i think people have this idea of an
artist as somebody who's locked up in an
attic and who's like
slaving away over paintings you know and
fighting against society and
and i totally disagree with that i think
that you know the more open we are and
the more
you know the more invested in sharing
and
working together the better it is
at an early stage when i started to work
with code i was really thinking about
drawing tools the fact that when you
draw on a computer it's so
you use these tools like photoshop and
illustrator where they're really
terrible compared to drawing on a piece
of paper
i was driven to try to create
tools that
transformed gesture
drawn as an early example of a project
where
you know it was a performance where i
was on stage painting and i would paint
with ink and then be able to manipulate
the paintings that i make live in front
of the audience so that that was trying
to take drawing and
and sort of mix it in this realm of
magic
i think a lot of these projects are
about building strange tools and then
really sort of letting yourself go
creating things that really unexpected
behaviors will happen
another project that i worked on was
called iq font which was with a car and
a stunt driver where we
designed a typeface and had the stunt
driver drive the letters of the alphabet
one thing that i like about
the work that i'm involved with but also
just the work of the community in
general is this idea of packing and
taking things that are in the everyday
and finding completely new uses for them
and that helps us understand what we're
living with
as i was working and making these
projects i wanted to take the things
that i was learning and share it with my
students with the idea of helping them
create projects that were like the
projects that i was making
so open firmware came about really to
create a tool for students to say you
know this is not hard like working with
software you don't need a computer
science degree i think the mental image
i have is almost like you know building
blocks and they can use it to express
their imagination and explore
it's really about trying to democratize
making art through software and to help
artists work computationally to help
computational
you know people work artistically and
that's the divide we're trying to bridge
so i was approached by the london
organizing committee for the olympics
games and was invited to come out and
take a look at hadrian's wall
hadrian's wall is this really beautiful
wall that goes across 73 miles it's one
of the longest walls in the world
and so
we were really thinking okay if you have
this wall
how could you create a system
for communicating along the wall
and if you think about what borders mean
borders are really about separating
populations right
and how could you create the opposite of
that
so we had this mental image of something
above the wall that's floating and
proposed to them to mount these balloons
that would extend across the 73 miles
and light up and pulse with color and
actually communicate with each other
we've spent a lot of time thinking about
the hardware and really designing the
the pieces that go in the balloon and we
have the radio communication devices
like fits on a very small chip and then
there's the lights inside of the balloon
but the interesting thing is that we can
actually program these so they have a
processor on here and so we can actually
control how bright the red should be or
how bright the blue should be which
makes this you know it's not only a
radio device but it's also a kind of
brain for the light itself
the audience will be invited to send
messages and the messages will light up
the balloon
seeing the color communicate from one
balloon to the next and being able to
also add your message into the system
my hope is that those key gestures are
simple enough that everybody will get a
feeling of being part of something
much larger than
you know their immediate surroundings
i just thought it was really unusual and
unique in how like
just how it was made and technology
behind it it's really inspiring and it's
like the whole technology the art stuff
i think that's pretty amazing
you know there's always this debate
about is it really interactive or is it
reactive or what does interactivity mean
i like this idea that the artwork
doesn't exist if people don't use it and
as we get better with this medium we
will be able to ask more meaningful
questions or questions that are more you
know more evocative or more poetic
and i think that these systems they are
powerful and they can have a profound
effect on people
you