Body Paint
Body Paint is an interactive visual piece created by Memo Akten to allow participants to create a vibrant composition by moving and dancing and having the virtual piece 'interpret' the participants movements.
Body Paint is really all about a sense of play and creativity. You perform a motion and the piece reacts by generating a certain color. You then react to its reaction to further form the piece into something even more complicated. This process continues ad infintum (forever). Creativity continues to inspire further creativity. There is no defined "end" for the piece, your version of the piece ends when you are happy with what it looks like.
"The installation is designed to work with any number of people and is scalable to cover small or large areas. The interaction is very simple – movement creates paint. Hidden in the simplicity, are many layers of subtle details. Different aspects of the motion – size, speed, acceleration, curvature, distance all have an effect on the outcome – strokes, splashes, drips, spirals – and is left up to the users to play and discover." (October 29th, 2009) Art-s-talker http://www.art-s-talker.com/blog/?p=241
This work is absolutely fascinating. While on the surface, describing what it appears to be doing is as simple as "it reacts to motion to generate painted areas," it's a lot more complicated. Every type of motion affects the piece differently, and as no two people move exactly the same way, the piece generated by the movements of any group of participants will always be unique to that group of participants. Body Paint is as much of about the playful, creative, performative, process of creating as what results from the emotional expression of the creation. Just as people do not play always play a musical instrument for the sake of composing or recording, but more for the sake of enjoying the playing of the instrument.
Why doesn't he just give them paint to throw at a canvas? Doing so would remove some of the performative element. If one has to physically land the paint on the canvas, it limits the motions one can make. The digital painting is more capable of distinguishing fine aspects of motion and making subtle differences in the piece that couldn't be accomplished by using physical paint.
Amoeba Dance is another interactive piece created by Memo Atken. In this piece, a digitally created "amoeba" reacts to audio stimulus from people "talking at it" and changes its shape depending on the audio input it receives from those interacting with it. Like Body Paint, Amoeba Dance is completely in real time, the digitally created amoeba is constantly changing and reacting based on the audio feedback it is receiving at that moment. The shape, size, and color of the amoeba are affected by the tone, cadence, volume, and number of audio stimuli it is being presented with. Playing music at it causes it to react different than talking to it, and the more stimuli it receives, the more quickly and intensely it changes its composition. Also like Body Paint, it has no defined end state, it ends for a particular participant when they decide to walk away and stop interacting.
While not an artist, Weave-Silk, or Silk, is a website that allows the userto create, save, and share their very own pieces of generative art. It is an easy to use tool that lets absolutely anyone get a feel for creating generative art, if not on the complicated level of people who do it professionally. It is a tool for the everyman to get a basic understanding of what Generative Art is. While the prior pieces are both intended for groups of people, Weave Silk is a solo piece...unless you let other people onto the computer where you've started working on it and let them modify your creation. Additionally, unlike Body Paint and Amoeba Dance, it comes with a built in way to save your work and come back and modify it later. After you leave the area of the first two pieces, your work will be overwritten by others coming and modifying the space. Pieces created in them are temporary and fleeting, like the lives of those who created them, but pieces created in Weave Silk are lasting (at least until something happens to the database they are stored in) and can be returned to at a later date.
Related Dates
2014 Jun 30-Jul 1,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Evreux, France
2013 Apr 8-2014 Apr 1,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2013 Nov 26-30,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Ajyal Youth Film Festival, Doha Film Institute, Qatar
2013 Apr 9-21,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
TIFF Kids International Film Festival, Toronto, Canada
2012 Jul 17-Aug 19,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
File Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil
2012 Apr 9-May 6,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
File Festival, Rio, Brazil
2011 Nov 18-2012 Mar 10,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Decode: Digital Design Sensations, Holon Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel
2011 May 25-26,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Johannesburg & Cape Town, South Africa
2011 Apr 9-May 8,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Bouillant festival, Vern-Sur-Seiche, France
2011 Feb 11-Apr 10,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Decode: Digital Design Sensations, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia
2010 Dec 5-19,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Yota Space Festival, St Petersburg, Russia
2010 Sep 21-Oct 3,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Cube Festival, Paris, France
2010 Jul 2-10,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Vigo Transforma Festival, Vigo, Spain
2010 Jan 27-Jun 16,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Lovebytes Digital Arts Festival, Sheffield, UK
2010 Jun 9-13,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Phoenix Spark Festival, Leicester, UK
2009 Dec 8-2010 Apr 11,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Decode: Digital Design Sensations, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK.
2009 Jun 25,
Exhibition , Body Paint,
Exhibit Festival, Venice, Italy
2009 Mar 5-8,
Exhibition ,Lecture ,Performance , Body Paint,
Clicks or Mortar? : Designing a future for cultural venues in the digital age', Newcastle, UK
