On October 2, the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) welcomed artist, engineer, and MIT Arts Curator in Space Exploration Xin Liu and electrical engineer Gershon Dublon as part of their Wednesday Wisdom series. Liu and Dublon spoke about their New York City-based creative engineering and art production studio, Slow Immediate, which they described as a marriage of their interests and expertise: creating art via the medium of engineering, science and technology.
Gershon and Liu, who met as graduate students at MIT, began by speaking about the perceived gap between technology and art; the two are on the cutting edge of engineering, but are relatively uninterested in technology as a subject of study. Instead, Slow Immediate is, in Liu’s words, a “non-traditional art studio,” concerned with questions of immediacy related to storytelling and performance.
The two launched into an explanation of their work, describing a project which enabled participants to “listen” to audio emanating from trees and a project allowing people to “become” trees via VR technology, which Liu said relates to psychological studies tracking human identification with things outside of themselves. Another project was used to observe and influence how we perceive change in a landscape, using sensory documentary of a wetland restoration to record soil conditions, climate conditions and sound over six years. Eventually, Liu, Gershon and their team were able to recount the story of wetland change to both laypeople and experts through a headset device, using augmented reality to adjust sound for the listener’s natural hearing.
Other projects Liu and Gershon discussed, from impetus to execution, included a device that gives users a false perception of their own breathing to subconsciously alter arousal states, a handheld device used to allow astronauts to pull themselves to a particular location, much like a spider might, a robotic sculpture built to send a wisdom tooth to space and back to tell a video-based story about departure and return, and a new project that will expand audiences’ sense of self using a multisensory installation centered on a sculpture element.
Gershon and Liu concluded by taking questions from the audience, explaining, among other things, their studio’s name: “Slow Immediate” is a merge of two types of immediacy, one controlled by technology and one devoted to temporal changes.