Remaking the Making of Americans
In March of 2012 I was invited to work with Liminal Performance Group to participate in the March Music Modern. I collaborated with Bryan Markowitz to create an installation based on Gertrude Stein’s novel “The Making of Americans.” We described the installation this way:
“In the living we are doing there are things that make us and things we make, something like bubbles. And the space between holds the possibility of unexpectedly anything. So making this has been a tracing of unending families of foam and residue. And it is something like the making of the Making of Americans.”
The installation consisted of a small room containing twelve ink prints, four of which housed projection mapped output from a dynamic simulation. The simulation was an autonomous system based on the characters and interpersonal connections from the novel.
Role:
Artist, Developer, Engineer
Tools and Technologies:
Processing, Eclipse, Ink, LEDs, Projection Mapping
Date
March 2012
The simulation was tuned to unfold over the course of three hours, starting in a very simple configuration and ending up in a massive swarm of character instances. Initially only a single instance of each character exists, over time, interactions within the system yield new instances, and old instances die and accumulate in the simulation.
A selected set of portrait photography from the creative commons was built into a dynamic collage based on the simulation and projected into the ink prints around the room.