Kimberlyn Cho – Looking Outwards 11

Mesocosm (Times Square) clips (2015) from Marina Zurkow on Vimeo.

Mesocosm is a software-driven animaton that uses three projections to portray the saptiotemporal organization of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. In short, Zurkow and her team depicts Eden before The Fall, the Present, and Hell in a hybrid animation of Times Square. The project blurs the boundaries in terms of time and ecology by making the animation continuous, as opposed to three distinct projections. I find the uncertainty in when the past ends and when the future begins, and where the landscape separates from civilization to be really interesting. What I admire most about this project is its coherent usage of art and programming. Zurkow and her team not only drew each frame in the animation using a hybrid of images from Google Street View, present-day architecture, but they also created a software to transition each frame in the animated landscapes in response to algorithmic rules. No cycle is repeated and the character interactions and changes in weather are determined by a probability equation. Zurkow’s usage of art/ graphics to depict algorithmic data makes the hybrid nature of this project much more complex and interesting.

Marina Zurkow is an artist who focuses on the intersections of nature and culture. She takes various unique approaches in her work by drawing from her knowledge in life science, animation, and software technologies. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1985 with a major in Fine Arts. After graduation, she traveled all around the world to showcase her numerous exhibitions and projects including New York, Shanghai, San Francisco, Berlin, South Korea, etc. However, she mainly works in New York, and is currently a full time faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts.

Mesocosm (2015), Marina Zurkow