Unknown Territory
The Hacktory Artist Residency and Exhibition
June 2014 - December 2014
6 artists were chosen for a 3 month residency at The Hacktory, for exploring and creating artwork. A result of a successful crowdfunding campaign and with support from the Knight Arts Foundation, the first Unknown Territory Fellowship and Artist-In-Residency program supported artists interested in creating and experimenting with art and technology such as cameras, projectors, sensors, robots, software and circuits to create new experiences and new possibilities with code, hardware and creative expression. The artwork featured in the exhibition consist of interactive works such as GPS-based music compositions and costumes, MIDI music devices, playful games, auto-generated artwork, projection mapped self-portraits, a comet observatory, self-aware smartphones and more.
Artists included in the exhibition are Michael Kiley (Philadelphia), Maximillian Lawrence (Philadelphia), Jacob Rivkin (Philadelphia), Tara Webb (Philadelphia), Robert Spahr (Illinois), New American Public Art's Bevan Weissman and Dan Sternoff Beyer (Boston/Philadelphia), Thiago Hersan (Oakland/São Paulo), and Jenna Frye (Baltimore).
The Hacktory was formed in 2007 to provide classes in topics like circuits, programming, and robotics for personal development, and to form a creative social group to collaborate with. Our mission is to inspire anyone to use technology for personal expression, and involves technology education and an atmosphere where artists, scientists, and programmers alike can feel comfortable asking questions and experimenting.
Capstone Bee Project
A collaboration with a bee keeper and a mathematician in developing a streaming realtime environment sensor for the apiarist’s beehives. We are now able to remotely “view” the bee hive via the internet, collect a range of data including an infrared video - audio feed , as well as temperature, humidity, methane, CO, alcohol, hydrogen and ozone metrics. It has been an incredible learning experience, ranging from the wonders of bee colony life and the effect the environment has on it , as well as streamlining the technology to guarantee reliability and be able to create visualization with the data.
The vision for this project is to take this pipeline of information from the beehives and recontextualize it - creating a Bee Synthesizer of sorts - at Pioneer Works. Through a range of tools , including programming frameworks like OpenCV, mechanical drawing operations, speaker arrays and projectors, a couple of humidifiers and maybe some heaters, wax, and a large bag of sugar, the goal is to bend - fold - and - manipulate these streams of data and see what takes form.
Bee patrol: How a ‘smart hive’ could save struggling pollinators [WHYY Article]