Seeing Machines — Exhibition Review
[Exhibition 2] “Seeing Machines”: A group show featuring two artists whose main tool is camera-based interactions
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Which exhibition did you see? How did you feel about the show?
I decided to explore Seeing Machines, a collection of work by Zach Lieberman and Golan Levin. What impressed me about this collection is how they managed to work with cameras, as early as the 2000’s when there were few resources to work with this technology. However, they managed to make relevant work, even for today’s technology standards.
Their work comes from simple geometrical shapes where you can notice and exploration of color and light to have different applications, from art installations to exploring maps to geospatial explorations.
What is your favorite work if you had?
Although is hard to choose, my favorite work from this collection is “Mas Que la Cara” a public art installation by Zach Lieberman.
What did you like about the piece?
This piece creates a relationship with each person that interacts with the exhibit and its location. The inspiration and research of these pieces is depth in content, including a database of masks. It reminded me of the work of Pablo Picasso and his research on African masks in his cubism journey.
His design process not only went to the restrictive vision to enrich the installation but how this could be a collaborative piece with the community. However, one of the things that I found more enriched is the personality of each mask and the morphisms of each expression. Technically I feel attracted to the definition and learned of the lines and color palette.
How is intangible interaction used in the piece?
This is an intangible interaction piece because there is no direct contact to establish a relationship with its user.
If you were the artist, what would you have done differently?
I think that this piece is awesome! I think that my approach would add a reinterpretation of more historical masks or faces, probably including some that come from Puerto Rico, like the Vejigante mask. I would love to see how this rich mask culture would fit in a modern installation.
I also would consider what other explorations could be done with other senses such as sound or vibration, to make the piece accessible for more users.
Bonus Exploration
Zach Lieberman and WeTransfer timely (March 24, 2020) launched an immersive online experience that you can explore with your computer camera.
Color Push
A collaborative experiment by WeTransfer and Zach Lieberman
