Emerge

[video src= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huvVO18c8Hw align: right height: 220] Emerge relies heavily on viewer interactivity. It features childish cartoon figures that are projected onto a wall. Visitors control the movement of the figures and change them through these interactions. The figures in this piece can be seen as fables about our own daily struggles and activities as they move, expand, and escape. In Emerge each character is inside of an individual chamber and this examines, in a humorous way, the illusions that drive us and the small worlds we confine ourselves to. They cover all available surfaces, reacting to viewer’s intrusions into their small worlds. Emerge is part of artist Brian Knep’s Exempla series and is the first item in the adjacent video.

Healing Pool

 

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The Healing Pool by Brian Knep is a six channel interactive video that was installed in 2008. A glowing pool of organic patterns move and pulse. As a person walks across the video the pattern tears and then continues to rebuild itself. However, the pattern never returns to its original form. Each person who walks across this work leaves a scar. The regenerative piece holds a record or a memory of every interaction it has as it constantly evolves. This work is part of Knep’s healing series and this work investigates artificial intelligence and artificial life. Of this work Knep says, “with these pieces I am focusing on the complexity possible with very simple rules. The patterns and their growth are completely emergent phenomena; they arise from the mathematical equations that the software simulates.”