골란 레빈
Голан Левин

Opto-Isolator

source: flong

Opto-Isolator (2007: Golan Levin with Greg Baltus) inverts the condition of spectatorship by exploring the questions: “What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge, how might they respond to us?” The sculpture presents a solitary mechatronic blinking eye, at human scale, which responds to the gaze of visitors with a variety of psychosocial eye-contact behaviors that are at once familiar and unnerving. Among other forms of feedback, Opto-Isolator looks its viewer directly in the eye; appears to intently study its viewer’s face; looks away coyly if it is stared at for too long; and blinks precisely one second after its visitor blinks.

Acknowledgements
Mechatronic design and fabrication by Greg Baltus of Standard Robot Company, Pittsburgh. Opto-Isolator was developed with support from the Creative Capital Foundation, from the Berkman Faculty Development Fund at Carnegie Mellon University, from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship award program, and from an anonymous Trustee of Carnegie Mellon University. Additional thanks to Frank Broz, Fran Flaherty and Dave Tolliver for their advice and assistance in realizing this project, and to Marius Watz, Grisha Coleman, Alice Lodi and Juliacks for their help in documenting it. Photographs by John Berens; video by David Plakke and Golan Levin.
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source: vimeo
Golan Levin develops artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, often created with a variety of collaborators, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity.
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source: cmuedu
Golan Levin [b.1972] is an artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, often created with a variety of collaborators, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity. Identified by Technology Review as one of the world’s “Top 100 Innovators Under 35” [2004], and dubbed by El Pais as “one of the most brilliant figures in contemporary audiovisual art” [2002], Levin has exhibited widely in Europe, America and Asia.
Levin’s work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media. He is known for the conception and creation of Dialtones [2001], a concert whose sounds are wholly performed through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones, and for The Secret Lives of Numbers [2002], an interactive online data visualization featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Previously, Levin was granted an Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica for his Audiovisual Environment Suite [2000] interactive software and its accompanying audiovisual performance, Scribble [2000]. Most recently, Levin and collaborator Zachary Lieberman premiered Re:mark [2002], an interactive installation, and Messa di Voce [2003], a new-media performance. These projects use augmented-reality technologies to create multi-person, real-time visualizations of their participants’ speech and song. Levin is now in the preliminary research phase of a new body of work, which centers about interactive robotics, machine vision, and the theme of gaze as a primary new mode for human-machine communication.
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source: creativeartetv

Artiste, enseignant, ingénieur et compositeur, Golan Levin mobilise tous ses savoirs pour créer des pièces interactives. Des créations qui sollicitent l’oeil (Double-Taker (snout), Opto-Isolator, Eyecode, Reface (portrait sequencer)), le geste (Interstitial Fragment Processor, Scrapple, The Manuel Input Workstation, Interactive Bar Tables), la voix et l’oreille (Ursonography, Messa di Voce, Dialtones (a telesymphony)) ou des logiciels graphiques (Self-adherence (for written images), Merce’s Isosurface, Floccular Portraits).

Souvent réalisés en compagnie de collaborateurs, les projets de Golan Levin, qu’ils ressortent du “software art” ou de la performance audio-visuelle, étonnent avant tout par leur caractère ludique.