Dorkbot:81 Dorkbot Seattle 0x51 material culture

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This month is all about playing with material culture.

Ephraim Russell

My work concerns iteration: how objects enunciate their culturally determined use, their temporality, their effectuality. My objects hover in an indeterminate space between connotation and denotation, nature and culture, obsolescence and futurism, specialization and ambiguity, utilitarianism and irrelevance. Deceptively terse, inconspicuous and emphatically un-heroic, these objects absorb multiple narratives about the cultural assumptions embedded in the objects we surround ourselves with. They both conjure and disorient archetypal Post-Fordist narratives of efficiency, obsolescence, integration, individuality and progress.

Brent Watanabe & Joseph Gray - Culture V!rus

"A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus—that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects."
- Malcolm Gladwell

CultureVirus is a meta character, or “ghost in the machine”, that monitors its environment and generates responses to it from the data it perceives. The CultureVirus exists as a set of software, a website, a set of social network profiles and hardware inputs in physical space which combine to create a virtual presence that forms a meta-conceptual being, rather than a single concrete entity.

The CultureVirus is given a location, event and/or topic as a restricted realm to work within. It observes public social media that has been tagged with location data, within a set geographic range. It can be set to watch for keywords (for instance a twitter hash tags) in publicly accessible social network messages. It will also watch the streams of those wishing to “follow” it on various social networks.

The CultureVirus then alters and combines the information it observes and posts it back to its own website, its own social network profiles and the profiles/pages of individuals, organizations and events it has been set to observe. Observers of the CultureVirus in turn are then able to share and/or respond to the posts it creates, thereby creating more data-fuel for its engine.

Brent Watanabe has created computer controlled gallery installations and interactive environments for over 10 years. These installations function much like immersive video games, with living, interacting characters and objects, each with their own logic, intelligence, scoring, and goals. These elements may rely on anything from simple light or sound sensors to complex custom programming, circuitry, and Internet networking. His work has been shown in galleries, museums, and film festivals internationally.

Before joining Superfad, Brent worked at Microsoft for 11 years as a User Experience Designer/Developer. He specializes in rapid prototyping, designing and developing products from wireframe prototypes to shipped products. Brent has worked on a wide range of projects, including interactive games, learning authoring systems, apps for mobile devices, and XBOX Live educational games.

Joseph Gray is a Seattle based artist and designer. Joseph earned a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 1999, focusing in video and sculpture. Since then he has worked with digital art and design practices for both artistic projects and commercial design applications. He began learning programming working in the graphic design industry, which quickly led to creating custom software and hardware tools for art installations and visual performances. He currently works at Superfad in Seattle as their Lead Creative Developer.

Joseph's sculptural and performance work has been exhibited at Unit B Gallery in San Antonio, TX; Meridian Gallery and The Lab in San Francisco, CA and a multitude of venues in the Pacific Northwest including Ghost Gallery, 911 Media, Bumbershoot and the Seattle Art Museum Gallery. Joseph has applied his technical skills to assist other artists as well including SuttonBeresCuller's exhibit PanOptos at the Henry Art Museum and more recently a toolkit for artist Gary Hill to support a performance/exhibition at the Museo MARCO in Vigo, Spain. He has also taught workshops at 911 Media Arts Center, Metrix Create Space and created an online course for O’Reilly Media on Processing and Arduino for creatives.