Erik Conrad // Sky Frostenson // Adrian Herbez // Garnet Hertz // Ryan Schoelerman // Margaret Watson // So Yamaoka

Ryan Schoelerman

Cargo Cult

Car-go n - Western rational industrial material economic political order
Cult n - indigenous religious or cultural conceptual system

The sexy but controversial anthropological term "Cargo Cult," once used to degrade and ridicule indigenous tribes of the southwest Pacific is appropriated into a contemporary practice of degrading and ridiculing Western Consumer Cultic behavior. Cargo Cult asserts that American consumers (aka humans) in the burgeoning globalizing information based economic network have become divorced from the realities of labor based production and mimic broadcast media rituals to obtain cargo.

Cargo Cult allows users to engage in the mimicking of broadcast media rituals within the CHEAP system in order to experience the relationship between the Cultic and the reality of Cargo from production to the Ports of Long Beach.

The Computationally Hackneyed Embodied Action Performance (CHEAP) system comprises an 8 channel spatialized audio array, webcam visual tracking, two channel video projection utilizing the Max/MSP/Jitter programming language.

>> MORE INFORMATION HERE

BLOWHARD:
Respiring the Rhetoric of Fear Culture

BLOWHARD is an interactive investigation into the rhetoric of fear culture, exploiting this carefully crafted atmosphere of anxiety by redeploying it in a breathtakingly new two-player game. Players compete by breathing into a specially crafted CPR mask, where a breath sensor translates cumulative respiration into the player's current level of anxiety, shown on the screen in the same friendly color-coded system used by the Department of Homeland Security's Threat Advisory System.

>> MORE INFORMATION HERE

About the artist

Ryan Schoelerman is an interdisciplinary artist/researcher completing his MFA in the Arts Computation Engineering Program at the University of California, Irvine. He is a researcher with the UC Game Culture & Technology Lab, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal(IT)2) and a teacher affiliated with the UCI Departments of Studio Art, Electrical Engineering and Music. He has completed and shown work in various analog/digital medias to include electronic music, video, robotics, interactive installation and public performance via tactical media practices. Ryan has a BA in Media Study from the Media-Robotics Lab, State University of New York at Buffalo, and is Director of the Electronic Intelligent Arts Lab, an independent research facility that specializes in the design of media art related projects requiring complex computational/engineered embodied hardware/software systems. The ELINT Arts Lab is dedicated to providing an open access database repository of design results for download to other DIYers and is seeking to establish a facility for community research outside the politics of Academic and Corporate USA. Recently he is a founding member of the collaborative venture QUASI-CAUSE Heavy Media Industries.
http://elintartslab.org | http://quasi-cause.com

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