[ISEA2015] Poster: Vicki Moulder & Michael Heidt – The Aesthetics of Activism: See-through Effect

Abstract (Poster)

Keywords: Interactive Art, Aesthetics, Code Literacy, Activism

For this demonstration the authors intend to present the Aesthetics of Activism as a work-in-progress. This interactive artwork explores the nature both of audience engagement as well as the interdisciplinary conditions of its making. The work is designed to visually represent an assemblage driven by people’s bodies that are tracked and translated into interactive collage elements via motion sensors. Images projected are composed from a mixture of algorithmically scavenged social web resources and artistically curated and altered videos. The demonstration will present a new interactivity feature that continuously tracks a body, coupling it with a distinct eyehole (a region distributing transparency), allowing one of the composition’s retrial layers to be viewed. The experience provided points towards the ways technological advances transform and shape public spaces, thereby subverting familiar strategies of activist practice while rendering possible new forms of aesthetic resistance.

  • Vicki Moulder,  Simon Fraser University, Canada
  • Michael Heidt,  Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

Full text (PDF) p. 955-956