Month: October 2022

Jake Barton is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Local Projects (I’m a local projects fan, so I was pleasantly surprised to see him on the index of speakers). He received his Bachelor’s from Northwestern University for Performance Studies and his Masters’ from New York University in Interactive Technology. Barton has been a pioneer in immersive experience and HCI/UX since 2000. His firm, Local Projects, is a media design studio responsible for award winning projects like the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and the Eisenhower Presidential Memorial. One work that I particularly admire is Greenwood Rising, which is an exhibit on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. It’s one of Local Project’s more recent works, so it’s cool to see how his 2015 lecture content has remained consistent to his original visions, yet also expanded with the introduction of new technology and tools in the present. In his 2015 Eyeo Festival presentation, he mainly spoke about the 9-11 Memorial Museum and the types of experiences and emotions he wanted to evoke through it. He discussed how to present, hold, and distirbute memories through museums and how he tried to involve the audience in the exhibit as well. You can see this in the Greenwood Rising exhibit, which uses XR technology to force the audience to become physically involved to reveal the story of the Tulsa Massacre. One thing I enjoyed about Barton’s presenting skills is how he manages to fly through numerous projects and concepts while still keeping things clear and linear. Even though he breaks from his lecture with an aside about memes, I could still tell that there was a purpose to the tangent and did not feel like the lecture’s flow was broken. His charisma and sociability compel the audience to sit through his 50 minute lecture painlessly, and demonstrates the importance of embedding your personality into your work to make others care about it.

Ron Morrison, an interdisciplinary artist with degrees from universities all over the globe including Parsons and University of Ghana-Legon, is currently a PhD fellow at USC and continues to build a body of work that is inherently personal to them. Their pieces seek to understand and represent “residual black data,” meaning the pieces of black history that have been erased through data visualizations that, though correct, do not encapsulate the experience of what is shown. For exmaple, their map piece, which uses glasses you might get at a 3-D movie showing, uses blue and red linework as a way of showing people how information is filtered for data visulization. Their Eyeo 2019 presentation uses 20th century U.S. river cartography to express the difference between viewing a river as a boundary or object used for transportation and using a different visual representation to see it as a meaningful form to represent change overtime. I thought this was especially effective in getting their point across that, depending on how you view things, you might see them entirely differently, and I will certainly use this to guide my work in architecture. Morrison’s work, especially their pieces focusing on redlining and slow violence in black communities are incredibly powerful and show new ways that we can view information with the tenderness that is necessary when dealing with difficult issues.

Ron Morrison

Paul Soulellis

An artist and professor at RISD interested in the meaning of crisis and Urgent Craft, as well as permanence, Paul Soulellis introduces himself as a queer artist and educator. As a child and young adult, Soulellis grappled with the self-hatred that came with being gay in the 70s and 80s as the AIDS crisis swept the nation. Since then, his queerness has deeply impacted his artistic practice. Although he recognizes his privileges, the difficult process of becoming secure in his sexuality was deeply entwined with a sense of urgency. Yet, Soulellis argues that slowing down in today’s society is inherently queer because it goes against the cultural fixation with acceleration. In response to this idea, he created the body of work: QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK (2013-2018), which is a vast series of printed web publications from queer artists, aiming to immortalize the fast-paced culture of internet art. Since this first foray into printing websites, Soulellis has created many collections of printed internet images, published books of redacted tweets from politicians, zines of digital protests, and many other examples of printed literature. Although the digital world is ever-expansive, I greatly admire that Soulellis continues to create physical copies of the art and protest material that is so indicative of our generation. 

Refik Anadol is a Turkish media artist based in LA that creates huge environmental art pieces driven by data. He operates Refik Anadol Studio and RAS LAB which both focus on “discovering and developing trailblazing approaches to data narratives and artificial intelligence”. He has a background in fine art. As an aspiring environmental and experience designer, I really loved being able to see how his work embodies the environments that they are in and connected to. A lot of his pieces are public art which adds another fun layer of defining space and giving people a new experience. He is able to take both architecture and open space and embed more meaning using data. For example, he created an installation in Boston that took data of the ocean breeze to visualize the connection of the city to the sea. Some of his other work utilizes invisible signals like LTE and bluetooth within spaces to create data visualizations and again visualize parts of those spaces that otherwise wouldn’t be seen or recognized. That is so cool! Another amazing project he shared was called “Archive Dreaming” in which archives turned into a data driven, visual experience. The computer almost becomes a living thing that processes your request and shares history in a new, beautiful way. Upon watching Anadol’s presentation, his imagery and videos in general were very successful in capturing your attention, but I also enjoyed how he integrated humor and light-heartedness into his talk, especially when talking about his past and moving forward with his work in cutting edge technology.

Artist: Refik Anadol
Website: https://refikanadol.com
https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2019/355843371
“Archive Dreaming” -> https://player.vimeo.com/video/218573298?autoplay=0&color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&muted=1