This event showcased four creative practitioners using Mozilla Hubs with its flexibility to customize spaces and create avatars. They discussed the elements that led them through their creative processes and how this platform enabled them to push artistic boundaries and explore new models of creativity.
Claudia Hart
Claudia Hart (New York) Claudia emerged as part of a generation of 1990s intermedia artists examining issues of identity and representation. Since the late 90s when she began working with 3D animation, Hart embraced these same concepts, but now focusing on the impact of computing and simulation technologies. She was an early adopter of virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, and later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR and objects produced by computer-driven production machines. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is a professor, she developed a pedagogic program based on her practice – Experimental 3D – the first dedicated solely to teaching simulation technologies in an art-school context.
Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum. Her work has been shown at the New Museum and produced at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology (where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14), at Pioneer Works, NY, where she was a technology resident in 2018 and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, UC Berkeley, where she collaborated with its director, the composer Edmund Campion, and been a resident for 5 years.
Kurt Hentschlager
Kurt Hentschlager (Linz, Austria) discussed No Exit Oasis, an audiovisual VR environment that he created in Mozilla Hubs. Kurt’s immersive media-installations and performances have been presented all over the world for three decades. His work is interdisciplinary in nature. He is considered a pioneer of performative installation. Recurring topics in his work include the human body; human expression; how the brain processes the outside world; and how perception is colored by culture, imagination, mood and identity. He researches psychology, neurology and contemporary art and culture. Kurt studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under Peter Weibel. He began to exhibit his work in 1983, building machines and then video, computer animation, and sound works. In 2010 he won the Quartz Media Art Award in Paris. In 2012 he was commissioned, as part of the Cultural Program of the 2012 London Summer Olympics to create CORE, a large-scale, symphonic installation. Most recently he premiered SOL, an immersive audiovisual installation at Halle Berghain in Berlin in January 2017 and ORT, a public project in Le Havre, a 360 projection onto Oscar Niemeyer’s Le Volcan building, which premiered in October 2017. From 2013-2018 he taught as a full time Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Andrew Blanton
Andrew Blanton (St Louis, MO) is an Associate Professor in the CADRE Media Labs at San Jose State University and a Ph.D. student in music composition working at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California Berkeley. His current work focuses on the emergent potential between cross-disciplinary arts and technology in the context of composition, New Media Art, and building sound + visual environments through software development. Andrew presented a new communication paradigm that he developed called ANTIPHON as well as a platform he developed in partnership with NewArt.City, a virtual gallery and exhibition toolkit for digital art and live performance. Andrew performed a percussion piece that interacted with one of his 3D designed spaces.
Matthew D. Gantt
Matthew D. Gantt (Durham, NC) is an artist, composer and educator currently based in Troy, NY. His practice focuses on sound in virtual spaces, generative systems facilitated by idiosyncratic technology and digital production presets as sonic ready-mades. He worked as a studio assistant to electronics pioneer Morton Subotnick from 2016-18, and has been an active participant in NYC’s creative community. In the fall of 2019, he joined the Electronic Arts PhD program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/EMPAC, researching spatial sound, virtual reality and the experimental arts practice as a frame to reconfigure new possibilities for immersive media futures.