For years, magicians have been showing us that playing cards are more then just tools for games - they are instruments with which we can transform chance and fate into impossible reality. In this project, the interface is a simple deck of cards, and the goal is to transform them with the same spirit of the eager magician. These cards make music and they tell stories. When they are face down, nothing happens, but when you flip them over, a wild, impossible world appears before your eyes.
Zachary Lieberman's work uses technology in a playful and enigmatic way to explore the nature of communication and the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible. He creates performances, installations, and on-line works that investigate gestural input, augmentation of the body, and kinetic response.
Working with collaborator Golan Levin, he created a series of installations - "Remark" and "Hidden Worlds" - which presented
different interpretations of what the voice might look like if we could see our own speech. These were followed with "Messa Di Voce," a concert performance in which the speech, shouts and songs of two abstract vocalists were radically augmented in real-time by interactive visualization software. The collaborators have toured and exhibited their works widely, much to the delight of their audiences. Lieberman's installation / performance "Drawn," in which live painted forms appear to come to life, rising off the page and reacting to the world around them, recently won awards in the Ars Electronica and CYNETart competitions. Most recently, he presented "Opensourcery," collaboration with Spanish magician Mago Julian, in which open source software is combined with traditional close-magic to create a completely new realm of tricks.
Lieberman is currently developing a suite of software for disabled students that transforms their movement into an audio-visual response as a means for performance and self-expression. He is also collaborating with Theo Watson on an open source toolkit, openFrameworks, for creative coding in c++.
http://www.thesystemis.com/
Theodore Watson is an artist, designer and experimenter whose work is born out of the curiosity and excitement of designing experiences that come alive and invite people to play. Watson’s work ranges from creating new tools for artistic expression, experimental musical systems, to immersive, interactive environments with full-body interaction. His recent work includes the Graffiti Research Lab's Laser Tag, laser graffiti system, and Funky Forest, an immersive interactive ecosystem for young children. Watson works together with Zachary Lieberman on openFrameworks, an open source library for writing creative code in C++. Watson's work has been shown at MoMA, Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Sundance Film Festival, Res Fest, REMF, Cinekid, Montevideo, OFFF, SHIFT, ICHIM, The Creators Series, Deitch Projects, Eyebeam, Pixel Gallery, Museum N8 Amsterdam.
http://muonics.net
