SA '18- SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 Art Gallery

My submission for the SIGGRAPH 2018 Art Gallery relates directly to the conference theme Crossover, and more specifically, to the sub-theme of Overlap. In the call for submissions, Overlap is described as "A state in which two organisms connect and share common ground on contexts, medium and/or aesthetics." My project draws connections between my body and an inanimate found rock. My project entitled "Being, nothing more" presents the volume of my body (i.e. 5,616.188 cubic inches found using air displacement plethysmography) reimagined as a CNC milled boulder that occupies the same amount of physical space. A small rock, only a few inches across, was 3D scanned then scaled to 5,616.188 cubic inches using Meshmixer. The mesh was then modified, sliced into 1 inch layers, and 2-sided 3D CAM was developed using Fusion 360. I used a Shopbot to mill the parts from polystyrene and reassembled the large volume. The final form was sealed with a thin coat of epoxy and the piece was painted using color-shifting auto paint.

The compact disk (CD) used to be a symbol of the multimedia era, but it has since become the latest out-of-date media. Most people listen to music via the Internet, not physical media. But it is quite sad to forget the media that we once loved. That's why I began to make a Buddha statue. CD Prayer is a portable CD player that prays for the obsolete media. It revives a CD as a halo of Buddha and plays hi-fi music for us. CD Prayer was created by editing the 3D data shared by Yahoo JAPAN under Creative Commons license (CC-BY-3.0). The edited 3D data is also shared at Thingiverse.com, because remix, share, and tribute are an integral part of music culture and Buddhism.

A mountain and a stone:

I sit atop a mountain with a pencil and paper, drawing a mountain peak across the valley. With pen and paper I attempt to understand the temporal relationships between the mountain and the river. The revealing and concealing of rock by vegetation is the exploitation of deposition in defiance of gravity and entropy. A mountain is rarely denuded, it conceals and reveals according to these ongoing geological conversations. The stone in a garden has been removed from one conversation and appropriated into another. Removed from geological processes, it becomes a projection for people unable to talk in geological time. Mundane on its own terms, the stone is appropriated into metaphysics, and contemplated like the life of a star. It is an object for speculation, not for dissection. Data stones:

I offer a composition of stones, conceived in the spirit of the human/mountain, the appropriation of the mundane, and projecting onto random noise. These stones are produced procedurally from the mundane dialogue accumulated by the everyday use of instant messaging. I download every conversation I have had with one person, and sort the messages using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The LDA gives an abstract order to sentiments and conversations that never had any order. It is another type of noise to generate another type of stone for speculation and projection. I visualise this information by making procedurally generated stones, each representing one half of the conversation. The stone is treated like a graph, where the statistical patterns my sentiments determines its shape. The stones are accompanied by a musical composition that reveals fragments of the processed conversation (composed by Tom Smith). I offer these stones for contemplation and speculation as objects of data collection, surveillance and big data processing, as well as objects of random noise.

This string instrument generates its tone through the tailoring of strings along the unique shape of a deer's antlers. Its tone may resound the howling roar of the very lord of nature. The antlers came from a deer who was hunted down by a local hunter and bequeathed to me. In Japan, one often hears of how damaging deer can be, but they are one of god's messengers.

"DIGITAL BEING" is an invisible and formless creature born from detritus of discarded and forgotten technologies after digital switchover. It reveals itself through an atypical movement and an interaction according to the machinery that it dominates.

Eclipse is a 1 minute continuously looped animation in which overlapping moire patterns create a visual and sonic eclipse. The work intentionally changes depending on the format, scale and streaming limitations, and attempts to address the aesthetics of compression and how technology delimits visual and sonic experience.

Eve of Dust is a collaborative performance and installation between a human and a robot. The artwork draws on both the possibilities and anxieties arising from the collaboration between humans and emerging intelligent systems personified in the robot. The artwork uses a Sawyer collaborative robot, an articulated 7-jointed robot arm that somewhat resembles a snake. The robot is able to be used in close proximity to humans, unlike most industrial robots, and will stop before causing physical harm. This enables human partners to physically interact with the robot to co-create a performance of dance and music.

Inspired by the works of the Chinese literary master Qian Zhongshu, HBG: Humans, Beasts and Ghosts is an experimental video game, a playable life simulator in which the player, assuming the role of God, facilitates the everyday being of the different worlds inhabited by humans, beasts and ghosts. The player can choose to act as an interventionist God, creating and destroying whimsically, or simply watching the worlds unfold with minimal or no interference.

Memoirs of the blind is an interactive installation consisting of a screen showing a black-and-white picture of a face with its eyes closed. This image at first remains still, however, when the interactor blinks, the installation detects it and takes a photo at the exact time of the blinking. Once the new face is obtained, it is processed (cropped, turned into b&w, and adjusted) and then it substitutes the displayed face.

Dennis Del Favero's collaborative research program comprises work across the fields of art, humanities, engineering and science, exploring the theorisation of interactive aesthetics and its application in intelligent visualisation systems. Nebula III explores emergent aesthetic of Georg Buchner, the 19th German dramatist and scientist. This aesthetic is characterised by its emergent dialogic spatial aesthetics, namely its approach to space as a two relationship between things where it is not simply a linear connections between entities. It foreshadows the aesthetics of Karen Barad, the contemporary theoretical physicist and philosopher who conceived of the concept of 'intra-action' to conceptualise how all spatial matter never pre-exists, but is always shaped and formed through the interactive relationships between its constitutive elements. Using this intra-active spatial aesthetic as its inspiration, Nebula III presents a 3D particle world that explores this notion of space as constructed through intra-action. Here 3D particles, while displaying elementary clustering spatial behaviour, are simultaneously single-minded and resistant to control. The user, by controlling an onscreen ball of light through the use of a tablet, can learn to assemble the particles. Gradually, depending on the user's ability to control the particles, the particles are attracted to the light, like moths to a bulb. On successfully assembling all the particles, a particle sphere emerges from the clustered particles, then dissolves into one of a series of different spatial worlds, depending on how the user interacted with the particles --- a rotating planet, a mountainscape, falling snow and a storm.

To understand the effects of the nuclear accident, long-term and wide-range monitoring of the effects of nuclear radiation on animals is required in Fukushima. For monitoring such species, counting the recorded calls of animals is considered an effective method to investigate the wildlife. The sounds of singing birds, buzzing insects, swaying leaves, and trickling water in a beautiful forest implicitly imprints the diversity of organism in the forest. However, it is difficult to use information devices in the exclusion zone as these areas do not have infrastructure services and necessary to develop a monitoring system capable of operating over multiple years in unmanned conditions. The project distributes the soundscape in the zone to the public via the Internet. A microphone has been placed at the entrance to a forest in the exclusion zone (37° 28′ 04.3″ N, 140° 55′ 27.5″ E), 10 km away from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. This allows us to hear the soundscape from this location in real time. This project started with a year of literature search (2011), fundraising with government approval (2012-2014), and the installation of a transmitter station with satellite Internet (2015). Finally, based on official preparations and approvals, a local electric company agreed to sign a service contract with us in an intensive feasibility survey of the all transmission facilities of the location. The final construction was completed by the end of March in 2016. This project aims to watch over the lives that will come to an end in the near future and the new lives that appearing after humans left this place on 11.3.2011. Prior to this project, we had experience in operating a similar system for more than 10 years. Therefore, it is possible to operate this project until the reactor decommissioning work has been completed until approximately 2030.

On February 28, 2016, Donald Trump gave his first address to Congress. He sent a clear message that enlightens his Presidential philosophy: "Each American generation passes the torch of truth, liberty and justice --- in an unbroken chain all the way down to the present. That torch is now in our hands. And we will use it to light up the world." "That Torch is Now in Our Hands" is an interactive installation made of 2 parts: - A model of the Statue of Liberty holding the torch. This torch is the main light of the space, up to 5 public address speakers surround the statue (the number commensurate to the exhibition space size). The loudspeakers diffuse the excerpts of the U.S. President talk. The statue light reacts to the sound: the light intensity is stronger when nobody is speaking, and it becomes lower when Trump's voice is heard. The higher the voice, the lower the light. The statue is like a bird, covered with feathers. We understand quickly that the feathers are just glued with tar. In an extended version, we can imagine 5 fans making feathers flying like a tornado around the statue, full Trump's address: https://youtu.be/3ZxsuGEL6yE (after 7')

Blinkand "Polyptelic" are software generated animations that consist of a matrix of cells that transition between 2 states, taking stock of their neighbors' actions. The process goes back and forth between states of stability where all cells try to be like their neighbors, and states of transition where the cells know their neighbors' state but cant decide if they should be like them or not. A certain degree of deviance is programmed so that some of the cells resist or differ from the general status quo of the collection. The status of the overall image is dynamically determined computationally in realtime and therefore guarantees a continuous stream of behavior based on the interaction of the cells.

Combining video in a CRT TV with physical movement to represent a state of human existence. Unlike Brâncuşi's Sleeping Muse which aims to create the most ideal form, the imperfect form of human body placing in an artificial container reveals the condition of our contemporary existence.