Projects

MeatBook

A project that provokes users' senses of their visceral responses. A time-based (that is, decaying) slab of meat, constructed as a book, is embedded with various sensors that cause the meat to react and quiver as the viewer approaches it. The reanimated flesh also responds with other movements and sound when users touch it. The next stage of development includes artificial intelligence and explores notions of generative art.

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Biomorphic Type™

BioMorphic Typography is Gromala's term for a family of fonts that respond, in real-time, to a user's changing physical states, as measured by a biofeedback device. Rather than one typeface, it is a postmodern pastiche of many different fonts that are continually morphing. So, for example, the font "throbs" as the user's/writer's heart beats, expands as the user breathes, and "spikes" according to galvanic skin response. In this way, users become aware of their autonomic states -- physiological states that usually remain under our conscious awareness. This project is part of a larger initiative, Design for the Senses. The goal is to develop new approaches to experiential design that focus on the senses and the phenomenological history of the body.

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Meditation Chamber

The Meditation Chamber is an immersive VR environment that provides users with real-time feedback. Wearing a head-mounted display and biofeedback device, users are guided through a series of relaxation and meditation techniques. In real-time, the audio and visuals are synced to the users' continually changing physiological states (respiration, pulse rate and sweat gland activity (a measure of calmness)). As users' approach meditative states, the hypnotic visuals dissolve to moving mist and darkness as the user relaxes. Exhibited at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies, and seen on CNN.

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Sky Reverie (2004 - present)

Artist : Jinsil Seo

’Sky Reverie’ is an immersive installation environment which meshes corporeal, spiritual and virtual domains. Here, the visitors’ consciousness is reoriented back towards that of untainted, lucid childhood. In ‘Sky Reverie’, visitors may enjoy visual and audio elements while physically playing with and in a huge inflated plastic cloud. When they stretch their hands up inside this cloud, as if they’re whispering their hopes to the sky, hundreds of stars fall into line to create a constellation triggered by fluctuations of viewers’ shadows. Meanwhile a profusion of blue LEDs, which react to visitors’ movements, facilitate people’s immersion in this atmospheric, celestial paradise. The piece’s fluorescent-

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Amputation Box (2006 - present)

Artists : David Jhave Johnston, Jinsil Seo, Diane Gromala

Amputation Box is an art installation that feeds a website.

It's just a few boxes boxes with holes in them. Holes are finger-sized, hand-sized, and head-sized. Light comes out of the holes. Every object poked into the holes is visually amputated and redisplayed as landscape or organism: horizon flesh, or creeping or flying flesh.

The Amputation Box website updates dynamically each time a new morsel of flesh video is amputated and automatically added to the archives on the server. Physical and online spaces form a continuum. The physical Amputation Boxes feed the Amputation Box website.

It is about birth, death, rebirth and how each body is part of a larger body. The embodied body and the online body.

It is a visual meditation on molecular reincarnation designed to generate nano-epiphanies. It exists virtually, physically, and mentally.

Online real-time reincarnation.

Exhibition History

New Forms Festival 2006 in Vancouver http://www.newformsfestival.com/

FILE 2006 in Brazil http://www.file.org.br

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Novel Race Car Interfaces(2006)

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AR equipment (2006)

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nite_aura (2007 - present)

Artists : Jinsil Seo, Greg Corness

Nite_aura is an audiovisual interactive installation exploring physical, auditory and visual movement in immersive environment. Since childhood, we have often imagined that we walk in the middle of space surrounded by stars and fly in the sky. We have whispered to the sky making wishes. nite_aura embodies this memory and experience allowing for visitors to whisper to the air and touch surroundings.

The structure appears as a hanging bell constructed of fiber optics and fabric. Participants enter the space by lifting one side, setting the bell in motion. The inside of the installation acts as a metaphor for private space, connection between space and people, and pathway between tangible and virtual world. Participants can continue to engage physically by pulling cords from the ceiling or touching the glowing fiber optics.

Sounds made within the structure are recorded and used to generate night ambient sounds. Granular synthesis and a set of resonant filters tuned to the harmonics of a bell are all controlled by the motion of the structure to produce the sound environment. The fiber optics disperse a shifting visual pattern into particles of light swirling around the space.

http://www.sfu.ca/~jinsils/nite_aura/

Exhibition History

NIME2007 in New York

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