted to be famous. I’ll post photos soon.

flyer by kara

My Fun-a-Day project is online and will be updated every day! Check it out:

art jokes

participatory installation and custom software
State of the Arts Conference, UC Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA)
November 19th-21st, 2010

“still building: mapping possibilities of student movements”

The building collective, based in Santa Cruz, CA, aims to transform the physical spaces that we occupy by playing games, engaging in conversations, going on walks, and drinking coffee. Our installation for the UCIRA State of the Arts Conference invites attendees to contribute to a collective map of UC campuses that focuses on the historicity, recent events and future possibilities of respective student movements.

Here are some photos from our installation: