DANM MFA 2018 – Digital Arts and New Media MFA Exhibition

Ann Altstatt

A Crystalline Quilt for the Thick Present

A Crystalline Quilt for the Thick Present is a multimedia installation centered on a sculptural assemblage of materials salvaged from the Dimeo Lane landfill in Santa Cruz. Through the formal metaphors of a crystal lattice and textile quilt, this work uses the landfill site as a case-study in the layered, entangled, superimposed nature of time, and proposes the ordering and reordering of matter as a record of these complex temporalities. A Crystalline Quilt invites the viewer to join and be implicated in this investigation by exploring the installation through a media-rich virtual interface that reveals the material histories of found objects.

Ann Altstatt is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on geologic and non-linear time, the intersections of scientific inquiry and mysticism, and the hidden stories of everyday objects. Ann lives in the historic floodplain of the San Lorenzo river with her partner, their young daughter, a cat, a dog, five chickens and innumerable termites.

Parul Wadhwa

Sandbox of Memory

Sandbox is a story of personal memory. The accidental discovery of a forgotten briefcase leads Navdha Malhotra to discover the lost identity of her grandfather, a refugee from the partition of India. What she unravels is a treasure trove of identity. His refugee documents, degree certificates, and personal journal entries reveal to her the man he was during India under British colonial rule, and his eventual status as a “political sufferer” from partition.

This virtual reality piece offers viewers an immersive experience of the life of Malhotra’s grandfather, as reflected in the refugee documents he left behind. The viewers interact and play in the environment, embarking on an experiential journey that leads them to audio narratives from the granddaughter, recounting her thoughts as she discovered her grandfather’s history for the first time.

Parul Wadhwa is a new media artist and documentarian. Her work blurs the boundaries between film and digital technology to create immersive environments. Her research interests include interactive digital storytelling, virtual reality, and she is committed to the use of new technologies for social impact.

Ian Newman

Gross Domestic People of the 21st Century

Gross Domestic People of the 21st Century (GDP21) is a transmedia archive comprised of photographs, video, audio, text, and digital sketches of American workers. As an act of collective empowerment positioned against centralized economic authority, the artist collaborated with a range of American workers to construct an alternative narrative for contemporary labor. The archive serves as a community space for workers to express their identity at work and illustrate the impact of neoliberal values in contemporary American social and economic systems.

Ian Newman is a transdisciplinary artist and labor activist who explores the effects and artifices of economic and social systems. He is from New York.

Tony Assi

Gaze Relations

Gaze Relations illustrates the difference between how the human eye and computer vision algorithms perceive the body. Gaze-tracking software records where the viewer is looking and reconstructs the gaze path, demonstrating the complexity and nuances of human perception. In contrast, computer surveillance employs body detection algorithms to reduce the human form to a set of simple, rectangular patterns that represent a computational model of a body. Displayed on two identical high-resolution monitors, this unconventional comparison reveals the mechanics and underlying processes of human and machine vision that normally go unseen.

Tony Assi is an artist, performer, and designer working at the intersection of visual art and computer vision. His work demonstrates art practice as an interdisciplinary approach to using software critically and creatively to investigate social and technological phenomena.

Photo Credit: Kathleen Deck

Lindsay Moffat

We Are All The Same But Different

We Are All The Same But Different reveals the systematic suffering of industrially farmed animals. Presenting viewers with the realities of animal agriculture, it asks them to challenge their current attitudes and reach new conclusions about how human society treats animals it deems consumable property.

The work includes stop-motion animation, footage of animals growing up inside the factory farm system, and an experiential, interactive installation component. The artist’s own story about the inner workings of factory farming offers viewers a personal narrative and relationship to her subject. Based on a foundation of activism, the work encourages a different approach by viewers who leave the installation with a change of heart and a desire to create positive transformation in the world.

Lindsay Moffat is and artist/activist investigating the connections between human and non-human animals. Focusing particularly on how humans view animals that are farmed for consumption. Through video and animation Lindsay explores the complicated layers of this controversial topic; while confronting the parallels between the treatment of marginalized people and living beings born into the factory farming system.

Photo Credit: Kathleen Deck

Carinne Knight

Presence Interference

Presence Interference is an interactive and immersive installation which illustrates an energetic and telematic system of communication between the human body and the environment. Each participant becomes both a transmitter and receiver, thereby creating a feedback loop of biotic data. By wandering close to a geodesic structure animated by a 360 degree, long exposure, timelapse image, viewers trigger various changes in the projected ecology. Inspired by biophoton theory and technoetics, Presence Interference visualizes a relational light spectrum between living entities through an abstract narrative of a water cycle within California’s redwood forests and coastal landscape. A contemplative space emerges to investigate anthropocentric interference within the natural world.

Carinne Knight explores the ephemeral imprints living entities leave upon landscapes by creating meditative spaces for reflection. As a digital artist and photographer specializing in 360° imagery, she integrates transcendental theories, ecological studies, and biotic relationships with conceptual art, physical installations, and virtual reality.

Colleen Jennings

Virtual Apparitions, Digital Ghosts, Manifested Networks

Virtual Apparitions explores the transfer of identity through networks by examining the physical manifestation of virtual bodies using platforms that support congenial, friendly, romantic, or intimate relationships over long distances. Virtual bodies, including avatars, social media profiles, or video platforms, do not relay intimacy or subtle social cues; however, as technology advances, the gaps between the corporeal and virtual continue to diminish. The work visualizes the extended social network as a physical presence through the use of video, sound, and sculpture. In the cacophony of voices, presence is indeterminable, focus is scattered, and the network pulses with artificial liveliness.

Colleen Jennings is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on emerging relationships between technology and visual culture. Virtual Apparitions is the culmination of the artist’s growing interaction with social media platforms that enable and encourage long distance relationships through visual manifestations of virtual bodies.

Christophe ivins

CRYOSPHERE: Frozen in Time

CRYOSPHERE: Frozen in Time presents still and moving images, narrated by letters written to a past self, to articulate the encounter between the half-century-old artist and the two-and-a-half-million year old cryosphere, the solid water of Earth.

Glaciers advance and recede. Memories of three short decades fast forward and rewind in funerary remembrance. The memoriam offers viewers an intimate, one-sided glimpse of love lost to a changing landscape.

The artist’s three-screen installation offers a meditative space for considering ice sheets — now vanishing on a human time scale — and allows viewers to contemplate the coinciding deaths of humans and the cryosphere.

Christophe ivins has worked on visual effects for Titanic, Avatar, and Life of Pi. He has shot and operated camera for Noah and Oscar winner West Bank Story, and in locations including Asia, the glaciers of Alaska, and in Europe with NATO Peace Implementation Forces.

Photo Credit: Kathleen Deck

Simon Boas

No in Disguise

Produced in collaboration with Kris Blackmore

No in Disguise is a procedurally generated video installation that features men reading and responding to transcripts of conversations by the artist and his collaborator with dating app users who expressed harmful attitudes toward women. It responds to the cultural anxiety over the shifting dominant narrative about gender and power dynamics in the United States, where critical responses to the #MeToo movement have argued that the harassment of women is merely the product of a deviant male minority. The voices and physical features of the readers in the video are deconstructed and recombined into a patchwork of faces that represent a male identity that is simultaneously specific and general. Every viewing presents a new series of faces.

Simon Boas is a socially engaged data and video artist whose work investigates permissions and nuance at the intersection of technology and personal life. His practice is largely informed by his experience as a journalist and documentary filmmaker. He has recently presented his work in Amsterdam, Rome, and San Francisco.