Elliot Anderson & Jim Bierman & Danny Scheie

For an entire year, the DANM Mechatronics Group partnered with the Performative Technologies Group to create a collaborative research cohort to develop interactive art and design projects as part of the “Monuments and Entropy” project.

The work began with Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey as a way of understanding movement, time, place, the monument and entropic conditions. Smithson operates as both camera and guide, where the reader/viewer is led through a landscape of impressions and reflections. The work is both textual and visual, which is the reason we are brought along on a tour. Given the structure and ways of seeing and understanding landscape, the text provides a rich foundation for dramaturgy and the creation of visual imagery. Our proposal was to have the graduate students create a performative “non-trip to a site from a Non-site,” creating space and giving physical shape to the concepts of Robert Smithson’s text, through re-staging / reconstructing a local entropic monument.

The students were encouraged to explore opportunities to address larger socio-political issues like climate change, destruction of landscapes and environments within this framework. They were also asked to reflect on their experience of the “monumental” in their daily lives. This conception of the monumental would include institutions and political conditions and conflicts.

The research group applied a systems based approach for fabricating functional experimental art devices that combined principles of sculpture, kinetics, electronics, motion control, sensors, actuators, motors, and other control devices with Arduino Boards using Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing as the primary programming languages. The fabrication methods included, woodwork, metalwork, moldmaking, and rapid prototyping to build and advance iterations of the mechatronic platform. The conceptual framework of the projects created by the Mechatronic’s group were developed in response to the art and science research topics chosen by the cohort.

The project group met weekly to focus on the design and prototyping of tangible user interfaces in order to create meaningful correlations with user gestures, controller interface, and the output of that controller as it related to the project theme. Interaction design concepts included perceived affordances, translation of physical action into digital information, and user observation. Applicants selected for the project group were required to demonstrate skills in 3D modeling and animation, art, music, gaming, programming, video, engineering, robotics, and design.

The outcome of the project group would be an interactive performative work, incorporating sound, animation and live action. The work could have been a traditional theatrical production or a collection of site-specific smaller works that would constitute a “theater-as-tour.” There were a number of opportunities for local sites to explore, both as content for the work and also as possible venues to perform/enact the work. Entropic sites such as the decommissioned cement plant in Davenport, the fabled “Santa’s Village” in Scotts Valley, or and the abandoned settlement on Año Nuevo Island all have rich histories and complex landscapes, but also are environmentally complex. Año Nuevo Island is a marine sanctuary and the cement plant requires environmental remediation. These sites provided an opportunity for student researchers to work with historians and scientists throughout the one-year project. After careful consideration, the Davenport Cement Plant was selected as the research cohort’s Entropic site of Inquiry.

SPRING 2017

“El Muro” – a Ceremony (Political Pop-up Performance with Projection Mapping)