Doug Aitken’s Mirror at the Seattle Art Museum

American multimedia and light artist Doug Aitken’s new installation Mirror strives to be a living museum, a dynamic representation of the constantly changing urban core of Seattle. Installed permanently on the north-west corner of the Seattle Art Museum, Mirror was unveiled this past Sunday and has since been received very warmly by the online community. 

Described as a “living kaleidoscope,” the installation responds to changes in weather conditions, pedestrian movement, and lighting conditions. Referring to its reservoir of hundreds of hours of video footage, the installation uses data from its sensors to compose these moving images, choreographing them in unexpected ways. Most interestingly, the installation has been programmed in such a way that the same sequence never occurs twice — it is constantly generating new sequences, all the while doing so in a way that responds to the unique changes in the city’s environmental conditions. The effect is a perpetually moving light show, an incessant video montage that is constantly reinventing itself.

The footage used was shot all around the region of Seattle, including but not limited to neighbouring mountain ranges and the city of Seattle itself. In this sense, Mirror is not merely a reflection of Seattle’s urban core — instead, it is a totalizing representation of the environment surrounding and affecting the very hustle and bustle of the city itself. Its constant visual manifestation of every minute of Seattle life calls into question philosophical notions of space and time, and its juxtaposition of rural and urban imagery provides a valuable reminder of the larger environment of which cities are a part. If Mirror is anything like Aitken’s past installations, it is sure to spark interesting dialogues, and hopefully some that delve deeper than the phrase “very cool,” the general consensus on the Internet thus far.

Although it may be a permanent fixture of the SAM, the installation is experimental at its core, so its very essence is its ability to grow and evolve over time. We will be watching the evolution of Mirror closely. If any of you happen upon this installation in real life, drop us a line — we’d love to hear about it! 

- Gabrielle Doiron

Aram Bartholl’s Google Portrait Series

Aram Bartholl’s hand-copied QR codes are portraits for the digital age. Made from different drawing media like charcoal, ink, and edding, Bartholl has artistically rendered what is now a very familiar form of information storage. Each of these portraits is encrypted with search results for the sitter’s name; the code is in this way a portal to the subject’s digital presence. Of course, these search results are ever-changing as Bartholl’s subjects continue to add to their digital biographies while also competing with others who share their name. These portraits begin to tap into a kind of acute cultural anxiety: that we must maintain a web-based existence to verify our physical one. Bartholl writes:

“Almost everyone can be found by name on Google nowadays. Even people who never used computers can be found because their names appear in scanned books on the internet. Almost everybody has at least once googled himself. ‘Ego-surfing’ is a very popular way to see what people find out about you googling your name. In that way the first 10 entries of a Google search result page represent the modern portrait. Who is this person? In what context does the name appear? What are the top links? Are there other people with same or similar name in the results? The portrait dynamically changes over time depending on the Google algorithms, the language of the search and of course by the activities of the person. Due to the omnipresence of Google people often care very much about their Google portrait and sometimes even hire specialized services to have the result page altered ‘actively’.”

Naturally, Bartholl makes sure to underscore the narcissism inherent in the act of Googling oneself by including a self-portrait in the series.

For more of Bartholl’s work — including his incredible Map work and a recent curatorial project called Offline Art — see his website here.

- Erin Saunders

Mike Thompson’s Growing Pains

In his project Growing Pains: Nurturing the Relationship Between Man & Object designer and researcher Mike Thompson toys with the notion of death, imagining a future wherein our bodies could cultivate an object that would represent us beyond the grave. If this design were possible, Thompson writes that “we would grow death inside of us, forcing us to interact with it on a daily basis whilst nurturing new material in preparation for our decay.”

Over the course of its growth process, we would shape the object under our skin through our physical interaction with it. Effectively, we would be designing our own death. 

After our death, the object would be extracted from our body and passed onto a loved one as a physical and symbolic representation of ourselves. In the images above, we see Thompson’s imagined object: a simulated bone shaped into a pipe by its agent.

Although imagined, Thompson’s project presents us with some challenging questions. If we were preparing for our death rather than attempting to run away from it, how might we live differently? If we could design our own death, what form would it take? How would we want to be remembered?  

For more information about this project and others by Thompson, visit his website.

- Gabrielle Doiron

Light and Art at Winterlude, with Ottawa’s Andrew O’Malley

In his upcoming Winterlude art installation, artist, and engineer Andrew O’Malley will allow festival crowds choose a light, and his installation’s gonna let it shine.

For the installation, O’Malley will crowd together 12 cones of varying sizes – he called it a forest – that will be lit up by colourful LED lights. They’ll range from 6 feet tall, to 15 feet tall, and attendees will be able to scan the cones with their smartphones, and influence their colour.

He has yet to decide exactly what colours will be, but O’Malley said:

“I’m gonna create a pallet of nine colours that people can choose. In doing that, I’m playing with the lights, and I’m looking at how the cones light up. I can have cold, icy colours, ’cause its winter, or I can go with a really warm pallet,” said O’Malley. It’ll depend on the mood he wants to create.

“For the actual interaction, the newest colour selected on the phone will be displayed on the three tallest cones, while the previous colours will be distributed around the remaining cones; and every once in a while, one lucky user will be treated to a surprise,” said O’Malley.

The installation is supposed to show how people, especially a crowd, can influence the world through the powerful computers that we call “smartphones”.

“Because it can be accessed simultaneously by anyone with a smart phone, there will also be group play, and dynamics involved with the piece, as people either fight to control it or work together to try and collaborate on a colour scheme,” he said.

A lot of O’Malley’s work deals with the idea that the the natural variation in the environment can be represented in surprising, and interesting ways through technology. And when you start with something as surprising, and interesting as a crowd, who knows where the technology will take you.

For more of O’Malley’s work, click here. 

- Tomek Sysak

Vincent Fournier

In this series The Man Machine Vincent Fournier documents current robotic technologies from all over the world. In his works, he is interested in how fiction is become reality. As he states,

“My work was fed with the world of childhood, with some sort of buried memory where reality and fiction are becoming confused, even merge somehow, a world in which things don’t even have a name yet. I remember stories which could have existed, stories in which the truth is dangerously flirting with the false, all together serious and absurd, amusing and disquieting, past or future.”

His photographs focus on narrative. We can see this in the robots playing with children or the robots sitting in an office. Immediately we create a story of a robot living a very human life. Yet at the same time the settings and environments show a futuristic world that is also recognizable as our own. As Fournier states, ”What I find extremely appealing is the aesthetic world of science, machines, geometric patterns.” These scenes look futuristic, yet they are now. To see more of his works. click here. 

- Lee Jones