eCommons

 

Coleman, Beth; and Howard Goldkrand

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Our work is interdisciplinary, combining media installation, moving bodies, sculptural objects, software programming, and political objectives. In a sense, we understand ourselves to be making art as context providers, creating dynamic architectures out of the materials of contemporary culture. We like to think that we can "steal time"--that is take time out of daily routine or habitual pattern and open it up to moments of the unaccountable, of delight, and unpredictable potential.

We often begin a project with a conceptual gesture that is then translated to form. For instance, the Mobile Stealth Unit (sample work 1) began as an imagination of a cloud of sound that could recast itself into shapes and rooms constructed from its own frequencies. As a physical object (mixed media, Workman tricycle, sound cabinet, Web camera, laptop, radio transmitter, electronics, 1999) it became a prototype for an android that gathers and disperses abstract messages of sound and image within an urban experience.

Two concepts that continue to inform our work are "cultural alchemy" and "electrotectural." Cultural alchemy speaks to the idea of diverse people working in concert, while electrotectural addresses an idea of an electronic architecture. These metaphors of recombinance and potential describe our process.

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  • Item
    2003 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal
    Coleman, Beth; Goldkrand, Howard (2006-11-15T16:43:55Z)
    Our project, Information Portraits, is an exploration of the idea that portraiture is no longer 'still life' but can be a form of dynamic distributed network. The Information Portrait project uses new media as a way to augment, converge, and experience representations of self with our shifting patterns in taste and habit. The Information Portrait project consists of three modes toward production: the mobile media studio (a real object), the space of communication (person-toperson), and interactivity (person-to-media). The media performance is the phase in the project during which the materials that make up the Information Portraits are created. The final aspect of the project is the translation of the material developed out of the performances into networked Information Portraits, which are then exhibited on a Web site. The Information Portraits are, in effect, a mapping of various individuals and their neighborhoods. The gesture is to recreate a context while creating a new media experience.