A Perfect Science, 2012, acrylic on panel, 48″x48″
I spend a lot of time in oncology clinic waiting rooms. I have this one fantasy that cancer is cured and the plants that they use to make chemotherapy drugs sprout out from the toxic liquids in an abandoned waiting room. This is a pacific yew tree growing out of the drug Taxol.
Movie Poster for the Secret Adventure of Franz Mesmer, 2012, acrylic on paper, 24″x32″
Healing Bath With Fake Future Machine 48″x48″ acrylic on panel
Pyramid and Cell 26″x32″ Acrylic on paper
Visual Piano Cube in Cellular Hallway, 48″x40″ acrylic and electrical components on and in panel, 2011
This is a painting with three knobs on a piano cube. When you turn the knobs the lights change color. I wanted to make a painting that a viewer could change.
Nerdnote: Here is the back. As you can see…quite a bird’s nest of wires. I used an Atmega 328 with Arduino bootloader to control 9 TIP120s..each resistor controlling 5 LEDs . The LEDs are super bright and use 12v of power. I had to get massive 3W resistors. The resistors get pretty hot and you can feel it on the front of the painting. I like that idea of a painting getting warm.
Deadly Lasers, 24″x32″ acrylic on paper.
I was watching a lot of airbrush tutorials on youtube when I made this.
Cellular Triad 48″x48″, acrylic and electrical components on panel, 2011
This is a cell that plays a harmonic triad based on the 528hz tone which is a frequency for healing as well as, supposedly, DNA repair:
There are also three videos embedded in the painting:
The gizmo that I built for this took a bit more work. It presses the buttons to get the video going and plays the tones. I used three atmega328s, 6 relays connecting to the buttons on the digital photo frames and (stupidly) three voltage regulators (probably could have done it with just one).
I built a little machine to press all the buttons on the video screens so that the video starts up right away. I used an atmega328 with the arduino bootloader on it. It’s just triggering little 5v relays.
Future Job (paper) Acrylic and enamel on paper, 22″x34″, 2011
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.
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:
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.
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…
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.
Cowabunga College 48″x24″ acrylic on panel
I made a painting with a video in it by cutting a hole in a panel and placing a digital photo frame that plays mp4s in the hole. Then I made a painting and a video and then epoxied the digital photo frame into the painting. It didn’t turn out that cool in the end I think but it was worth trying out.
The Abandoned Computer24″x24″ acrylic, epoxy and digital photo frame on panel
The video that plays in the painting from Jeremy Couillard on Vimeo.
Lavender Scientist Working on the Invention of Magical Microchips 48″x40″ acyclic on canvas over panel
