LATEST NEWS:

Brad Hindson and I are incredibly proud to be a part of the Corcoran Gallery's upcoming exhibit Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change. The exhibit will feature a presentation of Studio F-Minus' 400 sqft installation A Dream of Pastures. From the exhibition website:

Best known for his groundbreaking studies of animal and human locomotion, 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge was also an innovative landscape artist and pioneer of documentary subjects. Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, the first retrospective exhibition to examine all aspects of Muybridge’s art, will be on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from April 10 through July 18, 2010.

Born in England in 1830, Muybridge spent much of his career in San Francisco and Philadelphia during a time of rapid industrial and technological growth. In the 1870s, he developed new ways to stop motion with his camera. Muybridge’s legendary sequential photographs of running horses helped spark a technological revolution that changed the way people saw the world. His projected animations inspired the early development of cinema and the enormous impact of his photographs can be measured throughout the course of modern art, from paintings and sculptures by Thomas Eakins, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Bacon, to the 1999 blockbuster film The Matrix and the music video for U2’s hit song Lemon.
Structured in a series of thematic sections, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change includes numerous vintage photographs, albums, stereographs, lantern slides, glass negatives and positives, camera equipment, patent models, Zoopraxiscope discs, proof prints, notes, books, and other ephemera. Over 300 objects created between 1858 and 1893 are brought together for the first time from numerous international collections. Muybridge’s only surviving Zoopraxiscope—an apparatus he designed in 1879 to project motion pictures—will also be on view.

Organized by Corcoran chief curator and head of research Philip Brookman, the exhibition will also travel to Tate Britain in London from September 8, 2010 through January 16, 2011, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 26 through June 7, 2011. A catalogue of the exhibition, with new essays by Brookman, Marta Braun, Andy Grundberg, Corey Keller, and Rebecca Solnit, will be published by Steidl.

Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and made possible through the generous support of American Express and the Trellis Fund. Additional support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and Deane and Paul Shatz. The accompanying catalogue was made possible, in part, by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

MOST RECENT PRESS:

Lia Grainger for The National Post

Ceci Moss for Rhizome at the New Museum

Gareth Branwyn for MAKE Magazine Blog

Ben Spur for BlogTO

"...exemplifies the grandiose ambition of a young artist."

An interactive installation featuring a performance by Ashleigh Semkiw

First exhibited and performed January 22, 2010
at Spoke Club, Toronto.
Part of an exhibition with Tom Ngo running until April 2010

TECHNICAL:

The microphone feeds into a custom software written by the artist in the Processing language. The software performs a pitch and volume analysis on the incoming audio feed, and then uses a set of algorithms to determine which strings should be activated based on the audio input. The software then exports PWM values for all the motors via serial protocol to a set of microcontrollers. The project was originally set up using Arduino microcontrollers, but it was found that for addressing multiple controllers, the protocol was simpler using the new ArtBus controller being developed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The spinning bearing mechanism connecting the string to the brass rod was custom lathed from delrin machining plastic, and the accuracy of these mechanisms is essential to ensuring that the rods spin on axis.

OVERVIEW:

Visions of the Amen is an interactive kinetic sculpture. In the video seen here, the piece is brought to life by soprano Ashleigh Semkiw's performance of Messiaen's Poemes Pour Mi. The primary sculptural elements of the sculpture are the 16 strings, weighed down on one end by brass bars and attached at the other end to motors, that spin at various speeds to sweep out those ghostly sine-wave forms, and pull up and down on the brass rods. The resultant visual effect, overall, looks something like 16 brass rods dancing, bobbing up and down in a forest of ghostly columns. A tenuous, ephemeral architectural space is created, and viewers are encouraged to walk through the rows of columns being animated by Ms. Semkiw's voice.

Each string in the arrangement is activated by a different note, and spins with a velocity dependent on the volume of that note. Thus, each song and unique delivery creates a different ballet. Although the piece was designed with Ms. Semkiw's performanc in mind, for the vast majority of the piece's exhibition lifespan, viewers may stand in the space of the project and activate it themselves, by whistling, stamping their feet, or even trying their hand at the aria of their choice.