Islands, 2022
Exhibition Documentation
16mm film + HD Video + Kinetic Sculpture + Plinth + Stools
“Infinitely changeable, full of evanescent marble-patterned gradations, varying in every ripple, the fineness of its composition an everlasting joy to the eye. Let us try and analyze it.”
From the astronomer Marcel Minnaert’s popular 1950s text on meteorological optics, we find an intimacy of description evidence an aesthetic of scientific inquiry. Indeed, Minnaert’s empirical poetics would be cited by the computer scientist Dr. Nelson Max as an important technical reference in the creation of his 1981 Carla’s Island, widely considered the first computer-generated animation of water. Ray traced by a supercomputer at a nuclear weapons research laboratory during a summer of anti-nuclear weapons protests, Carla’s Island would go on to influence the representation of liquid in fluid-mechanics, military simulations, cinema, and video games; floating—in its algorithmic attempt at verisimilitude—the promise of a simulated world to inhabit and control.
Exhibtion History
Exhibition Documentation
16mm film + HD Video + Kinetic Sculpture + Plinth + Stools
“Infinitely changeable, full of evanescent marble-patterned gradations, varying in every ripple, the fineness of its composition an everlasting joy to the eye. Let us try and analyze it.”
Minnaert, M., Light and Colour in the Open Air. (1954)
From the astronomer Marcel Minnaert’s popular 1950s text on meteorological optics, we find an intimacy of description evidence an aesthetic of scientific inquiry. Indeed, Minnaert’s empirical poetics would be cited by the computer scientist Dr. Nelson Max as an important technical reference in the creation of his 1981 Carla’s Island, widely considered the first computer-generated animation of water. Ray traced by a supercomputer at a nuclear weapons research laboratory during a summer of anti-nuclear weapons protests, Carla’s Island would go on to influence the representation of liquid in fluid-mechanics, military simulations, cinema, and video games; floating—in its algorithmic attempt at verisimilitude—the promise of a simulated world to inhabit and control.
Exhibtion History
2022 Islands, Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria BC.
︎︎︎ 4x6 Publication
2020 Blind Pilotage, University of Toronto Art Museum, Toronto ON.
︎︎︎ Exhibition catalogue essay by Dehlia Hannah and Nadim Samman
Dry Dwellers of Eternity (Offshore Operations Simulator), 2020
10:30 min HD video loop with sound. Filmed at the Center for Marine Simulation in St. John's Newfoundland.
10:30 min HD video loop with sound. Filmed at the Center for Marine Simulation in St. John's Newfoundland.
The Far Splendour of the Yara Birkeland, 2020Kinetic sculpture
Gimballed brass oil lamp holder, servo motors, microcontrollers.
A custom playback device for a recording of the simulated motion of the first electric and autonomous container ship, the Yara Birkeland.
Gimballed brass oil lamp holder, servo motors, microcontrollers.
A custom playback device for a recording of the simulated motion of the first electric and autonomous container ship, the Yara Birkeland.
Dry Dwellers of Eternity (Carla’s Island), 20203:30 min 16mm film loop with commissioned soundtrack by Mitch Renaud, scanned and sampled from Nelson Max's original 16mm copy of the film.
Don’t Make a Wave, 2022
HD video loop of figure series from first tsunami wave simulation which appeared in the 1970 report by the US Atomic Energy Commission in response to the Amchitka Island nuclear weapons test protests.
HD video loop of figure series from first tsunami wave simulation which appeared in the 1970 report by the US Atomic Energy Commission in response to the Amchitka Island nuclear weapons test protests.
