Generative and New Media

486 Shorts

486 Shorts stems from a personal interaction with an ordinarily closed off part of a common machine.

By getting inside the black box (the casing of an archaic 486 computer), LoVid reached the physical location where signals are passed.  Connections were made on the circuit board of the video card, using wire to produce short videos.  Recordings made from these shorts were then edited into 486 short clips, each corresponding to one of the physical shorts.

486 Shorts is a limited-edition LikeLike release of 486 DVDs, each lovingly packaged in etched-cardboard and hand-harvested circuitboards.

Epic Doom (Black Metal City)

Diffusion of responsibility is a social phenomenon that occurs in groups larger than a critical size.  Unless accountability is explicitly assigned, each member's sense of personal responsibility for group welfare sharply declines as the group reaches a size of approximately 150 members.  This phenomenon is a common reaction to our society's many environmental crises, resulting in anxiety or apathy.  However, because social structures are complex systems, societal ills are necessarily emergences:  They arise out of the small (seemingly negligible) actions and interactions of individuals.

Epic Doom is both a comment on and an illustration of societal ills as emergent phenomena.  It is a generative sound- and video-installation that processes the physical actions of visitors and passersby (using an emergent generative algorithm) and re-presents those actions in real time.  Through this process, it provides an illustration of human agency and implicates the individual as a harbinger of evil ..even as "no one raindrop thinks it caused the flood".

Giraffe

Giraffe is centered on a program which, in real-time, generates unique, audible solutions to a problem of post-tonal music theory and composition:  How can one traverse pitch-class space in the most musically meaningful way?  Giraffe (written in Pure Data) generates emergence via the interaction of rule-based agents, to produce a harmonically rich four-part texture.  Agents detect several quantified musical features in the context of predetermined thresholds, and fire in response to critical values.  Using this neural-like algorithm, Giraffe addresses the issue of creating musical coherence through emergence, thereby navigating the tetrachords in an aesthetically compelling manner.

Short Station

Short Station is an educative performance and installation.