Artists

Art122PC: Luminaria

Name of project: Luminaria

Location: Anisq’Oyo Park Bridge

Description:
Luminaria is a site-specific interactive installation at the Anisq’Oyo Park Bridge in Isla Vista, which aims to provide a safer environment through illumination. This collaborative project was developed by students and faculty of the Art122PC (Advanced Digital Topics: Physical Computing) class in the Department of Art, UCSB.

Faculty:
Muhammad Hafiz Wan Rosli

Teaching Assistant:
Intae Hwang

Name of artists:
David Aleman
Hsin Hsuan Chen
Chris Hoang
Intae Hwang
Xindi Kang
Lu Liu
Wen Liu
Brenda Morales
Andrew Piepenbrink
PJ Powers
Rebecca Prieto
Annika Tan
Leonardo Vargas
Muhammad Hafiz Wan Rosli
Carmen Wen
Junxiang Yao

Madeline Berger, Mitchell Jakubka, Jamie Birkett: Luminescent Toran

This project is an interactive, community based art installation that highlights and celebrates the intersection of people’s experiences and art. Using blue LED light, Berger and team members will illuminate the memories of those who were lost and injured in Isla Vista by bridging our separate communities and creating something hopeful, beautiful and powerful. Whether the community uses the installation to provide a sense of “breaking free,” to connect with fellow participants, or to feel enveloped in soothing light, Berger, Jakubka, and Birkett hope that participants will take advantage of the many cathartic elements of the piece.

Artist Bio

Madeline Berger is a junior as UCSB, majoring in art with a minor in theater with an emphasis in costume design. As the Co-student lead of Blunite, a community movement in Isla Vista, the last two years have been focused on illuminating Isla Vista in blue. Light Works has made it so the same concept can be the inspiration for this piece.

Previous Work

Inspiration for hanging tendrils

Back Lit Blue LED Window

Chad “Fez” Gaetz: Worlds Bergs

Ancient ice around the globe is retreating at alarmingly unequivocal rates. The aim of Worlds Bergs, Running Tap is to translate nature’s ice forms into informative sculptures impacting metropolitan densities through first person experience. Most people will never witness first hand what an iceberg looks like, how it shimmers, how it illuminates in hundreds of different shades of blue and white, therefore Worlds Bergs takes the stance to fabricate these forms and display to viewers around the world. This installation is a multitude of modalities from upcycling, material processing and welding, coupled with LED lighting technologies and computer programming. Running Tap is a collaboration between Alchemy Arts Collective and the Santa Barbara Hacker Space.

Artist Bio

It’s easy to say that the earliest inspirations for Chad “Fez” Gaetz were his family and temperate environment. Often told to “go outside and play,” the forests and nature of the Pacific Northwest (USA) quickly became his comfort. Through early teachings of conventional construction practices, and an incredibly unconventional adulthood, Fez has basked in the sun’s rays in dozens of countries, soaking his eyes in the soul and spirit of culture around the world. He consistently states, Alaska is the place that will forever hold his heart, while Antarctica is the continent that holds him by the, ahem… well, has his heart too. Fez’s drive can be defined with little explanation. Make it large, interactive and jaw-dropping and he’d likely join any crew around the world. His works are of mixed medium and message. Not wanting to constrain to one sole material, he chooses to work in several realms. His works speak about connection to nature, our connections to one another, common ground, and beauty.

Previous Work

Lillium Gigantum, 2012

Helianthus Enorme, 2014

Jonathan Smith and Kym Cochran: Tulle Falls

A projected waterfall and pond and custom created for LightWorks: Isla Vista, Tulle Falls is an installation about flow. Projected imagery of black and white water textures appear to “fall” to a pool of aquatic creatures swimming in a pond below. Boxes placed around the edge of the pond offers an area for people to sit and contemplate.

Artist Bios

After traveling the world for much of his adult life, Jonathan Smith switched to making art. In general, his artistic creations involve light and projection with twists of interaction. Jonathan’s ability to define spaces has been showcased at SBCast, Lucidity Festivals years 1-4, New Noise and many other festivals and venues.

For nearly 20 years, Kym Cochran has specialized in creating immersive environments. Her ability to capture the nuisances of natural elements has established her as known force in the theming industry. Her skills have been used in both North and South America and include attractions such as The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (Orlando, FL), Carsland (Anaheim, FL) and Parque Temático de Flora y Fauna (Pereira, Colombia). Typically creating more permanent features, her artistic path is evolving towards more temporary installations including light emitting technologies and projections.

Previous Work

Architexture at SBCAST

Architexture at SBCAST

Concrete tree for toucans and concrete vines for 2-toed sloths

Concrete tree for toucans and concrete vines for 2-toed sloths

Denise Torres and Fernando Tapia: Video Projections

This project is a large-scale public video installation highlighting the often-overlooked Isla Vista working class. We intend to project this documentary onto the side of the Icon building—a wall which faces both UCSB and the police department. The documentary itself will be silent, containing subtitles in both English and Spanish, so as to be understood by the greater Isla Vista community.

Artist Bios

Denise Torres is a xicana artist, who grew up in the Eastern Coachella Valley, working primarily in video, performance, and installation. Her work is conceptually influenced by her own identity as femme, queer and first generation, and is often visually influenced by the fabulous and the grotesque, like that found in cult films and the punk scene. Torres has shown her work in the Glassbox Gallery and the Art, Design & Architecture Museum in Santa Barbara. She will be receiving her B.A. in art from the University of California Santa Barbara in the spring of 2017.

Fernando Tapia is a performance and video artist whose work involves studying the space between social constructs and one’s identity. He utilizes social taboos, cultural myths, and stereotypes to develop extreme or unusual situations that are then documented. Tapia’s work often envelops similar conventions to those of Mexican cinema, improvisational theatre, and Mexican soap operas, but also practices acts of endurance and sometimes mischief. Tapia has recently shown at the Glassbox Gallery in Santa Barbara, CA and The Evergreen Valley College Art Gallery in San Jose, CA.

Previous Work

Beach Party 3, 2015 – Fernando Tapia

Gridlock #2, 2016. Installation View – Fernando Tapia

Freedom Grove, film still, 2016 – Denise Torres

Laundry, performance, 2014 – Denise Torres

John Lawrence: HuggaTree

What if you hugged a tree and it responded warmly to your embrace? What if the harder you hugged it, the more it glowed?HuggaTree stands all by itself, its canopy lit by the glow of three green LED wall washers set at a distance. Stepping up to the tree, you prepare to place your arms around its softly lit trunk. Spreading out on the ground below is a gnarled root system, also quietly radiating light. You squeeze the trunk and the light becomes stronger and seemingly sends signals of joy down to the very tip of its roots. The tighter you hug, the more it responds. The tree itself appears to sparkle with ecstasy. When you let go, it slowly returns to its original state of grace.

Previous Work

Scotty Slade Wagner: Stage

In Stage, Scotty Slade Wagner plays the role of Director in a casting, giving participants the chance to audition for a fictitious play, generating scenes that will be transcribed through a photographic process of live, projected drawing. He received a BFA in Performing Arts Technology from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and is currently pursuing his MFA at UCSB, along with other life dreams.

Artist Bio

Scotty Slade Wagner is the son of a dentist and a veterinarian and youngest of five brothers. He has always craved attention. As a kid, he sought it out by making people laugh. This often meant “misbehaving.” As an adult, little has changed, but somewhere between the two he felt like there was something wrong with that so he tried a lot of other things that gave him many new skills, such as those in sculpture, animation, and video. No longer able to deny his deep cravings for attention, he recently arrived back at performance as his main focus, striving to combine entertaining theatrics with comedy and critical insight into contemporary life and culture. In, “Stage,” he plays the role of a Director in a casting, giving participants the chance to audition for a fictitious play, generating scenes that will be transcribed through a photographic process of live, projected drawing. He received a BFA in Performing Arts Technology – Media Arts from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and is currently pursuing his MFA at UCSB, along with other life dreams.

Previous Work

We’re Going Somewhere Somewhere, 2013

Ecopsychosis #1: Ecosymbolic Exercises, 2014

Shannon Willis, Marco Pinter, Weslie Ching: Luminous Gestures

Working as a team, Shannon Willis, Marco Pinter and Weslie Ching, along with a company of local dancers, will combine genres of media art, sculpture, engineering and contemporary dance choreography into a multimedia light-based event and installation for Lightworks IV. They will create an installation of sculptures, video projections and live contemporary dance, which will activate the site and create links to the surrounding community. The work explores questions of community space, the ephemeral nature of constructed boundaries, and breaking of spatial constructs in order to integrate viewers as participants in a shared experience.

Artist Bios

Shannon Willis is a multi-disciplinary artist residing in Santa Barbara California. From very early on, her artistic family fostered her visual imagination by immersing her in a creative environment. Shannon’s father, a professional sculptor, and mother (a painter and a scientist) taught her everything that an eager young artist needs to know, from an appreciation of contemporary art techniques to tips on craftsmanship. Her work continues to evolve and push boundaries. Currently she is finishing her Masters of Fine Art at University of California Santa Barbara. She shows her expansive multi-media installations and artwork internationally, recently exhibiting a video installation during International Digital Arts Week in Paris France.

Shannon’s work explores the exchange between philosophy, quantum physics, spirituality, and emotions. Working with video, tactile sculptural objects, projection, and viewer interaction, as the tangible results of those converging ideas. The art work becomes an event. She creates the objects and the script, providing spaces for the viewers to become engaged, entertained, and entangled in the phenomena of being alive.

Marco Pinter creates artwork and performances which fuse physical kinetic form with live visualizations. He has a PhD in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an undergraduate degree from Cornell University. His work integrating graphics with robotic sculpture is supported by grants from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative, and the UC Institute for Research in the Arts. He has exhibited artwork and performances at cities around the world, including Dubai, New York, Montreal, Tehran, Hong Kong, Anaheim, San Diego and Santa Barbara. Current exhibitions include Symphonic Picnic, a solo exhibition at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and Pas de Trois: Adagio, part of a group exhibition at the Arts Fund gallery. Pinter is a contributing author to The McGraw Hill Multimedia Handbook and The Ultimate Multimedia Handbook. He is an inventor on over 70 patents, issued and pending, in the areas of live video technology, robotics, interactivity and telepresence.

Weslie Ching (BFA, Dance UCSB 2002) is a performer, choreographer, and producer working in the field of contemporary modern dance. Her work has been presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, the Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, and the Pasadena Dance Festival, among others, and she also produces concerts of her own work as well as hosting CRIT, a series of showings by Santa Barbara-based performance artists followed by a community critique. Of late, she has been creating dances inspired by the intersection between concepts of modern physical cosmology and religious & metaphysical cosmology

Previous Work

Photon Sculptures, 2015 – Shannon Willis

2016 – Shannon Willis

Falling in Love While Drowning 2016 – Shannon Willis

Object Permanence III: Non-Dual, 2014 – Marco Pinter

Residual Energy, 2012 – Marco Pinter

Weslie Ching

Danial Nord: Playground

My recent nighttime visit to Isla Vista inspired a new site-specific installation entitled ‘Playground,’ to be created specifically for LightWorks. The light-based sculpture is an interactive enclosure of the children’s swing-set in Anisq’Oyo’ Park, which transforms it into a giant video light-box. Computer-controlled LEDs translate video source material into animated light, dynamically illuminating community members and performers within the installation. Passers-by see an endlessly changing fusion of color, light, motion, and people, cast as a shadow play onto a vivid public canvas. The flexible technology will enable the installation to shift into blue colorations, in harmony with Blunite 2016

Artist Bio

Danial Nord is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of sculpture, electronic technology, and mass media. His provocative large-scale installations were recently featured in “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in the “2013 California-Pacific Triennial” at the Orange County Museum of Art, and at “World Expo,” Shanghai, China. Nord’s exhibitions have been reviewed by the LA Times, LA Weekly, ARTFORUM, and NPR, and he has been honored with numerous awards including two Artistic Innovation Grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation, and a City of LA Individual Artist Fellowship. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Previous Work

No Exit, 2013

Ethan Turpin & Collaborating Artists: Tai Rodrig & Udo Gyene: Department of Light and Power

For LightWorks: Isla Vista a squad of video projection artists known as The Department of Light and Power (DLP), operating largely from the Hybrid Vehicle Video System (HVVS), will create multiple site-specific and interactive installations around the Embarcadero del Mar and IV Parks area. We will prepare quality work to be implemented quickly at a quantity of sites, featuring well over a dozen installations/situations in the three-night festival.

The goal of DLP is to celebrate the coexistence of people with each other and with nature in a bright and modular fashion across the downtown landscape. Viewers will see leaves burst into activity overhead, responding live to human presence. After a while that oak may go dark, with a cluster of sycamores down the path suddenly drawing attention. Over the course of the weekend, physical features all over the park and surrounding area will be illuminated by direct artistry.

Artist Bios

Ethan Turpin’s creative practice blends old and new media to broaden perception and examine humanity’s complex relationships with nature. Working as a video producer and artist, his documentaries and art installations have shown in film festivals, galleries, and museums nationwide, spanning topics such as endangered species, climate change, and bee colonies. In 2015 the SERI Fire team he is a member of was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to research and visualize wildfire regimes. Turpin’s solo exhibit “Stereocollision” showed at the California Museum of Photography in 2012.

Tai Rodrig is a new media artist living in Isla Vista, California. Tai studied Computer Science with an emphasis on generative art at the College of Creative Studies at UCSB. He’s interested in developing technological tools to explore the mysterious connection between science and art. Tai’s influences include the generative and mathematical works of Jean-Pierre Hebert, Bathsheba, Casey Reas, Zolloc, and patterns found in nature and in old architecture. He is always on the hunt for something mysterious that pushes our pattern recognition abilities to their limits.

Udo Gyene graduated with honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara, receiving a B.S. in both Physics and Math. Throughout his studies in both subjects, Udo became increasingly effective at creating connections between real-world patterns and the mathematical functions that can be used to describe them. It is this skill that Udo explores and exploits in creating generative visuals on a computer, making it a tool for fluid expression.

Previous Work

Land of the GiAnts, 2015 – Ethan Turpin and Jonathan Smith

Flow, 2016 – Tai Rodrig and Udo Gyene

Tra Bouscaren: Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories – downtown Loop

(Saturday only from twilight – 11pm)

Tra Bouscaren is a post-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of found-object assemblage and interactive video. Currently he serves as a Lecturer in the Department of Art at UC Santa Cruz, as well as the Interactive Video Instructor for the Idea Fab Labs, Santa Cruz. His work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues including the Centre Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Victor I Fils Gallery in Madrid, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, the Neu Kirche Contemporary Art Center in Pittsburgh, Hallwalls in Buffalo, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco, and New York’s Lincoln Center. He has been represented by N2 Gallery, Barcelona since 2007.

I take the world as a projection of found object/images through which I must act and re-project. Currently my work is organized around a “Dark Party” aesthetic, offering a grim exuberance of surveillance feed mash-ups mapped over upended landscapes of sculpted trash. I construct orphaned-object assemblages from demolition rebar, cast epoxy, salvage lab equipment and neon set into monumental styrofoam sculptures. The assembled sculptures then serve to provide the substrate for a projection-mapped interactive video bath, constructed out of multiple live surveillance feeds mashed together with drone footage, GIS imaging, and poached live webcams from all over the world.

Tom Pazderka: Outpost

In 1818, Caspar David Friedrich finished his painting “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog.” This work became the most iconic image of 19th century Romanticism. Today, in a world emptied of authenticity, utopian and romantic thought is never too far away. In my current work, both types of idealism meet at the point where each can be recognized for their naïve optimism, for their innocence, purity and sublime sensibility, but ultimately and more interestingly for their failures. Especially interesting to me is the specifically American veneration of the individual and nature. The individual is a stand in for the larger notion of freedom, an idea that gained dominance in the 19th century with Thoreau and is now undergoing resurgence in the popular ideology of the globalized technological West. For me, having come from Eastern Europe, and born during the twilight of Communism, the failure of utopian idealism was an ever present occurrence in the same way that the technological utopia is present in today’s globalized society, promising something that cannot be delivered. The vestiges and ruins of a Stalinist past can still be seen in much of Eastern Europe in the buildings and remnants of nationalist monuments, but similarly are the vestiges of a not so distant technological past of the United States visible, decaying in the California desert, inside mountains and buried beneath concrete slabs miles below the earth. It is wonderful to live among the ruins of bygone days.

www.tompazderka.com
tompazderka@umail.ucsb.edu