Empathy Box and Empathy Amulet
Sophia Brueckner / USA
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
www.sophiabrueckner.com
«An empathy box is the most personal possession you have. It's an extension of your body; it's the way you touch other humans, it's the way you stop being alone» «I had hold of the handles of the box today and it overcomes my depression a little—just a little…I felt everyone else, all over the world, all who had fused at the same time»
–Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
In Dick's novel, thousands of anonymous people connect haptically and emotionally through their empathy boxes in a fragmented and isolated world. Inspired by the story, the Empathy Box and Empathy Amulet are two networked devices that connect many anonymous people through shared warmth.
Both devices use physical warmth to cultivate empathy and a novel sense of connection with anonymous others. The devices encourage their users to make a deliberate and generous choice to invest their time and energy in connection with strangers, and they incorporate reciprocity into their design, such that helping oneself means helping other people. The Empathy Box explores synchronous connection, while the Empathy Amulet uses asynchronous connection allowing the user to experience the shared warmth either consciously or unconsciously.
- Date
- May 24, 2017
Googled Sculptures Series 2017
Sam Blanchard / USA
Virginia Tech
www.sambranchard.com/googledsculpture
The Googled Sculpture series explores this crowdsourced concept of object presence, examining the three most sought after sculptures in Western art history. Using only selected tourist photos from Google image search results for "Venus de Milo," "Michelangelo David," and "Thinker Rodin," the flawed and incomplete similarities are stitched together in photogrammetry software, rendered, and printed on 3D. The resulting jagged figure is a physical manifestation of the web presence. Areas of high and low resolution speak to the focal points and perspectives often captured by visitors to icons of Western sculpture.
- Date
- May 24, 2017
The Digital Skin Series
Emilio Vavarella / Italy
harvard university
www.emiliovavarella.com
The Digital Skin Series is composed of self-portraits in which I pose “under the digital skin” of strangers I've crossed paths with in the past. To create this series, I first used a 3D scanner to obtain an accurate three-dimensional model of my face. Then I used a camera-prototype to acquire HD portraits of strangers. Finally, I applied their portraits to my digital skull as if they were simply an additional layer. The result is a series of photographs where bidimensionality and threedimensionality collide in an intimate and unpredictable way. In the past, myths about skin were common across cultures and related to radical biological metamorphoses.
- Date
- May 24, 2017
wayfinding
Raphael Arar / USA
IBM Research
rarar.com
In his seminal work The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch coined the term “wayfinding”, which describes the process of using spatial and environmental information to orient oneself and navigate to a destination. Lynch elaborated to define four unique stages in this process: orientation, route decision, route monitoring and destination recognition. Throughout history, many approaches have been used to accomplish the four stages of wayfinding, and one of the most powerful devices and symbols has been the compass.
- Date
- May 24, 2017
PrayStation
Phillippe Pasquier and Justin Love / Canada
Simon Fraser UniversityThe PrayStation invites you to pray or meditate. Equipped by a medical grade brainwave interface, you get to choose a belief system for which you wish to pray or meditate. A population of agents will appear on the screen that paint some iconic images related to the belief. The size and dynamism of the population varies with the quality of your prayer.
- Date
- May 24, 2017
hypergradient
Andreas Lutz / Germany
Kasuga
www.andreaslutz.com
Inspired by the theory of Hermeneutics, Hypergradient analyzes the different interpretations of an impartial consistent statement. The installation repeatedly changes between two states: the "statement" state and the "interpretation" state. The statement state displays a sequence of characters of a distinct semiotic system, which can be described as a deputy for all known semiotic systems. These abstract propositions don't follow human dwelled principles, they possess inherent logic. In this state, the space containing the installation and the installation itself is lit up with fixed light sources.
- Date
- May 24, 2017
Where have you been?
Lasse Scherffig / USA
Where have you been? is an installation investigating the personal data leaked by networked mobile phones. It consists of a projection displaying seemingly random scenes from Google StreetView. These scenes, however, depict places members of the audience have visited in the past: a frequently used airport, a favorite café, or the own front yard. This information is harvested from the mobile devices entering the exhibition space, which search for available WiFis and by that reveal the networks they were connected to before. Where have you been? tries to link these networks to geographic origins, using WiFi location data collected by a wardriving community.
- Date
- May 24, 2017
Turbidity Paintings
Sara Gevurtz and Thomas Asmuth / USA
Virginia Commonwealth Universitysaragevurtz.com
"Turbidity Paintings" explores and challenges the divide between the arts and sciences, and directly questions the role of the artist when it comes to science and scientific data. Iterative process and procedure are almost indistinguishable in art and science. The role of the artist and art in this project is to create an experimental model that leads to new dialogues about water quality.
- Date
- May 24, 2017
Surófona - Latin American Online Radio of Electronic Arts
Bernardo Piñero, Claudia González, Gerardo Della Vecchia, Raúl Minsburg, Daniel Cruz and Hamilton Mestizo / Argentina-Chile
National University of Tres de Febrero - University of Chilesurofona.org/isea2017/ www.surofona.org www.facebook.com/surofona
The main contents are: talks with artists, sound art, electroacoustic music, improvisations, sound poetry, reviews of works, telematic concerts, soundscapes, field recordings, sound cartographies and Latin American geolects. The collective develops installations, objects, urban interventions, performance actions and workshops, which expand the discursive and aesthetic processes of emissions.
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