The Home, Memory, and Materialism Explored Through Landscape

Moving from Arizona two years ago meant editing down my possessions to fit in the back of a pickup truck that my best friend, two cats, and I shared for three days. I have been moving on average about once a year since I was fourteen. This nomadic lifestyle meant constantly having to get rid of things that felt unimportant and insignificant. Certain things, however, have survived the moves. Throughout my nomadic lifestyle, the bedroom became a curated space for possessions put on display, showcasing the importing things I own. In my travels, landscape and house became equally important in defining what “home” means to me. My thesis work explores memories through the lenses of the bedroom, landscape and material possessions. In my work, memory, immersion, and installation are one, where the viewer is enveloped. Viewers enter a bedroom space with objects on the walls, piles of clothes scattered about the floor, onto which a video of saguaro cactus blooms overlaying the streets and mountains I always passed by around the Phoenix Valley is projected. The piles are my old clothes that have been stowed away in garbage bags waiting to be thrown out. Now they are cast in iron, permanent and transformed, their shadows becoming mountains looming over my vision of home. The viewer’s body supplements and change the shadows; the installation in a constant state of fluctuation. Personal possessions cast in bronze sit atop bleached oak shelves, becoming moments of clarity amidst the installation as individual memories within those objects. Together, these objects are permanent impermanence, my bedroom always moving, my possessions locked in iron and bronze. The installation of everyday objects that have been transformed into more precious and permanent copies, set in an ephemeral and cerebral bedroom, creates a transitory space that embodies the ever changing state of the mind and the memories swimming within

Spatially Augmented Reality on Dynamic, Deformable Surfaces and its Applications

Spatially Augmented Reality (SAR), also known as projection mapping, uses multiple projectors to illuminate surfaces of arbitrary shape and size and create seamless, large-scale displays. Traditional SAR assumes that the projection surface is static and rigid. This restriction was partially addressed by Dynamic-SAR, where the surface is rigid and of known shape but can be moved around. However, no prior work has addressed SAR using multiple projectors on deformable surfaces, where the shape is unknown and constantly changing. Thus, multi-projector SAR on deformable surfaces introduces several challenges, including projector-camera calibration on a deformable surface, real-time surface shape recovery and real-time multi-projector warping and blending. My thesis is the first attempt to develop a comprehensive framework for achieving seamless multi-projector displays on deformable surfaces. Furthermore, I will also be presenting its applications in the medical domain to enable remote surgical guidance by using SAR to illuminate surgical stencils on a physical surgical site precisely

Comprehensive Use of Curvature for Robust and Accurate Online Surface Reconstruction

Interactive real-time scene acquisition from hand-held depth cameras has recently developed much momentum, enabling applications in ad-hoc object acquisition, augmented reality and other fields. A key challenge to online reconstruction remains error accumulation in the reconstructed camera trajectory, due to drift-inducing instabilities in the range scan alignments of the underlying iterative-closest-point (ICP) algorithm. Various strategies have been proposed to mitigate that drift, including SIFT-based pre-alignment, color-based weighting of ICP pairs, stronger weighting of edge features, and so on. In our work, we focus on surface curvature as a feature that is detectable on range scans alone and hence does not depend on accurate multi-sensor alignment. In contrast to previous work that took curvature into consideration, however, we treat curvature as an independent quantity that we consistently incorporate into every stage of the real-time reconstruction pipeline, including densely curvature-weighted ICP, range image fusion, local surface reconstruction, and rendering. Using multiple benchmark sequences, and in direct comparison to other state-of-the-art online acquisition systems, we show that our approach significantly reduces drift, both when analyzing individual pipeline stages in isolation, as well as seen across the online reconstruction pipeline as a whole

Carbon meets silicon

Annie Morrad, Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, University of Lincoln Ian McArthur, UNSW Art & Design, UNSW Australia, Sydney Abstract: Paradoxical (Data Driven) Space. This paper takes the form of a twenty-minute performative audio/visual presentation that explores and plays with the thematic of sound disruption and the puncture of a linear visual. It seeks to involve the audience with the intent to present instants of sound across a social landscape that also includes paradoxical sounds that juxtapose a dichotomy of tangled engagement. In using data from day to day activities based on the above Morrad and McArthur produce-interwoven compositional structures from which sound and image projects are produced. These sonic experiments are formed from the interplay of live and electronic sounds placed with images; projects exploring urban crowds (Canetti 1962) and their movement through structured and architectural urban space. This will be combined together with social noise interspersed with blank silence - this noise spread across into the silence a continuous rhythm that changes only through layering and an improvisational process of adding to or subtraction. The rhythms that are imbued within a social structure that create a time based pattern, are consonant with ideas referenced in Lefebvre (Lefrbvre 2004) with his understanding of daily rhythm the social pattern of time with opening and closing of places, the structure of time in the work place and within visual frames such as television and cinema. This includes the part rhythm plays in society through work and the very involvement of our bodies in keeping us alive. This method also echoes the approach of jazz saxophonist Steve Coleman who writes about rhythm and improvisation (Coleman 2007, Coleman 2011). As we are affected cognitively, emotionally and aesthetically by our temporal experience of all the myriad modalities of sound, natural, urban, musical (Fonseca, 2014) our awareness of time shifts – compressing, expanding, each conscious and unconscious moment or event reflexively re-making and narrating the self. Morrad + McArthur will be live performing this understanding of disruption, data and urban with video and sound

Viatopias: Exploring the experience of urban travel space

The title of this research is constructed from: `via' - route and töp(os) -a place. Viatopias are urban spaces of continual travel or flux that incorporate multiple forms of perception and inscriptions of meaning. My aim has been to define and describe the increasingly important fluid perceptual spaces that have developed between static nineteenth century destinations. Viatopias such as passageways, underground tunnels, train tracks, and the North Circular escape a sense of destination, operating as ever-changing experiences or events. The practice has sought to produce digital representations of these urban travel spaces that exist in constant flux, to communicate the experience of Viatopias. The research explores themes such as: The North Circular as a Deleuzian Route exploring driving as performance; Plica, Replica, Explica an unfolding of experience through digital media; The Making of Baroque Videos, using Baroque architectures of viewing; Mobilizing Perception treating human vision as an artifact; Mirrors For Un-Recognition disassembling nineteenth century controlled vision; Sound as an Urban Compass considering urban audio experience; Narrative Practice in New Media Space analysing contemporary approaches in digital media; and Convergent Languages, Digital Poiesis investigating the dislocation of representation in different digital languages. These conceptual frameworks developed in symbiosis with the practice. The visual practice presents a collection of digital videos that extend and complicate these concepts through experimental visual and audio techniques such as layering, repetition, anamorphic distortion, and mirroring to produce visual immersion and the fracturing of space. The concluding digital works incorporate video with audio and text resulting in integrated visual statements that attempt to stretch the viewer's perception, in the process offering a glimpse of a new experience within urban space

Projected performances: the phenomenology of hybrid theater

Throughout the 20th century, mediatized forms gained prominence and eclipsed the theater as a site of cultural power and popularity. Because of this tension, performance theorists like Peggy Phelan framed the definition of theater through its inherent differences from film and television. Other theorists like Philip Auslander problematized this distinction, particularly due to television’s similarities to live performance. The cinema, however, has remained an opponent to performance, ignored in favor of technologies that more readily promote a sense of “liveness.” In Projected Performances, I argue that film projection is more closely related to performance than previously thought, particularly when viewed in light of their phenomenological similarities. Projection is a live act that generates a kind of presence that approximates what is felt with a live performer. The theatrical setting of most film viewings foregrounds this phenomenological frame, despite the prerecorded nature of the content. Despite the seemingly static nature of film, the exhibition of it is most often decidedly theatrical. Hybrid theater, in which productions incorporate film projection alongside live performers, highlights these similarities in a much more explicit way, creating a unique sensory experience. This blending of effects is evident in theatrical broadcasts like the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” series, which capitalizes on the liveness of theater to draw people to the cinema. I also investigate hybrid productions that use projected scenery, such as The Woman in White and The Elephant Vanishes, as well as productions that feature projected bodies, like the work of Lemieux.Pilon 4d Art. Finally, I interrogate the use of projections in the monumental spectacles of the opening ceremonies at the 2008 and 2010 Olympics in Beijing and Vancouver, respectively.Throughout, I examine the ways in which these hybrid productions trouble the assumed distinction between performance and media, demonstrating that projection is a kind of performance that can share the stage with live performers without damaging the unique essential qualities of theater

Primary objects: developing a new type of furniture for the early elementary classroom

The traditional North American elementary classroom is dominated by traditional passive furniture. With the continual use of the traditional typologies of desks and chairs, the classroom furniture fails to challenge the student's development and engage the imagination of the users. As research shows that children learn most through movement, emotions, and exploration, the passive furniture hinders a well-rounded learning experience. In this study, the approach for designing new furniture that fosters a sense of creativity, independence, and active learning is not only guided by the researcher's experiences, but also involves insight from elementary students and teachers. This thesis investigation used a participatory approach to enable the examination of the current activities and interactions occurring within the first and second grade classroom. Using the characteristics of middle childhood, the third teacher theory, and affordance, the researcher developed a line of furniture for active learning that enables the students to shape their learning environment and experience. The resulting classroom furniture provides for intimate interactions, physical activity, social development, and personal customization

Skyler and Bliss

Hong Kong remains the backdrop to the science fiction movies of my youth. The city reminds me of my former training in the financial sector. It is a city in which I could have succeeded in finance, but as far as art goes it is a young city, and I am a young artist. A frustration emerges; much like the mould, the artist also had to develop new skills by killing off his former desires and manipulating technology. My new series entitled HONG KONG surface project shows a new direction in my artistic research in which my technique becomes ever simpler, reducing the traces of pixelation until objects appear almost as they were found and photographed. Skyler and Bliss presents tectonic plates based on satellite images of the Arctic. Working in a hot and humid Hong Kong where mushrooms grow ferociously, a city artificially refrigerated by climate control, this series provides a conceptual image of a imaginary typographic map for survival. (Laurent Segretier