Project Type: DANM MFA 2017

ultraSHIFT is the culmination of two years of research by seven unique artists in UCSC’s Digital Arts and New Media MFA program. Their work iterates ideas and performs experiments in realms not easily detected or deciphered in the conventional art world. Pushing the limits of game design, musical soundscapes, performative sculpture, social and interactive media, these artists’ work simultaneously resists and expands long-established, canonical meanings of art.

SL Benz

Auratic Interpreter

The desire for a holistic interpreter, or to be an objective empath, is a desire to move beyond ironic detachment, habitual consumerism, scientific reductionism and religious naivety. It reflects a desire for grounding the being phenomenologically, with one’s possessions as part of the politics of self. Benz’ installation is an attempt at mediating invisible knowledge, however anecdotal or trivial, revealing the multiplicities of possible narrative. Part divination, part polygraph technology, this machine reads the aura of inanimate objects and translates it to a visual record. This piece anticipates the need for increased data/memory retrieval in a post-material future.

SL Benz is an animation artist and experimental filmmaker working in hybrid media forms.Their work explores the interplay of memory, mediation, and political theology. By re-engaging with the supernatural and the ghosts of material forms, Benz’ work examines our relationships with culture.

https://vimeo.com/slbenz

Scott Tooby

Embedded Soundscaping

Embedded Soundscaping is an interactive sound installation exploring how audio-reactive technology can be applied in creative and scientific contexts to enable deeper understanding and connection to the world through sound. Through the combination of machine listening and embeddable computing, the installation features the Sonic Mirror, a new electronic instrument that selectively records and transforms the sounds of its environment into musical soundscapes.

Additionally, the instrument audifies the movements of an experimental robot made by engineering researchers at UC Santa Cruz to reveal the physical dynamics of digital materials – a new material technology developed by NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Scott Tooby is a sound artist and musician making electronic instruments and art that integrates machine listening and embeddable computing. After obtaining a BA in music composition from UCSB, Tooby moved to Los Angeles and acquired skills in electronics and sound design while working in the entertainment industry. He now lives in Northern California.

scott-tooby.com

Matthew R.F. Balousek

Opening the Horse

Opening the Horse is a method for queer game design. It is enacted through a series of tabletop games, each attempting to function as a sort of rhetorical Trojan Horse.

Through their respective fictions, the games attempt to entice the player as well as conceal their intentions as rhetorical objects.

After being exposed to the formal system which encodes the procedural rhetoric, the games shift their fictional contexts such that the connection to the queer rhetorical context is made more direct in order to prevent the communicative act from failing altogether due to misinterpretation.

Matthew R.F. Balousek grew up in Michigan, then dropped out of art school, then dropped out of community college, then got two degrees in computer science. He makes games with an emphasis on rhetoric and systemic expressions of queerness. He also makes bread, bots, interactive fiction, and bad jokes.

Marguerite Kalhor

artifice + superfice: two scoops of banality

the this: artifice + superfice: two scoops of banality is a series of works which highlight the sleepwalk-waltz of the user and their associated social media networks. Using the selfie as an easily produced and understood mechanism of virtual self-fashioning and communication, Kalhor explores its use as a tool of visual deception rather than a subject of personal celebration or a narcissistic phenomenon. With an assortment of image and sound editing software and the idiosyncratic content of kalhor’s social networks, the this aims to construct alternative narratives to the banal and repetitive nature of the socio-virtual sphere.

Marguerite Kalhor received her BA in art practice with a concentration in new genres and drawing from UC Berkeley. Her current research focuses on the selfie, social media and their effects. Pulling from a variety of aesthetic and conceptual sources Kalhor creates tension between seemingly irrelevant cultural themes and mass media messaging.

www.octo-mystic.com

@insteigram

@lurgemurge

Katie Green

A Place to Be

A Place to Be is a game that contemplates death and the cycles of life through a simple digital simulation.

Players are presented with a dreamlike natural world, and control an living resident. They then explore, earning points for making discoveries and surviving.

However, this is only part of a much grander cycle. A creature’s time is ever so limited. There’s only so much a single individual, limited by their bodily circumstances and sensory abilities, can accomplish before they play out their role. Nonetheless, the demand to drive this cycle dares players to strive towards their own purpose.

Katie Green is a new media artist living in Santa Cruz, California. She earned her BFA from the University of Florida in Art and Technology. Green makes digital games about death, storytelling, cats, werewolves, forests, and memory. Players are challenged to consider agency and purpose within a predetermined narrative.

www.katieagreen.com

Finley Coyl

Trace

Trace is an interactive fiction unraveling a certain authority of the American past.

Trace is a narrative questioning intersections of whiteness and queerness.

Trace is a non-linear tableau probing the remembrance of historical events across generations.

Trace is all of the above.

This project is navigated from the experience of three characters around select historically pivotal events. A combination of text, illustration, video and internet sources, Trace draws on different modes of temporality and media representation in an attempt to examine the frameworks in which particular stories are told. This project is built in Twine, a free, open-source hypertext game platform, with some additional HTML5/CSS.

Finley Coyl’s work delves into dynamics of social justice and resistance, identity and queerness, codes and hoaxes, transformation and shift. Combining drawing and photography, visual narratives, and time-based works, Coyl utilizes a hybrid of traditional and new media.

fcoyl.net

Darrell “Mc” Ruppel

Rideables

Can art provide opportunity for creative mobility and physical mobility? Darrell Ruppel’s Rideables are a series of electronically-powered performative sculptures that break down social barriers surrounding community, social engagement, the mis- and under-represented, and the underprivileged through a developing social art practice. These works serve as a platform for dialogue and interaction across diverse groups of the Santa Cruz community. Come watch videos of the processes involved in creating these sculptures, play multimedia arcade games that represent West Cliff and East Cliff, and step onto and navigate a full-scale Rideable to experience the mind altering fun that these collaborations create!

Darrell McKelvie Ruppel is a social practice artist and educator collaborating with underprivileged youth in Santa Cruz, California. Ruppel addresses sociopolitical and environmental understanding among diverse groups through performative social sculpture, videography, and interactive games. He holds a BA in art with a focus on sculpture from UC Santa Cruz.

www.darrellruppel.com