Poor David

UCSB Elings Hall & Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science, and Technology

This piece started as a final project for a "Fundamental Skills of Media Arts" class, where I jumped at the access to a 3D printer to explore my ideas of glitch in the physical world. I generatively modified a 3D scan of Michelangelo's David in Blender and, in the printer slicing software, purposefully removed the auto-generated supports in specific areas to encourage collapse. I also animated three different forms of destruction- shattering, overgrowth, and dissolving- in Blender to project onto the printed forms. The final piece was composed and projection mapped in TouchDesigner.

A few months later I was invited to exhibit alongside graduate students in the UCSB Media Arts and Technology graduate program. I brought the statues to show, along with the video from ".obj", an earlier piece of mine which started my interest in bending the boundary between physical and digital.

Cavern of Light

CSU Summer Arts 2022 (Fresno State University)

During a projection mapping course at Fresno State through the CSU Summer Arts program, we were presented with the opportunity to utilize LED bars and venture into pixel mapping. While the room we were exhibiting in would be full of dynamic projections meant to be a walkthrough experience, I envisioned a secluded area which people could discover and observe a complete story.

While the hardware setup was a group effort, this light show was my passion project. I gathered sound and music and edited it together in Adobe Audition before going to MadMapper to map the LEDs and build the cues. It was timed and controlled through QLab.

.obj, Transcendence, and Glitch It

UCSB Glass Box Gallery

One of the most influencial classes I've taken at UCSB has been "Glitch Art". It opened up my perspective to a way of imagining technology as an artifact to be dissected. Students in the class displayed projects in an exhibition the following quarter called "Error 404: A Glitch Art Exhibition". I presented three pieces together:

".obj" was born out of a curiosity with digital manipulations on scans of real, hand carved statues, blurring the physical-digital divide. The models were modified in both Python and Processing (Java) and finally edited and rendered in Blender.

"Transcendence" focused on image glitches, looking at three different photographs as they are destroyed (and reborn) algorithmically. I investigated different methods of glitch for each image, hoping they could transform to further embody an emotion- loneliness, brightness, and panic.

"Glitch It" was an interactive activity built in Processing where participants used the mouse to select, rotate, and pull apart a 3D model. The purpose was to expose the underlying data structure (triangular faces) and lead the viewer to use that geometry in a fun and intuitive way.