Software, hardware, art – a blog of process and findings
Super happy to be spending November in-residence at the Center for New Art, part of the art program at William Patterson University. I’ll be using their giant robot arm (named Daisy) to carve a 6-foot version of the microscopic dust I digitized last year.
Last week, I started as artist-in-residence at Bell Labs. Though they have worked with artists in the past, I’m fairly sure I’m the first long-term artistic collaborator at Bell Labs since the famous Experiments in Art & Technology which brought scientists and engineers together with the likes of John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. Bell Labs was also the birthplace of the transistor, laser, UNIX, proof of the Big Bang, and the glowstick, among lots of other really cools stuff.
I’m planning to work on several large-scale pieces about wifi, radio, and EMF. Above is a shot of my very large whiteboard in the beautiful studio Bell Labs has set me up with.
I could only bring a few things that I could carry on the train my first day, but I think I made a good choice: my dancing cat coffee mug and a copy of the Art & Technology book from LACMA’s original program.
As an early experiment for a curatorial residency with the Internet Archive, I wrote some software that searches for all PDF texts on the site that contain the word “brightness” in their title or description, downloaded the files (approximately 900 PDFs), analyzed them and sorted them by overall brightness.
Above are the first pages of the brightest and darkest PDFs – a table with all the files and URLs is after the break. Download the source code here.