Dorkbot:10 Untitled

Ellen Ziegler, “Chemistry Is The Emotion Of Matter”: Whether working as an artist, collaborating on a public art project or bossing corporate CEOs as a graphic designer, chemistry (literal and metaphorical) has been vital to the work of Seattle-based artist Ellen Ziegler (http://www.ellenziegler.com). Her work is shown locally and nationally, and includes installations incorporating water as a subject and medium, large works on paper using chemically-altered light-sensitive media, and public artworks, among them fountains and water features. Ellen will talk about her “new and used” works and the processes she has evolved to create them. In her own words, “When I place objects on light-sensitive surfaces in the sun, I never know how the image will turn out. Or whether it will. Processing the materials with a garden hose, I watch the objects appear as transformed ghosts. When I draw on the images with household chemicals or power tools, unexpected reactions occur. Chemistry is the emotion of matter. With these processes, form filters through the semi-permeable membrane of imagination.”

Shawn Brixey, “Too Many To List Here”: Associate Professor, Associate Director, extreme brush-hog wrangler and founder of the University of Washington’s newly-established research center and PhD program in Digital Arts and Experimental Media, Shawn Brixey, will talk about his extraordinary range of research projects, all of which marry art and technology in new and fascinating ways. Shawn has exhibited these works nationally and internationally, from Documenta to Karlsruhe, Germany, to the Chicago Art Institute, has been widely reviewed and was a recipient of a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for New Media. Past and present works include “Eon”, which uses the mysterious phenomenon of sonoluminescence - the process by which sound in water can be converted directly into light - and the Internet, extending his current artistic research in the fields of telepresence and telepistemology, and "Secret Agents", a collaborative, commissioned, networked e-opera.http://www.washington.edu/dxarts/faculty_home.php?who=brixey tells you more.

Toby Paddock, Laura MacCary and Kevin Hilbiber (and possibly more), “Sensing People, Part 1 (AKA Non-Contact People-Sensing)”: Local artists, technophiles and returning dorkbot-sea favourites Toby Paddock (http://www.seanet.com/~tpaddock/), Laura MacCary (http://www.maccary.com) and Kevin Hilbiber (http://www.houseofscience.com) will take you on a mystical journey through the techniques that allow you to use electricity to tell if people are nearby without actually touching them, and the artistic possibilities that these techniques have sparked in their own practices. They’ll discuss the Yin of Capacitance and Yang of Inductance, and manifestations of these phenomena from S. Lyn Goeringer and Otis Fodder’s theremins to Laura’s amazing, interactive, woven sculptures to the works-in-progress and completed projects in Toby’s workshop and Ballard’s magnificent House of Science.

The microphone is yours! Instead of our usual performance, we’re handing the floor over to you, to talk about whatever you’d like. Some example topics:

Ellen Ziegler: “When I place objects on light-sensitive surfaces in the sun, I never know how the image will turn out. Or whether it will. Processing the materials with a garden hose, I watch the objects appear as transformed ghosts. When I draw on the images with household chemicals or power tools, unexpected reactions occur. Chemistry is the emotion of matter. With these processes, form filters through the semi-permeable membrane of imagination. Making these images has yielded a new vocabulary for work on an intimate scale, as well as in installations that wrap the viewer in his or her own transformed peripheral vision.“ Ellen Ziegler is an artist working in Seattle, WA. Her work includes installations incorporating water as a subject and medium, large works on paper using chemically altered light-sensitive media, and public artworks, among them fountains and water features. http://www.ellenziegler.com.

Shawn Brixey is Associate Director of the University of Washington's newly established research center and PhD. program in Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Previously, he was founder of the Digital Media Program at the University of California Berkeley, and Director of their Center for Digital Art and New Media Research. A graduate of MIT's, CAVS/Media Lab, Brixey has exhibited art and technology works internationally, including Documenta, the Deutscher Kunstlerbund, Karlsruhe, The Cranbrook Art Museum, The MIT Museum, The Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, The Chicago Art Institute, The 1998 Winter Olympics, The first American Design and Architecture Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, and the Berkeley Art Museum. He has received all levels of major grants and awards to support his research including: The Boxlight Corporation, The National Institute of Health, The Intel Corporation, Silicon Graphics, Newport/Klinger Research Corporation, Apple Computer, IBM GmbH, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Leica and Hughes Aircraft. In 2003 he was honored with a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for New Media, past fellows include Bill Viola and Gary Hill. He lectures widely in the U.S and Europe on new and emerging media art forms. Critical writing and reviews of his work have been featured in diverse sources, including The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Stranger, Wired Magazine, Surface Magazine, The Cincinnati Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Art News, WolkenKratzer Magazine (Germany), Smithsonian World Television, and KQED/MSNBC Radio. Significant review of his work is included in Thames and Hudson's 1992 book release, Art of the Electronic Age, Leonardo/The Journal of Art, Science and Technology 2001, and a major new book release from MIT Press, Information Arts, the Intersection of Art, Science and Technology by Dr. Stephen Wilson 2002.http://www.washington.edu/dxarts/faculty_home.php?who=brixey

Toby Paddock is "just some guy that thinks hall effect sensors are kind of neat and that everyone should know about them". He also likes to listen to audio frequency magnetic fields using homemade pickup coils, but that's a different thing altogether. Tinkers with sound, electronics, and field recording, but mostly speculates about projects that never get started. Is trying to develop the "Shut Up And Solder" method of actually getting something built. He works for an aerospace electronics company in the environmental test labs and lives in Everett, WA with his wife, 2 kids, 1 fish, 2 cats, 1 dog, and a hamster. They appreciate his enthusiasm for his hobbies, however, not sharing his unique admiration of sound often send him to the garage.http://www.seanet.com/~tpaddock/

Laura MacCary is a weaver who has also been studying electronics for the last few years. Laura is interested in the idea of weaving as a ubiquitous but little-noticed technology, unvalued while still essential to human survival. Electronics is another technology that is becoming so omnipresent and so integrated with our lives that we will soon cease to notice it. However, electronics is sure to cross the boundary of our skin, and enter our bodies. Its fields already do. It is this intimate interface between people and technology that Laura examines in this series of works. Each piece in the series consists of an electronic component woven of conductive or resistive materials cast-off by industry, and a circuit designed around it. By interacting with the weaving the viewer physically enters the circuit, and the circuit passes through the viewer, blurring the boundary between them. The title of the series, Dialectric, is taken from the words dialectic, meaning the juxtaposition or interaction of two conflicting ideas or forces, and dielectric, an insulating substance or one in which an electric field can be maintained with a minimum loss of power. Laura sees these as metaphors for the participants in an interaction, and the space between them. This series is also an opportunity to collaborate with her father, longtime electronics experimenter and sculptor Lawrence MacCary, and she see the works as metaphors for aspects of their relationship, and relationships in general. http://www.maccary.com