Hannah Cai—Looking Outwards—08

I was drawn to Brian House’s work while viewing his website, which is filled with unconventional projects such as Tanglr, a chrome extension that links your own web browsing with that of a random stranger, and Conversnitch, a small “lightbulb” that discretely records conversation and posts bits of them to Twitter. Compared to my assigned projects in design, the unexpectedness and unconventionality of Brian’s work is really refreshing. I’d like to try doing exploratory work like that.

Brian has a background in computer science and sound, which results in a lot of experiments that generate sound from data. He describes himself as “an artist who investigates more-than-human temporalities.” Listening to his presentation, it was more dry than I thought it would be based on his eclectic projects, and a bit meandering. He didn’t really describe his work in an exciting or passionate way, and it was pretty objective — which I would expect more from projects that were assigned by others, and not self-driven. The content is interesting, it’s just formatted more like a essay than sharing your own art/work. I would present my own work differently.

Some of my favorite projects of Brian House are Fight Logic, Conversnitch, Animas, and Everything that happens will happen today.