Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Shad Valley program at the University of Waterloo. I learned a lot of exciting things, and what’s called Technology Art or Interactive Art was one of them. I met Professor Rob Gorbet, who teaches at the University of Waterloo and also has a practice in interactive technology-mediated artworks. In this post, I will talk about Interactive Art and some of his very exciting works. Interactive Art is a relatively new form of art in which the artist involves the spectator in the artwork in order to achieve the desired effect. Interactive art has been growing rapidly with the use of technology; museums have started investing heavily in making such forms of art and urban centres have been installing large pieces of public art.
Connecting With The Sun
The Solar Collector is a solar-powered interactive sculpture designed by Gorbet Design in Cambridge, Ontario. It consists of twelve tall aluminium shafts and each shaft has three sets of LED lights and three solar panels for generating energy. The interesting thing about these shafts is that the angle of inclination of each shaft corresponds to the angles of the sun through the year, and that makes it also look like the familiar sine wave. The massive structure hangs over the landscape and creates a graceful curve that appears to unfold to passing motorists. During the day, the solar panels collect energy and at night there is a performance with the lights from patterns submitted by the people on the website. You can choreograph your own performance and watch it on the live webcam at www.solarcollector.ca!
What if buildings could speak?
The Hylozoic Soil is a very interesting piece of interactive art. The soil has various sensors that detect the presence of a visitor and tiny structures assembled into a tangled network of “clouds” then tremble as visitors pass. The best part about Hylozoic Soil is that it uses technology in demonstrating how artificial and natural things react with each other.
