Through the Eye of the Wolf / Bill Tomlinson and Sam Easterson
September 23 - October 25, 2003
Opening reception: September 23, 6 - 9 p.m.
Ever wonder about life in the pack? Through the innovative use of technology, these two award-winning artists deliver the lives of wolves to the doorstep of our senses. Through the Eye of the Wolf pairs Bill Tomlinson's internationally acclaimed AlphaWolf, an interactive simulation of the social lives of wolves, with Sam Easterson's astonishing digital footage of wolves, captured through his "embedded" micro-recording systems.
AlphaWolf is a poetic and scientific exploration of the emergent social order of a wolf pack, from the perspective of an individual pup trying to find his role in the group hierarchy. With the simple interface of your own voice, you howl at other wolves in the pack to help your pup learn the behaviors that will establish its social order. Bill Tomlinson's AlphaWolf has been featured on Alan Alda's public television special, "Scientific American Frontiers," and comes to the Beall fresh from a successful international tour of leading electronic arts venues, festivals and awards-including Grand Prize in the Interactive Category of the 2002 Keio University Digital Art Awards, and Honorary Mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2002, SIGGRAPH 2001, and the new projects showcase at E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2001.
Bill Tomlinson is an artist/researcher who combines biology, real-time animation and artificial intelligence to develop new works that integrate art, science and interactivity. Dr. Tomlinson earned his Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, where he developed AlphaWorld (his thesis project), as well as collaborating on a number of other projects in Bruce Blumberg's Synthetic Characters Group. He has recently joined UC Irvine an Assistant Professor in the graduate program in Arts Computation and Engineering.
Bill Tomlinson is a researcher and animator of autonomous computational characters. His current work explores the connections between social relationships, emotion, and human ethical systems. Previous interactive projects have been shown at SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, the ZKM Future Cinema exhibition and other venues, and have been reviewed by CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Sculpture Magazine, Scientific American Frontiers, the LA Times, Wired.com and the BBC. In addition his animated film, Shaft of Light, screened at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by the Anti-Defamation League in its Anti-Bias/Diversity Catalog. He holds an A.B. in Biology from Harvard College, an M.F.A. in Experimental Animation from CalArts, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Synthetic Characters Group at the MIT Media Lab.
Join video artist Sam Easterson for an immersive ride in sight and sound through the daily life of a wolf. Easterson designs and fabricates customized miniature digital video cameras to capture full-color footage taken from the perspective of animals and plants from around the world. The footage featured in this installation, Animal, Vegetable, Video: Pack of Wolves, was acquired in the summer of 2002 at the Wolf Rescue Center in Florissant, Colorado, and premiered in a blockbuster exhibit on dogs that opened at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles in Fall 2002.
Sam Easterson has worked as a video artist for over 10 years. His work has been showcased at the Whitney Museum of American Art ("Whitney Biennial"), New York, NY; the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, CA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA, among others. Easterson's work has also been featured on the Sundance Channel and on CNN. Included among the publications that have reviewed his work are the New York Times, the Village Voice, FlashArt International and FilmmakerMagazine.
Sam Easterson has a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. He also holds an M.S. in Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Easterson has won national awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York, the Creative Capital Foundation, New York; the Peter S. Reed Foundation, New York and the Margaret Hall Silva Foundation, Kansas City, MO. Easterson is also the Founder and Director of Animal, Vegetable, Video. Animal, Vegetable, Video is dedicated to building the world's largest and most comprehensive "library" of video footage that has been captured from the point of view of animal and plants. Easterson can be contacted through Animal Vegetable Video at sam@anivegvideo.com.
Image Gallery
