Remaking The Making of Americans
A generative exhibit at Liminal Space, Portland, Oregon, 2012.
"The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything." - Gertrude Stein
This is an installation of ink drawings and image projections that Ben Purdy and I created at Liminal Presents Gertrude Stein. The installation consisted of a small room containing twelve ink prints, four of which housed projection mapped output from a dynamic simulation. The simulation was an autonomous system based on the characters and interpersonal connections from the novel.
Our project was a visual response to Gertrude Stein's novel, The Making of Americans, and her attempt to write a history of every American. Here's what we said about it in the program:
"In the living we are doing there are things that make us and things we make, something like bubbles. And the space between holds the possibility of unexpectedly anything. So making this has been a tracing of unending families of foam and residue. And it is something like the making of the Making of Americans."
Press
Above: A video clip of the installation. Ben selected hundreds of portrait photographs to form a changing collage of people, which were projected into the ink prints around the room.
Below: A demo of Ben’s simulation program, which was tuned to unfold over the course of three hours, starting in a very simple configuration and ending up in a massive swarm of character instances. Initially only a single instance of each character exists, over time, interactions within the system yield new instances, and old instances die and accumulate.
