>> Hrvoje Benko: Good morning, and thank you so much everybody for coming in early. It's my
great pleasure today to welcome Maja Petric to Microsoft Research for our visiting artist talk.
This is something that Studio 99, a grassroots group at Microsoft Research of artistically minded
folks has started and we are trying to attract both the local and international artists and try to
get them here to basically start the dialogue within the community about art and the role of art
within technology and the role of art within Microsoft because it's a little bit broader topic. It's
my great pleasure today to welcome Maja. I've known Maja for several years now. We share
the same country of origin so to say. She's a great emerging artist in the digital media domain
here in Seattle. Her background is she studied at ITP at NYU and then also she's a recent
doctorate graduate from the DXARTS program here at University of Washington. One of the
great things that, she works at a lot of installations, large room scale things with lighting and
kind of changing the nature of space, but one of the things that's really interesting to me about
it is she has this great track record of attracting collaborators from different disciplines and
working across disciplines which is something that we're looking forward to. In the past she
worked with dancers and choreographers and technology. It's like Maja actually seeked me out
for some of the projects, so it's really been a fun collaboration. So without further ado this is
Maja Petric. [applause].
>> Maja Petric: As Hrvoje says, I'm an artist and I work on the intersection of arts, technology
and science and I'll be telling you about my practice and the research that I've been doing in the
last 12 years. I think that most of it can be summed up under the title Transforming the Poetic
Experience of Space through Light. I will talk more on what it means and show some examples
from other artists that inspired me and from my own work. I would say that my work is focused
on changing the perception of space in function of art. Therefore, the subjects of my work have
been perception, space and art. To change perception I have been studying sensation,
experience and phenomenology and to create spatial situations I have been practicing
designing spaces, fabricating different materials, structures, manipulating materials and
integrating lighting and in all the individual systems inside of those spaces. The core is always
artistic and in my work the core has been the sublime and it's hard to define it and critical
history has proven that the sublime cannot precisely be put into words. But I would think that
for that reason it's actually important to try to figure out the meaning of it and I will talk also a
little bit more about that just to touch upon the meaning of artistic value of the works that I'm
interested in. I will give you a moment to read a quote by Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant
recognized the sublime as intangible and that it is something to be found in a formless object.
The experience of the sublime is necessary, to experience it is necessary to go beyond reason
and to employ sensibility and imagination, so it's a combination of reason, sensibility and
imagination. For him, it's not an object; it's a state of mind we must enter and that's what
enables us to experience it. We experience it when our imagination fails to conceive the
greatness of events solely by the means of reason, but compensates for this failure with
pleasurable sensation that can be manifested through synthesis of virtue of reason, imagination
and sensibility. In other words, for Kant this would be the sublime. It cannot be defined, but it
can be experienced and since it is unknowable but can be experienced, I think it's profoundly
valuable to find ways to experience it. My interest is in finding those ways. One of the first
artists exploring the phenomenological experience of the sublime was English romantic
landscape painter, Joseph Muller William Turner and this is one of his most notable paintings,
the Snow Storm: Steam-Boat Off a Harbour's Mouth, Making Signals in Shallow Water. He
portrays a ship in a distress off the English coast with a high degree of abstraction,
monochromatic palette, asymmetrical composition and it documents the storm and the ship in
the storm. But really, it doesn't use realistic techniques to just illustrate what happened, but it
conveys it by creating the sensation of how it must have felt to be in that storm or to be
watching it from a close distance. So I think the painting doesn't only inform us about what
happened to the steamboat in the harbor's mouth, but it also physically immerses us in the
event. For that reason it's beautiful, but it's also terrifying and it's a visceral experience. I think
it creates an example of the sublime in painting because it provides the gateway to that type of
experience. I also believe that art has a power to inspire both awe and terror and it has the
power to engage the senses and provide this immediate experience. I'll give you a moment to
read a quote.
>>: Just a little more.
>> Maja Petric: It was fast. Okay. I will read it for you. "My perception is not a sum of visual,
tactile, and audible givens. I perceive in a total way with my whole being. I grasp a unique
structure of the thing, a unique way of being which speaks to all my senses at once." I would
say this also sums the success of innovative contemporary artworks that many times you do
experimental manipulations of senses to reach the space that is experienced, both cognitively
and emotionally. The innovative use of materials engages sight, hearing, touch, smell, emotion,
memory, imagination and therefore it can transform spaces that it is situated in. This is one
example and it’s James Terrell’s project The Wolfsburg Project, and he's just one of the
contemporary artist who has followed the lead of Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, or The
Total Work of Art that in 1849 intentionally included all of the senses into a total experience, so
they tried to do art that immerses the body from all different sides. For the last 50 years I
would say that art has been marked by meaningful treatment inclusion of space and also trying
to find access to multiple sensory experiences of the artwork. This example uses Ganzfeld and
it's a technique that actually stands for perceptual deprivation and it's a phenomenon of
perception caused by exposure to unstructured uniform stimulated field. Here a hollow
construction divided into two interconnecting chambers, it's viewing space, is left entirely
empty and it's slowly flooded with light that changes colors and the way the color changes it
creates an experience of the space changing form and this is the fact that the light has to
transform the space and the experience of being in that space. I would say that such
multisensory spatial art positions the body in the center and the experience is triggered
phenomenologically and so the possibility of the sublime that I talked previously about is more
direct. A good example is Merisi da Caravaggio’s amazingly visceral painting. It is a
representation of St. Thomas reaching out his hand to touch the Christ. It visually portrays a
story that informs us about the event, but it is so visceral that we see with our eyes the image
of touch that translates into the haptic experience on our own flesh. When I look at that
painting I feel this poke in my own body, so I think that's the value of it, the experience. I'm
interested in the same effect, but creating situations in space that not only stimulate vision but
also other senses and provokes this more immediate experience. To do that, as I said I'd been
studying perception and five basic sensory systems, visual, acoustic, taste, smell orienting and
the haptic system, which collaborate with each other for us to experience things, but they also
collaborate with emotion and imagination. This is where artists have a lot of play room and
from the range of phenomenologically powerful tools to create the experience, I think the
potential for lighting stands out and my focus has been on studying theoretical and practical
examples that lead towards discovering, interpreting and developing known bodies of
knowledge for enhancing the multisensory spatial experience by use of lighting in order to
transform the poetic sensation of the space. My approach focuses on the use of lighting
materials that engage perception, emotion, memory and imagination and the subject of my
research are historical and contemporary references that demonstrate this transformation and
some of them I just showed you. My technical approach combines both traditional and
experimental principles of lighting design, spatial design, fabrication, audiovisual systems and
algorithmic composition. My interest is really to exploit technological advancements that
confuse perception of senses and add to the phenomenological experience of the artistic
intentions. So really to work with whatever is out there that can help reach and impact
meaningfully people when they enter a space and create a poetic experience for them. This
would be one of my first works that deals with what I just talked about and it's outside an
interactive light installation that was created in 2004. I attempted to transform the
atmosphere of this utterly shuttered pedestrian tunnel. It's in the New York City’s subway on
191st Street of station of the number one train and it's utterly shuttered and quite horrible
things happened there. It's a very long tunnel, but somehow people get robbed even when
other people are passing and there's rape and it's a pretty negative space and I was interested
in how to transform the experience of it a little bit just for a moment and point to the contrast
of that space with the rest of the environment. I used artificial light to simulate a striking
natural effect of light emanating from the sky, so I created false cracks on this evening to, and
then had artificial light coming through to simulate this effect of so-called God's light. Lights
were programmed to imitate the color and the intensity of the daylight outside the tunnel, so
when it was very, let's say, Seattle-like weather, the light inside would be bluish, whitish and
when it was very sunny it would be bright yellow, red and so on. This project is called As It Is
Cracking and it is an interactive light within the installation of the wall that cracks in real-time.
As the wall cracks the light and video appear through the cracks to simulate the change of
daylight and that is also happening outside. So the slowly changing light changes from being
frightful to pleasurable and the daunting cracks on the wall start to crack and crack fully over
the course of eight hours. Light and moving images appear through the cracks and simulate the
serene nature of daylight that is outside, but this change is interrupted by sudden and startling
experience of lightning, so this is one moment where the room completely gets washed out
with white light and then it turns into this form and really it happens in response to people’s
presence in the room. So throughout the course of time the light imitates the outside light but
then there is a change when there is recognition of people inside of the space. The opening
into the outside environment reveals the experience of calm and slow changes in the outside
environment that suddenly turns into a storm event and then goes back into calming space.
Yeah?
>>: Is there an audio component to this?
>> Maja Petric: No, for this one no. There could be. There is potential for that, yeah. It would
be, it has potential to be more sensory impactful with audio too, but in this edition there was
no audio. I was exploring how to change the sensation from something for me that feels calm
like into something that feels terrifying and how to do this in the course of time. I did this with
light and video in this case.
>>: How did you make the wall crack?
>> Maja Petric: It's a fake wall that is built in front of the real wall and it's actually made of
plastic which is then colored with a very, very dry paint with some other chemicals that are put
inside that cracks over time. So when you have almost too dry paint, it always cracks, right, so
it's kind of the same effect. Because it's transparent, it's showing really when it starts to crack a
little bit, it starts to show what's happening behind. This project got two awards, Light Art
Award, Richard Kelly and Thunen Light Art Award, and it also was a base for other projects that
followed that I'll talk a little bit about. In this project I worked with a choreographer also on
cracking the wall, but here we did something mechanical, and it is a project called Eyes of the
Skin that I did in collaboration with Professor Jennifer Salk who is a professor at the University
of Washington’s dance department and it’s a dance about the twisted nature of tenderness and
sensitivity. Tenderness is defined as the tendency to express a warm, compassionate
affectionate feelings, but it also stands for pain and discomfort. And I was interested in this
dichotomy and thought that a wall that cracks is both showing this fragility and beauty that she
was dealing with in her dance, and it was done with mechanical solution that cracked the wall
open. Also, then we worked on responding with light to whatever is happening in the space in
terms of the narrative and the dancer’s movement in the space the light would change. This is
a different project that is a continuation of the Eyes of the Skin, number one. This is Eyes of the
Skin number two, actually, and it's really a continued experiment with different technologies
and collaborating with lighting engineers, computer engineers, more dancers to create more
powerful solution for the previous one that I just talked to you about. And we were
commissioned by Henry Art Gallery to install it across their three floor museum, so this piece
was installed into the Henry Art Gallery. And then on every floor there were pieces of walls
that would either simulate cracks or in the big strong gallery there was a large wall that
provided the backdrop to the main dance and that was covered with another fake wall which
the dancers then ripped apart to open it to kind of peek into the cracks. And in collaboration
with Hrovje I worked on video mapping system that then provided video so look into what
happens inside of those cracks. I will show you a little bit about this. Once they opened the
wall you would see an image and once they would close the wall the image would no longer be
there. Could we please have the lights down a little bit? Thank you. The space, another
outcome of Hrovje’s and my collaboration was this interactive video installation Shadow
Inverted which was exhibited last year in this building in Studio 99, and it was an experiment
that examined the shadow is a place defined by an absence of light. This interactive piece
creates an inverted experience where shadows are illuminated and serve as portals into an
inverted imaginary world. So what is like in the real world? It is dark in the shadow and vice
versa and by moving through a light the person's shadow uncovers glimpses of the world
beyond searching the unknown and without ever being able to see it all, so really it was using
shadows, moving shadows as a map to display video of natural realms and there are beautiful
moments of people touching each other's shadows and then those videos fusing into one. And
it came out of talks that I had about creating an experience with video and also light and it was,
I would say, a quick experiment which just showed that there's a lot of potential in terms of
creatively applying technology. Large-scale spatial installations that I show you are pretty much
demanding in terms of resources, so I also do some smaller scale work, object work, but they
are also on the subject of space. This is a light installation called Skies; it's a 7 foot tall and 40
inches wide installation made of seven modules and these are seven boxes stacked on top of
each other and in each box there are dynamic lights that are individually programmed to
present change of daylight from sunset to sunrise and so the sky and the seven modules are
constantly changing to have the sense of ever-changing environment that's around this. My
study of transforming the poetic experience of space has been reflected also in my PhD exhibit.
Horizon is an imaginary line and this is the latest big installation work that I did and I will talk to
you about it in more than detail just to kind of show what's my process and then I will also
show you examples of what was the outcome. It was utilizing experimental light and electric
acoustic compositions to transform the experience of Jones’ Playhouse Theatre and the
attempt was to create, transform it into poetic experience of nature. As I said, the main
medium is light and the transformation of the immaterial sensation of light by projecting
animation of simple geometric patterns and references to nature into material experience of
the constructed landscape. I created light sculptures by means of re-appropriating cinematic
technologies and in that way holds a lineage that traces back to the abstract paintings of artists
like Mark Rothko and before him Turner that I talked about and varied the perception on the
landscape is treated as a vehicle for the sublime. Really, the idea was to use light as a tool that
then reaches people on not only visually but also you can almost feel it by the sense of touch
and the way I was working with it was reappropriating technologies that are already out there
and utilizing high-power projectors and programming haze to interact with it created this
sensation of almost physical light. The piece occupied a stage of the Jones’ Playhouse Theatre
which is located at the University of Washington and it is a one story brick building with a small
partial basement totaling around 13,000 gross square feet and seating for 210 people in ancient
Greek amphitheater style, so it's a pretty large semicircular theater space surrounded by
terrace seating. At the beginning of the piece the doors of the Playhouse Theatre open to
visitors to enter directly the stage where the installation was taking space and visitors were
encouraged to explore the entire stage and the installation in their own choosing. It was
completely painted with supersaturated concentrated velour black paint and the entire seating
was covered in black too, so there was absolutely no source of light and people coming inside
were pretty much disoriented because there was no reference. There was absolutely no light.
Even people who work there could not feel their way around and it was a very interesting
sensation with total absolute darkness. Once the visitors dark adapted their attention was
grabbed by ten instruments of light that was composed to cover the stage of the theater in a
very minimal way and to direct the gaze of viewers. I'm going to talk a little bit about the
technology behind this. So this is what I utilized to create the experimental lighting solution
and also electric acoustic insulation. Here is how it was laid out. When you came in it seemed
like just a very open-ended space completely bare-bones, but there was a pretty elaborate
installation of pieces across. My research concentrated on digital projection as a lighting source
and the interaction with fog in the air that created the sensation of light being palpable. The
experience of projection can be manipulated by positions of the projectors and each Panasonic
projector was positioned on one side of the theater and together they produced one connected
separate image by emitting horizontal beams of light and so the position of the projectors was
completely affecting how the light was experiencing the direction of it. But then I also was
using two moving, rotating projectors that were, by changing their position they were also
changing the direction of light. There were two. One was in position above the center of the
stage and the other in the center of the audience terrace and both of those were programmed
to move their yokes during the piece and then I worked on reappropriating the image into the
sensation line, so when you came in you could see some image on the ground but almost
nobody paid attention to it because it was so prevailing, the sensation of light. That's what the
image was designed to do, to create a sensation of light. This is just a quick image of how the
technology was connected so I was reappropriating all of the technology for this type of thing
and then I had to reappropriate the way it was coming together. I think I can skip actually some
of the details about this unless you are interested. I utilized two hazers and a fog machine
during the piece and the haze is present and maintained throughout the piece and then the fog
was introduced in key moments of the piece so it was very much intentional when it came and
where exactly it came. It was localized and there was also haze and fog and there is a very, the
nature of it is that it is very ever-changing so it cannot be completely controllable, so that was
also taken into consideration. Fabrication of fog and haze that is usually known as a weather
phenomenon is used to imply really a natural realm and to create more of sensation of the
atmosphere. It provokes in that way the stronger connection with nature. This has been done
from antiquity, there has been a fascination with the optical phenomenon that held the
fundamental role in both inspiring and examining premises about the physical world. The
weather has been employed in science, atmospheric optics, astronomy, art, art history, color
theory, mythology, military, and this is what interests me is how this one thing that we all know
and experience, weather and nature from this let's say little corner, from the position of fog
and haze, is experience that fascinates many different disciplines and how they treat it. Entire
civilizations have been actually ruined and some have prospered based on their ability to
predict and adapt to the climate change. That also has connection to what I am trying to imply
here. I'm going to show some other works of art that used fog as their tool and in my work I do
heavy research on everything related to what I'm doing and try to learn from that. Here you
can see works by [indiscernible] Curt Henshelger [phonetic] [indiscernible] and all of them used
fog in their work and they treat it as a sculptural medium that is in collaboration with water,
atmosphere, air currents and time itself. Experiential and ephemeral in nature this fog
sculpture specialized light, shadows and sometimes also an image. And borrowing various
forms of mediums and integrating them into the space of the artwork is I think where there is
importance for this poetic experience of space. I try to do a step up from that and mostly I did
this by repurpose this video, film and animation to shape the light. Really, the content of
projection was crucial in shaping the kinetic behavior of the light and experience of it. These
are the layers of animation used in the piece, so this is how the animation looks at the
beginning and it morphs into different shapes and it progresses. The shape, form and the
progression of the projections generates the fluidity of light that is being sculpted in this space
and after a series of experiments with many different projections I concluded that utilizing
simple geometric forms slowly transforming in time are the most effective in creating almost
fields of light that one can enter into and be into almost a shell of light. Then I advance into
more complex shapes which are then implying natural forms, which also has to do a lot with
things found in nature and that is simple geometric forms which then are walled into more
complex. So this is how those images that I showed you in animation form looked in space
when they were projected. The animations are created by use of the Adobe Aftereffects
editing software and manipulating in real-time and by Hippotizer Media Server, so it's a tool
used mostly in theater and entertainment and not in the way that I was using it. It was
interesting to see how to utilize this for my purposes and really it provided me access to
creating, animating and composing an abstract animation through key framing, time
remapping, animation, dynamic effects, color correction, computer based sliding, 3-D camera
construction, adjusting the angle, all of that in real-time. All animations are produced in a layer
and in a known linear editing environment , and are then imported into the Hippotizer to have
eight real-time layers that are manipulated in real-time. This is, again, a look at the stills from
the animation and complex composing of abstract moving imagery interacts with haze and fog
and results into a dynamic environment of light. Can we have some lights down please? So the
following image is a screenshot from the animation and then these are like how the light fell.
This is when you are inside of the light. This is looking outside and almost having the sensation
you can touch it. It's very hard to document most of this work. It's something that needs to be
experienced and it's even harder to do a video. That's why I'm kind of opting for images, but
more than anything I hope to install this piece again and hopefully you can experience it for
yourself. The aesthetic of simple shapes, bold colors and dynamic geometry has a heritage in
also color field painting and abstract Expressionism and I combined this anti-figurative aesthetic
of European abstract styles such as futurism Bauhaus, synthetic cubism with an emotional
potency of German and Expressionism. This is the point where technology and art meet and
where reappropriating technology can be applied in terms of artistic value. In previous quote I
can explain why I was opting for simple shapes. It wasn't just a good solution for my experience
of projection, but also it had a meaning in this work and this is first, again, a screenshot from
the animation and on the right you have an image of how this image felt in space. The work
looked further to approach this usage of moving images into an experience of spatial light by
creating the nonlinear composition of light and sound that could be experienced in space as an
extension of space that is ever-changing. Really, simple shapes were becoming more and more
complex in 20 minutes and this is in the images you saw previously. Experimenting with the
light beams coming out of the projector and then playing video stills with cinema and video art
and by this age cinema has developed complex relationship with contemporary visual and
media arts and is often used outside in its own context and placed into the territory of art
where in some cases it becomes almost unrecognizable and these are just examples of some
other artists reappropriating cinematic technologies. Viewers are turning to participants and in
turn their passive experiences have transformed into a viscerally immersive experience and
such works really explored the notions of time, memory and transition from material to
immaterial. This is a composition of light image and sound that I did for the piece. As I said, it
starts both sound and image alike, start with abstract forms and morph into organic
recognizable elements of nature only to be processed again and filtered to its abstract parts.
Really it's a nonlinear dramatic arc of the piece that can be felt, seen, heard, smelled and
touched and it leads towards the discovery of the natural environment. These are just some
pictures that showed the process and I will follow by showing you images of more nature like
environment in the piece. Much like the light experience of the horizon, sounds were also
derived from the cinematic appropriation and this is a moment where those abstract shapes
are becoming, evoking the sense of rain and evoking the sense of sunshine and this is all
happening in time and it's moving. It's becoming faster and it's changing pace. There's some
people here who experienced it so you can say how it felt. It's hard to take a picture or a video,
once again, but the same was done with the electric acoustic composition which was using
ambisonic, meaning 3-D sound system and you could hear different sounds at different parts of
the space and, again, it was kind of following the notion of oral cinema or lumia cinema
meaning reappropriating cinematic technology for this experience. It is a multi sensory
experience and it really tries to balance the interaction of the body and the space with light,
color, image and sound and the space of Playhouse Jones’ theater is transformed into an
environment without defined boundaries that provokes heightened perception, awakeness,
awareness of this undefined space and one's own presence in the space. Moving beams of light
who are both physical ephemeral, both figurative and abstract both still and dynamic and
phenomenal experience of light sound was nearly impossible to capture as they change based
on the state of the fog and viewer’s position in the space. It was almost, it was completely
impossible to capture everything at once and one had to move around the space and would
experience different things. Actually, every single time the piece was shown it also was
different because of different air flow. The fog would behave differently and you cannot really
re-create your movements so that was interesting too. Each visitor created a silhouette in
space that also contributed to the experience of the space and the total experience. As they
moved their figures at times blocked the haze and blocked the fog and blocked the image also
which provides them with an opportunity to interact with the environment and make
immediate influence on it and to play the play of light across the space is really transformed by
the play of visitors in the space. My plan is to keep on transforming and expanding this piece
into an interactive perceptual hyperspace that I have in mind that I am calling now
[indiscernible] Made of Light and really I would like to achieve the goal of creating even more
impactful experience of nature in a build space and I'm now exploring all possible ways to do
that. I'm really interested in a more compelling experience and whatever tool can facilitate that
and I believe there's a lot of opportunities in studying light as basic indispensable, necessary
substance of the universe which is visible and invisible energy that travels through space and
enables, but also defines life. I also think it's an important metaphor in my further work I would
like to explore it for both being a physical and symbolic and to explore those properties to
change the experience of space. Currently, I'm looking into possibilities for expanding the work
by incorporating projection that captures live visitors in space. What would happen would be
employing video mapping [indiscernible] which looks into the space to capture visitors and then
project towards the visitors back their silhouettes and really to create the space of light in the
shape of their silhouettes. So when one person is walking to have an outline of light around
them and then morph that outline into different shapes and maybe different visitors. There are
many different possibilities. The idea is that each visitor will create a light space by just being
present in the space and as they move across the space the light will be extruded in the shape
of them and leaving light trails of your presence across the space. At specific times these
volumetric light shapes will be composed to like morph into whatever will be appropriate for
this piece, but I'm really interested in morphing into a person that is maybe opposite or maybe
was there previously and the goal is to really experiment with technology to advance how
people experience space, their presence in space, how they deal with their environment and to
offer a variety of perspectives of our nature, our origins and our world. Another possibility that
I'm contemplating about is working with scientists who utilize recent groundbreaking discovery
of using ultrasound to levitate small particles around mid air in order to move particles of haze
and morph light sculptures, so using acoustic levitation to move haze and in that way kind of
intentionally shape the kinetic light sculptures. These are some other possibilities I am also
contemplating about, but everything is now a possibility. Whatever can help create more
compelling experiences, and for that reason I am very excited to be here because this is the
place of, for those opportunities and I would love to talk more with you and hear if you have
any ideas of how we could make this happen. Let me know if you have any questions or if I can
go back and show any of the work again. [applause].
>>: I do have a question. You were talking about the piece you did in the theater at the
University and you said that it was done in real time, so were you sitting with the soundboard
essentially and like affecting things or was it on like a time sequence?
>> Maja Petric: It was composed, precomposed, but then there were eight layers of animations
which were then also manipulated real-time. It could run by itself, but then it also was
modified based on what was happening in space. Not always, sometimes there was no need,
but sometimes it was interesting too because there were four projectors and they were all kind
of taking certain parts of space at different moments, so there was a possibility to kind of
localize different areas of space using this real-time mechanism.
>>: I found that very interesting, you know, where it comes together in the theater that way
because often we think of the experience as something that is created and then put out to the
world and it is just repeated essentially where in this case you are having a dynamic experience,
kind of like that dialogue you were speaking of earlier, that real live action.
>> Maja Petric: Yeah.
>>: [indiscernible] involves light and manipulation of light you opt to completely control the
environment and you can close it off to prevent outside light from coming in.
>> Maja Petric: You don't have to. For this…
>>: But for it to be that successful [indiscernible] has that issue too. Do you find that stressful,
that you have to control the lighting?
>> Maja Petric: This was a huge endeavor. It's a big theater and even though theaters are
made to be dark, there's still, you know, exit signs, little flashlights, reflective surfaces. The
chairs have a little bit of chrome that catches light, so all of that had to go, so it was challenging
to cover that, you know, it just took a lot of effort, but it was worth it because it is so
interesting to be in a space when there is no light and then to control the light that comes in.
For me it was worth it, yeah, for this piece.
>>: How did you cover being able to turn off exit signs and all sources of light in a space that
has stairs? The University of Washington is…
>> Maja Petric: Is this being recorded? [laughter] okay. I'll tell you later. [laughter].
>>: That I can understand. [laughter].
>>: So is your partnership ongoing research group right now, is it a formal partnership or is it
more of an informal partnership?
>> Maja Petric: I wouldn't say it's formal. I hope there is a possibility of making it formal, but
yeah, I have been very much engaged in working with technology and reappropriating
technology for the purpose of art and Hrvoje is also interested in creating technology that can
be used in artistic purposes, so it has been informal kind of.
>> Hrvoje Benko: I mean it came together for, I think the first time we worked was for the big
Henry exhibit and it kind of came together pretty fast.
>>: Are there plans for other exhibitions or anything on campus here?
>> Hrvoje Benko: Not right now, but the options are open.
>>: We're the Microsoft Art collection here. We have a gallery space, so it might be
interesting. Currently, we have a fairly isolated space set, potentially, or something like that.
>> Hrvoje Benko: We should talk.
>> Maja Petric: Yes. Absolutely.
>>: On that tunnel piece that you did, I presume that you went there before you got started
and kind of got a feel for it and a feel for the ambience of the mood of the people going
through it? And then afterwards, did you notice any difference? Did people seem any different
going through the tunnel?
>> Maja Petric: Unfortunately, it was a very short installation, almost a couple of hours because
of security reasons it had, it couldn't stay there longer. The people who were there were a lot
of people who knew it was going to happen and then there were also people who just were
passing by. And absolutely, there was reactions to it because it was an unexpected moment
and we did perform the entire experience. It's a very long tunnel and then seeing something in
the middle of it is kind of builds up anticipation and then passing through it was compelling,
yeah.
>>: On that same piece you mentioned simulating real world lighting conditions, and so I'm
curious if any of your projects involved redirecting or manipulating actual light.
>> Maja Petric: I'm interested in that, but in this project I actually started with measuring the
quality of outside light and then I was trying to translate those values into the light that is
experienced in the space and I discovered that it's almost better to create a little bit more
theatrical interpretation of the outside light. The outside light when it's really sunny is not
really yellow, but it was very effective for me to use this type of light to simulate the warmness
of the outside light, so it was, but I would like to use daylight if that's the question. I would
really like to work with daylight and I have been working on some proposals for, I can talk a
little bit about that, but using Haleo sets to harvest sunlight and also then direct it to special
objects that I have been coating with different optical materials, so they would refract light, so
that would be one example.
>> Hrvoje Benko: All right. If there are no other questions, let's thank our speaker one more
time. [applause] so Maja will be around if some of you guys have a [inaudible]