Sydney Salamy: Looking Outwards-11

USER_IS_PRESENT is a 2017 installation by Oblong designer and developer Kate Hollenbach. The installation is three screens with three different videos. The videos show the activities of three different people on their mobiles devices by blending the front and back cameras and screen capture from them using a custom technique. She had further developed screen recording software used in a previous work called phonelovesyoutoo: matrix to capture the screens of the phone in use while now also capturing the shots from the two cameras. The parameters were that when the phone was being used, it would record the three different shots. After capturing the footage, the respective shots from each person would be layered on top of one another, creating what Hollenbach described as a “space that is between physical and virtual realities: it blends elements of user, interface, and environment.” The portraits being next to each other allows comparison in aspects like phone quality and chance juxtapositions and/or similarities.

• I really like the concept of blending the virtual with the physical. I’ve covered people who have done similar in past posts, and it was always amazing to see the different ways they would try to accomplish the same things. I like this blending since it not only offers an interesting visual with all the layers kind of interacting with one another, but also sort of bring two worlds together. This is something that decades ago couldn’t be done, but now is being accomplished pretty easily. It’s an interaction between a world humans didn’t create and one they did.

• Kate Hollenbach earned an MFA from UCLA Design Media Arts and a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT. She is currently a teacher of interactive media design and programming at DePaul University School of Design in the College of Computing and Digital Media. In the past however, she was the Director of Design and Computation at Oblong Industries, overseeing the design of Mazzanine, one of the company’s most well-known products. To sum up her work, she is an artist, programmer, and educator, developing new tech and interactive systems relating to gesture, body, and physical space, and has spent years as an interface designer and product developer.