Underfoot / Overhead

Recently I realized I should be doing more with my blog than posting about py5 releases. I can and should write more! Here's a post that's also a small step in that direction.

I have the privilege of working with Marina Zurkow to create digital art. She's an amazing artist with much experience and knowledge. I'm grateful for the opportunity to work with her. Over the past few years we have made several digital art pieces together. You can see documentation of the work in the Art section of this website.

Recently we put together a gallery show alongside Jasmine Murrell titled Underfoot / Overhead. The show is at Wasserman Projects in Detroit, Michigan, USA. It opened on April 20th and will be up until June 8th.

Professional photographs (by PD Rearick) are trickling in. Here are two.

This first photo is of The Breath Eaters (2023). This is a work depicting global particulate pollution from wildfires and fossil fuel power plants. Every known power plant (from Global Energy Monitor) over 50 MW capacity is represented, each emitting a plume of particulate matter into the atmosphere. The particulate matter is transported around the world by the wind. Wind data comes from NOAA. The wildfire data comes from NASA.

The Breath Eaters is projected onto a circular screen. This is the first time we've presented the work on a circular screen, and now that we've done this, I don't ever want to see it any other way. Standing in front of this, in person, is beyond stunning.

The large hanging prints you see to the right of The Earth Eaters are AI-assisted images made by Marina. More information about them will be available on Marina's website soon. The small installation on the floor in the far corner is a work by Jasmine Murrell.

The second photo is of The Earth Eaters (2024). This we are presenting as a work in progress. The Earth Eaters addresses the destruction of the earth by the mining and extraction of metals and minerals. Three of the seven screens you see are playing videos in a loop. The other four screens show a 3D terrain surface of actual mining locations, all being destroyed by miners. The four screens are each running separate Processing Sketches, all perfectly in sync and aligned to form the larger composite image.

Both of these works use Processing with py5 in Processing mode. All of the realtime data acquisition and processing is done in Python.