Modern Guru
Modern Guru is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, floating above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of Modern Guru – a missive produced only for those who seek to photograph life rather than live the moment. This immersive new media art installation uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through unique interactions with characters along a mystical journey of discovery. Visitors are asked to commit to the path – a tight and winding trail with subtle points of connection along the way – a glowing landscape of oversized, whimsical mountains that chant incantations and blink innocently from digital eyes.
Having communed with the Guru, visitors then weave their way back through this warped and strange world full of illusions and delusions, perceptions and deceptions, all the while bathing in luminescent light; embracing big, gentle forms; and following their own path up the pink tongue staircase to meet the one who oversees the whole fantastic dominion, the Sun God.

Blooming
“Blooming” is an interactive audiovisual installation that highlights the importance of human connection. It takes the form of a life-size 3D Cherry blossom tree, which is a common symbol of social ties and transience of life in East Asian culture. As a response to participants’ skin-to-skin contacts, heart rate, and gestures, “Blooming” blossoms according to their intimacy. As audience members hold hands or embrace, the digital Cherry tree flowers bloom and scatter. When they let go off their physical contacts, the flower return to its pre-bloom state. The color of the flowers turns white or red based on participants’ heart rate as they interact with each other. (the faster the heart rate, the redder the tonality; the slower the heart rate, the whiter the tonality). In addition to the visual responses, sounds are also modulated according to the tree’s different stages: pre-bloom, blooming, petals falling.

Mud
Nicole Clouston is a practice-based researcher currently completing her PhD in Visual Art at York University. In her practice she asks: What happens when we acknowledge, through an embodied experience, our connection to a world teeming with life both around and inside us? Nicole has exhibited across Canada in Montreal, Victoria, Edmonton, and Toronto. She is currently the artist in residence at the Coalesce Bio Art Lab at the University at Buffalo.

Animistic Imagery
The exhibit introduces visitors to Duffy, the AI Artist, with an invitation to collaborate inside her Symbiotic Studio. This immersive space, made possible through projection mapping and interactive technology, invites guests to become the AI’s muse. As Duffy captures movements generated by visitors through real-time tracking, she draws links and connections, consulting a vast collection of colors and archetypal images of life on Earth. The result is an infinite series of surprising works of art—an artificial interpretation of humanity and the natural world.

Lexus Interconnection
There are forces in nature that are beyond the control of mankind. We have learned how fragile we are in the face of such forces. However, we have also learned the importance of accepting nature and learning to live in harmony with it. Interconnected and interdependent, there is a constant give-and-take in nature. Life does not rest. Our collective motion, nature’s response to our movements is essential to our planet’s delicate balance. When we are one with nature, we are at our most powerful. Our movement together gives us life. Our movement forward creates the next generation of ideas. Life is always more amazing in motion.

parallel supercomputer
Connection Machine CM-1(1986) and CM-2 (1987)

The Connection Machine was the first commercial computer designed expressly to work on “artificial intelligence” problems simulating intelligence and life. A massively parallel supercomputer with 65,536 processors, it was the brainchild of Danny Hillis, conceived while he was a doctoral student studying with Marvin Minsky at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. In 1983 Danny founded Thinking Machines Corporation to build the machine, and hired me to lead the packaging design group. Working with industrial design consultants Allen Hawthorne and Gordon Bruce, and mechanical engineer consultant Ted Bilodeau, our goal was to make the machine look like no other machine ever built. I have described that journey in this article, published in 1994 in the DesignIssues journal and republished in 2010 in the book The Designed World.

video

دومينيك ويلكوكس
多米尼克·威尔科克斯
דומיניק וילקוקס
ドミニク·ウィルコックス
Доминик Уилкокс
field
This installation by artist and designer Dominic Wilcox aims to breath life into the simple, inanimate shoe, making a connection with nature while referencing the lives of the absent owners. The shoe laces of seven hundred eco-friendly shoes rise up into the air as though growing towards the light creating a field of green on a bed of earth.

Broken Flower
Liquid Nitrogen
Throughout his career, Shireman has maintained a connection with flowers in decay; in other still lifes, he has cataloged the wilting of tulips and mums. This series, unlike those previous, is brutal and instantaneous. Where his other flowers underwent a slow, gradual death, these broken flowers are quickly frozen and violently ruptured. The process captured here is not a natural one but one that necessitates the use of a manmade element.

“Baraka is a documentary that starts from an old word with meanings in several languages. It can be translated as a blessing, breath or essence of life, from where the process of world evolution is triggered. The film reveals how much humanity is interconnected, despite the differences in religion, culture and language of the peoples. A true visual poem without narration or caption, only images and sounds carefully captured and articulated through an expressive montage, which makes each take add the next other meaning, whose theme is… After all, what is Baraka about? I believe that each viewer of the film sees a different theme. It can be about the strength of planet Earth. It may be about the multiple diversities that unite us. It can be a lot. Baraka is a visual reproduction of the human connection with the Earth ”

Electric Dress
«‹Electric Dress› is a powerful conflation of the tradition of the Japanese komono with modern industrial technology. Prior to her conception of this work, Tanaka had appeared in a larger than-life paper dress that was peeled away layer by layer, not unlike the peeling away of Murakami’s paintings; she was ultimately disrobed to a leotard fitted with blinking lights. Tanaka began to envision ‹Electric Dress› in 1954, when she outlined in a small notebook a remarkably prophetic connection between electrical wiring and the physiological systems that make up the human body. (…) After fabricating the actual sculpture, she costumed herself in it in the tradition of the Japanese marriage ceremony. Hundreds of light bulbs painted in primary colors lit up along the circulatory and nerve pathways of her body.»
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