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Design | Media Arts graduate students to present interactive art pieces in the exhibition “˜Unstable’

Second-year Design | Media Arts graduate student Noa Kaplan stands by her sculpture of a magnified dust bunny, which participants in the exhibition can walk through.

Today, 5-7 p.m.
New Wight Gallery, Broad Arts Center, FREE

By Kelsey Rocha

May 16, 2012 11:37 p.m.

Neil Bedi

Second-year Design | Media Arts graduate student David Leonard wears a bloody and damaged shirt for his smartphone application titled “Fatalitour.” Leonard’s project will be a part of the MFA graduate exhibition “Unstable.”

At first glance, the New Wight Gallery in the Broad Arts Center is a sprawling mess of robotic parts, synthetic materials and partially assembled projects. But come to, Design | Media Arts graduate students will transform these components into interactive art pieces with humanist themes. These students, after working in their classes and the studio for two years, finally get the chance to showcase what they have been creating.

“For most of this stuff, it ends up that, even for our family and friends, they don’t see what we’ve been working on for the past two years. … This is a great way to show people what we’ve been working toward,” said David Leonard, one of the graduate students. According to him, the students’ combined body of work is so multifaceted and cutting edge that it seems the best way to really understand it is to see it. For this reason, the show has been titled “Unstable.”

Leonard gave a sneak preview of his thesis piece, a smartphone application called “Fatalitour.” As the artist himself lay across a map of Los Angeles in a shirt splattered with synthetic blood, he explained that the application would spew blood on the screen when an individual walks by a place that a person, either in a film or in real life, was killed in a shooting.

“It’s hard for me to understand what goes on in someone’s mind, either as a shooter or a victim. I made this (application) so that instead of just looking at data on a screen, I could embody it, or actually walk in the places these events occurred,” Leonard said.

Leonard’s technology-driven project stands in stark contrast to Noa Kaplan’s larger-than-life sculpture. As the Design | Media Arts graduate student sat among masses of twisted synthetic materials, she revealed that she is assembling a magnified dust bunny, which participants in the exhibition can walk through.

According to Kaplan, creating a scale model of a dust bunny was a cross section between science and art. She spent extensive time examining familiar objects, including dust bunnies and pollen, under microscopes to determine how to best recreate these structures.

“I’m hoping for a subtle shift in perception that will make people think more about the complexity that’s around us all the time. We usually ignore it, because we don’t have time to consider how intricate dust bunnies are, or what the surface of a fly wing looks like. If we take a break to do that, it can put everything else in perspective,” Kaplan said.

According to Kaplan, the show will also include a live performance by Rhazes Spell, interactive games by Mark Essen and participatory artworks by Gabriel Noguez.

Although most of the artists will be present to explain their ideas and help people with the interactive exhibits, a few of the artists, such as Sephiroth Li, will opt out of speaking.

Li said he hopes people will understand the deeper meaning of his statue, which features hologram animation of a boy learning to understand what is inside his heart, on their own.

Kaplan said she felt as though things were not final yet and that “Unstable” meant a new beginning away from school rather than the end of it. Likewise, according to Leonard, “Unstable” gives these students a chance to reflect on their roles as artists away from the school atmosphere.

“It’s the role of the artist to take this technology and these ideas from our current time, and you’ll see this in the Design | Media Arts show, and do something unexpected and maybe never seen before. I think that’s exciting for a student and it’s relevant beyond here,” Leonard said.

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Kelsey Rocha
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