Teknopolis: Art Installations That Tease the Senses
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Version 0 of 1. Matt Parker, a new-media artist in New York, likes to watch people as they first encounter his installation “Lumarca.” Children, drawn to its candy colors, want to reach out and grab it. Adults, on the other hand, try to make sense of what they’re seeing — to figure out how its slender, vertical strands of light, glowing in the darkness, are seemingly suspended in air. Are fiber optics involved? Nope. That would be impossible, Mr. Parker said. LEDs? No again. Possible, he said, but expensive. “Almost no one understands what’s happening,” he said one afternoon this month at BAM Fisher, where “Lumarca” will tease onlookers as part of Teknopolis, a three-weekend participatory arts-tech event that the Brooklyn Academy of Music is billing as a digital playground. Opening on Saturday, the exhibition is meant to intrigue the minds and engage the senses of both grown-ups and children ( 6 and older only.) Through March 12, interactive installations and immersive technology will sprawl across three floors of BAM Fisher, including a studio dedicated to virtual reality with activities (like trying out Google Tilt Brush, the 3-D painting tool) and short films. Recently, some artists exhibiting in Teknopolis spoke about their work. Claire Bardainne, an artistic director of the French digital and live-art company Adrien M & Claire B, calls the company’s suite of installations “imaginary territory.” Titled “XYZT: Abstract Landscapes,” it features 10 interactive environments that will form the centerpiece of Teknopolis. The company, last seen at the academy two years ago with “Hakanaï,” a dance piece performed in a digital cube, will invite visitors to touch, walk on, dance with and sometimes just stand back and ponder its works arrayed in the Fishman Space. “We don’t want to do images that remain inside a screen,” Ms. Bardainne said from France. “We want to turn images into environment. We want to turn them into living partners to play with, relating and reacting in a sensitive way to the body. That’s why we always try to do immersive and interactive artwork — so you forget that you are in front of images.” The new-media artist Balam Soto, based in Connecticut, has a few artworks with titles that start with “Exp.Inst.” The first bit is an abbreviation for “experimental,” the second for “instrument.” But what is rain doing in the title of this one, “Exp.Inst.Rain”? “When I finished it, it was a rainy night,” Mr. Soto said cheerfully from Hartford. Made from Plexiglas, sensors, wood and other materials, “Exp.Inst.Rain” responds to touch with sound and colored light. A lover of electronic music, Mr. Soto wanted to create an instrument that would allow people to play it easily, whether or not they had any musical expertise. Technology, like visual art, used to be a more passive experience for the public, he said. Now that it is so hands-on, he added, “we have to make changes in the way the patrons can interact with the artwork.” For the Canadian multimedia artists Irene Angelopoulos and Christopher Felske, creating the “Pop n’ Lock Dance Machine” was partly wish fulfillment. “Both my partner and I, dancing is not really our strong suit,” Ms. Angelopoulos said from Toronto, where they collaborate under the name Catshrine. “But we’re really good at animating, so we thought, hey, let’s use those skills and make a machine that makes us look like really good dancers.” The process, she said, is less like dancing than like doing “dance yoga”: A participant strikes a series of dance poses. The machine takes pictures of those poses, then stitches them together in under five minutes to make an animated dance loop featuring the person’s silhouette. “They have become dancers in stop motion,” she said. Though there is an interactive element to “Lumarca,” trying to grab it would be a terrible idea. It is not made of light suspended in air, but rather light projected on hundreds of precisely arranged strings, which in this case will be suspended at balcony level in the Fishman Space. Sometimes people feel cheated, Mr. Parker said, when they find out that the piece’s technology is as simple as that: “All you need is math and projection and string, and all of those things have been available for quite some time now.” To him, though, that is part of the appeal: that you don’t need a virtual-reality headset to look at the work and experience wonder. “What I like about this project is that you don’t have that filter in front of you,” said Mr. Parker, who made “Lumarca” with Josh Holtsford. “You’re using your actual eyes. You know what you’re seeing is real. But it doesn’t make sense.” And, as an artist, he relishes that. |