When I first saw the photos of the distant martian landscape sent back by NASA’s curiosity lander, they felt so familiar, from a place I had been before. The distant mountains and red hills littered with rocks reminded me of the landscapes I had hiked in various deserts of the western US. At that moment, time and space seemed to collapse in my mind and the life cycles of civilization and technological development came full circle.

If the exterior of the craft, loosely modeled after the Apollo lunar return modules, symbolizes the pinnacle of modernity’s technological achievement and the era’s attendant hopes and optimism, the primitive interior relives mankind’s desire for escape and epic journeys over land, water, and beyond. Bridging the two is the view of heavens and the magnetic pull of the impossibly-far.

As I lay on the deerskins next to the embers of a smoldering fire, I run my hands through the soft earth beneath me, gaze at the stars, and inhale the aroma of smoke and mud. I feel grounded and secure and drift off to another era. Sometime later, the capsule begins to gently rise and fall, surfing on the wake from a passing ship and a feeling weightlessness ensues. A contradictory experience of terrestrial, nautical, and astronomical placement occurs. I am reminded of my own desires to explore and encounter the foreign, and then consider the impossibility of escape.

Azimuth was created in collaboration with Steve Gurysh for the VIA festival in Pittsburgh the first week of October 2012. It was facilitated by The Drift, an artist-run collective I co-founded to produce art for the rivers of Pittsburgh. Images 1-3 courtesy of Ryan Howard of Lux Aeterna Creative.

Echoes from Luke Loeffler on Vimeo.

Enacting a sort of modern day Walden from my tent in the Laurel Highlands, I constructed my own communications tower extending the reach of the phone tower just over the ridge. Is technology merely an “improved means toward an unimproved end” as Henry David Thoreau put it? Is there really nothing to say? As I considered his cynical view of technology, culture, and the content of the telegraph in light of today’s possibilities, I carved a slit gong from a log. These types of talking drums, able to generate sound waves reaching for miles, have been used since antiquity to alert neighbors of invasion, exchange idle gossip, or entertain. Sitting atop a hillside in the Laurel Highlands it became a communications dead-end as incoming messages, having made it to this final station, are permanently deleted with a musical flourish sending faint echoes through the forest and through time.

A recreation of the piece was installed for group show Extra Fancy at Bakery Square in April 2012. It consisted of the tower, a partly-carved log, three video channels, and polaroid photos of cell towers disguised as trees.

Recently I bought my first iPad and have been addicted to it. The paper-resolution screen, form factor, and apps like flipboard make it the ultimate content consumption device. Consequently, it has found much use and the situation got me to thinking about consumption, distraction and attention.

In response I created an app, Speck, that is the extreme opposite; a meditative experience that excavates your own thoughts and content. Each time you load it, a small hazy dot is drawn in the middle of the screen for you to stare at. Through the struggle of staring at the speck on the screen, a new awareness of your internal thoughts is generated. The longer you look, the more things you see as your mind grows weary and drifts, tired of focusing.

Although the project is critical of consumptive culture and technology and its simplicity may lead it to be seen as only a joke, there is also sincerity in its intent. It is a reference to an idea of William James, notable Victorian psychologist, in his Talks to Teachers series about attention.”Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You presently find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question…” [ p. 104 ]. He suggests that the only way to maintain focus is to study it intently, ask questions about it, and try to understand what it is.

But through this process, the mind takes various tangents and creates new stories and narratives which tend to break associative ruts. The tiny, hazy, abstract speck is surprisingly effective as it elicits various trains of thought which often collide with other things I’m thinking about and send them in a new direction.

Apple Responds

After submitting the app for review to Apple to be placed in the store, the following response was received which says it all:

“Apps that are not very useful, … or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected…We found that the features and/or content of your app were not useful or entertaining enough, or your app did not appeal to a broad enough audience…”

Sample images below:

The Really Real filter system consists of a custom-written Photoshop filter plugin which sends the image to a remote computer which displays it on its screen, creates a physical, visible effect over the screen, snaps a photo, and sends it back to the user, none the wiser. The three effects demonstrated in the video are ripples, perspective shift, and fog.

Stemming from an interest in replacing computer-generated effects with natural ones, I created an “unnatural natural” system that hides behind the veil of the familiar Photoshop user interface. As the beach ball spins and the user waits for the computer to finish, it is actually triggering physical movement and reactions in a remote location to “compute” the resulting effect.

video stills

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As the users mental activity increases due to computer usage, the screen blurs to make it harder to see and use. By meditating and closing the eyes, alpha waves increase and the screen becomes sharp again. The system creates a frustrating feedback loop that prevents normal computer use.

The documentation video below is a screen recording of me using the program while attempting to create a presentation about Brain Blur.

Foundation of Venice 2011

11×14 inches, map of venice with shattered luxury brand logos embossed into paper. Sidelit photo

Field Abstract 2008

Biomachinery  2008
Photo and digital drawing, Giclee print on Canvas 28″x18″

Radiation 2008

Chasing Circles 2007

Unravelled
In this portrait triptych, a continuous thread winds its way throughout the face. The delicate structure progressively becomes unraveled leaving a series of chaotic, disconnected points.

Imagined Systems is an interactive sound installation creating a virtual space filled with imaginary machines and objects. As visitors passed under spotlights in particular ways, for example in a counter clockwise motion for a large turbine wheel, the virtual devices would respond with appropriate sound. Drawing on everyday sounds collected over the years—a potato hissing in the microwave, unintelligible radio babble from a cab in Queens, an alarm at the airport, oil dripping in the pan of a cooling engine—the sounds are remixed into a scene that cannot be placed, perhaps vaguely reminiscent of Pittsburgh’s industrial past.

The work was created for 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. The visitor is presented with a darkened, empty room illuminated by three spots of light on the floor. Hidden 3D cameras fed video to computers running custom computer vision, physics, and sound synthesis programs driving a four-channel speaker system.

Below is a brief sample of the audio from one point during the piece’s lifetime.
Imagined Systems by ukle

2′x2′x.75″ sheet of particleboard, CNC Mill* custom-programmed to make small donuts and fire them at me to keep me awake while reading

*A $200,000+ industrial, computer-automated machine typically used to mass produce everything from furniture to snowboards.

Click to visit the gallery on flickr.

I designed the perfect bare-bones, no-frills computer system that would still enable me to do the essence of my work without unnecessary distractions. Furthermore, it solves one of the most difficult problems those in creative fields have to deal with—knowing when to stop. When the counter hits 999,999 and finally, 0, I know I am done.

Materials: Aluminum gutters, custom electronics and software, pump, plumbing.
Dimensions of the entire system are approximately 16x16x3 feet and variable.

The process of constructing the system involved continually running water to find leaks in the system and then attempting to control them with more gutters. Adding more pieces tended to shift the existing structure creating more problems, however. The result is patch on top of patch, fix on top of fix. Pots, bowls and cups are employed to catch the remaining leaks, and yet, water still escapes and floods the floor.

Kittenate! <– Drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar. Clicking it will replace all the images on the webpage you’re viewing with kittens. (Or you may have to right click and select ‘add bookmark’)

The Daily Puppy just got KITTENATED

Democratizing security one citizen at a time. Built with lasercut hardboard, iPhone 4, and custom html5 app.

I was recently featured on Berlin Reboot FM discussing some of my sound work, the episode is embedded above for listening. The episode’s page is here.

Below is a video clip showing the setup and sound produced.

Sonification of Ants from Luke Loeffler on Vimeo.