AI-generated images are generally bland and disposable. As an artist and researcher fascinated by the potential of generative AI models, this puts me in a difficult position. I have found that the outputs of these models seem to be imbued with more meaning when brought into the material world and physically handled. These collages are the product of countless iterations. From the tens of thousands of images I generated for each collage, only a few dozen were printed. By holding each photo in my hands, I was able to find the ones that managed to evoke some kind of emotion from me. These I decimated into fragments, and recombined to form something more interesting than the sum of their parts.

Phantasmagoria:

Ben collects and assembles discarded packing materials into new sculptural forms that resemble classic stone structures. Mounted on the wall in custom, contextual forms for each exhibition, they become topographical landscapes, brought to vibrant life with projection-mapped video art by Allison, merging the physical with the ethereal.

Levitations:

Ben’s innovative constructions suspend optical lenses in front of traditional flat-screen TVs. Rather than clarifying the imagery, they bend light and form, diffusing pixels and turning Allison’s incandescent video art into dimensional illusions.

I have always been fascinated by the intersection of sound and visual, and the potential for each to enhance and influence each other. While pursuing my graduate degree at MassArt, I focused on my MFA thesis, Sonic Scenery: When Sound Meets Visual, which has continued to shape my ongoing journey in this interdisciplinary realm.

In this exhibition, please enjoy my music visualization collaborations at Montclair State University (MSU) with Robert Levin, director and professor of the West African Drumming and Dancing Ensemble at MSU, and Raif Hyseni, director and professor of the Albanian Balkan Ensemble at MSU. Two video works included are created using the software Synesthesia Live which generates live visuals for music.

I Dream in CRT (v3) is a series of video paintings that feature color-morphing abstract moving images. Each video is a unique composition that combines shape, color, texture, and rhythm to create a dynamic optical experience. Drawing inspiration from abstract expressionist paintings and screensavers, the series was created using a combination of programming and digital effect software such as Touch Designer, MAX MSP, and Adobe After Effects.

This artwork embodies the concept of visual music, which explores and expands the musical form through visual imagery. Often associated with moving images in live performance settings, visual music enhances feelings of synaesthesia with colorful, abstract imagery. It externalizes the inner experiences and optical hallucinations of psychedelia for the audience.

Touchtone is an exploration of human connection through the medium of playful interaction. This piece invites participants to engage in a tactile, auditory, and visual experience that transcends specific objectives, fostering a shared sense of wonder and delight.

I created Touchtone to bring people together in a way that encourages exploration of touch—an essential aspect of human connection—without the constraints of social norms or goals. It’s a space where friends who might only hug in greeting or farewell can rediscover the simple, joyful act of touch.

By translating the sensation of touch into music and light, Touchtone challenges expectations and allows people to explore something familiar as if it were new. The piece bridges the worlds of art and science: while it offers a fundamentally human-centric experience, its creation required significant technical expertise in signal processing, electronics, and programming to bring the interaction to life. This blending of disciplines not only makes the experience possible but also deepens the sense of discovery as participants engage with the piece. Though the technical details are intentionally hidden, those who understand electrical circuits often find delight in discovering that they can form long chains of people to complete the circuit and bring Touchtone to life in unexpected ways.

"Meet your friend from another world. Gone are the days of endless scrolling, your digital friend is here just for you. Say hello!"

Ideas in a Room

These room sized constructions were made using found objects I scavenged from the streets of New York City. I layered the objects strategically in front of the camera lens, and then painted the floor, walls and even the window panes. Everything was constructed to be ‘seen’ by the lens of my 4x5 view camera and when finished I recorded the results on a single sheet of film. No Photoshop or other post production techniques are used.

I was interested to see how far I could push the image beyond the idea of faithful reproduction. In other words what happens when what the camera records is overtaken by what the mind suggest. I was also relying on the extreme depth of focus made possible by a small lens opening. This renders everything from 10 inches to infinity to be recorded with extreme sharpness. Making these photographs was akin to walking into a daydream or alternate universe. I learned to trust my instincts and focused on ways to champion all those discarded objects I was retrieving from the streets.

Boundless Echos

This work features a video collage integrating microscopy, animated poetry, and digital effects to delve into themes of growth, energy, transformation, consciousness, and healing. Inspired by the interplay between nature and spirituality, it captures the abstract beauty of organic forms that shape our reality. The altar serves as a space for reflection, protection, and restoration, with black tourmaline - known for its grounding and purifying properties at its core. Black tourmaline, a member of the complex aluminum borosilicate family, is mixed with iron, magnesium, and other metals. Its remarkable ability to become electrically charged through heating or rubbing distinguishes it. When charged, one end of the tourmaline becomes positive and the other negative, enabling it to attract or repel dust particles. The name "Tourmaline" derives from the ancient Sinhalese word "turamali," meaning something small from the Earth.

Microscopy by: Shelby Elder and Ally Chorun

“Narcissus Looks Back, and They Love You” is an exploration into queer subcultural spaces, camp as an aesthetic lens into a shared sensibility, and the community’s relationship with performance. Footage includes both old and new - videos from our previous hybrid installation/dance party, Haunted Body: Haunted House, interspersed with video of the event itself. We aim to explore these spaces’ inherent strengths as sites where we can live within the strangeness, define new meanings, and what our happiness can look like - and the limitations of its reality.

Sun Engine imagines hidden living worlds within our natural environments. Digital Animation with Synthesized Music.

Hexagon: Nuit
This exploration in the hexagon series features 91 individual LED lights that illuminate sparkling darkly colored, transparent, 3D printed shapes. It evokes a sense of wonder and is a reminder of the night sky, taking inspiration from images of galaxies and space. The piece plays geometric animations and patterns based on natural phenomena and it is mapped and animated using TouchDesigner.

Hexagon: Terre
This vibrantly colored exploration in the hexagon display series utilizes a brighter color palette that evokes a sense of life and nature. The piece plays geometric animations and patterns based on natural phenomena and it is mapped and animated using TouchDesigner.

Oscillation to the Edge

Translating musical gesture into breathing, moving visual webs, Oscillation to the Edge is Maria Finkelmeier's first collection of Melody Figments. Created by tracking nuanced motion as music is performed on marimba, the webs are generative, building upon each linear expression and sonic moment. The work was coded in collaboration with MAD Labs in Dania Beach, Florida.

The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine is an ongoing, interactive-participatory iterative poem cycle in spatial computing by Monica Storss.

In The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine: Verse 1: Data poems are created in real-time based in participant answers to a questionnaire by the artist. The artist places the poems in an onsite installation for the participants to find and interact with.

The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine: Verse 2: Sound is an augmented reality installation of spatial audio poetry. Users interact with the real and virtual environment through spatial audio poems.

Using 256 fans, controlled by custom circuit boards and software, The Fans of Life plays out Conway’s Game of Life. The viewer is able to edit the current state by spinning or stopping any fan, affecting how the game plays out.

The piece illustrates how simple rules can lead to complex and far-reaching outcomes and invites viewers to witness and participate in the spontaneous emergence of intricate patterns.

Just as simple rules of 1s and 0s have created technological marvels and basic biological principles gave rise to the diversity of life, The Fans of Life demonstrates the profound impact of simple interactions. By allowing the viewer to modify the grid it shows how individual actions can influence the outcome and cause significant change, mirroring the interconnectedness found in life all around us.

Hot Air Balloon Music Video: This video was a piece for the local Boston band Pile, for their Hot Air Balloon EP. I collaborated with Nicole Rifkin (illustration and art direction) and Ryan Dight (cinematography) in creating this, and we projected a rotoscoped version of Rick's face onto Rick as he was singing the song. I composited that footage with many of the rotoscoped illustrated birds Nicole Rifkin created, and had a blast designing the noisy and textured shots all throughout the video. I wanted to experiment with using panels to break up the scenes, reinforcing the feelings of overwhelm and slow descent that the song conveys, and creating a strange otherworldly atmosphere all throughout.

Caper Tapes Visual Album: I created visuals for my dear friend Milner's (aka Dead Army Choir) album Caper Tapes. Caper Tapes is an album that is an abstract noise collage of a pilgrimage that my friend group goes on to the nearest Waffle House most years (for more information, go to www.bummercityhistoricalsociety.com and click "Great Waffle House Caper"), in Scranton Pennsylvania. We go to Waffle House, and then rent an AirBnB and hang out and make art. Milner set up a bunch of recording equipment in one room, and many people recorded lots of sounds and words and music, and over the course of two years he collaged it into the album, and called it Caper Tapes. For the album's release show, he wanted me to create visuals that went along with the 44 minute masterpiece, to be projected at the (now closed) venue Pink Noise in front of a live audience and with a 4 speaker quadraphonic audio system. I did create those visuals, in a very hectic single week before the performance. I mostly used javascript expressions in after effects to tie the visuals to the sound, with some more authored animation throughout, and a few pieces of art direction from Milner for specific parts of the video.

"Fractured Time" is a unique timepiece that merges art and technology, featuring colored lights arranged in a Voronoi pattern to display time and other intricate patterns. The clock's creation involved generative design, where I developed a procedural tool in Python to optimize the fitting of LEDs into Voronoi fracture shapes. The PCB design was paired with a 3D printed baffle and housing, and an acrylic/vellum diffuser. It took several iterations of housing and diffuser designs to achieve the smooth, yet segmented final look of the clock face.

Initially inspired by traditional 7-segment displays, the design evolved from regular polygons to a highly irregular, procedural display. This evolution was driven by my growing boredom with more regular designs and the realization that I could push the envelope further. My coding expertise enabled the creation of such a chaotic, unique pattern, and without streamlining much of the workflow through code, this piece never could have come to be. The clock is my blending of artistic aesthetics with scientific precision, demonstrating how computational techniques can produce visually mesmerizing and functional art from pure noise. The Voronoi pattern, reminiscent of stained glass, underscores the fusion of traditional art forms with modern technology, making this piece a striking representation of that intersection.

Marble Fountain is my attempt to pull the flowing curves of generative art out of the screen and into tactile space. The algorithm pulls order from chaos, forcing initially random paths into smooth continuous tracks using an iterative optimizer. A second pass iterates from the top down to generate the support structure. It treats each support as a particle with inertia, an attractive force to other supports, and a repulsion away from the paths taken by the marble. This surprisingly simple system emergently generates the organic structures reinforcing each path, and allows the whole static structure to be printed in place.

The artistic process of this type of generative design frequently feels like a collaboration between myself and the system as I create it. When supports block the path or the track insists on ejecting balls into the void, I don’t fix the problem, but rather we work through it together. The system does generate unique pieces of art, but to me the real work is more akin to process art. The specific geometry is a reflection of the algorithm, and you can see every quirk shine through. My pile of unsuccessful iterations does not feel like a waste, but rather tells the story of Marble Fountain coming to life.

The Video Percussion Synthesizer

With this device, you can play the video while you make a beat. Inspired by a mixture of sound and video synthesis techniques, I wanted to create a performable instrument based on a MIDI drum pad and a pair of sticks. Striking each drum pad synthesizes a drum sound in real-time. Each strike on the six main pads also triggers a video synthesizer to play a video clip. The video layers can be played over each other just like drum sounds. They will interact with each other and can also be manipulated globally via three additional synthesis algorithms dedicated across the top three pads.

Created by Zizza (Nicholas Zampiello) of New Alliance East