Light & Sound
A&C’s art tech examines interconnections between touch, waves, and sound.
Nature Printer
(with commonworks, shown at Mana Contemporary Chicago via MDW Fair)
When we started exploring printers, we found this printer thrown out and left on the sidewalk. Here, it is repurposed as a container for a different sort of printing. While our original explorations of cyanotypes used sunlight to initiate the process, we use UV LEDs. The printer has been re-fashioned with additional natural growth. The line between artificial and natural becomes contested; is it natural to print?
The Nature Printer complicates this relationship, creating cyanotypes in an artificial enclosure. Using UV rays, we replicate a “natural” process in an “unnatural” setting. The traditional printer is opened—to expose its inner mechanisms—but then re-fashioned and closed to replicate the traditional photographic darkroom experience, a contrast from the open cyanotype process. We beautify the exterior of the printer, a technological tool that’s become representative of the clinical and sterile office environment, with natural growth.
During the exhibition, museum goers were encouraged to make their own prints, and we created new ‘negatives’ to combine and recombine on the fly. This process of deconstruction and reconstitution serves as a meditation on the boundaries between nature and technology.
Shadow Explorations
Shadow Puppets
Shadow Puppets
(with commonworks)
These shadow puppets evoke repressed feelings and archetypes to encourage exploration of unconscious feelings and experiences through play. They were used in a performance at a pop-up cultural arts center in Chicago. Copies of the puppets were distributed to audience members following the show.
A sad looking puppet casts a shadow on the wall. When it gets close, you can see that the center is empty.
Process video showing the top layer of the embroidered pressure sensor being made. This simple stitch is done with conductive thread on conductive fabric.
Work in Progress: Shadow Bed
The shadow bed is a meditation on illness and the implications of our inability to follow each other into thoughts and dreams. Viewers see a shadowy silhouette projected against a wall, and as they turn the corner, they see a live sleeper on an embroidered bed, whose weight becomes the shadow.
We’ve hacked the embroidery machine in order to prototype a miniature version of the bed, which is pressure-sensitive and can project a blocky shadow.
This prototype was shown at an open studio preceding the shadow puppet performance.
Sonic Explorations
Synthmaking Workshop
We hosted a community workshop that showed participants how to build synths. It culminated in a jam session with the synths so people could experiment and see how they changed the sound of other instruments.
A participant makes music using one of the synthesizers we built.
Sound Booth Redesign
We were asked to help transform a dingy sound booth into something both exciting and inviting. So we repainted, found new flooring and built this beautiful sound baffling to give the entire studio a fresh new look.