// jeremy couillard \\

Kihzi Island Data Center, 48″x48″ acrylic and enamel on panel, 2011

First painting in new studio. I got an airbrush…that’s how I did those gradients.

i was in new american paintings with two other columbians guy ben-ari and leah wolff.

also i had a painting in a huffington post article. below is my spread from new american paintings. the issue is going off the shelves soon…took me awhile to actually post this oops.

Data Mining, 48″x48″ acrylic and electrical components in and behind panel, 2011

This is a kinetic painting. The video is on digital photo frames and I made it with Processing…they are 3d cubes and they look like the little ‘bit’ animation from the first Tron. I’ll upload it later to Vimeo. There is also a little 555 synth I built…so some of those buttons are functional. Here is a cell phone video of me playing it:

Data Mining

192.168.1.127, 24″x24″ Acrylic, steel, digital photo frame and electrical components on panel, 2011

This is part of my ongoing project to network a bunch of artworks. This “painting” has a Twitter account and it takes your picture when you are near it. The twitter account is @1921681127

In the digital photo frame is a catalog of all of Messier’s space objects. So while you’re looking at the catalog, the catalog is also cataloging you. The black hole in the bottom is an LCD panel. It just tells you that the painting is either on stand-by or uploading a picture to TwitPic.

I hid the camera and the sensor in an amoeba like abstract thing. I used a LinkSprite JPEG Color Camera and a Maxbotix EZ1 range finder. Originally, I wanted to do all this with an Arduino but they aren’t powerful enough so I used an mbed microprocessor instead. Mbed is the same price as an Arduino mega and way more powerful and awesome.

I built the wooden stand and panel and then painted everything with acrylic steel paint.

Writing a library in C++ for Twitpic was way above me so I employed the services of a genius programmer, David Griswold, who hammered the thing out for me in a few days. Here is that library if you’re curious. I also used a good library for the camera which is here.

SYNTH CHAIR!

Acrylic and electrical components on a chair, 2011

I’m powering two 6ohm speakers with an arduino. I had to build a 386 circuit to power the speakers and everything with just one 9v wall wart. It sounds awful so it’s really not even worth putting up how it sounds. Instead, if you’re interested, here is the Arduino program in all its nastiness. I just wanted to do something really simple with an Arduino and use all the pins…and I wanted to paint my chair.

There are five potentiometers that you can move around. They change the frequencies and duration of the tones.

I also hooked up a bunch of tri colored LEDs that flash different colors depending on how you turn the knobs.

Projection, 24″x32″, acrylic and enamel on paper, 2011

Communication With Pyramid, 32″x24″, acrylic and enamel on paper, 2011

Got some one shot sign painting enamel.

Chair in a Room, 24″x32″, acrylic on paper, 2011

Just messin around with paint from Guerra Paint still…

Monitor with Paperclips, acrylic on steel and digital photo frame, 2011

Chairs on a Horizon, 22″x24″, acrylic on paper, 2011

The Future of the Internet, 22″x34, acrylic, glass beads and glass powder on paper, 2011

I went to this amazing paint store called Guerra Paint. You buy the pigments and binders to make your own acrylic paint and they sell crazy stuff to put in it…stuff that glows in the dark, powder with “magic” in the name, glass dust, glass beads, etc…so I’m messing around with the new paint. These are with Golden and Guerra paints.

192.168.1.177 96″x48″, Acrylic, resin, screen print, digital photo frames and electrical components on and in panel, 2011

Been working on this for awhile. It’s the most difficult to document thing I’ve ever done. It’s acrylic on panel, but then I cut holes in the panel, poured resin in the holes and then Velcroed some digital photo frames behind the resin. The videos are more or less similar to the ones posted previously plus a landscape with slow moving clouds.

There is also an Arduino Mega with an Ethernet shield behind the panel with a little LCD screen and a potentiometer. When you turn the knob the shapes on the LCD change around. You can see what the back looks like in the picture above. If you connect to the network (via cell phone, for example), you can access the Arduino file sever that I built. But you can only access the files if you align the shapes correctly on the LCD panel. (Here is the code) (Nerd note about code: the code was so long and had so many libraries I had to use a Mega. Most of the tricky code is from the adafruit forums and a Lady Ada tutorial on the Ethernet shield…thanks to everyone in the forums who helped me with this.)

Depending on what the shapes are, the QR code will take you to different files on the file server. (QR codes are those block bar code looking things that you scan with a cell phone camera)

The painting is so confusing that I made an instructional pamphlet and also have some old smart phones that people can use who don’t yet have one. This is somewhat of a reaction to a lot of art shows where in order to understand what’s there you have to read quite a bit about the piece. I thought I’d make that reading actually part of the piece itself.

The painting is lit by one 75 watt bulb hanging above it. This is so the videos are easier to see and it gives sort of this creepy atmosphere…like you’re in a basement…alone with all these obsolete and strange computers humming around you.

Making image sequences for animated Maya textures.

Pscyho Chairs from Jeremy Couillard on Vimeo.

Breathing Egg from Jeremy Couillard on Vimeo.

Another sketch for a video that will go in a painting.

Soldered a mini file server for a project today. First time I ever soldered something and it worked on first try.

Sacred ATMs from Jeremy Couillard on Vimeo.

Messing around more with Maya…this video is a rough draft for ones that will go inside a big painting…This is a mixture of textures from old paintings and old videos.

Working on a big project…

Cowabunga College 48″x24″ acrylic on panel

My Imaginary Uncle from Jeremy Couillard on Vimeo.

Been trying to learn Maya. It’s pretty fun.

3d space from Jeremy Couillard on Vimeo.