The Volumetric Society will be presenting two pioneering artists, Hanna Haaslahti - presenting "Captured", & Kathleen McDermott, presenting "Absurdist Electronics: The Disruptive Power of Slapstick in Wearable Tech & Consumer Robotic Design"
Captured
How do we step into representations? Captured is an ongoing research project about inhabiting the image, extending our physical likeness in virtual realities & simulations. The project explores new, hyper-realistic capturing & 3D modeling technologies & their effects & social implications on human relationships.
Captured takes shape as interactive installation with 3D face reconstruction technology, that generates avatars from people in realtime. Your avatar becomes a member of virtual community together with other captured avatars. The relations in the community are fickle & mob rule takes over. Sometimes you are the bully. Sometimes you are the bystander. Sometimes you are the target. Social pressure is bounced back from the avatar community to the audience where people follow together their misbehaving doubles in the animation. The actions in the avatar community are controlled by AI, mixing narrative with simulation.
It is impossible to know how much of me belongs to others & is commanded by my social communities. Captured lets you explore the unclear boundaries between collective & individual self, reflecting incidents of mob rule in contemporary information society.
Hanna Haaslahti is a media artist working with image & interaction based in Helsinki, Finland. Her tool is computer vision & shes interested in how machine shapes social relations. Her artworks generate new narrative interaction between people, she explores possibilities of human-machine-human collaboration. She is inspired by scientific research on perception, vision & AI, likewise everyday observations about human life in the age of machines.
Captured is a collaboration with Tyler Henry, an artist & creative coder based in New York.
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"Absurdist Electronics: The Disruptive Power of Slapstick in Wearable Tech & Consumer Robotic Design"
Kathleen McDermott utilizes a combination of sculpture, open-source electronics, performance & video, to explore the social ramifications of the relationship between organic bodies (human or otherwise), & technology; an artistic research method she refers to as absurdist electronics. Absurdist electronics promotes the use of absurdity as a counter to both the cult of reason prevalent within contemporary technology design methodologies, & the atmosphere of doom prophesied within science fiction narratives. Drawing on the Dada principle that absurdity & shock can be an appropriate response to technologically-enabled feelings of alienation, absurdist electronics seeks to jolt audiences out of the cycle of anxiety associated with technological change through playful, strange inventions; while simultaneously casting a critical eye on commercial design tropes which present technology as a solution to all of lifes problems.
Kathleen McDermott is a media artist with a background in installation & sculpture. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Cornell University, an MFA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong, & is a Ph.D. candidate in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). She is currently a Visiting Industry Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media (IDM) at NYU. Her work has been featured in a range of major publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, & Dezeen, & has been exhibited internationally. She shares tutorials for working with DIY electronics online at https://urbanarmor.org/.
