VIDA 7.0 - Healing Series

Brian Knep
Healing Series
USA

The Healing Series is a set of interactive floor pieces that explore responses to the change caused by interaction.

The series is currently made up of three separate but similar interactive floor pieces. They are dynamic and change in response to visitors. When a piece encounters a foreign body, such as a gallery visitor, the pattern on it pulls away, creating a wound. When the foreign body leaves, the pattern heals itself and the wound closes, but each piece heals itself in a different way.

In Healing #1 the sides of the wound never actually touch. A scar forms -- a memory of the interaction between the visitor and the mat. Over time the scar may be obliterated, but its effect on the pattern's growth is permanent. The pattern looks the same qualitatively, but it never looks exactly the same as it did before the interaction.

Healing #2 is minimal and meditative, with the mat oozing over the wound caused by visitor interaction. The mat heals itself until only the essence of each scar is left. Eventually this essence also disappears, leaving a solid glowing mat.

In Healing #3 the reaction is more violent, with the pattern pulsating and quickly reforming over the wounds. Again, as in Healing #1, the pattern is forever changed by the interaction with the visitor, but visitors' long-term effects on the pattern are less visible.

The pieces in the series are about interactions. They are an attempt to distill and explore the changes that happen when things interface with each other, whether it's two people talking, a person walking through the woods, wood rotting underwater, or other types of interaction. The contact causes changes in all participants, and so has a destructive quality, but change forces growth, and so has a regenerative quality.

Each piece is playful and encourages visitors to explore it in different ways. Some approach it meditatively, walking across the carpet slowly and then watching it heal. Some play with it like a pet, others try to destroy or 'kill' it. Some stop to dance, lie down, or roll on the carpet, watching the pattern react.

Others place objects, like scarves, umbrellas, even pets, on the surface to see what happens. They learn to push and pull the pattern, and can coerce it into different shapes. They experiment, trying new ways to interact with the piece, and they watch and learn from each other. In collaboration, they might even be able to destroy the entire pattern, forcing it to grow from scratch. In all these ways, they interact not only with the carpet but with each other, creating changes and forcing growth.

BIO

Brian Knep is an artist creating works that explore physical and spiritual relationships. He combines art, architecture and science to create pieces that react to visitors' behaviors and try to encourage interaction among people, even strangers.

Brian has shown internationally, including at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, the Insa Art Center in Seoul, Korea, the Lowry Centre in Manchester, England, and the Haus der Musik in Vienna, Austria. He often collaborates with leading-edge technology organizations, including Mitsubishi Electric Research and the MIT Media Lab to design and create interactive experiences, and he helped found Nearlife, a design firm focused on museum exhibits. He previously developed effects and production software for feature films such as Jurassic Park, and was awarded two Academy Awards in science and technology for his work at Industrial Light & Magic.

Brian helped organize the Collision Collective, an art/technology group based in Cambridge, MA, and co-curated several of their exhibitions. He has published in computer-graphics and human-interaction journals, and has spoken at both SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI. Brian graduated with honors from Brown University, where he received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees.

Statement

Every day we interact with dozens, if not hundreds, of machines and machine-made objects. Most of the tools we use were formed in molds and contain engineered materials, such as plastic, and we're starting to interact with more computer-enabled objects and environments, such as cell-phones and "smart" cars. These can be beautiful, and can enhance our lives, but they often lack something found in their natural, or hand-made, counterparts.

The satisfaction we get from hand-made objects and natural environments is hard to qualify, and not something we easily get from technology. When you hold a cup made with loving attention by a potter, you make a connection with his or her soul. With a machine-made object, the connection to another life is diminished or absent. Likewise, face-to-face interactions with people sharing the same physical environment provides something that is lacking in remote and anonymous interactions, such as we often have on the internet.

My work explores these boundaries—the similarities and differences between a hand-made bowl and an injection-molded bowl, between a wood chair and a plastic chair, between face-to-face communication and virtual communication. Can high-tech objects have the soul of natural objects? Can our interactions with these objects satisfy us as deeply as our interactions with each other and our environment?

I've been trying to find what I think of as the "soul" in technology by creating works that, though obviously man-made, show the complexity, in behavior and aesthetics, of natural objects. Works that interact with people and encourage interaction among people, even strangers.