Marek WalczakMarek 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 facade at 7 World Trade Center that reacts to pedestrians walking beneath it.

Third Person

2004

Third PersonThird 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.

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Parade

2004

Parade ‘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.

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Thinking Machine

2003

Thinking MachineThinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

Installation, London ICA, 2003. Ars Electronica 2004. Launch

Dialogtable

2003

Walker DialogtableDialog Table is a shared interface where you use hand gestures to discover more about any dynamic information. Several people can gather around and together explore the table’s movies, narratives and 3D journeys. The table provides an opportunity for people to discuss with each other their thoughts on what they have seen, whether it be an artwork. a game or a service.

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TimeMaker

2002

TimemakerOnce at a family reunion we were talking about time. It turned out that everyone had mental images of time, but they were all different. For instance, I imagine time as a rug that I am making, close by its all strands and colors but from a distance the rug forms into patterns. My uncle saw it as a 3d spiral thing. We decided to do a piece that looks at how people imagine and navigate through time.

TimeMaker, a commission by Art Center Nabi, is a place where individuals can express their subjective thoughts and experiences about the abstract theme of time. It is a Clock Gallery where one can take a look at other people’s interpretations of time.

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Apartment

2001

ApartmentViewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer’s words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships.

Apartment is inspired by memory palaces. In a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-It era, Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then reciting that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations. Launch

Light Threshold

2000

Light ThresholdThe Light Threshold was designed as a gateway to the Olympic Complex in Sydney, Australia. The work is a threshold of light that perpendicularly crosses the northern entry road/bridge to the park.

Five masts establishes a vertical plane that cuts across the access roadway in an open landscape. At the top of each mast is a 3m high stainless steel assembly with a series of nozzles that disperse a fine cloud of mist into the air.

This drifting cloud of mist is animated by reflecting a yellow/gold stream of sunlight through its center off of a system of mirrors. The mirror system, gimbaled atop a sixth mast, is controlled by a heliostat computer programmed to follow the sun’s path. More…

Wonderwalker

2000

WonderwalkerA commission of the Walker Art Center, WonderWalker reimagines the 16th/17th-century Wunderkammer as a communal collection space.

The WonderWalker is a collection of shared objects. Like the Wunderkammer collections of the 17th century, the map is conceived as a phantasmagoria of web objects, whose reason for placement in the collection is dependent on an independent eye.

Anyone can be a collector. You become one by dragging a button to your browser’s toolbar. Then anytime you browse and something catches your eye, just add that to the collection. Launch

Pancinema

2000

PancinemaA series of panoramic cameras are located throughout milan, pointed at the sky, at people in front of the train station, at trees and from the tallest building. Their output is continuously streamed to the server which then stores them chronologically.

These panoramic image feeds are collaged and shown on a giant glass cylinder in front of milan train station., so forming a memory of the city that starts at the inauguration of the sculpture.

The archived images are played as continuous time-lapse movies on the glass cylinder. The circular balustrade acts as in interface, each section of which marks a period of time past. More…

Sculptural Light Screen

2000

lightscreenThe Sculptural Light Screen is on the west front of the new atrium for the Austin Convention Center. It serves a number of functions. Made up of Photovoltaic panels that converts sunlight into electricity, it acts to screen the western sun from the Atrium, and so makes up part of the sustainable energy concept for the new building. The Light Screen is made up of both photovoltaic louvers and colored glass louvers. As the sun hits the wall, it modulates and refracts the light that projects onto the translucent curtain wall behind, creating a mosaic like wall as viewed from the escalator inside. For James Carpenter Design, 2000.

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Adrift

1999

AdriftADRIFT was an evolving multi-location Internet performance event that combined movement through 3D space, multiple narratives and richly textured sound streaming between virtual and real geographies.
Recent performances were designed for presentation as spectacles in physical locations. Making use of the output of 3 vrml cameras, ADRIFT was received by three computers and projected by three projectors onto a semicircular screen. The work focused on multiple journeys through a harbor and through virtual space.

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2D3D

1997

2D3D 2D3D was an early netart piece, part of the exhibit ‘Port’ at the List Center Gallery, MIT, 1997.

A user selects a webpage, and the perl/vrml software would translate the site into 3D.

The program would read the text, the images and the html code to generate specific shapes and backgrounds, so forming a unique portrait of the site.

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Periscope Window

1997

Periscope WindowThe Periscope Window is an optical device located in the stairway of a residence in Minneapolis which redirects views of the exterior onto a diffused glass screen. The window aperture faces the property line and a fence at eye level, with views of a tree and the sky above and beyond. The goal was to multiply views of the tree and sky while obscuring any direct views into the house.

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