I did the coding for this project which included some slightly tricky video crossfading for seamless playback. The music loop is going to play in my head forever.
Category: Digital art
Rayyane Tabet: Becoming American
Becoming American is a project for the 2022 Whitney Biennial that includes a technical intervention across all of whitney.org, where visitors are prompted with questions from the US citizenship test.
Sunrise/Sunset and letting artists take over the museum
Recently we published a new Sunrise/Sunset on whitney.org by American Artist, called Looted. The artist and project has been written about elsewhere, and while the most important thing I can say is go check it out, I think it’s also a good moment to talk about why Sunrise/Sunset is such an important, and unique series.
Since 2009 at sunrise and sunset (New York City time) whitney.org has been taken over by artists. For those 30 or so seconds twice a day, what happens on whitney.org is up to them. We’ve hosted figure eight balls, glowing orbs of light, color swatches of real sky, talking AI assistants, and 3d animated seabirds among others before most recently boarding up all images on the site. We’ve done this across 3 different iterations of whitney.org, and just watching the recordings can feel like a trip into the Wayback Machine.
As a developer, Sunrise/Sunset is my favorite part of my job. Working with these artists to help realize a vision is a direct connection to supporting their work, something that can otherwise feel abstracted. The process of receiving a project that may be fully or partially baked, and adapting it to operate within the structures of whitney.org is a rewarding challenge that changes from work to work. The web has evolved a lot in a decade, and it shows as these artists adapt the medium to their uses. Whether that’s the proliferation of Canvas, or CSS animation, or the birth and subsequent death of unmuted autoplaying video.
Most broadly, I think the series speaks to something deeper about what a museum can be. Sunrise/Sunset is a wholesale handing over of institutional space in a way you rarely see IRL. While an exhibition or installation might receive significant input from an artist on its design, you just can’t tear out the walls of a multi-million dollar building like you can tear down elements in the DOM. Sunrise/Sunset lets an artist come in, change anything they want about a museum space, and do it differently tomorrow.
Next sunrise is 6:05am, EST.
1/1/2015 — 10/5/2016
An animated mapping exploration of the Washington Post’s fatal police shooting dataset. Locations are geocoded through the Google Maps API, and build up a familiar image of the United States.
Neuron
Mixed media enlargement of an imagined neuron, incorporating generative audio and video, projection mapping with Kinect and OpenCV, chicken wire, stainless steel, and acrylic.
Spheres II
Continued exploration of deconstructing spheres, limited color, galaxy-inspired movements and shapes, and generative growth.
Deconstructing Shells II
Early exploration of deconstructing spheres, galaxy-inspired movements and shapes, and generative growth.
Fingers
An experiment in translating a piece of the human form into digital code.