| Shawn Brixey | |
|---|---|
Shawn Brixey Photo taken 2006. |
|
| Birth name | Shawn Alan Brixey |
| Born | 1961 Springfield, Missouri, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Digital art, Telematics, Physics, Bioart |
| Training | Kansas City Art Institute Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Movement | Art, Science and Technology, Phenomenological Art |
Shawn Alan Brixey (born 1961) is Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media, and the Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Chair for Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is also Co-Founder and former Director of the pioneering research center and doctoral program DXARTS (The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media) at the University of Washington, Seattle. Brixey is an artist, educator, writer, inventor, and researcher working primarily at the interface of art, science and technology.
Contents |
Brixey was born in Springfield, Missouri and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee and Kansas City, Missouri. His parents Alan M. Brixey and Mary Lou Peters were celebrated stage and radio performers, as well early television pioneers in the U.S. Brixey received a BFA in Sculpture and Experimental Media from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1985, and an MSVisS in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988. At the Kansas City Art Institute he was a student and protege of Dale Eldred and Jim Leedy. At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology he studied at the Media Laboratory and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His thesis advisors and research mentors included renowned holography pioneer Steve Benton, sky artist Otto Piene, bio artist Joe Davis, and high-speed photography pioneer Harold Eugene Edgerton. In 1989 Brixey was selected as the inaugural Leonardo Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and as a Visiting Artist at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills Michigan. In 1990 he joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky and founded their New Media Program which grew to include artist Eduardo Kac. In 1994 he joined the faculty at the University of Washington, and Chaired the new Interdisciplinary Visual Arts Program until 1997. In 1997 He received San Francisco State University's first Presidential Distinguished Scholar Award and helped found their New Media Institute. In 1998 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the Founding Director of the New Media Program. He rejoined the faculty at the University of Washington in 2002 to Co-Found the new DXARTS program along with composer Richard Karpen. In 2009 Brixey was honored with the University of Washington's Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Chair in Arts and Sciences.
Brixey is Co-Founder and former Director of the University of Washington's Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media.[1][2] Established in 2002, DXARTS offers both hybrid B.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees.[3] Research concentrations range from visual and aural synthesis, to algorithmic processes, sensing and control systems, mechatronic art, robotics, and telematic art . Designed around a revolutionary new model of creative practice, research, and discovery at the frontier of art, science and engineering, DXARTS supports the emergence of a new generation of arts pioneers by fostering the invention of new forms of art through expanded studio research that synthesize advances in digital computing, information technologies, science, biology and engineering .
While at the University of California, Berkeley, he was Chair and Founder of the New Media Program and also Director of their Center for New Media Research from 1998 to 2002 [4]. At Berkeley he also served as a Primary Investigator for the system wide UC Digital Arts Research Network (UCDARNET), and as an architect of the system wide "new media" Ph.D. initiative . He served as an Executive Council Member of the President's Planning Group on Digital Art. and also served as an Executive Committee and Research Council Member for the system wide Digital Media Innovations Agency (DiMI) . He was an Executive Committee Member of The Consortium for the Arts, and a founding Executive Committee member of The College of Environmental Design's Center for Design Visualization, as well as UC Berkeley's Institute for Design . He remains a Berkeley Art Museum Board of Trustees' Committee Member on New Media, and in 2008 was appointed by Ken Goldberg to the Board of Directors of UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media.[5] Other board members include Christiane Paul, and Lev Manovich.[6]
Brixey is best known for pioneering highly complex experimental artworks that synthesize physics, astronomy, cosmology, biology and advanced computing. Examples include his 1987 project Photon Voice filmed in the Mojave Desert by Smithsonian World Television, and detailed in Frank Popper's 1992 book Art of the Electronic Age. Photon Voice uses radiation pressure from sunlight (the kinetic momentum of photons) to build a micro-gravitational system. The light source developed for the project encoded an intense beam of sunlight with the artist's voice and was the used to levitate tiny galaxies of graphite particles in a vacuum chamber. The levitated graphite had fallen from the pencils used to make both the mechanical drawings for the project as well as the critical and poetic writings. Stereo video-microscopy allowed visitors to view these levitated galaxies, while scattered light from the levitated graphite particles was converted back into spoken word via novel photonics and electronics, creating an eccentric choir of audible voices endlessly speaking the words that were used the levitate them.
His project Alchymeia, was designed for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan and used naturally occurring steroids from the blood and urine of Olympic athletes to act as doping agents that would stimulate the growth of extraordinarily unusual snowflakes, snowflakes that would otherwise be impossible to find in nature. Detailed in Steve Wilson's 2002 book Information Arts, Alchymeia produces unique snowflakes that are precisely copied millions of times their original size creating spectacular colored ice crystals. Human biological material, which is physically embodied in the crystals atomic architecture, dramatically alters the snowflakes familiar and almost sacred form.
Chimera Obscura, created in collaboration with UC Berkeley Museum curator Richard Rinehart was commissioned for the 2002 premiere of the touring exhibition Genesis | Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery. Chimera Obscura examined issues of genomic research through the creation of a massive multi-user data driven organism. The project centered on the operation of a precision tele-robot that online visitors piloted through an elaborate real-world maze in a museum created from a human thumbprint. As visitors moved through the maze space they left behind archeological layers of virtual information genes in the form of text, video and audio. The stored data from their electronic “bread crumb trail” evolved into large structural information nodes. Much like cities, the information architecture of the nodes in the maze naturally mutated over time, and the more activity that occurred within the data organism, the more the physical space changed. The continually evolving physical structure of the maze, its dynamic range and mutability, required millions of Internet visitors aligned in loose confederations much like a social organism to generate a fundamental mapping and sequencing of a co-mingled hybrid virtual and real space.
More recent work, such as Eon, develops novel high-energy ultrasound, sonochemistry and plasma physics to explore the creation of “material poetry,” art formed from the discrete interactions of matter and energy. Eon received a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and focused on harnessing the phenomenon of sonoluminescence, the process by which sound in liquids can be converted directly into light, to construct a tiny brilliant star-like light source. Eon allowed museum and telepresent visitors from the Internet to send short poetic e-mails in five different languages to the exhibition site and have them converted into voice-encoded ultrasound. The high-frequency sound field modulates a 1000ml vessel of ultrapure water creating a series of high and low-pressure nodes. The sounds nodes trap microscopic gas bubbles at the center of the glass vessel, and through the process of sonoluminescence, the voice encoded sound field crush bubbles into infinitesimally small energy emitting points that produce a brilliant star-like light source radiating words as light from a small glass cylinder. Visitors wear specially designed headphones that allow them to listen directly to the starlight and the voices of the Internet based visitors around the world creating the star. Eon amplifies lingering questions on the nature of belief, beauty and the fidelity of digital experience, and begins to ask whether the nearly unbelievable natural phenomenon at the core of the project is more believable than the sophisticated technology tools used to create and sustain it.
For his research, Brixey has received numerous corporate grants including, Apple Computer, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, IBM GmbH, AVID Incorporated, Newport/Klinger Research Corporation, Boxlight Corporation, Silicon Graphics, 3M, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Leica and Hughes Aircraft.
His artistic work has also been honored with numerous state and national arts council awards including; The National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Council for the Arts, Michigan Council for the Arts, Kentucky Council for the Arts, and South Carolina Council for the Arts.
In 2003 he received a prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for New Media, past fellows include Bill Viola, Lynn Hershman and Gary Hill. In 2004 Brixey and two DXARTS doctoral students Bret Battey and Ian Ingram were selected winners of the Editors Choice Award, in Popular Science Magazine's, "World Design Challenge". The winning entry was awarded for novel use of feedforward ultrasound technology used to produce wide-field active noise cancellation in underwater environments specifically to protect endangered marine mammals. In 2006 Brixey was inducted as a lifetime fellow of the World Technology Network fellows include Char Davies, Jaron Lanier, Jeffery Shaw, and Eduardo Kac. In 2009 Brixey received the University of Washington’s prestigious faculty award in the arts, the Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Chair in Arts and Sciences.
As an artist his installations have been commissioned and exhibited internationally; including Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany 1987, The Deutscher Kunstlerbund in Karlsruhe, Germany 1988, The Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit, Michigan 1990, The Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati 1992, The MIT Museum in Cambridge 1995, The International Symposium of Electronic Arts at The Chicago Art Institute 1997, The Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan 1998, The first American Design and Architecture Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York 2000, Arizona State University's Institute for Studies in the Arts 2001, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle 2002, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California 2003, The National Products Building, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2004, and The Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon 2009.