David Wicks :: Works » All Work

Study for a Continuous Landscape

Wicks — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:05:38 +0000

Study for a Continuous Landscape is a procedural animation that follows a group of travelers wandering over a field of barnacles. The image of barnacles is edited so that it can be repeated infinitely as the travelers move across it.

The work exists as a custom software projection, written in c++ using the cinder framework.

Watch in HD on vimeo.

192 Short Stories

Wicks — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 04:57:56 +0000

192 Short Stories is a selection of submissions to Destinations. Displayed on two panels, the stories filled a wall for the exhibition Leaving Here, Being There. Each story is comprised of a place someone wants to go, the reason they want to go there, and an aerial photo of the place. The remainder of the narrative is left to the viewer.

Distance and Common Desires

Wicks — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:00:40 +0000

Distance and Common Desires is a series of prints created through analysis of submissions to Destinations. I filtered people’s responses to the questions “Where do you want to go?” and “Why do you want to go there?” to find clusters of similar desires. The three groups presented here are people traveling to go home, those who want to see their lovers, and those traveling for food.

Each print shows the distance between people and their desires, the paths they would follow to reach them, and the relative direction to their desired places. They present a macro view of travel within common narratives of desire.

I used the cairo 2d library within cinder to sort and draw the storylines. To parse the data, I used a few python scripts. Printed on Hahnemühle Bamboo paper.

Trace: Resonance Field

Wicks — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:31:31 +0000

Created in collaboration with Pete Hawkes, Trace is a series of ceramic plates installed in the desert that are struck according to past local seismic activity. Each plate repeats the recent history of movement at a site in the surrounding mountain ranges, transforming it into rhythmic percussion. The overall effect is something like a seismic gamelan, a subtle audible and visible trace of the activity that came before it.

Audio excerpt from Trace (wear headphones)

Trace work was installed in 29 Palms—just North of Joshua Tree—as part of the Dry Immersion III: Desert Projects exhibition. Process photos and video are available on flickr.

We used python to turn the seismic waveforms into data usable by an arduino microcontroller that drove the motors. Elaine Hu fabricated the ceramics.

The making and exhibition of Trace was supported by a grant from UCIRA.

Tamarisk: Desert Installation

Wicks — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:14:11 +0000

I showed Tamarisk as part of the Dry Immersion III: Desert Projects exhibition in 29 Palms. The salt-encrusted concrete plates and generative trees were installed on the foundation of an abandoned homestead. This documentation is from the day of the exhibition, and the day after, when it rained.

I got up at…

Wicks — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:43:29 +0000

An homage to On Kawara’s series of postcards to John Baldessari, I got up at… gives my computer the task On Kawara set for himself. My computer now tracks the time it gets up every day, reporting to the world via twitter rather than to an individual by post. Sometimes my computer wakes up about the same time as me. Other days, it sleeps late while I am busy with other things.

I got up at.. works by running a simple python application when my computer starts up.

Follow I got up at… on twitter

Tamarisk

Wicks — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:51:47 +0000

software, paper, concrete, salt.

Process photos on flickr.

Portable Forest

Wicks — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:47:40 +0000

Portable Forest is a jacket that plays bird songs and the sound of water. As you zip up the jacket, bird calls begin to echo around you. You start at a trailhead, a few birds nearby—just able to make out the sound of a nearby brook—and progress down a riverine path until reaching a waterfall when the jacket is fully zipped up.

Portable Forest is an attempt to create a portable natural space; one the wearer can raise around themselves wherever they are.

I gathered audio on a series of hikes in Southern California to set the tone for the walk. For the final tracks, I used bird sounds from ASU and a water sound from freesound.org.

Rebecca Fenton helped with photography and gave sewing advice. ITP provided information on making potentiometers using conductive thread.

This prototype jacket was made with Arduino. Small pockets of green fabric were sewn in to an existing jacket—one which I’ve taken many hikes through the woods in—to hold speakers that responded to the zipping and unzipping of the jacket.

Source code for controlling the embedded MP3 players from Arduino is available on github. Process photos can be seen in the flickr set.

Box Clock

Wicks — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 07:08:39 +0000

BoxClock is transforms time into a simple playground. The current hour can be read by counting the number of vertical gray bars in the background. The minute of the hour is represented by the number of gray boxes in front, with the seconds of the current minute bouncing back and forth within the minute until they run out of space.

You can grab the embed code and customize the colors of your clock by changing the noon and night parameters from the full-window box clock.

BoxClock is now available as an app for iPhone and iPod touch. Get the details here, or buy it now on iTunes.

Holiday Auto-Giffer

Wicks — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:14:48 +0000

You already know how awesome animated gifs are. We feel pretty much the same way, so we made over 1800 of them during our holiday party with an automated photo-booth. Feast your eyes.

The auto-giffer was created using a combination of processing, python, and php. For all the details, watch the explanation video. Also be sure to check out the holiday website.