My Colleagues‘ News

Work: She Who Sees The Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness, and The Left Witness   Artist: Allahyari,Morehshin Comment:

Work: Sustainable Cinema No. 2: Lenticular Bicycle   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: Lenticular Bicycle is the first sculpture in the series to use human energy. The pedal-powered movie references the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the hacked bicycles that are roughly converted for use in family businesses throughout Southeast Asia. Each moving sculpture uses simple illusions made with simple energy, yet still contains the mystery of cinema. They are the pure magic of the moving image. Sustainable Cinema is a series of kinetic public sculptures that merge natural power sources with early optical illusions to create a moving image. Nature is the power and the director of cinematography in each of the sculptures, which are designed to start a conversation about environmentally responsible media and a search for more sustainable solutions to power our emerging technologies.

Work: Sustainable Cinema No. 1: The Image Mill   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: The Image Mill is a public sculpture that uses the force and beauty of falling water as the energy to create a moving picture. As water falls over the giant wheel, a transmission assembly causes two disks to spin in opposite directions. On the interior disk are a series of animation frames painted onto glass; on the black outside disk, rotating in the opposite direction, are cut slits. As the wheel spins, the slits act as a shutter and the animation becomes visible…a movie plays in the falling water. Sustainable Cinema is a series of kinetic public sculptures that merge natural power sources with early optical illusions to create a moving image. Nature is the power and the director of cinematography in each of the sculptures, which are designed to start a conversation about environmentally responsible media and a search for more sustainable solutions to power our emerging technologies.

Work: Sustainable Cinema No. 3: Praxinoscope Windmill   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: The 19th century Praxinoscope consisted of a circular beveled mirror reflecting a series of animation frames. When the device is spun, a moving image appears on the mirror. Using wind as the power and a structure that references the Eiffel Tower (built the same time as the invention of the device), the animation appears in the base of the windmill and is completely controlled by the speed and direction of the wind. Sustainable Cinema is a series of kinetic public sculptures that merge natural power sources with early optical illusions to create a moving image. Nature is the power and the director of cinematography in each of the sculptures, which are designed to start a conversation about environmentally responsible media and a search for more sustainable solutions to power our emerging technologies.

Work: Sustainable Cinema No. 4: Shadow Play   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: The silhouettes of the ancient art of Shadow Play are achieved by light penetrating a translucent screen, and this sculpture uses the rotation of the windmill as the power to generate the backlight for the presentation. Additionally, the wind turns a series of gears and plates that animate the puppets and move a background diorama to create a one-minute shadow theatre performance. Sustainable Cinema is a series of kinetic public sculptures that merge natural power sources with early optical illusions to create a moving image. Nature is the power and the director of cinematography in each of the sculptures, which are designed to start a conversation about environmentally responsible media and a search for more sustainable solutions to power our emerging technologies.

Work: Sustainable Cinema No. 5: Dual Windmill   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: The Dual is an optical illusion in which two disks rotate in opposite directions; the front disk is black with slits that act as a shutter, the rear disk contains the animation frames. When the disks spin, the animation is visible. In this artwork, one windmill fan is black, the other contains 15 frames of animation. As the wind spins, the film is visible in the intersection of the two fans. Sustainable Cinema is a series of kinetic public sculptures that merge natural power sources with early optical illusions to create a moving image. Nature is the power and the director of cinematography in each of the sculptures, which are designed to start a conversation about environmentally responsible media and a search for more sustainable solutions to power our emerging technologies.

Work: Brakelights   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: Brakelights is a real-time computer system that senses color changes in the environment to make choices from a database of dialogue lines…a live cinema-generating machine. The program reads the color levels in every pixel of every frame in real time. The artist filmed 200 random lines of dialogue between a man and a woman in five different emotions—anger, irritation, indecision, hope, and love. “I hate you” to “I love you” and everything in-between. The camera was placed on the brakelights of an evening traffic jam in LA and a computer program matched the brightness of red to specific types of dialogue lines. When the traffic jams, the red gets brighter, the couple begins to fight. As it begins to flow again, they reconcile and fall back in love. The environment directs and assembles the film.

Work: Celestial Mechanics   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: Celestial Mechanics is an artwork intended to be viewed in a planetarium dome. Instead of stars and planets, the ‘night sky’ program reveals many of the aerial technologies hovering, flying, and drifting above us. The project mixes science, statistical display, and contemporary art by presenting these mechanical patterns and behaviors as a dynamic visual experience. The sky is filled with aircraft that transport people from place to place, perform utilitarian duties, assist in communications, enact military missions, or wander above us as debris.With help from government agencies and the science community, the artists worked with accurate tracking and protocol statistics to create 3-D models of the airborne systems. They then led a team of top animators to visualize those models in a style that reflects the chaos, force, and influence of these technologies.

Work: GPSFilm   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: GPS Film is the first locative media narrative system to merge mobile and GPS technologies. A way to watch cinema based on the viewer’s location and movement, the original source code was released as an open source application. Now recognized as predicting future applications for mobile technologies, GPSFilm invented a new form of film-viewing experience by using the place and movement of the viewer to reveal the story. By exploring a park, a neighborhood, or even a city or country, GPSFilm continually ‘reads’ the location of the viewer and plays scenes that are tied to those places.The more the viewer travels, the more of the film they see. The first film made specifically for the system, Singaporean filmmaker Kenny Tan's "Nine Lives" is a chase comedy of mistaken identity that unfolds as the viewer explores nine neighborhoods in Singapore's downtown. Each of nine neighborhoods tells a different part of the story of how a confused exchange of 3 duffle bags on a public train causes a hapless office worker to be running from both the Police and a dim-witted crime gang.

Work: The Moon is a Mirror   Artist: Hessels,Scott Comment: This series of artworks contemplates the screen and its origins. My time in the villages of Southeast Asia has shown me an array of organic resources that can be formed into papers. I've researched naturally-occurring translucent materials and have selected feathers, shells, reptile skins, seeds and fur each embedded in organic resin. The relationship between the video image and the screen are key to the piece. The organic screens are placed over an LED grid that plays the animation. Without the screen, the image would be difficult to discern due to the LED’s low resolution. However, the natural screen diffuses the LEDs and makes the video recognizable—nature acts as the lens and filter for a mediated digital image. The digitization of film in recent years has overshadowed that the origins of cinema are natural and organic. An off-shoot from my Sustainable Cinema series of sculptures, these Natural Screens consider an alternative history of media using environmentally-responsible materials