Projects

MeatBook

A project that provokes users' senses of their visceral responses. A time-based (that is, decaying) slab of meat, constructed as a book, is embedded with various sensors that cause the meat to react and quiver as the viewer approaches it. The reanimated flesh also responds with other movements and sound when users touch it. The next stage of development includes artificial intelligence and explores notions of generative art.

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Biomorphic Type™

BioMorphic Typography is Gromala's term for a family of fonts that respond, in real-time, to a user's changing physical states, as measured by a biofeedback device. Rather than one typeface, it is a postmodern pastiche of many different fonts that are continually morphing. So, for example, the font "throbs" as the user's/writer's heart beats, expands as the user breathes, and "spikes" according to galvanic skin response. In this way, users become aware of their autonomic states -- physiological states that usually remain under our conscious awareness. This project is part of a larger initiative, Design for the Senses. The goal is to develop new approaches to experiential design that focus on the senses and the phenomenological history of the body.

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Meditation Chamber

The Meditation Chamber is an immersive VR environment that provides users with real-time feedback. Wearing a head-mounted display and biofeedback device, users are guided through a series of relaxation and meditation techniques. In real-time, the audio and visuals are synced to the users' continually changing physiological states (respiration, pulse rate and sweat gland activity (a measure of calmness)). As users' approach meditative states, the hypnotic visuals dissolve to moving mist and darkness as the user relaxes. Exhibited at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies, and seen on CNN.

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Amputation Box(2006)

Artists : David Jhave Johnston, Jinsil Seo, Diane Gromala

Amputation Box is an art installation that feeds a website.

It's just a few boxes boxes with holes in them. Holes are finger-sized, hand-sized, and head-sized. Light comes out of the holes. Every object poked into the holes is visually amputated and redisplayed as landscape or organism: horizon flesh, or creeping or flying flesh.

The Amputation Box website updates dynamically each time a new morsel of flesh video is amputated and automatically added to the archives on the server. Physical and online spaces form a continuum. The physical Amputation Boxes feed the Amputation Box website.

It is about birth, death, rebirth and how each body is part of a larger body. The embodied body and the online body.

It is a visual meditation on molecular reincarnation designed to generate nano-epiphanies. It exists virtually, physically, and mentally.

Online real-time reincarnation.

Exhibition History

New Forms Festival 2006 http://www.newformsfestival.com/

FILE 2006 http://www.file.org.br

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