[-empyre-] more from the early days of empyre....

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Thanks Tamiko for posting.   Just wanted to add on bit of history.  When Melinda Packham first launched -empyre soft-skin space many of the first posts were introductions of each of the subscribers. Though -empyre has grown to close to 2000 subscribers strong the moderating team is dedicated to preserving the community based feeling of the list-serv.  We realize that some of you lurk more than you participate actively but we are hoping that all of you will take the opportunity to share who you are this month and then in future months take part in one of the discussions. 




See you in Washington Tamiko.   If any of you are in Washington, DC and are attending the College Art Association please stop by to see Tamiko and myself and a few other -empyre participants Nick Knouf, Claudia Pederson, Patrick Lichty and more.  The session is on Friday February 5th at 5:30 PM.  More info can be accessed here http://conference.collegeart.org/programs/augmented-reality-inventionreinvention-2/

Thanks everyone.  Renate 

On 1/28/16, 5:25 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Tamiko Thiel" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of tamiko at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hi Empyreans,

I was on empyre way back in the beginning, but seemed to have slid off it at some point - great to be back on and hearing the updates from everybody! Here are some of mine:

CAA conference, next week in Washington DC:
I hope to see some of you at the College Art Association conference in Washington DC next week! It's my first time, and I'm delighted to be speaking about my recent works at the New Media Caucus Showcase, 8-10pm on Thursday Feb. 4th, and participating in Renate Ferro's panel "Augmented Reality- Invention/Reinvention" on Friday Feb. 5th, presenting a paper on joint and individual work "Assemblage and Décollage in Virtual Public Space" together with Will Pappenheimer: http://www.newmediacaucus.org/events/

Seattle until April 17th:
Running until April 17th in Seattle is "Brush the Sky," an augmented reality (AR) Japanese calligraphy collaboration I did with my 83-year-old mother Midori Kono Thiel, a master calligrapher and well known figure in the Seattle art world. Part of the Construct\S group show of installations by Asian American women artists at the Wing Luke Museum, in the gallery Mom created beautiful calligraphic deconstructions on mylar hangings that I further augmented with layers of virtual calligraphy. Additionally we have augmented 18 sites around the city to form an alternative historical narrative from a Japanese American perspective, tracing 4 generations of my family in the Seattle area, from my great-grandfather who sold his produce in the Pike Place Market to my own memories of growing up bi-cultural in Seattle. Although AR is often used these days to overlay historical images at sites to give a then/now comparison, I have long wanted to do a work in which historical references are available on the "mARp" (AR map), but the AR experience on site is a much more poetic encounter with the multiple layers of physical space, history, memory and culture. We selected terms that express our relationship to the location, Mom transformed them into calligraphy, and I further animated, deconstructed or multiplied the calligraphy to create 360° installations at each site.
http://tamikothiel.com/brushthesky (see link to AR launch map - and videos!)

Vienna March 10th - April 8th:
The work in progress "I am Sound" is a collaboration with composer/sound artist Christoph Reiserer as part of the Digital Synesthesia project (project leaders Katharina Gsöllpointner, Ruth Schnell & Romana Schuler of the U. of Applied Arts Vienna, Jeffrey Shaw of City U. Hong Kong and Peter Weibel of the ZKM Karlsruhe). We are creating an installation that incorporates the visitor into a surveillance loop that scans their face, projects it magnified 100x onto the broken surface of a metallophone that plays a unique musical composition generated from the visitor's face data. If we get funding, we will take it to ISEA Hong Kong and hope to see you there!
http://mission-base.com/i-am-sound/
http://digitalsynesthesia.net/wp/group/

Seattle, June - August 2016:
Also very much a work in progress, "Anthropocene Gardens" is a commission for a geolocative AR installation from the Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park. For this I have been researching native plants in Washington and the expected climate changes in the Seattle area. I will be fantasizing a distopia in which augmented reality plants "mutate" to survive the radical climate changes and water level rise (the park is on the Puget Sound, just north of downtown), and deconstruct the man-made (sic) structures that encircle and cut through the park.


Bio:
Tamiko Thiel is a visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural memory. She is an internationally acknowledged pioneer in developing the dramatic and poetic capabilities of virtual and augmented realities to create spaces of memory for exploring social and cultural issues. Her virtual and augmented installations seek to reify the invisible webs of meaning that bind place and memory together into the assemblage we call “culture,” while actively engaging the viewer's kinesthetic body sense to meld this virtual imagery and the physical experience of a site into a new form of reality.

Take care, Tamiko