Artworks

We can sense and interpret a continued smooth flow of audio-visual information through a large-scale video projection and stereo sound system. This flow is a digital abstraction and re-configuration coded in a modular software program.

The artwork explores ideas about emotional archives and questions about the “digital alchemy” that happens when turning indifferent numbers and meaningful memories into reconfigured digital experiences.

Dark Room digital program: turning visual data into sound

A digital generative program produced Dark Room as an audiovisual experience. The scripted variables in the program are essential to the digital artwork as they shape the visualization and musicalization output. The program is using data as digital material and takes an archive of digital videos as a data source. An algorithm in the program uses the color values of the digital image to generate new digital material that is displayed as new color mapping and generates and plays the piece’s soundtrack. The audiovisual sensory experience as a vibrational flow of color and sound of Dark Room alludes to the realm of imagination as a powerful sensation in shaping an immersive projection.

During the creation of the computer algorithm for Dark Room, I collaborated with Dave Sanchez, a musician and an expert programmer in Max/MSP/Jitter.

Dark Room digital archives: guided visits series

The digital archives used in this piece are video recordings of activities created based on memories with others. These videos were recorded during a participatory/performative artwork connected to my previous work about visiting places. The videos record visits to various locations in Portugal, New York, and Argentina. The project participants chose these seemingly ordinary sites because they are unique and extraordinary places where the participants lived something meaningful. As we visited the location guided by the participant, the notion of time was spilled open. With the simple gesture of the visit, we uncovered the meaning of a particular site, a sign that perhaps because that meaning might be most valuable in a person’s placemaking experience. In the context of this project, we took the role of a type of urban archeologist-sociologist using tools like dialogue and memory storytelling. We discovered and made appear a place unfolding in the mix of time, personal relationships, and space over the wholly changed environment. We were activating a constellation of human-made indicators, signs, and meaning stored within and resonant between the depths of ourselves.

Generative video and sound. Large scale projection.

Projected animations (no audio)
En Lugar is a looped animated digital collage with text, extracts from transcripts of conversations from the Guided Visits series.

Primary backgrounds, polarization, explores the image as a surface in relation to vision, feeling, and intuition. The delicate shifting relation of meaning production, front and back, subjects of unconscious processes, unit, and unity, structure and gap. This video belongs to a series of photographs and graphics exploring these ideas in digital and print format.

C-print on photographic paper triptych, 17 x 22 ins. / 44 x 56 cm each, 56 x 26 ins / 1.42 x 66 cm framed

Guided Visits, abstract range composition, is a tryptic graphic of a sort of map and pattern combining digital photographs and color fields. The images are rendering a diagram of relations by associations between personal relationships, visiting places, and clothing. I requested a change of clothing to my personal relationships, friends, and family, in the two countries I call “home” in Argentina and United States. I traveled back and forth from New York to Argentina and visited a place dedicated to each person dressed in the person's clothing. Once at the location I took a picture, a self-portrait, of me there. The photographs document a layer of significance within the woven net of associations pertinent to this perimeter of the image and following the variables of a "game" in the piece’s program or diagram. Abstracting and documenting a gesture that takes all these linkages in the form of an artifact, a frontal portrait, in a personal perspective.

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

color print, 1.42 x 66 cm