New Site in Development
New Site in Development
New Site in Development
Corpus Phallosum is an interactive installation currently being developed by August Luhrs and Dave Fulmer, for placement at Burning Man 2019.
Video shown is from prototype made June 2018 to demo music and animation properties. Renders are from initial design, which has since changed slightly.
Renders by August Luhrs, using Sketchup. Drawing by Dave Fulmer.
Jackson Botgess is a twitter bot that tweets out quintains harvested from acclaimed poet Jackson Burgess’ body of work. I used Tracery and Cheap Bots Done Quick, frankenstein-ing hundreds of phrases collected from over 200 of Burgess’ poems.
https://twitter.com/JacksonBotgess
Thanks to Kate Compton and V21!
Tracery source at:
https://cheapbotsdonequick.com/source/JacksonBotgess
I think a near constant awareness of one's own mortality is an inspiring, motivating, (soul-crushing), and ultimately perspective-focusing endeavor that everybody should undertake. That's why I made a wearable to help me!
In short, it's a wrist-worn Adafruit Circuit Playground that displays a randomly generated (but statistically informed) number of days I have left to live. Fun!
Basic premise is: it operates on code that randomly generates these days based on an actuarial table I found that gave me the probability I would die in various age blocks. So every now and then it'll change -- one day it'll say I have 23,454 days left, another only 19. And it's all on a randomized timer as well, so I never know when it'll change, allowing it to catch me off guard and hopefully make me shift perspective in that moment and internalize that life expectancy.
I was inspired by a quote I found in Alan Watt's "The Book",
"The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ … of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them..." -- G.I. Gurdjieff
and thought it would be cool to make this "organ" into a device I could wear.
https://www.instructables.com/id/Deathwatch-Wearable-Life-Expectancy-Timer-Using-Ad/
https://github.com/DeadAugust/deathwatch/blob/master/deathwatch_sketch
a dance-to-divine text generator
by Trisha Chhabra, August Luhrs, and Claire Yuan
made for CIID's Machine Learning for Interaction Design class, July 2017, taught by Andreas Refsgaard and Gene Kogan
Inspired by the Oracle of Delphi, the High Priestess who served as a conduit through which the God Apollo could speak, we created a tool that allows a user to give their god or gods an offering in the form of a dance and receive a personalized message from the divine.
The basic premise is -- a kinect paired with Wekinator tracks the user's dance (mainly just hand height) and will send a single message to a processing sketch that will run torch-rnn on a terminal, seeded by a unique word obtained from the dance. The RNN will then spit out a religious sounding message.
Our RNN was trained on five major religious texts (The KJ Bible, The Quran, The Gita, The Gospel of Buddha, and The Book of Mormon) for around 500 epochs (so, not long enough).
https://twitter.com/oracleofdelphai
https://github.com/DeadAugust/OracleOfDelph-AI
“More Do” was a durational/endurance performance art piece where I stayed on a tarp for 12 hours and people came in and out to join a never ending process of creation and destruction. I scavenged trashed furniture from the streets of L.A. and with axes, sledgehammers, and cinderblocks, my collaborators and I broke down the objects and repurposed them into toys, sculptures, canvases, and whatever else we could think of, over and over and over.
Shown are stills from the first and last hours. We eventually ended up building a performance-activated trash sculpture made of pieces from the day's various creations. We ceremoniously destroyed it at the end of the 12 hours.
St. Squishy’s Summer Camp for Wayward Children
a burning man theme camp
Every August we bring 10,000 multi-colored, plastic balls to the Black Rock desert and set them up within a pentagonal wooden ball pit lined with sound-reactive LEDs, all under a big blue Geodesic Dome, so kids (of all ages) can come by 24/7 to relax and have a blast. Play is so vital to a healthy and happy life, so we make it our mission to create space for joy. My co-lead and I have the responsibility of taking an empty plot of land in the desert and transmuting it into an oasis that can house, feed, and entertain dozens of people for over a week. This work involves everything from intense off-site planning and transportation logistics, to technical architectural design and construction in a harsh environment with 80mph dust storms, to learning how to lead groups in times of crisis and facilitate non-violent communication when everyone is exhausted, dehydrated, and hot. We have events and workshops throughout the week, art installations, and most importantly, a camp culture that supports an inclusive and consensual space for all. It’s essential to me to create spaces like this where a slew of misfits, outsiders, and “wayward children” can come together and feel like they belong -- to create homes.
for Felly's Nov. 2017 country-wide tour: Strawberry Season
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2848adRcxvgWNRcz1g1tQD
The 3 pairs of infinity mirrors were designed to go on stage and automatically change colors with each new song in Felly's show. Lined with neopixels and connected via an Arduino, they received signal from the DJ triggering the next song on his MIDI controller, which sent data through Abelton and Max 4 Live, with the Arduino eventually receiving a serial message that triggered the color change. With help from Dylan Brown and Chris Robinson, I took the project from design to fabrication to wiring to coding to implementation.
Shown are pictures from the process, including before final installation of the front acrylic.
Arduino code inspired by a sketch from ITP's Tom Igoe.
A puzzle box I was comissioned to make for Countdown Live Escape Games -- it was a 1-4 player game that would take 30-60 minutes and ran off of four arduinos housed within a military cargo crate. All the mechanisms/triggers/locks etc were self-contained, so it was portable and had that magical feeling of being able to press a button on one side and have a panel pop open on the other.
Some elements: a RFID-sensor activated maglock, a magnet maze, a 3-D printed labyrinth, a keypad, several buttons/switches, and a couple timers/displays.
Pictures shown are all from construction and alpha playtesting. No pictures of final project are available due to contractual obligations.
Game Intro:
"Hello. My name is Agent Harrington and I represent a certain underground organization of a criminal nature. We have hired *cough*kidnapped*cough* you all as you are the best cryptologists and safe-crackers in the country. Your task is to pass the defenses contained within this high-security government cargo box and recover the weapon inside. We hijacked a military caravan leaving New Mexico that we believe was transporting extraterrestrial technology – alien tech that the U.S. Government plans to weaponize and deploy against its enemies. If you all are able to uncover this top-secret cargo, we will sell it on the Dark Net, making ourselves – and you all, of course – billionaires. If you fail, you will be disposed of."
Player's Manual:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Bgv3zZBSOG70tcmOpCF-FIV0joQMIyFe
In order displayed:
1&2) A pair of MIDI gloves I made for two musician friends. Based on an Adafruit tutorial.
3) A neopixel lined fanny pack with a zipper-switch, made for my cat-friend.
4) Two LEDildo strap-ons I made for two friends for Burning Man. Rainbow glow (featured) and sound-reactive LED functions.
5&6) A wrist-mounted “Connection Game” where two people competitively ask each other questions to get to know each other better.
An 8-minute blindfolded acro-yoga performance for Sokamba Performing Arts Company's Fall 2014 Show: Echo.
My partner Tonatiuh Elizarraraz and I were exploring questions related to connection: What experiences could come out of bumping into a stranger on the street? What is the process of developing a relationship of trust with a new partner? What is the best way to balance vulnerability and safety in relationships?
“Risky Click” is a hidden-role semi-cooperative strategy card game for 3-7 players that divides a group of friends into the USERS, a hacker-force attempting to steal some files and save the world, and one VIRUS, the deceptive rogue agent attempting to stop them at all cost. I was honored to have been selected to showcase Risky Click at Indiecade 2017 this past October, and plan on releasing a print-and-play version online in early 2018.
Rulebook:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQJkvJvQ5evF4fHlQUtTX3kN-YMDrDbcM2QFII9dn37G0d1vCss1Wvc1Ubq6kslZI64Dvt-g1yY6PKt/pub
In August of 2016 I fabricated a 24' diameter 3V 5/8 geodesic dome by myself in the span of four days. This included sourcing the EMT pipes, cutting them with a band saw, hammering the strut ends by hand with a mini sledge hammer, using a drill press to bore the bolt holes in the struts, and then coating the ends with anti-rust paint.
In 2016 I had the honor of starting a Los Angeles chapter of world-famous street performer Matthew Silver's radical artform of "Looping". Looping can best be described as "acting weird in public" but the movement celebrates play, interaction with the crowd, and the breaking down of oppressive social norms -- allowing people to be vulnerable and courageously express themselves within a supportive community. Some participants describe the experience as one of the most empowering and life-changing activities they have undertaken.
The video is from our biggest event, when Matthew Silver flew across the country to join us for a loop on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Free Gumbo was a production company / artist collective that sought to use absurd interactive art to empower, entertain, and challenge our participants. Our motto was "the audience is our medium", and some highlights of events/installations include:
Pasta Cult -- a showcase of our “greatest hits” installations, with a surprise midnight procession where fire-dancers, opera-singers, and our whole collective chanted starchy prayers as we bestowed angel hair-pasta onto the crowd, finally launching 350 lbs of noodles into the sky, starting a food fight of truly awesome proportions
Basement Admission -- a mind-bending interactive play where actors actively engaged with audience members, making them a part of the post-apocalyptic story as everyone ran around our stage, a real student house with every room containing simultaneous scenes
The Paint Balloon Shooting Range (feat. the taser-ignited dildo cannon)
A snowball fight in downtown L.A.
The Oblivion Room
Kiddie pools full of Oobleck
The Human Kaleidoscope
The Abyss
The River Styx Experience
A naked paint performance
The Slingshot Mural
The Human Synthesizer
An Oobleck Drum Kit
Marshmallow Catapult
The Spiderweb
The Gumbo Pareidolia Initiative
Vegan Jello Wrestling
and countless Midnight Surprises
"Find the Meaning" was a performance/installation/game I did for MEZCLA's one year anniversary show at Art Share LA in February of 2017. After a monologue on the relationship between artist and audience and their joint responsibility to create meaning from art -- the crowd was sent on an easter egg hunt to "find meaning". Once they had found an egg and the random message found within they were asked to collaborate and make our installation sufficiently "meaningful".
La Valentina was a ride-share bike trailer made out of IKEA furniture scavenged from the curbs of L.A.. Built through trial and error engineering, Cecilia Sweet-Coll and I brought it to Burning Man 2016 to provide cushioned taxi rides for people.
