Marek Walczak is an artist engaged in how people can participate in physical and virtual spaces. Trained as an architect, his work includes Apartment which was shown at the Whitney Museum and many venues worldwide. The first Dialog Table is installed at the Walker Art Center, a shared interface the table replaces a keyboard and mouse with gesture recognition technology. Current projects bridge physical installations with user interaction, including a one block long façade at 7 World Trade Center that reacts to pedestrians walking beneath it.
Noplace Online has launched as part of the Tate’s Intermedia series.
Whether paradise, heaven or a pessimistic distopia, each of us has a vision like no place on Earth. In noplace you write a few words about that place that has not yet come into being. As your write, your words trigger a set of visual associations, colliding to form a video of your ideal.
LAUNCH
Noplace Installation premiered as part of Synthetic Times in Beijing, running from June 9 - July 3, 2008. More images from the installation are here
We are pleased to announce that Thinking Machine is currently installed as part of Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition will run from February 24th to May 12th 2008.
More on Thinking Machines here.
If you are in Amsterdam on Friday 19th October we invite you to the opening of Video Vortex at the Netherlands Media Art Institute
Where we will be showing our work:
Noplace : Heaven
You may enjoy some screengrabs of the piece.
Whatever is in your clipboard, something that’s on your mind or just a distraction, you Paste. Paste keeps track of everyone’s ctrl-V, option-V or middle-button press - these routine actions combine into a single text stream.
Paste collects both trivial and profound thoughts creating a continuous scroll. The minutia of collective consciousness forms a shared narrative. A narrative that reflects personal and public history - from the horrors of war to a recipe for mashed potatoes.
Everyone who has lived in an apartment has a story to tell. Gothamberg is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings. Together, these tales of sounds and smells, lobbies and bathrooms, laundry room gossip and unexpected favors form a single collective building, Gothamberg. Their experiences form the elliptical threads of inhabitation, a mnemonic quality expressing something of the shared nature of dwelling.
This site specific artwork at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s 2006 Design Triennial is situated in front of a window facing the garden. It explores the reciprocal relationship between garden and interior, by reinterpreting the idea of window as a luminous and temporal information threshold.
Once a day a camera adjacent to the main entrance to the garden, records a 30 second film segment of the tree canopy along the back edge of the garden. This cumulative sequence is stored in a computer and played back on the 6ft x 3ft plane of Light Emitting Diode circuit boards. A larger 9ft x 5ft acid etched plane placed between the viewer and the LEDs resolves the pixilated abstractions presented by the LEDs. Meanwhile the compressed nature of the sequence reveals the temporal nature of the garden as it is transformed by the seasons.
Noplace is an interactive installation and website that aggregates utopias into a shared vision of paradise. We are developing software that collects data, images, and texts via the web and uses these feeds to create virtual architectural structures. These structures expand as utopias are added to the project. In the final installation, projected shadows on the gallery walls represent the architecture that’s evolved from the data, creating a physical browser which viewers can manipulate and transform with a wave of their hands.
Noplace has won a Creative Capital Award and is currently under development. The proposal for Noplace is here
The Podium Light Wall is located on the South and North facades of 7 World Trade Center. As people wander on the pavement below a strip of blue light gracefully follows them. This strip of blue light is 7 floors tall and is visible from Freedom Park. The Podium Wall accentuates the individual, and the patterns that are created as many pass by together. Kinecity designed the interactive element of the design for James Carpenter Design Assoc. who were the responsible for the wall as an art piece.
The Shimmer Wall is located in the link between the two buildings of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. A place of contemplation designed by James Carpenter Design Associates, the wall projects the subtle shimmering light as the sun plays with the Hudson River.
Kinecity have designed the camera recognition system that recognizes the shimmer on the water. Moving and zooming throughout the day on a very slow orbit, the artificial intelligence system tracks the beauty of light reflecting off water, through which on occasion a ferry or yacht passes by.
Thinking Table 4 is currently on exhibit at the Banff Center in Canada as part of the show The Art Formerly Known as New Media. In this version two players play against each other using a touchscreen.
CityCollage creates a leisurely, painterly image of a single second. Your image is used as a palette that echoes the sampling of the artist’s eye. CityCollage takes your photo and uses it to build a streetscape. You become the raw material for an urban construction. As in a city, your own presence is tangential, one ingredient among many. You may not even see yourself, until a sudden moment of recognition, like spotting a familiar face in a crowd.
Two cameras are trained on two views, one on the street, one in a private space at the installation. Each time movement is detected in the private sphere, a new streetscape is created.
Citycollage was part of the show ‘Urbanisms‘ at the Pace Digital Gallery. More…
Futureface is a group of 8 people that met once a month over Saturday brunch to discuss the future of interface. Each month there is a set topic and each person provides one image and a short text. Our intention is to then create an installation/exhibition based on our thinking.
Third person is a temporal mirror. Using camera recognition technology, it replaces realtime video of people at the installation with clips recorded earlier. In the present, people’s movements are ‘averaged’, a little like a Muybridge photo sequence, so that they form the canvas onto which the previous footage then plays.
People are visible only as dark silhouettes against which, perhaps, you can see a previous clip of a figure in white descending the same staircase.
Third Person was shown at the ICA, London, as well as at LMCC, 4 Walls Film Club and by appointment.
‘Parade’ is made from an exaggerated physiognomy, reacting to the movements of the passers by. Parade is part of a site-specific new media project called Third Person.
Parade is an interactive cinema installation shown in the town of Hudson in New York on December 4th 2004. Between 4pm and 8pm, 10,000 people took part in a ‘Winterwalk’, during which time we projected on the two windows of 330 U Gallery.