I've always found the desert to be kind of the most interesting aesthetic place for me.
Very beautiful.
I think when you put yourself out into this stark environment with very alien forms, you're
not in the built environment of human society, thinking at different scales, thinking in
longer time scales or thinking in longer spatial scales and engaging with those spaces.
I'm Jamie Ziegelbaum and I make interactive experiences and objects with contemporary
materials like software and plastics and glass, metal and electronics.
There's a Dutch physicist, Chris John Heuens, in the 1600s who discovered that when he put
pendulum clocks on his wall, no matter when he started the pendulum, they would become
in phase over time.
And this has been described by word in training, which is that oscillating systems when they're
in a linked substrate, like pendulum clocks on a wall, will tend towards synchrony.
Throughout most of history, people have found themselves to be a special case.
I have this subjective experience and that table does not, or that bacterium doesn't.
But looking at it in a different way, kind of stepping back from that assumption of it
and saying, let's not worry about what the person, the specialness of the person is,
let's just look at all of this stuff that we have around us.
That's a kind of non-anthropocentric approach.
Maybe these things can be seen to be on the same level, not that there's no differences
between them, but that those differences are less important or important in a different
way as we thought.
When you change your perspective and you start thinking, maybe I'm not Jamie the special
thing, maybe my experience is part of something else.
I think you open yourself up a bit to understanding and empathizing, perhaps, or interacting with
the world in a different way.
Triangular series is sensing people in its environment using distance sensors and sensing
the heart rate of people using a computer vision sensor, depending on which light it
is.
As you walk underneath them, they respond to your emotion, your presence beneath them
by changing the way that they're synchronizing their pattern of light with each other.
And then when you stand underneath the big one, and it begins to sense your heart rate,
then they all start to echo your heart rate back.
It creates a point of connection that I think allows you to explore more of what we are
and what we might not be.
When faced with this alien space, you can't help but ask, what is it, and what am I?
And can I relate to it?
The experience itself is a little different than we realize.
